1392: Jeff Schoep | An American Nazi’s Long Road to Redemption

Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Jeff Schoep: You know it's not something that the mainstream society likes, but you get this mindset amongst yourself. I've got this mindset that I was now a part of this cause that was something greater than myself or something that I was going to be a part of, that I was going to change the world, that I was going to save my country and all these different kinds of things.

As crazy as it sounds, people that are involved in this, a lot of them feel that it's patriotic, they're doing their duty. So I thought I was going to help save the white race from extermination and all these kind of things. So, and then it becomes confirmation bias because once you're in that environment, it's very cult-like.

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Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, a neo-Nazi's car breaks down in a predominantly black neighborhood in Detroit. He thinks he knows exactly how this ends.

Instead, strangers fix his car, refuse his money, and ask him to pay it forward instead. He came in worried about his engine. He left with a much bigger problem.

His entire worldview was leaking. Today we're sitting down with Jeff Schoep. For roughly a quarter century, Jeff led the National Socialist Movement, an explicitly neo-Nazi organization that he helped turn into a national recruiting and propaganda operation.

He took it from a ragtag bunch of semi-disorganized chapters and modernized the entire organization, implemented a ranking and promotion system, organized rallies, meetings, recruitment, a record label, and more. After 25 years at the top, the cracks started to form, and he's since left the organization, working now with advocacy groups to atone for his past. His memoir is American Nazi: From Hate to Humanity.

This is not a conversation about handing out absolution. It's about how hatred becomes identity, how a leader builds a machine around grievance, what finally breaks that worldview, and what accountability can possibly look like after decades of damage. Here we go with Jeff Schoep.

It's funny, the reason I booked this was I was going through old email that was stuck in some folder, and I saw an email from Daryl Davis from 2019. This is 2026. And I was like, I should probably dig this out and answer it and see if these people are still doing what they're doing.

And finally, we're here, a thousand episodes later, because Daryl Davis was episode 539, and we're at like 1400 now.

Jeff Schoep: Oh wow.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jeff Schoep: Daryl's my brother, man. We do a lot together.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, he said that, and I was like, okay, that's a pretty good endorsement. And for people who don't know who Daryl Davis is, what's the best way to describe him? A jazz musician who talks to guys who are in Nazi groups, Ku Klux Klan, hate groups, and shows them the human side of himself, and then de-radicalizes them slowly?

Race reconciliator. Yeah. He's a very interesting guy.

Jeff, you open the book with this recruit that you call Matt, and you basically lure him to an apartment. Tell me what happens here.

Jeff Schoep: It's a dark scene. There was a guy that, he had been involved in gangs and things like that, and he had been a skinhead before that, but then he had went and got involved in some street gangs and got out of that, and then came looking to get involved in the movement. So he joined up.

A lot of the people in the group didn't want him involved. And I said, you know, we'll take a chance on him. He says he's dedicated to the movement. We'll give him a chance.

And basically I told him, I said, if you cross us, we're going to put you in the ground, pure and simple, because I figured I was going out on a limb for him. It was not a popular idea.

And it turned out that he was still involved in that stuff. He had been around in the group for a while, was doing fine, and then he disappeared. And people were like, I bet he went back to the gang. I bet he went back to the gang.

And I said, well, let's find out. And so I called him up and I was faking a voice on the other end of the phone in Ebonics, and I was pretending to be a gang member.

And I thought, this isn't going to work. He's going to figure it out that it's me. And he didn't.

And basically he told what he thought was a gang affiliate on the phone, how to track us down, how to get us to come and meet with them, where that I met new recruits and things of that nature. And after that, we set him up, had some girls go pick him up and lured him to an apartment, sat him down in a chair and played that tape for him. And then it exploded into violence.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm sure. Yeah. But the violence was calculated, right?

It wasn't just like, we just want to talk to you. I mean, it was like, we're going to beat your ass because you're going to out us. So his other gang had beef with you guys, I guess, because is that what was going on? Is that why?

Jeff Schoep: It would have been a street gang. So that would have been a problem for us in our world. That was an issue. That was the problem. So they didn't like us on their turf and that was an issue. So definitely.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jeff Schoep: You had asked if it was calculated. It was calculated violence in a couple of ways, because one, I wanted to send a message to him that wasn't going to be tolerated. But two, it was also to put a psychological imprint on other people that were involved in the group that this is what happens when you betray us.

Jordan Harbinger: That totally makes sense. Did he end up escaping from that? You probably can't even say this on the show, but I assume you weren't going to kill him. You're going to scare the crap out of him so that everybody else saw that. So he escaped shoeless, literally, I think.

Jeff Schoep: One of the things in the skinhead movement basically is if you're stripped of your flight jacket and your boots, that's the greatest dishonor there is. So when he was sat down in the chair and I've asked him straight up, I gave him the opportunity to tell the truth. And I said, have you been hanging out with gangbangers?

And he says, no. And I said, let me play you this. And I walked over, pressed play on the, this was back in the days of cassette tapes.

Jordan Harbinger: It wasn't that long ago, man. We're not that old. I know. It's fine. It's age telling, isn't it? So I took my Discman with Megabass and you're like, okay, nineties. All right. Yeah. This was a long time ago.

Cassettes were around seemingly for so long. And I feel like CDs had a five minute, 15 minute window before becoming completely obsolete. It was like once everything went digital, because tapes were around for decades, right?

And CDs were around, nobody that I knew was buying them the second any sort of MP3 player was available. I guess maybe there were some holdouts for a few years or guys who had huge collections that were just didn't want to see them go. But otherwise it's like nobody has them now, right?

You either have a bunch of digital stuff saved or you've got vinyl. Nobody's farting around with tapes, CDs, none of it. It's either OG or digital only.

Anyway. So that makes me feel old as hell. Sorry.

That's all right. It's not your job to protect my ego on this show. So you asked him if he was gangbanging and you play the tape for him, man, the moment he figured out what was going on must have been pretty scary for him.

Jeff Schoep: Yes. We surrounded him. And when he heard that tape, you know, I cranked it up. So it just went throughout the room and you could hear his voice echoing off the walls. Then the beating started. And he ran for the kitchen in this apartment and grabbed his big butcher knife, swung it around and took off out the door.

Jordan Harbinger: Maybe shouldn't have left the knife out. Not that I'm trying to teach Nazi gangs how to do violence better, but that seems like a mistake.

Jeff Schoep: Right. It was bad. It's certainly something I'm not proud of. That was a long time ago.

Jordan Harbinger: Man. So this is a movement of which you were the leader. So I want to come back to that room and what it says about leadership inside an extremist group. But first, I want to understand the kid who eventually built that room, because you didn't grow up a neo-Nazi. And by the way, can we explain what neo-Nazi is? Because everybody just says Nazi.

Jeff Schoep: Is that not accurate? It's accurate. And when I was in the movement, if somebody said neo-Nazi, neo means new. So my response to that was always, there's nothing new about it. But we weren't necessarily offended by that term. But why do you have got to add the neo to it? There's nothing new about it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I guess the technical reason is because the Nazi party in Germany is done. But maybe before it was so common like it is now, it was confusing if you said Nazi and you were talking about somebody who was not 80 years old or dead already.

Jeff Schoep: And sometimes you're right. And that's exactly it. Because sometimes you'll still get that where people will say, well, if you say Nazi, that means those guys from that era. Not now.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Let's not split hairs. Although you guys don't have any of those either.

By the way, is the shaved head thing mandatory because it is called skinheads or is that just a style choice or are we just old now? And so you don't have any hair. Tell me the truth.

Jeff Schoep: It started falling out. But no, it wasn't mandatory back then. And I should differentiate with skinheads. There's different types of skinheads, too. You know, you've got your neo-Nazi skinheads, you've got your traditional skins, you've got your non-political skins, you've got sharps, which is anti-racist skinheads. You've got all sorts of things like that. So the organization that I was involved in was the National Socialist Movement. That was the Nazi party. It wasn't just skinheads. But I had the skinhead look for quite a while, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: It seems confusing to me that the anti-racist movement has a skinhead version. It's kind of like saying there's shirts and skins except for nobody has a shirt. So you just have to figure out some other way. It's like, OK, can't one team just pick something else? Why are we both skinheads? It is low maintenance and good for probably violence, right? Not having any hair. So maybe there's something there. Is there another reason for it?

Jeff Schoep: It was more just a militant look for a lot of the guys that were involved in it. But the whole difference between the competing factions and stuff like that, I always thought it was confusing, too. So a lot of times if we'd run into people, we'd say things like, what do you mean there's other kind of skinheads? No, there's not. They're only Nazis. Only Nazi skins. The other people are making up things. That's how we respond to it at the time.

Jordan Harbinger: I've got to wonder who you were. So you were the commander, right, of this unit. But who were you at age 15 or 16? What did you think your life was going to look like?

Jeff Schoep: As a teenager, I grew up in rural Minnesota. My family worked real hard. My mother was a German immigrant. My grandparents came over from Germany as well. My father was an American. And I grew up in the country, in rural Minnesota. So my goal growing up, I was obsessed with music. That was my big thing. And as a teenager, when I got to be about 18, I was in a band, a long-haired rock and roll band, if you can even imagine. Like Motley Crue. That was my goal.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a far cry from becoming a skinhead. Okay. So you grew up in rural Minnesota. You then moved to Detroit. And how did you end up with this fascination with the Nazi stuff? Was anybody in your immediate family teaching you that Hitler was right? Or did you build that narrative yourself?

Jeff Schoep: My grandfather and my great-uncles had fought in the German army during World War II. And I knew about that history growing up. But I need to explain that with the caveat that they didn't propagandize me. They didn't encourage it. In fact, if anything, they discouraged it. But just knowing that family history, it brought on this fascination for me. And I sought it out. So nobody actually recruited me into it or propagandized me growing up. I was doing all that on my own.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Also, for people who are not history nerds, and I may be getting some of this wrong, so I'm open to being corrected. But if you were, let's say you were 17 and you got drafted into the German army, you are not necessarily a Nazi hardcore believer. You're just a kid who got drafted into the army. There's also a difference between German army and Nazi party member, SS member, armband-wearing type of officer. I lived in Germany as an exchange student. People know this from the show. And I remember meeting older people, including the grandfather of the family that was taking care of me. And they were POWs in the United States. And I was like, oh my gosh, you are a Nazi? And they're like, not really. I was 17. I got drafted. I went to the front. I got captured in five minutes by the Americans. And I ate a lot of really good food and learned a little bit of English in a prison in Maryland. And I don't know. I never really thought about the Nazi thing. I was just fighting for Germany because I had no choice. There's just a difference between, and I don't know what your grandfather did, but there's a pretty good chance he just had to join the army and didn't give a crap about Jews or anything like that. And that wasn't really part of the calculus.

