Neo-Nazi

Neo-Nazi groups share a hatred for Jews and a love for Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. While they also hate nonwhite people, LGBTQ people and even sometimes Christians, they perceive “the Jew” as their cardinal enemy.

Top Takeaways

After several years of struggling to hold mass in-person events, the neo-Nazi movement managed to regain some of its organizational footing in 2023. On Sept. 2, more than 50 members of Blood Tribe, Goyim Defense League, Vinland Rebels and other white power activists gathered in Orlando, Florida, for the “March of the Red Shirts,” marking one of the largest neo-Nazi demonstrations since the flurry of white power movement activity between 2016 and 2018. The same day, about a dozen white power activists with the Florida-based Order of the Black Sun staged their own rally outside of Walt Disney World in Orlando, where white power activists shouted various slurs, waved Nazi flags and destroyed an LGBTQ+ Pride flag.

Though the March of the Red Shirts brought an unprecedented number of neo-Nazi activists together for the first time in several years, it followed on the heels of similar, albeit smaller, flash demonstrations organized by neo-Nazi activists in Ohio, Texas, Wisconsin, Florida, Massachusetts, Maine and Tennessee. These events are seldom advertised in advance and rarely attract more than one to two dozen activists. Nevertheless, they show a growing willingness among white power organizers to risk arrest, conflict with antifascist and antiracist demonstrators, or face other legal quagmires.

As the movement has shifted its focus back toward in-person organizing, neo-Nazi activists have elected to devote much of their momentum to topics and communities that are facing the most hostility from other more mainstream parts of the far right. Amid the Right’s growing attacks on trans rights, groups such as the New England-based Nationalist Social Club (NSC-131) and Blood Tribe focused their organizing efforts in the first half of 2023 opposing events celebrating LGBTQ+ equality. The reactive nature of these demonstrations means that the targets of neo-Nazi groups can sometimes abruptly shift. For instance, though NSC-131 organized almost singularly against LGBTQ+ communities throughout much of 2022 and early 2023, the group pivoted in June to targeting sites providing haven to unhoused families, many of whom are nonwhite migrants.

Some longstanding, more traditionally organized neo-Nazi organizations have continued to flounder. The National Socialist Movement, a decades-old group with roots in the American Nazi Party, was rocked by the 2019 departure of its longtime leader and has continued to fail to revive its pre-2019 membership numbers.

Smaller, more decentralized cadres and online social networks with a terroristic focus continue to animate the neo-Nazi movement’s imagination. On platforms such as Telegram, neo-Nazis and white nationalists who embrace a tactic known as white power accelerationism have proven to be susceptible to the same disruptions from law enforcement, journalists and activists throughout 2020 and into 2023, as the more traditional membership-based organizations they claimed were outmoded.

Key Moments

In February 2023, police arrested Brandon Russell, a co-founder of Atomwaffen Division, and Sarah Beth Clendaniel, his apparent girlfriend, on charges related to an alleged plot to plan and execute armed attacks on electricity, water and transport infrastructure in Maryland. Prior to his arrest, Russell contributed articles to the Atomwaffen Division-tied American Futurist website and shared material promoting violent attacks on U.S. infrastructure on the social media app Telegram, as Hatewatch previously reported.

Previously, Russell had pled guilty in September 2017 to possessing an unregistered destructive device and unlawfully storing explosive material. Though he was sentenced to five years’ incarceration in January 2018, Russell left prison and entered supervised release in June 2021.

Devon Arthurs, another Atomwaffen Division co-founder, pled guilty in a Florida court in May 2023 to two counts of second-degree murder and three counts of kidnapping. Arthurs has been in custody since 2017, after police arrested him that spring for his involvement in the slaying of fellow Atomwaffen Division members Andrew Oneschuk and Jeremy Himmelman. He is set to serve 45 years in prison and an added 15 years of probation upon his release.

In June, a New Hampshire superior court judge dismissed civil charges that the state’s attorney general brought against NSC-131 and two of its leaders, Leo Cullinan and Christopher Hood, in connection with a banner drop that the group conducted in Portsmouth in 2022. Prosecutors alleged that Hood, Cullinan and other members of the group violated New Hampshire’s civil rights statute when they hung a banner reading “Keep New England White” over a highway overpass. The superior court judge who dismissed the charges argued that the actions were protected on free speech grounds.

Shortly after the charges against Hood, Cullinan and NSC-131 were dismissed, authorities found Cullinan dead in his home. Later local news reports indicate that Cullinan died from a drug overdose, resulting from a lethal combination of fentanyl and methamphetamine.

WHAT’S AHEAD

Despite the neo-Nazi groups’ renewed focus on in-person organizing, attention from journalists, academics, nongovernmental organizations, activists and opposition researchers has continued to leave much of the movement weak, paranoid and unable to mobilize for the long term.

Already, at least one prominent neo-Nazi activist scrapped his plan to build a compound for his group in rural Maine. Chris Pohlhaus, the leader of Blood Tribe, sold a plot of land that he purchased with alleged fellow neo-Nazi convicted felon Fred Boyd Ramey a year prior. Pohlhaus dispensed of the property less than two months after Blood Tribe’s joint rally in Florida, citing concerns about safety in an Oct. 31 post on Telegram.

The size and influence of historically prominent groups will remain limited or continue to dwindle as the movement continues to reshape itself to cater to a new generation. Like other parts of the white power movement, many of those within this younger generation of neo-Nazis have tossed aside traditional organizing tactics in favor of decentralized online spaces. They gather on loosely moderated platforms such as Telegram, where they valorize and advocate for acts of terror. This rhetoric will continue in 2024.

For the past few years – and even more so after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection – American lawmakers have pushed for more legislation governing domestic terrorism, citing several neo-Nazi groups tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Though this legislative pressure has ebbed and flowed since early 2021, it nevertheless represents one of numerous points of pressure for the white power movement, which includes, but is not limited to, its neo-Nazi wing.

BACKGROUND

While some neo-Nazi groups emphasize simple hatred, others are more focused on the revolutionary creation of a fascist political state. Nazism, of course, has roots in Europe, and links between American and European neo-Nazis have, at times, been strong. American neo-Nazi groups, protected by the First Amendment, often publish material and host websites that are aimed at European audiences – materials that would be illegal under European hate speech laws. Similarly, many European groups put up their internet sites on American servers to avoid prosecution under the laws of their native countries.

For decades, most visible neo-Nazi group in the United States was the National Alliance. Until his death, it was led by William Luther Pierce, the infamous author of the race-war novel The Turner Diaries, a book believed to have served as the blueprint for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Today, one of the most vocal wings of the neo-Nazi movement advocate for a tactic known as white power accelerationism. Proponents of this form of accelerationism see terroristic violence as the sole method for ushering in the collapse of modern civilization so a fascist society grounded in white ethnonationalism can take its place. Though some prominent neo-Nazi groups, such as Atomwaffen Division, have embraced these tactics, more recent proponents have tended to completely eschew traditional organizing methods, favoring loosely knit online communities and, at times, very small, localized training cells.