
American neo-Nazi Paul Gray on Fox News in front of a wall featuring emblems of fascist militias like the Azov Battallion. Photo: Author
Orinoco Tribune – News and opinion pieces about Venezuela and beyond
From Venezuela and made by Venezuelan Chavistas
American neo-Nazi Paul Gray on Fox News in front of a wall featuring emblems of fascist militias like the Azov Battallion. Photo: Author
By Alexander Rubinstein â May 31, 2022
US corporate media has provided glowing coverage to Paul Gray, a notorious American white nationalist fighting in Ukraine. A DHS document warns heâs not the only US fascist drawn to Kiev.
As the United States undergoes a national mourning process over a spate of mass shootings, American white nationalists with documented histories of violence are attaining combat experience with advanced US-made weapons in a foreign proxy war.
Thatâs according to the Department of Homeland Security, which has been gathering intelligence on Americans who have joined the ranks of the more than 20,000 foreign volunteers in Ukraine.
The FBI has indicted several American white nationalists associated with the Rise Above Movement after they trained with the neo-Nazi Azov Battaliion and its civilian wing, the National Corps, in Kiev. But that was almost four years ago. Today, federal law enforcement has no idea how many US neo-Nazis are participating in the war in Ukraine, or what they are doing there.
But one thing is for certain: the Biden administration is allowing the Ukrainian government to recruit Americansâincluding violent extremistsâat its embassy in Washington DC and at consulates across the country. As this report will show, at least one notorious extremist fighting in Ukraine has received extensive promotion from mainstream media, while another who is currently wanted for violent crimes committed in the US was mysteriously able to evade FBI investigators looking into war crimes he previously committed in Eastern Ukraine.
According to a Customs and Border Patrol document released thanks to a May 2022 Freedom of Information Act request by a nonprofit called Property of the People, federal authorities are concerned about RMVE-WSâs, or âracially-motivated violent extremistsâwhite supremacyâ returning to the US armed with new tactics learned on the Ukrainian battlefield.
âUkrainian nationalist groups including the Azov Movement are actively recruiting racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist white supremacists to join various neo-Nazi volunteer battalions in the war against Russia,â the document states. âRMVE-WS individuals in the United States and Europe announced intentions to join the conflict and are organizing entry to Ukraine via the Polish border.â
The document, which was drafted by Customs and Border Protections, the Office of Intelligence, and other Homeland Security sub-agencies, contains write-ups of interviews conducted by law enforcement with Americans en route to Ukraine to fight Russia.
One such volunteer interviewed in early March âadmitted to contacting the Georgian National Legion but decided against joining the group as they were accused of war crimes,â according to the document. Instead, the volunteer â hoped to obtain a work contract with the Azov Battalion.â
That interview was conducted nearly a month before additional war crimes committed by the Georgian Legion were reported by The Grayzone. However, the volunteerâs allegation may also refer to the illegal execution of two men who had attempted to break through a Ukrainian checkpoint, or an additional, unreported crime known to insiders within volunteer networks.
One key âintelligence gapâ listed in the document speaks to the US governmentâs complete lack of oversight in the proxy war it is sponsoring in Ukraine. NATO arming campaign which has offered no assurances that Western weapons wonât fall into the hands of Nazis. âWhat kind of training are foreign fighters receiving in Ukraine that they could possibly proliferate in US based militia and white nationalist groups?â the document asks.
Property of the People shared the document with Politico, which sought to downplay and even discredit its explosive contents by inserting the caveat that âcritics sayâ the Department of Homeland Security document âechoes one of the Kremlinâs top propaganda points.â
But as this report will illustrate, the presence of hardcore American neo-Nazis in the ranks of the Ukrainian military is far from a deception cranked out by the Kremlinâs propaganda mills.
From fascist street brawler to volunteer fighter in US-backed unit
Among the most prominent American white nationalists currently serving in the ranks of the Ukrainian military is Paul Gray. The US military veteran has spent almost two months fighting among the Georgian National Legion, a Ukrainian military outfit that has been celebrated by US lawmakers and has committed multiple war crimes.
Besides having served in the US Army, Gray is a veteran of various street brawls against leftist groups in the US. This April, he was shuffled to a hospital in âan undisclosed locationâ in Ukraine for wounds sustained in combat. This time, his adversaries were not masked members of Antifa; they were soldiers in the Russian military.
