How white nationalists infiltrated the wellness movement - chof 360 news

On the surface, Arcadian Wellness seems like a run-of-the-mill health store.

It's a small operation, started in August 2023 by Kyle Hunt, a 41-year-old with light blue eyes, auburn hair and a close-cropped beard.

Originally from the quiet town of Mashpee on Massachusetts's touristy Cape Cod, Hunt attended a prestigious and politically progressive liberal arts college before moving to the San Francisco Bay area to start a tech career in the late aughts. About the same time, he started exploring alternative health and fitness lifestyles.

Hunt, who now lives in Florida, often uses social media to share his thoughts on the merits of vegan diets and eating simple, natural foods "like our ancestors", the value of sustainable agriculture and the challenges of living a healthy life in the modern world. On Arcadian Wellness's Instagram account, he shows people how he makes his brand's Muscle Builder supplements out of powdered ashwagandha extract, fenugreek and shilajit on what appears to be a kitchen counter.

Hunt makes and sells natural deodorant sticks and hair regrowth tonics, sulphate-free soaps and tooth-cleaning powder made with ingredients like activated charcoal and baking soda. The soaps with names like Floral Fields, Potent Pumpkin and Winter Warmth go for $6 or $7 per bar.

But behind its seemingly apolitical, health-driven digital storefront, Arcadian Wellness is part of a small but surging wellness subculture that uses ideas of purity, health and fitness to support and spread white nationalism.

Arcadian Wellness's products are advertised on Renegade Broadcasting, a digital radio station where far-right figures air their conspiratorial, racial grievances. The common thread: Hunt, the founder of both the wellness store and the radio station.

Tooth powder and conspiracy theories

In 2012 when Hunt created Renegade, his first broadcast rehashed anti-Semitic conspiracies about Jewish cabals manipulating the world. "The Jews have really screwed up our racial understanding," he said.

In 2013, he launched a blog, Renegade Tribune, to publish far-right essays. One of his first, "a theory on race mixing", envisions a utopia in which white people never have to encounter "a 'darkie'" in "our lands".

He told a Cape Cod newspaper in 2014 that in his 20s he had become convinced that America is biased against white people. That year, he tried to organise "white man marches" across the United States to protest against "government-sponsored racism", such as affirmative action, and promote race realism, an ideology that argues each race is fundamentally different. He told one reporter the various races are subspecies, likening their differences to those between dog breeds.

The marches achieved minimal turnouts. But Hunt has continued to work on less visible projects like a revisionist documentary that paints Nazi Germany as the victim of World War II's worst atrocities. His recent articles include a eulogy for the German Holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck.

Hunt doesn't delve into his politics or link to his other ventures on the Arcadian Wellness site, but Renegade Broadcasting's homepage features a banner ad for the store just below its tagline: "Welcome to the home of controversial, but factual viewpoints the mainstream does not want you to hear." On the Tribune, he explained that Arcadian Wellness isn't just a means to support himself and his activism but also a small step towards the realisation of his ideal world - one full of "virtuous people who have not been corrupted by the degenerate nature of modern civilization, living a simple, yet fulfilling existence".

Al Jazeera contacted Hunt, who declined to speak to us for this story.

Arcadian Wellness also appears on several lists of "pro-white" companies compiled by white nationalist content aggregators, such as the Aryan Archive, a trove of racist reading materials and resources maintained by Russell James, a self-proclaimed "longtime Aryan activist" and rural Maine homestead farmer.

Arcadian Wellness's language and products may not align with the common image of white nationalism, but Hunt's venture is part of a constellation of "pro-white" businesses and influencers that has emerged over the past decade, selling goods and services traditionally associated with the wellness industry. Extremism researchers worry that these "white wellness" ventures - which echo the language and style of mainstream wellness brands, especially their focus on nature and health - may create a deceptively wholesome veneer for white nationalists, allowing them to operate more freely as well as to normalise and spread their views.

All-natural soaps and plague doctors

None of the researchers interviewed for this story had a firm grasp on the size of the emerging white wellness industry. But after reviewing multiple white nationalist business directories like the Aryan Archive, Al Jazeera conservatively identified more than 20 companies in the US and United Kingdom that were active during the span of our reporting from November 2022 to January this year. Hundreds of influencers amplify the reach of these companies.

Al Jazeera reached out to every individual or entity named in this story via business contact forms, business and personal email addresses, social media profiles and phone numbers where available. Partial responses of those who replied have been included for context where relevant.

Four entities Al Jazeera identified also focused on small-batch, natural soaps like those Arcadian Wellness sells.

The Mighty White Soap Company, one of the oldest companies we identified, founded in 2015, appears to operate out of a home in rural Michigan. Many of its products have openly racial names like its Caucasian Abrasion body scrub.

Havamal Soapworks, incorporated by Shaun Ledgerwood in 2019 and ostensibly run out of his Columbia, Maryland townhouse, has used more innocuous names such as Courage, a cedar-scented bar with black and green swirls. But it has also used Nordic neo-pagan aesthetics and terminology that elements of the far right have co-opted. On social media platforms favoured by the far right, Havamal has praised Z-man, a blogger who promotes race realism. Havamal has also reposted content from Media2Rise, a media offshoot of the Rise Above Movement (RAM), a loose network of far-right mixed martial arts (MMA) groups, whose founder once claimed that its members are "fans" of "the 14 words" – "we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

Dissident Soaps - created in 2021 by William Jeffrey Poole, a former US army officer - uses sleek black packaging and logos featuring Crusader knights and plague doctors.

