CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

I think that F. Scott Fitzgerald was perhaps never more wrong than when he opined that “there are no second acts in American lives”.

The trope of second chances and redemption are rather common notes in the melodies of American life, even if there is no set consensus on who deserves to sing them.

Worth bearing in mind when considering why or how a Jewish person such as myself might pen an essay in service to a man, indeed a friend, who at one time was, as I put it in my first interview with him, “America’s most notorious neo-nazi”?

Well, my friend Jeff Schoep has no intention of squandering his second act. Particularly when he considers the pains and penalties he suffered to purchase this second act.

In his memoir, “American Nazi: From Hatred To Humanity”, Jeff is so vivid in his prose as to be almost terrifying. He sets the stage with no minced words by demanding his readers realize that in his early life “neo-Nazism wasn’t just an ideology, it was [his] life”.

And so the first act of Jeff’s life was one sunk in the swamp of hatred and ignorance.When all was said and done, he would, for 25 of his 27-year membership, be at the helm of the National Socialist Movement, the single largest neo-Nazi organization in the country at the time.

And the scars and bruises, both metaphorical and literal, of his old life have become just part of his great narrative once his own redemption and his own healing had begun. He even told me in one of my interviews with him that he had had people try to stab him and shoot him. He even told me that he has, “a scar across the back of [his] head from a guy who hit him with a tire iron and tried to kill [him]”.

One of Jeff’s less intellectually rigorous moments would be when he decided to wear a KKK Knight-rider-emblazoned T-shirt to a bar in a predominantly black neighborhood, which he covers in blood-soaked detail in the book.

But certainly the emotional wounds run quite deep. Forget his being doxxed live on a radio show (wait until you read that chapter) and forget the destruction it caused in his own life.

One need not consider whether Jeff Schoep’s past........

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