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EXCLUSIVE: Former U.S. military members, Patriot Front dropout secretly run Nazi publishing houses

In September 2024, a man by the name of “Royce” appeared on Stew Peters’ “Uncancelable” podcast.

Peters is an extreme right-wing ideologue with over 500,000 followers on Rumble. He kicked off this particular episode by offering viewers a promo code for a Holocaust denial website.

Royce was there to promote Europa: The Last Battle, a 13-hour neo-Nazi propaganda film that blames Jews for Nazi Germany’s fall. It was produced by a Swedish neo-Nazi, gaining a cult fandom on far-right Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

Royce spoke as a representative of Team Europa, a company formed to market and distribute the film. 

Peters praised Royce for giving him a second edition of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf, a moment that revealed more of Royce's past than he perhaps meant to, as he and Team Europa have ties to companies that publish and distribute Nazi books and merchandise: Invisible Empire Publishing and Dissident Minds Books.

These three companies regularly cross-promote each other on social media and their websites. The Invisible Empire Publishing website lists Team Europa as an affiliated partner; posts from the Invisible Empire Publishing Telegram group have described Dissident Minds Books as a preferred distributor for their titles, and Royce’s Team Europa has made posts promoting Dissident Minds Books titles.

This trio of companies is part of a growing industry of U.S.-based Nazi paraphernalia distributors—selling flashy hardcover editions of Mein Kampf to coasters and bottle openers adorned with swastikas.

Behind these entities, which help neo-Nazis obtain the kind of hardcover editions Barnes & Noble doesn’t stock, are a U.S. Army veteran, a former Marine turned vocally proud neo-Nazi, and a disgraced member of the far-right group Patriot Front.

Through reviewing business records, Telegram chats, posts on other social media platforms, and the digital fingerprints left on their website, the Daily Dot can reveal three of the individuals behind the neo-Nazi propaganda operations: Daniel Pemberton-Zikeli, a former military police officer; Zachary Degelau, a former Patriot Front member; and Christopher Pohlhaus, a former Marine and neo-Nazi group leader who tried to create a white supremacist enclave in Maine.

3 panel image: 3 people.
Zach Degelau, Daniel Pemberton-Zikeli, Christopher Pohlhaus

Pemberton-Zikeli and Degelau did not respond to multiple requests for comment by the Daily Dot. When reached, Pohlhaus responded by calling the inquiry “nonsense.”

Pemberton-Zikeli, a 29-year-old IT specialist with Honeywell, describes himself on Telegram as the co-owner of Invisible Empire Publishing, using a loose pseudonym: Daniel Zakal.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Pemberton-Zikeli previously served as a Military Police officer in the U.S. Army Reserves, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 

Royce is the pseudonym of Degelau, a 31-year-old software engineer who has been affiliated with a variety of far-right and neo-fascist organizations, including Patriot Front, the National Socialist Organization, and the White Lives Matter movement. A public LinkedIn profile for Degelau lists him as the owner of Team Europa LLC, which sells its products on the Invisible Empire Publishing website. 

According to leaked chats published by Unicorn Riot, Degelau was kicked out of Patriot Front in 2021 after upsetting the neo-fascist organization’s leader, Thomas Rousseau, who called him “dangerous, stupid, and potentially malicious” for bringing “two fully loaded pistols” to a Patriot Front event. 

Pohlhaus, a 38-year-old former Marine and leader of the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe, is the apparent operator of Dissident Minds Books, which has sold Invisible Empire Publishing books. 

Blood Tribe is explicitly neo-Nazi and aims to turn the United States into a white supremacist ethno-state. In 2022, Pohlhaus purchased several acres in Maine, intending to start a white supremacist compound. 

Pohlhaus has made various posts on X where he has described Dissident Minds Books as “our store,” announced new stock of a white power book, and promoted pre-orders for a flag he designed that combined the Confederate-era Mississippi flag with a Nazi swastika.

The two sites, along with Team Europa, sell a range of products. 

On Invisible Empire Publishing’s web store, shoppers can find copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, a novel by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and a copy of White Power by George Lincoln Rockwell. It also offers posters, coasters, bottle openers adorned with swastikas, and even resin busts of Adolf Hitler.

On Dissident Minds Books’ homepage, shoppers are greeted by the title, How the Jews Betrayed Mankind.

Its “featured products” section sells hard copies of SIEGE—a collection of essays authored by infamous neo-Nazi James Mason, which served as the inspiration for militant white supremacist groups like Atomwaffen Division and The Base.

Degelau, Pemberton-Zikeli, and Pohlhaus’ wares are popular among the broader white power scene. Links to their websites are frequently shared in the Telegram chats of domestic and international neo-Nazi and far-right groups, and their organizations have connections to some of the white power movement’s most recognizable and violent groups. 