The US army launched an investigation into Poole in late 2019 over social media posts he'd published espousing violence and white nationalist sentiments. It led to an official reprimand in 2021 and a recommendation that he be "other than honourably discharged". An army spokesperson told Al Jazeera that he is no longer in service although they did not comment on the exact timing or circumstances of his departure from the military.

Across the Atlantic in the small southwestern English seaside town of Teignmouth, two women set up Clean & Pure in 2021. Until recently, they sold soaps with names like Joyful, Relaxation and Sunrise/Sunset. The brand's founders were both members of Patriotic Alternative (PA), one of the UK's most influential white nationalist political groups, when they launched their business. The company also appeared in PA shopping guides, advertised on PA livestreams and set up retail tables at PA events.

The white wellness ecosystem also involves people making and selling herbal remedies, organic teas and coffees, candles, natural fibre clothing, health coaching, alternative medicines and even protective charms.

These companies and influencers all promote wellness, which the nonprofit Global Wellness Institute (GWI) defines as, in effect, holistic health. But according to experts who study the concept, what specifically constitutes wellness is malleable.

Alternative medical, spiritual and utopian movements in 19th-century Europe and the United States laid the groundwork for wellness as a broad concept, the GWI explains on its website. But modern ideals of wellness developed in the 1950s with the rise of self-help literature, alternative medicine advocacy groups, and fitness clubs and programmes and coalesced into a dedicated industry around the 2000s. The field promises health and fulfilment that will counteract the stress and alienation of an industrialised world.

The idea of seeking purity by returning to nature and ancient wisdom especially resonates with white nationalists, explains Catherine Tebaldi, a researcher at the University of Luxembourg. She studies why and how some far-right figures - whom she refers to as "Granola Nazis" - adopt the language and imagery of wellness culture.

The association with wellness can make white nationalists harder to track, even for dedicated experts who monitor these movements. And white nationalists have a history of successfully changing their image to appeal to new audiences.

Masking white nationalism

Crash Barry, a 56-year-old with thick glasses and a receding hairline, moved to rural Maine in 1991 to work as a lobster fisherman.

He later became a reporter for the now-defunct Casco Bay Weekly - a dying breed of American publications born of 1960s counterculture that focused on neglected, edgy, underground topics - and covered a slew of fringe communities.

Today, he lives on an acre (0.4 hectares) of land in the state's rural western foothills where he grows organic fruits and vegetables and raises chickens, goats and pigs while his wife, who trained as a herbalist, grows legal, licensed marijuana that she crafts into THC and CBD supplements.

Barry became an avid extremism researcher after his reporting helped to reveal in early 2018 that Tom Kawczynski, the town manager of Jackman, Maine, an old railroad town of fewer than 1,000 people, was a white nationalist. After writing up his initial research on Kawczynski on social media and after Jackman kicked Kawczynski out of office following a subsequent media firestorm, Barry decided to go undercover to learn more about Kawczynski's vision: persuading fellow white nationalists to move to his region, keeping nonwhites out and eventually building his imagined whites-only homeland of "New Albion".

Barry created an alternate persona on social media to infiltrate closed groups run by Kawczynski. After several weeks of monitoring, he donned a wig to disguise himself and tailed Kawczynski and four of his followers - two men and two women - to a Thai restaurant where they discussed their plans over a sampler platter and Japanese beers. Barry, who had planted two recording devices near Kawczynski's seat before the group entered, sat down at a booth next to the white nationalist party and quietly took notes. He later published a detailed breakdown of Kawczynski and his crew in The Bollard, a local magazine, which showed how the former town manager was still working to realise his New Albion plans.

Soon after, Barry started lurking in white nationalist Telegram channels and communities on Gab, social media platforms whose devotion to free speech has made them hotspots for hate speech and for groups banned or suppressed by sites like Facebook and X. Barry sometimes used aliases to identify, track and report on members of what he had realised was Maine's surprisingly vibrant neo-Nazi community. In 2019, he wrote another feature for The Bollard about Aryan Archives's Russell James, including accounts of his efforts to radicalise University of Maine students at a gym in the town of Machias only to discover that they wanted to talk about women and sex rather than listen to his warnings of a coming "white genocide".

But when Barry noticed people promoting healthy home cooking classes and handmade soap in the digital spaces he monitors, he was puzzled: Why were wellness trends showing up there?

That confusion is understandable, says Rumya Putcha, a researcher at the University of Georgia who studies the wellness industry. "Health and wellness have become coded in everyday conversation as 'liberal' or 'woke'," she explains. Throughout the 2010s, American political pundits used "the yoga vote" as shorthand for progressive Democratic voters.

The association of progressive social values with wellness can help mask the racism of a white wellness venture or influencer, explains Pete Simi, a professor of sociology at California's Chapman University who studies white nationalist recruitment tactics.

In the early 1980s, when he was nine years old, Simi's mother encouraged him to watch a documentary on the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to help him understand the history of racism in America. It left him reeling, trying to grasp how people could be so hateful. In 1988, when he was about 15 and attending high school in Oregon, he heard about how three neo-Nazis had murdered an Ethiopian immigrant, 28-year-old Mulugeta Seraw, in Portland, the state's largest city, and decided he needed to get to the bottom of the question that had plagued him since he was nine. In 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing, a white nationalist attack that killed 168 people and wounded about 700, Simi chose to focus his graduate studies on white nationalist groups. He reached out first to the Southwest Aryan Separatists, a regional white nationalist group, then to the Aryan Nations, at the time the most prominent US neo-Nazi entity, asking to attend their events as an ostensibly impartial researcher.

