← White Hot Hate: Agent Pale Horse
White Hot Hate: Agent Pale Horse
Season 1, Episode 5: The ‘Network Administrator’
00:48:11
<p>We speak with ‘Roman Wolf,’ the founder of The Base. Who is he really? Why did he start a white supremacist network? And with half a dozen members behind bars, what comes next? For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/white-hot-hate-transcripts-listen-1.6226840</p>
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- [00:01]
Kathleen Goldhar
While there are plenty of toxic social media personalities, few are as vicious and influential as Andrew Tate online. He brags about being a misogynist, and his videos have been viewed billions of times. Now Tate and his brother are under investigation for human trafficking. I'm Kathleen Goldhar, and this week on Crime Story, I speak with two journalists who spent four years inside Andrew Tate's manosphere. Find Crime Story wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:31]
Ollie Winston
This is a CBC podcast.
- [00:35]
Kathleen Goldhar
The following episode contains strongly racist language and descriptions of violence. Please take care when listening.
- [00:43]
Ronaldo Nazaro
The majority of us are natural socialists, and we're fascists. Although we do have guys who are more just sort of run of the algieric white nationalists. More.
- [00:55]
Kathleen Goldhar
Remember that voice? That's the man going by the alias Roman Wolf. He was vetting Ryan Thorpe, a Winnipeg Free Press reporter who'd gone undercover posing as a white nationalist. And Ryan had secretly recorded the call.
- [01:10]
Ronaldo Nazaro
We do have a very strong revolutionary and militant current running through the base, and most of our members are pretty hardcore.
- [01:22]
Kathleen Goldhar
Well, it turns out Ryan wasn't the only one documenting these conversations. The base had been infiltrated long before him, long before even the FBI. This insider joined the base soon after its inception, and for about a year and a half, he recorded dozens and dozens of vetting calls with wannabe members from around the world. Just like with Ryan's phone interview, they were almost always led by that one man, Roman Wolf.
- [01:53]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Why don't we just start out with kind of a general question? Just tell us a little bit about yourself. So I'm a man in my late 20s. I work a pretty normal job. It's a white collar job. I live in an apartment in Saskatchewan. I love going outdoors. Okay.
- [02:15]
Kathleen Goldhar
I am 26 years old.
- [02:17]
Ronaldo Nazaro
I live in the west of Germany.
- [02:19]
Kathleen Goldhar
I served several months in the German army.
- [02:22]
Ronaldo Nazaro
We call it Verdienst in Germany. So every. Okay, so my name is Peter and my. My parents are Polish. They came here to the US in the 90s. The town I live in, it used to be like a pretty, like, Polish Italian and, like, pretty American town. But, like, I've seen this shift from it being majority white to slowly, like, Section 8 housing coming in, all the Spanish people, the fucking blacks moving in. And now basically my entire main street is like a fucking ghetto. Like, I don't even like to go.
- [02:53]
Walter Grayson
So.
- [02:53]
Ronaldo Nazaro
I'm Giannis from Australia. Just tell us a little bit. Actually, I'm a birthday nationalist from Perth, Western Australia. I'm a licensed firearm owner. I have a clean record with the police. I have been part of Several white nationalist movements. So far, it's only been online. And I'm growing tired of that being around.
- [03:16]
Ollie Winston
Like it's getting to the point where only armed conflict is going to have any chance of turning this shit back around.
- [03:23]
Kathleen Goldhar
There are more than 100 hours of tape leaked to a handful of civil rights and media organizations. CBC was one of them.
- [03:33]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Okay. How old are you? I'm 36.
- [03:38]
Kathleen Goldhar
They give us a glimpse into how this group recruits who they consider a good prospect.
- [03:43]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Okay, what's your ethnicity? Monster race.
- [03:49]
Kathleen Goldhar
And crucially, how Roman Wolf thinks and operates. Because not only do we hear the.
- [03:56]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Interviews, what is your racial composition? I'm primarily like. I'm like 90% white with some Latin blood. It's not Spanish speaking Latin. It's like a mix of Portuguese and indigenous American kind of thing. Okay, yeah, I mean, that might be an issue.
- [04:21]
Kathleen Goldhar
We also get to listen to the post vetting debrief.
- [04:25]
Ronaldo Nazaro
He's not gonna align. Well, that's why, first of all.
- [04:29]
Kathleen Goldhar
Yeah.
- [04:30]
Ronaldo Nazaro
I mean, he admitted he's not totally white. Okay. And then 10%, I can usually give a leeway, but, you know. Yeah, yeah. Among the other things, I'm not gonna. Exactly, Exactly. Right. He's just like, way too touchy feely about blacks and mistreating blacks. It's like you feel guilty about it. And he hasn't even done anything yet.
- [04:53]
Kathleen Goldhar
Roman Wolf clearly appeared to be the guy in charge of the base. He also went by the alias Norman Speer, which is what Vice called him when they first reported on the group in 2018. All evidence pointed to him as the founder of the Accelerationist Network. There were more than half a dozen base members behind bars in the US but this Roman Wolf was seemingly a free man. So who is he? Shepard. And. And this is White Hot Hate, episode five. The network administrator.
