The military and the police have a far-right problem.
Across North America and Europe,
far-right extremists are actively recruiting both military personnel
and law enforcement officers.
In Germany, extremist groups have stashed explosives
and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
Trump, wooo!
In the US, serving soldiers are beginning to fight against
the very government they’re sworn to serve.
We’re in the fucking Capitol, bro!
This is how the far right are using troops
with state-of-the-art training and high-grade weaponry
to carry out violent attacks and spread their messages.
[DECADE OF HATE]
Our message to the patriots in Virginia is stand up,
muster your people together.
This is Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers,
an armed far-right militia
known for showing up at protests around the US with heavy weaponry.
The St. Louis County Police were out last night
saying that they were “unnecessary and inflammatory.”
They claim to be entirely made up of
both serving and former police and military personnel
and to provide protection for businesses during civil unrest.
We have an outstanding team—
Brian Carruthers is a combat engineer veteran.
Jose Rivera, he did Civil Affairs in the army.
We have Ivan, our Urban Ranger veteran.
Dave’s a combat veteran, US Army.
Scott, our cop, also.
So we've got a great crew.
But behind the facade,
the Oath Keepers promote a web of conspiracy theories
that suggest the government is planning to impose martial law,
send them to concentration camps,
and install a global totalitarian government.
One thing they fear most is all of us coming together
and standing up united and refusing to comply.
They fear the mass non-compliance. They also fear the US military.
Which is pretty ironic,
given they’re made up of so many former state employees.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco
is one of hundreds of law enforcement officials
caught on a list of leaked membership records for the Oath Keepers,
the far-right extremist group
the FBI calls “an anti-government militia.”
A police lieutenant is under internal investigation.
Some of New York’s finest may be linked to the Oath Keepers,
a right-wing extremist group.
And there will be a full investigation.
They will talk about things like
global governance organizations like the United Nations
being a vehicle for tyranny
that is orchestrated by some murky cabal of international elite.
It’s a place driven by this fight between good and evil.
In January, Rhodes was arrested for sedition,
relating to the Oath Keepers’ key role
in last year’s Capitol riots.
If you look closely at these images,
you can observe members of the Oath Keepers
in a military formation known as Ranger File.
This is a standard military procedure for clearing a building,
which would be instantly recognizable to any US soldier.
But here it’s being deployed against the US government itself.
A D.C. police officer witnessed
some rioters using military-style hand signals to communicate.
Small unit tactics used by the US military in urban warfare.
But the Oath Keepers are just a snapshot of a much wider problem.
In fact, one in ten of those charged with storming the Capitol
was either serving in the military or a veteran.
And there are similar groups right across the US,
such as the Three Percenters,
another far-right militia known for their large contingent of police
and military veterans.
Disturbingly, the authorities have been aware of this threat
for a long time.
By 2006, the FBI had actually recognized this issue.
They authored a report about
white supremacist infiltration into law enforcement specifically,
and they focused on this idea of what they called ghost skins.
The basic idea of a ghost skin is people that do cover up your tattoos,
you know, grow your hair out, basically hold the same beliefs
but mobilize in a more secretive fashion.
Unfortunately, that FBI report was shelved,
and even now, more recently, the FBI have essentially
de-emphasized the relevance of the report.
In February 2021, the Pentagon released a report
on the issue of white supremacists infiltrating serving military units,
but they have so far failed to take meaningful action.
This is not an accident.
Extremist groups go out of their way to cynically recruit
and exploit military and law enforcement personnel,
and they know how to do it.
They may be having to deal with PTSD
and traumas related to if they’ve been in combat.
And just generally, any time you have to reintegrate into society
from another way of life,
that's always going to be somewhat difficult.
And what the far right will offer
a veteran trying to reintegrate into society
is they will valorize their service uncritically, unquestionably.
They will see them as someone who possesses certain skills,
certain experience, certain expertise, certain knowledge.
They will attach status to that. They will see that as valuable.
They will give them the thing that we're all looking for,
which is acknowledgement, respect.
And though individual troops and officers
may be vulnerable to this type of exploitation,
there may well also be something in military
and police cultures themselves
that leaves them exposed to right-wing infiltration
and, crucially, to cover it up when it occurs.