They granted him access, and through these groups, he met members of a wide array of white nationalist factions. Simi thinks these groups wanted to recruit him. From 1995 to 2015, he observed numerous secretive neo-Nazi gatherings and spent days at a time with their violent followers — even sleeping on their couches on occasion.

White nationalists, Simi learned, know that they are often seen as backwoods hicks who wear white hoods or swastikas. They also know that people don't always recognise hate speech when it's delivered by someone who doesn't fit that mould. So, Simi told Al Jazeera, white nationalists often probe new ways of presenting themselves to make outsiders less wary of them and their ideas more palatable.

David Duke, who joined the KKK in 1967, stopped wearing Klan robes after he became the organisation's grand wizard, or chief executive, in 1974, explains Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which monitors and tries to disrupt violent transnational hate groups. Instead, he presented himself as a suit-and-tie-wearing "pro-white" rather than "anti-Black" activist and earned a place in mainstream political life. Duke came third in the race for a seat in the Louisiana State Senate in 1975 and kept running for office until he finally became a state representative in 1989. Although he had left the KKK by then, extremism monitors like the Southern Poverty Law Center still classify him as a white nationalist figure.

Greg Johnson, publisher of the white nationalist magazine Counter-Currents, calls these "secret agent" tactics: A white nationalist adopts an inconspicuous "normie" persona at work and in casual social interactions, then drops nuggets of race realism or Holocaust denial into conversations.

But it's hard to go fully undercover in spaces that revile white nationalism. It's far easier to infiltrate a subculture that already has some resonances with white nationalist symbols and ideas.

How neo-Nazis infiltrated punk rock

In the late 1970s, neo-Nazi groups in the UK noticed that elements of the punk rock movement had started using Nazi imagery in their shows.

The genre had emerged in opposition to the polished sound of pop and out of discontent with the notion of middle-class social propriety. These bands' focus on a fast, aggressive sound and confrontational lyrics and aesthetics drew several of them towards the shock value of taboo imagery: Wearing a Nazi symbol was just another "what of it" middle finger to polite social norms.

While early punks rarely held Nazi beliefs, their use of the imagery created camouflage for actual neo-Nazis to enter the space, organise openly within it and share their politics with others. Accordingly, white nationalist groups started to form their own bands in the UK and beyond.

"White nationalism shows up in new flavours" as culture, technology and economics evolve, explains Tony McAleer, who managed Odin's Law, a neo-Nazi metal band formed in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1993, and eventually became a lead recruiter within the Aryan Resistance Movement (ARM), a KKK-aligned group that expanded into Canada in the early 1990s.

McAleer grew up in Vancouver, angry at his once-idolised father for cheating on his mother, receiving corporal punishment at school for his academic failures and drifting towards punk rock in search of a sense of belonging. At a show, he met a couple of skinheads, a subculture built around working-class pride and a particular image: shaven heads, pressed shirts and heavy boots. While many skinheads were explicitly peaceful and antiracist, by the mid-1980s those in the punk scene were increasingly violent, brawling with each other and roughing up concertgoers. And some groups were flirting with white nationalism. McAleer liked the toughness the skinheads seemed to project, so he joined their group. He was 16 years old. Soon after, he joined the ARM, and by 21, he was a leader in the movement.

As an ARM recruiter, McAleer, who is now 57, built one of the first white nationalist websites as well as an automated phone-based bulletin board, which members of the far right could dial to get the latest neo-Nazi news or propaganda, leave messages for each other or connect with new groups. The system helped to spread messaging downplaying the extent of the Holocaust or asserting that nonwhite migrants were importing crime into Canada, for example. And he spent time thinking about how to adjust his image to reach new audiences.

In the early 1990s, McAleer was invited onto The Montel Williams Show, a popular American daytime programme. McAleer saw it as a chance to spread his group's message about the supposed dangers of diversity and the logic of white pride and racial segregation. "I was dressed like a skinhead: black T-shirt, combat boots,” he says of that first appearance. “When I was on the show again [a couple of years later], I was wearing a suit and tie. It was all about marketing to fit the era and softening the message."

But even as he did, he was starting to question his racist beliefs. He officially denounced the movement in 1998 and in the 2010s co-founded Life After Hate, a community of former extremists and experts, including Simi, that helps people leave violent far-right groups and reintegrate into the wider world.

In the years since McAleer left the movement, the tactic of "softening the message" has shifted to focus on new subcultures that - like punk rock - had existing handholds for white nationalists to grab onto. Such as wellness.

Wellness’s racist past

Early advocates of exercise in the West like 19th century German bodybuilder Eugen Sandow sold the practice as a necessary counterbalance to increasingly sedentary urban lifestyles. But Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a fitness instructor and historian at The New School, a university in New York City, argues that they tinged these arguments with the racial overtone that white men in offices shouldn't grow weaker than immigrant labourers. "I don't think that's completely gone from fitness culture," Petrzela said on a 2020 episode of Conspirituality, a podcast about the darker sides of the wellness world.

More recently, white nationalists have translated similar ideas into all-male, hardcore workout clubs dedicated to creating warriors ready to, as they describe it, defend their race - like RAM, the network of MMA training groups.

Several other wellness practices now associated with progressive 1960s counterculture were previously embraced by right-wing nationalist groups in 1920s and 1930s Europe, Matthew Remski, a host on Conspirituality, tells Al Jazeera.

