Arno Michaelis is a former white nationalist skinhead, lead singer of the neo-Nazi metal band Centurion, and member of Hammerskin Nation, one of the most violent white supremacist gangs in the US.
From 1987 to 1994, Michaelis played a central role in spreading neo-Nazi ideology through music, street violence, and recruitment efforts across the United States and beyond. His band sold over 20,000 copies of its white supremacist albums within six months.
Michaelis provides a rare look inside the world of violent extremism, detailing how white nationalist groups recruit young men, fund their operations, and use propaganda to radicalize followers. He describes the brutality of life inside the movement, the constant state of fear and paranoia, and how his involvement led to addiction, crime, and self-destruction.
After leaving the movement, Michaelis became an anti-hate activist, speaker, and author. He works with Parents for Peace to deradicalize extremists, exposing the tactics used by white nationalist groups and guiding individuals away from the influence of extremism through prevention. He is the author of "My Life After Hate" and "The Gift of Our Wounds," which was cowritten with Pardeep Singh Kaleka, whose father was killed in the Oak Creek Sikh temple shooting.
If you are concerned about someone’s extreme beliefs or behaviors, Parents for Peace has a free and confidential helpline at 844-49-PEACE (844-497-3223) or email at help@parents4peace.org.
If you or someone you know is dealing with substance misuse or mental illness, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's National Helpline (1-800-662-4357) for 24/7, free, confidential treatment referral and information.
For more:
Instagram: @ArnoMichaelis
Parents for Peace: www.parents4peace.org
Books: https://www.parents4peace.org/our-team/arno-michaelis/
From 1987 to 1994, Michaelis played a central role in spreading neo-Nazi ideology through music, street violence, and recruitment efforts across the United States and beyond. His band sold over 20,000 copies of its white supremacist albums within six months.
Michaelis provides a rare look inside the world of violent extremism, detailing how white nationalist groups recruit young men, fund their operations, and use propaganda to radicalize followers. He describes the brutality of life inside the movement, the constant state of fear and paranoia, and how his involvement led to addiction, crime, and self-destruction.
After leaving the movement, Michaelis became an anti-hate activist, speaker, and author. He works with Parents for Peace to deradicalize extremists, exposing the tactics used by white nationalist groups and guiding individuals away from the influence of extremism through prevention. He is the author of "My Life After Hate" and "The Gift of Our Wounds," which was cowritten with Pardeep Singh Kaleka, whose father was killed in the Oak Creek Sikh temple shooting.
If you are concerned about someone’s extreme beliefs or behaviors, Parents for Peace has a free and confidential helpline at 844-49-PEACE (844-497-3223) or email at help@parents4peace.org.
If you or someone you know is dealing with substance misuse or mental illness, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's National Helpline (1-800-662-4357) for 24/7, free, confidential treatment referral and information.
For more:
Instagram: @ArnoMichaelis
Parents for Peace: www.parents4peace.org
Books: https://www.parents4peace.org/our-team/arno-michaelis/
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00:00My name is Arno Michaelis.
00:02I was a white nationalist skinhead,
00:04a lead singer in a neo-Nazi metal band.
00:07This is everything I'm authorized to tell you.
00:12In the most formulative years of my life,
00:14I was just immersed in this hate and violence.
00:17I was actually at a neo-Nazi rally in Michigan
00:21where about 50 of us brawled with like 500 anti-fascists
00:26and there were all too many times when we would jump people
00:30and just beat the **** out of them.
00:32I've done a lot of harm to innocent people and to society
00:37and I need to be accountable for that harm.
00:45What attracted me to neo-Nazi ideology initially
00:50was really the hero story.
00:53I grew up being a big fan of fantasy and mythology.
00:58I was really into Greek myths and Norse myths as a kid.
01:02The mythology of Nazi ideology, going back to Adolf Hitler,
01:08was that we are these Aryan supermen,
01:11the brightest of all creation,
01:14that are under assault by these dark evil hordes
01:18and here we are fighting back against them,
01:21against incredible odds, but with incredible strength.
01:24It was very much the same kind of mystique
01:26that you would find in a Lord of the Rings movie
01:29or a Conan book.
01:32And for me, this was like my chance to actually be that hero
01:37on this noble quest.
01:39And then as I got more into it
01:42and took in more and more of the ideology,
01:44a lot of that ideology was about like,
01:47look how evil and horrible they are
01:49and look how good and noble my people are.
01:52Look at all these great things we have done
01:54despite all the challenges
01:56and despite being under assault by everybody else.
01:59There was actually a music distribution outfit in Chicago
02:02called Romantic Violence.
02:04And those two words sum up the entire ideology
02:08better than anything I could say at length.
02:11There's a romance to it.
02:13It makes you feel like you're a hero
02:15and you're doing something good for your people.
02:18As you get further into the ideology,
02:21it's all about pseudoscience,
02:23about how whites are superior to everybody else,
02:27all kinds of nonsense about the size of our brains and IQ.
02:31And then, of course, all of this
02:34is deeply rooted in anti-Semitism.
02:37The entire ideology is based on seeing Jews
02:41as the root of all evil on the planet Earth.
02:46That's the core of the neo-Nazi belief
02:49is that the white race is this...
02:51First of all, it exists.
02:53You have to have some kind of idea of who's white and who's not.
02:57And again, that was never firmly established by anything.
03:01I remember meeting Italian skinheads.
03:03There was one crew, their leader was an Armenian guy
03:06who looked like he was straight out of Iraq or something.
03:10And I said, what are you, Italian?
03:12He's like, I'm Armenian.
03:14Hitler had Armenian SS units.
03:17And I was like, all right,
03:19if it was good enough for Hitler, it's good enough for me.