Jeff Schoep: And I'm glad you mentioned that because you're right. A lot of people do get that mixed up. They automatically assume that if you fought in the German army, that you were a Nazi party member. And as far as I know, none of those family members that fought had any party affiliation, which is interesting. And people don't usually ask that either. So I'm glad you brought that up.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I just think it's fair because otherwise you have to then, what, accept that every German was a Nazi in the thirties and forties. That doesn't really make sense. And it's just easier to paint with a broad brush. There were tons of people who didn't agree with it. That's just like there are tons of people now who don't vote for one party or another. When you have a totalitarian government, there's a huge difference between people who are doing the dirty work of that government, people who are cogs in that machine, people who don't want anything to do with it, are apolitical, and then people who are fighting against it. And you can't really paint them all with the same brush as you would an SS unit or something like that. It's not going to be accurate. So family history, what did you choose to extract from those stories from the adults around you that they weren't actually teaching?

Jeff Schoep: I was told from a young age not to ask a lot of questions about it. So my grandmother, she would talk about it a little bit. I was one of those kids that was asking, why does the sun shine? I was that kid. Millions of questions, just boom, always wanting to know things, always interested in learning. So I'm asking not party questions or political questions. Mostly I wanted to hear war stories. I wanted to hear what'd you do in the war and that sort of thing. And as I started getting a little older, then my grandfather was a little more comfortable sharing some of those stories and the family history, whereas my grandmother was more protective about it, where I'm at their house watching World War II stuff on PBS as a kid. And she'd come in the room, why are you watching that? If your opa, your grandfather hears that, it's going to upset him because it's going to remind him of the war. Why are you even interested in that? So everybody in our family thought it was kind of strange that I was drawn to that particular history.

Jordan Harbinger: It depends on the actual draw. Watching war documentaries is not that weird. I think everybody has done that at one point or another. Watching war documentaries because you love the Nazi aesthetic and you're rooting for the bad guys, now that would be problematic in the adult eyes. But at that age, were you doing that or was it just more like, what is this all about?

Jeff Schoep: No. And you know, what's interesting about that is people that are involved in extremist groups of any sort, they think that they're doing something good and noble. If you're attracted to something because you know it's evil and bad, that's a whole different thing that enters into your sociopath category and other mental issues. But to the average extremist, and this goes across from neo-Nazism to far-left extremists like your Antifa groups, your communist groups, to radical Islamic groups like Al-Qaeda or ISIS and things like that, all these people that are involved in these things, for the most part, most of them, I shouldn't say all, but most, believe that they're doing something good and noble. And yeah, so that's how you get really trapped up in it.

Jordan Harbinger: When did the fascination with the history become admiration for the ideology?

Jeff Schoep: That's a good question. I would say probably around 16, age 16. Around that age, I had sought out and got Mein Kampf and read it and then started that journey to searching out this stuff. And I started reading Holocaust revisionism and all kinds of different things like that.

Jordan Harbinger: Got it. Okay. It's funny because I probably also read Mein Kampf at 16, but I'm part Jewish. So I think it was probably for a different reason. But I also remember... It's such a boring book. Oh, boring. I remember not being impressed at all. So whenever someone's like, I read Mein Kampf and I was inspired, I was like, really? Did we read the same book? You must have skipped through that one really quick and got to something far more interesting. Holocaust revisionism can be interesting in a way, and I use that word very loosely because it's despicable nonsense, but any contrarian narrative that makes it look like you're the only one who knows the real history of something is compelling in a weird way. That's why people believe conspiracy theories, right? The flat earthers think they're the only people who know and believe the truth, even if it's complete muck. So I kind of get that at age 16, wanting to be like, no, no, no. Here's something that even all the adults in my life don't really understand is that this is all a big ruse, right? It never really happened, or this is the biggest lie ever told, whatever.

Jeff Schoep: There's a big appeal of it. It's called magical thinking is how the cults would use it. It's called the magical thinking theory, where you have this idea and I sound far out there, but you're the only one that knows it or that the select group knows it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. All right. You're in a band. You're in a band. I wonder if any of this dovetails, right? Because you're reading Mein Kampf, you're reading Holocaust revisionism, and for people who don't know what Holocaust revisionism is, it basically is just that the Holocaust either never happened or that the numbers are totally made up or it's just a big conspiracy or this totally other thing happened that wasn't that at all, yada yada. You're in a band, you're on stage. I wonder if being on stage, getting attention or identity or status or having power over a room, did that blend in with the Nazi stuff at all? Because you eventually become the leader of this movement and leave the band. I feel like, oh, you just started getting whatever it was that you were getting from the band from the hate movement instead. And so you were able to leap. Am I connecting dots that aren't there?

Jeff Schoep: There's some parallels there and some irony, but I don't think they blend together. But I do think learning to have that stage presence that I had when I was in the band helped me later become a better speaker as far as getting up behind the microphone and addressing crowds and things like that. But music was my goal. That was what I wanted to do with my life. And I mentioned in the book, I was doxed early on a radio show when I was like 19 years old and that changed everything. Tell us about that, because that was quite an ambush. This woman pulled off, actually. Yeah, I was going under a fake name. I was going by Jeff Stevens at the time and the head of the organization. I wasn't in charge at that point. And he and I went on this program because the neo-Nazis in South St. Paul, which is where we were marching all over the streets and carrying flags and stuff like that. It was big news story. So now we're getting contacted by radio shows and all these other things. But I was using that fake name for two reasons. To separate my music career from my politics and to protect my family. And so we're on the air and we're on this radio show and it was a really popular show. It was live. And I started spewing anti-Semitic drivel as what I was accustomed to at that age and time. And the lady was running the show. She says, your name is not Jeff Stevens, it's Jeff Schoep. And she spells out my name, letter for letter, very slowly on the air and says where my parents work, where they live. And they lived out in rural Minnesota in this little tiny town. And she says, on the next commercial break, I'm going to call your mother and ask how she raised a son that believed in this sort of thing. My whole heart and stomach, everything just dropped. I felt like, oh my gosh, how did she find this out? And now how am I going to protect my family? It was one of the most horrible feelings I can ever describe.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's interesting that it was a horrible feeling, because it seems like at some point, if you're going to be the leader of a Nazi movement, everyone's going to know. And the whole point is everyone knows, and the more people that know, the better. But at this point, you're drawing the line between edgelord teenager and actual believer, right? Because I know the feeling you're talking about. When I was young, I was probably like 12, I brought a firework in the house and I was like, what would happen if I lit this in the house? And I lit it, and I immediately knew it was a mistake, right, immediately. And I remember thinking, I am so screwed when my parents find out. And your stomach drops, you know, I was opening the windows and running the water and just losing my mind. My parents were obviously not home, I wouldn't have done it if they were. And I just remember thinking like, the adrenaline dump was something like I'd never felt before. It's a really uncomfortable feeling. Okay, so did she call your mother? Because I don't even know if I could stick around for that. This is Barbara Carlson, her radio show.

Jeff Schoep: Were you on air when she called your mom? She tried to call her, but she didn't get her on the phone. But the commercial breaks were constant on these live radio shows. So it was like, when those breaks were going, I'm pleading with her like, hey, this is going to put my family in danger. It's one thing to say whatever you want to me, but please don't put my family in danger. And then I lied on top of it. And I was brought up not to lie, but I was like, my parents don't love me. They've disowned me. They have nothing to do with me. That was the lie. What can I say that can shield them is the first thing that went to my mind and that didn't work. But some of her callers were calling in and saying like, hey, there's crazy people out there that could target this guy's family because they don't agree with what he's doing in his politics. And I can't blame her for being angry about what I was saying. I deserved to be challenged. But at the same time, you know, I was 19 and that changed the trajectory of my life because music was number one. And when that happened, it just put this freefall in my life and into a place and it started damaging all the people around me. My mother's career was upended. She was a lawyer and she was running to be a judge and she had gotten elected to be a judge. This was my understanding of it from the nineties. And she had said that she got a phone call from the governor and the governor had said, Mrs. Schoep, your father fought in the German army during World War II. Your son is a leader in the neo-Nazi movement. I don't feel you're fit to be a judge in this state. And he wouldn't sign off on the formality for her to be a judge. So even talking about that is hard. So when that happened, after I got off the radio show, I'm thinking, now what? Now that Alias is gone, time, I'm not sure exactly when that happened with my mother. Was it two months afterwards? Was it six months afterwards? I don't know, but it happened after the show. And then I thought, now my band, their careers are going to be destroyed. So I quit the band and then I shaved my head, shaved off my long hair that I grew for so many years. And I said, screw it. Now I'm just going to go into the movement. And so I never had the intention to be like the leader of this party or anything like that. It was more of a side interest where music was always number one. And that whole trajectory changed after I got doxxed.

Jordan Harbinger: These guys couldn't figure out why announcing their Nazi affiliation wasn't getting them any girls. Fellas, that is not a dating app algorithm problem. That's the one part of the algorithm working correctly.

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So getting doxed, I understand you were afraid for your family. I think probably you were also afraid for yourself. Forgive me if that assumption is wrong. I think it'd be normal to be also quite afraid of the consequences that could come your way, which they did, right? Like you said, you had to quit your band. It closed off that avenue, right, for you. You weren't necessarily ready to choose that from the sound of it.

