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April 23, 2025
I can’t stop thinking about these white supremacy militia groups. Yesterday I finished my daily writing and went for a walk in the park to clear my head and shoot a video. As I admired the beautiful cherry blossom trees currently in full bloom with their pink and white delicate flowers I was blindsided by a left hook. “Holy shit! Riley got arrested for being a Neo Nazi!”
I served in the Missouri Army National Guard from 2009 to 2015. Our unit was an interesting mix of people. Based out of Boonville, Missouri, it was only half an hour drive from Columbia, home of the University of Missouri. The largest and most prestigious public university in Missouri. Because of this proximity a good third of the unit were college kids, like me, who joined the Army to pay for their education. Another third of the unit were cops and prison guards. The rest were a smattering of random professions. My platoon sergeant worked GIS for the government, my squad leader was a cop, and this old guy, Fuller, who’d been in the Army for probably 30 years but had only just made E5 when I joined the unit, was a garbage man.
I remember when Fuller made E5 because for three months after he would walk up to every new soldier just arriving at the unit and tell them, “hey man I’m sergeant Fuller, I just made E5, nice to meet you.” Fuller would eventually be moved from our unit and into a HHC(headquarters) position because he froze up during a convoy live fire simulator. Like, his brain stopped working, and he could not articulate orders. Not someone you want in charge of combat troops.
I don’t have many memories of SPC Riley. He served in my same platoon so we were in close proximity, but he wasn’t in my squad and we never really clicked. Hah, now I know why we never bonded. I know that he’d been on active duty and deployed overseas. I think he’d earned a combat infantryman’s badge so he’d seen combat. That meant he’d been in the Army for a minimum of four years, and had experience, yet in all the time he was at the unit he was never promoted from specialist to sergeant.
My first impression of Riley is that he was sloppy. He was sloppy in his dress, sloppy in his grooming, and sloppy in his physical appearance. He had a habit of wearing his hat crooked, like a gangster. His uniform was always wrinkly and unkempt. He’d regularly show up to drill unshaven and get yelled at by his team leader. Now that I think about it he really strikes me as someone who would wake up in a blind panic after having slept through his alarm, hung over from the night before, throw on his unwashed uniform and then rush to drill.
He was always failing PT tests. But that’s pretty common in the National Guard. I don’t understand it but guys would get away with never passing a PT test and it seemed like they faced no consequences from their actions. I only ever failed one PT test in my time in the Army. This was at the tail end of a 12 week cycle of testosterone ethanate(steroids). In those 12 weeks I gained 20 pounds of solid muscle. I was repping 315lbs for 8-10 reps on incline bench press and was deadlifting 350 pounds for sets of 20. What I didn’t do was run at all in that time. When the PT test came I pumped out 80 push-ups and 80 sit-ups, but I failed my run. I ran for a mile before my legs became so pumped and cramped that I couldn’t even jog anymore. I ended up walking the rest of the two miles and failed the test with a 22 minute two mile time.
I got off my cycle and started running again. I passed my next test with a 14 minute two mile time.
Anyway, Riley was just a dumpy looking guy. He was out of shape, rotund, and unremarkable and mediocre in every way. Even though he’d been on active duty, had deployed, and seen combat he never took any leadership initiative and he was never asked to take any leadership role by our command. This is why I find it hilarious and crazy that he was apparently asked by this white supremacy militia to train people in hand to hand combat and bladed weapons training. This is probably the only newsworthy thing Riley will ever produce in his pathetic life.
This also speaks to the allure of these groups. You probably scratch your head and wonder why anyone would ever join such a hateful group. But these groups are a place where these losers can find community and commiserate with each other about how immigrants are the cause of their sad, hopeless lives. They find community and acceptance and that is the most powerful drive in all humans. I just wish they hadn’t come to such a horrifyingly wrong conclusion. I would love to grab them by the ear and yell in their faces, “hey guys, you’re not poor because of minorities and immigrants! You’re poor because billionaires have stolen the wealth of this nation! If you want to pick up a rifle and fight somebody you should fight the billionaires! You should go after the pharmaceutical companies that have devastated your communities with prescription drugs! You should go after the GOP whose policies have stripped your communities of high paying jobs!”
In the American Front case, a Missouri Guard member identified as Ryan Riley provided firearms and military combat training to members of the white supremacist, militia-style group, including ex-cons, last summer in Florida, court documents allege.
“In July of 2011, Ryan Riley who is a patched member of the AF Missouri chapter was present at an AF compound in north Florida,” the Florida court documents, which just came to light, say. “Riley is also a member of the United States National guard.”
Riley was not among the dozen members of the American Front arrested last week in Florida on state charges of conducting illegal paramilitary training, attempting to shoot into an occupied dwelling, and violating hate crime laws.
