Faith had to stand up, but not to leave. She needed to push oxygen into her lungs. The room felt like a prison. She leaned against the wall. She crossed her arms over her chest. She waited.
Miranda said, “Let’s go back to the beginning. I asked you what causes historical upticks in membership in white supremacist groups. You said immigration and the economy, but actually, it’s war. War is the common thread for all of these men. They went off to fight, they came home, and nothing felt the same. To their thinking, the government abandoned them. Their women had moved on or grown more independent. Their kids were strangers. They didn’t know how to make sense of the world going on without them, and they needed someone to blame.”
Van said, “I blame the Jews myself.”
Faith wasn’t up for his weird humor right now. “Two of Hurley’s men—Sebastian James Monroe and Oliver Reginald Vale. They were discharged out of the Army.”
Van said, “Robert Jacob Hurley was an Air Force munitions officer.”
Faith asked, “What does this have to do with the Invisible Patriot Army?”
“Ah.” Miranda shuffled through her folders. “So, these guys are what we’re calling New Nazis. They’re not skinheads. They don’t shave their heads and get tattoos and dress the part. Their point is to blend in. Dockers and polos. Nice, clean-cut guys.”
Faith remembered the protesters carrying tiki torches in Charlottesville. The young men had all looked so normal until they’d started chanting about blood and soil and screaming Jews will not replace us.
Faith said, “The Unite the Right Rally—”
“That’s why they’re careful online,” Van said. “After Charlottesville, the internet turned against them. People identified them from the videos. ‘Hey, that’s my delivery guy. What’s he doing kicking a black woman in the face?’ They got fired from their jobs, cast out from their families, lost their security clearances, got dishonorably discharged. So, they learned to be careful. When the camera starts rolling, they cover their faces or wear masks.”
Miranda took over. “Charlottesville was a watershed moment. Groups came from thirty-five different states. This wasn’t a spontaneous get-together. They’d been staging smaller rallies all over the country, mostly in California, but usually twenty people showed up, maybe a handful of Antifa looking to bust heads and some hippie-wannabes looking to throw around flowers, but the media pretty much ignored them. After Charlottesville, their entire world changed. They got validation from the top down. Those guys went home energized, organized, ready to take action. Their membership soared.”
She showed Faith another photo. This one was a color mugshot of a young man. “Brandon Russell, Florida National Guard. Also a member of Atomwaffen Division. Atomwaffen is German for atomic weapons. They had a big presence in Charlottesville. May of 2017, the month before the rally, Russell was found with a bomb-making lab in his garage, swastikas all over his apartment and a photograph of Timothy McVeigh in his bedroom.”
Van said, “They found HMTD in Russell’s garage. It’s a highly explosive organic compound. It’s also the same material that was used in the two bombs that were set off in the Emory parking deck yesterday.”
Faith’s mind brought up the image of the smoking crater she had seen from the helicopter yesterday afternoon. They were still combing through the debris this morning. Another body had been found in the last hour.
She nodded for Miranda to continue.
“As far as the big groups, there’s Atomwaffen, RAM, which stands for the Rise Above Movement, Hammerskins, Totenkampf. The list goes on. Sometimes it’s ten guys, sometimes it’s fifty. What we’re seeing take place is the incarnation of the leaderless resistance. An attack on the level of 9/11 or 7/7 takes coordination, discipline and money. None of these groups really have those resources. What happens is one guy says to himself, ‘Hey, I’m sick of talking about this. I’m going to do something about it.’ Dylann Roof, Robert Gregory Bowers, Nicholas Giampa, Brandon Russell—they were heavily involved in white nationalism, but there was no master plan. They acted on their own.”
Faith said, “Like suicide bombers.”
“Not even that sophisticated. It can literally be a twenty-year-old with a lot of guns lying around who decides one morning to grab them all up and go to a synagogue.”
Van said, “These guys are big-time into hero-worship. It’s not just McVeigh they revere. Lone-wolf shooters are turned into gods. Check online the next time one of these attacks takes place. Within minutes, there’s fan pages, fan-fiction, contact info. If the fucker lives, they post his inmate number so people can fill his commissary, and the jail address for fan mail.”
Faith didn’t bother asking what the hell was wrong with people. “The shooter’s motivation is fame?”
“In some ways, yes,” Miranda said. “They’re incredibly disaffected. They feel marginalized, powerless, misunderstood. We’ve heard a lot of chatter lately about the Great Replacement.”
Van explained, “I’m sure you’ve heard it all before. White women aren’t giving birth at the same rate as minorities. Feminism is ruining the Western world. White men are being turned into cuckolds.”
Miranda said, “Which brings us back to the military. The men in these groups crave the discipline, the masculine affirmation of a military structure. We’ve noticed a concerted effort to recruit veterans, active duty and reserve. Primarily, they want these men for their combat skills and the validation of their military service. From the other side, it’s very attractive for a soldier whose fighting days are behind him to relive those moments. There are Hate Camps all over the country where ex-soldiers run kids through drills and exercises. Clearing rooms, target practice, ordnance training. One of the larger camps is in Devil’s Hole in Death Valley.”
Faith remembered the photographs in Kate Murphy’s IPA files. They showed young men running around in camouflage. “Devil’s Hole is where Charles Manson was going to hide after Helter Skelter brought on a race war.”
“Exactly.” Miranda seemed impressed. “While Manson was in prison, he corresponded with a man named James Mason. Big white supremacist. He also wrote a book called Siege, where he advocated strongly for the leaderless resistance. You could call it the bible for the modern white supremacy movement.”
Faith asked, “So what does this bible tell them to do?”
“The same things that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda do. They produce highly sophisticated recruitment videos. They create online forums where hate is not only accepted, it’s encouraged. They target angry young men and tell them that they’re part of a greater cause, that they need to fight to regain their white power and that women will flock around them when they do.”
Van said, “A lot of those guys like Hurley, Vale and Monroe served over in Iraq and Afghanistan. They paid attention to what the other side was doing. They saw the damage that an improvised explosive device can do. How one guy infiltrating the police force or a battalion could kill dozens of people. They learned from the insurgency, and they brought it back to America.”
“The insurgency.” Faith nodded to the stack of unopened folders. She still needed to know how Dash fit into all of this. “Tell me about the IPA.”
Miranda took a breath. “Okay, so they’re smart, which is what makes us nervous. They don’t talk about themselves online. There’s stray chatter where other groups say things—mostly about how the IPA is planning something big, how they’re going to bring on a second American Revolution. That’s how these guys talk so it’s hard to separate the boasting from what could actually be the truth.” She paused for another breath. “We think the IPA are survivalist. The reason I gave you this long preamble about how these groups operate is because that’s how we think the IPA operates. A small cell, advocating the leaderless resistance, possibly training so-called soldiers to embed in law enforcement or military and bring about holy war.”
Faith’s mouth had gone dry. “If they’re so quiet, how did you find out about them?”
“That was me,” Van said. “It’s kind of my field to monitor these groups. There are hundreds of them, and just as many lone wolves sitting in their trailers spewing crap about killing all the blacks and raping feminazis. I started to pick up stray mentions of the IPA a few years ago. It felt different the way they were talked about. I sent out a bulletin asking for information. I got back a memo from Valdosta State Prison that they had an inmate whose recorded phone calls contained heavy mentions of the IPA.”