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$PLC Hatewatch Report on The Base in Oz
After BBC TV’s “Panorama” showed how The Base expanded its network to Europe, Hatewatch can reveal that it also had success in expanding to a society whose settler history parallels the U.S.: Australia. Recorded vetting interviews, application documents, social media posts and The Base’s own internal chats show that the network, led by Rinaldo Nazzaro (who operated online under the pseudonyms “Norman Spear” and “Roman Wolf”), had some success in exporting both its ideology and organizing model to Europe and settler cultures such as Australia.
Archive
After BBC TV’s “Panorama” showed how The Base expanded its network to Europe, Hatewatch can reveal that it also had success in expanding to a society whose settler history parallels the U.S.: Australia. Recorded vetting interviews, application documents, social media posts and The Base’s own internal chats show that the network, led by Rinaldo Nazzaro (who operated online under the pseudonyms “Norman Spear” and “Roman Wolf”), had some success in exporting both its ideology and organizing model to Europe and settler cultures such as Australia.
A Hatewatch investigation has revealed that the U.S.-centered accelerationist white power group The Base had a sprawling international network of recruits and overseas cells that was even more extensive than that revealed in a recent BBC investigation.
After BBC TV’s “Panorama” showed how The Base expanded its network to Europe, Hatewatch can reveal that it also had success in expanding to a society whose settler history parallels the U.S.: Australia. Recorded vetting interviews, application documents, social media posts and The Base’s own internal chats show that the network, led by Rinaldo Nazzaro (who operated online under the pseudonyms “Norman Spear” and “Roman Wolf”), had some success in exporting both its ideology and organizing model to Europe and settler cultures such as Australia.
The materials show that the group made significant inroads into parts of Australia’s far right, and in particular the Lads Society, a white nationalist group that once invited Brenton Tarrant, the Australian who murdered 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019, to be a member.
They also show how local Australian far-right activists acted as virtual franchisees for The Base, finding fresh recruits in the ranks of the Lads Society, a local white nationalist network, and also vetting a man who had previously run for election to Australia’s parliament as a member of a right-wing populist party.
‘Norman Spear’: Rinaldo Nazzaro and the beginning of The Base
In late 2017, under the alias “Norman Spear,” Rinaldo Nazzaro began promoting an idea with a long history among white supremacists: that the Pacific Northwest could secede from the United States to create a white ethnostate.
The proposal had previously been associated with white supremacist Harold Covington and his Northwest Front organization. Before him, another influential advocate was Christian Identity preacher and Aryan Nations founder Richard Girnt Butler, who until 2000 occupied a compound at Hayden Lake, Idaho. Butler was associated so closely with the idea of a white ethnostate in the Pacific Northwest that it is sometimes known as the “Butler Plan.”
Covington, who died in 2018, had a long history in the organized white power movement. By the time of his death, however, his Northwest Front organization was largely inactive, and Covington’s main activity in the movement was writing propagandistic speculative fiction, some of which touched on race war and the establishment of an ethnostate in the Pacific Northwest.
In his 2007 novel “The Brigade,” Covington set out a scenario in which a guerrilla group, the Northwest Volunteer Army, is carrying out insurgent warfare against the administration of President Hillary Clinton, who has commenced a plan of “white genocide.” In the novel, the Northwest Volunteer Army’s motto is “Ex Gladio Libertas,” Latin for “Freedom comes from the sword,” which The Base used as its own motto in online recruiting materials.
In podcasts and social media posts at that time, “Norman Spear” praised Covington and the “Butler Plan.” He did so in an episode of Lone Wolf Radio, a podcast hosted by British white nationalist Chris White, in December 2017. White introduced Nazzaro as a Northwest Front activist and “northwest migrant.”
Also in late 2017, “Spear” released a series of videos spelling out a theory of “revolutionary struggle” with the stated aim of “coercing the system and making it capitulate to political demands.” Topics included “lone wolf operations,” “leaderless resistance” and guerrilla warfare. He advocated for guerrilla struggle wherein “lone wolves” would carry out acts of violence as a form of “propaganda of the deed,” and an above-ground leadership would negotiate with “the system” to achieve its military goals.
The argument was for acts of terrorism, which would bring about a condition of “siege” as the state imposed unsustainable condition of martial law, at which time it would negotiate with guerrilla leaders. “Victory isn't inherently dependent on physically defeating the enemy,” “Spear” said in the video. “Guerrillas win if they don’t lose,” and the central aim was to carve off sovereign territory from the state.
“Spear” thus synthesized the Butler Plan with some of the ideas for destabilizing and defeating liberal democracy put forth by the neo-Nazi who had the most influence on the accelerationist movement, James Mason.
Nazzaro began advertising The Base in July 2018 and trying to recruit members. He was also active in the “Read SIEGE” group on white power-friendly “alt-tech” platform, Gab. The group was dedicated to promoting the work and ideas of neo-Nazi author Mason, who advocated terrorism as a means to creating a white ethnostate. In December 2018, through a Delaware LLC called “Base Global,” Nazzaro bought three 10-acre blocks of undeveloped land in remote Ferry County, Washington, but maintained his principal residence in Russia.
Spear also posted messages from imprisoned members of the accelerationist neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division (AWD), one of the groups that sought to put Mason’s ideas into practice.
In fall 2018, early recruiting material for The Base stopped short of explicitly advocating for terrorism. Sources who spoke online and in person with Nazzaro, however, say Nazzaro told The Base’s inner circle that in truth, The Base was an “accelerationist” project: Its real purpose was to hasten the collapse of American liberal democracy into civil war, and bring about a white ethnostate in at least part of its current national territory. In encrypted chats, members discussed the methods and efficacy of tactics such as sabotaging infrastructure and the finer points of guerrilla warfare.
The Base and accelerationism
In most of the recorded vetting interviews obtained by SPLC, standard questions for potential recruits included whether they considered themselves national socialists; whether or not they had read “SIEGE,” the compilation of Mason’s newsletters that became the central text of the accelerationist movement; and whether they believed “a political solution” could remedy the perceived genocide of white people.
The ideal recruit would answer, respectively, yes, yes and no.
The final question, on the feasibility of “political solutions” to so-called “white genocide,” marks a defining characteristic of The Base, and the accelerationist ideology to which it adhered.
The false belief that a conspiracy exists to carry out “white genocide,” or to effect a “great replacement” of white Americans through mass immigration, is widely prevalent across the racist far right, from outright neo-Nazis, to so-called “identitarian” groups, to influential Republican officials. Many white nationalists hold, again falsely, that this “genocide” or “replacement” has been orchestrated by Jews.
As Hatewatch’s primer on accelerationism details, this belief has allowed white power movements to portray their own violence as a matter of racial self-defense. White power movements are necessarily violent because their various political projects, such as the creation of a white ethnostate, cannot be achieved without violence. But before accelerationism gained momentum, many groups and individuals sought to downplay or obfuscate this violence.
In 2016 and 2017, some did this successfully enough to reach the threshold of mainstream politics.
During and immediately after Donald Trump’s successful run for president in 2016, many so-called “alt-right” groups – which included white nationalists with such conspiracy-minded racist beliefs – felt emboldened by the victory of a politician who they considered to share at least some of their values, and who they felt they had played a part in electing.
Some were enthused enough to promote their beliefs more openly, using tactics associated with mainstream forms of political advocacy in liberal democracies. Throughout 2016 and 2017, groups such as Identity Evropa (now called the American Identity Movement) openly participated in rallies, street protests, campus recruitment and publicity campaigns. Many had platforms on mainstream social media services.
Others decided that the “political solution” was a false promise. Some of them came to believe that pluralist, multiracial democracy was headed for inevitable collapse, and that they should help it on its way by joining one of the burgeoning neo-Nazi accelerationist groups.
Atomwaffen Division was the template for accelerationist neo-Nazism. Following the ideas of Mason, whom they adopted as a kind of spiritual patriarch, Atomwaffen advocated terroristic violence as a political tool. Having abandoned electoral politics and the mainstream political process as futile, “optics” were of little concern.
Just as accelerationism was gaining influence, Nazzaro appeared on social media in the guise of Norman Spear.
