Trump: ‘A Recipe for Nazi Soup’

Why we should be paying attention to the ugly strain of racism and white supremacy now embedded in the Trump MAGA movement

Bill Conroy
9 min readSep 13, 2024
Photo by Bill Conroy

Given the rising ugliness of racism and white supremacy in the MAGA presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, I thought it was time to share a pertinent story related to my past journalism.

I have hesitated to do so in the context of politics until now because the story is hard to read, full of hate and demonization and threats. But it’s important now. It offers insight into Trump’s thinking on the subject of white supremacy, the ideology informing it and the people he is surrounding himself with now and in the past who are part of promoting the long-running dark movement in this nation.

It’s now the foundation of Trump’s base. Let’s be clear on that.

They have been organizing for quite some time, quietly growing their numbers and propelling their authoritarian ambitions. This upcoming presidential election is likely their last stand, as they see it. That’s because the demographic shift occurring in the United States will by 2045 or sooner make the white population of this nation a minority among other minority groups.

From William H. Frey’s book, “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics are Remaking America, excerpted by the Brookings Institute.

New census population projections confirm the importance of racial minorities as the primary demographic engine of the nation’s future growth, countering an aging, slow-growing and soon to be declining white population. The new statistics project that the nation will become “minority white” in 2045. During that year, whites will comprise 49.7 percent of the population in contrast to 24.6 percent for Hispanics, 13.1 percent for blacks, 7.9 percent for Asians, and 3.8 percent for multiracial populations.

Brookings Institute Report

It’s important to understand your opponent if you hope to defeat them. So, here’s the background…..

In the 1980s, I was part a group of journalists who founded Milwaukee’s still-surviving alternative weekly, The Shepherd Express. While working as an investigative reporter there in the mid-1980s, I interviewed a particularly vocal local white supremacist/neo-Nazi who described himself using a military title.

In 2001, just prior to 9/11, I published a book, a work of fiction, called Flip-Flop, that was loosely based on my time as an investigative journalist with The Shepherd Express. The newspaper was focused on covering local news, politics, arts, music and, of course, carried classified ads. But it also gave pages to investigative reporting. That’s where I cut my teeth in my 20s as muckraker.

As we know, all politics are local, even in swing states. So, I figured it was time to share this local story. It’s a fictionalized account based on my interview with the Milwaukee neo-Nazi leader. Although fiction, the content of the interview is essentially what the man said to me during the live interview some 40 years ago now.

Read it (below) and I believe you’ll have a better understanding of who Trump is now running with as he runs to be president of the democratic republic called the United States of America that he hopes to one day to rule over — if he can fool enough people into voting for him and his racist agenda.

***

Excerpt from the book Flip-flop:

Gabe Young took his stands in the newspaper. He figured it was the only place where anything had a chance of making a difference and, consequently, it was just about the only thing he really gave a damn about.

Young had gotten into trouble for some of those stands, though. The most recent example of that tendency was a story Young had written about a local Nazi screwball.

His name was Major General Alfred Schmidt. He claimed to be the leader of a neo-Nazi organization based on Milwaukee’s South Side. Schmidt called his group the Anglo American Brigade.

Young interviewed Schmidt about his organization and beliefs and printed everything, word-for-word, in The Time, along with plenty of photos and background information, letting the readers know that Schmidt was racist, anti-Semitic, and part of a small but well-organized neo-Nazi party that had loose connections to similar groups worldwide, including the Ku Klux Klan.

The article was called “A Recipe for Nazi Soup.”

… The Anglo-American Brigade was incorporated in January of 1975 in Milwaukee. Our first meeting was in September of that year, at the Selma Street Library. We’ve moved on from there of course.

We have members in 40 states. We don’t give out the exact number of members, that’s classified. We won’t give it to anyone, not even the Congress if they asked. The governing board of the brigade is a small group of like-minded persons.

As long as I live, I’ll be involved in something like the brigade. It seems to be the ideal vehicle. We’re in the struggle for the duration, and our opponents know that. We’re not backing down.

The only problem is that our opponents are always trying to put us behind bars. They’re trying to trip us up or entrap us, to get us locked up on specious charges of conspiracy. I happen to know for a fact that there’s a bunch of persons in the Anti-Defamation League and probably the state Attorney General, and certain elements of the FBI that would like to see us behind bars because of our publications.

They don’t like anyone being contrary to the official doctrine of the Establishment order of this country, which we call the Zionist Occupation Government of America. Whatever the Zionist crowd wants, they get. They control the media. They control the institutions of this country. They produce the propaganda and information.

If you go against them, they call you names. If that doesn’t work, if you’re not afraid of names, they try to get you to do illegal things. And if you don’t fall for that, they start calling you up and threatening your life, maybe they even make an attempt on your life.

I get threats all the time. I say, “Come on, I’m waiting for you.” I’m not frightened of anything.

Our goal is to organize white persons on the basis of race and culture to at least stand up for their race and their culture, and to stop apologizing for being white. Sooner or later, the whites have to come around to seeing that there are a lot of people in the Established order that do not like them merely because they’re white.

