Christopher Charles Cantwell (born November 12, 1980) is an American white supremacist, neo-Nazi, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, and federal informant.
A member of the broader alt-right movement, Cantwell earned attention during and immediately after his participation in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Cantwell was featured prominently in a Vice News Tonight documentary about the rally and its participants, in which he is shown threatening to kill protesters, wielding rifles and a handgun, and joining fellow antisemitic conspiracy theorists in marching with tiki torches, chanting "Jews will not replace us!"
Shortly after the rally, Cantwell published a video in which he wept while sharing that he had learned there was a warrant for his arrest. The video went viral, with some observers noting the discrepancy between the emotional video and the tough persona Cantwell had projected in the Vice documentary. He has since been widely referred to and ridiculed as "The Crying Nazi".
In July 2018, Cantwell was convicted after pleading guilty to two counts of misdemeanor assault and battery for pepper spraying two people at the rally. On September 28, 2020, Cantwell was found guilty on one felony count of transmitting extortionate communications and one felony count of threatening to injure property or reputation. Cantwell was sentenced to three years and five months in prison on February 24, 2021. The charges stemmed from Telegram messages Cantwell sent to a member of a rival neo-Nazi group, in which he threatened to rape the man's wife in front of his children if he did not give Cantwell information about the identity of another member of the group.
In 2021, Cantwell and others were found liable for civil conspiracy and racially motivated harassment or violence in Sines v. Kessler, a federal civil suit against organizers, promoters, and participants in the Unite the Right rally.
Early life Cantwell grew up in Stony Brook, New York. His father was an air traffic controller, IRS agent and the owner of a landscaping business. His mother is a homemaker. His maternal grandmother was opera singer Lillian Trotta, née Ventimiglia, who sang under the stage name Lillian Raymondi. Cantwell has claimed his mother suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her father during her childhood. He has a younger brother as well as a half-brother and a half-sister, the latter two stemming from a previous relationship of his father. His younger brother has been involved in gang violence and was serving a prison sentence in 2019. Cantwell attended Ward Melville High School in East Setauket, New York, but left school and did not graduate. He received his GED while serving his first jail sentence in 2000.
In 2012, Cantwell moved to Marlborough, New Hampshire, before returning to New York in 2013 and relocating to Keene, New Hampshire in 2014.
Cantwell has worked as a landscaper, an overnight technical support provider, and later started his own computer consulting business.
Broadcasting and writing Cantwell writes essays on his personal blog about topics including white supremacy, alt-right politics, libertarianism, and the men's rights movement. He has written for and republished essays about the men's rights movement to A Voice for Men, a men's rights and antifeminist website. In 2013 and 2014, he wrote and republished his anti-police essays as a volunteer for Cop Block, a police accountability organization.
Cantwell co-hosted the anarcho-capitalist radio show Free Talk Live but was suspended in 2015 after tweeting a racial slur against an African American person who criticized him. He was later removed from the position permanently.
Meanwhile, in December 2013, Cantwell began what he originally called Some Garbage Podcast, disseminated through YouTube and elsewhere, and in April 2015, renamed it Radical Agenda, subtitled "a show about common sense extremism". By calling compatriots who recorded the conversations and posted them on his blog, Cantwell continued to broadcast from jail while he was incarcerated in August–December 2017 on charges related to the Unite the Right rally. In January 2019, Cantwell created a more toned-down version of Radical Agenda called Outlaw Conservative. On April 9, 2019, Cantwell published a blog post announcing that he had been "neglecting to deal with some serious personal problems for a very long time", and that he needed to "stop, avoid recording devices, and pull [himself] together." Cantwell told the Southern Poverty Law Center that he had decided to step away from broadcasting because "Jews" had taken an "emotional toll" on him and that he needed to "[step] away from the microphone to avoid another 'Crying Nazi' moment". Cantwell returned to broadcasting and writing by June of the same year.
After he was released from prison in December 2022, Cantwell created an online fundraiser on the GiveSendGo Christian crowdfunding website, where he wrote that he was living in a halfway house and had been "left ...impoverished and exhausted" by his legal battles.
Both his personal website as well as the website of his podcast "Radical Agenda" went offline in January 2025, roughly a month and a half before his arrest for strangling a neighbor.
