The Crash of the Hammer

^{45.371120°N,} _68.155465°W

The first step in establishing a neo-Nazi compound is to clear and level the land. These sites tend to pop up in rural America, which means that there’s brush to hack down, tree stumps to pull up, and piles of debris to burn. All this work is done to make room for the barracks, kitchens, and meeting halls where modern-day devotees of Adolf Hitler will live, work, and train together.

When Christopher Pohlhaus moved to the forested lot where, like other neo-Nazis on other forested lots before him, he planned to start a fascist revolution, he brought two RVs with him. That meant he had somewhere to bunk down at night. But he didn’t have running water. I can’t say how he bathed when he first arrived; as for other matters of hygiene, perhaps he used the woods.

Pohlhaus’s parcel of 10.6 acres does not have an address. Technically, it’s in Springfield, Maine, a hamlet of fewer than 300 people. The closest city, about an hour’s drive away, is Bangor. That’s where Pohlhaus, a gym rat, eventually joined Planet Fitness. To get home after a session of lifting, showering, and doing whatever else he needed to do, Pohlhaus would take Route 2 north, then turn eastward on Route 6. He would drive to Bottle Lake Road, take a right, and drive about two miles before taking another right on a gravel lane called Moores Road. Eventually, among scattered hunting camps, Trump banners, and “Support the Blue” signs, he would come to a metal gate situated on a dirt road. Behind the gate sat the land of Pohlhaus’s dreams.

Pohlhaus, 37, is a former U.S. marine, an itinerant tattoo artist, and a hardcore white-supremacist influencer. He is loud and hostile, and proud to be both. His voice is pitched surprisingly high, and he has a slight Southern drawl. He has a large body and small bald head; a blue-black tattoo crawls up the right side of his face, from his chin to his forehead. Over the years, Pohlhaus has collected thousands of social media followers, who know him by his nickname: Hammer.

Hammer had been living in Texas for a few years when, in March 2022, he bought the land in Maine. He told his followers that he was going to use it to build a haven, operational center, and training ground for white supremacists. He invited them to join him. Together, he said, they would plant the seed of a white ethnostate, and they would engage in violence, if necessary, to nurture it. “An unarmed man sacrifices his family to the unpredictably [sic] of chaos,” Hammer wrote online in 2021.

Hammer packed his bags and headed north, meeting with various white supremacists along the way. He solicited donations for his new compound in the form of cryptocurrency, and later set up a page on GiveSendGo, a Christian crowdfunding site. He raised close to $10,000 before the campaign was shut down earlier this year.

Once he’d settled in Maine, Hammer kept his followers abreast of his progress breaking ground, frequently posting photos and uploading videos to Telegram. There was Hammer standing next to a pile of freshly chopped wood, snowshoeing through the forest, holding a beer in front of a bonfire. Followers saw him cradling an AK-47 in his arms. (Caption: “All this Slavic war training in the Maine woods has me exhausted!”) Hammer posted footage from a celebration he held with about eight of his followers, where he claimed they sacrificed a goat. Another clip showed Hammer helping a man in a balaclava slice the palm of his hand as part of an initiation ritual.

Hammer appeared excited, optimistic. He was careful—or thought that he was careful—not to reveal his exact location, lest it attract unwanted attention from his enemies, including the media and the FBI. If people wanted to join him at the compound, they could get in touch directly.

But unbeknownst to Hammer, he was being followed. A longtime Mainer was determined to wipe the smirk off the neo-Nazi’s face. Indeed, he hoped to run Hammer out of the state for good.

Maine has fewer than two million residents, most of whom live on a mainland about the size of Ireland. Others, myself included, live on one of the state’s 4,000-plus islands flecking the Atlantic Ocean. Maine is a place of independence and modesty, of irreligious Catholics and liberal conservatives, where the unofficial slogan is “The Way Life Should Be.” It is the country’s number one supplier of blueberries and lobsters, and home to the world’s leading provider of genetically engineered mice. The state’s rocky, rolling landscape is a point of pride—billboards are banned, lest they sully the views from Maine’s roads.

Maine is also the grayest state in America, with a median age of 45. It tends to attract retirees and to retain older residents. One of those residents is Crash Barry. Crash, 56, is a lot of things: a homesteader, a lumberjack, a rabble-rouser. In past lives, he was a McDonald’s grill cook, a clerk at a health-food store, an alpaca herdsman, and a janitor. He is tall and broad-shouldered, with soft eyes and hair the color of rain clouds. In the summer he wears paisley Crocs, size 12, when he isn’t barefoot, which he prefers to be. He is gritty and clever, and speaks in sweeping, unfiltered paragraphs.

