‘DISPARAGING NATURE’

Kentucky State Worker Lifted From a Neo-Nazi Video to Train Emergency Personnel, Report Says

The worker told investigators he did not realize the footage was made by a white supremacist group, but he did notice the video included attacks on Jews.

A staffer from Kentucky’s Department of Criminal Justice unwittingly included a Nazi symbol in a training video for emergency personnel after lifting footage from a white supremacist YouTube video, an investigation by state authorities has found. The Lexington Herald-Leader reports that state workers were undergoing training on the drug epidemic when an instructor showed them a six-minute clip of a video that included a “Sonnenrad,” also known as the black sun, a symbol associated with white supremacists. Investigators later determined that Jeromy “Chad” Burkhart, the instructor of the class, had lifted the clip from a 33-minute-long-video made by Renegade Films, a company known to produce racist and anti-Semitic videos. The video Burkhart lifted from included racist rhetoric about Jewish people and blamed “Jewish gangsters” for heroin sales. Other than the Nazi symbol, the rest of the six minutes included in Burkhart's training video did not include anything offensive, according to Inspector General Maryellen Mynear.

But Burkhart was apparently not tipped off to the origins of the video even after it went on to attack Jews—though he did at least opt against including that part in the training video because “he did not believe it was ‘relevant,’” Mynear reportedly said in her report, noting that he had failed to “recognize the disparaging nature” of the video.