Understanding the critical role of the sovereign powers of the states as a redoubt beyond the reach of Trump’s increasingly autocratic power is really the entire game right now, at least for the next 18 months and, in various measures, almost certainly through the beginning of 2029. People can march, advocate, campaign, donate to candidates, all the stuff. But in many ways the most important thing right now is both communicating to and demanding of state officials that they act on this latent power.
There are key areas where Democrats in Congress may have moments of power, the ability to slow a few things down. But to a great degree, the battle is already lost within the federal government until the next election. It’s only in the states where opponents of Donald Trump hold executive power outside the reach of and the hierarchies of the federal government. That’s where the whole game is. It is strategic depth not in extent or remoteness of territory but in the structure of government and the state. And states have vast amounts of power, far more than we tend to realize because we’ve never been in a position where the mundane daily activities of state and local government have become so critical — its taxing powers, its policing powers, the ways in which the federal government actually struggles to effectively extend its powers to the local level at scale without the active participation of local government.
Something Jason Sattler wrote yesterday needs repeating this morning:
Everything we do makes it easier for our neighbors to stand up or sit down for this regime. We all know there’s a crisis coming that will force all who pay attention to make a choice that could define the rest of their lives.
Will people do it? In most cases, it depends on what they see us doing next.
SEE us doing. That’s the key.
How the less-engaged make up their minds about political matters, Anand Giridharadas observed (based on Anat’s work), is more akin to how they decide to buy pants: What’s everyone else wearing this year? What are normal people like me doing? Not in one-and-done big rallies but every day. Your resistance must be visible and persistent for that to work and give the less engaged permission to join the resistance movement. Calling your senator five days a week is fine, but which of your neighbors sees that?
Plus, if you want people to join your party, throw a better party. We’re out in the streets multiple times a week now. I bring dance music.
A friend pointed to this TikTok by someone going by @logicnliberty. She advocates a unified front by blue-state governors with trifectas. It’s not that they are not already unified, coordinating, and suing. They are. Govs. Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Kathy Hochul are speaking out and holding press conferences. (State AGs too.) But not necessarily as a team. Are they leveraging their trifectas proactively to erect firewalls in their states against Trump’s gutting of the Constitution? They should.
(snip-TikTok video embedded on the page)
Would the press cover it if they did? We are already in the slow civil war Jeff Sharlet described. The blue and the gray meets the blue and the red. Run with it. The press loves controversy. Generate more, blue state governors.
There are key areas where Democrats in Congress may have moments of power, the ability to slow a few things down. But to a great degree, the battle is already lost within the federal government until the next election. It’s only in the states where opponents of Donald Trump hold executive power outside the reach of and the hierarchies of the federal government. That’s where the whole game is. It is strategic depth not in extent or remoteness of territory but in the structure of government and the state. And states have vast amounts of power, far more than we tend to realize because we’ve never been in a position where the mundane daily activities of state and local government have become so critical — its taxing powers, its policing powers, the ways in which the federal government actually struggles to effectively extend its powers to the local level at scale without the active participation of local government.
Understanding the critical role of the sovereign powers of the states as a redoubt beyond the reach of Trump’s increasingly autocratic power is really the entire game right now, at least for the next 18 months and, in various measures, almost certainly through the beginning of 2029. People can march, advocate, campaign, donate to candidates, all the stuff. But in many ways the most important thing right now is both communicating to and demanding of state officials that they act on this latent power.
And those actions must be not only public, but in-your-face public. Their actions and yours.
The human heart hangs on to hope until there’s no other choice. People will not fight back in the ways that will work, until they realize there is no other choice, until the only other choice is their own imprisonment or death, or that of someone they love. For many of us, that moment is already here. But for most of us, it’s not.
