Black Man Becomes neo-Nazi Leader...
While the neo-Nazi movement is atrocious and bizarre, nothing more bizarre happened then recently when the president of a legacy neo-Nazi group handed the organization over to a black civil rights activist... James Hart Stern became the newest president of the National Socialist Movement. A group that rose after the second world war to celebrate and spread Hitler, and his values prejudicing anyone not "Aryan"and other far right politics.
James Hart immediately has begun to destroy the group, first by asking a Virginia judge to find the organization guilty of conspiring to commit violence at the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. His next step is to transform the former alt right website visited by the masses of neo-Nazi's into a Holocaust information space. When asked about how he was able to become the president of the neo-Nazi group as a manager, James said it was with infiltration, persuasion, and a hint of manipulation and has the nickname "the race whisperer". James Hart began his interaction with these types of groups when he went to prison for wire fraud and met the former Grand Wizard of the KKK, Edgar Ray Killen who was convicted of killing three civil right workers in 1964. He was able to manipulate the former Grand Wizard to hand him over the power of attorney over his life story and estate which he then used to eradicate the organization that Killen had lead.Link
Nice blog post, and it's a really interesting story. I did more research into the case and found that these changes had initially occurred in January but neither Stern or Schoep (the man who held what is now Stern's position for 24 years) finally began talking about it in February where Schoep said, "I’d rather not comment on this stuff. He’s tell outright lies and slandering in the press so I feel like I have to address it." I also found that Stern had managed to convince the Group to hand over the reigns by explaining how if they did so he would be able to protect them from their impending lawsuit.
ReplyDeleteSource: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/03/01/how-black-man-outsmarted-neo-nazi-group-became-their-new-leader/?utm_term=.fd2a1f8497f4
This is such an interesting story! It is amazing that in our current political climate that there are individuals who are able to end such discrimination. This piece is incredibly eye-opening as it displays that there are people willing to dedicate a large portion of their life to end bigotry. Additionally, this piece shows how uneducated these bigoted groups are. It is important to understand that these groups are able to amass a following by scapegoating individuals for the plight of specific disenfranchised individuals. For example, this organization scapegoated "non Aryan" individuals for commonly uneducated white individual's economic and social struggles.
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