American Nazis: The Aryan Freedom Network is riding high in Trump era
With Donald Trump’s return to power, a neo-Nazi group buoyed by his rhetoric is expanding its reach and changing the face of white extremism in America. Its leaders: a Texas couple, both born to Ku Klux Klan leaders.
Wearing cargo shorts, flip-flops and a baseball cap shading his eyes from the sun, Dalton Henry Stout blends in easily in rural America.
Except for the insignia on his hat. It bears the skull and crossbones of the infamous "Death's Head" SS units that oversaw Nazi Germany's concentration camps – and the initials "AFN," short for Aryan Freedom Network, the neo-Nazi group Stout leads with his partner.
From a modest ranch house in Texas, the couple oversee a network they say has been turbocharged by President Donald Trump's return to the White House. They point to Trump's rhetoric – his attacks on diversity initiatives, his hardline stance on immigration and his invocation of "Western values" – as driving a surge in interest and recruitment.
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Trump "awakened a lot of people to the issues we've been raising for years," Stout told Reuters. "He's the best thing that's happened to us."
While the Aryan Freedom Network and other neo-Nazi groups remain on the outermost edges of American politics, broadly regarded as toxic by conservatives and mainstream America, they are increasingly at the centre of far-right public demonstrations and acts of violence, according to interviews with a dozen members of extremist groups, nine experts on political extremism and a review of data on far-right violence.
Several trends have converged since Trump's re-election, Reuters found. Trump's rhetoric has galvanised a new wave of far-right activists, fuelling growth in white supremacist ranks.
Trump's pardons of January 6 rioters and a shift in federal law enforcement's focus toward immigration have also led many on the far right to believe that federal investigations into white nationalists are no longer a priority.
"[Trump] awakened a lot of people to the issues we've been raising for years. He's the best thing that's happened to us."
And the boundaries of the far right itself are shifting. Ideas once confined to fringe groups like the Proud Boys – who helped lead the January 6 siege – are now more visible in Republican politics, from election denialism to rhetoric portraying immigrants as "invaders."
Trump's public support and pardons for far-right figures helped normalise those views, the researchers said. As the Make America Great Again movement has come to define the party's identity, the line separating the far right from mainstream conservatism has grown increasingly difficult to draw, they added.
What was once extreme now blends more easily into the broader far-right, not because those extreme groups have changed, but because the terrain around them has, said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a nonprofit that tracks hate speech and extremism.
"A Proud Boy doesn't even seem that scary anymore because of the normalisation process," she said.
That shift has coincided with a surge in white nationalist activity. White extremists are committing a growing proportion of US political violence, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, a nonprofit research outfit that tracks global conflicts.
In 2020, such groups were linked to 13% of all US extremist-related demonstrations and acts of political violence, or 57 of the events ACLED tracked. By 2024, they accounted for nearly 80%, or 154 events.
Trump has denied that he supports white extremism, and the White House rejects the notion that his rhetoric promotes racism.
"President Trump is a president for all Americans and hate has no place in our country," White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in response to questions for this story.
"President Trump is focused on uniting our country, improving our economy, securing our borders, and establishing peace across the globe."
Fields also pointed to a significant rise in support for Trump among Black voters. In last year's election, his share of the Black vote nearly doubled from 2020 to about 15%.
Trump has batted away accusations of racism. At a campaign rally last year, he declared, "I'm not a Nazi. I'm the opposite of a Nazi." A few months earlier, he told an interviewer that he can't be racist because he has "so many Black friends."
Even as he has made inroads with non-white voters, Trump has consistently drawn support from white nationalist and extremist groups while using racially divisive rhetoric.
He promoted the false claim that Barack Obama, the nation's first Black president, was not born in the US In his 2024 campaign, he suggested immigrants commit violent crimes because "it's in their genes," a remark condemned by many as racist.
Stout said his group opposes violence. Yet the Aryan Freedom Network openly advocates preparing for a "Racial Holy War." It promotes white superiority ideology, seeks to unify elements of the broader white nationalist movement and actively recruits former members of other extremist groups.
The Trump administration has scaled back efforts to counter domestic extremism, redirecting resources toward immigration enforcement and citing the southern border as the top security threat.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has reduced staffing in its Domestic Terrorism Operations Section. The Department of Homeland Security has cut personnel in its violence prevention office.
White-nationalist political violence on the rise
An increasing share of political violence in the US is being perpetuated by white nationalists since 2020, according to ACLED data on extremist-related demonstrations and acts of violence.
