Uncover - S13: "White Hot Hate" E5: The ‘Network Administrator’

Episode Date: December 27, 2021

We speak with ‘Roman Wolf,’ the founder of The Base. Who is he really? Why did he start a white supremacist network? And with half a dozen members behind bars, what comes next? For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/white-hot-hate-transcripts-listen-1.6226840

On an evening in early December 2018, the young CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange reportedly dies while on his honeymoon in India. This death is not announced to customers for another month. And when they're told Gerald Cotton is the only person to hold the passwords to their funds, conspiracy theories grow, leaving some to wonder, could Gerald Cotton still be alive? Honeymoon, moving the body, all the missing money. It was like, but what happened? A Death in Cryptoland. Available now on CBC Listen and everywhere you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC Podcast. The following episode contains strongly racist language and descriptions of violence. Please take care when listening. Remember that voice? That's the man going by the alias Roman Wolf. Remember that voice? That's the man going by the alias Roman Wolf. He was vetting Ryan Thorpe, a Winnipeg Free Press reporter who'd gone undercover posing as a white nationalist. And Ryan had secretly recorded the call. We do have a very strong revolutionary and militant current running through the base.

And most of our members are pretty hard core. And that's that. Well, it turns out, Ryan wasn't the only one documenting these conversations. The base had been infiltrated long before him, long before even the FBI. This insider joined the base soon after its inception. And for about a year and a half,

he recorded dozens and dozens of vetting calls with wannabe members from around the world. Just like with Ryan's phone interview, they were almost always led by that one man, Roman Wolfe. Why don't we just start out with kind of a general question. Just tell us a little bit about yourself. So I'm a man in my late 20s. I work pretty normal job. It's a white-collar job I live in an apartment in Saskatchewan. I love going outdoors

Okay, I am 26 years old I live in the west of Germany I I am 26 years old. I live in the west of Germany. I served several months in the German army. We call it Verdienst in Germany. So every... Okay. So my name is Peter, and my parents are Polish. They came here to the U.S. in the 90s.

The town I live in used to be, like, a pretty, like, Polish, Italian, and, like, pretty American town. a pretty like Polish, Italian, and like pretty American town. But like, I've seen this shift from it being majority white to slowly like Section 8 housing coming in, all the Spanish people, the fucking blacks moving in. And now basically my entire main street is like a fucking ghetto. So I'm James from Australia. Just tell us a little bit, actually. I'm a birthright nationalist from birth, Western Australia. I'm a Bethna nationalist from Perth, Western Australia.

I'm a licensed firearm owner. I have a clean record with the police. I have been part of several white nationalist movements. So far, it's only been online, and I'm growing tired of that. Let's get to the point where only armed conflict is going to have any chance of turning this shit back around. There are more than 100 hours of tape leaked to a handful of civil rights and media organizations. CBC was one of them. Okay. How old are you?

I'm 36. They give us a glimpse into how this group recruits, who they consider a good prospect. Okay, what's your ethnicity? Monster race. And crucially, how Roman Wolf thinks and operates. Because not only do we hear the interviews. What is your racial composition?

I'm primarily, like, I'm like 90% white with some Latin blood. It's not Spanish-speaking Latin. It's like a mix of Portuguese and indigenous American kind of thing. Okay. Yeah, I mean, that might be an issue. We also get to listen to the post-vetting debrief. He's not going to align well. Yeah, I mean, first of all, he admitted he's not totally white.

Okay, and then he first of all... 10% I can usually give a leeway, but, you know... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Among the other things, I'm not going to... Exactly, exactly right. He's just, like, way too touchy-feely about Blacks and mistreating Blacks. It's like, he feels guilty about it,

and he hasn't even done anything yet. Roman Wolf clearly appeared to be the guy in charge of the base. He also went by the alias Norman Spear, which is what Vice called him when they first reported on the group in 2018. All evidence pointed to him as the founder of

the Accelerationist Network. There were more than half a dozen base members behind bars in the U.S., but this Roman Wolf was seemingly a free man. So who is he? I'm Michelle Shepard, and this is White Hot Hate, episode five, The Network Administrator.

