North Dakota dad denounces white nationalist son in letter to newspaper

A North Dakota man condemned his son Monday for attending the #UniteTheRight white supremacist rally in Virginia over the weekend.

The son, Peter Tefft, was the subject of a tweet from Yes, You're Racist, a Twitter account that is attempting to crowdsource the identities of those who attended the alt-right rally of several hundred people in Charlottesville, Va.

The gathering protested the city's plans to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from Lee Park downtown and erupted into violence. A counter protester died when an apparent neo-Nazi supporter rammed his car into others on a crowded narrow street as people were leaving the event.

In the letter published in the Fargo (N.D.) Forum, father Pearce Tefft writes that he and his family "wish to loudly repudiate my son’s vile, hateful and racist rhetoric and actions." The father said he taught all of his children that all men and women are created equal.

Evidently Peter has chosen to unlearn these lessons, much to my and his family’s heartbreak and distress. We have been silent up until now, but now we see that this was a mistake.

It was the silence of good people that allowed the Nazis to flourish the first time around, and it is the silence of good people that is allowing them to flourish now.

In a post on his Facebook page, Peter Tefft referenced his attendance at the rally, quoting an article from the site Altright.com.

The article discusses, among other things, the rally as "the beginning of the White Civil Rights movement" and claims that Charlottesville's mayor plotted the disorder at the rally to end the movement.

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It also theorizes that James Fields of Maumee, Ohio, charged with second-degree murder after driving his car into a crowd of people at the rally, was not part of the alt-right, primarily because his mother has "a very Jewish name." Her name is Samantha Bloom.

Peter Tefft's Facebook posts remain public and now largely are filled with comments mocking him with various vulgarities.

But none of the comments come close to the final line of Pearce Tefft's letter to his son.

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"He once joked, 'The thing about us fascists is it’s not that we don’t believe in freedom of speech. You can say whatever you want. We’ll just throw you in an oven,' " his father wrote. "Peter, you will have to shovel our bodies into the oven, too.

"Please son, renounce the hate, accept and love all."

Follow Trevor Mitchell on Twitter: @TJM613