‘The white man’s coming back’: Eight held over links to resurgent violent skinhead group
Court documents suggest charges may follow for three others detained outside North Carolina.
Founded in 2003, Vinlanders Social Club earned a reputation as one of the most violent racist skinhead groups in the U.S., linked to at least four murders. It declined in the early 2010s but extremism researchers were alarmed last fall when the group began to show signs of resurgence.
Southern Sons emerged in late 2021 as a neo-Nazi group seeking to recruit members in the Carolinas and Georgia. The group was co-founded by David William Fair, who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 as a juvenile, alongside his mother. Previously known as Southern Sons Active Club, Fair’s group has worked with other far-right groups including Patriot Front and Aryan Freedom Network.
Now, Southern Sons has become increasingly aligned with Vinlanders Social Club. A review of Southern Sons’s Telegram channel indicates the group has been largely absorbed.
For example, a message posted by Vinlanders and forwarded by Southern Sons last May shows 11 men with Vinlanders and swastika flags giving Hitler salutes outside a Confederate memorabilia shop in South Carolina. The caption reads: “Vinlanders Social Club Supporters and Probates Firm 22-Southern Sons at Dixie Fest 2025.”
A propaganda video posted last September on the Southern Sons channel, highlighting the murder in August of Iryna Zarutska by a mentally disturbed man on the Charlotte light rail, directs prospective members to the Vinlanders website.
Southern Sons members and Vinland Social Club probates at the Dixie Republic store in South Carolina in May 2025, including Ryan Gower (standing, second from left), Tristan Somerson (standing, center), Martin Harvey (standing, fourth from right), David Fair (kneeling, right) and Joseph Webb (second from right). Flag altered with superimposed smiley face.Facebook
‘The point is desecration’
Fair was booked in jail in Columbia, S.C. on the same day this month that the five North Carolina men were arrested in Charlotte. The jail record indicated that as of Sunday, Fair was being held on a $2,500 bond for breach of peace.
The sprawling investigation into a hate-crime spree allegedly committed by the Southern Sons members — with 27 charges against five defendants ranging from felony conspiracy and soliciting gang activity to disturbing a casket/grave marker — started in October.
Then, three members showed up at a peaceful Pro-Palestine protest in Charlotte. Charges filed last fall indicate that David Pagava, a 19-year-old student at UNC-Charlotte; Ethan Purcell, 18; and an unnamed juvenile were armed with knives and brass knuckles at a “Rise Up For Gaza” protest at First Ward Park in Charlotte on Oct. 4. The police seized phones from the three as evidence.
A detective with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Unit obtained a search warrant to review the phones, according to court documents, and discovered footage showing members desecrated a Jewish veteran’s grave at a cemetery in Huntersville, N.C., then traveled to a church in Charlotte, stole an LGBTQ+ pride flag, and burned it at the home of one of the members’ parents on Sept. 13.
Video allegedly shot by Alexander Hare, 21, shows Pagava squatting beside a grave decorated with the star of David and the U.S. Army logo, stating: “Jew right here. Now, I’m not a fan of Jews, so …”
Then, according to the affidavit, Pagava kicked “flags and other decorative/spiritual items” on the grave, and yelled, “White f---ing power!” while giving a Nazi salute.
Later, Pagava, described as a “member leader” of Southern Sons, traveled in a truck owned by Joseph Keaton Webb, 22, with Purcell and the juvenile, to Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Charlotte, according to the affidavit.
“Don’t f--- up, don’t get cold feet, don’t [unintelligible], okay?” Pagava said, according to the affidavit. “Tear that s--- down, okay? The point is desecration. Stealing it … may be a sign of it. Alright get ready. Go go go!”
The video then shows Purcell and the juvenile running behind the church and returning to the truck with the pride flag.
According to the affidavit, members of the hate group burned the flag later. The videos also show a book burning said to have taken place on Sept. 14. A compilation video posted on the Southern Sons Telegram channel shows a man — alleged in court documents to be Tristan Somerson, a 19-year-old student at Mount Mitchell Community College — wearing a Vinlanders probate patch and holding up The Straight Man, a novel by Richard Russo.
“What he doesn’t realize is the white man’s coming back, and we’re going to kill every last single n-----,” Somerson allegedly says, before throwing the book into the fire. “White power.”
