Trump and the neo-Nazis – How the president revived a crisis

0:00MUSIC NeoNaxes are unfortunately very much still a problem in America. How did this ideology take hold and how insidious is it today? Welcome back, you're listening to American Friction. MUSIC This is American Friction and I'm Jacob Jarvis. And I'm Chris Jones. Joining us today we have Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Eric Lishblow, the author of American Right, Immurdere in Orange County, NeoNaxes and a new age of hate. Eric, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. So first off, I wanted to just go right back into the history of America's Nazi problem. You also wrote a book called The Naxes Next Door. I'm guessing this is quite hard to place, but how long has America had a Nazi problem for? How long have there been Nazis in the United States? Well, if you take it back to World War II itself, as I did with The Naxes Next Door,

1:02the earlier book you mentioned, we had thousands of Nazis who got into America after the war, some of them at the invitation of the US government, both scientists and spies who numbered in the several thousands and were allowed to stay here with their histories as Nazis. Many of them involved in horrible wartime atrocities, basically erased by the US government. And that continued for years and years, often with the blessing of the US government, it wasn't until about 35 years after the war that the government began deporting and investigating and deporting these former Nazis. But then what happened was that you had a new generation, not of original Nazis, the OGs, unfortunately, but of neo-Naxes. And that started as soon as the 1960s. There was a guy named George Lincoln Rockwell right outside Washington, DC, where I am in Arlington.

2:02He set up a base in what was known as Crout Hill, idolizing Hitler and setting up a new Nazi party. And it's ebbed and flowed through then, but what I focus on in the book is the last 10 years, which is really seen in explosion. An epidemic, if you will, of neo-Naxi violence, hate crimes, extremist ideology, and how that has surged in the Trump era. And I say that intentionally because there's certainly a direct linkage between the political rhetoric of the current president and fueling the neo-Naxi party directly and indirectly as no president before him has done in modern times. I would imagine those original Nazis felt some need to somewhat keep their heads down or beliefs under the radar. When and why did people start to find it acceptable to be so publicly facing as Nazis?

3:04How did that happen? That's an excellent distinction. Yeah, the original Nazis, yes, they wanted to do everything they could to distance themselves from their past, especially beginning in the 1970s. And they was saying when the government started to go after them very belatedly, but they wanted to keep their noses clean. They publicly and privately disavowed any connections that Nazis see. Then you had this term with the neo-Naxis as they became known. And there are some today, I interviewed a number of them for the book, who say, I hate that term neo-Naxi. I'm a Nazi through and through. There's a guy, James Mason, who was an elderly leader of the neo-Naxi movement, who maintains he is a Nazi. He wants to call himself an original Nazi, of course. He was nowhere near Europe then. In fact, his father fought the Nazis, but he considers himself ideologically a Nazi. Anyway, that's more a semantic issue, but these neo-Nazis, there are some differences among the, oh, it's about 150 plus groups at this point, who hold some allegiance, but

4:11in terms of how publicity friendly they are, but there are certainly many, many of them who seek out the publicity. And by no means run from it. That is their calling card is instilling fear through their exposure. We saw this just a few months ago in Washington here on July 4th with the scene of marching first on the metro. There was the photo, of course, of surrounding a young black woman, and then marching near the mall, obviously trying to make a statement, trying to instill fear, trying to say, we are neo-Nazis. We belong to a fascist ideology, and we want the country and the world to know that. Now, in that case, there fortunately was no violence. That's fairly rare for these events. There usually is, as we saw in many, many public events, there is usually a result of violence by members of this group. They are prone to violence. So there are some that still operate below the surface.