03:22The most damaging aspect of the neo-Nazi ideology
03:25is definitely the fear.
03:27Anybody who does look like you and doesn't think like you,
03:31they're not only an enemy, they're the highest order of enemy.
03:34They're a race traitor.
03:36So it's this experience of going through
03:39every waking moment of your day
03:41thinking that everyone else in the world
03:44is not only out to kill you personally,
03:47but out to destroy everyone who looks like you.
03:50And it's a miserable way to live
03:52that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.
04:00I tattooed a swastika on my own leg,
04:03which I since had covered up.
04:05I had a swastika on my middle finger for a time, cleverly,
04:09so I could show it to someone before I hit them.
04:12The other symbolism we used, there was any kind of Norse ruin.
04:16Just like Hitler did, we co-opted the Norse folk religion
04:21and kind of made it into this white nationalist thing,
04:25which is, along with pretty much everything else in the ideology,
04:29is incredibly historically inaccurate.
04:32Because the Vikings really, they killed people who looked like them,
04:36and they had peaceful trade and diplomatic relationships
04:39with North Africa and the Middle East.
04:42There's a lot of, like, lingo to neo-Nazi movement.
04:46The first one I learned was 88.
04:49When I met the Chicago skinhead crew,
04:52a lot of them had, like, sports jerseys on that had 88 as the number.
04:56The 8th letter of the alphabet is H.
04:59So 88 means Heil Hitler.
05:01So it's code for Heil Hitler.
05:03In the mid-'80s, there was a really dangerous, militant,
05:07white nationalist terror group called the Order, or the Bruderschweigen,
05:11and they assassinated a Jewish talk show host.
05:15They were doing all kinds of things to, like, fund a race war
05:18before they were ultimately taken down.
05:20But one of the members of the Order, who was in prison for life
05:24and unrepentant, he decided we needed some sort of, like, slogan,
05:29like some catchy mantra that the movement could use
05:33to unite us and inspire us.
05:36So he came up with the 14 words, which are,
05:40We must secure the existence of our race and a future for white children.
05:44So to this day, if you're looking at a social media handle,
05:48if you see the numbers 14 and 88,
05:51that's a good indicator that it's a white nationalist account.
05:55There were ways to identify as either a white power
05:59or an anti-racist skinhead, and it was typically involved
06:02the color of the laces in your boots
06:05and or the color of your braces that you wore.
06:09If you were a neo-Nazi, you have red laces, red braces.
06:14Anti-racist skinheads would sometimes wear white laces,
06:18although some people would say white laces are white pride,
06:21so they'd wear, like, yellow laces or anything but the red laces.
06:26And then, of course, beyond that, obviously,
06:29if you see someone with a swastika patch,
06:32a white power skinhead's typically going to have
06:35outright white supremacist symbols all over their body
06:39and tattoos and or patches on a jacket,
06:42whereas the anti-racist skinheads would also have, like,
06:45anti-fascist patches and things like that.
06:52Hammerskin Nation began in the southern United States,
06:57specifically Dallas, Texas.
06:59There was a skinhead gang in Dallas
07:02who took the crossed hammers from Pink Floyd the Wall,
07:06and they put them in front of a Confederate flag,
07:10and it looked really cool, and they said,
07:13they just called themselves, We're the Hammerskins.
07:16This was right about the same time that my gang in Milwaukee was starting.
07:20In 1988, one of the lead members
07:23of the Confederate Hammerskins in Dallas, Texas,
07:26came up to Milwaukee, and he pitched the idea to us
07:29that we become Northern Hammerskinheads,
07:32and the Hammerskins were born.
07:34Despite the hypocrisy of using a symbol
07:37from a band that considers themselves very anti-fascist,
07:41we had no problem appropriating that crossed hammer logo,
07:46and in our case, we put it on a field of U.S. flag blue
07:50with 13 stars around the hammers
07:53to signify the Northern Hammerskins,
07:56and very shortly afterwards,
07:59there were Northern Hammer chapters in Chicago,
08:02in St. Paul, in Detroit, in Ohio,
08:05and while this was happening,
08:07there were more Confederate Hammerskin groups
08:10popping up all over the South.
08:12Down South, there was a lot of crossover
08:15between the Ku Klux Klan and the Hammerskins.
08:18There was a lot of old-school Klansmen
08:20who were very happy to see
08:22this wellspring of youth coming into their movement,
08:25and they were okay to stomach the tattoos
08:28and the punk rock music in the process.
08:31So there were a number of Confederate Hammer skinheads
08:34who were also members of Ku Klux Klan groups at the time.
08:38When I was involved in Hammerskin Nation,
08:41there was really no centralized command.
08:44Every group operated individually.
08:47It was really just, well, we use the same symbol,
08:50we're all racist anti-Semites, we're all violent drunks,
08:53we all love this music,
08:55and those were the real unifying factors behind it.
08:58As I was leaving, people started having titles,
09:01and there started to be an attempt
09:04at having some sort of structure
09:06about how the group was going to work,
09:09and to varying degrees, that was followed
09:12as Hammerskin Nation spread to Europe,
09:15to Australia, to New Zealand,
09:17even to Argentina and South Africa.
09:20In our group in Milwaukee,
09:22we didn't have any kind of official structure.
09:25We didn't have titles.
09:27We had just unofficial kind of organic hierarchy
09:30the same way a Wolfpack would.
09:32There's certainly alphas, and they certainly run things,
09:35but they're not voted, they don't have titles,
09:38that's just how it is.
09:40I wasn't the sole alpha leader, I was one of a number.
09:44We weren't really conscious of this,
09:46it was just kind of how it went.
