Some Far-Right Books From Montco Publishers Dropped By Amazon

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, PA — Amazon has removed several titles published by the Montgomery County trio behind Antelope Hill, a company that translates and publishes works which include white supremacist and fascist ideologies.

As of Sept. 7, Amazon still had a number of Antelope Hill works available. The offerings include a translation of “A New Nobility of Blood and Soil” by SS officer Richard Walter Darré, and a collection of speeches by Adolf Hitler called “In His Own Words.”

In the book notes on Amazon, Antelope Hill said these works should be preserved for historical context. But a national civil rights organization is pushing on Amazon and other online retailers to be more incisive in its cuts to the publishing house's content stream.

In June, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified the heads of Antelope Hill as three Montco residents: Vincent and Sarah Cucchiara of Green Lane Borough and Dmitri Anatolievich Loutsik of Harleysville. Read more: Publishing Co. Behind Nazi, Fascist Publications Run By Montco Couple

The SPLC and the Allentown Morning Call said the owners went to great lengths to hide their identities, but reporters connected them to Antelope Hill using social media, public records, and commercial data services. The three met at Penn State, the report said.

In an update to their June article, the Southern Poverty Law Center said Amazon “removed some of the titles and chose to leave more than a dozen other titles standing.” In a comment to the organization, Amazon said it removed content based “on the literature itself, rather than the publisher.”

Some of the titles Amazon removed are still available at other online retailers like Libroworld and Book Depository. One is available at Target.

Amazon has rules against offensive and controversial materials that do not apply to books, music, videos, and DVDs. There is an offensive content policy listed on the Kindle Direct Publishing page that indicates content removal is up to Amazon's discretion:

"We don’t sell certain content including content that we determine is hate speech, promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, advocates terrorism, or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive. "

Amazon has seemed to take a hard line on certain Nazi-affiliated literature in the past, as the New York Times and Daily Beast have reported. Books by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell came off the proverbial shelves sometime before a Times report in 2020 titled "In Amazon’s Bookstore, No Second Chances for the Third Reich."

However, smaller publishers like Antelope Hill are still printing, and selling, books by authors both old and new. And Amazon isn't the only place to find them.

Barnes and Noble pulled down an Antelope Hill page on its website after the Southern Poverty Law Center contacted them about the books’ content, the report said. Barnes and Noble said the page came from a book industry feed, and that Antelope Hill titles were never sold in-store.

Powell’s Books sells Antelope Hill titles online, and told the SPLC they have only sold one title in the collection. The retailer said they had a commitment to free speech, the report said.

And, public libraries in Massachusetts were shocked earlier in 2022 when titles by Antelope Hill and other far-right publishers showed up in the e-book library, WGBH reported. The books were available through the libraries' subscription to Hoopla, an online media vendor, the report said.

“We’re talking about deeply damaging information that’s not factual,” said Jason Homer, executive director of the Worcester Public Library, in the WGBH report.

The Southern Poverty Law Center also said Antelope Hill has ties to white supremacist and far-right groups, which they identify as the National Justice Party (NJP) and The Right Stuff (TRS) podcast network.

Antelope Hill's website also includes a link to Arktos, which says it has “established itself as the principal publisher in English of the writings of the European ‘New Right’ school of political thought.”

Thus, the SPLC says, Amazon is essentially funding white supremacists who exploit the conglomerate's low publishing standards.

Amazon and Antelope Hill did not reply to Patch's multiple requests for comment.

Antelope Hill is registered as a limited liability company (LLC) in the state of Pennsylvania with a Bucks County UPS store as its address, records show. The company was originally registered in New Mexico.

The LLC was formed on Jan. 28, 2021 and is registered under a foreign owner, according to the state. Antelope Hill also publishes books by new authors, and has separate imprints for fiction and children’s books.

"Antelope Hill Publishing seeks to ensure history, culture, and revolutionary ideas will be preserved in the written word and made easily accessible, fairly priced, and professionally published," the company says. "The best refutation of historical revisionists is a clear statement of primary accounts – fighting the battle for minds from the printed page, instead of locked away in secret hard drives and foreign languages."

The Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Alabama, is known for identifying white supremacist groups and other extremist organizations and pursuing legal action against them. Its stated mission is to be “a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of all people.”

The center fired attorney Morris Dees, one of its co-founders, in 2019 because of "conduct issues." Staffers had accused him of being a racist and said Black employees had "felt threatened and banded together" in previous years, as the Associated Press reported.

The SPLC has drawn scrutiny from its characterizations of people or organizations as being associated with hate groups, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in an article on Dees' firing.