This article is a collaboration between Atlanta Antifascists and Utah Antifascists.
Summary: Nicholas Gene Ambrose is a Patriot Front member from South Carolina, currently living in Columbus, Ohio, where he is an undergraduate student at The Ohio State University. He is active with multiple racist and fascist organizations in the US, and also brags about his connections to other far-right groups overseas. Online, he uses the handle “GoyHio” to talk about stalking and harassing people he perceives as enemies, including other students; and to advocate for violence against women, people of color, Jewish people, and LGBTQ+ people. The actions and behavior documented in this article demonstrate the ongoing threat he poses to members of his community.
In September 2023, Nicholas Gene Ambrose was confronted while putting up white supremacist stickers in broad daylight at a skate park in Columbus, Ohio. He was then named and shamed on Twitter by local researchers. Independently, Ambrose’s online persona had been monitored for months by anti-fascists. We identified him as the person behind the “GoyHio” Telegram handle just three days before he was exposed in Columbus by community members. This article documents his fascist networking and travel; his harassment campaigns and calls for violence against those he perceives as his ideological enemies; and his virulent racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and homophobia/transphobia. We hope this information about Ambrose’s activity will be useful to residents in the Midwest and the South where Ambrose operates.
Nicholas Ambrose aka “GoyHio”
Nicholas Ambrose first came to our attention as Telegram user “GoyHio,” a member of the Southern Sons Active Club (SSAC) chat channel. (Please see our previous articles, “Inside Southern Sons Active Club (Part I)” and “Inside Southern Sons Active Club (Part II),” for more information about the SSAC and its members.) Even in a Telegram chat full of neo-Nazis, Ambrose stood out for his violent rhetoric and threats against individuals he encountered on the internet.
We soon learned that he is a member of Patriot Front and that he lives in Ohio, as his username suggests. He is an undergraduate at The Ohio State University (tOSU) in Columbus, and is believed to be a member of a fraternity there. His LinkedIn profile says he is majoring in Pharmaceutical Sciences and plans to pursue an MS in Anesthesiology with the ultimate goal of becoming a Certified Anesthesiologist Assistant.
Online, Ambrose loves to show off all the things he thinks will make him look cool to other members of the chat.
He also brags about clothes, stickers, and accessories he buys from fascist brands like Runic Storm. In real life he’s reluctant to wear overt Nazi symbols like the swastika, and tries to maintain plausible deniability about his abhorrent beliefs by lying about where he gets his clothes.
Ambrose likes to post photos of himself doing “activism,” and on more than one occasion was helpful enough to point out when he was in a photo posted by someone else.
Nicholas Ambrose and Patriot Front
Patriot Front (PF) was founded in the aftermath of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. Originally a splinter of neo-Nazi group Vanguard America, today PF is mainly known for its masked flash rallies and its nationwide propaganda campaigns. Both are intended to intimidate groups that PF considers targets, such as people of color, Jewish people, and LGBTQ+ people.
Nicholas Ambrose has been a member of Patriot Front since at least the summer of 2022. In late January 2023, he wrote on Telegram that he had not been to Cincinnati in eight months, and that the last time he had been there was for a banner drop. A PF video from the time period eight months before Ambrose’s message corroborates his claim: it shows Ambrose and another Patriot Front member hanging a banner in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio sometime between May and August 2022. Banner drops are performed by members of PF, not mere supporters, so Ambrose’s membership must date to the middle of 2022 at the latest.
Also in August 2022, Patriot Front members in Ohio vandalized a Black Lives Matter mural on an art studio in the Franklinton neighborhood of Columbus. Security footage taken on the night of the Franklinton vandalism should clarify whether Ambrose participated in the defacement, or whether it was the work of his close associates. We know that he was involved with at least one other PF defacement project: he targeted the Ohio University campus in Athens in April 2023, when he and other Patriot Front members painted PF stencils on the campus graffiti wall.
HARASSING DRAG EVENTS IN OHIO
Between December 2022 and April 2023, PF mobilized to harass three drag events in Ohio: in Columbus on December 3, 2022; in Wadsworth on March 11, 2023; and in Chardon on April 1, 2023. Ambrose was present at two of the three events.
