Without notifying his followers or even his inner circle, the longtime president of a legacy neo-Nazi group handed his organization to a black civil rights activist from California.
James Hart Stern, 54, is the new president of the National Socialist Movement, a group whose members wear uniforms reminiscent of those worn in Nazi Germany, celebrate Adolf Hitler and organize public rallies across the county.
Stern’s first move as president was to ask a Virginia judge to find the organization culpable of conspiring to commit violence at the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. The group has been accused of wrongdoing in a lawsuit but had previously denied any responsibility.
Next, he plans to transform the hate group’s website, visited by millions of white supremacists each year, into a space for Holocaust history lessons.
“I did the hard and dangerous part,” Stern told The Washington Post. “As a black man, I took over a neo-Nazi group and outsmarted them.”
For weeks, the sudden change in power had confounded those who study hate groups and perplexed those within the organization, who had heard nothing from Jeff Schoep, the man who led the Detroit-based organization for 24 years.
Paperwork to set the change into motion was first filed in January, but neither man publicly addressed the organizational changes until Friday.
Stern spoke first, and in a lengthy interview with The Washington Post said his unconventional rise to power was an “epic” tale that included infiltration, persuasion and a hint of manipulation. There’s a reason, he said, that some call him the “race whisperer.”
Hours later Schoep released his own statement, and later shared his version of events in a phone conversation with The Washington Post. “The truth has to come out," 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."
In the lengthy statement to his followers, Schoep wrote that he had been “deceived” by Stern who “convinced me that in order to protect our membership from the ongoing lawsuit, I should sign over NSM’s presidency to him.”