Among them is yoga, which came from India but found an unlikely band of enthusiastic promoters in mid-20th century Europe.

"Most of us have forgotten or we never knew that the Nazis loved yoga," explains Remski, who, following a career as a yoga teacher in Toronto, now reports on abuse in the yoga world.

"They believed cultivating purity of blood and soil was intrinsic to the goal of repelling foreign invaders and excising what they believed to be the cancers of modern life: the medicines, psychological ideas and educational systems they associated with Jewish intellectuals." Nazis viewed yoga as a tool to accomplish these goals, Remski says.

White nationalist ideas and mainstream wellness have periodically overlapped ever since, Christian Picciolini, a 51-year-old former neo-Nazi punk band frontman, tells Al Jazeera. He was drawn into the movement as a 14-year-old when a man in an alley pulled a joint out of his mouth and told him that weed was a tool communists and Jews used to keep young men like him docile. Picciolini renounced the movement when he was 22 and later co-founded Life after Hate with McAleer.

Picciolini points to Salubrious Living, a book by Ben Klassen, who founded the Church of the Creator, a white supremacist, nontheistic religious movement, in the 1970s. In the book, Klassen rejects modern allopathic medicine and promotes a fruit-centric raw vegan diet to bolster white racial strength and purity while referring to nonwhite people as "mud races".

Modern white wellness by contrast replaces the overt language of figures like Klassen with language and aesthetics that help "whitewash - forgive the pun - white nationalists' true intentions", Picciolini explains.

This linguistic camouflage makes talk about returning to pure, ancestral (white) traditions and building healthy (white) communities - the core goals of most white wellness projects - appear harmless, even laudable to casual observers.

"Fascism is presented as being natural," Tebaldi, the researcher who studies the intersection of the far right and wellness, explained in a 2023 paper.

That not only helps avoid scrutiny but may also act as a "gentle introduction" to far-right views for those who wouldn't otherwise have considered them, explained Jared Taylor, a 73-year-old white nationalist ideologue. Since 1990, he's operated American Renaissance, a far-right publication that regularly hosts public conferences flogging soft-peddled white nationalist ideology to diehards and curious newcomers.

While Taylor recognises its normalising and evangelising potential, he is not personally active in the white wellness space. The field is mainly shaped and promoted by a small set of specialised influencers.

One of the most visible among them is Jason Kohne.

Fostering ‘white wellbeing’

Kohne is a sandy-haired, well-groomed man in his early 40s. Hate movement watchers like Beirich consider him a key figure in the white nationalist streaming and podcasting ecosystem.

He's claimed on his shows that he's been a "pro-white advocate" since he was a preteen in the early 1990s, but he seemingly started gaining recognition across the wider white nationalist world from 2017 to 2018 when he began livestreaming and uploading videos of himself monologuing, often while driving, to social media under the name NoWhiteGuilt. Eventually, he abandoned the car in favour of a home studio and started writing books as well.

Little is known about his private life because, as he has explained in livestreams, he avoids sharing details to minimise his risk of being doxxed. But based on public records leaked by two disgruntled white nationalists, Barry and other researchers believe Kohne is a prison guard - or at least was at some point - and was briefly a co-defendant in a lawsuit over the 2006 asphyxiation death of an inmate. Kohne and other guards named as co-defendants with the prison were dropped from the suit on procedural and technical grounds.

He claims he once corresponded with William Luther Pierce III, a physics professor turned neo-Nazi who in 1974 founded the National Alliance, which became the premier US white supremacist group but faded after Pierce's death in 2002.

Pierce also published The Turner Diaries in 1978, a story about white nationalists rising up against the supposedly Jewish-controlled US government through attacks that spiral into a world war, a white nationalist victory, the genocide of all nonwhite peoples and executions of white "race traitors". Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, handed copies of the book out to friends. Elements of McVeigh's attack directly mirrored the text.

In 2019, Kohne praised Pierce's contributions to white people and mused about "how tall will [his] statue be when we regain our destiny".

Kohne describes "antiwhitism" as the "greatest threat facing Western civilisation". Antiwhite policies, according to him, include efforts to address historic racial injustices and embrace equity and diversity, which he sees as abandoning "excellence"; media coverage of violent white nationalist rallies, which he claims are staged by "antiwhite" interest groups to demonise white people and justify attacks against them; and depictions of interracial relationships, which he sees as promoting "miscegenation" and "white erasure".

But unlike more stereotypical white nationalists, Kohne usually avoids slinging slurs at other races or calling for violence. "No race is the enemy, and genetics don't make you virtuous," he argues. Members of other races can be "pro-white", he adds, and thus allies, just as white people can promote "antiwhitism" and thus be foes.

Instead, he argues, white people need to give up on mainstream institutions that supposedly fail or harm them and turn inward to foster what he calls "white wellbeing".

Nurturing a sense of "purpose, safety and happiness" within insular white communities, he believes, will create a wall of inner and communal strength that "antiwhite" forces cannot penetrate, helping white people reclaim the power he believes they've lost.

Those ideas have an audience: Kohne has amassed tens of thousands of followers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Gab, Telegram, Spreaker and more niche right-wing platforms as well as several sites he operates. In 2018, he became a regular contributor to the weekly livestream show of Mark Collett, who founded PA, the prominent British far-right group, in 2019. Collett invited Kohne to speak at PA's first major conference in 2020.

Simi, who has followed Kohne's career since about 2020 says "his approach to white nationalism is gaining salience" even if it's unclear whether he is gaining prominence as a leader.

