Can You Ever Trust a Former White Nationalist?

She sent them to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in what would become the first of multiple information dumps to SPLC. She earlier had given leaked emails to the Atlantic, part of a flurry of releases of once private correspondence.^[6] Names, records, insider information, pseudonyms—it was all available. The news that Miller—and by extension, the Trump White House—had substantial ties to leading White nationalist organizations like VDare and American Renaissance made a splash. It was one of the most significant leaks in the Trump years, showing exactly how organized White supremacy was pushing on the U.S. immigration system.

For McHugh, it was, at least in part, a bid for redemption. “Certainly you become scared, but you know in your soul that it is the right thing to do,” she said. “These are extremely bad people; they are going to hurt more people. I have to do something.”^[7]

But some antiracist activists and observers expressed skepticism among themselves, given the role McHugh had played in mainstreaming White nationalism. Today, McHugh’s story isn’t unique. While White supremacists have always lingered on the edges of the political Right, the Alt Right’s rebranding efforts grew their numbers. It stands to reason that the ranks of those now trying to leave the movement could grow as well. And so, over the last few years, the idea of the remorseful “former White nationalist” has come into vogue, featured in popular books, a catalogue of TED Talks, and a growing industry of media figures who’ve built personal brands out of being a “former.”

Some of them have landed positions as consulting experts with “Countering Violent Extremism” organizations that present themselves as non-partisan opponents of “extremism”—defined so vaguely that they often make no distinctions between groups advocating far-right violence and those fighting against them.^[8]

All of this deeply complicates questions about which former White nationalists should be trusted as windows into the movement, and what accountability looks like for those who want to leave their harmful pasts behind.

Seeking Redemption

For Christian Picciolini, a former White nationalist who’s made it his life’s work to help others leave the movement, a guiding principle is understanding that “not everybody is going to be convinced that people have changed.”

“It’s healthy to be skeptical about people who have done and said awful things to suddenly change, and I think we need to hold them to account,” he said. “I also think we can’t have the blanket statement of ‘nobody can change.’”^[9]

Picciolini’s conviction comes from his own story as a former neonazi in the Hammerskins skinhead group in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Traveling with his band White American Youth, he became a violent street brawler before leaving the movement in the 1990s and beginning the long process of reconciling with what he had done. Eventually he founded Life After Hate,^[10] a group that is intended to help people transition out of racist groups and works with survivors of White supremacist violence and communities of color to hold former White nationalists accountable.^[11]

Picciolini is one of many figures and organizations in a growing field focused on “de-radicalization:” an approach to far-right militancy that works with people who want to get out to confront their past, with varying results. Some have measurable success, while critics allege that others simply legitimize White nationalists without holding them accountable, or even without fully reforming their views.

During the 2000s, Picciolini primarily worked with kids leaving skinhead crews and the Ku Klux Klan, but now he deals mostly with the more fragmented world of online radicalization. He also hosts a show on MSNBC, featuring White nationalists who say they want to leave the movement. Although he sometimes works with more than 300 people at a time, Picciolini says his program is not a rubber stamp exit plan, but comes with a stack of stipulations and requirements, including setting personal goals and making amends. There’s no shortcut to the redemption many “formers” seek, he said—just a deliberate process to take responsibility and understand what brought them into the movement in the first place.

One of Picciolini’s colleagues, Shannon Martinez, a former neonazi drawn into the movement after a sexual assault, says most work with “people who are still in” isn’t ideological, but personal. “You have to address the underlying things that create the reason you found resonance with this stuff in the first place,” she said. “That takes time and a lot of really hardcore, ongoing support.”^[12]

And it’s not a process that happens quickly, she said, noting the many current “former” White nationalists who rapidly became public figures within months of leaving. At that point, Martinez said, “You don’t even know the sickness you have yet.”^[13]

The Commander

Before PRA reached out to Jeff Schoep, the former “Commander” of the neonazi National Socialist Movement (NSM), Picciolini warned me to be careful. Schoep, he said, was “a grifter and not being fully genuine.”^[14]