Before The Base was formed, Nazzaro raised his profile in far-right spaces online by claiming he had served in the military and had experience with intelligence work. While The Base was operating, Nazzaro reiterated its emphasis on action. He demanded that members engage in training and meet-ups, and that potential recruits detail any skills that they could bring to the group or teach other members.
This practical orientation, his embrace of ideas important to survivalist and apocalyptic prepper movements, the openness of the network to members of other organizations, and his adoption of Covington’s project of a white ethnostate in the Pacific Northwest made Nazzaro’s offering distinct from Atomwaffen Division and other emerging accelerationist outfits.
The Base struggled early on after leaks from its chats on an app called Riot were exposed by an antifascist group operating in the Pacific Northwest. The group gradually reestablished protocols for internal communication and vetting for new members using the encrypted messaging platform, Wire.
Its brand – though drawing heavily on U.S.-specific white supremacist movements – proved highly exportable to white power individuals and groups around the world.
The Base eventually recruited members in Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia and Australia.
Eventually, some members of the group began acting on the hate The Base fostered. Former members in New Jersey and Wisconsin stand accused of conspiring to vandalize synagogues, the Georgia cell with plotting an assassination. Charging documents for the cell based in Delaware and Maryland allege that the men discussed firing at random into a pro-gun rally in Virginia last January.
Nazzaro’s claim that the group had no formal member list, and even no formal existence, allowed a tolerance for “double-patching” – or dual membership in another white supremacist group. The Base was designed as an umbrella that could draw in people who had been radicalized in other groups, like Atomwaffen Division.
Richard Tobin, 18, one of those arrested in relation to the desecration of synagogues in Michigan and Wisconsin, was a member of both neo-Nazi accelerationist groups.
Volkskrieger: The Australian connection
Late in the group’s active history, it began recruiting in a country whose history of indigenous dispossession, white supremacy and xenophobic politics is on a parallel track with the U.S.
In late October 2019, members of The Base’s vetting committee received a bundle of identically formatted PDF documents from five Australian men.
A sixth, who operated under the alias “Volkskrieger” within The Base and elsewhere online, appointed as Australian recruiter for the group in 2019, had acted as a virtual local franchisee in bringing these recruits forward for the group.
The group had had several Australian applicants and had accepted some as members. But until late 2019, according to audio recordings, none had been as dedicated as Volkskrieger, who according to open source materials and internal communications obtained by the SPLC, lives in the vicinity of Perth, Western Australia.
After Spear and other Base members were banned from Gab after mid-2019, Volkskrieger was one of the few left to carry the group’s banner. On Gab, in May 2019, he posted Western Australia-specific advertising for the group, advising potential recruits to contact the group’s main email address.
In June, he posted photographs showing that design being used in a poster run in Perth’s Hyde Park. At this time, as revealed in a voice chat with The Base’s leadership recorded on Oct. 20, 2019, he was the only standing Australian member of the group.
A post showing promotional materials for The Base.
Apart from poster runs, Volkskrieger claimed to have used more active methods, and his existing network of white supremacists in Australia, to find recruits.
In chats on the encrypted messaging application, Wire, Volkskrieger claimed on May 28, 2019, that he was “meeting some West Aussie NatSoc [National Socialist] group today, if all goes well I might be able to send some guys our way.”
Volkskrieger discussed recruiting efforts in this May 2019 post.
Eventually, this dedication to the cause was rewarded. In the October voice chat, Nazzaro, other senior leaders, and Volkskrieger discussed his new role as The Base’s lead Australian recruiter.
In that conversation, Nazzaro told Volkskrieger, “You’ve been really solid for us," specifying that “You’ve postered, you’ve produced some content for us, you’ve postered on Gab.”
Nazzaro expressed dissatisfaction with the progress made in Australia up until that point, saying, “We’ve had 7 Australians come and go,” and “We’ve probably had a dozen apply,” adding, “We think there is potential there,” and “We need someone to lead the charge.”
Later in the call, Volkskrieger mentions collaborating on a promo image for an Australian Base cell with with “Matthias,” a California-based admin of an accelerationist website, FascistForge.
He also said that at that time, there were new Australian members in FascistForge who might be recruited for The Base.
In the call, the men agreed to establish a separate email account for the Australian cell, and Nazzaro and others coached Volkskrieger on methods of email vetting.
Within two months, Volkskrieger presented the group with five applicants who were ready for vetting calls, along with his own commentary on the quality of the recruits and their pathways into neo-Nazi accelerationism.
The applications and vetting interviews reviewed by Hatewatch showed that the men who applied for Base membership came from other white nationalist groups, after growing dissatisfied with those groups’ unwillingness to embrace more extreme tactics.
The Base and the Lads: Connecting with Australian white supremacists
In the May voice call, Volkskrieger describes his involvement in a series of groups on Australia’s fractious far right.
He explains that he needs to conceal his Base membership from his comrades in the Society of Western Australian Nationalists (SWAN), which does not allow dual patching.
SWAN is a regional breakaway from the Lads Society, a national network of white nationalists founded in 2017 by prominent local far right activists previously associated with the anti-Muslim United Patriots Front, including Blair Cottrell, Neil Erikson and Thomas Sewell.
They were soon joined by other local extremists including Jacob Hersant, who was previously a core member of local neo-Nazi accelerationist group, Antipodean Resistance.
Like Atomwaffen Division, Antipodean Resistance was formed by members of the IronMarch forum, which helped shaped the development of accelerationist ideology and aesthetics.
Between Volkskrieger and the five applicants he brought to The Base, four claimed some involvement in Lads Society or SWAN, including one who claimed to be the Queensland chapter leader. Of the remaining two, one came to group via FascistForge, and another heard about the group on the “Goy Talk” website, one of a number of online hubs for the alt-right.
Lads Society has conducted a range of activities – both public and private – aimed at building a cadre of white nationalist activists and injecting their talking points into mainstream Australian political debate.
Away from the public eye, the group has operated underground “fight clubs” and maintains clubhouses in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
In 2018, reporters revealed the Lads Society’s involvement in significant far-right infiltration of the youth branch of the conservative National Party.
But the group – and especially Cottrell and Sewell, its figureheads – have also sought the media limelight with rallies and stunts.
In 2019, the group staged an anti-Black, anti-Muslim protest on St. Kilda Beach, in the midst of a national moral panic about the supposed activities of “African gangs” in the city of Melbourne.
Cottrell’s, Erikson’s and Sewell’s previous organization, the United Patriots Front, was formed in 2014 during anti-Muslim mosque protests in the Australian city of Bendigo.
In 2015, members of the group beheaded a dummy mocked up as a crude representation of an ISIS fighter, spilling fake blood on the ground outside Bendigo’s City Hall.
That stunt led to Cottrell, Erikson and another UPF member, Christopher Shortis, being convicted and fined for inciting contempt for Muslims.
After Tarrant’s March 2019 massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, Sewell admitted on Facebook that he had contacted Tarrant about joining Lads Society at its formation in 2017. Responding to other members’ concerns that Tarrant’s attack may have been a “false flag” operation, Sewell said that Tarrant had in fact “been on the scene for a while.”
Other reports showed that Tarrant had been a devoted online follower of United Patriots Front, and Cottrell in particular. When Cottrell and Sewell livestreamed their ecstatic reaction to the election of Donald Trump in November 2016, Tarrant reportedly wrote a series of comments on the group’s Facebook wall.
“Knocked it out of the park tonight Blair,” he wrote. "Your retorts had me smiling, nodding, cheering and often laughing.
He added, “Never believed we would have a true leader of the nationalist movement in Australia, and especially not so early in the game”.
Like Tarrant, many young men would be drawn into the orbit of Sewell and Cottrell, the Lads Society and other groups that overlapped with or broke away from the group.
Andy Fleming, an antifascist researcher who recently identified a number of members of the group, estimated that the Lads Society has around 80 core members, with scores more in the group’s orbit.
