I was a neo-Nazi for 7 years going through life in constant hate and fear. My daughter was the major push I needed to finally quit.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Arno Michaelis, a former neo-Nazi who works with the organization Parents for Peace that helps radicalized individuals. It's been edited for length and clarity.
For seven years, I was a white nationalist skinhead and the front man of a neo-Nazi metal band based in Milwaukee.
During that time, I lived in fear and anger, driven by a violent ideology that twisted history into mythology and cast me as a hero in a delusional war.
However, that "heroism" was hollow. The life I led was toxic to myself and everyone around me.
How I became a neo-Nazi
I was drawn in when I was 16. I was an angry, lonely kid, searching for something: identity, purpose, belonging.
I found it, or thought I did, in a fantasy: the idea that I was part of a master race under siege.
I was into Greek and Norse myths as a kid, and Nazi ideology sold itself as the real-life version. It told me I was one of the "noble few" standing up against dark, corrupting forces.
That story was intoxicating, and listening to it through the music drew me in.
I wasn't a real musician. I couldn't carry a tune, but I could scream loud enough to whip a crowd into a frenzy, and that was enough.
Our goal was to spread the ideology through music, to indoctrinate others like I had been. Music was the device that allowed us to feel united and righteous in our hate.
Being a neo-Nazi, though, wasn't empowering, it was exhausting.
I lived in constant anger, fear, and hate
Everyone who doesn't look or think like you is seen as a threat. You wake up angry and go to bed angry. The only relief is violence, and even that doesn't satisfy for long.
We justified brutal attacks — what we called "boot parties" — on people we saw as enemies: people of color, LGBTQ folks, Jews, punks, anyone who wasn't us.
I'd hear a quiet voice inside asking, "What are you doing? This guy didn't do anything to you. You don't even know him," but I didn't have the courage to listen.
I told myself I was protecting my race, but the truth is, I was addicted to hate, and somewhere deep down, I knew it.
I'm an alcoholic. I drank profusely from the time I was 14 until I was 34. There were days when I was like, "I just, I can't do this anymore. I'm so tired of it."
Hate's the same way.
I was going through life in constant fear and hate of everyone who didn't look and think like me, and I got sick and tired of it.
The push I needed to get out
By 1994, I was looking for a way out, but leaving wasn't easy.
Being a neo-Nazi gave me status. I was a reverend in a so-called racial holy war. I had groupies and was a "founding father" of my band.
Outside that fantasy, though, I was a high school dropout and an alcoholic who couldn't pay my bills and had to move back in with my mom and dad.
It was intimidating to give up all of this, albeit false, status and face the cruel reality of the hole I had dug for myself.
It was going to require something drastic to give me the push I needed.
In early 1994, the mother of my daughter and I broke up, and I found myself a single parent to our 18-month-old. Two months later, a second friend of mine was shot and killed in a street fight. By then, I'd lost count of how many friends had been incarcerated.
It finally hit me that if I didn't leave, prison or death would take me from my daughter. That was the push I needed, so I walked away.
My life is better without fear and hate
The hate didn't end overnight, but freedom came in stages: listening to music I actually liked and going to a Packers game without the guilt of feeling like I was playing into the pop culture propaganda designed to corrupt the will of the white man.
A year and a half after leaving, I was on the South Side of Chicago at 4 a.m., dancing to house music with 3,000 people of every ethnicity, gender, and background. That's when I knew I was free.
That night, I realized something profound: what I had been searching for all along — belonging, joy, connection — wasn't found in hate, it was in community.
There were moments along the way that gave me glimpses of that truth: a Jewish boss, a lesbian supervisor, and Black, Latino, and Asian coworkers. People who treated me with kindness when I least deserved it, but most needed it.
That's what undid me, in the best way. Their compassion made me see who I could become if I let go of the lies.
Today, I work with Parents for Peace, an organization that helps people caught in extremism find a healthier, more connected life. We support individuals on their journey — whether they're questioning, struggling, or still deeply entrenched — and we guide families trying to reach a loved one.
