Neo-Nazis Are Organizing Secretive Paramilitary Training Across America
November 20, 2018A neo-Nazi who goes by the alias Norman Spear has launched a project to unify online fascists and link that vast coalition of individuals into a network training new soldiers for a so-called forthcoming “race war.”
Spear, who claims to be an Iraq and Afghan war veteran, is a self-proclaimed white nationalist with a significant online following. His latest act involves bringing neo-Nazis together, regardless of affiliation and ideology, into a militant fascist umbrella organization. His tool for doing this? A social network he calls “The Base,” which is already organizing across the US and abroad, specifically geared toward partaking in terrorism.
Within the confines of a secure chat room viewed by VICE, Spear and his burgeoning global web of terror cells are networking, creating propaganda, organizing in-person meet-ups, and discussing potential violence or “direct action” against minority groups, especially Jewish and black Americans. An extensive online library contains a trove of manuals with instructions on lone wolf terror-tactics, gunsmithing, data mining, interrogation tactics, counter-surveillance techniques, bomb making, chemical weapons creation, and guerilla warfare.
The network's vetting process serves to funnel committed extremists from around the internet into a group explicitly focused on providing users with terroristic skills, in order to produce real-world violence. Members of The Base have made it clear they’re recruiting applicants with military and explosives backgrounds. And in addition to homemade bombs, members have also begun discussing trying to find unexploded World War II ordnance to make improvised explosive devices.
“I'm all about violence, but I want to gather with people and plan something out,” wrote one user going by the name Rimbaud to the almost 50 other members of the secret network, lamenting that the recent terror attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh could’ve been more effective. “Maybe some form of bombing, or something a bit more destructive.”
“Recent data regarding terror attacks and hate incidents in the US evidences that, one, an audience of carriers for The Base’s instructive-style of propaganda is out there and, two, the small size of that audience only compounds its threat,” Beirich explained. “This is because individuals and small-cells are often tougher to spot, predict and thwart (relative to extremist organizations with larger physical and digital footprints) before they can carry out an act of violence.”
“So-called ‘lone wolves,’ whether single individuals or small cells, comprise only six percent of US offenders but are responsible for 25 percent of terrorism-related violence,” she added. “Right-wing terrorism comprises 35 percent of US terror-attacks since 2010. Compare that to the 2000s, when terror-attacks from the far-right comprised just six percent of hate crimes in the US’s ten largest cities.”
Despite the attention they’ve received within their general community, several Twitter users have accused the organization of being “the feds.”
“You guys should really be encouraging individual defense and making an organization on the DL. advertising like that is very sus, no offense,” reads one tweet directed at The Base.
The odds that a law enforcement agency is operating a group as biased towards violent action as The Base seem low. More likely, The Base marks the latest evolution towards Spear’s anti-statist, pro-white goal of organized guerrilla war against world governments. As he explained when he was a guest on the podcast for the Darkest Hour site earlier this year: “We don’t need to convert or transform every weak-willed white person into a great Aryan warrior in order for us to win. We just need to unite the best of us who are willing to fight to do what’s necessary."
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