Above all Crash is a storyteller. Years ago, for a magazine called The Bollard, he wrote “One Maniac’s Meat,” a series of essays in which he waxed with affection and dark humor about his quest to live more closely with nature. He has authored several books, including the novel Sex, Drugs & Blueberries. (Amazon synopsis: “Failed Portland rocker Ben Franklin moves Down East with his poet wife to start a new life. Desperate for cash, Ben signs on for the Maine blueberry harvest where he’s lured into a seamy world of sex and drugs that could lead to his downfall.”) Crash has also published a memoir, Tough Island, which recounts the years he spent 20 miles out to sea on Matinicus, Maine’s most remote inhabited island, working as a sternman on a lobster boat with “resourceful individuals and scoundrels.”

I first met Crash about a decade ago, when we were both  invited to compete in a live storytelling event in Portland called Literary Death Match. He arrived with a large wicker basket filled with cannabis, which he’d cultivated himself. This wasn’t to bribe the judges. Crash just wanted to share his harvest, spread the love. He handed the basket to a person in the front row and invited everyone to take a bud and pass the rest along. He was a force on stage, both in stature and in performance—he has the physicality you’d expect of someone who works in the woods, and he has a background in improv comedy. By the time Crash finished presenting the story he’d prepared for the event, the basket of weed was empty.

These days, Crash still spends a lot of time around cannabis—his wife grows it near their homestead in the western hills of Maine. When Crash isn’t outdoors tending to his land, he’s often researching people he calls the “sewer-dwelling monsters of New England.” People like Hammer.

For years, Crash has been doing the dirty work for the rest of us, documenting pockets of hate in America. He first started tracking fascists as a journalist in 2003, going undercover to report on the World Church of the Creator, a white-supremacist cult that promoted “racial holy war.” (The WCOTC collapsed in 2004, after its leader was convicted of solicitation of murder—he asked someone who turned out to be a government informant to kill a federal judge.) Crash got back on the beat in earnest in 2017, amid a surge of far-right recruiting and organizing after Donald Trump was elected president.

Crash isn’t an armchair reporter. He isn’t content to merely gather information online—though he does plenty of that, going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. When he can he tails people, sometimes in disguise, and reports what he learns in his newsletter, The Crash Report; on social media; and on his podcast, The Crash Program. He focuses his energies on bad guys in his own backyard. “If I didn’t limit myself to Maine, I would never get anything done,” Crash told me. “There are just so many of them.”

With his podcast cohost, Andy O’Brien, he exposed Tom Kawczynski, the town manager of Jackman, in the western part of the state, for espousing white-supremacist views. A few weeks after Kawczynski was booted from office, Crash donned a long wig and hid recording devices near a table at a Thai restaurant, where Kawczynski and a collection of like-minded folks planned to talk about their grand plans for establishing an all-white community. (Crash knew about the meeting because he’d posed as a man named Walt—“one of my numerous online alter egos”—to get into Kawczynski’s good graces.) Crash later turned his attention to Larry Lockman, an arch-conservative state representative and the founder of the Maine First Project, which seeks to defund sanctuary cities, eliminate the state income tax, and ban “political indoctrination” in public schools, among other objectives. Crash has also covered local chapters of Moms for Liberty and the work of anti-trans zealots.

^{Hammer insists that} Blood Tribe is more hardcore _{than other white-supremacist groups.} (This is a claim _{many fascist organizations make} in relation to one another: _{We’re better neo-Nazis than you are.)}

Hammer is different from Crash’s other subjects: He is a virulent white supremacist in the vein of onetime WCOTC acolytes. In 2020, while living in San Antonio, Hammer burst onto the right-wing scene when he created an Instagram account that mainly shared hateful memes; it was eventually banned. He created another Instagram account, which was also banned, then another, and so on. Eventually he pivoted to Telegram, then Odysee, BitChute, Gab, and other dark corners of the internet that tolerate neo-Nazi chatter. He launched a Web-based talk show, Hammerstream, in which he exhorted the dominance of whiteness and the importance of physical fitness. He summoned white people to a “last stand, a righteous war” against those who “call for the destruction of their birthright and posterity.” He also peddled propaganda and swag: books by or about Hitler, swastika flags and fitted caps, and “Hammer Shades”—Oakley knockoffs available for $25.95 a pop.

By 2021, Hammer’s popularity had grown to the point that he was able to launch a membership-based organization called Blood Tribe, or Blutstamm; Hammer is fond of German terminology. Blood Tribe joined a bewildering array of neo-Nazi groups active in the U.S. today: the Goyim Defense League, Werewolf 88, Aryan Freedom Network, and the Nationalist Social Club (often styled as NSC-131*), to name a few. While these bands of fascists hold the same core beliefs about racial superiority and the pressing need to protect Western civilization, some venture into more obscure territory. Blood Tribe subscribes to Odinism, a neo-pagan faith that honors ancient Norse gods. Some neo-Nazis appropriate the religion to celebrate the white race, which they contend originated in Northern Europe. Ron McVan, one of the most prominent ideologues of this bigoted variant, which is sometimes called Wotanism, has described it as “an ancestral faith that puts race first” and “the inner voice of the Aryan soul.”