Yeah, he claims he did some tours overseas as a contractor. The guy's veracity is really in question, and I think that in a lot of the remarks that he's made, he's tried to puff up his own reputation quite a bit. Ollie Winston was among the first journalists to investigate Roman Wolf to try to figure out the offline reality beyond his online persona. And since 2017, 2016 maybe, I've spent a lot of time researching the extreme right wing, both in the United States and abroad elsewhere in the Western world. Far-right extremism has a long, bloody history in the U.S.

But there's one tragedy, 26 years ago, that really pushed this threat into the American consciousness. It was just after 9 o'clock this morning when the building full of federal government employees was hit. The explosion turned the office building to rubble. A daycare full of children was shredded. Whole floors simply disintegrated. On the morning of April 19, 1995, ex-soldier Timothy McVeigh set off a massive truck bomb in downtown Oklahoma City. 168 people were murdered, including 19 children. He and his accomplices carried out that horrendous act of domestic terrorism in 1995 that unfortunately in this country we seem to forget about because it was carried out by

Anglos, by white folk, instead of the people who we've been trained and conditioned over the past 20 years to think as our mortal enemies. That's something that I think about a lot. Once 9-11 happened, the threat posed by the violent far-right fell off the agenda, even though there have since been many much smaller domestic attacks. Ali had devoted much of his reporting to police accountability, but in about 2016, he shifted focus to street demonstrations that were getting more and more vicious. There was a political rally in Southern California in Anaheim where members of the Ku Klux Klan got into an altercation

with a number of anti-fascist counter-protesters. I think at least two or three people went to the hospital for stab wounds. And that was unusual because the Klan hadn't rallied in California in a long time, not publicly, and they hadn't had any sort of bloody clashes like that. There appeared to be a snowball effect, one incident after another. We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! snowball effect, one incident after another. And then gradually during the course of that election season, you'd see in 2016 at these political rallies, you'd see more fistfights, more confrontations.

Then in 2017 came the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The first time in generations that Americans watched racists proudly marching en masse, their faces uncovered, tiki torches burning, seemingly unbothered by law enforcement. While others were covering the rally and its fallout, Ali was paying closer attention to the online activity. Rather than uniting the right, Charlottesville actually fractured the wider movement. And what seemed to follow in its wake was a smaller,

but even more noxious ideology. You started to see this kind of new movement arise out of places like Iron March, 8chan, 4chan, kind of drags of the internet where young folks, they were into the shock, shock and awe thing. They were trying to be edgy, trying to look for a counterculture. They developed their own aesthetic, their memes. It was a really weird, broad movement. But I do think that it was a culture developed by the youth and it was, you know, fed by a broader current of rising xenophobia and white nationalism that came from an older strain of American culture that's always been around in the U.S. and other parts of the West.

Soon, Ali was specifically tracking Adam Waffen Division. They're another neo-Nazi accelerationist group. Their name means atomic weapons in German. You know, you can think of them as like Tim McVeigh's children or Tim McVeigh's little cousins. They have a similar worldview and they, in fact, venerate him along with Charles Manson. As Ali continued his reporting,

he spotted an intriguing photo of two men posted online. They were holding, you know, wearing masks over their face and holding up two flags. One of them was the Atomwaffen Division. There's a radioactive symbol inside a shield. That's their insignia. But next to the Atomwaffen Division member was something new. It was a young man holding a black flag with three IWAS runes, S runes.

And I'd never seen that flag before. And what that indicated was that whoever the young man from Atomwaffen was, he was showing his organization's support for whatever that was. It seemed to be an Atomwaffen mimic, right? An organization that had the same aesthetic, same idea, you know, small man cells preparing for collapse. An Adam Woffin copycat group calling itself The Base. They recruited and spread their propaganda on all the same platforms. Their founder did the rounds on all the same far-right podcasts.

