Josh Deitz (right) co-hosting a podcast with Richard Spencer (left) YOUTUBE

For years, Joshua Dietz has taught psychology at New York City’s public and private universities. Students at Kingsborough Community College describe him as a “modern professor,” easygoing and informal. He plays guitar in his spare time, and maintains a hypnosis practice in Downtown Brooklyn, providing emotional counseling and “assertiveness training.” He was an adjunct at St. Francis College, just a few blocks away, as recently as last fall.

But when he’s not teaching undergrads or hypnotizing passive men, Dietz is lecturing under another name: Josh Neal, avowed white nationalist and co-host of Richard Spencer’s podcast.

Operating under that thinly-veiled moniker, Dietz hosts the McSpencer Group alongside Spencer, perhaps the best known American neo-Nazi and a founding member of the so-called alt-right. For hours at a time, Dietz and a rotating selection of guests help plot the future of the white identity movement, touching on subjects from eugenics to Kurt Cobain (“a symbol of white displacement”) to the “negrofication” of American culture.

[Following publication of this article, videos posted to Spencer's YouTube account featuring Dietz were pulled down. Several of Dietz's podcast episodes can still be found on the streaming site BitChute.]

“They can’t speak eloquently. They can’t dress a particular way. They can’t show enthusiasm for education or career advancement or, I don’t know, monogamous healthy relationships without out of wedlock children,” said Dietz, during an episode with the author Colin Flaherty recorded earlier this year. (Flaherty, incidentally, was the voice behind the explicitly racist video that NYPD union boss Ed Mullins apologized for sharing this past summer).

Dietz frequently appears on other similar podcasts, and his own show, No Apologies, has featured guests such as Patrick Little, who believes Jews should be raised as livestock, and notorious neo-Nazi David Duke. In a conversation with Duke earlier this year, Dietz asks about the “issue” of right-wing figures maintaining relationships with Jewish people, and whether it “makes them emotionally blind to criticism.”

“You really can’t trust them,” says Duke. “The only Jews that I really have any respect for are those Jews that expose Jewish power and expose Jewish racism and expose Jewish efforts to destroy us.”

Following the lengthy monologue, Dietz replies: “That’s so well said.”

Dietz’s face is visible on his frequent video livestreams, which often rack up tens of thousands of views on YouTube and other streaming services. But until this week, the connection between his pseudonymous podcasting and his public-facing life as a professor and life coach was not widely known.

That changed following a tweet posted on Monday from an anonymous account, seemingly sent as part of an internecine fight within the alt-right that exploded this past weekend, after the far-right personality Milo Yiannopoulous leaked audio meant to humiliate Spencer. (“My ancestors fucking enslaved those little pieces of fucking shit,” Spencer shrieks, purportedly reacting to blowback to the bigoted Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. “I rule the fucking world.”)

The tweet was followed by an investigation by It’s Going Down, an antifacist blog, that linked “Josh Neal” to Joshua Dietz. The article noted that Dietz plays guitar for Jimmy and the Band, an experimental six-piece with an openly gay frontman known for their electrifying performances. The band was scheduled to headline Arlene’s Grocery next month, though that listing has since been removed.

A now-deleted tweet unmasked “Josh Neal” TWITTER

Dietz also runs a hypnotherapy practice, Tranceformation, out of a Court Street building overlooking Brooklyn Borough Hall. On his website—TheDietzMethod.com—he refers to his services as hypnosis counseling and life coaching. He notes that he received a master’s in clinical psychology, but does not specify where he earned his degree. A call to a number listed for Dietz was answered, but the voice hung up after I identified myself as a reporter. He also did not respond to email requests for comment.

Former colleagues and students of Dietz said they were horrified to recognize the professor’s face in chummy videos with Spencer and other white supremacists.

Anthony Alessandrini, a professor in the English Department at Kingsborough Community College, recalled interacting with Dietz multiple times in the wake of the 2016 election. Days after Trump’s inauguration, Alessandrini shared tips on the faculty listserv about protecting CUNY’s undocumented students.

“Please stop including me in these emails,” Dietz wrote back. “For one, it’s propaganda. For another, you’re clogging my inbox with garbage.”

A spokesperson for Kingsborough Community College confirmed that Dietz no longer teaches at the school, but refused to provide additional information about why he was let go and how long he spent at the university. Reviews on RateMyProfessor indicate that he taught there as far back as 2012.

According to a since-deleted LinkedIn page, Dietz has also lectured at Brooklyn College, York College, Queensborough Community College, Medgar Evers College and New York City College of Technology. Inquires to those schools were not immediately returned.

A spokesperson for St. Francis College—where Dietz was listed in an employee directory until Friday morning—said that he last taught there in Fall 2018, and “will not return as an instructor in the future.” Further questions about Dietz’s time at St. Francis were not answered.

“I’m shocked that it happened and I’m shocked that there isn’t more of a response—the reaction seems to be more about ass covering than taking responsibility,” said Alessandrini, who noted that Kingsborough is a majority nonwhite school. “Students are aware of this, and if they’re not hearing about it from their college, what message is being sent to them?”

One of those students is Joslyn Alexis, an undergraduate at York College in Queens, who learned of Dietz’s online identity through a Facebook post on Thursday night. She says she took an intermediate psychology class on maturity and adolescence with him last spring.

“It’s scary and bizarre. York is like 80 percent black,” Alexis wrote in a message to Gothamist. She added, “Honestly, nothing stands out about him that I can tell you. He seemed pretty normal.”

In conversations on his shows, Dietz occasionally refers to his own path toward white nationalism. He started as a traditional conservative, then became involved in Men’s Rights circles, writing for Return of the Kings, a pick-up artist website, and self-publishing a book billed as the “politically incorrect guide to dating.” He was once a fan of Gavin McInnes, the Proud Boys founder, but over time has come to regard that strand of the “alt-lite” as too moderate.

Speaking with Spencer, he frequently describes the path to building power for “our little community” in the years to come.

“We need to make being white and having a family and believing in something beautiful again,” declared Dietz in an episode from earlier this year. “The alt-right is the last stop on the train, and we’ll be here with arms wide open.”