This is the inside story of how Rinaldo Nazzaro built the Base, a neo-Nazi terror organization—and how it all came apart. It was August 2019 and the eight men, clad in camouflage gear and armed with semi-automatic rifles and pistols, never expected the cops to show up. This was supposed to be a secret meeting in the woods of rural Pennsylvania where they would sharpen their skills for the coming genocide, in which people of color and race traitors would die by the millions. The leader, thinking quickly, ripped off the neo-Nazi patches from his camo gear and walked towards the officers. The police said there was a noise complaint from a nearby property and that they were just checking in. After a soft warning to keep quiet, they left. The men then went back to shooting, filming their exploits for propaganda videos. What those local cops hadn’t realized was that they had encountered members of a neo-Nazi terror group, training for the next phase of the violent American experience: race war.
Later that day, Norman Spear, an alias for the stone-faced leader who would eventually be outed as a 47-year-old New Jersey native with a private school pedigree named Rinaldo Nazzaro, put his patches back on and presented three of the members who had leadership roles in the group with flags and knives adorned with three wolfsangels—the group’s symbol and an allusion to the markings of the German SS from World War II—and the name emblazoned across the lower blade: the Base. Nazzaro, who hasn’t been charged with a crime and is allegedly in Russia, had high hopes for his terror group, then bordering on a few dozen members. And though it wasn’t ready for the future insurgency he desired, its members believed there would come a time when they could give their lives for the cause of a white ethnostate born out of the ashes of society’s collapse. Within a year, a significant portion of the men shooting guns would be in prison cells awaiting trial on a variety of terrorism-related charges. After that day, the Base members went their separate ways and wouldn’t see each other until months later in rural Georgia at another training event. Law enforcement would have a presence there, too—this time in the form of an undercover FBI agent. According to sources with direct knowledge of the inner workings of the Base, a massive cache of internal communications amounting to tens of thousands of records, other published reporting, and extensive court documents from FBI investigations, this is the story of the birth and the apparent demise of a neo-Nazi terrorist group. (…) During his initial rise in the neo-Nazi scene, Nazzaro appeared on a number of far-right podcasts and radio shows. He released a series of videos on Bitchute, lecturing about the finer details of guerilla warfare and how they could be used in the modern world. Then, in the summer of 2018, Nazzaro released his most ambitious project to date: He began posting on social media about his new group, the Base, which he first advertised as a survivalist network. (…) But the Base was able to put personal differences aside and gel quickly as their hatred for people of color (and Jews in particular) easily overpowered personal beefs. At Nazzaro’s urging, according to sources, members organized themselves into compartmentalized cells based on location. During its peak, the Base was active in New England, Delaware, Texas, Georgia, Florida, Wisconsin, Maryland, and Michigan. Internationally, members and, in some cases, small cells could be found in the U.K., Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the Baltics. Cell leaders who were responsible for working with Nazzaro to plan meetups and train members in their “zone” were chosen. At times the group had close to 50 members active in the chat and in the several regional cells. It was clear the Base wasn’t pooling from the ordinary alt-right troll or even from the “Proud Boys,” a far-right national organization founded by VICE co-founder Gavin McIness (who parted ways with the company in 2008) that works as something of a modern-day collective of Brownshirts with ultranationalist politics, and which President Donald Trump recently gave a nod to during a debate with Joe Biden.
via vice: How One Man Built a Neo-Nazi Insurgency in Trump’s America
