Raised for the Reich: White Supremacists Are Recruiting Teens for On-the-Ground Action

Introduction

White supremacists have a long history of trying to recruit youths to join their movement as a means of filling their ranks and maintaining relevancy. However, the ubiquity of social media in young people’s lives means that today there are many opportunities for white supremacists to reach youths with their content and recruit them to their cause. These efforts can potentially lead children down a path of hate, as is the case with recent “for youth, by youth” white supremacist groups cropping up across the United States. As recent criminal cases involving juveniles demonstrate, these youth recruitment initiatives can even draw minors into criminal activity – occasionally with life-altering consequences.

In January 2025, three teenage boys in Florida were convicted for a spree of antisemitic vandalisms in Pensacola, which included spray-painting hate symbols and throwing bricks through the windows of a Chabad Jewish Center and a synagogue. The teens were part of a white supremacist crew for boys under the age of 18 called “Blood and Soil Crew” or “2119.”

That same month, at least one student at a high school in Virginia was caught distributing propaganda for a white supremacist group. The group’s Gab account claimed to be preparing white youth for an "invisible” race war being waged on white people.

One month later, in February 2025, a white supremacist network of affiliated "Youth Clubs” became active online. By April, the clubs began distributing hateful propaganda and holding training events in their local communities. The national network appears to emulate the Active Club Network—older white supremacist crews who view themselves as fighters training for a battle against a system that they believe is against the white race—but claims to be a “nationalist” organization specifically designed for individuals aged 16-18. These Youth Clubs serve as a jumping off point for young men, introducing them to the greater white supremacist movement.

In addition to these “for youth, by youth” white supremacist clubs, well-established white supremacist groups and networks have created mechanisms to attract young people. For example, the Goyim Defense League (GDL) is using OmeTV video chats to encourage children to make hateful gestures or use hate speech while trying to draw them into their network.

White Supremacist Youth Groups

Youth Clubs

Active Club-inspired “Youth Clubs” are the latest iteration of white supremacist efforts to recruit children, notable for their wide geographic reach and their offline activity. These Youth Clubs comprise a network of loosely affiliated regional chapters that seek to organize boys under the age of 18 to engage in hateful activities before adulthood. The geographically dispersed, white supremacist youth network portrays itself as the last vanguard against perceived threats to the white race; as one Youth Club-affiliated Telegram channel wrote, “The weight you feel is real—because the fate of our people rests on your shoulders...If you fall, it all falls.”  As of July 28, 2025, at least 12 Active Club-inspired “Youth Clubs” are actively operating around the United States.

In response to media attention, a DMV-based Youth Club disputed public claims that they are turning youth into fascists, stating, “Everyone who joins our clubs is already in a 'fascist ideology'.” (Source: Telegram)

In April 2025, the main Active Club-affiliated Telegram channel advertised Youth Clubs to its supporters. Despite this boost, it is unclear what, if any, direct role adult Active Club members play in recruiting or interacting with Youth Club participants. Though Youth Clubs claim to be independent from the broader Active Club Network, they echo Active Clubs’ emphasis on mixed martial arts training, shared decentralized structure and emphasis on on-the-ground engagement. Youth Clubs also frequently adopt names of Active Clubs—such as the Great Plains Youth Club, Sagebrush Youth Club and Heartland Youth Club, which all share the name of a pre-existing regional Active Club—and emulate Active Club symbology in their logos and propaganda. Youth Clubs also employ slogans like those used by Active Clubs, such as “White Youth in Revolt,” a phrase commonly used across Active Club-affiliated activity both online and in propaganda since at least 2021.

Youth Club logos [Left] closely mimic Active Club [Right] logos, consisting of a variation of the Celtic Cross, along with a symbol illustrative of the group’s regional location.

Since the beginning of April 2025, the Youth Club Network has been active in distributing propaganda, holding mixed martial arts training events and staging group hikes, camping trips and other activities. Chapters differ in their size and activity levels. The New England and Atlantic chapters are most active on-the-ground, with over 100 and 300 Telegram subscribers respectively. Based on a Telegram message announcing that a Great Lakes-based chapter gained enough members to become official in early April, it appears that chapters are likely formed independently by local youth and then are later accepted into the greater online Youth Club community.
 

A small group of individuals associated with the Great Lakes Youth Club held a meetup and hiking event in late June 2025. (Source: Telegram)

The network’s propaganda largely consists of stickers with the logo of the chapter that distributed it, but others have included generic white supremacist messaging. For example, the Atlantic Youth Club distributed propaganda in Pennsylvania that depicted a white man holding a fasces that reads, “Together We rise, Join the Fight.” Youth Clubs have also incorporated explicit antisemitic phrases. For example, in a separate incident, the same club shared propaganda at an undisclosed location in New York that reads, “End Zionism in Palestine and America!” In another incident, Heartland Youth Club distributed propaganda in Wichita, Kansas, which advertised the group’s social media and reads, “Radical Youth Against Zionism.”

Other Youth Clubs

The Youth Club network is not the first recent attempt by young white supremacists to create dedicated white supremacist clubs for other youths. In California, the Kalifornian Nationalist Youth (Kali Youth), an Active Club-like youth group, has been active online since August 2024. Kali Youth describes itself as “a fraternal organization made up of White youths across the state of California” who are “dedicated to organizing the Youth of our state to defend one another from the likes of antifa and the hooked nose zionists [sic].”

Like Youth Clubs, Kali Youth regularly distributes white supremacist propaganda (also with the “white youth in revolt” tagline) and encourages mixed martial arts and combat sports training. In May 2025, Kali Youth announced their “first regional chapter” based in Sacramento, called Sutter City Nationalist Youth. Kali Youth also participate in vandalism, commonly in the form of tagging.
 

