43
white-power movement Picciolini had left
behind more than two decades earlier.
This, he recalls, had been their plan all
along: to break out of back-alley meetings
and blend in to the places where Ameri-
cans live, work, discuss politics and con-
sume news. The ragged crowd of jack-
booted skinheads Picciolini escaped in
the 1990s had merged into a throng that
included college students, suburban
“Women for Trump,” wealthy profession-
als, middle-class retirees and conspiracy
theorists, united by a stolen- election fan-
tasy stoked by conservative media.
“I was horrified, because it showed
how effective these groups have been
over that time that we’ve ignored them,”
says Picciolini, 47, a former neo-Nazi who
now helps others leave the movement.
“And I’m angry, because so many of us
saw it coming for many, many years, and
nobody listened.”
Picciolini’s radicalization came during
a previous peak of antigovernment fer-
vor. On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh
detonated a 4,800-lb. bomb concealed
in a Ryder truck parked in front of the
Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in
downtown Oklahoma City. The kill-
ing of 168 Americans, including 19 chil-
dren, forced the feds to acknowledge the
homegrown threat. McVeigh, a Gulf War
veteran, sought revenge against the U.S.
government for the deadly sieges by fed-
eral agents in Waco, Texas, and Ruby
Ridge, Idaho. He drew motivation for the
attack from The Turner Diaries, the 1978
race-war novel that has inspired genera-
tions of white supremacists.
Today the threat emanates from a
tangled web of ideologies, including
white supremacists, neo-Nazis, anti-
government militias and adherents of
the QAnon conspiracy theory that posits
the U.S. is controlled by Satanist pedo-
philes. Notions once consigned to the lu-
natic fringe have moved into the main-
stream as right-wing news networks,
politicians and interest groups, while
embracing a them-or-us posture against
“liberal elites,” increasingly endorse
white- nationalist narratives.
Few law-enforcement officials are
more familiar with extremist propaganda
than former FBI agent Michael German,
who spent much of his career undercover,
including infiltrating far-right groups. In
1992, as a young agent working on savings-
and-loan scams in the bureau’s Los Ange-
les field office, German was walking the
halls when a colleague turned to him and
said, “Hey, you have blond hair and blue
eyes. You can be a Nazi.” German went
with it, growing his hair long and be-
friending a circle of neo-Nazis incensed
by riots and looting in the aftermath of
the police beating of Rodney King. He
spent 14 months on the case, which led
to the arrest of eight suspects who had
amassed explosives and automatic weap-
ons with plans to bomb the First African
Methodist Episcopal Church in Los An-
geles and shoot members of the congre-
gation. “That was in the 1990s, and there
was no shortage of laws to address crim-
inal terrorists,” he says. “So what’s hap-
pened since then?”
9/11, for one. After the attacks, the
U.S. government turned its full strength
to building a globe-spanning intelligence
network capable of stopping foreign
Biden, in the Oval Office on Jan. 28, has made cracking down on domestic extremism a top priority
ANYTHING BIDEN
DOES WILL REINFORCE
FAR-RIGHT NARRATIVES
THAT THEY ARE BEING
CENSORED, PERSECUTED
OR SILENCED, WHICH
EXPERTS WARN WILL
FURTHER BOOST
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