By 2019, No White Guilt flyers, banners and signs began to crop up in towns and at protests across the US. In 2022, a community of "White Wellbeing" advocacy groups emerged on social media, amplifying Kohne's rhetoric. In 2023, an independent game-development studio, Dynostorm, announced it was working on a game reportedly based on Kohne's ideas. Previews suggest that it involves players killing atheists, journalists and furries to save Western civilisation. And in 2024, his followers created a Foundation for White Wellbeing to facilitate giving money to Kohne and his allies.

Kohne's rise coincided with a wave of backlash against traditional, aggressive, outward-looking white nationalist groups and figures after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, one of the largest white nationalist gatherings in recent US history.

Members of a wide array of far-right groups, including open white nationalists, gathered in the city to protest against the planned removal of a Confederate statue and find ways to unify their movements. The rally descended into violent clashes with counterprotesters and reporters.

The rally's aftermath triggered a series of investigations into far-right groups, including RAM, and spurred social media platforms, online payment processors, web hosts and other services to ban far-right groups and individuals linked to them. These blows led white nationalists to re-evaluate how to organise and present themselves, explains Kurt Braddock, a professor at American University in Washington, DC, who studies white nationalist rhetoric.

Some moved towards "accelerationism", the idea that seemingly random acts of racial violence by decentralised cells that are unable to sell each other out if their members are arrested can trigger enough unrest to bring about a power vacuum for white nationalists to then fill. The Christchurch mosque shooter, who killed 51 people and injured more than 40 in New Zealand in 2019, referenced accelerationism in writings before the attacks.

But many white nationalists turned inward, focusing on strengthening their own communities while making themselves seem innocuous, even acceptable, to outsiders. Kohne's language exemplifies this trend, explains Barry, who's monitored the far-right ideologue's content for several years.

Kohne has also made clear that he wants to appeal to an audience that has traditionally been sidelined within white nationalist movements by creating a way for them to "contribute": women.

More than sewing Klan hoods

Historically, women's participation in white nationalist groups has been limited to domestic labour - sewing KKK hoods or cooking for rallies. They had no platforms to publicly discuss and promote the movement until the era of social media, Tebaldi says. And those who grew too powerful got purged - like Elizabeth Tyler, who ran the KKK's women's auxiliary arm, throwing parades and picnics throughout the 1920s. When outsiders started to describe her as a leading Klan figure, the organisation forced her out.

"Women are often objects more than real people" within the movement, Tebaldi explains. "They're the symbols of the nation that must be protected."

In the 2010s, a handful of women carved out a space online as influencers promoting white nationalism as a women- and family-friendly movement. But they only got to do so, Tebaldi says, if they "positioned themselves as reproducers of male knowledge - the female helpmates of a male business". If they got too assertive or if they argued that the movement needed to create opportunities for other women to contribute beyond household management, they faced hate and even doxxings from white nationalist men. In the late 2010s, dedicated "thot [derogatory slang for sexually active women] patrols" formed to dig up dirt on female activists. At least one former white nationalist, Katie McHugh, has explained that this aggressive policing to keep women in their supposed place played a role in driving her out of the movement.

"It was tough back then to be a woman on the far right," Allyson McKevitt, a one-time white nationalist in the US in her early 30s, told a podcaster in 2022. "People were very cruel and unwelcoming. 'You know about politics? You should be tied to the radiator in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant!' … I was so frustrated with being delegated [sic] to literal sewing circles, … pissed off that there was nothing I could do and nowhere I could go to have an avenue to contribute anything meaningful to nationalism."

That's where wellness comes in.

It largely aligns with traditional female domains, Tebaldi argues, such as healthy cooking and home remedies. So women can speak relatively freely and publicly about white wellness and through it voice their views on white nationalism without much risk of men telling them they've overstepped their gender roles.

And many wellness brands thrive on "the image … of a mom lovingly hand-making things" at home, Tebaldi adds, which makes it acceptable for white nationalist women to start their own ventures and contribute to the movement.

White wellness, Tebaldi argues, "gives [women] a role".

McKevitt, for one, seized upon this opening, starting an at-home venture making candles and taking a leadership role in Evergreen, the women's auxiliary of the all-male National Justice Party in the US. The white nationalist group has organised baby formula drives for women in the movement suffering from shortages but also raised money and spread white nationalist talking points through their family support and wellness operations.

Evergreen changed its name in mid-2023, and McKevitt no longer appeared in its materials as of 2024. She told Al Jazeera in October that she is no longer "connected with any white nationalist efforts, economic or otherwise". She added that her candle-making venture ceased operations several years ago.

Over in the UK, meanwhile, Grandma Towler's Tea, a brand launched by PA deputy leader Laura Melia (also known as Laura Towler) in 2020, has emerged as an inspiration for several white wellness ventures, Tebaldi and other experts say.

In an email exchange with Al Jazeera in July, Melia, who is in her mid-30s, explained that the company started as a "screw you then" response to Yorkshire Tea after the brand "told me on Twitter never to buy their tea again because I don't support Black Lives Matter". It would be an alternative for folks like her who want to "know their hard earned cash isn't supporting anti-White campaigns".

"But Grandma Towler's is really just a tea company that sells great tea," she adds. "There isn't anything about policies or activism on my website."

She says she mostly caters to white nationalists because her involvement in PA limits her ability to use conventional social media, ad services or even banks. And some people may buy from them because they want to support activists fighting "for the rights of the indigenous peoples of these islands". But, she says, they also "have customers from other areas of the political spectrum".

