Blood Tribe is a white supremacist group with chapters in multiple states whose members stage brash, theatrical demonstrations using explicit Nazi imagery.
Wearing their trademark black-and-red outfits and waving swastika flags, members of Blood Tribe have staged rallies in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Tennessee, South Dakota and Pennsylvania since the group’s founding in 2022.
While Blood Tribe’s membership is small, the group played a key role in popularizing a racist myth that non-white immigrants eat pets during the 2024 presidential election.
In Their Own Words
“If you are affiliated with anyone that isn’t actively fighting for separation, you are affiliating with the eventual mongrelization of this country and of our beautiful, holy, sacred blood, forged by thousands of years by our ancestors.” — Chris “The Hammer” Pohlhaus, in a March 15, 2025, livestream
“People who stick up for k***s remind me of some sick Stockholm syndrome a feminine cellmate has to cope with the constant rapes” — Chris “The Hammer” Pohlhaus, in a Jan. 19, 2025, post on Telegram
“Non-whites are nature’s victims. They blame their leaders, they blame their conquerors, they blame each other, their families, alcohol, drugs, cops, the system that spoonfeeds [sic] them everything they’ve ever wanted. And as such, they still get nowhere despite everything being handed to them. Victimhood has taught to Whites via the communist means of turning them into n*****s I spoke about previously. This has made us weak and useless against our subjugation by the jews.” — Drake Berentz, under the pseudonym “Nathaniel J. Higgers,” in a post on Telegram, Sept. 24, 2024
“Is the spirit of the swastika inside of you, and you’re just not doing it yet? Now, the answer could be ‘no.’ If the answer is ‘no,’ then we’re not on the same team, n—–. You should be upset I’m flying the swastika. I’m not you. You’re not me. We are different.” — Chris “The Hammer” Pohlhaus, in an audio message published on Telegram, March 12, 2023
“Here are my demands…1) Admit America was on the side of evil during WW2. 2) Cut out every single race mixer from your life even immediate family members. Burn those bridges. 3) Cut out every single non white/LGBT+ and jew out of your life. Burn those bridges. 4) Say hail Hitler every single day at least once. 5) Fearlessly raise the swastika over your head in pride.” — Chris “The Hammer” Pohlhaus, in a post on Telegram, April 30, 2023
“And it’s still true that people will take war brides in the end of days, and it’s just gonna happen, OK. And for, you know, honestly, I don’t find that liberal white women have the right to decide about how their reproductive system is going to be used. If the world crumbles because of them, and I’m standing by that, I do find them to be enemies to us. And if they leave themselves on the position of being an enemy, they should be treated as such, and one of them is losing the rights and the control of how their reproductive system is to be utilized.That is very scary for people to hear. It is very edgy, and it is not popular. But I don’t care. They’re tearing, they’re tearing our world down.” — Chris “The Hammer” Pohlhaus, in a video posted to Telegram, Jan. 22, 2023
Background
Chris “The Hammer” Pohlhaus, a former Marine and tattoo artist, founded Blood Tribe in 2022.
Pohlhaus’ history in the white power movement predates his involvement in Blood Tribe. Before founding the group, Pohlhaus — then a resident of Texas — ran a network of channels and chats on the messaging app Telegram under the pseudonym “The Hammer.” In April 2020, antifascist activists exposed Pohlhaus as the administrator behind a channel using that pseudonym. There, Pohlhaus shared propaganda promoting World War II-era Nazis, praising neo-Nazis such as George Lincoln Rockwell, and depicting white supremacist mass murderers as “saints.”
During this same period, Pohlhaus sold neo-Nazi merchandise and led a network of chats called “The Camps” on Telegram. “This chat was engineered to recruit and groom the most insufferable bullies in white nationalism/national socialism,” wrote an administrator for the chat room in its description at the time. Inside the chat room, members promoted racist, antisemitic and neo-Nazi content. Among the chat’s more noteworthy members were close allies of Pohlhaus, as well as Riley June Williams, whom federal authorities charged and investigated for stealing a laptop from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. (Williams, who was convicted in March 2023 and sentenced to three years in prison, was among those rioters that President Donald Trump pardoned upon taking office in January 2025.) Vice News first identified Williams as active in “The Camps” under a pseudonym in August 2021.
