Dark Net (2016) s02e04 Episode Script
My Nation
1 [Damigo.]
We live in a society that hates those who speak truth.
We want to bring about a different world, and we want to show people a vision of something much more beautiful, much greater, healthier than is being promoted right now.
Look at this, man.
Tree hugger.
It's like what's gonna happen if, you know, we become an underwhelming minority in the United States, and who's gonna care about the environment? - But we secure our future - Right.
by speaking the truth.
We are the only ones speaking the truth about this.
[Damigo.]
A nation is a people with a common heritage.
Right now, I'm not even sure if America is a nation.
Heterogeneous societies, the more diverse they become, the more social trust starts to break down, the more polarized the politics start to become.
And in some cases, eventually, there does become a split, and new nations emerge.
[narrator.]
The World Wide Web has given us access to powerful tools of messaging and manipulation.
And with social media news feeds limiting our access to different points of view, armies of frustrated citizens are fueling each other's anger, embracing ideologies that promise a revolution for everyone, a revolution that could tear us apart.
[man.]
Get back on your side of the border! [Picciolini.]
Black people are animals.
Jews control the media and the finance system and the entertainment industry.
Immigrants are flooding into our country to destroy our society and take away our jobs and eventually to commit genocide on our race.
That's what I believed 21 years ago when I left the American White power movement that I helped build.
My name's Christian Picciolini.
From 1987 to 1995, I was one of America's first Neo-Nazi skinheads.
When I first joined, it wasn't about ideology for me.
The first thing that grabbed me was the fact that I could now belong to this new community where I was accepted.
It felt like I was really changing the world for the better, so that instilled power in me.
And that power was very intoxicating.
[Sighs.]
Aside from the violence that I caused, you know, I think the worst thing that I did was plant all those seeds of hate, thousands of them, many of which are still sprouting today, and I find myself pulling out the weeds.
[man.]
If you or someone you know is in the dark world that hate takes you to, we can help.
No judgment, just help.
[narrator.]
In 2009, Christian Picciolini co-founded a non-profit called Life After Hate to help other people leave hate groups.
[Picciolini.]
We've employed microintervention strategies online to actually see what types of words people were using in their social media.
Were they using racist words? And what we'd do is apply an algorithm to see who was following who, how many influencers they followed, or if, in fact, they were an influencer themselves.
And then we'd contact people one-on-one and start a conversation with them.
When I was recruited in 1987, it was very much face-to-face recruitment.
Now recruitment is different, and it's more powerful because the Internet provides this layer of anonymity.
There's this whole underground world of White nationalists who operate chat rooms with tens of thousands of people in them, who operate message boards and websites with misinformation and statistics that are skewed to make minorities look worse in our eyes.
If you think ISIS has a presence on social media, you haven't seen anything.
[woman.]
She was a very friendly, very happy little girl.
She was quiet, shy, didn't make friends that easily.
Somewhat introverted.
[woman.]
With the challenges of middle school and high school, clique-iness, she always wanted to do online school, so we said, "Okay, we could try it.
" [man.]
You know, with her time that she spends online, she would go out and research different viewpoints, and that's where she connected and actually had the ability to then feel like she was part of a group.
[woman.]
She came to me one day and said, "You know, sometimes I talk to some people online about politics.
" And I said, "Well, who are these people?" And she said, "Well, they're two 15-year-old girls and this one boy who's in college.
" [man.]
She shared with him about her lack of friends and not being accepted, and he identified with everything.
She mentioned that he had had the same kind of a background and situation.
So they really connected.
[woman.]
That's when she said, "I'd like to make a video over the summer.
" And I said, "Well, what kind of video?" She said, "Well, just political.
" At this time, I had no clue the magnitude of what, you know, this was all about.
Times are changing and Western civilization is in decline.
What kind of future do you want your children to inherit? Are you concerned about demographic replacements? Are you tired of feminists, SJWs and Black Lives Matter terrorists destroying the foundations of a healthy society? Do you know who rules over you and who you're not allowed to criticize? Whatever the future holds for us, we are ultimately responsible.
Come join the crusade against the destroyers of Western civilization.
She came out with it, and we were just, like, blown away how bad it was.
