The Protein: Rinaldo Nazzaro on the American Futurist Podcast
Logo for American Futurist Podcast
THIS CONVERSATION IS EDITED FOR LENGTH AND CLARITY.
American Futurist podcast with Rinaldo Nazarro and host Ryan Hatfield.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The white nationalist scene is trending away from accelerationist groups due to a climate of paranoia. Many people have been arrested and most of the potential recruits are scared to participate.
There is no mistaking that this is the first episode of a podcast, because the sound design expertise is sorely lacking. Podcast host Ryan Hatfield’s audio levels are mixed too low and Nazarro’s are too high.
This entire discussion is about Nazzaro clearing his name in the eyes of his peers. He feels wronged by his fellow travelers in the white nationalist scene. The most recent rumors about him on Telegram this past winter were the driving force.
For some reason he decided to lie about graduating from Villanova University.
He offers the closest thing to a semi-coherent narrative about what his personal life was like before he became the leader of a Neo-Nazi accelerationist group.
One of Nazarro’s biggest grievances with the US government stems from the way the intelligence community was used to sell the Iraq War to the American people.
He became fully redpilled on National Socialist Movement (NatSoc) ideology during his time in Afghanistan. If his story is to be believed, we can start the timeline for when he became a Nazi during his tour of duty in-country.
An undercover federal agent was planning to attend the Washington meetup in August 2019. Members were planning to transport guns and ammo across state lines, which is a felony. Had Eugene Antifa not prematurely leaked the information about this planned meetup, Nazzaro would likely be in prison right now.
Nazzaro will not acknowledge any of the serious mistakes he had made as leader of The Base. Throughout the interview he consistently downplays or omits fatal errors he made including the number of infiltrators that got past vetting.
The Russian foreign ministry publicly dismissed any concerns about Nazzaro residing within their borders.
In Nazarro‘s version of events, huge chunks of his life were omitted. His emotional journey from one state of mind to another is nonexistent. There’s a marriage and a divorce missing in his timeline. He doesn’t say anything about happy moments in his life like, falling in love with his wife, getting married, or caring about anybody really. He also makes no mention of his childhood or high school years or even his hometown.
His post-grad years remain a blank void of uncertainty.
FULL BREAKDOWN OF THE EPISODE
0:00 - Hatfield introduces the inaugural episode of the American Futurist podcast.
Hatfield gives Nazarro a warm welcome describing him as “Roman Wolf, also known as Norman Spear, the founder of The Base network, dedicated to promoting survivalism and self defense among accelerationists.”
Hatfield says that one of the main reasons Nazarro is doing the show in the first place is because of the recent controversies on Telegram which we detailed last week in the Weird Rumors section. Found here.
0:01 - Nazarro describes the accusations against him.
Regarding being an asset for the Russian Federal Security Service, he characterizes the accusation as “...just another variation of the ‘Fed’-type of rumors[...]that I’m used to by now.”
“That’s a little more logical considering I live in Russia. [...]the whole quote unquote “evidence,” if you can call it that, was just some random female online[...]she was using my last name…saying, he lives in Russia so of course he has to cooperate with the FSB. So, that's all they needed to hear.[...] like, ‘Oh, shit!’ You know, ‘here's Roman Wolf's daughter, admitting that he worked for FSB!”
0:04 - Hatfield frames this controversy to be a badge of honor.
“In this general, whether you call it a movement or just a group of like-minded people, if you haven’t been called a “Fed,” a “Gay” or a “Jew,” then, I don’t know, I’m not sure you’ve even made it yet. You’re gonna get called that eventually, probably 1,000 times.”
They talk a bit more about how the rumor mill is a normal part of participating in the white nationalist movement, then drop the subject. “You’ve been attacked from all sides. So I’m sure this is no surprise, but it’s annoying how it really never stops.” Nazarro accepts this.
0:07 - They move on to talking about Nazarro’s childhood and his early political views.
Nazarro’s parents were “apolitical, maybe moderates at best,” so he was “free to choose his own path,” a “blank slate.”
NOTE: Nazzaro grew up in Livingston, a well-to-do commuter suburb in North Jersey’s Essex County. His mother worked for several different travel agencies over the years. He had a Roman Catholic education and graduated from Delbarton, which is operated by Benedictine monks. Nazzaro liked the experience at Delbarton well enough that NY Magazine was able to find records of his contributing to the school in alumni fundraising drives.
0:08 - Going to university’s effect on political views.
He paints himself as the hapless victim of a predatory university campus “The fact that I was a blank slate left me vulnerable to the indoctrination that is typical of American universities.”
His interest in Philosophy was partly a hyperfixation on the “truth.”
Nazarro describes his politics at the time as “very, very, radically left” but says that he maintained some “spiritual convictions” “I had no clue what I was getting myself into and so I was easy prey.”
NOTE: He spent his college years at Villanova, then a proudly conservative place, run by Augustinians and nicknamed “Vanillanova.” …Nazzaro was involved with the anti-corporate Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). which was having a moment at Villanova and seemed to attract the school’s outliers.
0:12 - Transition to professional life
“I ended up having two majors in Philosophy and Religious Studies, and a minor in Political Science… Real life confronted me towards the end, you know, my, my university career, and being a philosophy major was kind of a wake up call [...] like, shit, what the hell am I going to do with the rest of my life here?