Hammer frequently refers to himself as a “son of Wotan,” and the tattoo emblazoned on his face is runic text that spells “Wotan.” He also flirts with esoteric Hitlerism, a fringe belief system holding that Hitler was a deity. “I believe he was an incarnation of Wotan,” Hammer once said on Telegram.

Hammer insists that Blood Tribe is more hardcore than other white-supremacist groups. (This is a claim many fascist organizations make in relation to one another: We’re better neo-Nazis than you are.) To prove his group’s preeminence, Hammer established a vetting system for aspiring members to weed out those he called “snakes” and “fragile people.” In Telegram chats that the group calls the Camps, hopefuls haze one another—think hypermasculine taunting and verbal abuse. “Expect confrontation,” a Telegram announcement about the Camps reads. Wannabe members who are deemed worthy receive an invitation to join Blood Nation, a private chat group. Participants may then be approved to attend Blood Tribe events in real life.

Reportedly, only a select few members become part of the organization’s inner circle, a privilege commemorated by rubbing one’s blood on a spear shaft. According to Hammer, this unites an initiate with the “bros of the past and bros of the future.” Should any of his lieutenants be so brazen as to challenge him for the group’s top job—Hammer calls himself Blood King, or Blutkönig in German—they may do so in a duel with weapons of Hammer’s choosing. “The likelihood of that being legal in this country, I don’t know,” Hammer admitted during a live-streamed meeting to discuss the group’s constitution. “Maybe you could go to, like, some international waters.” (Presumably, this has yet to occur.)

Women are not permitted to join Blood Tribe. Like a hastily scribbled sign on a boys’ treehouse, an invitation to the Camps declares, “No girls allowed.” Hammer doesn’t trust women. It’s fair to say that he doesn’t even like them, especially if they’re white and liberal. “I do find them to be enemies to us,” Hammer has said. “They should be treated as such.” Hammer promotes claiming women as “war brides,” which involves taking away the “rights and control of how their reproductive system is to be utilized.” To his mind, stripping women of their bodily autonomy, and deciding when and how they have children, is a masculine imperative and an urgent matter of racial survival.

What made Hammer this way? It’s hard to say. Radicalization can be a circuitous process. He was born and raised in a middle-class Pentecostal household in Baltimore. As a teen he was devout, a youth group leader. At some point his family moved to Mississippi, after which his parents split up. He went to boarding school for a year, then dropped out and joined the Marines, serving two years stationed in Japan and another two in California. After that he scraped together a living by tattooing, mostly swastikas and other racist symbols. He considers this “a unique niche that I’ve got cornered.” (I tried for several weeks to make contact with Hammer, who openly disdains the media, but only hit dead ends. I pieced together a portrait of him from publicly available source material, including social media videos, chat transcripts, and interviews he’s given to like-minded individuals. When he was reached for comment during the fact-checking process, Hammer declined to answer questions.)

Crash Barry refers to Hammer and his Blood Tribe brood as “chuds,” from the acronym “cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.” The term is from a 1984 sci-fi horror movie, the plot of which revolves around several New Yorkers, including a cop and a homeless-shelter manager who team up to investigate a slew of disappearances, people who it turns out were killed by sewer-dwelling CHUDs. That’s how Crash sees Hammer—a lowlife, a bottom-feeder. “I’ve been following assholes like him for years. And when you dig down deep into these guys, their most core belief is misogyny. They’re like roided-out orcs,” Crash told me. “They look back at this ‘idealistic’ time when women were essentially property. Perhaps Hammer expected things to be easy, and that’s why he is so full of hate.”

Crash and his wife, Shana, are madly in love. When I met her, she wore gardening clothes and a brimmed hat, still dressed from her job at a nursery. She knows everything there is to know about medicinal plants. She also writes, sings, and records music. Crash sent me one of her tracks—she sounds a little like Edie Brickell—about a pink whale that doesn’t want to be hurt by humans. Crash and Shana have a production booth in their home where she records her songs and he produces his podcast.

Crash has been following Hammer for nearly two years. He has pored over Hammer’s videos and photos to determine where they were shot. He has examined public records and genealogical information. (Crash told me that, based on some sleuthing he did with a volunteer genealogical researcher, he thinks Pohlhaus’s great-great uncle once removed might have been Jewish and sent to a concentration camp.) And he has tracked Hammer’s movements carefully, hoping to understand the one that to Crash mattered most: his relocation to Maine.

Maine is the nation’s greenest state—90 percent of its land is forested, and the farther north you go, the denser the woods. Maine is also the whitest state. The 2020 census shows that its population of almost 1.4 million is more than 90 percent white. Taken together these conditions help explain why Hammer picked Maine to embark on his grand plans for neo-Nazi domination.

Maine’s whiteness isn’t accidental. It was intended, orchestrated. To understand this history I spoke to Samuel James, a journalist and the creator of the podcast 99 Years, which he describes as “a Black exploration of the deliberate creation of the whitest state in the nation.” James is tall and tattooed, with large brown eyes and a goatee. He is the descendant of a slave and grew up in Biddeford, Maine, “in cornrows and Rollerblades.” His father was a Black session musician, and his mother was a white dancer, the daughter of a church pianist.

