The “New Look, Same Racism” of Blood Tribe

In September, Springfield, Ohio, became the flash point of the country’s contentious debate around race and immigration, thrusting the recovering Rust Belt community into the national spotlight. 

In August, claims that the city’s Haitian migrant population was abducting and eating local pets ignited a social media firestorm. America’s far right took notice, wasting little time to seize the moment and generate anti-immigrant fervor. The small neo-Nazi organization known as Blood Tribe heeded the call and, on Aug. 10, marched through the streets of Springfield armed with swastika flags and AR-15s. Exactly a month later, on the presidential debate stage, the rumors reached an audience of millions, generating both significant support and condemnation. 

In the days that followed, Blood Tribe engaged in a public relations blitzkrieg, pushing racist tropes about Springfield’s Haitian community and doxing local citizens who dared to speak out against them on Gab—an alternative social media platform best known as an online gathering space for white supremacists. More than 30 bomb threats against local schools, government buildings, and city officials followed the online campaign, causing residents to fear for their safety. 

While Blood Tribe is a relative newcomer to the American far-right scene, its tactics and ideology draw on the modus operandi of racists of generations past—donning the veil of “community defense” utilized by Citizens’ Councils of the civil rights era while drawing inspiration from the genocidal, apocalyptic fantasies of the country’s most violent domestic terrorist groups of the 1980s. As nativist and anti-immigrant rhetoric becomes more mainstream, extremist groups like Blood Tribe pursue opportunities to spread their message and threaten violence against vulnerable communities and those who defend them. 

The Image May Change, but the Roots Remain the Same

Founded in 2021 by former Marine and tattoo artist Christopher Pohlhaus, Blood Tribe began as an online following Pohlhaus amassed while selling white supremacist propaganda and networking with other extremists. As Pohlhaus’s online popularity grew, so did his desire to create a membership-based neo-Nazi organization. In May 2022, Pohlhaus moved to the remote town of Springfield, Maine, where he purchased 10 acres of land in an attempt to establish a neo-Nazi compound with the stated goal of turning the entirety of Maine into a white ethnostate. Pohlhaus’s Nazi homesteading project eventually fizzled out, as he was never able to recruit more than a half-dozen members to join him, and the local backlash eventually forced him to sell the property. Despite this failure, Blood Tribe remains one of most visible white supremacist groups in the country, having participated in multiple marches across the Midwest and East Coast and establishing a presence on social media sites such as X (formerly known as Twitter), Gab, Telegram, and Odysee.

Still, Blood Tribe’s racist efforts are rooted in the long history of other white supremacist groups in the United States. Since the 1970s, white power groups, such as the Aryan Nations, led by Richard Butler, and the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, led by Louis Beam, established paramilitary training camps in Idaho and Texas, respectively, to train white supremacists for what they believed to be an inevitable future racial holy war, or “RAHOWA,” in the United States. 

But they didn’t just train. They took action. In 1981, Beam and his Klan followers engaged in a violent intimidation campaign against Vietnamese refugees along Texas’s Gulf Coast, burning multiple Vietnamese homes and fishing boats. The Klan’s violent activities invited the legal attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center, leading to the eventual shuttering of Beam’s paramilitary camps. 

Beam and his hooded followers’ crusade against Vietnamese refugees fleeing a war-torn society came amid yet another anti-immigrant panic in the U.S., spurred on by the likes of John Tanton, whose think tanks mainstreamed anti-immigrant rhetoric and emboldened extremists to mobilize for violence. By using the past as a guiding light, one only needs to glance briefly at Pohlhaus’s and Beam’s offensives to notice the similarities in their tactics and rhetoric.

Networking Events for White Supremacists

During his time in the Northeast, Pohlhaus began connecting with other white supremacist organizations, such as the National Socialist Club (also known as NSC-131) and the Goyim Defense League (GDL). The associations between these groups, however, run deeper than mere ideology and mutual hatred of Jews and non-whites—they organize and demonstrate together. 