5:14Adam Waffen was one of them. At James Mason, the elder, the guy I mentioned, is sort of their spiritual guru. They consider themselves guys who just blow things up and keep low key and don't want to be seen or heard until they are ready to attack kind of thing. But they are outnumbered by those who are seeking out the publicity for the sake of the threat and the extremist violence that they bring. On a side note there, you mentioned the phrase spiritual guru. Based on that, with the original Nazis, there were these links to the occult. And they were kind of quite woo-wooful of a better way to describe it, I suppose. Do you still see that thread in modern neo-Nazis movements? Yes, there certainly are some who believe in the occult and there's some demonic elements. You know what?

6:15Unfortunately, these days there are so many different neo-Nazis groups that there is no one size fits a hole. You know, some are more into the occult, the suburb are into drugs, suburb are into explosives, suburb are more into, there's some, there's a martial arts sort of wing that's into the hand to hand, martial arts fighting. If you're looking for, and I say this only somewhat facetiously, if you're looking for you know, a neo-Nazis club to your liking, you can find almost any color and strain these days. In the book, you write that America is seeing a huge nationwide surge in violent bigotry and white supremacy, unlike anything since the bloody days of the civil rights movement in the South in the 1960s. What is it you think about the current climber of America has allowed that to happen? You mentioned the president, but what other sort of circumstances are there that have drawn us to this place? Well, I think that the two major factors I would point to are the political rhetoric beginning

7:21with Trump. And then the second is the role and the failure of the telecom companies of the huge social media platforms to keep this spewing of hate-filled garbage off their sights as they once pledged to do. They never did it very successfully. There are always huge gaps in that, but they at least had their policies until just a few years ago to officially ban hate speech. And that has now gone to the wind in just the last couple of years, led by Elon Musk with his takeover of Twitter and turning it to X, which is really, I would just argue, assess pool these days for neo-Nazis. That's a go-to place where they don't need to. There are certainly any number of encrypted platforms where neo-Nazis and white supremacists gather to talk about operational plans, for instance, that could and very likely are concerned criminal. They may go to parlor or to forechand or now H&N or others for encrypted more secure

8:26communications. But there's less of a need for that now when they're just spewing hatred and bashing minorities, they can do that fairly openly now under the current policies at X and even Facebook and Meta followed suit at Facebook and Instagram where policies that specifically said hate speech is not allowed have now been overturned. And Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have said that they've gotten rid of their fact checkers for the most part. They've gotten rid of the people and the algorithmic controls that were monitoring hate speech. Again, there are always huge gaps in this, even if when there was a policy, but now it's the Wild West. So that's the other big factor that I think has made the spread of these really toxic ideologies so rapid. And I realized there's a free speech element to this. You know, the irony in the whole discussion about the hate speech of the internet is that

9:30the backlight started when Trump was banned from many of these platforms after January 6th for inciting violence and spewing hatred. And then when Elon Musk, of course, who became his confidant and his benefactor and his aid before they're falling out, came into power, then Trump was not only allowed back on the platform, but so were all these similarly-minded messengers with all the hatred spewing out about blacks, about Jews, about case, about immigrants, about Hispanics, etc., etc., with the controls just totally gone. Do you struggle to keep up with the news every week? The bunker has got you covered. Every Monday, we really start your week. We'll be going over the big stories to follow in the coming days. And then on Friday, we have our weekly wrap-up, where we give you the context and the meaning behind the biggest and the weirdest stories of recent days.

10:30Search for the bunker wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Wage a battle for dominance. In new weapons for new wars, a brand new limited series from This Is Not a Drill, we look at the fastest, most intense transformation of warfare in half a century. Automated battle systems that learn as they fight, faster, more accurate missiles, cheap drones that can take out a warship, for less than the cost of a family car. The next generation defences to keep enemies at bay. That's new weapons for new wars with me, Gavin Esner. Search This Is Not a Drill on your favorite app now. It's really interesting with social media because when you look at all of these stories that