The politician
In one vetting interview obtained by Hatewatch, a panel of Base members, including Nazzaro, tested a recruit Hatewatch has identified as a former political candidate for the right-wing populist Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (PHON). Hatewatch determined this using internal materials from The Base, material on the public record and other materials provided by Australian antifascist group the White Rose Society,
His efforts to join The Base suggest that the barriers between anti-immigrant right-wing populist electoral parties and accelerationist terror networks are permeable, and that progress through the stages of radicalization can happen very quickly.
In the interview, a necessary step for new recruits, Dean Smith, under the aliases “Will” and “WLL2PWER,” described himself as a Western Australian member of PHON who had been a candidate for the party in 2019.
He said that he had signed up for a five-year membership in 2019, and that he was still a member at the time of his vetting interview with American members of The Base.
The interview took place more than a month after the first member of The Base was arrested. Richard Tobin, 18, of New Jersey, made international news after he was charged on Nov. 19, 2019, with federal hate crimes for allegedly orchestrating the vandalism of synagogues hundreds of miles away, in the midwestern states of Michigan and Wisconsin.
This did not deter Smith from seeking access to the network. When he was asked about his political background, he replied that he had “been a member of One Nation for almost a year now. I signed up with them in May when I was still believing in the political system.”
“Being around that sort of party structure and political structure in Australia, I sort of lost faith in the whole thing. And then I decided take more direct action, and then got pushed on to the Society of West Australian Nationalists (SWAN),” he said.
His loss of faith in PHON, he said, was not just due to their slow progress. He told The Base interviewers, “They’re all race mixers and it turns my gut upside down.”
But he added that “(SWAN’s) progress is too slow on things like demographic change and how the political atmosphere is turning towards our race,” referencing the“Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that mass immigration is a deliberate effort to wipe out the white race.
Smith also described how between joining PHON and SWAN, he had run as a candidate.
“So I was a member of One Nation maybe two months, three months prior (to joining SWAN). Because I actually ran for the last Federal Election in Australia as a candidate of One Nation.”
He also describes how he “became more and more extreme and passionate about my views and it was harder and harder to speak out about it for fear of losing my political career.”
“And I thought, well, I have to sell myself to the devil to have a career in politics, or I can leave my career in politics and live an authentic life. And I think that, you know, leaving politics behind is a much better option than going for it,” he said.
In his written application, submitted prior to the interview, Smith described his ideology as “NatSoc (National Socialism) ubermenschnihilism,” a reference to the concept of the “übermensch,” or superman, derived from the work of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Though Nietzsche’s work has been drawn on by a diverse range of thinkers and political traditions, fascists from the 20th-century European interwar period on have made simplified and selective readings of Nietzsche, focusing on his antisemitism, his opposition to democracy and feminism, his anticipation of a superior human type, and his affinity for a warrior ethos to claim him as their own.
The commonalities between Smith’s online, far-right persona and his comments as a candidate helped reveal his identity.
Prior to the leak of the interview, Smith had been identified as WLL2PWR by the White Rose Society, an Australian antifascist group. Their materials were provided exclusively to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The reference to the philosopher Nietzsche links Smith’s username to his far-right YouTube channel and Twitter account, both of which are also run under the WLL2PWER moniker.
On the Twitter account, Smith has repeatedly expressed disgust at diversity initiatives in a local technical college.
Smith’s social media accounts make frequent references to Nietzsche and Nietzschean philosophy. In Smith’s candidate profile in the Albany Advertiser on May 10, 2019, he said he would like to meet “Friedrich Nietzsche, Jesus Christ, Julius Caesar, and Thomas Jefferson.”
In his written application to The Base, Smith says he is in his early 20s, and has skills including “welding experience, and heavy machinery”.
In his interview, he says he is 23.
A profile with The West Australian on May 12, 2019, said that Smith had “entered the political contest only a few weeks ago,” and that while “politics is a new venture for him, he believes in his party’s policies.”
In media interviews and in his PHON candidate profile earlier in the year, Smith said he was 22 and he worked as a laborer.
Smith made other connections between his WLL2PWR persona and PHON in 2019.
On April 14, 2019, on his WLL2PWR YouTube channel, Smith interviewed fellow PHON WA candidate Tyler Walsh, and gave direct hints in the interview that he was an active PHON member in Western Australia.
At one point he asked Walsh, “What inspired you to put your hand up being such a young man like myself to go out there and basically face the world?”
Looking forward to a PHON function in the Perth area, Smith said, “And we’ve got the meeting tomorrow don’t we at Vic Park, is that right?”
He also described the process of joining the party and his interactions with Sheila Mundy, another PHON candidate and influential Western Australian party member.
“I actually personally met Sheila. I think it was February. I’d just got involved, I’d just put my membership down for One Nation and then she rang me up three days afterwards and said, ‘Oh hey do you want to catch up and talk about … your local issues,’ and I’m like, ‘What is this, people actually care!’”
Dean Smith did not respond to repeated requests for comment from the SPLC.
Tyler Walsh, who at the time of reporting was again running for PHON, this time for a seat in the Western Australian parliament, confirmed in email responses to questions that the "wll2pwr" YouTube account belonged to Dean Smith. Walsh denied any close or ongoing relationship with Smith.
"I have not communicated with Mr. Smith since the 2019 Australian Federal Election," Smith wrote. "I am unfamiliar with his personal political positions and beliefs apart from Mr. Smith being supportive of Pauline Hanson's One Nation."
Walsh also said that “[Smith] has not had any involvement that I am aware of with Pauline Hanson's One Nation since the most recent federal election.”
Rinaldo Nazzaro did not immediately respond to requests from the SPLC on his efforts to recruit members in Australia.
After Smith left the vetting call, the Australian white nationalist who had sponsored his application remarked to vetting team members that Smith “has a mustache that is pretty distinguished.” Smith sported a thick mustache in media and publicity photos during his campaign.
According to internal sources, Smith discontinued his application, choosing to remain with SWAN, who do not allow double-patching.
Exporting racism and violence
At the point in time that the chats, vetting calls and social media records obtained by the SPLC end, The Base had recruited two Australians, was preparing to vet two more and had interviewed another two, including Smith, who withdrew their applications for their own reasons.
The SPLC also documented two other Australian men who were fully fledged members who left. In October 2019, Rinaldo Nazzaro asserted that a dozen in total had applied.
The Base’s success in attracting recruits from Australia, Europe and elsewhere suggests that an accelerationist politics founded on racism, a preparedness for violence, and a contempt for pluralist democracy can be exported, even if its founding tenets are rooted in the history of U.S. white supremacist movements.
This is not the first time that white supremacist ideas and movements have made their way from the United States to Australia. In the 1980s, groups such as National Action and the Australian Nationalist Movement formed under the influence of William Luther Pierce’s white supremacist novel “The Turner Diaries.”
Under the leadership of Jack van Tongeren, the Australian Nationalist Movement commenced its activities in 1987 in a similar fashion to The Base’s Volkskrieger, and in the same city: They plastered hundreds of anti-Asian, anti-immigrant posters around Perth.
Then, between 1987 and 1989, members firebombed six Chinese restaurants in the city, carried out a series of warehouse thefts in order to fortify their headquarters, seriously assaulted an anti-racist activist and finally murdered one of their own members they suspected of being a police informant.
Van Tongeren and other members of the group received long prison sentences in 1990. After his release in 2002, van Tongeren committed arson attacks on three more Chinese restaurants in 2004.
In the 1990s, the Southern Cross Hammerskins were formed in Australia as a chapter of the U.S.-originated white power group.
After BBC TV’s “Panorama” showed how The Base expanded its network to Europe, Hatewatch can reveal that it also had success in expanding to a society whose settler history parallels the U.S.: Australia. Recorded vetting interviews, application documents, social media posts and The Base’s own internal chats show that the network, led by Rinaldo Nazzaro (who operated online under the pseudonyms “Norman Spear” and “Roman Wolf”), had some success in exporting both its ideology and organizing model to Europe and settler cultures such as Australia.
The materials show that the group made significant inroads into parts of Australia’s far right, and in particular the Lads Society, a white nationalist group that once invited Brenton Tarrant, the Australian who murdered 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019, to be a member.
They also show how local Australian far-right activists acted as virtual franchisees for The Base, finding fresh recruits in the ranks of the Lads Society, a local white nationalist network, and also vetting a man who had previously run for election to Australia’s parliament as a member of a right-wing populist party.