To make his point about Maine’s racist history, James cited Malaga Island, a fishing community settled by free Blacks around the time of the Civil War. “The Great Migration begins in 1910, and powerful Northern racists freak out,” James wrote to me in an email. “Maine’s then governor Frederick W. Plaisted was one of those racists, and the following year he began the ethnic cleansing.” The state forcibly removed people from Malaga Island, committed many of them to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded, and even dug up the graves of their dead. “This made national news and gave all the right and wrong signals to all the right and wrong people,” James explained . Signals, that is, about the kind of state Maine was and wanted to be. (It wasn’t the only state outside the South to embark on such an openly racist path. In 1859, Oregon entered the union with a law excluding Black people from moving there; though rendered moot by the 14th Amendment, the legislation wasn’t formally repealed until 1926.)

By 1925, when the Ku Klux Klan was at its peak, it had more than 150,000 members in Maine—roughly 20 percent of the state’s population—who helped elect a governor and informed public policy. The Klan’s organized influence was short-lived; it all but collapsed nationwide before the end of the 1920s. But as James pointed out to me, its members didn’t go anywhere. “They didn’t just suddenly find Jesus or move out of state,” he said. “Rather, the mission continued with redlining their towns. Some stayed in the PTA and chambers of commerce. They became town managers and state governors. They became those racist grandparents, excused by their children for being ‘from a different era.’”

Given the state’s white-supremacist history, James isn’t surprised that Hammer set his sights on Maine. “In 2020, there were still three islands with the word ‘nigger’ in their names, and when the state finally redesignated them, the Press Herald said it acted ‘swiftly,’ ” James told me, referring to Portland’s daily newspaper.

In Telegram chats dating back to early 2021, Hammer and his followers discussed Maine’s other assets: cheap property, geographical isolation, and lax gun laws, the same attributes that had enticed white supremacists to build compounds in northern Idaho (Aryan Nations) and West Virginia (National Alliance). But for Crash, pinpointing where Hammer put down roots in Maine wasn’t easy, because he didn’t broadcast it. When Crash started looking for answers, in late 2022, he had to turn to property records.

And there it was: a quitclaim deed for the acreage in Springfield, listing the sale price at $25,110. Hammer had purchased the lot with a promissory note and a cosigner named Fred Boyd Ramey, who calls himself Fred the Felon. Ramey, a long-haul truck driver, supported Andrew Yang in the 2020 presidential election, then changed his political tune and fell in with Hammer. Around the same time he helped Hammer buy the land in Maine, he registered a short-lived company in Wyoming called White Working Class Consulting.

At first, Crash kept the information about Hammer’s compound to himself. He was still deciding how to proceed with his reporting. Then, in March 2023, a few months after Crash found the land deed, Blood Tribe members showed up at what was billed as a Rock-n-Roll Humanist Drag Queen Story Hour in the small city of Wadsworth, Ohio. Hammer traveled from Springfield to be there and carried a firearm on his hip. The neo-Nazis were in uniform: balaclava, black pants, red shirt. This made their identities hard to determine. But Hammer didn’t cover his face; he wanted to be seen. As he led chants, his face turned red and the veins in his temples popped out. “Pedophiles get the rope!” he screamed. And: “Seig heil!” (A few months later on a podcast, Hammer said of his group’s tactics, “We go to the enemy, scream at them, give them PTSD, and leave.”)

Back in Maine, winter was turning into spring, which is known locally as mud season. That meant it was time for Crash to complete various tasks on his land before new life arrived. He oiled up his chain saw, felled and bucked ash trees, built a new paddock for his goats. He also researched Hammer as much as he could—the demonstration in Ohio had sent Crash into overdrive. He’d spend an hour cutting wood, return to his desk, listen to a few episodes of Hammer’s podcast while taking notes, then go outside to turn the compost. He’d familiarize himself with pagan neo-Nazi practices and then dig holes for fence posts. Working on the land helped him recharge mentally so that he could keep wading into Hammer’s muck. It also gave him time to think. He’d be tending to his animals when a new avenue of investigation would open up in his mind.

_{Word that a neo-Nazi} shopped at Smith’s _{spread over family dinners, at store counters,} and in sidewalk conversations. ^{The gossip fuse had been lit.} In small-town Maine, _{few things are quite as powerful.}

On March 19, Crash released his first podcast episode about Hammer. He didn’t replay much of what Hammer had said on his own show, because the words were too appalling—instead Crash summarized and paraphrased. “Hammer is on a whole other level,” Crash told me. “The audio I have of him talking about taking war brides is chilling.” Listeners inclined to do so could seek out Hammer’s unfiltered content themselves.

