Teacher Fired After School Discovers His Ties to White Nationalist Richard Spencer

A substitute teacher and coach at an all-girls Catholic school in Maryland was fired because he works for white supremacist Richard Spencer’s white nationalist think tank.

Greg Conte, who tweets under the alias Gregory Ritter, lost both of his positions at Academy of the Holy Cross in Kensington, Md. for being an alt-right leader, the school’s president and CEO Kathleen Ryan Prebble told TIME.

According to Prebble, Conte joined the school in the fall of 2014 as a seasonal coach, and then worked as a substitute teacher. In October, Prebble received a tip in an email about Conte’s involvement with the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist organization founded by Spencer focused on “heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States and around the world,” according to its website.

Prebble said the school decided to fire Conte right away once they confirmed his connections. The school informed parents about Conte’s alt-right ties in a letter sent Thursday — something Prebble said she decided to do after Conte went public about his real identity.

“Prior to his firing, he was successfully using an alternate identity in his work with his atrocious group,” Prebble wrote in the letter. “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.”

Using the alias Gregory Ritter on Twitter, Conte has frequently tweeted in support of the alt-right movement, including several links to alt-right supporting websites. According to his page, Conte is the director of operations at the National Policy Institute.

In an interview with ABC7, Conte said that while he understood why the school fired him, he was disappointed, saying that the views he espouses as a member of the alt-right are “fairly common.”

Conte doubled down on those views, saying “whites have a right to their own countries and to control who comes into their countries.”

“Diversity leads to social problems,” he said. “It leads to conflict, it leads to war.”

Conte did not immediately respond to a request for comment.