‘Norman Spear’: Rinaldo Nazzaro and the beginning of The Base
In late 2017, under the alias “Norman Spear,” Rinaldo Nazzaro began promoting an idea with a long history among white supremacists: that the Pacific Northwest could secede from the United States to create a white ethnostate.
The proposal had previously been associated with white supremacist Harold Covington and his Northwest Front organization. Before him, another influential advocate was Christian Identity preacher and Aryan Nations founder Richard Girnt Butler, who until 2000 occupied a compound at Hayden Lake, Idaho. Butler was associated so closely with the idea of a white ethnostate in the Pacific Northwest that it is sometimes known as the “Butler Plan.”
Covington, who died in 2018, had a long history in the organized white power movement. By the time of his death, however, his Northwest Front organization was largely inactive, and Covington’s main activity in the movement was writing propagandistic speculative fiction, some of which touched on race war and the establishment of an ethnostate in the Pacific Northwest.
In his 2007 novel “The Brigade,” Covington set out a scenario in which a guerrilla group, the Northwest Volunteer Army, is carrying out insurgent warfare against the administration of President Hillary Clinton, who has commenced a plan of “white genocide.” In the novel, the Northwest Volunteer Army’s motto is “Ex Gladio Libertas,” Latin for “Freedom comes from the sword,” which The Base used as its own motto in online recruiting materials.
In podcasts and social media posts at that time, “Norman Spear” praised Covington and the “Butler Plan.” He did so in an episode of Lone Wolf Radio, a podcast hosted by British white nationalist Chris White, in December 2017. White introduced Nazzaro as a Northwest Front activist and “northwest migrant.”
Also in late 2017, “Spear” released a series of videos spelling out a theory of “revolutionary struggle” with the stated aim of “coercing the system and making it capitulate to political demands.” Topics included “lone wolf operations,” “leaderless resistance” and guerrilla warfare. He advocated for guerrilla struggle wherein “lone wolves” would carry out acts of violence as a form of “propaganda of the deed,” and an above-ground leadership would negotiate with “the system” to achieve its military goals.
The argument was for acts of terrorism, which would bring about a condition of “siege” as the state imposed unsustainable condition of martial law, at which time it would negotiate with guerrilla leaders. “Victory isn't inherently dependent on physically defeating the enemy,” “Spear” said in the video. “Guerrillas win if they don’t lose,” and the central aim was to carve off sovereign territory from the state.
“Spear” thus synthesized the Butler Plan with some of the ideas for destabilizing and defeating liberal democracy put forth by the neo-Nazi who had the most influence on the accelerationist movement, James Mason.
Nazzaro began advertising The Base in July 2018 and trying to recruit members. He was also active in the “Read SIEGE” group on white power-friendly “alt-tech” platform, Gab. The group was dedicated to promoting the work and ideas of neo-Nazi author Mason, who advocated terrorism as a means to creating a white ethnostate. In December 2018, through a Delaware LLC called “Base Global,” Nazzaro bought three 10-acre blocks of undeveloped land in remote Ferry County, Washington, but maintained his principal residence in Russia.
Spear also posted messages from imprisoned members of the accelerationist neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division (AWD), one of the groups that sought to put Mason’s ideas into practice.
In fall 2018, early recruiting material for The Base stopped short of explicitly advocating for terrorism. Sources who spoke online and in person with Nazzaro, however, say Nazzaro told The Base’s inner circle that in truth, The Base was an “accelerationist” project: Its real purpose was to hasten the collapse of American liberal democracy into civil war, and bring about a white ethnostate in at least part of its current national territory. In encrypted chats, members discussed the methods and efficacy of tactics such as sabotaging infrastructure and the finer points of guerrilla warfare.
The Base and accelerationism
In most of the recorded vetting interviews obtained by SPLC, standard questions for potential recruits included whether they considered themselves national socialists; whether or not they had read “SIEGE,” the compilation of Mason’s newsletters that became the central text of the accelerationist movement; and whether they believed “a political solution” could remedy the perceived genocide of white people.
The ideal recruit would answer, respectively, yes, yes and no.
The final question, on the feasibility of “political solutions” to so-called “white genocide,” marks a defining characteristic of The Base, and the accelerationist ideology to which it adhered.
The false belief that a conspiracy exists to carry out “white genocide,” or to effect a “great replacement” of white Americans through mass immigration, is widely prevalent across the racist far right, from outright neo-Nazis, to so-called “identitarian” groups, to influential Republican officials. Many white nationalists hold, again falsely, that this “genocide” or “replacement” has been orchestrated by Jews.
As Hatewatch’s primer on accelerationism details, this belief has allowed white power movements to portray their own violence as a matter of racial self-defense. White power movements are necessarily violent because their various political projects, such as the creation of a white ethnostate, cannot be achieved without violence. But before accelerationism gained momentum, many groups and individuals sought to downplay or obfuscate this violence.
In 2016 and 2017, some did this successfully enough to reach the threshold of mainstream politics.
During and immediately after Donald Trump’s successful run for president in 2016, many so-called “alt-right” groups – which included white nationalists with such conspiracy-minded racist beliefs – felt emboldened by the victory of a politician who they considered to share at least some of their values, and who they felt they had played a part in electing.
Some were enthused enough to promote their beliefs more openly, using tactics associated with mainstream forms of political advocacy in liberal democracies. Throughout 2016 and 2017, groups such as Identity Evropa (now called the American Identity Movement) openly participated in rallies, street protests, campus recruitment and publicity campaigns. Many had platforms on mainstream social media services.
Others decided that the “political solution” was a false promise. Some of them came to believe that pluralist, multiracial democracy was headed for inevitable collapse, and that they should help it on its way by joining one of the burgeoning neo-Nazi accelerationist groups.
Atomwaffen Division was the template for accelerationist neo-Nazism. Following the ideas of Mason, whom they adopted as a kind of spiritual patriarch, Atomwaffen advocated terroristic violence as a political tool. Having abandoned electoral politics and the mainstream political process as futile, “optics” were of little concern.
Just as accelerationism was gaining influence, Nazzaro appeared on social media in the guise of Norman Spear.
Before The Base was formed, Nazzaro raised his profile in far-right spaces online by claiming he had served in the military and had experience with intelligence work. While The Base was operating, Nazzaro reiterated its emphasis on action. He demanded that members engage in training and meet-ups, and that potential recruits detail any skills that they could bring to the group or teach other members.
This practical orientation, his embrace of ideas important to survivalist and apocalyptic prepper movements, the openness of the network to members of other organizations, and his adoption of Covington’s project of a white ethnostate in the Pacific Northwest made Nazzaro’s offering distinct from Atomwaffen Division and other emerging accelerationist outfits.
The Base struggled early on after leaks from its chats on an app called Riot were exposed by an antifascist group operating in the Pacific Northwest. The group gradually reestablished protocols for internal communication and vetting for new members using the encrypted messaging platform, Wire.
Its brand – though drawing heavily on U.S.-specific white supremacist movements – proved highly exportable to white power individuals and groups around the world.
The Base eventually recruited members in Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia and Australia.
Eventually, some members of the group began acting on the hate The Base fostered. Former members in New Jersey and Wisconsin stand accused of conspiring to vandalize synagogues, the Georgia cell with plotting an assassination. Charging documents for the cell based in Delaware and Maryland allege that the men discussed firing at random into a pro-gun rally in Virginia last January.
Nazzaro’s claim that the group had no formal member list, and even no formal existence, allowed a tolerance for “double-patching” – or dual membership in another white supremacist group. The Base was designed as an umbrella that could draw in people who had been radicalized in other groups, like Atomwaffen Division.
Richard Tobin, 18, one of those arrested in relation to the desecration of synagogues in Michigan and Wisconsin, was a member of both neo-Nazi accelerationist groups.
Volkskrieger: The Australian connection
Late in the group’s active history, it began recruiting in a country whose history of indigenous dispossession, white supremacy and xenophobic politics is on a parallel track with the U.S.
In late October 2019, members of The Base’s vetting committee received a bundle of identically formatted PDF documents from five Australian men.