NOTE: The summer after his junior year, in 1994, Nazzaro dropped out of Villanova for reasons that are unclear. A college friend of Nazarro told NY Magazine, ‘Last I heard of Ron (Nazarro), he told me he wanted to go to law school and work with battered women, women who’d been in an abusive situation.’
Instead, his activities over the next decade are murky, ultimately he gravitated towards government-adjacent work.
“... really, when I say ‘political science', I mean, my interest is more like international affairs. And so, that was one of the avenues that I explored.”
NOTE: Several years later, Nazarro resurfaced in Virginia, working as an intern for the National Defense Council Foundation, a think tank devoted to special operations and energy security. He was only there for two months, but was able to gain enough knowledge of the inner workings of the military to convince others that he was competent as a military/security contractor.
“And, you know, I looked at some, potentially working at the UN, you know, at some point, I was living in New York. And I also had the thought, ‘intelligence community,’ really, just because I thought it would be cool… And that's kind of where it started with my first job with the Pentagon as a research assistant..”
NOTE: In 2002, Nazarro formed his own “security consulting firm” Omega Solutions International (OSI), incorporated in Virginia. 2003; he purchases a condo in Arlington, VA. (His mother, Gianna, pays the seller $282,000 in cash via check). He was there until 2007; when he sold the condo for $417,000 and bought a newly renovated apartment for $585,000 in NYC. He reincorporated OSI in New York.
0:14 - Nazarro says he was never a trained CIA operative of any kind.
“I didn’t go to The Farm”, referring to a couple of training facilities inside of Camp Peary in Virginia where the CIA and DIA train secret agents.
His first stop was an amorphous position he calls “general military intelligence”
His next stop was a focus on counter terrorism. What prompted this was the US Embassy in Nairobi being bombed by Al Qaeda on August 7th, 1998, killing more than 200 people.
Around this time his ideology had changed completely. “I had really done a 180 and become much more conservative.”
Something happened to him before, during and after graduation that he won’t get into details about. He just says “I went through some personal things”
He describes his awakening to conservatism while offering as little information as possible. “I realized the opinions and viewpoints that I was adhering to at that point were… were bullshit, ok, and so it was just a very traumatic kind of sudden shift.”
His shift to conservatism came with “a heavy dose of patriotism”. He says it was patriotism that led to his personal desire to work for the government in the first place.
The terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001 were the final straw for him. Again, he presents shifting dates on when exactly he got into counter-terrorism.
Nazarro clarifies for the listeners who may be eyeing him suspiciously that he has never done any domestic counterterrorism work against “groups like The Base for example.” It’s noteworthy that he names his own group as a domestic extremist group, but he quickly moves on. “It was always foreign terrorism, and more specifically, Islamic terrorism.”
0:20 - Ethical concerns with the Bush Administration and The War On Terror.
Nazarro saw military intelligence as becoming much more politicized during “the weapons of mass destruction debacle where Cheney was making weekly trips over to CIA headquarters in Langley trying to pressure analysts to change their assessments.”
“George Bush actually purged the CIA of all these seasoned Middle East analysts, who were getting in the way of his agenda…That really shifted the culture.”
He claims the “decision makers” tried the same playbook in other countries as well. “We see the same thing in Syria with the weapons of mass destruction, or the chemical attack that was supposed to happen there, which was also bullshit.”
Nazarro says he had open discussions with his colleagues about these ethical concerns. He says they acknowledged that the whole thing was rotten. “There were people that would acknowledge and be in agreement with me that, yeah, you know, there was shady shit going on, but they were making more money than they would ever make otherwise, so they weren’t gonna rock the boat…”
“As my career went on, I was exposed to more hypocrisy and lies. That was just something I couldn’t ignore anymore…Living by certain virtues like truth, honesty, things like that are very important to me. So, I felt like I’m totally going against my own credo by participating in, or contributing to, these fucked up wars.”
The human cost of war was also a big factor “...people in uniform were sacrificing, risking their lives for these goals that were actually not… for these threats that didn’t actually exist[...]they’re being told like, ‘yeah, you know, Saddam has got weapons of mass destruction and we’ve got to go in and get him.’”
To this day Nazarro says he still respects the courage of US soldiers to put themselves in harm's way. “I have a continued degree of respect and admiration for guys in uniform who are actually, like, the trigger pullers and have that type of courage.”
Heavily redacted letters of gratitude. One is from the Department of Homeland Security. The other two are from the United States Marine Corps. All three were posted to Telegram by Nazzaro.
0:27 - Going down rabbit holes in Afghanistan, becoming a National Socialist.
Nazarro used his off-time in Afghanistan to read and “disappear down rabbit holes.” “I worked long hours, but when the shift was over there wasn’t really a whole lot to do.” He was feeling conflicted about his ideological assumptions, and so he went in search of a new ideology. “I went from, I guess from being like, sort of a conservative to like a libertarian, you know, to a, some point, I was like, an ANCAP,” (that is an anarcho-capitalist, which is essentially a more radical version of libertarianism).
Nazarro uses this interview to offer, for the first time, a semi-coherent explanation of his own “red pill” experience. “I became a National Socialist, because I just realized, like, one big kind of red pill for me was realizing that, like, free markets are bullshit, they just don't exist[...]typical conservative or even libertarian ideology hinges on that, this idea of like, free markets.”