- [05:50]
Ollie Winston
Yeah. He claims he did some tours overseas as a contractor. The guy's veracity is really in question. And I think that in a lot of the remarks that he's made, he's tried to puff up his own reputation quite a bit.
- [06:02]
Kathleen Goldhar
Ollie Winston was among the first journalists to investigate Roman Wolf, to try to figure out the offline reality beyond his online Persona.
- [06:12]
Ollie Winston
And since 2017, 2016, maybe, I've spent a lot of time researching the extreme right wing, both in the United States and abroad. Elsewhere in the Western world.
- [06:24]
Kathleen Goldhar
Far right extremism has a long, bloody history in the U.S. but there's one tragedy 26 years ago that really pushed this threat into the American consciousness.
- [06:35]
Ronaldo Nazaro
It was just after 9:00 this morning when the building full of federal government employees was hit. The explosion turned the office building to rubble. A daycare full of children was shredded. Whole floors simply disintegrated.
- [06:51]
Kathleen Goldhar
On the morning of April 19, 1995, ex soldier Timothy McVeigh set off a massive truck bomb in downtown Oklahoma City. 168 people were murdered, including 19 children.
- [07:05]
Ollie Winston
He and his accomplices carried out that a horrendous act of domestic terrorism in 1995 that unfortunately in this country we seem to forget about because it was carried out by Anglos, by white folk instead of the people who we've been trained and conditioned over the past 20 years to think as our mortal enemies. That's something that I think about a lot.
- [07:26]
Kathleen Goldhar
Once 911 happened, the threat posed by the violent far right fell off the agenda, even though there have since been many much smaller domestic attacks. Ali had devoted much of his reporting to police accountability. But in about 2016, he shifted focus to street demonstrations that were getting more and more vicious.
- [07:48]
Ollie Winston
There was a political rally in Southern California and Anaheim where members of the Ku Klux Klan got into a altercation with a number of anti fascist counter protesters. I think at least two or three people went to the hospital for stab wounds. And that was unusual because the Klan hadn't rallied in California in a long time, not publicly, and they hadn't had any sort of bloody clashes like that.
- [08:14]
Kathleen Goldhar
There appeared to be a snowball effect, one incident after another.
- [08:18]
Ronaldo Nazaro
We need one, Trump. We need one.
- [08:22]
Ollie Winston
And then gradually, during the course of that election season, you'd see in 2016 at these political rallies, you'd see more fistfights, more confrontations.
- [08:34]
Kathleen Goldhar
Then in 2017, came the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The first time in generations that Americans watched racists proudly marching en masse, their faces uncovered, tiki torches burning, seemingly unbothered by law enforcement. While others were covering the rally and its fallout, Ali was paying closer attention to the online activity rather than uniting the right. Charlottesville actually fractured the wider movement. And what seemed to follow in its wake was a smaller but even more noxious ideology.
- [09:14]
Ollie Winston
You started to see this kind of new movement arise out of places like Iron March. 8chan 4chan kind of drags to the Internet, where young folks, they were into the shock, shock and awe thing. They were trying to be edgy, trying to look for a counterculture. They developed their own aesthetic, their memes. It was a really weird, broad movement, but I do think that it was a culture developed by the youth and it was, you know, fed by a Broader current of rising xenophobia and white nationalism that came from an older strain of American culture that's always been around in the US and other parts of the West.
- [09:51]
Kathleen Goldhar
Soon, Ali was specifically tracking Atomwaffen Division. They're another neo Nazi accelerationist group. Their name means atomic weapons in German.
- [10:01]
Ollie Winston
You know, you can think of them as, like, Tim McVay's children or Tim McVay's little cousins. They have a similar worldview, and they, in fact, venerate him along with Charles Manson.
- [10:10]
Kathleen Goldhar
As Ali continued his reporting, he spotted an intriguing photo of two men posted online.
- [10:17]
Ollie Winston
They were holding, you know, wearing masks over their face and holding up two flags. One of them was the Atomwaffen Division. There's a radioactive symbol inside a shield. That's their insignia.
- [10:27]
Kathleen Goldhar
But next to the Atomwaffen Division member was something new.
- [10:32]
Ollie Winston
Was a young man holding a black flag with three AIWAS runes. S runes. And I'd never seen that flag before. And what that indicated was that whoever the young man from Atomwaffen was, he was showing his organization's support for whatever that was. It seemed to be an Atomwaffen mimic, right? An organization that had the same aesthetic, same idea. You know, small man cells preparing for a collapse.
- [11:01]
Kathleen Goldhar
An Atomwaffen copycat group calling itself the Base. They recruited and spread their propaganda on all the same platforms. Their founder did the rounds on all the same far right podcasts. But the Base didn't garner as much public attention. That is, until its members started getting arrested. And Ali and his fellow reporters on this extremism beat set out to uncover more about the group's creator over time.