I believe that accountability isn't just about admitting guilt, it's about using your story to make sure the cycle stops with you.
I live with deep regret for the harm I caused, but I know I can never undo it. What I can do is work to prevent more pain, and in doing so, I've found a life I never thought was possible: a life without fear, anger, or hate.
If you or someone you know is struggling with extremism, Parents for Peace offers confidential support for families and individuals. Learn more at Parents for Peace.
This story was adapted from Michaelis' interview for Business Insider's series, " Authorized Account." Learn more about his life before and after neo-Nazism in the video below:

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles

Los Angeles Times
33 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Netanyahu's government survives vote to dissolve Israel's parliament
JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government survived an attempt to dissolve Israel's parliament early Thursday morning, with most of his ultra-Orthodox coalition partners joining him in voting against a bill that would have forced them to register for military service while the country is at war. The vote was the most serious challenge to Netanyahu's government since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which was the biggest security failure in Israel's history and triggered the ongoing war in Gaza. The bill's failure means that no other piece of legislation to dissolve parliament, called the Knesset, can be submitted for at least six months, shoring up Netanyahu's embattled coalition. The ultra-Orthodox parties are furious that the government has failed to pass a law exempting their community from mandatory military service. The issue has long divided the Jewish Israeli public, especially during the 20-month war in the Gaza Strip. Israel's opposition had hoped that the public anger over the exemptions would help topple the government. But just two of the 18 ultra-Orthodox members of the Knesset supported the bill. Most ultra-Orthodox legislators agreed to vote against the bill after Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Yuli Edelstein said that he and the ultra-Orthodox parties had reached an understanding on the basis of a new draft law, which they will continue discussing over the coming week. Yitzhak Goldknopf, the head of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, resigned in protest as the Minister of Construction and Housing, but will remain a member of the Knesset. Ari Kalman, spokesperson for Goldknopf, said that the minister resigned because he was frustrated with Netanyahu's constant requests for more time to pass a draft exemption law. 'Whatever they haven't been able to do over the past year they won't do in a week,' Kalman said. Military service is mandatory for most Jews in Israel, but the politically powerful ultra-Orthodox, who make up roughly 13% of Israeli society, have traditionally received exemptions if they are studying full time in religious seminaries. The ultra-Orthodox, also known as Haredim, or 'God-fearing' in Hebrew, say that integrating into the army threatens their traditional way of life. Each year, roughly 13,000 ultra-Orthodox men reach the conscription age of 18, but less than 10% enlist, according to parliament's State Control Committee, which held a hearing examining the issue. Israel is engaged in the longest active war in the country's history, which has stretched its military to the breaking point. The Haredim's widespread refusal to serve, and threats to topple the government during wartime, have enraged many Israelis, especially those who have served multiple rounds of reserve duty. Lidman writes for the Associated Press.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Second Italian journalist targeted with Paragon spyware, watchdog group says
By Raphael Satter LONDON (Reuters) -A second Italian journalist was recently targeted by software made by U.S.-owned surveillance company Paragon, internet watchdog group Citizen Lab said, raising new questions about a surveillance scandal that has already led Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's government and Paragon to part ways. Citizen Lab said in a report on Thursday that Italian investigative journalist Ciro Pellegrino's iPhone showed evidence of having been targeted by Paragon's sophisticated spy software. Pellegrino works at the online newspaper Fanpage, whose editor-in-chief Francesco Cancellato earlier disclosed that he was one of scores of users who received January alerts from WhatsApp that they had been targeted using Paragon's technology. Fanpage has published a stream of critical coverage of Meloni's government, notably an exposé tying her party's youth wing to neo-Nazi activity, and the allegation that Fanpage's journalists, among others, were put under surveillance has stirred controversy in Italy. On Monday, the government and Paragon announced that they were no longer working together, offering conflicting explanations about who fired whom. Paragon referred questions back to an earlier statement it provided to the Israeli publication Haaretz in which it said it had offered Italian officials a way to check whether its systems had been used against Cancellato, but that Italian authorities had rebuffed the offer. Italian officials did not return a message seeking comment on the Citizen Lab report. In a text exchange with Reuters, Pellegrino said the discovery that he had been targeted with spyware was "horrible." The Naples-based journalist said his phone was "the black box of my life, which contains everything from personal and health data to journalistic sources." Although an Italian parliamentary panel reported on Monday that the country's spy services had deployed Paragon's tools to intercept the communications of migrant sea rescue activists in the context of law enforcement work, the panel said it had found no evidence that the tools were used by Italian intelligence to go after Fanpage's Cancellato. The discovery of Paragon spyware on the phone of one of Cancellato's colleagues adds to questions about the panel's thoroughness, said Natalia Krapiva, a senior lawyer with Access Now, a human rights group that works with spyware victims. "It sheds serious doubt on the adequacy of the investigation," she said. The Italian parliamentary panel, which has reserved the right to conduct further investigations around the matter, did not respond to a message seeking comment. In its report, Citizen Lab also said that an unnamed European journalist was hacked with Paragon's spyware. The lab, which is based out of the University of Toronto, offered no other details and declined to answer questions about the journalist's identity or the circumstances of their targeting.
