12 | MAY 21 • 2020 continued from page 11 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 ■ ■ ■ on the cover