The first hint of James Fields’s ideology has emerged, from a former teacher of his. Surprising precisely nobody, he turns out to have been a Nazi sympathizer:

The accused driver, James Alex Fields Jr., 20, of Ohio, had espoused extremist ideals at least since high school, according to Derek Weimer, a history teacher.

Weimer said that he taught Fields during his junior and senior years at Randall K. Cooper High School in Kentucky. In a class called “America’s Modern Wars,” Weimer said that Fields wrote a deeply researched paper about the Nazi military during World War II.

“It was obvious that he had this fascination with Nazism and a big idolatry of Adolf Hitler,” Weimer said. “He had white supremacist views. He really believed in that stuff.”

Weimer said that Fields’s research project into the Nazi military was well written but appeared to be a “big lovefest for the German military and the Waffen-SS.”

This deals a blow to any incipient alt-right conspiracy theory that, oh, maybe his gas pedal got stuck. Yesterday perennial alt-right defender John Cardillo — in between issuing tweets blaming the wrong person, and talking about how “the right is finally fighting back” so you have to “strap in” because it’s “going to get bumpier” — filled his Twitter timeline with theories about how this might be a false flag operation. Guess that theory is done.

Time for Cardillo and his ilk to move to Plan B: proclaim the need for Fields to be tried for murder while spending all your time denouncing Antifa.

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