The Soldiers of Odin have established 42 state chapters in the U.S. since February

About a dozen people dressed in all black gathered on a street corner in a Denver suburb to conduct their first “patrol.” It was March 19, just weeks after this group of vigilantes began organizing on social media. In a video posted online, the crew of mostly young men starts to roam the streets, on the lookout for illegal immigrants and refugees—who they say are out to rape and assault their women.

They call themselves The Soldiers of Odin, and they’ve just arrived in the United States.

Members of the organization—which gets its cryptic name from the Norse god Odin—have been patrolling the streets of European cities since last year, in response to a wave of mostly Muslim asylum-seekers coming through the EU’s porous borders. But, the anti-immigrant group has now spread to the U.S. and is growing like wildfire—with the help of a powerful social-media recruitment program, Soldiers of Odin has now established U.S. chapters in at least 42 states since February.

“[Soldiers of Odin] bring together white supremacists, anti-government groups, anti-immigrant folks,” said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “This is a nasty group of people.”

The official Soldiers of Odin USA Facebook page, which started in February, boasts a membership of more than 4,000 people. The page is private, and the movement’s leaders have to accept a person into the group—not anyone can just click a “like” button and become a Soldier of Odin. As Pitcavage notes, this doesn’t necessarily mean there are 4,000 vigilantes actively “patrolling” U.S. cities; some are just “cheerleaders” of the movement, he said. But the group definitely has a presence that lives beyond cyberspace.

Their mission can be summed up in a message posted on that private Facebook page where it states that the Soldiers of Odin USA “stands in opposition to the hoards [sic] of ‘refugees’ that have invaded Europe and will soon be coming to America, bringing massive waves of rape and crime with them… We say no!”

Chevy Sevier is a leader in the group and holds the title of Southwest Regional Brass. He told Vocativ that despite the organization’s bad reputation as a violent, neo-Nazi-esque lynch mob in Europe and Canada, the U.S. group is neither violent nor racist.

“The accusation that we are a Nazi or any other racially motivated hate group is not true,” he said. “We are simply Americans preparing for the worst and hoping for the best.”

Sevier credits the growth of the Soldiers of Odin in the U.S. to “current events both foreign and domestic.” Things like President Barack Obama’s executive action to give millions of undocumented immigrants citizenship, and the federal government’s acceptance of Muslim Syrian immigrants have sent thousand of people to groups like Sevier’s over the last year. According to the Southwest Commander, “We have a multitude of different religions, races, and financial backgrounds.”

Despite his assertion that the organization is peaceful, some of its members have used the group’s social media accounts to express the message with more vitriol than what’s laid out in the Soldier of Odin’s bylaws.

“These Africans are a bunch of spoiled brats contaminating clean communities. Call them out. Kick some ass. Spread the message. America needs to get tough,” reads one Facebook comment cited by the Anti-Defamation League in a scathing report provided exclusively to Vocativ that will be made public on Thursday. In another, a member wrote “hate isn’t a strong enough word for what I feel for these sand monkeys.” The ADL’s report cites a litany of racist Facebook comments that target those in the black, Jewish and Muslim community.

It’s not just the rhetoric, however, that worries civil rights advocates. It’s also the group’s breakout growth on social media and the types people who are joining the movement.

As noted, Soldiers of Odin officials claim publicly that the group is not a racist organization. But several of its U.S. members are in Ku Klux Klan organizations and other racist groups like the National Socialist Movement, the country’s premier band of neo-Nazis, and racist skinhead groups. One member, Jacob Laskey, was convicted of a federal hate crime in 2006 for an attack on an Oregon synagogue, according to the ADL’s report.

http://www.vocativ.com/315509/soldiers-of-odin-in-us/