“Don’t F-cking Leave”: How Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists Trap Their Followers in the Movement Forever

There’s a lot of debate over what to call the loosely connected group of people working to make America more racist: white supremacists, white nationalists, white power advocates, professional racists, neo-Nazis, the alt right, the dissident right. None of these terms are perfect, and many originated in racist slogans coined decades ago.

I prefer “nazis”—lowercase, like a generic drug, to cover all their ideologies, and to distinguish them from Germans in the 1930s and ’40s and skinheads in the ’90s. What they want is more white power. What they are defending is white male supremacy.

What those inside it call it is “the movement.” All of them. The ones who resent it, the ones who think they’re above it, the ones who quit. They speak of it as though it is a sentient blob. Another word for it might be “cult.”

“The movement is angry with me,” Richard Spencer, its most infamous leader, told me after my interview with him aired on television. “The movement’s been propelled by insecurity,” said Matt Parrott, who’d been part of it since 2008 and was one of the organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. His longtime collaborator, Matthew Heimbach, began a backstory with the disclaimer, “If movement lore is to be believed…,” Jeff Schoep, who ran a neo-Nazi group for almost three decades, answered most of my questions with the preface, “When I was in the movement…” They talk about their “movement friends” and their “non-movement friends,” if they have any. There are movement parties and movement funerals.

You can dabble in racism, hang out on racist websites, read fascist literature, and later come back to the normal world, but when you use your real name in the movement you have passed the point of no return. You can quit, but you can’t leave. No one will forget what you’ve done. The movement takes away your friends and gives you new ones, but they don’t really like you, and they’ll turn on you the moment you become a liability, or “cringe,” an embarrassment. After the movement ruins you, it will laugh at you. You deserve it. You were never really good enough, but the movement had fun while it lasted, You, of course, did not.

At the center of the movement is a group of old men. The old men provide the money—but there is never enough money to do much of anything, and the old men are always pushing the young men to find a new source. When the wealthy inventor Walter Kistler developed an interest in race science in his later years, one of his aides told me a significant part of his job was to stand between Kistler and the grifters who wanted to extract money from him. “He was like a childlike genius—brilliant, but naïve, easily manipulable,” the aide said. “We were basically all policemen…because Walter’s checkbook would be in his pocket and whoever walked in, he said, ‘Okay, here is a check.’”

The old men offer validation. They have overlapping clubs and conferences, and when a young man gets an invitation, it’s a sign he has promise. One of those old men was Bill Regnery, whose uncle founded an important conservative book publisher that bore his name, and whose grandfather was a member of the America First Committee, created to keep the U.S. out of World War II. Regnery did not have much of his own mainstream success. He’d been pushed out of his family’s textile business in the 1980s and removed from the board of the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute in the 2000s. But within the movement, he was elite. In 2015, Regnery emailed friends in the movement that he was “flabbergasted” that mass murderer Dylann Roof’s manifesto showed so much intelligence: “Based on Roof’s essay he is the kind of youth we could have invited to a meeting.”

The meeting would have been with the Charles Martel Society (CMS), one of the old men’s clubs. Members are not supposed to talk about CMS publicly. When, in March 2017, a BuzzFeed reporter asked if CMS was a secret society, members debated over email whether they should say “It is not a secret society,” or if saying it wasn’t a secret society made it seem even more like a secret society. Regnery settled on “The Charles Martel Society is a private but not secret organization.” However, when the story was published a few months later, member Kevin MacDonald was quoted saying, “It’s a secret society.”