Have you noticed anything different about my website in the last few days?

If you’ve been following this project for the past six months, you know I haven’t shied away from hard truths.

I’ve documented how extremist ideologies—from white supremacists and neo-Nazis to Christian nationalists and QAnon true believers—have moved off the fringes and right into our local town halls, school board meetings, and elections.

That’s the reality that first led me to launch this project under the name “Hate Comes to Main Street.” It captured the urgency of the moment and reflected the kind of investigations that have defined this stage of my career, including two George Foster Peabody Awards. It named the problem head-on.

You can read more of my personal journey here.

But language matters—and after six months of delivering this work, I’ve heard your feedback loud and clear.

In a time when there is already so much to feel heavy about, a title focused solely on the arrival of hate can feel like just another downer.

Documenting the problem isn’t enough. We need a path forward. Confronting this challenge requires that we equip people to act rather than wallow in despair.

That’s why this work is evolving.

Welcome to ConfrontTheHate.com.

Guided by a simple mission—Confront the Hate, Find the Hope—this site will continue to face tough realities head-on with clear, independent journalism, while placing a stronger focus on what matters most: finding practical ways forward together.

My goal is to continue to offer deep, reflective analysis on how extremism impacts everyday life, highlight essential reporting from around the country, and shine a spotlight on ordinary people showing extraordinary courage.

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It’s about women, too

As part of this shift, I’m also expanding my scope to explicitly cover attacks on the role of women in America and other forms of misogyny. As we’ve seen, extremist ideologies rarely exist in a vacuum—they almost always intertwine hatred based on race, gender, religion, ethnicity, and personal identity.

As I’ve previously reported, Christian nationalists who want to sideline people based on their skin color or ethnicity are also setting their sights on the role of women—for example, calling for an authoritarian leader who will one day take away the rights of their mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters to vote.

As Maya Angelou suggested, when people show us who they are, we need to believe them the first time.

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Confront the hate

While my lens is widening and my title is changing, the core reporting remains the same rigorous, uncompromising work that you’ve already seen from me:

• Exposing the Young Republican group behind a racist, antisemitic, misogynistic, Christian nationalist X account appealing to other young men.

• Revealing how white nationalist groups in America studied the race riots in Belfast for lessons on avoiding detection by law enforcement.

• Confronting a Christian nationalist candidate for governor who wants to outlaw Islam and Hinduism, and deny the morning-after pill to rape victims.

• Uncovering associations between KKK-loving figures and forces who are trying to push the Southern Baptist Convention farther to the right.

• Critiquing a 60 Minutes segment that unintentionally amplified a fascist group’s rebranding efforts.

• Challenging provably false claims by the Trump administration about its indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In this first six months, I published more than 80 individual reports—all while being fully committed to my main job for Nashville’s NewsChannel 5.

That’s how passionate I am about this mission! If you don’t know about the problem, you can’t fight it.

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Find the hope

What difference would it make if we all took time to get to know someone who looks, loves, and lives differently from us?

That question, posed by the sign outside a progressive Christian church in Nashville’s Green Hills neighborhood, goes to the heart of the redefined mission.

As critical as it is to confront the hate, we cannot stop there. Together, we have to look for paths forward.

That is why essays like Hate in a Hallmark Town, my recommended books, conversations with influential thinkers, and a persistent focus on community resilience will stay at the heart of this publication.

The shift to Confront the Hate, Find the Hope isn’t a retreat from hard truths.

It’s an invitation to become part of the solution—staying informed without feeling overwhelmed, seeing how national movements play out locally, and discovering real reasons for hope through stories of resilience and progress.

Below is just one example:

If you have other suggestions of stories about hope triumphing over hate, please drop them into the comments or the paid subscriber chat.

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Become part of the solution

If you’re a free subscriber, my goal remains clear: you’ll continue receiving thoughtful, reliable journalism with no ads and no algorithms.

If you believe in this project and its renewed focus, I hope you’ll consider joining me as a paid supporter. (If you are already a paid subscriber, you can increase your level of support by becoming a Founding Member. Here’s how.)

This independent project isn’t underwritten by a newsroom budget; I launched it with money out of my own pocket.

By helping to sustain work that requires research, tools, and legal protections, you become an active partner in a community committed to understanding what’s happening in our cities and towns—and finding real reasons for hope.

Other action steps you can take:

• Share this post and all my posts on your own social media!

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• Send me your ideas!

We’re in this together!

Confront the Hate. Find the Hope.

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Less than two months after taking a victory lap following the Southern Baptist Convention’s rightward turn, William Wolfe is headed back into controversy.

Wolfe, who leads the Center for Baptist Leadership and spearheaded efforts to push the nation’s largest Protestant denomination farther to the right during its recent annual meeting, is among the scheduled speakers for this weekend’s gathering of the right-wing True Texas Project (TTP) in Fort Worth.

The first-term Trump administration political appointee made news at a TTP event earlier this year when he expressed alarm about the skin color of people he saw at a DMV office in his home state of North Carolina.

“My boys all look like me—and I want my children to grow up in a country where they’re not minorities,” Wolfe told attendees.

The True Texas Project is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-government group and, as I documented two months ago, the group’s leaders are considered so extreme that mainstream Republicans have publicly denounced them as “antisemites and racists” and boycotted their conferences.

Among the announced topics for the “Year of the Patriot Conference”—which is scheduled to be held at Birchman Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist congregation—are the “strategy for stopping Islam” and “the threats of Sharia law, totalitarianism & communism facing our faith, freedoms, and way of life.”

Wolfe’s topic is listed as “the church’s response to mass immigration.”

Among those joining the Southern Baptist activist are a former neo-Nazi pushing for a White ethnostate, a Christian nationalist podcaster who talks of Jews being “at odds” with American values and argues political violence is “morally justified,” and a political figure with ties to Hitler-loving Nick Fuentes.

Below are, from my perspective, the three most interesting figures I have identified from the conference:

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True Texas speaker Cyan Rose Quinn

Joining the Center for Baptist Leadership founder on the agenda for the daylong conference will be a woman, previously identified for her neo-Nazi ties, who is now pushing for “creative” ways to turn America into a White ethnostate.

Cyan Rose Quinn—whose topic is listed as “They Gotta Go Back: The Remigration Cure”—serves as spokesperson for a white nationalist group known as the White Papers Policy Institute. As I previously reported, the group’s website includes proposals for convincing Black Americans to leave the country.

“Overall, I’m definitely in favor of the secession of the non-White population back to their countries of origin,” Quinn said in one podcast I discovered.

Listen to the clip below:

Quinn and Wolfe were both part of the same True Texas Project conference back in February. (Check out my previous post for more documentation about the backgrounds of Quinn and the White Papers Policy Institute.)

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True Texas speaker C.Jay Engel

Then, there’s Tennessee-based Christian nationalist C.Jay Engel, a right-wing podcaster and social media provocateur known for controversial views in which he argues that White Protestants, with few exceptions, are the true Americans.

Engel, who has appeared at other events with William Wolfe, is scheduled to speak on the topic: “Ourselves & Our Posterity: Protecting Our Legacy.”

Engel has claimed Jews “as a collective have largely operated at odds with the Old American way of life, rooted as it is in European Christendom” and argued that “antisemitism is actually just a bogeyman.”

Earlier this year, he teamed up with a Pennsylvania man who republishes Nazi-related books to create a non-profit group—the White Civil Advocacy Project—that claims it advocates for the rights of people of his race. He has called for deporting non-White Americans of foreign ancestry like Vivek Ramaswamy.

(More on my reporting on Engel for Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 can be found here, here, and here.)

The right-wing figure recently defended the white nationalist Patriot Front, saying the group “has done nothing wrong and they seem [to] operate with discipline, integrity, patriotism, and moral clarity about their goals.”

And Engel has refused to condemn political violence—if the violence is being carried out by his slice of the political spectrum.

“I think it’s morally justified now,” he wrote in a June post on X. He added, “But it’s not prudent at all. We are not organized and we have no leader yet. So political violence is something I am currently not on board with.”

In another post, Engel laid down his principles: “For my enemies: violence is never the answer. For my friends: we must restore order at all costs.”

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True Texas speaker Chris Russo

Also joining CBL founder William Wolfe at the True Texas conference is Chris Russo, president of Texans for Strong Borders. His topic: ”the impact of legal immigration and the key laws that have gotten us to where we are.”

A 2023 Texas Tribune exposé by veteran investigative journalist Robert Downen identified Russo as “a prominent, anonymous figure in Nick Fuentes’ white supremacist movement” who operated under the username “Optics Respecter.”

Russo had been photographed in Texas with Fuentes who, the article noted, is “an avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler and misogynist who has encouraged his followers to beat women.”

According to the Tribune:

“The Optics Respecter’s various social media accounts are replete with posts railing against Black people, immigrants and women. They contain slurs against LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities; claims that women should not be allowed to vote; and screeds against a multiracial society.

“The Optics Respecter account was banned from Twitter in 2022, but has remained active on Gab, a well-known haven for Fuentes’ movement and other far-right figures. Many of the posts have been in defense of Fuentes or parroted his vitriolic disdain for women, the LGBTQ+ community and non-white people.”

Russo reportedly did not respond to Downen’s “repeated requests for comment.”

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William Wolfe’s response?

You can find much more of my past reporting about Wolfe’s controversial connections here.

So, what does he say about his associations for the upcoming conference?

The Center for Baptist Leadership executive director has blocked me on X, making it difficult for me to reach him directly for comment.

I’ve sent him an email anyway. I’ll let you know if he responds.

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I originally published this investigation at NewsChannel5.com. Watch the video below.

Outside a jujitsu gym in a Nashville industrial park, I had kept watch on the comings and goings of one of the more visible figures in a far-right movement that’s raising concerns among those who monitor extremist activity.

That man, with his trademark handlebar mustache, identified himself in a video posted online as a fighter who goes by the name “Sporty.” His real name is Tristan Rettke, and he works as a licensed EMT for a Nashville-area ambulance service.

Rettke made headlines seven years ago, while a student at East Tennessee State University, when he showed up at a Black Lives Matter protest wearing a gorilla suit. He was later convicted for the misdemeanor of disputing a public meeting.

Now, he’s become a player in the so-called Active Club scene, a sort of fascist fight club.

Last October, the Guardian reported that Rettke was among the white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups that participated in an exhibition – dubbed “Slaughter Smokey Mountai” – with a Russian street fighting organization.

In April, the Guardian again listed Rettke among a group that had participated in riot-style combat events with other white nationalists at a compound in Virginia.

There is no evidence that Rettke has done anything illegal.

Such activities are part of the so-called Active Club movement headed by Robert Rundo, a white nationalist who was featured in a recent 60 Minutes segment.

A self-identified fascist, Rundo has tried to recast the movement as being about young, White men simply getting fit.

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‘Fascist cultural revolution’

But, behind that image, is another image of Rundo violently assaulting a Trump protester at a California rally in 2017.

Rundo spent 24 months in federal prison, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, for “planning and engaging in riots at political rallies across California.”

The Active Club founder has described organized fights like the ones in which Rettke participates as a “tip-off point for a fascist cultural revolution.”

He added, “Every victorious nationalist movement was forged by hardened men who already tasted real danger.”

“This is not just a national sports club or nationalist sports club. In its essence, it’s the strategy to build a neo-Nazi militia,” said Alexander Ritzmann, a senior adviser for the Counter Extremism Project.

