Angry Planet - The Rise of The Teenage Terrorist

Episode Date: May 29, 2020

The neo-Nazi movement can’t keep it together. After a series of high profile outings, murders, conspiracy charges, and other assorted run-ins with authorities, the leadership of the Neo-Nazi movement has gotten younger, more online, and more extreme.Here to walk us through this today is Zaron Burnett. Burnett is an investigative journalist and longform features writer based in Los Angeles. He covers culture, politics, race, and other perplexing mysteries for MEL Magazine. You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Watching that scene, it was the strangest thing because I literally felt badly for the Nazis. That's how pathetic they were, is that they had failed so hard and they looked so badly beaten down by life. and they were clearly victims of all sorts of things, and yet here they were trying to demand that they be respected as this master race and all so forth.

You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. The neo-Nazi movement can't keep it together. After a series of high-profile outings, murders, conspiracy charges, and other assorted run-ins with authority, the leadership of the neo-Nazi movement has gotten younger, more online, and more extreme. Here to walk us through this today is Aaron Burnett.

Burnett is an investigative journalist and long-form features writer based in Los Angeles. He covers culture, politics, race, and other perplexing mysteries for Mel magazine. And if you're not reading Mel magazine, you should be. It's one of the best publications online today. He recently wrote about Neo-Nazis for Mel in an article called Young Shitlin. how teen edge lords became the new leaders of the neo-Nazi movement. Sir, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you guys for having me.

All right, so let's talk about the news here before we kind of, you know, broaden out. Tell us who Commander is and how old he is. Commander is a 13-year-old Estonian boy who lives on an island called Serer Sarima. I may be pronounced an ending correctly, but it's an officer. island of about 13,276 people. And on this island, from this island, he has been, or was, running a 15-nation online hate group called Furikrieg Division, which in German, Furikid means fire. And they were a neo-Nazi terror cell primarily, I guess would be the best way of describing them.

And this 13-year-old had been running it for the last two years, and he had a number of other teenagers and a number of adults who were all members of this terror cell. And some of them and some of their close associates have had run-ins with the law in America since being members of this group. And they were one of the leading edges of young neo-Nazi movement, but they also are only one of the many. And so some of the members of Turecrieg were also members of other very well-known neo-Nazi groups such as Adam Woffin and the base.

But Purecrieg was, I'd say different in the sense that it was another effort to spread hate online, but specifically with the energy and ethos of teenagers. So it was very much edge lord style comedy, but beyond that and beyond the keyboard warriorism we've seen in the past, these were kids who wanted to take their hate into the real world. And so they were using online chat groups and telegram and signal to have encrypted chats

when they can make plans for meetups and bigger plans, unlike in the past where the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists were much more satisfied with making public shows, hanging up banners over freeway, overpasses, and so forth. And that would be a good show. Now these kids want to make a good show that is much more violent, much bigger,

and their plans are much bigger. And with all of the VIM and Bigger women to expect from teenagers trying to impress each other. Okay, so something that stands out for me from all of that is that he's 13, but he's been running it for two years, which means he started when he was 11? Either 11 or 12 because of how the years overlap. We don't know exactly because the European authorities did not release his identity. All we know is his age. And based on when it was started, he could conceivably have been 12 and be 13 now.

So, but either 11 or 12 when he started. And how did he get caught? What's he being charged with? What are all those details? Well, as far as him getting caught, he was part of a, there was a, basically international, not manhunt, but there has been a lot of international pressure over the last six months to track down these hate groups, especially the neo-Nazis ones, because they've been responsible for a growing number of murders.

We'll get into that with Adam Woff and later. But there has been more real world consequences. So the European authorities have been putting pressure just like the American authorities, and they were able to track down this kid. And Commander was busted for making a number of terroristic threats. And for instance, one point he was joking about how it would be great to unleash a dirty bomb in London. And once you start joking about that online, you draw the attention of authority. So it was only a matter of time until they could find him.

Once they found him, he was arrested. The charges and the case itself are very much under wraps due to his age. So it's very difficult to get particulars to what he's being charged. charged with and what crimes will be likely convicted of. Right, but the, I mean, the headline here is that 13-year-old leads neo-Nazi movement online. Did they, you said that adults were following him, were they aware of his age? No, that's the weird thing is because the predominant amount of interactions occur online, they were unaware that this was a 13-year-old boy.