No one is addressing white issues on a national scale. Now that’s why our organization got into it. We were especially tuned into the problem by the 1976 court order that required the integration and the busing of school children.

I was motivated toward right-wing activities by the Goldwater campaign in 1964, which, for the first time, itemized what I would consider to be conservative or right-wing attitudes toward the problems facing America. I grew from there, particularly after reading two books, Oswald Spenger’s “Decline of the West” and Francis Parker Yockey’s “Imperium.” I got the idea that civilization was far more than just economics and partisan politics. Civilization, and its continuance, has to do with the preservation of the white, the Caucasian, the Aryan race — whichever name you’d like to call it.

I’ve never had a feeling of bad conscience in the years we’ve operated this organization. We’ve always sought after the truth. We’ve never avoided the truth. Wherever the issue fell, wherever the truth was to be found, we went after it. Some people don’t like the truth. Like when Chief Karl Farber mentioned that busing was exporting black crime around the city, which is proven by the statistics that he has through his police department and arrest records, they said he was a racist. They didn’t say that he was not telling the truth. They know he was telling the truth.

To tell the truth is to be called names. They don’t want the truth; they want lies. We’re not in the business of telling lies.

The brigade is patterned on the idea that the white race has crafted the civilization that we now live in and enjoy. We call that the truth of history. All we have to do is go to Europe and look at them, and then go to Central Africa and look at that and see who is capable of creating civilization.

We are American nationalists. We believe that this country was founded as a white constitutional republic by white men for white men. But, it’s been changed now to a social democracy where anything goes. It’s similar to the ruination of Athens. Our country has brought in all sorts of people who are not related to the West, who have no love for Western culture, and who especially have some sort of envy of white persons that’s dangerous to us.

Now, if that way of thinking is Nazism, then I accept that. I admire Hitler because, like Caesar, he took the bull by the horns. I think Hitler may have saved Germany from communism. If we discount the six million Jews allegedly killed in the holocaust — and I personally, from my own research, do not believe that even one-tenth that many Jews died in the whole of the World War II, a war that killed 30 million people — then what did Hitler do wrong? It’s always alleged that the great wrong the Germans did is that they killed six million Jews; that’s the allegation. If one believes that the Germans did not kill that many Jews, that they could not have done it, then what was Hitler guilty of? Guilty of trying to stop communism by attacking Russia? It was a noble gesture to try and overthrow Stalin. I only wish that we had been on Hitler’s side.

Our organization is like an ombudsman for white people. Who else would do it? Nobody we know, especially in Milwaukee. The whites who have a problem can come to us. We’ll listen to them, and we’ll make calls or write letters. We’ll put pressure where pressure might do some good. We know how to do that. We use clout.

A lot of people in high places are our friends, but they don’t speak of us because they don’t want to be associated with us publicly. We’re a bigger factor than many of the media people would like to admit. I can go down to City Hall and hobnob with certain politicians. I won’t tell you who, but behind closed doors a lot of those people will give me information that other people don’t know.

We do have our methods, and we’ve worked very diligently on the inside of certain things. Now, the media will never admit that. But we don’t care what the media thinks. We would rather work behind the scenes, if possible, at all times — until we get control of the media….

Along with the interview, Young published the names and addresses of several people who, according to his research, belonged to the Brigade. None of the names he uncovered carried any clout in Milwaukee’s political circles, but all of them had at one time or another shown up on the opinion pages of local newspapers and at demonstrations connected with Jew and Black bashing.

When talking publicly about the Brigade, Young wrote them off as a small-minded group of racist hicks. But the events that unfolded after the story ran led me to believe that Young saw Schmidt and the Brigade as much more dangerous than he let on. A few weeks after the “Nazi Soup” scoop was published, Young began to receive anonymous letters threatening to “cut his pinko red throat,” or to “put his newspaper out of business for good.”

Young printed the letters in The Time. Nothing happened, until the day before my visit. Young walked outside with his cup of coffee and was greeted by a giant swastika painted on the side of his house, which then doubled as The Time’s office. A note, nailed to the center of the symbol, warned: “It’s not over, Young. We’re going to even the score.”

When I brought the subject up that night, sitting on Young’s porch, he said, “There’s two things I always take seriously: someone who threatens to kill themselves and someone who threatens to kill me.”

Published August 2001

Link to book here.

More reading [nonfiction] on white supremacists and Nazis:

Former Anti-Drug Agents: Pardoned Arizona Ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio Harassed Black and Hispanic Law Enforcers at the DEA

It’s Not Just the Cops — Racism Is a Problem for the Secret Service, Too

Neo-Nazis Blitz Vigils for Immigrant Killed by Cops

2017: Pending Lawsuit Seeks to Expose Trump’s Neo-Nazi Connections

Project 2025 — a roadmap for remaking America into an authoritarian white Christian nation

“The Racist Manifesto”: U.S. Customs Officers Are Often Divided by Ethnicity

--

--

Bill Conroy

Bill Conroy is an independent investigative journalist. For more information, check out billconroy.pressfolios.com.