A black activist got control of a neo-Nazi group, and he's going to 'set some hard records right'

It sounds like a set-up for a knockoff of comedian Dave Chappelle's Clayton Bigsby character — the blind white supremacist who does not realized he is himself black — but James Hart Stern's takeover of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) is entirely serious.

Stern, who is African-American, is an activist in California who leads a group called Racial Reconciliation Outreach Ministries. He was contacted by former NSM president Jeff Schoep in 2014, Stern told The Washington Post, and the two men began speaking regularly. "From day one, I always told him: 'I don't agree with you; I don't like you,'" Stern said in his Post interview. "I talked to him because I wanted to hope to change him."

Schoep did not change his views, but he did get scared he'd be held accountable for the criminal actions of NSM members, most pressingly via a lawsuit alleging the group conspired to commit violence at 2017's Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Early this year, Stern was able to convince Schoep to give him legal control over NSM.

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In his new role as leader of the neo-Nazi group, Stern has asked a Virginia court to find NSM guilty in the Charlottesville suit. He does not plan to disband the organization, lest its several dozen members simply reform under a different name. Instead, he intends to work with Jewish groups to transform the NSM website to educate members on the history of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism.

"I did the hard and dangerous part. As a black man, I took over a neo-Nazi group and outsmarted them," Stern said of his project so far. "My plans and intentions are not to let this group prosper. It's my goal to set some hard records right." Read the full Post story here.