As many of you mentioned in the comments, my previous cartoon was based on the globe scene from “The Great Dictator”. Putting aside that Trump couldn’t possibly be that athletic, I chose to base my multi-panel cartoon on that scene because I was looking for a concept which illustrated Trump’s need to project that he’s the big guy, the leader of the free world who summons all the other little countries. All the theater and pageantry the White House put on the last several days had everything to do with Trump’s narcissism and desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
If you haven’t seen the Charlie Chaplin film and that brilliant scene, I encourage you to do so. Chaplin was prescient in his urgent warning to the world about Hitler and the Nazi ideology. I wish we could see what he would have created for our situation today.
D.C. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office instructs federal prosecutors not to press felony charges against people openly carrying shotguns and rifles in the Capital.
August 21, 1831 Nat Turner, a 30-year-old man legally owned by a child, and six other slaves began a violent insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia.They began by killing the child’s stepfather, Joseph Travis, and his family. Within the next 24 hours, Turner and, ultimately, about 40 followers killed the families who owned adjacent slaveholding properties, nearly 60 whites, while freeing and inciting other slaves to join them.Militia and federal troops were called out, and the uprising was suppressed with 55 African Americans including Turner executed by hanging in Jerusalem, Virginia, and hundreds more killed by white mobs and vigilantes in revenge. More about Nat Turner Nat Turner’s confession
August 21, 1968 The Czechoslovakian people spontaneously and nonviolently resisted invasion of their country of 14 million by hundreds of thousands of troops and 5000+ tanks from the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact countries.The troops were enforcing the overthrow and arrest of Alexander Dubcek and his government. They had been implementing significant democratic reforms known collectively as “socialism with a human face,” or the Prague Spring. Cover of the magazine Kvety, with a photograph of the statue of St. Wenceslas in Wenceslas Square in the center of Prague. Graffiti on the statue reads “Soldiers go home” in Russian and “Dubcek – Svoboda” in Czech. Hundreds attempted to obstruct invading tanks. Both Czechs and Slovaks argued with the soldiers and refused all cooperation with the occupying armies while showing broad support for the deposed government and its reform program. Moscow relented and returned Dubcek to office, at least temporarily. Prague Spring in retrospect Czech perspective
August 21, 1971 Two grenades killed and wounded members of the leadership of the Philippines’ Liberal Party during a rally in Manila’s Plaza Miranda. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos accused a leader of the party, Benigno Aquino, of the bombing and arrested him, labeling him a communist. Liberal Party Secretary-General Aquino, an effective young leader and Marcos opponent, was imprisoned, mostly in solitary confinement, for seven years until allowed exile to the U.S., ostensibly for medical treatment.
August 21, 1976 Approximately 20,000 people, mainly women, from both Protestant and Catholic areas of Belfast, Northern Ireland, attended a Peace People’s rally at Ormeau Park.
August 21, 1983 Exiled popular Philippine political leader Benigno Aquino was assassinated by soldiers of the Aviation Security Command as he crossed the tarmac at Manila International Airport. Benigno Aquino He had spent three years of asylum in the U.S. Upon his return, he intended to lead the political opposition to President Ferdinand Marcos and the martial law he had imposed. During the plane trip across the Pacific, he had commented to reporters, “I suppose there’s a physical danger because you know assassination’s part of public service . . . My feeling is we all have to die sometime and if it’s my fate to die by an assassin’s bullet, so be it.” Hundreds of thousands demonstrated against Marcos.
Ferdinand Marcos The Aquino funeral drew millions and gave impetus to the broad-based People’s Power movement which eventually forced Marcos from power. Read more about Aquino
August 21, 1991 A coup against Soviet Union President Mikhail S. Gorbachev by hard-line Communist Party members (State Emergency Committee), collapsed in the face of popular opposition. Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin, having quit the Party the previous year, had called for a general strike. Mikhail S. Gorbachev | Boris N.Yelsin
August 21, 1998 Samuel Bowers, the 73-year-old former Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was convicted in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, of ordering a firebombing that killed civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer 32 years before. Bowers had also been instrumental in the killing of three other civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi for which he was never charged. On Vernon Dahmer’s tombstone are the words, “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.” Samuel Bowers 32 years to justice Dahmer’s home after the bombing
(It’s a newsletter I receive, and I don’t have a link for what I’ve copied and am pasting, but there are links within the piece. Enjoy.)