But The Base didn't garner as much public attention. That is, until its members started getting arrested. as much public attention. That is, until its members started getting arrested. And Ali and his fellow reporters on this extremism beat set out to uncover more about the group's creator. Over time, I'm just digging into them a little bit, he went by the aliases Norman Speer and Roman Wolf online. The journalists combed through leaked internal chats,

dug into property records for land allegedly bought for training. And that's how they uncovered Roman Wolf's real identity. My colleague Daniel DeSimone at the British Broadcasting Corporation and our other colleague Jason Wilson at The Guardian, parallel to us, discovered the identity of their leader. We determined that he is, in fact, an American named Rinaldo Nazaro. is in fact an American named Rinaldo Nazaro. Rinaldo Nazaro, American in his late 40s, Italian roots, and grew up in New Jersey.

Graduated from a prestigious Catholic prep school in 1991. As Roman Wolf, he claimed he had served as a military contractor in Afghanistan and Iraq. Under his real name, Nazaro had registered a company called Omega Solutions International, which advertised specialists in counterterrorism and psychological operations who had been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. Then there was this very curious detail. there was this very curious detail. Nazaro was no longer living in the States. He was calling the shots from St. Petersburg, Russia.

Ali told me that uncovering his real identity, it wasn't actually that hard. There are individuals who are very good with their tradecraft online, with eliminating traces of who they are and what they're about. And there are some individuals who are either careless or don't care what sort of trace they leave. I would say Nazaro would fall into the second category. Roman Wolf's real name and a short bio of his life were now public. But there were still details missing about why he created this neo-Nazi group. So I tried to talk to his family and friends.

His mom, who still lives in the States, got back to me briefly on Facebook, but then went quiet again. Trying through military contacts to get someone who knew him in Iraq or Afghanistan didn't result in any hits. But when I went back further into his history, there were people who would talk and who remembered a very different guy,

a guy named Ron. Are you good there, Walter? Comfortable, all set? Can you hear me okay? Aside from having to discuss some really horrible people, yes, I'm absolutely fine. Walter Grayson is an educator, historian, and author, and he's dedicated his life to fighting racism and discrimination. His academic work in Afrofuturism influenced both writers of the comic book superhero Black Panther

and the filmmakers who brought him to the big screen. Wakanda forever! Panther and the filmmakers who brought him to the big screen. Today, he's a professor at Macalester College in Minnesota. But at the start of the 90s, he was a college student alongside Ronaldo Nazaro. I knew him as Ron, and it was probably my sophomore year of college, I'd expect. Walter and Ron, both from New Jersey, met in the 1990s at Villanova, a private Catholic university in Pennsylvania. Walter studied history, while Nazaro was a philosophy major. Villanova was an odd choice for Walter. I was attending a college fair. There was a Villanova table

and they had a current student at the fair who was standing maybe three or five feet from me talking to another group of all white students. This was also a white student and he didn't see me. And in talking to those other students, he said, well, I really love Villanova because there are no Black blacks or Latinos there. He did not say blacks or Latinos. He used a more harsh language.

And so to hear this student say that openly in public as a good thing, that that's why people should come to Villanova. I was, you know, dramatically, tremendously offended and went immediately to the Villanova recruitment table and began looking through the literature to find if there was a way that I could get a full scholarship to attend there so I could begin to challenge the kinds of practices that he was describing. Walter may have been confident that he could change the institution from the inside, but he says the racism that spurred him to enroll confronted him nearly daily as a student. I want to say probably September or October of 92, a student in my dormitory attacked me with a nightstick for using a payphone because he wanted to call his girlfriend. There were a number of really clear incidents where people made it plain that I didn't really fit in, didn't really belong,

that Black people shouldn't be at Villanova. And so I remember other Black students talking about I was the only African-American living in that dorm. They were like, oh, they haven't lynched you yet? That certainly was the norm at Villanova, is that people believed that Blacks and Latinos didn't belong, that the general notion that it was a white society should be a white society and any means of defending that were appropriate. There was just one place on campus where Walter could find some like-minded students. If you didn't belong anyplace else, the Center for Peace and Justice gave you a place where you could come and be accepted. for Peace and Justice gave you a place where you could come and be accepted. And so that's where I met Ron when he was part of the Democratic Socialists of America and a lot of the work they were doing on campus. I was doing work with the International Committee Against Racism,