Social media suspensions On August 16, 2017, Facebook said it had shut down Cantwell's Facebook and Instagram profiles due to statements he made in connection with the Unite the Right rally. The following day it was reported that Cantwell had been banned from online dating service OkCupid after a woman reported receiving a message from him after seeing him in the Vice News Tonight segment. In a blog post published on August 17, 2017, Cantwell wrote, "I have been shut out of nearly every financial and communications system I once had available. PayPal, Venmo, Dwolla, and Stripe all disabled my accounts. I was shut out not only of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and MailChimp, but now even my online dating profiles at OkCupid, Match.com, and Tinder have all been disabled." On March 18, 2019, the far-right social network Gab tweeted a statement that they had indefinitely banned an unnamed "controversial user" for making two "inflammatory political posts". Cantwell posted on his blog that he believes he was the one who was banned, after he discovered his profile had been blanked and he was unable to log in, and it was later confirmed the banned user was Cantwell.
A December 2017 episode of the Radical Agenda podcast featured a conversation between Cantwell and Andrew "weev" Auernheimer, a white supremacist, Internet troll, and the webmaster of The Daily Stormer. In the episode, Auernheimer called for the mass murder of Jewish children. Shortly after, GoDaddy announced that they would no longer host the Radical Agenda website after finding it in violation of their policies against encouraging and promoting violence.
Cantwell wrote of the difficulties he was facing due to his suspensions in a private Telegram group in October 2018, saying, "My inability to grow [Radical Agenda] by being on other platforms, my inability to make money, is threatening to bankrupt me and end the show".
Ideology and politics
Cantwell has described himself as a member of the alt-right, a fascist, and a libertarian. The Anti-Defamation League includes Cantwell in its list of alt-right figures, and the Southern Poverty Law Center has profiled Cantwell, describing him as "an anti-Semitic, Alt-Right shock jock and an unapologetic fascist, who spews white nationalist propaganda with a libertarian spin".
By Cantwell's own account, he was originally "radicalized" to libertarianism in 2009 after listening to a presentation by former Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik. In 2009 he announced he would be running as a Libertarian Party candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York's 1st District, but he did not collect enough signatures to get on the ballot. He has been repeatedly expelled from libertarian organizations because of his violent and racist views.
Cantwell has held strong anti-police views, including advocating for violence against police officers. In a June 2012 Facebook post about police hypothetically attempting to pull over a driver, he said, "It is my honest opinion that this driver would be morally justified in shooting that police officer at the moment the [police car's] lights go on." He was later removed from the Free State Project and banned from their events for this and other statements the group found to violate the libertarian non-aggression principle. Cantwell has posted photographs of himself dressed as a police officer who had been shot in the forehead for a 2014 Halloween party, and later that year he applauded the man who killed two police officers in New York City.
Cantwell went to Keene, New Hampshire to be part of the protest group Free Keene, which is associated with the Free State Project. In 2014, Cantwell was one of three members of what Stephen Colbert called the "Free Keene Squad" who were featured in a mocking segment on The Colbert Report, which lampooned them as "brave patriots [who] are fighting back… against government overreach" by harassing "meter maids". Ian Freeman, a leader of "Free Keene", later stated that Cantwell's violent anti-police rhetoric had been excluded from Free Keene.
Over time, Cantwell has focused less on anti-police and anti-government positions, saying "I have become convinced that our problems are a lot more racial than anything... the police are not my biggest problem right now." In March 2018, white supremacist and Internet troll Andrew Auernheimer, known online as weev, leaked a screenshot of an online conversation with Cantwell. In reply to a message from Auernheimer condemning other people for talking to police, Cantwell is shown saying "I talked to cops too, gonna talk to the feds soon most likely". Auernheimer replied to Cantwell to say "that's fucking shitty scumbag behavior," and in the post accompanying the screenshot criticizes Cantwell for being "an admitted government informant" and describes the behavior as incompatible with Cantwell's calls for revolt. Soon after the leak, Cantwell published a blog post confirming that he was working with the government and claiming that he was doing so in an effort to get retribution at Antifa. The confirmation that he was working with law enforcement was met with anger from some members of the far-right.
Although Cantwell endorsed Donald Trump for president in January 2016, he has said that he hoped for a leader who was "a lot more racist than Donald Trump" and who "does not give his daughter to a Jew" (referring to Ivanka Trump's marriage to Jared Kushner).
Unite the Right rally
Cantwell participated in the Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11–12, 2017. He was featured prominently in "Charlottesville: Race and Terror", an episode of Vice News Tonight about the rally and the groups who were present. He is first pictured marching through the University of Virginia campus among a group of white supremacists carrying tiki torches and chanting "Jews will not replace us." He later is shown bragging about carrying guns, working out, and "trying to make [himself] more capable of violence," later saying "We're not nonviolent. We'll fucking kill these people if we have to." In the same interview, he called the murder of Heather Heyer "more than justified", claiming "the fact that none of our people killed anybody unjustly, I think, is a plus for us", and threatened that "a lot more people are gonna die before we're done here, frankly."
Legal issues