American Front leader Marcus Faella “had Riley conduct paramilitary training on techniques (hand-to-hand combat, edge weapon techniques) he learned from the National guard,” the documents. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/missouri-national-guard-probes-claims-neo-nazis-ranks/
I honestly find this whole situation more humorous than it is alarming. Because Riley couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag. We’d regularly have combatives training, basically jiu jitsu but taught in the Army way, which meant that it was more complicated and less effective than the jiu jitsu taught in gyms. I don’t think Riley ever tapped anyone. Ever. He didn’t even have the physical stamina to stay active for a five minute round. Rolling with him was like a rest break. Like rolling with a flesh and blood practice dummy. You could just practice arm bars and triangle chokes and rear naked chokes because Riley sure as hell wasn’t going to put up a fight about it. I once tapped him out just by squeezing his torso with my legs when I had him in full guard. What a wuss.
Our in-house combatives tournament. I took home the win for the 185lb division!
And bladed weapons? I was in the infantry for six years. I trained with bladed weapons for exactly two hours on the bayonet range where we stabbed a dummy with a FAKE PLASTIC bayonet and yelled at the sky about blood and grass. I guess they’d probably had too many dumb privates cut themselves with real bayonets so they made us practice with plastic ones. The most fun part was the screaming. The Drill Sergeants would ask, “WHAT MAKES THE GRASS GROW GREEN?” Then the privates would respond, “BLOOD! BLOOD MAKES THE GRASS GROW GREEN DRILL SERGEANT! HRARARARARARARARA” Stab stab stab. It went on like this until the Drill Sergeants grew bored and we went back to actual training.
It is disturbing how many infantrymen cannot qualify on the rifle range. In the Army, you qualify by shooting different targets as close as 25m all the way out to 300m. “Sergeant Major the max effective range for the M4A1 carbine is three hundred meters. The effective kill radius of the M18A1 claymore antipersonnel mine is fifty meters at fifty meters Sergeant Major! I don’t know the proper procedure to PMCs a Humvee but I will look it up Sergeant Major!” I still remember these questions from sitting the soldier of the year boards back in 2012. I missed soldier of the year by 2 points according to my platoon sergeant.
The perfect score on the rifle range is 40/40. You need to score at least 36/40 to qualify as an expert marksman. To pass the qual you only need to hit TWENTY THREE targets out of 40. Basically you can miss 50% of the shots you take and still be “qualified” to operate the M4 carbine. It would honestly scare you to watch the qualification range of a bunch of National Guard infantrymen and see how many of them fail to hit twenty three targets. I’m not exaggerating when I say some people will take half a dozen tries before they finally qualify. These are the dangerous, highly trained, and highly motivated killers defending our nation!
I always felt it was so unfair and so backwards that these people who couldn’t shoot got hundreds of rounds of ammo and got to keep shooting while those of us who passed our quals on the first try just had to sit in the bleachers and watch them for the rest of the day. We’d pass the time bullshitting each other. That was when I first heard that Riley had been arrested down in Florida for training some white supremacy militia. “What the fuck? Did you guys know he was a neo Nazi?”
People have this mistaken notion that those in the military are badasses who can fight and kill you with a hundred different techniques. They think we’re taught how to sneak up behind a man and kill him silently with a knife. They think people in the military are experts with firearms.
Sorry to disappoint folks. Goto Walmart, look around you. Notice all the people in mobility scooters. The inbred looking troglodytes squinting at price tags. The 300lb man pushing a cart full of cheetos and Dr. Thunder. These are the people that enlist in the military. I’m being hyperbolic of course. I’ve met some of the most motivated and most intelligent people I’ve ever known in the military. But I’ve also met the dumbest motherfuckers on this planet in my time in service. The military breaks down like the general population, except it certainly skews more to the lower socioeconomic spectrum and skews right leaning. If you have the means to goto college and get a good job chances are you’re not going to join the military and be paid $24k/a year to risk your life and limb.
My unit was a bit of an anomaly because of our proximity to Mizzou. Most units will have less soldiers enrolled in college. And the infantry demographics also skew differently from the rest of the Army. For non combat MOSs minorities make up a majority of those who serve. Combat arms sees many more white, middle class Americans.
The prevailing theory is that those people joining the military primarily for economic reasons tend to choose jobs that won’t put them in the front lines while patriotic folks who join to “defend the nation” and actually want to see combat will join infantry and other combat units. So that’s why you see supply and trucking units made up primarily of black and hispanic Americans while infantry, tankers, artillery, and other combat arms units are made up of primarily middle class white kids.
I wonder when Riley got indoctrinated as a Neo Nazi. Was it before he joined? Did he join in order to get the firearms and tactical training in order to fight in a race war? It’s well known that white supremacists join the military for the training, just as inner city gangs used to send their members to the military for training in the 80s.
