The man dressed as a crusader knight lifts his megaphone. “C’mon you agitators. Get moving!” He shouts at a group of around fifty protestors and the portly 19-year-old, Juan, leading them over the bridge. A rear wall of Cleveland police inch them along. 

One goggled officer bikes to the front. “We don’t need you here! Fucking pigs! Don’t touch me!” Snaps Juan. The man dressed as a crusader knight’s eyes grow wide and angry. “Juan, why do you always do this! You’re gonna get arrested!” He roars. “We have to live in a community with those people!”

It’s September afternoon. We’re at a Refuse Fascism march in Cleveland, Ohio. Unlike most other protests this year—or exactly like most other protests this year, depending on who you ask—this one is organized by actual Communists: orange-shirted Bob Avakian proselytes from the Revolutionary Communist Party. Their signs and chants say “Black Lives Matter,” so they’ve accrued a few stragglers, as well as Juan, the tie-wearing teenage wildcard.

On the other side is the man dressed as a crusader knight, McKenzie Levindofske, who goes by McKenzie Levi. Levi—a lanky, long-haired 30something man—is notorious around the Cleveland area. He’s regularly spotted at open mics, doing parkour, or campaigning as a write-in candidate for Mayor or Congress, lugging his 65-pound crusader knight armor everywhere.

In fact, Levi has a singular dedication to the Crusader life path. Some would describe him as an elite-tier LARPer (live-action role player), a person who picks a character and then portrays them in the real world. Levi dresses only as a 12th century crusader knight marching to Jerusalem would. He begins with the braies—white puffy underclothes, which he lounges around the house in—pulls on a long tunic, adds a padded gambeson jacket, armors up in full metal chainmail, straps on a sword and shield, and then goes to the grocery store. Over everything, he wears a long surcoat with a red cross emblazoned on the chest.

Levi claims to be pro-Christian, pro-Western civilization, and anti-Globalist. He is a Monarchist who endorses principalities in America—feudal states governed by vassal princes who pay tribute to a king. He once went to Jordan to try to find the Ark of the Covenant. By night he studies 13th century sword fighting manuscripts. Then he charges into battle against those he perceives as the enemies of Western civilization: Antifa and communists.

Since 2017, Levi has attended “hundreds”—probably over 300—of protests in Northeast Ohio. He sees himself as a vessel of public safety “keeping order” in the community. He seems to prefer attending actual communist and Antifa gatherings—like the Refuse Fascism march—over Black Lives Matter protests, though he’ll show up at everything, May Day to a MAGA rally.

Any Clevelander can tell you that ‘radical left’-associated activities have never really taken root in our city—no significant rioting, antifa, or communist presence. Levi claims credit for that. By going to every protest and using crowd-control techniques he’s eager to share, Levi says he’s directly helped to dismantle Antifa cells in the region. He’s a regular villain on the dwindling Cleveland Antifa Facebook page and its cohorts. Yet he’s never raised his sword in public. 

At the march, every single chant is disrupted by Levi. “Trump’s a fascist!” They chant. They clap. They stamp their feet. “Juan’s a fascist!” Levi bellows back. Sometimes it’s hard to hear the group over Levi’s continuous megaphoned mockery.

A group of guys that identify as Catholics begin to walk alongside the march. One of the protestors bikes up to them. “What are you doing here,” he says. He jabs a finger in the fat rosy face of one. The boy looks startled. “Look at you, scared…you don’t have any place here—”

Levi stomps down between them. “They’re just walking down the street and watching what you guys did! Leave them alone!” Although Levi’s indoor voice is mild and nearly resigned, his battle roar has a genuinely scary—almost primal—attribute. The protestor seems taken aback. He shakes his head and moves on. 

A lady with sunglasses and auburn hair, blowing bubblegum, zips in and out of the march on a scooter. She parks next to me. “Me, I’m just here to show support to the protests,” Scooter Lady says. She points to Levi. “But him? He’s being an asshole.” She purses her lips wryly. “You know the ‘alt-right?’ We call him the alt-knight,” she says and zooms away. 