To be sure, Paul Gray is not just some angry suburban dad glibly labeled a fascist by the liberal media because he delivered an off-color rant at a parent-teacher conference. He is the real deal: a former member of several bonafide fascist groups including the now-defunct Traditionalist Workers Party, American Vanguard, Atomwaffen Division, and Patriot Front.
Gray is also a former soldier of the 101st Airborne Division with a Purple Heart and multiple deployments to Iraq who was eager to impart battlefield lessons and training to Ukrainians engaged in a US-backed proxy war with Russia. This January while in Ukraine, he joined the Georgian National Legion, an outfit led by a notorious warlord who has enjoyed friendly visits with high profile members of US Congress while boasting of authorizing gruesome war crimes in Ukraine.
RELATED CONTENT: May Update: A War to the Last Ukrainian
In fact, Gray is among at least 30 Americans currently fighting with the Georgian National Legion. The unit is therefore at the heart of the ratline channeling US weapons and fascist foreign militants into the Ukrainian military, while Congress and American corporate media cheer it on.
Indeed, Fox News has featured Gray no less than six times, painting him as a heroic GI Joe sacrificing himself to defend democracy. Fox did not inform its viewers of Grayâs identity until his most recent appearance, obscuring his record of neo-Nazism from its viewers.
For Texans who bore witness to the street rampages of local fascist organizations throughout the past five years, Gray was a familiar face.
Back in 2018, Gray was slapped with a citation by local police for trespassing on the campus of Texas State University at San Marcos. He was distributing fliers at the time for Patriot Front, a fascist organization led by Thomas Rousseau. While Gray, along with two others, were identified by the university, the names of five others were withheld, leading âthe communityâ to accuse âthe university of protecting white supremacists.â
Rousseau had been rising through the ranks of Vanguard America, a growing organization at the forefront of white nationalism. But the group swiftly collapsed after one of its members, 19-year-old James Alex Fields, plowed his car through dozens of people protesting the now-notorious âUnite the Rightâ rally in Charlottesville in 2017 after he had been photographed equipped with a shield featuring the organizationâs emblem. The attack, which was witnessed by this reporter, left a protester dead, and resulted in Fields being locked away for life. Vanguard Americaâs founder, Rousseau, subsequently bolted from the group and formed Patriot Front.
According to self-described âanti-fascistâ journalist Kit OâConnell, Gray joined forces with Patriot Front to provide combat training to fellow veterans. He also helped the group disrupt the Houston Anarchist Bookfair in 2017.
Gray has also been associated with the Traditionalist Workers Party, a lead organizer of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, as well as with Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi organization whose members have trained with Ukraineâs Azov Battalion, and which was designated as an illegal terrorist organization by the United Kingdom and Canada.
In leaked chat logs, Atomwaffen celebrated the bloody exploits of a member who murdered a gay Jewish college student in December 2017. Another member slaughtered the parents of their own girlfriend. Yet another member of Atomwaffen, Devon Arthurs, murdered his neo-Nazi roommates that same year after they mocked him for converting to Islam.
One of Arthursâ victims, Andrew Oneschuk, had appeared on the Azov Battallionâs official podcast a year before his killing. The host encouraged the teenager and other Americans to come to Ukraine to join Azovâsomething Oneschuk had previously tried and failed to do in 2015.
Details of Paul Grayâs involvement with Atomwaffen and the Traditionalist Workers Party were left unexplained by journalists Kit OâConnell and Michael Hayden. However, this reporter was able to corroborate Grayâs collaboration with the neo-Nazi Vangaurd America organization, as well as Patriot Front.