Jeff Schoep: No, I had no intention to choose politics over music. Politics was a side interest and it was something that I was dabbling in. I was obsessed with that part of German history and our family history, but music was number one. And in my teenage brain at 19, when that happened, it was like, now I have no choice. The choices are all off the table. My life is over. I can't move forward anywhere from this. So I wouldn't say that I was necessarily afraid. I was more looking at all the damage that was caused across my family and I didn't want it to happen to other people. And then it came in later, you know, I'm worried about my grandparents as well because then I'm being confronted about their history and things as well.

Jordan Harbinger: Looking back at yourself as a teenager, so before you're 19 and you do the radio show, what is the first outward sign that the World War II history interest has gone beyond curiosity?

Jeff Schoep: Well, I would say when I formally joined the movement, I went from just being reading stuff and writing to groups and things like that until about age 18, I joined up and then I got active in the streets and things of that nature. So at that point it became an active interest.

Jordan Harbinger: So you just cold emailed these people or it's not even email. This is what the 90s probably. So you just shot them a letter and they were like, oh yeah, join our white supremacist club. I'm surprised I didn't think it was a trap or anything. I guess maybe some of them did.

Jeff Schoep: These groups are full of informants and things like that. But how I found the group, because I was looking for groups, I wanted to join one and get involved. I found a book at the library because I was reading all this stuff I could find on it and it was written by a sociologist or something. In the back, and I won't even say what the book is, it's not on the air because I don't want people to go out and get it. Now everything's just a click away. But back then the sociologist had written a book and in the back of the book, in the index, glossary, whatever you call it, was all the groups that had participated from the white power movement. So now you have skinhead groups, militias, everything you can imagine was listed back there. So that's where I got the list of start writing people.

Jordan Harbinger: Did it make you feel like you were joining history? Because you're joining a fringe club, right? But obviously that's not the feeling you have when you sign up to the Nazi movement as an 18 year old.

Jeff Schoep: You know it's not something that the mainstream society likes, but you get this mindset of yourself. I've got this mindset that I was now part of this cause that was something greater than myself or something that I was going to be a part of, that I was going to change the world, that I was going to save my country and all these different kinds of things. As crazy as it sounds, people that are involved in this, a lot of them feel that it's patriotic, they're doing their duty. So I thought I was going to help save the white race from extermination and all these kinds of things. So a lot of crazy ideas go in your head and then it becomes confirmation bias because once you're in that environment, it's very cult-like. It's an echo chamber. So if you start doubting things or thinking differently, you might talk to your friends that are also involved in it. And then they're going to reinforce those same ideas. So anytime that you're trying to look outside of it, you become more and more isolated and you're part of this echo chamber.

Jordan Harbinger: You meet this guy Cliff who's running things. He's like a one man picketer, right? He's protesting alone, marching with the Nazi flag and he tells you guys, okay, you can film it and if I get attacked or jumped, don't do anything. What's going on there?

Jeff Schoep: So he showed us the one man picket and that was to basically prove that we could start this with nothing. One man could get out there and do it. And the point was why he said don't intervene was basically because if somebody came in and attacked him, that person would get in trouble and go to jail or something of that nature. In that scene in the book, when he had tells us that, I said to my friend or the other recruit that was there, I said, you know, if he does get jumped, we're not going to stand here. We're going to intervene.

Jordan Harbinger: Was the idea that one man can make a difference or that one provocateur with a camera and another guy with a flag can make kind of a tiny fringe organization look more powerful than it is?

Jeff Schoep: You've got it. A one man can make a scene. If you put it in that context, a person could get dressed in a clown outfit and dance around in the middle of the street and get the exact same kind of attention. But I didn't see it that way at 19.

Jordan Harbinger: No, this makes sense because if there's public outrage and then you get footage of that, that sort of gets you recruits or interested parties because the whole point is the movement needs enemies to survive. In fact, the more the better with something like this.

Jeff Schoep: If there's nothing to fight against or later on when we were doing rallies and things like that, there was a time that we had done a rally, I think it was in Mississippi and nobody showed up. It was nobody throwing stuff at us or trying to fight us or anything like that. It was just all cordoned off that area. So it's like we were shouting out into the wind and you could see the morale of the people around us dropping when some of the other groups that were there and I thought, man, no one's going to show up next time because the guys that are coming out to it, they're also coming for that adrenaline rush and all that as well. So the more violence or the more excitement, so to speak, at these events, the more likely people were to come. So whenever there was actual physical violence and clashes, the people that didn't come were always like, oh, we'll be there next time, things like that. So it becomes symbiotic with the people that are fighting against it.

Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting because otherwise it's a picnic with a bunch of skinheads. You need the people with the other flags and the police there with the little bike racks between you guys and the barricades and riot gear. Otherwise, yeah, you're just hanging out in a park. Way less cool, way less interesting for a teenager who wants to throw hands. Yeah, man, I would love to know more about how recruitment actually works. Can you take us through the typical recruiting process from the first conversation to the commitment to the Nazi party or the Nazi movement? Because you're looking for people who are, what, willing to do something that's contrarian. Maybe they've got some emotional pain or trauma. What are you looking for?

Jeff Schoep: The recruitment methods and stuff have changed and evolved over the years, and I was learning how to shift those things as well. But in the early days, it was a lot of leafleting and then the leaflets, passing out flyers, leaflets, you'd go and hit parking lots and stuff them under windshield wipers or at a shopping mall or a baseball game or a concert or something like that. So you could hit hundreds of cars and you just had the people fan out to the parking lot, get in and get out quick. So the flyers were geared towards different things. There was like ones that were pro-gun, you know, armed people are free people. It's a lot of slogans and stuff or family, race and nation. Or we even had some that would like quote George Washington or different historical figures. Or if anybody said anything bad about Jews, there was a whole series of flyers of like Ben Franklin quotes and all these other quotes that had anti-Semitic things on it that we would pass out. So there was different things to attract different people as well.

Jordan Harbinger: So there's no initial promise of come join us and you'll never be alone again or anything like that. That's sort of implicit later on in the communication, I would imagine.

Jeff Schoep: Yeah, you hear people that sometimes they say, well, I was looking for a sense of purpose or a sense of belonging or I was looking for friends and I would have joined whatever. For me, I didn't need that. You know me, I had friends and purpose and all these other things. It was that historical, I was ideologue. So is that historical thing for me? But there is people that will look and join these groups just for that sense of belonging or to be part of this tight crew. And a lot of the crews function like, I say cult a lot, but I wouldn't have called it that when I was involved. But I could tell you that the girls I was dating, they all said it, but I couldn't see it. I thought it was more like brotherhood or a family in a lot of ways. And a lot of people treated it like that. And a lot of the skinhead groups, too, even call themselves skinhead families.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's interesting that you started with the historical angle, but you end up with the community. I think most people probably, if I had to guess, they don't start with a historical angle. They start with hanging around and being friends with everybody and then they just take on the beliefs because that's what you need to do to be in the gang, to be in the inner circle. What did you deliberately avoid telling recruits too early? Do you know anything about Scientology, by the way? I'm giving an analogy here.

Jeff Schoep: A little bit. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: When you go to their initial thing, they tell you, oh, we have these audits and we're going to see if you're stressed and we're going to give you ways to improve your life. And then you get up to like whatever crazy level. And then they start saying, by the way, everybody on Earth is an alien ghost infested mess and something Xenu, the overlord, blah, blah, blah. And then but you're committed. You've already given them a hundred grand and you've been in there for eight years doing their little seances or whatever the hell they're doing. Right. And then they tell you the crazy stuff because they know if they start with, by the way, everybody, thanks for coming in on day one. So you're all infested with alien ghosts that were killed in a nuclear explosion from a volcano. And you're just like, you don't even have to finish that sentence. I'm leaving. Do you guys validate parking? I'm out. So what is the Nazi version of that? Because everybody knows Nazis don't like Jews. But is there something else that you keep under wraps for a few days, weeks, months?

Jeff Schoep: That's a good question. I can think specifically when I was preparing somebody to be like a unit leader or some sort if they were going up in the ranks. So with your new recruits, you didn't tell them anything that was bad or dangerous or anything like that. But when someone was going to be in a position of authority, I would always sit that person down and say, look, this might be as glamorous as you think. Things can happen. You put your life on the line, all these kind of things. You could lose your job. You could be thrown out of your apartment building, all these kind of things. And that was pretty common for any of us that were known. So that was another reason why some people would go under anonymous names or things of that nature, because I couldn't even tell you how many jobs I lost or how many apartments and things like that before I owned my home. It was like every time the lease would come up, you had to get another place. And it was the same thing with Cliff before me. So I already saw that early on as in my teens. And then I experienced it later. And I saw it over the years with a lot of other people being involved in this kind of stuff is a nonstop train wreck for everybody around it.

Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting. The consequences just keep piling up and you have to keep moving.

Jeff Schoep: But like you said, with the Scientology thing, you've bought into it now. Now you're bought into it. It comes with the territory. It's almost like a beaten dog that just keeps going back to its master.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. When did the recruits, existing friends and families start becoming the enemy, too? Because I would imagine you can't tell somebody on day one, by the way, all your old friends are going to get rid of them. Your parents, they might not understand. That's going to scare some people away. When do you sort of go, hey, your parents keep telling you not to come to the meeting. Maybe they're part of the problem. Maybe they're race traitors or whatever the line is. When do you tell them that? When do you break it to them? That they can probably only hang out with other Nazis?

Jeff Schoep: It's not done in a structured way like that, but a lot of it is happening naturally in that sense. A lot of the guys had a lot of trouble dating and stuff like that. They'd be like, how come when we're around, we don't have any girlfriends, but you always have different ones? And I said, because I'm not telling them my politics when I first meet with them. You guys are. And they were because they wanted to recruit and things like that. And I just learned not to do that. If you were going to date outside of the movement, you had to be very careful and you had to let the person get to know you first, because otherwise, if they meet somebody and say, hey, guess what? I'm the head of the Nazi party.

Jordan Harbinger: Oof. Put that in your Tinder profile for sure. No. Oof. Most leaders of hate movements end up in prison or dead, but you stayed at the top for, what, 25 years? So why do you think you lasted so long? That's an incredibly long career in that position.