A sixth, who operated under the alias “Volkskrieger” within The Base and elsewhere online, appointed as Australian recruiter for the group in 2019, had acted as a virtual local franchisee in bringing these recruits forward for the group.
The group had had several Australian applicants and had accepted some as members. But until late 2019, according to audio recordings, none had been as dedicated as Volkskrieger, who according to open source materials and internal communications obtained by the SPLC, lives in the vicinity of Perth, Western Australia.
After Spear and other Base members were banned from Gab after mid-2019, Volkskrieger was one of the few left to carry the group’s banner. On Gab, in May 2019, he posted Western Australia-specific advertising for the group, advising potential recruits to contact the group’s main email address.
In June, he posted photographs showing that design being used in a poster run in Perth’s Hyde Park. At this time, as revealed in a voice chat with The Base’s leadership recorded on Oct. 20, 2019, he was the only standing Australian member of the group.
A post showing promotional materials for The Base.
Apart from poster runs, Volkskrieger claimed to have used more active methods, and his existing network of white supremacists in Australia, to find recruits.
In chats on the encrypted messaging application, Wire, Volkskrieger claimed on May 28, 2019, that he was “meeting some West Aussie NatSoc [National Socialist] group today, if all goes well I might be able to send some guys our way.”
Volkskrieger discussed recruiting efforts in this May 2019 post.
Eventually, this dedication to the cause was rewarded. In the October voice chat, Nazzaro, other senior leaders, and Volkskrieger discussed his new role as The Base’s lead Australian recruiter.
In that conversation, Nazzaro told Volkskrieger, “You’ve been really solid for us," specifying that “You’ve postered, you’ve produced some content for us, you’ve postered on Gab.”
Nazzaro expressed dissatisfaction with the progress made in Australia up until that point, saying, “We’ve had 7 Australians come and go,” and “We’ve probably had a dozen apply,” adding, “We think there is potential there,” and “We need someone to lead the charge.”
Later in the call, Volkskrieger mentions collaborating on a promo image for an Australian Base cell with with “Matthias,” a California-based admin of an accelerationist website, FascistForge.
He also said that at that time, there were new Australian members in FascistForge who might be recruited for The Base.
In the call, the men agreed to establish a separate email account for the Australian cell, and Nazzaro and others coached Volkskrieger on methods of email vetting.
Within two months, Volkskrieger presented the group with five applicants who were ready for vetting calls, along with his own commentary on the quality of the recruits and their pathways into neo-Nazi accelerationism.
The applications and vetting interviews reviewed by Hatewatch showed that the men who applied for Base membership came from other white nationalist groups, after growing dissatisfied with those groups’ unwillingness to embrace more extreme tactics.
The Base and the Lads: Connecting with Australian white supremacists
In the May voice call, Volkskrieger describes his involvement in a series of groups on Australia’s fractious far right.
He explains that he needs to conceal his Base membership from his comrades in the Society of Western Australian Nationalists (SWAN), which does not allow dual patching.
SWAN is a regional breakaway from the Lads Society, a national network of white nationalists founded in 2017 by prominent local far right activists previously associated with the anti-Muslim United Patriots Front, including Blair Cottrell, Neil Erikson and Thomas Sewell.
They were soon joined by other local extremists including Jacob Hersant, who was previously a core member of local neo-Nazi accelerationist group, Antipodean Resistance.
Like Atomwaffen Division, Antipodean Resistance was formed by members of the IronMarch forum, which helped shaped the development of accelerationist ideology and aesthetics.
Between Volkskrieger and the five applicants he brought to The Base, four claimed some involvement in Lads Society or SWAN, including one who claimed to be the Queensland chapter leader. Of the remaining two, one came to group via FascistForge, and another heard about the group on the “Goy Talk” website, one of a number of online hubs for the alt-right.
Lads Society has conducted a range of activities – both public and private – aimed at building a cadre of white nationalist activists and injecting their talking points into mainstream Australian political debate.
Away from the public eye, the group has operated underground “fight clubs” and maintains clubhouses in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
In 2018, reporters revealed the Lads Society’s involvement in significant far-right infiltration of the youth branch of the conservative National Party.
But the group – and especially Cottrell and Sewell, its figureheads – have also sought the media limelight with rallies and stunts.
In 2019, the group staged an anti-Black, anti-Muslim protest on St. Kilda Beach, in the midst of a national moral panic about the supposed activities of “African gangs” in the city of Melbourne.
Cottrell’s, Erikson’s and Sewell’s previous organization, the United Patriots Front, was formed in 2014 during anti-Muslim mosque protests in the Australian city of Bendigo.
In 2015, members of the group beheaded a dummy mocked up as a crude representation of an ISIS fighter, spilling fake blood on the ground outside Bendigo’s City Hall.
That stunt led to Cottrell, Erikson and another UPF member, Christopher Shortis, being convicted and fined for inciting contempt for Muslims.
After Tarrant’s March 2019 massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, Sewell admitted on Facebook that he had contacted Tarrant about joining Lads Society at its formation in 2017. Responding to other members’ concerns that Tarrant’s attack may have been a “false flag” operation, Sewell said that Tarrant had in fact “been on the scene for a while.”
Other reports showed that Tarrant had been a devoted online follower of United Patriots Front, and Cottrell in particular. When Cottrell and Sewell livestreamed their ecstatic reaction to the election of Donald Trump in November 2016, Tarrant reportedly wrote a series of comments on the group’s Facebook wall.
“Knocked it out of the park tonight Blair,” he wrote. "Your retorts had me smiling, nodding, cheering and often laughing.
He added, “Never believed we would have a true leader of the nationalist movement in Australia, and especially not so early in the game”.
Like Tarrant, many young men would be drawn into the orbit of Sewell and Cottrell, the Lads Society and other groups that overlapped with or broke away from the group.
Andy Fleming, an antifascist researcher who recently identified a number of members of the group, estimated that the Lads Society has around 80 core members, with scores more in the group’s orbit.
The politician
In one vetting interview obtained by Hatewatch, a panel of Base members, including Nazzaro, tested a recruit Hatewatch has identified as a former political candidate for the right-wing populist Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (PHON). Hatewatch determined this using internal materials from The Base, material on the public record and other materials provided by Australian antifascist group the White Rose Society,
His efforts to join The Base suggest that the barriers between anti-immigrant right-wing populist electoral parties and accelerationist terror networks are permeable, and that progress through the stages of radicalization can happen very quickly.
In the interview, a necessary step for new recruits, Dean Smith, under the aliases “Will” and “WLL2PWER,” described himself as a Western Australian member of PHON who had been a candidate for the party in 2019.
He said that he had signed up for a five-year membership in 2019, and that he was still a member at the time of his vetting interview with American members of The Base.
The interview took place more than a month after the first member of The Base was arrested. Richard Tobin, 18, of New Jersey, made international news after he was charged on Nov. 19, 2019, with federal hate crimes for allegedly orchestrating the vandalism of synagogues hundreds of miles away, in the midwestern states of Michigan and Wisconsin.
This did not deter Smith from seeking access to the network. When he was asked about his political background, he replied that he had “been a member of One Nation for almost a year now. I signed up with them in May when I was still believing in the political system.”
“Being around that sort of party structure and political structure in Australia, I sort of lost faith in the whole thing. And then I decided take more direct action, and then got pushed on to the Society of West Australian Nationalists (SWAN),” he said.
His loss of faith in PHON, he said, was not just due to their slow progress. He told The Base interviewers, “They’re all race mixers and it turns my gut upside down.”
But he added that “(SWAN’s) progress is too slow on things like demographic change and how the political atmosphere is turning towards our race,” referencing the“Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that mass immigration is a deliberate effort to wipe out the white race.
Smith also described how between joining PHON and SWAN, he had run as a candidate.
“So I was a member of One Nation maybe two months, three months prior (to joining SWAN). Because I actually ran for the last Federal Election in Australia as a candidate of One Nation.”
He also describes how he “became more and more extreme and passionate about my views and it was harder and harder to speak out about it for fear of losing my political career.”