It actually sickened me.
[Morton.]
The Internet is an anarchic arena, where every individual has independence to think and believe and to say what they want, and that essentially could be a good thing.
But we still live in a hierarchical-structured society.
And you have a radical rebellion across the world against authority.
I was born into a very dysfunctional family in a rural Pennsylvanian town.
I endured severe physical abuse.
No one did anything about it, and so I grew to mistrust the society that I grew up around and ran away at the age of 16 and soon found a rock-'n'-roll band called the Grateful Dead, which had a very counterculturalist basis.
I chose to provide party favors, or drugs, for those going into the concerts.
And eventually I ended up in jail and started to open up to a more conservative lifestyle.
One of the first verses of the Quran says, "This is a book wherein there's no doubt.
" And as a critical thinker, I was sort of enthralled and continued to read on.
And I had sort of a spiritual awakening, so to say.
[narrator.]
After he was released from prison, Jesse Morton began experimenting with ways to promote Jihad.
[Morton.]
For someone who was already critical of the society around them, I naturally gravitated to a politicized interpretation of Islam.
2007, I used a relatively nascent platform, YouTube, and I uploaded a 11-minute clip that played small segments of a debate between a very well-known radical preacher, Abdullah Faisal, and a Christian bishop.
Jesus said about Jihad, he himself believed in it.
Jesus said, "Bring my enemies here and kill them in front of me.
" He was able to manipulate the Christian texts and embarrass the bishop.
Within a couple of weeks, it had, you know, a quarter of a million views.
There was thousands of comments.
So we saw the power of online media.
[narrator.]
Alongside the video, Jesse launched a website and an organization named Revolution Muslim, one of the first to use YouTube to recruit Americans for Al-Qaeda, creating a template that was copied by other Jihadist groups.
[Morton.]
We had a prolific effect.
We were the gateway drug.
[narrator.]
It only takes one click to join the vanguard.
And with algorithms feeding us content based on what we already like, it's easy to become trapped in a filter bubble where we only meet people who agree with our beliefs.
It's how Internet movements emerge, grow and go viral.
[Damigo.]
The alt right is a very broad and disparate movement of dissidents who typically follow along right-wing politics.
A large part of the alt right really did begin on message boards like /pol/ and 4chan.
These ideas eventually developed to the point where they were mutating and becoming more simplified and more digestible by the masses, often with comedy in the forms of memes, constantly creating outrage to make people look foolish and overly emotional.
[narrator.]
The alt right is moving beyond offensive memes to more sophisticated forms of digital provocation, and Nathan Damigo is leading the charge.
[Damigo.]
I see myself largely as an organizer.
It's quite amazing what you can get done and what you can accomplish just through the use of a computer and access to a Wi-Fi network.
[narrator.]
Nathan spends 10 hours a day online spreading his message.
[Damigo.]
This is On The Front, where we talk about what's happening in the culture war.
[narrator.]
His critics have labeled him a Nazi, but if Nathan is a threat, at least he's a visible one.
The man that 17-year-old Crusader Girl first met in a chat room would only Skype with her with his webcam turned off.
[woman.]
She was starting to get fond of this young man.
I could tell he was isolating her from us.
[man.]
This so-called boyfriend was very charming.
She was talking to him morning and night, and it was becoming an obsession.
[woman.]
She said his name was Michael Hansson.
He's 23.
He lives in Eagle, Idaho.
He's German.
He had a Facebook account.
I was studying it very carefully.
This is where it really didn't match up.
His friends looked very odd.
It's almost liked he compiled it overnight maybe.
He just grabbed any individuals.
I figured out how to do a reverse search with the images, and, lo and behold, two of the pictures were from, like, modeling websites.
[narrator.]
Crusader Girl's parents turned to Christian for help.
Hi, it's Christian.
How are you? [woman.]
Hi, Christian.
How are you? I'm doing good.
How's everything going with your daughter right now? Any updates? He seems to be pushing her to make these videos.
She seems to be obsessed with this.
It's taking over her life, and it's pretty heartbreaking, you know, to see that.
And I am going to follow this guy to the gates of hell until I find him and turn her life around because my daughter is not disposable.
