Ben van der Merwe Profile picture
Data journalist

Aug 25, 2019, 39 tweets

I spent five months undercover in Generation Identity with @hopenothate

I found:
- Links to terrorist group National Action
- Links to the Navy and Trident
- The inside story of their split with Europe

Full story: hopenothate.org.uk/inside-generat…

THREAD:

1/ Back in March, I made a fake Facebook profile and added people on the most extreme, violent fringes of the far-right. People who posted things like this after the Christchurch massacre.

2/ Getting into these circles apparently made me a prime recruitment target. Within days a GI member tried to start a conversation by sending me their DNA ancestry test. Totally normal.

3/ After a brief Skype interview (bear in mind this is meant to be a "youth" group) I was added to their Telegram chat.

4/ To the general public, GI like to present themselves as a group of clean-cut young people with genuine concerns about preserving British culture.

To the far-right, GI claim to be a highly competent, disciplined and ideologically watertight metapolitical project

Both are lies

5/ Many outlets have uncritically broadcast GI's PR strategy, which is to distance themselves from the "Old Right". They want to be seen as non-violent, non-racist, non-conspiratorial, etc.

6/ In reality, GI's end goal is ethnic cleansing. The forced deportation of many millions of non-whites (including legal migrants and their descendants) from Europe. Inevitably, people in camps.

How else to describe this but violence?

hopenothate.org.uk/what-is-identi…

7/ GI are known for pushing the apocalyptic conspiracy theory 'the Great Replacement', a rebranding of the century-old 'white genocide' conspiracy. This theory claims that (((elites))) in Europe are deliberately bringing about the end of white people through mass immigration.

8/ Three terrorist attacks *this year* directly cited the theory as inspiration: Christchurch, Poway, and El Paso.

74 people died.

hopenothate.org.uk/the-identitari…

9/ GI's internal response wasn't to mull on how their theories could have inspired mass-murder, but to consider the effects on their "brand".

10/ The Christchurch mosque killer not only named his manifesto 'The Great Replacement' but gave thousands of euros to GI's French and Austrian branches. Martin Sellner even invited him to Austria for drinks.

theguardian.com/world/2019/may…

11/ GI UK is also no stranger to terrorist associations. Last year, @hopenothate revealed that one of their activists was a member of the banned neo-Nazi terror group National Action, that had plotted to assassinate a Labour MP.

hopenothate.org.uk/2018/03/12/exp…

12/ During my time in GI, I saw members joke about dressing up as ISIS to kidnap Diane Abbott and advise each other on how to make homemade weapons.

Little wonder, then, that I met 3 people at their conference with alleged National Action links.

hopenothate.org.uk/the-threat-of-…

13/ The first speaker at the conference was Tom Sunic.

A white nationalist author and activist, Sunic is co-director of the *extremely* antisemitic 'American Freedom Party'.

He spoke about genetics and racial identity. He was also selling a book of his wife’s poetry.

14/ Second speaker: Anne Marie Waters

Too racist for UKIP, she founded anti-Muslim party For Britain. This speech was a notable radicalisation of Waters rhetoric, part of her drift towards GI. Now she openly supports the 'white genocide' conspiracy:

15/ Third speaker: Thomas Rowsell (aka SurviveTheJive)

A far-right YouTuber, Rowsell asked that his attendance be kept secret and not recorded. He came late and read the speech off his phone, but GI accidentally recorded it and sent me the video. So everyone messed up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

16/ Rowsell has had links to terror group National Action, attending a training camp they led in 2014.

Probably something GI should have checked beforehand, since the two friends he brought to the pub after the conference were also ex-National Action, according to a GI member.

19/ Worse still, one brave GI member tried to buy coke off Rowsell’s friend. They did *not* take it well.

Incidentally, this resemblance is striking:

20/ Final speaker: Colin Robertson (Millennial Woes)

A Scottish alt-right YouTuber, Robertson is openly antisemitic, pro-slavery, and entertains genocidal fantasies about "mowing down the Muslims."

Here he is calling for the murder of an academic

More:

21/ This was meant to be a much longer infiltration, but we decided we had to cut it short. Why?

Meet Mike.

Mike is the leader of Generation Identity South West.

Mike is also a serving member of the Royal Navy.

22/ You should probably also meet Kenny. Kenny told me that he's a friend of neo-Nazi musician @ReichEternal, and that Mike recruited him to GI from on their naval base.

If his interview goes well, Kenny will soon be stationed on board a submarine armed with nuclear weapons.

23/ At this point we knew we had to cut the project short. The situation was just too dangerous.

Kenny had also alleged that others on his base held similar views, including officers. He even said the Navy knew he was in GI – they just didn’t care.

We had to go public.

24/ Aside from their extremism, one of the other things that struck me about GI was their size.

Many members were well over 40, and the organisation was far smaller than presented online.

The Scottish branch is just 5 guys, while the South West branch is literally just Mike.

25/ European GI is actually big offline, but in the UK there were barely any meet-ups. They mimic the online appearance of the big branches without any of the offline substance

Protests are planned entirely around social media, which hasn't won them any friends on the far-right:

26/ Every meet-up and action was leveraged for maximum social media impact.

They even created fake Twitter accounts to reply to their own tweets.

27/ I was also struck the conference's high security. The location was released at the last minute, and the room was booked under ‘Ben’s birthday’.

The only flaw was that they made a @hopenothate infiltrator the official photographer, allowing me to take photos at will.

D'oh!

28/ They also got me editing their videos, giving me access to all their raw footage.

Is this what metapolitics looks like? 🤔

29/ Infiltration or no infiltration, GI doesn't need @hopenothate to abolish itself.

Upon hearing that Colin Robertson had spoken at the conference, GI's European leaders were furious and issued coordinated public statements against the UK leadership.

30/ Without telling the continental leaders or his own members, leader Ben Jones had disobeyed a direct order from the continent *not* to invite Colin Robertson.

In the leaders' chat, Martin Sellner issued an ultimatum: either Jones steps down, or the UK splits from Europe.

31/ Members called for reconciliation, but the leadership refused to back down.

Jones said that inviting Robertson wasn't a mistake, because it's important to engage with 'JQers' (JQ = Jewish Question). He says Sellner is jealous of their success, and treated him "like dirt".

32/ Understandably, some members aren't happy splitting the most successful pan-European far-right movement in living memory over two men's egos.

Things start to get bitter.

33/ After unsuccessfully urging Jones to back down for the sake of the movement, George, a founding member of GI UK, leaves in anger. David, always Jones’ trusty side-kick, comes to his defence.

34/ In fairness to Jones, Sellner's decision to provoke the split over Colin Robertson's appearance was hypocritical.

Robertson is a friend of Sellner's wife Brittany Pettibone and was allegedly invited to their wedding earlier this month.

35/ The European GI branches were clearly not motivated by any moral or ideological disgust at Robertson's views. It was a matter of optics - the UK branch were just too embarrassingly open about their associations.

hopenothate.org.uk/generation-ide…

36/ So, where next for GI UK?

They're rebranding as the 'Identitarian Movement', a name which has not received rave reviews from others in the far-right.

37/ As one member pointed out, without the logo, name or brand recognition imparted by their much larger partners on the continent, GI UK will essentially be starting from scratch. They are likely to remain small, or even split further.

END/ But we mustn't be complacent.

Small groups can be even more dangerous, especially given the UK leadership's stated intention to open up to more extreme elements of the far-right. After all, it only takes one person to pick up a gun or a bomb and take an innocent life.

Remigration = ethnic cleansing

Ethnic cleansing = violence

GI support remigration

GI support violence

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