In his late teens, Mike became a Nazi. Now, just six years later, he supports the Black Lives Matter movement and cares deeply about how close he came, at the most angry moment of his life, to going out on the street with his gun and shooting people. .

When Mike looked into the eyes for a brief moment of the man who had just fallen to the ground, he knew he was going to die. It was a hectic night in downtown Oakland, California. The tear gas stung and the strong wind whipped the palm trees into a frenzy.

Three days after the death of George Floyd, protests in support of Black Lives Matter spread across the United States.

Mike had been protesting with his girlfriend, but when night fell and the police started firing rubber bullets and tear gas, they decided to leave.

They were walking back to their car, through streets covered in black smoke from burning garbage cans, when they saw a truck stop. Then they heard the shots.

The truck drove away as a man in uniform fell to the ground. Mike walked over to him, trying to remember the first aid training he had learned in the army.

But a police car arrived and a nerve agent armed with a gun barged in and ordered Mike to leave.

He later learned that Dave Patrick Underwood, a federal officer who had been guarding the courthouse, had died there. More than a year later, Mike is still haunted by the fact that he couldn't have done more to save him.

By coincidence, Mike had a connection to Underwood; he had been marching that day with members of his family.

But he was also linked to the man who was later charged with his murder.

Steven Carillo was a sergeant at the same California Air Force base where Mike had enlisted a few years earlier.

And that was not all.

Mike had a secret. At home, in his wardrobe, there was a uniform made of gray-green khaki cloth, with a Nazi symbol on the collar.

Mike hung it there to remind himself of the person he used to be, someone who wanted to go out and kill people.

Like Carillo, Mike had fallen down the rabbit hole of extremism and had become a supporter of America's violent far right.

In the summer before his senior year of school, Mike watched as the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests played out in America, but being a part of it was far from his mind.

"I thought they were the devil incarnate," he says.

He had just met a new friend in an online messaging group.

Paul (not his real name) invited Mike to his house, where he lived with his parents. It was an ordinary house, on a quiet street in a suburb of a big American city. They got together to "shoot some propaganda videos."

Paul opened the door wearing a Nazi uniform and led Mike straight to his garage.

“It was like a clothing store for Nazis. Weapons, ammunition, cartridges and many pistols were hanging on the walls,” he says.

Paul had gathered other young men for the filming. They loaded weapons and ammunition into a truck and drove into nearby hills.

“We were in a state park shooting automatic and semi-automatic weapons, filming and running around in Nazi uniforms,” Mike says.

Then the forest guards appeared. Paul was upset.

“I was there, standing, without participating. He didn't want to listen to the government authority telling him that he couldn't do what he believed he had the right to do, which was to produce videos and pretend that he was a Wehrmacht (the armed force of Nazi Germany)”.

The guards confiscated all visible weapons, but the boys had hidden some of them and reloaded them into the truck when they were alone again.

They then returned to Paul's house and spent time with his parents, still wearing their Nazi uniforms.

Mike was 17 years old and admits that he had become the perfect vehicle for toxic extremism.

He had spent his childhood in a small, predominantly white, rural town.

He spent his days rowing on the lake or riding bikes around town with his closest group of friends.

Adults and children enjoyed together and dinners and barbecues were common. It was a place where everyone knew each other.

But Mike's stepfather was an alcoholic and often violent, and when Mike was 12, his mother divorced him and he moved with her children to another part of the country.

Suddenly Mike was living in a suffocating multiracial neighborhood that he hated.

“There were people there who didn't look like anyone he had ever seen before. The food was different, the water tasted different, everything was completely different."

Mike's stepfather, with whom the teenager felt close despite his violent outbursts, never kept his promise to visit the children.

Anger grew within Mike and the way out he found was the far right.

Motivated by a friend's father, Mike started listening to right-wing shows and when he searched for similar content on the internet, he found all kinds of far-right videos and podcasts on Facebook and Youtube.

The algorithms in social networks already created what is known as the rabbit hole effect, in which the recommendation system ends up pigeonholing the user into content that for Mike became more and more extreme.

Here he was told, for example, that divorce was a Jewish conspiracy designed to destroy the white family ideal.

"For whatever reason, it was easier for me to believe that than my stepfather was a degenerate alcoholic," he says.

Over time Mike became involved in the darkest corners of the internet, on the white nationalist message boards 4chan and 8chan.

These sites are a kind of social clubs for racists, Nazis and white nationalists, where people could say “forbidden” words and get to know each other.