[Crusader Girl.]
Dear Muslim people, you think you can get away with playing the parts of the poor little refugee fleeing Syria.
[Picciolini.]
This recruiter, in my opinion, is a predator.
He's somebody who has absolutely no interest in this girl and is using her to meet his own agenda.
Crusader Girl is putting this message out there and affecting thousands of people with it.
Once it's online, she can never pull that back.
[Damigo.]
Presentation is everything.
That's why we want to master an aesthetic that is attractive, that people want to be a part of.
What's going on, guys? If you can, share this as much as possible.
We want to get a lot of people on here.
Believe it or not, you can say just about anything as long as you know how to say it.
Uh, right now, and someone just asked, you know, in this day and age, how can we create a sense of community? It starts by, you know, bringing people together who share a common history and a common world view.
And that's what Identity Evropa is.
Identity Evropa was founded with the purpose of promoting identity amongst people of European heritage.
I think my greatest inspiration was that of Generation Identitaire, which started in France when they occupied a mosque with about 20 or 30 members.
And they were rejecting the propagation of Islam within France.
[narrator.]
Generation Identitaire blazed a trail for an anti-immigration youth movement that has swept across Northern Europe, with self-proclaimed identitarian groups parading their exploits across the Internet.
And now their brand of pro-White activism has arrived on American shores.
Nathan launched Identity Evropa in April 2016, and they already have chapters in cities across the U.
S.
[Damigo.]
The goals of our organization are largely to bring people together beyond the Internet and break through the political correctness that has been created.
It's @sweden.
They let a random Swedish person run the Swedish account, and she was, like, talking about how Sweden was racist not because they had any part in the slave trade, but because they produced iron, which was used to make the ships in the slave trade.
Like, I'm not even joking.
You know, by that theory, though, the Earth is racist because the iron came from the Earth.
The hurricane went and killed 400 black people from Haiti.
That racist-ass hurricane.
Yeah.
Not just that.
There is nothing White people can't do that's not racist.
What you guys are doing today is going to have massive significance for the future of this country and for the future of our people.
So I want to thank each and every one of you for being here and making that happen.
Thank you.
- Hail victory.
- To victory.
[Damigo.]
I wanted to make the world a better place for other people.
However, at that time, I was very young and very naive.
I joined the Marine Corps straight out of high school and never stopped to consider how our involvement over there would actually play out.
And when I got out there I started to realize that, for the first time, I was actually kind of an outsider looking in.
And, to me, it was just so plain.
Like, "Okay, this is dumb.
These people have different religions.
They have come from different tribes.
They have different cultural practices, and they don't like being forced to go along with the practices of the other tribe by law.
Why not just give these people their own nations?" America wants to conquer your land, conquer your resources, kill your brothers, maim your sisters, rape your sisters and drop bombs on your children! [narrator.]
By 2010, Jesse had shed any loyalties to his nation and was actively radicalizing American Muslims through his website.
[Morton.]
I would go speak in public, and they would film it, and then they would put it on the YouTube channel.
To hell with America! To hell with nationalism! Within a year and a half or so, there started to be an overwhelming amount of terrorist-related cases in the United States, most of which were directly connected to us.
This is Islam! This is Islam.
One morning, I woke up, and "South Park" had declared that they were going to portray the prophet Muhammad in an episode.
Okay, how about, like, a a big mascot outfit, one that covered him completely, head-to-toe, not even showing his eyes? Muhammad, would that be okay? Okay.
[Morton.]
I wrote a statement that justified killing those that portrayed the prophet Muhammad using medieval scriptures.
I felt internally like I was doing my duty to God.
[narrator.]
Jesse was convicted for conspiring to solicit murder and using the Internet to communicate threats.
For the second time in his life, he was sent to prison.
I established a relationship with law enforcement after realizing that not only were they human beings, but that their primary concern was not with waging a war on Islam and Muslims, but with identifying individuals that may go on to kill civilians.
The system itself was not as corrupt as I once imagined it to be.
[narrator.]
By the time he was released 4 years later, Jesse had de-radicalized.
[Morton.]
We probably want to preserve the way of life that we have.