"We want to appeal to families," Melia explained in a 2021 video. "We want to go mainstream."

But Simi believes that talk about building wholesome communities and calling people in rather than projecting hate "seems more like an appearance … than a reality".

In one of his livestreams, for instance, Kohne told any Native Americans discontent with white cultural dominance in the US to "go back to your moccasins". In another, he railed at women for "whoring themselves out" rather than starting families and suggested that they're stealing jobs from white men through affirmative action.

Likewise, Melia's behaviour gets more biting beyond Grandma Towler's homepage. She's openly advocated for PA proposals to deport nonwhite and mixed race people from the UK. And while Grandma Towler's website doesn't explicitly stump for these ideas, it does make it clear that Melia will plough her profits into projects that align with her political values.

Currently, Grandma Towler's site says it is raising money to "free Sam Melia", Laura's husband, fellow PA activist and Grandma Towler's co-founder, from "persecution by the British state" through sales of Sam-branded merch.

In early 2024, British authorities sentenced Sam to two years in prison for "intending to stir up racial hatred" and "encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage" as an organiser of Hundred Handers, a white nationalist propaganda network. The group created flyers and stickers with slogans like "Diversity - designed to fail, built to replace" and "Equality or Quality - you can only have one," which a diffuse network of activists posted in public places across the globe.

But while Melia and other entrepreneurs talk about going mainstream, some ventures focus almost exclusively on serving their community rather than projecting an acceptable "normie" persona.

‘Serving our people’

Before Sarah Dye launched Above Time Coffee Roasters, she and her husband, Douglas Mackey, grew organic, heirloom tomatoes and other produce on their Schooner Creek Farm about 18 miles (29km) east of Bloomington, Indiana. They sold most of their goods at farmers markets in and around that city. Then authorities arrested Nolan Brewer, a young man who had spray-painted swastikas and iron crosses on a synagogue in Carmel, Indiana, in July 2018.

Investigators learned that Brewer was active in Identity Evropa, an "identitarian" (a subset of white nationalism) community. When they asked him about his connections to members of that mostly digital group, he said he once had dinner with two of them at a small family restaurant. They were "a lovely couple" named Sarah and Douglas.

When details of Brewer's case entered the public record in 2019, local amateur sleuths connected elements of his account to information leaked from Identity Evropa forums and realised that Dye was an active member of the group under the pseudonym "Volkmom".

Protesters descended on a Bloomington farmers market where Dye sold her produce, blocking her stand and handing out pins that read "Don't Buy Veggies From Nazis." White nationalist militia groups showed up to counterprotest, some of them armed with guns, according to reports. The city suspended the market for two weeks over safety concerns.

When Al Jazeera reached out to Dye, she responded, "Do not contact me again."

After the market reopened, Dye returned sporadically. However, Dye has said she still faced enough backlash to make her feel unwelcome and unsafe.

In 2020, she started a blog and podcast, Hearth & Helm, to present a "feminine, holistic, conservative and primal" perspective on "everything" from pregnancy to homeschooling, homesteading, dieting, spirituality and "even controversial topics such as vaccinations, circumcision, feminism". She used these platforms to promote white nationalist authors as well as artisans, tincture makers, soap mongers and more - some of them fellow open white nationalists.

Then in early 2022, she closed the farm and soon after announced she was working towards the launch of Above Time, which would offer fair-trade, chemical-free, organic beans because, Dye explained on an early version of the company's website, "we want our people in optimal health."

On the brand's website, she made it clear from the outset that, unlike her public-facing farm, Above Time would be an overtly "nationalist-owned business serving our people".

The name Above Time is an apparent reference to deceased neo-Nazi Savitri Devi's writings, which characterise Hitler as an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu destined to redeem the world. According to experts on neo-Nazi imagery, the company's logo incorporates Nazi SS symbols and a subtle swastika motif. And the company proudly declares that its beans are "#NKC - Not Kosher certified".

In interviews, Dye has also claimed that, whenever possible, she and a few Above Time collaborators have relied on other white nationalist-owned ventures for their business needs. Close friends did their graphic and web design, she explained, and fellow white nationalist artisans made mugs and shirts for them to sell. Will2Rise, an activewear brand linked to RAM and Media2Rise, made them a limited run of cotton tank tops. Ledgerwood of Havamal also crafted a seemingly short-lived line of logoed soaps for the company's online store.

In early 2024, Dye, now in her late 30s, turned over ownership of Above Time to an unnamed colleague. She appears to have stepped back her public presence overall. Hearth & Helm has seemingly not been updated since 2023. But Above Time is still up and running.

Its "by us, for us" philosophy has appealed to several white nationalists who have praised Dye on Telegram.

"I support parallel economies," one comment reads, "where we would typically buy from each other, made by us and for us, to support each other directly and help each other become more independent from a system that hates us."

The 'parallel economy'

The idea of building a "parallel economy" in which people engage only with others who share their views to avoid the economic backlash that often follows expressions of far-right politics got a boost in white nationalist circles in late 2018.

After an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist who posted about his views and intentions on Gab attacked a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, killing 11 people and injuring six, major payment processors and web hosts pulled support from the platform.

Andrew Torba, the platform's founder, developed his own core services to keep the company alive and support other businesses who feared what they perceive as unjust, politicised corporate censorship. Gab is now home to multiple self-proclaimed parallel economies. In late 2022, Torba published a Parallel Economy Shopping Catalogue, highlighting about 200 companies active on the platform representing fields from art and literature to financial services and wellness.

