Heritage Foundation staffer RSVP’d to white nationalist’s wedding
A contributor to The Heritage Foundation’s intended to attend a white nationalist’s wedding, according to publicly accessible information the Data Lab reviewed.
Amalia Halikias, The Heritage Foundation’s government relations director and former campaign director for Blake Masters’ failed 2022 U.S. Senate campaign, RSVP’d yes to Nathan Lyons’ wedding in June 2022, according to publicly available data on wedding registry website The Knot. Lyons, a former U.S. Army Ranger, attended the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection with Nicholas Fuentes, a white nationalist livestreamer who aims to move the Republican Party further to the extreme far right.
Lyons also appeared in a photograph at a white nationalist fitness club in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2020.
Halikias wrote, “Looking forward <3 Amalia” on her RSVP. The Data Lab was unable to confirm Halikias attended the wedding.
Halikias and The Heritage Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.
The Data Lab discovered Halikias’ plan to attend the wedding using public data available from The Knot’s source code and comments Fuentes made on his livestreamed program, “America First.”
On a June 24, 2022, episode of “America First,” Fuentes explained that he was supposed to be at a wedding that day but decided to stay home and do a show about the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade reversal instead.
Fuentes congratulated “Nathan and Katelyn” on their wedding in Florida during the show. He encouraged the couple to go “make some white babies.”
The Data Lab determined that the “Nathan and Katelyn” referred to in the Fuentes monologue are Nathan Lyons and Katelyn Swett, according to The Knot’s source code.
Fuentes concluded, “And we actually have some friends in the Blake Masters camp who are at the wedding, too,” referencing Masters’ unsuccessful 2022 campaign to become a U.S. senator for Arizona. One article called Masters “,” and another said “” in his campaign.
The data suggests the wedding attendee from “the Blake Masters camp” is his former campaign manager Halikias. The Data Lab checked all salaried employees and contractors the Masters campaign listed in federal election filings with the wedding’s guest list. Halikias was the only name that appeared. She served as the Blake Masters campaign manager beginning in 2021.
There is no evidence to suggest that Fuentes and Halikias have met.
Lyons and Halikias are part of an Ivy League friends’ circle comprising Yale University and Columbia University anti-abortion activist groups, including Halikias’ brother, Dimitrios. Social media shows their circle has remained in contact.
One photo appears to show shows Lyons and Halikias attending a joint Ivy League anti-abortion conference at Yale. The two are connected on social media, including Instagram, where Lyons’ profile does not include his name and Halikias’ profile is private.
Lyons did not invite most of the Ivy League friend circle to the wedding, but did invite Halikias and three more, including Phil Jeffery, a deputy opinion editor at Newsweek. Jeffery responded “no” to the invitation.
Lyons did not respond to a request for comment.
Project 2025
Project 2025 is a proposal to dramatically reshape the U.S. government should former President Donald Trump become president again. The project embraces a controversial interpretation of the , which claims the entire executive branch is under the president’s direct control. It proposes reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil service workers as political appointees. this is a precursor to
Multiple Project 2025 contributors have and association with racists, according to a report by USA Today. These include Richard Hanania, a right-wing academic; Corey Stewart, a 2018 Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate representing Virginia; Michael Anton, a conservative speechwriter and former Trump administration official; Stephen Moore, who withdrew from consideration for an appointment to the Federal Reserve Board under the Trump administration; and Jason Richwine, whose 2009 doctoral thesis claimed “Hispanics” may never reach “IQ parity with whites,” a trope of the “scientific” racism movement.
Project 2025 lists Halikias as a contributor. The document does not reveal to what extent she contributed to the plan.
Trump has publicly disavowed the project. But his vice-presidential running mate, U.S. Sen. of Ohio, has ties to Project 2025’s key personnel, including Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts.
Halikias has ties to numerous conservative figures and a history of conservative activism. Vance and Halikias were , a pay app that has limited social media features.
Halikias attended Yale from 2011 to 2015. In her first semester, Halikias was part of a for her choice to check only “white” as her race during the admission process, even though she is half-Asian. She told the Associated Press that she “didn’t want to be grouped into that stereotype ... I didn’t want to be written off as one of the 1.4 billion Asians that were applying.”
While at Yale, Halikias was a leader in the conservative Tory Party of the Yale Political Union. After college, she worked for U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, the Utah Republican, as a committee communications director. She was named a Claremont Institute fellow for rising conservative leaders. She also worked as the membership director of the conservative RightNOW Women PAC and was the press assistant for the Jeb Bush 2016 presidential campaign before serving as the campaign policy director for U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican.
Halikias would later co-author a conservative book series for children called Liberty Lane alongside Yale graduate Josh Bansal.
Far-right ranger
The groom, former Army Ranger Nathan Lyons, has extensive ties to the far right.
The wedding invitation Fuentes received from Lyons came after the two attended the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection together.
Lyons appeared in photographs and was captured on video during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol standing with Fuentes and chanting, “America First.”
Before that, Lyons near extremist Alex Jones at the “Million MAGA March” in November 2020 in Washington, D.C. The far-right protesters were there to demonstrate against the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
Lyons also appears to have been a member of racist weightlifting club Vengeance Strength Kvlt [sic]. The club’s founder, Christopher Leaming, who goes by Sky Lemyng, is the co-author of the handbook for Operation Werewolf. Operation Werewolf is a white nationalist fight club envisioned by brothers Paul and Matthias Waggener, the founders of the neo-Völkisch hate group Wolves of Vinland.
The gym’s Telegram channel, last updated in 2021, is rife with racist posts.
Lyons appeared in a 2020 photograph of people training at Vengeance Strength Kvlt’s Nashville location featured on the racist gym’s website.
It is unclear what Lyons does for work. Federal Election Commission records show that on Aug. 9, 2021, Lyons made the maximum donation of $5,800 to Blake Masters’ Senate campaign, listing “Entrepreneur” as his job title. He donated $616 to the Ron Paul presidential campaign in 2012, listing Century 21 Real Estate as his employer.
In 2017, Lyons used an address in Illinois to register a business called Bitcoin Application Group LLC in New Mexico.
Lyons served as an Army Ranger from 2005 to 2010. He invited several other Army soldiers to his wedding, including Stuart Adcock. Adcock was in the same Army Ranger battalion as Lyons. Adcock pleaded guilty to a charge of transporting explosives without a license in December 2011 following a tip about Adcock . The court sentenced him to two years’ probation.
In May 2022, Lyons was elected “Executive Officer” or XO of his local Army Ranger Association club, the John Minatra Ranger Base in Franklin, Tennessee. Social media posts show Lyons hosting members of the Army Ranger veterans club at his College Grove, Tennessee, home in 2021.
In 2013, Lyons enrolled in a at Columbia University for former military members. According to his LinkedIn profile, Lyons graduated in 2016. Facebook posts show him remaining active in the Columbia Right to Life student organization, traveling with the group to demonstrate at the 2018 March for Life in Washington, D.C.
Columbia University did not respond to requests to confirm Lyons’ tenure at the university.
Image at top: Photo illustration by the °Ä˛ĘżŞ˝±