As one of the highest-profile neonazis in U.S. history, in the 1990s, Schoep transformed his skinhead crew into a nationwide political organization, which he then led for 25 years. The NSM were often referred to as “Hollywood Nazis” for their brazen racism, including dressing in a “blackshirt” uniform with swastikas, using racial slurs, and preaching race war. Schoep sought out recruits with military training—he claimed 50 percent of their members were veterans—and NSM members have one of the longest rap sheets of racist violence in the movement.^[15] Schoep helped lead the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and became one of U.S. White nationalism’s loudest voices. But in 2019, he began presenting himself as a “former White nationalist,” first appearing on Picciolini’s MSNBC show and then working with the Washington, D.C.-based Light Upon Light. Within months, he was speaking at conferences as an expert on White nationalism, and offering “deradicalization” counseling. To Picciolini, it seemed disingenuous.

“Immediately after [he was on my show] … I was pressuring him to do the work, to see a therapist. I had job interviews lined up,” said Picciolini. “He kind of refused to do it. He just decided he wanted to be a spokesperson for himself again. And I decided to cut it off because it didn’t feel like he was being genuine.”^[16]

The issue may not be whether someone like Schoep sincerely wants out—there are plenty of practical, non-ideological reasons to not want to be publicly affiliated with White nationalism anymore—but whether he was willing to work to make amends, or even cared to.

When we first spoke on the phone, Schoep said, “The longer some of us have been in, the more harm we have done. I think it’s really important that we …do what we can to repair that damage. Anybody can talk about it but you need to walk the walk.”^[17]

But it’s unclear what Schoep means by “walking the walk.” He left the organization in 2019, amid a lawsuit^[18] stemming from his role in the 2017 Unite the Right rally, where Schoep and associates were alleged to have attacked counter-protesters.^[19] After his departure, though, Schoep refused to provide anti-racist organizations with NSM’s membership lists or other information that could help authorities target the group.

“It wasn’t mine to just give away,” Schoep said, citing alleged non-disclosure agreements that NSM members sign and comparing such disclosures to corporate espionage. “It’s like saying, ‘Well, if you worked for Apple and now you are working with IBM, how come you didn’t take all the schematics and things Apple was working on and hand them over to their competitor?’ You just don’t do that. It’s not ethically sound.”^[20]

Schoep also hasn’t worked with any victims of NSM violence, and minimizes the long history of violence associated with the group, including a recent case where an NSM member from Missouri was arrested en route to bomb a hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic.^[21] Instead, when asked, Schoep seems to wax nostalgic about the impressive things he did in his time with the NSM.^[22]

“He likes very much to remind everyone that he was the leader of the NSM for 25 years. There is no way that you undo 25 years in a matter of months,” said Martinez.^[23]

Formers, Inc.

But Schoep’s high-profile redemption story has been helped along by Light Upon Light (LUL), which has recently come under fire for what many in the deradicalization community consider to be playing fast and loose with the process. By appealing to a supposed political center with so-called countering violent extremism (CVE) programming, LUL has denounced antifascist activists and even collaborated with right-wing writer and livestreamer Andy Ngo, whose misleading reporting has created dangerous hyperbole and around antifascist activism—including by alleging “Antifa violence” where there is none—and whose use of racial, transphobic, and bigoted characterizations of left-wing activists, and singling out of reporters and community organizers, has left them vulnerable to far-right political violence.^[24] Ngo’s inclusion as a legitimate voice helps to launder far-right ideas and bigotries under a “both sides” narrative of manufactured centrism, and also shows LUL’s disconnect from how the Far Right actually functions.

Starting in 2019, shortly after his conversion, Schoep became a public speaker for LUL, speaking about his experiences in the White nationalist movement, and appearing as an expert on the Far Right at conferences and universities.^[25] LUL was also criticized by antifascist activists for working with the Clarion Project, an anti-Muslim organization^[26] that has used Islamophobic films such as Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West and The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America in trainings for law enforcement and with voters in battleground states.^[27] Both LUL founder Jesse Morton^[28] and Schoep appeared in a Clarion video alongside the group’s Intelligence Network Director Ryan Mauro, who has been featured on Fox News’ Lou Dobbs Tonight repeatedly alleging that there are domestic terrorist “training camps” in the U.S.^[29] Schoep and LUL also participated in an event from the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism. During this, Morton participated in a controversial forum on the “involuntary celibate” or incel movement, suggesting that the movement, which has inspired numerous misogynistic murders and mass killings in recent years, was instead simply misunderstood.^[30]