Jeff Schoep: Yeah, it's almost unheard of. See, a lot of the lessons that I'd learned early on through Cliff, seeing how informants operated, being hyper legal about things. I'm not saying that everything was always legal, but the organization, from an organizational standpoint, always tried to keep things legal. And if you had somebody that was busted for a serious crime, they were thrown out. That's how the organization operated. Not because from some great moral standpoint, I'd love to say that was the truth, but it was more to protect the organization because the organization meant more than the individual always. It was the organization first.

Jordan Harbinger: So if you've got somebody in the gang and they sell meth and they get arrested for that, that's the end of that because you don't want an ATF or DEA investigation going into your whole gang to get a meth dealer who can't behave.

Jeff Schoep: Yes, exactly. So that kind of thing happened over the years quite a few times where people would get in trouble for different things. So there was one guy that ended up on America's Most Wanted at one time. So that was really bad press for the organization.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, no kidding. Your mother ends up losing that judge position. What about your, you had a sister, you had a dad? Were they having blowback from this as well?

Jeff Schoep: Yeah, it tears through your family. And the more prominent you are, the more known you are in that world, the greater the ripple effect. Law enforcement would show up and question my dad about different things. I don't know how often he was kind of tight lipped about a lot of that stuff, didn't like to talk about it. But my sister had issues and stuff. And later on with getting jobs and when they do background checks, it would come up, you know, oh, what's your relationship to Jeff Schoep, the leader of the Nazi Party? That's not something any family member wants to be questioned about during a background check at work. How embarrassing.

Jordan Harbinger: Did they have to say, oh, we're not really in contact with him? Or did they just go, yeah, my brother's the head of the Nazi Party. Thanks for taking my application. I'll see you later.

Jeff Schoep: I'm not sure what exactly they said when that came up, but I know it was embarrassing. A lot of those things the family didn't like to talk about. Early on, when I was a teenager, I'm trying to recruit my family. When you're first involved in this stuff or anybody gets involved in a cult or extremist group, they want to recruit everybody around them because it's like you've discovered this grand epiphany. And you know, there's just like a conspiracy theorist, you know, this great thing and you want to bring everybody in around you. So that goes back to your earlier question about when does the time come when you start getting separated from your family? And I said, it kind of happens naturally. That's one of the ways that happens is people will try to bring their family members in because anybody that's not part of it is the enemy. Literally, if you are not involved and you are not fighting for this cause, there's no gray areas. It's all black and white. That sort of thinking is one of the most difficult things to unwork when you're bringing somebody out of it as well, because they don't think in the gray areas. In life, you've got black and white, right and left and everything in between. And most of us are kind of in between. Somebody that leaves the movement automatically becomes the other extreme. Like, I've heard it, I've seen it. And when people talk about me, they'll say, oh, now he's Antifa and I'm the farthest thing from Antifa. I'm absolutely not. But in their mind, they get this mindset where if you're not with them, you are an opposite extreme. So I try to be very patient with people and explain that, look, don't hate people, get away from racism. It doesn't matter where you land politically, just be somewhere in the moderate areas, not in the extremes.

Jordan Harbinger: It's interesting. You start with this abstract idea of protecting your race and then it's, sorry, I screwed up my mom's career. Oh, my dad's having work trouble and my sister can't get a job and it's hard for me to date. Who are you protecting again? Because it seems like you're screwing up everybody's life who comes into contact with you. But that's, you know, I'm just looking at the scoreboard. That's interesting. That sort of juxtaposition, man, it's got to be tough to have a kid who's interested in this stuff. I mean, they appoint you the national leader at age 21. No offense, but what kind of Mickey Mouse organization has a 21 year old kid as their national leader? The Nazi Party. But come on, when I was 21 and somebody appointed me into an important position, I would probably think, what kind of place is this? I don't know. Anything says a lot. I think appointing a 21 year old kid, a commander of the American Nazi Party. Again, no offense, but that's ridiculous.

Jeff Schoep: It sure shocked me when the position was offered to me. But the organization was pretty small at that time. It was an old organization that had been around since 1973. So way before my time. But it was started by men that had served with George Lincoln Rockwell, the original founder of the American Nazi Party from the 1950s. So that was another reason why I joined that particular organization is that it had that historical connection. And Cliff had served with Rockwell as well. So there was that personal historical connection.

Jordan Harbinger: Got it. OK. And you start to professionalize recruiting and I guess what security and the chapters and the fundraising and the merchandise and like youth divisions, women's divisions. I mean, it's quite expansive, right, because you didn't just inherit a hate group. You've made it into a more durable and more effective hate group, which is a shame, actually, because you could have done that with any group probably that wasn't terrible. And I'm sure you've thought of that many times in the last few years. But I'm still curious about recruitment. What do you say before you mention Hitler, Jews, racial separation or violence? What are you even talking about before that?

Jeff Schoep: So a lot of times with the new recruit, sometimes people would come in on one issue. So you might recruit somebody that say they were a victim of black crime or their sister or their family member or something like that. And then you would lean into those type of things. There was people later on when we were doing border operations in Arizona and different states like that. And there was people that were reaching out to us that were saying, I never thought in a million years I'd be reaching out to the Nazi party, but you guys are on the borders, you're down there doing stuff. And I'm concerned about this, but I don't understand the Jewish thing. Once you get them in the door and then they're inside the cult, now you are propagandizing them and you're bringing them in. So I always felt like if we could get them in the door, even on that one issue, whatever it might be, it's usually a grievance. But get them in the door on that grievance, then you're going to get them eventually because you're going to just keep piling on the information and surrounding them with that. And again, it goes back to that cult reference. And I didn't like that when I was involved. In my mind, I wasn't saying, hey, I'm building a cult. That was stuff that came together after I left. But at the time, I was just naturally doing these things.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, this makes sense. And you see this now in online discourse. Someone will say, there's all these illegal immigrants. And it's like, OK, well, look, here's immigrants doing crime. And there's a video of that. They don't show a video of the immigrants setting up a convenience store and living peacefully for 30 years in the community. Right. They show a video of somebody doing a crime. They say it's an immigrant. And then there'll be a comment that's like, this is what the Jews are doing. They're letting all these people in. It's all part of their plan. Maybe you're concerned about immigrants because you live on the border and you see actual drug traffickers walking across your backyard. And then the net widens to immigrants who come across illegally at all. Then maybe it widens a little bit more to all immigrants that are brown or whatever ones you don't like. And then it's, oh, also the Jews, because apparently they're the ones who are behind letting these people in. You're from Michigan. I'll use this analogy. It's like there's a crack in the sidewalk and then some water gets in there and then it's winter and it freezes and the crack gets a little bit larger. And the next winter, water gets in there in that larger crack and it freezes again and it makes it even larger. And then pretty soon you can fit your whole freaking foot in the sidewalk walking around in Michigan and you got to pour the concrete again, right, to fix it. And it's a big repair job. This seems like what you're doing with these ideas, right? You're selling not just political ideas, but a complete identity to people who maybe otherwise didn't have one.

Jeff Schoep: Hate is based on fear, and a lot of people don't understand that. But I think you just explained it very eloquently. It's exploiting that fear. It's breaking that idea wide open and it just keeps stuffing things down in it. So when you tell somebody, you say, there's a reason why you're struggling to feed your family. There's a reason why you have to work two jobs to pay the rent and all this kind of stuff. And then these groups will tie that in and scapegoat Jewish people or black people or all of the above.

Jordan Harbinger: I still see it. I am sure you do, too. You look at the Instagram comments or Reddit comments on something and you can still see this happening. People are going to ask me, is this a grift? You believed in it, but is there a lot of money going through this movement? It doesn't strike me as something that's particularly lucrative, but I could be wrong.

Jeff Schoep: You mean being involved in it? Is it a grift?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, or even at the top, right? There's membership dues and they're selling records and T-shirts and stuff like that. And there's events and there's probably donations. But again, I could be wrong, but it doesn't strike me as a huge cash flow kind of opportunity for the people at the top, is it?

Jeff Schoep: It depends on the group, I think. In the group that I was running, it wasn't extremely lucrative or anything like that. But I made a living off the record label. That's what I did for work. But there's some people that make quite a bit of money at it as well. It really just depends. It depends on the group because some of them have a lot more finances than others. But that really depends.

Jordan Harbinger: They made Jeff the national leader at 21. At 21, I wouldn't have trusted myself to run a carpool. Apparently, the master race had some pretty serious staffing issues.

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I would think it would become harder to doubt your ideology if it's also where you're making a lot of money, right? And you see this with media figures, right? You look at media figures who jump from one horse to another. They're Democrat. Now they're Republican. Actually, now they're a super right wing. Actually, now they're kind of anti-Semitic and right wing or left wing or whatever. And they're just doing it because that's where the clicks are. So you get these people and you think, do they know they're a scumbag or do they not care? Do they think that they believe this or are they just cynically creating clickbait stuff on YouTube and other platforms in doing that? Guys like Alex Jones, right? These guys who are conspiracy theorists. There's a part of me that he believes all this stuff because it's totally wild and he's that kind of guy or he just doesn't care about any of it and only cares about making money. And this is true for any media figure in that position. I always have to wonder that because look, if I'm the head of the Nazi party, which would be a tough swallow for the party being half Jewish, but I don't think I'd want to sacrifice my paycheck. And you see this with terror groups in the Middle East. Eventually the leaders, the OGs, they're millionaires or they have a hundred million dollars and they live in Dubai or Qatar. They probably don't really care that much about the cause anymore. None of their family and friends really live there. They don't have to stay there. They got their own jet. The whole thing just becomes a grift. And so of course they're still doing it, but I don't know if they believe it anymore.

