Chapter 56: With America’s Nazis, Revisited
Any writer worth his or her salt has stories they look back at with regret. Regret about how they told it, or framed it, or reported it. At the time, the story felt right and maybe even wise. But now, seeing it years later, you cannot help but wish you had another shot.
In 2013, in the first issue of The Big Roundtable – the Review’s predecessor – we ran a story by Vegas Tenold. It had a clever headline, “My Weekend at Adolf’s” which captured what felt like the essence of the piece: Vegas had spent a lot of time with self-styled, Brown-shirted, Jew-hating, racist Nazi wannabes, and returned with a vivid account of these many sad sacks who had found meaning in their lives through communal hate. They were reminiscent of the men who appeared in 1920s accounts of the rise of Nazism in Germany – losers, dregs, forgettable, no threat. We know how that ended.
Vegas wondered about those who found common cause with Hitler and Geobbels. Few reporters presented a better fit for immersing himself in their world: Vegas is Norwegian with a shaved head and many tattoos. He is also a terrific journalist with a keen eye and great wit. Wit seemed the right fit for a story about Nazis that begins in Brooklyn in 2011.
It opens with this scene: By the curb outside Avenue U station in Brooklyn, John threw a small, plastic bag into the back of a rented Kia station wagon. The bag was all he was bringing. He was already wearing his brown shirt, black trousers and black boots and he wasn’t planning on changing. “Lot of Jews here,” he said, squinting and looking down the street.
“Yep,” Duke Schneider answered as he checked his phone again. “Passover.”
“That’ll give them something to crow over,” John chortled. “Fucking pieces of shit.”
Schneider put the flip phone back in the holster on his belt and frowned towards the station exit. “There’s just no excuse,” he muttered to himself. “If they were in the SS they’d be right out on their keisters. We’re leaving at exactly 11:05!” The last sentence was aimed at us; John, Schneider’s daughter Kate and me. “If they’re not here they can take the Jersey Transit.”
Six minutes later we were headed for New Jersey. We were on our way to the annual convention for the National Socialist Movement, the largest Neo-Nazi organization in the US. It was to be held somewhere in the Garden State and there would be a march in Trenton on Saturday. This was all I had been told, and to the best of my knowledge, this was about as much as most people in the NSM knew. The location of the hotel and the venue for tonight’s banquet were closely guarded secrets to which only the members of the leadership were privy.
John and Kate were in the back seat. John had only been a member of the NSM for a short time, and this was his first convention. Kate, who works as a claims adjuster, was telling him about a black woman who had tried to claim children she wasn’t caring for on her insurance. Her round face became distorted and her voice became broad and exaggerated. “What you mean I can’t claim fo’ them children jus’ ’cause they livin’ wi’ they baby-daddy?!”
John laughed. “Baby-daddy!”
Clowns, right? So they seemed.
Vegas is now a correspondent for VICE News. I emailed him the other day to ask about that story and what it’s like to look back now, given how much has happened since and how much he has learned.
He replied: “I first met Jeff Schoep, one of the main characters in this piece, in Trenton in April 2011. The last time I saw him was in a parking garage in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017.
“It’s strange to think about how one article became a career, and it’s even stranger to think about everything that has changed in the country since I wrote it. The existence of white supremacists in our streets and even our halls of power are now relatively established facts. A lot of the stuff folks said at Nazi rallies back then can now get you elected to Congress if you’re not careful. Jeff Schoep is a self-proclaimed peace activist, although I would take that with a giant grain of salt. Nazis know a good grift when they see one.
“I know a lot more now about covering extremism than I did then. I got stuff wrong. Like all of us, I had blind-spots that probably influenced my reporting. There are things I wish I had done differently. There was that time I ate possum at a KKK barbecue and ended up filing the story from the toilet of a Red Roof Inn in Tennessee.
“It feels like it was written a lifetime ago, and most of the key characters have drifted away from the movement only to be replaced by others. The people come and go but the hate remains.”
I wrote back. “It’s one of those stories that is at once prescient and which, as you say, captures a moment in time that feels almost innocent. That fair to say?”
“Absolutely,” he replied. “There's something almost quaint about these idiots marching in their ridiculous uniforms. Little did we know. Although I feel like many people will disagree. It's a pretty privileged position to be able to find Nazis ridiculous rather than terrifying, but I was somewhat oblivious back then.”
“Oblivious how?” I asked. “Looking back, what did you miss?”
Vegas can be very funny as well as self-deprecating. He did not spare himself. “It takes a certain amount of obliviousness and privilege,” he wrote, “to be able to look at Nazis and think ‘weird’ and not ‘that's fucking horrifying.’"
To his great credit, Vegas stayed with his subject and in 2018 his acclaimed 2018 book Everything You Love Will Burn appeared and told a darker, frightening story about “the rebirth of White Nationalism in America.”
By 2018 Donald Trump was president and neo-Nazis had marched in Charlottesville. It was hard to recall how the nation appeared, on the surface at least, when Vegas began his reporting in 2011. Barack Obama was president. The great divisive issue of the day was the Affordable Care Act. And people too naive by half were heard to suggest that racism was a past thing in the United States.
The final chapter of his book opens with an acknowledgement that this story, which had once felt so contained and different, was not ending. He closed the narrative with Charlottesville, but with a caveat.
Writing a book about something that is ongoing is a surreal affair because one needs to decide at some point when the story in the book ends, whereas in real life it continues, unaffected by narrative concerns.
There is always a next rally.
If you’d like to read Vegas’ original story you can find it here .