Ritzmann has been studying the Active Club movement for years.

He says that, in their propaganda, Rundo and his followers liken themselves to Italy’s fascist militia known as the Blackshirts or to Adolf Hitler’s Stormtroopers.

I asked Ritzmann, “So, if this is a militia hiding in plain sight, what is the battle they’re preparing for?”

“They say,” Ritzmann answered, “we are preparing for the time when a white supremacist leader is worth and in need of protection.”

In one of the hype videos for the fascist exhibitions, Tristan Rettke is shown entering a fight in Texas, escorted by Sean Kauffmann, head of the Tennessee Active Club.

Kauffmann has been described by the Stop Antisemitism watchdog group as “a disturbed neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier with a documented history of violence and a massive cache of firearms.”

The neo-Nazi figure is now sitting in jail in Perry County, Tennessee, awaiting trial on a domestic violence charge. His bond was revoked last December after shooting a bird at NewsChannel 5’s camera in open court.

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‘They aren’t just exhibitions’

Other video discovered by NewsChannel 5 Investigates shows Rettke competing earlier this year in what was called a “Spring Brawl,” a riot-style event that critics argue is designed to prepare men for battle on the streets of America.

A posed photo from the event (at top of page) shows Rettke among a group that included someone holding up a flag for a violent neo-Nazi group known as the Hammerskins.

“They aren’t just exhibitions,” said veteran extremist watchdog . “They are physically training, as we do in the military, to be able to, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally, cause physical harm to another human being.”

Goldsmith heads a non-profit, known as Task Force Butler, that trains veterans to infiltrate groups that they fear might pose a threat to American democracy.

“It is far, far, far easier for a white supremacist to go and to, you know, punch someone in the face, to hit someone with a baseball bat if they’ve spent a few months punching their friend in the face for practice,” Goldsmith argued.

And, in recent years, the Active Clubs have begun collaborating with another white nationalist group, known as Patriot Front, that wants to turn America into an ethnostate for white people only.

In one photo posted online, Rettke poses with Patriot Front leader Thomas Rousseau.

Other photos show Rettke attended the grand opening for a training facility that Patriot Front recruiter Ian Michael Elliott operates in East Tennessee, near Tellico Plains.

So, after unsuccessfully trying to reach him by phone and email, I caught up with Rettke outside the gym where I had spotted him.

“I’m not interested,” he responded when I first approached him.

Still, I had questions.

“What are you guys fighting for?”

“Sorry, man. I’m not answering any questions.”

“Robert Rundo says this is part of a fascist cultural revolution. Are you a fascist? Do you hate democracy?”

“Sorry, man. I’m not answering any questions.”

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Gyms targeted by fascist groups

But it’s that focus on combat sports and physical fitness that, experts say, makes such gyms prime targets for such groups.

In fact, photos posted by the gym show that Patriot Front recruiter Ian Michael Elliott has worked out in the same facility.

The concern is that these activities could potentially hide a much more sinister motive.

After a recent stabbing incident in Belfast involving a Sudanese refugee, mobs of masked white men took to the streets attacking innocent immigrants, burning immigrant businesses, and torching some of their homes.

Online, Robert Rundo’s group celebrated the riots, with one Telegram post declaring “white boy summer is starting off hot this year.”

Another recited the white nationalist slogan “By God, we’ll have our home again.”

Another warned, “Tomorrow belong[s] to us.”

Rundo’s group even published a post about the OpSec – operational security – that helped the Northern Ireland mob to avoid arrest.

The “how-to” post carried a disclaimer, “For educational purposes only.”

And what worries observers even more is that the Active Clubs are now making deliberate efforts to target teens.

Among the people we discovered in the exhibition videos was a young man, now an adult, I met three years ago at a candidate forum in Franklin, Tennessee.

Logan Gulbranson later sent me a photo, showing off his swastika tattoo, to taunt me.

I asked Alexander Ritzmann, “What is the danger in allowing these people to work out in your gym?”

“Recruitment,” Ritzmann answered. “The main aspect would definitely be recruitment.”

Following questions that I raised, the man who recently purchased the gym told us that Rettke has now been banned from the facility.

“Things like that don’t fly anymore,” Nick Britt said.

“We’re inclusive, and we’ve got every color under the rainbow – and every one of them is my brother. There’s one tribe, and that’s one tribe under God.”

What do you think? Paid subscribers can comment below.

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Though separated by the passing of a century, America in the 2020s once again finds itself wrestling with the predominant question of the 1920s:

Who is an American?

For many, the 1920s—the so-called “Roaring Twenties”—was a period when the United States shook off the gloom of the First World War.

“It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby and perhaps the greatest chronicler of this slice of American history.

But it was also an age of hate.

“We know this era for its cultural exuberance—flappers and jazz and swanky new buildings reaching into the sky,” writes journalist Timothy Egan.

“But it was also a time when millions of people took an oath to hate their fellow citizens.”

Egan’s 2023 history, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, reveals a dramatic series of events involving the rise and fall of the new KKK and how a young woman’s death at the hands of a prominent Klan figure contributed to its demise.

Woven into the fabric of Egan’s narrative is a grim warning: hate often clothes itself in the attire of patriotism and faith, showing how easily America can fall victim to such deceits.

In some ways, as I outline below, 2020s MAGA America is not so far from 1920s KKK America.

Related post:

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Klan ‘needed to be a player’

For Black Americans, there was no idealized, Great Gatsby version of life in the 1920s.

As Egan notes, “A three-week exposé by the New York World in the fall of 1921 had detailed murder, flogging, iron-branding, arson—at least one hundred acts of vigilante violence nationwide.” That year, a White mob burned down some 35 blocks of an affluent Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. When the smoke had cleared, dozens—by some estimates, hundreds—lay dead.

“The Klan of the 1920s had enough control of the legal system to ensure that those who gutted the wealthiest Black community in the United States, a mass murder of American citizens, would not face justice,” Egan writes.

In the 2020s, we can hear the eerie echoes of that period in questions of whether justice can be found for unarmed immigrants gunned down by ICE agents.

As the author recounts in A Fever in the Heartland, the Klan was also driven by a keen sense for public relations and a well-developed blueprint for power.

“If the new Klan was going to stand out, it needed to be a player, and not just when the sun went down. Who cared what a bunch of costumed men did in a basement on a Friday night?” Egan writes.

“What about politics? Writing laws and enforcing the rules? Congress? The statehouse? Real power!”

The 1920s Klan skillfully wrapped itself in the red, white, and blue of the American flag—and marched beneath the cross of Jesus. “There was nothing wrong with promoting white supremacy—it was only ‘race pride.’”

A KKK newspaper characterized the Klan oath as “an oath of Americanism.”

“The flesh burnings and beatings always happened at night,” Egan explains. “By day, the Klan gave out money to charities and churches, and even built an orphanage—Hope Cottage.” They also attempted to create a Klan university that would offer a “one hundred percent American” curriculum.

In the 2020s, once again, far-right forces offer scathing critiques about whether our schools and museums tell the “true” story of America, and state legislators—like in my state of Tennessee—pass laws against teaching “divisive concepts.”

Like with today’s adherents of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, the new Klan became obsessed with putting a stop to the immigration of Europeans who were not deemed to be sufficiently Nordic. It was “a struggle for the rebirth of the White Race and the preservation of civilization.”

Egan notes, “[T]he top objective of the new Klan was stopping the flow of people who could never be idealized Americans. Fixation on designing a more perfect white citizen had become an obsession of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan.” the author observes. “The debate had moved on to whites with a shade of color.”

Again, in the 2020s, Christian nationalists pine for the day when White Protestants like themselves—so-called “Heritage Americans”— will have near-exclusive control over all levers of society.

And an American president, who warns of the “poisoning of the blood of our country,” oversees an administration where the country’s refugee policies are applied almost exclusively to White South Africans.

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‘Control of America’

A Fever in the Heartland describes how Klan leaders of the 1920s "had their eyes on an even bigger prize—’control of America by peaceful methods.’”

The focus was no longer just on Black subjugation,

“They wanted to stock Congress with members who’d taken dual oaths, one in conflict with the other,” Egan writes. “In turn, these political foot soldiers would start the process of adding amendments to the Constitution to take away rights given Black people after the Civil War, and to restrict the expansion of certain religions. At least that’s what many in the Klan envisioned.”

And, among the American public, the Klan found a receptive audience.

“When hate was on the ballot, especially in the guise of virtue, a majority of voters knew exactly what to do,” Egan notes.

By the mid-1920s, an estimated 10 to 15 percent of American White men were members of the Klan, and “the order that had been outlawed a half century earlier had become a major force in the nation’s capital.”

Those efforts paid off when Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924. It was an immigration measure “that slammed the door on those who could never meet the Klan’s definition of one hundred percent American.”

“Both parties needed the millions of voters who veiled themselves under pointed hoods,” but it was the Republican Party—the party of Abraham Lincoln and the Great Emancipation—where the Klan had become most entrenched.

As Egan writes, an anti-Klan measure proposed for the 1924 Republican Party platform never even made it to the floor of the convention; a similar measure at the Democratic convention failed on a 542-541 vote. “That was a day, said Will Rogers, ‘when I heard the most religion preached, and the least practiced.”

As a result of the KKK’s tight grip on the GOP, Black Americans began to shift their loyalties to the Democratic Party, forever changing U.S. politics.

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Find the Hope: An age of resistance

While documenting a dark period in American history, A Fever in the Heartland also tells a story of resistance, of people who refused to cave when it might have appeared that the Klan was unstoppable on its march toward the White House.

Among them were the young men of Notre Dame University—the antifa of their time—who took to the streets of South Bend, Indiana, to stand against the Klan’s anti-Catholic hate, forever solidifying the school’s “Fighting Irish” nickname.

There was the 32-year-old prosecutor, William H. Remy, who ignored pressure to appoint KKK-approved deputy prosecutors, and brave politicians like Congressman William E. Wilson refused to “take a vow and bow” to the Klan.

Perhaps, for obvious reasons, my favorites are the brave journalists who stood against the Klan’s evils:

• George L. Knox, a formerly enslaved man, used his influential Indianapolis Freeman to sound the alarm about how the state’s Republican Party had become “the Ku Klux Klan of Indiana.”

• Irish-American lawyer Patrick H. O’Donnell launched a weekly newspaper, Tolerance, and began a campaign to unmask the Klan.

• And Muncie newspaperman George Dale exposed the Klan’s infiltration of the judicial system, earning him a stint in jail for contempt of court.

In their stories, amidst A Fever in the Heartland, we can find inspiration for confronting—and defeating—the hate of our times.

Check out other “What I’m Reading” posts.

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Christian nationalist Pastor Joel Webbon was trying hard to make nice with Patriot Front founder Thomas Rousseau—after all, both men are united in their opposition to the notion of America as a place where all races are welcomed.

Rousseau, who wants to turn the United States into a White ethnostate, refused to concede that one of Webbon’s favorite Black people, ultra-conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, would not have to “go back.”

The best Webbon could get out of Rousseau is that the Black, American-born Supreme Court justice “would be at the very end of the line” for deportation.

Still, the Reformed Baptist pastor from the Austin area assured Rousseau that he found his position on Clarence Thomas “understandable.”

“ Now, your position, I disagree with it, but I don’t find it to be obscene,” Webbon continued.

