Revealed: neo-Nazi active club counts several of US military as members

A neo-Nazi “active club” counts several current and former members of the United States military as its members, the Guardian has learned, including a lance corporal machine gunner currently in detention on insubordination charges and a former US Marine Corps staff sergeant who was booted from the service for stealing large quantities of ammunition.

Lance corporal machine gunner Mohammed Wadaa and former Marine Corps staff sergeant Gunnar Naughton are part of the Clockwork Crew, California’s first “ active club ”, according to the group’s own internal research records and social media posts , as well as law enforcement sources.

Related: Inside one city’s battle over textbooks, teaching and Harvey Milk: ‘It can happen anywhere’

Active clubs – white nationalists and neo-fascist fight clubs that train in combat sports – are a growing concern for US law enforcement. Their recruitment among active and former members of the military underscores both the broadening appeal of the fitness-centric organising model and the American armed services’ persistent struggle with extremism within the ranks.

The Clockwork Crew, formerly known as Crew 562 (the area code for Long Beach, California), was founded in 2021 and counts roughly a dozen members, researchers say.

The group has considerable overlap with other California active clubs, as well as with the Golden State Skinheads , a more “traditional” skinhead gang of whom some members stabbed several anti-fascist protesters at a chaotic 2016 clash outside the state capitol in Sacramento. Clockwork Crew’s reach also briefly extended to eastern Europe: Juraj Mesić , a Croatian neo-Nazi, headed an eight-person chapter in that country before being arrested in March for racist abuse of an immigrant worker, according to news reports and internal chats.

Researchers say Clockwork Crew stands out because of its members’ willingness to engage in public confrontations and the key roles played by active-duty and veterans of the armed forces.

“We’re seeing a more aggressive, more hostile far right,” said Jeff Tischauser, a senior researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). “Groups like the Clockwork Crew are more willing to take their hatred into public spaces and shout people down outside of synagogues and in communities they perceive as predominantly Jewish.”

Last year, the SPLC listed the Clockwork Crew as a designated hate group over the participation of some members in a 2022 hate march by the Goyim Defense League, an antisemitic hate group, and another episode that spring when some Clockwork Crew members drove through San Diego and harangued passersby from a van draped in white nationalist propaganda.

“They’re trying to recreate the cell-based, ready-made force that RAM had where five to 20 people can go out and intimidate people with propaganda, flyer-ing, and highly aggressive posturing,” said Tischauser, referring to the Rise Above Movement , the now-defunct street-fighting neo-Nazi crew whose members have been targeted by federal authorities for participating in street violence against political opponents in California and Virginia during the presidency of Donald Trump.

The Clockwork Crew was co-founded by Mohammed Wadaa, a lance corporal with the 3rd battalion, 5th regiment of the 1st United States Marine Corps division out of Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base just north of San Diego and one of the largest in the country. Photographs from Wadaa’s Telegram posts show he lives on base in Camp Pendleton in a room adorned with a poster of Adolf Hitler.

Groups like the Clockwork Crew are more willing to take their hatred into public spaces and shout people down

Jeff Tischauser

A 25-year-old from Oregon who has been in the Marine Corps since at least 2018, Wadaa has claimed one of his ancestors fought alongside the Nazis in the Handschar Division, an SS unit made up of Bosnian and Croatian volunteers to suppress anti-fascist partisans in the former Yugoslavia. Wadaa has participated in the Clockwork Crew’s banner drops and sticker campaigns, and has taken part in marches with members of other hate groups, including the Goyim Defense League.

Wadaa is currently under court martial for disobeying Marine Corps general orders prohibiting advocating extremist ideology and having extremist tattoos, the military branch confirmed. He entered a guilty plea on 27 July. He was sentenced to 11 months in the brig, a reduction in rank to private, and will be given a bad conduct discharge, according to court records and a Marine Corps spokesperson.

Wadaa co-founded Clockwork Crew with Nicholas Daniel Large . Wadaa and Large met through the Church of Aryanity, a neo-Nazi cult, and at first intended to create a west coast chapter of the group, per communications unearthed by the Southern California Research Club, an independent research cooperative monitoring far-right extremism in southern California. Large works mostly as a propagandist, creating Clockwork Crew’s insignia, including stock Neo-Nazi iconography, and plastering cities in Orange and Los Angeles counties with hateful stickers. Large also has made death threats against the California state senator Scott Wiener.

The duo have drawn recruits from the broader far-right community, in particular the west coast chapters of the “ White Lives Matter ” network, another hate group affiliated with the broader “active club” nationalist movement. But Clockwork Crew has also made targeted efforts to recruit from within the military and the veterans community.