Someday you may visit Ohio. Breathe our air and walk our streets—come to the city of Lakewood, a suburb hugging Cleveland. Visit Lakewood Park; come on Sunday between 1-4 pm. See on the front lawn men in full medieval armor swinging wildly at each other with swords.

Lake Erie Historical Fencing was founded by Mckenzie Levi in 2018. He started it after his previous club, Sword Fight Society, shut down. “That one was dangerous,” Levi recollects with nervous laughter. “We didn’t have any rules, people were bringing crazy weapons, sharp weapons, shovels.” Lake Erie Historical Fencing is for more measured medieval enthusiasts and anyone interested—Levi calls all onlookers to join in. Each meeting begins with members emptying their canvas bags onto the picnic table: out tumble great swords, steel plate armor, gauntlets, helms, and fencing masks.

The men’s eyes gleam. Today, someone has brought a new silver rapier. They pass around the small sword, flicking and twirling it. Heads nod in approval. Besides Levi, two others: a scowling Aryan with a buzzcut and all-black armor, and an impish fellow with a handlebar mustache. A Legolas and a Gimli.

“Shall we?” The two characters trudge towards the open lawn and begin dueling. Gimli puts one hand on his hip and whimsically needles Legolas, whose heavy sword swishes back. Due to the authenticity of their armor, the men are able to engage in aggressive, full-contact sword fighting. Before the advent of guns, I am told, medieval armor had become nearly impenetrable. The only vulnerable area was the helmet’s eye slit. You can be stabbed without pierced—the men lift their shirts to reveal an old battlefield of scars and blood bruises.

Levi talks about his life as the men clang their metal together. Growing up, he lived in Buffalo, sometimes visiting his mom in Cleveland. After graduating from the University at Buffalo with a degree in Communications and dreams of writing screenplays in Hollywood, he worked construction jobs. During this time, he read books that portrayed the Crusaders and Christianity as “necessary heroes, virtuously saving Europe and the Holy Land…with an unwavering trust in God,” revising his “earlier notion of these endeavors as evil.” 

Levi, immersed in medieval studies, says he began to feel at home with the Crusaders. He formally converted to what he considered to be the closest to the medieval church, Catholicism. Then the housing crash happened. No more construction jobs. Levi went to Hollywood.

In Hollywood, Levi recounts bitter rejection—“Everyone I met was self-serving and stingy with their connections”—so he left just over a year later, in May 2014. He rented a trailer in the remote town of Willow Creek on the north coast of California. Things were bleak. A gang of transients had descended upon the town’s woods, leaving trash, polluting the water supply, and bringing meth and heroin into the community. Appearing in front of the town’s council, the Willow Creek Community Services District, Levi volunteered to deal with the situation.

Levi warned the transients they had 24 hours to “clean up and move on.” He successfully cleared the campsites, and began calling himself the ‘Watcher of Willow Creek.’ The local newspaper reported that the town council “congratulated [Levi] for his efforts, which included picking up garbage and patrolling areas frequented by homeless people.” In a twist of fate, later that year, Levi hosted an art and music show that featured some of the transients he had helped to find work and housing, as well as his own heavy metal band The Beast of Revelations.

In 2015, Levi moved to Cleveland to help take care of his mother, sister, and young niece. Changed by his experience in California, he decided to clean up litter in public spaces “but now dressed as a Knight.” He replaced his entire wardrobe with the clothes and chainmail of a 12th century crusader. “The armor actually protects me from weapons, and just wearing it discourages attackers,” Levi says. “It inflames the revolutionary LARPers that are only comfortable with leftist-driven personal expression like pagans and witches. I feel purposeful when I put it on.” 

Levi began training in parkour, kickboxing, and medieval combat, studying Royal Armouries Ms. I.33, the earliest known surviving European sword fighting manual. “I use a lot of the ancient techniques from the old manuscripts at the protests,” he says. “My defensive stance—guarded, not revealing I’m ready to fight—came from the I.33.”

