Editor's note: This article has been updated to include new details released by the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Eastern District of North Carolina and confirmation that Nix is no longer serving in the Army following the original publication of this article on Sunday, Aug. 18.
Kai Liam Nix, a 20-year-old Army soldier tied to extremist threats against a Raw Story reporter, was arrested on Aug. 15 and is being detained in a North Carolina jail on a “federal hold,” Raw Story has confirmed.
The New Yorker, which published an extensive article Sunday about right-wing extremism, further detailed that Nix’s federal charges involve “illicit sales of firearms and lying on a background check.”
Update, 5:01 p.m., Aug. 19, 2024: A federal grand jury indicted Nix — also known as Kai Brazelton — with unlawful firearms trafficking, including the sale of two stolen firearms, according to a statement Monday from the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Eastern District of North Carolina.
The grand jury also indicted Nix on making false statements to the government by allegedly lying on a security clearance application document by saying he had "never been a member of a group dedicated to the use of violence or force to overthrow the U.S. government."
The FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the U.S. Army Criminal Investigations Department have combined to investigate Nix's case, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Eastern District of North Carolina.
Together, the charges carry a maximum penalty of 30 years in federal prison.
Update, 12:10 a.m., Aug. 21, 2024: Bryce S. Dubee, an Army spokesperson, confirmed to Raw Story that Nix "has left the Army," while referring additional questions to the Department of Justice.
Robert J. Parrott Jr., a public defender, told the New York Times "that we should avoid rushing to judgement" on Nix, adding that the defendant "looks forward to making his case in court."
The story by New Yorker reporter David Kirkpatrick links Nix to a demonstration by neo-Nazis in February outside the Greensboro, N.C., home of Raw Story reporter Jordan Green.
The article also links Nix to photographs of a bogus pizza delivery at Green’s home in January — ones circulated by extremists in an attempt to intimidate Green, who was then completing reporting on a neo-Nazi youth gang 2119, also known as the Blood and Soil Crew.
As detailed by the New Yorker, the license plate of a pickup truck parked outside Green’s home and containing someone surreptitiously photographing the pizza delivery traced back to Nix. The photo apparently taken by Nix was posted by a 2119 member on the social media app Telegram the day after the incident.
Nix, who is an active-duty soldier based at Fort Liberty, N.C., per the New Yorker’s reporting, was also reportedly present at the neo-Nazi demonstration in front of Green’s home in February.
The New Yorker indicated that Nix photographed four men wearing skull masks holding burning flares in Hitler salutes while flanking a fifth man, who held a sign warning of a “consequence” for Green’s reporting.
The man holding the sign, Sean Kauffmann, along with two of the men making Hitler salutes — Jarrett William Smith and David Fair — had been the subject of Green’s previous reporting.
Photos of the demonstration soon appeared on a Telegram channel named Appalachian Archives.
Also posted: photos of the Nazis posing next to a historical marker commemorating the Greensboro massacre, where a coalition of Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members fatally gunned down five labor organizers in 1979.
Raw Story attempted to reach the Army to confirm Nix's service status, but did not receive a response before publication on Sunday. Messages left for the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina likewise went unreturned Sunday.
Sean Kauffmann, a neo-Nazi and violent white supremacist whose harassment of LGBTQ+ people and journalists has beenhighlighted by Raw Story, faces charges for aggravated assault and child abuse following a report that he punched the mother of his infant son in the head.
A sheriff’s deputy in Perry County, Tenn., was dispatched to Kauffmann’s home in Linden, Tenn., at about 8:09 p.m. on March 22, according to a police report obtained by Raw Story.
Kauffmann’s partner, whose name is redacted in the report, told the deputy that Kauffmann “assaulted her by punching her numerous times in the face and head, while she was holding their infant son.”
The report goes on to say that Kauffmann’s partner “had bruising above both her eyes and swelling on her left jaw, and around both her eyes,” that she was “bleeding from the mouth and ears,” and “had a broken tooth, which was about to fall out.”
The woman also reportedly told the deputy she was several weeks pregnant and that Kauffmann told her he was going to kill her.
The report also quotes the woman as saying that Kauffmann, who is listed at 6 feet, 5 inches tall, and weighing 225 pounds, grabbed the infant by the clothing and tried to pull him from his mother’s arms, causing bruising on the child’s head and a red mark on his arm.
Kauffmann was held in the Perry County Jail from March 22 through March 26, and released on a bond for $15,000 for aggravated assault and $10,000 for child abuse, according to police records.
He is scheduled to appear in court before Judge Katerina Moore on Thursday to face charges of child abuse/neglect/endangerment for a child eight years old or younger, and aggravated assault-domestic.
Kauffmann could not be reached for comment for this story.
The Telegram channel for Tennessee Active Club, the neo-Nazi group led by Kauffmann, went dark on March 26, the day he bonded out of jail. A new channel for Kauffmann’s group reemerged on Telegram on March 30, but does not include any content.
History of violence
Sean Kauffmann leads the Tennessee Active Club, a group that is part of a decentralized, global network of white nationalist groups.
Under Kauffmann's leadership, Tennessee Active Club has served as a hub for neo-Nazi organizing and harassment of LGBTQ+ people and other perceived enemies.
In 2021, Kauffmann was convicted of two counts of domestic assault in Perry County in November 2021, according to local court records.
According to an incident report filed in the case, an investigator observed red and purple marks on the neck of the victim — a different woman — and she told him he strangled her and she could not breathe. The investigator reportedly observed a knot on her forehead, black eye, swollen lip and swollen nose.
William Beals, a 15-year-old boy and Sean Kauffmann (l-r) outside a drag show in Cookeville, Tenn., on Jan. 22. Robert Bray is in the background at left. (Courtesy Josh Brandon)
Following Kauffmann’s arrest in the 2021 case, according to the report, deputies obtained a court order to seize all the firearms from his house.
Moore, whom Kauffmann will again face on Thursday, also granted a protective order to the victim.
* * *
Editor’s note:Kauffmann was among five neo-Nazis who demonstrated in front of Raw Story reporter Jordan Green’s home in Greensboro, N.C. in February. Flanked by four men holding lit emergency flares, Kauffmann held a handwritten sign warning of “consequences.”
Kauffmann suggested in a post on the encrypted social media app Telegram that he held Green responsible, at least in part, for his ongoing legal troubles.
“We can’t wait for everyone to see how our activities have helped build a case for a far greater exposé of the people orchestrating antifa and these journalists,” he wrote in the post, referencing the demonstration. “Specifically to me how this will impact all of my legal situations helping me win decisive victories! It’s the only thing that’s helped keep pushing me as hard as it’s gotten!”
The post was made in a Telegram channel run by Kauffmann’s partner, who is the alleged victim in the aggravated assault case.
I began reporting on 2119 in an effort to expose its actions. As I investigated the group’s leadership and activities, and publication of a two-part project neared, neo-Nazi threats against me escalated. Online harassment led to phone calls and doxxing, which devolved into death threats and, most recently, visits to my home.
My ordeal began in November, when 2119 called me out by name in profane Telegram posts laden with racism, antisemitism and homophobia.