11:48involve killings that revolve around as you put it, these toxic ideologies, things like H&N seem to pop up all the time in terms of how these people became what they are and what they were. One of the main narratives in the book is about the killing of Blaise Bernstein by Samuel Woodward. I wonder if you could just outline what that story was and also why you chose to focus in on that as well. Sure. So, Blaise Bernstein was a young man in Orange County, California, who happened to be both gay and Jewish and had gone to high school with a young man named Sam Woodward. He was always a bit of an outcast even then. He was kind of the kid in the back of the room with his footy stretched tight over his head kind of into the video war games, but progressively got more and more into this neo-Nazi ideology

12:54through a couple of different ways. And so I use this case and unfortunately Sam Woodward's ultimate killing of Blaise Bernstein. It's really emblematic of how these young people and they almost always are young people in their late teens or early 20s and young men. It's almost always young men. It is unfortunately tragically typical of this increased radicalization of these people who get pulled into neo-Nazi ideology and oftentimes resort to violence as a way of expressing their racial hatred and really their identity. So Sam Woodward painting the picture of him in the book, he really sort of learned to hate at home from his father for gays in particular. That was instilled in him from a young age at home. But then that blossomed really flourished as a neo-Nazi to just about all minorities and

13:56he just got sucked in more and more first online. But then in person, he started on any number of social media sites becoming parts of groups, some encrypted others public. But then took that next step going in person joining up with several hate groups including Adam Woffe and the one I mentioned which is kind of for the young kids who like to blow things up, even going to one of their hate camps in Texas. And they would fire air 15s in the scrub brush of Texas and talk about race four and their hatred of minorities and their loyalty to the Nazi cause. And then he even went to visit James Mason, this elder statesman who I keep talking about who I argued quite a bit also. But it was almost a right of passage, a pilgrimage for young people, hundreds of them like Sam Woodward would go to see James Mason have like a selfie taken with them and get him to sign their

15:03copy of his racist screed which was called siege. And that was an indoctrination for these kids. And then very soon after that Sam Woodward reconnected with Blase Bernstein as old high school classmate, Lord and man by pretending to be gay and then ultimately that ended tragically in a park not far from Blase Bernstein's home with him dead. And he became a hero to the other members of Adamoff and they could, a one man gay Jew wrecking crew was what they called him. It's horrible to say those words, it's horrible to say. But that was the mentality. So we've seen, you know, that's just one case. If you look at the biggest deadliest hate crimes of the last few years in what's already been a huge surge. We've had an enormous surge in last 10 years. Say, hate crimes in the United States have more than doubled in the last 10 years.

16:03And if you look at the deadliest ones, they are almost without fail carried out by young white supremacists with AR-15s, young men. It's jarring and and and and horrible. If you look at Buffalo, the tops shooting there, which was the biggest mass murder of blacks in modern American history, that's by a young 19 year old from New York. Sir passing Dylan Roof's shooting of eight churchgoers in South Carolina. You look at San Diego, you look at El Paso at a Walmart where there were 20 something Hispanics killed at a Walmart. These are all young white supremacists with AR-15s, gunning done minorities. And more off the night, writing these horrible manifestos, proud of why they did it. Just the last one a few months ago was in San Diego. Probably most people have forgotten it by now, but certainly not the families and certainly

17:04not the Muslim community because they targeted a mosque where you had two teenagers, one who was only 17, the other was, I believe, 18, and went into a mosque, they had written their manifestos, you know, doodly about their rage against their first of all their loyalty to the Nazis. They even mentioned James Mason by name. They're Nazi party Hitler, the ideology. And then they went in with guns blazing this mosque and killed two people. And if it wasn't for a Muslim guard, this was a daycare center where there were something like 100 plus kids in San Diego at the daycare center. If it wasn't for the Muslim guard shooting an injuring them, God knows what the bloodshed would have been. So, you know, this is just a horrible, horrible pattern that we are trapped in that is not turning around. Yeah, that El Paso example that you gave there is just absolutely horrific. I remember reading about that at the time, I think it was 22 killed in 23 others injured.