In 2017, Gray helped organize a rally featuring Vanguard America and Mike âEnochâ Peinovich, a prominent white supremacist blogger. The event was billed as âa movement of like-minded whites are banding together to fight off the diseased hordes of anti-white, anti-fascist, communist scum parasitizing and subverting the good denizens of Bat City.â The Daily Stormer, a popular neo-Nazi blog, hailed the fascist confab as a gathering of âproud white men got up and talked about Jews and their hordes without any reservation whatsoever.â
Prior to the fascist jamboree, Gray successfully convinced Texas State Representative Matt Schaefer to sponsor the rally, promising him the event was simply aimed at supporting âconservative leaders and the policies they are seeking.â Schaefer later apologized for accepting Grayâs request, claiming he was âlied to.â
Gray ultimately grew so prominent in the Texas neo-Nazi scene that he became a target of local âantifaâ groups, who doxxed him and distributed photographs of him at fascist rallies. They also revealed that on Facebook he had âlikedâ a number of neo-Nazi pages, includinig Liftwaffe, a âNazi-themed weight-lifting groupâ named after Nazi Germanyâs Air Force.
In one of the photos, Gray can be seen in 2017 sporting a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the neo-Nazi podcast Exodus Americanus. Later that year, Grayâs sister opened a cafe in East Austin that became a target of anti-gentrification protests.
Gray rallied three of his friends, all fellow army veterans, to confront the protesters. When he later appeared on the Exodus Americanus podcast, his hosts introduced him as âour buddy down in Texas,â and âone of our dudes,â and described the protesters as âbrown hordesâ and âthe local beaner squad.â
âDo you recall,â one of the hosts asked Gray, âwhen [co-host] Roscoe and I got really drunk and slept on your couch?â
During the interview, Gray recounted how he and his friends âfought offâ the protesters. One of the hosts closed the interview by reciting the slogan, âwhite power!â
Fox & Nazi friends
At some point in early 2021, Gray found his way to Kiev, Ukraine and opened a gym, which helped him insinuate himself into the mixed martial arts culture popular among local ultra-nationalists.
In early February, 2022, as war with Russia approached, the known American neo-Nazi joined the Georgian National Legion and began training civilians and volunteers in American military techniques. His exploits earned glowing coverage from a San Antonio, Texas NBC affiliate, which effused, âFrom the front lines of Ukraine, veteran Paul Gray is using his extensive military background to empower a nation.â
Fox News had also discovered Gray around this time; the pro-GOP network cast him as an American Rambo leading Ukrainians into battle against Putinâs war machine. Throughout the first two weeks of March, the network featured Gray four times, giving him ample opportunity to wax poetic about spreading âdemocracyâ and draw favorable parallels between Ukraine and his home state of Texas.
On March 1, when Gray was featured for the first time on Fox News, reporter Lucas Tomlinson noted that âhe would only give us his first name.â Two days later, he was interviewed again on Fox & Friends, where he described the war in Ukraine as âtheir 1776.â
According to Gray, the Georgian Legion was âtraining hundreds every day. Weâre out there. Thereâs Americans, thereâs Brits, Canadians and all people from free countries of Europe and America and beyond.â
Asked whether thereâs an âinsurgency in the making,â Gray responded that âabsolutely, these people here are doing everything they can to assist their soldiers on the front line and to assist their neighbors in some kind of insurgency if needed.â
Gray concluded the interview by appealing for more US weapons to Ukraine, which he called its âarsenal of democracy.â Fox host Pete Hegseth asked Gray whether he was willing to kill Russians, but the foreign fighter was unwilling to answer the question, changing the subject and chumming it up with Hegseth about how they both served with the 101st Airborne Division.
On March 8, Fox Newsâs Tomlinson discussed a trip he had made to the Georgian Legionâs âtraining campâ where he met Gray. âHe said there was a platoon of Americans. When I asked to show me, he wouldnât show me, but he says thereâs 30 Americans joining him.â
Again, on March 12, Fox interviewed Gray. While in previous interviews Gray used the Georgian Legionâs emblem as his backdrop, heâd now been deployed to Kiev and wore their patch while holding a rifle. During the interview, Gray accused Russia of war crimes and genocide against Ukrainians, whom he called âthe strongest Europeansâ and again called on the United States to send its âarsenal of democracyâ and âhelp out Ukrainians with the airspace.â
During the first four of Grayâs appearances on Fox News, his name was not disclosed. However, two local media reports identified the Fox favorite by his full name during the same period. None of the reports mentioned his close association with neo-Nazis.
