White nationalists have infiltrated the US military

Patrick Casey came to the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on a mission. Casey, executive director of Identity Evropa, a white nationalist group that was involved in the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, believes diversity is harmful to the United States and aims to create a “white supermajority.” He told NBC in an interview at CPAC that his organization aims “to take over the GOP as much as possible.”

If Identify Evropa hasn’t taken over the GOP as Casey hoped, his organization, HuffPost reports Monday, has made inroads into another key institution: the military. Seven members have been identified as Identity Evropa members, according to HuffPost’s investigation.

HuffPost identified these members through leaked online chat logs from a server on Discord, a chat app popular among alt-right groups, which Identity Evropa members have used to communicate with each other for years. The independent media group Unicorn Riot first published the logs last week.

In its investigation, HuffPost found that “Two Marines, two Army ROTC cadets, an Army physician, a member of the Texas National Guard and one member of the Air Force all belong to … Identity Evropa.”

After Unicorn Riot released the chat logs, another anti-fascist collective, Identify Evropa, reviewed them and used biographical details from the posts, which were written under pseudonyms, to begin to determine their actual identities.

HuffPost then used that research to continue its own, and verified the identities of seven service members. Their messages, HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias writes, “indicate that they hold deeply racist and anti-Semitic views and participate in Identity Evropa propaganda campaigns, posting stickers and flyers in cities and on college campuses.”

One of the military personnel revealed by HuffPost was Stephen T. Farrea, 29, who, as a military spokesperson confirmed, is a corporal in the Selected Marine Corps Reserve. He posted under the name SuperTomPerry-RI and frequently referenced his Marine Corps position. Among his racist comments were statements including “Portsmouth my town 95 percent white very nice,” and that he was looking forward to posting “It’s OK to be white” flyers.

According to HuffPost, “Last week, he attended an Identity Evropa gathering in Kentucky,” also attended by Jason Laguardia, a lance corporal who posts on Discord under the name Jason-CT. Laguardia often posts “pictures of Identity Evropa flyers and stickers … throughout Connecticut and New York City.”

This revelation isn’t the first indication of concern over the presence and power of white nationalists in the U.S. armed forces.

As Mathias writes:

In February, federal authorities arrested Coast Guard Lt. Christopher Hasson, a white nationalist who prosecutors allege was stockpiling weapons to massacre leftists and reporters in a violent plot to establish a “white homeland.”

Last year, a series of investigative reports by ProPublica and “Frontline” found multiple members of violent neo-Nazi groups among the ranks of the military.

And a 2017 poll conducted by the Military Times found that nearly 25 percent of service members surveyed said they encountered white nationalists within their ranks. That poll found that 30 percent of troops said they saw white nationalism as a bigger threat to national security than the wars in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Identity Evropa was founded by an ex-Marine. HuffPost spoke with multiple experts who expressed concern over the impact of white nationalists in the armed forces. Military personnel, active duty and veterans alike, said Kathleen Belew, author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” have “played an instrumental role in moving weapons, training and tactics from military to civilian spaces” and, she continued, “dramatically escalated the impact of white power violence on civilian populations.”

Daryle Jenkins, an Air Force veteran and founder of One People’s Project, an anti-racist group, told HuffPost he was concerned about the safety of nonwhite, Christian service members who must serve alongside white nationalists who might, as he explained, “undermine and threaten their fellow soldier[s].”

These revelations come on the heels of concerns over white nationalists in government. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, told The New York Times in January, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., once allegedly described himself as “David Duke without the baggage,” as the Times reported in 2014.

Following the release of the chat logs and HuffPost requests for comment, “The military is determining whether they violated rules regarding discrimination and extremist activity,” Mathias writes. Scalise and King remain in Congress.

Read HuffPost’s full article, with the list of service members and their Discord posts, here.