- [11:27]
Ollie Winston
I'm just digging into them a little bit. He went by the aliases Norman Speer and Roman Wolf. Online.
- [11:33]
Kathleen Goldhar
The journalists combed through leaked internal chats, dug into property records for land allegedly bought for training. And that's how they uncovered Roman Wolf's real identity.
- [11:44]
Ollie Winston
My colleague Daniel DeSimone at the British Broadcasting Corporation and our other colleague, Jason Wilson at the Guardian, parallel to us discover the identity of their leader. We determined that he is, in fact an American named Ronaldo Nazaro.
- [11:59]
Kathleen Goldhar
Ronaldo Nazaro. American in his late 40s, Italian roots and grew up in New Jersey. Graduated from a prestigious Catholic Prep School in 1991 as Roman Wolf. He claimed he had served as a military contractor in Afghanistan and Iraq under his real name. Nazaro had registered a company called Amega Solutions International, which advertised specialists in counterterrorism and psychological operations who had been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. Then there was this very Curious detail. Nazaro was no longer living in the States. He was calling the shots from St. Petersburg, Russia. Ali told me that uncovering his real identity, it wasn't actually that hard.
- [12:54]
Ollie Winston
There are individuals who are very good with their tradecraft online, with eliminating traces of who they are and what they're about. And there are some individuals who are either careless or don't care what sort of trace they leave. I would say Nazaro would fall into the second category.
- [13:13]
Kathleen Goldhar
Roman Wolf's real name and a short bio of his life, now public. But there were still details missing about why he created this neo Nazi group. So I tried to talk to his family and friends. His mom, who still lives in the States, got back to me briefly on Facebook, but then went quiet again. Trying through military contacts to get someone who knew him in Iraq or Afghanistan. Didn't result in any hits. But when I went back further into his history, there were people who would talk and who remembered a very different guy. A guy named Ron. Are you good there, Walter? Comfortable? All set. Can hear me. Okay.
- [13:58]
Walter Grayson
Aside from having to discuss some really horrible people, yes, I'm absolutely fine.
- [14:02]
Kathleen Goldhar
Walter Grayson is an educator, historian, and author, and he's dedicated his life to fighting racism and discrimination. His academic work in Afrofuturism influenced both writers of the comic book superhero Black Panther and the filmmakers who brought him to the big screen, Wakanda Forever. Today, he's a professor at McAlester College in Minnesota. But at the start of the 90s, he was a college student alongside Ronaldo Nazaro.
- [14:35]
Walter Grayson
I knew him as Ron, and it was probably my sophomore year of college, I'd expect.
- [14:41]
Kathleen Goldhar
Walter and Ron, both from New Jersey, met in the 1990s at Villanova, a private Catholic university in Pennsylvania. Walter studied history, while Nazaro was a philosophy major. Villanova was an odd choice for Walter.
- [14:57]
Walter Grayson
I was attending a college fair. There was a Villanova table, and they had a current student at the fair who was standing maybe three or five feet from me talking to another group of all white students. This was also a white student, and he didn't see me. And in talking to those other students, he said, well, I really love Villanova because there are no blacks or Latinos there. He did not say blacks or Latinos. He used more harsh language. And so to hear this student say that openly in public as a good thing, that that's why people should come to Villanova, I was, you know, drama, tremendously offended and went immediately to the Villanova recruitment table and began looking through the literature to find if there was a way that I could get a full scholarship to attend there so I could begin to challenge the kinds of practices that he was describing.
- [15:50]
Kathleen Goldhar
Walter may have been confident that he could change the institution from the inside. But he says the racism that spurred him to enroll confronted him nearly daily. As a student, I want to say.
- [16:03]
Walter Grayson
Probably September or October of 92, a student in my dormitory attacked me with a nightstick for using a payphone because he wanted to call his girlfriend. There were a number of really clear incidents where people made it plain that I didn't really fit in, didn't really belong, that black people shouldn't be at Villanova. And so I remember other black students talking about I was the only African American living in that dorm. They're like, oh, they haven't lynched you yet. That certainly was the norm at Villanova is that people believed that blacks and Latinos didn't belong, that the general notion that it was a white society should be a white society, and any means of defending that were appropriate.
- [16:47]
Kathleen Goldhar
There was just one place on campus where Walter could find some like minded students.
- [16:52]
Walter Grayson
If you didn't belong anyplace else, the center for Peace and justice gave you a place where you could come and be accepted. And so that's where I met Ron when he was part of the Democratic Socialists of America. And a lot of the work they were doing on campus, I was doing work with the International Committee Against Racism. But all of those student organizations through the center ran into each other all the time and tried to cross support each other. I remember Ron was there in DSA and he was much more about supporting anarchism and the end of government and kind of critiquing what he felt were overreach by public infrastructure.
- [17:30]
Kathleen Goldhar
And so Nazaro wasn't a bold character. He certainly didn't present as a young white supremacist who'd go on to start a group like the base.
