White supremacist groups like Atomwaffen, which also goes by the name "National Socialist Order," are looking to recruit U.S. military members to help carry out terrorist attacks against minorities, according to experts speaking to Military.com.
In its annual 2023 threat assessment released in March, the U.S. intelligence declared that racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism is the "most lethal threat to Americans." It highlighted groups that believe "recruiting military members will help them organize cells for attacks against minorities or institutions that oppose their ideology."
"New extremist organizations such as Atomwaffen, the Boogaloo movement and the Base, a neo-Nazi group, have picked up where the anti-government militias of the '80s and '90s left off," the report said.
"They seek a violent overthrow of the government or a civil war so they can recreate society, usually into a white supremacist or fascist state. The accelerationist groups -- the term denotes that they wish to bring about that civil war swiftly -- have sprung up in the aftermath of the Unite the Right extremist group gathering and protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. The event was the largest gathering of white supremacists in recent memory, and many of the torch-bearing participants were young men."
But the fallout from Charlottesville -- which resulted in a young leftist protester getting killed -- sent the white supremacist movement into disarray. Rick Eaton, a senior researcher and the head of the digital terrorism and hate research team at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said event caused radicals to look elsewhere towards "more active and dangerous paths, such as we've seen in the Hard Reset."
The Hard Reset, according to Military.com, is a manifesto put out by extremist groups on the social media messaging system Telegram that includes a terrorist how-to magazine that contains "tactics, techniques, and procedures" on how to bring about societal collapse, as well as attacks on infrastructure.
"It's definitely more disturbing than it's ever been, and the willingness to commit violence combined with the general levels of, you know, violent shootings and things in this country are not helping," said Eaton, who has studied extremism at the Wiesenthal center for 37 years.
Read the full report over at Military.com.
