Pro-Trump Nazis at the Iowa Capitol

Protesting the existence of non-Aryan peoples and the LGBTQ+ community...

Mar 13, 2025

Approximately 300-400 people were at the Iowa Capitol on Tuesday for One Iowa’s LGTBQ+ day on the hill, less than two weeks after transgender Iowans were stripped of some civil rights by Republican legislators. A few minutes before the rally I asked Keenan Crow, Director of Policy and Advocacy at One Iowa, where everyone was. He told me that approximately 250 people were walking up to the Capitol from the East Village.

Above is a photograph of two Nazis protesting and heckling people as they arrived. Below is a photograph of the rotunda during the rally while Senate Minority Leader Janice Weiner spoke.

I’m an anthropologist and since I knew other local media would cover the rally, I decided to talk with the Nazis. Friends cautioned me from giving them a platform, but I don’t think I’m doing that. I simply wanted to know what they wanted, and there was no way for me to know that without asking them. Or for you to know.

As I walked up an Iowa State Trooper was giving them a stern talking to. If I remember correctly, she was telling them to give marchers space. They were respectful to her.

I saw her later after my interview, and I asked her if she wanted to know what the Nazis told me.

“Will it make my day any better?” she asked, giving me a stern look.

“Probably not,” I said.

“Then no,” she said, turning and walking off.

My friend Iowa Captive took this photo of me interviewing the Nazis without me knowing it. I can’t even keep my cap on straight.

Below is the audio of my brief interview, followed by a rough transcript. There was lots of cross-talk, two of them were talking and I didn’t pull them apart for the transcript, it was windy, and a couple of times other people made some comments. The audio is better. Or worse, however you want to put it.

Before you listen or read, please understand that I know that I could have asked better questions, had better follow-up questions, and known the facts I needed at hand. I interrupted them too much. Believe me, if you have any criticisms, I’ve already thought of them.

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My questions and comments are in bold.

So, what's your beef?

Again, these people, a lot of them, they are pedophiles and everything like that.

I'm recording.

It's fine, you can record if you want. We're in public, but a lot of them are pedophiles and things like that. They again, they groom children, many of them have been convicted of sex offenses and things like that against children, and we're trying to keep them out of the schools.

You don't know that.

We do.

The statistics say men are the problem.

There have been convictions. There's a lot more women than you think, sir…And a lot of…

So what group are you with?

We are with the Aryan Freedom Network.

Okay, so you're Nazis?

I am particularly a National Socialist, yes. I'm not a Nazi I'm a National Socialist.

Okay, so why the Swastika?

Because I'm a National Socialist.

All right, so a Nazi.

No, Nazi is a slang term. An epithet.

So they called themselves Nazis. They wore that symbol.

They did not. Jews called them Nazis. They didn't call themselves Nazis.

No, it's not Jews that call them that. It's history that calls them that as well.

The victors get to write the history books too. So there is that and that's why they're all constantly called that. And Jews control the media, definitely.

I'm in the media. These are all old racist tropes that you're sharing.

Diatribes. But still it's…

So what's the ultimate goal, what do you want to happen to people?

To just basically have our own ethnostate and America be for white people as it was intended. This country was founded as an ethnostate.

Native Americans were here for a long time before that.

Yes. But even before that there was Neanderthals in Europe and then they got pushed out and wiped out. It's the story as old as time.

It was diverse people that came here to found America.

It was a diverse group of white people. Well, mostly again, people trying to escape the Church of England.

Right, but there are also black people that brought here as slaves, there were Hispanics. Okay, so you want a white ethnostate. So where's everybody, and also uh straight state, I presume.

Yes.

Okay, so where's everybody supposed to go?

Back to their original countries.

Yeah. Okay, so where are you guys from?

Again. Here. We’re Europeans

No your ancestors again and your ancestors. So you're going to go back to Europe?

Yeah, honestly I would like to have but let's face it, logistically speaking that's not going to happen.

Well logistically speaking it's not going to happen for these guys.

It's very possible that's, like we can we put all the Indians on reservations so it's very possible. Yes that is possible.

To put people on reservations?

If they want to live there and do their degeneracy.

So where does your hate come from?

No we it's again, our hate comes from basically their hate.

No it’s not their hate, they are here peacefully.

We don't We don't necessarily hate them just for existing. We hate them for what they do. For what they do to kids. For what they do to society. It's disgusting. It’s immoral.

They contribute to society…

A woman behind me interrupts: Why are you covered up?

Everybody keeps asking us that. You know why. You keep asking a question to which you already know the answer to. It's because you cannot dox us. You're not going to ID us so you can get us fired from our jobs.

Okay, so you're worried about that. You don't have to say where you work. What kind of work are you in? How's that?

I'd rather not again. That's again, anything to potentially identify me is bad.

What's the core of your hate? Did it come from your family?

Oh, no. Again, it's it's not it's not about the hate. We're not a hate group. We're a love group. We love our race.

But you're here but you're here harassing people.

Well, they harass straight people too.

I haven't seen any of that.

If you were here yeah a couple days ago actually a couple weeks ago they had to probably be dragged out by those officers right there for disrupting Governor Reynolds signing 418.

I appreciate your time. I don't know if I'm going to do anything with it but I just really want to understand. I just don't see you as loving. I see you as being hateful and it's a big beautiful country…

One hero is a terrorist in someone else’s eyes.