L-R: Ethan Purcell, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Detention Center, Alexander Hare and Joseph Webb
The investigation by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police identified Fair, the Southern Sons co-founder, along with Martin Blaine Harvey, 22, and Ryan Anthony Gower, 21, as “additional gang members.”
An affidavit filed in support of criminal charges against Somerson alleges that Harvey “gave a hate speech towards the LGBTQ community and Jewish people” before Somerson and Purcell burned the stolen pride flag.
Harvey was booked into the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center in Columbia, S.C. on Jan. 21, and was being held as of Sunday on a criminal conspiracy charge.
Gower, 21, of Bradenton, Fla., was arrested on Jan. 21, and also faces a felony conspiracy charge in North Carolina. Gower signed an extradition order on Jan. 22 agreeing to be transported to North Carolina.
and is subject to extradition on an out-of-state warrant, according to Manatee County court records.
The felony conspiracy charges allege that Pagava, Somerson, Purcell, Webb, Fair, Harvey, Hare, Gower and the juvenile conspired in various combinations to desecrate the Jewish veteran’s grave, steal the pride flag, and burn it “in furtherance of the gang’s mission and ideology.”
An email to Southern Sons requesting comment for this story went unreturned.
Somerson, Pagava, Purcell, Hare and Webb were released on bond, despite an attestation by the police detective that at least four planned “organized criminal activities in the furtherance of the gang’s motives” and are “willing to use violence to advance the group’s objectives.”
Magistrate Robert Gardner added a finding of fact to Somerson’s release order that the defendant holds a “high likelihood of involvement in ongoing violence and organized crime across state lines.”
Of Pagava, Garder noted that he has “pending weapons-related charges” and is subject to “allegations of ongoing violent activity and organized crime.”
Murder and racial intimidation
The Southern Sons’ drift from the active club network — a global white nationalist formation that generally avoids overt neo-Nazi symbolism — to Vinlanders tracks an apparent escalation in violence.
The pinned message on Southern Sons’ Telegram channel still references the group as “Southern Sons Active Club,” and as recently as July 2025, the channel forwarded a message from the Great Plains Active Club, indicating a continued affiliation.
But more than half of the posts last year were forwarded messages from Vinlanders, showing how the groups have meshed.
For the active club network in the U.S., the Southern Sons arrests appear to be an “escalation,” Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Raw Story, adding that “there have been arrests abroad of AC members for terrorism.”
Last August, a 24-year-old Dutch man who was a member of Guezenbond — described by the investigative news outlet Bellingcat as “a Dutch affiliate of the white supremacist Active Club movement — was arrested in the Netherlands and accused of planning a terrorist attack and possessing illegal firearms.
“When it comes to the Vinlanders, of which Firm 22 is their feeder group, that’s a different matter,” Beirich said. “That group has always openly praised violence and has been around for years.”
Beirich added that active clubs typically allow members to join other groups, a position confirmed by Fair in a January 2022 interview with a white nationalist podcaster.
While active club ideology is typically cloaked behind an emphasis on fitness and brotherhood — for young, white men — there is no such ambiguity in the Vinlanders’ well-documented history of racial violence.
In 2007, three Vinlanders brutally beat a Black man in Indianapolis in broad daylight while threatening horrified onlookers with violence if they called 911, according to a profile by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
One assailant, Eric Fairburn, later confessed to the 2004 murder of a man allegedly responsible for the drunken-driving death of one of his friends.
In 2009, a Pennsylvania prison guard who was secretly a probate member of Vinlanders reportedly murdered his girlfriend and their 18-month-old child.
The same year, a Vinlanders probate named Travis Ricci yelled racial slurs at a Black man walking with a white woman in a park in Phoenix. Ricci returned in a car driven by another neo-Nazi and fired two shotgun blasts, killing the woman, a 40-year-old mother of two. Ricci was sentenced to life in prison in 2019.
Fair has long expressed admiration for racist skinhead culture, demonstrating comfort with violence and racism and a tolerance for risk.
“Honestly, at the current state of our scene it almost takes a criminal mind to keep going sometimes,” Fair said on the 2022 podcast, when he was 17. “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.”
This story has been updated to reflect that Ryan Gower faces a felony conspiracy charge in North Carolina, and signed a waiver of extradition following his arrest in Florida.