LUL turned even more heads in 2020 when it announced they were working with Matthew Heimbach, another longtime White nationalist celebrity and the former head of the Traditionalist Worker Party who, like Schoep, was still facing a lawsuit over his role in the violence in Charlottesville. In a video LUL released in April 2020, Heimbach discussed leaving the movement over concerns about members’ violence, yet neglected to actually denounce any of its politics. Just a matter of months prior to the video’s release, Heimbach had helped launch the National Socialist Charitable Coalition to help raise money for James Alex Fields, the Alt Right activist who killed antifascist counter-protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in 2017.^[31] Just a few months before that, Heimbach had also appeared on an accelerationist neonazi podcast and proclaimed “God bless Dylann Roof,” the White supremacist who murdered nine parishioners at Charleston, South Carolina’s Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the oldest Black churches in the nation. There, and in other podcasts, Heimbach talked about supporting imprisoned White nationalists, which had been his official role as an officer in the NSM.^[32] Not to mention that before he left the movement, leaked messages he’d written on a White nationalist forum showed him praising an accelerationist neonazi manual and terror groups like Atomwaffen Division as “good friends of ours.”^[33]         

Heimbach’s subsequent connection with LUL seemed to confirm critics’ suspicion that the organization was achieving little beyond helping White nationalists rebrand themselves and their politics. In a YouTube comment in April of  2020, Heimbach posted a letter clarifying his views, expressing continued support for nationalist causes, using coded language like “anti-Zionist” to express otherwise antisemitic tropes,^[34] and saying he opposed the “PC” culture found among other former White nationalists.^[35]

In an email to PRA, Heimbach confirmed that while he had left White nationalism, his beliefs hadn’t moderated and he saw nothing to be contrite about. His main transformation, he suggested, was becoming a nationalist socialist rather than a national socialist. In a subsequent interview, Heimbach added that he now believes what can best solve the world’s problems is some form of authoritarian Marxism or a type of National Bolshevism—an ideological current that tries to mix ethnic nationalism with a distorted form of Marxism. Now, instead of citing neonazi leaders, he pulls from obscure Soviet or Chinese Communist Party policies to justify his far-right ideas, as well as the nationalism of some Marxist leaders such as Ho Chi Minh, while also arguing that he affirms “proletarian internationalism” and cross-racial solidarity against capitalism and its elites. Much of his apparent ideology still centers on antisemitism—calling Jews “hyper capitalists” and “rootless cosmopolitans” in our interview^[36]—even as he attempted to qualify this by suggesting he was only condemning various elites of Jewish descent (a qualification that’s been the hallmark of open antisemites for decades). He also still believes in racial IQ differences, in the unique threat that Jews and Judaism pose to the world (though he phrases it as “Zionists”), that transgender people are “mentally ill,” and that some form of nationalism is acceptable.

Despite Heimbach openly proclaiming that his beliefs haven’t changed, and maintaining friendly relationships with other White nationalists, including his former Traditionalist Worker Party co-leader Matthew Parrott, LUL not only allowed him to become an organizational ambassador, but to host a six-episode podcast with Morton. In the show, Heimbach reverently uses honorifics for White nationalist leaders (such as “Dr. Pierce” for National Alliance founder William Pierce); defended “national socialism” as an ideology; propped up the myth that there is a genocide against Boer farmers in South Africa;^[37] blamed antifascists for not allowing the Far Right an acceptable outlet for their racist rage;^[38] and hyped moral panics over claims about “transexual drag shows for children.”^[39]

Far from LUL being misled about Heimbach’s views, they seem to have been his ticket into the group.^[40] His connection with LUL began in early 2020, after Heimbach wrote Morton a letter, outlining his political trajectory and explaining why he left White nationalism. The letter was never released publicly, but in a copy acquired by PRA, Heimbach writes, “Traditionally in the United States, when someone leaves White Nationalism they go on a long apology tour, about how sorry they are about being a hateful bigot and hurting innocent people, and while your average neoliberal might nod approvingly and clap their hands at this wonderful ‘transformation’, the average person in and out of the White Nationalist movement just rolls their eyes. I am not apologizing and have nothing to apologize for. End of story.” Rather than challenging Heimbach, Morton responded immediately with an offer to connect him with The New York Times for an interview about being a former White nationalist.^[41]