And he was, like, you know, very smart, I guess you might say, to hide his age because it's doubtful that they would have listened to him or been as driven by him as they were, knowing that he was 13. But he was able to pose as if he was somewhere in his young 20s and he was a very ambitious, hateful young man. And there are other teenagers that he was interacting with ones we can get to later, such as Zephyr Garrison, who was a 17-year-old and is also a young leader in the neo-Nazi movement. and in their interactions, you can watch their chats and their forum exchanges. You can see this teenage energy, but they would chastise each other. But he very much took the stance of like an older guy, even though he was the youngest member of the group. So it was a shock to a lot of the members of Furrow Creek to find out that they were being run by a 13-year-old boy. And I would imagine something to their embarrassment, but they have not as much spread that as much as they were just surprised.

and then there's always in the neo-Nazi spaces and the white supremacy spaces online, the assumption that some of the members that people are interacting with are feds or FBI agents, what have you. So there's often a matter of how do you get vetted, and that's difficult when you are exchanging with each other information online.

He had passed through some level of betting. So somebody must have either known him or at least was able to speak for him or on his behalf. But other than that, almost none of the members said they'd ever had any faith. to face interactions with him, even the UK members. Do we have any sense of how he got himself into a leadership position and what it was about him that people found charismatic online?

It seems to be that teenagers have an advantage here because much like the zealousness of a convert, teenagers have the zealusiness of the new acolyte, which is somebody who very much believes in the mission, but also due to their, you know, I don't want to say their biologna. but because they're teenagers, because they're adolescents, and they have all of the perspectives that adolescence allows,

they don't necessarily think about what there is to lose. They don't, as some of the older Nazis and bigots would think about, oh, I have a house, I have a wife, I have these things to lose. So they have, they're free of societal concerns at that level. At the other level, personally, they're looking to impress. They're looking for acceptance. They're looking for some level of engagement with their fellow bigots. And they view this as not a competition or a competitive realm,

but there very much is that teenage spirit of wanting to one up each other and to be like, oh, man, that was sick what you did and hyping each other up. So as somebody who did both that, but then also was very focused on how to build the movement and was in contact with some of the older leaders of the movement, asking them what their secrets were. This is something you see amongst a lot of the teenagers is this reliance on the older guys. to learn from them to see not where they made mistakes per se. I don't know if they would describe it as that,

but basically to learn from their lesson and to further what they were doing and to go to places that they could never take the movement. Very much that the mantle they're taking on right now is a new dawning for the movement. The pandemic and the lockdown of coronavirus providing them a new context, and they've decided this is a great springboard

to bring about what they refer to as the Bugaloo, which is in reference to the end of times, becoming race war, the collapse of Western democracy and civilization, that would allow them to establish an ethno state in a line with their values. So this idea of the siege, which came about from James Mason, who was kind of a neo-Nazi, I don't want to give him too much credit as a mastermind, but basically he is a leading philosopher of the movement. He was the one who advocated for lone wolves being the thrust of where the neo-Nazi movement can gain its strength, and that With a nimbleness, they would be able to both spread terror, but then also have a certain amount of plausible deniability.

So this whole triangulation of goals that come together between they have an older, an elder who has given them a playbook, that they are now trying to enact as lone wolves, but with loose confederation, and then learning from the neo-Nazis who were middle-aged, who they view as not being able to get to the promised land of whatever hateful kingdom they want to reach. And this has led them to have like an energy that we haven't seen in a while. Although their numbers have been shrinking and the FBI has been putting pressure on them, they are still rallying around this sense of not being just wounded, but they don't mind that they are being arrested and people are being convicted of crimes and looking at five years and 10 years stretches of time behind bars,

they see that as not something to be afraid of because they are teenagers. They don't really have the fear of the loss of time that some of the older men do. So a lot of the things that have kept the neo-Nazi movement in check are no longer in place for these teenagers. And then when you add in a charismatic leader like commander, who by his choice of Nol Degger, you can tell he thinks much of himself in his leadership position. here is somebody who wants to seize the reins of power and has a lot of designs for what he would do

and is not encumbered by a lot of the previous obstacles the neo-Nazi leaders have. So it is not a perfect storm, but it is very much a triangulation of a lot of thrust and not seem to come together the way that they are now for these teenagers. I want to go over some recent history and make some things crystal clear. So we talk about the neo-Nazi movement. I want to be explicit that like there are, while dangerous and frightening, they are, there's a bunch of different groups. They don't all necessarily feel the same way about the different goals and tactics. And there is infighting, right?

It's not like a mass organized movement, first of all. Yes, it is an interesting patchwork of ideologies. The organizing principle, obviously, is racism and a, a white supremacy model, but there is infighting. For instance, we know that Russia is considered a last great hope for white ethno-state dreams, right? And that has been something that has come up with previous generations. David Duke has talked about it. But at Charlottesville, they were chanting.