“And I thought, well, I have to sell myself to the devil to have a career in politics, or I can leave my career in politics and live an authentic life. And I think that, you know, leaving politics behind is a much better option than going for it,” he said.
In his written application, submitted prior to the interview, Smith described his ideology as “NatSoc (National Socialism) ubermenschnihilism,” a reference to the concept of the “übermensch,” or superman, derived from the work of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Though Nietzsche’s work has been drawn on by a diverse range of thinkers and political traditions, fascists from the 20th-century European interwar period on have made simplified and selective readings of Nietzsche, focusing on his antisemitism, his opposition to democracy and feminism, his anticipation of a superior human type, and his affinity for a warrior ethos to claim him as their own.
The commonalities between Smith’s online, far-right persona and his comments as a candidate helped reveal his identity.
Prior to the leak of the interview, Smith had been identified as WLL2PWR by the White Rose Society, an Australian antifascist group. Their materials were provided exclusively to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The reference to the philosopher Nietzsche links Smith’s username to his far-right YouTube channel and Twitter account, both of which are also run under the WLL2PWER moniker.
On the Twitter account, Smith has repeatedly expressed disgust at diversity initiatives in a local technical college.
Smith’s social media accounts make frequent references to Nietzsche and Nietzschean philosophy. In Smith’s candidate profile in the Albany Advertiser on May 10, 2019, he said he would like to meet “Friedrich Nietzsche, Jesus Christ, Julius Caesar, and Thomas Jefferson.”
In his written application to The Base, Smith says he is in his early 20s, and has skills including “welding experience, and heavy machinery”.
In his interview, he says he is 23.
A profile with The West Australian on May 12, 2019, said that Smith had “entered the political contest only a few weeks ago,” and that while “politics is a new venture for him, he believes in his party’s policies.”
In media interviews and in his PHON candidate profile earlier in the year, Smith said he was 22 and he worked as a laborer.
Smith made other connections between his WLL2PWR persona and PHON in 2019.
On April 14, 2019, on his WLL2PWR YouTube channel, Smith interviewed fellow PHON WA candidate Tyler Walsh, and gave direct hints in the interview that he was an active PHON member in Western Australia.
At one point he asked Walsh, “What inspired you to put your hand up being such a young man like myself to go out there and basically face the world?”
Looking forward to a PHON function in the Perth area, Smith said, “And we’ve got the meeting tomorrow don’t we at Vic Park, is that right?”
He also described the process of joining the party and his interactions with Sheila Mundy, another PHON candidate and influential Western Australian party member.
“I actually personally met Sheila. I think it was February. I’d just got involved, I’d just put my membership down for One Nation and then she rang me up three days afterwards and said, ‘Oh hey do you want to catch up and talk about … your local issues,’ and I’m like, ‘What is this, people actually care!’”
Dean Smith did not respond to repeated requests for comment from the SPLC.
Tyler Walsh, who at the time of reporting was again running for PHON, this time for a seat in the Western Australian parliament, confirmed in email responses to questions that the "wll2pwr" YouTube account belonged to Dean Smith. Walsh denied any close or ongoing relationship with Smith.
"I have not communicated with Mr. Smith since the 2019 Australian Federal Election," Smith wrote. "I am unfamiliar with his personal political positions and beliefs apart from Mr. Smith being supportive of Pauline Hanson's One Nation."
Walsh also said that “[Smith] has not had any involvement that I am aware of with Pauline Hanson's One Nation since the most recent federal election.”
Rinaldo Nazzaro did not immediately respond to requests from the SPLC on his efforts to recruit members in Australia.
After Smith left the vetting call, the Australian white nationalist who had sponsored his application remarked to vetting team members that Smith “has a mustache that is pretty distinguished.” Smith sported a thick mustache in media and publicity photos during his campaign.
According to internal sources, Smith discontinued his application, choosing to remain with SWAN, who do not allow double-patching.
Exporting racism and violence
At the point in time that the chats, vetting calls and social media records obtained by the SPLC end, The Base had recruited two Australians, was preparing to vet two more and had interviewed another two, including Smith, who withdrew their applications for their own reasons.
The SPLC also documented two other Australian men who were fully fledged members who left. In October 2019, Rinaldo Nazzaro asserted that a dozen in total had applied.
The Base’s success in attracting recruits from Australia, Europe and elsewhere suggests that an accelerationist politics founded on racism, a preparedness for violence, and a contempt for pluralist democracy can be exported, even if its founding tenets are rooted in the history of U.S. white supremacist movements.
This is not the first time that white supremacist ideas and movements have made their way from the United States to Australia. In the 1980s, groups such as National Action and the Australian Nationalist Movement formed under the influence of William Luther Pierce’s white supremacist novel “The Turner Diaries.”
Under the leadership of Jack van Tongeren, the Australian Nationalist Movement commenced its activities in 1987 in a similar fashion to The Base’s Volkskrieger, and in the same city: They plastered hundreds of anti-Asian, anti-immigrant posters around Perth.
Then, between 1987 and 1989, members firebombed six Chinese restaurants in the city, carried out a series of warehouse thefts in order to fortify their headquarters, seriously assaulted an anti-racist activist and finally murdered one of their own members they suspected of being a police informant.
Van Tongeren and other members of the group received long prison sentences in 1990. After his release in 2002, van Tongeren committed arson attacks on three more Chinese restaurants in 2004.
In the 1990s, the Southern Cross Hammerskins were formed in Australia as a chapter of the U.S.-originated white power group.
Archive
- Registrado
- 21 de Dic, 2018
Interesting read
Andrew Casarez court hearing transcript (August 20, 2020)
Andrew Casarez (aka "Vic Mackey) court hearing transcript from August 20, 2020, in Sacramento Superior Court.
www.documentcloud.org
Hesa
kiwifarms.net
- Registrado
- 19 de Mar, 2019
I'm not sure if this is the right thread for this idiot as he floated around all kinds of groups a few years ago. I'll delete it if it's not the right thread.
‘Antifa hunter’ gets 3 years for online racist threats
A Florida man who called himself “the Antifa hunter” as he waged an online campaign to terrorize and harass those who opposed his white supremacist ideology was sentenced on Monday to more than three years in prison.
Daniel McMahon, 32, of Brandon, Florida, pleaded guilty in April to using social media to threaten a Black activist to deter the man from running for office in Charlottesville, Virginia. McMahon also admitted that he threatened to sexually assault the young autistic daughter of a North Carolina woman who protested against white nationalists.
A federal judge in Virginia sentenced McMahon to three years and five months in prison. McMahon declined an opportunity to make a public statement beforehand, but he heard from his victims during the hearing, which was conducted remotely by video conference.
In a written statement read aloud by a court employee, the North Carolina woman said McMahon methodically “cultivated a culture of fear and chaos” in her community of anti-racist activists.
“There is seemingly nothing that Daniel McMahon will not do in the name of white supremacy,” she wrote.
Most of McMahon’s cyberstalking victims knew him as “Jack Corbin.” Under that pseudonym, he posted social media messages intended to deter a Black activist, Don Gathers, from running for a seat on Charlottesville’s city council. He called himself “the Antifa hunter,” a reference to anti-fascist, leftist militant activists who confront or resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations.
McMahon accused Gathers of “attacking” a white supremacist group member who later pleaded guilty to attacking counterprotesters at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. McMahon called for using a “diversity of tactics” against Gathers, which authorities interpreted as a euphemism for violence.
The FBI notified Gathers of McMahon’s threats. Instead of kicking off his campaign at a January 2019 event, Gathers announced he wouldn’t run for office. “Hail Victory!” McMahon wrote in response.
On Monday, Gathers told McMahon that he prays he may find a way to forgive him some day.
“But today is not that day,” Gathers added. “I despise all that you and others like you represent.”
After McMahon’s arrest, the North Carolina woman called federal prosecutors to report that he had threatened her and her daughter, a severely autistic minor, over Facebook and tried to extort personal information from her about another counterprotester.
The woman said McMahon sent her hundreds of threatening messages, including some detailing how he would sexually assault her daughter. He posted the girl’s photo on a racist social media platform, she added. He also did a Google search for the term “sex with autistic girls” a day before his arrest, according to a court filing.