Soon, I began receiving threatening phone calls and voicemails. Someone took pictures of me with a telephoto lens, private investigator-style, and posted them online. A pizza delivery showed up at my doorstep, unrequested, courtesy of 2119. And earlier this month, matters culminated with six avowed white supremacists standing in front of my house, holding burning traffic flares, their arms up in Nazi salutes. One held a sign warning me of “consequences.”
Harassment and even death threats are, unfortunately, an occupational hazard for journalists on this beat. The leader of the neo-Nazi terror group, Atomwaffen, unhappy about being the subject of a ProPublica story, conspired with others to carry out a swatting attack — a tactic in which the perpetrators place bogus calls for the purpose of eliciting a law enforcement response to the victim’s residence — on journalist A.C. Thompson.
Other examples abound: Journalist James LaPorta, for one, learned his name was on a hit list in the possession of a neo-Nazi accused of plotting race war. In another case, a journalist received a death threat from the leader of a Nazi group called Feuerkrieg Division to try to discourage them from reporting on his group.
I first ran across 2119, also known as Blood and Soil Crew, while combing through Telegram chats in December 2022. They’ve been firmly on my radar since the spring of 2023, when I began to tally up racist and antisemitic incidents and attacks made in 2119’s name. Starting in late October 2023, my editor let me spend significant time investigating what — and who — 2119 truly is.
Almost as soon as they became aware of my reporting, the 2119 members responded with hostility and threats in a naked attempt to stop me from reporting on what had become a multi-state campaign of racist, antisemitic and homophobic violence.
Four days before Thanksgiving, an anonymous Telegram channel published my professional headshot, home address and phone number.
This wasn’t the first time such a thing has happened during my many years covering neo-Nazis, and other extremists. Online posts that include my personal information have been a semi-regular occurrence for the past four years. What was notable this time is that 2119 members immediately amplified this doxxing, highlighting it to like-minded extremists on their Telegram channel.
The accompanying note included a complaint from 2119 that “the bastard above” — me — had “been found out to be harassing our boys.”
Over the next two months, their tactics would become ever more extreme — and strange.
‘You're being watched'
Just before New Year’s Eve, I received a phone call from a restricted number at dinner time. Someone identifying himself as “Bozak” warned me that I was “being watched by international bricksters.”
I already knew by that time that “Bozak” was 2119 member Aiden Cuevas, but the caller hung up before I had an opportunity to confront him.
I understood this “bricksters” term as a reference to an antisemitic attack last summer in Pensacola, Fla., where another 2119 member, Waylon Fowler, threw a brick through the window of a Jewish center while two rabbis sat inside having dinner.
Written on the brick: a swastika and the words “No Jews.”
A couple minutes after the “Bozak” phone call, the same person made a transparent attempt at misdirection by calling back and leaving a voicemail. He claimed to be Thomas Rousseau, leader of the white power group Patriot Front, and again warned: “I’m letting you know that we have people on standby. You’re being watched. Quit messing with us.”
In early January, early on a Sunday afternoon, an unidentified 2119 member placed an order for a pizza delivery at my house. It’s clear a 2119 associate was parked down the street with a camera and a telephoto lens because, the following day, a 2119 member posted a photo on Telegram that shows me standing in my doorway.
The experience was unsettling, but their efforts at intimidation only confirmed in my mind that we had a story that was worth telling. Just as any investigative journalist would do in the course of reporting a story, I called the subjects to offer them an opportunity to be interviewed and to ask them questions.
I began calling 2119 members — and their parents. The response was an odd mixture of silence, defiance, confessions and pleas for understanding.
'We'll keep shooting'
But one particular interview — with Mathew Bair, a Marine Corps veteran who, at 34, is roughly twice the age of most of his fellow 2119 members — stood apart.
Bair readily confirmed much of my reporting about 2119’s activities and goals. And unlike some of his younger cohorts, he was unapologetic, even appearing to take pleasure in confirming some of the most unsavory aspects of 2119’s racist and antisemitic intentions.
As we came to the end of the interview, I dropped what I expected to be one of the most difficult questions.
I asked Bair about a video he had posted showing a flier with the words “Shoot your local judge” that includes a URL to the 2119 Telegram channel.
Bair danced around the question. He initially attempted to deflect by suggesting that the reference was to a specific firearm model — a Taurus Judge.
Regardless, he told me he wasn’t concerned about how a potential victim might interpret the message.
He might have left it at that — an ambiguous, vaguely worded threat shrouded in plausible deniability.
But instead he veered back to the more direct interpretation, mentioning that he is “close” to where an anti-feminist extremist went to a federal judge’s home New Jersey, in 2020, and fatally shot her son.
Then, he casually tossed out the phrase “just like you live in the Raleigh/Durham area, right?”
As it so happens, I don’t live in that area. But the implication was clear: I could be a target, too.
A couple of days later, on Jan. 21, Bair forwarded a message from a private Telegram channel complaining about my reporting.
“Jordan Green, you have a healthy respect for a Taurus Judge now, yes?” the message concluded. “Keep phishing for minors and we’ll keep shooting our local Judge.”
A Telegram post forwarded by Mathew Bair on Jan. 21, 2024 contains an implied threat.
One might be tempted to chalk this up as nothing more than online bluster. But gun violence directed at journalists is very real. This became apparent when shots were fired into the home of an online news publisher in Tennessee last April.
Concurrent with Bair’s warning, an anonymous Telegram account patronized by avowed extremists doxxed me again — this time with the photo of me standing in my doorway when 2119 sent a pizza to my home.
A couple weeks later, the account posted more personal information about me, accompanied by a note: “It’s not over, yet. More to come soon.”
They weren’t lying.
Around 5 p.m. on Feb. 10, six Nazis approached my house on a quiet, residential street in Greensboro, N.C. They held burning traffic flares as they raised their arms in Nazi salutes.
Photos show that at least three of the men are subjects of my reporting on extremism.
Among them: Sean Kauffmann, leader of the Tennessee Active Club, stood in the middle holding a sign warning about a “consequence” for exercising freedom of the press. Flanking Kauffmann were David William Fair, leader of the Southern Sons Active Club, and Jarrett William Smith.
The three men have a history of glorifying and pursuing violence.
Kauffmann and Smith met through Terrorgram, a loose collective of Telegram channels that extol mass shooters, while promoting graphic violence and wildly flagrant racism, in 2019.
Smith, then a soldier in the Army, advised Kauffmann on how to hide firearms from law enforcement when Kauffmann was worried that the police would take them due to a custody dispute with an ex-partner.
According to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, sheriff’s deputies responding to a domestic violence incident in 2021 encountered Kauffmann waving around an assault rifle and later “received information that Kauffmann stated he was going to get into a shootout with police.”
Smith was arrested and charged with distributing information related to explosives and weapons of mass destruction in 2019, a couple months after his exchange with Kauffmann on Telegram. The government alleged that Smith shared information with others on Facebook about how to make improvised explosive devices and suggested to an FBI informant that then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) would make a suitable assassination target.
During his prosecution — for which he ultimately pleaded guilty and served 14 months in prison — federal prosecutors presented evidence that Smith stated in a text message that it was on “my bucket list to KO an antifa member” and advised other Telegram users on how to get away with committing arson against a Michigan podcaster.
