Neo-Nazi Misfits Join Unite the Right
Over the weekend, the country’s largest neo-Nazi group announced plans to attend an alt-right rally next month in Charlottesville, Virginia, which is expected to draw thousands of extremists.
The National Socialist Movement (NSM) published a YouTube video and flyer announcing that NSM members and their leader, Jeff Schoep, will attend the Unite the Right rally on August 12.
According to the Unite the Right Facebook event page, the rally, “seeks to unify the right-wing against a totalitarian Communist crackdown, to speak out against displacement level immigration policies in the United States and Europe and to affirm the right of Southerners and white people to organize for their interests just like any other group is able to do, free of persecution.”
Schoep is not included in the speaker lineup, however two members of the Nationalist Front (NF) — formerly the Aryan Nationalist Alliance, a white supremacist coalition NSM co-founded last year — will address the crowd. Michael Hill, leader of the neo-confederate group League of the South, and Traditionalist Worker Party chairman Matthew Heimbach, are among 10 scheduled speakers.
It remains to be seen if “Uniting the Right” means that the Spencers of the world will now open their doors to openly racist groups like NSM, which has a well-documented criminal history, including murder.
In 2012, former NSM Nevada state leader Josh Davenport was charged with four counts of sexual assault on a victim under 14, four counts of sexual assault with a deadly weapon, lewdness with a minor, kidnapping and battery with intent to commit sexual assault.
In 2015 former NSM member Anthony Baumgartner was sentenced to 45 years for murdering a drug dealer in order “to get back in the race war.” Baumgartner attended an NSM rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2012, just three months before he and three others murdered and dismembered the victim.
Organizers may have intentionally excluded Schoep, who loves the limelight, to prevent Richard Spencer and other alt-right keynote speakers from sharing a public platform with the leader of a violent neo-Nazi group filled with misfits. But that won’t stop Schoep and his numerous followers from joining the crowd. “This is a call to all NSM Members to be in Charlottesville, and show our support for White History and Heritage,” the NSM announcement reads.
