Hardy Lloyd
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On August 10, 2023, federal authorities arrested longtime white supremacist Hardy Lloyd in West Virginia. The arrest follows years of Lloyd’s incendiary and threatening online posts, but the charges are tied to his activities surrounding the trial of Robert Bowers, the white supremacist who murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018.
Lloyd is charged with obstruction of the due administration of justice, transmitting threats in interstate and foreign commerce, and witness tampering. He faces up to 35 years in prison for the combined charges.
Lloyd’s extremist history
The ADL has been tracking Lloyd and his white supremacist activities since at least 2003, when he lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Since that time, he’s been associated with various white supremacist groups, many of which he created himself and were relatively small.
Currently, Lloyd is the self-proclaimed leader of a pseudo-religious, white supremacist group known as the Church of Ben Klassen (CoBK). The CoBK follows a type of white supremacy known as the Creativity Movement.
Lloyd has a long history of violence going back to at least 2004 when he was charged with the murder of his then-girlfriend, Lori Hann. Claiming self-defense, Lloyd was acquitted on the homicide charge, but convicted on weapons charges. He received a 36-month probation sentence for the weapons conviction.
In 2010, Lloyd was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to illegally carrying several firearms without a license.
Over the next decade, Lloyd settled into a routine: he would violate the conditions of his parole, his parole would be revoked and he would return to prison. Those violations included Lloyd harassing people online and various weapons offenses.
In 2020, Lloyd was released from prison and sent to a halfway house. In 2021, Lloyd moved down to Austin, Texas for a short time, eventually moving back up north, likely to the western Pennsylvania/West Virginia area.
Over the past two and a half years, Lloyd has encouraged his followers to ramp up their efforts to distribute white supremacist propaganda stickers in their respective states. At the start of the Bowers trial, Lloyd began anouncing online which Pittsburgh-area neighborhoods have a high concentration of Jewish residents (and should be targeted with propaganda).
Despite being a convicted felon, Lloyd openly brags and posts videos online about owning multiple guns, providing instructional videos on loading and shooting them. He is able to circumvent laws preventing felons from owning firearms because the guns he owns are black powder pistols and pepperball pistols.
Hardy Lloyd on BitChute
Lloyd responds to the Bowers trial
Since the start of Bowers’ May 2023 trial, Lloyd has posted threatening comments on Telegram and elsewhere, encouraging the murder of Jews and law enforcement. He has also threatened to publicly reveal the identities of the jurors in the Bowers trial. In a May email Lloyd sent to his followers, he threatened violence in Pittsburgh if Bowers were to be found guilty.
In a May 28 Telegram post, Lloyd wrote, “I told our people to double their efforts. The flyer drive for Western PA shall continue all Summer long to show support for the gunning down, Turner Diaries style, of 11 yids. Ya know, most synagogues are under guarded. Lone Wolves should be targeting more of these. ... KILL MORE JEWS!!”
Hardy Lloyd’s August 3 post on Telegram.
The post continued: "Jews, rabbis, CEOs, bank presidents, corporate presidents, those who run the large investment firms and trans-national corporations, etc.... These are the scum we need to kill” [sic]
In a May 30 email to his followers, Lloyd wrote: “We shall also file for the names of the jury once it is over to make sure they voted the right way. If Bowers is not freed then we shall not only up our flyers, but also make PGH sorry. We cannot state what this is, of course. Don't want to say anything NOT covered under the 1A. But just know that any guilty verdict could bring down the wrath of lone wolves in the region.”
Hardy Lloyd’s August 3 post on Telegram.
On August 2, 2023, Robert Bowers was sentenced to death for the Tree of Life synagogue mass shooting. The following day, Lloyd posted on his Telegram channel calling for white supremacist lone wolves in Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio to attack Jews in western Pennsylvania, writing, “Shed jew [sic] blood till [sic] none is left to spill!!”
On August 8, the judge in the Bowers trial ordered that the names of the jurors will remain permanently sealed to protect the jurors from “improperly motivated members of the public.”