Levi’s first battle came at the 2017 May Day event in Cleveland. He says he had been “appalled” by media reports of Pacific Northwest Antifa activity, as well as his own brushes with far-left activists—”no one was standing up to their...overtly evil behavior and rhetoric”—so at the march, he walked up to the black bloc of Cleveland Antifa present and challenged them to a physical fight. They were “flabbergasted” and didn’t respond, he recalls, but retribution came a month later. The Cleveland Antifa Facebook page posted photos of Levi with the caption: "Northeast Ohio people, we need your help in identifying this individual. He was seen…harassing people and ripping signs out of people's hands. His behavior keeps escalating. We don't want to see anyone get hurt or even killed because of this fascist.”

Cleveland Scene reported that “in the May Day video, [Levi] can be seen yelling at the protesters for littering, and running to and fro to put garbage in city trash cans.” When they interviewed Levi, he “did admit to stealing signs and to verbally provoking protesters. He claimed he threatened to fight them because he knew in his heart that no one would actually fight him.”

The Crusader Knight was born that day. Levi has since attended hundreds of protests, often by himself, single handedly turning the scene into a Ringling Bros. Circus. Scene wrote that the crusader’s original nemesis was Islam; it’s morphed into the more general “The Left”; these days, it’s Juan. “The people that were here [in 2017] are not the people here now,” Levi says. “Different leftist scenes try to make something every year and then they find out it’s not fun to do it here…because I don’t make it fun.”

How is that even possible? “You make them back into a person rather than just an anonymous soldier. I learn their names. I say their names on my megaphone. A lot of this movement relies on anonymity and if you take that away from them...they start thinking about their own life and the stuff that’s actually important to them.”

Levi’s weapons—apart from a shield-bashing incident at Kent State seen in the video trailer for this story—are for show. He’s developed his own freewheeling method of crowd control, which involves aggressively individualizing conspirators using their first and last names; a Trumpian nastiness—“Shut up you rotten teeth old man!”—he snarls at one of his critics at the Refuse Fascism March; an overwhelming absurdity that often debilitates opponents; and a relentless willingness to engage, engage, engage: talk, taunt, conversate, debate, take pictures with, battle, befriend.

I ask the obvious question. At Kent State, he literally stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the police blockade. Is this all just a bleak cope—a manifestation of his desire to be a cop? “I don’t want to be a police officer,” Levi says. “Because then I would have an authority tell me what to do. You don’t have independent thought when you have a boss.” I ask Levi what he thinks of Black Lives Matter. “Black lives more than matter,” He says reflexively. “But the phrase has been hijacked by white people exploiting racial tension to advance Communism.”

Legolas and Gimli end their duel. They walk back to the picnic table, helmets in hands, panting like puppies. Levi offers for us to go a round. Sure, I say. I strap on a gambeson—the padded jacket—and twist on a big hot fencing mask, feeling like the Wicker Man. Legolas hands me a two-handed sword. It’s heavy as hell.

Levi goes easy, but his blunt tip arrives fast. I want to avoid a poke to my paunch. I’m drenched in sweat. He lifts his helmet. “You know, I really get to see the challenges a crusader had to face every day wearing this armor,” he says with a grin. “It’s so hot and heavy that it sucks, but it’s so awesome that I keep wearing it.”

McKenzie Levi isn’t a loser. That might be the first conclusion one draws—here’s a delusional man-child with ‘problematic’ beliefs roleplaying as a Crusader Knight—but anyone with a sliver of imagination could see something beyond. Yes, Levi believes George Soros funds Antifa and aspects of Pizzagate are real; you can ‘fact-check’ him into oblivion. His beliefs aren’t just far-right, they’re literally medieval. 

That doesn’t mean he’s bad or evil. Levi is…different. These days, it’s hard for some to stomach a man’s passionate, non-atheistic belief—incapable of such leaps of imagination themselves, it’s more comfortable to crucify him. And while Levi is unabashedly down to fight, there’s a childlike quality to his endeavors. It feels like the opposite of cynicism. Levi enthusiastically runs for local office, has spent hundreds of hours picking up trash around Cleveland, and once went to Jordan to dig in a cave for the Ark of the Covenant. It’s refreshing to be around someone who still believes in something, and isn’t afraid to be name-called for it.

One could say the same about Levi’s rotund nemesis Juan, currently on the receiving end of a bad hombre jingle. Levi is basically beatboxing Juan’s first and last name into the megaphone. Juan zips by waving an American flag, Black Lives Matter Flag, and Pride flag. “Don’t think you’re not going to to talk to me today,” Levi zigs. “My lawyer told me not to talk to anyone,” Juan zags.