On their own Telegram channels, Invisible Empire Publishing and Dissident Minds Books heavily promote their product. Their posts are regularly shared in other neo-Nazi Telegram chats that collectively have audiences numbering in the tens of thousands. 

They’ve also promoted their products via social media sites like Gab and X.

All three entities are registered to the same address, through a Wyoming corporation, Registered Agents Inc., that helps obscure the identities of business owners. 

The Daily Dot identified Degelau and Pemberton-Zikeli through an examination of Invisible Empire Publishing's sitemap, which reveals two website administrators with publishing permissions. 

One administrator provided a username, “yindis.” A subsequent search for “yindis” across other websites produced a GitLab profile with the name “Zach Degelau.” Searches for “Zach Degelau” on LinkedIn revealed a public profile for one “Zach D.,” whose work experience includes multiple stints as a site reliability engineer and as the owner of Team Europa.

The second administrator, who made posts on the website promoting Nazi ideology and a neo-Nazi video game under the name Daniel Zakal, links to a profile with the name “Dani Pemberton-Zikeli.” 

A search for that name led to LinkedIn and Facebook profiles for a Daniel Pemberton-Zikeli with a current location in Washington state. 

A March 8 Telegram post stated that Invisible Empire Publishing was “excited to announce that our relocation to the Northwest for book distribution is nearly complete.” 

In that same Telegram post, the author noted the company’s ties to Team Europa, stating they would maintain a distribution center in the Midwest to mail Blu-rays of the film. 

Pemberton-Zikeli sells his own books on the site under his apparent pen name, while publishing rambling treatises extolling the virtues of Nazism.

In a Feb. 18 message in an Invisible Empire Telegram chat, “Daniel Zakal” posited that National Socialism “recognizes the immutable truths of racial hierarchy, struggle, self-improvement, and the organic unity of a people. These principles are not exclusive to Germany; they are universal laws that have always existed.” 

The purveyors of the three entities have appeared on each other's social media, further highlighting the ties. 

In a now-deleted Feb. 6 X Space audio chat, Pemberton-Zikeli—using the handle @The_NS_Question—joined Pohlhaus for a conversation. In it, he compared National Socialism to a flowering plant and asserted that believers in the ideology, such as himself, “are morally superior to most people who have ideologies outside of National Socialism.”

On X, Pohlhaus noted he uses Invisible Empire to help sell works. 

“Last night reading of Bilbo's book was so much fun. Replay will be posted soon. A must watch. I'll definitely be putting it in print with Invisible Empire Publishing,” he wrote. 

Invisible Empire Publishing also helped raise money for Pohlhaus' Blood Tribe, steering funds to a group accused of violence and intimidation. 

Last year, Blood Tribe’s activities in Springfield, Ohio, gained national attention after spreading racist conspiracy theories about the city’s Haitian migrant community. 

A February 2025 federal lawsuit filed in the Southern District of Ohio alleges members of Blood Tribe engaged in a months-long intimidation campaign, sending false bomb threats to city officials and pointing firearms at counterprotesters. 

Invisible Empire Publishing also helped steer funds to other neo-Nazi groups, using proceeds from merchandise sales to provide to the Nordic Resistance Movement in May 2022, which the U.S. government later designated as a terrorist organization.  

These neo-Nazi propaganda peddlers rely on major website providers and payment processors to do business and raise funds for violent Nazis. 

The Invisible Empire Publishing website uses the WordPress platform for content management, CloudFlare for hosting, Dream Host for domain name registration, the WooCommerce plugin for its store functionality, and Stripe for processing payments. 

Purchases of these products can also be facilitated through Google and Apple Pay. 

The Dissident Minds Books website is built using GoDaddy, uses Amazon for hosting, and also relies on Stripe for processing payments. The Team Europa website utilizes LiteSpeed Web Server for web server software, CloudFlare for hosting, and sells its products via the Invisible Empire Publishing website.

The use of these platforms to promote Nazi ideology may violate some of the terms of service. 

GoDaddy previously delisted a neo-Nazi website, Stripe previously stopped processing payments for President Donald Trump’s campaign citing incitement to violence, and Amazon Web Services has an acceptable use policy that prohibits the use of their platform “to violate the rights of others” or “to threaten, incite, promote, or actively encourage violence, terrorism, or other serious harm.”

But other providers do not have policies that would prohibit their platforms from being used to promote Nazism.

While WordPress does not allow “content promoting hatred,” that policy only applies to websites that are hosted by WordPress, not websites like Invisible Empire Publishing, which uses WordPress software but are hosted by other services.  

Neither CloudFlare, DreamHost, nor LiteSpeed have policies that prohibit the use of their services to promote hate and discrimination.


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The post EXCLUSIVE: Former U.S. military members, Patriot Front dropout secretly run Nazi publishing houses appeared first on The Daily Dot.



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