Mike began exchanging messages with a group of neo-Nazis in the San Francisco Bay Area, and that's how he ended up on Paul's doorstep that summer afternoon.

“I was just looking for a place to put all my anger. And I found the perfect house,” says Mike.

A year later, Mike finished school. Failing to qualify for his favorite colleges, he decided to join the army, but his mother opposed the idea.

They outlined an entirely different plan: Mike would attend business school in London.

In the UK, the young man expected to see gentlemen in bowler hats. His image of the British capital was like something out of a Victorian novel.

But the reality was very different. His school was in the Whitechapel neighborhood, where a vibrant Muslim community lives.

“I was 18 years old. He was a deeply fearful, Islamophobic radical white nationalist and had arrived at a Whitechapel flat sandwiched between the Royal London Hospital and the East London Mosque. I never saw diversity as something positive, but as an example of everything that was wrong in the world”, says Mike.

During his stay in London, the young man became further immersed in white nationalism. Most of his activities were online.

He monitored and harassed leftist celebrities in the United States for months along with a team of other extremists. However, one day he dared to enter a mosque and leave a packet of bacon at the door.

He stopped going to classes and after a few months he received a letter from the British Home Office announcing that his student visa would be revoked.

One afternoon in April 2017 he was on his way to meet some friends in a pub near the British Parliament. While he was on the train, passengers were told that Westminster station was closed due to a police operation.

They were asked to get off the train earlier.

A vehicle had gone up the pedestrian crossing of Westminster Bridge at 113 kilometers per hour against pedestrians.

The driver got out and stabbed a police officer. Six people were killed, including the attacker, and 50 were injured.

Mike walked out of the subway station and was met with a scene of panic. The image of two children wrapped in aluminum blankets delivered by the emergency services is still etched in his mind.

At this time, the Islamic State was still a powerful force in the Middle East. He claimed responsibility for the attack, in the same way as others that occurred in Europe during its heyday.

Mike tried to sign up with the military the next day. Some of the white nationalists he had been talking to online were military and he followed their example.

He was rejected from the British Royal Air Force because of his nationality, but within weeks he was back in California to enlist in the United States Air Force.

I want to learn how to use an offset smoker.

— #GlazersOut Thu Oct 22 15:27:52 +0000 2020

“I was very motivated. I had no doubt that I wanted to go to another country, whether it was Iraq or Afghanistan, put on a uniform and pick up a gun to kill people."

In the weeks before he began his military training, he spent hours in his garage drinking and smoking cigars, full of rage.

“I almost always carried a gun with me. I was at a point where I would have done anything anyone asked me to do,” says Mike.

At that time, he thought that he could become someone like Steven Carillo, he fears.

Although then another incident occurred, at the end of 2020, where this feeling became more intense.

Months after the Oakland protests, Kenosha, Wisconsin, was rocked by riots when a black man was gunned down in a dispute with police.

A 17-year-old boy named Kyle Rittenhouse traveled to the city armed with a semi-automatic rifle to join a vigilante group formed to defend the city from what one organizer called "evil thugs."

Rittenhouse shot three people and is now on trial, charged with attempted murder.

Mike remembers what he felt when reading the news. “I looked at that young teenager and I was like, 'Wow, he was so close to that being me.'

In February of this year, the Pentagon declared zero tolerance against extremism, ordering military leaders to crack down on extremism in their troops.

At the same time, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin created a task force to determine how to identify "insider threats," explaining that potential recruits will now be scrutinized for their extremist affiliations.

These stockings came after previous analyzes of those arrested in the Capitol riots on January 6.

A worrying proportion of those involved were found to be ex-military or current military personnel, such as Ashli ​​Babbitt, an Air Force veteran who was killed by police while trying to break through a barricade.

A 2020 Military Times online survey of 1,108 active-duty readers found that just under a third had seen signs of racist or white supremacist behavior within the military.

Among those charged with crimes in 2020, in addition to Steve Carillo, were US Army Private Ethan Melzer, accused of setting the stage for a deadly ambush on his unit by sending information to a neo-Nazi group, and three extremist veterans accused of carrying Molotov cocktails to throw at police during a Black Lives Matter protest in Las Vegas.

But, perhaps surprisingly to Mike, the military would be the beginning of his journey out of far-right extremism.

At the end of 2017, he was in the second month of his training, situated in the deep woods of Missouri.

“I was in the middle of nowhere with all kinds of people from all over the United States, including blacks, Jews, and a guy from Guam who taught me how to fish,” he says.

"I made friends with people I never thought I could consider friends."

