Cyber Casts

For us, the story of the Base all began in the spring of 2018 when we spotted the Twitter profile picture of a shadowy neo-Nazi who went by the alias ‘Norman Spear.’ The photo was eye catching: He looked severe, with a strong brow and a bushy beard, and tweeted about guerilla warfare and the tactics of insurgency. At the time, Spear also had the attention of some serious operators in the domestic terror space: On Twitter he was followed by and following an assortment of well known, online, far-right militants. We saw members of Atomwaffen Division—a Nazi terror group that was already connected to murders and a chilling plot to bomb a nuclear power plant—and right-wing trolls alike, some of which were gaining the attentions of federal authorities that worried about another Oklahoma City bombing, all linked to Spear.Then Spear started tweeting about what was one of the most ambitious plots coming out of the American far-right movement to date: funneling all the disparate worlds of extremists, activists, an