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

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