“I just want you to know when I hear you say, ‘Uh, Joel, I’m trying to be consistent and so I cannot say that a Black is an American’ … I hope you know this, like, I don’t hear that and say, ‘You dirty racist, that’s terrible’ or ‘I can’t believe that.’ Yeah, I perfectly understand the position.”

Watch excerpt below:

By the way, as Webbon explained,  “Under my scheme, a lot of Black people could not vote. Clarence Thomas could, and I would thank God for it.”

Perhaps that explains why the pastor does not find Rousseau’s views “obscene.”

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‘I actually like diversity—in heaven’

This week, Webbon hosted Rousseau, a fellow Texan, on his New Christian Right podcast. The meeting followed Patriot Front’s successful effort to capture headlines with its white nationalist march through Washington, D.C., on July 4.

In Hitleresque tones, Rousseau delivered a speech outside Union Station that celebrated “the blood and spirit of the race which created America.” He also denounced the “Jewish cabals” and “homosexual peddlers of vice and exploitation” who, in his mind, are the “enemies of our people.”‘

In cryptic terms that certainly would have been understood by his audience, Webbon assured Rousseau he was “aware of the JQ”—slang for the “Jewish question,” a term straight out of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf—and claimed America has been living under a “Jewish theocracy.”

Like Ku Klux Klan preachers of the past, Webbon invoked the Bible to defend a separation of the races—at least, on Earth.

“I actually like diversity—in heaven, right?” Webbon insisted.

He told Rousseau:

“ If I want to be surrounding the throne of my Lord and Savior—worshiping Him forever with my brothers and sisters in Christ of every tribe, tongue, and nation, people who don't look like me and speak like me—to have diversity in the end game, heaven, those distinctions have to be maintained and not eroded now, here, temporally on Earth. And if we eradicate all distinctions and it just becomes this amalgamation, this brown soup, and we all speak the same … dialect, we all look the same, then you actually lose this great eternal eschatological promise. And here's the thing, it's not just what I like. Who cares what Joel likes? It seems like God mentions this because he likes it, it seems like there's something about the Christian God who actually prefers and designed that there would be not just one people, but there would be a variety of distinct peoples in different dialects with different cultures who all love and worship him.”

Watch excerpt below:

Listening to Webbon’s theological contortions, I was reminded of Jesus’s prayer: “Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in heaven.”

I seemed to have missed the asterisk: “Diversity not included.”

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Modern Christianity ‘has become the poison’

As Webbon described it, White people were chosen by God. From Rousseau’s perspective, it was the rugged individualism that put his race on top.

Still, both men agreed that the U.S. Constitution needs some work to preserve the White man’s proper role in American society.

 “I’m not against the Constitution, but I regularly find myself spurring on our politicians to be willing to at times go against the Constitution to save the Constitution,” Webbon argued.

They disagreed about whether America should be a theocracy.,

In the view of the Patriot Front funder, whether one is White would be the primary determinant of whether a person could be an American. The pastor’s analysis would first begin with whether the individual was a Christian.

Rousseau, who admittedly is not religious, acknowledged that Patriot Front’s members include people who practice Odinism, an ancient European, pagan religion whose Gods include Odin, Thor, and other deities from the Norse pantheon.

Watch excerpt below:

Even there, Webbon seemed eager to find common ground

 “What I’m trying to constantly convey to white nationalist guys who are a little bit more interested in Thor and Odin than they are Jesus,” he recounted, “is I’m saying, ‘No, no, no, no, Christianity is not the liability. It’s the modern liberalization of Christianity that has become the poison.”

Under what circumstances, the Christian nationalist pastor “constantly” encounters pagan white nationalists was unclear.

Curiously, Webbon insisted he did not believe that Rousseau’s pagan friends were just imagining their gods, although he suggested they were fallen angels.

Watch excerpt below:

He told Rousseau:

“Angels are real, and angels descending to Earth, and fallen angels, and taking the daughters of men and marrying. And like, so when I think of, like, a god of the sea, I think that's probably real. And that that god of the sea that some called him Poseidon, others called him Neptune, but that this god of the sea was probably a fallen angel that had a regional jurisdiction.”

The pair also found agreement in their desire to limit who would be allowed to vote in America, although they disagreed over who should be shut out.

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A final thought…

As I was listening to the Webbon-Rousseau podcast, a meeting of white nationalism and Christian nationalism, I was also scrolling through Telegram, the messaging app popular among America’s far right.

On one of those accounts, I spotted an image that portrayed the “factions of the movement”—extremist elements divided by their different approaches, but united by a similar vision of taking the country back to a time when White people were seen as supreme.

They are quietly working, sometimes together, podcast by podcast, to convince their fellow Americans that their views are patriotic, even godly.

They are waiting for a moment where history might give them an opening through which they can achieve their goals.

This is why we cannot afford to close our eyes.

P.S. Check out the reaction to this post from Pastor Webbon and people who support him.

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“When people show you who they are, believe them.” - Maya Angelou

What a week it has been! Over the past few days, Maya Angelou’s famous admonition has constantly come to mind.

I prepared for this week with great ambitions for a major post that I hope will contribute to the national conversation about who we want to be as a country.

But, because this independent project does not yet pay the bills, Hate Comes to Main Street had to take the back seat as my real job became all-consuming over the past 10 days. (Thanks to those who have become paid subscribers in hopes of one day making this project a bigger part of my work.)

After a badly needed beach break, I broke a big story—completely unrelated to the topic of this publication—about how U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn’s office had been the subject of a confidential Senate Ethics Committee investigation last year into the use of taxpayer resources for her political campaigns. The MAGA candidate is now running for Tennessee governor.

And, because my bosses and I tend to be conservative about what kinds of stories we break once early voting begins, I anticipated there would be no follow-up—at least, until after Republican voters had chosen their nominee.

Then, Blackburn did an interview with another television station in which she claimed that there was nothing to the investigation.

"This was a politically motivated complaint,” Blackburn insisted. “It was fully investigated. There was no misconduct.”

What the U.S. senator apparently did not anticipate was how much I knew and how much evidence was in my possession.

As a result, this week, I followed up with the revelation that the Senate Ethics Committee’s evidence included recorded conversations among Blackburn’s own staff about feeling pressure to engage in political activity in violation of the law.

Why would Blackburn try to spin the investigation as completely politically motivated when, as I also reported, her office faced pressure from the Ethics Committee to rectify the problems uncovered by investigators?

Why not just admit that mistakes were made—and explain what you are doing to address the issues raised by the ethics investigation?

When they show you who they are…..

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An unexpected response

One of the many surprises of this publication is how subjects of my reporting sometimes willingly own who they show us they are, no matter how ugly it may appear to those of us monitoring their behavior.

My most popular post last week was summarized in these two paragraphs:

Now, Hate Comes to Main Street can link a racist, antisemitic, misogynistic, Christian nationalist X account to another group of Young Republicans—in this case, far-right men associated with a Knox County chapter in East Tennessee.

That X account—calling itself the Tennessee Heritage Association—routinely pushes themes that once would have been more commonplace at cross-burning Ku Klux Klan rallies than in mainstream GOP politics.

The story mentioned that one of the people appearing at a Tennessee Heritage Association event—and defending Young Republicans caught up in scandals for making Nazi jokes—was Christian nationalist Aaron Miller.

But rather than disputing my critique, Miller jumped into the comments on my Facebook page and suggested that my feelings had been hurt when he canceled my ticket to another event they held in the Nashville area.

(Truth be told, I was a bit relieved. Listening to a bunch of Christian nationalists was never what I considered to be an ideal way to spend a Friday evening.)

“Phil is just salty because we blocked his RSVP to our last event,” Miller posted. “We’re going to win, it’s only a matter of time. Father Time is undefeated, and we are on the rise. Christ is King!”

That was all he had to say about my reporting?

When they show you who they are….

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Nobody ever said fascists are smart

Among those paying close attention to Hate Comes to Main Street is fascist Robert Rundo and the people involved in his Active Club network.

They recently put my image in one of their mocking AJAB—”All Journalists Are Bastards”—graphics.

And last week, Rundo did a podcast critiquing my interview with antifascist activist . You can watch it here.

Apparently trying to discredit me to his followers, the Active Club founder claimed I “used to work for one of the biggest corporations out there, DuPont.”

Rundo continued, “These guys, them and the working class have never met. It’s such a funny thing that these leftists try to throw this word around: hate.”

Let me speak to Rundo directly:

Rob, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I never worked a day for the chemical giant DuPont. Yes, I have won five duPont-Columbia University Awards for my journalism, but—I hate to break this to you—I am just not the corporate type.

In fact, my upbringing is probably not so different from your own background, except I focused on my education as the way out of that poverty. It never occurred to me that beating up other people was the way to a better life.

When they show you who they are….

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Political violence for me, not for thee

Over the last 10 days, I noticed a pair of revealing posts on X by rightwing podcaster C.Jay Engel, who now calls Jackson County, Tennessee, home.

I’ll let them speak for themselves.

When they show you who they are….

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“A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

It was a line from the Declaration of Independence that sent MAGA into an absolute frenzy. I had posted the 25-word sentence on Facebook, without attribution or any additional comment, during the Fourth of July weekend when America was celebrating the Declaration’s 250th anniversary.

Quickly, the comments section on that post erupted in unbridled outrage:

• “Phil, you letting your bias into reporting again. Resign.”

• “Man how far left can you go? You are not news, you are a leftist and maybe people will see how bad the media is.”

• “Phil is basically a socialist. He was actually relevant 30 years ago. Go to sleep old man.”

• “Look up TDS on WIKIPEDIA. There is a picture of od [sic] Phil Williams.”

• “You’ve definitely turned into the ‘get off my lawn guy!’ Dude actually lives in your head rent free!”

Truth be told, I posted that declaration from America’s founding document as a thought experiment of sorts, remembering how NPR had sparked a similar reaction as it live-tweeted the Declaration of Independence back in 2017.

Hoping the previous episode was perhaps a fluke, I wondered what the reaction would reveal about the state of America’s civic life. Surely, the stilted language of the sentence might be a clue as to its origin, I thought.

Now, even more than nine years ago, American government had become a MAGA government and, more than anyone, its defenders have reason to celebrate.

Scrolling through the barrage of hateful comments, along with the mocking responses of more enlightened readers, it occurred to me that the MAGA crowd still see themselves as victims, perpetually at war, ready to verbally slay at the slightest hint of dissent. It does not matter that they now have their choice for president sitting in the White House, enacting his controversial policies with the help of a subservient Congress and a sympathetic Supreme Court.

Perhaps, it is in the DNA of a movement determined to get its way—at all costs.

After all, it was MAGA that stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2020. When the 2024 election did not go the way progressives wanted, they simply girded themselves and began preparing for the next elections.

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‘Not a Klansman from the era of lynchings’

As I attempted to process the responses I had found so discouraging, if not completely unexpected, I was reminded of ’s excellent 2026 book, Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small American Town.

Hayden is an accomplished investigative reporter, formerly employed with the Southern Poverty Law Center, who specializes in far-right extremism.

Strange People on the Hill, which is reminiscent of the quirky portrait of Savannah in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, describes how the “somewhat queer-friendly” resort town of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, was torn apart in 2020 by the arrival of the leaders of an SPLC-designated hate group.

As Hayden notes, that white-nationalist group, known as VDARE, was named not so subtly after Virginia Dare, “the first White child born into an English colony on the land that would become America.”

Its founder, Peter Brimelow, and wife Lydia had purchased a nineteenth-century sandstone castle that towered over Berkeley Springs.