In December, over two dozen PF members rallied against a “Holi-drag storytime” event in Columbus along with Proud Boys, White Lives Matter-Ohio, and other far-right groups. Ambrose’s messages in the SSAC chat show that he was at the Columbus mobilization with PF. He did not participate in the March 11 mobilization in Wadsworth, but is easily identifiable in footage of PF from the April event in Chardon, where nine uniformed members showed up briefly to protest a drag brunch fundraiser.
After each of these three events, the William McKinley Institute (WMKI) website published photos of community members who had turned out to counter the far-right harassment. (For more information on WMKI, please see “Violent White Nationalist Leader Works on ‘Anti-Antifa’ Info Project from New Base in Atlanta.”) After examining the materials on the WMKI website, it appears that Patriot Front members fed images of their local opposition to the Institute. We cannot establish whether Ambrose directly passed any of these photos to WMKI, and we note that he was away traveling during one of the events featured on the site. However, his close associates in PF were certainly involved.
Ambrose has also traveled out of state to participate in PF events. In January 2023 he was photographed at the “March for Life” rally in Washington, DC with other masked individuals, distributing flyers for PF.
While Ambrose has been very active with PF, he does not appear particularly invested in the organization. He flouts the rules, laughs at the organization’s leader (“Tommy,” aka Thomas Rousseau) for his height, and wishes PF’s activism included more violence.
White Lives Matter Network
In addition to his activity with Patriot Front, Ambrose is involved with the White Lives Matter (WLM) network in multiple states. He appeared with the Ohio chapter of WLM on February 11 and February 25, 2023, when they held street demonstrations in Circleville, Ohio and Springfield, Ohio respectively.
One of the WLM-Ohio members who rallied alongside Nicholas Ambrose in Springfield was Aimenn Penny, who was arrested in March 2023 for firebombing a church where drag events were scheduled.
While he was living in South Carolina over the summer of 2023, Ambrose continued to submit “activism” posts to WLM Telegram channels. In July he was featured in the WLM-Georgia channel after writing graffiti at an “undisclosed location.” Although he wore a ski mask for the photo, Ambrose is identifiable by his height and build, as well as by his clothing, including shorts he had posted about buying from Runic Storm.
Southern Sons Active Club
The Active Club network is comprised of small, mostly autonomous local “fitness” clubs for aspiring street brawlers in Europe and North America. Founded in 2021 by Robert Rundo, it is essentially a re-brand of the violent, white supremacist Rise Above Movement (RAM), which Rundo co-founded in 2016. Active Club membership in the US overlaps significantly with Patriot Front membership in many places, as discussed in our Southern Sons Active Club series. However, as of 2023, PF has little to no representation in South Carolina.
In South Carolina between school terms, Nicholas Ambrose does “activism” with the Southern Sons Active Club (SSAC). The photo above is from a joint PF/SSAC stickering run and photo op in December of 2022, between Ohio State’s Autumn and Spring Semesters. Following the end of Spring semester 2023, Ambrose also found the time to write some embarrassingly shoddy graffiti for SSAC in Columbia, South Carolina.
Much of Ambrose’s activity with SSAC consisted of posting in their public chat on Telegram. The chat channel, which included both SSAC members and friends of the Active Club, was deleted in the wake of an anti-fascist infiltration. Nicholas Ambrose’s posts in the chat frequently encouraged violence against groups of people he dislikes.
In one particularly disturbing instance, he posted an 11-second video of a man and a woman sitting next to each other on a couch. The woman smiles at the man and says something to him, after which the man pulls out a shotgun and shoots the woman in the head. While fake, the video is quite graphic, showing blood splattered all over the wall after the shooting. As the woman’s apparently dead body lies on the couch with her head out of frame, the man calmly puts away the shotgun, picks up a remote control, and continues watching television. Ambrose posted the video with the caption “me when trans,” signifying that his response to trans people is to think about killing them with a shotgun.
He also advocated violence against specific people he encountered online, as well those mentioned by other chat members.
However, Ambrose could only play the Irony Bro card so many times before even the other neo-Nazis began to suspect that his obsessive violent ideation was not entirely ironic. Near the end of April 2023, Ambrose was banned from the SSAC chat because, in the words of another chat member, “Dude was always just RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE KILL KILL KILL RAPE.” A week after getting kicked out, he was begging for readmission to the chat, promising to behave better. The mods relented on May 9th; this time he lasted barely two weeks before they banned him again.