“I was always taught that antisemitism is [...] almost like a mental illness, this irrational, kind of, fallback that people who are disgruntled” He describes wanting to thoroughly research the history of antisemitism. “Honestly, there has to be more to it. I just wasn't satisfied with that answer [...] I was going through and finding case studies, going back to like, medieval periods, to like, the present day, of course, up to through World War Two. And that was quite an eye-opener[...] there actually were reasons why people were pissed off at Jews, specific cases!” He does not feel compelled to share any specifics. The host does not ask for any.
Nazarro continues, “[Anti Semitism] wasn't a case of some just sort of irrational hatred[...] there are real historic events, and cause-and-effect here[...]I realized that, I felt like I had been, kind of, duped on the topic[...]Well, wait a minute… What’s up with, like, National Socialism and Hitler and that whole thing? Could that all be bullshit? (laughs) And yeah, you know, so, here we are.”
Hatfield compares claims of persecution against a Jewish diaspora to a person who travels from village to village and gets kicked out after being accused of molesting children every single time. He ponders how 100 villages in a row could possibly all be making up the same story.
Hatfield says that Nazarro’s political journey is something he has seen many times before “That’s a pretty typical pipeline to go from libertarian to questioning to anti-semitism to NS.”
NOTE: The best way to determine whether Nazzaro is being honest or not, is seemingly based on a few verbal “tells” he has. If he’s feeling nervous because his words do not match up with reality, he will repeat the same statement multiple times, re-phrasing it each time. The second thing he’ll do is lie by omission whereby he will say one thing that’s true and then quickly shift topics. So, how do we know if he’s being honest? Well, when a story of his is genuine, the plot points are concise and do not repeat. They follow a logical structure of “This happened and I felt this way about it and so this is what I did next.” Considering this, his redpill story seems plausible.
0:33 - Hatfield asks for a definitive redpill moment.
“Would you say there was one moment where you said, ‘I guess I’m a National Socialist?’”
Nazarro claims that he came to NatSoc ideology from an “economic standpoint” then backtracks and says it was mainly the “social aspect” that drew him to it. He considered NatSoc to “...be a solution to having a more harmonious society and in order to have a harmonious society you need to have a homogeneous society”. The racial aspect was a “secondary concern”. He also sees NatSoc as a synthesis of Right and Left ideological tendencies, Nationalism and Socialism.
To this day he still does not consider himself a hateful racist person. “I really don't hate any particular race of people just because they're a different you know, skin color or religion” He thinks that if anything, he’s pro-white but not necessarily anti-black or anti-anyone else.
Circling back to the original question Hatfield asked, he says that his redpill moment happened during his idle hours in Afghanistan. He spent a lot of his free time thinking about who he is and what he stands for, going down rabbit holes.
Nazarro says that by the time he left Afghanistan, he was fully National Socialist.
NOTE: At face value, Nazzaro seems like an unusual person to end up becoming a Neo-Nazi. As we listen to his story, this all sounds very familiar. It’s a story we’ve heard a hundred times before from many other NatSoc adherents, both young and old. Rinaldo Nazzaro was an alienated and disillusioned guy who spent too much time on the internet. He disappeared down a rabbit hole and never returned.
Nazzaro in his contractor days. He’ standing in front of the Swords of Qādisīyah in Baghdad.
0:36 - Nazarro’s experiences working with US Special Forces only confirmed to him that the US military is a morally bankrupt institution.
When he left Afghanistan, he decided that he would give the US military one more shot and spent the next two years working with US Special Forces. He’s likely referring to SOCOM (United States Special Operations Command).
This decision was partly because he still held out hope that the US military wasn’t completely crooked “If, like, in the Special Forces community, I couldn't find just some kind of purity of purpose and mission, then, I mean, where am I going to fucking find it?”
He felt like the US Special Forces were the worst of the worst. “It turned out that it was more highly politicized than almost anywhere else.” Once again doesn’t offer any details as to what that he saw that led him to this opinion.
Whatever went down during his time working with SOCOM, his experiences compelled him to quit his job in US military intelligence “pretty abruptly”.
0:38 - The end of the line. After Nazarro quit working with US Special Forces, he focused on his consulting company, Omega Solutions. It did not go well.
He felt like he was “back to square one” after “almost 20 years” of experience working for the US intelligence community in various capacities.
After exploring a variety of career options, he decided to put some effort into Omega Solutions, the company he had founded in 2002 but didn’t bother doing anything with until he officially left the military. He describes this project as a “consulting gig”.
The biggest timesuck for him was developing “targeting software.”
He has a difficult time explaining the purpose of the product he was trying to sell: a “targeting software” that he developed “It was sort of like analytical software, I guess you could say, that will just provide from a geo-status… geospatial standpoint, like, information that could be accessed really quickly and understood really quickly, like, you know, in a geographic way. So it can be used for, like, an operational planning type of thing.”
Nazarro claims he was in over his head. “ The price of entry into that whole thing, like, selling software to the government, is pretty steep.”
He tried to make Omega Solutions work out for a couple years. “Wasted a lot of money that I put into it myself trying to get it off the ground,” before giving up.
Note: Between 2003 and 2014, Nazarro appears to be on an upward economic trajectory with housing purchases increasing in value and his military/security contracting company performing as a viable business. In 2015, his economic fortunes turned with the sale of his DC townhouse and his family having to move into his mother and stepfather’s North Bergen, New Jersey apartment. The assumption is made that, by the 2015 period, his contracting company is no longer economically viable. This is followed by his company and Nazarro being sued over trademark infringement with the suit lost (with no appeal made) in the post Fall 2017 period.