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Unearthing the Deep Fascist Roots of the Unite the Right Rally
On August 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists carrying tiki torches mobbed the University of Virginia's campus, shouting racist and antisemitic slogans and violently attacking the students who stood up to them. The next day, the same hateful crowd rallied in a Charlottesville park that held a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The city of Charlottesville had recently engaged in a public debate over whether to get rid of the statue, and supposedly the white supremacists were there—summoned by a number of neo-Nazis, chief among them Richard Spencer, and a local racist troll named Jason Kessler—to defend it. Really, they had come to court attention and cause harm. They succeeded on both fronts. Their event, called Unite the Right, became national news when they swarmed the UVA campus, chanting, 'Jews will not replace us.' (This had what to do with Robert E. Lee?) It became a national tragedy when, on August 12, James Alex Fields Jr., who kept a framed photo of Hitler by his bed, rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring several and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. The biographer and essayist Deborah Baker's Charlottesville: An American Story is both an account of those two horrifying days and an intellectual history of the far right in the United States. It mixes investigative rigor—Baker must have listened to hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of archived Charlottesville City Council meetings, as well as far-right podcasts and YouTube videos—with emotional intensity and wide-ranging cultural critique. Baker reaches from Virginia's slaveholding history to the poet Ezra Pound's deluded post–World War II fascism to the misogynistic trolls of Gamergate in her quest to understand Unite the Right. The result is not merely smart but shattering. It joins the ranks of some of the best American nonfiction in recent years—Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing; Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show—as testimony to events we'd be unwise to forget. Baker's approach to her material is distinct in two ways. One is that, like Schulman but unlike many authors of researched nonfiction, she's not a reporter, and shows no deference to the norm of representing both sides. She did not interview any of the white supremacists that came to—or came from—Charlottesville. Baker saw them as tricking 'conscientious journalists into following them down rabbit holes,' or taking advantage of those who 'couldn't imagine they believed what they said they believed. [The media] thought it was a game, not a calculated strategy to spread their message.' Nor does she show a journalist's inclination to suppress her judgment. Baker writes damningly about the intellectual cowardice and inconsistency that set the stage for the city of Charlottesville's and University of Virginia's mismanagement of Unite the Right: At both the march and the rally, police not only failed to defend the counterprotesters, who were left to protect themselves against heavily armed, malevolent throngs, but, in some instances, attacked them. The author knows some of that inconsistency personally, which is the other distinctive piece of her approach. She grew up partly in Albemarle County, Virginia, where Charlottesville sits. Her father, though he came from a family of New England abolitionists, was also raised there, and he lends the book a telling moment. In 1968, when Baker was in elementary school, he published a 'thin volume' called Strike the Tent: In the Steps of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. In its preface, he wrote that, although his account might seem 'a bit sentimental and slanted' toward its Confederate subjects, he wanted not to glorify or redeem them, but to comprehend why it is that, as he wrote, '[w]hat men may sincerely believe they are fighting for is often unrelated to the consequences of their doing so.' Any Confederate who thought he was defending 'individual liberty and freedom' was risking his life for its opposite. Baker isn't caught in this rhetorical (or maybe emotional) trap, but she's intimately acquainted with its distinct Virginian manifestation. All over the country, Americans tell themselves romantic stories about the Confederacy, narratives in which Southern troops were scrappy underdogs who didn't care about saving slavery. Of course, this narrative has its own moral bankruptcy: Not caring about slavery is differently, not less, rotten than championing it. But Virginia's white elite, squinting backward from Lee and Stonewall Jackson to