Unlike other groups that had appeared on the SPLC hate lists, the Brimelows wrapped their extremism in the language of immigration reform.

“Peter Brimelow had played a critical role in turning the country into what it became under Donald Trump,” Hayden writes. “Not a Klansman from the era of lynching, but far from a typical conservative of the nineties and aughts, Peter effectively shifted Republicans away from neoconservatives and toward nativism. Eventually, that nativism would take America into a series of constitutional crises and to the edge of some American version of fascism.”

As news spread of the arrival of the Brimelows, more progressive voices in Berkeley Springs were alarmed.

Hayden notes that Peter Brimelow, while insisting that he decried violence, was completely ready to proclaim that acts of mass violence by right-wing terrorists should be addressed by ending the “great replacement.”

“It was never the movement—that group of people, including nativists, neo-Nazis, and white nationalists who performed activism in response to the great replacement—that was to blame,” Hayden writes. “It was always others.”

When neo-Nazi Mauricio Garcia “gunned down a random collection of innocent people who had exited a mall in Allen, Texas, at the wrong time, killing nine and wounding seven,” Hayden and his SPLC colleagues discovered that the killer had been a VDARE reader. Garcia had even posted one of VDARE’s anti-immigration screeds on a Russian social media site, Hayden writes.

Still, the Brimelows were welcomed into the local Catholic parish, as well as the community’s more conservative social circles.

Some defended Peter Brimelow as simply being “a journalist.”

“He writes about immigration,” one person told Hayden. “Some people may disagree with it. But he’s not a hate group like BLM and antifa. Or Pride.”

Hayden describes a meeting he held with community members who were concerned about what influence VDARE might have on the town they loved:

“In the electronic pages of VDARE they are repeatedly talking about a civil war,” I told the room. “And that we are in a cold civil war. Well, I am not in a civil war. I am not fighting a civil war. Okay? I’m not at war with anyone. No one here should be at war … with anyone.

“What I’d said might calm people’s anger at VDARE, but I realized after I said it that it was misleading. Just because I didn’t want to be in a civil war didn’t mean I could avoid it.”

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‘You’ll outlast Peter Brimelow’

When Michael Edison Hayden first came to Berkeley Springs in 2020 in response to pleas for help for the community’s progressives, he assured those gathered for that first meeting that time was on their side.

“I’m obviously not a lawyer but I’m going to write about this situation, and I’m going to stay on it and use whatever platform they give me to help. I really believe in this town,” he recalls in Strange People on the Hill.

Hayden added, “You’ll outlast Peter Brimelow.”

In July 2024, Peter Brimelow announced the disbandment of VDARE.

“The conservative movement had started to emulate Peter at the same moment that conservatives abandoned him, leading to the termination of his nonprofit,” Hayden observes about the group’s demise.

And in September 2025, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against the Brimelows “for years of self-dealing and abuse of charitable assets.”

As it turns out, Hayden had been right about the progressives outlasting the Brimelows—even if he at times may have harbored his own doubts.

As the journalist argues in the preface, it is those people who continued to have hope in the face of hate who are the real heroes—not the MAGA keyboard warriors who, in my case, are act as if they are ready to go to war over words they fail to recognized from our country’s Declaration of Independence.

“Trump has talked about serving the ‘forgotten men and women’ of America, his supporters,” Hayden notes.

“But are Trump’s ‘forgotten’ people truly forgotten, after two election wins and an authoritarian government pandering to their biases?”

Instead, Hayden sees the red-state progressives in Berkeley Springs as representing “a more neglected feature of American life.”

Here is how he describes his heroes:

“Outnumbered in their towns, people like the women I mentioned are spiritual optimists who dig deep to donate to nonprofit groups and Democrats, and then feel let down when the money gets squandered. They live among reactionaries and fight quixotic battles to make their neighborhoods more inclusive….

“When I feel down about what has happened to America, I try to remember that there are people like them in every town. You will find them waving hand-painted signs on the side of the road and meeting in coffee shops just like the one at the center of this book. They keep fighting, even after wealthy institutions surrender.”

Those people, Hayden adds, “are my ‘forgotten men and women’ and ‘the living’ for whom I wrote this book.”

Have you read Strange People on the Hill yet? (If not, it’s available in my online bookstore.) If so, what do you think?

Paid subscribers can discuss in the comments below.

Watch my interview with Michael Edison Hayden below:

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Perhaps no detail is more important to understanding Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement than the religious component: it is overwhelmingly White and evangelical.

Which is why the MAGA president awkwardly attempts to invoke a Christian faith that, to many, often comes across as less than authentic.

Who can forget Trump being asked to name his favorite Bible verses?

“I wouldn’t want to get into it. Because to me, that’s very personal,” he said. “The Bible means a lot to me, but I don’t want to get into specifics.”

Trump—who, as CNN noted, once referred to communion as “my little wine and my little cracker,” —was asked if he prefers the New or Old Testaments.

“Probably equal. I think it’s just incredible,” he said.

Last year, the , a progressive Disciples of Christ pastor from San Diego, decided he needed to call out how traditional MAGA politics fails the test when compared to the teachings of Jesus.

Here’s part of what he told me in the attached video about his viral “MAGA vs. Jesus” video series:

“I’ve been pretty critical of MAGA since Donald Trump first ran for office, and it was something that I’ve spoken about openly from the pulpit and in writing and and all of that for for many years.

“But one thing that is different for me than during Trump’s first term is that I now have a larger social media following, and I continued to hear Christian nationalists, MAGA Christians, use the Bible in ways that were just not compatible with with Jesus’ message—like, the things they were advocating for just were clearly antithetical to Jesus.

“And I thought, you know, a pretty clear way to show that is to just say something that MAGA has said and then show something that Jesus said—and show how those are kind of incompatible….

“And I think one of the reasons that that was so successful is just that it shows in a very clear, short visual way how what people I think know to be true, a lot of people know to be true, about how MAGA is inconsistent with with Christianity. It articulates that in an easy to digest way.”

In this conversation, Dr. Lines explains why he does not believe that Christians can legitimately use the Bible to condemn abortion nor same-gender relations.

Please watch, then tell me what you think in the comments below.

First, there was the leak of the Telegram chats of national Young Republican figures who “referred to Black people as monkeys and ‘the watermelon people’ and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers.”

One person famously declared, “I love Hitler.”

More recently, there was a blowup inside Tennessee’s Maury County Republican Party over what was viewed as an antisemitic mailer sent out by a 32-year-old man as part of his effort to build up a local Young Republicans chapter.

Now, Hate Comes to Main Street can link a racist, antisemitic, misogynistic, Christian nationalist X account to another group of Young Republicans—in this case, far-right men associated with a Knox County chapter in East Tennessee.

That X account—calling itself the Tennessee Heritage Association—routinely pushes themes that once would have been more commonplace at cross-burning Ku Klux Klan rallies than in mainstream GOP politics.

Among the examples:

• The Tennessee Heritage Association amplifies racist notions of an “America for Ethnic Americans”—in other words, White people— and supports far-right calls for “remigration” of non-white “invaders” from American soil, declaring: “We do not give a shit about their human rights.”

• It demands imposition of “Jim Crow 2.0” and envisions a day when Black people will no longer be “living on our lands.” It mocks a White Supreme Court justice for adopting Black children and calls a highly educated African-American justice “retarded.” And it warns, “We are ending all this nonsense and making America American again.”

• The Tennessee Heritage Association’s X account also argues that “when the rightwing and leftwing jews [sic] sing in unison, their target is always White people.” Referring to a video showing a Jewish politician speaking at a Black church, it says: “Nobody in this video should be in my homeland.”

• And it calls for overthrowing the U.S. Constitution if necessary to achieve its idea of America. In advance of the Supreme Court’s ruling on birthright citizenship, it said, “It’s likely time to move on from this form of government because it is incapable of preserving our heritage….”

And if you think they are a bunch of racists, the Tennessee Heritage Association does not care.

“Childish and fake terms like ‘racist’ don’t matter to Gen Z,” the X account claimed.

Yet, rather than being relegated to the extreme, the Tennessee Heritage Association has co-sponsored an event with MAGA Congressman Andy Ogles and produced videos with Christian nationalist candidate for governor Monty Fritts.

The mysterious group has also signed on as one of the backers of the so-called Mass Deportation Coalition, which includes the influential Heritage Foundation, as well as the politically connected Center for Baptist Leadership.

The latter group is engaged in a campaign to try to push the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination, farther to the right.

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Who is the Tennessee Heritage Association?

Its website describes the Tennessee Heritage Association as “a single-issue advocacy group determined to end and reverse mass migration.”

The group first popped up on my radar when it co-sponsored an event in Knoxville on January 2026, that was titled “Building a Legacy: The Future of Gen Z in U.S. Politics.” The event’s other sponsors included the Young Republicans of Knox County, and it was promoted by the Knox County Republican Party.

A 90-minute video from that event was posted on YouTube, but it suddenly disappeared after I grabbed images of two men who appeared to be the group’s leaders and made a request on X for help in identifying them.

One of the event’s speakers, a balding man who identified himself as “Austin,” said he was treasurer of the Young Republicans of Knox County and co-founder of Tennessee Heritage Association.

“We started this organization last year with the purpose of bringing an authentic right-wing vision in Knox County and to preserve our way of life for Heritage America,” Austin said. “Our goal here is to build this into a right-wing cultural center, something that the next generation can shape and grow.”

Later, a bearded man, who was not identified by name, welcomed the audience—on behalf of the Tennessee Heritage Association—to the gathering that he said represented “delegations from at least six or seven other states.”

“We, the right-wing American youth, expect support for remigration as the absolute baseline political stance on the Right to earn and maintain our support,” the mysterious Tennessee Heritage Association figure insisted.

Remigration, according to extremism watchdogs, is a term originally popularized by European neo-Nazis as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.

In April, the Tennessee Heritage Association was involved in a second event, this one in the Nashville area, that featured Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles and several prominent Christian nationalist figures from the Southeast.

In preparation for this post, because I have been blocked by the X account, I unsuccessfully attempted to contact the group’s leaders through a contact form on their website. I have also attempted, again without success, to reach out to the individuals whom I believe to be the men shown in the video from the event.

It is not known who operates the @HeritageTN X account, but this post will explore the group’s apparent ideology through its own words on social media.

Tennessee Heritage Association: On race

On June 27, the person or persons operating the Tennessee Heritage Association’s X account reposted an item from an anonymous Christian nationalist who insisted “nobody posting Confederate flags wants slavery back.”

Its real problem, the item continued, was with Black people themselves.

“Not only do we not want those folks living on our lands, but we don’t even want them on our continent,” the post continued. “The South is the last bastion of unabashed White identity….”

In another case, the Tennessee Heritage Association responded to a news report about the racial makeup of students in America’s public schools.

“White students should be 100% of the students in American schools,” the X account argued.

“I don’t want my kids replaced in our own country, our one and only homeland. The politician who campaigns on ending White replacement in this country will rule for life.”

Recently, the group lambasted the University of Tennessee Athletic Department for celebrating Juneteenth.

“Trump won, we don’t have to do this anymore,” it said, adding that UT Sports should “stop selling your overwhelmingly White alumni and fanbase down the river to appease angry urban teens.”

Later, replying to a critic, the account added, “We The Honks don’t care man, we’re ending all this nonsense and making America American again.”