Nazzaro wearing a Russian nationalist shirt. The text says “Russia. Absolute Power.”
0:41 - Nazarro’s priorities shifted away from his intelligence career ambitions after the birth of his daughter. The decision to emigrate to Russia soon followed.
“I knew that I didn't want to stay in the United States. I had a child to raise and I felt like it was my duty to put her first and her future well being first. That included raising her in the most, like, healthy social environment that I could possibly find. So that really took precedence over any kind of career type of thing.”
He says that he had invested a large portion of his savings into real estate. “So I had, like, a pretty decent nest egg. And I could rely on that to kind of have some breathing room and figure out what I wanted to do. And ultimately, you know, I decided to move to Russia.”
Nazarro says before he and his wife permanently made the move, they had a one-year residency in Saint Petersburg where he and his wife looked into buying real estate, but “it didn’t pan out” so they moved back to the United States “When I got back to United States, that was like right before Trump got elected, around that time period”
If true, this would place Nazarro and his family back in the United States (New Jersey), some time before November 2016.
0:42 - Now back in the United States, Nazarro joins Twitter and begins his nosedive into the white nationalist organizing cesspit.
He claims that, at the time, he had no social media other than a “normie Facebook account”.
Nazarro claims his primary source of white nationalist news, propaganda and discourse at the time was blogs and web pages. He names the Stormfront forums as an example of a site he visited but says it was a one-way interaction as an anonymous lurker “I didn’t have an account, but I would just peruse it sometimes.”
The inspiration to create a Twitter account is oddly phrased, but to summarize, he read on one of the NatSoc blogs he follows that Twtiter is the place to be for all the latest happenings inside of the far-right. So, in November-December of 2016, Nazarro set up his Twitter account and adopted the “Norman Spear” handle.
Nazzaro’s posts on Twitter using the handle “Norman Spear”.
0:44 - “Norman Spear” searches for a white nationalist tribe to call his own on Twitter.
For Nazarro, now a Gen-X’er man in his mid-40’s, actively engaging with white nationalist Twitter circa 2017 came with a dose of culture shock “At first I was just trying to get a lay of the land, you know, there were like so many different ideas and philosophies under the pro-white kind of rubric.” He goes on “As a newbie to all that I just spent a good solid year trying to figure out what the hell was going on.”
He would engage in threads where different far-right factions were debating one-another. He recalls one time when an Atomwaffen account that went by the name “Matthew Maci” got piled on by some Patriot Front guys and he stepped in to defend him “ I just would ask questions, well wait, why are you guys shitting on him on this point?”
Nazzaro considers himself to be a solutions-oriented person. He doesn’t like feeling stuck in an endless repetitive public relations dialogue. He wants a group that has a plan to change the world. “That is what I feel like we're lacking to this day. There’s plenty of people online, you know, just essentially complaining about all the issues, which most of us are painfully aware of, but there's very few practical solutions being offered. That's what I tried to focus on.”
A rare example of Nazzaro smiling in a photograph. This was taken before he started The Base.
0:47 - Nazarro has his “There is no political solution” epiphany.
First Trump let him down when it became clear he was not a secret Nazi. “At first, I kind of was excited that Trump got elected. I, you know, just sort of thought maybe things would change for the better but I quickly realized that that was not the case. So, at that point, that's when I became more radicalized.”
He sees the failure of Donald Trump to change even his own rhetoric to align more with white nationalist politics as a sign that “Maybe here really isn’t a political solution”. This led him to conclude that “...the revolutionary option was the way to go.”
At the same time, he didn’t see how an armed white nationalist insurgency could happen in the United States. He cites his own lived experiences fighting against armed insurgents in the Middle East. “ I think one thing I bring to the table is my background in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism [...] I kind of understand the ins and outs and, like, the practical aspects and challenges to a revolutionary approach, I realized that was the only way but I wasn't sure what that would really look like.”
Hatfield asks him if this is around the time he discovered the popular accelerationist text Siege by James Mason. Nazarro says he’d seen it passed around before, but never properly sat down and gave it a read until later.
0:51 - Nazarro discovers the white separatist movement and wants to start regional recruiting for the Northwest Front.
“The ‘Butler Plan,’ okay, which, just for anyone who's not aware, advocates for creating an independent, white ethnostate, in the Pacific Northwest…First phase is..to encourage people who are …consciously pro-White, to form communities in the Pacific Northwest, and then eventually, you know, as society continues to degrade, and we approach collapse, you switch over to a kind of, active, revolutionary phase of relying on that community…Harold Covington was, was trying to make that a reality…I thought that idea seemed very viable…it was unrealistic to try to ‘Take it all back!’ …But, I thought separatism, like a separatist state breaking away trying to take a portion of territory, at least, has some probability of working… So, I kind of just threw myself into the Northwest Front, trying to support it as much as possible… considered moving to the Pacific Northwest…began trying to promote them, recruit for them, that's when I ‘face-doxxed’ myself… Just for the sole reason of having people trust me more…”
Rinaldo Nazzaro taking a selfie on his newly purchased land in Republic, WA.
0:54 - Nazarro describes the “pro-white community” refusal to act on the idea of separatism.
