Teamsters President Sean O’Brien with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, January 3, 2024. [Photo: @Teamsters]
The leadership of the Teamsters union recently hired Peter Cytanovic, a known neo-Nazi who participated prominently in the fascist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, for an administrative position at its headquarters in Washington D.C. Cytanovic was reportedly terminated after his background became known to co-workers.
The hiring was first revealed in June on Reddit by an anonymous user claiming to be a Teamsters employee. The individual reported that Cytanovic had been hired in January and that, upon recognizing him and alerting management to his neo-Nazi affiliations, Cytanovic was subsequently terminated. However, the anonymous Teamsters employee says they were fired shortly afterward, suspecting it was most likely retaliation for speaking up.
The story was later picked up by HuffPost, which cited an unnamed source within the Teamsters. According to the report, Cytanovic was hired for an administrative position, and officials at the Teamsters’ Washington D.C. headquarters claimed to be unaware of his far-right political affiliations.
Cytanovic’s hiring and firing were effectively confirmed by Teamsters International Vice President John Palmer, who issued an open letter to Teamsters President Sean O’Brien demanding an explanation of how Cytanovic was brought on and what access he had to union resources and communications. Palmer’s letter was released two days before the HuffPost article appeared.
“When we hire somebody at the international, they vet people and it takes at least three or four people signing off,” Palmer told HuffPost.
It is almost impossible that no one involved in the hiring of Cytanovic was aware of his political connections to neo-Nazi groups. Cytanovic, 20 years old at the time of the Charlottesville rally, became internationally famous as the “face of the far-right” when a picture of him angrily chanting, his face lit by the distinctive tiki-torches of his fellow fascists, went viral.
Chants at the rally included anti-semitic slogans such as “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil,” a phrase used by the Nazis.
An internet search of Cytanovic’s name yields countless results, including interviews he gave following the Charlottesville rally in which he openly espoused fascist views and described himself as a “white nationalist.”
Originally from Reno, Nevada, Cytanovic was a student at the University of Nevada, Reno at the time of the Charlottesville rally and graduated in 2018. While in college, he joined Identity Evropa, a white nationalist organization that targeted young white men for recruitment. In 2019, he went on to earn a master’s degree from the London School of Economics.
During this time he claims to have disavowed his neo-Nazi affiliations and to have volunteered with Groundswell, an organization dedicated to “countering violent extremism.” Upon returning to the United States, Cytanovic enrolled in the Nevada National Guard but was expelled in 2021 after a security clearance investigation unearthed his political past.
It is not clear what Cytanovic did after being expelled from the National Guard, but The HuffPost reports that he told the Teamsters that he had also worked for the Service Employees International Union. If true, it would be an even greater exposure of the union bureaucracy’s political orientation.
Any suggestion that Cytanovic has undergone a meaningful break with the far right is unfounded. While he has described his participation in the Charlottesville rally as a “mistake” and distanced himself from the label “white nationalist,” his public statements suggest he is more concerned with the personal consequences of his involvement than with any genuine repudiation of fascist politics.
In an interview with The Beaver, the student newspaper of the London School of Economics, Cytanovic continued to defend Confederate general Robert E. Lee, describing the removal of his statue, the event that sparked the Charlottesville rally, as a “pain.” He added, “I wasn’t wrong on everything. I was wrong in the way I expressed it,” signaling an attempt to repackage, rather than renounce, his far-right views.
Throughout the interview, Cytanovic repeatedly dodged political questions and attempted to portray his far-right affiliations as the product of youthful ignorance. He claimed he was unaware that Identity Evropa was a neo-Nazi organization, despite the fact that it was one of the most active and publicly visible fascist groups at the time.
The hiring of Peter Cytanovic is an expression of the deep political degeneration of the trade union bureaucracy. It takes place under conditions in which the Teamsters leadership, and particularly International President Sean O’Brien, has cultivated increasingly close ties to the fascistic wing of the Republican Party—and to Donald Trump himself.
O’Brien has openly aligned himself with Trump, delivering a nationally televised speech at the Republican National Convention last year and repeatedly praising the former president. He maintains a friendly relationship with fascistic Republican Senator Josh Hawley, has appeared multiple times on the podcast of far-right media figure Tucker Carlson, and has admitted in interviews that he speaks directly with Trump several times a month.
This is the same Trump who infamously described the neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville, including Cytanovic, as “very fine people.”
O’Brien represents the natural alliance of the trade union bureaucracy with fascism. Sitting above the working class as a labor contractor, the union bureaucracy pursued a policy of class compromise in an earlier period of capitalist growth. Today, under conditions where the program of national reform has been undermined by globalization and the working class faces unrelenting attacks on jobs and living standards, the union bureaucracy has integrated itself with the state and corporate management, imposing concessions and suppressing opposition.
The political trajectory of the union bureaucracy increasingly mirrors that of the Italian syndicalists of the early 20th century. Figures like Edmondo Rossoni and Agostino Lanzillo transitioned from union leaders into key officials in Mussolini’s fascist regime. In the United States today, O’Brien and others are charting a similar course, aligning the unions with Trump’s anti-immigrant demagogy, trade war nationalism, and preparations for authoritarian rule.
Cytanovic’s presence at Teamsters headquarters must be taken as a warning sign of a broader political shift within the bureaucracy toward open collaboration with the forces of fascism. The union leadership is signaling that it is prepared to ally with Trump and the far right to suppress opposition from below and defend its own power and privileges against the interests of the rank and file.
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