How a TV Show Helped a Neo-Nazi Stop Hating Jews | American Recovery

Seinfeld was a big part of me working past my anti-semitism and the way that happened was my last girlfriend in the movement who later became the mother of my child, she was in it longer than I was and she was really burnt out on it and she was just like, I just want to hang out with normal people, I'm so sick of this. And I'd be like, normal people are traitors, to hell with them, blah, blah, blah. She's like, well, I'm going to go hang out with normal people when I can. And she was doing that, and that's how she got exposed to Seinfeld. When Seinfeld was like peak popularity, when it was the water cooler show that everybody talked about. And so she came back home one day, and she's like, Arno, you've got to see this show. And I'm like, yeah, what's the show called? It's called Seinfeld, and I'm like, Seinfeld, Jews, and I lose my mind, I'm screaming, and she's like, just watch one episode, like, you'll love it, and she prevailed upon me to watch an episode, and I was hooked from, like, day one. What was the episode? The Pony Remark. Season two, episode two. Thank you. Thank you. Aunt Manya has the dinner, and Jerry says he hates ponies, and she's like, I had a pony. Oh, yeah. And I'm hopelessly goyish. Like, I don't think there's ever been an objective definition of what white means, but, like, I took a 23andMe, and if there is one, I'm about as close to it as you can be. So one could say it was the straw that broke the... The pony's back to your white nationalism. Well, and the thing is, because Seinfeld is observational humor, a fan of Seinfeld, you don't go a day, much less sometimes an hour or two, without seeing a reference somewhere. Right now I'm thinking about the episode where Kramer found the Merv Griffin set in the dumpster and set it up in his apartment. And so I was still like that as I'm this, like, vehement anti-Semite. But I would be having a bowl of soup or eating some marble rye or there's like a close talker, or a low talker or whatever. And these moments would bring up joy and I'd recall the show and I'd laugh just like everybody else who loves Seinfeld does. But then after that, probably that same voice that would chide me about beating people would say like, well, what about Jerry Seinfeld? Does he get to live in your whiter and brighter world? And if he does, do you think he's going to be very funny if you're killing all the other Jews? And the only answer to that was that this ideology I had assumed as my identity was nonsense. So every time I got a chuckle over some Seinfeld occurrence every day, it was like reminding me, hating Jews is stupid, hating Jews is futile, and actually the world's a better place because of Jews. The, this, um... Same hypocrisy extended to my band. We practice every Saturday night. And we would spend two, three, four hours writing songs about how Jews are the scum of the earth and everything wrong with the world is their fault. And then when we were done practicing, we'd all plop down on this pissed-up couch in front of a battered little TV with a battered VCR. We'd pop in a copy of Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap. Oh, boy. Which everybody who's ever been in a band loves. Yeah. To me, it's one of the greatest films of all time. To this day, I've lost count of how many times I've seen it. I absolutely love it. Rob Reiner, rest in peace. May his memory be a blessing to all of us. But we knew that movie word for word. And when you're a white nationalist, your judar is on like a thousand at all times. You don't cross paths in any way with someone who's remotely Jewish without being a Jew. So we knew Rob Reiner was Jewish, we knew Harry Shearer was Jewish, we knew there was all sorts of other Jewish people involved in creating this film that we love so much, and we just like... Didn't care for that moment. We covered Tonight We're Gonna Rock Ya. We would have like 400 skinheads in a mosh pit as we're covering Spinal Tap songs. And on our CD, which I designed the liner notes for, we had 11 songs. And so after the lyrics, all of the lyrics were literally about slaughtering Jews and everybody else. And at the end of it, it said, This one goes to 11. Ha ha ha. Like, that hypocrisy is exhausting. But what was most exhausting was when people I claimed to hate treated me with kindness. And fortunately for me, that happened time and time again throughout my seven-year span as a neo-Nazi skinhead. There were people like a Jewish boss. A lesbian supervisor, Afro-American, Latino, and Asian co-workers who treated me with kindness when I least deserved it, but when I needed it most. That's so powerful. And in doing so, they were putting themselves in a position of power because everything I did as a neo-Nazi skinhead was meant to provoke hostility. I wanted, I wanted my every action to make people hate me and ideally to swing at me. And, and he, I'm a big dude. And I'm sure you got mad every time that you tried to provoke them and you failed. Oh yeah. That, that would, that was like the, that was losing. If, if I provoke someone and I get the snot beat out of me, that's winning. And I'm, even though I'm a big dude, I was six, three when I was 14 years old, like I, I've never been very coordinated, so in all the fights I got, I got my ass kicked as often as I might have beat other people up, and it didn't matter if I won or lost the fight. The violence was my victory. That was what I sought. And so when I had coworkers and a boss, my boss was a guy named Jack Cooper. When I dropped out of school and I moved out, my parents didn't have a lot of money, and my mom's like, okay, we can't afford to support you, so you got to get a job. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'll get a job. She's like, he's not going to get a job. No one's going to hire this kid with the shaved head and swastika tattoos and the outspoken racist. And so she asked Jack to give me a job. He had a business printing T-shirts. And he gave me a job, and as soon as I'm at work, and not only do I have swastika tattoos, I've got them on my jacket, and I'm running my mouth about my beliefs to everybody at work, and nobody's into it. Like, all the white guys I work with are like, yeah, that's not cool. I'm not into it. I don't want nothing to do with this. All the black guys I work with, the Asians, Latinos, are like, yeah. But they still treated me with kindness. And it got back to my mom that I was showing up to Jack's business with swastikas on my jacket. She knew Jack was Jewish. She knew that he had lost family in the Holocaust. And she was mortified and embarrassed and humiliated by her son's actions. So she called up Jack and said, Jack, I would understand if you fire him. Like, I don't want you to fire him, but I wouldn't blame you if you did. And my mom's actually like, you know, I'd fire him if I were you. Like, that's horrible that he's doing that. And rather than fire me, Jack goes, he's a good kid. He's just going through a phase. And he not only let me keep my job, he hired my skinhead buddies. Gave them jobs selling the t-shirts that I was printing. Folks, if you enjoyed this short video, check out the link right there for the full episode.