As some prominent Republicans across the country are raising alarms about the rise of racism and white supremacy among younger conservatives, a far-right group focused on removing non-white people from the United States is seeking property for a downtown Knoxville headquarters — with the aim of recruiting college students and young professionals.

Heritage Hubs' founder says he is 'reclaiming Knoxville for us, for the right wing.'

Heritage Hubs, a nonprofit organization based in Knoxville, says on its website that it is seeking to build “permanent infrastructure for community, culture and civic life.”

The organization is affiliated with the Tennessee Heritage Association, a group that has posted white supremacist content online — including an assertion that American schools should be for white students only. It's part of a movement built around the idea of a "Heritage America" dominated by the descendants of white European colonists.

Heritage Hubs is also sponsoring a local forum on Oct. 10, featuring two guest speakers: former U.S. Border Patrol Commander-at-large Gregory Bovino, who oversaw the violent immigration-enforcement campaign in Minneapolis earlier this year; and Ryan Neuhaus, a former chief of staff to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts who resigned in the blowback from Roberts’ defense of talk-show host Tucker Carlson and neo-Nazi leader Nick Fuentes.

Also on the agenda are panel discussions, with advertised participants including Knox County Commissioner Andy Fox, state Reps. Monty Fritts and Jody Barrett, and C. Jay Engel, a self-avowed Christian nationalist and executive director of an organization called the White Civil Advocacy Project.

Heritage Hubs co-founder Sam Rhodes said during an event in January at the Square Room on Market Square that his goal is to radicalize the local Republican Party and push “remigration” — the removal of immigrants, which for some conservative activists goes far beyond deporting unauthorized residents — to the top of its agenda. 

“To put it as simple as possible, we — the right-wing American youth — expect support for remigration as the absolute baseline political stance on the right, to earn and maintain our support,” Rhodes said at the Jan. 27 event, which was titled “Building a Legacy: The Future of Gen Z in Politics.”

One of the organization’s other co-founders, Austin Rinearson, is now president of the Knox County Young Republicans. He told Compass in an email that he is no longer affiliated with Heritage Hubs or the Tennessee Heritage Association.

Rhodes did not respond to multiple messages for comment.

‘A Right-Wing Cultural Center’

Heritage Hubs incorporated as a Tennessee nonprofit on Feb. 2 of this year, according to filings on the Secretary of State’s website. Rhodes is its president, and Rinearson was listed as vice president of the organization in the state file through mid-July of this year. 

Rinearson’s name disappeared from the file not long after Nashville investigative reporter Phil Williams reported on the Jan. 27 event as part of his ongoing coverage of white supremacy and Christian nationalism in Tennessee. Williams is the chief investigative reporter for News Channel 5 in Nashville, and he has also started an independent project of his own, with a Substack now titled Confront the Hate.

On July 13, he posted a report with the headline, “Another Disturbing Peek Into the Minds of Young Republicans.” It recounted the event at the Square Room, where Rinearson and Rhodes both gave remarks along with featured speaker Aaron Miller, a Maury County commissioner and the founder of the Institute for Christian Statecraft. Miller’s organization sponsored an event in Nashville in April featuring anti-Muslim U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles and leading Christian nationalist podcasters and activists.

Williams included some clips from a video of the Square Room event that had been posted online. The video has since been taken down, but Compass also obtained a copy of it. 

In opening remarks, Rinearson said the Tennessee Heritage Association was founded to advance the cause of remigration. “We started this organization last year with the purpose of bringing an authentic right-wing vision to Knox County and to preserve our way of life for Heritage America,” he said, using a phrase often invoked by white nationalists. “Our goal here is to build this into a right-wing cultural center, something that the next generation can shape and grow.”

Rhodes said establishment Republicans might not like the extremism of younger conservatives, but they need it to mobilize younger voters. “The message that we’re talking about here tonight, the message of our speaker — remigration, national sovereignty, and America for Americans — this message is one that excites the young generation, makes us excited about politics, makes us want to get involved,” he said. 