09:48If we were going to make a decision about something,
09:51it would be me and the other alphas talking about it,
09:55and once we decided on whatever that was, that's how it was,
09:59and everybody else could follow along
10:01or they could get the hell out.
10:03That was basically how things worked.
10:05I don't know that Hammerskin Nation
10:07is as much of a thing as it used to be.
10:10There are groups like the Proud Boys.
10:13At their peak, the Proud Boys were like
10:16the modern manifestation of Hammerskin Nation,
10:19even though there was very significant differences,
10:22namely that the Proud Boys' official leader was a Latino man,
10:26and that would have never happened in Hammerskin Nation.
10:29But other than that, they were a street brawling,
10:33kind of street fighter-oriented group,
10:36and I think a lot of Hammerskin Nation people,
10:40if they didn't grow out of it, which most of them do, honestly,
10:45they may have found themselves affiliated
10:47with groups like the Proud Boys.
10:54Recruiting a neo-Nazi was 2 steps, basically.
11:00The first step was to get this kid to identify as white.
11:04Typically, I have an archetype called Joe Pissed-Off White Kid.
11:08If I'm talking to Joe Pissed-Off White Kid,
11:10the first thing I have to do is convince him that he's a white man,
11:14and that's how he should identify himself.
11:17In the late 80s, most people racialized as white
11:22didn't identify themselves as white.
11:24If I asked Joe who he was, he would say,
11:28I'm American, my family's Catholic,
11:32we're Democrats or Republicans, whatever.
11:35There's going to be all sorts of ways that they identify themselves
11:38other than racially.
11:40So I have to stop him in his tracks and be like,
11:42listen, white man, whether you like it or not,
11:45the enemies of our people identify you as white.
11:48You don't have a choice about that.
11:50And the white race is under attack.
11:52If you don't join us and fight back, we're all going to be wiped out.
11:57I have to get that across to this kid,
12:00and he has to buy into it before I can proceed to step two,
12:04which is to make him feel persecuted because he's white.
12:08In the late 80s, it was much more difficult to do that than it is today.
12:12In the late 80s, we didn't have all this talk of white privilege
12:18and white fragility and open talk saying,
12:21well, everything wrong with the world is basically white people's fault.
12:24Back in the 80s, it was just much more amorphous for all human beings.
12:28We have all these different ways of identifying ourselves.
12:30It wasn't codified into racial groups like it is today.
12:34So I had to concoct things about how white people are oppressed.
12:39And once I could get him to buy into that,
12:41that he is white and he's oppressed because of it,
12:44now he's a white nationalist.
12:46Now he's a neo-Nazi.
12:48Now he's ready to come up to our drinking hall,
12:50get drunk with us and get beat up.
12:52That was the recruitment process that we went through back in the day.
12:57If you're a teenager who has a history of trauma in your family,
13:02if you're living in poverty, whatever you have going wrong,
13:06the more things wrong you have,
13:09the more openings there are for neo-Nazi ideology to take hold.
13:14And so that was how we recruited these kids,
13:17was we blamed all their problems on Jews.
13:21And then they said, if you join us, we're going to fight back against that.
13:25And we're going to take our country back and take our lands back
13:28and you'll have all sorts of women crawling all over you.
13:31You'll be a white warrior. It'll be great.
13:33If you were a new guy in the crew,
13:36you needed to prove yourself and prove that you could hang with us.
13:39And the first way to do that would be by wrestling with us
13:44wherever we're drinking.
13:46If you can't handle that, which many people couldn't,
13:50there were a lot of guys who would be there for one night.
13:53They'd get the snot knocked out of them.
13:55They're like, okay, I'm done with this. They wouldn't come back.
13:58But for the guys who did come back and they're like,
14:00yeah, let's do that again. That was fun.
14:02Like, okay, now we know we got to, this is a viable candidate here.
14:06And again, this was very organic and it was very, it just happened.
14:10It wasn't like a policy. It wasn't something,
14:13oh, hey, congratulations for surviving, getting your a** kicked last night.
14:17You're in. It was more like, okay, if you like that,
14:21then let's do more of it. If you don't like it, get the hell out.
14:25The bulk of our recruits were men.
14:28It's interesting now because I work at Parents for Peace
14:32and we address all sorts of violent extremism.
14:35And there is a specific type of violent extremism called incel nowadays,
14:40which are people who, men who call themselves involuntarily celibate.
14:46And they're angry because they don't have girlfriends.
14:49In my day, as in today, the typical number one complaint
14:53for Joe Pissed Off White Kid is he doesn't have a girlfriend.
14:57And he's angry about it.
14:59The thing was, is that there were women in our movement,
15:02but it was at least seven or eight to one as far as men to women ratio went.
15:08So there weren't a lot of women to go around.
15:11And typically the few women that were involved in the movement
15:14were all with the alpha guys.
15:17So the alpha guys all had hot girlfriends,
15:20and Joe Pissed Off White Kid sees this, and he's not doing the math,
15:23and he's like, well, that's what I want.
15:25So I'm going to do what this guy says because then I'll get that too.
15:28Never mind that there's not a whole lot of women out there.
15:31I actually had one guy in my crew who dipped his toes in and left.
15:35When I was interviewing him for my book, I said, well, why did you leave?
15:38And he's like, dude, it's really hard to get laid
15:41when you're not feeling like chicks aren't into that, man.
15:45That's not attractive.
15:47And that was his big motivator to leave.
15:50He's like, I wanted girls, man, and they're not into that.
15:53So that dynamic was really front and center in our recruiting
15:58and really in everything that happened in that group.
16:02Milwaukee, where I was from,
16:05is the most segregated city in the United States for many years running.
16:10And what that means for neo-Nazi groups
16:13is it's very easy to point at these severely depressed inner-city areas
16:18and go, see, that's what happens.