Not all parallel economic communities, including most of those on Gab, are aligned with white nationalism. Some are, for example, built around the open expression of hardline Christian values, MAGA-style conservatism or even the idea of disconnecting from Chinese supply chains on political grounds.

But the concept of a parallel economy resonates especially with white nationalism's core goal, several extremism researchers told Al Jazeera - the creation of a world in which white people don't have to engage with anyone but their own racial and ideological kin.

Patriotic Alternative has historically encouraged its members to start their own businesses to insulate themselves against potential social or economic blowback over their membership and foster a thriving community.

"I support [other] pro-white businesses," Melia told Al Jazeera, "because I like to support my own people and people who work hard to fight for the rights of my people."

The PA alone has spawned and promotes several wellness-focused brands beyond Clean & Pure and Grandma Towler's, including a soy candle maker and a honey and syrup firm.

On social media, Hunt explains that he believes his open white nationalism cost him his tech career, forcing him to rely on donations and "menial gig jobs to make ends meet" for years. He describes Arcadian Wellness as a lifeline, helping him survive while openly espousing white nationalism.

Taylor, the elder statesman of the white nationalist world, believes that these businesses "are the beginnings of a parallel economy that affirms European values and culture rather than scorning them".

He acknowledges this economy won't be large or diversified enough to, say, "start a car company that does not implicitly insult whites" by working with "antiwhite" parts makers, skilled technicians or distributors along its supply chain. But a parallel economy that isn't all-encompassing still reduces the amount of contact white nationalists need to have with what they call an "antiwhite" world.

One white wellness business owner praised Above Time in a social media post for helping her "make fewer and fewer trips to the grocery store".

"We are seeing more of these," Z-Man, the blogger, wrote in a 2022 post on small white nationalist businesses. He called them "the most important political development in generations" for what he calls the "dissident" movement.

Yet while they mainly serve insular communities, many white wellness businesses are more discreet than Dye's Above Time in articulating their ideology in public, both to avoid scrutiny and potentially attract a wider consumer base, as Melia claims she's been able to do.

But this is a double-edged sword. Subtlety also makes it hard for white nationalists to find and patronise stores within their parallel economy.

Spotting the signs

If a company isn't clearly affiliated with a larger network like the PA or openly endorsed by a known white nationalist organisation, company or influencer, potential customers usually have to fall back on subtle clues that may signal a business's occluded intentions.

"I'm an expert at looking for the signs," Poole, the former army officer and Dissident Soaps founder, tweeted in reply to a query about whether a specific company was aligned with his political views. "They seem legit. 'Meet our team' is all white guys and one chick. Owner has [a] wild beard. No gay pride posts on social media or 'black out' squares in June 2020 on Instagram."

When Al Jazeera reached out to Poole for this story, rather than reply, he posted Al Jazeera's email on Gab with the caption, "I regret to inform you that we're being cancelled again." In a follow-up post, he quipped that this article would bring Dissident Soaps and the Mighty White Soap Company new business and blocked this reporter on social media.

Some companies' politics are easy to spot.

Most of the Mighty White Soap Company’s soaps have used ordinary names like Old Kentucky Home while some have featured whimsical designs like a bar with a gnome face and tall red hat. But they've also sold soaps referencing far-right memes and shibboleths, such as Covert sOaP, a dark blue patchouli-scented bar with embedded glow-in-the-dark letters that read "CIA" or "FBI".

White nationalists often accuse particularly vocal and violent figures within the movement of being "feds" planted in their ranks to make them look bad or to criminally entrap them. These people are so clearly undercover law enforcement officers, they argue, that they "glow".

The company offers discount codes like in July 2022 for "White History Month". Some of their old, limited edition soaps carried more blatantly white nationalist names like one named Day of the Rope Soap, an apparent reference to an event in The Turner Diaries in which white nationalists execute "race traitors" en masse. The term has become shorthand for a white nationalist uprising.

The Mighty White Soap Company did not reply to a request for comment.

But for every company like the Mighty White Soap Company or About Time that makes clear nods to its politics in its products and social media accounts, many more seem to try to scrub any sign of their white nationalist politics from their public-facing platforms.

Clean & Pure, for example, had no clear political language on its website, and its products use innocuous imagery and names.

White nationalists try to cut through all of this confusion by making definitive lists of businesses like Maine neo-Nazi Russell James's Aryan Archive, explains Amy Cooter, director of research at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at Middlebury College in Vermont.

But these lists are often subjective creations and might accidentally include businesses that aren't actually white nationalist-aligned. A farm that was just critical of "woke" culture on social media was surprised to learn from Al Jazeera that it was on such a list and promptly got the maker to remove them.

Lists also vary because white nationalists are quick to shun each other.

While they're unified in their core beliefs, McAleer explains, quibbles between leaders within the movement over philosophical details and organising tactics often descend into vicious infighting.

"These people just don't get along with each other," Barry says.

In 2020, for example, Hunt of Arcadian Wellness suggested Kohne might actually be an undercover officer "covering up kosher [Jewish] culpability" for challenges facing white people. Through 2022, a succession of other white nationalists also attacked Kohne for, as Barry put it, not insulting Jewish people enough. In November 2022 as a result of this wave of criticism, Kohne lost his long-term position on the PA's weekly livestream. Kohne issued a 1.5-hour monologue response, accusing his critics of an obsession with losing issues and hurling obscure insults at them.

