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I can't speak to any of the accusations about James as I don't know him - but regarding Simon, I can only say that the suggestion that he's a neo-nazi or white supremacist is absolutely bat-shit insane. He's a biker and a tattooist, with an avid interest in the occult/slasher-horror-movie culture, and using these selective screengrabs of (non-nazi) swastikas as a kind of 'gotcha' is ridiculous (even if I completely understand why some people are uncomfortable with the imagery or the reclamation of the symbol - I'm probably one of those people myself!).
Full disclosure - I do have tattoos from him, and have a few close friends who are close friends (out-and-out lefties, for what it's worth).
Anecdotally - recently he did a tattoo with a crusader (or maybe St George) having their head cut off or something, and a right-winger took issue with it in the comments - Simon replied, in detail, explaining the racist roots of the crusades and basically telling this dude to go fuck himself.
Gaaaah, it's really really hard to try and respond to these kind of allegations, even as a third party - the accusations are made in such a way that almost any rebuttal can be twisted and used against you.
I just feel strongly that this is something that can ruin a small business that people have poured their life-savings into, based on spurious smears that a very small but vocal part of the left (especially online) have a tendency to jump on before examining things in closer detail.
hvsds-
Hmmm, I don't know Simon personally but it's not just swastikas he seems keen on. There's a few images he's posted contains symbols almost exclusively used by neo-Nazi groups and he's flirted with using the SS symbol and things like that.
Even if you disregard that, the way they've dealt with racism in their business has been piss poor. The fact that it was swept under the rug and no action was taken against an employee for overt racism in the workplace until they started to receive a huge amount of negative press seems like they, at best, didn't take the whole thing seriously at all.Edit: anyway, I don't want to derail this thread, there's plenty of information on that Instagram account for people to use to make their own minds up!
ltc
In case anyone visits Leeds and thought about visiting Temple Donuts. Maybe don't, it turns out one of the owners is a very sketchy bloke who, at best, has a strange obsession with nazi imagery and at worst, is a full blown white supremacist. It all came to light when a former employee spoke out about racist abuse towards them being swept under the rug by management.
They've deleted all of their social media accounts but somebody was thoughtful enough to set them up a new Instagram account to keep track of all of their bad behaviour. Here's a link. CW: racism, abuse.