but all of those student organizations through the center ran into each other all the time and tried to cross-support each other. And I remember, you know, Ron was there in DSA, and he was much more about supporting anarchism and the end of government and kind of critiquing what he felt were overreach by public infrastructure. And so... Nazaro wasn't a bold character. He certainly didn't present as a young white supremacist who'd go on to start a group like the base. as a young white supremacist who'd go on to start a group like The Base. No, no. If you had asked me in 1994 to make a list of the folks I went to school with who would end up founding a radical right-wing organization,

nah, I got a hundred names I'd put on that list before I would have come to his. But Walter did wonder if Nazaro's university experience shaped him in other ways. The thing about Villanova is that it was prime recruiting for the military. Walter says there was a strong tradition of students joining the Reserve Officer Training Corps at the university. So Nazaro was definitely surrounded by the future military types he'd later work with. After Ali and others revealed Nazaro's identity, a vice report confirmed that he had been a

Pentagon contractor who, in 2014, worked with SOCOM. That's the Special Operations Command, an ultra-secretive unit. Nazaro later posted two letters that seemed to be from the Marine Corps and one from the Department of Homeland Security, thanking him for his service. The DHS later confirmed that he had worked as a contractor from 2004 to 2006. I could see that for Ron. When I saw him through those years. It's that he wanted so badly to belong and to have connection to people. That was the hardest thing I saw from him is that he seemed to put together a compelling message. And so he was awkward and it was unfortunate because it reinforced his sense of insecurity. Villanova confirmed that Nazaro had attended the university between 1991 and 94, but he withdrew and never came back.

So how did socialist Ron, who dropped out of school, start a white supremacist organization decades later? According to a New York Magazine profile entitled The Prep School Nazi, Nazaro later got engaged to an army veteran who once worked out of the PSYOPs division at Fort Bragg. But they broke up. Then there was his time running Omega Solutions International and whatever that involved in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nazaro got engaged again, ultimately marrying a Russian woman who'd worked with his mother. They had a lavish Manhattan wedding before moving to St. Petersburg in 2018. Once Nazaro was outed as the leader of the base, he kept a relatively low profile until this.

This lovely and caring father of a large family is called Rinaldo Nazaro. He is an American with Italian roots. In late 2020, state-sponsored news channel Russia 24 did a half-hour feature on Nazaro. He granted them multiple interviews and even agreed to be taken to a Holocaust museum. The item ends with footage of him, his wife and their young children at a playground. Finally, a family-oriented person. Yeah, I'm a family man, first and foremost.

My family, my children, everything is for me. Yeah, I'm a family man, first and foremost. I wondered if Nazaro would do an extensive interview with anyone other than Russian state-sponsored media. He made no secret of his disdain for journalists, who he liked to call the enemy. But I thought I'd try anyway. Now, I wouldn't say I'm an especially skilled online journalist. I like to think I have other investigative talents. But digging into the dark corners of the internet or underground social media, not my specialty.

But Ali told me Nazaro wasn't that hard to find. And, well, he was right. I won't say exactly how I got in touch with Nazaro, but it took me about 15 minutes, encrypted app, over to email, to eventually a phone call with the founder of The Base. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons,

but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Hello? Hello. Hi.

Can you hear me okay? Yeah, can you hear me? I can. How are you doing? Not bad. Hanging in there. Yourself? Not bad. Same. You're quite late there now, aren't you? Oh yeah. I'm a bit of a night owl, so it's not a problem. Rinaldo Nazaro is connecting to the studio from St. Petersburg via an encrypted app. We start talking just past 1 a.m. Russian time.

You're going to be recording this, right? I am recording it, yeah. Right, okay. Just a quick aside. When you cover national security issues, you think and talk a lot about how to present your stories. There's great debate, and there should be, about interviews with those who belong to terrorist groups. Over the years, I've interviewed about half a dozen men

in various countries who are wanted on FBI or UN terrorist watch lists. And each time, it's a balancing act between trying to gain valuable insight and, of course, not helping spread propaganda or inflating someone's importance. Ollie Winston's been there. It's difficult. There are never easy interviews to do, but it's good that you're in contact with him.

