White supremacist and right-wing online troll Daniel McMahon has been arrested for making racial threats against Don Gathers, Charlottesville, Virginia, Black Lives Matter chapter co-founder and former city council candidate.

According to HuffPost, McMahon, who used the online alias “Jack Corbin,” was indicted on four federal charges, including cyberstalking, willful interference with a candidate for elective office and threats to injure in interstate commerce. 

Gathers was the intended target of McMahon’s malicious attacks on social media. The former city council candidate intended to formally announce his candidacy on January 8. But the day before, McMahon reportedly threatened the community leader. 

Prosecutors told The Washington Post 31-year-old McMahon threatened the community activist because he was a Black man running for public office, leading him “to fear death and serious bodily injury.” 

As chair of Charlottesville’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces, Gathers led a recommendation to rename the city’s parks that housed statues of Confederate generals Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee.

The city council subsequently voted to move the Lee memorial, thus sparking the violent “Unite the Right” rally in the northwestern Virginia city in August 2017. 

Published evidence shows that McMahon also used other pseudonyms like “Pale Horse” and communicated often with other white supremacists, harassing anti-fascist activists.

He once wrote that fascism opposers should be “tortured and executed,” according to HuffPost. 

The Washington Post reported that under his alias, “Jack Corbin,” McMahon reportedly communicated extensively with Robert Bowers, the accused mass shooter at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.

Before the massacre in October 2018, Bowers shared McMahon’s post encouraging violence against anti-fascist groups including racist and homophobic commentary. 

McMahon’s case is being prosecuted by the office of U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia Thomas T. Cullen.

Though appointed by Trump, Cullen has expressed that Congress should press for legislation to prosecute domestic terrorists and aggressively try violent right-wing extremists.