Crash described “details about Hammer and his precise location in Maine” as “very scarce,” but he told his listeners that he was aiming to change that. He announced that Hammer was living in Springfield, and explained the location’s appeal. “He was on a lot of podcasts talking about, ‘Come to Maine,’ ” Crash said. “I listened to one where he was talking about, ‘You know what’s so great about Maine up here is that the people working in the convenience stores are white.’ ” He also criticized what he saw as Hammer’s attempts to build a homestead, based on what he’d seen and read online—Pohlhaus claimed, for instance, to have a sawmill on his land. “I’ve been homesteading for over a dozen years, so I think I can offer a fair assessment of the land and the plan that he’s got. Yeah, that land is pretty useless,” Crash said. “It’s woodland, but all the good lumber was already cut, probably taken twenty or thirty years ago. So there’s lots of small to medium trees—you can maybe get some firewood out of it. But there’s no timber for dimensional lumber to build anything. And there’s no agricultural land whatsoever. There’s really no way to grow anything.”

In other words, Crash was pretty sure Hammer was doomed to fail. But why not hasten the inevitable? On March 22, Crash reached out to state authorities to report that he suspected Hammer was running an illegal tattoo operation, and he provided the latitude and longitude coordinates of the property (45.371120°N, 68.155465°W). White supremacists are often brought to heel by the government not because of violent acts but because they violate basic laws and regulations. “They got Al Capone on tax evasion,” Crash reminded me.

Crash also alerted local journalists to Hammer’s presence in Springfield, hoping to prompt more widespread coverage. According to Crash, no one bit—not fast enough, anyway. “The mainstream media claims that they don’t write about chuds because they don’t want to give them attention and amplify their message. But that’s a lame excuse,” he told me. Eric Russell, a reporter at the Press Herald who was in touch with Crash, explained that his paper did look into Hammer, but on its own terms. “Crash’s work is niche,” Russell said. “I’m a fan, but he’s a different type of reporter than I am. He has different ways of getting his information and different ways of reporting it.”

On April 4, Crash released a second podcast episode about Hammer. He addressed Mainers directly, suggesting what they should do if they ever came face-to-face with Hammer or another neo-Nazi in the wild. “Don’t be afraid,” Crash said. “You guys know the Nazis are losers, right? Mock them!” He insisted that white supremacists have “shitty lives” and should be reminded of it. After the episode aired, at least one Springfield resident took the advice to heart.

Smith’s General Store is a cream-colored gas station off Route 6. The entrance is flanked with an old plastic Coca-Cola sign and a 2004 Red Sox World Champions banner. An American flag hangs above the door. The store sells fishing lures, laundry detergent, firewood, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, light bulbs, basic household hardware, maxi pads, milk, eggs, bread, and small plastic toy toilets that dispense sour candies shaped like poop. There’s a deli in the back, and one aisle contains deer, mink, and lynx hides. Next to the cash register is a billboard pinned with the business cards of fishing and hunting guides.

When you live in a town with a population of 293, the general store is where you get to interact with other humans—or where you have to, depending on your worldview. Zac Chickering, a carpenter with a scratchy voice and a chain saw he calls Missy Mac, leans toward the latter. He likes to spend his time alone in the woods. It was in the late spring or early summer of 2023—he can’t recall the date—when Chickering encountered Hammer at Smith’s. Chickering had heard about him from Crash, whom he’d met decades prior when they were young punks together in Portland. He’d been listening to his old friend’s podcast. Now was his chance to do something.

Chickering approached Hammer cooly. “Get the fuck outta here with that Nazi shit,” he said.

According to Chickering, Hammer said nothing. He just sneered, paid for his items, and left. Abruptly, the other people in the store started talking—it was as if they’d all been frozen for a moment and now were able to react. From there, word that a neo-Nazi shopped at Smith’s spread over family dinners, at store counters, and in sidewalk conversations. The gossip fuse had been lit. In small-town Maine, few things are quite as powerful.

Shortly after I moved to Peaks Island, Maine, I was in the checkout line at the local market, talking to the woman at the register. She told me that as a newcomer, I was being noticed. This wasn’t Brooklyn, where I’d lived for more than a decade. This was a place where I couldn’t be invisible—where no one could. “There is something you should know about living here,” the woman said. “If we don’t know anything about you, we’ll make something up. And if we like our story better, we’ll stick to it.”

Thanks to his digital profile, and to Crash’s early efforts to bring his arrival in Maine to public attention, the people of Springfield didn’t have to make anything up about Hammer. After Chickering’s confrontation with Hammer at Smith’s, Crash got several tips from locals: where they’d seen the neo-Nazi, whom they’d seen him with. Chickering drove by Hammer’s compound for what he called “a lookie-loo.” When town elders got wind of the fact that Hammer was a fascist, hackles went up. A good portion of them are World War II veterans, and they were insulted by Hammer’s politics. They also didn’t want their wives knowing about—much less encountering—a man who spewed violent misogyny.