Some specialists in domestic terrorism say these moves could embolden extremists by weakening US capacity to detect and disrupt threats. The DHS and FBI have defended the cuts, saying they remain committed to fighting domestic terrorism.
The FBI said in a statement it allocates resources based on threat analysis and "the investigative needs of the Bureau," and that it remains committed to investigating domestic terrorism.
"Racist Royalty"
In his first interview with any news organisation, Stout met Reuters journalists in April at a restaurant in Hochatown, Oklahoma, a quiet town known for its hiking and fishing about an hour's drive north of their Texas home. He was joined by his partner, who goes by the name Daisy Barr.
Stout says AFN is focused on staying within the law. "We got to watch our Ps and Qs," he said.
Then his tone turned apocalyptic: "And when the day comes, that will be the day – that's when violence will solve everything."
While he offered no timeline, researchers who study domestic extremism say the comment reflects a strategy among some far-right groups: operate within the law while openly predicting a moment of upheaval.
The Aryan Freedom Network first drew national attention in 2021 after organising a "White Unity" conference in Longview, Texas. By the following year, it was distributing flyers in cities across the country.
One in Texas featured racist caricatures of Black Americans – one swinging from a street lamp amid rubble and an overturned car – alongside the caption: "At the current rate of decline what will America's major cities look like in ten years?"
AFN also began staging protests, often targeting drag events and LGBTQ+ gatherings. Stout says the demonstrations were designed to attract recruits.
Its conferences and annual "Aryan Fests" have become networking hubs for the far right, drawing attendees from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and other white nationalist organisations, according to two individuals affiliated with those movements.
Reuters was unable to independently verify the claim.
The pseudoscientific notion of a superior white Aryan race – essentially Germanic – was a core tenet of Hitler's Nazi regime. AFN gatherings brim with Nazi memes: Swastikas are ritually set ablaze and chants of "white power" echo through the woods.
AFN's website pays specific tribute to violent white supremacist groups of the past, including The Order, whose members killed a Jewish radio host in 1984. Two key members responsible for the killing were sentenced to lengthy prison terms and are now deceased.
Stout's beliefs are rooted in the Christian Identity movement, which claims that white Europeans, not Jews, are the true Israelites of biblical scripture and therefore God's chosen people.
Stout and Barr also claim that Black Americans, under Jewish influence, are leading a Communist revolution – an ideology that fuses racial supremacy with far-right conspiracy theories.
Stout, 34, and Barr, 48, were born into self-avowed white supremacist families with deep ties to the Ku Klux Klan, infamous for its white robes, burning crosses and long history of racist violence, including decades of lynchings and terrorist campaigns against Black Americans.
As a child, Stout said he attended Klan ceremonies and white nationalist youth camps. He recalls reading translations of SS training manuals from Nazi-era Germany.
And while other girls were playing video games, Barr said she was wrapping torches in burlap strips, for secret KKK cross-burning ceremonies.
Though they now identify as American Nazis, their ideology is anchored in the KKK and other white extremist groups. Their families are well known to historians of the movement.
Stout's father, George Stout, was a "grand dragon" in the White Knights of Texas, a KKK offshoot. He declined to comment for this story.
Barr's late father was a KKK "grand wizard" from Indiana who was sentenced to seven years in prison for holding two journalists at gunpoint. AFN requires members to use aliases; she chose "Daisy Barr" after the name of a female Klan leader of the 1920s who sold Klan robes and died in a car crash.
One person familiar with the couple described their 2020 marriage as a union of "racist royalty."
They filed for divorce two years later, but Stout said the split was in name only – a legal move to shield their assets in case they faced civil rights lawsuits like those that once bankrupted the Klan and Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi group held liable in a 1999 civil suit for inciting violence.
Stout and Barr declined to share membership numbers but said AFN now has nearly twice as many chapters as the 23 it claimed in early 2023.
The Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium, a private research group that monitors extremist movements, estimates AFN's members have grown to between 1,000 and 1,500.
"We collect and record every event of theirs," said TRAC researcher Muskan Sangwan. Some of the earliest chapters, including those in Texas, likely began with around 100 members each, Sangwan said, suggesting the group may have had roughly 200 members in its initial stages.
Chris Magyarics, a senior researcher at the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy organisation that monitors antisemitic harassment, said he was skeptical AFN was so big but said he had no independent data on its size.
"The previous largest neo-Nazi group only had a couple of hundred," he said, referring to the National Socialist Movement, which has been in steady decline.
Reuters was unable to independently establish the extent of AFN's membership.