These complexities as well as the short lifespan and informal operations of many white nationalist ventures make it difficult to map out the white wellness ecosystem. But Chris Magyarics - a researcher with the Anti-Defamation League, one of the largest and oldest US hate monitoring organisations, who tracks far-right merchandise - believes that wellness brands are growing more popular among white nationalists.

Wellness also inherently makes more sense as a business model for white nationalists than traditional far-right ventures, Barry suggests.

Historically, researchers tell Al Jazeera, far-right groups mainly sold overtly ideological literature, apparel and accessories to supporters.

"If you're writing the new Mein Kampf, how many copies are you going to sell?" Barry asks rhetorically. "Maybe your potential buyers get one copy for themselves and one for their racist cousin," then your income stream dries up. The same goes for openly white nationalist T-shirts and jewellery, he added: Not every white nationalist wants to buy something so blatant, and those who do need only a few. "But coffee, you're selling like a pound a month to everyone in your community," he adds. The same logic applies to toiletries and cosmetics.

"Even the cash-strapped actually have and spend a lot of money every day on necessities," one white nationalist explains in a Gab post. "If you divert some of those purchases to friendly companies, you're in effect donating hundreds of dollars" to supporting white nationalist groups "without spending a penny more".

Wellness products are also easy to make at home, Barry explains. One of his soap-making friends broke down the maths: You can make soap mostly using basic kitchen equipment like Havamal’s Ledgerwood appeared to. He brandished kitchen spatulas and immersion blenders in a home workshop in photos posted to his since-deleted Facebook profile.

If you homestead or farm, you can conceivably make soaps, tinctures and supplements using leftovers from animal slaughters and harvests or from herbs collected from nearby woods. But even if you need to buy lard for tallow or herbs for fragrance, an artisanal soap bar can be produced for about $2. One person working a few hours per day could, he calculates, make upwards of 15,000 bars of soap every year and sell each for $5 to $10 - a hefty mark-up.

The ‘white supremacist rabbit hole’

If you believe Melia, then Grandma Towler's is proof that some white wellness businesses do sell beyond their ideological silos.

In early 2023, Scotland's The Herald reported on Clean & Pure's presence at a craft fair in Dornie, a small town in the Scottish Highlands, where the previously Devon-based Claire Ellis, one of the brand's co-founders, had recently relocated. The brand also appears alongside more than a dozen seemingly mainstream businesses in a How to Buy British guide online.

Al Jazeera reached out to Ellis to talk about her brand and white wellness after The Herald story - which she described as a "hit piece" in a social media post - ran. She said she would try to find a time to get back to Al Jazeera but as of publication has not done so. In mid-2023, she and other PA members broke off to form a new group. Her Clean & Pure co-founder stayed behind. Their digital storefront went down in 2024.

As did Havamal's late last year after its social media accounts vanished in 2023. But Ledgerwood's presence wasn't limited to online spaces.

On social media, Ledgerwood also posted about selling his soaps at a small Christmas market in Maryland in 2019 and at a store in Massachusetts.

Such appearances at more mainstream venues as well as casual outsider exposure to white wellness brands on social media are the sort of interactions that most worry extremism researchers.

"Repeated exposure" to soft-pedalled or masked elements of hateful ideology "without sufficient critical thinking about the deeper facts or implications" may lead people to fall "down a more overtly white supremacist rabbit hole", as Cooter puts it.

"This approach can be quite effective in introducing people to or onboarding them into white nationalism," says Simi, the expert on white nationalist recruitment.

It worked on one of Tebaldi's close family members, as she explains to Al Jazeera. Tebaldi grew up in an ostensibly liberal college town in western Massachusetts but still often bumped up against socially conservative views about topics like the role of women in homes and families. This relative, however, held fairly progressive views, especially on topics like female education and empowerment. She was also active on "natural health forums for people seeking alternative remedies for things like psoriasis, general health and maybe mental wellness", she says.

After Tebaldi left home, she noticed on return visits that this family member started making crass jokes about "the Jews", offhand comments about fundamental biological racial differences and remarks about the value of traditional gender roles. Slowly, these comments grew more conspiratorial, racist and antifeminist. Tebaldi eventually realised that the communities her family member had learned to trust were not full of "leftist hippie moms" as she had presumed. They were in fact overrun with "traditionalists and far-right groups".

The pathway from wellness to white nationalism is not as odd as it might seem at first glance, argue Vivian Gerrand at Deakin University in Australia who researches ideological violence and Wendy KZ Anderson, a University of Minnesota researcher who studies women in far-right spaces.

Many people feel uncomfortable with social change like racial justice movements that reorient how they see themselves in relation to other groups like marginalised populations, Gerrand and Anderson explain.

When someone they learn to trust like an influencer in a mainstream wellness space on social media affirms their misgivings about, say, the Black Lives Matter movement and frames support for "white lives matter" as a matter of self-care, then an individual might slowly warm to this ideology.

Periods of social and economic upheaval like the last few years of pandemics, rampant inflation, large-scale wars and major social justice movements leave people more prone to influence, Gerrand says.

Ultimately, even if white wellness businesses don't make a tonne of money, "the investment returns they are making in recruiting new 'nontraditional' people" into the movement "is worth it to white nationalists", Picciolini, the ex-neo Nazi believes.

"This is an ecosystem ripe for recruiting new members."

Thanks to researchers Elizabeth Simons, Jennifer Reich, Joshua Fisher-Birch, Sophie Bjork-James and Tresa LeClerc for contributing insights and information that helped to shape this article.