A co-founder of the far-right group Heritage Hubs, who was recently named by County Commission to the Board of Zoning Appeals, was charged with misdemeanor assault on Saturday for punching a protester in the face outside Jackson Terminal in the Old City. 

At the event, former Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino talked about deporting 107 million people.

Robert Moody attacked protester William Wilson, who was filming and talking to security guards before the start of an anti-immigrant event sponsored by Heritage Hubs. Moody co-founded the group earlier this year, according to state records. [Ed. note: Compass co-founder Jesse Fox Mayshark witnessed the incident and called 911 to report it. See related sidebar.]

County commissioners appointed Moody, who goes by the name Alex, as the 9th District representative to BZA on a divided 6-5 vote last month. His appointment was supported by 9th District Commissioner Andy Fox, who was among the featured speakers at Saturday’s event. Moody also appeared during public forum at a Commission meeting earlier in the year, calling for “remigration” of immigrants and praising far-right ethnonationalist movements in Western Europe. 

Neither Fox, Moody nor other representatives for Heritage Hubs responded to requests for comment over the weekend.

Saturday's event featured speakers including former Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, who oversaw violent immigration-enforcement efforts in Minneapolis and elsewhere; C. Jay Engel, who moved from California to rural Jackson County, Tenn., as part of an effort to create a Christian nationalist enclave there; and state Rep. Monty Fritts, who ran for governor this year on a platform that included outlawing non-Christian religions and executing women who have abortions.

Organizers had kept its location a secret, but it leaked out on the Knoxville Reddit board Saturday morning. Dozens of protesters gathered outside Jackson Terminal from about 12:30 p.m. through the end of the scheduled program at 4 p.m. At that point, the event was set to turn into a watch party for the University of Tennessee-Arkansas game.

Protesters said the event and its attendees were promoting white supremacy and Christian nationalism — the idea that the United States should be a country primarily of and for white Christians. Chants included “Hate has no home here” and “Fuck you, fascists.” 

In an interview after he had been punched, Wilson said he had come to the event because, “These folks are white supremacists. They’ve invited a person who’s trying to start a whites-only town in Tennessee, they’ve stated that schools should be whites-only.” Of the attack by Moody, he said, “I walked up to talk to the security and let them know what they’re doing security for, because they’re clearly private security, and someone stepped outside and just hit me.”

Compass attempted to register to attend the event but was declined. It appeared that the only media representative of any kind allowed inside was Christian Seus, who runs the right-leaning social media outlet Backroom Knox. He posted that there were about 160 attendees inside the venue, but there was no way to confirm that.

Moody retreated inside after initiating the attack. He appeared to be one of the event organizers and worked the door for much of the afternoon along with Heritage Hubs president Sam Rhodes. Knoxville Police officers responded, and after taking Wilson’s complaint and reviewing his video of the interaction with Moody, they eventually entered the venue and issued Moody a citation for misdemeanor assault.

Police said Moody declined to provide his own statement or version of events for the report. A court date will be set for the charge.

What Happened Inside

Although Heritage Hubs organizers appeared to go to great lengths to keep the proceedings secret, local conservative activist Michael Baer posted numerous photos and a few videos from the event on his Facebook page. They include a photo of himself with Bovino. 

“Today I witnessed an amazing panel of patriotic leaders,” Baer wrote in one of his posts. “It was amazing!! The only hate was from the protestors calling us Nazis.”

Another attendee, Bren Rosen, also posted on Facebook that the event was “amazing.” She wrote, “Each speaker had insight, passion and ideas for the future of our country. Each wanted unity and not diversity with the hope of educating our younger generation to make America a better place.”

Rosen and Baer are both active with the Knoxville chapter of the group Act For America, described by the Anti-Defamation League as “the largest anti-Muslim group in America,” and by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “working to advance anti-Muslim legislation at the local and federal level while flooding the American public with hate speech demonizing Muslims.” Rosen regularly posts about alleged dangers that Islam poses to Western civilization. 

Baer also posted a video of Bovino speaking, although the audio is too poor to make out much of what he said. The former Border Patrol leader identified the influx of immigrants in recent decades as an existential threat to the country’s culture and identity. He repeated past fantastical claims he’s made that there are 107 million illegal immigrants in the country — which would be about 31 percent of the total population — and went on to say that they amount to a communist invasion.