Despite the uncertainty over its numbers, AFN is on the radar screens of independent researchers. Jon Lewis, a research fellow specialising in domestic extremism at George Washington University's Program on Extremism, said the group has been "really popular" among far-right "accelerationists," a term used by white supremacists who advocate violence to hasten a race war.
Stout said his group has benefited from the decline of the Proud Boys following the Capitol attack. Once prominent for street clashes during the Trump administration, the Proud Boys have faced legal setbacks and public scrutiny since many of its members were convicted – and later pardoned by Trump – for their roles in the 6 January Capitol riots.
The group describes its ideology as "Western chauvinism." Critics say the group uses the term "Western" rather than "white" to veil its racism, a charge the Proud Boys' defenders deny.
Stout described groups like the Proud Boys as "civic nationalists" – movements that draw in followers with patriotic rhetoric, then serve as stepping stones toward more overtly racist organisations like AFN or the Klan.
"A lot of newbies, new people to the movement, join that type of movement before they join us," Stout said.
Reuters was unable to reach a Proud Boy representative for comment.
Weapons and race war
Although Stout said the Aryan Freedom Network rejects violence, firearms and tactical training remain central to its identity and feature prominently in its gatherings and recruitment efforts, according to a review of federal court records.
One former member, Andrew Munsinger, built and traded semi-automatic AR-15 rifles and other weapons, using a machine shop to fabricate untraceable parts, according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court. He boasted to other AFN members of stockpiling ammunition and constructing explosive devices, and claimed to have pointed a shotgun at a sleeping prosecutor, the affidavit said.
Munsinger, who went by the alias "Thor," was arrested last year in Minneapolis on federal charges of illegally possessing firearms. As a convicted felon, he was barred under federal law from owning weapons.
He attended at least five AFN events in one year, the FBI said. Agents described him as an adherent of accelerationism, which seeks to provoke a race war through violence.
AFN is "an umbrella organisation for other white-supremacist organisations," the affidavit said. Documents relating to Munsinger's case, including testimony from an FBI informant who infiltrated the group, offer a glimpse inside its operations: firearms training across several states, encrypted communications focused on weapons, a recruitment event at a lakeside bar in Ohio, and new members building timber swastikas in a ritualistic initiation.
Stout said he disavowed Munsinger, who was convicted by a federal jury in April of illegally possessing firearms and ammunition, as well as trafficking marijuana. He is awaiting sentencing. Munsinger and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
Stout said his network has links to the Klan, which has splintered and shrunk dramatically since its peak a century ago.
In May, Reuters attended a modern-day Klan ceremony held in a clearing deep within the woods on private land in northeastern Kentucky. William Bader, leader of the Trinity Knights, a small Klan faction, donned a purple silk robe and conical hood as he presided over the swearing in of about half a dozen heavily tattooed new members.
In an interview, Bader said Trump has energised the white nationalist movement. "White people," he said, "are finally seeing something going their way for once." Bader said he had previously attended an AFN event without elaborating.
Steve Bowers, another Klan official at the ceremony, which didn't involve AFN, said he isn't a fan of Trump because of his administration's close ties with Israel. But he said many white nationalists are fully behind the president.
"People think he's going to save the white race in America," said Bowers, dressed in a white KKK robe and hood, decorated with two blood crosses on the chest.
The Klan once claimed as many as six million members in the 1920s. It had dwindled to an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 members across 72 chapters by 2015, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that tracks extremist groups. More recent figures are unavailable, a research analyst at the centre said.
AFN has adopted certain tactics and rituals of the Klan, including widespread distribution of racist flyers.
AFN's flyers have appeared in multiple cities and towns, from Florida to Washington state, according to police reports. Stout and Barr said they view them as a recruitment tool.
Police in West Bend, Wisconsin, said hundreds of flyers targeting immigrants were distributed in May. One flyer found in the Wisconsin village of Mukwonago read, "Tired of being discriminated against because you're white? Join."
Stout said members are instructed to distribute flyers at night – what he calls "night rides," echoing the Klan's term for its historic terrorism campaigns against Black people.
In another echo of the Klan, its signature cross burnings, swastikas are set alight at AFN gatherings. In an AFN video posted online, Stout stands on the bed of a pickup truck, masked and flanked by armed guards, arm raised in a Nazi salute.
"White power!" he shouts in a hoarse Texas drawl, wearing a chest rig for rifle magazines. His audience returns the Nazi salute. "White Power!" they call out.
At the restaurant in Oklahoma, asked why he believes his group is gaining momentum, Stout offered a simple explanation.
"Our side won the election," he said.