Among those recruits was Gunnar Naughton, a Kansas native and erstwhile civil war re-enactor who served in the Marine Corps’ 1st Reconnaissance battalion as a sergeant until military authorities caught him and five other Marines stealing more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition and several grenades from a weapons depot at Camp Pendleton in the winter of 2021.

Naughton pled guilty to charges related to the theft in July 2021 and was dismissed from the Marine Corps after being demoted to Private. At his sentencing , Naughton claimed he was bullied by other Marines in 1st Recon and pressured into taking part in the ammunition theft.

Naughton first appeared in Clockwork Crew’s circles the following year, in July 2022. A month later, he used volunteer work in eastern Kentucky following lethal flooding there as an opportunity to spread white nationalist propaganda and proselytize for the group, according to posts to Clockwork Crew’s Telegram channel.

They’re trying to recreate the cell-based, ready-made force that RAM had where five to 20 people can go out and intimidate people

Jeff Tischauser

Ezra Liel, a 22-year-old from the central valley town of Turlock, who enlisted in the Army National Guard in 2021, is another Clockwork Crew member, according to his own social media history, photographs of his neo-Nazi tattoos posted to the group’s public channel and information obtained by the Southern California Research Club.

In Telegram group chats with members of other violent neo-fascist groups, including the Base, Liel has claimed he was once affiliated with the Atomwaffen Division, a defunct guerilla group involved in five murders and at least two bomb plots .

Liel has also posted photos of himself in a US army uniform toting a machine gun, as well as bare-chested snaps of his Black Sun and Valknut tattoos, both widely used amongst fascists. “I am an NCO [non-commissioned officer] and officers and lower enlisted decided to launch an investigation into me and essentially try to cancel me,” Liel wrote on 25 January 2023.

Photographs obtained by the Southern California Research Club show Liel participated in a Goyim Defense League march in Los Angeles and public training sessions publicised by Clockwork Crew on their Telegram account.

In other posts, Liel describes himself as an “open supporter of Azov”, the far-right Ukrainian social movement and volunteer regiment. Elsewhere, Liel mulls over volunteering for combat in Ukraine and discusses logistics about travel and enlisting in the Ukrainian military with other neo-Nazis.

Another member, social media sources show, is Jayde Milne, a former member of the Marine Corps reserve from Orange county who currently lives in the coastal city of Oxnard. Milne, who has been dipping in and out of the skinhead scene in California, was released from the Marine Corps reserve in 2020 and often refers to his military experience in group chats. Milne appears in the earliest propaganda video shot by Clockwork Crew in 2021.

Several members of the Golden State Skinheads have also turned up in Clockwork Crew’s internal communications, including John Gahagan, a Fresno resident from a family immersed in California’s white supremacist culture, Jonathan Court, a Golden State Skinhead who is also a recruiter for the Asatru Folk Assembly, a neo-Nazi pagan group, and Will Planer , a Golden State Skinhead who was convicted of felony assault for knocking a counter protester unconscious with a pole at the 2016 Sacramento melee.

Wadaa, Large, Naughton, Liel, Gahagan, Milne, Court and Planer did not respond to a request for comment.

Far-right extremists have long been a problem in the modern US military, from race riots and Ku Klux Klan demonstrations on bases during the Vietnam war through Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s troubled service in the army’s First Infantry division. The Marine Corps is no exception, with dozens of members brought up on disciplinary charges related to far-right views and actions in recent years. Last month, the Boston Globe found at least 82 current and former military service members immersed in far-right ideology were arrested over the past five years. This month, the Globe documented the involvement of at least 10 army and marine veterans in NSC-131, a growing New England white nationalist street-fighting group with connections to Patriot Front and other active clubs – including the Clockwork Crew.

To this day, commanders and military judges struggle with how to address radicalization in the ranks. Since Joe Biden took office, the Department of Defense has taken public steps to recognize that far-right radicalization is having a major impact on rank and file discipline. In a February 2021 address to the military, Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary, condemned rightwing extremism as “views and conduct that run counter to everything we believe in and can actually tear at the fabric of who we are as an institution”.

“I’ve seen this before – I’ve lived through it as a soldier and as a commander,” Austin said in his remarks. “It’s not new to our country and sadly, it’s not new to our military.”

However, the changes since put in place have not been evaluated and have been criticised for being insufficiently rigorous. Meanwhile, hard-right politicians like the Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville have attacked efforts seeking to root out white nationalists.

Kris Goldsmith, an army veteran who researches far-right extremism in the military and veteran community, said that veterans and active duty soldiers are targeted by far-right groups as a guaranteed way to lend credibility to those organizations. “People who are in the military, who’ve served in the military, are team players and valuable members of teams,” Goldsmith said. “We are mission oriented, and a veteran’s involvement lends status to organisations we join that can influence civilians in ways that other demographic groups cannot.”