AUGUST 17 — AUGUST 23
Angela Davis debuts on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. In 1969, the legendary author and activist Angela Davis was a newly minted assistant philosophy processor at UCLA. But she was also an avowed Communist, and as a result, then-Governor Ronald Regan tried to have her fired before she’d begun any actual teaching. No luck: Davis’s dismissal didn’t hold up in court, and her first class had to be moved to a bigger classroom to accommodate the 2,000 students who had signed up for it—but she would finally be fired again nine months later, for “inflammatory rhetoric” in public speeches. Davis was an outspoken supporter of the Black Panthers and was fervently against the Vietnam War, but arguably her most scandalous activist activities at the time were in defense of the Soledad Brothers, three Black inmates imprisoned in Soledad, CA, who were accused of killing a white guard. In 1970, guns registered to Davis were used in an attack on the nearby Marin County Civic Center; the perpetrators hoped to take hostages to bargain for the inmates’ release, but instead left four casualties. Davis, despite not being at the scene, was charged with murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy charges. She couldn’t be found, and so on August 18, 1970, by order of J. Edgar Hoover, Davis became the third woman ever to be included on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Eight weeks later, Davis was finally arrested in a New York motel; the trial that followed catapulted her to international fame—and turned her into a revolutionary icon—as her supporters, who viewed her as a political prisoner, chanted “Free Angela!” across the globe.In 1972, after 16 months in prison, she was acquitted of all charges by an all-white jury. “It took a worldwide movement of people to acquit Miss Davis,” noted one of her attorneys, Howard Moore Jr., but it shouldn’t have. “Justice should be the routine of the system,” he added.
THIS IS WHY THEY BAN IT: “Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation. ” –Angela Davis
I have been waiting for the show to clip this interview. I watched it live when he was interviewed. I was blown away by Frost. He is the kind of Democratic elected members we need and the kind of candidates we should vote for. Please give the interview a watch. Hugs
The Overton Window is a model that describes the range of policies considered acceptable at a given time by the public and policymakers. It’s the spectrum of ideas that are legitimate, feasible choices, and anything that falls outside of the window is considered too extreme for serious consideration. For instance, the idea of deploying the National Guard, or even the military, on American streets to control the local population is something we would have considered far outside of the Window for decades.
Think of what Donald Trump is doing in the District of Columbia in these terms. He’s made up a crisis—a wave of crime that doesn’t exist. The law in the District is different from how it is elsewhere because of limited home rule and a law that was drafted, at least arguably, to give the president alone the ability to declare an emergency that would permit control of local law enforcement. Trump tried it in Los Angeles, but ran into issues, like the Governor’s objection and the Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents direct law enforcement by the Guard and the military. But in the District of Columbia, Trump has asserted the ability to seize control of the Metropolitan Police for at least thirty days and longstanding DOJ interpretation of the law says Posse Comitatus doesn’t apply in D.C.
Trump is using the quasi-federal status of the District to socialize the idea that he can:
make up an emergency and no one can challenge his thinking
seize control of local law enforcement
use the National Guard for direct law enforcement purpose
For the casual observer of American politics, he’s creating a new normal and shifting the Overton Window to include a presidential takeover of American cities.
Next stop, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Oakland, New York and Chicago, all cities Trump said were “bad, very bad,” without explanation. All cities where the law is less friendly to a Trump takeover than it is in the nation’s capital. But Trump has been more than willing to brazen it out in court and live to fight in the Supreme Court, where he hopes for, and has frequently been rewarded with, a decision that hands over more power to the unitary executive. To be able to last out the appeal, Trump needs to make sure that the public isn’t so outraged that he has to pull back. Hence, the need to move the Overton Window.
