Editor’s note: This story contains obscene language.
In the weeks leading up to Pride month, Jeff Tischauser was keeping an extra close eye on hate groups in Tennessee. He’s a senior researcher with the Southern Poverty Law Center, and has been doing this kind of work for about a decade.
On a weekend morning in late May, he was on the messaging platform Telegram, poring through a channel used by a white supremacist group called the Tennessee Active Club, when something caught his attention.
“Lo and behold, there I see this message posted by the administrator . . . bragging that they use a gym above Lewis Country Store to train,” he said.
About four hours later, he added, the post was deleted along with most of the channel’s content.
“Clearly, someone made a mistake,” said Tischauser, “It kind of like dawned on me, well, maybe there’s something here.”
The Lewis Country Store is no stranger to controversy. The gas station, located about 20 minutes northwest from downtown Nashville, is infamous for anti-mask, pro-Trump and pro-insurrectionist messaging, which is often broadcast on the large digital sign out front. In 2016, the store lost its Shell branding after a customer complained about one particularly obscene message: “Trump Just Said It. Bill Clinton Did It! The Only Pussy Trump Ever Grabbed Was Paul Ryan! #TrumpThatBitch.”
After seeing the store’s name mentioned in this hate group’s messages, Tischauser started out by looking them up on Google. He soon found the store’s real estate listing, complete with detailed photos of the interior, including the private gym upstairs.
He already had multiple screenshots from the Tennessee Active Club’s Telegram channel, which included photos of men posing in a gym with flags and captions identifying them as members of hate groups, including the Proud Boys and smaller neo-Nazi groups. He also had a copy of a video showing sparring between members of the Tennessee Active Club and another neo-Nazi group, which appeared to be shot in the same gym that the photos were taken in.
Tischauser brought in a few colleagues and started cross-referencing the video and the screenshots with the photos from the real estate listing.
“We agreed it was almost identical,” he said.
But what exactly is the Tennessee Active Club?
The Southern Poverty Law Center considers it a chapter of a larger, decentralized network of hate groups. It’s focused on getting white men who have been radicalized online into the real world to train for what they believe is an impending race war.
And the Lewis Store, Tischauser said, has given them a private place to meet.
“They’re training in mixed martial arts, in boxing, etc., to fight against and survive what they perceive as an anti-white system that’s controlled by Jewish interests,” he said.
Tischauser published a report through the Southern Poverty Law Center detailing his findings.
Not long afterward, the owner of the store, Brad Lewis, went on a white supremacist podcast, where the host asked him about the report published by “the commie scumbags from the SPLC.” Lewis responded by confirming that he allows people to train in the space above his store.
“I’ve got some guys that are ex-MMA pros that have been training with me for, gosh, 15 years now. We’re getting some younger, younger white men in there,” he said.
Since publication, Tischauser said that Lewis has repeatedly called him racial and anti-Semitic slurs, and written not one, but two homophobic poems about him.
“It’s kind of funny. Brad Lewis wrote a poem about me,” Tischauser said. “So he’s clearly showing us that he’s a levelheaded guy and that he clearly doesn’t mind that my story came out.”
While Tischauser has been able to find some humor in Lewis’ response, he added that it’s important to understand that the store owner is serious about his beliefs. The day after the report was published, Lewis posted on Telegram: “I’m not a cuckservative, I’m an actual literal Nazi.”
“So that’s who Brad Lewis is,” said Tischauser.
Lewis did not respond to WPLN’s request for comment.
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