16:21That's what they do.
16:23Those people create these neighborhoods.
16:27That's completely ignorant of the truth
16:30that all the ghettos in the United States
16:33were created by government policy.
16:36And because of being segregated and sequestered
16:39to these incredibly hyper-compressed inner-city areas,
16:44that's what created those ghettos.
16:46It wasn't the people who lived there.
16:48But of course, no white nationalist is going to admit that.
16:52No neo-Nazi is going to look at the true driving force
16:55of poverty and addiction and crime in our country.
16:58Instead, they're going to make a leap of logic
17:02and say it's the color of the skin of the people who live there
17:06that create these conditions, not the actual policies that did.
17:10We were terrified to go to the inner-city of Milwaukee.
17:13We knew if we went there looking for trouble, we'd probably get shot.
17:17So instead, we went to a more posh part of town
17:22where, like, frat boys would hang out.
17:25We went there looking for anti-racist skinheads
17:28because that's typically where they would hang out.
17:31And if we found them, we'd chase them down and beat them up.
17:35In Milwaukee, we couldn't get a proper fight with them.
17:38So quite often we'd pile into vans and drive out to Minneapolis
17:42or we'd drive down to Chicago
17:44where there was a lot more anti-racist skinheads
17:47and we could count on a good fight with them.
17:50A lot of times if it was late
17:52and there weren't a lot of people on the street
17:55and we saw a lone target of opportunity,
17:58which would basically be anyone that we didn't like,
18:01which was everyone but us,
18:03but if it was a person of color
18:06or if it was someone that we thought was gay or Jewish or a punk rocker,
18:11like, that was all the better.
18:13And there were all too many times
18:15when we would jump people in those circumstances
18:18and just beat the hell out of them.
18:20We called it a boot party.
18:22If it was like 10 of us booting one guy, that was a boot party.
18:26We'd throw him a boot party.
18:28And my stomach turns when I think about that violence that I've engaged in,
18:34but that happened quite often.
18:37Just as often we'd run into larger groups.
18:41A lot of times we would go to bars where there was just a few of us
18:45and we'd piss off somebody at the bar and end up fighting the whole bar.
18:49That happened a lot as well.
18:52Our main targets for violence and our main rivals
18:55were self-proclaimed anti-racist skinheads.
18:59It's important to understand that when the skinhead counterculture arose
19:04back in the 60s in the UK,
19:07it was working-class kids, typically football hooligans,
19:12they'd go to soccer matches, they'd brawl the opposing team,
19:16but it wasn't racist from the get-go.
19:19There were immigrants from Pakistan and the West Indies
19:24who were all among the original skinheads.
19:27It wasn't until the 70s when the National Front,
19:31an outright fascist group in England,
19:33saw the potential amongst the white skinheads
19:37that the offshoot of racist skinheads arose.
19:41In the mid to late 80s, when the white power skinhead movement
19:45was kind of sweeping the United States,
19:48there were more traditional skinheads
19:52who stood up and said, hey, that's not what skinhead's about.
19:57What we now know as Antifa started back then with groups called SHARP.
20:03It was Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice.
20:06So SHARPs were our favorite target as well.
20:09And then there was also another group called Anti-Racist Action.
20:12I was actually at a neo-Nazi rally in Michigan
20:16where about 50 of us brawled with like 500 antifascists,
20:22and that was a real formative moment in my path
20:26from just being a drunken hooligan to being a militant racist.
20:30There was a time we were walking down a street in a posh area
20:34very late at night, and we saw an Afro-American kid on his own,
20:39and somebody has walked up to him and said, oh, look, an N-bomb.
20:44And we all just swarmed on him and just started punting him.
20:49That will haunt me to my grave, and it should.
20:52It was a horrible thing to do.
20:55But that happened fairly often.
20:59Even though we were really out looking for the Baldies,
21:02if we didn't find the Baldies and someone else was in the way,
21:07they were the ones who were going to get it.
21:10At the same time, many of the people that I beat up
21:14were just like random white dudes, just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
21:19And I had no idea who they were.
21:22I would try to rationalize it afterwards that he was a race traitor
21:25and that's why he got beat up.
21:28It was really just that I was addicted to that violence
21:32the same way as I'm addicted to the hate, and I needed a fix.
21:36I felt bad while I was in the movement.
21:38I had this inner voice going, what the hell are you doing?
21:41This guy didn't do anything to you. You don't even know who this guy is.
21:44I didn't have the courage to even acknowledge that voice,
21:47much less answer those questions.
21:50Aside from the fights and my bands,
21:54my main activity in the group was,
21:57I did a lot of networking with other white nationalist groups.
22:02So we'd get road trips organized,
22:05and quite often also it would involve rallies.
22:09When you're having a white power rally,
22:11you obviously want as many people as you can get there.
22:13Therefore, that's when you flex that network
22:17and you're in Detroit and you're reaching out to the guys in Milwaukee and Chicago
22:20and St. Paul and Columbus and be like,
22:23hey guys, everybody come to Michigan, we're going to have this rally.
22:26So you can go from 10 to 50 people
22:29instead of just being out there with 10 people.
22:32My personal role in a lot of these rallies was making the contacts,
22:36and I was the means that my crew was invited through.
22:40They would contact me and I would get my crew together
22:45and bring them out there.
22:47Really the most transformative event I was involved in
22:51was that neo-Nazi rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
22:54There was a group in Ann Arbor called the SS Action Group.
22:58They were dressed up like the SS,
23:00and actually we thought they were pretty comical,
23:03but we liked that they were Nazis
23:06and we liked that they were shocking people and scaring people,
23:10so we were happy to travel there from Milwaukee
23:13and join in on that rally.