The channel that helped organize the flash rally in front of my home followed with an eerie sequel. The subsequent post showed some of the protesters posing with a historical marker commemorating the Greensboro Massacre. The sign marks the site where a coalition of neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members fatally shot five civil rights and labor activists near a public housing community in 1979.
The caption in the Telegram post emphasizes the point that the shooters were acquitted during state and federal criminal trials by arguing that they acted in self-defense.
The message to me isn’t subtle.
Jordan Green is a Raw Story investigative reporter who covers domestic extremism.
One of the hazards of participating in racially motivated extremist activity is getting banned from U.S. military facilities — as David Fair can attest.
Fair is no longer “allowed to enter military bases,” according to a disclosure he made during chat sessions on the encrypted messaging app Telegram that caters to racist skinheads in the United States and Europe.
“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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Neo-Nazis in Tennessee continue to exploit their relationship with Franklin mayoral candidate Gabrielle Hanson, using their newfound notoriety to recruit followers and convey threats toward local journalists and progressive politicians.
A new video featuring a 20-minute conversation between neo-Nazi and Tennessee Active Club leader Sean Kauffmann and Valerie Baldes, an aide to Franklin mayoral candidate Gabrielle Hanson, provides a platform for Kauffmann to openly promote Nazism while spreading hate against Jews and LGBTQ people. During the interview, Kauffmann described anti-fascists as “the foot soldiers of the Judeo-capitalists” while equating LGBTQ people with pedophilia.
The video, which was produced by a consortium of white supremacist groups, was released late Wednesday, on the eve of the final day of early voting for Franklin’s mayoral and board of aldermen election. The official election day is scheduled for Oct. 24.
Hanson currently serves as an at-large alderman on the city’s governing board, and is challenging incumbent Ken Moore for mayor. Moore has served as mayor since 2011.
The video, posted Wednesday on social media platform Telegram, is the latest in a string of incidents injecting the neo-Nazi group into the civic affairs of Franklin — a small, affluent city on the outskirts of Nashville — during the final weeks of the city’s mayoral campaign.
Earlier this month, about a dozen white supremacists showed up at a candidate forum — at Hanson’s invitation, according to one associate — at Franklin’s city hall.
Hanson then compounded the controversy surrounding her association with the neo-Nazis by issuing a press release that included large blocks of quotes from the Tennessee Active Club’s Telegram channel. Hanson has continuously refused to denounce her neo-Nazi supporters.
Baldes opened her interview with Kauffmann by stating, “This isn’t about me condoning anything or denouncing anyone or anything. This is about information, and this is how reporting is done. You go directly to the source and you ask them what’s going on.”
Responding to Baldes’ question about why people call him and his group Nazis, Kauffmann said, “This one is tough, you know, because swastikas and stuff are pretty much the reason.”
He went on to say, “If loving my country and loving my culture and my southern heritage and my ethnic background makes me quote-unquote ‘white supremacist’ or ‘Nazi,’ then so be it.”
Baldes did not renounce Nazism during the interview.
“And I’ve been called these things as well,” Baldes told Kauffmann. “Just because I’m helping with the political campaign — these people are just against everything. They come out and they call you names just to discredit you, and they don’t mean anything. So, if they’re going to call me names like nationalist, fascist or Nazi — and it’s because I love my country and I’m a patriot — so be it.”
The video shows Kauffmann and Baldes seated in armchairs, with a crookedly hung painting and a small table behind them. Earlier in the day, the same white supremacist Telegram channel that released the interview video also posted a photo of Kauffmann posing with Hanson, the mayoral candidate, in the same setting.
The Telegram message described the photo as a “teaser.”
Neo-Nazi leader Sean Kauffmann (left) and Franklin mayoral candidate Gabrielle Hanson pose for a photo shared on a white supremacist Telegram channel. Telegram
On Tuesday, the Telegram channel put out a propaganda video that interspersed images of Democratic state lawmakers Justin Jones and Gloria Johnson with footage of Tennessee Active Club members training in mixed martial arts, and a burning a flag celebrating Black, brown, Asian and indigenous people of color and a collection of Black Lives Matter signs.
Threats and intimidation
The steady stream of videos, online threats and taunts, distributed through multiple white supremacist Telegram channels within a span of days appears to be intended to create a sense of anxiety among voters and residents in Franklin.
In recent weeks, a white supremacist associate of the Tennessee Active Club has posted threats against journalists who produced critical coverage of Hanson’s campaign, including one warning about “the Day of the Rope” — a reference to a 1978 novel written by the late white supremacist leader William Pierce.
The associate, Brad Lewis, also issued a Telegram message purporting to show the home of a specific journalist. An anonymous user in the Tennessee Active Club’s Telegram chat wrote in response: “Who is this person? Where can I find them so I can beat the s--- out of them? So they know, I am in fact active and lurking.”
The white supremacist Telegram channel that distributed the Kauffmann interview video and Tennessee Active Club propaganda video has in the past issued a statement promising to “make it dangerous for the reporter to report freely.”
During his interview with Baldes, Kauffmann discussed a volatile confrontation in January between his group and pro-LGBTQ activists outside of a drag show in Cookeville, Tenn., a small city about 75 miles east of Nashville.
He told Baldes that the group mistakenly brought a swastika flag — a symbol of Nazism — while intending to show up with a Confederate battle flag. Ultimately, he said, they decided to just unfurl the swastika flag because “the point of us being there was essentially to intimidate them.”
When asked whom Kauffman meant by “they,” he replied, “The homosexuals.”
As previously reported by Raw Story, the Cookeville police executed a traffic stop on Kauffmann’s vehicle as he was leaving the rally.
Robert Bray, a fellow white supremacist who was riding in the passenger seat, admitted to throwing a stink bomb at left-wing counter-protesters. One of the officers noted a pistol strapped to Bray’s hip and asked him if he had been trying to provoke a response from the counter-protesters so he could justify using his firearm.
While claiming that the firearm was only for his own protection, Bray quipped: “Those aren’t people.”
Kauffmann explained to Baldes during the recent interview: “We’re there to be direct opposition to antifa. Anywhere they go, we go. And we train just on the off chance that there potentially we would have to defend ourselves, that we were able to do so, or defend other people.”
Despite informing Kauffmann and his passengers during the traffic stop in Cookeville in January that they could be charged with aggravated assault, the lead officer let them go with a warning.
Kauffmann told Baldes that “the officer in charge” at the drag show in Cookeville asked him what they were doing with a swastika flag. (During the protest, Kauffmann also threw up a Nazi salute, and an associate called for killing Jews and Black people.)
Kauffman recounted to Baldes that he told the officer: “And my biggest point that I can make to you is, if they’re here, we’re coming, and we’ll be here. If you don’t want us to be here, they can’t be here.”
Recounting the conversation with Baldes, Kauffmann claimed that “the police were actually very supportive of what we were about and what we were doing.”
Cookeville police Chief Randy Evans could not immediately be reached for comment. Evans did not respond to previous requests for comment from Raw Story about the department’s handling of the Tennessee Active Club’s presence outside the venue where the drag show was held.