A potential pitfall for Trump is that outside D.C., he’ll need to convince courts, where his moves will certainly be challenged, that his determination of an emergency or other condition necessary to allow him to interfere with state and local control is not reviewable. Since his first day in office, when he declared an emergency at the border, Trump has been relying on that notion, that contrary to the checks and balances the Founding Fathers set up, any decision he makes that there is a national emergency can’t be challenged in the courts. Then, he declared an emergency that permitted him to make the (false) claim that the Venezuelan drug cartel Tren de Aragua was invading the United States, which set up his inhumane deportations of people to CECOT prison in El Salvador without due process. Most recently, it has been tariffs, predicated on the claim that “foreign trade and economic practices” have led to a “national emergency.” In each instance, Trump has faked an emergency, while pushing the courts to say that they cannot review his decisions. So far, the lower federal courts seem to be skeptical. At some point, that issue will make its way to the Supreme Court. If SCOTUS lets him get away with that, our position becomes that much more precarious.
Understood this way, what’s happening this weekend in the District of Columbia is a matter that should concern all of us. We cannot afford to let the Overton Window move. Our conversations with the people around us matter and it’s a moment where we need to make real the spectre of armed and masked troops marching through our streets—not just those in other people’s neighborhoods.
Last week, we discussed how small of a force the D.C. National Guard is. There are reports that early this week, National Guard troops from other states, Trump-friendly red states like West Virginia, Ohio, and South Carolina, will arrive to assist in whatever it is that Trump thinks he’s doing—surely not fighting crime, since these troops aren’t trained to do that. If Trump wanted to help reduce crime, he’d be funding data-driven best practices that are shown to work and that have, in fact, been bringing down crime in the District, as then-interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin announced Trump had done during his first 100 days in office. Make sure you point out the incredible hypocrisy by Trump when he justifies his actions by claiming crime is out of control.
The most important news is that Americans are not giving way to Trump. As the pictures sent to me by protestors show, people were out in the District of Columbia today, refusing to be intimidated by a president who wants to convince us that sending out masked law enforcement agents and armed troops on the streets of the nation’s capital, and any other city for that matter, is within his power. It is not. We will not tolerate his creeping totalitarianism. We are not obligated to accept his power play or make any of this easy for him, as he takes a well-worn page from every authoritarian’s playbook. We are not that country and he is not a king—nor a dictator.
On Friday, Judge Ana Cecilia Reyes, born in Uruguay and appointed to the district court in D.C. by Joe Biden in 2023, wasted no time in scheduling a hearing after the District filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s attempt to exceed the power granted by the home rule law in his attempt to take over the Metropolitan Police. The previous night, Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to replace the D.C. Chief with the head of the DEA.
You have to like a judge who has this picture of herself with her pup on Wikipedia and reportedly brings her dog to work. Such a breath of fresh air during an administration where the president has no pets and the Secretary of DHS admitted that she shot hers.
Judge Reyes began the hearing by clarifying that she was not holding an evidentiary hearing and would not get into issues that would require development of the facts, like whether there was actually an emergency or a legitimate federal purpose behind Trump’s takeover. For purposes of the hearing, she assumed that Trump was correct on those points, saying she would go into them this coming week if necessary, before delving into the legal issues surrounding Trump’s order.
In the end, Attorney General Pam Bondi backed down, agreeing to let Metropolitan Police Department Chief Pamela Smith continue to run the Department’s day-to-day operations under Mayor Muriel Bowser’s orders. She wrenched a concession from the district, directing Bowser to order the police department to assist in federal immigration enforcement. There is likely another legal confrontation coming where that process may conflict with laws passed by the District, which is a sanctuary city.