In April, Tennessee Heritage Association also shared a post attacking Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett for her adoption of “foreign black children.”

Those children were adopted from Haiti.

Another post insulted Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s intelligence.

Referencing the civil rights reforms that ended racial segregation, the group described those laws as “letting the blacks in the South destroy all our cities.”

It then called for “Jim Crow 2.0,” which it defined as “no longer letting the blacks in the South destroy all our cities.”

Other posts have called for “restoring American freedom of association”—in other words, the right to discriminate— and warned of a “resurgent young Right who don’t care at all about the label of Jim Crow.”

“When we win,” the group said elsewhere, “MLK Day will be erased from history.”

And it hinted at the possible return of lynchings in America.

Unfortunately, there is much more.

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Tennessee Heritage Association: On Jews

Whoever operates the Tennessee Heritage Association account on X appears to have also bought into the antisemitic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that claims Jews are waging a war to replace White people.

“When the rightwing and leftwing jews [sic] sing in unison, their target is always White people,” the account tweeted. That, it added, is “not a tolerable position for anyone on the young Right and incredibly short-sighted….”

Tennessee Heritage Association also shared a post by an account tied to antisemitic, Christian nationalist Pastor Joel Webbon in which he argued that Jews “killed the Prophets” and “the Lord Jesus Christ.”

It references a Bible verse often twisted by antisemites to say that the Apostle Paul—a Jew himself—called Jews “the enemies of all mankind.”

“Why do we partner with them?” it asked.

Then, there was a June 22 post that referenced U.S. Senate candidate Jon Ossoff, which it felt the need to describe as “a jew,” speaking to a Black church.

“Nobody in this video should be in my homeland,” the Tennessee Heritage Association declared.

And the group has criticized the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s efforts to combat antisemitism.

“The jews [sic] behind the IHRA want to criminalize the Easter story, to criminalize the Christian faith, and to further eradicate the remains of Christendom,” another tweet claimed.

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Tennessee Heritage Association: On other non-whites

Looking at the Tennessee Heritage Association account on X, it is also clear that it has no love for people of foreign ancestry, especially Indian Americans.

“Arjun, you’re getting deported,” it told a Canadian-born man of Indian ancestry. The post added, “Christ is King.”

Tennessee Heritage Association has retweeted multiple far-right accounts mocking GOP activist Vivek Ramaswamy, and it has hurled its own attacks against the U.S.-born man of Indian ancestry.

“You can travel to America. You can live in America. You can have American citizenship. But you, Vivek, will never be an American,” it said.

Similarly, the account has repeatedly expressed disdain for Harmeet Dhillon, the India-born assistant attorney general in the Trump administration, calling her “a rootless anti-White foreigner.” Dhillon became a U.S. citizen as a child.

At one point, Dhillon was mentioned as a possible candidate for attorney general.

“You want a twice-divorced, demon-worshipping Indian woman to be the AG?” the Tennessee Heritage Association account asked. “Not an actual American, not Christian, not even male—abysmal choice on all counts.”

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Tennessee Heritage Association: Other views

Responding to a photo of the four women on the U.S. Supreme Court, Tennessee Heritage Association posted: “Stop appointing women to do men’s jobs.”

It has also argued that sexual harassment by men is a “fantastic argument *against* women in the workforce.”

And it has expressed disdain for democratic norms, suggesting that elected officials should not worry about whether their actions are legal.

“I don’t care, and neither do your voters bubba,” one post said. “Do the thing, reward voters, rule for life.”

Recently, it argued for national control over big cities like Chicago, Seattle, and Portland, saying: “the federal government ought to seize control of all blue city cartels, from the alderman up to the Governor, because their rule is illegitimate.”

And anticipating that the U.S. Supreme Court might overrule President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, the X account argued that “the Constitution might as well not exist at this point.”

“If this farce is where the SC lands, it’s likely time to move on from this form of government because it is incapable of preserving our heritage and securing our future,” the post continued. “Our children matter more than the Constitution.”

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Defending Hitler jokes

One of the Tennessee Heritage Association’s co-sponsors at both the Knoxville and Nashville events, was another mysterious, Christian nationalist group, the Institute for Christian Statecraft. The group’s founder, Aaron T. Miller from Columbia, Tennessee, was the keynote speaker at the Knoxville event.

Miller, whose X account with its 160 followers describes him as a “social media influencer,” also serves as a Maury County commissioner.

Addressing the controversy of the national Young Republicans caught making jokes about Hitler—or, as Miller called him, “the Austrian painter”—the speaker insisted the GOP was being too hard on the party’s right-wing young men.

Many of those caught up in the national Young Republicans scandal lost their political jobs, which Miller said showed a lack of loyalty.

Watch an excerpt from Miller’s talk below:

“And what does that tell the next crop of young leaders that are gonna come up?” he asked. “Nope, you can’t tell edgy jokes. Nope, you gotta walk on eggshells. You gotta be careful. You don’t want to offend anybody.”

He continued, “Is that the kind of political movement that we want for the future, is that the future that we want for our country? No, absolutely not.”

Miller, by the way, has blocked me on X and not responded to my repeated attempts to reach him.

What do you think?

Please leave your comments below, and let’s discuss.

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This post is part of a continuing series that explains how I began this unexpected journey into the world of hate. Other essays from the “Hate in a Hallmark Town” can be viewed here.

Mention Gabrielle Hanson’s name around Franklin, Tennessee, and you are likely to be met with a roll of the eyes, perhaps even a hint of PTSD.

The one-term alderman and candidate for mayor did more to divide the affluent Middle Tennessee community and sully its once-glowing reputation than anyone had ever imagined was possible. When neo-Nazis showed up at a candidate forum to provide “security” for Hanson, it became national news.

Almost three years later, Franklin is back in the spotlight—recognized by the National Civic League as an “All-American City”—partly for its stand against Hanson and the hate she and her allies represented.

“For a city that had built its identity around inclusion, civic engagement, and honest reckoning with its history, this was not just a campaign controversy,” the league said in its official announcement this week.

“It was an existential test of Franklin’s democratic character.”

The National Civic League also acknowledged the role of my team’s “investigative journalism—conducted despite personal threats from white nationalist operatives” that gave “voters the full picture they needed.”

That’s the kind of recognition, knowing that my reporting on hate is making a difference, that keeps me going even in the toughest of times!

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What the National Civic League said

Here is an excerpt from “All-American City” recognition:

A Community That Said “Not In Our Town”

In October 2023, members of the Tennessee Active Club—a white nationalist organization whose members publicly self-identified as neo-Nazis—appeared at a mayoral candidate forum in the heart of Franklin’s historic downtown. There to provide “security” for a mayoral candidate with documented ties to extremist organizations, they attempted to physically block journalists from attending the public event and posted anonymous threats on buildings and around town, reading, “Always Watching, Always Listening, Always Near.”

For a city that had built its identity around inclusion, civic engagement, and honest reckoning with its history, this was not just a campaign controversy. It was an existential test of Franklin’s democratic character.

Franklin’s civic infrastructure, built intentionally over years, proved equal to the moment. Within 48 hours, the Franklin Board of Mayor and Aldermen issued a joint condemnation. The Board subsequently passed a formal resolution denouncing white supremacy. Civic organizations, business leaders, and neighborhood associations across the political spectrum added their voices. Investigative journalism—conducted despite personal threats from white nationalist operatives—revealed fabricated claims, concealed criminal history, and documented extremist ties, earning a Peabody Award and giving voters the full picture they needed.

On October 24, Franklin’s residents delivered their answer. Early voting surged more than 330% compared to the prior municipal election, and final turnout set a city record. The extremist-backed candidate was defeated 80 to 20 and every candidate on the coordinated slate lost decisively.

The civic aftermath is measurable. Franklin’s National Community Survey showed confidence in local government rose from 68% to 75%, perceptions of safety increased from 95% to 97%, and trust across multiple dimensions strengthened. Rather than eroding civic health, the crisis reinforced it, proving that when communities invest in civic infrastructure over years, they can call upon it decisively when democracy demands it.

To be clear, some of the details in the summary are slightly misplaced. For example, it was Hanson’s supporters who attempted to block my photojournalist colleague and me from attending another forum, not the neo-Nazis.

Still, it nails the essence of the story about Franklin’s stand against Gabrielle Hanson and the political divisiveness she represented.

As acknowledged in the National Civic League recognition, I am immensely proud of the role that my NewsChannel 5 colleagues and I played in helping the community to confront the threat it faced.

You can go to the All-American Cities website to see much more about how the Williamson County community was chosen for this honor.

And CONGRATULATIONS to the people of Franklin! As I’ve said before, we’re in this together.

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Hate Comes to Main Street has become a demanding passion project (I don’t do anything halfway). More than ever, I feel an urgency to sound the alarm about the hate and anti-democratic extremism that has infected our local communities, making its way from Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Now, I need your help to take this project to the next level.

More on that personal request in a moment, but let me first begin with a strange story from my journey this past week.

Louis Dunn, aka “Buck Fiden,” is a 44-year-old, avowed neo-Nazi from El Mirage, Arizona and part of the antisemitic Goyim Defense League (GDL). In July 2024, that group created havoc on the streets of Nashville for 10 days or so with members of the Hitler-loving gang becoming involved in two violent attacks.

Dunn was back in Nashville for a hearing on a couple of longshot motions to try to disqualify the district attorneys who are prosecuting him for his involvement in the assault on a young Jewish man in a downtown parking lot.

On the stand, Dunn unapologetically admitted to being a neo-Nazi who has a problem with Jewish people, and he grinned from ear-to-ear as his attorney showed a video of his group shouting vile slurs during their Nashville visit.

“Did you see his face?” an appalled woman in the courtroom later asked me.

Dunn’s odd defense appears to be that his assault, which was captured on video, was quick. He slammed the victim into the side of his truck, then let him go.

At the end of the brief hearing, there was no big news. Unsurprisingly, Criminal Court Judge Cynthia Chappell rejected the motion to disqualify the prosecutors.

Then, the neo-Nazi decided to chase me down the hall of the courthouse.

“Hey, Phil, let me get a selfie,” he called out as he held out his mobile phone, jogging probably faster than he has jogged in years.

“Sorry, I don’t do selfies with neo-Nazis,” I replied, as he snapped a pic on the run.

He gloated, “I got one anyway!”

That episode reflects the strange world into which I entered with this project.

GDL founder Jon Minadeo has repeatedly mocked me in the vilest terms on his Hitler-saluting podcast. Thomas Rousseau, head of the white nationalist Patriot Front, knows me by name, as does Robert Rundo, the self-described fascist behind the neo-Nazi Active Club movement.

When the white nationalists and neo-Nazis are paying attention to my work, I have to believe I’m doing something right.

Here are four things you can do to join me in this effort:

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1. Convince three friends (more if you can) to subscribe to Hate Comes to Main Street

Does that sound like a realistic goal?

Obviously, there’s a lot happening in the world today. Thousands of content creators like myself are competing for your attention. As a result, I still run into people who support my work but do not know about Hate Comes to Main Street.

In this case, I am trying to deliver a product that is unique, that speaks to the challenging times in which we now live.

Repeatedly, I hear from readers that, prior to seeing a post here, they were not aware of various aspects of the belief systems of the white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and QAnon conspiracy theorists I cover.

For example, my reporting here has:

• Revealed how white nationalist groups in America were taking notes from the race riots in Belfast to study how they too could one day avoid detection by law enforcement. This is something police need to know.