That sort of pattern has led many researchers and activists to criticize “CVE” groups. “[Many groups] that have focused on trying to counter violent extremism or prevent extremist radicalization have been very vague about their criteria for success,” says Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a researcher who studies far-right radicalization. “You have to find some way of…assessing the genuine commitment to disengagement from the beliefs… It’s really important that there are metrics for success, and that you assess what you’re doing before you scale up.”

“So much of the crossover of the CVE framework and bringing it to American Nazism is just about image laundering and producing these narratives of rehabilitation,” said Molly Conger, a Charlottesville native who became an antifascist organizer in the aftermath of Unite the Right.^[42] “And most of the high-profile examples they produce are clearly fictional.”

Even a former LUL consultant on far-right radicalization, Samantha Kutner, echoed the critique. In the six months she was there, she saw what she described as multiple “red flags” that eventually convinced her to quit, including LUL’s relationship with the Clarion Project; watching the “ways that ‘formers’ were being used with no accountability measures in place”; and being placed in the middle of a “turf war” between competing CVE organizations. Kutner was also particularly concerned by Morton’s collaboration with Andy Ngo,^[43] since she’d been one of 13 journalists and activists targeted by an Atomwaffen-style “kill list” video, entitled “Sunset the Media,” after Ngo publicized a list made by Eoin Lenihan accusing the journalists of having connections to “Antifa.”^[44] “When I realized the org that I was recruited into had really no interest in doing the work they claimed to do or the work that I wanted to be there for,” said Kutner, “I made the choice to leave.”^[45]

LUL declined repeated interview requests for this article and did not respond to a detailed list of questions. Ultimately LUL and Heimbach parted ways—prompted, Heimbach claims, by Morton saying that Heimbach was going to “ruin everything” with LUL’s donors after Heimbach wrote in a livestream comment thread that “fascism has a lot of good points.” But as of this writing, Heimbach’s content is still online at LUL’s website.^[46]

Responsibilities for a Pathway Back

Giving over organizational information, particularly information that can be used to confront and dismantle White nationalist organizations, is often considered the baseline of amends-making by antifascist activists, who both play an extensive role in confronting White nationalist movements and are frequent targets of threats or violence for their defensive work. There has to be an attempt to use what information and skills the person has to undo some of the base-building work they did for the White nationalist movement. If they act in defense of their old comrades and organizations, how can the rest of the community actually trust them as anything other than a dangerous unknown?

“People who leave these movements do have an obligation…to commit to using their knowledge to better inform the interventions that could prevent other people from going down that path. And not just in a way that platforms their own personality and their own experiences,” says Miller-Idriss.

When Schoep talks about his White nationalist past, he tends to brag about the skills he learned leading the NSM, such as his infiltration of law enforcement and antifascist groups. But that sort of boasting makes it particularly hard for his former targets to believe his claims of redemption.

In 2016, for example, Schoep worked with a Black NSM supporter to infiltrate the antifascist group One People’s Project, with the intention of doxing antifascist organizers.^[47]  That’s not the kind of harm that is easy to undo, yet in our interview, Schoep seemed more proud than remorseful.

“[Former White nationalists] have to be upfront about what they and [their] hopefully former colleagues did, especially those of the caliber of Schoep. While I appreciate the need to move on, even those I have helped to get out that just [want] to live their lives have provided info that was helpful,” said One People’s Project Daryle Lamont Jenkins. “They know that there was some pain they have caused that they will need to atone for if they want to be accepted. And the more pain they caused the more they have to deal with.”^[48]