23:16I remember we packed about 50 people into a big 26-foot U-Haul
23:20and left from the guy's house,
23:22which was in a really depressed part of Detroit.
23:25And as we got there, I could see the grin on the face of the leader guy.
23:29They had motorcycle helmets on too,
23:31and they handed out these big shields that were made from stolen sopsteins.
23:35In the truck a guy was going around with a big sack full of used batteries,
23:39and he's going around with it, I'm like, what's that for?
23:42He's like, you can throw them at the Reds.
23:44And I'm like, okay, cool.
23:46So I got a couple pockets full of these batteries.
23:49As soon as we arrived, the truck's being pelted with bricks
23:52and it's just thundering all over the place.
23:55The back door opens and we see this huge roaring crowd of 500 people
23:59that are, I just remember, bloodthirsty.
24:02My ironic thought was like, wow, they really hate us.
24:06Look how much they hate us.
24:09So there's all this glass raining down on us
24:11and bricks coming at us from the crowd,
24:14and we're whipping the batteries at them from behind our shields
24:17and holding up the shield to keep bricks from hitting us.
24:20When the truck first opened, I was terrified,
24:23but as soon as I poured out, the adrenaline started pumping,
24:26and I was like, all right, let's go, this is it.
24:29And I was ready to just wade into that crowd
24:32and fight for the life of me until it was over.
24:36This went on probably 5, 10 minutes before the cops were like,
24:39all right, you guys get the hell out of here.
24:41And driving back from that rally,
24:44I was just like basking in my own righteousness
24:49and in the importance of our cause.
24:52I was like, that's what we're up against.
24:55And it was very important that I had this visceral mob to experience
25:00to be like, yeah, that's it.
25:02That was one of the things that when I would have my own misgivings,
25:05go, hey, this has messed up what we're doing,
25:07I would remember that rally and remember the antifa
25:11and say, no, that's why we're right.
25:13That's why we have to keep doing what we're doing.
25:21All of us had menial, low-paying jobs,
25:25and we were pissed off about it,
25:27and that was certainly a driver of the violence we were committing.
25:31As far as my group was concerned, we self-funded everything.
25:36And it wasn't easy.
25:38We would have meetings every week.
25:40We'd call it our haul.
25:42That cost like $500 a month or so.
25:44About like 40 of us chipped in for that.
25:47And so we'd all chip in to pay the rent on our place.
25:51When we'd go on these road trips, we'd all chip in for gas.
25:54We became involved with a group called the Church of the Creator
25:58and they published a monthly newspaper called Racial Loyalty.
26:02And they had a bit of money behind them,
26:05and they would basically send you as many of these racial loyalty papers
26:08as you could handle.
26:10And so we would get boxes and boxes and boxes of this racist newspaper,
26:14and we decided we're going to go into white neighborhoods
26:18and we're going to put this newspaper in every mailbox or on every door.
26:22And we would have meetings every Sunday.
26:24This is when we were starting to become more organized.
26:27And at these Sunday meetings,
26:29the Church of the Creator had a book called The White Man's Bible,
26:32and we'd read.
26:33And mind you, the Church of the Creator was vehemently atheist.
26:36We despised Christianity.
26:38It was really only called a church so we wouldn't have to pay taxes.
26:41But we would read a Bible passage,
26:43and then at the end of that we would go around the group
26:46and we'd say, Arno, what have you done for the white race this week?
26:50And I distributed 600 racial loyalties.
26:55Or I brought in three new members to our group.
26:59And if you did something, everybody would go, yay!
27:02You'd get a big cheer.
27:03And if they came around to you and they said,
27:05Arno, what have you done for the white race this week?
27:07And I'd be like, um, I got drunk, I got in a fight.
27:11Everybody would go, boo!
27:14You'd be shunned and shamed and really motivated
27:18to go out there and hand out those newspapers the next week.
27:22The name Church of the Creator,
27:25when it says creator it doesn't mean some supernatural force.
27:30It sees the white race as the creator of all noble things in human history.
27:38Their founder was an old man who made a bunch of money
27:43with some kind of can opener patent in the 40s,
27:46and then he parlayed that into real estate.
27:49To us, anybody who was making over minimum wage was rich.
27:53But this guy was rich to us.
27:55And he had, I don't know if he was a millionaire,
27:58multi-millionaire, whatever,
27:59but he had enough money to fund all these magazines
28:02or the newspapers being printed and distributed.
28:05But again, he was doing that out of his pocket.
28:08In Otto, North Carolina is where the Church of the Creator compound was,
28:12and there was an actual church.
28:15As far as groups being involved in drug trafficking,
28:18I'd hear things from, you know,
28:20the crews out West sell crystal meth.
28:23And later on in my current work,
28:26I know of Ku Klux Klan members who were involved in meth trafficking.
28:30It wasn't something they wanted people to know about, but it was going on.
28:34I know there were groups out West that were involved in drug trafficking.
28:38And then, like, my group is,
28:40while we lived and breathed alcohol every single day,
28:43we openly shunned every other drug on Earth,
28:46and we would have never openly done them, much less trafficked them.
28:50And so when we heard that crews out West
28:53were selling crystal meth to fund their groups,
28:56we're like, they're not hammer skins.
28:58And issues like that caused fractions
29:02that led to the entire thing kind of splintering.
29:06I knew a man who was on methamphetamine and in the Klan.
29:10They were all dealing to each other
29:12and to other white people in their communities.
29:15It's interesting because one of the reasons we cited
29:18to not get involved with drugs
29:20was that doing so inevitably connected you with non-whites.
29:25The entire existence of a neo-Nazi is rationalizing hypocrisy.
