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:
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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.
