Episode One: The Basement

Among the crowds storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 are people carrying Nazi flags and those wearing shirts with anti-Semitic messages. Who are they and why were they there? A reporter, and son of a Holocaust survivor, takes on the story he has avoided and learns the answers are more alarming than he ever imagined.

The audio is the official record of the show, not the transcript below.

Transcript

Natasha Del Toro: A note to our listeners before we get started, this podcast contains offensive and violent content. Please be advised.

Jalen Gentry: I was scared simply because it happened literally right outside of my door. So in my head I was thinking, oh my gosh, like white supremacists are literally outside of my door. It’s a harsh reality of white supremacist groups at our campus. And I'm a Black woman in a predominantly white institution. I didn't know, there were any other white supremacist group outside of the KKK if we're being honest.

Natasha: It was January, 2021. Jalen Gentry, a freshman at Northern Kentucky University, woke up and got ready to go to class. She grabbed her books and headed out. That's when she saw racist propaganda spread all over her college campus. White supremacists vandalized a large boulder in the center of campus. Typically the students would use the same boulder to post inspiring messages, like a tribute to graduating seniors.

But now it was full of hate.

Jalen showed it to me, located right outside her dorm.

Jalen: So you see it when you're walking to class, you see it when you're walking back to your dorm from class, you see it when you're going into the dining hall to eat, you see it when you're leaving the dining hall to eat. There's no way that you really can't see it. Honestly, if you, especially, if you live over here by these dorms, you see it every day.

Natasha: A couple months later, Jalen and her friends painted it with Black faces. Then a few weeks after that, the rock was targeted again by white supremacists, the Black faces were now crossed out with a white X as if they were being eliminated.

White supremacists came onto your campus, not once but twice. They wanted to let you know, and you and other people of color know that you're not welcome there. Talk to me about how that feels.

Jalen: I questioned a lot about living on campus at that point, because I'm like if white supremacists can walk into our campus twice and paint a rock, then what would they do to a student of color or a minority if they saw them outside?

Natasha: So it affected you that, that much, that you actually thought you might go home for a bit.

Jalen: Yeah.

Natasha: But she didn't go home.

Jalen: I'm not going to let nobody scare me away when I know I'm doing something right. And I'm still Black. Can't nobody change anything about that. So I'm going to stay, I'm going to continue doing what I'm doing. And if I ever get the chance to promote Black love, Black excellence, I'm going to do it.

Natasha: Jalen has experienced racism before, but this was on a whole different level.

Jalen: People have accused me of stealing. People have followed me around corner stores or in hair stores, things of that sort. People have called me the N word, but nothing so close to me as like coming for where I live. And that's what really scared me because, especially because I like to do homework late at night, like it literally got to a point where our mentors and our advisors were telling us, like, don't walk home alone. Don't study late at night, go back to your dorm. Tell somebody if you are going to be late at night, outside, late at night by yourself and that's scary, because I shouldn't have to be afraid to walk around a college campus at any time of day.

Natasha: But the racist propaganda wasn't just appearing on her campus. It was showing up on other campuses, as well as cities and towns across the United States. In recent years, there's been more propaganda like this than ever before. I can relate to Jaylen's story and the fear that she felt knowing white supremacists were right outside her door.

When I was a teenager, the KKK held rallies in my little town of Lexington, North Carolina, right on Main Street. It was terrifying to a Puerto Rican girl like me. The first friend I ever lost was a 17 year old Black kid named Marcus bay. He was handsome and charismatic and a little flirtatious. One time on the steps of the local YMCAs he asked me to go to prom, but I was only 14. A few months later, he and a group of Black teenagers met up with a group of white teens after school to settle a dispute. Marcus was stabbed in the neck with a hunting knife and rushed to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. His death affected me. And I remember thinking at the time, why would someone hate another human being so much just because of his skin color, or religion, or whatever makes us different.

In the decades since Marcus has murder, Americans have made some progress in addressing racism, but now it feels like white supremacists are out in the open again in ways I've not seen since I was a girl. And it feels like the country is backsliding. In fact, the FBI says hate crimes have surged to a 12 year high, more than 8,000 cases in 2020 alone.

So where's all this hate coming from? Why is it bubbling up now? And what does it mean? These are the questions the Verified reporting team set out to answer. And what we discovered is a bigger and more complex web than you can imagine. This season, we go from the United States across Europe and all the way to Russia, to uncover a dangerous network united in a global fight for white power. And we meet some of the brave people fighting back.