Jeff Schoep: A perfect example of that is politicians, especially when they're switching what they believe in, especially around election time. And then all of a sudden it's a completely different person that's standing there. For me, when I started de-radicalizing, I'm trying to change things in the organization. Like the last few years I was involved, I was like telling people it was a white civil rights organization. And I know how ridiculous that sounds. I get it. But in my mind, that was my attempt at trying to fix things. I was like, I can fix this. It was like unfathomable to walk away. My career was wrapped up in it and everything else. But at the same time, when I got to that point where I realized like, look, you're not fixing this. You're putting lipstick on a pig. You're not fixing it. You can put lipstick on the pig, but it's still a pig underneath. It's not pretty. And that's what I was trying to do. So eventually I was just like, man, but my business is wrapped up in this. Everybody I know is wrapped up in it. My whole life. I want to say like, that could be a selfish way of looking at it. But the problem was, is I could have kept going indefinitely. NSM wasn't a democracy or anything like that. I could have just kept going, but my conscience didn't align with that anymore. It's like, I wasn't believing in what I was saying. It's like, now I have two choices. I can be a hypocrite and keep doing this because it's easy. I've gotten accustomed to it. I thrive. I got to the very top in that world. Or I can start life over at middle age and see what civilian life looks like. I had no idea what civilian life was. I had no idea what life outside that movement was because I started so young.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a really good point. It's almost like getting out of prison. You're in prison since you're 18 and you get out and you've got to figure out how to use Google docs or whatever, and mobile phones. And it's like, what the heck? In alien planets. Before we talk about your de-radicalization though, I would like to know what normal daily life as an American Nazi is like. You live in this Brown house, the South St. Paul, Minnesota, national social Nazi headquarters. And you're marching through neighborhoods carrying Nazi flags. And there's armed guards and media attention and yet guns everywhere. How was your stress level during this time, during this period of your life?

Jeff Schoep: Well, that was back in the nineties. So yeah, looking back at it, even when I was writing the book and I'm looking back at my life, I'm like, man, how did I even survive? But you don't think about that. At the time, it was just like another scar, another battle. And you just didn't really think about it. You just kept going. And it's when you stop and reflect on all those things. I tell you, I didn't reflect on any of it until after I got out and I started going through that decompression period, because in those years, in the nineties, like when we were at the Brown house in South St. Paul, you had to post guards every night because you had all of the press and everything that was going on at the time. It was dangerous.

Jordan Harbinger: You have to check your car and make sure it's not going to explode when you turn it on and all kinds of stuff like that, I would imagine is going through your head.

Jeff Schoep: I think there was a chapter about that as well, because my brakes were slashed one time and I was getting on the freeway and managed to get the car off the road, but that could have really caused some damage otherwise. Oh, wow. So after that, I learned to check, make sure there's not wires going into your gas tank. You look underneath to make sure that the brakes aren't slashed. And at the time, Cliff had said, because I keep telling you about security, my brakes have been slashed a couple of times here at the same address and you weren't listening. After that, I was listening. I was paying close attention. So I was hyper vigilant about my surroundings at all times.

Jordan Harbinger: So there's a cycle here because the ideology creates confrontation, right? You're verbally abusing strangers while carrying a Nazi flag through a black neighborhood or whatever. And then it seems like the plan then is to deliberately misinterpret any confrontation as persecution and then use the persecution as proof that our ideology is correct. Look how many people are against us. Look at all this bad press we're getting. They don't want everyone to find out that we're speaking the truth. Am I on to something?

Jeff Schoep: I think you are, but I don't think it's deliberate, at least from my perspective. When I was involved in it, it wasn't deliberate, but the mindset that you're talking about, it drives that person deeper into that psychological hold. Because the mindset of these people is a lot of times people look at these movements from the outside, looking in, they say, oh, this guy is an oppressor. He's a bully. He wants to hold all these people down. But in their minds and the minds of the person that's involved in it, most of them feel like, no, we're on the defense. We're fighting back. We're just trying to protect ourselves. We're just defending the white race. That was the mantra. That's the kind of things that we said and really believed. It wasn't like it was nefarious in the sense of, oh, hey, we're going to trick our guys and do this psychological trick to them. Now I can pick it apart and go back and say, yeah, these are the things that we did. So every time somebody lost a job or got hit on a demonstration or got hurt, all of those things stacked up as more reasons like we're being persecuted. That's how the mindset works. A lot of times it drives that person farther into their commitment and solidifies their hold the movement has on them or the cult or whatever group they're involved in.

Jordan Harbinger: Tell me about this Buford Furrow guy, because you say, OK, well, we're doing this and we're getting attacked and we're defending the white race. But then you've got a guy like this. I wonder how this gets reconciled. Tell us the story of this man.

Jeff Schoep: Oh, he's somebody that I ran into at Aryan Nations. I was out there a number of times, but I was out there one year to speak. And I think he might have been on security out there, but he was staying out there or he was out there at that same time that I was. So I didn't know him well, but I did cross paths with him and I talked to him a number of times. It was sometime in the late 90s. But that same individual had went on and did a mass shooting in California at a Jewish daycare or school, like a summer camp type of thing. And he went in with an Uzi and started shooting kids. And he fled from there and ended up killing a guy out, delivering the mail. Then police eventually caught him.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Why didn't an attack like that make you go, geez, this is not for me? How were you able to compartmentalize something like that or rationalize something like that?

Jeff Schoep: I can tell you over the years how I process things like that, because when I was involved, I didn't like that sort of thing. And now there's a small percentage of people that are in these groups that cheer on that sort of thing and they'll say it's good and they cheer it on. And I was always like, that's not a good thing. It's a bad thing. It makes the movement look bad. So thankfully, Furrow wasn't involved with the NSM. So that was one compartmentalizing. You'd say that wasn't my organization. That was some other group. So you separate it that way. Or you would justify it by saying that was a crazy person. That person must have been mentally ill. That's why they did that. So it was never the ideology, but it is the ideology. I'm saying in the psychological mindset of the extremist, it's never the ideology. They could say that guy went nuts. That's how we process. We always say, oh, that guy went crazy. I don't know what was wrong with him. He went crazy. But the movement's not like that. But really, it is ideology drives people.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And you now argue that mental illness and extremist ideology can be a volatile combination.

Jeff Schoep: Absolutely.

Jordan Harbinger: You didn't pull the trigger, but I would imagine at some level you've got to think, OK, I taught people like this who the targets are and why they deserve hostility.

Jeff Schoep: That's a good point. And it fuels the work that I do now, why I speak out, why I'm public about it, why I go into schools and talk to young people, especially why I talk to adults and why I do the work that I do now is all driven by that. It's by the realization that the stuff that I was putting out into the world for so long caused a lot of damage. So I'm trying to unwork that every single day. And I do everything I can to try to fix that and try to use the skill set that I use for the wrong things, for positive things now. And I tell you, every single time that I speak somewhere, especially at schools, I watch people for how they're taking in information. Because it was something you had to do in the movement anyways. And when you can see a young person and you can see on their face that the talk resonated or that something clicked with them and made sense to them. And one of the things, you know, like I'm talking is a lot of schools to a lot of students that aren't white. So they're not going to join a Nazi group, but they might join a gang. They might join another kind of extremist group. And one thing I found out from being involved in doing the work that I do now is that these extremist groups, the psychological holds across all of them, all the different sorts are very similar. The stories of people that have broken free from it, it all takes the similar type of strength and ability to break free from that. And it's very similar. There's some differences with gangs. The motivations are different than a lot of times in an extremist group. But there's still enough similarities that it resonates, even for those inner city kids, you know, that might be subject to gangs.

Jordan Harbinger: I would love to know how these cracks start to form. So for listeners who don't know, again, Daryl Davis, he's a black musician and he spent years talking to Klansmen. How does this guy end up sitting across from you in a diner?

Jeff Schoep: I was contacted by a film crew and they basically pitched this film. They said, would you like to come on this this film and talk about the movement? When I interview you, they didn't tell me it was Daryl Davis.

Jordan Harbinger: OK, surprise attack.

Jeff Schoep: It was a surprise. Yeah. So in the movement, we knew who Daryl was because he pulled out a lot of Klan people, some neo-Nazis and stuff as well. So we knew who he was. But I just agreed to come down to this filming for this show, for Daryl's film, Accidental Courtesy. But I didn't know that what it was at the time. I just checked out the film company. OK, they're not Antifa. They're not some communist group. It's a legit film crew. I'll go down there. So my girl and I are sitting outside this cafe and out of the vehicle steps Daryl Davis. I still didn't recognize him. Like I was thinking, man, this guy looks familiar. He comes over and shakes my hand, says, hi, I'm Daryl Davis. You must be Jeff. Yes. Nice to meet you. Daryl Davis. I know that name, too. It still didn't click. It did not click.

Jordan Harbinger: In your defense, you probably didn't have a lot of black friends back then. But you would think I would know him from how he was pulling people out. But it did not click because I was just focused on, OK, this is the guy I'm going to debate. I wasn't thinking, oh, I know who he is. It didn't resonate until after we were sitting down. And then I purposely escalated in that conversation when it clicked in my head that I know who this guy is and we're getting along really well. Like it was like two old friends getting along. He's a great guy.

You'd have to try really hard not to love Daryl Davis. That's his superpower.

Jeff Schoep: Yes, he's amazing.

Jordan Harbinger: So you're in this conversation saying, I'll fight for my people until the last bullet. And he's probably just sitting there talking about jazz and being warm and calm.

Jeff Schoep: He did not react. I mean, I pound my fist on the table. I'll fight to the last bullet for my people. And I figured he was going to push back because that's what people do in those conversations usually. And he didn't. He just was like and just continued the conversation. So I was like, man, I've got to figure this guy out. What is going on here? It was a really interesting show. I was drawn into the conversation. But the deradicalization part, the first real big cracks for me was around that time. And I was hearing a story about Daryl told me about his childhood when he was in the Boy Scouts. He was the only black child in this Boy Scout parade. At about like 11 years old, a handful of white adults were throwing rocks at him. And he had to go home and his parents pulled him aside. And they said, what happened? Why are you all banged up? And he says some people didn't like the Boy Scouts. He didn't understand that they were targeting him because he was black. And his parents had to tell him about that. And he says, Jeff, I never disbelieved my parents ever until that day. They had to be lying. They were lying to me. That made no sense whatsoever. How can someone hate me when they don't even know me? It bothered me because, you know, as a father, I'm hearing this story. I'm thinking, man, what if somebody would have done that to one of my kids? It would have been on targeting children. That bothered me.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And I assume you had to hide how deeply that disturbs you when you're sitting in front of a camera and the lights.

Jeff Schoep: Oh, yeah. That was hard. It was tough. Inside, it was eating away at me.