Soon Springfield’s righteous NIMBYism spun up into something bigger. On July 23, as part of a lengthy investigation of white supremacists in Maine, the Press Herald reported on Hammer’s compound. A few days later, Crash made a juicy discovery. Hammer posted a video on Telegram complaining that his gym had kicked him out because patrons didn’t like the T-shirts he wore, emblazoned with racist slogans, or his tattoos, including a giant swastika inked over his heart. He flashed an email the management had sent him banning him from the gym. He referred to the establishment as “PF,” and it was easy enough to figure out what that stood for: Planet Fitness. The closest one was an hour away in Bangor.

Crash called the facility, disguised his voice, and explained that he was a concerned father whose daughter had told him about a creepy guy with a Nazi tattoo who frequented the weight room. An employee confirmed that Hammer had been banned. Crash hustled to his computer and posted what he’d learned on social media; the Bangor Daily News picked it up the next day.

The same week, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report on Hammer’s presence in Maine. (According to the SPLC, it was tipped off by a gym employee.) When researcher Jeff Tischauser reached out for comment, Hammer responded with a voice message. “Breaking news, Nazi buys a piece of property. Tell everybody, run the presses. He owns property,” he ranted. “What the fuck do you expect me to do? Where do you expect me to go? You want me to go to your neighborhood? Why are you guys so goddamn awkward? This isn’t a news story.”

“The more I think on it, ^{the more I realize we need to make it} ABUNDANTLY clear _{that Chris isn’t welcome here,”} one commenter wrote. ^{“[He] lost the right to feel safe.”}

Except that it was, whether he liked it or not. In early August, Kathleen Phalen Tomaselli of the Bangor Daily News published a story about Hammer. A seasoned reporter with a Stevie Nicks haircut and a nose ring, Phalen Tomaselli had written for papers in New York and Pennsylvania before buying an old farmhouse in Maine and relocating with her husband. She brought unique experience to the Hammer story: She’d once investigated the East Coast contingent of Aryan Nations.

Phalen Tomaselli is bold and wanted to see Hammer’s land for herself, so she drove down from her home near Maine’s border with New Brunswick, Canada. The people of Springfield were eager to assist. “Town officials were really helpful in showing me exactly where it was, helping me find the registry of deeds. And people gave me information like, ‘If you pass this thing that looks like this particular landmark, you’ve gone too far,’ ” she said. She went into the woods with her camera to document what was there, which wasn’t much. Hammer’s construction plans appeared to be moving at a glacial pace.

Around the time Phalen Tomaselli published her story, one Mainer came to Hammer’s defense. Her name was Kathie Greear, and she lived in Lee, a town not far from Springfield. “I am not a Nazi sympathizer or supporter but I still thought this country allowed people to have different opinions without being accused or cancelled,” Greear wrote in a letter to the editor, published by the Lincoln News on August 3. She referred to Hammer by his first name, Chris, and described him as “a very talented, intelligent young man” who was always “willing to have a conversation.”

Greear didn’t explain how she knew Hammer, but internet sleuths figured it out soon enough. Greear ran the Loon’s Nest Lodge, which rented rooms through various websites, including Airbnb. At some point since relocating to Maine, Hammer had spent time there. He was even featured in a photo on the lodge’s Facebook page, wearing blue jeans and straddling a cider press next to a plastic bin filled with apples.

On Reddit, where Greear’s letter got plenty of attention, commenters were blunt: “Wow, someone drank the kool aid.” And: “Eat shit Kathie.” Also: “I’m sure the folks at AirBNB wouldn’t like it to be known that a Nazi sympathizer is hosting a property.” (Airbnb soon banned Greear from the platform.)

Another commenter focused on the bigger problem: what to do about Hammer. “The more I think on it, the more I realize we need to make it ABUNDANTLY clear that Chris isn’t welcome here,” they wrote. “[He] lost the right to feel safe, and should honestly be run out of the state, sooner rather than later.”

I first heard the buzz about Hammer not in the papers or on Crash’s podcast, but from my church’s pastor. Peaks Island is just one square mile in size, and its inhabitants form a very tight, more or less intentional community. Everyone knows and looks out for one another. If the island has a hub, it’s New Brackett Church.

Originally NBC was Methodist, but until recently the Methodist church didn’t welcome same-sex marriages, so the congregation voted unanimously to disaffiliate. When Reverend Will Green married his husband, Tyler, the reception was at the church. Eventually, NBC became affiliated with the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association. I’m not really a person of faith, but I love our small, 161-year-old church and attend, well, religiously. Every Sunday at 10 a.m., the pews support the rear ends of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, pagans, abortion doulas, antiracist activists, psychics, atheists, and the occasional tourist.

One day in 2023, my spouse caught up with Reverend Will while he was walking his dog and proposed several sermon topics. Among them was the paradox of tolerance. Challenge accepted. A few weeks later, Reverend Will delivered the sermon.

The concept of the paradox of tolerance is usually credited to the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper. In his work The Open Society and Its Enemies, published near the end of World War II, Popper writes in an extensive footnote:

If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.… We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal.

Boiled down: If we tolerate hate, we run the risk of tacitly supporting it.