I'm your host, Natasha Del Toro. This is Verified: The Next Threat.

I want you to meet my friend and colleague Mark Greenblatt. He's an investigative reporter in Washington with Newsy. We've been working on this story together for months. And what I can tell you about Mark is that he's a hard-nosed journalist. He's not the kind of guy who gets personal when it comes to his job. But sometimes a story finds you at a particular moment in your life, and it becomes an all consuming mission.

Mark Greenblatt: It's sort of a mess. Whoops, kicking, kicking stuff around from all over.

Natasha: Mark has poked around in a lot of dark places.

Mark: Welcome to the unfinished basement.

Natasha: But there's a story that he's been avoiding for most of his life. Something he hid away in a dusty corner of his basement until now.

Mark: This is where, sort of my family's history lives right now. I've inherited a bunch of furniture and documents from my mom who just very recently passed away. She had for a long time been the family historian who really did a lot of keeping of the secrets of the family and keeping of some of the more interesting things.

Natasha: Have you looked through these things before?

Mark: I will be very honest with you. I have not looked through a lot of them in detail.

Natasha: Mark pulls out a document out of a chest and he shows it to me.

Mark: This is the chest that had a bunch of the documents that are now in plastic in them for some time, but where it's a sort of a family heirloom, you can see it's been passed through many hands over the years. And I continue to keep what I think are sort of the most important documents in here.

Natasha: These documents are old. It's the first time he's seen this.

Mark: This document is an original document. You can see the Russian Cyrillic on it. This is a, a passport of a kind, a temporary passport of a kind that was issued to my great-grandfather who is known to us as Moses Nathan.

It says that he is dismissed into various towns and villages of the Russian empire for his personal needs for one year, from the date listed below 1890. After that date, he must come back. Otherwise he will be dealt with- you know, according to the law of the Czars. This passport is valid only where the Jews are allowed to live.

As the story goes Moses decided to take his chances and come to the United States and never return. And he's been on the run ever since and formed a family. And eventually, you know, I'm one of the byproducts of, of his getting out of a place that wanted to sequester Jewish people. I knew that my family not only in this instance, but then later 50 years down the line when, again with the rise of Germany and the rise of Nazis when they targeted my dad's family, one of the remarkable parts of, of our family story is that my dad's family and my mom's family, each actually lived in an area, a town called Rzhyshchiv.

Natasha: I've never heard of Rzhyshchiv. Where, where is that in Russia?

Mark: So it's currently a town in Ukraine. It was in the Russian empire years ago. It's sort of in this area where it's near Kiev. And what, what I'm learning about right now is, you know, I've been seeing this massacre that took place there.

The entire Jewish community was taken out. Gunned down in a, in a, in a massacre, thousands, thousands of them in, in World War II. And they, one day had dug a series of ditches outside of town and outside of the ghetto, and they began taking truckloads of the Jewish people from Rzhyshchiv, who lived there, who were now imprisoned in the ghetto, and they would just bring them in truckload after truckload and then walk everyone towards the mass graves. And they had machine guns and a keg of beer, and they would open fire with machine guns while taking sips of beer in between You know, a bloody massacre. And then everyone was buried and it was just one truckload after one truckload and, and you know, to the, to the tune of thousands of people were, were, were murdered this way. And the entire Jewish community of Rzhyshchiv was eviscerated.

Natasha: Oh my God, that's so awful.

Mark: You know, that's what would have happened, if, if, if my grandfather, my great-grandfather would have stayed.

Natasha: From so far in the past, it's easy to think that this is just history, and that those ideas are in the past. But of course they aren't, especially after what Mark saw on January Sixth.

Thousands of protestors gather on the mall in front of the US Capitol in Washington DC, but within a few hours, a smaller group begins to riot. They overtake police, smashing windows and doors and break their way into the Capitol itself.

I am watching from my TV at home. I could not believe what I was seeing. Mark, what were you seeing?

Mark: You know, I'm sitting there watching people who are outwardly white supremacists. You know, people that had shirts on that were talking about Auschwitz, people with swastikas that were openly displayed and it's, it's shocking.

And I couldn't believe my eyes, that there were people who appeared to be modern day Nazis who had breached the United States Capitol. And so as the son of a Holocaust survivor, I immediately wanted to know what, what was going on there. But I also needed to know- what were they connected to? Who were they connected to? How big, how big was, was this threat? Were these a couple of kooks who were on the fringes of society, who I didn't really need to worry about? Or was this something bigger?