- [17:40]
Walter Grayson
No, no. If you had asked me in 1994 to make a list of the folks I went to school with who would end up founding a radical right wing organization. Nah, I got 100 names I'd put on that list before I would have come to his.
- [17:58]
Kathleen Goldhar
But Walter did wonder if Nazaro's university experience shaped him in other ways. The thing about Villanova is that it was prime recruiting for the military. Walter says there was a strong tradition of students joining the Reserve Officer Training Corp at the university. So Nazaro was definitely surrounded by the future military types he'd later work with. After Ali and others revealed Nazaro's identity. A Vice report confirmed that he had been a Pentagon contractor who in 2014 worked with SOCOM. That's the special Operations Command, an ultra secretive unit. Nazaro later posted two letters that seemed to be from the Marine Corps and one from the Department of Homeland Security thanking him for his service. The DHS later confirmed that he had worked as a contractor from 2004 to 2006.
- [18:55]
Walter Grayson
I could see that for Ron when I saw him through those years is that he wanted so badly to belong and to have connection to people. That was the hardest thing I saw from him, is that he seemed much more like a loner. And as he tried to get involved, he would propose ideas or strategies or tactics, but he was still kind of sorting through his own issues about how to put together a compelling message. And so he was awkward. And it was unfortunate because it reinforced his sense of insecurity.
- [19:26]
Kathleen Goldhar
Villanova confirmed that Nazaro had attended the university between 1991 and 94, but he withdrew and never came back. So how did socialist Ron, who dropped out of school, start a white supremacist organization? Decades later, according to a New York magazine profile entitled the Prep School Nazi, Nazaro later got engaged to an army veteran who once worked out of the PSYOPS division at Fort Bragg, but they broke up. Then there was his time running Omega Solutions International and whatever that involved in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nazaro got engaged again, ultimately marrying a Russian woman who'd worked with his mother. They had a lavish Manhattan wedding before moving to St. Petersburg in 2018. Once Nazaro was outed as the leader of the base, he kept a relatively low profile. Until this. In late 2020, state sponsored news channel Russia 24 did a half hour feature on Nazaro. He granted them multiple interviews and even agreed to be taken to a Holocaust museum. The item ends with footage of him, his wife and their young children at a playground. Finally, a family oriented person.
- [20:55]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Yeah, I'm a family man. First and foremost.
- [21:00]
Kathleen Goldhar
I wondered if Nazaro would do an extensive interview with anyone other than Russian state sponsored media. He made no secret of his disdain for journalists who he liked to call the enemy. But I thought I'd try anyway. Now, I wouldn't say I'm an especially skilled online journalist. I like to think I have other investigative talents, but digging into the dark corners of the Internet or underground social media, not my specialty. But Ollie told me Nazaro wasn't that hard to find. And, well, he was right. I won't say exactly how I got in touch with Nazaro, but it took me about 15 minutes. Encrypted app over to email to eventually a phone call with the founder of the base. At 24, I lost my narrative, or rather it was stolen from me. And the Monica Lewinsky that my friends and family knew was usurped by false narratives, callous jokes and politics. I would define reclaiming as to take back what was yours. Something you possess is lost or stolen, and ultimately you triumph in finding it again. Follow reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Reclaiming early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Hello?
- [22:43]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Hello?
- [22:44]
Kathleen Goldhar
Hi. Can you hear me okay?
- [22:46]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Yeah. Can you hear me?
- [22:47]
Kathleen Goldhar
I can. How are you doing?
- [22:50]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Not bad. Hanging in there yourself?
- [22:54]
Kathleen Goldhar
Not bad. Same. You're quite late there now, aren't you?
- [22:57]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Oh, yeah. I'm a bit of a night owl, so it's not a problem.
- [23:02]
Kathleen Goldhar
Ronaldo Nazaro is connecting to the studio from St. Petersburg via an encrypted app. We start talking just past 1am Russian time.
- [23:12]
Ronaldo Nazaro
You're going to be recording this, correct?
- [23:14]
Kathleen Goldhar
I am recording it, yeah.
- [23:15]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Right.
- [23:16]
Kathleen Goldhar
Yeah.
- [23:16]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Okay.
- [23:17]
Kathleen Goldhar
Just a quick aside. When you cover national security issues, you think and talk a lot about how to present your stories. There's great debate, and there should be about interviews with those who belong to terrorist groups. Over the years, I've interviewed about half a dozen men in various countries who are wanted on FBI or. Or UN terrorist watch lists. And each time, it's a balancing act between trying to gain valuable insight and of course, not helping spread propaganda or inflating someone's importance. Ollie Winston's been there.
- [23:52]
Ollie Winston
It's difficult. There are never easy interviews to do, but it's good that you're in contact with them.
- [23:58]
Kathleen Goldhar
But there's just this ethics debate that it's important to figure out where. Where he came from, why he started this and where he's at now. At the same time, you don't want to give this guy a platform.