And as for Trump’s claim that he was worried about crime? Chief Smith wrote in an affidavit accompanying the District’s lawsuit that, “If effectuated, the Bondi Order would upend the command structure of MPD, endangering the safety of the public and law enforcement officers alike.” Imagine your local police department being run by the attorney general or his designee instead of the people who know your city and its needs the best. We’ve come full circle to where we started: Trump is making up the need for any of this. It’s about moving the Overton Window to give him the opportunity to seize more power, in more places, in a distinctly un-American fashion.
We shouldn’t forget about what was on the front pages before Trump started all of this and his embarrassing knee-bending exercise with Putin in Alaska on Friday. Trump has something to hide. And, apparently, he’s willing to take some hits to try and knock it off the public’s radar screen. Let’s not let anyone forget about it: Trump could release the Epstein files tomorrow.
Henry Stout runs the neo-Nazi Aryan Freedom Network with his partner. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart
HOCHATOWN, Oklahoma – Wearing cargo shorts, flip-flops and a baseball cap shading his eyes from the sun, Dalton Henry Stout blends in easily in rural America.
Except for the insignia on his hat. It bears the skull and crossbones of the infamous “Death’s Head” SS units that oversaw Nazi Germany’s concentration camps – and the initials “AFN,” short for Aryan Freedom Network, the neo-Nazi group Stout leads with his partner.
From a modest ranch house in Texas, the couple oversee a network they say has been turbocharged by President Donald Trump’s return to the White House. They point to Trump’s rhetoric – his attacks on diversity initiatives, his hardline stance on immigration and his invocation of “Western values” – as driving a surge in interest and recruitment.
Trump “awakened a lot of people to the issues we’ve been raising for years,” Stout told Reuters. “He’s the best thing that’s happened to us.”
While the Aryan Freedom Network and other neo-Nazi groups remain on the outermost edges of American politics, broadly regarded as toxic by conservatives and mainstream America, they are increasingly at the center of far-right public demonstrations and acts of violence, according to interviews with a dozen members of extremist groups, nine experts on political extremism and a review of data on far-right violence.
Several trends have converged since Trump’s re-election, Reuters found. Trump’s rhetoric has galvanized a new wave of far-right activists, fueling growth in white supremacist ranks. Trump’s pardons of January 6 rioters and a shift in federal law enforcement’s focus toward immigration have also led many on the far right to believe that federal investigations into white nationalists are no longer a priority.
[Trump] awakened a lot of people to the issues we’ve been raising for years. He’s the best thing that’s happened to us.
Henry Stout, a leader of the white nationalist group Aryan Freedom Network
And the boundaries of the far right itself are shifting. Ideas once confined to fringe groups like the Proud Boys – who helped lead the January 6 siege – are now more visible in Republican politics, from election denialism to rhetoric portraying immigrants as “invaders.” Trump’s public support and pardons for far-right figures helped normalize those views, the researchers said. As the Make America Great Again movement has come to define the party’s identity, the line separating the far right from mainstream conservatism has grown increasingly difficult to draw, they added.
What was once extreme now blends more easily into the broader far-right, not because those extreme groups have changed, but because the terrain around them has, said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a nonprofit that tracks hate speech and extremism. “A Proud Boy doesn’t even seem that scary anymore because of the normalization process,” she said.
That shift has coincided with a surge in white nationalist activity. White extremists are committing a growing proportion of U.S. political violence, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, a nonprofit research outfit that tracks global conflicts. In 2020, such groups were linked to 13% of all U.S. extremist-related demonstrations and acts of political violence, or 57 of the events ACLED tracked. By 2024, they accounted for nearly 80%, or 154 events.
Ideas once confined to fringe groups like the Proud Boys are now more visible in mainstream Republican politics. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart
Trump has denied that he supports white extremism, and the White House rejects the notion that his rhetoric promotes racism.
