Panorama 2020 E22
Category
🦄
CreativityTranscript
00:00The global network of neo-Nazis that inspired a British teenager to terror.
00:07I turned away from being tolerant at a young 14.
00:11My phone was found with pictures of Hitler on it.
00:14My name's Daniel Desimone and I'm investigating network leaders as they recruit in the UK.
00:21The UK is a place that we think there's a lot of potential.
00:26But right now, you know, we want to build our numbers up there.
00:30They not only want to form terrorist cell structures,
00:34they also want to inspire others to go out and commit lone-actor acts of terror.
00:40I speak to a family torn apart by their violence.
00:44Our family will never be the same again. I mean, this destroyed our family.
00:49And police here who say right-wing extremism is the fastest-growing terror threat.
00:56I'm really concerned with the young and mid teens,
01:00the propensity towards violence and the fascination with violence.
01:05As the extreme right stands accused of helping to stoke racial tension in the States,
01:10I'm on the hunt for leaders of the network who hide in the shadows online.
01:15The main question is, does he understand what damage he's caused?
01:20Let's go. Let's do it.
01:32I am a radical national socialist.
01:37I'm starting to write a journal.
01:40I hope to record events from now all the way to the inevitable race war.
01:46Last year, a Durham teenager became the youngest person
01:50ever convicted of planning a terror attack in the UK.
01:54He was 16 and kept a diary of his descent into neo-Nazi extremism.
02:00The white race is being silently genocided.
02:05What I may write here could be very infringing and incriminating
02:08and fall into the hands of someone who doesn't follow my ideology.
02:13He was radicalised online.
02:16He wanted to help start a race war
02:19and thought violence was the only way to make it happen.
02:24I just want to strike the system, but wanting means nothing.
02:28I boil down the areas that are worth attacking here.
02:32Banks, railways, public transport, bridges.
02:37He wanted to build a bomb
02:39but couldn't get hold of the ingredients he needed here,
02:42so he turned to an online contact in the States,
02:45someone calling himself Italo.
02:50I put some manuals on explosives up.
02:54I found a lot of such manuals recently,
02:57although the illegality of ammonium nitrate is regrettable.
03:02That being said, my associate is going to mail me some.
03:08They made plans on an encrypted app.
03:11Hey man.
03:12Yeah.
03:13So I made a cash app thing.
03:15Italo 333.
03:17Alright, I'll get on it.
03:19I just need to know, one, where you want it delivered,
03:22plus how much money you're going to send.
03:24Alright.
03:25Well, exact, it's £30.64.
03:29$40.
03:30I'll send the address after I get permits sorted.
03:35Payment failed, and so did the teenager's bomb-making ambitions.
03:39Police, who'd been tracking him online, arrested him.
03:43He's now serving six and a half years in prison.
03:47His prosecution is one of many I've covered in the last four years.
03:53If I was talking to you in 2014,
03:566% of my casework would be extreme right-wing.
03:59It's now 10% since 2017.
04:02We've disrupted 25 plots designed to maim and kill,
04:07and eight of them were extreme right-wing.
04:09I still think it's what I would describe as a toehold
04:12in the United Kingdom for right-wing threat.
04:15What I don't want it to become is a foothold.
04:20I wanted to know more about this dangerous world,
04:23whether Durham teenager and Italo
04:25were able to share information and form alliances.
04:29Part of a new wave of extremist groups online devoted to terror.
04:36The young generation are, like, absolutely depressed,
04:39politics is a mess, so, you know, it almost was the perfect storm
04:43to come in and say to young lads,
04:45look, accelerate, let's destroy, we're angry,
04:47let's show everybody we're angry.
04:49Jake and I are part of an international collaboration
04:52of journalists trying to expose these extremist groups.
04:56Media organisations need to co-operate on this.
04:58People could die, you know what I mean?
05:00It's bigger than your job. Stop it with a scoop.
05:02They've got their networks, now we've got ours as well.
05:05Their chat groups have basically got people from all over the world.
05:08There's no borders.
05:09It takes, frankly, nerds like us to be in here,
05:12to be, like, we'll talk till four in the morning,
05:14looking at the most tiniest detail.
05:19These groups want to destroy society so they can take power.
