Uncovered plots expose danger of the ‘Base’
The plans were as sweeping as they were chilling: “Derail some trains, kill some people, and poison some water supplies.”
It was the blunt, bloody prescription for sparking a new race war by a member of the Base, a white supremacist group that has come under intense scrutiny amid a series of stunning recent arrests.
Federal agents, who had secretly recorded those remarks in a bugged apartment during a domestic terrorism investigation, pounced on seven members of the group last week in advance of a rally Monday by gun rights advocates in Richmond, Virginia. Three members of one cell in Maryland affiliated with the group plotted attacks at the rally, hoping to ignite wider violence that would lead to the creation of a white ethnostate, law enforcement officials said.
The “defendants did more than talk,” Robert K. Hur, the U.S. attorney for Maryland, said after a detention hearing Wednesday in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland. “They took steps to act and act violently on their racist views.”
The details that emerged in court and in documents from active cases in three other states — Georgia, Wisconsin and New Jersey — unveiled a disturbing new face of white supremacy.
The Base illustrates what law enforcement officials and extremism experts describe as an expanding threat, particularly from adherents who cluster in small cells organized under the auspices of a larger group that spreads violent ideology.
“We have a significant increase in racially motivated violent extremism in the United States and, I think, a growing increase in white nationalism and white supremacy extremist movements,” Jay Tabb, the head of national security for the FBI, said at an event in Washington last week.
Experts who have studied the Base say it seems to have followed the model of al-Qaida and other violent Islamic groups in working to radicalize independent cells or even lone wolves who would be inspired to plot their own attacks.
They describe the Base as an “accelerationist” organization, seeking to speed the collapse of the country and give rise to a state of its own in the Pacific Northwest by killing minorities, particularly African Americans and Jews.
Experts estimate that the Base, which was formed around July 2018, has dozens of hard-core members and tries to recruit many more online, although its approach is evolving.
The arrests to head off violence in Richmond and Georgia exposed aspects of a long-running FBI investigation, involving at least one undercover agent who infiltrated the group, as well as a hidden recording device and a video camera that were placed inside a Delaware apartment where two of the men were arrested. The group’s toxic blend of ideology, dangerous rhetoric and embrace of violence has made it a top priority for the agency.
The case also reflected an aggressive approach that the FBI can take when investigating an extremist group like the Base when there is a legal basis to do so.
Membership alone in a hate group is not a crime, but this case is a rare example of investigators treating a neo-Nazi group like the Mafia or a drug cartel, and allowing the FBI to legally use a wide swath of investigative tools to target its members.
In other words, the FBI suspected that the Base was operating as a criminal enterprise.
The men arrested in Maryland hoped that attacks in Richmond would spark a wider conflict.
“We can’t let Virginia go to waste, we just can’t,” Patrik J. Mathews, a member of the Base, and a combat engineer who was expelled from the Canadian army reserve, was recorded as saying about Monday’s rally in Richmond.
In Georgia, the three men arrested had, in the presence of an undercover agent, cased the house of a Barstow County couple they planned to shoot dead for being members of antifa, which has staged counterdemonstrations at right-wing rallies across the country and revealed the identities of Base members publicly.