In his late teens, Mike became a Nazi. Now, just six years later, he supports the Black Lives Matter movement and cares deeply about how close he came, at the most angry moment of his life, to going out on the street with his gun and shooting people.
When Mike looked into the eyes for a brief moment at the man who had just fallen to the ground, he knew he was going to die. It was a hectic night in downtown Oakland, California. The tear gas stung and the strong wind whipped the palm trees in a frenzy.
Three days after George Floyd’s death , the protests that supported Black Lives Matter spread across America.
Mike had been protesting with his girlfriend, but when night fell and the police started firing rubber bullets and tear gas, they decided to leave.
They were walking back to their car, between streets covered in black smoke given off by burned garbage cans, when they saw a truck stop. Then they heard the shots.
The truck drove away when a man in uniform fell to the ground. Mike walked up to him, trying to remember the first aid training he had learned in the military.
But a police car arrived and a nerve agent armed with a gun barged in and ordered him to Mike to leave.
He later learned that Dave Patrick Underwood, a federal officer who had been guarding the courthouse, had died there. Over a year later, Mike is still haunted that he couldn’t have done more to save him .
By coincidence, Mike had a connection to Underwood ; He had been marching that day with members of his family.
But he was also linked to the man who was later charged with her murder .
Steven Carillo was a sergeant at the same California Air Force base where Mike had enlisted a few years earlier.
And that was not all.
Mike had a secret. At home, in his wardrobe, there was a uniform made of grayish-green khaki cloth, with a Nazi symbol on the collar.
Mike hung it there to remind himself to himself from the person he used to be, someone who wanted to go out on the street and kill people.
Like Carillo, Mike had fallen into the den of extremism and had become a follower of America’s violent far right.
In the summer before his last year of school, Mike watched as the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests was reproduced in the United States, but being part of it was far from his mind.
“I thought they were the devil incarnate,” he says.
He had just met a new friend in an online messaging group.
Paul (not his real name) invited Mike over to his home, where he lived with his parents. It was a normal house, on a quiet street in a suburb of a big American city. They got together to “shoot some propaganda videos.”
Paul opened the door wearing a uniform Nazi and took Mike straight to his garage .
“It was like a clothing store for Nazis. Weapons, ammunition, cartridges and many pistols hung on the walls, ”he says.
Paul had gathered other young men for the filming. They loaded guns and ammunition into a truck and drove to some nearby hills.
“We were in a state park shooting automatic and semi-automatic weapons, filming and running in Nazi uniforms ”, says Mike.
Then the forest guards appeared. Paul was upset.
“I was there, standing, not participating. He did not want to listen to the government authority telling him that he could not do what he believed he had the right to do, which was to produce videos and pretend that he was a Wehrmacht (the armed force of Nazi Germany). ”
The guards confiscated all the visible weapons, but the boys had hidden some of them and reloaded them into the truck when they were alone again.
Then they returned to Paul’s house and spent time with his parents, still wearing their Nazi uniforms.
Mike had 17 years and admits that it had become the perfect vehicle for toxic extremism .
He had spent his childhood in a small rural town, predominantly white.
He dedicated your days paddling on the lake or biking around town with your closest group of friends.
Adults and children d They enjoyed together, and dinners and roasts were common. It was a place where everyone knew each other.
But Mike’s stepfather was an alcoholic and he used to react violently, and when Mike had 12 years her mother divorced and moved with her children to another part of the country.
Suddenly Mike was living in a suffocating multiracial neighborhood that I hated .
“There were people there who didn’t look like anyone I’d ever seen before. The food was different, the water tasted different, everything was completely different. ”
Mike’s stepfather, with whom he The teenager felt close despite his violent outbursts, he never kept his promise to visit the children.
Anger grew inside Mike and the way out he found was extreme Right .
Motivated by the father of a friend, Mike started listening to right-wing shows and when he searched for similar content on the internet, he found all kinds of videos and podcasts about extreme right on Facebook and Youtube.
The algorithms in social networks already created what is known as the rabbit hole effect, in which the recommendation system ends up pigeonholing the user into content that for Mike became more and more extreme.
Here you were told, for example, that the divorce was a conspiracy Jewish created to destroy uir the ideal of the white family.
“For whatever reason, it was easier for me to believe that than that my stepfather was a degenerate alcoholic,” he says.
Over time Mike got involved in the darkest corners of the internet, in the white nationalist forums 4chan and 8chan.
These sites are a kind of social clubs for racists, Nazis and white nationalists, where people could say “forbidden” words and get to know each other .
