He infiltrated a neo-Nazi hate group and knows how they recruit #shorts

WARNING: This video contains distressing details.

An anti-facist activist calling himself Tradian infiltrated a neo-Nazi organization called The Base from its inception in the summer of 2018. The Fifth Estate and researchers received access to material he gathered and we spoke to him in an exclusive interview.

Tradian said he had been looking to join a neo-Nazi group in North America for years in order to destabalize the movement but never managed to get past the vetting session. Until he did.

“I was the right person in the right place at the right time, and the thing that I was looking to do was engineer a disaster that would kneecap a militant national socialist movement at a very important time.”

He walked away from the group in February 2020 with 80 gigabytes worth of screen grabs, videos and audio recordings. The Base Tapes, as they came to be called, became the subject of several high-profile podcasts in the United States and Australia and CBC’s White Hot Hate.

Most of the recordings – about 100 – were vetting sessions of men applying for membership in The Base. Tradian said he was assigned a senior role by the group’s founder, Rinaldo Nazzaro, who tasked him with interviewing potential recruits where he was exposed to extremely racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and deeply misogynistic views.

Far-right accelerationists believe that violence is the only way for them to pursue their political goals to cause the collapse of liberal democracies and replace them with white ethno-nationalist states. The group offered recruits military training in addition to targeting recruits with a military background.

In February 2021, Canada designated The Base as a terrorist entity. Bill Blair, the public safety minister at the time, had described it as a “neo-Nazi organization, nihilistic and accelerationist in their rhetoric.”

CBC agreed to refer to Tradian by that alias to protect his identity and change his voice for reasons of personal safety.

“I don’t want to have someone try and shoot at me.”

For more on our interview with Tradian, tap our link in bio. Watch “Base of hate: Inside accelerationism” Thursday at 9 p.m. on CBC-TV and CBC Gem.

(Reporting: Nazim Baksh, Gillian Findlay, Ivan Angelovski)

#CBCFifthEstate #HateGroup #Military

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