Goyim Defense League (GDL) is a white supremacist group that engages in antisemitic harassment that it casts as pranks. Its members have harassed Jewish people in the streets, “zoombombed” public meetings with antisemitic slurs and rhetoric, filmed themselves with antisemitic signs outside a Nazi concentration camp, used racial slurs against children, marched alongside other white supremacist groups while throwing up Hitler salutes, and assaulted people while carrying out their antisemitic “Name the Nose” harassment campaigns. GDL’s founder, Jon Minadeo II, operates GoyimTV, a streaming platform for white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other extremists.
In Their Own Words
“N-‑-‑-‑-‑- music. N-‑-‑-‑-‑- club. N-‑-‑-‑-‑- activities. N-‑-‑-‑-‑- consequences.” — Jon Minadeo II, during a livestream, August 2025
“Every aspect of inflation is jewish. When famine hits, and you are starving remember it’s the jews. When supply lines are cut and stores close, its the jews. When you have to choose between food and heating your house, it’s the jews. And the jews are laughing at you.” — Telegram user “Graci WinStar,” in a GDL-affiliated chat on Telegram, July 19, 2024
“So, if you’re kicked out of your job, right? Or, let’s say a bar. You’re kicked out of 109 bars. Over 1,030 times. Would it be the bartender’s fault? Or would they ask you what you did to get kicked out?” — Jon Minadeo II, in an interview with a journalist, June 2024
“The ‘Rope list’ grew by a few more Nashville jews today” — David Bloyed, aka “Schwetty Balls,” in a Telegram post, July 14, 2024
“This n-‑-‑-‑-‑-‑- never been called n-‑-‑-‑-‑- before. … What’s up, n-‑-‑-‑-‑-, you want a banana for your bitch ass? Come on, you bitch-ass n-‑-‑-‑-‑-. … White power, you gap-toothed n-‑-‑-‑-‑-.” — Jon Minadeo II, during an Omegle chat with a Black man, April 16, 2023
“We white Christians have been at war with Judaism for over 3,300 years, which was very exacerbated during Roman Empire times. When the Jews were treated like slaves, they revolted. They killed Jesus. Then waged wars against white Christians.” — Robert Wilson, aka “Aryan Bacon,” at a demonstration, October 2021
“I don’t have a 20-point plan to National Socialism. I’m not a big brain guy. My point is to wake up everyone to the Jews and kick these Jews out of our country. It’s that simple. 110, never again. That’s the goal. I want Jews out of my country. I want ’em all out of Europe as well, I want ’em out everywhere. I actually support Zionism, in a way. I support Jews getting the hell out everywhere and going to Antarctica. … I am for a space program. I want them nowhere where they can be parasites.” — Jon Minadeo II, in an interview with Matthew Gebert (“Coach Finstock”), June 22, 2021
Background
Jon Eugene Minadeo II started his career in public life as a little-known actor and rapper before becoming a full-time antisemitic activist.
A native of Petaluma, California — a small city located in Sonoma County — Minadeo says he dropped out of high school in the early 2000s. In a conversation with a reporter, he described himself as “a tough kid to handle.” Upon leaving Novato High School, Minadeo said, he received his GED and went to a community college for theater. It was there, he said, that he became involved in the music and entertainment industry.
In 2011, Minadeo starred in a feature-length comedy called Curveball. Minadeo was cast as James, a recovering addict. His subsequent film roles were limited. He performed in the 2011 short film Vampire. Then, in 2014, Minadeo played Cliff Timberfalls in another feature-length comedy, Reality TV Movie, about a feud between two reality television stars.
During his stint as an actor, Minadeo began recording rap music under the stage name “Shoobie Da Wop.” He released his first EP, American Man Whore, in 2013. The five-track compilation features the then-31-year-old Minadeo rapping about drinking, using drugs and wanting to have sex with college-aged girls. One song, titled “Coconut Shrimp,” describes going clubbing with a “pocket full of dope, like a young Charlie Sheen.” (Sheen, an American actor, had very public struggles with addiction in the early 2000s and 2010s.) In another track, from his 2015 EP Whore Moans, Minadeo depicts himself as an Uzi-toting gangster, rapping, “Bitch, my name is Shoobie/And you should get naked/And we should make a movie.”
