Former SC teacher accused of hate group ties may be linked to more social media posts
A social media account with the same name and similar likeness as a former Lexington County middle school teacher who was accused of belonging to a hate group contains anti-Semitic language and offers support for alt-right causes.
The now-deleted Facebook account uses the name “Tim Manning” and displays a photo that resembles former Pleasant Hill Middle School teacher Timothy D. Manning Jr.
The teacher last week was accused on social media of belonging to a hate group. The original accusations claimed Manning posted anti-Semitic comments on Twitter. After they surfaced, the Lexington One school district said the teacher was on leave.
On May 15, two days after the accusations were made, the district announced that Manning had resigned.
When the initial allegations against the Pleasant Hill teacher surfaced, his lawyers issued a statement strongly denying that he or his wife had anything to do with the “repugnant Twitter account referenced in recent blog articles and on social media.
“They are not members of, nor do they sympathize in any way with, fringe or otherwise prejudicial groups or associations,” attorney Elizabeth Millender said in a statement on Thursday.
After the initial accusations were made last week, The State received images of separate Facebook posts under an account with the name Tim Manning. The posts were provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Since May 14, The State has twice reached out to Manning’s attorneys to ask if the Facebook posts belonged to their client. On both occasions, the attorneys asked for privacy for Manning. On neither occasion did the attorneys dispute nor confirm whether the posts belonged to their client.
“Tim has resigned his employment and he is no longer a public employee,” Manning’s attorney J. Paul Porter said in an email. “He is trying to move on, and he is now purely a private citizen who wishes to be left alone.”
Asked if the school district had seen the posts, Lexington 1 spokeswoman Mary Beth Hill said in an email: “The individual no longer works here.”
The State was able to reach Manning’s father, Tim Manning Sr., whose Facebook account also appears in the screenshots, and sent him screenshots of the Facebook posts. When asked whether the posts belonged to his son, he said in a text message, “Seriously. All the problems in the world and reporters are worried about Facebook.”
The Facebook account with the former teacher’s likeness frequently shared articles from The Daily Stormer, which is considered by the Anti Defamation League and other organizations to be a neo-Nazi website.
In one of the posts that contained a link to a Daily Stormer article, the account says “guys like my dad are trolling and meming the enemy into gassing themselves.”
In another post, the author said he has had a lifetime membership in “LS” since 2004. The League of The South, which the Anti-Defamation League calls a white supremacist organization, frequently refers to itself as “LS” on the group’s website.
The Manning Facebook account frequently uses alt-right and anti-Semitic terminology in the posts to refer to Jewish people.
In response to another Facebook user’s assertion there were “rats” within a white supremacist organization, the Manning account responded: “Nobody said ‘rats.’ that would imply that they are Jews.”
Another post on the Manning account says: “Real battles are being fought and won by the Alt Right.”
The account owner goes on to refer to himself as part of the “Alt Right.”
Screenshots of the social media posts show that the person running the account claimed to be an editor for Southern Partisan, a neo-Confederate magazine. Last week, the initial statement from one of Manning’s attorneys confirmed the former Pleasant Hill school teacher worked at Southern Partisan, but downplayed his role, saying he was little more than a copy writer and typesetter, according to a previous article from The State.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is confident the account is authentic, said Howard Graves, a senior research analyst for the center.
“Unless someone has been masquerading as Tim Manning Jr. and interacting with his father...this would have been an incredibly elaborate con,” Graves said.
Richard Quinn and Chris Sullivan, two former editors of Southern Partisan, said Tim Manning Jr. worked at the publication as an assistant editor. Manning worked for Southern Partisan 10 to 15 years ago, the former editors told The State.
Manning was responsible for book reviews as well as for selecting and editing articles for Southern Partisan, said Sullivan, who was the editor when Manning Jr. worked for the publication.
“I have seen the thing that he’s been accused of posted on the internet since he was an employee at the Southern Partisan,” Sullivan said. “I never heard him express those views while he was an employee.”
Quinn said he didn’t know Manning too well and “never heard him talk his politics.”
“If he held those views I was unaware of them,” Quinn said.
This story was originally published May 22, 2020 at 2:48 PM.