Jordan Harbinger: Why did Daryl's story about being attacked as a child, why did that land when history books, news stories, even your own family's objections and pleadings? That none of that landed. Why did this land?

Jeff Schoep: You hear about these stories in school and you hear about racism is bad and you hear all these different kind of things. But when you're sitting face to face with it and you're actually it's not screaming and hollering, it's actually you're sitting across from another human being and you're hearing that deeply personal story. Nobody ever approached me in that manner. And I don't want to say Daryl is a victim because I don't think he would appreciate that.

Jordan Harbinger: His 11 year old self was a victim of hate. He's not a helpless man now. He's super powerful. But yeah, an 11 year old boy, I think it's fair to say he was a victim. White adults are throwing rocks at him because he was black. Doesn't get much more clear than that.

Jeff Schoep: Yeah, he was. And hearing that, I feel like that taps into a segment of our humanity that is really hard to look away from. If a human being can hear a story like that and you're sitting across from somebody and you just go, yeah, and blow it off, then there's something else wrong with you because something like that, it taps into it. So what I had to do is compartmentalize that. But that was the first really big crack that I can point out. There was a lot of cracks that came after that. So usually, you know, you hear these stories, someone just snapped their fingers and change. It's a process. It took time. So I feel like I was de-radicalizing for about three years before I got out.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that makes sense. He made you confront a lived experience, but that's not going to change you overnight. You got the one-two punch because then you met Deeyah Khan. She hasn't been on the show, but I know her work well. She does this 30 minute interview. There's a part of you that must have wanted to almost de-radicalize if you're agreeing to meet Daryl Davis. But then you meet Deeyah Khan. You had to know that was going to pour water into that crack and freeze it again.

Jeff Schoep: No, I didn't think so. But it did, though. When Deeyah had called me and asked about being in the film, I said, you've got 30 minutes of my time. Thirty minutes turned into like maybe four hours. It was like all night long. And then she's looking at her watch going, what happened to that 30 minutes, Jeff?

Jordan Harbinger: She's a brilliant film creator for people don't know. And I think one of her most famous works is White Right Meeting the Enemy. I'll have my team link it in the show notes on the website at jordanharbinger.com. We'll find where it is. She's great. She doesn't say, why are you a Nazi? She just starts sharing her own experiences of racism. And she explains, hey, these beliefs that you promote, they made me feel ugly and hated and unworthy and less than human as a child. And then she's so likable that you're just like, oh, my gosh, I'm a terrible person for doing something like that to this little kid who's sitting in front of me as an adult. That must have been a fight to remain composed as well.

Jeff Schoep: It was even harder because I had spent time with her and she had driven with us to rallies and things like that. So I'd spend quite a bit of time with her, broke bread with her and gotten to know her. So when she finally hit me with some of that heavy stuff about how racism and hate affected her, you can see in that film, I sometimes I like to show a little clip of that because the cameraman catches it and he zooms in on my eyes because I was fighting to keep composed when she said that to me was really difficult.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, there was a human in there after all, because, yeah, she stops being an ideological category and becomes a little girl that your ideology had essentially harmed in many ways. Wow. I wonder, did their compassion, Daryl, did that cause you to change or did compassion from them only work because your certainty in the ideology had already started to crack?

Jeff Schoep: I think it was seeing the human being beyond the ideology. When you dehumanize somebody, you lose your humanity in that process, I feel. And I had dehumanized people for a very long time, so that was like blocked. And when they shared those deeply personal stories, something broke through and it hurt. They were able to break through that. Now, if they would have come at me and nasty about it or why are you involved in this garbage or something like that, I don't think it would have worked. So I call the process relational dialogue, but that's the process that Daryl uses as a method. Dia, that's just how she is. She was just being her natural self and was able to break through like that.

Jordan Harbinger: There's another woman, Julie, who's an Orthodox Jewish lady. You tell her, hey, my information's out there. People know who I am. Her and her husband offer you a place to stay. I've got to wonder, what is a Jewish woman offering protection to a neo-Nazi? What does that do to your picture of Jewish people? Right. Because aren't we supposed to be like stingy and selfish and evil? And it's like, no, you can come stay at my house with my husband. And you're like, what's going on here?

Jeff Schoep: It was really tough, but that was in that same time frame, too. So you compartmentalize that stuff, too, because you'll say, well, Daryl's cool. Julie's cool. But they're the exceptions. Not the rest of them.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, they're the exceptions. Exactly. Well, you see that in Dia's film, right? She starts talking to these guys. They're in some kind of militia that's supposed to be like a race protection militia, whatever. And they're like, I'm worried about you because we love you. But there's guys out there, they could hurt someone like you, you know? And she's like, what do you think will happen to me? They're like, God, I don't know. I don't want anything to happen. And you just see these old guys and they're like protective of her. Five minutes ago, you wanted to murder everyone who looked like her. And now you're like hiding her in your living room when other people come over and making sure that they don't see her car in your driveway. I mean, the change is slow, but it's not that slow, right? It doesn't take years. It just takes kind of the right combination. You had the combo effect here with these three influences, kind of all at the same time.

Jeff Schoep: It was those and there was other things, too. But it's like moving to Detroit and being in a city that was where white people are the minority. Yeah. Having all these different experiences.

Jordan Harbinger: Your car breaks down in a predominantly black neighborhood in Detroit. That's a tough break for a Nazi. What happened there?

Jeff Schoep: So I'm coming back from a date and the car breaks down and we pull over. And I didn't want to pull over. And she's like, you've got to pull over. And I was like, no, I'm going to get the car home. We can't pull over here. We're going to get shot. You know, this is an all black neighborhood. This is the ghetto. This is not going to work out well. She convinces me. So we pull into this liquor store at like midnight and there wasn't any other white faces anywhere in sight and all people hanging out there. And I thought, this is bad. This is not going to go well. So I'm telling her, stay in the car, stay in the car. And she's like, look, you're scary. No one's going to help us. Let me go in and find help. And I'm thinking, yeah. Everything that I thought was going to happen that night went the opposite way that I expected. She goes into the liquor store, comes out with a guy and two kids. Hey, I found a mechanic. Yeah. I go, how do you find a mechanic at midnight? He fixes the car. Yeah. And he gets it all fixed. And I'm trying to give him money and he won't take it. And he's like, don't drive it anywhere until you get antifreeze in it. Because all fluid came out the bottom. And there's a guy that was standing there. He says, hey, I heard you need antifreeze. And I had noticed this guy's car when we pulled up because it was right next to us. And it had clothes stacked up to the roof in the back of the car. And I don't know if he was homeless, but it sure looked like he was living in the car. And he's like, hold on a second, come here. And I walk over with him. He opens his trunk, fumbles around, pulls out a brand new gallon of antifreeze and hands it to me. And I was just like, what is going on here?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jeff Schoep: He wouldn't accept the money. And he says to me, he goes, I think if this would have happened to me, you would have done the same thing. And in my mind, I'm going, yeah, I wasn't going to lie. But I was like, would I? You know, and I have helped a number of people, but he probably saw that I was thinking about it because my eyes were like I was actually thinking about the question when he asked me and he puts his hand on my shoulder and says, young man, just pay it forward. The next time you see somebody that needs help, help them. Can you give me your word on that? Yes. And we got home. It blew me away.

Jordan Harbinger: Jeff went to Detroit expecting race warfare and got free roadside assistance. That is a rough night for a worldview. The engine gets repaired and the ideology gets totaled.

We'll be right back. All right, guys, no more newsletter. It was Wee Bit Wiser. So if you're not getting those, we decided to shut it down. There was a lack of sponsorship. We were getting lowball offers for sponsorship for quite a large newsletter. And we realized it was taking us a ton of time to write it. So we're putting a little hiatus on there. Eventually, we may be doing it again. But in the meantime, you can always do six minute networking at sixminutenetworking.com. That's our free networking course. If you're just desperate to hear from us outside of the show, there's also the Jordan Harbinger subreddit. If you want to check it out, go to jordanharbinger.com. If you want to talk about the show now, back to Jeff Schoep.

For most people, generosity like that is really reassuring. I would imagine for you it had the opposite effect in many ways.

Jeff Schoep: Very unsettling.

Jordan Harbinger: What did your date think?

Jeff Schoep: She worked in the black community. She was like a promoter or something like that. So she was already not happy with what I was involved in. She had a real problem with that. So she's just looking at me the whole drive home. And she's going like, I'm like, OK, fine. Yeah, you was right to pull over. And she goes, you spared your engine. Your engine's fixed. You would have not made it home. And the mechanic had said that too. So I was not wanting to admit that she was right and I was wrong. So I half-hearted admit it, but mostly I was just really quiet because it blew apart a lot of my worldview of things. Like if these guys would have recognized me, how would they have treated me? And how does it feel from my position to be taking help from the so-called enemy? That was a lot to process. So with her, the next morning she was gone and there was notes left behind. I cannot be in a relationship with somebody that's a racist. And last night should have proven you wrong and you should have walked away at that moment. And she was right, but I still wasn't totally de-radicalized. I was mad upset.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah. Because when you see this in a movie, there's like one thing that happens and somebody has a cinematic turning point, but the reality is more like years of accumulated contradictions followed by a much less cinematic de-radicalization period, I wonder what did Daryl and Deeyah do that somebody listening could actually imitate, because people are going to hear this and they're going to go, so we just be nice to Nazis? What's going on here? There's more to it than that.

Jeff Schoep: And that's like with relational dialogue. I actually have a course where we teach how to do this, but it's basically to a lot of the way we handle things. So if you're in a situation, this works in the extreme. So it can also work in like regular situations, like family problems or just with friends and arguments. But it's like, usually when someone wants to yell at you, you're going to raise your voice and yell back. Every action has a counter, the same counter reaction, you know, push back and it's just, that's just human nature. So you have to buck that trend and go against that human nature. And just when I raised my voice to Daryl, you know, and say, you know, I'm going to fight to the last bullet and he didn't react, that deescalated everything immediately. So now when you deescalate in a situation like that, the person is more open to listening because it opens up curiosity and leading with curiosity is key in any of these kinds of things. So we could use another example, like in a political argument, you could say, well, I'll take, I use conspiracy theories for an example. There was a conspiracy theory around like 2016 or somewhere back there that had said, I think it was QAnon and they said, JFK was going to come back and help president Trump.

