In a video he posted on his website, Jon Minadeo II, founder of an anti-Semitic group known as the Goyim Defense League, can be seen telling the boy on the chat platform Omegle, "Put your face where I can shoot it, nigger."
Omegle randomly links up users for online chat sessions and Minadeo is known to take advantage of that feature in order to seek out Black people, often children, to record as he subjects them to verbal abuse. On August 28, while using a digital filter he frequently applies to make himself look like an ape, Minadeo pointed a banana at the youth and showered him with slurs before simulating a shooting motion as a gunshot sound effect rang out.
On Saturday, August 26, the Jacksonville shooter gunned down Uber driver Angela Michelle Carr, 52, Dollar General employee Anolt Joseph Laguerre Jr., 19, and Jerrald De’Shaun Gallion, 29, at the dollar store in the New Town community. Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said the gunman, whom he identified as 21-year-old Ryan Christopher Palmeter, killed himself at the scene. The sheriff said Palmeter, a white resident of neighboring Clay County, left behind a manifesto filled with racist rants and that the attack would be investigated as a hate crime.
Minadeo attempted to convince his followers that the shooting was a false-flag operation meant to discredit the neo-Nazi movement. He said on his livestream that he discerned "Jew spellcasting codes" in news coverage of the Jacksonville shooting.
"I know how you Jews do your codes. I know all your symbology. I know all your crisis actors," Minadeo said. "The more we turn up the heat, the more the Jews are going to be doing the false flags. I just want to show you guys this. I called it a long time ago — that we're going to put the pressure on these Jews, and they are going to do false flags. So there you go. I was proven right."
According to the donation tracker on his livestream, Minadeo collected more than $500 during the August 28 broadcast, a typical haul for his shows. The show was labeled as the 460th livestream for the website set up by Minadeo, a former YouTube rapper who has risen in popularity as an extremist media figure in recent years. He frequently solicits funding for the Goyim Defense League, including an instance where he asked for money to help replace a drone he claimed to have crashed into an FBI building.Minadeo claimed he discerned "Jew spellcasting codes" in news coverage of the Jacksonville shooting.
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As New Times reported this past March, Minadeo has used online livestreams to endorse violence. In February, he shared a video purportedly showing attackers beating a group of trans people in India, while he told his followers, "I totally support this," and, "This seems like good old-fashioned common sense."
"Bring out the sticks and just do what you gotta do," Minadeo told his viewers as he warned, "We've gotta do something here. Folks, we are running out of time."
In late 2022, Minadeo, who is of Mexican-American descent, relocated from California to Florida, where he and other neo-Nazi groups have been courting new followers as the state sees a spike in extremist fervor.
The California native maintains that the Goyim Defense League, known for its distribution of flyers and publicity stunts in which Minadeo projects swastikas onto buildings, does not condone illegal activity. He told his followers during the August 28 show that he has previously found "bad apples" in his group who were removed "for doing things that we don't condone."
Both Minadeo and Josh Nunes, a neo-Nazi who leads a Jacksonville-based group called NatSoc Florida, have made use of anti-Semitic light projections to promote their brand of hatred in the northern Florida metropolis.
That and other stunts, which have included yelling slurs at passersby near a synagogue, were stifled when the Florida Legislature passed a law outlawing unauthorized light projections and making it illegal to harass people for "wearing or displaying of any indicia relating to any religious or ethnic heritage." Minadeo contended that the legislation violated his free-speech rights.
Reached via email, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office declined to comment about whether the Dollar General shooter had any interaction with Florida neo-Nazi groups, citing an open investigation. Waters stated at an August 27 press conference that his office had seen no evidence that "the shooter is part of any large group."