“President Trump is a president for all Americans and hate has no place in our country,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in response to questions for this story. “President Trump is focused on uniting our country, improving our economy, securing our borders, and establishing peace across the globe.” Fields also pointed to a significant rise in support for Trump among Black voters. In last year’s election, his share of the Black vote nearly doubled from 2020 to about 15%.
Trump has batted away accusations of racism. At a campaign rally last year, he declared, “I’m not a Nazi. I’m the opposite of a Nazi.” A few months earlier, he told an interviewer that he can’t be racist because he has “so many Black friends.”
Even as he has made inroads with non-white voters, Trump has consistently drawn support from white nationalist and extremist groups while using racially divisive rhetoric. He promoted the false claim that Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, was not born in the U.S. In his 2024 campaign, he suggested immigrants commit violent crimes because “it’s in their genes,” a remark condemned by many as racist.
Stout said his group opposes violence. Yet the Aryan Freedom Network openly advocates preparing for a “Racial Holy War.” It promotes white superiority ideology, seeks to unify elements of the broader white nationalist movement and actively recruits former members of other extremist groups.
The Trump administration has scaled back efforts to counter domestic extremism, redirecting resources toward immigration enforcement and citing the southern border as the top security threat. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has reduced staffing in its Domestic Terrorism Operations Section. The Department of Homeland Security has cut personnel in its violence prevention office.
Some specialists in domestic terrorism say these moves could embolden extremists by weakening U.S. capacity to detect and disrupt threats. The DHS and FBI have defended the cuts, saying they remain committed to fighting domestic terrorism. The FBI said in a statement it allocates resources based on threat analysis and “the investigative needs of the Bureau,” and that it remains committed to investigating domestic terrorism.
“RACIST ROYALTY”
In his first interview with any news organization, Stout met Reuters journalists in April at a restaurant in Hochatown, Oklahoma, a quiet town known for its hiking and fishing about an hour’s drive north of their Texas home. He was joined by his partner, who goes by the name Daisy Barr.
Stout says AFN is focused on staying within the law. “We got to watch our Ps and Qs,” he said. Then his tone turned apocalyptic: “And when the day comes, that will be the day – that’s when violence will solve everything.” While he offered no timeline, researchers who study domestic extremism say the comment reflects a strategy among some far-right groups: operate within the law while openly predicting a moment of upheaval.
The Aryan Freedom Network first drew national attention in 2021 after organizing a “White Unity” conference in Longview, Texas. By the following year, it was distributing flyers in cities across the country. One in Texas featured racist caricatures of Black Americans – one swinging from a street lamp amid rubble and an overturned car – alongside the caption: “At the current rate of decline what will America’s major cities look like in ten years?”
An AFN flyer found in West Bend, Wisconsin, in a plastic bag. Photo via West Bend Police Department. Image was redacted by Reuters to remove group’s website address.
Another AFN flyer, targeting immigrants. The plastic bags were weighted with wood pellets to make them easier for canvassers to toss into people’s yards. Photo via West Bend Police Department.
AFN also began staging protests, often targeting drag events and LGBTQ+ gatherings. Stout says the demonstrations were designed to attract recruits. Its conferences and annual “Aryan Fests” have become networking hubs for the far right, drawing attendees from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and other white nationalist organizations, according to two individuals affiliated with those movements. Reuters was unable to independently verify the claim.
The pseudoscientific notion of a superior white Aryan race – essentially Germanic – was a core tenet of Hitler’s Nazi regime. AFN gatherings brim with Nazi memes: Swastikas are ritually set ablaze and chants of “white power” echo through the woods. AFN’s website pays specific tribute to violent white supremacist groups of the past, including The Order, whose members killed a Jewish radio host in 1984. Two key members responsible for the killing were sentenced to lengthy prison terms and are now deceased.
Stout’s beliefs are rooted in the Christian Identity movement, which claims that white Europeans, not Jews, are the true Israelites of biblical scripture and therefore God’s chosen people. Stout and Barr also claim that Black Americans, under Jewish influence, are leading a Communist revolution – an ideology that fuses racial supremacy with far-right conspiracy theories.
