Strom, until July 2006 the director of National Vanguard, first gained a name giving speeches on the neo-Nazi National Alliance's American Dissident Voices radio show in the early 1990s.  He was a devoted follower of William Pierce, the founder of the Alliance, whom he considered his mentor.  In April 2005, Strom and fellow activists were expelled by Pierce's successors for attempting an alleged coup.  Strom, who had also been in charge of the Alliance's magazine, National Vanguard, subsequently formed a new organization, which he also named National Vanguard.  A number of the Alliance's local chapters followed Strom and it appeared that the new organization would take a leading role in the neo-Nazi movement.

However, some National Vanguard members soon questioned Strom's leadership skills, while others complained about Strom's "domineering" wife.  By March 2006, the Tampa and Denver units, two of the largest and most active chapters, left the National Vanguard to form their own organization, the Nationalist Coalition.  Strom also had a falling out with Ed Fields, a long-time racist who had joined the National Alliance and then associated himself with the National Vanguard.  Fields, who had appointed Strom the managing editor of his white supremacist newspaper The Truth at Last in November 2005, fired him in the spring of 2006, and Strom's situation continued to go downhill from there.