A Defense Department report highlights disturbing examples of white supremacy inside the military, calling for changes in how the department screens recruits for possible ties to domestic extremism.
The report, which the Trump administration drafted last year before the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, was sent to Congress in October, but it has not been made public until now.
It describes one case in which a Florida National Guards member, who was part of a neo-Nazi group, was chatting in an online forum with a fellow white supremacist, bragging that he makes no secret of his racist ideology among his colleagues.
"Are you worried at all about being found by your mates or someone, now being in the U.S. military?" he was asked.
The guard membersman replied: "I was 100% open about everything with the friends I made at training. They know about it all. They love me too cause I'm a funny guy."
Domestic extremist groups view the membership of active-duty U.S. forces as "highly prized," because service members can bring "legitimacy" to their cause and help them attract more recruits, according to the report.
"Access to service members with combat training and technical weapons expertise can also increase both the probability of success and the potency of planned violent attacks," it said.
Riley was a funny guy. He had the clown personality archetype. He was always joking around and never serious. I don’t remember him openly talking about white supremacist topics but then again maybe he had enough awareness not to discuss Nazi shit with the only Asian guy in the unit.
The ex-guardsman told investigators that while serving in Iraq with the Army in 2008, he "became interested in protecting the white race" and posted on skinhead blogs, including American Front's, and first exchanged messages with its leader, Marcus Faella.
After returning to the United States in 2010, he continued talking to Faella and was invited to a barbecue and camping weekend.
Riley arrived in Florida on July 2, 2011, with a pistol, AK-47 assault rifle and 200 rounds of ammo. The court document says other attendees also were armed, and Faella had 12 AK-47-style rifles, as well as pistols that he lent to members.
The story of how former Missouri National Guard Spc. Ryan Riley got involved with a group that authorities now say planned for the collapse of the U.S. government was detailed amid hundreds of pages of documents recently made public in a criminal case against the group in Florida.
Known as American Front, the white supremacist organization was snared in a joint terrorism investigation by the FBI and Florida authorities earlier this year. Its leader, Marcus Faella, and 12 of his associates were arrested and charged with a variety of crimes, including training of a paramilitary group and hate crimes.
Prosecutors said the group was experimenting with the creation of the toxin ricin, plotting to attack rival groups and wanted to cause some sort “disturbance” at Orlando City Hall.
One of the persistent mysteries since the arrests in early May was the involvement of Riley, a military veteran whose name appeared only briefly in initial police reports.
He was never charged and the Missouri National Guard would not confirm that a specialist with the same name serving in its ranks was indeed the person caught up in the terrorism case.
But a report released in recent weeks by the Ninth Circuit State Attorney’s Office in Florida confirmed it was true. The five-page report, which was dated June 8 and written by FBI special agent Sean McDermott, showed Riley agreed to tell his story to investigators in exchange for some sort of immunity.
It was not clear, however, who provided the immunity or whether Riley planned to testify against his former associates. State attorney’s spokesman Bernie Presha said it did not come from the prosecutors in his office who are in charge of the case.
Regardless, Riley, 28, appears to have spoken at length about his involvement with American Front.
He told investigators he grew frustrated with “racial hypocrisies” in U.S. society and the military while he was serving in Iraq in 2008. He began to look for like minded people on the internet and soon found racist skinheads who shared his beliefs. He particularly liked a group that called itself American Front. He started posting messages to its website.
Riley said he used his personal laptop, logging on about twice a week while he was at Camp Striker, to write messages and blog posts. Eventually, Faella, the group’s leader, sent him a message telling him to be careful in Iraq and encouraging him to keep posting.
“Faella also wanted to utilize Riley for firearms, survival and medical training,” the report said. “Riley believed Faella wanted this training because AF believed the U.S. was going to collapse, and they wanted to be prepared for the ensuing chaos.”
Riley told the investigators that he met a number of people at the July 2, 2011 event who were later caught up in the terrorism probe. He said he let some of them, including several he was told were convicted felons, hold his rifle as he taught them how to shoot it and break it down.
The event went well and Riley agreed to take the oath to join American Front. Faella handed him a patch and was the first to congratulate him, Riley said. Later in the evening, according to the report, “Faella proclaimed Riley as the leader of the AF Missouri chapter.”
Ah so he got radicalized while he was in Iraq. Frustrated with “racial hypocrisies.” It’s always the same with white supremacists. They speak about and how radical leftists are committing genocide against the white race. But their true grievance is they’re unable to compete in a multicultural world where being white isn’t the only prerequisite to success anymore. They don’t like living in a world where black and brown and gay and trans people have access to the rights and opportunities that once were reserved for white people only.