These chats were not just limited to online activism. Members of “The Camps” staged a series of sticker campaigns in Idaho and other parts of the Western U.S. in early 2021, according to reporting from Left Coast Right Watch.
While Blood Tribe did not hold its first official in-person demonstration until spring 2023, Pohlhaus began referencing the group in social media posts on Gab in mid-2022. On other platforms, he described “The Camps” as an entry point for membership into the group. In one January 2023 post on Telegram, for instance, Pohlhaus referred to “The Camps” as “the front door to the BT [i.e., Blood Tribe] experience.” Following the group’s first demonstration in Wadsworth, Ohio, in March 2023, Pohlhaus and other Blood Tribe affiliates shared links to “The Camps” chats on Telegram, encouraging those “looking to join us on our next march” to become members.
Pohlhaus and other Blood Tribe members are unapologetic neo-Nazis. While some members of the white power movement see using overt World War II-era Nazi flags and Nazi imagery as bad “optics” for promoting their ideals, Pohlhaus and his members see these symbols as instrumental to their cause. “The 2 ultimate exercises for achieving supreme stoic control of the mind are shooting archery and marching with the swastika,” Pohlhaus wrote in a Nov. 21, 2024, post on Telegram.
Beyond Blood Tribe, Pohlhaus has associated with multiple other extremist groups.
In fall of 2022, he appeared at a flash demonstration that the Nationalist Social Club (NSC-131) organized in Maine targeting non-white migrants. In a conversation with Vice News, Pohlhaus denied being a member of NSC-131 but portrayed himself as a supporter.
Pohlhaus is involved with Dissident Minds Books, a neo-Nazi bookstore and Southern Poverty Law Center-listed hate group based in California. Though Pohlhaus’ exact role with the company is unclear, he regularly shares links to the bookseller’s Telegram and website on his own personal social media. The company also sells “Hammer”-branded paraphernalia, such as sunglasses and skull masks, in addition to Blood Tribe’s trademark black-and-white swastika flag. Antifascist researchers have also documented Pohlhaus and other Blood Tribe members as being involved with the neo-Völkisch group Raven Folk United.
Early demonstrations
Pohlhaus and members of Blood Tribe first began holding in-person demonstrations in early 2023.
In March of that year, Pohlhaus and over a dozen members of Blood Tribe conducted their first demonstration using the Blood Tribe moniker. Pohlhaus, Blood Tribe members and other racist activists disrupted an LGBTQ+ event in Wadsworth, Ohio, where they shouted slurs and brandished black-and-white swastika flags. Some members, including Pohlhaus, carried firearms. Associates of the group wore matching black pants and red long-sleeve shirts, as well as black balaclavas. Along with apparent members of a local White Lives Matter chapter, as well as associates of the Proud Boys and Patriot Front, Pohlhaus led a series of neo-Nazi chants, including “Sieg Heil!” — a slogan with roots in World War II-era Nazi Germany — and “pedophiles get the rope.”
“You cannot compete with the swastika. No symbol and optics you come up with will ever come close,” Pohlhaus wrote on Telegram a few days after the event, on March 13, 2023.
After the demonstration in Wadsworth, Blood Tribe began holding more frequent rallies, often focusing on issues that align with the broader right wing’s political program. Between April and August 2023, Blood Tribe rallied outside LGBTQ+ events in four different locations in Ohio and Wisconsin.
Pohlhaus and his group capitalized on their momentum from these successive events to bring multiple neo-Nazi and antisemitic groups together in September 2023 for a rally in Orlando, Florida.
Pohlhaus co-organized the event, dubbed “The March of the Red Shirts,” with then-Florida-based neo-Nazi Jon Minadeo II, who leads the antisemitic hate group Goyim Defense League. Members of the loosely organized neo-Nazi group Vinland Rebels, which had chapters in multiple states, and the Florida-based Dixieland Nationalists appeared at the event as well.
