Troops who are caught with ties to white nationalism are typically punished by their commanders for violating Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If we are to believe that up to 36% of troops today have recently witnessed white nationalism or ideological-driven racism in the ranks, we must also conclude that the vast majority of white nationalists in the military not only slip through the cracks during the recruitment process, but that they also remain undetected, unaccounted for, and unpunished. 11, 2001, reveals dozens of cases of white nationalists in the military-and these are just the examples of troops who have been caught, written about in the media, and punished.
military since the terrorist attacks of Sept.
When he was the secretary of the Army, Esper continued, “We screened very closely and diligently the new recruits coming into the service,” and in cases where someone with white-nationalist beliefs slipped through the cracks, the Uniformed Code of Military Justice would be used to root them out.Ī search of incidents of white nationalism in the U.S. “I don’t believe it’s an issue in the military,” he said. Two days later, Defense Secretary Mark Esper was asked by a reporter whether he had heard anything about the incident and if he thought white supremacy in the military was an issue. According to a recent poll conducted by, 36% of the 1,630 active-duty troops it surveyed reported they had personally witnessed examples of “white nationalism or ideological-driven racism within the ranks in recent months.” If this same percentage is extrapolated to the whole population of active-duty troops (about 1.3 million in December 2019), that would mean nearly half a million troops have witnessed examples of white nationalism in the ranks in recent months.Ī couple of months before published the results of its poll, a few West Point cadets and Naval Academy midshipmen were seen flashing what was viewed as a white power hand signal behind ESPN’s Rece Davis, while he was broadcasting live before the annual Army-Navy football game. military has a problem it doesn’t want to acknowledge: Despite increased efforts to bar them from enlisting, white nationalists have continued to infiltrate all branches of the U.S.
And white supremacists intending to perpetrate violent acts await to see exactly how much federal time they may be looking at in assessing whether and how to act on their violent beliefs.” “The eyes of many await this court’s sentence,” one of the prosecutors, Thomas Windom, noted. Coast Guard lieutenant, Christopher Hasson, receive 25 years in federal prison. Prosecutors requested that the 50-year-old U.S. “This case,” one of his lawyers said, “has been mischaracterized and sensationalized from the start.” He was not a potential domestic terrorist, they said instead, he was a “once-stellar and respected career military man unhinged in recent years by opioid abuse,” which “poisoned his tolerance for racial and religious diversity and caused him to fantasize about atrocities he did not intend to commit.” In his defense, his lawyers said that despite having stockpiled a cache of weapons and ammunition, and even though he had called for “focused violence” to “establish a white homeland,” he never would have actually attacked anyone. They said he had been dreaming of a way, in his own words, “to kill almost every last person on earth.” They claimed, and intended to prove, that had law enforcement not arrested him when they did, he would have murdered innocent civilians “on a scale rarely seen in this country.”
They said he was obsessed with neo-fascist and neo-Nazi views and that he spent untold hours online not only reading the manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik-a white supremacist who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011-but also meticulously researching how best to carry out a series of attacks against liberal politicians and hosts of cable news programs. Prosecutors said the lieutenant was a self-proclaimed white nationalist.