William Beals, a violent Three Percenter who was involved in the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol, went on to link up with neo-Nazis in Tennessee to harass drag shows.
More than two years later, the FBI has arrested Beals, Raw Story has learned.
Raw Story reviewed a Facebook update by one of Beals’ friends, who wrote that “a brother of ours has been took in.” That update from Thursday was then shared by another friend of Beals, who added the hashtag “#FBICorruption.”
While the federal complaint against the 52-year-old Beals has not yet been unsealed, Beals is scheduled to appear by video before a magistrate judge in federal court in Knoxville, Tenn. this afternoon, according to the court calendar for the Eastern District of Tennessee. It was not immediately clear what charges he faces.
Beals is currently listed as being housed at the Hamilton County Correctional Facility in Chattanooga, Tenn. Beals could not be reached for comment, and it is not clear whether he has a lawyer.
Beals’ arrest is the culmination of legal troubles that have been mounting for months.
The TVA, a federally owned utility that provides power to Tennessee and portions of surrounding states, notified Beals that he was banned from its facilities for “unauthorized access to the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
Beals was a union carpenter and has said he worked at a nuclear power plant.
Violent history
Beals is a self-identified member of the authoritarian Three Percenter movement that falsely positions itself as a modern-day equivalent to the American patriots who fought the British during the Revolutionary War.
On Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021, publicly available media showed Beals interacting with other Three Percenters, including Jeremy Liggett, leader of Guardians of Freedom militia group; Robert Gieswein, who is currently serving a four-year prison sentence for assaulting an officer; and Cory Ray Brannan, a former detention officer from Texas.
Beals has publicly boasted that he fought left-wing counter-protesters on the eve of the assault on the Capitol. On Jan. 6, online sleuths tracked Beals attempting to climb a media tower, which earned him the nickname #TowerPup.
Beals also was captured climbing the scaffolding for the inaugural risers, facing off against a line of Capitol police officers at the west plaza and walking inside the Capitol building. Afterward, Beals was seen carrying off a police riot shield and posing with Gieswein.
Following his involvement in the attack on the Capitol, Beals became active in right-wing campaigns to oppose COVID-19 restrictions in the Chattanooga, Tenn. area. He also became embroiled in a battle with the Georgia Division of Family & Children Services over custody of his daughter, who was a student in Catoosa County Public Schools.
Beginning last fall, Beals began protesting against drag shows in Tennessee, frequently appearing with Sean Kauffmann, leader of the neo-Nazi group Tennessee Active Club, along with other far-right groups such as the Proud Boys, Patriot Front, National Justice Party and Vinland Rebels.
William Beals in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5, 2021. Photo courtesy of Sedition Hunters
Despite being under investigation for his role in the attack on the Capitol at the time, Beals demanded that a Chattanooga police sergeant search a community theater for evidence that minors were being served alcohol during a drag show in November 2022, as previously reported by Raw Story.
The police obliged Beals, but found no evidence of violations. A couple months later, Beals challenged police in Cookeville, Tenn. after they pulled over a car driven by Kauffmann, having observed a passenger throw a projectile at left-wing counter-protesters.
The passenger, a neo-Nazi named Robert Bray, admitted to throwing a stink bomb at counter-protesters while wearing a pistol strapped to his hip. Asked by an officer if he was looking for a pretext to shoot the counter-protesters in self-defense, Bray responded, “Those aren’t people.”
As one officer was questioning Bray, Beals walked up and asked to speak with them. Speaking to another officer, he questioned why they were not cracking down on “antifa,” later identifying himself as a Three Percenter.
During the anti-drag protests in Chattanooga and Cookeville, Tenn., Beals walked into the middle of the street and challenged counter-protesters to fight. Posting on a neo-Nazi channel on the messaging app Telegram in June, Beals explained his strategy for instigating violence.
“Most groups won’t walk across the street and confront antifa,” he wrote. “I do, and I do my best to get those retards going to cross the street on me because it’s entertainment to me to knock a libtard out.”
Around the same time, Beals escalated threats against Josh Brandon, an antifascist TikTok creator who frequently found himself on the opposite side of the street from Beals during anti-drag protests.
On at least one occasion, Beals drove his truck in front of Brandon’s house, according to surveillance footage, and called Brandon and described his vehicle to him, indicating he had been there. Beals also told Brandon that he’s been convicted of second-degree assault with a deadly weapon.
In one of many phone calls to Brandon, Beals challenged him to meet him at a Pride celebration in Franklin, Tenn.
“You’re a dead son of a bitch,” Beals said. “If you come across me again, I will put my f---ing foot in your face. Meet me in Franklin, motherf---er.”
UPDATE: During a hearing in federal court in Knoxville on Friday, Magistrate Judge Jill E. McCook ordered Beals released on bond, and a prosecutor assigned to the case confirmed that the government was not seeking pre-trial detention. McCook set a preliminary hearing for Beals on Sept. 5 in the District of Columbia, where all Jan. 6 cases are being tried.
McCook set Beals' conditions of release to accommodate his employment, which requires him to cross back and forth across the Georgia-Tennessee state line to travel from home to work. Beals told the court he is currently employed at FedEx driver, and that he travels from his home in northern Georgia to a FedEx office in Chattanooga, and then back across the state line to drive a daily delivery route in Blairsville, Ga.
Sean Kauffmann gave a stiff-arm Nazi salute as he arrived at a protest outside a drag show at a local brewpub in Cookeville, a small city about 75 miles east of Nashville, Tenn., in late January.
“Kill all the n—ers and the Jews!” shouted a 15-year-old boy who had come with Kauffmann to protest the “Celebrity Drag Brunch,” an event benefiting a local LGBTQ advocacy organization.
An array of fascist and far-right groups flanked Kauffmann and the boy, chanting homophobic slurs at the several dozen people across the street who had arrived to serve as informal protectors for the drag show performers and patrons, according to police body-camera footage exclusively obtained by Raw Story through a state open records request.
Kauffmann, the 15-year-old boy and a third friend — former Proud Boy and Army military veteran Robert Bray — left the protest in a black Honda Civic around 1:30 p.m. As the three were driving past the brewpub, the protectors saw them throw some type of projectile out of the car.
William Beals, a 15-year-old boy and Sean Kauffmann (l-r) outside a drag show in Cookeville, Tenn. on Jan. 22. Robert Bray is in the background at left. Courtesy Josh Brandon
But they had company. A Cookeville Police Department officer tailed the car as it passed the brewpub and turned right at a stop sign. The officer activated his blue emergency lights about 30 seconds later. Kauffmann pulled his Honda over. Three additional police units fell in behind.
Exclusive video obtained by Raw Story shows the local Tennessee police officers letting neo-Nazis off with a warning after menacing the drag show brunch that was supporting charity. The police’s encounter highlights a broader pattern of law enforcement missing the warning signs about extremist violence.
The lead officer, who identified himself as “Officer Smith,” first greeted Kauffmann, while another officer, Caleb Rubel, approached the passenger side.
“The reason I stopped you is throwing stuff at people. You can’t be doing that, okay?” Smith said, after collecting driver’s licenses from Kauffmann and Bray, who was seated in the front passenger seat, the police body cam footage showed.