Mike began exchanging messages with a group of neo-Nazis in the San Francisco Bay Area and that’s how he ended up at Paul’s door that summer afternoon.
“I was just looking for a place to deposit all my anger. And I found the perfect house, ”says Mike.
A year later, Mike finished school. Failing to qualify for his preferred universities, he decided to join the military, but his mother opposed the idea.
They outlined a completely different plan: Mike would attend business school in London.
In the UK, the young man expected to see gentlemen in bowler hats. His image of the British capital was like something out of a Victorian novel.
But the reality was very different. His school was located in the Whitechapel neighborhood, where a vibrant Muslim community lives.
“I had 18 years. He was a deeply fearful, Islamophobic, radical nationalist target and had arrived at an apartment in Whitechapel sandwiched between the Royal London Hospital and the East London Mosque. I never saw diversity as something positive, but as an example of everything that was going wrong in the world ”, says Mike.
During his stay in London, the young man immersed himself even more in white nationalism . Most of his activities were online.
He monitored and harassed left-wing celebrities in the United States for months along with a team of other extremists. However, one day he dared to enter a mosque and leave a packet of bacon at the door .
He stopped going to classes and after a few months received a letter from the British Home Office announcing that his student visa would be revoked.
One afternoon in April of 2017 was on her way to meet some friends at a pub near the British Parliament. While on the train, passengers were informed that Westminster station was closed due to a police operation.
They were asked to get off before the train.
A vehicle had entered the Westminster Bridge crosswalk at 113 kilometers per hour against pedestrians.
The driver got out and stabbed a policeman. Six people were killed, including the attacker, and 50 they were injured.
Mike left the subway station and came across the scene of panic. The image of two children wrapped in aluminum blankets handed over by emergency services remains etched in his mind.
At this time, the Islamic State remained a powerful force in the Middle East. He assumed responsibility for the attack, in the same way as others that occurred in Europe during its heyday.
Mike tried to sign up with the military the next day. Some of the white nationalists he had been talking to online were military men and he followed suit.
He was rejected from the Royal British Air Force for his nationality, but within weeks he was back in California to enlist in the United States Air Force.
“I was very motivated. I had no doubt that I wanted to go to another country, be it Iraq or Afghanistan, put on a uniform and take a gun to kill people. ”
In the weeks before starting his military training, he spent hours in his garage drinking and smoking cigarettes, full of rage.
“I almost always carried a gun with me. I was at a point where I would have done anything someone asked me to do, ”says Mike.
At that moment, he thought he could become someone like Steven Carillo .
Although then another incident occurred, at the end of 2020 , where this sentiment became more intense.
Months after the protests in Oakland, Kenosha, Wisconsin, was rocked by riots when a black man was gunned down in a dispute with the police.
A boy from 17 years named Kyle Rittenhouse traveled armed to the city with a semiautomatic rifle to join a vigilante group formed to defend the city from what one organizer called “diabolical thugs.”
Rittenhouse shot three people and is now on trial, charged with attempted murder.
Mike rec Remember what you felt when you read the news. “I looked at that young teenager and I said to myself ‘wow, it was very close to me.’
In February of this year, the Pen tágono declared a zero tolerance against extremism, and ordered military leaders to end extremism in their troops.
Al At the same time, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin created a working group to determine how to identify “insider threats” and explained that potential recruits will now be screened for their extremist affiliations.
These measures happened after previous analysis of those arrested in the Capitol riots on January 6.
It was found that a worrying proportion of those involved were ex-military or active military Like Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran who was killed by police trying to enter through a barricade.
An encu is online from the Military Times of 2020 to 1, Active duty readers, found that little less than a third had seen signs of racist or white supremacist behavior within the military .
Among those accused of crimes in 2020 In addition to Steve Carillo, there were US Army Private Ethan Melzer, accused of setting the stage for a deadly ambush in his unit by sending information to a neo-Nazi group, and three extremist veterans accused of carrying Molotov cocktails to launch police during a Black Lives Matter protest in Las Vegas.
But perhaps surprisingly for Mike, the military would be the beginning of his journey out of far-right extremism.
At the end of 2017, was in the second month of his training, located in the deep forests of Missouri.
“I was in the middle of nowhere with all kinds of people from all over the United States, including blacks, Jews, and a guy from Guam who taught me how to fish,” he says.
“I made friends with people that I never thought I could consider friends.”
He found the military training camp difficult. The hours were exhausting and the lack of autonomy, the control that his superiors had over his every move, was difficult to handle.