He found the military training camp difficult. The hours were exhausting and the lack of autonomy, the control that his superiors had over his every move, was difficult to manage.

"It's one thing to be a kid smoking, reading 4chan and getting angry in his garage and quite another to find yourself in the middle of nowhere, on an Air Force base where you can't leave and people yell at you."

He was miserable and tried to give up basic training about six times in eight weeks. His mother did not speak to him. Mike believed that perhaps she knew that she had joined the army for the wrong reasons.

Receiving letters was common among recruits, but for the first five weeks Mike received none. When the other trainees had time each week to read his letters, Mike sat alone, wallowing in his misery.

One day, another black-skinned recruit noticed this.

"Hey, let's pray together," he told her, grabbing a Bible.

It was one of those small gestures that got Mike through basic training and ultimately changed his perspective on his life.

In the weeks to come, this recruit and another young Jew would support Mike through his darkest moments. They gave him a friendly pat on the back when he needed it and, when he was having a hard time, they soothed him by saying, "Hey, you can do this."

During his training, he too was shaken from that camera obscura that reinforced his racist beliefs. He no longer had time to spend time online, and without the toxic propaganda that had filled his days, the hate drained out of him.

When he finished basic training, Mike knew he didn't want to be in the military. He spent several months working at the Air Force base, but he was deeply depressed.

His worst moment was shortly before he was due to be sent to Afghanistan.

“I knew they were deploying me. I was under a lot of stress, with too much alcohol one night and access to a firearm.”

He almost committed suicide and was given a medical discharge. It is an episode that is difficult for him to discuss.

Although his basic training helped him escape extremism, Mike doesn't think it's a coincidence that a number of those involved in far-right violence in recent years have served in the military.

He thinks some extremists might join the army, like he did, looking for an opportunity to kill people of different races.

Others, he suggests, sign up because they think the training will help them topple the state, while a third group becomes disillusioned and radicalized as a result of their experience in the ranks.

"They feel like they're being taken advantage of, misunderstood and lied to," he says.

One of them is a friend Mike has seen showing support for an anti-government militia on social media.

“He served between 16 and 20 years in the army and has participated in two wars. Two wars that were a lie,” says Mike, referring to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last month, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue published a report examining the military issue discussed by far-right radicals on the Telgram messaging app.

They found that a small number of extremists claimed to be veterans, but they also found that they spoke negatively about the military.

"This is primarily due to the perception that US interventions abroad serve the interests of Israel rather than those of the white race," the report says.

Mike also began to believe that America's wars were meaningless, but he also accepted that racism was meaningless, too.

"I began to realize, some 70 years after everyone else, that Hitler was clearly wrong," he acknowledges.

When Mike's ideas began to change, he contacted Christian Picciolini, a former neo-Nazi who now channels his energy into deradicalization.

“He told me to practice empathy, not to judge people, to be honest, thoughtful. Essential steps to find a way to do good”, says Mike.

He started working in a music hall and fell in love with the punk and rock scene. It was the space he needed to channel the rage he had built up since childhood. Punk became his salvation.

“My punk and rock community has been one of the biggest things that has gotten me out of here. I think about how vital it is to have an outlet and a group that you feel like you belong to and that is constructive,” reflects Mike.

After his medical discharge expired, Mike did not return to the Army and was considered a deserter. Then, last December, to his surprise, he was honorably released.

Sometimes he worries that extremism continues to arouse brusqueness in him.

In late 2019, he was working in a store when two young black men shoplifted and assaulted an adult woman.

Mike tried to stop them and then they pulled out a gun.

Later that night, Mike recognized the same ugly, dehumanizing, racist ideas populating his thoughts again, but he fought them.

"I've made continuous efforts to be anti-racist, to be actively anti-racist, but it's hard and I don't want to pretend it's not."

While Mike has managed to get out of the spiral of extremism, other Americans have fallen deeply.

Oakland and Kenosha weren't the only places where Black Lives Matter protesters were injured, and Mike was horrified by the attack on Capitol Hill.

America is a "union of clans that would otherwise be at war," he says.

“And when you decide to drop a match, it can become incredibly dangerous. I've already seen a tremendous amount of violence."

Mike wants people to understand how easy it is in America today for an extremist ideology to take someone's life.

“I was a teenager with basic internet access in a California suburb and I became radical enough that I wanted to commit acts of violence against people just because of their skin color or religion. I want people to know that I was a Nazi. Not in Bavaria in 1939, but in modern America,” he concludes.

Mike is a pseudonym.