I've come to appreciate it, and I regret deeply who I became.
[narrator.]
Jesse is still a Muslim.
He now monitors Jihadist propaganda and plans to start a new organization to counter Islamic extremism.
[Morton.]
What we are now seeing is with groups like ISIS, they're developing their own apps, and everyone is now migrating to the darknet.
And Jihadist organizations, just like any extremist entity, they're fluid.
They're fluid entities.
They can change almost overnight in strategy and tactic.
[woman.]
It's horrifying.
It really is because you think you're doing everything right as a parent.
You try to give them all the tools they need, but you have no idea that this evil could come right into your home on your computer.
[Picciolini: He uses probably a dozen aliases.
With one screen name led me to another, which made another connection to a gamer site.
That's when I found out that this guy who pretended to be a German was actually a Russian.
I may have taunted this guy a little bit, and, within a couple of hours, I had several of my own websites attacked with malicious software all coming from Russia.
I hope that this is enough to really sway her to stop making the videos.
I'm not going to let another life be destroyed by some of the same things that I helped put into this world.
The first thing I want to talk about is these smoke flares.
Pretty cool.
They're fun.
They definitely will generate a lot of interest in what we're doing and get people's attention.
Just several months ago, Kate Steinle was shot and killed by a man who had been actually deported previously several times and had committed various crimes, and he still kept coming back to the country.
We want to push back against this massive illegal immigration that's happening that has been very harmful.
So how do you want me to film it? You really shouldn't even turn your camera on till right as we're getting into position.
This is going to be live-streamed by Red Ice.
We couldn't reach this large of an audience just by hitting the streets, so I'm really excited about all this.
This will be our first public demonstration.
Our main purpose is to get our ideas out into the mainstream, where they're talked about, where they're thought about.
And I think, if we can accomplish that, then I think everything else will fall in place.
There you go.
Pop flares.
Pop flares.
You guys ready? No sanction! No quarter! Get back on your side of the border! No sanction! No quarter! Get back on your side of the border! Citizens of San Francisco, if you are in this city illegally, it's time for you to go home.
America is not your home.
You need to make your nation and your homeland and your people great again.
No longer will you guys sit here and be demonized for being who we are.
Every single person standing here is White, and we're proud.
No sanction! No quarter! Get back on your side of the border! Go fuck yourselves, man.
Yeah.
You are the reason why a woman was murdered here several months ago.
- Fuck yourselves.
- We're not scared of your anti-White, ethnomasochistic language.
When you call everyone a racist, no one is a racist.
No sanction! No quarter! Get back on your side of the border! Y'all have stupid haircuts, too, for the record.
Let's go, guys.
[narrator.]
When everyone has a camera in their pocket, a public demonstration can become the fuse for the fire online.
[woman.]
Fuck you, Nazis! Get the fuck out of San Francisco.
- [man.]
Oh, yeah.
- We're not going anywhere.
We're not going anywhere.
This is about hate.
This is hate towards people of European heritage who say, "I have an identity.
I have a culture.
I have a society, a civilization, a nation.
" And we're not going to back away from that.
[Picciolini.]
While most of us, I think, would like to believe that the Internet is a place where the world is smaller and we can access more information, the reality is our news is curated for us based on our browsing history and based on what we've liked on Facebook or on Twitter.
We're only really being fed things that we agree with.
[Morton.]
We once thought the Internet would democratize societies.
I think, in many ways, what we find now is that it's polarizing societies.
ISIS adopted a position in its most famous strategic work called The Management of Savagery.
They talk about creating conditions of chaos so that they can then cleanse those societies.
I would really say that we've done a great deal to fulfill the objectives of the Jihadists, which is essentially a 2,500-year war to wear us down and to cause us to collapse internally.
My name is Grace, and I'm here to talk about how being a racist stole my high school years.
I came across a website that told me that minorities are responsible for all the wrong in the world, and I believed it.
Soon, I found a White nationalist movement that gave me a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose.
I eventually learned that the friends I met in the movement were nasty and ignorant people.
I also learned that we, as humans, are evolved enough to coexist rather than live as separate tribes.
Nowadays, I just want to reinvent myself and help people of all races.