But there's just this ethics debate that it's important to figure out where he came from, why he started this, and where he's at now. At the same time, you don't want to give this guy a platform. Yeah. Yeah. The most critical element is to not allow him to push his worldview out there and to state his ideas unchallenged. Also, when I've done interviews with folks like that, typically I just want to have something to ask them

that I found out about them they have to respond to and put them on the back foot. I did have a lot of questions to put to Nazaro. Some were simple. How are you funding this? And what's the end game? Some were more involved. What exactly was your role in U.S. intelligence services?

And how does it feel to be sitting in comfort in Russia while members of the base in the U.S. are serving time for planning violent acts? I start with getting him to explain why he started the base. Okay, well, the base is a survivalism and self-defense network. It's always had a very practical mission. The motivation for forming it is the increasing political divide and social tension in the United States, which has a very strong racial component. So in order to protect like-minded ideological individuals, this is a network of sort of self-support to get through any type of crisis situations

that may arise now or in the future. When he says like-minded, he means white people. Throughout our conversation, Nazaro embraced a narrative of victimhood. The white race is at risk, he insists. I don't have any hatred towards anyone who's not white. I don't consider myself like a racist in the sense of I want to do harm to other races and I have issues with other races just because of the color of their skin. That's not me, okay? What I have an issue with is the way that the issue of race and identity politics is being weaponized against white people.

That's what I have. That's the issue that I have. Nazaro worked hard to disprove he's a racist. In that vetting call with Ryan, he used the benign-sounding label pro-white to describe the group. But again and again in the hours of leaked tape, pro-white sounds a lot like the euphemism it is. Ask the candidates who dare to have non-white spouses. Another guy recently, he looked pretty good. And then he was using his real name.

I did a little digging on his background and through his social media. I think he's married to some Asian. But I didn't say, are you married to an Asian woman? I just asked them, are you married? And I never heard from him again. So I guess he figured that I saw a comfortable conversation there, I guess. Yeah, well,

I mean, my partner, like, she's not 100% white, but by riot standards. She's not a Mishling. She's like 116th Jewish and she understands race. Team B,

what do you think? Seems pretty good. Too excited about the 116th part with his wife. Right. I don't know. I mean, I guess And then there's the tweet that Nazar wrote in 2018 as Norman Spear, with a photo of Hitler and the words, Speer with a photo of Hitler and the words, we will finish what you started. It's not over yet. We carry the torch. But in our two-hour-long conversation, Nazaro just kept stressing that his pro-white stance was because, apparently, the white race was under siege. If you're white and liberal and you accept what is increasingly becoming a second-class citizen status, then you'll be fine.

But if you're somebody who is conservative or a traditionalist and you're white, well, now you are essentially an enemy of the state. For someone with such a strong sense of grievance, Nazaro couldn't really give me concrete examples of how he'd been oppressed. Nazaro couldn't really give me concrete examples of how he'd been oppressed. Just the prevailing attitude within the United States is, in trying to promote equality, trying to promote racial justice, the solution for promoting those things is to lower the stature or political influence of whites through different means, culturally, affirmative action programs, things like that. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. I guess that's what I'm just trying to get down in the weeds

as much as we can, just to really understand it. I mean, are you talking about people losing their jobs, people articulate the oppression? Multiculturalism and immigration and migration is being forced upon the oppression. Multiculturalism and immigration and migration is being forced upon the population. And if that common man dares to vocalize any kind of opposition to those things, then that's when the guns come out

as far as calling someone a racist and charging them with hate crimes and investigating them and at least, again, deplatforming them, getting them fired, doxing them. It sounded like he had started a neo-Nazi group because of cancel culture, which I put to him. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely a big part of it. The way we view it is that the base is in it for the long haul. We feel like this is just foreshadowing to what is in store.

All this type of policies and oppression will intensify. And so we're preparing now. Before I forget, I do have to ask you why you chose the name The Base. Well, there's two reasons. One is just the notion of literally forming base camps. But then also just from a political sense, I guess you could say, just form a base of like-minded individuals as a support network. You had to know that the base is also what al-Qaeda means. um uh well i mean yeah i know i was i was aware of that but i mean i just didn't have that in mind i mean there's lots of things that are named after you know use call themselves the base i mean there's even an antifa group is called the base and what about the symbols used in the

recruitment and promo material had sort of a nod to the Third Reich. No, those are runes. They're runes, and they just represent a strength in numbers, essentially. They have nothing to do with Third Reich symbology or anything like that. That's just part of the strategy to demonize us, to delegitimize us. I'm sure if I picked some other name or some other symbol, someone would have gotten creative and found something nefarious in that too, right? So they're both oversights, sort of the comparison,

or you didn't realize those two comparisons would be made? No. Okay, I find this hard to believe. You call your organization the same name as one of the most infamous terrorist groups in recent history. And you use Nordic runes adopted by the Nazis? And that didn't occur to you? It reminds me of what Ali said about the base being an Atomwaffen mimic.

