12 | MAY 21 • 2020
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said Schoep’
s mother, an attorney, had once lost a judgeship
appointment after links to her son were made public. Even this
wasn’
t enough, at first, to dissuade her son from his cause.
In 2007, Schoep moved from Minnesota to Detroit, taking
the NSM headquarters with him and incorporating the group
in the state of Michigan. Detroit’
s dramatic economic downturn,
he reasoned, would make for fertile white nation-
alist recruiting ground, and he was right. “The
movement did better in the big cities,
” he recalled,
“especially cities that had racial strife or economic
problems.
”
Besides, he added, Michigan had always been
one of the most-represented states in the NSM,
though he said he never kept an accurate count of
the group’
s total members. But the state does have a
long strand of bigoted activity, including prominent
and still-active membership in the Ku Klux Klan;
the Michigan Militia movement that launched in
the mid-1990s; and anti-Semitic preachers like
Father Charles Coughlin and James Wickstrom.
Both of them were quoted frequently within the
NSM.
It took many years for Schoep to begin to see the
error of his ways.
He first began to have doubts about his cause in the mid-
2010s, unsettled by positive interactions he’
d had with people
from various minority groups who’
d reached out to him. Among
some of his unlikely new friends were Daryl Davis, a black
blues musician who’
s played for Chuck Berry and B.B. King and
is known for befriending Klansmen and convincing them to
renounce their memberships; and British Muslim documentary
filmmaker Deeyah Khan, who profiled Schoep for a documen-
tary, White Right: Meeting the Enemy, which screened locally in
February at an event hosted by NEXTGen Detroit and others.
In addition, Schoep said he befriended an Orthodox Jewish
woman in the Detroit area, whom he declined to name, citing
safety concerns.
Beginning to doubt the hate he preached, but too scared to
strike out on his own, Schoep tried to rebrand the NSM in a
way that would make it acceptable to mainstream
politics. After Donald Trump was elected president,
Schoep saw an opening. In fact, he said, the state
of America in 2016 was what the NSM had always
wanted.
“I had hoped for that kind of polarization,
” he
said. “We wanted America to break down, you
know, a socioeconomic collapse, because we felt that
during that time, that’
s when the movement would
rise up and people would be looking for answers.
”
Schoep directed the NSM to insert themselves
into the immigration debate by setting up their
own “patrols” along the Southwest border. The ploy
worked: new members signed up because they saw
the group as “the only ones doing anything about
illegal immigration.
”
Most significantly, in 2016, Schoep removed the
swastika from the NSM’
s flag. The move was deeply
controversial within the group (most of its followers were still
proud Nazis), but Schoep was no longer interested in emulating
his own Nazi heritage. He promoted the NSM instead as “a white
civil rights group,
” in the vein of the growing popularity of “alt-
right” groups promoting similar ideology.
This was what the NSM looked like to Acacia Dietz when she
decided to join the group in 2017. Dietz, now 36, was raised in a
conservative Christian family in rural Ohio and initially moved
to Metro Detroit to attend Rochester College (today Rochester
University), a private Christian school. Her father was a pas-
tor, and as a child, her favorite movie was Fiddler on the Roof. In
Further
Discussion
Jewish News Editor
Andrew Lapin will host
a Facebook Live session
Tuesday, May 26 at 1:00
p.m. EST to respond to
reader questions about
this story. You can submit
questions ahead of time
to alapin@thejewish-
news.com or via the JN’
s
Facebook page.
Schoep, center with crossed arms, leading the NSM during
his movement days. His patch displays the revised NSM
logo; he replaced the swastika with the Odal rune in 2016.
PHOTO FROM WHITE RIGHT: MEETING THE ENEMY, DEEYAH KHAN/FUUSE FILMS
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on the cover