Stalking and Targeted Harassment
Nicholas Ambrose has actively stalked and harassed leftists and others he perceives as ideological enemies in his community, including other students at tOSU. When he discovered that a fellow student had been covering his fascist trash with anti-fascist stickers, he retaliated by posting stickers with the other student’s name, address, and photograph around Columbus — including in places where he knew the student would find them.
Note that in the photo he posted to the SSAC chat, he obscured the student’s street address, presumably to avoid leaving clues to his own location. His attempt at secrecy would have been more effective if he had covered up the Ohio State logo on the student’s hat; but whatever his motivation, it was not concern for the student’s safety. When he posted the above photo, Ambrose had already submitted the student’s personal information to a fascist website with a national audience. The dossier published at the site included not only the student’s name, location, and social media handles, but photographs and social media handles of the student’s partner as well. The post encouraged readers to report the student to Ohio State’s online crime report tipline, for the crime of “vandalism” – i.e., putting up stickers.
Other Telegram posts suggest that this was not the only Columbus resident Ambrose harassed. In February 2023, he asked if the SSAC chat would help him “mess with” a student who had posted a flyer looking for someone to play video games with. Ambrose’s message in the chat included a photo of the flyer, with the student’s name, Discord handle, and Switch Friend Code visible.
On January 27th, 2023 he claimed to have surreptitiously photographed a student sitting next to him in a lecture who had an anti-fascist sticker on their laptop. The next day, he stalked a protest march against police brutality in downtown Columbus, posting photos of the demonstrators to the SSAC chat while he walked the protest route with the rest of the crowd. That afternoon one of the photos was also posted in the White Lives Matter-Ohio Telegram channel, along with a claim that WLM had “several operatives” with “concealed body cams” surveilling the protesters so they could be identified and exposed.
ONLINE INFILTRATION ATTEMPTS
In early 2023, using the handle “lewisohg,” Nick Ambrose joined a public Discord server for a youth liberation group in Central Ohio, posing as an anarchist. Although he would later brag about having “infiltrated” leftist chat groups in Columbus, the truth is that a handful of posts in a Discord server intended to be a safe space for minors was enough to get him an invitation. After posting a photo of a flyer for a Charlie Kirk/TPUSA event with the comment “Gross,” he was able to access a text-message group organizing a protest against the event. He had likely already used this tactic once before in the same server, using a now-deleted Discord account, to get access to a Signal group that was tracking his stickering campaign in Columbus.
He would later try the same gambit in an antifascist Discord server whose contents were subsequently leaked to the William McKinley Institute (WMKI). This time, however, he failed to get into vetted areas of the server – at least with his lewisohg handle – because he failed the entrance exam.
In the spring of 2023, he expanded his infiltration efforts to include activist groups in Columbia, South Carolina. On March 30th he posted a screenshot of a Twitter account belonging to a community defense organization in Columbia, and asked if SSAC was “monitoring this Columbia antifa group yet.” When South Carolinian David Fair said he had completely forgotten the group even existed, Ambrose suggested they should confront the group.
By May 12th he was out of school for the summer and attempting to dox an “antifa musician” in South Carolina, whose identity he later claimed to have found.
Two weeks later, WMKI published a piece naming several members of a group organizing against transphobia in South Carolina, and shortly afterward published leaked Discord chat logs from the group. The day after this leak, the musician identified by Ambrose was targeted in a follow-up piece on the fascist National Justice website.
Ambrose also encouraged other members of the SSAC chat to identify and take action against activists in their communities. When users posted about leftists or members of targeted groups in their area, GoyHio would inevitably respond with “have you done anything about that?” “have you doxxed them yet?” etc.
Conservative Student Organizations
On March 2, 2023, GoyHio posted a candid photo of scandal–ridden Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, who was at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland. A group picture from CPAC 2023, posted on Ohio State College Republicans’ social media, shows that Ambrose appears to have traveled to the conference with the club. When the SSAC chat asked why he was in the DC area, however, Ambrose replied that he was there to interview for a summer job as a congressional aide, adding, “This frog is getting into position.” In fascist slang, this is a reference to infiltration of right-wing electoral power structures in order to advance a hidden and more extreme set of beliefs.