“When you try to advocate for a specific region, then the challenge becomes even greater. I found out just from a practical standpoint, most people don't want to move… or they can’t.”
Rather than attempt to draw blood from a stone, Nazzaro decides to replicate Covington’s vision for the Northwest on a national level “Why not have a Butler Plan for every region? I mean, in other words, just try to encourage the Butler Plan everywhere…that's where I came up with the idea for The Base.”
“... I never explicitly stated that my intention was to have, like, a Butler Plan scenario, take root through this. But that was my intention. I mean, it still is…You can't go wrong having people locally that you can rely on, in a crisis scenario, regardless…”
“And training…Where we're imbuing our guys with the skills they need to survive, like a post-collapse scenario. ..These things have value and merit, regardless of the strategic outcome, whether- whether like, my dream of having a separatist state, somewhere in the United States, or balkanization actually happens or not, they’re still worthy goals!”
Harold Covington holding the Northwest Front tricolor flag.
0:57 - Nazarro describes traveling to the Pacific Northwest to meet Harold Covington.
“... to essentially get his approval for me to launch The Base. I didn't see it as competing with Northwest Front…I thought it was something that could complement it, potentially. But, I just wanted to give him a heads up that I was going to start this project. So he wasn't just, totally blindsided.”
“We were gonna meet like, at a restaurant, and I waited for several hours and he just never showed up. .. I contacted his right hand man and was like, ‘hey, you know, is Harold okay..?’”
“He sent someone over. to…do like a welfare check. And yeah, unfortunately, he had passed away. So, anyway, so, pretty much, at that point. I felt like I totally had a free hand to just go forward with my plan for The Base…the Northwest Front pretty much died with Harold.”
NOTE: The right hand man that Nazzaro was referring to is Andreas Donner or “Andy” for short. Donner attempted to keep the Northwest Front going after Covington died, but gave up after about a year. Recognizing that his life had hit a wall, Donner chose to disband the group and leave the movement The Northwest Front website has been completely wiped. It now shows a blank page with a header that reads:
“The Northwest Front has been shut down. Consider Life After Hate.”
1:00 - The origin of his group name The Base is pretty mundane.
Nazaro envisioned white nationalist action groups needing physical locations or “bases” for training and for bugging out in a collapse scenario. That’s the inspiration.
A physical base of operations was also the intended purpose of the land Nazzaro bought in Republic, WA. “That’s why I bought the land in the Pacific Northwest.”
To Hatfield’s credit, he doesn’t bother asking about “The Base” translating to “Al-Qaeda” in Arabic.
Richard Tobin posing with an Atomwaffen Division flag on the left. Rinaldo Nazzaro posing with a Base flag on the right.
1:02 - Nazarro talks about his relationship with the Atomwaffen Division.
“I've always had sort of, I would say, like a fairly good and somewhat close relationship with Atomwaffen. I mean, I've always been a supporter of Atomwaffen, I always liked the radical and radical militant nature of it.”
Nazzaro says he was Invited to join AWD but decided not to. He was never “totally sold” on them. He felt like they lacked focus. Always supported them and liked their radical mindset.
He defended Atomwaffen during their Satanic Panic scandal. The short version of that story is that when Order of Nine Angles cultist John Cameron Denton aka “Rape” took over the group from Brandon Russell, he brought in all of his weird Satanist beliefs. This freaked out a lot of people who are more traditional in their NatSoc beliefs.
Nazzaro keeps on referring to the host of the show as “you guys” when talking about Atomwaffen Division, which means he still thinks of the host, Hatfield, as an Atomwaffen guy despite the rebrands.
“I stay true to like Atomwaffen as far as trying to support, trying to, like get, yeah, trying to get guys… to people who are starting to badmouth you guys, and, and, you know, turn their backs. I was like, hey, well, wait a minute, you know, like, you gotta you gotta, let's take a little more balanced perspective on this, don't just throw out the baby with the bathwater.”
Atomwaffen Division cell photo.
1:05 - Hatfield says the legend of the Satanist contingent within AW became larger than life.
He says it just goes hand in hand with working with NSBM (national socialist black metal) guys. NSBM guys are often edgelords and they’re into Satan.
Hatfield says they’ve done a decent job recovering from all the O9A (Order of Nine Angles) drama.
He then asks a question about how Nazzaro went about promoting the group. The answer is he used Twitter and he had help from some extra-enthusiastic members who helped spread the word.
Three Georgia cell members doing a mag dump for propaganda purposes.
1:09 - Hatfield asks about keeping members in The Base network engaged in the group through giving members tasks to complete.
Nazarro says he did not assign specific tasks to members besides trying to keep them focused on meeting up and saying so in chat.
Hatfield, completely spaced out in the middle of Nazarro’s answer to his question and apologizes for losing his train of thought.
He regains focus after about 25 seconds of stammering and then asks about next steps Nazarro took after the initial burst of activity within The Base.
The answer for this question is exactly the same as the answer for the question above. Get guys to meet up, train and prepare for the country to collapse, worded in 10 different ways.
Retired FBI Agent Scott Payne gives a keynote speech at the Eradicate Hate Summit 2022 in Pittsburgh. Journalist Michelle Shepard interviews him about his experiences undercover inside of The Base.
1:13 - Now it’s time to talk about The Base getting infiltrated.