“Illegal aliens don’t come from America, they come from somewhere that’s not America; many of them are communists,” Bovino told the audience at Saturday’s event. “Do you think they’d like your Second Amendment right to bear arms? Absolutely not, no. … What do you think is going to happen to our traditions, our values, our culture and everything we hold dear as Americans? That’s why I say that the very greatest threat we face today is that. So let’s treat it that way.”

Most estimates of the population of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. put it at 12 million to 14 million people, which has almost certainly dropped since the Trump administration began its current mass-deportation campaign last year.

Knox County Commissioner Justin Cofer attended the event and posted on Facebook that it was being unfairly characterized as racist. “What I heard was a discussion about public policy, not white supremacy,” he wrote, although he noted the policy discussions were about immigration. He recounted unpleasant encounters with protesters outside the venue and said, “the only hostility I personally observed came from some of those protesting.” 

More on Moody

Of course, the only person charged with a crime related to the event was Moody — one of its organizers. He was one of the three incorporators of Heritage Hubs early this year, along with Rhodes and Austin Rinearson. State documents initially showed Rhodes as president, Rinearson as vice president and Moody as secretary.

Rinearson is now president of the Knox County Young Republicans and sits on the county party’s executive committee. He has told Compass he is no longer affiliated with Heritage Hubs or a related organization called the Tennessee Heritage Association. His name disappeared from the state file not long after Nashville investigative reporter Phil Williams first reported on the Tennessee Heritage Association in July.

Moody, like both Rhodes and Rinearson, has a scant digital footprint. But he spoke under the name Alex Moody during public forum at County Commission’s meeting on Feb. 25 of this year in support of a presentation by Fox titled “A Christian’s Biblical View of Illegal Immigration.” Fox intended the presentation to push back against Christian appeals for empathy and support for immigrants regardless of their legal status, which he said was misguided.

Moody went further in his remarks. He said that deporting people in the country illegally was just the first step in a broader “remigration” project. The Tennessee Heritage Association and Knox County Young Republicans have also posted online about remigration, a concept imported to the U.S. from far-right white nationalist groups in Europe. Moody mentioned some of those groups approvingly.

You can watch his remarks right here. He began:

“I want to talk about the future, and I want to talk about the future of what’s coming next for immigration. So I have a unique perspective on this you haven’t heard before, perhaps, but it’s a perspective I think will define the coming decades on the policy of immigration. And it’s summed up by one word, and that word is remigration.

“Remigration is the future of immigration. Mass deportations is the policy of today, but the policy of tomorrow is remigration, and what that means is more than just mass deportations of illegal aliens. That’s a given. It also means sending back all the legal immigrants who are here as well. It means reversing the effects of mass migration completely and sending all the foreigners back to the countries they came from.”

Proponents of remigration often include naturalized citizens among their targets for deportation. Tennessee Republican Congressman Andy Ogles introduced a Remigration Act this year that would expand the categories of citizens who could be subject to denaturalization.

Moody went on to say that remigration “is already wildly popular overseas,” referring to Germany’s Alternative for Deutschland and Britain’s Reform UK, far-right political parties with ethnonationalist anti-immigrant agendas. He concluded by advising commissioners, “The future is remigration. It’s already mainstream overseas, and soon it will be ascendant politically here in America. A savvy politician would steer with the wind and not against it.” 

Remigration was also the focus of an event the Tennessee Heritage Association hosted with Knox County Young Republicans at the Square Room in January (as detailed in prior Compass coverage). 

Last month, with Fox’s support, Moody applied for appointment to the county’s Board of Zoning Appeals. According to the county website, the nine-member volunteer board hears “requests for variances of the Knox County zoning regulations, appeals of Uses on Review, and appeals of Zoning Enforcement & Stormwater Engineering administrative decisions and penalties.”

The résumé Moody submitted for the position was surprisingly opaque. It included no phone number, email or address — saying they were “Available upon request” — and omitted names of his current and past employers, which were identified only as “Software Company,” “Defense Contractor” and “Wireless Company.” It listed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Minnesota State University and San Diego State University, respectively.

In a brief accompanying letter, Moody wrote that he has lived in the 9th District for five years, “and I am committed to ensuring that the people of my district are well served by their government.” (Ironically, perhaps, William Wilson — whom Moody is charged with assaulting — also lives in the 9th District.)

Although serving on the BZA is hardly a high-profile position, it is the kind of appointment often sought by people who want to build a civic résumé for future runs for office or other public service. Six county commissioners voted to appoint Moody, with the other five voting for a different candidate. The six who supported him were Republicans Fox, Cofer, Angela Russell, Barry Beeler and Adam Thompson, and Democrat Damon Rawls.