The guest list for Tennessee’s most notorious white nationalist conference has finally come into focus.
And if you ask NewsChannel 5 investigative reporter Phil Williams, what he found at Montgomery Bell State Park is not just distasteful politics. It’s an ecosystem that includes people who have openly celebrated mass murder, praised neo-Nazis and flirted with the idea of violence themselves.
A Secretive Gathering In A Public Park
Williams explains that the American Renaissance conference has been using Tennessee’s Montgomery Bell State Park as its venue since 2012.
The event is run by a white nationalist organization that likes to pitch itself as a kind of “intellectual” meetup for people worried about the future of white America.
But for years, the identities of the people actually attending have been tightly guarded.
So this year, when the conference returned in mid-November, Williams and the NewsChannel 5 Investigates team did something simple but effective: they set up in a public area near the park’s security checkpoint and quietly watched who drove in.
Williams says they stayed on clearly public ground in a public park, where any citizen could have done the same thing.
Still, some attendees reacted as if they’d stumbled into a crime scene.
One woman, Williams reports, used both hands to shield her face from the camera as she checked in.
Others glared, muttered, or sped past.
For a supposedly confident “renaissance,” there was a lot of hiding.
Protesters Say This Is “The Worst Of The Worst”
Out at the entrance, Williams also talked to protesters who turned out to send a very different message.
One protester, who identified herself only as Johanna out of fear of retaliation, told Williams that there were “200 or 300 people in that building over there that believe only they belong in this country.”
She said American Renaissance “kind of represents the worst of the worst,” and that she wanted to stand outside and say clearly: this is not the America I grew up with, and not the America I believe in.
Another protest leader, who gave her name as Rory, said they wanted their message of “tolerance and acceptance” to stand in stark contrast to what was happening inside the lodge.
The fact that this is all happening at a state park, run by Tennessee taxpayers, makes it even more unsettling.
This isn’t some private, hidden compound.
It’s a public facility that most families associate with hiking trails, cabins and fishing – not manifestos and mass-murder apologists.
Faces Behind The Conference: From Organizers To True Believers
Over about four hours at the checkpoint, Williams and his team began putting names to faces.
One of the highest-profile figures they spotted was Greg Johnson, a longtime white nationalist and editor of the extremist site Counter-Currents.
Johnson, Williams notes, has carefully avoided cameras for years.
This time, he was caught on video in the passenger seat of a car, looking visibly angry when he saw the NewsChannel 5 crew.
Johnson wasn’t just another attendee.
He was one of the speakers at the conference.
According to Williams, Johnson is also the author of The White Nationalist Manifesto and has a disturbing record of commentary on political violence.
After the 2011 massacre in Norway by neo-Nazi Anders Breivik — who bombed central Oslo and then murdered dozens of young people at a youth camp — Johnson wrote that he developed a “strange new respect” for the killer.
Williams reports that Johnson framed Breivik’s actions as “resistance” to so-called “genocide” caused by immigration, and even suggested the attack would have been “better” if different targets had been chosen.
In other words, Johnson’s complaint was not that the violence happened, but that it was aimed at the “wrong” people.
That is a chilling mindset for someone being welcomed as a featured voice inside a state-park conference hall.
Celebrating Charlottesville And Other Violence
Johnson wasn’t the only attendee Phil Williams linked to praise of political violence.
Sitting with him, Williams says, was David Zsutty, executive director of the anti-immigration Homeland Institute and a former activist in the neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa.
Zsutty, according to Williams, previously posted online that James Alex Fields – the man who murdered Heather Heyer by plowing his car into a crowd of anti-racism protesters in Charlottesville – was essentially a hero who had “done nothing wrong.”
Zsutty has also used dehumanizing language about liberals and pushed antisemitic conspiracy themes about “Jewish media control,” Williams reports.
When you put that history next to the American Renaissance image of a “serious” ideas conference, the mask slips pretty quickly.
These are not just edgy bloggers complaining about immigration.
Some of them are openly reinterpreting lethal attacks as noble acts.
That’s not academic debate.
That’s propaganda for violence.
Younger Recruits And The Turner Diaries Shadow
Williams’ investigation also highlights how groups like this aren’t just recycling old names – they’re cultivating younger ones.
Using facial-recognition tools on publicly available images, NewsChannel 5 linked a young man in a National Alliance hat to Dillon Gaidano, who appears in Naval Sea Cadet Corps videos and later moved from California to Tennessee.