The best gift you can give to the world is a kinder version of yourself.
We live in a society that hates those who speak truth.
We want to bring about a different world, and we want to show people a vision of something much more beautiful, much greater, healthier than is being promoted right now.
Look at this, man.
Tree hugger.
It's like what's gonna happen if, you know, we become an underwhelming minority in the United States, and who's gonna care about the environment? - But we secure our future - Right.
by speaking the truth.
We are the only ones speaking the truth about this.
[Damigo.]
A nation is a people with a common heritage.
Right now, I'm not even sure if America is a nation.
Heterogeneous societies, the more diverse they become, the more social trust starts to break down, the more polarized the politics start to become.
And in some cases, eventually, there does become a split, and new nations emerge.
[narrator.]
The World Wide Web has given us access to powerful tools of messaging and manipulation.
And with social media news feeds limiting our access to different points of view, armies of frustrated citizens are fueling each other's anger, embracing ideologies that promise a revolution for everyone, a revolution that could tear us apart.
[man.]
Get back on your side of the border! [Picciolini.]
Black people are animals.
Jews control the media and the finance system and the entertainment industry.
Immigrants are flooding into our country to destroy our society and take away our jobs and eventually to commit genocide on our race.
That's what I believed 21 years ago when I left the American White power movement that I helped build.
My name's Christian Picciolini.
From 1987 to 1995, I was one of America's first Neo-Nazi skinheads.
When I first joined, it wasn't about ideology for me.
The first thing that grabbed me was the fact that I could now belong to this new community where I was accepted.
It felt like I was really changing the world for the better, so that instilled power in me.
And that power was very intoxicating.
[Sighs.]
Aside from the violence that I caused, you know, I think the worst thing that I did was plant all those seeds of hate, thousands of them, many of which are still sprouting today, and I find myself pulling out the weeds.
[man.]
If you or someone you know is in the dark world that hate takes you to, we can help.
No judgment, just help.
[narrator.]
In 2009, Christian Picciolini co-founded a non-profit called Life After Hate to help other people leave hate groups.
[Picciolini.]
We've employed microintervention strategies online to actually see what types of words people were using in their social media.
Were they using racist words? And what we'd do is apply an algorithm to see who was following who, how many influencers they followed, or if, in fact, they were an influencer themselves.
And then we'd contact people one-on-one and start a conversation with them.
When I was recruited in 1987, it was very much face-to-face recruitment.
Now recruitment is different, and it's more powerful because the Internet provides this layer of anonymity.
There's this whole underground world of White nationalists who operate chat rooms with tens of thousands of people in them, who operate message boards and websites with misinformation and statistics that are skewed to make minorities look worse in our eyes.
If you think ISIS has a presence on social media, you haven't seen anything.
[woman.]
She was a very friendly, very happy little girl.
She was quiet, shy, didn't make friends that easily.
Somewhat introverted.
[woman.]
With the challenges of middle school and high school, clique-iness, she always wanted to do online school, so we said, "Okay, we could try it.
" [man.]
You know, with her time that she spends online, she would go out and research different viewpoints, and that's where she connected and actually had the ability to then feel like she was part of a group.
[woman.]
She came to me one day and said, "You know, sometimes I talk to some people online about politics.
" And I said, "Well, who are these people?" And she said, "Well, they're two 15-year-old girls and this one boy who's in college.
" [man.]
She shared with him about her lack of friends and not being accepted, and he identified with everything.
She mentioned that he had had the same kind of a background and situation.
So they really connected.
[woman.]
That's when she said, "I'd like to make a video over the summer.
" And I said, "Well, what kind of video?" She said, "Well, just political.
" At this time, I had no clue the magnitude of what, you know, this was all about.
Times are changing and Western civilization is in decline.
What kind of future do you want your children to inherit? Are you concerned about demographic replacements? Are you tired of feminists, SJWs and Black Lives Matter terrorists destroying the foundations of a healthy society? Do you know who rules over you and who you're not allowed to criticize? Whatever the future holds for us, we are ultimately responsible.
Come join the crusade against the destroyers of Western civilization.
She came out with it, and we were just, like, blown away how bad it was.
It actually sickened me.