Natasha: Right? All that history that you had just discovered in your basement- now it's coming back to life in front of your eyes.

Mark: Yeah. And it wasn't just Jewish people that I saw under attack now. It was something much, much bigger, like, like as if there was an assault on, on all of Western democracy itself. Right, right. Before our very eyes. And with the knowledge of what had happened to my own parents, families, this was the first time in my life that I was truly petrified, that we might be heading towards something similar, in our own time. And I wasn't the only one concerned.

Jackie Speier: So there were probably 20 of us in the gallery-

Mark: Like so many members of Congress, Jackie Speier was in the house gallery when rioters stormed the Capitol.

Jackie: We were told to get down, I'm crouching down and I'm thinking, well, if something happens here, you know, I have a chair with some foam and some fabric that's going to be easily penetrated by a bullet, right? And then I heard a gun go off.

I just, there was a sense of resignation and I just put my head down on the marble, cold marble floor. I just remember that, that coldness on my cheek. And I thought that this was it. I survived the jungles of Guyana and I'm gonna lose my life in this tabernacle of democracy.

Natasha: Jungles of Guyana. What is she talking about Mark?

Mark: Well, she's, she's having these, these flashbacks from about 40 years ago. There, there was a standoff with religious extremists and she was shot five times at a remote airstrip in South America. Her boss, a Congressman, was assassinated. 

Jackie: I think for a moment there, I was afraid I was going to die and it took me back to Jonestown. But I think since then, what pains me is this effort to whitewash what happened? Because we were teetering on losing this democracy. I don't think we have articulated that well enough to the American public. You know, Democracy is fragile. They don't survive historically. And yet we have just kind of taken it as you know, common. And it was almost over.

Mark: So with the stakes this high and extremists of all kinds seeming to come together, I wanted to know more about the glue that seemed to be connecting them, and if they really were connected. So I turned to a woman, who's had her eyes on this for years. Her name's Heidi Beirich. She co-founded the Global Project on Hate and Extremism. And she watched the Capitol attack from her home in the Georgia mountains.

Heidi Beirich: So every sector of the radical right in the United States converged on the Capitol that day of January 6th. And that's actually unprecedented in the history of extremism in the United States.

Mark: Natasha, Heidi has spent decades tracking extremism and hate groups.

Heidi: If you had asked me on January 5th, if I was going to see antigovernment people hand in hand with neo-Nazis in an event like this, I would have said, "That's very unlikely. They usually keep their distance." But everything changed on January 6th. There was a huge melding of these kinds of extremists.

Mark: What is different about right now? Why, why did they come together?

Heidi: These ideas have been simplified and spread, right? "They're coming to get you white person." That's going to be a very powerful lure for people and a powerful thing to say, to try to radicalize people. So that's what's happening. There's like a consolidation of propaganda, and that has made it easier to address, I think, for the far right a common enemy.

Mark: -So they simplify the message and then they create a common. And, and that's that to you is, is one of the, the core explanations for, for why we're seeing such a rise.

Heidi: Yeah, I mean, look, it's, it's a basic principle of, of marketing not to give them too much credit, but you try to simplify the message. Make it very clear what you should believe and who you're against. Right. And, and that's what's happened and it makes it easier for people to come together. And it's not just in the United States where this has been happening. Right? All the so-called Western countries, European countries, United States, Canada, places like Australia, New Zealand have all been experiencing a rise in extreme right groups, racist groups in particular. The rise of conspiracy theories and probably worst of all terrorism.

Mark: So you're, you're saying that when Nazis and all these other people converge at the Capitol on the 6th- If I'm trying to understand, like what, what is the next threat in the United States? Your answer is to understand that I've got to look abroad.

Heidi: It's really, really important to look abroad.

Karoline Preisler: The whole day was like a straight party, very colorful, lots of flags and banners. It was so peaceful that you could walk barefoot.

Natasha: It was August, 2020 and Karoline Preisler, a local German politician, was so happy to finally be outdoors. She'd been stuck inside after having just recovered from a bad case of COVID. So she put on her mask and joined a large group of peaceful protesters outside the parliament building in Berlin. Many of the people there were protesting COVID restrictions and she wanted to talk to them about how COVID is real.

Karoline: But then things took a turn in the afternoon. I knew I had to leave. Lots of other people felt the same. And so after that, there was a group left, a cell of sorts, who considered it acceptable to use violence, to get what they want.