Russia is our friend. This is something that we know to be an organizing principle. But even in that area, we still see some of the neo-Nazis from America go to the Ukraine, and they want to fight for the Azov Battalion against the pro-Russian separatists. And then we also see white nationalists from America go to Russia and try to basically, you know, ingratiate themselves with the powers of being in Russia

as much as that's possible. So even in the Russian theater, we're seeing that they're taking different sides. So they can't all get on the same page. They can't all figure out what would be in their best interest. And they seem to be in certain instances, as in Ukraine, fighting each other. But for the most part, we're starting to see,

I would say, more of a coordination amongst the online youth, because they don't seem to have the allegiances to the previous alignments, and they are now looking at it for something of more of a network idea. There's much more of a model of previous terror groups, to be quite honest. They took a lot of big page from Al-Qaeda. The group, the base, is nicknamed that. because al-Qaeda means the base, so they play, if you will, on the idea of the base, which is basically individual terror cells operating with a similar ethos,

but loosely aligned with a grand strategized goal and then some coordination. So we're starting to see that. I don't know how you would frame that as cooperation, but they're definitely recognizing that that is the model for right now in terms of, like, asymmetrical warfare that they're engaging. You just lit on something. I think it's very important. And I know that Kevin just perked up as well and is making sure that I asked the right follow-up questions.

Fascism is kind of a fuzzy ideology. It's adaptable. It can be incorporated into a lot of different things. And you just made this connection that I think is very, that should be very clear and is very explicit. When you look at somebody like Devin Arthur's, who we'll talk about, that there's something appealing about both like Nazi like neo-fascist movements

in America and radical Islam specifically like ISIS and Al Qaeda they both they both appeal to angry young men right and one group has inspired and ISIS I would say has directly inspired

this new group in America right? Yes there's the nickname online of calling them white ISIS and although it started as a joke or as like a comparative, it actually is very applicable because that's how they view themselves. They are taking a model from the power structure and organizational model of ISIS and al-Qaeda,

where you have a small cadre of elders who they respect as having the vision and having the grand model, but then when it comes down to it, the younger men are the ones implementing it on the ground, and they're doing it in these loose confederated models of terror cells. and they find that that allows them to escape prosecution, persecution, what have you, which is that basically if they feel that one group is taken down,

they can have plausible deniability that, oh, I don't really know them. Like, we may have exchanged some chat or whatever, but we don't have any plans. And there isn't a direct connection. So their power is by pretending to be smaller than they are, in a sense, or in a sense hiding behind this lone wolf idea. So that way when the media has the narrative of, oh, this is a mentally disturbed young man with a gun, this is a lone wolf, they can play right into that. But amongst them, they know, even when the media reports that, that that's a win for them, that they get that same message and it sounds like a W. So they keep even just like ISIS have perverted the media narrative amongst their own followers that what could appear to be a loss is actually a win.

Speaking of losses and elders, I want to get some recent history out of the way because I think that it's important to understand like what happened the last few years that kind of paved the way for this younger generation. So give me a little bit more about Mason and siege culture and why it's important to all of this. Like who is this person that is then it's not just James Mason comes up in a lot of real, weird places online, right? Like, if you, if you find an online extremist movement, you're probably going to see a copy of siege, some talk of James Mason, and, like, Ted Kaczynski's manifesto.

Like, I can almost guarantee I'm always going to see those things, no matter the ideology. And they all kind of come from the same place of 80s, I can say separation ideology. So, because of Ted Kaczynski, it was man against the world. and the modern technological world with James Mason, its man against the system or the world as system. He viewed the America and Western democracy as basically a failed project,

and he advocated for total war against the system. Now, meanwhile, this is a 67-year-old man who lives in Denver, lives in public housing, and relies on the beneficence of a soup kitchen for his night, dinner. He is somebody who lives only because of the system, but he would also, I imagine, pervert that and turn it into him helping bring down the system and helping, like, you know, take resources from it. He doesn't view that as a hypocrisy. And there he sits in Denver, in his Section 8 housing, and young men from the movement, primarily from Adam Woffin recently,

have been going to him for ideological instruction. And he does that based on the book he wrote in the 80s called siege, which advocates that lone wolf ideology I was talking about earlier, but also for the overthrow of the American state and the creation of an ethno state. And this is now somewhat coalesced into a dream of the Pacific Northwest as the beachhead for this movement. So they can force people, force good whites to move to the Northwest. That's kind of where it is right now. Now, James Mason has been happy to pose in neo-Nazi uniforms with teenage boys and young men all around him and to become this abuncular figure of the online hate movements. But at the same time, he's been smart enough to constantly distance himself

because he has spent time behind bars. He spent 30 days behind bars for taking pictures of a 15-year-old girl who he claims her husband brought to him to take photos of, but no matter what he claims, that's still child pornography. So here he is a child pornographer who already knows what it is, how easily that his previous charges can be used against him. So although the Adam Woffon youth and the other neo-Nazis of America will go to him and for leadership,

and they will claim him as their mastermind, he himself has to constantly distance himself. And most recently said when Adam Woffin, when the Devon Arthur's, which will get into shooting happened in Tampa, it put a bad look. But then there's been more recently murders, also from that same organization, And so he has distanced himself from Furikrieg, from Adam Woffin, from the base,

from all of the young neo-Nazi movements because he wants to return to the idea of what he advocated, which is this lone wolf idea, which is that they should hide in the shadows, they should hide in, they don't need to organize, they don't need to make a big public face. We've seen this also in Charlottesville where the uniform of neo-Nazis has changed. You no longer see the flight jackets and combat boots. Now you see the khakis and the shirt. the nice shirts and the tiki torches. So they have understood how to brand differently.