[Morton.]
The Internet is an anarchic arena, where every individual has independence to think and believe and to say what they want, and that essentially could be a good thing.
But we still live in a hierarchical-structured society.
And you have a radical rebellion across the world against authority.
I was born into a very dysfunctional family in a rural Pennsylvanian town.
I endured severe physical abuse.
No one did anything about it, and so I grew to mistrust the society that I grew up around and ran away at the age of 16 and soon found a rock-'n'-roll band called the Grateful Dead, which had a very counterculturalist basis.
I chose to provide party favors, or drugs, for those going into the concerts.
And eventually I ended up in jail and started to open up to a more conservative lifestyle.
One of the first verses of the Quran says, "This is a book wherein there's no doubt.
" And as a critical thinker, I was sort of enthralled and continued to read on.
And I had sort of a spiritual awakening, so to say.
[narrator.]
After he was released from prison, Jesse Morton began experimenting with ways to promote Jihad.
[Morton.]
For someone who was already critical of the society around them, I naturally gravitated to a politicized interpretation of Islam.
2007, I used a relatively nascent platform, YouTube, and I uploaded a 11-minute clip that played small segments of a debate between a very well-known radical preacher, Abdullah Faisal, and a Christian bishop.
Jesus said about Jihad, he himself believed in it.
Jesus said, "Bring my enemies here and kill them in front of me.
" He was able to manipulate the Christian texts and embarrass the bishop.
Within a couple of weeks, it had, you know, a quarter of a million views.
There was thousands of comments.
So we saw the power of online media.
[narrator.]
Alongside the video, Jesse launched a website and an organization named Revolution Muslim, one of the first to use YouTube to recruit Americans for Al-Qaeda, creating a template that was copied by other Jihadist groups.
[Morton.]
We had a prolific effect.
We were the gateway drug.
[narrator.]
It only takes one click to join the vanguard.
And with algorithms feeding us content based on what we already like, it's easy to become trapped in a filter bubble where we only meet people who agree with our beliefs.
It's how Internet movements emerge, grow and go viral.
[Damigo.]
The alt right is a very broad and disparate movement of dissidents who typically follow along right-wing politics.
A large part of the alt right really did begin on message boards like /pol/ and 4chan.
These ideas eventually developed to the point where they were mutating and becoming more simplified and more digestible by the masses, often with comedy in the forms of memes, constantly creating outrage to make people look foolish and overly emotional.
[narrator.]
The alt right is moving beyond offensive memes to more sophisticated forms of digital provocation, and Nathan Damigo is leading the charge.
[Damigo.]
I see myself largely as an organizer.
It's quite amazing what you can get done and what you can accomplish just through the use of a computer and access to a Wi-Fi network.
[narrator.]
Nathan spends 10 hours a day online spreading his message.
[Damigo.]
This is On The Front, where we talk about what's happening in the culture war.
[narrator.]
His critics have labeled him a Nazi, but if Nathan is a threat, at least he's a visible one.
The man that 17-year-old Crusader Girl first met in a chat room would only Skype with her with his webcam turned off.
[woman.]
She was starting to get fond of this young man.
I could tell he was isolating her from us.
[man.]
This so-called boyfriend was very charming.
She was talking to him morning and night, and it was becoming an obsession.
[woman.]
She said his name was Michael Hansson.
He's 23.
He lives in Eagle, Idaho.
He's German.
He had a Facebook account.
I was studying it very carefully.
This is where it really didn't match up.
His friends looked very odd.
It's almost liked he compiled it overnight maybe.
He just grabbed any individuals.
I figured out how to do a reverse search with the images, and, lo and behold, two of the pictures were from, like, modeling websites.
[narrator.]
Crusader Girl's parents turned to Christian for help.
Hi, it's Christian.
How are you? [woman.]
Hi, Christian.
How are you? I'm doing good.
How's everything going with your daughter right now? Any updates? He seems to be pushing her to make these videos.
She seems to be obsessed with this.
It's taking over her life, and it's pretty heartbreaking, you know, to see that.
And I am going to follow this guy to the gates of hell until I find him and turn her life around because my daughter is not disposable.
[Crusader Girl.]