Kali Youth tags, likely in Sacramento, containing white supremacist symbols and the group’s name, along with “white youth in revolt.”

In the Pacific Northwest, a similar club called PNW Youth, active since around April 2024, also distributes propaganda and participates in other outdoor fitness-related activities, particularly in Oregon and Washington.

Blood and Soil Crew or 2119 (also known as Revolutionary White Brotherhood), the group responsible for the Pensacola vandalisms, was founded sometime in 2022, also as a youth alternative to adult-oriented Active Clubs. The group explicitly branded itself as a “youth crew,” and there were instances of adult white supremacists directing minors to the group and encouraging them to join. In addition to numerous instances of white supremacist graffiti and the vandalism of the Chabad Jewish Center and a synagogue in Pensacola, 2119 has also disrupted local events: In March 2023, members of 2119 (who were later arrested in the vandalism case) disrupted an International Women’s Day event while wearing “siege” masks, shouting white supremacist slogans, performing Hitler salutes and holding a Confederate Flag.

A 17-year-old student caught distributing propaganda in January 2025 at his high school in Orange County, Virginia, was promoting Waidmann’s Division, a white supremacist group he allegedly founded (“Waidmann” being a German translation of “Hunter”). According to an online profile for the group, they claimed to be "bringing awareness" to an invisible war being waged on white people by other races.

White Supremacist Recruitment of Young People

Teenage recruitment is not just the purview of youth clubs: for decades, established white supremacist groups have attempted to branch out into youth recruitment.

In March 2024, Aryan Freedom Network (AFN), a Texas-based neo-Nazi group, launched an “Aryan Youth” division with the aim of incorporating children into their community so that they would remain part of it as they get older. Prior to this, membership was restricted to men and women 18 years of age or older; however, Aryan Youth is exclusively for children (male and female) ages 14 to 17, who have at least one parent or guardian that is a full member in the AFN. Aryan Youth requires members to reject “all forms of pettiness and decadence, whether it be Negro Rap music, effeminate hair styles, sloppy clothes, vulgar talk and Jewish thought control.” Aryan Youth’s promotions, in some ways, sound like other youth social organizations (i.e. Scouts), purportedly offering camping and hiking trips, survival skills, leadership, physical fitness and learning about farming and agriculture. However, they also ostensibly teach “racial education classes,” military skills and enforce opposition to race mixing, multiculturalism and immigration.

The infamous online white supremacist forum Stormfront also actively seeks to indoctrinate youth. In the late 1990s, Stormfront established a “kids page” that included games, optical illusions and links to white supremacist content, seeking to radicalize young people through a seemingly innocuous, child-friendly web page. Today, the “kids page” has evolved into an entire section of the site dedicated to white supremacist youth. Stormfront’s “Youth” section contains over 8,100 threads. One of the section’s primary threads, dedicated to posters connecting with other nearby young white supremacists to organize and potentially engage in on-the-ground action, alone has nearly 2,000 replies. Other threads allegedly started by young people seeking advice from other Stormfront members, both youth and adults, litter the site. One thread purportedly created by a 15-year-old asked how they can establish a white supremacist group to engage in on-the-ground activism without being able to drive. As of this writing, the most recent post in the thread is from July 2025.

Capitalizing on Live Interactions

White supremacists are also using technology to directly radicalize young people they randomly meet on the Internet while using Omegle knockoffs like OmeTV, which was released after the former service was discontinued in 2023. During these interactions, white supremacists use offensive language while speaking with young people and often goad them into hateful, racist and antisemitic behaviors.

The ADL Center on Extremism is aware of at least 20 white supremacists who use OmeTV and similar platforms to troll people, including children. The most prolific abusers of these platforms are typically connected to the antisemitic and white supremacist Goyim Defense League (GDL). The network’s leader, Jon Minadeo, has claimed that these platforms are a tool for “grooming the youth to hate” and GDL-affiliated livestreamers, including Minadeo, and other prominent figures like Jordan Lazaro (AKA PaperGoy5000) regularly interact with young people. These interactions typically involve streamers sharing white supremacist rhetoric while encouraging kids to endorse extremist ideologies or perform racist acts, like Hitler salutes. Afterwards the interactions are clipped and shared for entertainment.

In one interaction with two teens on OmeTV, Minadeo asked them if they “kill n***ers.” When one teen responded, calling himself a “n***er killer,” Minadeo held up a firearm and said, “stop feeding them [Black people] food stamps, feed them lead,” before exclaiming “fuck n***ers, white power” and holding up a Hitler salute. In response, the two teens also exclaimed “white power,” and held up their own salutes. Minadeo then encouraged them to “go to the shooting range” and “get prepared” for “the race war.”

In another livestream, Lazaro spoke with several young people on OmeTV while wearing a balaclava and using a swastika flag as his backdrop. On multiple occasions while speaking to teenagers who appeared to be minors, he abused a Black baby doll, holding a firearm to its head and saying that he would put the “n***er baby” into a woodchipper. He also shows a teenager holding up a Hitler salute as the teen and a friend film.

In another instance, GDL streamer “White Paladin”—who used a Cookie Monster puppet to make white supremacist remarks and troll people on an Omegle clone—asked a young person if they were “pure white” and if they “like Hitler.” The teen made the “white power” hand sign and says, “Hitler is my homie…” Eventually, “White Paladin” is able to get the young person to perform a Hitler salute and say “sieg heil.”

The recruitment of youth into the white supremacist movement presents not only a threat to young people and their families but also a threat and danger to society and our ability to create a just and equitable world. As the social media landscape continues to evolve, and children are increasingly susceptible to such content, it is imperative for parents, educators and families to understand and appreciate this current threat environment. For more information, please visit the ADL Toolkit on understanding and resisting domestic extremist recruitment efforts aimed at young people.