James Mason, to his credit, I guess, as one of the elders also sees this and has been able to navigate these spaces rather well and has been kind of pushing for a decentralized organization and everybody has switched over to his model. And there is a novel called The Turner Diaries that puts forth this dream of how to get there. And it's between Siege and the Turner Diaries, they have a playbook for where they want to go. So he, in a sense, is kind of like the El Ron Hubbard of a hateful Scientology movement and is revered as such. But he doesn't necessarily want the credit because he knows that the feds are looking at all of them right now. So he's playing two games, which is he's trying to keep the respect of the young while at the same time dodging any pressure from the authorities

because he, as the elder, is afraid of what it means to be locked up. And yet he can't really show that fear with the young, so he has to make it seem like a smart thing that he's acting as fearful as he is. So I think that Mason, you know, if they really considered this guy as their leader, I think they would be disappointed. But rather, easily, he's able to charm people because he recognizes how to send contextual messages on two levels at once. So he can, much like a lot of the neo-Nazis, constantly turn a loss into a win, he can turn prosecution into persecution. He can turn anything to his benefit, no matter how much it looks like it should be a negative.

And that's why these young men continue to come to him. All right, we're going to pause here for a break. We'll be back right after this. All right, you are back on with War College. We are talking about young shitlers. Okay. Now, tell me about Matthew Heimbach, the traditional workers' party, and the great cuck boxing, and why it's important to this story. Matthew Heimack.

That guy is a strange one. He came to prominence in 2016 at a Trump rally. He was a chubbing of black woman. He has also organized. He's the leader of the traditional workers party. and it is a neo-Nazi group that is based on the German ideas of the Volk and the people and the worker, and he prides himself on being a man of the people and so forth. I went to a neo-Nazi rally that he held at Sacramento at the state capital,

and it turned into a scene of violence. But the scene itself was rather pathetic. And as I was trapped on the Capitol steps behind the cordon of police on their horses and behind opposite the protesters who were throwing hunks of brick, I was on the Capitol steps with two neo-Nazis, right? It's just me, these two neo-Nazis, and a bunch of

flying water bottles and pieces of rock and brick, and then between the protesters is just the cordon of CHP and sheriffs on horseback, right? Now I'm on the steps of these two neo-Nazis who were there extensively from the traditional workers' party, and one of them

was in a wheelchair and was just a pathetic sight, and his friend, was basically pushing him and taking care of him, and yet they wanted to defiantly stand there and raise their neo-Nazi salutes and so forth. They were eventually attacked and hit with the protest sticks and so forth, or the signs for sticks, rather the sticks for the protest signs. And watching that scene, it was the strangest thing

because I literally felt badly for the Nazis. That's how pathetic they were, is that they had failed so hard, and they looked so badly beaten down by life, and they were clearly victims of all sorts of things, and yet here they were trying to demand that they be respected as this master race and all so forth. Now, Matthew Heimbach is their leader. This pitiful cadre of racists that I witnessed,

he is the one who represents them, and he couldn't represent them any better because he's known for the great cuckboxing, which undid his organization. He was on the arise. He was an ascendant leader. was one of the last of the, I would say, the young somethings before this group of teenagers, we were currently seeing rise to ascendant levels of power in the movement.

He was before them the hope for the movement. And this guy, you know, basically blows his position as that by getting into an affair with, this doesn't even quite make sense to me. He's married. His wife has a stepfather. His wife's stepfather is married to a younger woman who is a woman who is a woman who is roughly the age of the wife and Matthew Heinbach, only a few years older than them.

And I don't know where the mother is for the wife. But in this weird cluster fuck of relationships, Matthew starts having an affair with the stepfather's wife. And then the stepfather and Matthew Heinbach's wife start to be gross suspicious. So then one day

they confront the stepmother, the wife, and they basically tell her, look, we know what's going on. She then promises to help them, to help them basically catch Matthew Heimbach in the act. After saying, like, oh, we haven't been having an affair for a while, she then helps them lay like a honey trap. And Matthew Heimbach steps right into it. Then his wife and his father-in-law, or stepfather-in-law, ostensibly, stand outside of a trailer and watch as he and the stepmother start to get amorous. and the wife sees enough, she runs away, the father, the stepfather gets upset, he confronts Heimbach.