- [24:09]
Ollie Winston
Yeah, yeah. The most critical element is to not allow him to push his worldview out there and to state his ideas unchallenged. Also, when I've done interviews with folks like that, typically I just want to have something to ask them that I found out about them they have to respond to and put them on the back foot.
- [24:31]
Kathleen Goldhar
I did have a lot of questions to put to Nazaro. Some were simple. How are you funding this? And what's the end game? Some were more involved. What exactly was your role in US Intelligence services? And how's it feel to be sitting in comfort in Russia while members of the base in the US are serving time for planning violent acts? I start with getting him to explain why he started the base.
- [25:01]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Okay, well, the base is a survivalism and self defense network. It's always had a very practical mission. The motivation for forming it is the increasing political divide and social tension in the United States, which has a very strong racial component. So in order to protect like minded ideological individuals, this is a network of sort of self support to get through any type of crisis situations that may arise now or in the future.
- [25:42]
Kathleen Goldhar
When he says like minded, he means white people. Throughout our conversation, Nazaro embraced a narrative of victimhood. The white race is at risk, he insists.
- [25:55]
Ronaldo Nazaro
I don't have any hatred towards anyone who's non white. I don't consider myself like a racist in the sense of that I want to do harm to other races or have issues with other races just because of the color of their skin. That's not me. Okay. What I have an issue with is the way that the issue of race and identity politics is being weaponized against white people. That's what I have. That's the issue that I have.
- [26:21]
Kathleen Goldhar
Nazaro worked hard to disprove he's a racist. In that vetting call with Ryan, he used the benign sounding label pro white to describe the group. But again and again in the hours of leaked tape, pro white sounds a lot like the euphemism it is. Ask the candidates who dare to have non white spouses.
- [26:44]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Another guy recently, he looked pretty good and then he was using his real name. I did a little digging on his background and through his social media. I think he's married to some Asian, but. But I didn't say, are you married to an Asian one. I just asked him, you know, are you married? And I never heard from him again. So I guess he figured that I saw a comfortable conversation there, I guess, yeah. Why? I mean, my partner, she's not 100% white, but by riot standards, she's not a measling. She's like 1:16, Jewish and she understands race. Team B, what do you think? Seemed pretty good. Too excited about the 1 16th part with his wife, but. Right. I don't know. I mean, I guess if. How does she even know she's 1 16th? That seems pretty far removed, but.
- [27:36]
Kathleen Goldhar
And then there's the tweet that Nazaro wrote in 2018 as Norman Speer with a photo of Hitler and the words, we will finish what you started. It's not over yet. We carry the torch. But in our two hour long conversation, Nazaro just kept stressing that his pro white stance was because apparently the white race was under siege.
- [28:01]
Ronaldo Nazaro
If you're white and you're liberal and you accept what is increasingly becoming a second class citizen status, then you'll be fine. But if you're somebody who is conservative or a traditionalist and you're white, well, now you are essentially an enemy of the state.
- [28:18]
Kathleen Goldhar
For someone with such a strong sense of grievance, Nazaro couldn't really give me concrete examples of how he'd been oppressed.
- [28:26]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Just the prevailing attitude within the United States is in trying to promote equality, trying to promote racial justice, the solution for promoting those things is to lower the stature or political influence of whites through different means, culturally, you know, affirmative action programs, things like that. Right.
- [28:52]
Kathleen Goldhar
Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. I guess that's what I'm just trying to get down in the weeds as much as we can, just to really understand it. I mean, are you talking about people losing their jobs? People like articulate the oppression, multiculturalism and.
- [29:05]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Immigration and migration is being forced upon the population. And if that common man dares to vocalize any kind of opposition to those things, then that's when guns come out. As far as calling someone a racist and charging them with hate crimes and investigating them, and at least again deplatforming them, getting them fired, doxing them.
- [29:30]
Kathleen Goldhar
It sounded like he had started a neo Nazi group because of Cancel Culture, which I put to him.
- [29:37]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Yeah, I mean, that's definitely a big part of it. The way we view it is that the base is in it for the long haul. We feel like this is just foreshadowing to what is in store. All this type of policies and oppression will intensify. And so we're preparing. Now.
- [29:56]
Kathleen Goldhar
Before I forget, I do have to ask you why you chose the name the base.
- [30:01]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Well, there's two reasons. One is just the notion of literally forming base camps, but then also just from a political sense, I guess you could say just form a base of like minded individuals as a support network.
- [30:17]
Kathleen Goldhar
You had to know that the base is also what Al Qaeda means.
- [30:24]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Well, I mean, yeah, I was, I was aware of that, but I mean, I just didn't have that in mind. I mean, there's lots of things that are named after, you know, use call themselves the base. I mean, there's even an Antifa group that's called the Days.
- [30:37]
Kathleen Goldhar
And what about the symbols used in the recruitment and promo material had sort of a nod to the Third Reich?
- [30:45]
Ronaldo Nazaro
No, those are runes. They're runes, and they just represent a strength in numbers, essentially. They have nothing to do with Third Reich symbology or anything like that. That's just part of the strategy to demonize us, to delegitimize us. I'm sure if I picked some other name or some other symbol, someone would have gotten creative and found something nefarious in that too. Right?