Reverend Will used Hammer to illustrate his point that, by accepting all types and all sides, whatever our intentions in doing so, we give oxygen to those who would cause irreparable damage to our polity and civil society. “We should be very concerned about a neo-Nazi training camp in our neighborhood,” Reverend Will said from the pulpit on a cool morning. Even if Hammer was exercising his constitutional rights to free speech and privacy, even if he had committed no crime, constructive intervention was still possible. “Rather than hiding behind tolerance, we should do the hard work of helpfully intervening for the sake of our community,” Reverend Will continued. “That requires both spiritual self-examination and social, political engagement. It isn’t spiritual to rise above it. Instead, our spirituality should equip us to get down to it.”

Our congregation nodded enthusiastically as he spoke. “Everything isn’t a shade of gray. Jesus is not pleased with Christians using the word tolerance to give the Devil equal airtime on Sunday morning,” Reverend Will added. “We can be tolerant and have moral clarity. They aren’t mutually exclusive.”

What does this look like in action? What does a community do when a fascist intent on destroying democracy arrives? Springfield and its environs provided a model, if an unwieldy one. As news of Hammer’s arrival spread, a popular movement began to take shape. There wasn’t a one-size-fits-all approach when it came to tactics. Nothing about what happened was cinematic. Still, the movement made itself felt.

By late summer 2023, it seemed like everyone in and around Springfield was talking about Hammer. There were community meetings about confronting the rising tide of white supremacy. Papers ran articles that shined a light on Hammer and op-eds that condemned him. “I am not pleased at all with this presence in the community. My grandfather and uncle fought the Nazis…. My other grandfather milled steel for the war effort, and my grandmother on that side worked in a munitions factory. We did not fight that war for nothing!” one local man told the Bangor Daily News. “They are unwelcome here and will not find support from anyone who still believes in what America is really supposed to be about.” The paper’s editorial board stated its view succinctly: “The welcome mat has limits.”

According to Zac Chickering, some Springfield residents were more aggressively intolerant than others and went straight to the source of the problem. “We have a bunch of 80-year-old men that went up to that dickhead’s face and threatened to backhoe his body into a grave. And that’s nothin’. That’s just the flake on the potato plate,” Chickering told me. When Hammer started handing out pamphlets promoting his views, residents told him, as Chickering put it, that “nobody gives a thin shit what you think.”

Oglers showed up on Hammer’s land. Like journalists before them, these visitors could see that he’d achieved very little. “Proud of my boys hitting it hard up here,” Hammer had written in a Telegram message, where he also referred to his site as a bootcamp. “We are working until dusk on the camp seeing exciting results as it comes together. This is where we will turn regular wignats into pure distilled Aryan violence.” (Wignats is a term for white nationalists willing to wear Nazi insignia and to commit street violence.) In truth, however, the camp comprised only a few small tents, and “the boys” couldn’t have numbered more than a half-dozen at any given time. One of them used the charming moniker “Nate Higgers”; his real name is Drake Berentz. “[Hammer] spent all his time talking on social media and not building anything,” Crash told me.

Information about Hammer made its way to Augusta, Maine’s capital, where Joe Baldacci, a state senator from Bangor, voiced his concern. “It’s time for the Governor, the Attorney General of Maine, the Penobscot County District Attorney and the U.S. Attorney [to] work on shutting these Nazis down and sending this guy back to Texas,” he posted online in early August 2023. Soon lawmakers were drafting a bill to ban paramilitary camps like the one Hammer was trying to establish, and to make it a criminal offense to offer training in firearms, explosives, or other tactics with the intent of causing a “civil disorder.”

Not long after the proposed legislation was announced, Hammer shared an image of an assault rifle with his online followers. “Baldacci isn’t gonna stop us,” the caption read. A few days later, on September 2, Hammer showed up in Florida with a cluster of followers to stage a demonstration not far from Disney World, which had ginned up far-right hysteria by opposing Governor Ron DeSantis’s ban on discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation in public schools. The event made national headlines. But for all of Hammer’s tough talk and the attention it invited, behind the scenes he was losing his foothold.

The bill banning paramilitary training was signed into law by Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, in April 2024. “This bill is about us saying we are going to draw the line,” Joe Baldacci said in a speech on the senate floor. “We are not going to allow people to flout the law and intimidate others.” But the new law, it turned out, would have to be used on Hammer’s successors, the next neo-Nazis who decide that Maine is their promised land. By the time Mills approved it, Hammer was long gone.

The previous October, Hammer had sold his Springfield property for $39,000—it was a quiet deal, executed with another quitclaim deed. Online, Hammer explained why he’d given up on Maine. “With the militant leftist[s] doxxing the location, it was basically too dangerous to fulfill its purpose,” he said. He claimed that the whitest state in the country wasn’t safe for neo-Nazis, casting himself as a victim rather than admitting the truth: He’d been driven out by his neighbors.