After March 29, Gray disappeared from the media for almost a month. He only re-emerged after being injured in combat on April 27, when he was interviewed in Coffee or Die, the magazine of the Black Rifle Coffee Company, which is popular among right-wing law enforcement and military personnel. Gray told Coffee or Dieâs correspondent Nolan Peterson, âWe were ready for a tank to come down the road when the artillery hit us. A concrete wall protected me but then fell on me.â
Gray and his companion Manus McCaffery were shuffled off to a hospital âat an undisclosed locationâ according to Peterson, who said the pair âworked together as a team targeting Russian tanks and vehicles with US-made Javelin anti-tank missiles.â
Photos provided by Gray to the publication show him and McCaffery posing in Ukraine with two telling patches on their uniforms. One appeared to represent the ultra-nationalist Right Sector organization, however, the sword typically displayed in the groupâs emblem was replaced with a gladiator-style helmet. The other patch featured a literal fasces.
https://twitter.com/nolanwpeterson/status/1519333208520859649
Forbes also reported on Gray and McCaffery being wounded in Ukraine, but like Coffee or Die, it failed to note his neo-Nazi affiliations.
Some 19 days after he was injured, Fox caught up once again with Gray. The network neglected to note the foreign fighterâs neo-Nazi history, but for the first time, it quoted him by his full name in two segments it aired. One Fox piece highlighted Grayâs weapon of choice: the American-made Javelin anti-tank missile, showing him posing by a Russian tank he supposedly destroyed. âConfirmed kill,â a self-satisfied Gray declared.
Gray told the outlet that he planned on returning to the battlefield as soon as he recovered.
Ukraine is âa Petri dish for fascism. Itâs the perfect conditionsâ
When Paul Gray signed up for the Georgian National Legion, he joined thousands of foreign volunteers eager to fight Russians on the Ukrainian battlefield. The Legionâs leader, Georgian warlord Mamuka Mamulashvili, is a former mixed martial arts fighter who shares Grayâs enthusiasm for hand-to-hand combat. Now fighting his fifth war against the Russian Federation, Mamulashvili, was reportedly sent to Ukraine at the insistence of jailed former Georgian President and longtime US asset Mikheil Saakashvili.
As warlord Mamuka Mamulashvili boasts of executing Russian POWs, the legion he commands carried them out just five miles from Bucha on March 30. I expose this war criminal's longstanding ties to key American foreign policy officials for @TheGrayzoneNews https://t.co/naSeNsEJgm
— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) April 8, 2022
As The Grayzone reported, members of Congress on key foreign policy committees have hosted Mamulashvili in their offices inside the US Capitol. Ukrainian American nationalists, meanwhile, have raised funds for his Georgian Legion on the streets of New York City.
Gray now joins a growing list of Georgian Legion veterans with extremist backgrounds. The roster includes Joachim Furholm, a Norwegian fascist activist who was briefly imprisoned after attempting to rob a bank in his native country.
After signing up for the Georgian Legion, Furholm made several attempts to recruit American neo-Nazis into the ranks of the Azov Battallion, which had set up housing for him near Kiev as well as âtraining facilities for foreign volunteers he attempted to recruit.â
âItâs like a Petri dish for fascism. Itâs the perfect conditions,â Furholm said of Ukraine in a podcast interview. Referring to Azov, he stated that âthey do have serious intentions of helping the rest of Europe in retaking our rightful lands.â
Furholm appealed for listeners to contact him through Instagram. When a young man in New Mexico reached out, the Norwegian urged him to join the fight in Ukraine: âGet over here laddie, thereâs a rifle and a beer waiting for you.â
RELATED CONTENT: From Buffalo to Uvalde: Racism, Violence Come from the Top
Furholmâs media appearances were not limited to fringe neo-Nazi podcasts. After delivering a speech at an Azov rally in 2018, he was interviewed by the US governmentâs Radio Free Europe.
There is one Georgian Legion veteran whose violent exploits made him more notorious than even Furholm. He is an American military veteran named Craig Lang.
Wanted murderer rides the US ratline from the Venezuelan border to Ukraine
Lang was a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan who was injured in the latter theater of combat. Upon returning home for medical care, he fell into a bitter dispute with his pregnant wife, who retaliated against him by sending him a video of herself having sex with other men. Lang promptly gathered up some body armor, night vision goggles and two assault rifles, ditched his base in Texas and drove straight to North Carolina, where his wife lived.