On the encrypted messaging app Telegram, an account matching Gaidano’s details talked about his admiration for violent white supremacists Robert Jay Mathews and Frazier Glenn Miller, according to Williams.
One post suggested that if movement goals weren’t achieved in his lifetime, he might “pull a page” from Miller’s playbook – a reference to a man who murdered three people near a Kansas Jewish community center in 2014.
You don’t make that kind of comment if you’re just there for “heritage” talk and tax policy.
You make it because you’re at least fantasizing about following a terrorist path.
Williams also spotted a Pennsylvania man linked to the far-right publisher Antelope Hill, which reprints Nazi and other extremist texts.
Inside, according to a Romanian-born pro-Russian podcaster Emil Cosman who attended as an observer, the National Alliance had a table set up with materials, including The Turner Diaries – the infamous novel that inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Cosman later said on his podcast, as Williams recounts, that American Renaissance insisted the book be kept under the table, out of obvious public view.
Cosman’s explanation for that secrecy?
He said organizers told him bluntly that it was a “Nazi book” and that the people pushing it were “neo-Nazis.”
It’s telling that the line they wanted to draw wasn’t “we don’t associate with Nazis,” but “please don’t put the Nazi book where cameras might see it.”
A Room Energized By Antisemitism
Cosman also provided one of the clearest windows into what was actually being said inside the sessions.
Williams reports that on his podcast, Cosman described the conference atmosphere as one where antisemitism reliably brought the room to life.
Whenever a speaker mentioned “the Jews” in a negative context – claiming they control things, harm society, or manipulate politics – Cosman said the crowd cheered and reacted as if someone had finally “told the truth.”
That reaction matters.
It shows that for many attendees, this isn’t primarily about abstract debates over immigration levels or demographic trends.
It’s about blaming a specific group and normalizing hatred toward them, in a space where applause is the reward for going further.
That is the kind of environment where talk of violence stops sounding unthinkable and starts sounding “inevitable.”
Organizers’ Public Denials, Private Reality
Williams reminds viewers that American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor has for years tried to keep public distance from open neo-Nazis.
In a previous on-camera interview, Taylor told Williams he didn’t even know any neo-Nazis.
But Cosman’s account from inside this year’s gathering undercuts that claim.
According to Williams, Cosman says Taylor privately acknowledged that The Turner Diaries was a “real problem” because it promotes terrorism and violence.
Yet, rather than ban the book or bar the group behind it, Taylor’s solution was apparently to keep it off the table where outsiders might notice.
That’s not a rejection of extremism.
It’s brand management.
And when you look at the guest list Williams pieced together – from Greg Johnson and David Zsutty to Dillon Gaidano, Patriot Front leader Thomas Rousseau, “Return to the Land” organizer Eric Orwoll, a neo-Confederate-aligned Lutheran pastor from Alabama, and others – the pattern becomes hard to ignore.
This isn’t just a “controversial” conference.
It’s a hub where some of the most radical corners of the movement cross paths, trade literature, and quietly normalize each other’s presence.
Why A State Park Venue Matters
One of the most striking parts of Williams’ reporting is where all of this is happening.
Not in a private compound, or a foreign country, or a hidden online forum.
But at Montgomery Bell State Park, just 30 minutes west of Nashville, on land managed by the Tennessee state government.
At the end of the broadcast, anchor Rhori Johnston notes that American Renaissance has been there since 2012 and, according to a blog post, has no intention of leaving.
The group even boasted after this year’s event that it is now an “institution” at that location.
From a free-speech standpoint, the state can’t easily discriminate based on ideology when renting public facilities.
But Williams’ investigation raises a different question:
What does it mean when a state park becomes, year after year, the comfortable home base for people who praise mass killers, flirt with the idea of copying them, and rally around openly antisemitic narratives?
At minimum, the public now has a clearer picture of what’s actually going on behind those guarded doors.
Thanks to Phil Williams’ dogged reporting, the American Renaissance conference can’t hide behind vague buzzwords and euphemisms anymore.
The guest list speaks for itself – and it’s a picture of a movement far more extreme, and far more willing to entertain political violence, than its organizers want the public to believe.
Mark grew up in the heart of Texas, where tornadoes and extreme weather were a part of life. His early experiences sparked a fascination with emergency preparedness and homesteading. A father of three, Mark is dedicated to teaching families how to be self-sufficient, with a focus on food storage, DIY projects, and energy independence. His writing empowers everyday people to take small steps toward greater self-reliance without feeling overwhelmed.