Hatfield asks about when the first FBI infiltrator was admitted into the group. Here is where Nazarro is deliberately dishonest when he gives his answer. “I am only aware of one badge-carrying federal agent that infiltrated.” Nazarro makes no mention of when he got in or how long he was there. He chooses instead to talk about which cells he was able to bust, which were the DMV cell and the Georgia cell.
He neglects to mention that this agent also gathered Intel that led to the arrest of a man in the Great Lakes Cell named Yusef Barasneh, another guy in the Northeast named Richard Tobin and two others in Alabama / Texas, named Brandon Gregory Ashley and Duncan Christopher Trimmel respectively. As usual, Nazarro will make light of any setbacks and lie by omission in order to paint a favorable narrative.
NOTE - The answer to the original question is publicly available information. You can read the FBI affidavits if you’d like to learn more. The agent he’s referring to was in The Base from July 2019 to January 2020, about 6 months. According to this agent’s (Scott Payne) interview at the Eradicate Hate Summit, the alias this agent went by at the time was PaleHorse.
The location of the Nazzaro property in Republic, WA was obtained through records requests by investigative journalists.
1:14 - Nazarro mentions that Antifa found out about a planned meetup in Washington and blew the whistle publicly, forcing him to cancel that event.
He spins this as being a positive thing because “that forced the local authorities to admit that they were tracking it”.
He says that the undercover FBI agent was going to travel there for that training meetup as well.
Finishing his answer, he lies some more saying that “As far as I know that was the only actual law enforcement that was actually in The Base”.
Taking even a cursory look at the number of arrests and public ID’s in the press since PaleHorse left the group in January 2020, Nazarro knows that can’t be true. The way he pauses between sentence fragments during that answer is a tell. It indicates that he isn’t confident about this.
NOTE - Nazarro completely neglects to mention that undercover federal agents and/or antifascist spies have been inside of The Base from the very beginning. He also neglects to mention that one of these antifascists, “Tradian”, made it into the leadership cadre and the vetting team of The Base. Giving this person that kind of access for over a year was an unprecedented OpSec disaster. This was the perfect post for a left wing spy to collect information on all their new members one-by-one and pass that information to nonprofits and media organizations.
Left: Courtroom sketch of training camp video used as an exhibit during the trial of the Delaware/Maryland cell.
Right: Sketches of the defendants in that case, from left to right, Brian Mark Lemley, Patrick Jordan Matthews, William Garfield Bilbrough IV.
1:15 - Hatfield brings up the arrests in Georgia, Delaware and Maryland, the “lowest point in the history of The Base.”
“How did the group react to this happening? Did you have a plan on how to handle this?”
Nazarro initially sidesteps this question so he can shift the blame and add some context. “It was really the media that kind of was like the tail the wagged the dog” and goes on to moan about the first article that came out from Vice News and how it was full of lies, “saying that we were planning attacks and all this shit which just wasn’t true.”
This bit about Vice is an old Nazzaro victimhood narrative that he has never been able to let go of since November 2019. It also has nothing to do with contingency plans in case of a raid by federal agents.
The answer he won’t give is, there was no official plan for getting raided and there still isn’t one now. There’s plenty of ways to actually prepare a group of activists for that kind of attention, but he can’t think of any.
Hatfield interrupts to make a smug remark. “If we were half as badass as the media thought we were, we would be twice as badass as we actually are.” This is his way of saying “God, I wish we were actually as scary as they say in the papers!”
NOTE: We’ve heard several versions of this quote from the antifascist side too. Conservatives turn the black bloc anarcho-communists into a boogeyman. They create narratives that make them seem like terrorist when in reality they’re mostly disorganized college students.
The headline of the “Vice News hit piece” that Nazaro is still upset about.
1:17 - Nazarro returns to his original point about yellow journalism.
He believes that the feds only took an interest in them because of one hyperbolic Vice article setting the tone. He then admits that “When the arrests happened that totally took me off guard.” He then claims “I had no idea what was going on there as far as, like, the Georgia situation.”
He then, in this instance, admits that “We were kind of reeling, I’m not gonna lie. We were sort of in panic mode. We haven’t experienced anything like that before and weren’t really sure what to do.” Nazarro claims to have shown good leadership instincts at this moment.
Nazzaro repeats an old talking point he gave for panicking Base members in 2020 surrounding legality “I tried to explain to guys like, look, if you have nothing to hide, then you really have nothing to worry about.”
NOTE: We at Glitterpill have the chat logs and transcripts showing how he actually handled things during The Base’s darkest hour. He rambled endlessly. His attempt to put a positive spin on the situation came across as delusional, not comforting. He was unable to calm down the panicked line members who were fleeing The Base chats one-by-one.
Nazzaro’s doublespeak continues. “Look, yeah we are anti-system. We’re vocal about that. We don’t hide that… I think it’s only natural, to be expected that we’re gonna get some degree of law enforcement attention, but I mean the best defense is to just keep your nose clean.” He then re-words and repeats that talking point a few more ways and says “that’s what I tried to hammer home”.
Photo of Rinaldo Nazzaro in a Villanova University school newspaper, later published by the Guardian when he is publicly identified by Jason Wilson.
1:19 - Our unreliable narrator recounts how it felt to get publicly ID’d.
Nazarro initially minimizes how dire the situation was, naturally, saying that “I always anticipated getting doxxed at some point. I mean when I put my face out there, I figure it’s just a matter of time y’know but I was prepared to live with that. The way it went down was way more spectacular than I expected, I mean, not in a good way.”