Attendees, approximately 50 in total, wore bright red shirts emblazoned with the logos of their respective groups, as well as the black pants and face masks that had become characteristic of Blood Tribe rallies. The event, as longtime researcher of the radical right Spencer Sunshine noted for Truthout, marked one of the largest white supremacist demonstrations to use overt neo-Nazi imagery since the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Over the course of 2024, the group held at least six rallies in Tennessee, Ohio, South Dakota and Pennsylvania.
The rhetoric at these rallies often focused on anti-immigration and non-white migrants. At a Feb. 17, 2024, rally “for the great white South” in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, for instance, Drake Berentz, a Blood Tribe leader in Ohio, led members of the group in a call-and-response chant. After Berentz yelled, “They hate white men,” masked Blood Tribe members shouted, “Deport every Mexican.” Later, at an Aug. 24, 2024, rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Pohlhaus described members of America’s “founding stock” — which, presumably, referred to white people — as entitled to the land around them.
This focus on non-white migration would serve as the basis for Blood Tribe’s later activities targeting Haitian migrants and their supporters in Springfield, Ohio, throughout later summer and fall of 2024.
‘Maine’s a white state’
In 2022 and 2023, Pohlhaus tried to set up a Blood Tribe compound in Maine. He told a Vice News reporter in October 2022 that he had elected to move to Maine because he was part of “a tight-knit community of guys that, you know, we want to live near each other.” Shortly thereafter, according to Vice News, he launched an online fundraiser to build “a retreat/community area [that] we can train on and help families move to.”
Hatewatch, the publishing arm of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, identified the parcels of property that Pohlhaus obtained for this project as located in Springfield, Maine — a community of fewer than 300 people located around 70 miles north of Bangor. In a social media post from June 2022, Pohlhaus described the property as “a collective Blood Tribe project.” The post includes a photo of a tractor moving brush in the woods.
Public records indicate that Pohlhaus and his apparent associate, Fred Boyd Ramey, purchased a 10-acre property in March 2022. A mortgage deed that Ramey signed on March 8, 2022, lists the cost as $25,110, to be paid over the course of four years.
Locals told the Portland Press Herald in July 2023 that they were aware of Pohlhaus’ presence. The newspaper reported that at least two businesses — a local pub and gym — had asked Pohlhaus to leave. The owner of a tattoo parlor, who told the Herald that Pohlhaus had come in to inquire about a job, said Pohlhaus’ tattoo work “wasn’t very good, and I didn’t need any help.” Some reported seeing a Nazi flag flying on the property.
Following scrutiny from reporters, activists and local officials, Pohlhaus quietly sold the property. In an Oct. 31, 2023, statement on Telegram, he blamed “militant leftist [sic] doxing the location” and said it had become “too dangerous.”
“People were coming up there all the time, snooping and getting very brazen, even driving down into the clearing,” he wrote.
Prior to the sale, multiple Maine lawmakers suggested introducing bills banning paramilitary trainings camps or otherwise restricting their activities. In April 2024, Maine Gov. Janet Mills signed one of these proposed pieces of legislation, which included the possibility of bringing a penalty of up to a year in jail, into law.
Harassment of Springfield, Ohio, residents
Blood Tribe was one of several far-right groups to target non-white migrants and immigration advocates in Springfield, Ohio, during the 2024 election, resulting in a slew of threats and harassment against community members and local politicians.
The group also appeared to play an early role in promoting the racist myth that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pets through a series of in-person demonstrations and targeted harassment of local residents, according to NBC News, New Lines Magazine and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s own research.
Clark County, which includes Springfield, is home to an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants. Local government estimates found that 10,000 to 12,000 of those migrants came from Haiti, where years of ongoing gang violence has resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing their homes and millions suffering from extreme hunger. Due to the conflict in the country, Haitian migrants in the United States are eligible for temporary protected status, or TPS. TPS is a designation that allows refugees from certain countries to work and protects them from deportation.