“What’d y’all throw out over there?” Smith asked.
“A stink bomb,” one of the occupants of the vehicle replied.
While Smith was running the men’s driver’s licenses, Rubel alerted him: “Hey Smith, front guy’s got a firearm on his right hip.”
Rubel approached the Honda Civic’s passenger side again.
“So, which one of you all threw it?” Rubel asked.
Bray raised his hand, and chuckled.
“So, why?” Rubel asked.
“Control,” Bray replied.
“Trying to use that gun on your hip?” Rubel asked, referring to Bray’s pistol.
“No, that’s for my personal protection.” Bray replied.
“It’s not real smart to go provoking people and then trying to find some lousy excuse to use it, right?” Rubel asked.
“Those aren’t people,” Bray responded.
Rubel continued standing at the front passenger window, as Smith meanwhile learned from dispatch that the occupants of the vehicle were part of a “terroristic group.” Smith informed Kauffmann, Bray and the 15-year-old that they could be charged with aggravated assault. An arrest seemed likely, even imminent.
But it wasn’t: Smith ultimately let Kauffmann, Bray and the 15-year-old juvenile go with a mild warning.
“Don’t throw something at someone, OK? You guys are free to go,” the officer said.
After the traffic stop, the Tennessee Active Club, a neo-Nazi crew led by Kauffmann, celebrated the protest as a victory.
Noting the participation of two other neo-Nazi groups in a post on its Telegram channel, he declared: “Hail victory, hail group unity and networking.”
'Law enforcement is unprepared'
The Cookeville police’s encounter with Kauffmann and his crew highlights a broader pattern of law enforcement missing the warning signs about extremist violence.
From the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. in 2017 to the attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, and now a groundswell of attacks against LGBTQ Americans, police have repeatedly found themselves overmatched or under-informed relative to the potential threat.
And the failure to enforce the law and accurately identify known extremist groups points to an apparent bias that makes it difficult for law enforcement to recognize threats from far-right actors, and predisposes them to view community members who mobilize to protect drag shows and LGBTQ-friendly spaces as equal offenders.
Kauffmann and his Tennessee Active Club’s effort to provoke violence in Cookeville came amid the group’s participation in a sustained run of vitriolic protests against drag shows across the state from November 2022 through February 2023.
Since a new law went into effect on April 1 banning drag shows in the presence of anyone under the age of 18 in Tennessee, the Tennessee Active Club’s campaign of provocation has fed into a wider national pattern of violence against the LGBTQ community. This includes a Molotov cocktail attack last month by a neo-Nazi against a church hosting a drag event in Ohio.
Meanwhile, the campaign to curb if not shut down drag shows has united a coalition of far-right factions — from neo-Nazis to the Proud Boys and QAnon followers — to a degree not seen since the Jan. 6 insurrection. The intimidation campaign against LGBTQ-friendly spaces unfolded alongside a flurry of legislative proposals in dozens of states targeting transgender people, whether following Tennessee’s lead to ban drag performances or restricting gender-affirming care and blocking access to collegiate and school sports.
In concert with the harassment of drag shows and legislative efforts, anti-trans talking points by conservative media figures such as Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh have created a feedback loop that lends mainstream legitimacy to vigilante violence.
Gwen Snyder, an anti-fascist researcher and veteran community organizer in Philadelphia, told Raw Story that the fact that Kauffmann “is so engaged in anti-trans terrorism now is telling in terms of what the terrorist far-right agenda is, and really goes to show how both this terrorist far right has laid the groundwork for the assault on trans people by the mainstream right and what the mainstream right is giving cover to. This stuff bubbled up on Terrorgram and Nazi right spaces. It was taken on by the mainstream right, and the mainstream right is now giving cover to Nazis like Sean” Kauffmann.
The mainstreaming of anti-trans hate dovetails with a continuous failure by law enforcement to interdict extremist violence over the decade.
“Law enforcement is unprepared, despite public statements that they’re planning to commit violence,” Michael German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program, told Raw Story. “And too often, they don’t follow up after the violence occurs, which tends to condition the militants to believe they’re allowed to commit violence.
“Law enforcement has been reluctant to respond to far-right violence in a manner that would address its organized activity,” said German, who infiltrated neo-Nazi groups in the 1990s as an undercover FBI agent. “Unite the Right is an example of national groups that included individuals who had committed violence elsewhere coming to an event that was publicly advertised. That shouldn’t be a hard problem to recognize.”
Raw Story left 10 voicemails over the course of a week for the Cookeville police chief and the department’s public information in an attempt to obtain comment from them. Cookeville officials did not respond to these messages.
'All the red flags are there'
Kauffmann’s violent ideations reached a fever pitch in 2019, when he founded a neo-Nazi group called Panzer Strike Force in Tucson, Ariz.
During that period, he communicated with an enlisted soldier named Jarrett William Smith, who was later convicted for distributing bomb-making instructions to an FBI informant while suggesting former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) as an assassination target. Shortly before Smith’s arrest in September 2019, he counseled Kauffmann to “hide your guns” after Kauffmann expressed the fear that federal authorities would seize his firearms because of his history of violence and Nazi beliefs.
Snyder uncovered communications on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app favored by white supremacists, between Smith — handle: “Anti-Kosmik 2182,” according to federal court documents — and Kauffmann, who posted under the handle “Boog Führer.” Raw Story has independently reviewed the material.
Posting under the “Boog Führer” moniker, Kauffmann inadvertently disclosed his identity by sharing clippings from what appear to be confidential documents referencing his history with the Arizona Department of Child Safety to illustrate why he was at risk of losing his guns. The clippings shared by Kauffmann, posting as “Boog Führer, included his first and last name.
Snyder discovered Kauffmann when she was monitoring the emergence of “Terrorgram” — a term researchers use to describe an online network of neo-Nazis who share violent propaganda on the social media app Telegram, including posts valorizing white supremacist mass shooters as “saints.”
“He was very noticeably one of the most active users in those spaces,” Snyder told Raw Story. “He has been in conversation with people including Jarrett William Smith.…. He has obviously a prolonged interest in committing acts of terror. He has a violent history. All the red flags are there.”
Kauffmann declined to comment when reached by Raw Story.
In June 2020, when Nick Martin — another anti-fascist researcher — posted a photo of four men throwing up stiff-arm, Nazi-style salutes at a Black Lives Matter rally in Tucson. Snyder said in a Twitter thread two days later that until that point she had been reluctant to reveal Kauffmann’s identity, but his appearance at a protest prodded her into action.
“I am truly worried about the dangers this man poses, and if I weren’t actively afraid he’d try to murder people at a protest, I wouldn’t be chancing provoking him with an ID,” Snyder wrote at the time.
A month later, Kauffmann traveled to east Tennessee and showed up at a Black Lives Matter protest in Rogersville, a small town of about 4,700 people. Kauffmann and three other neo-Nazis were charged with disorderly conduct. A local news station cited police reports that said the men “became violent and started trying to assault people in the crowd.”