18:07So 45 people in total. There were just their lives absolutely torn apart for no reason whatsoever by someone who believed that their ideology was categorically correct. And I guess that brings me to my question in terms of when it comes to these young people, mostly as you say, these young white men, how much is grooming the issue, the way that they get into believing these things are these mostly, I guess, people who are on the outskirts of society, wherever that may be in school or at home, and they're groomed into being part of this group and making them feel like they belong in a world where necessarily they don't actually feel like they have a place. Yeah, I mean, there's a playbook for these groups in their recruitment. You know, they look for vulnerable, disaffected young men who feel left out by how much America

19:09has changed ethnically and identity wise to their dislike and they pray on them. I mean, there are four members who've left the Nazi party that I interviewed and to speak out publicly from time to time now. And they talk about this. They use video games, for instance, to learn because they know that a lot of these kids like Sam Woodward will be very, very active and see that as such a cool thing. And they know what buttons to push and the group that marched Patriot Front, the group that marched in Washington just a few months ago, they become particularly adept at that. And their numbers have surged the last couple of years, you know, into the thousands with the very public outfacing identity you were asking before about, you know, those that are willing to be out there, Patriot Front, a certain group will be out there. Although we're the caveat with masks over their faces. So they march, but with masks over their faces.

20:10So they're looking for kids who are trying to find a sense of place and identity and look, a lot of kids are trying to find a sense of identity. You know, you're turbulent teenage years. They're a lot of kids. Unfortunately, there's this growing pocket of kids who are finding that in the worst parts of extremism, literally doing high-hitlers and preaching loyalty to James Mason siege. You know, read siege became a meme on certain sites, on Discord, and on parlor and other places because, you know, they see these people as truth tellers. And a lot of that is through misinformation. I think that's an important part. This isn't just sort of getting the word out. It's getting lies out about, for instance, the levels of black on white crime. You know, that's a frequent trope and misinformation. You know, Dylan Roof acted on that. You can find that in lots of manifestos.

21:11You know, when in fact the percentage is tiny compared to what the neo-nazis would believe. And there are any number of examples of that. Fuelling anti-Semitism, fueling anti-Muslim rhetoric, fueling anti-black, fueling anti-K's, it's propaganda, it's appealing to emotions and feeding that with lies oftentimes. You know, for instance, and I'll come back to Trump. His two favorite groups lately have been immigrants and trans. And you know, the ugly rhetoric is an awful lot of misinformation. And it's intentional misinformation. I mean, it's be honest about that. And I could, we could talk for half an hour just about the fact checking the lies that Trump has told, but just to give you a few examples of what the close of the 2024 campaign with the catty-ding and dog-eating Haitians, you know, it never happened. It was not only not evidence, but it was debunked. And in fact, where that rumor came from was not many.

22:13People were aware of this. But it was a neo-Nazi party in Ohio. And JD Vance from Ohio and Trump jumped on that and gave it air like you had never seen before to prop it up to the extent that the neo-Nazis in Ohio were amazed. And they're encrypted channels. They say, can you believe it? The president is talking about this now. This is what real influence looks like. That's directly from there. From their mouth. This is what real influence looks like. So it's propaganda, but it's a lie. I mean, there were no catty-ding Haitians or dog-eating Haitians. Or the caravans of immigrants who were coming spilling out of insane assilums and prisons, you know, a lie. And in many of these cases, this is just music to the years of neo-Nazis and wannabe neo-Nazis, so that misinformation fuels the hatred. Is everything we knew about warfare changing right before our eyes?

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24:26the coming days. And then on Friday's, we have our weekly wrap-up, where we give you the context and the meaning behind the biggest and the weirdest stories of recent days. Search for the bonkers wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe so you never miss an episode. When we speak about this sort of thing in racism in society at large, I can see why the conversation draws to neo-Nazis and these extremes and to focus on that. But one thing I found quite interesting in your book was how Woodward's parents had their own questionable views, let's say, and things that they would say which were relatively problematic. But there was a point when he started mentioning, I'm going to go on to these rallies, I'm going to meet these people, and even they were going, okay, we're not sure on that. We have some sympathy, but we don't totally agree with that.