- [31:12]
Kathleen Goldhar
They're both oversights or the comparison, or you didn't realize those two comparisons would be made?
- [31:18]
Ronaldo Nazaro
No.
- [31:20]
Kathleen Goldhar
Okay. I find this hard to believe. You call your organization the same name as one of the most infamous terrorist groups in recent history, and you use Nordic runes adopted by the Nazis, and that didn't occur to you? It reminds me of what Ali said about the base being an atomwaffen mimic, in a way. The edgy aesthetic, the provocative name, even the propaganda, it was all unoriginal. We'll get to this later. But that lack of originality, it raised suspicions about Nazaro, even among accelerationists, as to how Nazaro came to embrace this ideology in the first place. He, again, couldn't really point to one transformative moment.
- [32:05]
Ronaldo Nazaro
There was a lot of things that happened, I would say, over, like, a solid decade. But I guess I could say I remember the whole George Zimmerman case and that President Obama at the time interjected himself into what was, like, a local issue, and he, you know, amplified that into, like, a national level. Another one, I guess, is Bill Clinton, when he took office and the first executive order was to implement the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.
- [32:33]
Kathleen Goldhar
Don't Ask, Don't Tell was a controversial US Law intended to lift a ban on LGBT military service members.
- [32:42]
Ronaldo Nazaro
So that's like the beginning of the kind of promoting this LGBT agenda, which in practice is really about ends up being really taking away rights from traditional people and families. We're the bad ones.
- [32:57]
Kathleen Goldhar
But does it. How does granting those rights negatively impact your life personally?
- [33:04]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Well, because to me, children should not be exposed to those type of issues or topics I think is abhorrent and extremely damaging psychologically, emotionally, etc. And damaging for society.
- [33:23]
Kathleen Goldhar
So he says that's why he formed the base. But what does he want to achieve? How does he want to achieve it?
- [33:32]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Me, personally, I would like to see a independent homeland for people of European descent can maybe draw a parallel to Zionism. So maybe like a form of white Zionism.
- [33:45]
Kathleen Goldhar
What does that physically look like? Like you take over the eastern part of the US or you just want to be left alone in a city to govern?
- [33:53]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Right, well, let me just caveat this answer with. This is me speaking. I'm not speaking on behalf of the base, and it's not why I particularly created the base. Okay, so.
- [34:07]
Kathleen Goldhar
But aren't you. Can I just interrupt just for one second? Because that. But don't you speak on behalf of the base. I mean, you're its creator.
- [34:14]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Well, the thing is that, like I said, the basis does not have. Is not a political organization. We're not pushing for a specific policy. We are strictly a network focused on training, survivalism, the self defense. I mean, we are more of like a prepper network. That's it, you know, that's it.
- [34:32]
Kathleen Goldhar
Now Nazaro is contradicting himself in one of the leaked interviews from mid-2019. He, he says we're not like typical.
- [34:41]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Prepper group where we tend to just hunker down and weather the storm, you know, wait for the storm to pass. We want the storm to increase. We want to be the storm. Eventually, at some point, you know, after the initial collapse occurs, we want to keep that going. So we have a very different end goal and purpose for learning those skills.
- [35:03]
Kathleen Goldhar
So can you just, just relate that to what you just said?
- [35:07]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Well, I guess. Okay, so because there are people within, you know, we are comprised of accelerations, like people who see that chaos is growing. And we feel that an increase in that chaos actually is a good thing because it creates potential opportunities for us to break free from the system.
- [35:31]
Kathleen Goldhar
Throughout the interview, Nazaro maintained that he does not encourage violence. That's not what he meant by being the storm. But did it really matter what he says to me now? If there were enough aspiring recruits who believed the base stood for the very opposite, like that Australian candidate with the 1 16th Jewish partner.
- [35:53]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Well, I have experience in martial arts, ordered training knives. I have firearms and access to properties to shoot on.
- [36:01]
Kathleen Goldhar
And just a warning, this next clip is hard to hear.
- [36:05]
Ronaldo Nazaro
I've been teaching her daughter Krav Maga and she's already bashed two fucking Africans. She's 11. Right. Okay, that's good. So then you are a good trainer. That's good. All right, so what other questions do you have?
- [36:21]
Kathleen Goldhar
Throughout the leaked vetting tape, Nazaro consults with a man using the alias to tmb.
- [36:27]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Tmb. Anything? Tmb. Any questions? Tmb. It was a interesting interview, for sure.
- [36:34]
Kathleen Goldhar
From the sounds of it, TMB was a Valued member, a diligent deputy to Nazaro. Remember that acronym tmb? It stands for the militant Buddhist. And it was the call sign of Luke Austin Lane. He was the leader of the Georgia cell who was arrested but has pleaded not guilty on conspiring to murder the so called antifa couple. You're the leader of the group, you're together with these members, vetting other members. You know, ostensibly you're talking about how the base is going, how the plans are going.