George Washington, James Madison, and Charlottesville's own Thomas Jefferson, have their own set of 'fairy tales. That the South stood for something fine and brave. That Virginia was exceptional in the same way that America, above all other nations, was [and] Virginians were a breed apart from the regular run of Americans. Finally, to be a Virginian was to live in accordance with the most exacting code of chivalry, 'for here the ideals of the nation were born.'' Because Baker knows this vision of Virginia, she can—and does—write against it. She suggests that for white Charlottesvillians, a real reckoning with history would involve not only removing Confederate statues, which the city did in 2021, but confronting the toxic effects of Virginian exceptionalism: state, city, and university authorities' refusal to admit the presence of hate; white Charlottesvillians' unwillingness to listen to Black ones; an overriding inability to react to new information. Of course, the whole country suffers from these issues. We always have. One of Charlottesville's central arguments is that the nation's refusal to reckon with history is connected to its most violent, authoritarian elements. Donald Trump, of course, is radically anti-historical. During his first term, he created a commission for 'patriotic education' in reaction to The New York Times' 1619 Project, which described the centrality of slavery to America's founding, and this March, he issued an executive order banning 'anti-American ideology,' which seems to mean any discussion of race, from exhibits at the Smithsonian museums. It is as if he believes that, by erasing racism from the historical record, he can also erase its effect on our present, though the effect he and his supporters have in mind isn't structural inequality but what they call 'wokeness'; as if, by forbidding talk of racism, he can prevent protest of it, too. Charlottesville is full of this absurd way of thinking, and Baker makes no bones about its link to fascism. Fascist movements, from Benito Mussolini's to Richard Spencer's, claim they will turn back time to an illusory past in which the dominant social order went unquestioned. Trump wants to do the same. In 2020, a Charlottesville clergyman who counterprotested the rally told Baker, 'We're in the shit. America is Charlottesville now. Everywhere is Charlottesville.' In 2025, he's more right than ever. During the two days of Unite the Right, Charlottesville, Virginia, was the place where the nation's better ideals came to die, and one of the places its dark new ideology, the one now ripping civil society and the civil service to shreds, was starts with the statues. In 2015, a Charlottesville high schooler named Zyahna Bryant launched a petition to get the city's sculptures of Lee and Jackson taken down and the parks where they stood renamed. At 15, Bryant wasn't a stranger to activism: Baker, who has a novelist's instinct for detail, writes that, after Trayvon Martin's murder three years earlier, Bryant had organized a 'protest at the federal courthouse: a twelve-year-old girl corralling ten-year-olds with popsicle stains on their shirts.' In high school, she called the city's vice mayor, Wes Bellamy, and asked him to get on board with removing the statues. He did, and Charlottesville created a special commission to examine the issue, but conversation stagnated. Baker writes that, at community forums (which she listened to after the fact), the statues' white defenders 'believed that four generations in Virginia, or a Confederate ancestor who was by Lee's side at Appomattox, or simply their childhood memories should give special weight to their testimony.' Many of the city's longtime Black residents steered clear of the debate, recognizing that in the face of such willed obliviousness, 'Silence was the only power [they] had.' And the obliviousness was intense. One white Virginian wrote to the commission that, although she agreed that the story of slavery needed telling, the statues should remain in place because she appreciated their beauty alongside the parks' blooming trees: She imagined, Baker writes, that 'these two histories might peacefully coexist, one ugly and painful, the other framed by flowers.' But not all the statues' defenders prevaricated in this way. In fact, as the commission stalled, local white supremacists—whose presence, Baker notes, was widely known, though rarely acknowledged—came out of the woodwork, so that instead of parks without Confederate statues, Charlottesville now had ones full of Confederate flag-wavers 'protecting' the bronze generals. One of Charlottesville's most impressive qualities is Baker's subtle insistence on keeping her eye on guns. She links gun culture to