25:26Does that really remind us as well how we have to be not only cautious of these extremes, but really, really cautious of just more mundane and run-of-the-mill moments of prejudice. Because to me, it sounds like the homophobia was basically a gateway drug almost to this insane rabbit hole he went down. Right, yeah, his parents, yeah, they were okay with some bigotry when it came to geese, especially they were particularly anti-gay. But then, once they began seeing like their son was going full-blown neo-nazi, they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this wasn't quite what we meant. And that, I think, is sad. They probably knew more than most parents of these killers about what their son was up to compared to like a Peyton Gendron in Buffalo, who was a top shooter or others. I mean, there are some where it's still a bit of a blur. But obviously, there are warning signs that in almost all these cases, you can look back

26:33and say, how could we not have seen this? In the case of the Moss tutors in San Diego, those two teenagers a few months ago, there had been guns confiscated at the home after some extremist writings, a big number, I remember, it was like 20 plus guns, I think. And even that wasn't enough to really alert the parents were involved in purchasing those guns. You know, they, in that case, like a sandwich, seemed to turn a blind eye. And you have the problem that law enforcement has really been stymied in taking steps against these groups the last few years. But there was a period about five years ago when the FBI and the former director, who trumped forced out of office, Chris Ray, was pretty actively going after these extremist violent white supremacist groups. Of course, being white supremacist or neo-Nazi is not a crime as long as you cross that line

27:38into violence or harassment or intimidation. But it became sort of too hard for them to ignore. And they raised to a national priority level these racially generated killings that we would see in South Carolina, and Buffalo, et cetera, et cetera. And they recognized that. And they were taking steps to go, you know, undercover against some of these groups. They rounded up a bunch of these Adam often kids. There are about 30 or 40 of the Adam often kids that were, that were in young adults, were arrested on charges of violence, stalking, and cyber attacks, and all sorts of things, which actually gets minorities. But then what's happened is that, you know, with the current environment in Washington under the Trump administration, the FBI has completely backed away from that. Antifa is now seen as the top national priority, which is tied to very few cases of actual violence. There was one case for the first time in Texas, maybe four or five months ago, where there was a conviction that was the first, and I believe still only conviction.

28:42Antifa compared to neo-Nazis and whites of prebusis where there are scores and scores of federal convictions. And more every day we become sort of immune to it. It doesn't even make the news. There was one in Michigan just a few months ago where a guy, a car carrying neo-Nazis, brought up a bunch of cars in his neighborhood and left anti-gay and anti-black graffiti on some of the cars. And then they found a whole cache of weapons and a manifesto and other material in his apartment in the investigation of that. This is the local police, not of course the FBI, you know, along with like a plot to kill all the Jews and a desecrated, I think it was an Israeli flag with neo-Nazis symbols on it. You know, that guy wanted to be basically the next Sam Woodward or Peyton Gendron or Dylan

29:43Roof and all the other sense of Robert Bowers. There was another one interesting, not a known car carrying neo-Nazis, but just your run of the Mill white supremacist who in North of Virginia, not far from me here in Washington, a few months ago was sent to prison for life because he had a fantasy about killing immigrants. He said he had been sort of driven to this from all the right-wing cable news shows about you know, the immigrant invasion basically. And he followed this young, Hispanic-looking guy who I believe was a legal resident by the way, not that really matters for purposes of this discussion, but to a gas station and then he ended up shooting him and his friend, both in the chest, they were lucky to be alive. And he was quite frank that like he just couldn't stand the immigrants and he wanted to shoot someone. You know, you probably knew when your viewers probably never heard about that.

