An all-girls Catholic high school in Maryland has taken out the trash fired a substitute teacher and field hockey coach after discovering his white supremacist ties, including the fact that he works for Richard Spencer’s think tank, which was originally reported by our sister site Splinter.
Gregory Conte was fired from his positions at Academy of the Holy Cross in Kensington, Md. According to a letter that school President and CEO Kathleen Ryan Prebble sent home to parents Thursday, Conte was fired “immediately,” BuzzFeed reports. The letter noted that students had discovered through social media that Conte was “a member of the ‘alt-right’ movement” under an “alternate identity.”
“Prior to his firing, he was successfully using an alternate identity in his work with his atrocious group,” Prebble said in the letter, Fox 5 DC reports. “As for his potential impact on our girls, I conducted an investigation at the time of his firing and determined there was no reason to think that he negatively influenced any of our girls with his philosophy.”
Conte appeared to use the alias Gregory Ritter on Twitter, using his account to send out several problematic tweets, including remarks such as “Hitler did not commit any crime.”
Students also discovered footage of Conte attending the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., back in August.
“I don’t regret it,” Conte, who had been working as a substitute teacher since August 2016, told the news station. “I obviously liked working at the school and I miss everybody, but I understand the political situation and I expected them to act as they did.”
School officials acknowledged that they first learned about Conte’s white supremacist ties back in October, but declined to say why they waited until January to inform parents.
“The school is just trying to protect its own position,” Conte, who is the current director of operations at the National Policy Institute, Richard Spencer’s “think tank, added. “I get why they are doing that. They are doing it because they are put in an awkward position where they have employed somebody with whom they had no problem and whose views did not at all adversely affect their school’s operations.”
Nonetheless, now that the truth has surfaced, Conte is no longer hiding behind his fake name, and is actually speaking out in an interview with WJLA-TV to double down on his rhetoric.
“Diversity leads to social problems, it leads to conflict, it leads to war,” he told WJLA before taking a weak puff of a cigar, because of course he would.