29:29You're doing it every single day.
29:32My exit from the movement had a lot to do with that
29:37because it was exhausting to constantly try to reconcile your own hypocrisy.
29:46I was active in the neo-Nazi movement from 1987 to 1994.
29:52I was drawn into it through neo-Nazi music.
29:56There were neo-Nazi skinhead bands from the U.K.
29:59that had found their way to the United States
30:03through bootleg tapes and through people
30:06importing the records actually from Europe.
30:09It excited me because it was so repulsive to civil society.
30:13I got into punk because I love to lash out.
30:16I love to repulse people. I love to shock people.
30:19It's important to understand that punk is a big tent
30:22and it was in the 1980s as well.
30:25There are all sorts of different ideologies within the punk scene
30:29and some of them are actually very progressive
30:32and actually very leftist and activist-oriented.
30:36But in my case, I saw punk as just smashing things
30:41and shocking people, and nothing repulses people like a swastika.
30:47The band I was in as well as the gang I was in
30:51operated out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
30:54I don't have a lick of musical talent. I can't sing properly,
30:57but I could scream really loud back then
31:00and I could get people crazy on stage.
31:03I connected with some other neo-Nazis from Toronto, Canada
31:09and formed Centurion.
31:12And Centurion was far and away the most successful
31:15white power band I was involved with.
31:18We had sold 20,000 CDs within 6 months or so of releasing it.
31:25And I actually still get hate mail from Centurion fans
31:30who are just crushed that I am now a race traitor.
31:33And they somehow reconcile it still.
31:37Well, I still love Centurion. It's still a great band.
31:40Our imagery was incredibly hyper-violent,
31:44incredibly hyper-anti-Semitic and racist.
31:48And the more shocking it could be, the better we liked it.
31:53And we thought that was awesome.
31:56We were like, our music is so hateful and so violent
31:59that our own audience tears itself apart when they hear it.
32:04The goal of the band was to spread the ideology through music.
32:09And if you can get a recording of it as you're driving around in your car
32:13with a cassette tape or later CDs,
32:16you can practice the ideology throughout the day
32:22as you're going about your business.
32:24It's important to understand that there is a real element of practice here
32:29and that to be a neo-Nazi, you have to be in a constant state of fear.
32:35You have to be in a constant state of anger.
32:38Neo-Nazis aren't like the most contemplative, meditative people.
32:42They need some sort of device in order to practice the hate.
32:47And that's what that music was.
32:49The people who attended our concerts later on especially
32:53were typically other affiliated white nationalist skinheads.
32:57People who were already parts of skinhead gangs,
33:00who were very familiar with the whole process of white power music.
33:05They listened to it all the time.
33:07We were one of many, many white power bands out there.
33:10Typically, if there was a potential recruit,
33:13they would get brought along to one of these concerts.
33:16And it was a really powerful thing for a recruit to see.
33:21The exhaustion came from all sorts of directions.
33:25There were times as I was committing acts of violence
33:28that I had this inner voice saying,
33:30why are you doing this? This is wrong.
33:32And I had to expend a lot of energy to suppress that voice for seven years.
33:38It was exhausting to cut myself off from pop culture
33:42that I took for granted my entire life.
33:44I've always been a huge TV fan.
33:48I've always been a huge TV, movies, music, sports geek.
33:54And when you're a neo-Nazi, all of those things are forbidden.
33:58They're all seen as Jewish propaganda
34:01to corrupt the will of the white man to make him easier to oppress.
34:06Whether you're talking about the Green Bay Packers
34:08or you're talking about Hollywood movies or a sitcom on TV.
34:13So I would sneak away to watch a Packer game on Sundays
34:16knowing that if my guys caught me doing this,
34:18they'd see me as complicit in the destruction of the white race.
34:22We talked about hypocrisy.
34:24This is like one of the daily aspects of hypocrisy
34:28that I have to do mental gymnastics to navigate around.
34:32That takes a lot of energy. It's exhausting.
34:35The hate itself is exhausting from an addiction standpoint.
34:39I'm an alcoholic.
34:41I drank profusely from the time I was 14 until I was 34.
34:45I'm 54 now.
34:47So I drank for 20 years straight.
34:50And especially toward the end,
34:53there were days where I was like, I can't do this anymore.
34:56I'm so tired of it.
34:57Hate's the same way.
34:59When you're going through your life in constant fear
35:01of everyone who doesn't look like you
35:03and everyone who doesn't think like you,
35:05you get sick and tired of it.
35:07What was most exhausting, though,
35:09was when people I claimed to hate treated me with kindness.
35:12And I was very fortunate that time and time again
35:15throughout the seven-year span that I was in neo-Nazi hate groups,
35:19there were people like a Jewish boss,
35:21a lesbian supervisor, Afro-American, Latino, and Asian coworkers
35:26who treated me with kindness when I least deserved it,
35:30but when I needed it most.
35:32And in doing so, they demonstrated for me,
35:35first of all, how a human being should treat another human being,
35:39and second of all, a glimpse of the life I could be leading
35:44if I just set all this nonsense ideology aside.
35:48That was the final straw in the exhaustion that led me to 1994
35:53when I was literally looking for an excuse to get out.
35:56For seven years of my life, and the most formative years of my life,
36:00from the time I was 16 until I was 23,
36:03when a normal person would be going to college
36:06and deciding on a career and what motivates them and what they love,
36:11I was just immersed in this hate and violence.
36:14And within the movement, I had developed a bit of status.
36:19I was a street fighter. I was a lead singer in this band.
36:23I had groupies. I was a reverend in a racial holy war.
36:27I was one of the founding members of Hammer Skin Nation.
