Federal officials announced today that authorities arrested a Florida man whose identity Right Wing Watch confirmed last year as a person who repeatedly threatened reporters and activists with violence using the social media website Gab, which serves as a clearinghouse for radical far-right content.
The Department of Justice announced in a press release dated September 18 that authorities arrested 31-year-old Daniel McMahon on federal charges. According to the DOJ press release, a sealed indictment was returned from a grand jury in the Western District of Virginia on September 11 with four criminal charges: “Willful interference with a candidate for elective office, bias-motivated interference with a candidate for elective office, threats to injure in interstate commerce, and cyberstalking.”
And here's the indictment for Daniel McMahon, aka "Jack Corbin," the self-proclaimed fascist and Holocaust denier who was just arrested on federal cyberstalking and threat charges. pic.twitter.com/dgykADFHO3
— Nick Martin (@nickmartin) September 18, 2019
Last year, Right Wing Watch was able to independently confirm research published by antifascist activists who identified McMahon as the person operating a slew of social media profiles with screen names that included “Jack Corbin,” “Pale Horse” and “Dakota Stone.” Right Wing Watch was also able to confirm with multiple sources that at least two complaints regarding McMahon had been submitted to the FBI at the time of our original reporting.
Online, McMahon would frequently spread violent anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric, and often singled out women for explicit sexual harassment and violent rape threats. We reported in December 2018:
Although McMahon aggressively targets reporters and left-wing activists, the violent rhetoric he deploys and the worldview he hopes to advance most aggressively targets people of color and Jews, whom he is convinced are sabotaging white existence.
Under his faceless “Jack Corbin” profile, he behaves like a cartoon villain, antagonizing people and issuing declarations of the eventual success that fascism will supposedly achieve and the impending doom in store for those who resist it. Considering the network of violent extremists that McMahon resides in online, many of whom dwell in a swamp in which they actively encourage one another to commit acts of violence, McMahon’s online persona becomes as alarming as it is absurd. For that reason, Corbin’s behavior carries an innate risk; his behavior in that swamp makes his ability to do harm, or simply spur others to do so, virtually inevitable.
Calling himself a “god damn fascist,” McMahon interacted on Gab with the man who murdered 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last year. He also used the site to celebrate murders and violence against people of minority groups he hated. McMahon is the latest in a string of arrests of Gab users who are being held to account for utilizing the social media platform to call for violent political extremism.