In a way, the edgy aesthetic, the provocative name, even the propaganda, it was all unoriginal. We'll get to this later, but that lack of originality, it raised suspicions about Nazaro, even among accelerationists. As to how Nazaro came to embrace this ideology in the first place, he again couldn't really point to one transformative moment. There was a lot of things that happened, I would say, over like a solid decade. But I guess I could say, I remember the whole George Zimmerman case, and that President Obama at the time interjected himself into what was like a local issue, and he amplified

that into a national level. Another one, I guess, is Bill Clinton, when he took office and the first executive order was to implement the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. Don't Ask, Don't Tell was a controversial U.S. law intended to lift a ban on LGBT military service members. So that's like the beginning of the kind of promoting this LGBT agenda, which in practice is really about ends up being really taking away rights from traditional people and families. We're the bad ones. But does it, how does granting those rights negatively impact your life personally? Well, because to me,

children should not be exposed to those type of issues or topics. I think it's abhorrent and extremely damaging, psychologically, emotionally, and damaging for society. So he says that's why he formed the base. But what does he want to achieve? How does he want to achieve it? Me personally, I would like to see an independent homeland for people of European descent. It can maybe draw a parallel to Zionism.

Maybe like a form of white Zionism. What does that physically look like? Like you take over the eastern part of the U.S. or you just want to be left alone in a city to govern? Right. Well, let me just caveat this answer with this is me speaking. I'm not speaking on behalf of the base. And it's not why I particularly created the base.

Okay. So can I just interrupt just for one second? Because that, but don't you speak on behalf of the base? I mean, you're its creator. Well, the thing is that, like I said, the basis does not have, it's not a political organization. We're not pushing for specific policy. We are strictly a network focused on training,

survivals and self-defense. I mean, we're more of like a prepper network. That's it. Nazaro is contradicting himself. In one of the leaked interviews from mid-2019, he says, We're not like typical prepper group where we tend to just hunker down and weather the storm, you know, wait for the storm to pass. We want the storm to increase. We want to be the down and weather the storm, you know, wait for the storm to pass. We want the storm to increase.

We want to be the storm eventually at some point, you know, after the initial collapse occurs, we want to keep that going. So we have a very different end goal and purpose for learning those skills. So can you just relate that to what you just said well i guess um okay so because there are people in within you know we are comprised of accelerations like people who see that chaos is growing and we feel that an increase in that chaos, it actually is a good thing because it creates potential opportunities for us to break free from the system. Throughout the interview, Nazaro maintained that he does not encourage violence. That's not what he meant by being the

storm. But did it really matter what he says to me now if there were enough aspiring recruits who believed the base stood for the very opposite? Like that Australian candidate with the 116th Jewish partner. Well, I have experience in martial arts, ordered training knives, I have firearms and access to properties to shoot on. And just a warning,

this next clip is hard to hear. I've been pitching her daughter, Krav Maga, and she's already bashed two fucking Africans. She's 11. Right, okay, that's good. So then you are a good trainer. That's good. All right, so what other questions do you have?

Throughout the leaked vetting tape, Nazaro consults with a man using the alias TMB. TMB, anything? TMB, any questions? TMB. It was an interesting interview for sure. From the sounds of it, TMB was a valued member, a diligent deputy to Nazaro. Remember that acronym, TMB? It stands for the Militant Buddhist, and it was the call sign of Luke Austin Lane.