It is unclear what prompted Minadeo to shift from his entertainment career to antisemitic activism. In articles about Minadeo’s life for The Press Democrat and theMiami New Times, he refrained from delving into specifics about his radicalization process. In one conversation with a reporter from The Press Democrat, Minadeo pointed to his career in the music industry. Minadeo told the journalist, “I started kind of waking up and learning about the Jewish stuff.” Elsewhere, he has said that Patrick Little, a white supremacist who ran a failed 2018 campaign for U.S. Senate in California, inspired him to make a YouTube channel. There, he streamed under the name “Handsome Truth.”
Minadeo launched Goyim Defense League sometime in 2018. In December 2018, BuzzFeed News reported that the group had been using Cameo, a service that allows customers to purchase short, personalized video messages from celebrities, to obtain videos of prominent figures appearing to praise “GDL,” or Goyim Defense League. In one video from Brett Favre, a former NFL quarterback, he shouted out “Handsome Truth and the GDL boys” in a video laden with coded antisemitic references. Favre, for his part, told BuzzFeed News that he was unaware the request included antisemitic language and believed the video was intended “to support the brave men and women of our military forces.”
In a later video, Minadeo said the coded language was intentional. “We wanted to be cryptic enough to where they would say it,” Minadeo said, according to BuzzFeed News.
In 2020, after YouTube banned Minadeo for his antisemitic acts, he and Dominic DiGiorgio, who used the cartoon character name Ned Flanders online, launched their own streaming platform called GoyimTV. Minadeo registered GoyimTV as a limited liability company, or LLC, that year, using an address in Petaluma, California.
The site — which now hosts a variety of content from GDL affiliates and other neo-Nazi groups, such as Blood Tribe — soon became the heart of GDL’s operations. Though it includes some original videos, an analysis from Southern Poverty Law Center’s Data Lab found that most of the content on the site originated from other streaming platforms, including BitChute (36%) and Odysee (29%). Videos on the site include livestreamed conversations, recordings of in-person demonstrations and clips of members of GDL using Omegle and Monkey, a video chat app, to harass Black, Brown, Asian, Jewish, mixed-race, or any non-white European people, including children. The site also sells GDL-branded merchandise and includes flyers that supporters can print out and download and are then used to harass and intimidate Jewish people and to recruit people into the GDL. Users can choose from an array of T-shirts with violent slogans, including “Gas The Jews With Us” and “Voting Will Not Remove Them.” The store serves as one means of raising funds for the group’s racist in-person activism.
Tactics and activism
GDL’s goals, tactics and activism are explicitly antisemitic. “I don’t have a 20-point plan to National Socialism,” Minadeo told Matthew Gebert, aka “Coach Finstock,” on a 2021 episode of Full Haus, a white nationalist podcast. “My point is to wake up everyone to the Jews and kick these Jews out of the country.”
GDL activists target Jews and people of Jewish heritage. The group refers to its public activism — including banner drops, flash demonstrations and flyer distributions — as its “Name the Nose” tours. These tours are organized in-person activism in which the group descends on a town and uses harassing racial, anti-LGBTQ+ and antisemitic slurs and provocative language at public meetings, bars, restaurants, sidewalks and other public places. Though Minadeo and GDL affiliates have masked their antisemitic rhetoric to evade content bans on mainstream social media platforms, they have otherwise not shied away from carrying out Hitler salutes, waving swastika flags or using other Nazi symbolism. Antisemitic and political violence is at the heart of GDL’s rhetoric. At rallies, its members have shouted slogans like “Jews will not replace us,” “Jews get the rope,” “white power” and “Heil Hitler.”
Some of the group’s earliest in-person acts including hanging a series of banners over a highway in Los Angeles in late 2020. The banners read “Honk if you know the Jews want a race war” and included a link to GoyimTV’s website. In another instance, on Halloween in 2021, multiple GDL members dressed in rabbi costumes and shouted antisemitic slurs as residents, including many children, celebrated the holiday. Later that evening, the same GDL members livestreamed themselves burning a swastika into the ground.
The group also distributes flyers promoting its website with antisemitic messaging. One review of incidents between 2020 and 2023 from The Jewish News of Northern California found over 230 reports of GDL flyers across 36 states. While the messages on these flyers varied, some sought to capitalize on growing resentment among the right over COVID-19 restrictions and vaccination requirements. In California, Florida and elsewhere, GDL activists began distributing flyers with the message, “Every single aspect of the COVID agenda is Jewish.” The flyers listed public health officials and executives that the group believed to be Jewish, along with a link to GoyimTV.
