The Proud Boys, med ryska rötter

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.