30:47That happens so frequently these days that we only hear about when at sort of rise level of a, you know, of a San Diego Mosque attack or the Buffalo Tide, you know, that you've got to kill a lot of people these days to make the news if you're a neo-Nazzi, a sati-commentary as that is. Yeah, absolutely. Do you think that when it comes to the amount of acts that are carried out in terms of hate crimes right now, as you mentioned, that there's quite the boom really in terms of things that are happening against minorities from neo-Nazis? Do you feel like when it comes to those 150 groups that you mentioned at the top of the show, do you think they feel like they more than ever now have an ally in the White House? Absolutely. Yes. You talk to them as I have. They feel like Trump is a person who understands them, who is speaking their language, who is

31:48carrying their message. Yes. James Mason, again, to come back to him, we'll tell you that specifically. You know, there are a few, I guess, of the extreme extremists who don't like Trump because he has a Jewish son-in-law, you know, he's somehow, he's, they're so anti-Semitic that they think that even Trump is in on the Jewish conspiracy. But certainly the majority that I'm aware of and that I've spoken with, you know, they, just again, that example of the dog eating Haitians. I mean, to give a shout out like that of misinformation, a flood of disinformation about catting Haitians, that's right out of their playbook or another example, an immigration policy, you know, visas from virtually every country in the world these days, especially those with people of color, are shut down and we're deporting many of them from Haitians and other words, some other simoleons. The one glaring exception is South Africa, where we, where we are in the process of allowing

32:51in as many as I think it's 10,000 white South African Afrikaners, which is based on, again, the misinformation, the debunked theory that blacks in South Africa are systematically killing white South Africans. So that's why we're allowing them in. It was an idea fed to Trump by Elon Musk among other people and white supremacists and neo-Nazis in South Africa. That's the kind of thing that's just catnip for these, for these neo-Nazi groups. They see that and they say, that's our guy. Just a final question and I don't really know what normal, what normal is anymore, but let's say when there will be a point when Donald Trump isn't in the White House or isn't around, whatsoever. Do you have much hope for there being able to be some sort of return to normality, where the numbers do drop down? How long a road do you think that is? Or am I being naive and

33:59unfortunately normality means that there's going to be neo-Nazis around because they're just always have been? Well, I think it's going to be a long road. I mean, I hold out some optimism, but to repair the damage in racial tension that's occurred in racial violence that's occurred over these last 10 years, where I think we're going to look back on this period as one of those crises. It seems like every 65, 7 years over its history, America has gone through one of these periods. If you go through the post reconstruction after the Civil War and then after World War I, there was a period, the blood summer. And then in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement and the backlash to that and the violence in the South and the return of the clan, now we're at that period again, I guess the wishful part of me would like to thank, maybe this is the last one.

35:03Maybe years from now people say, there was never another flare up quite like this, but I don't know, as we sit here and live it, it's hard to imagine it dissipating any time soon. You know, we see, and there are poll numbers and anecdotes just to show the crisis, especially anti-Semitism, it's worth flagging, is surging in no small part because of what's going on, what's gone out in Gaza with Israel. That's certainly that's surging and a number of the most violent episodes in the last year now have been against Jews. It's going to take a long road before we can sort of take a breath and say, we're out of that really, really dark, dark period. And it's going to take law enforcement to get back on the horse and start actively investigating this stuff, which the FBI, there's no sign really is doing now. And it's going to take a new

36:07leadership voices to say that just the, you know, the vile immigrant bashing, minority bashing rhetoric is is no longer acceptable. Eric, thank you so much for joining us on American friction. Thank you. It's my pleasure. And thank you to all of you for listening to American friction. Remember, if you enjoy what we do here, you can help us out by backing us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com forward slash American friction to find out how you can get episodes ad free and early. And if you'd like to find out more about Eric's work as well, there's a link to his book in the show notes. I'm Jacob Jarvis and I'm Chris Jones and this has been American friction.