36:30In real life, I'm an alcoholic high school dropout
36:35who's too much of a drunk to pay his bills,
36:37has to keep moving back to mom and dad's house.
36:40Like, that was real life.
36:42And it was an intimidating prospect to give up all of this,
36:46albeit false status, and face the cruel reality
36:51of the hole I had dug for myself.
36:54And I needed something drastic to happen
36:57in order to kind of push me over those last couple steps.
37:01What happened was, early in 1994,
37:05the mother of my daughter and I broke up.
37:08Go figure, but hate and violence and alcohol
37:11is not a recipe for a healthy relationship between a man and a woman.
37:15And I found myself a single parent to our 18-month-old daughter.
37:19A couple months after that, after a concert my band had played,
37:24a second friend of mine was shot and killed in a street fight.
37:27And by that time, I had lost count of how many friends had been incarcerated.
37:31So it finally hit me that if I didn't change my ways,
37:34death or prison was going to take me from my daughter.
37:37And that was the excuse I needed to walk away from the movement.
37:41When I first left, I had this sense of elation and this sense of freedom.
37:46I can hang out with whoever I want to hang out with now.
37:49I can watch the Packers. I can watch Seinfeld.
37:52I can go to the movies without feeling like a race traitor.
37:56Just all those things felt amazing.
37:58There weren't a whole lot of immediate consequences when I first left
38:02because by the time I left, what was once a pretty large group of people
38:08had splintered into all these separate groups
38:11that were very disparate and not talking to each other.
38:14So really by the time I left, the only people I hung out with
38:17were the guys in my band and a couple other older guys
38:20who we called the inner circle.
38:22There were other guys who did a complete 180 like me
38:25who were very outspoken against the movement.
38:28There were other guys who were still kind of like,
38:30yeah, they had some of the ideas, but for the most,
38:33they worked with a diverse group and they liked their coworkers.
38:37They were able to get along with the rest of the people in the world
38:42and function as adults.
38:45And so because most of the other guys were as burnt out as I was,
38:50there wasn't a lot of blowback when I left.
38:53In my case, my de-radicalization process was the Midwest rave scene.
39:00Within a year and a half of leaving the hate group,
39:04I found myself on the south side of Chicago,
39:06four in the morning on Sunday, shaking my ass to house music
39:10with 3,000 people of every possible ethnicity,
39:13socioeconomic background, gender identity, sexual orientation,
39:18and loving every minute of it.
39:20And that very much took over and filled those needs
39:24of identity, purpose, and belonging.
39:26In the rave scene of the 90s,
39:29their mantra was peace, love, unity, and respect.
39:39The street violence we engaged in back in the 80s and 90s
39:44has morphed into mass casualty violence today.
39:48On August 5th of 2012, a neo-Nazi skinhead
39:53who was part of the gang that I was involved with
39:56attacked the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin,
39:59and he ended up murdering seven people.
40:02At the time, that was the worst attack
40:06by an affiliated white nationalist since the 1960s
40:11when the Ku Klux Klan killed four little girls in Alabama
40:15with a bomb that was meant for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
40:19Tragically, since August 5th, 2012,
40:22there have been almost too many other white nationalist attacks
40:27to count, including the attack at Emanuel AME Church
40:31in Charleston, South Carolina,
40:34where nine people were killed by a young man
40:38who was radicalized into white nationalism online.
40:42Going from there, there were attacks in El Paso,
40:45in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Loyce Synagogue,
40:49there was a horrible attack in Buffalo at a supermarket,
40:54and on and on.
40:56I'm ashamed to not remember every specific one,
41:00but there have been so many that it's hard to even keep track of them
41:04without a reference source.
41:06And I do believe that the frequency
41:10and the scale of these attacks feed upon each other.
41:14Another kind of milestone amongst these white nationalist attacks
41:19were the attacks in Norway,
41:22where he set a bomb in Oslo at the Labour Party headquarters
41:26that killed eight people,
41:29and then he drove to a youth camp on Utøya Island
41:34and murdered 69 more people with firearms,
41:38most of whom were teenagers.
41:40Today, these attacks are typically perpetrated
41:44by a quote-unquote lone wolf attacker.
41:48It's usually the wallflowers in these groups,
41:51the guys that don't stand out,
41:54the guys that even though they're a part of the group,
41:57people don't really take them seriously,
41:59people don't pay a lot of attention to them.
42:02Those are the guys, the affiliated guys,
42:04who are going to commit these types of atrocities.
42:09Unfortunately, I think today's society
42:16is a very ripe breeding ground for race-based hate
42:23because race is so at the forefront
42:28of all of our social discourse.
42:31When Joe Pistov, white kid, is being branded as white at his school
42:36and then told he has all this oppressor-colonizer privilege,
42:39that's steps one and two to creating a white nationalist.
42:42There's no middle ground for that kid.
42:45There's no room for him to say,
42:47you know what, I'm a human being.
42:49Yeah, I might be racialized as white,
42:51and of course there's all sorts of social issues
42:53we need to talk about as far as that goes,
42:56but that's not who I am.
42:57Until there's middle ground,
42:59neo-Nazi groups are going to go to town with us,
43:02and I'm happy to see that more and more people understand that.
43:05And they understand that discussion and creating that middle ground
43:09is really how we fight racism.
43:12There's no social media platform
43:14that is proof against hate happening on it.
43:17And obviously neo-Nazi groups are well aware
43:20that a screen is an amazing tool
43:22for them to connect and to recruit.
43:24It's going to have the potential to be
43:27extremely harmful and extremely toxic.
43:30Of the existing platforms today of consequence,
43:34there's 4chan, 8chan,
43:36there's all sorts of obscure things
43:38where people meet and have these kinds of discussions
43:41and these ideologies propagate.
