As One People’s Project has reported (as well as Philly.com and the Philadelphia Inquirer) Keystone State Skinheads (KSS) associate Vincent Pellegrino died on the morning of May 20th while fleeing the scene after sexually assaulting a woman in the 2600 Block of Collins Street.
Pellegrino crashed the car, which belonged to the woman he assaulted, into a wall along Westmoreland street and was pronounced dead at the scene minutes later. It is unknown whether he lost control of the car or intentionally crashed.
KSS (also known as Keystone United) had been trying desperately to fix their brand in recent years, changing between the two names frequently, and claiming in interviews that their acts of violence are all in the past. They would have us believe that these days they are just concerned nationalists. This incident demonstrates once again that KSS members and supporters are the scum of the earth, and no amount of careful media planning or timid behavior in public will make people forget this.
The Pellegrino brothers are both listed on the 6400 Block of Ditman street, only a few blocks from KSS members Patricia and Bryan Vanagaitis. Nunzio was the KSS supporter who recently attended a rally against Russian intervention in Ukraine. KSS members and other Neo-Nazis are lamenting Pellegrino’s death on social media and making absolutely no mention of the assault.
Rape and sexual assault are a global crisis. As much as we would love to blame it on Fascism, rapists (overwhelmingly but not always male) will claim to follow all sorts of political ideologies. What we can confidently say is that Fascism is and always has been a sexist and anti-woman movement.
“Woman’s world is her husband, her family, her children and her home. We do not find it right when she presses into the world of men.” – Adolph Hitler
Fuck you, Hitler.
Antifascists must support reproductive freedom, personal autonomy, an end to rape and rape culture, and oppose patriarchy and sexism. If we ignore those things in favor of making alliances with sexists who may be Anti-Nazi, we doom our movement to destroy itself with toxic people, as happens within Fascist movements routinely.
By now most of you have heard about the Misogynist murder spree of Elliott Rodgers, a so-called “nice guy” who was in reality a murderous sexist and racist to boot. Rodgers felt entitled to murder women for the “crime” of not wanting to sleep with him. He lamented online about how he couldn’t compete sexually with “inferior” black men. He had weapons and choose to turn them against unsuspecting young women because he felt entitled to do so.
Philly Antifa believe that we can live in a world without men like Elliott Rodgers and Vincent Pellegrino. That racism, sexism and hetero-patriarchy were concepts not borne from nature but intentionally engineered into our social and religious institutions as forms of control that have since become “tradition” or “just the way it is.” The fights against those evils are all unique and require different analysis and tactics, but they will either all be won or all be lost.