He decried the liberal tilt of Knoxville and its city government. “Here in Knoxville, the City of Knoxville, there are leftists who think that this is their city, that we shouldn’t have events, right-wing events, here in our own city, blue city in a red state,” Rhodes said. “This is the first of many events. We are reclaiming Knoxville for us, for the right wing.”

Williams also posted some tweets from the Tennessee Heritage Association’s X.com account, which he was able to preserve in screenshots before being blocked by the group. Its account is private and open only to approved members. One of the tweets said, “Childish and fake terms like ‘racist’ don’t matter to Gen Z. Remigration of all foreign peoples is the only way to preserve our heritage and secure our future.”

Another was a comment on a news article reporting that white students now make up only 49 percent of all American students. The THA responded, “White students should be 100% of the students in American schools.” 

Seeking a Historic Home (And Tax Credits)

At the time of the event, Rinearson was treasurer of Knox County Young Republicans. He was subsequently elected as the group’s president. That means that by state party rules, he has a seat on the county party’s executive committee. Martin Daniel, the party chair, referred to the guidelines when asked about Rinearson’s role.

He added, “The Young Republicans of each Tennessee county elect their own officers.”

Asked about his involvement with both the Young Republicans and the Tennessee Heritage Association, Rinearson downplayed the latter. In an email, he said, “To clarify my involvement, I participated in some initial discussions about forming an organization focused on celebrating Tennessee’s history and heritage only. My involvement ended during those preliminary planning stages, and I was never involved in any formal organization that subsequently emerged from those discussions.

“After I stepped away, other individuals continued using the name and associated social media accounts independently and without my involvement, input, or authorization. I cannot speak to any activities, statements, or decisions made after my departure. My political involvement has been focused on the Young Republicans, and I have not been involved with THA or its activities.”

Still, Rinearson’s stated ideal of making Knoxville a hub for young right-wing Republicans is at the heart of Heritage Hubs, which Rhodes incorporated a week after the Jan. 27 event.

The nonprofit group’s website indicates that it is working to raise $4 million to purchase and renovate property in or around downtown. The group says it is seeking historic property in the urban core partly for tax reasons — its website outlines the historic tax incentives and Opportunity Zone benefits it hopes to claim. 

The idea is for a mixed-use facility that could serve educational, research and social purposes for young conservatives. “Young Americans seeking tradition lack local gathering places,” the website says. “Online communities can’t replace bonds formed face-to-face.”

Rhodes has made presentations about the plan to some local Republican clubs and conservative groups. But for someone seeking a prominent role in local politics, he keeps his online profile low. There is a listing advertising the services of Sam Rhodes as a math tutor, which lists the same phone number used on the state Heritage Hubs filing. It says he is “Vanderbilt Class of 2020.”

‘These People Are Diminishing the Republican Party’

The growing extremism of young, mostly (but not exclusively) white conservatives — raised on internet trolling and ironic flirtations with Nazism that have perhaps lost their irony — has been much discussed and reported on in the past few years.

Representative headlines include: “The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem” (The Atlantic); “Bigotry among young conservatives has Republicans on edge” (The Washington Post); “The Far Right Is Dividing College Republicans” (The New York Times); “How the Internet Fringe Infiltrated Republican Politics” (The New Yorker).

Group chats leaked from young and college-age Republican groups across the country have repeatedly turned up racism, antisemitism and persistent favorable references to Hitler. 

Concerns about the rising tide of ethno-nationalism broke through at another level on Sept. 12, when Bo French — a Republican candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission — posted an image of University of Texas students who appeared to be of South Asian and Latino descent wearing school garb and cheering during a Longhorns football game. Clearly referring to their ethnicity, French wrote, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”

That brought a public rebuke from Republican Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who will leave office at the end of the year after losing the Republican primary to state Attorney General Ken Paxton. “This is the Republican nominee for statewide office,” Cornyn said in a social media post. “Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized. This is how great political parties self-destruct. Sad.”

Other Republicans did repudiate French, including state Speaker of the House Dustin Burrows and several other members of the Legislature. One-time Republican political mastermind Karl Rove, who lives in Texas, wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal saying that he would vote for French’s Democratic opponent.