“Only a deeply disturbed individual would do this, a monster,” the woman wrote. “I will never feel completely safe about my child again.”
Prosecutors say the contents of McMahon’s computer revealed his obsession with racially motivated violence and hatred of Black people, including images of white supremacist James Fields plowing his car into a crowd of Charlottesville counterprotesters, killing a woman.
A folder with a racist slur for a title contained photos of dead Black men, including a lynching victim. McMahon also saved graphic images of Trayvon Martin after the Black teenager was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch member in Florida in 2012, according to prosecutors.
Other folders on McMahon’s computer contained personal information about his targets, including photos of their children. One target was a woman whose child had died, a tragedy that McMahon tried to exploit to extort information from her about antifascists, prosecutors said.
The FBI found 278 files with the word “owned” in the title, signaling that he had harassed that victim to his satisfaction. All told, prosecutors said, McMahon compiled 35 gigabytes of data that he could “weaponize” against his targets.
McMahon pleaded guilty to cyberstalking and bias-motivated interference with a candidate for elective office. U.S. District Judge Norman Moon wasn’t bound by sentencing guidelines that called for a prison term ranging from two years and nine months to three years and five months.
Moon accepted prosecutors’ recommendation to impose the maximum under the guidelines, saying McMahon’s conduct was “as egregious as it could be.”
“It may not have been physically violent, but it couldn’t have been more violent to one’s mental health or feeling of well-being,” the judge said.
Defense attorney Jessica Phillips asked the judge to sentence McMahon to a year and a half in prison and give him credit for time served since his Sept. 18, 2019, arrest.
Phillips said her client made “bad choices” but is remorseful and took full responsibility for his crimes. She attributed McMahon’s behavior to an untreated mental health disorder, alcohol abuse and a “lack of social stability.”
“While he did not realize the impact of his words at the time, he certainly does now,” Phillips wrote in a court filing.
Gathers told McMahon that “a new day, a different day, is coming” for those who share his “pitiful views.”
“Like it or not, Black lives matter,” he said.
‘Antifa hunter’ gets 3 years for online racist threats
A Florida man who called himself “the Antifa hunter” as he waged an online campaign to terrorize and harass those who opposed his white supremacist ideology was sentenced on Monday to more than three years in prison.
Daniel McMahon, 32, of Brandon, Florida, pleaded guilty in April to using social media to threaten a Black activist to deter the man from running for office in Charlottesville, Virginia. McMahon also admitted that he threatened to sexually assault the young autistic daughter of a North Carolina woman who protested against white nationalists.
A federal judge in Virginia sentenced McMahon to three years and five months in prison. McMahon declined an opportunity to make a public statement beforehand, but he heard from his victims during the hearing, which was conducted remotely by video conference.
In a written statement read aloud by a court employee, the North Carolina woman said McMahon methodically “cultivated a culture of fear and chaos” in her community of anti-racist activists.
“There is seemingly nothing that Daniel McMahon will not do in the name of white supremacy,” she wrote.
Most of McMahon’s cyberstalking victims knew him as “Jack Corbin.” Under that pseudonym, he posted social media messages intended to deter a Black activist, Don Gathers, from running for a seat on Charlottesville’s city council. He called himself “the Antifa hunter,” a reference to anti-fascist, leftist militant activists who confront or resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations.
McMahon accused Gathers of “attacking” a white supremacist group member who later pleaded guilty to attacking counterprotesters at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. McMahon called for using a “diversity of tactics” against Gathers, which authorities interpreted as a euphemism for violence.
The FBI notified Gathers of McMahon’s threats. Instead of kicking off his campaign at a January 2019 event, Gathers announced he wouldn’t run for office. “Hail Victory!” McMahon wrote in response.
On Monday, Gathers told McMahon that he prays he may find a way to forgive him some day.
“But today is not that day,” Gathers added. “I despise all that you and others like you represent.”
After McMahon’s arrest, the North Carolina woman called federal prosecutors to report that he had threatened her and her daughter, a severely autistic minor, over Facebook and tried to extort personal information from her about another counterprotester.
The woman said McMahon sent her hundreds of threatening messages, including some detailing how he would sexually assault her daughter. He posted the girl’s photo on a racist social media platform, she added. He also did a Google search for the term “sex with autistic girls” a day before his arrest, according to a court filing.
“Only a deeply disturbed individual would do this, a monster,” the woman wrote. “I will never feel completely safe about my child again.”
Prosecutors say the contents of McMahon’s computer revealed his obsession with racially motivated violence and hatred of Black people, including images of white supremacist James Fields plowing his car into a crowd of Charlottesville counterprotesters, killing a woman.
A folder with a racist slur for a title contained photos of dead Black men, including a lynching victim. McMahon also saved graphic images of Trayvon Martin after the Black teenager was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch member in Florida in 2012, according to prosecutors.
Other folders on McMahon’s computer contained personal information about his targets, including photos of their children. One target was a woman whose child had died, a tragedy that McMahon tried to exploit to extort information from her about antifascists, prosecutors said.
The FBI found 278 files with the word “owned” in the title, signaling that he had harassed that victim to his satisfaction. All told, prosecutors said, McMahon compiled 35 gigabytes of data that he could “weaponize” against his targets.
McMahon pleaded guilty to cyberstalking and bias-motivated interference with a candidate for elective office. U.S. District Judge Norman Moon wasn’t bound by sentencing guidelines that called for a prison term ranging from two years and nine months to three years and five months.
Moon accepted prosecutors’ recommendation to impose the maximum under the guidelines, saying McMahon’s conduct was “as egregious as it could be.”
“It may not have been physically violent, but it couldn’t have been more violent to one’s mental health or feeling of well-being,” the judge said.
Defense attorney Jessica Phillips asked the judge to sentence McMahon to a year and a half in prison and give him credit for time served since his Sept. 18, 2019, arrest.
Phillips said her client made “bad choices” but is remorseful and took full responsibility for his crimes. She attributed McMahon’s behavior to an untreated mental health disorder, alcohol abuse and a “lack of social stability.”
“While he did not realize the impact of his words at the time, he certainly does now,” Phillips wrote in a court filing.
Gathers told McMahon that “a new day, a different day, is coming” for those who share his “pitiful views.”
“Like it or not, Black lives matter,” he said.
- Registrado
- 1 de Sep, 2019
If he's a lone wolf, then he gets his own thread via Articles and Happenings.
Última edición:
- Registrado
- 28 de Dic, 2014
Imagine fighting degeneracy by threatening to molest a child.
He'd be a lolcow but he'd be starting out his career "inactive" which is kind of pointless.
Also sentencing memorandum by USA:
And by the defendant:
And the docket:
There is, somewhat perturbingly, a sealed statement from someone claiming to be a victim in the case:
62 | Oral Order; The Court today received by email a statement from a purported victim of Defendant. As the Probation Officer would have done in the normal course, the Probation Officer shall file an amended pre-sentence report under seal attaching the statement, and shall do so no later than 12:00 p.m. on August 28, 2020. Counsel for the Government or Defendant will be permitted to raise any arguments concerning relevance or timeliness of such statement at or before the sentencing hearing. Entered by Senior Judge Norman K. Moon on 8/27/20. This Notice of Electronic Filing is the Official ORDER for this entry. No document is attached.(hnw) |
Última edición:
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Ulrich Wessel fiel, doch tausend neu erstehen!
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
- Registrado
- 17 de Mar, 2019
LolInteresting read
Andrew Casarez court hearing transcript (August 20, 2020)
Andrew Casarez (aka "Vic Mackey) court hearing transcript from August 20, 2020, in Sacramento Superior Court.www.documentcloud.org
Nice of the judge to openly state that he feels that people who speak out against Jews shouldn't be allowed to defend themselves.
Hesa
kiwifarms.net
- Registrado
- 19 de Mar, 2019
Another one caught with child porn.
PuniPuniFag
kiwifarms.net
- Registrado
- 11 de Sep, 2016
Now it's gone. Hmmmmmm....
- Registrado
- 1 de Sep, 2019
The account was deactivated, so she has 30 days to start everything back up.