05:23Ethnic minorities, women and gay people are all targets
05:27in their ideology of chaos and destruction.
05:32They love any, like, social distress.
05:36Anything that's, like, messed up in society, they love it.
05:39They want to collapse. They want to collapse, yeah.
05:41They're a collapse cult. It's not your grandad's Nazism.
05:43It's not, like, you know, jackboots.
05:45It's not, like, running around like skinheads.
05:48It's very different.
05:49I would consider myself a natural sadist.
05:54Seeing weak people suffer and feel genuine fear
05:59fills me with a type of glee.
06:03I turned away from being tolerant at a young 14.
06:07I tore down LGBT posters, got suspended for it.
06:12My phone was found with pictures of Hitler on it.
06:15My hunt for the leaders in this neo-Nazi network
06:18begins with the person who helped turn a Durham teenager
06:22into a would-be bomber, Italo.
06:25They met on a website called Fascist Forge,
06:28where more than 1,000 people were registered
06:30and nothing was off limits.
06:34It's like, meet at Fascist Forge, like, find your mutuals,
06:37you know what I mean, and then move on to encrypted apps
06:40when they want to talk about, like, who they want to kill.
06:43Italo was prolific online.
06:46He celebrated infamous murders,
06:48posted streams of violent imagery and terror plot instructions.
06:53He hadn't been named in court, so all I had to go on was his alias.
06:59I mean... He's quite mysterious, him. Yeah.
07:02He seems to be quite well organised,
07:04he's good at staying under the radar, we don't know who he is.
07:07And certainly people I've spoken to kind of talk about him
07:10like he's a serious guy.
07:14It was interesting, he said about Italo, which is he's a serious person.
07:18Serious meaning dangerous.
07:21You just don't know whether you're going to get to them,
07:24you don't know whether you're going to find out who they are.
07:27That can be quite frustrating until you get to them
07:30and you're able to challenge them.
07:32You sort of worry, because you worry about what they're going to do,
07:35what they're going to encourage.
07:37And I think that... So that anxiety is still there at the moment.
07:42For several weeks, I thought I was looking for a man.
07:46But it turns out I was wrong.
07:48Piecing together clues Italo had left online,
07:51I discover he's even younger than the boy he helped to radicalise.
07:55He was only 15 when the two met.
07:58We're not naming him because of his age.
08:01He lives in Connecticut and we understand he's been visited by the FBI.
08:08I'm really concerned with the young and mid teens
08:12and the propensity towards violence
08:15and the fascination with violence.
08:17You know, browsing for it, looking for it.
08:19And what we have found, and this is particularly gross in my view,
08:24is very young people who've never met the person
08:27on the other end of their chat room,
08:29who grow instantly attracted to that person,
08:33develop deep relationships very quickly online.
08:36And those relationships can be both long-lasting
08:39but also used to incite and instruct.
08:47The University of Pennsylvania student went missing a week ago.
08:51The Sheriff's Department now calling this a homicide investigation.
08:58It is such a devastating thing
09:01to spend 20 years raising a child,
09:04to do something good with their lives,
09:07to be a good, not just a good human being,
09:10but somebody that is trying to repair the world
09:13and make it a better place.
09:15That is the type of man that Blaise would be today.
09:18Blaise Bernstein went missing in January 2018.
09:22His body was found in a shallow grave
09:25in a park near his family home in Orange County, California.
09:30The 19-year-old, who was Jewish and gay,
09:33had been stabbed more than 20 times.
09:37We don't live in the same home that we raised our children in anymore
09:41because it was too painful for us to stay there.
09:44Our family will never be the same again.
09:46I mean, this destroyed our family.
09:48I will never... I will never get over it.
09:51I will never get over the loss of this child. Never.
09:5522-year-old Sam Woodward, who'd known Blaise since high school,
09:59has been charged with his murder and is due to stand trial soon.
10:05My mother-in-law, she was born in 1936 in Romania.
10:09Many of her relatives were taken to concentration camps in the area.
10:14She lived through a war
10:16and she saw the devastation to her country, to her community,
10:21and her grandson was killed by a Nazi.
10:26Woodward has pleaded not guilty.