In October 2022, Pohlhaus marched through Lewiston, Maine, with members of NSC-131 in an attempt to intimidate the town’s large Somali diaspora—a tactic similar to that of Beam’s in the 1980s. Just a few months earlier, during a white supremacist meet-up in July 2022, Pohlhaus tattooed GDL founder Jon Minadeo II with a Nazi Totenkopf and SS bolts. Later, in June 2023, Blood Tribe marched with GDL again through Hudson, Wisconsin, to disrupt an LGBTQ pride event. Members of the White Lives Matter movement were also in attendance. Aimenn Penny, a member of White Lives Matter, previously attended a March 2023 Blood Tribe event three weeks before firebombing a Chesterland, Ohio, church for hosting a drag show. 

Aside from the tactical inspiration gleaned from white supremacists of yesteryear, Blood Tribe’s eccentric religious philosophy is not unfamiliar among its neo-Nazi contemporaries. As evidenced by the runic tattoo scrawled across the left side of Pohlhaus’s face, members of Blood Tribe adhere to Wotansvolk or “Wotanism”—a theology that combines elements of esoteric neo-Nazism—a religious admiration for Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, and Norse pagan mythology.

Wotansvolk—founded by David Lane during a 190-year prison sentence for his role in the white supremacist terrorist organization “The Order”—promotes a white revolution, the establishment of a white ethnostate, and further endorses Beam’s concept of “leaderless resistance,” which is popular among today’s milieu of accelerationist violent extremists. By adopting these practices, Blood Tribe seeks to normalize and revitalize the symbology of Nazi Germany in hopes of inspiring others to take up violent action in defense of their race. Pohlhaus and his followers’ brazen public displays of hate serve as an opportunity to recruit potential members and harness the power of what they perceive as redemptive acts of violence against minority groups supposedly usurping their rightful place at the top of an imagined racial hierarchy.

Claiming “Self-Defense”

In light of its recent forays into Springfield, Ohio, Blood Tribe claims to be on the culture war’s front lines. The group reiterated as much in a recent Gab post: “Yes, if you care about your Nation and your Folk, then join us in our struggle to defend and protect White families and interests.” Its rhetoric echoes that of the White Citizens’ Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, which coalesced around white backlash to the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, eliminating racial segregation in public schools. 

Founded in Indianola, Mississippi, in July 1954 by plantation manager Robert B. “Tut” Patterson, membership in the first White Citizens’ Council initially consisted of local business owners and prominent political figures who eschewed the overtly violent disposition of the Ku Klux Klan. Seeking to undermine racial progress in the South, “Council leaders typically made a point to see that the names of any black persons who had attempted to register to vote or signed petitions for school desegregation made their way to the local newspapers so that whites in the community would know which blacks to fire, turn off their tenant farms, or deny credit,” according to James Cobb, a history professor at the University of Georgia. Councils in the South also attempted to publicize the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s supposed communist connections—a tactic commonly used by white supremacist groups during the Cold War to draw those wary of communism into their circle of hate. 

Although the influence of White Citizens’ Councils fell considerably in the 1970s after federal legislation codified equal rights for Black Americans, it isn’t difficult to see how their ideology reflects onto today’s white supremacist movements. Blood Tribe and its like-minded counterparts in the GDL, White Lives Matter movement, and Patriot Front habitually hold demonstrations outside of state legislatures, LGBTQ-friendly establishments, and canvassing communities with racist banners to protest what they perceive as an attack on the way of life divinely bestowed upon them by virtue of their race. 

From Selma to Springfield

Victory in World War II ushered in what many consider America’s “golden age” of the 1950s and 1960s. With the shadow of European fascism in the rearview mirror, the civil rights era birthed a mission dedicated to securing equal rights for all. The pursuit of social justice still endures to this day. But, much like then, not everyone shares the same enthusiasm. 

George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party had their “hate bus,” riddled with swastikas to intimidate Freedom Riders in the 1960s. Fifty-some years later, Thomas Rousseau and Patriot Front ride around in U-Hauls to transport their members to and from hate marches from city to city. 

White Citizens’ Councils boycotted Black businesses. Pohlhaus and his Blood Tribe protest LGBTQ pride parades.

Unfortunately, despite the separation of current and previous generations’ white power movements, manifestations of hate and violence continue to capture headlines and reach audiences of millions. These groups are not new to the U.S. Instead, they are merely the scabs that formed over decades-old societal wounds, freshly torn from the flesh of a polarized body politic in the wake of the latest sensational disinformation campaign.

The national conversation around Springfield’s Haitian community is evidence of that. And it serves as a reminder that today’s fascists continue to carry the torch of their predecessors.