“I honestly don’t know if it’s the fact that I’m the leader of a white nationalist group or January 6th involvement,” Fair elaborated in a voice chat posted in the channel, which Raw Story has reviewed. “Trying to figure it out myself. I don’t know what to tell my boss. Which one’s worse?”
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Fair did not respond to emails requesting comment for this story. It is not clear how he learned about the ban or what type of work he does that might require him to visit military bases. He lives near Fort Jackson, a military installation near Columbia, S.C., that provides basic training to more than 45,000 soldiers entering the Army each year.
The Department of Defense did not respond to inquiries from Raw Story about why Fair, who is not a member of the military, was banned from military bases.
Fair leads the South Carolina-based Southern Sons Active Club, which is part of the burgeoning network of neo-Nazi groups that emphasize brotherhood and mixed-martial arts training. These “active clubs” also work to indoctrinate young men in the white supremacist conspiracy theory that white people are facing genocide.
Southern Sons Active Club also has a presence in North Carolina and Georgia.
Most of these active clubs outwardly present a more sanitized version of white nationalism by generally refraining from overt displays of Nazi symbolism, such as the swastika. They also have worked alongside the Proud Boys — a group with complicated racial politics that accepts men of color while also harboring members who embrace Nazism — and harassed drag shows and other LGBTQ events.
Fair’s group is less guarded than others in its ideological signaling: Photos distributed on its public channel on the encrypted messaging app Telegram show members giving Hitler salutes.
Beyond his involvement in the active club network, part of the so-called “white nationalism 3.0 model,” Fair is a self-avowed fan of racist skinhead culture, a throwback to the 1980s and 1990s, before the 19-year-old man was born.
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Fair’s presence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 is not a secret, but there’s no evidence that he violated any laws beyond being on restricted Capitol grounds — an offense that the Department of Justice typically does not prosecute, with some rare exceptions.
Regardless of whether Fair’s presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 played a role in his getting banned from military bases, discussion of Fair’s situation among members of the Telegram chat indicates that it was a relatable predicament for other extremists.
For example, Vassilios Pistolis, a white supremacist who was formerly active with the now-defunct Traditionalist Worker Party and Atomwaffen, disclosed in the chat that he has been banned from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Pistolis was court-martialed and ultimately discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps for assaulting antiracist counter-protestors at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.
Non-military civilians typically have access to military bases for a range of activities including contract work and services such as deliveries and heating and air-conditioning maintenance.
The military has been slow to take action against active-duty members charged with criminal offenses for their participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection. But the Tennessee Valley Authority — a federally owned utility — banned William Beals, a union carpenter, from its facilities after learning he was present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, as exclusively reported by Raw Story.
More than two years later, the FBI arrested him and charged him with theft of U.S. property, as well as violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.
Tyler Dykes, a Marine Corps veteran who was briefly involved with the Southern Sons Active Club earlier this year, was arrested in July and charged with assaulting law enforcement and other alleged violations related to the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
David Fair appears in the top row, second from left, in a composite photo published by Atlanta Antifascists.
Prior to his arrest by the FBI, Dykes served time in jail for crimes related to his participation in a torch march on the eve of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.
It is not clear whether Dykes and Fair knew each other on Jan. 6, but no evidence has surfaced that Fair was with Dykes that day.
Instead, Fair walked to the Capitol with his mother, Christina Praser-Fair, according to an account she gave to WLTX News 19. “We got to the Capitol building, there was already a ton of people there,” Praser-Fair told the news station. “We were right next to the scaffolding.”
A photo included in the news report shows Fair wearing a red Trump 2020 hat and dental braces, while holding a Vietnamese American Freedom and Heritage flag and standing in front of the risers erected on the west side of the Capitol for Joe Biden’s inauguration.
A local news story shows Fair with his family at then-President Donald Trump’s January 2017 inauguration, giving his age as 12 at that time. He recently announced that he was celebrating his birthday on Telegram. Based on that metric, he would have been 16 at the time of the insurrection, and 17 when he helped found Southern Sons Active Club in the summer of 2022.
‘Act the fascist part’
During an interview with a white nationalist podcaster in January, Fair pitched an approach to talking about white power ideology to friends and neighbors — one he asserted would avoid tripping alarm bells.