It turns into a violent confrontation where Heimbach actually chokes the guy out, and then he, you know, passes out, apparently, according to the police report. He then, the stepfather comes to later on, he gets angry again, he confronts Heimbach again, all in the same night. He gets choked out again for the second time. Police are called. when the police arrive they, Heimbach is now back at his trailer with his wife, the police go to confront him and

they hear him making what is ostensibly terroristic threats to his wife and telling demanding that she lied to the police. So then they are able to arrest him and they charge him with basically a series of different

charges of abuse, abuse in front of a child and now he is, you know, his star has fallen completely. But online, everybody found this to be absolutely hilarious, the great cuck boxing, they called it, because as you know, in Nazi spaces, and it whites his premises spaces, and an edge lord spaces, cuck is one of the great terms of derision. And here he is literally cucking his stepfather's and, or you know, his wife's stepfather. And it just played so perfectly into so many narratives that are online. But here it was, of course, taking place in a, in a

trailer in southern Indiana. So it played both with stereotypes and with memes and it has become something that he has not been able to overcome. And his star has not only fallen, but I don't think the New York Times will be writing anything about him any time soon. Right. So I have a lot of thoughts and some questions. The first is, like, what is it about Sacramento that just, it's such an anodyne place where such a bizarre political theater happens, but set that aside. I'm wondering, when you're covering Nazis in the field, how do they interact and react to you? Well, that's actually what the pitch was, was originally I was going to go to the Nazi rally and confront, not violently confront, but ask a bunch of Nazis for interviews and then say, why is it that you hate me? I want you to tell me to my face, and I'm going to have some questions about that.

and I couldn't find any Nazis to talk to because the protesters had basically disallowed the Nazis from congregating on the Capitol, and that's why the police were there was also to protect their ability to protest, but it turned into a violent scene, and it's interesting as the Nazis, like the neo-Nazis rather,

they were not violent towards me. They weren't like, you know, and I knew that because I grew up in the South, I've been around a lot of biggest 16 KKK rallies, and usually that's not the point you have to worry about. It's when they're not rallying, that is really the more scary part. Because when they're rallying, yes, there may be some violence,

but generally it'd be as a reaction to violence being done to them. So I was counting on that to be the case, and it pretty much held true. But they were afraid. Their eyes were afraid, their body language was afraid. When I did try to speak with them, when I did get stuck with them up on the Capitol steps, They were terrified and they weren't afraid of me.

They were afraid for themselves. And I think that that's the thing that we forget about them is that primarily their experience of life is fear. And that's what all of this bluster comes from, all this anger comes from, all this rhetoric comes from, as a place of fear. It's no different than jailhouse when a guy tries to get swall so he no longer gets picked on and beaten up

and sexually violated or whatever he is afraid of. He tries to appear scarier and bigger than he. is. And I think that that is the general consensus amongst the neo-Nazis is that these are fearful people who are trying to act tough and trying to act scared. And when you were close to them, it's impossible to miss that. The fear comes off them like an aroma. It's really striking. And I think that more people, if they were aware of this, they might see neo-Nazis differently. And not that we should pity them as victims, but I definitely don't have the, like, there's a lot of rhetoric online about, oh, we need to punch a Nazi. And I think,

that there's merits to be said about that type of non-acceptance of their hatefulness, but at the same time, punching a frightened man is going to do nothing to help him become better. And my goal, ultimately, as a human being, is to help people lead happy lives to become better people. And if that means that I have to, you know, like, be the better person when dealing with a neo-Nazi, then that's what I'm going to do, because I'm hoping that I can convince him to leap behind his fear and to join the human community with the rest of us. And that's always been my goal. So I wasn't personally afraid dealing with neo-Nazis,

but I was definitely struck by how afraid they were of everything. Not me, just everything. So that was my primary takeaway from that rally. It's funny. I was at Unite the Right 2, the second one. And when I saw Jason Kessler, who was one of the organizers, it really struck me like how small and sad and afraid he seemed.

It was such a, it was a much smaller event than the first one. And the entirety, it felt like the entirety of Washington, D.C. turned out to just heckle these guys down the street. Yes, exactly. They've become a theater spectacle of patheticness. And yet, like, people keep acting as if they, and they are definitely a threat to the rest of us. There is nothing to dismiss their violence, but their existence in and of itself is not a frightening thing. They are a really pathetic, like, I don't want to like minimize them to the point that people, like, you know, dismiss them. But they really should be seen differently, in my opinion.

They should be treated as victims of themselves more so than perpetrators that we should be afraid of. And perhaps by seeing them that way, we can minimize their fear. and thus minimize their violence and their anger. Okay, but so with these high profile, like, you know, Jason Kessler gets, he was the one that was spotted. His dad came in and yelled at him while he was on stream, right? So Kessler gets yelled at by his dad. Heimbach is in this, this Mori-povich-like dispute with his relatives. The brand is bad.