It’s hard to imagine that the FBI wasn’t tracking Kauffmann by the summer of 2020. Jarrett William Smith had been arrested by the FBI in September 2019, after speaking with an undercover informant who purported to be interested in traveling from Oklahoma to Texas to carry out an assassination against an unnamed politician. In the Telegram chats that Snyder uncovered, prior to his arrest, Smith expressed interest in driving to the Dallas/Fort Worth area to meet one of Kauffmann’s associates.
“I sent a DM,” Kauffmann said in the chat. Smith replied: “If you need help or knowledge I have contacts in the aforementioned orgs that can supply me with the stuff you may want/need.”
Darrell DeBusk, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Knoxville Field Office, declined to comment on whether the agency is tracking Kauffmann.
The Telegram chats that Snyder culled in 2019 and 2020 show that Kauffmann's appetite for violence was nearly boundless. There was a suggestion to “make it a Saint Day September” — a term indicating a month of mass murder. He shared a GIF of the Norwegian white supremacist and mass murderer Anders Breivik. He made comments promoting rape as weapon of dominance and others expressing a desire to “rape and kill antifa.” He denied that the Holocaust occurred, while arguing, “it should of happened.”
The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks extremism, sent out a law enforcement alert on the Tennessee Active Club and Kauffmann specifically to the FBI in November 2022. But it’s unclear how much of this information, if any, reached the Cookeville police officers when they surrounded Kauffmann’s Honda Civic on Jan. 22.
“Did they say who they’re with?” an officer identified as “Young” who responded to support the traffic stop, asked Smith, his fellow officer.
“They got American flags in the back,” Smith replied.
Gesturing towards Bray, the neo-Nazi who could not be reached for comment for this story, he added, “Got a veteran.”
It’s unclear what Smith saw that looked like an American flag, but the men had been openly displaying a flag with a swastika encircled by a field of red less than an hour before.
After confirming Kauffmann’s insurance, Smith told him: “The only issue is that if you’re throwing something at a protest or whatever … still that can cause bodily injury, you can still be charged with aggravated assault by throwing something like that at somebody. Do you understand that?”
“Yeah,” Kauffmann said.
“That’s a Class D felony in the state of Tennessee,” Smith continued. “Don’t want to see anybody get charged with anything today. It’s a protest. We want to see everybody protest however they feel. Just don’t throw stuff, okay?”
“Right, yeah,” Kauffmann said. “We were making sure to [remain] nonviolent.”
“I got you,” Smith replied.
“I can see the way it would be construed that way,” Kauffmann said.
Conferring with Young a couple feet away from the vehicle, Smith said, “They’re definitely affiliated with the Proud Boys, that’s what dispatch said. Terroristic….”
The group’s links to the Proud Boys was grounded in personal history and association: A YouTube interview from 2019 that was reviewed by Raw Story shows Bray wearing a Proud Boys shirt, and photos published by the Philadelphia Inquirer and a local blog show that he attended rallies with the Proud Boys in Philadelphia in September 2020 and then, in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, the following month. Video from the Jan. 22 rally also shows Kauffmann and Bray shaking hands with two Proud Boys when they arrived at the Cookeville protest.
Robert Bray, a passenger in Sean Kauffmann's car, admitted to throwing a stink bomb at drag-show supporters.Courtesy Cookeville Police Department
The police body-camera video from the traffic stop also shows Sgt. Zach Gilpin, who was on the scene, advising Smith to police the situation with a light hand. Any further enforcement, he told Smith would just make them “hostile” and “make them want to retaliate and make it even bigger.”
“Oh yeah,” Smith agreed.
While conferring with Gilpin, Smith characterized Kauffmann’s statement about his intentions in a way that was imprecise at best and took his assurance at face value.
“He said, ‘We don’t want violence; we just want to protest,’” Smith told Gilpin. “I said, ‘You have every right to do that.’”
Michael German, the Brennan Center fellow, told Raw Story he finds the sergeant’s rationale to be astonishing.
“Wow,” he said. “I would think that would have the opposite effect. If this individual in the group thinks the police are not going to enforce the law, then they might think they can get away with even more aggressive actions to instigate violence.
“I’m not sure how that would escalate things unless the police thought the militants were going to escalate violence towards them,” German added. “And that would point to a bigger problem if the police are more concerned about protecting themselves than protecting the community. Either they know that this is a group that is prone to violence that is coming into their town, or they don’t. If they think this is a group that is prone to violence, they should probably be doing more to police that group.”
German said the hands-off approach taken by many law enforcement agencies toward far-right extremists stands in stark contrast to the approach commonly taken toward non-violent left-wing protesters, who are often subject to mass arrest just for marching.
“It’s hard for me to see it any differently than it’s a demonstration of bias on the part of the police that they view a non-violent environmental protest as a national-security threat, and deadly violence by white supremacists as not that big of a deal,” German said.
Smith and Gilpin could not be reached for this story, either directly or through the Cookeville Police Department.
See no hate
The absence of any apparent recognition on the part of the officers that the driver of the vehicle was a prominent white supremacist who leads the Tennessee Active Club, or even that he and his passengers were neo-Nazis is striking, considering that reforms two decades ago were intended to address this very gap, German told Raw Story.
German told Raw Story that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “law enforcement established numerous intelligence-sharing vehicles” that include FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces, along with state and local fusion centers that are intended to disseminate intelligence among agencies “about the kinds of groups that are engaged in organized criminal acts.”
Many of the fusion centers “spread misinformation and unfortunately don’t accurately portray violent groups in a way that allows law enforcement to understand how to react,” German added.
“It seems that this information-sharing network is not sharing the accurate information correctly,” he said.
By the time of the Jan. 22 traffic stop in Cookeville, there was ample public documentation of Kauffmann’s presence at protests outside drag shows across Tennessee, including Chattanooga on Nov. 13 and Maryville on Nov. 25.
Following a period of relative dormancy, Kauffmann had moved from Arizona to rural Perry County in Tennessee in October 2022.
With the launch of the Tennessee Active Club the same month, Kauffmann grafted his organizing efforts onto a national network of so-called “active clubs” that typically distribute white supremacist propaganda, join small-scale demonstrations and gather for private training events. The network was inspired by Robert Rundo, the founder of the Rise Above Movement, who is currently under indictment for conspiracy to riot.
Since founding the Tennessee Active Club, Kauffmann has made it into one of the most robust crews in the country, putting a particular emphasis on anti-LGBTQ activism while aggressively deploying white supremacist symbols and rhetoric, according to Morgan Moon, an investigative researcher with the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, a nonprofit dedicated to monitoring, exposing and disrupting extremist threats.
“A lot of that has to do with the fact that Sean Kauffmann is running this organization,” Moon told Raw Story. “He’s been on our radar for some time. Kauffmann has advocated for violence online. He’s advocated for rape. … He has a history not only of white supremacy, but also aggression and violence.”
Moon spotted a Nov. 20, 2022, post on the Tennessee Active Club’s Telegram channel flagging an upcoming drag show in Maryville and calling on supporters to “shutdown [sic] the grooming, sexualization and exploitation of children.”
The Anti-Defamation League issued a law enforcement alert the following week.
Prior to the Maryville protest, a similar protest outside a community theater hosting a drag show in Chattanooga on Nov. 13, 2022 provided an intelligence-gathering bonanza for law enforcement.