Jordan Harbinger: I remember this. And I remember thinking, oh, I like this one. Because it's so dumb. Once that doesn't happen, this movement is going to evaporate because this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Yeah. They're still around, I guess, here and there, but I loved that. I put that on my calendar because I was like, I can't wait to rub this one in.

Jeff Schoep: Yeah. Well, you take a situation like that and you be curious about it and go, okay. Instead of laughing at the person or making fun of them or going like, man, you're an idiot, I need to take your course. Yeah. You just go like, you can ask them a question. Questions are very good. So you could say, isn't JFK passed away? Like, how is that possible? But don't laugh or don't roll your eyes or a lot of microexpressions or even like crossing your arms and looking angry, you're not going to get the correct results, so you have to like push all that stuff aside and it takes practice for a lot of people. Some people have it naturally like Dia, but it takes a lot of practice and it's counterintuitive.

Jordan Harbinger: Look, person to person, I feel like I'm much better at that. Online is a completely different story. I'm complete idiot on the internet. Like most people, if I see somebody on Twitter say that JFK is coming back and he's going to help Donald Trump, that's up there with flat earth. It's even dumber actually. And so I just bookmark it so that I can see like this you bro retweeted. But in real life, yeah. And in fact, when I was younger, they attempted to recruit me a lot because I actually would listen. And I think a lot of people mistook that for he's interested. And I was like, no, no, I'm interested in why you believe something that is completely morally bankrupt. I'm not interested in buying a shirt with a Nazi Eagle on it and blaming the Jews for all of your problems. If your life sucks, it's not because of the Jews, man. It's because of all the bad decisions that you seem to keep making in your life. So you go through this process with all these different people. You've got all this evidence. And then, so you just left, you said it wasn't something that happened immediately. You tried to change the organization. But even after you left, you were still questioning things like the Holocaust death toll. So what did you still believe even after you left the movement formally?

Jeff Schoep: The only thing I think I was still struggling with was that numbers and the Holocaust thing. That was like the last little bit of peace that had to be broken away. So when I left, most of the de-radicalization was done, but anti-Semitism was prominent. The Jews were blamed for everything. I'll say now, like you could spill a glass of water in the movement and say it was the Jews. It's a joke, but yeah, but it was also a little bit true in the sense of how they think. Not that it was accurate, but I'm saying that in their mindset, there was always a scapegoat, always somebody to blame. So that was the last thing that I was struggling with was with the numbers. So after I'm getting out and I'm meeting people, I'm meeting the Jewish community, I had met with Simon Wiesenthal Center, had come out. And within days of me putting out my website and denouncing the movement, they had come out, the chief researcher, Rick Eaton, flew out from LA to meet with me.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm surprised. I was going to say, how did you set that up? Because if you email me and you're the leader of the Nazi party in the United States, the Nazi movement, and I work at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is like a Jewish center, I don't know if I'm taking the meeting, right? But I guess, why were they in such a rush to connect with you?

Jeff Schoep: They reached out to me, so I didn't contact them. The only thing I knew about Wiesenthal was they were involved in some of the tracking down World War II war criminals and things like that. And they do a lot of other things too. And of course I know that now because I work with them. But you know, I first got that email and it says, Hey, you know, the Simon Wiesenthal Center would like to meet with you. I thought, oh boy, what are they going to do, kidnap me and bring me to Israel to stand trial or something? You're getting black bagged. Yeah, exactly. I didn't really think that, but it was like, you know, worst case scenario in the back of my head. Well, you're just going to get yelled at a lot by somebody.

Jeff Schoep: But no national neo-Nazi leader had ever left in the United States. I don't want to speak for them, but my understanding of it was that my story and my journey could inspire a lot of people. And they'd worked with former's before. So the first former that went public in the United States was, I think back in the either late eighties or early nineties and a light, and he had worked with the Wiesenthal Center and I didn't realize at the time when they reached out, but I learned that later. So they had done some work with former's and then I'd learned Rick was undercover from the Wiesenthal Center. When he came out to meet with me, I said at the end of the meeting, I said, well, it was a nice meeting. He goes, we've met before. And I said, nah. And he says, yeah. And then he rattled off where at a meeting that he was undercover. I was a speaker at this Christian identity thing in rural Minnesota, and he was there undercover apparently.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's interesting. Wow. And so he recognized you actually. Okay. So you have this period after leaving called the decompression phase. What's actually going on there? Because I assume the group they're texting you, right? They're emailing you. They're probably showing up at your house. They're certainly calling you to try to draw you back in. Are you just ignoring all that? You're just ghosting them.

Jeff Schoep: Yeah. So when I decided that I was going to leave, I retired first because I knew that I was going to speak out, but I didn't know what that looked like. I didn't know anything about civilian life, but I also knew you can't just stop and then snap your fingers and everything is better. I still had to work through the Holocaust numbers and things like that. I wasn't ready to speak out immediately. I call that the decompression phase. And that's when you're beating yourself up over who you were and trying to process it and why did I do this? Why did I stay so long? All these different kinds of things. And it was during that period of time, before I met the Wiesenthal center people, I was introduced to a former Al Qaeda guy that had introduced me to a Jewish woman. And this is a story I always forget to tell. I had met this lady and she was asking me all kinds of questions about the movement and what movement people thought about Jews and all that. And she said to me, she told me about her family history. Her stepfather survived the Holocaust. At least one side of the grandparents had survived the Holocaust. And she had talked about how that affected them. And as a child that she says, I think it was her grandparents. She goes, sometimes I didn't want to go over there because they shared about the trauma from the Holocaust and it was always so depressing and it was hard for me to hear those things. I said, yeah, I can understand that. And she goes, so I have a question for you, Jeff. She goes, for the movement's perspective, if they believe that Jews were lying about the Holocaust and that all the survivors and all these people were lying about it, she goes, knowing that they passed that information down or those stories or those lies or whatever, they passed that all down to their children and their grandchildren and the future generations, she goes, do you really think that parents would do that to their children? That hit me like a slap in the face. Now, by this time I was out of the movement, but I was like, whoa, no one ever framed it that way because now for me, that made sense because you could say maybe some terrible parent or some crazy person might do that to their child and traumatize them with something that wasn't real, but most people would not do that. And you've got all these survivors and all these families, why would they do that to their own children? That didn't make any sense to me. It didn't fit the narrative. So that hit harder. I was already pretty much done with that thinking, but my gosh, when she told me that, I said, I wish somebody would have tried that or said that to me when I was in the movement, I might've left years ago, I told her, I said, I will never forget this. And I said, when I encounter people that are coming out, because especially out of the neo-Nazi movement, it's that anti-Semitism is the sticking thing when they come out. And for some, it is that numbers and the Holocaust thing, because they took in so much revisionism. So I've also used that same method or that same example that she shared with me with other people. And I don't say it's worked for everybody, but when you can see their face, when you say that, and you can see it click, you can see the light bulb click, then you know.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's interesting. I'm sure some people just say, oh, well, they would do it because the lie is more important than their family's mental health and whatever. And it's like, all right, some people aren't ready to look at facts or history and they can't take it in. I wonder when you're out of the echo chamber in the information environment, what became visible once the information stream stopped? What was one of the most visible things?

Jeff Schoep: It's almost like waking up from being in a sleep or being completely gone from society. Yeah, it's like, that's why I call it decompression, because I feel like it was just like this crushing weight on you. And then all of a sudden things start to lighten, like the weight that you were carrying on your back starts to lift and all this anger and all this persecution complex that is developed inside the movement that starts to let go and all these different kinds of things. It's almost like discovering a whole new world. And then you realize, how much did I miss out on all those years for being involved in this? It's a nonstop train wreck of destruction and it doesn't just affect you. And that's the important thing that a lot of people that are, if anybody's thinking about getting involved in extremism, even from my case, I had it all figured out. I was going to protect my family. I was going to protect my music career, had it all figured out, was very careful about it. And then one day you go on a radio show and your name is Dox, then it changes everything. No matter how careful you try or how you think you've got everybody protected, being involved in this stuff has ripple effect and it can harm everybody around you.

Jordan Harbinger: If it isn't the consequences of my own actions, what is the smallest act of human connection that might keep, say, a 17 year old today from becoming the man that you had become?

Jeff Schoep: Ooh, that's a deep question. I really think it's seeing the humanity in others and being able to meet with people that were affected by it. It's not scolding, shaming, humiliating. All that stuff has the opposite effect. That's going to drive somebody deeper into those echo chambers or deeper into those ideologies. It's going to be compassion, empathy, love, understanding, and even for people maybe that don't deserve it or that we feel don't deserve it, sometimes making that human connection can make all the difference. There's nothing that is going to work on absolutely everybody. And some people are not ready to hear these things or they're just that entrenched or that defiant. You're not going to reach everybody, but it's been quite effective. I've brought a lot of people out. I've seen a lot of people come out and we're working on new cases all the time.

Jordan Harbinger: What form of extremism is currently recruiting people in ways that maybe the rest of us won't recognize until the damage is already done?

Jeff Schoep: All forms of extremism, I think, are equally dangerous, but in different ways. So I think right now we're seeing a real spike in the far left extremism on the college campuses and antisemitism, and it's going mainstream in a lot of ways. And that I think is disturbing because I think people will say, Oh, you're saying one side's worse than the other. I'm not saying that. They're all equal as far as I'm concerned. But right now we've got an uptick in, I'd say like your stuff from the, what you'd say racism and hate from the extreme far right is pretty in your face. It's pretty obvious. Oh, those are Nazis. They get dismissed. Now, some of the far left stuff where the antisemitism and hatred is coming in there is more mainstream. So in my personal opinion, I feel like that's a little bit more dangerous at this point because it's been mainstreamed in some ways, so it's been given some credibility and you've got candidates that are running for office that are saying these things and they're winning primaries. So, I mean, I think that's extremely dangerous because it's more subtle. They're using language that sounds nice to say ugly things.

Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting. That's a whole show right there. What belief or reflex or emotional need from the old Jeff still shows up and what do you do when it does? There's got to be something that just sort of creeps in and you go, oh geez, you know, I thought I was past that, but there it is. Your grandma will say, I'm not racist at all. But then she sees the African-American guy walking next to her car at the gas station, he's on his way to his car, but she goes like this, right? And she tenses up and you go, locks the doors real quick and you go, sure thing grandma. You laugh it off because she's 86 years old and nobody noticed and it didn't become a thing, but okay, no, that's still there. There's got to be something like that from your old life that creeps in and you go, oh, you know what, that's a 25 years of leading the Nazi movement creeping back in. I need to reevaluate that belief or that instinct.

Jeff Schoep: It is pretty common for people to have those pulls and things like that, but I feel like there's nothing I can think of. The last thing for me, and I was honest about it, was the numbers in the Holocaust. And when I got past that, that was it. People laugh at when I say this, but I said, I was still in the movement. I was de-radicalizing while I was still in. The proper process is to disengage and then work on de-radicalization. Mine was opposite. I was de-radicalizing while I was still in. So I was going through all these different things. I feel like sometimes Daryl explains this even better than I do. He was like, oh, I know how your mind works, Jeff. You had to try every single thing you could to fix that organization before you got out. And that's exactly what I did. I let go of a lot of that stuff and it was gone. But there's people that have a lot of issues with it. There was one guy I was working with, and he actually left before I did. He told me, he said he was still struggling with racism about Black people. And I said, well, let's talk this through. What is it? It was one thing. It was that he had this issue with where the Black guy that lived down the street from his house would always hit on his wife when she was walking to work. And I said, okay. He couldn't think of nothing else. It was just this guy. So I've reframed it for him and asked, okay, if a white guy was hitting on her or something else, he's like, no, why are you saying that? So I keep kind of needling with him. And then finally, I said, well, did you ever think that maybe it had nothing to do with his color, that he's just a jerk? Maybe your wife's just hot.

Jordan Harbinger: All right, buddy. Right.

Jeff Schoep: I didn't say that.

Jordan Harbinger: Your neighbor has rizzed.

Jeff Schoep: Don't be a hater. Yeah, but he didn't think of it like that. He was just like, oh, hey, wait a minute.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jeff Schoep: Yeah. I really don't have issues. It's just him. Can I hit on your wife? No.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Let's not, cause he's black. You just don't want people hitting on your wife. Yeah. Oh gosh. Yeah. You're welcome. 10 years of therapy in one conversation. It was wild. That's really funny. What did the people you hated understand about your humanity before you understood it yourself? You met Dia, you met Daryl, you met other people. Even the people you met at the liquor store parking lot. What did those people see in you that maybe you didn't even see in yourself?

Jeff Schoep: I think they saw another human being and they just looked at it through that lens instead of judging somebody by the color of their skin or preconceived notions, because that's the biggest thing. When people say white people, this black people, this Jewish people, this, none of those things are true. Sure. There's stereotypes that people fit into. Sure. That happens in every culture and you can have that, but it is not definitive. You can't say all people from this group or all women do this or all men do this. It just doesn't make sense. So when you start breaking those things down and you treat people based on merit and how they are as people individually, I think that's key to breaking this kind of radical thinking.

Jordan Harbinger: Some people might think it hasn't been that long. This is just a rebrand from this guy. It's not real. What do you think will prove that this is repair rather than just rebranding a fresh coat of paint?

Jeff Schoep: Jordan, when I first left and I first left the movement, there was a newspaper article from a big paper that came out. It was about me. It was like, do you believe him? And he was involved in this all these years. And I thought, man, that hit me so hard at the time. I was so angry. I was heartbroken. I mean, it hurt. It was like, man, I'm risking my life speaking out on this stuff. And I've done everything I could. I left everything I knew behind. I gave up my career. I gave up everything and started over with nothing. So that's where my mind went at first when people were criticizing me like, oh, nothing I do will be good enough.

Jeff Schoep: Jordan, when I first left and I first left the movement, there was a newspaper article from a big paper that came out. It was about me. It was like, do you believe him? And he was involved in this all these years. And I thought, man, that hit me so hard at the time. I was so angry. I was heartbroken. I mean, it hurt. It was like, man, I'm risking my life speaking out on this stuff. And I've done everything I could. I left everything I knew behind. I gave up my career. I gave up everything and started over with nothing. So that's where my mind went at first when people were criticizing me like, oh, nothing I do will be good enough. That's going back to how extremists think. Now I process it a lot better. I understand that. I understand that thinking, and there should be skepticism about anybody that leaves, especially if they've been in for a long time, but the actions and walking the walk and talking the talk are two different things. I think when somebody's out here doing the work and they've been working hard at it and trying to make a difference for society to reject that, I think is at society's peril, and I'm not talking about just myself, but I'm just talking about in general, a lot of people that I'm working with that are coming out now, you know, they were watching to see somebody like me that hasn't happened where a national leader from this movement has left. That was part of the fear or concern that I had when I was leaving as well. Would society ever accept me back? Then if I'm speaking out, I wanted to set things right, but would they ever see me as anything else? That was one of the concerns that I had was maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot here when I'm leaving the rest of the life is over because that's how I thought when I was 19, when I got doxxed on that show, I gave up everything that I love doing because I thought my life was over. So if we think like that, and a lot of people that are watching from the outside, looking in, that are considering changing their lives and stuff like that, they want to see if it's possible. So the formers that are out there speaking out like what I do, it gives a lot of people hope that they can change and they can come back to society, that they're not stuck forever because the movement depends on that. These movements, extremist movements, all kinds depend on that. Holding those people in that place, you're never going to get out. Your family's not going to accept you for those that broke ties with their families and things like that. This is their new family. So it's very hard to break free from that. So it's important that they see that, in my opinion, anyways, it's important that they see that there's life after being involved in something like that, in a gang or an extremist group of any kind.

Jordan Harbinger: Surely you have tattoos and stuff. Did you have to have those covered up or removed or have big swastikas all over your body or what?

Jeff Schoep: Thankfully, I was smart enough not to put swastikas on me because I think if I did that, I would need to get them covered. I have like an iron cross and a couple of things like that, but I haven't gotten them covered because I feel like it's a good conversation starter. If somebody comes up and says something about it, it opens up a conversation because I'm not going to just go up and start talking to somebody on the street, but sometimes people will come up and talk to me and I'll certainly talk with them.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I guess iron cross, you could always play it off like you just thought it was cool when you were younger, you had a motorcycle or something. I don't know. Yeah. Swastika is a little bit more intense. There's nothing on your face or your neck that I can see. You don't have lightning bolts or the SS stuff on you or anything like that? Were you thinking ahead or were you just like, I don't really want that in particular, because it seems like a lot of those guys have that stuff and they have to get them covered.

Jeff Schoep: A lot of them do, especially while in the skinhead movement. But I think a lot of that's changing now where a lot of them are not getting marked for that because when you're carrying those kinds of tattoos, it's a, another societal burden that's on you now when you're marking yourself like that. So I'm not sure, but something inside of me was telling me like, don't put swastikas on you. Huh? Yeah. I don't know why.

Jordan Harbinger: Maybe there's a part of you that always knew. Thank you very much, man. Fascinating conversation. Really appreciate it.

Jeff Schoep: It's an honor to be here. Thank you.

Jordan Harbinger: You're about to hear a preview of The Jordan Harbinger Show with a black man that befriends members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Daryl Davis: I don't support the KKK at all. I don't support that ideology, but I support people having the right to believe as they want to believe as long as they don't cross the line and hurt people. And to show, to prove that I will stick up for somebody else's rights has also led to people just like that sticking up for mine. I know I didn't convert anybody. I am the impetus for over 200 to make up their own minds to convert themselves because I've given them reason to think about other things that make more sense than what they're currently doing. It bothers me a great deal that we call ourselves the greatest nation on the face of this earth.

You know, we have to admit that there are some flaws here. I don't adhere to that statement that we are the greatest. Maybe I would bend and say that perhaps technologically we are the greatest.

So how is it that we as Americans can talk to people as far away as the moon? Or anywhere on the face of this earth. But yet there's so many of us who have difficulty talking to the person who lives right next door.

This is the 21st century. This racist nonsense does not belong in any century, let alone the 21st. We are living in space age times, but there's still too many of us thinking with stone age minds.

Jordan Harbinger: For more on how Daryl Davis convinced 200 KKK members to give up their robes, check out episode 540 on The Jordan Harbinger Show. Big thank you to Jeff Schoep for coming on the show.

What sticks with me is how much effort it took to keep his worldview intact. Daryl Davis. Oh, he's an exception.

Deeyah Khan, another exception. A Jewish woman offering him a safe place to stay. Another exception.

The black strangers have fixed his car. More exceptions. At some point, if everyone you meet is an exception to your theory, maybe your theory is bullshit, but recognizing that still took some time.

Jeff describes years of contradictions accumulating before he left. And even after leaving, he still had Holocaust denial to work through. Walking out of the organization didn't automatically get the organization out of his head.

Although I will say there's something poetic about the nation's foremost and most famous Nazi now working with the Simon Wiesenthal center on the Holocaust stuff. This stuff matters because these groups can make the damage they cause feel like evidence that you need them. You lose relationships, jobs, opportunities.

And instead of asking whether the movement is ruining your life, you decide the outside world is persecuting you. Eventually, the group becomes the only place you think you can go. And that's why the question of life after extremism matters.

There has to be a way out that includes accountability and the possibility of building something better. The people harmed, they don't owe anyone forgiveness. And skepticism about a former leader like this is reasonable.

Repair is something you demonstrate through sustained action. I also don't want to overlook the people who helped challenge Jeff's beliefs. Daryl, Dia, and the strangers in Detroit had lives of their own.

They weren't supporting characters waiting around to give a Nazi a breakthrough. Their humanity was always there. Jeff was just finally beginning to see it.

Thanks to Jeff for coming on the show. All things Jeff Schoep will be in the show notes on the website, along with advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show. Those are at Jordan Harbinger dot com slash deals.

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And this show is created in association with PodcastOne. Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi are the team. Remember, we rise by lifting others.

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