“It is one thing to be a child smoking, reading 4chan and getting angry in his garage and quite another finding yourself in the middle of nowhere, in an Air Force base where you can’t leave and people yell at you. ”
He felt miserable and tried to give up basic training about six times in eight weeks. His mother did not speak to him. Mike believed that perhaps she knew she had joined the military for the wrong reasons.
Receiving letters was common. among the recruits, but in the first five weeks Mike did not receive any. When the other trainees had time each week to read their letters, Mike would sit alone, wallowing in his misery.
One day another black-skinned recruit noticed this.
“Hey, let’s pray together,” he said, grabbing a Bible.
It was one of those little gestures that helped Mike survive training and basic and that ultimately changed his perspective on life.
In the coming weeks, this recruit and another young Jew would support Mike in his darkest moments. They would give him a friendly pat on the back when he needed it and, when he had difficulties, they would calm him down by saying, “Hey, you can do this.”
During his training, He was also shaken from that camera obscura that reinforced his racist beliefs. He no longer had time to spend time online and, without the toxic propaganda that had filled his days, the hatred lost steam within him.
When he finished basic training, Mike knew he did not want to join the military. He spent several months working at the Air Force base, but was deeply depressed.
His worst moment was shortly before he was sent to Afghanistan.
“I knew they were deploying me. He was under a lot of stress, with too much alcohol one night and with access to a firearm. ”
He almost committed suicide and they gave him medical leave. It is an episode that is hard for him to discuss.
Although his basic training helped him escape extremism, Mike does not think it is a coincidence that a number of those involved in far-right violence in recent years have served in the army.
Think that some extremists might join the army, as he did, looking for an opportunity to kill people of different races.
Others, he suggests, sign up because they think the training will help them overthrow the state, while a third group becomes disillusioned and radicalized as a result of their experience in the ranks.
“They feel that they are being taken advantage of, that they are not understood and are lied to”, says.
One of them is a friend that Mike has seen show support for an anti-government militia on social media.
“Served between 16 and 20 years in the army and has participated in two wars. Two wars that were a lie, ”says Mike, referring to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Last month, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue published a report examining the army issue discussed by far-right radicals on the messaging app Telgram.
They found that a small number of extremists claimed to be veterans, but also observed that they spoke negatively about the military.
“This is mainly due to the perception that US interventions abroad serve the interests of Israel rather than those of the white race,” the report says.
Mike also began to believe that America’s wars didn’t make sense, but he also accepted that racism didn’t make sense either .
“I began to realize, some 70 years after the whole world, that Hitler was clearly wrong “, recognize.
When Mike’s ideas began to change, he got in touch with Christian Picciolini, a former neo-Nazi who now he channels his energy into de-radicalization.
“He told me to practice empathy, not to judge people, to be honest, thoughtful. Essential steps to find a way to do good, ”says Mike.
He started working in a music room and fell in love with the punk and rock scene. It was the space he needed to channel the anger that he built from his childhood. Punk became their salvation .
“My community of punk and rock has been one of the biggest things that has gotten me out of here. I think about how vital it is to have an outlet and a group that you feel you belong to and that is constructive, ”reflects Mike.
After his medical leave expired, Mike did not return to the army and was considered a defector. Then last December, to his surprise, he was honorably released.
Sometimes he worries that extremism continues to awaken abruptness in him.
At the end of 2019 was working in a store when two young black men broke into robbery and assaulted a woman adult.
Mike tried to stop them and then they pulled out a gun.
Later that night, Mike recognized the same ugly, dehumanizing and racist ideas once again populating his thoughts, but he fought against them.
“I have made continuous efforts to be anti-racist, to be actively anti-racist, but it is difficult and I don’t want to pretend that it is not.”
While Mike has managed to get out of the spiral of extremism, other Americans have fallen deeply.
Oakland and Kenosha weren’t the only places where Black Lives Matter protesters were injured and Mike was horrified by the attack on the Capitol.
The United States is a “union of clans that would otherwise be at war,” he says.
“And when you decide to drop a match, it can become incredibly dangerous. I’ve already seen a tremendous amount of violence. ”
Mike wants people to understand how easy it is in America today for an extremist ideology to end someone’s life.
“I was a teenager with basic internet access in a California suburb and I was radical enough to want to commit violence against people just because of their skin color or religion. I want people to know that I was a Nazi. Not in Bavaria in 1939, but in the modern United States ”, he concludes.
Mike is a pseudonym.
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