video game culture, to whiteness, to the Civil War. She summons the writer Tony Horwitz's argument that just as 'Americans had once appeased and abetted the Slave Power, they were now appeasing and abetting the spread of guns.' Baker excoriates a dominant culture that accepts mass shootings and armed vigilantism as part of life, that tolerates a gun lobby that bullies and railroads anyone who considers 'the proliferations of guns unsettling' or sees 'freedoms curtailed by the shadow guns cast over our lives.' In Charlottesville, after the statue debate and, of course, on the weekend of Unite the Right, this shadow was overwhelming. Baker describes armed white supremacists telling injured, unarmed counterprotesters that 'this is what you get when you get in the street,' as if their weapons gave them the right to hurt anyone in their way. Of course, those white supremacists weren't only local. The statue debate got Spencer's attention, too. A University of Virginia graduate and professional hate-monger who coined the term 'alt-right,' he was, in 2017, as Baker writes, 'openly audition[ing] for the role of Trump's brain.' He was also adopting harassment techniques he'd learned from Gamergate, the concerted threatening, stalking, and doxing of the game designer Zoë Quinn in 2014. In writing about Spencer, Baker decodes an aspect of Unite the Right that initially bewildered her. Early in Charlottesville, she writes that after the virulent antisemitism of the torch march, she 'was hard pressed to see the connection between Charlottesville's Confederate statues and Hitler Youth, between Southern white supremacy and European fascism. Which histories—whose histories—were in play?... It felt as though American and European national creeds were being remixed and weaponized in ways I couldn't wrap my mind around.' She wasn't alone in her confusion: She writes that even a Charlottesville rabbi she spoke with struggled to see why neo-Confederates hated Jews. I can relate. I'm Jewish, and a branch of my family settled in Richmond, Virginia, not long before the Civil War. One of my ancestors was conscripted into the Confederate Army, a shameful bit of family history that is part of a greater legacy of Jewish complicity with slavery: Consider the Lehman brothers, who built their fortune on plantation cotton. In my estimation, the involvement of many Jews in one of America's great sins binds us to the nation; it's proof of Jews' Americanness. We're obligated to do what we can to remediate slavery's harms. Unite the Right didn't change my mind about that. But it did make me take seriously the alt-right's belief that Jews aren't American at all. Baker takes it seriously, too. In researching the history of fascism in the United States, she came to understand that 'Jews were the glue that held the ideology of white supremacy and white nationalism together.' She traces this idea to the 1930s, when Ezra Pound, who had moved to Europe, became a fascist. Hoping to ground Mussolini's and Hitler's ideas in U.S. history in order to better promote them at home, he turned to Virginia's sage, Thomas Jefferson. He argued that Jefferson's vision was, in fact, the same as Mussolini's, and, in the 1950s, acquired a young protégé, John Kasper, who he hoped could help spread these ideas and 'give fascism an all-American face.' Kasper did so, Baker writes, by going to Charlottesville in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision and arguing that Jews had put Black people up to demanding integration. Some 50 years later, Spencer took the Confederate statue debate as an excuse to do precisely the same. Baker writes that fascists like Pound, Kasper, and Spencer, looking to Hitler, argue that the 'liberal elite driving the conversations in media, business, and culture, were either Jews or in the pay of Jews, and thus hostile to a political order in which Christian white men claimed ascendancy.' This conspiracy theory allows them to reject the idea that Black Americans might achieve something on their own: Really, the Jews are behind them. It also allows them to foment grievance. Baker describes the Nazi Andrew Anglin whipping up his followers' emotions by listing their humiliations—student debt, addiction, trauma and injuries from fighting in meaningless wars—and then, to 'relieve them of their shame, [directing] their attention to the root cause of their tribulations: Jews.' Immediately after, he led them into the streets of Charlottesville. There, the alt-right mob encountered no resistance from the University of Virginia's authorities—its president, Baker writes, assumed that because Spencer was an alum, he'd abide by the university's honor code—or from Charlottesville and Virginia police. Baker