He is black, he infiltrated a supremacist group and became its leader to destroy it.

For two years, he entered the structure of the National Socialist Movement

WASHINGTON – Without telling his supporters, the historic president of a North American neo-Nazi group has given power to a civil rights activist for blacks in California. James Hart Stern, 54, is the new leader of the National Socialist Movement of the United States (NSM), who has long infiltrated groups of white supremacists.

And his first step as president was to deal with a pending lawsuit against his neo-Nazi group, asking the judge of the case to convict him of violence at the supremacist protest known as the name of "Unite the Right" in Charlottesville in 2017..

Your next step will be to transform the hate group website into a space where the historical lessons left by the publication are published.

Holocaust

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"I have made the most difficult and dangerous part," Stern said.
The Washington Post during his first interview since he took control of NSM. "I, a black man, cheated on them and took control of a neo-Nazi group," he added. This sudden change of hands surprised members of the group, that Jeff Schoep – the man who had been running the Detroit-based NSM since 1994 – had never warned them.

Stern was the first to come out and tell the whole story of his rise to power, a story that includes his infiltration into the group, a lot of persuasion and a bit of manipulation. After Stern gave his version of the facts, Schoep also decided to speak.

In a long statement to his supporters, Schoep wrote that he had been "deceived" by Stern, who had convinced him that to protect his supporters from the ongoing trial, he had to hand over the presidency of the MNS.

Schoep took control of the group 25 years ago and was responsible for the growth of its ranks and the installation of the NSM brand as a group of Holocaust deniers and acolytes. Adolf Hitler. The group has a website that attracts millions of visitors from around the world and organizes events across the United States. Its members wear uniforms similar to those of the SS of Nazi Germany.

To understand how Stern managed to take control of the organization, one must first understand how Schoep met him.

While he was serving a jail sentence for fraud in Mississippi, Stern is bonded with his cellmate and former Ku Klux Klan (KKK) grand magician, Edgar Ray Killen. The KKK leader was found guilty of murdering three civil rights activists during episodes known as "Mississippi Burning." Killen eventually gave Stern plenipotentiary power over his history and badets.

Stern intervened in 2011 and in 2016 he used his legal power to dissolve the organization headed by Killen. This was his first successful infiltration.

In 2014, Schoep called Stern unexpectedly to inquire about his relationship with Killen and tell him that he was the first black man his organization had contacted since Malcolm X.

Stern investigated Schoep's name, discovered that he was a white supremacist, and then prepared to meet him in California. Since then, both have nurtured a strange relationship.

They regularly debated the holocaust, the ugliness of the Nazi swastika, the flaws in Schoep's ideals of white supremacism, and fundamentally the fate of their hate group. According to Stern, the goal was always to get Schoep to change his mind on these issues.

He did not succeed, but he did something almost as well. Schoep appealed to Stern earlier this year for legal advice in a lawsuit against NSM and other white nationalist groups that took part in the Charlottesville protests in 2017.

change

It was at this point that Schoep started talking about change. His beliefs remained the same, but he was willing to disbadociate himself from the NSM and created a new organization, because he felt that his followers were not giving him enough value and that the major supremacist groups had left him out during the nationalist wave that swept the United States. on the eve of the 2016 presidential election, which was later won by Republican Donald Trump.

According to Stern, Schoep was concerned about the repercussions of the lawsuit against Charlottesville and the legal costs he had to bear. He went to Stern looking for solutions and put himself in his hands. "There, I noticed that there was a crack in his armor," says Stern.

Now, get ready for the next step. He does not intend to dissolve society, because he does not want Schoep's supporters, or other people of the white nationalist movement, to reconcile him. His plans for the band's website are still under discussion, but his primary goal is to make this place a space where Jewish organizations can help him educate NSM followers about the history of the city. 39; Holocaust.

"Everything is in the light of day," said Stern. "My plans and intentions are not to let the group prosper, my goal is to make the facts very clear," he said.

The Washington Post

Jaime Arrambide Translation