43:43But of the big ones,
43:45I think X is obviously first and foremost.
43:48It's a hotbed for people
43:51to be openly racist and openly hateful.
43:54I happen to think the most dangerous ones
43:57are the ones that are linked to video gaming.
44:01Discord, actual platforms that are meant for gaming
44:05and getting together,
44:07what Call of Duty map are we going to play?
44:10These are places where white nationalists,
44:13neo-Nazis, and all sorts of other violent extremist ideologies
44:17can propagate and recruit.
44:19And it's something that parents need to be very aware of.
44:24I'm a big fan of a man named Jonathan Haidt
44:27who is kind of at the forefront
44:30of getting kids to get off of social media
44:33and get back to the real world.
44:35And I think that that's really the answer
44:38not only to diminish the power of neo-Nazi groups
44:42but to diminish the power of these screens entirely
44:45and the hold they have on us as human beings.
44:48We certainly have the power and the capacity
44:52to completely diminish the power
44:55and even the existence of neo-Nazi groups as a whole.
44:58In the United States, it's not illegal to hold neo-Nazi beliefs.
45:02And I'm actually a strong proponent of the First Amendment.
45:07I don't believe that anti-hate speech laws are effective.
45:11And this knowledge is based on my experience working internationally.
45:17So I do think that free speech is very much a pressure valve
45:22and that restricting speech is not an effective means
45:27of diminishing hate in our society.
45:29I've seen countermeasures against hate by governments
45:33that can be very effective.
45:35I've done a lot of work in Scandinavia,
45:37namely Denmark and Norway.
45:40I've been to Sweden once and did some of the work there.
45:43But they spend a lot of money
45:46in providing things for young people to do,
45:51like healthy things for young people to get together and do.
45:54And I think we in the States could do a better job of that.
46:05I'm very mindful of the harm that I did as a white nationalist.
46:11Every day I'm mindful of that harm.
46:14And my method of accountability is to actively work
46:19to get kids out of these hate groups nowadays,
46:22as well as to put a message out there,
46:24as I'm doing on your show here,
46:27that it's not only possible to change your life around,
46:31it's awesome to change your life around.
46:33Life is so much better and so much happier
46:36when you're not burdened by hate every waking moment of your day.
46:41So everything I can do to put that message out into society,
46:45I'm going to do that.
46:46And I do that all motivated by the harm that I committed in those days.
46:52Nowadays I work for a group called Parents for Peace,
46:55where we coach families who have a radicalized loved one
46:59into any form of violent extremism.
47:01And we coach them on how to best deal with that loved one
47:05to guide them to a healthier place.
47:07We also work directly with the radicalized individuals
47:10to try to get them on a healthier path.
47:13And the way we do that is, ironically,
47:16the same way that I recruited Joe Pissed Off White Kid back in the day,
47:21which is to find that underlying pain point
47:24that's driving their affinity for this hateful ideology.
47:30If it is not having a girlfriend,
47:33or they don't have a good job, or whatever,
47:35it's typically they don't feel that they matter.
47:38They don't feel that they're important.
47:40We help them develop a healthy sense of self-worth.
47:44That's how deradicalization works.
47:47Getting them out of the movement or out of whatever group they're in
47:50is obviously step one.
47:52It's hard to proceed beyond that if you don't take that step.
47:55But once that step is taken, that's when the real work begins.
48:00To address what are the issues that drove me to this in the first place.
48:04At Parents for Peace we see violent extremism as a public health issue.
48:10Certainly not a political issue.
48:12The same way alcoholism is a public health issue.
48:15The same way domestic violence is.
48:17The same way HIV, AIDS is a public health issue.
48:21If you look at HIV, when it first came about in the 80s,
48:26it was extremely stigmatized.
48:28It was also extremely politicized.
48:30You only got AIDS if you did horrible, sinful things.
48:33It only happened to people who deserved it.
48:36Today, thank God, we see HIV as the public health issue that it is.
48:41It's something we all need to be concerned about.
48:43It's something anybody can get.
48:45We have to see it as something that we all need to be active in treating
48:49and healing in our society.
48:51When you look at violent extremism in that same lens,
48:54anyone can become a violent extremist,
48:56anyone can be a victim of violent extremism.
48:59It's not restricted to any certain demographic.
49:02I've written two books.
49:04The first book is called My Life After Hate.
49:06I'm actually in the process of a new version of My Life After Hate,
49:11which is like a memoir about my time in the movement,
49:14but also everything I've done over the past 15 years.
49:17My second book was called The Gift of Our Wounds.
49:20I wrote that with Pardeep Singh Kalika and Robin Gabby Fisher.
49:24Pardeep's father, Satwan, was killed in the Sikh temple shooting
49:27of August 5, 2012.
49:29Pardeep reached out to me a couple months after the shooting.
49:32Him and I sat down and had dinner
49:34and became very dear friends and brothers to this day.
49:37We've done a lot of work together
49:39and will continue to do a lot of work together.
49:41And the book is basically our two intersecting stories.
49:44Every day I'm grateful to not be who I was 30 years ago.
49:49Every day I experience joy just walking down the street.
49:54We're shooting this in New York City,
49:56which is one of my favorite places on Earth,
49:58because I can walk down a block and hear five different languages.
50:01And see people from all over the world.
50:04And it's never lost on me that back in the day
50:07I would have been terrified to walk down that same block.
50:11All people want to be happy.
50:13All people want to be safe.
50:15All people just want to live their lives.
50:17They want to experience love.
50:19And when we can get that through our heads,
50:22it makes our own lives so much more of a rewarding process
50:27and it also enriches the world around us.
50:57© transcript Emily Beynon