The Texas Department of Public Safety is searching for a violent white supremacist who is believed to have moved from Pennsylvania to Austin last year. Hardy Carroll Lloyd, 44, is charged with making terroristic threats after DPS said he promised to “carry a firearm onto the Texas State Capitol grounds this weekend and challenge any law enforcement officer who tried to take enforcement actions against him.” The department is offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to Lloyd’s arrest.
Lloyd is a lifelong bigot with an avowed hatred for women, people of color, Jews, the LGBTQIA community, and police, among many others. He calls himself the reverend of the Church of Ben Klassen, which he created to preach race war, and has spent much of his adult life in prison – on weapons charges, and then for violating his parole by promoting violence on social media. For example, after the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh that killed 11 and injured six others, Lloyd – then on probation, and specifically prohibited from using the internet to promote terrorism – couldn’t help but encourage lone-wolf attacks against Jews and gun-ban advocates. He was sent back to federal prison until the end of 2020.
Members of the local antifascist community believe that after his release, Lloyd moved to the Highland neighborhood of Austin. They report that stickers and posters with messages such as “RaHoWa” (racial holy war), “White Pride,” and “Fuck Diversity” began appearing in schoolyards, parks, and government buildings around the area in November. Now, Lloyd is thought to have moved to the Southpark Meadows area and fliers and stickers are appearing there.
Lloyd completed probation after his release and before moving to Austin, so he is once again free to dox and intimidate people online, which he does through the Church of Ben Klassen’s website and Blogspot. It’s from there that Marianna Wright was doxxed in November of last year.
Wright, who lives in the Rio Grande Valley, was the first to file suit against Steve Bannon‘s We Build the Wall fraud. She says that Lloyd posted her picture on his website, called her an anti-white bigot, and asked his followers to supply him with more pictures – “legally.” She took this information to several law enforcement agencies but was told that Lloyd’s post was protected under the First Amendment and no action could be taken against him. The McAllen and Mission police departments “did absolutely nothing,” Wright said. “They were completely unresponsive. Same with DPS and the FBI.”
Wright noted that the language in Texas law governing online threats is vague and subject to interpretation. “The officer receiving the complaint has discretion on whether to send it to an investigator. The investigator has discretion on whether to send it to a district attorney or assistant U.S. attorney. That person then has discretion on whether it’s worth sending to a judge for a warrant or arrest. And then the judge has discretion on whether they think this person needs to be dealt with. So there is language in the code, but that language is irrelevant, apparently, when you’re a woman in Texas. And the man is a Nazi who has already served three terms in prison for threatening and provoking the murder of human beings.”
This article appears in May 27 • 2022.
