Recordings reveal Oregon port contractor praising Hitler, using slurs — now officials face a quandary

As an antifascist infiltrator secretly recorded their phone calls in September, most members of Oregon’s White Lives Matter chapter used aliases.

But not Whit.

Whit used racial slurs, argued for the superiority of the Nazis’ “national socialism” over capitalism and declared “there were so many positives to what Hitler was doing,” including “when he eliminated the Jew” — and he used the same nickname he used in public.

He doesn’t have a private life, he told other members of the group, in recordings leaked to InvestigateWest.

“You guys know everything about me,” Whit said. “You know my company names. You know my real name. You can find my address.”

He even named the specific street where he lives in Coos Bay.

Coos County records show there are fewer than 30 properties along that street — and one of them is owned by Michael Whitworth Gantenbein. But everyone in Coos Bay knows Gantenbein, owner of the hydraulic repair business Whit Industries, as Whit.

What the Port of Coos Bay didn’t know until September, Port Commission President Kyle Stevens said, was that Gantenbein — whose company they’d paid hundreds of thousands of dollars — was allegedly part of a white nationalist group.

Since then Stevens has seen emails — and read blog posts and Reddit threads and listened to a podcast episode — accusing Gantenbein of being second-in-command of the now-defunct Oregon chapter of White Lives Matter, a national organization established as a neo-Nazi counterpoint to the Black Lives Matter movement. Gantenbein did not return a phone call from InvestigateWest, but denied the allegations to The Oregonian.

To confirm Gantenbein’s involvement with White Lives Matter, however, InvestigateWest reviewed photographs, public records and hours of raw audio calls between White Lives Matter members. The calls were provided by an anonymous source identifying himself as an infiltrator from Corvallis Antifa, a group of left-wing activists who aim to expose and dismantle white supremacist groups.

Across hours of conversations, the group debated the optics of Nazi salutes, accused each other of being federal agents or gay, and praised Whit’s plans to recruit more white nationalists to Coos Bay to work for him and potentially run for office.

Newspaper articles and court records examined by InvestigateWest show that Gantenbein moved to Oregon from across the country to escape criminal drug charges, and there’s still a warrant out for his arrest in Louisiana.

Now Stevens, who became president of the port commission in October, feels flanked by bad options. The Port of Coos Bay has repeatedly hired Whit Industries as a contractor for painting equipment and repairing the hydraulics throughout the port.

Critics, led by the Western States Center, a nonprofit that tracks extremism, have mounted a campaign to get the port to cut ties with the company, which is one of few in the area qualified to perform the kind of hydraulic repair work that’s crucial for the region’s shipping and fishing industries.

“This situation raises significant concerns, not only about public funds potentially going to an active supporter of the neo-Nazi movement, but also about the broader impact Gantenbein’s views could have on port operations, political power and community safety in the region,” Western States Center said in a news release.

If port officials continue using taxpayer dollars to hire Gantenbein, they risk national outrage and reputational damage. But if the port cuts Gantenbein off, it could enrage the fishing community, lose a difficult-to-replace vendor at the port, and risk triggering a legal challenge.

It’s a dilemma that Stevens has spoken about with the legal staff and other governmental agencies in the region. Since the First Amendment protects hate speech, “you would have to show that it didn’t fall into some protected First Amendment or free speech or protected activity, even if it was something you personally found vile,” Stevens said.

It’s a conundrum between a government’s desire to stand up against bigotry, the constitutional protections for free speech, and economic realities that could threaten the future of the port itself.

“It’s a delicate tightrope,” Stevens said. “I don’t think there’s specific training for something like this.”

‘Whit is a really big part’

In a recent article in The Oregonian, Gantenbein denied being a part of White Lives Matter or having any racist ideology.

At a Port Commission meeting last month, several members of the fishing community defended Whit as “nothing but great for our community,” and dismissed the reports as merely “rumors” and “Facebook BS.”

The fact that the accusation came anonymously from Corvallis Antifa doesn’t necessarily help in a conservative-leaning county.

But for the Western States Center, it’s hard to argue with all the damning social media messages, voice recordings and photographs that Corvallis Antifa released.