The real irony is that these people would be losers and failures even in the older US that had slavery and segregation and Jim Crow laws. They’d still be pathetic failures. They’d just have found some other group on whom to displace the responsibility for how their lives turned out.
Mother Jones has confirmed that a soldier in the Missouri National Guard, an Iraq war veteran, is being sought for allegedly joining and training a paramilitary white supremacist group that was preparing for a coming “race war” in the United States. A spokeswoman confirmed that the soldier in question is Spec. Ryan Riley, a member of Company A, 1/138th Infantry Regiment based in Boonville, Missouri. “We are conducting an internal investigation,” said the spokeswoman, Maj. Tammy Spicer.
https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2012/05/national-guard-neo-nazi-soldier/
From these articles it looks like Riley turned rat and testified against his militia buddies who were charged with more serious crimes. Guess you can’t expect solidarity and loyalty amongst a bunch of people plotting to commit mass murder against minorities, eh? Looks like Riley never faced charges and he got out of the National Guard when his enlistment ended. Shame on you Missouri Guard. The very least he should have gotten an other than honorable discharge. Frankly he should’ve faced UCMJ and military jail time along with a dishonorable discharge for training traitors.
White supremacists accused of planning for 'race war' in Florida
I’m going to keep hammering home this point. These people have been emboldened under trump. They were arming themselves and recruiting under trump’s first term. Jan 6 really riled them up and emboldened them. Between November of 2020 and January of 2021, 5.56 ammo was selling for $1.50/round on the secondary market when you were able to routinely buy it for $.20 per round in stores(except stores were always out of stock). So 100 rounds of 5.56 that would cost you $20 at the store was selling for $150 on the secondary market at the time. And people bought it up.
Bolt carrier groups for AR-15s, which you could buy for $80-100 were selling for $200-250 dollars. AR-15s that cost $600 were selling for $1,500. Items like level IV ceramic body armor plates which in normal times NEVER sell out were selling for twice their price again. A set of HESCO lvl IV plates usually cost $150. They were selling for $300+.
Hard to say exactly who was buying all of that but it’s not difficult to guess that white supremacists and the Qanon folks who believed that Trump was about to declare the elections void and declare martial law across the country were the main ones paying such absurdly high prices for guns and ammo at the time.
I think there was a dampening effect on these militia members after Biden took office and prosecuted all the Jan 6 people. But now that they’ve been pardoned and trump is back, look at how they’ve already been emboldened. Nazi rallies are being openly held across the country. They’re marching with Nazi flags!! And it’s just allowed!
Members of a white supremacist skinhead group called American Front trained with AK-47s, shotguns and explosives at a fortified compound in central Florida to prepare for what its reputed leader believed to be an “inevitable race war,” prosecutors said Tuesday.
According to court documents, members of American Front discussed acts of violence that included causing “a disturbance” at City Hall in Orlando, shooting at a house and attacking an anti-racist skinhead group.
At least 10 members of the group, which authorities described as a militia-styled, anti-Semitic domestic terrorist organization, have been arrested in Florida since the weekend, including at least three people on Tuesday.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/white-supremacists-accused-planning-race-war-florida-flna761152
This was the group that Riley was a part of and trained with. This is not an outlier case. There are groups like this all across the United States. They are training. They are arming. They are quietly recruiting. And they are gleefully awaiting their chance to murder minorities when the race war comes.
Understand this. These people aren’t buying guns to defend their homes against intruders. They aren’t getting military training to defend themselves against government tyranny. They are stockpiling guns, ammo, body armor, night vision, thermals, comms, and survival gear in preparation for a race war that they desperately want. They are excited for a race war. They’re not like you or I who are making preparations for civil unrest that we dread and hope won’t come to pass. They WANT civil unrest. They WANT rioting and killings in the streets. They WANT chaos so that they can unleash their vile hatred upon the country. They want to murder minorities so that they can regain their rightful place as the rulers of a white-lead and white-dominated culture.
This is part of a book I am writing about my life story. Thank you for reading. I recommend taking a look at my guide on how to prep for martial law/civil unrest. This is the danger I’m talking about when I wrote that guide. I hope I’m wrong but the more research I do on this topic, the more alarmed I become. Don’t be scared. Use this to motivate yourself to action. Build community. Band together. We outnumber these hateful folks 1,000 to 1. But the problem is they’re organized into terrorist cells, they’re armed, and they have comms with each other across the nation. We need to organize like they have. Not so that we can spread violence and hatred, but so that we can defend each other and defend our marginalized communities.
Keep writing your book. You are a pretty good writer and seem to have an interesting and timely story to tell.
It’s deeply comforting to read that white nationalist soldiers are not universally “ultimate weapons” lol. They advertise themselves boldly, but since they’re dipshits by definition, we have to maintain a balance between wise, mindful apprehension and contemptuous disregard.