After speaking with the owner of a tattoo shop next door to the theater who called in a complaint about threats from the anti-drag protesters, the responding officer crossed the street and approached Kauffmann, according to police body camera video reviewed by Raw Story.
“Hey guys, who’s in charge of this group right here?” asked the law enforcement official identified as “Officer Hauge.”
“We’re just independent,” Kauffmann responded. “We’re not with a group.”
Standing to Kauffmann’s right was the 15-year-old juvenile who the police in Cookeville later encountered in the back seat of the Honda Civic. Standing to his left was an unidentified man wearing a shirt and hat identifying him as a member of the League of the South, a group that advocates for the secession of the original states of the Confederacy to create a homeland for white Christians. The League of the South was among dozens of white supremacist groups and individuals found liable for conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and ordered to pay more than $25 million to plaintiffs injured in the attack.
Belying his claim that he was an independent participant, Kauffman was wearing the Tennessee Active Club’s official T-shirt and ballcap. The ballcap was turned backward, and there was no lettering on the front of the T-shirt. But later Hauge walked up behind Kauffmann, and the video shows the distinctive Tennessee Active Club logo, with the sonnenrad — a symbol commonly embraced by neo-Nazis — encircling the three stars of the Tennessee state flag, on the back of his shirt.
Later, Hauge’s video shows that he watched members of Patriot Front, a fascist group accused of vandalizing a monument to the African-American tennis legend Arthur Ashe and defacing an LGBTQ pride mural. Patriot Front splintered from Vanguard America following Unite the Right. Vanguard America collapsed amidst a storm of bad publicity after James Fields Jr. rallied with the group before accelerating his car into an anti-racist march, murdering Heather Heyer in Charlottesville.
Despite ample documentation of Patriot Front’s background by groups that monitor extremism, the officers give no indication in the video that they were familiar with the extremist group in their midst. The video shows Davis, the police sergeant, bringing back a flier to show the other officers, including Executive Chief Glenn Scruggs.
“So, the weird-looking flag thing, that’s what they are,” Davis said, referring to Patriot Front’s distinctive flag featuring the fasces encircled by 13 stars.
Scruggs took a quick look at the flier and responded: “Yeah.”
Davis noted that the name of the group was “Patriot Font,” and another sergeant, George Forbes, muttered something that is hard to discern in the video.
Whatever he said, it ended the discussion.
As the event was winding down, Hauge instructed a rookie officer named Shackleford on how to write a report.
“Did somebody have a card on what that flag meant?” Shackleford asked Hauge.
“Yeah, I think Davis got one that was like …” Hauge responded, his words trailing off.
There was no further discussion between the two officers about the group with the strange flag, but Hauge gave Shackleford a rambling and fine-grained tutorial on when officers should and should not name specific groups. The discussion illuminates the political sensitivity surrounding policing protests against drag shows and the pressure on officers to take a “both sides” approach toward those harassing drag shows and those seeking to protect LGBTQ-friendly spaces.
“Now, say you had a Blood or Crip shoots a Ghostface, Aryan Nation, Latin King, whatever,” Hauge said. “Putting it in that kind of report where there has been a physical assault on somebody and saying that this set attacked this set — all that does in that report — that’s not Crips attacked this Aryan guy and it’s Black on white; it has to do with gang affiliation, right? So, there’s no problem with associating a specific set with that because that helps us track what’s going on there.”
But documenting groups involved with drag show protests required more delicate treatment, Hauge suggested.
“When it comes to a political view where it’s two parties that are going to sit there and cuss and yell and scream at each other, don’t put yourself in that hole,” Hauge counseled. “Because what’s ultimately gonna happen is ultimately in some way, shape or form, the media’s gonna get a hold of this. I guarantee they’re probably going to pull it up. And the last thing we want to put in there is that us as police who are neutral to this situation — all we’re here for is to make sure the public is safe — is to sit here and say, ‘Oh, well, LGBTQ was harassed by Republicans, or Democrats were harassed by Republicans, or left wing was harassed by right wing,’ and we put a stigma that they can use as flak against us or anything else. So, don’t put yourself in that situation.”
Hauge’s final point to his law enforcement colleague: “We’re not gonna establish groups, or whether or not it’s a hate group, unless there’s physical violence.”
Jerri Sutton, an assistant chief with the Chattanooga Police Department, defended the decision to exclude information about specific extremist groups in the report, adding that it doesn’t reflect officers’ awareness of intelligence.
“That incident report was written up and gave an account of the event,” Sutton told Raw Story. “It was documented on video, as you have pointed out. The report’s not written to slight any group. The information was part of the intelligence gathering. We were aware of who we were dealing with.”
William Beals, a 51-year-old construction worker who attended the Chattanooga protest and two months later walked up on the Cookeville police officers as they were conducting the traffic stop involving Kauffmann, told Raw Story that he has been tailed in Chattanooga by an “FBI member that is chosen to be on the side of antifa.”
“I am on the terrorist watch list because of the FBI,” he said. “I don’t give a s—. I’m not an actual terrorist. I’m a Three Percenter.” Three Percenters are an authoritarian movement whose adherents view themselves as latter-day equivalents of the original American patriots who are guarding against supposed government tyranny.
Beals has been publicly identified by online researchers, who nicknamed him #TowerPup, as being present at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and going inside the building. He told Raw Story that at least one of the videos cited by researchers as evidence that he was at the Capitol was fabricated from a photo of him on his motorcycle that was grafted onto another person’s body at the Capitol. But he has publicly stated he was involved in an altercation with left-wing counter-protesters during the same time period.
In an interview with a right-wing podcaster last month, Beals said his own mother asked him if he was at the Capitol.
“I said, ‘Nope,’” Beals recounted. “I’m one of those Three Percenters that was whupping the s— out of antifa and BLM down BLM Plaza road. I definitely take accountability for that one.”
During the Nov. 13, 2022 protest at the drag show in Chattanooga, Forbes, the police sergeant, noted that Beals was walking around with a “Bowie knife on his damn hip” and singled him out as one two “instigators” in the crowd.
When Forbes arrived on the scene, Beals approached him — and asked him to investigate the venue hosting the drag show.
“See, the reason I’m asking — if they’re giving children alcohol or in any form grooming those children, okay, that’s what we need to know,” Beals told Forbes. “Because this ain’t OK.”
William Beals (left), a self-identified Three Percenter, addresses Sgt. George Forbes at a drag show protest in Chattanooga, Tenn.Courtesy Chattanooga Police Department
Forbes heeded Beals’ request. The venue owner informed Forbes that they were not serving alcohol because they submitted their application for an alcohol permit too late. With her permission, Forbes and two other officers conducted a walkthrough of the venue, where they inspected a drink menu and looked behind the bar.
Video from the protest shows Beals walking into the middle of the street and daring a drag supporter to fight.
“I’m right f—ing here, boy,” he said. “I’m right here, pussy.”
It’s unclear whether officers observed the incident, but police body-camera video shows that Hauge told another man that Forbes also identified as an “instigator” to get out of the street. Later, as the man walked through a grassy strip occupied by drag show supporters, Forbes told him: “Sir, right now, you’re causing a disorder.” Around the same time, drag show supporters accused the man, in the presence of officers, of assaulting a woman by bumping her with his shoulder, but Forbes brushed them off.