“I have to figure it’s a lot more work to falsify all of this evidence than for it to be real,” said Kate Bitz, an organizer with the center. “People would have to be very determined to pull the wool over our eyes in pursuit of this one guy.”

Lending credibility to the authenticity of the recordings, Whit wasn’t the only White Lives Matter member that InvestigateWest recognized from the audio. Portland area neo-Nazi Casey Knuteson, who InvestigateWest profiled, for example, can be heard on the recordings going by his longtime alias Alfred.

In the audio, other members praise Whit for creating White Lives Matter banners, producing White Lives Matter T-shirts and driving hours from Coos Bay to attend White Lives Matter events.

“Whit is a big part of our operations — whether it’s the driving, whether it’s the banners, whether it’s the uniformity — Whit is a really big part,” one member said.

In the leaked recordings, Whit sometimes talked in detail about personal things, such as his mother’s illness and putting down a dog he had for 17 years. His voice, a distinctive gravelly rasp, sounded identical to the one on Gantenbein’s outgoing voicemail message when InvestigateWest called for comment. And it sounded identical to Gantenbein’s voice on a YouTube clip uploaded this summer, where he told a prank caller that “it’s a bummer” that Hitler is dead and that he votes for him.

To that, add videos and photographic evidence: A White Lives Matter propaganda video from September shows activists in white masks riding on a flatbed truck that looks identical to Gantenbein’s distinctive truck, right down to the American and “Don’t Tread On Me” flags.

Another photo, taken by an Associated Press photographer, appears to show Gantenbein’s scraggly white beard sticking out from his mask as the group waved a Nazi flag and placed banners above a Portland overpass. Then there’s the unmasked photo where he’s having lunch at the Corvallis Burgerville with the alleged leader of the local Oregon chapter of White Lives Matter.

In The Oregonian, Gantenbein admitted the photograph was genuine — but claimed that he “walked away immediately” when he found out what the meeting was about.

Stevens said he thinks the voice on the recordings sounds like Gantenbein’s. The photographs look like him. The truck looks like his. But he’s cautious about declaring it with 100% certainty.

“It would have been easier if there was a situation like this, and it was a police charge,” Stevens said. “Something that wasn’t as anonymous.”

Few in Coos Bay are aware that there have been police charges against Gantenbein — a background check showed that Gantenbein fled justice to come to Coos Bay to begin with.

In January 2007, newspaper articles from the time show that he and his dad were pulled over by Louisiana State Police while towing a vehicle. Police found 369 pounds of marijuana in the vehicle they were towing and a gram of cocaine. Gantenbein admitted to police the cocaine was his.

His Goodyear tire shop in North Carolina was shuttered for failure to pay taxes a few days later. His dad was fired as the planning and zoning director of a small North Carolina town the day after that. Both faced 10 to 60 years in prison if convicted.

But their court cases shuddered to a halt in 2008, when Gantenbein disappeared. A warrant was issued for his arrest on the felony charge of failure to appear.

Gantenbein’s LinkedIn account indicates he moved across the country that year and remade his life in Coos Bay. His dad skipped town in 2010, according to a newspaper account, and today owns a property next to Gantenbein’s house in Coos Bay.

InvestigateWest confirmed with St. Tammany Parish in Louisiana that the warrants for Gantenbein and his father are still active.

‘Viewpoint-neutral’

Personally, Stevens said he passionately opposes all forms of racism. He’s donated to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the legal activist organization that calls White Lives Matter a hate group.

But pushing back against extremism can be complicated.

It’s not illegal to celebrate Hitler or be a part of a white supremacist group like White Lives Matter. It can be illegal for the government to punish a contractor over it.

When the government hires a contractor, it typically has to be “viewpoint-neutral,” said Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a legal advocacy group that has defended the free speech rights of controversial figures across the political spectrum.

“It cannot discriminate based on someone having the wrong ideology or the wrong views,” he said. “That includes views that people would see as hateful or bigoted.”

The same constitutional principles that FIRE cited to stop Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis from banning trainings with “pro-Black Lives Matter types of views,” he noted, protects speech on the radical other end of the political spectrum.

