A far-right figure who is involved in a secretive invitation-only fraternal organization, whose founder has spoken of being at war with the US government, is also part-owner of an ammunition company that has contracts with the federal government and law enforcement, the Guardian can reveal.
Nathaniel Fischer – a venture capitalist, former Claremont Institute fellow and president of the Dallas lodge of the secretive Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR) – is also part-owner of Texas-based ammunition manufacturer S1 Armory, which trades as Stand 1 Armory.
A Guardian investigation has revealed that the company has current US federal government and law enforcement contracts, even though Fischer regularly promotes anti-government conspiracy theories on social media.
The Guardian contacted Stand 1 Armory and a Gmail address associated with Fischer for comment but received no response.
Fischer, 38, of Dallas, Texas, is also CEO of New Founding, described by him as a “venture fund for the American right”, which is now seeking wealthy investors for a venture fund that will power explicitly rightwing startups.
Filings with the Texas comptroller of public accounts and IRS indicate Fischer has been president of SACR’s Dallas lodge since its founding in 2021.
The Guardian reported last month that the secretive, invitation-only fraternal organization was founded by former shampoo magnate, Charles Haywood, who has mused on his website about his possible future as a “warlord” at the head of an “armed patronage network” which might engage in “more-or-less open warfare with the federal government” in a post-collapse US.
Following the Guardian’s reporting, Haywood and SACR attracted broad criticism, including some from others on the Christian right like Josh Buice, an Atlanta-based Baptist pastor.
Dallas and Dallas county property records, data brokers and real estate websites indicate that the registered address for SACR’s Dallas lodge is also Fischer’s home address, a property owned on paper by a trust registered to the same address.
The property is a 6,400 sq ft French Normandy-style house on a one-acre lot in Royal Northaven, one of Dallas’s most exclusive neighborhoods. The city of Dallas valued the home at over $3.3m in its most recent assessment.
Also registered at that address is S1 Armory LLC, whose Texas filings name Fischer as a general partner, along with Mary Kaufman of Fairview, Texas, and Jennifer Williams of Weatherford, Texas.
That company is an ammunition manufacturer located in Allen, Texas. It was founded in 2013 by Anthony Miglini but was bought in 2020 by Principal Investments, a private stock company reportedly founded by Fischer.
Federal government records indicate the company currently has two contracts to deliver ammunition to the US Department of Justice worth a total of $78,678.
On X, formerly known as Twitter, meanwhile, Fischer has repeatedly criticized the justice department and its agencies, and more generally expressed anti-government sentiments and aired anti-government conspiracy theories.
Many of these comments concern the January 6 attacks at the US Capitol.
In January 2022, Fischer wrote of accused rioters: “The way the DOJ is treating these political prisoners is disgraceful”. In the same month, he objected to Twitter’s efforts to push back on disinformation claiming that federal agencies orchestrated those events, claiming “we don’t know the extent of the FBI’s involvement”.
Other Fischer posts assert collusion between federal agencies, media and internet companies.
In August 2022, in relation to allegations that Facebook censored the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election, he asked: “Does the CIA handle foreign coups and the FBI domestic ones?” Last January, Fischer posed a “sincere question for institutionalists / pro-institutional conservatives … Is there a reason FBI agents who censored information that proved true … deserve anything more than contempt?”
Fischer also appears to believe that federal agencies are involved in an ongoing effort to simulate far-right protests. Recently after neo-Nazi protests in Orlando, Florida, Fischer repeatedly endorsed the rightwing conspiracy theory that the protesters were federal agents, at one point responding to another poster: “We know that the Feds are trying to build a narrative that right-wing extremism is the greatest security threat we face.”
Fischer has also repeatedly called for conservative US to secede in an act of “national divorce”.
Laura K Field is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Institute who has written about the Claremont Institute and the political milieu surrounding it.
In an email, she pointed to the “incoherence of Fischer’s position”, writing that Fischer “is selling munitions to (and is presumably dependent on) government entities for whom he also shows great contempt”.
Field added: “He is also stoking the culture war and pitching his wares to would-be vigilantes whom he hopes will turn on the government,” which she wrote is “altogether consistent with the Claremont Institute worldview, which is constantly fretting about civic disunity and the perils of multiculturalism, while at the same time actively stoking the flames of the culture war”.
She concluded: “It’s also so vivid and potentially violent – it’s impossible not to imagine the vigilantes and the government entities shooting at one another using Fischer’s munitions!”
S1 Armory also has contracts with local law enforcement agencies in several states. Council meeting records from Normal, Illinois, indicate that the city’s police department paid the company $6,200 for ammunition in June 2022 and $2,580 in 2021; Amarillo Independent school district paid the company $1,545 in September 2022 according to its check register.
Fischer has acted as a public representative for S1 Armory. In a video on the company published for the Align platform – which was subsequently bought from New Founding by Blaze Media – Fischer says that US gun culture is “an important lever against potential tyranny in our country”, and suggests that “when a guest comes over to a host’s place, there should be a new norm of not bringing wine, they should bring ammunition”.
Fischer is CEO of New Founding, which bills itself as a “venture firm and talent network”. Having sold its platforms Align and Return to Blaze Media last month, which also saw New Founding’s co-founder Matthew Peterson move to Blaze Media as editor-in-chief, New Founding has launched a new venture fund which requires investors to pay $50,000 a quarter for a subscription, according to fund documents.
Their funds will be invested in companies that “embody a distinct right-wing cultural thesis and/or provide technology or infrastructure that is strategically valuable to the right”, according to a post on X from Santiago Pliego, a New Founding employee.
The venture fund is not required to make extensive filings with regulators due to its size and remit, and it is not clear who has invested in it so far. However, Charles Haywood, the former shampoo maker and would-be warlord, retweeted Fischer’s 21 August announcement of the fund.
New Founding’s earliest publicly recorded income came from Firebrand Pac, a now defunct political committee whose main activities included producing a series of videos featuring the Claremont Institute’s primary funder, Thomas Klingenstein, warning that conservatives were in a “cold civil war” with “woke communists”.
Federal Election Commission records show that Firebrand Pac paid New Founding $382,500 in four disbursements between January and September 2022. The Guardian reported last month that Klingenstein had become a far more active political donor since 2020.
Fischer was a Claremont Lincoln fellow in 2020, in the same class as the Breitbart tech reporter Allum Bokhari, and Michael Knowles, the Daily Wire pundit who told the Conservative Political Action Coalition conference last March that “transgenderism must be eliminated”.
