Spider-Man arrived in Minneapolis recently – not to save the city from supervillains, but to have a rather more direct confrontation with far-right provocateur and pardoned January 6 rioter Jake Lang.
The masked anti-fascist counter-protester became an overnight sensation after video showed him leaping onto the back of a pickup truck carrying Lang during a demonstration outside Minneapolis City Hall on 22 August.
Threw punches
He grappled with Lang and threw several punches before being pulled from the vehicle.
The extraordinary encounter came as Lang, a prominent far-right activist, staged a rally in support of Shilo Hendrix, a woman convicted after using a racial slur against a Black autistic child.
Lang arrived with supporters in two vehicles, one of which drove onto the pavement towards a crowd of counter-protesters.
Police subsequently arrested all seven occupants of the vehicles, as well as four other people.
Folk hero
Spider-Man was eventually identified as 33-year-old William Nicholas Love II.
He has been charged with fifth-degree assault, a misdemeanour. His supporters, meanwhile, have turned him into an unlikely anti-fascist folk hero. A GoFundMe campaign set up after the confrontation has attracted thousands of donations and raised more than $100,000.
The organisers say Love is being represented pro bono and that the money will instead assist with medical expenses, family security and other costs.
But the most intriguing part of the story concerns what happened behind the scenes before the rally.
The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office has now declined to bring felony charges against Lang or his associates – despite their vehicles driving onto the pavement towards protesters and a police officer being struck.
The reason is prior communication and logistical coordination between Minneapolis police and Lang’s security detail.
Coordination with police
Prosecutors reviewed extensive communications between the police department and Lang’s team in the days before the rally.
Dozens of text messages showed detailed discussions about routes, vehicles, security arrangements and where Lang’s supporters would assemble.
Lang’s team supplied police with maps, itineraries and photographs of their intended staging area.
In one particularly revealing exchange, Lang’s security team sent Minneapolis police a photograph of four men wearing ballistic helmets and tactical vests.
The police lieutenant coordinating with them replied: “You guys are looking ready,” accompanied by a fist-bump emoji.
Evidential problem
Police were also given details of the vehicles and their occupants and were told that Lang’s vehicles would be kept “inside barricades”. The officer later warned that driving on the pavement was illegal.
That warning is now central to the police defence of the operation. Minneapolis police insist that they never authorised Lang’s people to drive onto the pavement and specifically told them not to do so.
But prosecutors concluded that the preceding coordination created a serious evidential problem in proving that Lang intended to threaten or frighten anyone.
Jake Lang is a white-power and anti-immigrant provocateur who took part in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol, where prosecutors alleged he attacked police with a baseball bat and riot shield.
He spent almost four years in pre-trial detention before Donald Trump pardoned him in January 2025.
Public execution
Since his release, Lang has reinvented himself as a street activist, leading anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim demonstrations, making nazi salutes and using racist slurs, while also threatening a Capitol Police commander with public execution. He is now seeking a seat in the US Senate.
County Attorney Mary Moriarty described Lang’s conduct as “despicable and disgusting”, while stressing that the decision was a legal one. The available evidence, she said, did not provide a route to proving the necessary criminal intent beyond reasonable doubt.
Meanwhile, the man in the Spider-Man suit – who intervened physically against Lang – is facing an assault charge.
