Josh Steever’s Reign of Error is Over; Neo-Nazi Gets 20 Years for Guns, Drugs

We are amazed he was smart enough to inhale and exhale.

Joshua Steever, the neo-Nazi best known for having the word “racist” tattooed on his forehead and also for bumbling his way through various White Power circles who seen him primarily as a laughing stock, has been sentenced to 20 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to a drug and weapons trafficking scheme he and other members of his group Aryan Strikeforce concocted.

Steever, who called himself “Hatchet”, pled guilty to the charges in April 2018, but it wasn’t until last Tuesday that he was handed down his sentence by U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann who said his history of violence and involvement in racist organizations warranted a prison term that would protect the public. He, along with other members of the group worked with people they thought were drug and gun dealers and traveled to Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia to deliver shipments of methamphetamine and automatic weapons parts in exchange for cash and gift cards, but the drug and gun dealers were actually federal agents and the methamphetamine was rock salt.

Steever was arrested in his Phillipsburg, NJ home in April 2017, in a raid by federal agents who eventually also picked up Jacob Mark Robards of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Connor Drew Dykes of Silver Spring, Maryland, Justin Daniel Lough of Waynesboro, Virginia, Stephen Daniel Davis of Bumpass, Virginia and Henry Lambert Baird of Allentown, PA, the Aryan Strikeforce president who once served 12 years in prison for assaulting a Black couple in a baseball bat attack in 2001.

Court records show that Aryan Strikeforce also planned to have one of their terminally ill members commit a suicide bombing in a crowd of counter-protesters to a National Socialist Movement rally held in Harrisburg, PA in 2016.

Robards, Baird, Lough and Dykes also pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute controlled dangerous substances and the four received sentences ranging from four to 14 years. Davis pleaded guilty to unlawfully transporting a weapon as a felon and was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

Steever, has been a neo-Nazi pariah for much of the two decades he has been active. He has lived all over the country, and has been arrested numerous times across the country mostly for violent crimes. He was arrested in 2005 in Texas on felony aggravated assault charges for striking someone with an ax handle, a charge that was eventually reduced to misdemeanor deadly assault, of which he was convicted, and again the following year for reportedly allegedly threatening to kill two African-American students at the high school his girlfriend attended, him being 26 years old at the time. In 2008 Steever was seen in a group photo featuring members of the so-called Supreme White Alliance (SWA), which was run by the son of Ron Edwards, the Imperial Klans of America leader who is currently incarcerated on drug charges. SWA probate Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman are also in the photo, and would later would be convicted of plotting to kill then-President-elect Barack Obama in a crime that generated national headlines. Steever has also become tabloid fodder after he and the niece of the late actor Patrick Swayze were married after maintaining an online relationship. The marriage has since been dissolved.

At the time Steever was the president of another group he founded, the Aryan Terror Brigade. In 2013, he was kicked out of the group while he sat in jail on a charge of terroristic threats. He was eventually released – the conditions of his probation being he had to remove the word “racist” from his forehead – and founded Aryan Strikeforce. The current status of Aryan Terror Brigade is not known at the time of this posting.

Steever, who received the largest sentence of him and his co-defendants, will be on five years of supervised release when he gets out of prison.