Dear Muslim people, you think you can get away with playing the parts of the poor little refugee fleeing Syria.
[Picciolini.]
This recruiter, in my opinion, is a predator.
He's somebody who has absolutely no interest in this girl and is using her to meet his own agenda.
Crusader Girl is putting this message out there and affecting thousands of people with it.
Once it's online, she can never pull that back.
[Damigo.]
Presentation is everything.
That's why we want to master an aesthetic that is attractive, that people want to be a part of.
What's going on, guys? If you can, share this as much as possible.
We want to get a lot of people on here.
Believe it or not, you can say just about anything as long as you know how to say it.
Uh, right now, and someone just asked, you know, in this day and age, how can we create a sense of community? It starts by, you know, bringing people together who share a common history and a common world view.
And that's what Identity Evropa is.
Identity Evropa was founded with the purpose of promoting identity amongst people of European heritage.
I think my greatest inspiration was that of Generation Identitaire, which started in France when they occupied a mosque with about 20 or 30 members.
And they were rejecting the propagation of Islam within France.
[narrator.]
Generation Identitaire blazed a trail for an anti-immigration youth movement that has swept across Northern Europe, with self-proclaimed identitarian groups parading their exploits across the Internet.
And now their brand of pro-White activism has arrived on American shores.
Nathan launched Identity Evropa in April 2016, and they already have chapters in cities across the U.
S.
[Damigo.]
The goals of our organization are largely to bring people together beyond the Internet and break through the political correctness that has been created.
It's @sweden.
They let a random Swedish person run the Swedish account, and she was, like, talking about how Sweden was racist not because they had any part in the slave trade, but because they produced iron, which was used to make the ships in the slave trade.
Like, I'm not even joking.
You know, by that theory, though, the Earth is racist because the iron came from the Earth.
The hurricane went and killed 400 black people from Haiti.
That racist-ass hurricane.
Yeah.
Not just that.
There is nothing White people can't do that's not racist.
What you guys are doing today is going to have massive significance for the future of this country and for the future of our people.
So I want to thank each and every one of you for being here and making that happen.
Thank you.
- Hail victory.
- To victory.
[Damigo.]
I wanted to make the world a better place for other people.
However, at that time, I was very young and very naive.
I joined the Marine Corps straight out of high school and never stopped to consider how our involvement over there would actually play out.
And when I got out there I started to realize that, for the first time, I was actually kind of an outsider looking in.
And, to me, it was just so plain.
Like, "Okay, this is dumb.
These people have different religions.
They have come from different tribes.
They have different cultural practices, and they don't like being forced to go along with the practices of the other tribe by law.
Why not just give these people their own nations?" America wants to conquer your land, conquer your resources, kill your brothers, maim your sisters, rape your sisters and drop bombs on your children! [narrator.]
By 2010, Jesse had shed any loyalties to his nation and was actively radicalizing American Muslims through his website.
[Morton.]
I would go speak in public, and they would film it, and then they would put it on the YouTube channel.
To hell with America! To hell with nationalism! Within a year and a half or so, there started to be an overwhelming amount of terrorist-related cases in the United States, most of which were directly connected to us.
This is Islam! This is Islam.
One morning, I woke up, and "South Park" had declared that they were going to portray the prophet Muhammad in an episode.
Okay, how about, like, a a big mascot outfit, one that covered him completely, head-to-toe, not even showing his eyes? Muhammad, would that be okay? Okay.
[Morton.]
I wrote a statement that justified killing those that portrayed the prophet Muhammad using medieval scriptures.
I felt internally like I was doing my duty to God.
[narrator.]
Jesse was convicted for conspiring to solicit murder and using the Internet to communicate threats.
For the second time in his life, he was sent to prison.
I established a relationship with law enforcement after realizing that not only were they human beings, but that their primary concern was not with waging a war on Islam and Muslims, but with identifying individuals that may go on to kill civilians.
The system itself was not as corrupt as I once imagined it to be.
[narrator.]
By the time he was released 4 years later, Jesse had de-radicalized.
[Morton.]
We probably want to preserve the way of life that we have.
I've come to appreciate it, and I regret deeply who I became.
