Last month, Canberra followed London and Ontario in putting the Base, a white-supremacist group with the bulk of its membership in the United States, on its terrorism list. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Varsha Koduvayur describe the group, and why they think America should take similar steps:
The Base was established in 2018 by Rinaldo Nazzaro, a U.S. citizen living in Russia. Although the group has not carried out any attacks, its explicit goals make the dangers associated with it clear enough. The Base’s ideology is accelerationist: it aims to commit violent acts to foment a civil war, to overthrow the current system, and ultimately to establish a white ethno-state. Nazzaro, who goes by the pseudonym Norman Spear, has defended the use of terrorism to achieve the Base’s goals.
In a June 2018 post on Gab, a social network associated with the far-right, he wrote “it’s only terrorism if we lose. If we win, we get statues of us put up in parks.” The group’s ideology is also overtly anti-Semitic; Nazzaro tweeted in 2018 that his goal was to “prepare for the armed struggle against Z0G,” using the acronym for “Zionist Occupied Government,” a term often employed by white supremacists that reflects the belief that Jews secretly control the U.S. government. Nazzaro went on to state his mission was to free “our people from Z0G oppression.”
In October, two members were sentenced to prison for plotting to carry out an attack at a gun-rights rally in Richmond, Virginia. In February, a member pled guilty for stirring up an intimidation campaign against Jewish Americans and Black Americans, during which he encouraged his online followers to vandalize property belonging to these two groups, calling it “Kristallnacht,” in reference to the 1938 Nazi pogrom. Three other Base members were charged in Georgia for being part of a criminal street gang and for plotting to murder a couple they thought belonged to the far-left group Antifa.
Read more on Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/12/21/white-supremacist-terror-groups-the-base-australia-designation/