Jeff Schoep (born 1973) was the chairman of the National Socialist Movement from 1994 to 2019.
Biography[]
Jeff Schoep was born in Litchfield, Minnesota in 1973, and he read Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf in fourth grade. He joined a minor neo-Nazi group at the age of 19, and he succeeded Cliff Herrington as the leader of the National Socialist Movement in 1994. In 1998, he was sentenced to probation for assisting in burglary; the judge called him out for fathering an illegitimate child and for stealing, crimes that Schoep and other neo-Nazis attributed to non-whites. In 2009, he oversaw the adoption of black "battle dress uniforms" as the new uniform of the NSM, replacing the Nazi brown shirt. Schoep's party became known for its crude propaganda, the violence that it worked hard to provoke, and for its faux SS outfits that led to the NSM being branded "Hollywood Nazis" by other Nazi groups. They group fell apart after Schoep attempted to transform it into a mainstream party and replace its swastika logo with an Odal rune, angering many of its members and causing its membership to decline to 40. He ultimately decided to leave the NSM in 2019 and become a public speaker, anti-racism advocate, and extremism consultant, renouncing his racist past and his involvement in racist groups.