Heimbach and Schoep are two of the over 20 defendants who were successfully sued for their roles at Unite the Right. The lawsuit accused Schoep of not truly separating from the NSM and of refusing to turn over equipment, such as his cell phone, requested by the plaintiffs during the lawsuit.^[49]  According to the lawsuit, Burt Colucci, Schoep’s replacement as NSM’s “Commander,” who was arrested in April 2021 for allegedly threatening to kill a Black man,^[50] testified during a deposition that Schoep was still involved with NSM in late 2019, well after his LUL biography claims he left the movement.^[51] Evidence of these continuing ties included a 2019 text message from Schoep warning Colucci about a federal informant, and the fact that Colucci testified in his December 2019 deposition that Schoep’s girlfriend, Acacia Dietz, still was an “informal” NSM member who maintained the group’s website.^[52] Schoep’s warning text was sent just two weeks before LUL released a video of Schoep expressing his remorse for his role in the movement and claiming he’d left it behind.^[53] The court documents also reveal Schoep’s profound unwillingness to release NSM member data, with Schoep’s attorney “obstinately refus[ing] to even inquire who else within the organization, beyond the former leader, possess responsive documents.”^[54] Taken together, these facts convinced many activists that Schoep’s supposed conversion was just a ploy to aid in his defense against the lawsuit.^[55]

Another sticking point with activists is the tendency of “formers,” and the groups that have sprung up to promote them, to draw false equivalencies between White supremacist movements and those who resist them—using a “both sides” approach to assign equal blame for political violence between the Far Right and antifascists.

In addition to a baseline expectation that “formers” make amends and share information, said antifascist writer Spencer Sunshine, they must also understand that some issues, such as antifascism or Jewish cultural issues, should be off limits.^[56] Instead, Schoep has started to weigh in on what kinds of antifascist tactics he thinks should be practiced, and castigating the Left for engaging in what he calls their own form of “extremism.” On Twitter, he’s evoked far-right conspiracy theories in decrying “Marxist” antiracist activists, and said that leftist politics are a turnoff to those he is trying to urge to leave White nationalism.^[57]

“Even if I thought Schoep was being real, how he is approaching things is downright insulting,” said Jenkins. “He doesn’t get to lecture anyone about anything, period.”^[58]

Now Schoep is trying to counsel other people out of the movement, presumably using the same soft-hand approach that he took to leaving, without requiring tough ideological work, serious conversions, or real accountability.

“Somebody like Jeff Schoep, he spent 30 years in it…he doesn’t really know anything else. He’s continuing that grift he had there, and just kind of monetized it now,” said Picciolini. “I think he really does not want to be a Nazi anymore, but I think he’s trying to figure out how to make it being a former Nazi to celebrity.”

Lastly, many antifascist activists argue that, while much of the de-radicalization model focuses on trying to dismantle White nationalism one soul at a time, this goal shouldn’t come at the cost of community safety and is ultimately no substitute for a structural transformation of society that eradicates White supremacy and White nationalism at its root.

“If you’re willing to engage in a years-long emotional connection of extraordinary strength [that it takes to deradicalize White nationalists] …fine,” said Tal Lavin, an author and organizer who tracks the Far Right. But “that’s not scalable. What is scalable is saying these sentiments are unacceptable. You cannot show up in my town. You cannot show up in my university.”^[59]

Moving On

“Going into and going out of it was slow and gradual…I can’t tell you at what point I started believing this stuff,” said Mak Kapetanovic, who picked up White nationalist beliefs as a teenager while browsing message boards like 4Chan.^[60] Today, Picciolini says that he has to deal with a huge number of young people like Kapetanovic who were radicalized in online spaces frequented by the Alt Right.^[61] Kapetanovic had come across this milieu when looking to debate people on the Internet and instead stumbled on racist pseudoscientific talking points—about racial intelligence difference or Holocaust denialism—that he didn’t understand enough to refute. Gradually, he came to see that these racist allegations are a house of cards: put under even a little scrutiny, the White nationalist manipulation of data and lies crumble. He could no longer stand by the ideas he had adopted, and who he had become.

“When I saw the same rhetoric that I had said or believed… used to justify killing 50 people, I fucking cried,” said Kapetanovic, who watched with horror as the “White genocide” conspiracy theories he had bought into were cited as justification for mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 51 people and injured another 40.^[62] Kapetanovic is from a family of Muslim refugees himself, who escaped from the Bosnian genocide in the 1990s. He thought he needed to speak up about what he had experienced joining and leaving the White nationalist movement, so he sent Picciolini an email to offering to volunteer in an effort to help people understand what White nationalists were thinking so that they could be countered more effectively.

