Lloyd Austin, who took over as secretary of defense for the Biden administration, ordered a military-wide, one-day “stand down”-a formal pause in operations-in February to address the issue. An estimated 13 percent of arrests in ongoing law enforcement operations against the insurrectionists have snagged veterans or currently serving soldiers, about double their share in the population at large.ĭespite robust evidence that white supremacists and other extremists have penetrated the ranks of the armed forces, the military has declined to address the issue in a systemic manner. The issue of extremism in the military has drawn national attention in recent months, thanks to the disconcerting prevalence of current and former servicemen during the January 6 storming of the Capitol building.
And Mercurio, I knew, was far from alone. I kept thinking about a thousand rounds a minute and what they could do. “The Jewish religion is that of Satan,” he’d written. The young Pennsylvanian who celebrated Hitler and gleefully indulged in his beliefs that some races are biologically inferior to others was still being trained with some of the most fearsome weaponry in the world. But far from there being “no place in the Marine Corps” for such individuals, his place was where it had been all along: in the ranks of a battalion, training with fully automatic guns capable of firing up to a thousand rounds a minute. Marine investigators had determined that Mercurio’s open extremist sentiments were serious enough to merit punitive action.
Mercurio had been demoted from lance corporal to private, with unspecified disciplinary action and further administrative action “pending.” When I followed up again to ask if Mercurio was still deployed, and still using military weapons on a daily basis, the response was dismaying: “He remains assigned to that battalion and continues to train in his assigned role as a machine-gunner, but has not been sent for advanced training since being investigated.” “There is no place in the Marine Corps for supremacist or extremist activity,” he said. When I followed up six months later to find out what consequences, if any, had befallen Mercurio, a different Marine spokesperson, Captain Andrew Wood, gave an emphatic response. “We are serious about holding ourselves accountable,” he said. for Israel’s sake, and comparison of anti–police brutality protesters to “wild animals.” According to Marine spokesman Captain Joe Butterfield, the investigation would be thorough. The publication had uncovered further racist and antisemitic material on Mercurio’s Facebook page: a cartoon from neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer, accusations that Trump had betrayed the U.S. Within a day, a Marine spokesperson told military-news outlet Task & Purpose that Mercurio was under investigation.
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