• Shined a light on the anti-democratic ambitions of Christian nationalists who want to destroy democracy, as well as the misogyny behind their often-repeated desires to take away the rights of women to vote.

• Challenged a Christian nationalist candidate for governor on his beliefs, revealing his desire to outlaw Islam and Hinduism, as well as his intention to prevent rape victims from receiving the morning-after pill.

• Explored associations between KKK-loving figures and forces who are trying to push the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination, farther to the right.

• Reviewed what I believed to be a botched effort by 60 Minutes to report on fascist groups gaining popularity into America, inadvertently boosting the groups’ carefully crafted efforts to reinvent themselves for the public.

• Critiqued the provably false claims by the Trump administration about its indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center. I am committed to continuing to follow the developments there.

Through Hate Comes to Main Street, I have been honest with you about the personal costs of doing this work.

Yet, I have also tried to highlight reasons for hope , suggest books that I find meaningful, and bring you fascinating conversations (like the one below).

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Still,, few care enough about being able to comment directly on my pages to pull out the credit card—because there are other ways to interact with me for free.

But Hate Comes to Main Street is a completely independent project that I finance out of my own pocket.

My employer, Nashville’s NewsChannel 5, is supportive of my efforts, but that does not include financial support. My costs include podcasting software, website services, books, and other research materials, as well as engaging a social media consultant and obtaining media insurance.

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Hate Comes to Main Street is the title I chose when I launched this platform because it reflected my focus on how hate and political extremism have infected the places we call home. In addition, it was the title we used to capture the essence of my first year of work on this topic for NewsChannel 5.

In my mind, it has a certain punch to it; yet, for some, it may be too much of a downer—in a time when there is plenty to be depressed about.

Recently, I purchased another domain that approaches the topic from a more positive, solutions-oriented perspective: ConfrontTheHate.com.

Here are the options:

• Stick with Hate Comes to Main Street. Maybe you believe it is already a sufficiently established brand with a strong sense of focus.

• Rebrand as Confront the Hate. Perhaps you think it offers readers more motivation to subscribe because they are part of the solution.

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Taking a brief break…

I am taking a 10-day or so hiatus from Hate Comes to Main Street for the holiday to decompress, focusing on family and self-care. You may see some automated posts from me, but I will not be directly engaging with readers on a regular basis.

I have MORE BIG STORIES and an INCREDIBLE INTERVIEW that are in their final stages and ready to post soon after I return.

But, leaning into what I think is an apt analogy, this work is a marathon, not a sprint.

And, as always, thanks for your support!

We’re in this together!

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This post is part of a continuing series that explains how I began this unexpected journey into the world of hate. One of the people I met was Pastor Walter Simmons. This is his story. — Phil Williams

Other essays from the “Hate in a Hallmark Town” can be viewed here.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, I would walk through my cozy Franklin, Tennessee, neighborhood every day for about two hours.

Dressed in my normal attire—a black hoodie, Nike sneakers, and jogging pants—and listening to gospel music, I tried to keep my sanity. At least four times a week, Franklin police would show up to “watch me.”

But one day in 2020 would be different.

After the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, where I used to live, I was hurt and disappointed. While speaking on Facebook Live as I walked, the same thing happened again. The police showed up, watched me walk, and suddenly pulled off after circling back around the cul-de-sac.

A few days later, I learned that a billboard at the local elementary school in that community displayed the word “nigger.” It was my first direct encounter with hate in Franklin—and not just on Main Street.

There are many who choose not to believe that hate is in the DNA of the city of Franklin and in the community of Williamson County.

Let me explain.

In 2017, after the violence of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, a prayer vigil was held in downtown Franklin by concerned citizens. Pastors, residents, business leaders, and civic leaders gathered to pray and peacefully demonstrate.

Also in attendance were factions aligned with the extreme right. Armed with rifles, flags, and signs displaying anti-justice rhetoric, they stood to protect the mascot of white supremacy and racism in downtown Franklin known as “Chip.”

This Confederate monument, erected in 1899, is a daily reminder that Williamson County and Franklin have a long, deep history of racial terror toward the descendants of enslaved Africans. That reality became even clearer when Dr. Kevin Riggs, a White pastor in Franklin, uttered these words on that rainy day: “We need to remove the Confederate statue!”

The Sons and Daughters of Confederate Veterans were not happy with that comment. They launched an assault campaign using court injunctions and intimidation tactics against what would become known as the “Fuller Story.” The Fuller Story was led by three local pastors and a historian who began to address Franklin’s history with racism as a means of bringing the city together around truth, love, and hope.

After a four-year process that included much debate, the city of Franklin decided to put up five historical markers in the city’s square. One marker spoke of a race riot that occurred near Mellow Mushroom in 1867. Another marker told of a market house that sold enslaved men and women on the square.

Finally, a statue commemorating the history of United States Colored Troops soldiers was erected in front of the courthouse where newly emancipated black men enlisted in the Union Army. On October 23, 2021, that statue—titled “March to Freedom”—was unveiled and dedicated in downtown Franklin, in front of thousands of black, brown, and white people. The square’s history with hate momentarily diffused with hope, joy, unity, and dignity.

As one alderman stated, the USCT statue was now standing in a place of “equal nobility.”

These efforts prove that the city of Franklin once had the motivation and determination to reckon with its past experiences of racialized hate and systemic oppression. But where has that motivation and determination gone?

Apparently, confronting hate in the past appears to be easier than facing hate in the present.

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A glimmer of hope that would fade

My next encounter with hate in Franklin came on June 3, 2020. I organized the “Jesus and Justice” prayer vigil at First Missionary Baptist Church with a diverse group of churches and speakers. Both mayors, police officials, city leaders, religious leaders, and business leaders spoke about the importance of justice and our need to love one another after the murder of George Floyd.

Little did the attendees know that the church and I had been threatened multiple times by factions of hate prior to the event. We were warned that if we left the church grounds and attempted to gather anywhere downtown, we would be met with violence—especially “your leader, that nigger pastor.”

With great calm and dignity, Dr. Chris Williamson of Strong Tower Bible Church, who knew of the threats, led us in prayer while kneeling on the asphalt to dramatize how George Floyd’s life was slowly taken from him. Thousands of people knelt and joined him in prayer. There seemed to be a glimmer of hope that day, but unfortunately that glimmer would soon fade.

Alderman Gabrielle Hanson would capitalize on the seeds of hate still present in the soil of our community. She was not the genesis of hate on Main Street. Rather, she grabbed hold of the hate that was already there and transformed herself into the newest threat to unity in Franklin.

The first time I encountered Gabrielle Hanson was at a BOMA meeting in 2022. After organizing a successful Juneteenth event in downtown Franklin the previous year, Mrs. Hanson removed the permit approval from the consent agenda in order to comment on the organization I led, the Franklin Justice and Equity Coalition (FJEC). She attempted to give me and other Black people a lecture about the country’s history with racism, and how to best deal with it.

And this is where the most painful attacks began.

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A ‘dreadful concoction’

Much of the hostility the FJEC and I faced came from the Black community itself. Even after Phil Williams and NewsChannel 5 reported on Hanson’s ties to white supremacist groups, certain members of the Black community remained steadfast in support of Hanson during her mayoral campaign.

This partnership reflected a deeper and more troubling pattern between white supremacy and Black capitulation. This dreadful concoction has always worked to smother authentic African-American progress in our country. When a White resident stood in a BOMA meeting and called me the “most racist man in Franklin,” the Black community remained silent as a support to this hypothesis.

After the disrespect from Hanson and at the BOMA meeting, people from “White Lives Matter” felt emboldened to appear at our Juneteenth event. Hate reared its ugly head once again on the square just off Main Street.

This was my first clear understanding of Hanson’s ability to tilt the scales of decency toward racial division through the leaven of hate. It also smothered the progress of unity that was fostered with the “Fuller Story” and through the work of the Franklin Justice and Equity Coalition.

It should be noted that in 2022, Tennessee hosted more Juneteenth celebrations than any other state in America. However, Franklin’s Main Street celebration was the only event visited by a hate group. From June 2023 through December 2024, I became the target of attacks from White Lives Matter, Moms for Liberty, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Ku Klux Klan.

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‘Love is stronger than hate’

I understand that my perspective is different from most, and that’s because my experiences are different from most.

I contend that hate didn’t come to Main Street—it’s always been here.

As a senior pastor of a large multi-ethnic/racial fellowship—one of the only racially diverse churches in Franklin—I believe it is important to hear and listen to the voices of those who carry the weight of what happens on Main Street.

In the end, I will always believe that love is stronger than hate—and better for us all.

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Former GOP Congressman Denver Riggleman has witnessed the Republican Party’s struggle for identity from a front-row seat.

In this conversation, we discuss my reporting about a Jew-hating, Hitler-loving figure who appears in social media videos for Monty Fritts, a Christian nationalist who is seeking the GOP nomination for governor in Tennessee.

And we discussed the hypocrisy of local Republicans who are enraged by a Young Republican activist’s antisemitism, but seem far less concerned about their own leaders’ Islamophobia.

Does the Republican Party have a Nazi problem?

Please watch, then tell me what you think in the comments.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Where does the Republican Party draw the line when it comes to hating people based on the color of their skin or their religion?

There is perhaps no better example of that question than a blowup this week inside Tennessee’s Maury County Republican Party over an antisemitic mailer sent out by a Young Republican activist.

Maury County, located about 45 minutes south of Nashville, is MAGA country—although the county seat of Columbia has a more center-left alignment. Five years ago, Confederate sympathizers relocated the remains of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the KKK, to an antebellum plantation there.

Hate Comes to Main Street has been primarily focused on how hate and political extremism have infected America’s communities—and this episode, in my mind, provides an excellent example worthy of deeper consideration.

The more that I have processed the denunciations of someone deemed to be too hateful to be tolerated, it has become clear that the picture is more complicated than I was fully able to capture in this story for Nashville’s NewsChannel 5.

Please take a look, then let’s talk about it.

Let’s break it down

First of all, Austin Lee is pretty much a nobody.

As of this writing, the Maury County Young Republican president has 676 followers on X and a mere five followers on Rumble.

From his posts and his X bio description—”Save White America”—Lee seems to have a clear plan for how he thinks he can get attention in today’s GOP.

He distributed the mailer to young Republican voters, making an appeal for support that included a reference to the antisemitic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. That theory claims Jews are engineering the immigration of people of color as part of a secert plot to replace White people.

“I put out the following mailer to thousands of conservatives in my area. It is time for the Republican Party to face the reality of race,” Lee said on X.

His one mistake may have been in being too blunt about his views of Jews.

As a result, when the mailer came up at the monthly meeting of the Maury County GOP, state Representative Scott Cepicky—a member of the conservative Church of Christ that is popular in the region—stunned some people with a revelation about his family history.

“I’m a Jew,” Cepicky told the GOP audience. “I’m an Ashkenazi Jew. My family left Israel, moved to Central Europe. In the 30s, you know what happened in Central Europe with Jews. My family immigrated to the United States.”

Noting that his own father fought in World War II, the Republican lawmaker invoked the horrors of the Nazis and the Holocaust.

“You gotta take a stand against this stuff,” Cepicky continued. “This is an idea that gains traction and destroys. This doesn't unite us.”

Referring to the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution, Cepicky noted that it references “we, the people.” He continued, ‘It doesn't say ‘we, the White people,’ or ‘we, the Christians,’ or ‘we, the Jews.’ It says ‘we, the people.’"