But should nothing happen by then, it's KO'ed for good. But I managed to get what I could archived not long before this happened.
KiwiNexion
kiwifarms.net
- Registrado
- 13 de Jul, 2020
National Socialist Order (AWD rebranding) stickering random Colorado shops: https://www.instagram.com/p/CEstAmXM5ZD/
Última edición:
- Registrado
- 1 de Sep, 2019
KiwiNexion
kiwifarms.net
- Registrado
- 13 de Jul, 2020
"In broad daylight at 12:45pm"
Ryan Hatfield is sad to be missing out on the AWD prison meetup apparently.
YeahBitchImaFascist
kiwifarms.net
- Registrado
- 7 de Sep, 2020
Última edición por un moderador:
- Registrado
- 4 de Ene, 2020
I was just wondering that when I saw that picture. I thought, "If I ever made some sort of manifesto video in front of a flag the FIRST THING I'd do is google 'how to unwrinkle folded flag'. "
Hesa
kiwifarms.net
- Registrado
- 19 de Mar, 2019
A neo-Nazi threatened Jewish and Black journalists. He faces five years in prison.
In late January, Johnny Roman Garza traveled to a Jewish journalist’s home in Arizona, crept up to a bedroom window and then glued a poster to the glass.
“Your Actions Have Consequences,” it said. “You have been visited by your local Nazis.”
On Tuesday, Garza, 21, of Queen Creek, Ariz., pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court in Seattle to multiple charges related to threatening numerous journalists as part of a plot by a group of neo-Nazis, the Associated Press first reported. He faces up to five years in prison at his December sentencing.
Garza and three co-defendants were members of the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group started in 2015 and born from a now-defunct white-supremacist online forum. The group called police to various journalists’ homes and offices and dropped off threatening fliers, prosecutors said, and also made threats to employees of the Anti-Defamation League.
The neo-Nazi faction has repeatedly targeted journalists, prosecutors said. Around the same time that Garza and his co-conspirators were arrested, John Cameron Denton, an alleged Atomwaffen leader, was charged with conspiring to call police to the home and office of a ProPublica reporter. In July, John William Kirby Kelley admitted to “swatting” journalists, by calling in false threats to send SWAT teams.
According to the plea agreement, Garza first got involved with his alleged co-conspirators — Kaleb J. Cole, Cameron Brandon Shea and Taylor Ashley Parker-Dipeppe — in November, when Shea invited the group to a chatroom to discuss a plot to threaten journalists. Shea called it “Operation Erste Saule,” a German term meaning “first pillar,” which Shea used to refer to the news media, according to court documents.
In a message to the group chat, Shea said they would target “journalists houses and media buildings to send a clear message that we too have leverage over them. … The goal of course, is to erode the media/state air of legitimacy by showing people that they have names and addresses, and hopefully embolden others to act as well.”
Garza was given the task of coordinating efforts to deliver the threatening fliers to journalists’ homes and workplaces, the plea agreement said. Garza told the group that he tracked down “a leader of an ‘association of Black journalists’” in Arizona.
In the following months, the group accrued the addresses of Jewish journalists and activists and came up with a plan to mail them threatening fliers and deliver them in-person to their homes.
Cole designed three posters. One said, “Two can play at this game,” with swastikas between each word, skeletons holding weapons and the words, “Death to pigs.” Other posters read: “Our patience has its limits” and “We are watching. We are no one. We are everyone. We know where you live. Do not f--- with us.”
On Jan. 25, Garza and another individual, who is not named in court documents, drove to an apartment complex in Phoenix, where a member of the Arizona Association of Black Journalists lived. Garza attempted to affix a poster to the journalist’s home but, according to the plea agreement, could not find a suitable spot for the poster, so he left.
After returning to the car, he and his companion drove to the home of Mala Blomquist, editor at Arizona Jewish Life magazine. Blomquist told the Arizona Republic that Garza secured the poster to a bedroom window. The poster had an illustration of a skeleton holding a molotov cocktail, she said, and included Blomquist’s personal information at the bottom.
“Garza intended that the poster cause the editor fear of property damage and personal harm,” the plea agreement said. “The editor did in fact become fearful upon discovering the poster.”
The same day, other members of the group dropped off or mailed the threatening fliers to people in Florida and Washington state, according to the complaint. The FBI had been monitoring the group and warned many of the targets that they would probably get a threatening flier. The group members were arrested on Feb. 26.
On Tuesday, Garza pleaded guilty to counts of conspiracy to mail threatening communications, conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to interfere with a federally protected activity, according to court documents. Garza’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
His co-defendants still face trial, but court days have been delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic, the AP reported.
Washington Post
In late January, Johnny Roman Garza traveled to a Jewish journalist’s home in Arizona, crept up to a bedroom window and then glued a poster to the glass.
“Your Actions Have Consequences,” it said. “You have been visited by your local Nazis.”
On Tuesday, Garza, 21, of Queen Creek, Ariz., pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court in Seattle to multiple charges related to threatening numerous journalists as part of a plot by a group of neo-Nazis, the Associated Press first reported. He faces up to five years in prison at his December sentencing.
Garza and three co-defendants were members of the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group started in 2015 and born from a now-defunct white-supremacist online forum. The group called police to various journalists’ homes and offices and dropped off threatening fliers, prosecutors said, and also made threats to employees of the Anti-Defamation League.
The neo-Nazi faction has repeatedly targeted journalists, prosecutors said. Around the same time that Garza and his co-conspirators were arrested, John Cameron Denton, an alleged Atomwaffen leader, was charged with conspiring to call police to the home and office of a ProPublica reporter. In July, John William Kirby Kelley admitted to “swatting” journalists, by calling in false threats to send SWAT teams.
According to the plea agreement, Garza first got involved with his alleged co-conspirators — Kaleb J. Cole, Cameron Brandon Shea and Taylor Ashley Parker-Dipeppe — in November, when Shea invited the group to a chatroom to discuss a plot to threaten journalists. Shea called it “Operation Erste Saule,” a German term meaning “first pillar,” which Shea used to refer to the news media, according to court documents.
In a message to the group chat, Shea said they would target “journalists houses and media buildings to send a clear message that we too have leverage over them. … The goal of course, is to erode the media/state air of legitimacy by showing people that they have names and addresses, and hopefully embolden others to act as well.”
Garza was given the task of coordinating efforts to deliver the threatening fliers to journalists’ homes and workplaces, the plea agreement said. Garza told the group that he tracked down “a leader of an ‘association of Black journalists’” in Arizona.
In the following months, the group accrued the addresses of Jewish journalists and activists and came up with a plan to mail them threatening fliers and deliver them in-person to their homes.
Cole designed three posters. One said, “Two can play at this game,” with swastikas between each word, skeletons holding weapons and the words, “Death to pigs.” Other posters read: “Our patience has its limits” and “We are watching. We are no one. We are everyone. We know where you live. Do not f--- with us.”
On Jan. 25, Garza and another individual, who is not named in court documents, drove to an apartment complex in Phoenix, where a member of the Arizona Association of Black Journalists lived. Garza attempted to affix a poster to the journalist’s home but, according to the plea agreement, could not find a suitable spot for the poster, so he left.
After returning to the car, he and his companion drove to the home of Mala Blomquist, editor at Arizona Jewish Life magazine. Blomquist told the Arizona Republic that Garza secured the poster to a bedroom window. The poster had an illustration of a skeleton holding a molotov cocktail, she said, and included Blomquist’s personal information at the bottom.
“Garza intended that the poster cause the editor fear of property damage and personal harm,” the plea agreement said. “The editor did in fact become fearful upon discovering the poster.”
The same day, other members of the group dropped off or mailed the threatening fliers to people in Florida and Washington state, according to the complaint. The FBI had been monitoring the group and warned many of the targets that they would probably get a threatening flier. The group members were arrested on Feb. 26.
On Tuesday, Garza pleaded guilty to counts of conspiracy to mail threatening communications, conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to interfere with a federally protected activity, according to court documents. Garza’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
His co-defendants still face trial, but court days have been delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic, the AP reported.
Washington Post
- Registrado
- 17 de Dic, 2019
Garza