10:28He's alleged to have belonged to a neo-Nazi group
10:31that's been linked to five murders in the States
10:34called Atomwaffen Division.
10:37It's connected to a UK-based group, the Sonnenkrieg Division,
10:41that was banned earlier this year.
10:44I was completely ignorant that these things were really a thing.
10:49It was right under our noses and we had no idea.
10:52And with the way that we have social media now
10:55and the way that we connect with each other through iPhones,
10:58it's so seamless now and so easy to connect with things
11:02that are really fringe, very extreme.
11:08Until a few years ago,
11:10extreme right-wing groups like National Action
11:13were very visible on Britain's streets.
11:16Now the neo-Nazi movement is online and underground,
11:20hiding behind aliases to form networks and add to their ranks.
11:27I wanted to delve deeper into this dark world.
11:31I created fake identities so I could search online platforms
11:36and join groups in encrypted messaging apps undetected.
11:41One platform that is very, very relevant to this area is Telegram,
11:45the encrypted messaging application.
11:48You've got one here which, every day,
11:51just produces endless propaganda and glorification of violence.
11:56What's quite shocking, really, is that this is completely open.
12:00There's no hiding these accounts.
12:03The more I follow these accounts,
12:06the more I follow these accounts,
12:08the more disturbing content is recommended to me.
12:11Search algorithms creating echo chambers.
12:14It's easy to see how you can get drawn in.
12:18Got a fake account on Instagram
12:21and then I've been able to follow a load of extremist accounts.
12:24I'm not looking for these, they are just simply being suggested to me
12:28based on the things I've already followed.
12:30And really what happens then is if someone is genuinely
12:33making their way in this world and perhaps becoming more radicalised,
12:36they don't even have to look for people.
12:38They are being suggested to them and proposed to them
12:41as people they want to follow.
12:46Instagram says safety is a top priority
12:49and accounts, pages and groups that repeatedly violate their policies
12:53are removed from recommendations and demoted in search results.
13:00Telegram didn't respond.
13:04In this online world, many roads lead to the website Fascist Forge,
13:09where extremist Italo met and befriended the Durham teenager.
13:14Police interest prompted the man behind the site
13:17to take it down earlier this year.
13:19He calls himself Matthias.
13:22He says he's 25 and lives in Los Angeles.
13:25I want to know who he really is.
13:29I call another journalist contact called Ali Winston,
13:32who knows the LA scene well.
13:35At first, I was looking at it because it kind of overlapped
13:38with some of the more traditional elements in California's gang culture.
13:42A couple of years back, it was more...
13:45It was a different group of people,
13:47more people who were suburban, middle class,
13:51very young, high schoolers and educated too.
13:55Sadly, we've seen a big uptick in domestic...
14:00..what we would call domestic terrorism from these organisations.
14:05There have been quite a number of murders, assaults, shootings.
14:2211 people were killed in this attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
14:30And it's not just the states.
14:35Eyewitnesses say the MP was shot and stabbed.
14:38She died of her injuries...
14:40Joe Cox murdered on the streets of a Yorkshire town
14:43by a white supremacist.
14:45It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack.
14:51And in New Zealand, 51 people murdered last year
14:55at two mosques in Christchurch.
15:00Footage of the murders was promoted on the Fascist Forge website.
15:04Its founder, Matthias, like the killer himself,
15:07hell-bent on accelerating the destruction of society.
15:12I could see that Matthias had been promoting something else
15:15on Fascist Forge too.
15:17A militant group called The Base.
15:20The FBI says its aim is to incite a race war
15:23and unite white supremacists around the globe.
15:27If The Base is involved, it's a big lead in my hunt to unmask him.
15:31The Base is interesting.
15:33They've kind of positioned themselves as an umbrella organisation
15:37over other groups in that far-right sphere.
15:41Police say the three men arrested in Georgia
15:44had trained at a camp for the white supremacist group known as The Base.
15:48In January, three members of the group were charged
15:51with plotting to kill two anti-fascists.
15:54The base is not interested in electoral politics, rallies.
15:59Their goal is to prepare for proper conflict.
16:04Earlier this year, I tracked down the founder and leader of The Base
16:08in Russia.
16:10Lone wolf attacks or lone wolf operations are not...