He was the leader of the Georgia cell, who was arrested but is pleaded not guilty on conspiring to murder the so-called Antifa couple. You're the leader of the group. You're together with these members, vetting other members. You know, ostensibly, you're talking about how the base is going, how the plans are going. Sure. Right. But the base was not designed to plan attacks. I mean, that would not be on the agenda. But it was on their agenda, it sounds like, allegedly. I mean, allegedly. But I mean, that, you know, I can't be responsible for what people do on their own time. Anyone who ever was or is planning violent activity is not something that I was ever aware of, am aware of, or would encourage.

I look at myself as a network administrator. That was my role, to just keep the ball rolling, make sure the network was functioning, was growing, and that people were doing what they were supposed to do to the best of my ability. I cannot give orders to people and expect them to follow, you know, whether it was... Perhaps the network administrator, as Nazaro calls himself,

does not give orders. But he does vet all members, like this one. So I've seen and experienced and talked to enough Muslims just know, like, I fucking hate them. And they just, they don't deserve to be here, period. So when Tarrant did what he did, and everyone's saying he's an all-right alright fascist Nazi, blah, blah, blah, I'm like, well, if that's what he is, then okay, I'll just be that.

If you want me to be the boogeyman, then I guess I'm the fucking boogeyman as well, because I fully, wholeheartedly agree with what he did. Some of the applicants and members that you approved of praised the Christchurch shooter or what Breivik did in Norway. And I actually covered that. I covered that in Utoya. It was one of the saddest terrorism cases I ever did. I couldn't associate with people who praise those actions.

And yet you bring them into an organization that you created. Right. Because they have a militant mindset that we need. I would never encourage them to go out and do things like that. But they have an understanding, again, that embracing the fact that some degree of violence could very well be necessary at some point in the future. If you take those phone calls that were recorded, listen to what I say to every single recruit.

That we're not doing anything illegal. That that's not the purpose of the base. I mean, I don't know how to make it more clear than what I said. And it's all out there. I've listened to a lot of the calls. But just to go back to what I was saying earlier, that somebody tells you that they admired these two horrific terrorist attacks. And, you know, your answer was,

yeah, they'd be a good asset because they're militant. They believe in militancy. I don't call that militancy. I call that terrorism. No, no, no, no, no. I'm not saying that what those, that those, no.

I'm saying the guys who made those comments are expressing kind of a militant mindset. I'm not saying the what those, that those, no. I'm saying the guys who made those comments are expressing kind of a militant mindset. I'm not saying the people who did the attacks represent that. I mean, I don't condone that. You know, I don't support doing those type of things. But your members expressed to you that they do support those. And that wasn't any kind of red flag for you? I mean, unless they told me that they plan on going to do an attack, then no.

But they admired those killers. I just find that chilling. I don't agree with glorifying violence in general. But, you know, there are, I mean, if you could imagine a group that you would consider to be freedom fighters. One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. Yes, in the complicated geopolitical morass of conflicts worldwide, this can be true. But we were talking about the man who went into mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, during Friday prayers and slaughtered 51 men, women and children.

And the man who perpetrated the Norway massacre, a bombing and the murders at a Labour Party youth camp that left 77 dead. I had suspected Nazaro would distance himself from his members and their actions. He had all his plausible deniability talking points. But what really seems to enrage him is the suspicion around his leadership from even within the accelerationist community. After the spate of arrests basically

rendered the base inoperational, rumors began to swirl that Nazaro was actually an intelligence asset. At first, there was suspicion that he was a U.S. government plant whose purpose was to lure in neo-Nazis planning violent acts. That one didn't make a lot of sense to me, and he batted it away as a conspiracy theory. So, you know, there's a very, very strong current of paranoia in our community. Anyone could be accused of being a Fed or a honeypot or whatever at any moment. I can't sit around worrying about that. I mean, if I was an FBI honeypot, why would I be living in St. Petersburg, Russia?

Exactly. So what about the theory that Nazaro was working for the Russians? Pretty good way to destabilize the United States. But no, I'm definitely not. I guess I'll just have to take my word on that one for what it's worth. Are you able to work there? Technically, yes. But again, I don't speak Russian, so that's a pretty major practical issue. I was working just as an English tutor to just make some extra money for the bills.