[narrator.]
Jesse is still a Muslim.
He now monitors Jihadist propaganda and plans to start a new organization to counter Islamic extremism.
[Morton.]
What we are now seeing is with groups like ISIS, they're developing their own apps, and everyone is now migrating to the darknet.
And Jihadist organizations, just like any extremist entity, they're fluid.
They're fluid entities.
They can change almost overnight in strategy and tactic.
[woman.]
It's horrifying.
It really is because you think you're doing everything right as a parent.
You try to give them all the tools they need, but you have no idea that this evil could come right into your home on your computer.
[Picciolini: He uses probably a dozen aliases.
With one screen name led me to another, which made another connection to a gamer site.
That's when I found out that this guy who pretended to be a German was actually a Russian.
I may have taunted this guy a little bit, and, within a couple of hours, I had several of my own websites attacked with malicious software all coming from Russia.
I hope that this is enough to really sway her to stop making the videos.
I'm not going to let another life be destroyed by some of the same things that I helped put into this world.
The first thing I want to talk about is these smoke flares.
Pretty cool.
They're fun.
They definitely will generate a lot of interest in what we're doing and get people's attention.
Just several months ago, Kate Steinle was shot and killed by a man who had been actually deported previously several times and had committed various crimes, and he still kept coming back to the country.
We want to push back against this massive illegal immigration that's happening that has been very harmful.
So how do you want me to film it? You really shouldn't even turn your camera on till right as we're getting into position.
This is going to be live-streamed by Red Ice.
We couldn't reach this large of an audience just by hitting the streets, so I'm really excited about all this.
This will be our first public demonstration.
Our main purpose is to get our ideas out into the mainstream, where they're talked about, where they're thought about.
And I think, if we can accomplish that, then I think everything else will fall in place.
There you go.
Pop flares.
Pop flares.
You guys ready? No sanction! No quarter! Get back on your side of the border! No sanction! No quarter! Get back on your side of the border! Citizens of San Francisco, if you are in this city illegally, it's time for you to go home.
America is not your home.
You need to make your nation and your homeland and your people great again.
No longer will you guys sit here and be demonized for being who we are.
Every single person standing here is White, and we're proud.
No sanction! No quarter! Get back on your side of the border! Go fuck yourselves, man.
Yeah.
You are the reason why a woman was murdered here several months ago.
- Fuck yourselves.
- We're not scared of your anti-White, ethnomasochistic language.
When you call everyone a racist, no one is a racist.
No sanction! No quarter! Get back on your side of the border! Y'all have stupid haircuts, too, for the record.
Let's go, guys.
[narrator.]
When everyone has a camera in their pocket, a public demonstration can become the fuse for the fire online.
[woman.]
Fuck you, Nazis! Get the fuck out of San Francisco.
- [man.]
Oh, yeah.
- We're not going anywhere.
We're not going anywhere.
This is about hate.
This is hate towards people of European heritage who say, "I have an identity.
I have a culture.
I have a society, a civilization, a nation.
" And we're not going to back away from that.
[Picciolini.]
While most of us, I think, would like to believe that the Internet is a place where the world is smaller and we can access more information, the reality is our news is curated for us based on our browsing history and based on what we've liked on Facebook or on Twitter.
We're only really being fed things that we agree with.
[Morton.]
We once thought the Internet would democratize societies.
I think, in many ways, what we find now is that it's polarizing societies.
ISIS adopted a position in its most famous strategic work called The Management of Savagery.
They talk about creating conditions of chaos so that they can then cleanse those societies.
I would really say that we've done a great deal to fulfill the objectives of the Jihadists, which is essentially a 2,500-year war to wear us down and to cause us to collapse internally.
My name is Grace, and I'm here to talk about how being a racist stole my high school years.
I came across a website that told me that minorities are responsible for all the wrong in the world, and I believed it.
Soon, I found a White nationalist movement that gave me a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose.
I eventually learned that the friends I met in the movement were nasty and ignorant people.
I also learned that we, as humans, are evolved enough to coexist rather than live as separate tribes.
Nowadays, I just want to reinvent myself and help people of all races.
The best gift you can give to the world is a kinder version of yourself.