16:14The 47-year-old had been using an alias
16:17and claimed to have worked for the US security services.
16:21He followed his real name, Ronaldo Nazaro.
16:25He directed The Base from his upmarket flat in St Petersburg.
16:30We all believe that there's no saving the system now.
16:34So the best option for us is to see it fall, see it collapse.
16:40I mean, even if it's just, like, on a localised level,
16:43to whatever degree, we'll offer some sort of power vacuum
16:46that we can take advantage of.
16:49Nazaro didn't know it,
16:51but his secretive organisation had been infiltrated.
16:54Earlier this year, covert recordings of how it recruits
16:57were leaked to US civil rights organisation
17:00the Southern Poverty Law Centre.
17:04Every single person was asked about
17:07if they had training in weapons or firearms.
17:12Nazaro wanted it to be a real-life training ground
17:16for people to learn guerrilla warfare tactics
17:19in preparation for a race war.
17:22It's pretty rare that we would get a set of recordings
17:26where dozens and dozens of people are being asked
17:29in some really, you know, deep detail sometimes
17:33to describe how they eventually became
17:36a white nationalist or a neo-Nazi.
17:40The recordings, which haven't been broadcast before,
17:43reveal Ronaldo Nazaro trying to influence
17:46and groom would-be recruits.
17:49He encourages them to read an obscure book from the 1990s.
17:54We're not going to name it.
18:14The book promotes total war against society
18:18and encourages racial hatred.
18:21This was really required reading for members of the organisation,
18:25and it's probably the most important text
18:28in the neo-Nazi world right now.
18:31They consider themselves the revolutionaries
18:34of the white power movement,
18:36and people in that part of the movement
18:39not only want to form groups in terrorist cell structures
18:44like the base,
18:46but they also want to use their propaganda
18:49to inspire others to go out and commit lone-actor acts of terror.
18:55Then I hear the base pushing recruitment in Europe and the UK.
19:10The UK is a place that we think there's a lot of potential.
19:15But right now, you know, we want to build our numbers up there.
19:20All the calls follow the same pattern.
19:23Applicants are vetted from a script.
19:40The caller's British and says he's a teenager.
19:43Same with this would-be member.
19:49They all use aliases to hide their identities.
20:10And what is your ethnicity?
20:16Many trying to join the base are teenagers.
20:19Time and again, the leadership discuss shaping their ideology.
20:23In other words, radicalising them.
20:39He doesn't work ideologically, but he sounds like he's kind of on his way.
20:42You know, he's definitely headed in the right direction, it sounds like.
20:47This is quite amazing, actually.
20:49The leader basically asks them,
20:51so guys, what do you think?
20:53Does he match, does he kind of meet our standards?
20:56Is he neo-Nazi enough?
20:58But it's very, very cynical.
21:00And when you strip it all away,
21:02what these people are really doing is seeking recruits to collapse society.
21:07Basically everyone who got to this vetting stage
21:11was allowed to become a member of the group.
21:13As long as they had the right ideological commitments
21:17and they had a convincing radicalisation narrative.
21:20We tend to talk about groups like this
21:22as if they sort of emerged from the ether.
21:25But really what they're drawing on is a long-standing white power canon.
21:30So these are groups who are pushing slogans like
21:33Bullets, not ballots.
21:35Which is exactly the ideology that the base has adopted now.
21:41But what about the man who'd been promoting the base on his website?
21:45The man who calls himself Matthias.
21:50Matthias, what do you think?
21:52I think it's fine. I don't have any objections.
21:55Finally, I'd heard his voice.
21:58He seemed confident that he'd be able to balance his obligations
22:02and that he would have no problem fulfilling them.
22:04So, yeah, he's got my thumbs up.
22:07It's quite a big moment in our hunt for him.
22:10We thought he was in this group
22:12because he was so heavily promoting it online.
22:16But this actually shows it.
22:19This is him on the call.
22:21He's being asked at the end of this interview,
22:23what do you think of this guy?
22:25What do you think of this potential recruit?
22:27He sounds arrogant.
22:28He sort of sounds sort of laconic, as if he's the man.
22:31You get a kind of a sense of who is important in the base.
22:35And Matthias pops up in not a few of these calls,
22:39so he appears to be pretty senior too.