Because these institutions again historically
have been very much white male heterosexual dominated institutions
doesn’t mean every individual white male heterosexual
in the military or police is a misogynist or a homophobe
or a white supremacist.
But it does create a certain kind of climate and culture
within these institutions
that has certain parallels to the far right.
And this is not just an American problem.
In July 2019, police in northeast Germany
uncovered a huge cache of weapons belonging to Nordkreuz,
an underground extremist far-right network.
The stash contained over 50,000 rounds of ammunition,
explosives, and body bags,
as well as a list of political enemies.
So far, only one member of the group has actually been imprisoned,
and he only got 21 months for possession of firearms,
not for his part in any larger conspiracy.
And in January, federal prosecutors
dropped the case against other members of the group
for plotting a violent attack against the state,
citing insufficient evidence.
The decision to drop the case
is nothing short of scandalous.
They made detailed plans for exactly what they would do—
how they would round up political enemies,
how they would transport them in a lorry.
They had body bags.
They had quicklime.
They even had a special system of patches
they would wear on their uniforms.
They could identify other members.
No one really understands why the German authorities
are so reluctant to get tough with these guys.
If you compare it to the Islamist scene,
they would have put them away a long time ago.
Nordkreuz was later discovered to have grown out of
a huge, nationwide encrypted chat network
of far-right sympathizers amongst military and police personnel.
This was codenamed the “Hannibal network,”
founded by an officer in the KSK,
the most elite unit of Germany’s special forces.
We have very small group of soldiers called the KSK.
One of the guys, who was a soldier for 12 to 13 years
and his code name was Hannibal,
started to set up chat groups all over Germany,
where he recruited people
to prepare for the Day X, for the uprising,
for the day that right-wing people would take control of the country.
After an investigation, it was decided that the KSK
had been so deeply penetrated by far-right extremists
that an entire fighting unit within the KSK had to be disbanded.
That’s the equivalent of the US deciding to dissolve
part of the Navy SEALs for having too many Nazis.
The special forces in particular require a basic trust
not only of their political and military leadership
but also of parliament as their employer as of society as a whole.
Special forces, usually you use them,
send them behind enemy lines, and cause mayhem.
So this is really like a nightmare.
Those guys are the last guys you want to turn into right-wing guys
because they have this special knowledge about weapons,
about explosives, about tactics.
They have a lot of good connections in the security apparatus.
It’s very easy for them to get information,
to get blueprints of buildings and all that.
It’s a real nightmare.
Meanwhile, in Belgium,
a soldier triggered a 35-day manhunt in 2021
after stealing four rocket launchers, several guns,
and threatening to attack the country’s leading virologists
in response to COVID restrictions.
And in the UK,
a British soldier who vowed he would “die committed to the white race”
was jailed for being a member of the neo-Nazi terrorist group
National Action.
He’d been trying to recruit fellow soldiers into the group
in preparation for a race war.
We know that this is a problem that has existed for a long time
in multiple ways.
The whole point of infiltration
is for it not to become public knowledge
and for us not to become aware of it.
All this raises serious concerns for national security.
So far, though the far right have infiltrated forces
and some individual military personnel may harbor extremist views,
security services themselves have stayed loyal and followed orders.
But some experts have begun to wonder what might happen
when extremist beliefs come into direct conflict with their orders.
It undermines the legitimacy of both the military and law enforcement.
It’s hard to say you have a democratic institution
when you have active neo-Nazis making up that institution
or interested in undermining the government
or essentially advocating for various kinds of vigilante violence.
And these concerns have historic precedent.
During Germany's Weimar Republic,
right-wing military units attempted to overthrow the government.
And one of the turning points in the lead-up to the Spanish Civil War
was when fascist commanders became willing to attack Spanish civilians
as if they were a foreign enemy.
The potential is that they’re going to have access
to some of the most high-powered weapons
and be potentially involved in active combat situations
where that mindset may really cloud their behavior.
And even to the point of not only posing a threat to others,
but internally, it’s an insider threat as well.
This time, the insurrection failed, and Stewart Rhodes was arrested.
If the infiltration of the military
and security services is allowed to continue,
next time, the outcome could be much, much more dangerous.