Collective approaches often emerge from stark realizations. In this case, it was that hate had no home in rural Maine. These days, Springfield residents are tired of talking about Hammer—they don’t want their town to be known as a place where a neo-Nazi tried to make his stand. At Smith’s General Store, a woman named Deirdre stood next to a “No Bare Feet” sign and photos of deer hunts as she described how much locals detested Hammer and his friends. She’d heard that Hammer had moved to Russia. The farther away the better. “Now we have the pleasure of never seeing him again,” she said.

I spent some time on Hammer’s old land in the spring and found that the place had a strange atmosphere, a mix of abandonment and renewal. There was charcoal in a fire pit, some felled trees, and a footpath worn into the earth. A parenthesis of young conifers, hemlock, and beech was growing at one side of the property—a fresh forest, tawny and green. Nearby, perched on a ridgeline in the Rollins Mountains, were enormous wind turbines, 40 in all. Their white wings spun in circles, but if they made a whooshing sound, it didn’t reach the compound. If you never bothered to look up toward the hills, you might not know they were there.

Crash didn’t stop tracking Hammer once he left Maine. In March 2024, he published a special installment of his newsletter titled “No Hugs for Chuds,” in which he called Hammer “a tattoo-ink-slinging-juice shooting-bloody-spear-handling-sovereign.” He shared a video from a Blood Tribe event in Nashville that February, in which Drake Berentz, aka Nate Higgers, appears to choke a passerby. “According to Nashville police, there were no reports of the attack or any arrests connected to the Nazi march through the shopping and tourist district,” Crash wrote.

As far as Crash knew, Hammer hadn’t decamped for Russia—he was in Montana, long a favored destination for white supremacists (see Richard Spencer and April Gaede). More recently, according to Phalen Tomaselli’s reporting, Hammer popped up online after the September 10 presidential debate to boast that he and his followers had helped spread the myth that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, which Donald Trump echoed from the podium. “BT put Springfield in the public consciousness,” Pohlhaus said on Telegram, referring to Blood Tribe. In the weeks leading up to the debate, the organization had indeed amplified lies about Haitian immigrants; its Ohio chapter also held what it called an “anti-Haitian” march. Berentz, who is originally from Ohio, was removed from a Springfield city council meeting in August after he threatened violence in retaliation for immigrants being allowed to settle in the city. “No one else is more on top of what’s happening in #Springfield from the WN [white nationalist] perspective than we are. Our boots are literally on the ground there weekly,” Pohlhaus wrote online.

Hammer has a new podcast in which he gabs with other racists. Even by chud standards, Crash finds it lame. “There is no real fire,” he told me. In one episode, Hammer told his followers about an electric trimmer he had recently purchased to prune his small yard.

When I visited Crash on his homestead over the summer, he had sheared his scraggly hair close to his head and sported a tidy goatee. He was preparing to go undercover at a Christian nationalist revival near the state capitol, and he wanted to blend in. I had my family with me, and Crash suggested we share a meal of homemade pulled pork. He also invited us to stay the night.

Over dinner, between conversations about farming, I asked Crash why he does what he does. He said that as a young man, he was heavily influenced by Catholic activist movements like liberation theology and by Plowshares cofounders Daniel and Philip Berrigan. “All of them demonstrated the need to take action in defense of the poor, downtrodden, and powerless,” he explained. “As far as I can tell, most journalists, and I guess most people, don’t have that action goal as part of their motivation.” Crash does. As someone who believes that he’s lived a relatively charmed life, he feels that it’s the least he can do.

My son interjected, asking if Crash was his real name. “No, it’s not,” he replied. “It’s Crashtopher.” Crash doesn’t have kids, but he was good with mine, funny and affectionate. He’s the same with his rescue dogs, Clover and Rosie.

With the election around the corner, Crash was thinking a lot about ways the average person can help to curb the antidemocratic forces gaining ground in the United States. He’d recently reminded readers of his newsletter that they weren’t powerless in the face of Hammer and his ilk. “We CAN fight fascists without fisticuffs or violence. Voting, and encouraging other non-chuds to vote, is an important first step,” he wrote. “So is keeping an eye on your local polling place on election day. Maybe even sticking around after the polls close to watch the vote counting—and democracy—in action. Hopefully, though, you’ll want to do more, before votes are cast, to ensure your candidates for the Legislature, school board and other municipal offices aren’t chuds, chud-adjacent or chud-sympathetic.”

Before leaving Crash’s homestead, we helped with the morning chores. We brought feed to the chickens and slop to a trio of pigs named Larry, Curly, and Moe. My kids stood next to Crash in the swine enclosure as he demonstrated how to administer a medicinal tincture—one of the Stooges had contracted a cold while being transported to the homestead from a factory farm. “That’s our job, you see,” Crash explained. “Our job is to give them the best life possible.”

He squeezed the medicine into the pig’s mouth with a giant syringe. At first the pig wouldn’t swallow, but Crash held its jaw shut, encouraging the animal to follow its instincts. Finally, the pig swallowed and gave a snort, then went back to rooting in the weeds.

*Correction: The text originally stated that the name of the group is NSC-113.

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