Rove echoed Cornyn’s warning: “The GOP has a growing number of Bo Frenches — and not only in Texas. Conservatism and the party it dominates have an increasing number of bigoted advocates of a ‘heritage America’ composed of white descendants of the original European settlers. There are ‘just asking questions’ Jew-haters, misogynists who worship hypermasculinity, conspiracy nuts seeking clicks for profit, and religious bigots who won’t differentiate between Muslim terrorists and Muslim American patriots. These people are diminishing the Republican Party, not building it. I’ll have no part of it.” 

That was followed last week by a critical column by the conservative talk-radio host and commentator Erick Erickson, who took a look at the groups pushing the party farther right — and their close ties to Vice President JD Vance, among others.

“A group of white guys have subtly inserted themselves into conservative institutions and church organizations,” Erickson wrote. “They all embrace racial grievances. To varying degrees, they embrace white nationalism, antisemitism, and even Nazi sympathies. They are getting added to conservative institutional boards, attempting to purge churches, and are desperate to indoctrinate young conservatives into fascist ideology.”

This kind of pushback from establishment Republicans was a focus of Aaron Miller’s talk at the Square Room event in January. He said that older conservatives were going to have to get more comfortable with what he called “edgy jokes,” and he expressed sympathy for the young Republicans who were penalized for their leaked chats.

“You know, they’re making jokes about ‘the Austrian painter,’” Miller said, using internet slang for Adolf Hitler. “Hey y’all, newsflash: Young people, especially young men, make edgy jokes. I’m 36, and I still make a lot of edgy jokes. I just, you know, don’t put them in my real name most of the time.”

He said the party needed to hold onto young leadership, not chase it away with limits on acceptable discourse that younger conservatives don’t respect. “Many of those young men probably would have been powerful players, powerful leaders in the Republican Party and in the conservative movement,” Miller said. “Now they’re probably not ever going to be.” 

A Forum of Nationalisms

The Oct. 10 forum — which will be followed by a watch party for the Tennessee-Arkansas game — seems to be another of the gatherings that Rhodes promised in January. Unlike the Square Room event, its location is secret and will be revealed only to those approved for registration.

Bovino, the headliner, gained both a certain form of celebrity and widespread condemnation for his aggressive tactics with the Border Patrol, which left two U.S. citizens dead in Minneapolis among much other mayhem. But he is venerated by some on the far right, who are agitating for even more arrests, detentions and deportations.

Those include the national Mass Deportation Coalition, which is cosponsoring the event with Heritage Hubs. The group is made up of anti-immigration hardliners who are putting pressure on the Trump administration to deport at least 1 million people a year. (Patrick Casey, former leader of the neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa, announced in June that he had joined the MDC, calling it “the closest thing we have to a lobby *against* mass immigration.”)

Fritts, who is slated to speak at the event, ran for governor in the Republican primary this year, losing to Sen. Marsha Blackburn — but winning nearly 1 in 4 primary votes with a platform that called for the outlawing of non-Christian religions and the execution of women who have abortions.

Engel, meanwhile, is part of a group of Christian nationalists who have relocated to Whitleyville, Tenn., in rural Jackson County, seeking to form a like-minded community. He is best-known for popularizing the phrase “Heritage American” to refer primarily to Americans of European descent, preferably those who arrived before the Civil War.

He elaborated on the term in a long social media post in 2024. Engel wrote that Native Americans and Black descendants of enslaved people could qualify as Heritage Americans, as long as they don’t “leverage their experience for the purposes of political guilt in our time.” But, he added, the phrase affirms "the domination and pre-eminence of the European derived peoples, their institutions, and their way of life. Heritage America is centered around the experiences and norms of Anglo-Protestants."

And he was clear about who he thinks doesn’t belong: “peoples like Indians, or South East Asians or Ecuadorians or immigrated Africans are the least capable of fitting in and should be sent home immediately.”

Andy Fox, the only local speaker listed on the forum program so far, is the most energetic culture warrior on Knox County Commission. He has repeatedly introduced agenda items inveighing against the presence or recognition of immigrants, Muslims and LGBTQ people in Knox County. He did not respond to a request for comment about his participation.

Compass filled out the online form to register for the event, but the request was denied.