IBM Botches Investigation of White Nationalist Employee

In early April, our organization exposed metro Atlanta resident John Lee Clemmer as a member of the white nationalist organization Identity Evropa (IE) and an active racist propagandist operating under the alias “Why Tea”. Clemmer bankrolled an expensive banner action by the white power organization IE on Georgia Tech campus in late 2017. Clemmer also snuck far-Right messages into his science fiction novels and forcefully campaigned against a Black teaching assistant at the University of Georgia.

John Lee Clemmer

We identified “Why Tea” as John Lee Clemmer via leaked discussion logs from IE, which were published by the Unicorn Riot independent media collective. Identity Evropa has now rebranded as the “American Identity Movement” (AmIM). At the time, we did not know whether Clemmer had stuck with the white power organization after its name change, but new evidence establishes that Clemmer has remained in IE/AmIM.

With the publication of our article on Clemmer, we alerted Clemmer’s employers at International Business Machines (IBM), where he was working as a managing consultant for Cloud Identity Services. We also mailed flyers to Clemmer’s neighbors in Smyrna, Georgia, informing them of the racist propagandist in their midst. In response, Clemmer lied and insisted that he had been misidentified. 

In May, we updated our article to state that “We have received multiple indications that John L. Clemmer is no longer working for IBM”. We pointedly did not write that Clemmer had been fired.

Now, Unicorn Riot has published a new set of leaked messages from AmIM, providing discussion from that group’s “Dox Support” channel. This channel was established so that members of the racist organization who had been publicly identified could discuss how best to respond. John Lee Clemmer appears in this channel as “Humanbiodiversity”: a scientific-sounding euphemism for racism. In one message, “Humanbiodiversity” discusses “when antifa sent flyers to all my neighbors” and the neighbors’ responses. Due to the timing and details of what occurred, this could only refer to the mailing of John Lee Clemmer’s neighborhood. Elsewhere, “Humanbiodiversity” clumsily switches from writing about his experience in the first person to referring to John Lee Clemmer in the third person. Since Clemmer shared his thoughts in a closed chat exclusively for AmIM members, it is clear that Clemmer stuck with the white nationalist organization IE after it rebranded as AmIM.  

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