You know, they come across is very cringe, is the word that I would use. Is the youth that are stepping into place now, because these stars have kind of fallen, aware of that branding, aware of cringe and interested in putting a different face forward? Well, it's interesting. There is a quote by Danny Colson. He was the former deputy assistant director of the FBI. He was the one who was the lead investigator and the Timothy McVeighbobbings of the the Oklahoma City bombings.

And he's made a lot of comments, and he's been quick to call them, quote, inadequate personalities. He's, at one point, he said that, what was it? Let me see if I can find the quote. Here we go. We all have our own insecurities. There's always something we'd like to be better at,

to be stronger, a better shot, a better dad. But these are things that are more like chronic inadequacies. And he spoke of Timothy McVeigh and said how he'd never succeeded at anything. And then in a further dismissal, he pointed out that McVeigh, who would like to always claim how he'd been invited to join the beret, he'd joined the Green Berets, and he's this big military guy, and he's this soldier and, like, fighting a war.

Colson points out that the guy only lasted one day as a Green Beret invitee, and the reason why is because apparently he had foot troubles that boiled down to a blister, and he was removed from potential. So that's the thing that they're going against, is that they have these people that they venerate, like Timothy McVeigh, who if they really investigated him, they would find that he's not up to their veneration. He's an inadequate symbol.

So the young, they still venerate him, but they don't focus on the man as much as the mission. So I don't know if they are aware that he is, like the failed son that he was, or if they are just more interested in what he did. But they seem to be moving on from ideologies that are based on, veering just these characters and holding them up as the great men of the past. The danger with these teenagers is they want to be the great men of the present. They want to be the great men of the future.

So their ambitions are dangerous. And I don't think, as you pointed out, like with Kessler, with his dad chastising him, I don't think anybody confronting them is going to do anything to divert them from it because it only emboldens them further. And I don't think that giving them hugs is going to keep them from doing it either. but definitely starting from a place of recognizing that these are people with their, you know, basically inadequate personalities, as Colson put it. These are people who aren't able to process the world.

They are living in a detached reality. And I think that we should start from that point and then look at how they affect our reality, but not constantly act as if these are, I don't know the best put it, but like deny them the role of soldier that they want to cast themselves in. like don't treat them as soldiers. Don't treat them. They don't deserve that stolen valor. These are people who couldn't cut that muster.

So they, you know, should be treated as what they are. And I think that in a sense, they would have to be confronted with the reality of that, which is the thing that they constantly tried to deny. It's their fantasy. It's their militaristic cosplay that is their power.

So that's the ground that I would fight them on is their fantasy. Breivik is another really good example of what you're talking about. spent the bulk of his life trying to find somewhere to belong and was rejected by lots of communities. But setting that aside, so what do, is there a coherent ideology here at all? Because it seems like what's going on is angry young men looking for something to attach themselves to and seeking some sort of purity through violence? Yes. that would be an overarching ideology. The other one would be this dream of civilizational end,

the boogaloo, as they call it, is... Accelerationism. Exactly. Accelerationism is a key point. Then there's also, on the approaching horizon, is the use of eco-fascism. You see a lot of talk now about eco-fascism. Matthew Heinbach was one who was really into that.

He was going over to Europe, trying to coordinate with some of the European proto-fascists so that they could, like he was interested in what Orban's doing in Hungary. He was obviously interested in what Putin's doing in Russia. He's trying to connect some of those groups so that they can create a way of taking away the great thrust of the future people looking at, which is how do we live in concert with the planet in these ecologically sound ways? They're like, yeah, why don't we co-op that movement? So if there is a growing ideology, you will see more and more of their presence in environmental movements

and in what they referring to as eco-fascism, which is using the fear of what is happening to the planet to gain control of that and then to deny brown people from coming into America based on the grounds of it's not environmentally sound. So you're going to see what used to be something of a movement of the left be used now as a cudgel on the far right. Right.

Basically, they're looking for the places where people are afraid and disaffected and trying to turn them to this thing, right? They're constantly working with fear. So anytime they see that society rushes up against something that causes them fear, they rush into there and think, how can we weaponize this? They are like, if you think of the market as people seeing a need that people have, and then they go, how can I profit off this? They're very much in the same mind,

but their only profit they're interested in is spreading fear, weaponizing anger and hate, and then feeling some level of strength based off of that. and then this weird fraternity of being on the outside, but by being on the outside, they're actually the vanguard. They're very into the idea of the vanguard. How important do you think this idea of the white ethno state and the Pacific Northwest actually is?

It seems like there's not really a dream. I would say that one of the current political problems in America right now in the world at large is that no one has a dream of. the future that anyone believes? Yes. Everything is just, let's get back to status quo, or I will make it like it was, and that's not going to happen. But no one has a coherent vision of what a good future might be.