A woman in the audience agreed.

“ I am not a Jew, but I am with you. This is unacceptable.”

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Here’s where it gets complicated

Except for his blatant disparagement of Jewish people, it is not clear that Austin Lee’s views are so different from some MAGA leaders, including the congressman who lives in Maury County and represents them in Washington.

Here is the reverse side of Lee’s mailer:

“Stop the Great Replacement”?

Maury County’s MAGA Congressman Andy Ogles insists “replacement of American culture is not a theory.”

“Expel the invader”?

Ogles is explicit: “New York City has been occupied by muslim [sic] invaders. DEPORTATIONS NOW.”

“Ban Islam”?

Andy Ogles says, “America and Islam are incompatible. Time for a Muslim ban” and “DEPORT THEM ALL!”

And what about Representative Cepicky’s insistence that the Constitution is not exclusively for “we, the Christians”?

His own congressman has adopted images from the Crusades and declared that “America cannot survive if the people are not committed, Biblical Christians.”

Neither Scott Cepicky nor the Maury County Republican Party have ever denounced Ogles’ rhetoric about Muslims or immigrants.

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‘You gotta take a stand against this stuff’

Maury County Republican Chair Jason Gilliam posted a statement on Facebook from the Tennessee Young Republican Federation and declared, '“The Maury County Republican Party stands with the Tennessee Young Republicans.”

“We do not condone the hate conveyed in the mailer that was sent out to young men in our community,” Gilliam said. “The MCGOP will support any effort assuring that these people are held accountable for such disgusting behavior.”

But here’s the problem: the Tennessee Young Republican Federation does not actually denounce the language in Austin Lee’s mailer. It only states that the mailer was not approved at the state level.

“The TYRF did not, and does not, authorize, endorse, or support the recent communications published by the Maury County Young Republicans,” the statement declared, promising an “immediate review.”

Neither Scott Cepicky nor anyone else of prominence within the Tennessee GOP has called out the Young Republicans for their lackluster response.

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Crickets about another GOP controversy

The Maury County blowup came the same day that I revealed that a prominent figure in a Tennessee GOP gubernatorial candidate’s social media videos has a long history of hateful views.

Dane Chisholm calls Jews “a malevolent force throughout history,” praises Adolf Hitler as “a great man,” and urges Black Americans to “return to Africa.”

But the candidate, Christian nationalist Monty Fritts, has ignored the entire controversy—and no Tennessee Republican has called him out on it.

Has such a controversy now become “no big deal” within the Republican Party?

These are questions that the GOP now faces.

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“If you’re not anti-fascist, you’re either fascist or you’re just ok with fascists. I’d prefer to follow in the footsteps of my forefathers who fought fascism.”

That statement defines Kristofer Goldsmith’s current mission in life.

An Iraq War veteran, Kris founded Task Force Butler, an organization that “trains veterans in research and operations to counter extremism, teaching the skills and context necessary to keep veterans and their communities safe as they gather intelligence on dangerous individuals and organizations.”

And he is unequivocal in his insistence that fascist groups like Patriot Front, the Active Club movement and other far-right extremists cannot be ignored.

“People who believe that if you ignore them, then they’ll go away, should look at history and look at what unbridled and unopposed hate can do—because it’s not just Germany in the 1930s,” he told me.

“This has happened several times throughout human history where othering people has enabled not just the extremes like genocide, but things like Jim Crow laws in our own country, right?”

Kris continued, “Hate and dehumanization of the other can cause mass human suffering, and it has happened here. That is part of the history of the United States, and we have not as a nation come to terms with it.”

His goal—and the goal of Task Force Butler—is to expose such extremists and make it more difficult for them to harm others.

“People who get involved in white supremacy always, always, always get cocky—they always do,” Kris insisted. “They always do something that will lead to evidence existing in the public domain that allows us to track them down, to figure out who they are and hold them accountable.”

I originally published this investigation at NewsChannel5.com. Stay tuned for a postscript on GOP candidate Monty Fritts at the end.

He calls Jews “a malevolent force throughout history,” praises Adolf Hitler as “a great man,” and urges Black Americans to “return to Africa.”

Despite that history of hateful comments, he has now become the star of a pair of social media videos for Tennessee Republican candidate for governor Monty Fritts.

Still, Dane Chisholm, 28, of Rogersville, Tenn., is completely unapologetic about his controversial views.

“For the soft and fake ‘conservatives’ who worry about being called homophobic, racist or Nazi … go sit quietly in a corner,” Chisholm wrote in a June 20 post on X.

“The real Christian men – who will save this world – are going to start handling things.”

Fritts, who is running an unapologetically Christian nationalist campaign, did not respond to a text from NewsChannel 5 Investigates about the star of his social media posts.

Reached by phone, Chisholm insisted he was not paid for the videos; instead, he said he produced them as part of Fritts’ team of volunteer campaign workers.

“Do I think my words are going to hurt Monty? No,” Chisholm added. “I’m sure there are surface-level thinkers and voters who were probably going to vote the other way anyway. But the idea that an individual separate from him has ‘controversial takes,’ I can’t imagine that goes very far.”

Chisholm appears in the two social-media videos, interviewing voters on the streets of Knoxville in one and chatting with Young Republicans after a forum in another. In the videos, Chisholm wears an America First cap with the initials “NJF” – for America First founder Nicholas J. Fuentes – on the back.

Fuentes is the white-nationalist, antisemitic figure whose followers are known as Groypers. Despite the Jewish genocide, Fuentes has called Hitler “cool” and argued that “what Hitler represents is if white people didn’t give a f--k.”

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What he believes

On X, Dane Chisholm describes himself as a Christian who “fearlessly speak[s] the truth.”

And Monty Fritts, the candidate for governor, follows him.

“There’s lots of clues that we’ve been lied to tremendously about who Hitler was,” Chisholm said in a video posted on Easter comparing the Nazi leader to Jesus.

In another post, he wrote: “Hitler was a great man. We’ve been lied to, we know it.” He has argued that Hitler’s actions “were justified by the necessity of security or defense of his people, to which Jews were internationally plotting to destroy.”

In other posts, he has argued:

• COVID was part of a Jewish plot,

• “The jews [sic] did kill Jesus Christ, and they have been a malevolent force throughout history,” and

• “Jews only lie when they breathe.”

In a reply to another X account, Chisholm demanded: “shut up jew rat.”

And while he was cordial to a group of young African-American men in one of the videos for Monty Fritts, NewsChannel 5 Investigates found a post where Chisholm referred to Black people with a shortened version of the n-word and called them “f--king monkeys.”

“Don’t forget,” he added, “this racial-tension s--- show is only a created distraction by the Jewish ran [sic] and owned press and socials to distract you from their jew [sic] crimes and subversion.”

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What Monty Fritts says

In a recent interview, Fritts sought to distance himself from some Christian nationalists who have praised Hitler as a much-needed Christian prince.

“You’ll never hear from me that Adolf Hitler was a good guy,” Fritts said. “You’ll never hear that from me. I think he got what he deserved.”

This controversy follows Fritts’ appearance back in December on a podcast hosted by Stew Peters, who has been described by the ADL as “a far-right conspiracy theorist, Christian nationalist and prolific antisemite.”

During that show, Peters acknowledged that Fritts might be opening himself up to criticism.

“You’ll have to understand that I’m toxic. You’ll probably get a hit piece written about you just for appearing on my show,” he added.

Peters has called for what he calls the “final solution” to deport all Jews from America.

I asked Monty Fritts about the Stew Peters appearance:

Still, when pressed about that appearance, Fritts insisted he had not made a mistake by engaging with the man known for his hatred of Jews.

“You and I aren’t gonna agree on everything, Phil – we don’t have to,” the candidate said. “That’s the beauty about being in America and in Tennessee, is we can have divergent opinions on stuff and still have respect for one another.”

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Postscript

Meanwhile, on his own X account, Fritts expressed support for a Texas massage therapist who was caught on video telling two women in a grocery store that they were “not welcome here” because “this is not a Muslim country.”

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This post is part of a continuing series that explains how I began this unexpected journey into the world of hate. Other essays from the “Hate in a Hallmark Town” can be viewed here.

This past Saturday in Franklin—the affluent Middle Tennessee community that inspired Hate Comes to Main Street—the sun seemed to shine just a bit brighter.

Perhaps, it was because my perceptions of the quaint town had been dimmed by the antics of former Alderman Gabrielle Hanson, who had shown up at a candidate forum in 2023 with a group of neo-Nazis providing security. There were also the memories of the night a group of her supporters had physically accosted me and my photojournalist colleague at another event.

Along with her ardently MAGA followers, Hanson had opposed efforts to include the history of Franklin’s Black citizens alongside the story of the Confederates who waged a bloody stand in the closing days of the Civil War. And she had been most vehement in her opposition to any historical markers acknowledging the dark days of lynchings in a place that prided itself as a Hallmark town.

Seeming to see a sinister plot that everyone else had chosen to ignore, Hanson insisted the “racial terror markers” were part of a secret Marxist plot.

“If we can get a racial terror placard for someone who experienced a civil rights crime, they can get victim status,” she argued during a March 2023 meeting. “If they can get victim status, they can file for reparations.”

Hanson continued, “With these racial terror placards, we are setting ourselves up for financial reparations.”

Her rantings, to my ears, were truly bizarre given the fact that one does not need to have a historical marker to be considered a victim, and no one had ever made any such claims for reparations based upon the erection of such markers.

That debate still echoed through my mind as I met a group of local pastors on the public square to take photos for an upcoming Hate Comes to Main Street post.

“Is Franklin ever going to erect those lynching markers?” I asked, fully expecting to hear a tale of continued hesitation to fully address Franklin’s history.

Pastor Chris Williamson surprised me.

“As a matter of fact, they’re going to dedicate them in about 15 minutes,” Williamson said, pointing past the 40-foot, marble Confederate statue that looms over Franklin’s Main Street.

This was an unexpected development that gave me renewed hope.

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‘Pray for light to continue to open our eyes’

There, at the town’s Bicentennial Park Pavilion, a few dozen of Franklin’s most civic minded citizens—many members of a group known as Williamson Remembers—gathered to dedicate the first two of three planned markers. The third will eventually be erected in the shadow of the Confederate monument.

My first impression was the number of attendees paled in comparison to the hundreds of people who had jammed Franklin’s public square to mourn the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Still, it was a hard-fought victory by a passionate few.

“Today, we create a new legacy by shining the light of truth on lynchings in the city of Franklin,” said former pastor Kenneth Hill. “This dedication ceremony puts us on a new path toward becoming the beloved community.”

Hill co-chaired the group of citizens who had met once a month for three years as part of the effort “to acknowledge, honor, and give voice to the stories of racial injustice that have long been hidden or untold in Williamson County.”

Franklin Mayor Kenneth Moore, a longtime Republican who has faced many accusations from the MAGA crowd of being a RINO (Republican in Name Only), was applauded for leading the way for the project.

As I listened to Moore’s remarks, I felt they perfectly captured the difficulty of the task faced by these citizens and the ambition for a better tomorrow that motivated them. Below are excerpts from what the mayor told the crowd.

Today is a historic day.

The task laid out for the committee was not an easy one, and it was not without criticism particularly at the time of the heightened tensions of a hotly contested election season and the effects of the pandemic. The committee was committed to doing it right, down to the smallest detail.