22:43It feels like I'm getting closer to Matthias.
22:46But I still didn't know his real name.
22:49I ask Ali to see if he can help in my hunt to unmask him.
22:53There's nothing about him online.
22:56He's been really careful to cover his tracks.
22:58We've got that avatar of him from Fascist Forge
23:01where you kind of see the half-skull mask over his face.
23:04But you can make out his hair, his long hair and his eyes.
23:08And then, digging around,
23:11there's one image of them in California.
23:13They're based out in California, posing with a flag.
23:16And you can see one of them has what appears to be
23:19that long, flowing hair.
23:22And, you know, I put the two side and side together,
23:25I blew them up, I looked at them and I said,
23:28that looks the same, he looks like the same guy.
23:33So then I worked through a different set of contacts
23:36and I've come up with a name for him.
23:41The name, Matthew Bacari.
23:44The founder of Fascist Forge and a senior figure in the base,
23:48a group seeking to expand its neo-Nazi network
23:51into Europe and the UK.
23:53Time to ask him some questions.
23:59I traced him to a property in California.
24:02I can't travel to the States because of coronavirus,
24:06so I asked another journalist to pay him a visit.
24:12We're actually on our drive over right now.
24:14The main question is about his activities as Matthias
24:19on Fascist Forge and in the base.
24:23Does he understand how much damage he's caused?
24:32Our team in California wait for most of the day
24:35for the unemployed 25-year-old.
24:38But he's nowhere to be seen.
24:40So they knock on his door.
24:43Let's go. Let's do it.
24:53Hi. Can we speak with Matthew Bacari? Is he available?
24:58They asked three times for him to come to the door.
25:01First, they were told he'd been up all night and was still asleep.
25:05Then that he didn't want to speak to anyone.
25:09Did you hear them talking?
25:11We could hear them talking. I don't know if Tim could...
25:14Yeah, I could hear them talking upstairs, that's what it sounded like.
25:17Yeah, so definitely he wasn't asleep.
25:19We knew he wasn't asleep. He just didn't want to come to the door.
25:23Matthew Bacari, aka Matthias.
25:27The online big I am who wouldn't come out of his bedroom
25:31to answer questions about his involvement
25:34in a global network of neo-Nazis.
25:37He hasn't responded to the letter we left for him either.
25:41Well, they're opening up right now. Yeah.
25:45He's definitely looking.
25:48But don't be fooled into thinking these people aren't dangerous.
25:55As my investigation draws to an end,
25:57protests, some of them violent, erupt in the US
26:00following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police.
26:07Online, the neo-Nazi network I've been following
26:10are watching what's going on closely.
26:13They've certainly been paying a ton of attention to the disturbances.
26:18Because of their particular brand of bigotry,
26:22they view them negatively.
26:25There has been talk about, and some channels have seen some talk
26:29about attacking certain protests, about using an attack on these
26:33to push forward societal collapse.
26:37In Las Vegas, three men with alleged links to the far right
26:40are facing terror charges for conspiring to cause destruction
26:44during protests there.
26:47And what we've seen over the past couple of years
26:51is really that this more violent faction of the white power movement
26:55is gaining more adherence.
26:57And there's been sort of a change in the tenor of the movement
27:01where violence is becoming more and more readily accepted
27:06among members of the movement.
27:09And where there's violence, you're going to find more violence.
27:15I feel like I've become more violent recently.
27:18I've been wanting to lash out for about a week now.
27:23Go down to the forest, find the most public path there is,
27:28tie a string at throat height between two trees.
27:32I'll bring a bat, wear a mask,
27:36wear cheap clothes in case I need to get rid of them.
27:42As the neo-Nazi network tries to spread its influence
27:46across the UK, Europe and the States,
27:49the extremists who recruit and radicalise online
27:53are a real and present danger.
27:56Is this the history that we want to keep repeating itself
28:00and do people that hate understand that this is where it leads?
28:04That they will be standing in the ashes of the people that they kill?
28:08We can change things. We have to. We don't have a choice.
28:12Humanity must get rid of hate.
28:25David Olusoga looks back at 1,000 years of Black and British forgotten history
28:30starting now over on BBC4.
28:55.