- [37:11]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Sure, right. But the base was not designed to plan attacks. I mean there would be, that would not be on the agenda, but it.
- [37:21]
Kathleen Goldhar
Was on their agenda. It sounds like allegedly, I mean allegedly.
- [37:24]
Ronaldo Nazaro
But I mean that, you know, I can't be responsible for what people do on their own time. Anyone who ever was, you know, or is planning violent activity was not something that I was ever aware of, you know, am aware of or would encourage. I looked at myself as a network administrator. That was my role, to just keep the ball rolling, make sure the network was functioning, was growing and that people were doing what they were supposed to do. To the best of my ability. I could not give orders to people and expect them to follow.
- [38:03]
Kathleen Goldhar
Whether it was perhaps the network administrator, as Nazaro calls himself, does not give orders but, but he does vet all members like this one.
- [38:14]
Ronaldo Nazaro
So I've seen and experienced and talked to enough Muslims to just know like I fucking hate them and they just, they don't deserve to be here, period. So when Tarrant did what he did.
- [38:25]
Ollie Winston
And everyone's saying he's an alright fascist.
- [38:27]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Nazi, blah blah blah, I'm like, well if that's what he is, then okay, I'll just be that. If you want me to be the boogeyman, then I guess I'm the fucking boogeyman as well. Because I fully, wholeheartedly agree with what he did.
- [38:44]
Kathleen Goldhar
Some of the applicants and members that you approved of praised the Christchurch shooter or what Breivik did in, in Norway. And I actually covered that. I covered that in Utoya. It was one of the saddest terrorism cases I ever did. I couldn't associate with people who praise those actions. And yet you bring them into an organization that you created, right?
- [39:09]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Because they have a militant mindset that we need. I would never encourage them to go out and do things like that. But they have an understanding again that embracing the fact that some degree of violence could very well be necessary at some point in the future. If you take those phone calls that were recorded, listen to what I say to every single recruit that we're not doing anything illegal. That. That's not the purpose. Purpose of the base. I mean, I. I don't know how to make it more clear than what I said. It's all out there.
- [39:38]
Kathleen Goldhar
I mean, I've listened to a lot of the calls. But just to go back to what I was saying earlier, that somebody tells you that they admired these two horrific terrorist attacks and, you know, your answer was, yeah, they'd be a good asset because they're militant, they believe in militancy. I don't call that militancy. I call that terrorism.
- [40:00]
Ronaldo Nazaro
No, no, no, no, no. I'm not saying that. What, those. That those. No, I'm saying the guys who made those comments are expressing kind of a militant mindset. I'm not saying the people who did the attacks represent that. I mean, I don't condone that. You know, I don't. I don't support doing those type of things.
- [40:16]
Kathleen Goldhar
But your members expressed to you that they do support those, and that wasn't any kind of red flag for you?
- [40:25]
Ronaldo Nazaro
I mean, unless they told me that they planned on going to do an attack, then, no.
- [40:31]
Kathleen Goldhar
But they admired those killers. I just find that chill. I find that chilling.
- [40:37]
Ronaldo Nazaro
I don't agree with glorifying violence in general, but, you know, there are. I mean, if you could imagine a group that you would consider to be freedom fighters.
- [40:47]
Kathleen Goldhar
One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. Yes, in the complicated geopolitical morass of conflicts worldwide, this can be true. But we were talking about the man who went into mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, during Friday prayers and slaughtered 51 men, women and children. And the man who perpetrated the Norway massacre, a bombing, and the murders at a Labour Party youth camp that left 77 dead.
- [41:19]
Ronaldo Nazaro
That's at least logical.
- [41:21]
Kathleen Goldhar
I had suspected Nazaro would distance himself from his members and their actions. He had all his plausible deniability talking points. But what really seems to enrage him is the suspicion around his leadership from even within the accelerationist community. After the spate of arrests basically rendered the base inoperational, rumors began to swirl that Nazaro was actually an intelligence asset. At first there was suspicion that he was a US Government plant whose purpose was to lure in neo Nazis planning violent acts. That one didn't make a lot of sense to me, and he batted it away as a conspiracy theory.
- [42:01]
Ronaldo Nazaro
So, you know, there's a very, very strong current of paranoia in our community, and anyone could be accused of being a fed or a honeypot or whatever at any Moment. I can't sit around worrying about that. I mean, if I was an FBI honeypot, why would I be living in St. Peter Libert. In Russia?
- [42:19]
Kathleen Goldhar
Exactly. So what about the theory that Nazaro was working for the Russians? Pretty good way to destabilize the United.
- [42:27]
Ronaldo Nazaro
States, but no, I'm definitely not. I guess just have to take my word on that one, for what it's worth.
- [42:34]
Kathleen Goldhar
Are you able to work there?
- [42:37]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Technically, yes, but again, I don't speak Russian, so that's a pretty major practical issue. I was working as just as like an English tutor, right, to just make some extra, extra money for the bills.