There, he surrounded her condominium with land mines and attempted to murder her. Langâs failed revenge killing earned him a dishonorable discharge and a prison sentence that was reduced to a short, several months stint on the grounds that the Army had been aware of his history of mental illness.
After his release, Lang continued to cycle in and out of prison before gravitating to Ukraine, where he linked up with fellow Army veteran Alex Zwiefelhofere. Both men joined the ultra-nationalist Right Sector organization in 2015, while Lang reportedly recruited dozens of fighters from the West.
By 2016, Lang was fighting alongside the Georgian National Legion in the eastern Donbas region, and giving interviews on behalf of the unit.
While on the front lines in 2017, Lang and sixth other Americans fell under investigation by the Department of Justice and the FBI, as they were believed to have âcommitted or participated in torture, cruel or inhuman treatment or murder of persons who did not take (or stopped taking) an active part in hostilities and (or) intentionally inflicted grievous bodily harm on them.â
Leaked documents from the Department of Justiceâs Criminal Division of the Office of International Affairs claim Lang and the other suspects âallegedly took noncombatants as prisoners, beat them with their fists, kicked them, clobbered them with a sock filled with stones, and held them underwater.â Lang, who is said to be the âmain instigatorâ of the torture, âmay have even killed some of them before burying their bodies in unmarked graves.â
According to the leaks, one American under Langâs command showed FBI investigators video of Lang beating, torturing and eventually killing a local. Another video, according to the publishers of the leak, shows Lang beating and drowning a girl after a fellow fighter injected her with adrenaline so that she would not lose consciousness as she was drowned. Lang allegedly carried out these crimes as a member of Right Sector.
As the low intensity war dragged on in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, Lang and Zwiefelhofer reportedly grew âbored of the monotony of trench warfare.â In a desperate search for high-intensity combat action, the pair traveled to Africa, reportedly to fight al-Shabaab, but were swiftly deported by Kenyan authorities.
Back in the United States, the duo decided they wanted to travel to Venezuela to overthrow its socialist government and âkill communists.â To fund their expedition and secure guns and ammo, the pair posted an advertisement claiming they were selling weapons. When a Florida couple responded, they traveled to the Sunshine State and murdered them, stealing $3000, according to a superseding indictment from the Department of Justice.
How Lang managed to leave the United States after carrying out the alleged murder is unclear, as is the reason why he was not immediately apprehended for questioning by the FBI in connection with the bureauâs investigation over war crimes in Donbas. Somehow the wanted criminal was able to ride the ratline from the US to Colombia, and then back to Ukraine again.
Several months after the murders, Lang arrived in CĂşcuta, Colombia, a town on the border of Venezuela that has served a base for destabilization operations against the government in Caracas. There, he joined a band of insurgents seeking to attack the Venezuelan army. Somehow, Lang managed to escape justice by returning to Ukraine.
Despite being wanted for extradition to the United States, Langâs lawyer, Dmytro Morhun, told Politico that his client had apparently returned to the battlefield. In reporting Langâs membership in an unnamed âvolunteer brigade,â Politico noted that he had also re-emerged on social media with a new Twitter account featuring a photograph of himself âwearing a Ukrainian military uniform and brandishing an anti-tank weapon.â
Discovered by this reporter, Langâs Twitter account offers a strong hint that he belongs to Right Sector, the former street gang now incorporated into the Ukrainian military. This was the same unit Lang belonged to when he allegedly tortured a woman to death.
While previously a hot topic, the shocking saga of Craig Lang conveniently disappeared from the mediaâs radar following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February. Politicoâs May 24th report contained his first mainstream media mention in months, with his name buried deep in the article.
Paul Gray, for his part, continues to receive glowing media coverage despite the exposure of his ties to neo-Nazi organizations. Meanwhile, the thirty Americans allegedly fighting by his side remain unidentified.
As the Department of Homeland Security has privately acknowledged, extremists like Gray and his compatriots are likely to return to the home front before long, bringing along a wealth of combat tactics and new connections with an international network of fascist militants and war criminals. What happens then is anyoneâs guess.
Alexander Rubinstein is a staff writer for MintPress News based in Washington, DC. He reports on police, prisons and protests in the United States and the United States' policing of the world. He previously reported for RT and Sputnik News.