And so I'm wondering if this like ethno state thing, is it real or is it just an excuse for them to take their anger out on the world? That's an interesting question. I can't necessarily parse their internal psychologists, the personal psychologists, but as a group ethos, it would seem that it is a false hope, a shining city on the hill kind of idea that they're borrowing from that Reagan-esque idea, but then they just make it all white. But the idea is that it's like future promise land. So it's not something that I don't even, I don't think that they, in their heart of hearts,

really believe that they will live long enough to see it or to. to reach it or to live in its friendly, you know, exclusionary confines. But I think the idea of dying for a glorious struggle is what's appealing. And then having a goal that they can't reach allows them to constantly fail. So there's a psychological protection, a defense mechanism and the idea that, you know, I am but trying to reach this grand goal knowing I will never get there. So any failure is just part of the struggle. So therefore, everything they do has merit, everything they do has value.

Everything they do is heroic. So there is a grandeur and their failure that is apparent in their dream of reaching this place. So I don't even think they really believe in. Now, obviously, there is the state of Jefferson model in Northern California, Oregon. There is the Cascadia dream. There are these outlying ideas that we'll create a white ethno state from these different states and unify them. And I have friends who live, like, you know, in parts of these areas. I have friends in Reading who have to deal with this.

And they say that although it is you will see the flags, you will see this growing ethos, it always still remains a dream, not something that they're trying to achieve, but something that they like to have, something that gives them value and reframes their losses, their struggles, their personal fights. All of their indignities are washed away with this dream of a better place. In the absence of religion, they've had to satisfy themselves with this heaven on earth as a white ethno state that they also won't reach. But that doesn't matter.

Its value to them is in the dream. At least that's how it seems. That's one of the things that always struck me as interesting and perhaps different about the Islamic State is that there was a clear, coherent dream of a caliphate and they, it was awful, but they did implement it in the places that they took over, right?

There was, people were picking up garbage and they had paperwork and, you know, they had all these systems in place for afterwards. It was brutal and a nightmare, but it did exist. They had something that they were trying to build. And it just seems like a lot of what we see now is people just trying to tear things down. Totally. And also, without the mindset of an administrator or an executive, I don't think that even if they gave them the whole state of Idaho, they'd be able to run it.

You know, I don't think that they're thinking in systemic ways. the thinking in reactionary ways. In a reactionary, the problem with being a reactionary is that it's always implied that it's acting against a power system. So if you gave them the keys to power, they've never, I don't think, really considered what that would mean, what they would do. So unlike the ISIS and the caliphate,

they have no blueprint, they have no battle plan, and they have no structures that they want to build and impose on their civilization. They just want to have the idea of civilization. It's advertising far more than actual acquisitional thinking. Whereas the Caliphate, they both have the benefit of having a religion that they've perverted and a dream that they have that they can then actually build in bricks and mortar, whereas I don't think that the neo-Nazis could do that if you gave them all the bricks and mortars they need it.

How do you keep your kids safe online from this shit? That is an interesting question. Now, I don't have children of my own. I do have a nephew and a niece, and I paid attention to what their online engagements are. And, you know, I've been surprised to find, like,

how easy it is to get to these channels, like on YouTube, right? How easy it is to find something through recommended media somewhere else. And it is, I'm not, once again, I'm not going to blame YouTube for this,

but I do find that it is far too easy, and I don't see what the benefit of, like, even if it's just that the not, the Nazis have figured out a way to game these algorithms, then that has to be a game that somebody else is fighting them against. You know, they can't just be like, oh, they game the algorithm. Like, that seems to be the kind of the throwing up the hands thing.

And then there's like, oh, there's some promise or we're going to do more. I would like to see there to be more of a consideration of how serious this threat is and not just that, well, people want to see it. This is what people want to see type of excuse of, like, I can't blame the commerce for giving people what. they want. Well, yes, you can. I mean, like, if, I think that if some of these threats were being done differently, I think if I posted videos about, like, how I want to, like, you know, blow up white people and I'm going to go give instructions, I'm going to do all this stuff, I think it would

be treated a little bit differently than these people. I think that some of these neo-Nazis, like I was saying earlier, they get dismissed for being, like, you know, pathetic and being paranoid and being conspiracy theorists and being, like, all these whack job things. But, but they're really able to effectively use online tools to spread their hate. So obviously they are not bad. So they're not being treated as what they are, which one. But then two, protecting your child from the standpoint of, you know, in your home, you having control of that, I would say it is primarily going to occur through communication,

which is, now obviously the child's not going to tell you everything they're seeing, but through communication, you can track any changes. is you can start to notice changes in their thinking and the questions they're asking, where their thoughts are going. I think that it, I don't want to put it too much where it's incumbent upon parents

to become police of their children's curiosity. I don't mean it that way. But they should engage as much as possible so that way they know what their children are interacting and be asking them questions so that way there isn't so much of a surprise, that it isn't so much of, I never thought my child.