A Telegram channel associated with Blood Tribe’s Ohio chapter first posted an anti-immigrant screed targeting Springfield’s Haitian population on July 22, 2024. In it, the group included a photo of members of the region’s Haitian community from a ceremony in 2023 honoring their contributions to the local community.
In the post, Blood Tribe wrongly referred to the presence of Haitian residents as an “invasion” and described it as an act of “demographic warfare.” The post closed with an encouragement to “GET VETTED” — referring to the process through which new members of Blood Tribe join the neo-Nazi group.
Blood Tribe members led their first demonstration in Springfield on Aug. 10. Berentz, the Blood Tribe leader based in Ohio, and around a dozen members of the group marched through downtown, waving swastika flags. Some members were openly carrying firearms. Berentz gave a short speech outside of Springfield City Hall, accusing politicians of “giving [the U.S.] away to savage n——.” One family, who had stopped in their car as members of Blood Tribe crossed the street, reported that several members of the group pointed guns at their car and screamed, “Go the f— back to Africa,” according to a report in The Dayton Jewish Observer.
Berentz and others stepped up their harassment campaign against the town’s residents following that Aug. 10 march. On Aug. 27, Berentz attended and was subsequently removed from a city commission meeting. There, he told local politicians that “crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.” Blood Tribe reposted a clip of Berentz with the caption, “Don’t expose my Hatian [sic] pets!!” Pohlhaus and other accounts associated with the group shared the clip on Aug. 31.
The racist references to Haitian immigrants eating pets appeared to originate in local Facebook groups, an NBC News investigation found, beginning in June and picking up steam in fall due to engagement from mainstream right-wing figures.
In early September, over a month after Blood Tribe picked up media attention for its focus on migrants in Springfield, major pro-Trump social media accounts and influencers began promoting the false narrative using screenshots of unsubstantiated comments from local Facebook groups and AI-generated memes of Trump supporters protecting pets. The social media blitz prompted JD Vance to encourage his “fellow patriots” to “keep the cat memes flowing” in a Sept. 9 post on X. Trump repeated the racist conspiracy theory in a Sept. 10 presidential debate, accusing “the people that came in” — a reference to migrants — of “eating the pets of people that live there.”
Neither Vance nor Trump offered evidence to support their claims. The Springfield Police Division told media outlets at the time that it had found “no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed.”
Pohlhaus shared a clip of Trump’s remarks on Telegram on Sept. 10, writing, “BT [i.e., Blood Tribe] pushed Springfield into the public consciousness.”
Consequences of Blood Tribe’s focus on Springfield
After Vance, Trump and other prominent right-wing figures promoted the pet-eating lie, Springfield faced a deluge of threats.
In the week after the debate, officials reported that anonymous individuals had called in at least 33 bomb threats targeting various buildings in the city, including schools and hospitals.
Despite these threats to the town, Pohlhaus, Berentz and other members of Blood Tribe stepped up their targeting of local officials and activists on social media and even at their targets’ homes or places of employment.
On Gab and Telegram, two social media platforms popular with extremists, Blood Tribe posted doxes of local officials and activists. (Doxing is the act of posting someone’s private information, such as a home address, phone number or private email, online.) In some posts that included contact information and people’s home addresses, Blood Tribe appeared to encourage readers to “say hello” or “let” one of the targeted residents “know” that the group viewed their activities as “traitorous.”
Blood Tribe’s targets described experiencing death threats and harassment after the group doxed them, according to a complaint that attorneys with the Anti-Defamation League and law firms Paul Weiss and Taft filed on behalf of local officials and residents in February 2025. The plaintiffs in the case included residents, activists, two city commissioners and the city’s mayor, Rob Rue.
Throughout the complaint, plaintiffs described receiving death and bomb threats, strange visitors to their homes, unwanted packages, threatening phone calls and a deluge of harassment and hateful messages on online platforms. In one incident cited in the complaint, Berentz and about a dozen members of Blood Tribe staged a demonstration outside of Rue’s house, in which the group said, “Enjoy your peace now, until we come back.”