Natasha: As things got more tense, Karoline asked a cop to help her leave. She was scared. She was still feeling weak and didn't think that she could escape., if things got ugly. A couple hundred far-right protestors broke through, ran up the steps and tried to storm the parliament building, but they didn't manage to get in.

Karoline: It truly scared me because I saw those people early in the day. They were wearing anti-Semitic symbols. They were denying the Holocaust. They were saying that the Jews would rule us all, that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, should be killed, and that politicians should be court-martialed. Those were the same people who wanted to get into our parliament.

Natasha: New Nazis. We're flying an old German flag they used to represent the Nazi movement. That's a big deal because swastikas in Germany are banned. That day the protesters didn't get inside the parliament, but a few months later, Karoline turned on her television to see the U S Capitol under attack too.

Karoline: The day of the US Capitol siege was like the end of a spiraling escalation. I saw the same images, the same antisemitic ideology, the right wing symbols, the white nationalism and the hatred of science. And I thought to myself, these are the same people who attacked our democracy and Germany. I was extremely shaken.

Mark: Listening to Karoline, Natasha, I'm having what I call, in investigative reporting, a holy shit moment.

Natasha: I know I'm, it's wild. I'm feeling the same.

Mark: I mean, it's, it's, it's almost like you could take her words describing what played out in Germany and just sort of like insert them in some kind of a scene talking about what happened at the Capitol in Washington, DC. I mean it feels like there's just a direct parallel. This doesn't feel like a coincidence.

Natasha: Right. I mean, you've got Jackie Speier worried about the threat to democracy. And then Heidi Beirich says that she's seen groups of extremists who normally never come together, coming together, an attack on the German parliament. I mean, I guess the question is are these dots really all connected?

Mark: That's what I wanted to know. And so I called up a guy whose job it was to keep his eyes on threats to America from all around the globe.

Hey Jason.

Jason Blazakis: Hey Mark. Want me to start recording on my side?

Mark: Yeah, please do.

Jason Blazakis is a guy who worked for more than 10 years at the US state department, and his job was to oversee the office that designates the most dangerous groups and people from around the world as terrorists.

Jason: I think it's important to kind of zoom out from what happened on the 6th of January to think more broadly about how this ecosystem associated with violent, radical right actors looks. There is a level of connectivity that absolutely does exist, that binds individuals and even to a lesser level organizations together, that aren't just based, say, in the United States, but also go overseas as well. So there are those overseas connections.

Mark: I mean, is this serious? Like, should I be worried about the white supremacists in the US connecting with someone overseas? Does that sound scarier than it really is? Or, or is there something, something I should really be concerned about?

Jason: It's something we absolutely should be concerned about. When you were introducing me briefly about my old job at the state department, thinking about all the designated foreign terrorist organizations ranging from groups- like ISIS, to Al Qaeda, to groups like Lebanese Hezbollah and Hamas, to even smaller groups that still operate in Europe, like the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA- I have the same kinds of level of concerns with white supremacists that are based in the United States that have connections over seas.

Mark: So just to level set, Jason is equating the threat level of white supremacists now in America to the same kinds of people that we've been fighting for decades. You know, some of the people who literally chop off Americans heads, if they can get to us. I mean, it's disturbing. And I wanted to know what's our government know about this.

Jackie: We have no handle on how big these groups are on.

Mark: Here's Congresswoman Jackie Speier, who has a front row seat on discussions about national security.

Do you think that the United States government has a handle on the nature of the threat?

Jackie: No, I don't. Not at all.

Mark: Why do you feel that?

Jackie: Because I serve on the intelligence committee. And I, you know, I know what we're focused on. I mean, we are, we're pretty, flat-footed dealing with these groups. They are so diffuse and, and social media allows for these people to come together, and for them to solicit and recruit that, you know, it's, it's, it's a challenge.

Natasha: Wow. That's pretty sobering. White supremacists are finding each other, they're coming together and trying to expand their ranks. How exactly is that happening? Mark starts poking around.

Mark: I remember getting the email in my inbox, you know, and he basically said, I'm interested in talking with you, you know, you know, he's a terrorist in the United States, but, but he says in Russia, he's not.

Natasha: That's next time on Verified.

There's so much more for you to discover about this story and what's coming up on the show. You can find us on Twitter @verpod. We're also on Instagram and Facebook, if you just search for Verified Pod. And if you have a story to tell us, send a voicemail or an email to [email protected]. That's [email protected].

If you liked the show and believe in this kind of storytelling, please give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. It'll help more people discover Verified. I'm your host Natasha Del Toro. This is Verified. Thanks for listening.