“If you’re talking to a person, politics comes, up you don’t need to say, ‘Oh yeah, I’m a national socialist, like you know, Hitler from Germany,’” he said. “I would just tell people, ‘Yeah, I’m a nationalist. I love my nation. I love the people in it. And I’m proud to be who I am.’ And nobody on Earth — even non-white people — they won’t get mad at hearing that.”
But to the podcast audience, he made no effort to conceal who he was.
“Act the fascist part,” Fair urged. “Don’t just say you’re a fascist. Become a fascist. Or national socialist, or pro-white, identitarian, whatever you consider yourself to be — act the part.”
Fair has evangelized for his racist beliefs off-line, too.
For example, Southern Sons Active Club has actively networked with other far-right groups.
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They joined forces with the Proud Boys to protest the drag show in Florence, S.C., in September 2022.
They appeared at a flash rally outside the headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., with Tennessee Active Club, which is led by Sean Kauffmann, who recently garnered notoriety for attaching himself to the mayoral candidate Gabrielle Hanson in Franklin, Tenn.
And members of Southern Sons Active Club collaborated with the neo-fascist group Patriot Front on stickering runs and hand-to-hand combat training, according to their Telegram channel.
Southern Sons Active Club allows its members to join other white power groups, Fair said in the podcast interview.
“You can join any group you want because this is your brotherhood, this is your family, and if you want to do the national thing, go ahead,” he said. “We’re still your brothers.” He added only one caveat: “You can get in touch with any other guy as long as it’s not some terrorist group, you know.”
But Fair’s efforts to distance Southern Sons Active Club from terrorism is belied by a message on the group’s Telegram channel recommending that followers “read the 88 precepts of David Lane.”
Lane was a member of the neo-Nazi terrorist group the Order who authored the seminal text of the modern white power movement while serving a 190-year prison sentence for his role in the 1984 murder of Jewish talk-radio host Alan Berg.
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Beyond pushing fitness and self-improvement, the Southern Sons Active Club channel salts in messaging with an aggressive edge, with phrases such as, “Mark your territory,” “We win by dominating physical space,” and, “Total victory or total death.”
While Southern Sons Active Club has been relatively dormant over the past eight months since its members were exposed in the Atlanta Antifa report, Fair has been talking about reviving the group.
In a message posted on the Telegram chat frequented by racist skinheads, Fair said he is “planning on traveling the entire Carolinas and Georgia on a grand tour of sorts meeting with our guys to build up more support.”
He specifically mentioned interest in convening an in-person meeting of Southern Sons Active Club members and other white supremacists in Charlotte, N.C., although he appears to have not settled on a date. Last weekend, he joined a friend in Atlanta and pledged to put up Southern Sons Active Club stickers.
In his posts on the Telegram chat for racist skinheads, Fair is open about his abuse of alcohol, and in one recent post he wrote, “Literally me,” in reaction to a meme about drinking and driving. And he presents himself as someone willing to confront people he views as his adversaries, writing in one message that he has “troll”-ed Radical Hebrew Israelites, an antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ group whose membership is predominantly Black.
The day before Fair announced that he had been banned from military bases, he said he planned to go to his local Waffle House and harass a trangender employee.
“I’m thinking maybe like just harassing the f---ing t----- or making a big scene out of it,” he said. “I don’t know. I got like five dudes on board with me, so we can probably do something funny if y’all can think of something.”
Last month, he announced in the chat at 10:14 p.m. on the Saturday after Thanksgiving that he was at Waffle House on “hour something of being drunk,” and said he was “tempted” to start a fight. More than four hours later, he announced that he “got home safe” and was “Booz cruising again.”
Fair posted a video of himself driving that referenced getting “socked in the jaw,” but it’s not clear exactly what happened during his visit to Waffle House, although he appears to have avoided any entanglements with law enforcement.
Commenting on a former Southern Sons Active Club member who apparently failed to demonstrate sufficient mettle, Fair reflected on the qualities he values in his fellow white supremacists.
“Honestly, at the current state of our scene it almost takes a criminal mind to keep going sometimes,” he said. “I don’t say criminal mind to say we are dangerous lads. But it takes a certain mindset — an ability to be ready to do anything.”
Leonard Leo in 2017 while appearing on C-SPAN. (Photo courtesy of C-SPAN.)
Supporters of ultra nationalist party Golden Dawn hold party flag and Greek flag as they demonstrate on February 1, 2014 in Athens, Greece. (Photo by Milos Bicanski/ Getty Images)
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