He recounts how the story of his identity became an international headline. His cell phone was blowing up with journalists from every corner of the world trying to contact him all at the same time. He remembers the hysteria on social media “They’re calling me the Osama bin Laden of, like, white nationalism.”
At the time he claims he was mostly worried about what the Russian authorities would do “I think everyone realizes what the Russian government’s feeling is about anyone who might be considered a Neo-Nazi so I panic at that point. I’m like fuck, I was waiting for the FSB to kick down down my door at any minute.”
1:21 - Nazarro says the Russian authorities didn’t bother him
He recalls that someone asked the Russian Foreign Ministry about him by name at a press conference. “They just blew it off […] calling it ‘idle chatter’ and they just tried to downplay it because at that point there was no official arrest warrant by the FBI [...] it was just all media speculation.”
“I think that’s why the Russian government never went after me. I’m sure they were monitoring me and still are very, very closely but they really didn’t have anything to go on.”
He says he had no personal social media and The Base had been banned off of every social media platform save for Telegram, which he did not have admin access to.
When Nazarro was publicly identified in The Guardian, he handed off his leadership responsibilities to someone else so he could bug out and hide because “My immigration status was still up in the air.”
The Michigan cell, who recently assumed a leadership role over The Base in Nazzaro’s absence. The tallest man on the left is Justen Watkins, who is currently incarcerated.
1:23 - Nazaro describes handing the reins of power over after bugging out.
He lies by omission here and makes no mention of putting “Tradian” in charge. He time skips ahead to when he left Justen Watkins in command “I handed over the reins to guys who I trusted, who I felt could carry the torch while I was getting my situation taken care of and you know, they did a good job.”
The guys in Bad Axe were the next Base members to get arrested in late 2020 but Nazzaro doesn’t seem to care. He considers even leadership figures within the Base as disposable, replaceable people “I mean, unfortunately, that would lead to additional arrests. That's when the guys in Michigan ended up getting busted but, you know, whatever.”
Screenshot from the Russia-24 segment about Rinaldo Nazzaro and The Base. He is interviewed walking around on the streets of Saint Petersburg. Later they give him a free visit to a local Holocaust museum.
1:24 - He explains how his Russia-24 news segment happened
“The straw that broke the camel's back for me was when the BBC put out something about me grooming, like children. They weren't saying I was a pedophile, but they're saying that I was ideologically grooming them. The illusion was there using that same kind of terminology.”
NOTE: Until someone on the vetting team pressed Nazzaro to change it, the age cutoff for joining The Base was 17 years old. One of the youngest members was 15. He recruited teenagers into the ranks of the group on a regular basis.
He claims that he approached Russian state TV about arranging an interview. “I gotta fucking put an end to this shit now. That's when I had dug up a phone number of the producer of Russia-24 who had called me when I initially got doxxed [...] I gotta get my side of the story out there and kind of clear my name to a certain extent. I figured the best way to do that, since I'm in Russia, is to do it through a government news outlet.”
After the Nazzaro interview was finished filming, it took Russia-24 several months of post production before they published it.
Nazzaro viewed the publication of his news segment as the Russian government signaling to him that they were okay with his activities and that he could become active again without concern for legal blowback. “I took it like a signal, like, kind of unspoken. If they actually broadcast it. Okay, I'm in the clear. They're not going to come after me. And so I waited for that. And then that's when I became active again.”
Rinaldo Nazzaro posting to Gab under the handle “Norman Spear”, looking for new recruits.
1:26 - After lying low for a while, Nazzaro decided to become active again.
Hatfield says that leadership of the Atomwaffen Division fell to him after the arrests of John Cameron Denton, Caleb Cole, Cameron Shea, Ashley Parker Dippepe and Johnny Garza. “Of course, with AWD, I disbanded the group after leadership fell to me for reasons I'm sure you know.”
NOTE: The fact that Atomwaffen leadership fell to this particular person after the arrests in early 2020 confirms that the podcast host is a man by name Ryan Hatfield.
American Futurist host Ryan Hatfield with his mom.
There was a brief period where Nazzaro attempted to start a brand new group with the brand name “Project Omega”. It had the same goals as The Base. The only thing that changed was the name. He quickly abandoned it.
“But that just reminded me how hard it is to get traction with something new. So, I felt like the Base still had… We had put so much into it. I mean, you know, for better or for worse, it had that name recognition and I felt like we could still use it.”
He acknowledges that The Base brand still carries the stink of being branded a fed honeypot and the scary prospect of being arrested for being a member. He rambles for a bit about weighing the pros and cons between rebranding versus keeping the publicly known name. He also mentions that The Base is designated a terrorist group in 4-5 countries at this point.
Hatfield mentions how there was a very real possibility of Atomwaffen being declared a terrorist group in March of 2020. If The Base were designated a terrorist group in the United States, Nazzaro says he would be left with no choice but to cease operations entirely “Members have asked me when that came up, like, what are we going to do if that happens to us as well? Then we’ve got to just close up shop, because what else can we do?”
Neo Nazi Telegram channel “Biden Brostown Laughsacre” actively discouraging participation in accelerationist groups.
1:31 - The US white nationalist movement is scared of accelerationist groups now.
Hatfield asks about how Nazzaro attempted to rebuild The Base in the wake of an unmitigated disaster. The short answer is, due to a combination of factors their ability to organize is severely diminished.