Rabbi Laurie Rice introduced me to the work of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice—the nation’s first comprehensive memorial dedicated to victims of racial terror and lynchings. Many on our committee traveled together to Montgomery to hear these stories firsthand.

Inside the memorial, 805 steel rectangles hang in solemn rows, each representing a county where lynchings occurred with the victims’ names cut into the metal. Standing among these powerful and painful reminders, alongside other solemn depictions of the cruelty of slavery, I felt a clear conviction that we, too, must tell this story, the story of Williamson County.

We are one of many Civil War towns in which this occurred, but we have chosen to perhaps tell it in a different way than others, just as we have with the “Fuller Story.” The Williamson Remembers project tells the stories of these acts of racially motivated killings in our community. The markers’ narration reflects that each word has been carefully chosen, and historic verification has been confirmed by multiple sources. These stories affirm the importance of telling the truth, and they mark not an end but a beginning—a starting point for strengthening our civic health.

They are meant to bring light to a dark spot in our history and educate others moving forward.

As we unveil two of the markers today, I urge you to carefully read the narratives and pray for light to continue to open our eyes and wipe out the darkness of prejudice and antisemitism. I humbly plead and pray that telling the stories will prevent us from falling back into darkness.

May it be so!

So what do you think?

Please let me know in the comments below.

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His bio succintly summarizes his mission: “Jemar Tisby is a New York Times bestselling author, national speaker, and public historian on a mission to deliver truths from the Black experience with depth and clarity.”

This conversation was exactly what I needed, and it exemplifies the type of conversations I want to elevate. diagnoses the threats he sees from white Christian nationalism—without giving up hope for a better America.

First of all, he’s blunt about the threat of white Christian nationalism:

“I always say the ‘white’ part out loud, because that’s the part that becomes easy for people to skip over—and yet it is integral to the project of nationalism in general…. If folks who ascribe to white Christian nationalist ideology have their dream of the nation completely fulfilled, what does it look like? Is it very racially and ethnically diverse, particularly at the top? No. If there’s a hierarchy, who’s at the top of that pyramid? It’s gonna be White wealthy men. And that’s actually what we’re seeing right now.” (7:00)

While studies have shown that Black Americans embrace general Christian nationalist ideologies at similar rates as White Americans, they manifest those views in vastly different ways:

“So, when you look at the Black Christian tradition and political activism, what tends to happen? It’s an expansion of voting rights, an expansion of civil rights, moving closer toward a multiracial participatory democracy. When you look at the political behavior of White Christian nationalists, it’s the exact opposite. It is a narrowing of voting rights. It becomes harder to participate as an average citizen. It is a more concentrated power among the few, tending toward authoritarian anti-democratic expressions.” (11:00)

Pointing to efforts in Tennessee and other Southern states to dilute Black voting power, Jemar sounds the alarm:

“It is an absolute five-alarm fire for democracy. What is happening now is all designed to tip the scales in the favor of a far-right contingent come midterms. And what’s happening with the voting rights stuff is they are scrambling mostly in the Southern states, the states of the former Confederacy, to redraw districts that will essentially dilute Black political power. It is beyond urgent. And whatever kind of ‘Chicken Little, sky is falling’ people think that activists are doing right now, they couldn’t be more wrong.” (14:38)

Yet, he still holds out hope:

“Most of us kind of categorize hope as a feeling. I think it’s more accurate to say hope is action. How would an enslaved black person in the 1830s or the 1790s have viewed their circumstances? They wouldn’t have seen on the horizon any sort of conflagration like the Civil War. It would have looked like, well, this is my entire life. And yet, they were somehow able to come up with music and dance and have families and laugh and find joy in the world. Everything they did to push back against their own dehumanization was an act of hope. Similar to today, everything we do to push back against the dehumanization of ourselves or our neighbors, to push back against anti-democratic forces, is a sign of hope.” (29:30)

Please watch the entire conversation and let me know what you think!

A review by Hate Comes to Main Street of salacious new allegations against the Southern Poverty Law Center has uncovered more questions about the strength of the Trump Justice Department’s case against the civil rights organization.

Those new allegations were contained in a recently returned superseding indictment of the SPLC on fraud and money laundering charges. This week, the New York Post trumpeted the development this way: “SPLC boss funneled $1.2 million to lover in neo-Nazi group — pair even had joint bank account.”

Those new charges came after the Trump administration’s original indictment of its longtime nemesis in April was widely ridiculed—even by white supremacists who had been SPLC targets—for its claims that the group had secretly staged Charlottesville’s deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017.

As I have reported, that spin runs counter to every known fact about what really happened in Charlottesville.

So, now, SPLC critics have latched onto the new allegations in the superseding indictment that a staff member—identified as “Employee-2”—was romantically involved with a paid informant who infiltrated the neo-Nazi National Alliance. That informant—a “field source”—is identified only as “F-9.”

While not being directly named, Employee-2 is described as someone “who would become Director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project”—a high-ranking position but not the head of the organization as the term “boss” might imply.

Still, does the indictment really say that she “funneled $1.2 million” to a “lover” who was in a neo-Nazi group?

In a word: no.

I appeared on the Legal AF podcast to discuss this report:

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What the indictment really says…

Just like the original indictment did not actually contain the allegations that Trump administration officials and SPLC critics claimed, a close reading of the new indictment reveals the evidence may also not be quite as the Post suggests.

A few key points:

• SPLC paid that undercover informant $1.2 million between 2010 and 2023—a 14-year period—the indictment says.

• That indictment, however, does not specify when Employee-2 allegedly began the relationship with the informant. So, it’s possible the relationship began well after much of that money had been paid.

• The indictment claims, “Between 2015 and 2021, approximately $140,000 in donors’ money flowed from the SPLC operating account” and was deposited into a bank account that Employee-2 shared with F-9. That money was supposedly used “to pay the couple’s personal living expenses.”

• However, the person identified by the Post as Employee-2 left SPLC in October 2019 amid a leadership shakeup at the organization, presumably meaning she no longer had control of payments to F-9 in 2020 and 2021.

• So why would the DOJ’s indictment include payments to the informant after the woman was no longer an SPLC employee? And how much of that $140,000 was in that time period?

While raising potential ethical and legal issues about Employee-2’s conduct, that person has NOT been charged with any criminal wrongdoing. Southern Poverty Law Center Inc.—as a corporate entity—is the only defendant.

Yet, there are no allegations within the indictment that higher-ups within the non-profit organization itself knew about the potential conflict of interest nor that top SPLC brass directed it.

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And there’s more…

At the heart of the Trump administration’s indictment—the alleged fraud—is the allegation that “SPLC hid from donors the fact that a portion of their donated funds was being secretly used to support extremist groups and to fund their violent, racist, and extremist activities.”

Yet, in the case of F-9, the superseding indictment alleges he broke into the headquarters of National Alliance in West Virginia, stealing “approximately 25 boxes of documents” that were used for an investigation published by SPLC.

That investigation—identified by the Post, correctly I believe, as one published in May 2015 under the headline “Chaos at the Compound”—was damning. It described “evidence of embezzlement, money laundering and more than two million dollars in unreported taxable income” within the neo-Nazi group.

The report identified SPLC’s source as Randolph Dilloway, “an accountant … active in the neo-Nazi, white supremacist scene for more than a decade.” SPLC disclosed that Dilloway had been hired by National Alliance Chairman Will Williams to audit the group’s books, and he eventually turned on them.

Dilloway “was given full, unsupervised access to offices holding dozens of boxes of poorly-filed financial documents and data disks associated with the group’s various business entities going back to 1985,” SPLC’s reporting indicated.

The SPLC report continued:

“For five months, Dilloway organized, examined, and in many cases copied key documents and data files among tens of thousands of pages of sales receipts, donation records and ledgers. Dilloway claims that within the first 10 weeks he reported his audit findings to Will Williams and Alliance attorney, Timothy E. Kalamaros, and warned them the NA’s financial records showed a ‘prosecutable pattern of embezzlement and income tax fraud going back at least 15 years.’

“Among the thousands of pages of documents, database files, transaction records and digital media provided by Dilloway to the SPLC, the disturbing email exchanges he had with Kalamaros and Williams outlining possible financial improprieties earlier this year seem to suggest the Alliance attorney was advising them to ignore evidence of tax fraud and embezzlement to avoid being audited by the IRS.”

The SPLC report also said “Dilloway has since been interviewed by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, and he is now seeking federal protection under IRS Whistleblower statutes.”

Still, according to the Post’s account—which seems to lean heavily on the word of current National Alliance leader Will Williams—Dilloway was likely just the stooge described in the indictment as someone who was paid $6,000 by Employee-2 to take the blame for stealing the boxes of documents.

Which also, presumably, meant throwing away his professional reputation as a trustworthy accountant—for $6,000.

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Not a new line of attack

The Trump administration’s attack on the Southern Poverty Law Center regarding the National Alliance files follows the pattern of a federal lawsuit filed against the SPLC in 2018 by a former Baltimore city attorney who lost his job after being identified as a “neo-Nazi” based on Dilloway’s documents.

In 2018, Glen K. Allen filed a federal lawsuit against the person identified as Employee-2 by the New York Post and against the Southern Poverty Law Center accusing them of engaging in a criminal conspiracy.

“The Intelligence Project and SPLC paid Dilloway for the stolen documents,” Allen’s lawsuit claimed. “On information and belief, the amount paid for the stolen documents substantially exceeded $5,000.”

Allen’s lawsuit also claimed:

“On information and belief, the Intelligence Project and SPLC have paid not only Dilloway but other members, former members, friends, acquaintances, and spouses or former friends and spouses of members, and supporters or former supporters of the National Alliance for information about the National Alliance.

“On information and belief, the Intelligence Project and SPLC have also paid members, former members, friends, acquaintances, and spouses or former friends, acquaintances, and spouses of members, and supporters or former supporters of other ‘hate groups’ as defined by the SPLC for information.”

These allegations occurred during a time when the DOJ claims donors were being kept in the dark about their money being used to pay informants.

Like with the current criminal charges, that 2018 lawsuit accused the Southern Poverty Law Center of attempting to “masquerade as a 501c3 public interest law firm dedicated to a tax exempt educational mission, when in reality the SPLC fails the basic requirements for this favored status because of its illegal actions (including numerous instances of mail and wire fraud), multiple violations of canons of professional ethics (including improper disclosure of confidential and privileged documents and failure to train its nonlawyer employees)….”

Allen’s lawsuit was quickly dismissed by the trial court, a decision that was later upheld by an appeals court.

What do you think? Please let me know in the comments below.

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You can check out my appearance on the and podcast to discuss this post:

Former GOP Congressman Denver Riggleman tried to warn America about the growing threat of QAnon, Christian nationalism, and right-wing extremism.

Then, much to his horror, a Christian nationalist-QAnon crowd stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Soon, Riggleman—an experienced intelligence officer—joined the staff of the committee investigating J6.

“I thought the attack would be a wake-up call—it needed to be,” Riggleman wrote in his 2022 New York Times bestselling book, The Breach.

“Our fellow Americans were being radicalized to believe in twisted fantasies and conspiracies. We had to make the rest of the country understand we were now engaged in a new war, whether the battles were immediately visible or no. Welcome to our new forever war: the Information War.”

In this interview, Riggleman offers unique insights about the extremist threat facing America and offers hope for the future.

Please watch, then tell me what you think!

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