In 2023, an antifascist collective published the results of their deep-dive investigation into Dissident Homeschool, a channel on the messaging app Telegram where self-avowed neo-Nazi parents shared educational materials and ideas for raising their children to embrace racial hatred. “Teach race realism first,” one of the Ohio-based founders, who went by Mrs. Saxon, advised the group of approximately 2,300 subscribers. Use math lessons, for example, to talk about crime statistics and how it’s dangerous to associate with other races. Teach them “to keep things quiet around certain people,” she added. That selective silence affords them the space to build adherence to a Hitlerian ideology without scrutiny.
Outlets such as VICE Media and The Guardian picked up on the story, verifying and expanding on the collective’s initial reporting and kicking off a wave of public shock and outrage. Stories named and shamed Dissident Homeschool’s founders. Officials called for investigations. And homeschool activists condemned the community as an aberration—one, they noted, that shouldn’t affect the way the public thinks about at-home instruction. Then the founders went underground, the group faded away into digital obscurity, and the news cycle moved on from this hate-filled little anomaly.
But Dissident Homeschool was not an anomaly. More than a year before the group went viral, I broke a story for The Daily Beast about a former teacher in Arizona who created another openly white nationalist homeschooling community, the School of the West—a more organized endeavor that created and still offers its own curricula and course materials. In the five years since I dug into that group, I’ve identified more than a half dozen additional highly organized white nationalist homeschooling networks, as well as many more informal digital groups similar to Dissident Homeschool. Some of these networks have been humming along since the late 2010s, but others are new and expanding—such as the homeschooling initiative within Return to the Land, a group that started building explicitly white nationalist communities in the American Southeast in 2023. I have reached out to many of these groups for comment; none ultimately spoke with me.
“We still don’t have good quantification on white nationalist homeschooling,” says Amy Cooter, co-founder of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism. “But based on online chatter and advertising, it seems likely this is an increasingly common practice.”
Homeschooling is not inherently conservative or reactionary. One founder of the modern homeschooling movement, John Holt, was actually an anti-authoritarian leftist who believed decentralizing education would help children find their own paths and passions. From the 1970s onward, notes Cooter, many families have pursued homeschooling not as a matter of ideology but of practicality: Because they’re too rural for busing hours to school to make sense. Because their children have special needs their local educators may not be able to accommodate. Because of concerns about bullying. Over the past couple of decades, homeschooling has exploded in large part due to fears about school safety, classroom overcrowding, and academic rigor. Some families actually remove their children from school due to educators’ perceived conservative biases, and Black families have become the fastest-growing homeschooling demographic largely because of concerns about institutional racism.
In 2026, it is easy to find diverse homeschooling networks and curricula if you go looking for them. And although studies on homeschooling populations are sparse, some seem to indicate that some students who go through the process come out the other end well-educated, well-rounded, and well-socialized.
But in the 1960s, conservative Christian groups grew concerned about court rulings and district policies that stripped practices like Bible readings and communal prayer out of public schools. In the 1980s, hardline conservative Christian activists started to promote homeschooling as a means of extricating children from an increasingly secular world and reasserting parental control over family life and values. They also spearheaded campaigns to deregulate homeschooling—to eliminate restrictions and oversight on what parents can teach their children and how. While overtly religious homeschooling is less prevalent today than it was a few decades ago, these groups are still a powerful bloc within the homeschooling ecosystem.
Between this lobbying and wider national don’t-tread-on-me tendencies, by 1993 homeschooling was not only legal in every corner of the United States, but the country also had some of the world’s laxest regulations on home-based education: Although laws vary from state to state, in most of the United States, parents do not need any credentials to teach their own children, nor do they need to tell officials what they plan to teach. About a dozen states don’t even require parents to let state officials know they plan to self-educate their children, allowing them to operate entirely off the grid. Functionally, stresses James Dwyer, a professor at William & Mary Law School and an expert on homeschooling policies, “there is no public oversight of homeschoolers” in most of the country. Parents “can teach whatever they want.” On top of that, he adds, “No one has legal authority to investigate.”
In the early twentieth century, supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan were “staunchly in favor of public education,” notes homeschooling historian Adam Laats of Binghamton University, State University of New York. “Their idea was to get Catholic children in particular into public schools to ‘cure’ them of their ‘foreign’ ideas,” he adds.
As the United States slowly enforced school integration starting in the late 1950s, white nationalists took an interest in de facto all-white private schools. But moving into the 1980s, explains Indiana University Bloomington professor of education policy Christopher Lubienski, diehard racists started to form insular communities—the seeds of the modern militia movement—to wall themselves off from mainstream society. Like conservative Christians, they turned to homeschooling as a fundamental tool for protecting themselves from what they considered corrosive forces.
“In my day, homeschooling was pretty limited,” says Christian Picciolini, who led a skinhead group in Chicago as a teenager in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before renouncing hate in his twenties. Picciolini now helps others adjust as they exit hate groups.
By the mid-1980s, more organized groups like the Aryan Nations and World Church of the Creator had created informal academies for homeschooled children on or near their main compounds. Other communities circulated newsletters, then in the early 2000s shifted to Internet forums, which they used to swap information on homeschooling laws, advice on how to build a curriculum, and lists of recommended readings. But none of them actually developed plug-and-play programs that would-be white nationalist homeschoolers could adopt, nor bespoke instructional materials. Most simply relied on old books, such as early twentieth century encyclopedias, which were to them devoid of objectionable political, social, or racial viewpoints. Some simply taught curricula and used class materials designed for fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers. To this day, it’s easy to find hardline Christian texts and workbooks that present revisionist history and convey bigoted views—notably describing Indigenous peoples as primitive, Islam as inherently violent, and the evils of slavery as overblown.