Nazzaro’s answer paints a bleak picture “It's been tough, you know? It's slow going. I think a lot of things changed just in the larger kind of movement or community. I mean, even like, in the Siegepilled, more kind of militant community. I think that the arrests had, like a ripple effect. [..] People pointed to that. It freaked people out in general.”
Former online allies started to actively discourage joining groups and organisations. “We had supporters in like, for example, Terrorgram, that would promote us, and then after the arrests, they were going out and telling everyone not to organize. [...] They were pointing to The Base as one of the clear reasons why. They took a totally different attitude towards organizing in general and they're very influential.”
Nazzaro sees this as a betrayal from the broader white nationalist community “It was our own people who were nominally on our side who really did the most damage to The Base’s reputation and just to the idea of organizing in general”.
From the sound of things, Nazzaro has intentionally benched himself. He has noticed the movement energy trending towards groups that don’t engage in paramilitary training and he doesn’t feel like fighting against the tide “And I feel like, in a lot of ways, I’ve kind of taken a step back. I'm happy to see, like, some of the more activist-type groups doing pretty well, these days. You know, that's, that's nice to see but I feel like that's kind of limited from a strategic standpoint.”
He sees the possibility of converting the Active Club Network in the USA into something explicitly revolutionary later on “ There's that network there and they could always turn into that, you know, when the time comes, become some kind of fighting unit or something like that” He’s not optimistic about convincing those guys to make the switch.
Photo on the left: Jacob Kaderli and Michael Helterbrand in court.
Photo on the right: Luke Austin Lane in court.
1:37 - The two take turns ranting about the risks involved in participating.
Hatfield believes that everyone gets caught for a reason “ I've never seen somebody in this movement get arrested for doing nothing. Like, every single person has fucked up in some major way that led to their arrest. Like, you're not gonna get arrested, if you don't fuck up.”
He also notes that your margin for error in situations like this is zero. “They only have to catch you once, you know. You can get away with it 100 times, and they only have to catch you once so you have to be really careful about how you do everything.” he then hedges a bit “You have to be paranoid but don’t let that paranoia rule your life. Don’t have a cop in your head.”
Nazzaro says that they should stick with the same formula they’ve been using where they organize meetups and post photos or videos to social media in order to promote the group. “ I've always tried to have our guys be as active as possible, try to document it, try to publish contents of meetups of training, and showing that like, we have a pulse.”
Base meetup photo circa 2022.
1:40 - With every cycle of collapse and rebuilding, the group has changed.
The Base has been going through multiple cycles of creation and destruction. The Base has had multiple iterations now where we get hit with the media exposure initially, we kind of went underground for a little bit then came back. So we've kind of had this phoenix rising from the ashes thing at least three times [...] but every time it does get more difficult.”
Nazzaro briefly pivots to the “refined” version of the long-term goals for the group “I felt like it was important to be more explicit about my long-term strategic intentions as far as having separatist goals or balkanization being a goal and why I think that that's an important goal and how we can configure ourselves to achieve that”
He also briefly mentions his new strategy of forming “A-Teams” which is modeled after the US Special Forces. All it means is that the goal is to form a small unit of well-trained guys that can make a large impact in a warzone. He talks about it at length on his personal Telegram channel.
1:44 - Why Nazzaro chose to move to Russia instead of other places
The reason he offers is pretty mundane. He claims he looked into moving to other countries in the European Union and discovered that it’s quite difficult to get a residency permit which would later on lead to citizenship. Because he has a Russian wife though, securing citizenship in Russia would be significantly less of a hassle. For him, it came down to choosing the path of least resistance.
The other reason is because he considers Russia to be a much more traditionalist place than the USA. He considers that type of environment to be preferable to an American public school “...where they’re trying to like fuck with my kids heads.”
Hatfield talks about the burdens that come with being a NatSoc parent in the USA “You send your kids to American public school and now you've got to, in addition to being a parent, you have to be sort of like a cult deprogrammer as well. You come home, ‘Okay tell me about everything we learned today at school. Okay, so here's how this is bullshit. Here's how that is bullshit. Here's how you were lied to about this.’”
Nazzaro continues to say that he barely speaks any Russian.
They talk about how walking down the street in Russia is nicer because “...you don't see any black crackheads or anything like that on the side of the street.” Hatfield comments that he considers it to be “a form of demoralization really to see that every single day and it just beats you down to the point where you think that’s unacceptable.”
1:49 - Nazzaro’s stance on the war between Russia and Ukraine (final question).
His position is that it’s a bad war because the entire conflict is white-on-white violence. “I just look at it as essentially like a brother war, especially for guys of our ideological persuasion. There's guys who are ultra-nationalists slash, you know, fascists, however, they identify themselves, on both sides of the conflict. To me, that's kind of like a tragedy to, you know, where we need to be trying to achieve unity.” He’s right about this. There are Neo-Nazi military units fighting on both sides of the conflict.
For anyone reading this, I hope this helps to summarize where Nazarro and The Base are at. Nazarro is still relentlessly positive about every unmitigated disaster and is consistently in denial. His pet project ‘The Base’ is at the ‘flogging a dead horse’ stage and he is left with few options in Russia. As iterated in Part 1, counterterrorism work is his best option, so he’ll likely end up working for the Russians as either a regular or a PMC.
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