PORTLAND, Ore. — Peter Santilli, a self-styled “new-media” journalist and right-wing YouTube talk-show host, was named last week in a grand jury indictment involving the armed takeover of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Three of his 15 co-defendants were released to home confinement last week, but Santilli — a 50-year-old ex-Marine — remains in jail.
While his co-defendants like brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy took their place as leaders during the occupation, Santilli made a name for himself in Burns, Oregon, as the cameraman in military fatigues known for shouting down environmental protesters with a bullhorn.
Despite Santilli’s continued insistence that he was at the wildlife refuge as a journalist and activist, a judge kept him in jail after hearing clips of Santilli’s own radio show — proof, the government argued, of Santilli’s participation in the occupation and evidence of his potential danger to the community. As the judge read his decision, Santilli — often smiling in the courtroom and whispering in his attorney’s ear — held his head silently in his hands.
The prosecution played 20 minutes of clips from Santilli’s show for the court, dating as far back as June 2015, in which Santilli discusses burying illegal guns, dying a free man and shooting federal agents if they came through his door uninvited. And, in a clip that U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman called “distasteful,” Santilli expressed a desire to “try, convict and shoot Hillary Clinton in the vagina.”
Santilli’s attorney, Thomas Coan, argued that his client was not to be taken seriously: His words were the bloviations of a “shock jock,” “an entertainer,” but also a “new-media journalist.” Mosman saw Santilli’s words differently: “When he says he will die a free man, I don’t take that as a man who is joking about it,” he said.
Despite Santilli’s extreme right-leaning views, his case has attracted the interest of First Amendment activists, including the ACLU of Oregon, which released a statement Tuesday questioning whether the court’s determination of Santilli’s danger based on his words is a violation of his First Amendment rights.
“We think the government is in an overreach position,” Mat dos Santos, legal director for ACLU of Oregon, said over the phone. The ACLU won’t be representing Santilli but plans to watch his case closely, dos Santos says. “If the government is allowed to cherry-pick our statements over the course of months or years to label us a danger, you really run the risk of silencing civil discourse.”
Santilli’s role in the armed occupation continues to be a point of confusion. And even more confusing is whether he can continue to be criminalized for his speech.
To many, Santilli is a provocateur, mouthpiece and broadcaster for the anti-government Patriot movement, often screaming into a bullhorn while in Burns at any whiff of opposition. But to others, he’s a citizen journalist in military attire who had no knowledge of the conflict until the day it started.
In an interview at her Portland hotel room, Deborah Jordan Reynolds — Santilli’s girlfriend and co-host on his YouTube channel — told The Washington Post that Santilli’s skepticism of America turned toward extreme around 2002, when conspiracy theories that the government had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks surfaced. Reynolds says that after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Santilli, a proud veteran, was ready to reenlist and go to war.
But soon “he started looking into the idea that maybe the government did know something else,” she says. And it threw Santilli for a loop. “Pete’s done a lot of changing since 9/11.”
Santilli started his YouTube channel in 2009, and his first videos show a starkly different person than the long-haired “ambush journalist” of today. In his first YouTube dispatches, Santilli wears a suit and tie in videos he calls “Consumer Advocate TV,” pointing to bottles of Coca-Cola and telling viewers that high-fructose corn syrup is “destroying America.”
By early 2012, Santilli became a radio persona: hosting a new program, “The Overthrow Show,” where his voice took on a deeper, haughtier tone as he discussed conspiracy theories and lambasted American politicians. That’s when Reynolds says the two met in an online Ron Paul meetup group and decided to co-host the show together.
“People have likened Pete and I to Howard Stern and Robin Quivers,” she says. “I bust his chops on the show.”
By July 2013, the show was officially named “The Pete Santilli Show,” with Reynolds acting as co-host and announcer.
Reynolds says that the show has attracted ire from all sides: Howard Stern, in 2013, questioned Santilli’s statements about Hillary Clinton (which also attracted the attention of the Secret Service). And last summer, while attending the Baltimore Black Lives Matter demonstrations, Geraldo Rivera calls a screaming Santilli a “fascist” and a “Stalinist.”
“What he does is dangerous. He’s speaking out against the United States government, and he’s an activist,” Reynolds says.
“It’s ambush journalism,” she says. It’s “this new in-your-face journalism.”
Although Reynolds says that Santilli “broke the story” of the armed 2014 Bundy Ranch standoff in Bunkerville, Nevada, others argue that Santilli is the reason it occurred in the first place.
“You would not have had Bundy Ranch if not for Santilli,” says J.J. MacNab, an expert on militias and anti-government extremist organizations in the United States. MacNab says that the militia and patriot movement was looking for a way to take a “hard stand” against the government, and “by 2014 the movement was ready… . Because Pete Santilli got their attention, they convened.”
Coan, Santilli’s attorney, argues that his client was never encouraging people toward violence. “The government is alleging that his rallying calls asking people to come to the area as witnesses to this, asking people to bring flowers … to come peacefully” were provoking violence. “His intent was to put this in a spot where it had the best possibility for peaceful resolution.”
Santilli traveled from his home in Cincinnati to Burns on Jan. 2. In his own livestream videos, Santilli is seen speaking during a march with Ammon Bundy about taking a “hard stand” at a nearby wildlife refuge. “Let everybody know that they’re to go to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge,” Bundy says to Santilli on camera, who responds enthusiastically: “Okay!”
An environmental protester of the armed occupation, Kieran Suckling says he could make no distinction between Santilli and the armed occupants of the refuge — noting that, contrary to Santilli’s arguments in court, he saw Santilli carrying weapons on the refuge. “He’s not media at all, it’s all a fraud,” says Suckling, who is executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity.
In his own videos, there are times when Santilli plays the eager, hired public information officer for the occupation. “They want me!” he says to Reynolds from behind the camera in a livestream from the Hammond protest. Later he steps off camera to speak with leaders of the occupation. “I’m going to have to step away to make sure I don’t relay anything that they don’t want relayed,” Santilli says to the camera. “It’s my job to relay what’s publicly available.”
Reynolds says that’s what new media is: taking a stand, aligning with a cause. “His show is a form of his activism — his civil disobedience. He protests every day,” she says.
And she is sure that keeping Santilli in jail will only make his voice louder: “They’re creating a monster, as far as I’m concerned.”
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