German said provocation is a time-worn tactic of white supremacists and far-right groups, going back to Nazi Germany.
“When I was working undercover in the 1990s in neo-Nazi groups, law enforcement understood the tactics that they used,” he said. One of those tactics, he said, was to show up at rallies where they knew they would face opposition, and then provoke a fight.
“Law enforcement has forgotten those lessons since 2015, and they have tried to present these events as mutual combat,” German said.
Sutton, the assistant police chief in Chattanooga, noted to Raw Story that Executive Chief Glenn Scruggs responded in person to monitor the scene.
“Any situation where the officers deem it necessary to make an arrest, they have the discretion to do so,” she said. “In this case, they made the decision to keep the parties separate, so that the patrons going to the business could do so safely, and those who were protesting could do so from a distance that allowed them to exercise their freedom of speech.”
German also said that law enforcement responses often reflect a false equivalency between extremists and the communities they are sworn to protect.
“What’s frustrating to me and what’s frustrating to many others is that the far-right militants are coming from outside the community, and law enforcement doesn’t protect them, and treats them as mutual antagonists rather than understanding that this is an outside force coming in with the purpose of instigating violence. There’s a fallacy that mutual combat means there’s no crime, and we don’t have to intervene.
“If someone wants to have a drag show and far-right militants are coming to menace and prevent them from exercising their rights,” German added, “law enforcement needs to understand that this isn’t a both-sides issue.”
Since the Nov. 13 standoff, Chief Celeste Murphy has met with the owner of the community theater.
“Chief Murphy has been in contact with several interested parties in this whole situation,” Sutton told Raw Story. “We have a relationship with the LGBT community. We are well aware of their ability to exercise their rights. We are working with the district attorney’s office to ensure that everybody’s rights are secured.”
Within a week of the Chattanooga drag show, the Tennessee Active Club mobilized again to harass a drag show in Maryville, a small city outside of Knoxville. The LGBTQ community and anti-fascists also mobilized to protect the bookstore hosting the drag show and toy drive.
Josh Brandon, a voice actor and former country radio programmer who hosts the “Overthinking Everything” podcast, had planned to travel to Virginia that day to visit a friend who was having gender-affirming surgery. But on Thanksgiving he found himself in the emergency room. With his travel plans disrupted, Brandon decided he might as well go to help out at the drag show.
A self-described “lifelong shamed and closeted bisexual,” Brandon handed off a metal detector used to check patrons for weapons when Sean Kauffmann and his crew arrived at the bookstore, instantly finding a new calling as an anti-Nazi antagonist.
“Look me in the eye,” Brandon told Kauffmann, with a big smile spreading across his face. “I’m not afraid of you, you piece of s—.”
Shortly after the encounter, Brandon said Kauffmann shared his personal information on Telegram. Around the same time, he also received a phone call from Beals, who was not present at the Maryville protest, but indicated he had seen footage of Brandon there.
“He made threats,” Brandon recalled. “He said, ‘I’m going to come find you. I’m going to beat the s— out of you.’”
Brandon told Raw Story he reported Kauffmann’s Telegram post and Beals’ phone call to the FBI. He said he also called the Knox County Sheriff’s Office to tell them to expect Beals at a drag protest in Knoxville on Dec. 22.
As a precaution, Brandon said, he continued to alert the FBI when he planned to attend a drag event in which he expected to face Beals and Kauffmann across the street.
It remains unclear whether the implementation of the new Tennessee state law banning drag performance for audiences under 18 will aggravate or ameliorate far-right violence against LGBTQ-friendly venues in Tennessee, or whether the neo-Nazi groups will be able to capitalize a recent right-wing effort to leverage rage against trans people in response to as a school shooting in Nashville that was carried out by a person who identifies as trans.
The Tennessee Active Club has recently shown signs of looking beyond Tennessee. Kauffmann and three of his associates traveled to Lexington, Ky., last month to protest the prosecution of a University of Kentucky student accused of assaulting another student while berating her with racist slurs. Meanwhile, protests at drag shows, often marred by violence and displays of overt support for white supremacy, continue to be a nearly weekly occurrence in communities across the country.
Moon, of the Anti-Defamation League, noted that Kauffmann has shown a motivation to travel, including a trip to San Diego, Calif., in August for a mixed-martial arts competition and to Washington state in December to network with other active clubs.
Moon noted that the active clubs place a strong emphasis on physical fitness, and the Tennessee Active Club recently held a joint fight training with the Vinland Rebels, another neo-Nazi group that was also in Cookeville. Law enforcement should pay attention to Kauffmann for a number of reasons, Moon told Raw Story.
“I think what’s most important is that the Tennessee Active Club and Sean Kauffmann have put a particular focus on LGBTQ events,” she said. “They keep coming out to these drag events. Sean Kauffmann has a history of violent criminal activity. He shares his extreme and violent beliefs online. This shows this potential for a future powder keg at an event with counter-protesters.”
* * *
Editor's note: Raw Story obtained more than two hours of body worn- and dash-camera video from the Cookeville Police Department after requesting the video through the Tennessee Public Records Act. Raw Story edited down the video to produce a compilation video presenting a chronological narrative of a Jan. 22, 2023 traffic stop. The Cookeville Police Department blurred footage that shows a 15-year-old juvenile and one of the officers’ laptop computers, and redacted a conversation between the officer and dispatch.
Raw Story also reviewed more than three hours of police body-camera video from the Chattanooga Police Department capturing officers’ response to a Nov. 13, 2022 drag show protest. The first video compilation shows officers’ encounters with known extremist groups and the lead officer coaching a rookie on how to file a report. The visuals were blurred inside the police unit in the original video as provided by the Chattanooga Police Department. A second compilation video has been edited to produce a chronological narrative of the Chattanooga officers’ encounters with two men described as “instigators” and discussion among officers about how to handle the situation. Raw Story did not include footage showing individuals at the scene whose presence is incidental. Portions of the video that include a letter reviewed by one of the officers was visually redacted by the Chattanooga Police Department.
William Beals, a 15-year-old boy and Sean Kauffmann (l-r) outside a drag show in Cookeville, Tenn., on Jan. 22. Robert Bray is in the background at left. (Courtesy Josh Brandon)
A Telegram post forwarded by Mathew Bair on Jan. 21, 2024 contains an implied threat.
Neo-Nazi leader Sean Kauffmann (left) and Franklin mayoral candidate Gabrielle Hanson pose for a photo shared on a white supremacist Telegram channel. Telegram
William Beals in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5, 2021. Photo courtesy of Sedition Hunters
William Beals, a 15-year-old boy and Sean Kauffmann (l-r) outside a drag show in Cookeville, Tenn. on Jan. 22. Robert Bray is in the background at left. Courtesy Josh Brandon
Robert Bray, a passenger in Sean Kauffmann's car, admitted to throwing a stink bomb at drag-show supporters.Courtesy Cookeville Police Department
William Beals (left), a self-identified Three Percenter, addresses Sgt. George Forbes at a drag show protest in Chattanooga, Tenn.Courtesy Chattanooga Police Department