In addition, GDL has used a variety of digital tactics to harass local politicians, often shouting homophobic, antisemitic or transphobic slurs. This includes “zoombombing,” a practice that involves calling into a public or semi-private meeting on Zoom or a similar video chat application and disrupting it. Researchers and reporters noted an uptick in the practice in 2020, after the COVID-19 pandemic forced many once-public, in-person meetings to take place virtually. Even after these meetings resumed taking place in person, GDL affiliates continued their campaign of harassment, sometimes appearing at municipal meetings in person.
GDL affiliates have targeted religious groups or local municipal meetings in Maine, California, Massachusetts, Wyoming, Florida and Wisconsin, according to reporting from the Anti-Defamation League and local newspapers. In one meeting of the Novato City Council — the town in California where Minadeo attended high school — GDL affiliates pretended to be rabbis engaged in pedophilia, according to The Press Democrat. Others spouted anti-LGBTQ+ tirades.
Minadeo has sought to portray his grotesque antisemitic messages as a form of humor or entertainment. This includes use of guns, advocacy of race war, and jokes about the Holocaust and using gas chambers to murder Jewish people. Extremists use this tactic of masking racist or other bigoted rhetoric under the guise of humor to simultaneously build community and recruit, attempt to avoid legal liability, and expand their message to new audiences, including children.
“We try to have a good time using entertainment to kind of wash it down, you know,” Minadeo told Christopher Cantwell, one of the organizers of the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally, during an episode of the latter’s Radical Agenda podcast.
Yet, even early in the group’s foray into real-life activism, its purported entertainment tended to spiral into threats and hate crimes.
Hours after GDL concluded its campaign of harassment in Austin, Texas, on Halloween in 2021, a Texas teen named Franklin Barrett Sechriest set fire to a local synagogue, causing an estimated $25,000 in damage. Minadeo and GDL denied any connection to the attacks, proceeding to complain to a journalist with The Daily Beast covering the incident that the media was “run by Jews.”
Sechriest pleaded guilty in April 2023 to federal arson and hate crime charges and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Targeting Holocaust sites
As the group’s reach grew online, GDL activists took their antisemitic campaigns global. In September 2022, Minadeo and Robert Wilson, another prominent GDL member who uses the name “Aryan Bacon” online, recorded a video and took photos of themselves holding up crude, antisemitic signs targeting the Anti-Defamation League at the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a former World War II-era Nazi death camp in Poland. More than 1.1 million people were murdered at the camp during World War II.
Minadeo shared photos of the incident on Gab, writing: “We must continue exposing the Jewish anti white propaganda! That for decades has conditioned our people to be slaves for the Jews.”
Shortly after the incident, Minadeo said in a post on Gab that Polish authorities arrested and charged him for hate speech. He said that Polish authorities released him with a fine. Polish law prohibits political parties and organizations that espouse “totalitarian methods” like “nazism, fascism and communism,” as well as ones that “sanction racial or national hatred.”
Several months later, Robert Wilson, who joined Minadeo at Auschwitz-Birkenau, made international headlines once again.
In February 2023, authorities in the Netherlands detained and charged Wilson after he projected an antisemitic message onto the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. That October, a court in that country found him guilty of insulting a group and inciting discrimination. He served three months in prison prior to his trial.
Wilson denied the charges, saying he had traveled to Amsterdam for a weekend getaway. Multiple news outlets reported that he had left the United States for Europe after facing additional hate crime charges in California stemming from an incident in November 2021 involving his neighbor.
Collaborations with other groups
Minadeo and GDL have collaborated with or co-organized rallies with several other hate groups that the Southern Poverty Law Center has listed in its annual Year in Hate and Extremism reports. These include Nationalist Social Club (NSC-131), Order of the Black Sun (OBS) and Blood Tribe, as well as the antisemitic and anti-Black livestreamer Paul Miller, who streams under the handle “Gypsy Crusader.”
NSC-131, a neo-Nazi group that operated throughout multiple states in New England, hosted Minadeo and other GDL affiliates at a “summer conference” in 2022.
OBS is a small neo-Nazi group with a presence in Texas and Florida. Its members have collaborated with GDL on numerous occasions and distributed literature promoting GoyimTV. In October 2024, for instance, apparent members of the two groups participated in a boat parade in support of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in Jupiter, Florida. From a boat, the OBS and GDL members waved swastika flags and shouted slurs, as well as slogans like “white power.”