- [42:52]
Kathleen Goldhar
But as Ali reported for the BBC in 2019, Nazaro had been listed as a guest at a Russian government defense exhibition in Moscow. Nazaro told me he never attended due to, quote, scheduling conflicts.
- [43:06]
Ronaldo Nazaro
I don't think that I really have much to offer to, you know, to the Russian government.
- [43:12]
Kathleen Goldhar
Come on. Come on. You're 17 years a contractor working in the Pentagon. You were an analyst. You run an organization that the US Is after. I actually couldn't script it any better for how the Russian government would want you to work for them.
- [43:28]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Well, I don't know Russian, so that could be a showstopper right there. But I wasn't looking to work for the Russian government. I said I was trying to network and I was looking at private security.
- [43:40]
Kathleen Goldhar
I raised this with Nazaro's old classmate Walter.
- [43:44]
Walter Grayson
You know, whether he's a formal registered agent of the Russian state or whether he is kind of rhetoric simply aligns with the kinds of goals they have to disrupt and foment division within the United States. I'm not so worried about the specifics of did he sign a contract with such and such agency?
- [44:04]
Kathleen Goldhar
Just before ending the call with Nazaro, I asked him to talk about Patrick Matthews. He said he contacted him after Ryan's story came out in the Winnipeg Free Press.
- [44:16]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Yeah, I mean, he infiltrated, he doxed Patrick Matthews, he got him again vilified in the media and to the point where he panicked to the degree that he felt like he needed to flee Canada.
- [44:28]
Kathleen Goldhar
But Patrick Matthews told him he wanted to derail trains and said some pretty heinous things, including the fact that he had a non white girlfriend and was worried that if they had a child, it would be half human.
- [44:42]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Well, I mean, I don't know what he said or didn't say. I wasn't there. I wasn't privy to those conversations. I just know what actually occurred. So that's. You know, that was a fallout of journalists infiltrating us. I mean, that had a direct effect on the base's mission.
- [44:59]
Kathleen Goldhar
Nazaro also claimed the base's Georgian members had been entrapped by the FBI. But however, they ended up behind bars. He said any arrested member was a waste because they hadn't stayed operational.
- [45:14]
Ronaldo Nazaro
You're getting arrested, you're taking yourself out of the rotation. We're trying to build a movement. We need to build a vanguard. You can't just pop up guns a blazing when you have zero infrastructure, support, training wherewithal. These are all things that need to be built up from nothing and form a vanguard. I mean, every revolution is led by a vanguard.
- [45:37]
Kathleen Goldhar
A vanguard training up an army big and strong enough to seize control after the collapse of government and society, prepping for a race war, dreaming of a white separatist state. Those are pretty terrifying and dangerous goals, especially for someone who said he was once a military contractor working for the Pentagon. But it's worth remembering that at the time we spoke, Nazaro had fewer than 70 subscribers on a messaging app once called the Right Wing Extremists Favorite new platform. That's not a very large vanguard. And I'll also mention that a couple of weeks after the interview, he felt familiar enough to send me misogynistic and vaguely threatening text messages with music videos. After a link to a Guns n Roses song he wrote. You've probably dated multiple Al Qaeda by now, but somehow I'm the asshole. I emailed the next day asking about this abrupt shift in his tone. He apologized and said he had been drunk. So does Nazaro or the base remain a threat? Various governments believe so and have listed the base a terrorist entity. And I bet there are very few countries Nazaro could travel to without being arrested upon landing. But no matter what happens to the group he founded or Nazaro himself, the ideology he espouses lives on. And accelerationists have been out there consuming the propaganda, acting on their rage, and capable of the most brutal attacks. Coming up on White Hot Hate. It wouldn't be right for my son to have been a victim of such a terrible crime and to allow this to potentially happen to other people, too.
- [47:35]
Ollie Winston
People are coming into contact with these.
- [47:39]
Ronaldo Nazaro
Extremist ideas younger, and they're becoming radicalized faster. These people make us out to be evil incarnate. They want bad guys so bad they can have it. Give them what they want. Give them what they deserve.
- [48:02]
Kathleen Goldhar
White Hot Hate was written and produced by Ashley Mack and me, Michelle Shepherd. Our Associate producer is Kim Kasher with production support from Sarah Melton. Additional reporting by Ryan Thorpe Mixing and sound design by Donnelle Cloutier and Julia Whitman with technical assistance from Laura Intinelli. Emily Cannell is our digital producer. Fact checking by Emily Matthieu and Zachary Kamel Legal advice from Sean Moorman. Original music by quiet type. Special thanks to the Winnipeg Free Press, CBC Reference Library Olse Sorokhna Nazimbosch and Yvonne Angelica for CBC Podcasts. Our senior producer is Chris Oak and our Executive producer is Arif Nohrani. If you're enjoying this series and want to help new listeners discover the show, please take some time to give us a rating and review wherever you listen. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram bcpodcasts.
- [49:19]
Ollie Winston
For more CBC Podcasts, go to CBC CA Podcasts.