It’s September afternoon. We’re at the Refuse Fascism rally in Market Square in Cleveland, Ohio, before the march begins. The orange-shirted Communists are speaking to the gathering crowd.  “Ignore the agitator that has come here today!” An organizer proclaims. The crowd shuffles a wall of backs against Levi, who heckles from the back. His voice crackles on the microphone. “Are you guys taking requests? You’re losing your crowd.”

Scooter Lady stops over. “Why can’t you be respectful?” She says behind sunglasses. “You’re disrupting.” Levi stays mum. “Wait till the march, then you can do whatever you want,” she says. She offers him half of a full sandwich she’s eating. Levi declines, but says thank you. Other passerbys cross-examine him. “Are you a white nationalist?” One asks. “No,” Levi scoffs. “I’m a Crusader.”

Three small Black children, two boys and a girl, are trotted out in front of the orange Refuse Fascism banner for pictures. I have no idea where their parents are. They’re arranged next to a white guy dressed in all-black waving a Pride flag.

Juan materializes to us. “See, I don’t agree with that. We shouldn’t use children.” I’m shocked by his appearance—but for Levi, this is the resumption of a dialogue. “Well then why are you marching with them Juan?” Levi says breathlessly. “I’m here to fight Fascism,” Juan says forcefully, “But I'm also anti-Communist.” “I’m doing the same thing!” Levi exclaims. 

It’s absurd, then, that Juan is leading a group of Communists today, but the precocious teenager rallies groups all over the city—seeming to prefer Black Lives Matter protests over more explicitly left-wing rallies. “We don’t need Communism…I want liberty and justice, but I want liberty more than anything,” Juan says. 

The two have been going at it since they met in May. Once, Juan pulled a knife out after activists warned him Levi was dangerous. At a later protest, Juan says Levi saved him from tear gas. Here, possibly mediated by my presence, the two form ideological alliances. They both agree that “America is great but could be greater.” They’re both pro-Second Amendment. They’re both pro-American flag—”they gave me shit for taking it out,” Juan says. They both listen to medieval music. They both like the culturally conservative households they grew up in. Juan tells Levi he’s here to protest Trump, but that when Levi organizes the anti-Biden protest next year, he’ll join him.

The truce is short-lived: “[The Communists] are going to get mad at me for talking to you,” Juan says, raring to return to his side. I snap a picture of the pair along with another attendee holding an AR-15. Juan says he wants to go to lunch with Levi, and Levi warns Juan of the forthcoming showdown on the bridge. "I dont want to see you get manhandled. When you get close and yell [at the cops] like that, they’re going to arrest you,” Levi says. 

Juan walks away. The kid is charismatic, and I can see why Levi thinks he has a future in politics—for better or worse. "Juan has two personalities—one is that wise person, the other is the one who yells at cops,” he mutters. It’s hard to tell who’s snagged in who’s net. One can speculate how much Juan is using his own form of crowd control by befriending his primary agitator, and that his moderate, reasonable performance was a show for the reporter present—I’ve wondered the same about Levi. 

So I’m delighted to find out weeks later that they did get that lunch. In November, Levi interviewed Juan for his YouTube channel and they got to talking more. Levi speaks warmly of Juan now. “After I got to know him, Juan is kind of funny. He’s a good frenemy. He played fair and he made it fun. And I think he’s retired as an agitator,” he says of Juan’s waning ‘belligerent’ activity at the protests. “The way I’m usually able to solve problems isn’t head-on confrontation, but the back doors. I end up becoming friends with the people I’m fighting against.” 

That hasn’t happened yet. We’re still at the Refuse Fascism march. Soon, all the pleasantries will dissolve and Juan and Levi will go back to yelling. The showdown on the bridge is a mile away. The characters race to their positions. Juan stands at the head of the march. The Communists fill the ranks. Scooter Lady tails on the periphery. The Crusader Knight looms in the back. He lifts his megaphone. The carnival is about to begin.

Follow Zachary Emmanuel on Twitter.