One of GDL’s longest-running collaborators is Chris Pohlhaus of Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group that uses similar over-the-top theatrical stunts to promote its racist and antisemitic messages. Pohlhaus, who livestreamed under the pseudonym “Hammer” prior to founding Blood Tribe, appeared in multiple livestreams with Minadeo that aired on the GoyimTV website throughout 2021. A GDL documentary from May 2022 highlighting the group’s antisemitic activism in Texas also listed Pohlhaus, as “Hammer,” in its credits and included footage of him shouting into a bullhorn outside the Alamo.
On Sept. 2, 2023, Pohlhaus and Minadeo — along with close to 50 white power activists — marched through Orlando, Florida. The event brought together members of Blood Tribe, GDL, Vinland Rebels and Dixieland Nationalists for what they called “March of the Red Shirts.” The group conducted Hitler salutes and waved swastika flags. Spencer Sunshine, a researcher and author of Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism, described the event as one of the largest events “using explicit Nazi imagery” to happen in the United States since the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“We’re trying to wake up white people,” Minadeo told a reporter while standing in front of a line of masked men wearing GDL and Blood Tribe T-shirts. After Laura Loomer, a Jewish far-right activist with ties to the Trump administration, approached the rally, the masked neo-Nazis pointed at her, shouted “Laura Jewmore” and chanted “f—–.”
In addition to these specific collaborations, researchers have also identified GDL members or affiliates with multiple overlapping associations, including White Lives Matter, Active Clubs, the Proud Boys, Clockwork Crew, and the National Justice Party.
Tennessee incident
For nearly 10 days in July 2024, GDL turned its campaign of antisemitic and racist harassment against the residents of Nashville, Tennessee. Minadeo and other prominent members traveled to Nashville for their sixth “Name the Nose” tour. While in the city, GDL members harassed, threatened or assaulted multiple Nashville residents, including a man of Jewish descent, a biracial man and a group of Black schoolchildren.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is currently suing Minadeo and several other GDL members in federal court. These include Ryan Scott McCann, Nicholas Alan Bysheim, Louis Dunn, Colby Alexander Frank, Zane Fenton Morris and several others whose identities are unknown.
The complaint contends that GDL members traveled between a rental home in Kentucky to Nashville over the course of multiple days in mid-July 2024, starting on July 12.
On July 13, over a dozen GDL members, including McCann, Dunn, Minadeo and Frank, confronted a man they believed to be Jewish. After verbally harassing him, the group proceeded to block him from entering his vehicle to leave. McCann tried to goad the man into fighting him. When he didn’t, McCann attacked him. Minadeo, according to the complaint and video of the incident, encouraged others to follow. Dunn then body-slammed the man into his truck and said he “would’ve choked that m———– out.”
Both McCann and Dunn later faced criminal charges over the attack. In July 2025, McCann was convicted of assault and civil rights intimidation for the July 13, 2024, attack and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault for an attack on a bartender that took place the next day. He was sentenced to 45 months in prison. Dunn was charged in July 2025 with civil rights intimidation and assault. His case is ongoing.
The next day, on July 14, around 20 members of GDL marched through the streets of Nashville carrying swastika flags and bearing T-shirts reading “Whites Against Replacement.” After coming across a group of Black boys, ranging from ages 8 to 11, Minadeo, Bysheim, Morris, Dunn and other GDL members began shouting the N-word at them.
As they proceeded through the city streets, GDL members marched by Deago Buck, an employee of a local bar and barbecue joint who was standing outside the building. After Bysheim called Buck a “n-‑-‑-‑-‑- baby,” Buck said he felt threatened and reflexively struck him, according to the complaint. As Buck was walking away, Minadeo and other GDL members rushed to the scene and began to attack Buck. According to footage and the complaint, Minadeo attempted to choke Buck and gouge out his eyes. Others punched, kicked, and slammed him into a car and attacked him with the pole of one of the swastika flags.
Photos from that same day show Minadeo and other GDL members in the streets of downtown Nashville, conducting Hitler salutes, handing out antisemitic GoyimTV flyers and accosting tourists and local residents.
Other GDL members have faced additional criminal charges in connection to their “Name the Nose” tour in Nashville.
In September 2024, federal authorities arrested David Aaron Bloyed, known as “Schwetty Balls,” and charged him with threats against a local district attorney. According to the indictment, Bloyed threatened to lynch and murder Glenn Funk, the district attorney for Nashville and the surrounding region. He was convicted in May 2025 and could face up to five years in federal prison.