Neo-Nazi group #theBase found a safe space to recruit Americans: the Russian internet – #terror

The move is part of an ongoing theme among the far right when western apps remove or moderate their accounts. Two masked men are in frame, wearing camouflage and sitting opposite each other. A table is between them and they are in the middle of what they claim is an American forest. “You want to be as high up on the chain for modern warfare,” one of the men says under garbled voice distortion, while explaining the finer points of a fantasy insurgency against the US government. The video, less than 20 minutes, is propaganda from the proscribed neo-Nazi terrorist group the Base. “You want to have the best weaponry for war; to have the best tactics for war,” the man continues, “especially here in America.” The video, meant to entice Americans to join its ranks, isn’t on YouTube or even a social media site most people know. Instead, it’s being hosted on Rutube, a Russian-government-sponsored knockoff. Multiple analysts who follow its movements have noticed that the Base recently migrated much of its online content to Russian-owned sites or services. The move is part of an ongoing theme among the far right when western apps de-platform or moderate valuable accounts used for recruitment: retreat to the free-for-all that Russian sites offer. The Base relocating its recruitment to safer Russian havens comes at a time when western intelligence services are openly warning that the Kremlin has taken the gloves off, directing their agents to sow chaos in the west. Part of that has included the covert support of far-right extremist groups adjacent to the Base. Founded in 2018, the Base was the subject of a major nationwide FBI counterterrorism sweep netting more than a dozen of its members for a laundry list of terrorist activities across the US and Europe. Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, the UK’s domestic intelligence service, publicly stated earlier this month that Russia was responsible for “arson, sabotage” and other “actions conducted with increasing recklessness” on European and British soil. In a September announcement on SimpleX, a newly adopted encrypted chat service for some far-right extremists, the Base told its recruits to consume their content via its VK account, the Russian version of Facebook, or its Rutube channel. And in a series of September and October VK posts where it describes the “process for joining the Base in [the] USA”, the group also curiously dropped a new email with a Mail.Ru address – the email provider of a well-known ally of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. The Base had previously operated a Proton Mail account (an email company based in Switzerland) as its point of contact.

via guardian: Neo-Nazi group the Base found a safe space to recruit Americans: the Russian internet

screenshot SimpleX