The chance that the white supremacist views of a contractor could cost the port significant business or trigger boycotts isn’t a viable constitutional reason to reject a contractor either, he said.

But while offensive speech is typically protected, Steinbaugh said, conduct often isn’t.

“The government can’t really discriminate on the basis of viewpoint, but it can generally require that the people it contracts with don’t discriminate in their employment practices,” Steinbaugh said.

Last month, the Port Commission passed an official non-discrimination policy, stipulating that contractors would be barred from discriminating against anyone based on “race, color, or national origin.”

“We will not be engaging in any future business dealings with any entity that violates our strict policies,” Stevens later told InvestigateWest.

Gantenbein told The Oregonian that he employs “people of color” and, according to Stevens, stressed to the port “that he keeps his personal life separate from his professional life.”

But the recordings shared with InvestigateWest show that Whit not only actively recruited members of White Lives Matter to work for him, he used the low number of Black people in the area as a selling point.

“Whit offered me a job,” one member said. “So I’m moving to Coos Bay at the end of the month, and I’m pretty excited about it.”

“You’re gonna come down here and not see (slur) and shit anymore,” Whit responded, using a racial slur for Black people. “You’re gonna be like, ‘Oh, my God, look at all the white people.’”

A comment like that, Bitz said, could have a major impact on a discrimination case.

“If someone’s explaining how they engage in hiring only a specific group of people as much as they can — that group being white nationalists — what you’re dealing with is a business that really can’t be trusted to serve its customers very well,” Bitz said.

‘Caught off guard’

Since 2015, according to Stevens, nearly $300,000 of port contract work has gone to Whit Industries. Information for Public Use, a coalition of researchers in Oregon, used record requests to show that other local governments have used Whit Industries as well, including contracts worth more than $2,500 paid by Coos County and more than $13,000 paid by the City of North Bend.

“I think everybody was kind of in the same spot, kind of caught off guard trying to figure out what to do,” Stevens said of allegations against Gantenbein.

Finding someone else to do that work can be tough. Coos Bay is a coastal community built on timber, an industry that has collapsed in the last three decades, whittled away by environmental regulations and competition from foreign imports.

Much of that logging equipment relied on hydraulics, and less logging meant fewer hydraulic repair shops to service them. Whit Industries faces less competition than it once did.

“We’ve been shopping around just trying to see what’s out there,” Stevens said. “I’ve heard from the Port of Umpqua they have somebody up in that direction.”

This fall, it looked like Gantenbein was poised to have even more influence. The owner of Giddings Boatworks — the boat repair shop that gave Gantenbein a job in 2008 after he moved across the country — was considering selling to Whit Industries.

Earlier this month, Western States Center wrote a letter, signed by a coalition of environmental activists and union members, urging port commissioners to oppose a new lease for Giddings Boatworks if it sold to Whit Industries, worried it would effectively hand control of the infrastructure of the port’s Charlottesville Marina to a white nationalist.

In their letter, the Western States Center recognized the tough situation that the port faced.

“The answers lie in investing in and supporting the needs of the fishing community in ways that expand the pool of viable services at the port, not concentrating them in the hands of one person who presents a potential risk to the future of our port,” the center wrote.

Amid the controversy, Stevens said, the owner of Giddings Boatworks “called the CEO of the port and let her know that there was not a sale on the horizon.”

Other shipyards in the area have already shut down. To some in the fishing community at last month’s port meeting, Gantenbein represented not only a way to help keep Giddings afloat, but to, over the long term, turn it into an “updated, thriving, productive shipyard.”

But the voice recordings shared by Corvallis Antifa indicate that Gantenbein’s dreams for the transformation of Coos Bay go beyond upgrading port services. In recordings, White Lives Matter members talk about Whit’s desire to recruit more white nationalists to Coos Bay, to create a “locked-down” compound with “24/7 security,” and to “try to have our guys run for mayor, city council and other high occupational jobs within the government.”

Bitz said white nationalists often have a goal of trying to “transform one single town according to their exclusionary, bigoted idea for how a world should be.”
“That often presents a really serious threat to people’s safety locally in these towns and to local economies,” she said.

InvestigateWest is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Reach reporter Daniel Walters at daniel@invw.org.

This republished story is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.