Stout, 34, and Barr, 48, were born into self-avowed white supremacist families with deep ties to the Ku Klux Klan, infamous for its white robes, burning crosses and long history of racist violence, including decades of lynchings and terrorist campaigns against Black Americans.
As a child, Stout said he attended Klan ceremonies and white nationalist youth camps. He recalls reading translations of SS training manuals from Nazi-era Germany. And while other girls were playing video games, Barr said she was wrapping torches in burlap strips, for secret KKK cross-burning ceremonies.
Though they now identify as American Nazis, their ideology is anchored in the KKK and other white extremist groups. Their families are well known to historians of the movement. Stout’s father, George Stout, was a “grand dragon” in the White Knights of Texas, a KKK offshoot. He declined to comment for this story.
Barr’s late father was a KKK “grand wizard” from Indiana who was sentenced to seven years in prison for holding two journalists at gunpoint. AFN requires members to use aliases; she chose “Daisy Barr” after the name of a female Klan leader of the 1920s who sold Klan robes and died in a car crash.
AFN leaders have links to the Ku Klux Klan. Here, a KKK member attends a gathering marking the 160th anniversary of the of the Klan’s founding, outside Maysville, Kentucky, in May. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart
One person familiar with the couple described their 2020 marriage as a union of “racist royalty.”
They filed for divorce two years later, but Stout said the split was in name only – a legal move to shield their assets in case they faced civil rights lawsuits like those that once bankrupted the Klan and Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi group held liable in a 1999 civil suit for inciting violence.
Stout and Barr declined to share membership numbers but said AFN now has nearly twice as many chapters as the 23 it claimed in early 2023.
The Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium, a private research group that monitors extremist movements, estimates AFN’s members have grown to between 1,000 and 1,500. “We collect and record every event of theirs,” said TRAC researcher Muskan Sangwan. Some of the earliest chapters, including those in Texas, likely began with around 100 members each, Sangwan said, suggesting the group may have had roughly 200 members in its initial stages.
Chris Magyarics, a senior researcher at the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy organization that monitors antisemitic harassment, said he was skeptical AFN was so big but said he had no independent data on its size. “The previous largest neo-Nazi group only had a couple of hundred,” he said, referring to the National Socialist Movement, which has been in steady decline.
Reuters was unable to independently establish the extent of AFN’s membership.
Despite the uncertainty over its numbers, AFN is on the radar screens of independent researchers. Jon Lewis, a research fellow specializing in domestic extremism at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, said the group has been “really popular” among far-right “accelerationists,” a term used by white supremacists who advocate violence to hasten a race war.
Stout said his group has benefited from the decline of the Proud Boys following the Capitol attack. Once prominent for street clashes during the Trump administration, the Proud Boys have faced legal setbacks and public scrutiny since many of its members were convicted – and later pardoned by Trump – for their roles in the January 6 Capitol riots. The group describes its ideology as “Western chauvinism.” Critics say the group uses the term “Western” rather than “white” to veil its racism, a charge the Proud Boys’ defenders deny.
Stout described groups like the Proud Boys as “civic nationalists” – movements that draw in followers with patriotic rhetoric, then serve as stepping stones toward more overtly racist organizations like AFN or the Klan.
“A lot of newbies, new people to the movement, join that type of movement before they join us,” Stout said.
Reuters was unable to reach a Proud Boy representative for comment.
Members of the Ku Klux Klan take part in a cross-burning to mark the group’s 160th anniversary, outside Maysville, Kentucky, in May. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart
WEAPONS AND RACE WAR
Although Stout said the Aryan Freedom Network rejects violence, firearms and tactical training remain central to its identity and feature prominently in its gatherings and recruitment efforts, according to a review of federal court records.