Several experts I spoke with believe it didn’t make sense for white nationalists to build their own content. Historically, only a fraction of the people willing to chat about hacking together a racist lesson plan were also willing to pay for and use explicitly racist class content. Working with hardline Christian materials just made more sense, if only as a matter of plausible deniability when discussing their homeschooling activities with others. But over the past decade, movements like Trumpism have emboldened racist groups, helping their views seep back into mainstream discourse with alarming speed. “Racialized language is now somewhat more acceptable,” Lubienski notes. “People are more open about some prejudices.”
Limited research on white nationalist communities suggest that only a minority actually pursued homeschooling as of the 2010s. But the 2020 pandemic shift to remote learning pushed homeschool-curious parents of all political persuasions to actually try it. The number of homeschooled children in the United States more than doubled from 2019 to 2021, creating new demand for teaching resources. Even as schools returned to in-person classes between 2021 and 2022, many families stuck with their new homeschooling norm.
Also in 2021, conservative media latched onto critical race theory (CRT) as a new culture war wedge issue. CRT is in reality a niche academic field that analyzes systemic racism. But conservative activists claim it is a new liberal dogma infecting schools nationwide, which teaches white children to hate their culture and themselves. The artificial panic created around CRT has combined with anxieties about vaccine mandates, inclusive sexual education, and general liberal indoctrination in schools to create a new push for homeschooling among conservatives. Far-right figures like Candace Owens, Steve Bannon, and social media influencers like “tradwives” now actively encourage their followers to take their children out of school.
White nationalist activists recognized that these trends not only increased the pool of their existing ideological peers open to buying explicitly racist homeschooling materials, but also opened new doors for recruitment and radicalization. The mostly white parents taking children out of schools over fears of supposed anti-white bias want “pro-white” curricula, which white nationalists could supply—and ideally use to slowly draw these nervous families into the movement.
Families often “choose one curriculum or another simply based on what’s in front of them,” says Lubienski, “or because somebody at church or on the Internet told them about it.” Unfortunately, anecdotes from homeschooling conferences and content fairs in recent years suggest that some are trying to weed out “woke” lesson plans, creating more space for dubious racist content. A 2023 review of homeschooling materials mentioned in homeschool groups on Gab, the far-right social media platform, found tons of white nationalist material, soft-peddled to a wider conservative audience using the language of anti-CRT activism.
“If you asked straight up if they identify as a white supremacist, they’d shudder and say, ‘No, I don’t think I’m better than you,’ ” says Ye Bin Won, the researcher behind that study. “But how they talk about education values and the reasons they pull their kids out of school is very racist.”
As to whether white nationalists achieve their goals via homeschooling, adds Cooter, there is not yet enough data to say.
Former homeschoolers—parents and students—and outside observers have for decades voiced concerns about the space that deregulation created for the isolation, indoctrination, and abuse of children. The Coalition for Responsible Home Education, formed in 2013, tracks cases of misconduct and advocates for what it sees as commonsense regulations. These include measures like identifying when students are being pulled out of school, requiring parents to disclose what they’re teaching, and periodically assessing the quality of at-home education. This approach, Cooter says, “would not completely prevent white supremacist families from teaching false histories and hatred” but would “mitigate some of the more extreme outcomes.”
Yet groups like the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), a Christian parents’ rights organization, reject any form of oversight. Earlier this year, Connecticut and Nebraska passed watered-down laws making it slightly harder for families to start homeschooling if someone in their household is under investigation for abuse or neglect, or on a register of abusers. The HSLDA characterized the legislation as dire assaults on educational autonomy.
These groups fund and promote studies showing positive homeschooling outcomes and mobilize their supporters to counteract stories of homeschooling misconduct with stories of misconduct in public schools. An HSLDA representative tells me that the group “condemns white nationalism” as an ideology, but does not believe that “individuals exploiting homeschooling” is grounds for any action that may “harm the liberty and parental rights of millions of Americans.”
“The HSLDA is extremely effective at lobbying,” Lubienski notes. Even as officials call for more oversight as groups like Dissident Homeschool are exposed, most of the policy experts I spoke to for this story doubt that we’ll see any regulatory change in the near future.
Fortunately, white nationalists disagree about everything from who actually counts as white to what a “pro-white” legal framework should look like. Hate monitoring experts I spoke with agree that white nationalist homeschooling programs will likely end up competing with each other for racist hearts and minds rather than collaborating, limiting their potential for profit and thus proliferation.
Mainstream conservative support for homeschooling is also a double-edged sword for extremists, Lubienski argues. Since the early 2010s, politicians have gradually expanded the ability to use “school choice” tax credits, exempt savings accounts, and vouchers not only for charter, magnet, and private schools but also for homeschooling expenses like curricula, textbooks, and social programming. Expanding support for homeschooling was a part of the 2024 GOP platform, and new provisions made it into the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
This has raised concerns about tax dollars going to white nationalist groups via their homeschool materials, Lubienski points out. But many conservative groups also want oversight of the programs they end up funding. As one pro-homeschooling group put it on a protest flyer back in 2024, “Where there is ‘free’ money there is also a ‘poison pill’ of accountability.”
Mark Hay would like to thank Elizabeth Bartholet, Heath Brown, Mark Pitcavage, Patrick Riccards, Robert Kunzman, Sophie Bjork-James, and Stephanie Foggett, all of whom offered insights that informed this article.
