Happy Friday. We need to talk.
We end the week with breaking news that knocked my planned essay off the docket, but I believe is worth flagging. I'm referring to the arrest of Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old air national guardsman who allegedly leaked a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents that revealed Ukraine military secrets and other information damaging to the U.S.
You can read more about the leaked documents here and the possible ramifications here and here.
But for this column, I’d like to focus on the active community of acolytes that Teixeira led online and the persona of authority—reinforced by a Christian fervor and his delight in racist memes—he adopted to justify his alleged crime.
Teixeira allegedly leaked the information over several months to a small, invitation-only clubhouse of teens and young men on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers. “United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God,” as the Washington Post says in this must-read piece, Teixeira began impressing his followers with the occasional recreation of classified intelligence that he claimed to have garnered by virtue of an unnamed job in the military. Those posts became photos of authentic documents, and the trickle became a torrent.
Teixeira, referred to by the men as “OG,” became a dazzling and demanding father figure to his Discord squad. “He’s fit. He’s strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” one group member told the Post.
But Teixeira also embraced troubling elements of Christian (self-described) white supremacist organizing, even as one member tried to reassure reporters that it wasn’t “a fascist recruiting server.”
Well, maybe it was. One nugget from the piece:
“In a video seen by The Post, the man who the member said is OG stands at a shooting range, wearing safety glasses and ear coverings and holding a large rifle. He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target.”
Teixeira also trafficked in textbook white supremacist conspiracies, specifically that race-related hate crimes are all government plots.
“He claimed, according to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022…[he] said federal law enforcement officials let the killings proceed so they could argue for increased funding.”
As news of his arrest spread, Jeff Sharlet, the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power and a national authority on the politics of religion, offered analysis on Twitter.
“The kid [quoted in the Post story] didn’t want it to be fascist recruitment, even as he describes every textbook element of such recruitment, a perverse & precise case of conspiracism, 'purity,' violence, racism, & antisemitism, and masculine 'fitness,'" he wrote.
Sharlet has it exactly right. While the full damage from the leaks remains to be seen, the societal rot that allowed Teixeira—who comfortably traffics in a racist interpretation of faith—to become an attractive figure to impressionable young men continues to fester.
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
This edition of raceAhead was edited by Ruth Umoh.