draws a direct line from the city's underwhelming response to the statue debate sparked by Zyahna Bryant to its failure to prepare properly for Unite the Right, although police intelligence analysts and anti-fascist activists had given warning. The city and state governments and police chiefs just didn't want to take seriously the threat that the alt-right posed. And the Unite the Right organizers applied for, and got, a permit for their march. In the city's eyes, this entitled them to do what they liked, even as their rally turned into a violent and then murderous riot. Meanwhile, the unarmed Charlottesvillians who opposed the white supremacists received no police protection. They were accused of unlawful assembly; cops watched blankly as armed men kicked, hit, and maced them. It seems that not one trooper or officer was present when Heather Heyer was killed. Charlottesville's counterprotesters and the anti-fascists from around the region who helped them are Charlottesville's heroes. One of Baker's central subjects is Emily Gorcenski, a local data scientist who went from monitoring fascist chatter on the internet to confronting Spencer and his cronies face-to-face, bearing a storm of physical violence and anti-trans abuse. Others are members of the Charlottesville Clergy Collective, a group of Christian faith leaders who learned the techniques of nonviolent resistance in order to stand up to Unite the Right. She talks to a local arts administrator who turned into an activist after the statue debate, the founding members of Charlottesville's chapters of Black Lives Matter and Showing Up for Racial Justice, and citizen journalists who captured the riot in real time. Many of these people were both physically and morally wounded that weekend. Andy Stepanian, an activist who helped manage the counterprotesters' crisis communications, told Baker that, when he saw Heyer receiving chest compressions, it was as if his brain 'short-circuited. From that moment he lost the ability to live in the here and now. It has never returned.' All those decisions—even, or especially, the ones that don't feel like decisions at all—create room for fascism to flourish. Charlottesville is not a book of the here and now. It's too wide-ranging for that. In all its movement through time, through archives and forums and the intellectual history of America's ugliest movements, it seeks to locate 'the germ of the present in the past'—a mission of which Baker declares herself skeptical; maybe, she writes, it's 'just something writers tell themselves to exert control over events that are effectively beyond their control. But it was what I knew.' It's also a way of looking into the future. By linking Spencer to Pound, Baker demonstrates that American fascism is hardly newer than its Italian and German inspirations; by highlighting Pound's Jeffersonian pretensions, she reminds us of how deeply the crime of slavery affects not just the nation's founding philosophies but their later uses; and by tying the Jefferson-Pound-Spencer lineage to gamer culture, she reminds us how contemporary—how online—these problems are. Unite the Right happened through the internet. So did Trump's electoral victories. He's handed the reins of government, it seems, to alt-right activists who agitate on social media; he's letting Elon Musk, a tech billionaire who promotes far-right parties around the world and celebrated Trump's inauguration with a Nazi salute, dismantle the civil service. Charlottesville tells us how the country got here: by kowtowing to guns, by refusing to accept responsibility for racism close to home, by too many people ignoring what they don't want to see and not taking seriously what they don't want to hear. All those decisions—even, or especially, the ones that don't feel like decisions at all—create room for fascism to flourish, just as Charlottesville's white supremacists took the town's foot-dragging on removing the Lee statue as an opening to wave guns and Confederate flags in public parks. At the very end of the book, Baker challenges readers to attend closely not only to the hateful currents she investigates in chilling detail, but to the activists who resisted them in Charlottesville and continue to do so to this day. She is clear that these activists are responding to a deeply entrenched hate that preceded them and is more powerful than them—so powerful that its representatives are now in Congress and the White House. Yet these grassroots movements, she thinks, are our only hope. She writes that we must listen to them. 'We must regard them not as radicals … but as ordinary Americans standing up and fighting in a myriad of ways for what is right.' At this point, we've all got to do the same.