I think people should recognize that it could happen to anyone's child, and that to start from that standpoint, as opposed to the standpoint of, well, my child is good, my child is innocent, my child is this. Those are all invalid statements if you're not really aware of what your child is doing and what they are thinking. You're talking about a symbol. So that's what I'd like to see people move past is these symbolic victories and these symbolic salves of people telling themselves what is. So let's see Nazis for who they are. Let's engage children so we can know what they are experiencing and be able to,

their questions in better ways, be able to track what they're doing so you can, in a sense, head off any like indoctrination that's occurring online rather than just making a presumption that your child is this or your child is that. I think we have to engage with these things on all the possible levels we can by seeing them for what they are and not putting our head in the sand or patting ourselves on the back for having raised children who would never do that or whatever just people tell themselves. I think it's a big lift to ask people to be both appropriately freaked out by online Nazis

and recognize how pathetic they are. And I think that that goes to why they're, maybe not so dangerous, but like why they're able to continue to glide through the culture so easily? That's a really good point. It is known that it is difficult for people to hold two opposing or juxtapose thoughts in their head at the same time and give them equal value and merit. So Nazis have managed to do that because they are either one or the other.

And then if you say that they are the danger that they are, they can point to all the places that they aren't to danger. They're like, oh, you're overreacting. If you don't react well and you say all the, you dismiss them, then they can use that to then. evade detection and evade any type of prosecution and people tracking them. So they are able to use that two definitions against the world in the sense because they refuse to be either one.

And we have to recognize that they are both at the same time. They are both a terrifying threat at the same time as a pathetic existence. And it is that dichotomy, it is that dynamic that gives them their impetus for their violence. is they know that they are a pathetic existence, and thus they become a terrible threat. So if we can see that that is a unified thing, even though it seems quite opposite and disparate as values, it is that dynamic that makes them so violent, so dangerous.

The Devin Arthur's kid who is in Adam Woffin, he was the one who was involved in, and he converted to Islam and then tried to stay a neo-Nazi. So here we have this kid who's like 18 years old. He's looking for affiliation. He lives with the founder of Adam Woffin, Brandon Russell, who is an older, slightly older guy, who's in the military, he's the Florida National Guard.

So he's this strong older brother figure, we'll say. He's got two other roommates who are also neo-Nazis. So they're all on board with the same vision, living together, dreaming about the race war they're going to start. But even in that environment, he still feels that there's not enough. He starts trolling people about Islam, and he starts reading about Islam.

He starts thinking that Islam makes some sense to him. Then he decides to convert. He converts to Islam and tries to unite his two identities of being a neo-Nazi and then being a Salafist Islamic radical. And obviously that is not going to work. So the neo-Nazis reject him. And then he, of course, turns violent. So you see in his dynamic exactly this.

He is this pathetic existence. He is this person looking for acceptance and fraternity and possibly love. and he turned when he's denied that when he is rejected he becomes terribly violent and murders to people he lives with with a with a with a i think it was an automatic rifle in their bedroom in the living room in the bedroom in the bedroom so here he is i mean he's using weapons of war in his own apartment in a tampa apartment and then he goes and he gets caught with police and he starts telling them but he's also mad about what people are doing to his brown brothers and sisters all around the world meaning muslims around the world So you have a person who's living in all sorts of ideologies, all sorts of fantasies, but ultimately is really aware of the fact that his existence to him is sad, pathetic, and unsatisfying. And even when he tries to find the neo-Nazism, it doesn't work. When he tries to find the radical Islam, that doesn't work, none of it works.

And yet, that's exactly what turns him violent and turns of into this monster. So you have to be able to recognize that we don't know how short that road can be. Sometimes it's really quick, sometimes it's really long, but it is all part of one journey. So the pathetic and the monstrous are the same thing. So we can't label it one or the other, but recognize that it is all part and parcel of one dynamic. All right. I think that is a great message to go out on because these issues are complicated. And as the world gets more complicated, we need to be able to start thinking about things in a complicated and nuanced way.

Or we aren't going to make it, folks. Sir, thank you so much for coming onto the show and walking us through these issues. Where can people find your work? Over on Mel magazine, you'll find a lot of my investigative journalism, and the team is great, so I recommend reading not just my work, but anything you find on Mel, because there's a lot of other great investigations being done. It is a one-of-a-kind place on the Internet right now, a refuge. We greatly appreciate that.

We're trying to do our best to provide people some kind of. white in dark times. That's it for this week. War College listeners, War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Kevin Nodell, who's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, please follow us on Twitter. I am at MJG, A-U-L-T. Kevin is at K-J-K-N-O-D-E-L-L. The show is at War underscore College.

We will be back next week with more stories from behind the front lines. Stay safe until then.