Although the Congressional representative interviewing him was not mentioned, Ambrose also posted – and later deleted – a video of South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson’s office door. The residence where Ambrose is believed to have stayed over the summer is within the boundaries of Wilson’s congressional district.
Nicholas Ambrose bragged that while he was in the Washington, DC area, he hung out with Ryan Sanchez, aka Culture War Criminal; “bullied” videographer Ford Fischer at a Groyper event; went on a racist bar-crawl in DC; and went out to dinner with insufferable neo-Nazi twerp Nick Fuentes and a small group of hangers-on. Surprisingly, the latter claim is probably true, albeit missing a few details.
In May 2023 GoyHio posted in the SSAC chat that he had once seen Fuentes get into a fight “IRL,” and asked, “Should I leak the never before seen footage here[?]” He did, in fact, post the footage, despite recognizing that it “might be able to be used to dox me.” He wasn’t wrong: the video was taken while Fuentes was getting kicked out of CPAC, so there were plenty of other photographers and videographers documenting the incident, including one from the New York Post. Video posted to Twitter shows Ambrose approaching Fuentes in a hotel lobby, then pursuing him out onto the sidewalk and maintaining close orbit while Fuentes and his assistants call an Uber.
There is some question as to whether Nicholas Ambrose is officially a “member” of the OSU College Republicans club, or whether he merely spends a lot of time at their events. After the video surfaced of Ambrose getting caught stickering a skate park in Columbus, the Ohio State College Republicans tweeted that “following recent events,” their board had “unanimously voted to bar a student from attending.” Ambrose was not mentioned by name, but it was clear from both the timing of the tweet and the replies to it that he was the student in question. The club further claimed he was “not a dues-paying nor active member” of their organization, and deleted several of their tweets and other social media posts in which he appeared.
Ambrose has also been spotted at college events hosted by climate change deniers Committee for A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a group with close ties to the Leadership Institute; Koch Industries-funded Students for Liberty; and Young Americans for Freedom, a group which – among other issues – pushes anti-vax and Covid misinformation.
Overseas travel and networking
Nicholas Ambrose traveled to Europe at least twice in 2022 and 2023, where he represented Patriot Front and networked with far-right groups. In late December of 2022, he connected with Vanguard Britannica, a relatively new nationalist/anti-immigrant organization in the UK with similar propaganda and aesthetics as those used by Patriot Front in the US. On the same trip, he met with members of Active Club France, as well as neo-fascist “groupuscule” Luminis Paris. Posts in French-language Telegram channels show that he was in Paris on the 26th and 27th of December 2022. He later revealed in the Southern Sons Telegram chat that he had been scheduled to meet with a neo-fascist student union, Groupe Union Défense (GUD), but they had been arrested over a football riot and missed the connection. On January 2nd, 2023 he posted that he was back in the US.
While Ohio State was on Spring Break in March 2023, Ambrose headed to Europe again. This time he visited Switzerland, where he met with neo-Nazi youth group Junge Tat in Zurich and Francophone nationalists Ouest Casual in Geneva.
Interactions like these are concerning because they can lead to coordination and material support between geographically disparate far-right groups. Even when these meetups amount to little more than a handshake and a selfie, they provide propaganda value: both groups can portray themselves as important players on the world stage, no matter how small or marginal they are in their home country.
Nicholas Ambrose Is A Danger To His Community
In addition to the real-world harm he has already caused to his fellow students and others around him, Nicholas Ambrose represents an ongoing threat to any community he lives or works in. He has already been reprimanded or banned by at least one neo-Nazi group; his violent ideation is at such an extreme level that they assess him to be a potential liability. His expressions of misogyny, a well-known predictor of real-life violence, further distinguish him within an already misogynistic milieu.
Should he succeed in entering the medical field, he would be in a position to inflict harm on those to whom he provides medical services. Given the violent hatred he expresses for women, people of color, Jewish people, LGBTQ+ people, and other individuals, this is a position of trust he should never be placed in. If you have further information about Ambrose’s whereabouts, associates, or activity, please contact us.