We're just here to let them know that, they're not welcome here. Their degeneracy is not welcome here. It's not welcome in the schools and them trying to to groom children in the schools and… Iowa has been a straight white ethno-state for so long. And it should stay that way. And now they are pushing this degeneracy into our schools, into our community, corrupting our children.

I guess there's a lot of evidence against all of that and…

Plenty of articles that are important and true…

Where do you get your news? I need to figure that out.

Well from them again, we again we see it on the internet and YouTube everywhere. I mean it's the Jew media is everywhere. We see it. We just…we disagree with it. And but and unfortunately for them since the advent of the Internet we can look up again. Statistics, not just the statistics but the data. All of it's there and we can prove that that no these people are a minority and they're still not welcome. By most people.

Most of us welcome them.

But who's most? That’s sad. Well, most of society in general, no most of the society disagrees with it. That's also why Trump got elected. We're tired of this wokeness. Tired of the degeneracy that is pushed onto us. It’s gotta stop.

There's here's so much for me to unpack here. I don't think I can, but I appreciate your time.

No problem, sir. You have a great day.

If I had to do it over again I would do it differently. But it is what it is.

The ADL has this to say about the Aryan Freedom Network.

AFN is a small but growing neo-Nazi group based in De Kalb, Texas.
The group claims to have chapters in 25 states.
AFN has been increasingly active since transitioning from a white supremacist networking site to a membership organization in January 2022, spreading white supremacist propaganda, holding anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrations and organizing private gatherings.
AFN promotes hardline white supremacist views and largely directs its vitriol at Jewish people, Black people and the LGBTQ+ community.
AFN promotes the goal of white unity and holds events that bring together disparate white supremacist groups.
The AFN logo, which includes a Totenkopf, or death’s head, acorns and oak leaves, is meant to convey the group’s willingness to defend the “racial purity” of the “white race.”

The Aryan Freedom Network isn’t the only white supremacist group in Iowa. Radio Iowa reports the Patriot Front was in Des Moines last month. Iowa Public Radio reports that AFN flyers have been reported recently in Cedar Falls, Waterloo, and Hampton.

KCCI reports that after the Patriot Front incident:

“Both chairs from the Iowa Democratic Party and the Republican Party of Iowa shared the following statements:”

“Today, a white supremacist group that primarily exists to spread hate and fear by marching with their flags and hiding their faces with white masks, tried to intimidate Iowans. This group has joined protests that resulted in murder, harassment and chaos in cities like Charlottesville and Nashville. Let me be clear: This group, their scare tactics, and their hate have no place in Iowa.” -Iowa Democratic Party Chair, Rita Hart

"I don't know who this group is. I've never heard of them. They sound like morons and I and the Republican Party will always condemn crap like this." -Republican Party of Iowa Chair, Jeff Kaufmann.

I first met Jeff Kaufmann, the historian, in 2009 at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch at Hooverfest, an annual celebration of the work of Herbert Hoover, the only President of the United States born in Iowa. We were there to do readings from a wonderful book we both had contributed to, Ice Cube Press’s Iowa, the Definitive Collection: Classics & Contemporary Readings about Iowa, by Iowans. The book should be in every library and home in the state.

It’s unlikely Kaufmann remembers me from that event, but I remember him. I was impressed by his good humor and and the content of his presentation.

Kaufmann says the members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front sound like “morons” to him. This is misdirection. Calling them “morons” is an attempt to deny the reality of the threat they, and others like them, including the Aryan Freedom Network members I interviewed pose, and that these fascist white supremacists are aligned with the goals of Donald Trump and the Republican party.

Listen to the audio of the Nazis I interviewed. They are not “morons.” They are intelligent, committed, and broken young men caught up in a current of evil in a dangerous cult.

Kaufmann says that he and the Republican Party “will always condemn crap like this.” No, they won’t. Instead, they are actively bringing “crap like this” into reality. The Nazis are just more transparent about it.

Iowa Republicans took away civil rights from transgender Iowans just a couple of weeks ago, and the Nazis I spoke with were proud of them for doing it. Republicans have demonized immigrants and worked to obscure and erase parts of our history in an effort that would make Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels proud. They attack our public schools, our teachers, and our librarians to divide us all and undermine our institutions including the Constitution.

Trump encouraged the violent insurrection on January 6, 2021, and white nationalists were at the center of it. When reelected, Trump pardoned them all. Previously, in September 2020 Trump refused to condemn white supremacist groups and their violence that summer, and told the far-right group the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Fascists around the world love him.

Hanna Arendt, the German-American historian and philosopher writes of the banality of evil—it’s very ordinaryness. How the thoughtless person can go along with anything, even evil, as long as it is normalized and accepted by the majority. Donald Trump and Iowa Republicans are normalizing evil and are aligned with the Nazis I spoke with who were protesting LBGTQ+ Iowans at the Capitol.

In considering Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia in The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt wrote:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

This is the world we live in today where totalitarianism and fascism are rising, and must be resisted.

Like the Nazis I spoke with, our Republican leaders are caught up in a cult, the cult of Trump, that is having evil consequences. To be sure, I’m not saying that our Republican elected officials are evil, just that they are banal, unthinking, and complicit.

And that Jeff Kaufmann is one shitty historian.

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