One former member, Andrew Munsinger, built and traded semi-automatic AR-15 rifles and other weapons, using a machine shop to fabricate untraceable parts, according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court. He boasted to other AFN members of stockpiling ammunition and constructing explosive devices, and claimed to have pointed a shotgun at a sleeping prosecutor, the affidavit said.
Munsinger, who went by the alias “Thor,” was arrested last year in Minneapolis on federal charges of illegally possessing firearms. As a convicted felon, he was barred under federal law from owning weapons. He attended at least five AFN events in one year, the FBI said. Agents described him as an adherent of accelerationism, which seeks to provoke a race war through violence.
An excerpt from the federal arrest affidavit for Andrew Munsinger.
AFN is “an umbrella organization for other white-supremacist organizations,” the affidavit said. Documents relating to Munsinger’s case, including testimony from an FBI informant who infiltrated the group, offer a glimpse inside its operations: firearms training across several states, encrypted communications focused on weapons, a recruitment event at a lakeside bar in Ohio, and new members building timber swastikas in a ritualistic initiation.
Stout said he disavowed Munsinger, who was convicted by a federal jury in April of illegally possessing firearms and ammunition, as well as trafficking marijuana. He is awaiting sentencing. Munsinger and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
Stout said his network has links to the Klan, which has splintered and shrunk dramatically since its peak a century ago.
In May, Reuters attended a modern-day Klan ceremony held in a clearing deep within the woods on private land in northeastern Kentucky. William Bader, leader of the Trinity Knights, a small Klan faction, donned a purple silk robe and conical hood as he presided over the swearing in of about half a dozen heavily tattooed new members.
Item 1 of 5 New initiates are blindfolded and walked along a trail as part of an induction ceremony during a gathering and cross-burning marking the Klan’s anniversary outside Maysville, Kentucky, in May. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart
[1/5]New initiates are blindfolded and walked along a trail as part of an induction ceremony during a gathering and cross-burning marking the Klan’s anniversary outside Maysville, Kentucky, in May. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart
In an interview, Bader said Trump has energized the white nationalist movement. “White people,” he said, “are finally seeing something going their way for once.” Bader said he had previously attended an AFN event without elaborating.
Steve Bowers, another Klan official at the ceremony, which didn’t involve AFN, said he isn’t a fan of Trump because of his administration’s close ties with Israel. But he said many white nationalists are fully behind the president. “People think he’s going to save the white race in America,” said Bowers, dressed in a white KKK robe and hood, decorated with two blood crosses on the chest.
The Klan once claimed as many as six million members in the 1920s. It had dwindled to an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 members across 72 chapters by 2015, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that tracks extremist groups. More recent figures are unavailable, a research analyst at the center said.
AFN has adopted certain tactics and rituals of the Klan, including widespread distribution of racist flyers.
AFN’s flyers have appeared in multiple cities and towns, from Florida to Washington state, according to police reports. Stout and Barr said they view them as a recruitment tool. Police in West Bend, Wisconsin, said hundreds of flyers targeting immigrants were distributed in May. One flyer found in the Wisconsin village of Mukwonago read, “Tired of being discriminated against because you’re white? Join.”
Stout said members are instructed to distribute flyers at night – what he calls “night rides,” echoing the Klan’s term for its historic terrorism campaigns against Black people.
In another echo of the Klan, its signature cross burnings, swastikas are set alight at AFN gatherings. In an AFN video posted online, Stout stands on the bed of a pickup truck, masked and flanked by armed guards, arm raised in a Nazi salute.
Still image from AFN video shows Stout on the bed of a pickup truck, arm raised in a Nazi salute. AFN website.
Still image from AFN video found on their website
“White power!” he shouts in a hoarse Texas drawl, wearing a chest rig for rifle magazines. His audience returns the Nazi salute. “White Power!” they call out.
At the restaurant in Oklahoma, asked why he believes his group is gaining momentum, Stout offered a simple explanation.
Scottie's Playtime 