But as Ali reported for the BBC, in 2019, Nazaro had been listed as a guest at a Russian government defense exhibition in Moscow. Nazaro told me he never attended due to, quote, scheduling conflicts. I don't think that I really have much to offer to the Russian government. Come on. Come on. You're 17 years a contractor working in the Pentagon. You were an analyst. You run an organization that the U.S. is after. I actually couldn't script it any better for how the Russian government would want you to work for them. Well, I don't know Russian, so that could be a showstopper right there.

But I wasn't looking to work for the Russian government. I said I was trying to network and I was looking at private security. I raised this with Nazaro's old classmate, Walter. You know, whether he's a formal registered agent of the Russian state or whether he is kind of rhetoric simply aligns with the kinds of goals they have to disrupt and foment division within the United States, I'm not so worried about the specifics of did he sign a contract with such and such agency. Just before ending the call with Nazaro, I asked him to talk about Patrick Matthews.

He said he contacted him after Ryan's story came out in the Winnipeg Free Press. Yeah, I mean, he infiltrated. He talks to Patrick Matthews. He got him, again, vilified in the media and to the point where he panicked to the degree that he felt like he needed to flee Canada. But Patrick Matthews told him he wanted to derail trains and said some pretty heinous things, including the fact that he had a non-white girlfriend and was worried that if they had a child, it would be half human. Well, I mean, I don't know what he said or didn't say. I wasn't there. I wasn't privy to those conversations. I just know what actually occurred.

So that's, you know, that was a fallout of a journalist infiltrating us. I mean, that had a direct effect on the base's mission. Nazaro also claimed the base's Georgian members had been entrapped by the FBI. But however they ended up behind bars, he said any arrested member was a waste because they hadn't stayed operational.

You're getting arrested. You're taking yourself out of the rotation. We're trying to build a movement. We need to build a vanguard. You can't just pop up guns a-blazing when you have zero infrastructure, support, training, wherewithal. These are all things that need to be built up from nothing and form a vanguard. I mean, every revolution is led by a vanguard.

A vanguard. Training up an army big and strong enough to seize control after the collapse of government and society. Prepping for a race war, dreaming of a white separatist state. Those are pretty terrifying and dangerous goals, especially for someone who said he was once a military contractor working for the Pentagon. But it's worth remembering that at the time we spoke, Nazaro had fewer than 70 subscribers on a messaging app once called the right-wing extremist's favorite new platform. That's not a very large vanguard.

And I'll also mention that a couple of weeks after the interview, he felt familiar enough to send me misogynistic and vaguely threatening text messages with music videos. After a link to a Guns N' Roses song, he wrote, You've probably dated multiple Al-Qaeda by now, but somehow I'm the asshole? I emailed the next day, asking about this abrupt shift in his tone. He apologized and said he had been drunk. So does Nazaro or the base remain a threat?

Various governments believe so and have listed the base a terrorist entity. And I bet there are very few countries Nazaro could travel to without being arrested upon landing. But no matter what happens to the group he founded or Nazaro himself himself. The ideology his spouses lives on. And accelerationists have been out there, consuming the propaganda, acting on their rage, and capable of the most brutal attacks. Coming up on White Hot Hate. It wouldn't be right for my son to have been a victim of such a terrible crime

and to allow this to potentially happen to other people too. People are coming into contact with these extremist ideas younger and they're becoming radicalized faster. These people make us up to be evil incarnate. They want bad guys so bad they can have it. Give them what they want. Give them what they deserve. White Hot Hate was written and produced by Ashley Mack and me, Michelle Shepard. Our associate producer is Kim Kasher, with production support from Sarah Melton. Additional reporting by Ryan Thorpe.

Mixing and sound design by Danelle Cloutier and Julia Whitman, with technical assistance from Laura Intanelli. Emily Cannell is our digital producer. Fact-checking by Emily Mathieu and Zachary Kamau. Legal advice from Sean Mormon. Original music by Quiet Type. Special thanks to the Winnipeg Free Press, CBC Reference Library,

Olsi Sorokhna Nazimbash and Yvonne Angelofsky. For CBC Podcasts, our senior producer is Chris Oak and our executive producer is Arif Noorani. If you're enjoying this series and want to help new listeners discover the show, please take some time to give us a rating and review wherever you listen. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

at CBC Podcasts.