“I felt like I had a responsibility to do something about it. And I thought that my story specifically could help people understand how this happens and hopefully either deter or help people be more informed,” said Kapetanovic.^[63]

What many people leaving White nationalism must confront is that many people will never accept them back. The responsibility is on them to try and address the damage they have done, not on those who bore the brunt of that harm. And while it’s important for people like Kapetanovic to have access to a pathway out, and people like Picciolini have shown what compassion and redemption can accomplish, it’s more important to keep people safe and do what is possible to decimate fascist movements.

“It’s hard to explain, because it is kind of uncharted territory. What does a somebody do to win redemption?” asks Picciolini. “Right now, people want to forgive people who are interested in leaving those movements. But we have to be careful because we have to hold those people to account, and there are different levels of what they have done.”

Racists accumulate a debt, not just to the people they harmed directly, but also to the wider world they have made more cruel and dangerous. Paying down that debt isn’t—and shouldn’t be—easy. And none of this can begin to happen without an act of penance that brings real-world consequences: They have to bring down their former comrades.

“Whatever information that you have, give it,” said Katie McHugh, who has continued to share information with reporters and nonprofits to help expose White nationalists. The sincerity of her actions is up for debate, just like it is for every White nationalist who claims to be “out of the movement.” As McHugh said, “You don’t have to believe my words, just believe my actions.”^[64]

But many of the actions of allegedly former White nationalists are hard to believe, particularly when organizations like LUL provide them the prefix of “former” without sufficient rigor or expectations of internal and external work. “Formers are experts in their own biography. That’s it…They’re not experts about the far-right extremist environment. They’re not experts about radicalization,” says Daniel Koehler, the founding director of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-Radicalization Studies. Koehler, whose work with German neonazis is considered foundational to evidence-based deradicalization programs, says that formers have to make serious attempts at restitution, should not be money-making celebrities, and programs that center formers who have not even had professional training raise “red flags.”^[65]

Allowing figures like Heimbach and Schoep—who don’t even pretend at a substantial ideological transformation—to re-enter mainstream society without criticism both leaves the community at risk and advertises to potential White nationalist recruits that a clean slate and second chance will always await them no matter what they do.

In November 2021, at least one form of accountability arrived, as both Heimbach and Schoep were found liable in a well-publicized civil lawsuit against them and nearly two-dozen other White nationalists and organizations involved in the violence in Charlottesville in 2017. The $25 million judgement is enough to potentially bankrupt not only the defendants, but the entire movement, similar to how lawsuits against White Aryan Resistance, the United Klans of America, and Aryan Nations did in the 1980 and ‘90s.^[66] During the trial it was revealed that Heimbach had sent convicted murderer James Alex Fields a letter calling them “comrades” and praising Fields as a “martyr for our folk.”^[67] While Heimbach  argued that he does not really work with fellow defendant Richard Spencer , other testimony showed that Heimbach’s Traditionalist Workers Party had clearly acted as a security force and army for the Alt Right leader.

But it shouldn’t take a major lawsuit to prevent actors like this from getting a free pass from organizations claiming to “deradicalize” violent bigots. There is a challenge here that goes beyond simply asking for denunciation and ideological conversion: the White nationalist movement has committed crimes against the community, and they’re not guaranteed forgiveness. Groups like Light Upon Light offering such a guarantee, and a fast-track to redemption, are instead creating a world where it could be nearly impossible to believe that anyone in that movement is truly reformed.

“Trying to get White supremacists to not be White supremacists, that’s a struggle, to be sure,” said Heimbach.^[68] That may have been the most honest part of his interview.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Acacia Dietz “still is an ‘informal’ NSM member who maintains the group’s website.” This article has been updated to reflect that this claim to Dietz’s NSM membership and involvement was made by NSM Commander Burt Colucci in his December 2019 deposition in Sines v. Kessler. 

Dietz told PRA that she maintains she has not been a formal or informal member of the NSM or had access to the NSM website since June 2019.