Ukraine's military has a real Nazi problem

Note: Shared from Responsible Statecraft . For the interests of our readers.

Ukraine's military has a real Nazi problem

Screenshot from original article. Source

In their zeal to deconstruct Russian propaganda, Western elites have tried to hide the fact there are Third Reich extremists among Kyiv's ranks.

 

Marta HavryShko

June 2, 2026

 

When Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he claimed one of his goals was the country’s “denazification.” The Kremlin still uses this narrative as a cornerstone of its war propaganda.

 

Both Ukraine and the West reacted by dismissing the claim outright as a cynical abuse of Holocaust history. Politicians, media outlets, academics, and educational institutions rushed to prove that Putin’s argument was fraudulent. 

 

But in their zeal to deconstruct Russian propaganda, Western elites created a propaganda myth of their own: there are no Nazis in Ukraine. Or, if there are, they are supposedly isolated cranks with no influence.

 

This fiction required the whitewashing of Azov, a unit founded in 2014 by the neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine under the leadership of Andriy Biletsky. Azov became notorious for extremist ideology, Nazi symbolism, and allegations of war crimes in the Donbas. In 2018, the U.S. Congress banned the group from receiving American weapons, funding, or training. 

 

After Russia’s full-scale invasion, that stigma vanished almost overnight. Kyiv repackaged Azov, separating the most radical elements into a new formation, the 3rd Assault Brigade. Western media rebranded and whitewashed it. The language of “de-radicalization” and “depoliticization” became mainstream. Questioning this narrative became taboo and labeled as “Russian propaganda.” The result is a culture of deliberate silence.

 

Neo-Nazi networks are deeply embedded in parts of Ukraine’s military structure. Their presence is visible in units such as Azov, the Third Assault Brigade, the Russian Volunteer Corps, Bratstvo, the German Volunteer Corps, Karpatska Sich, and others. Yet Ukraine’s Western backers continue to arm, fund, and train these units without meaningful scrutiny.

 

Even more striking is the normalization of Nazi imagery itself. Official Ukrainian military channels and mainstream media regularly publish images of soldiers wearing swastikas, Waffen-SS insignia, and patches linked to neo-Nazi groups like Combat 18 and Misanthropic Division. This is no longer treated as scandalous. It has been normalized. 

 

Most disturbing of all, some Ukrainian military units have incorporated Nazi-linked symbols into their official insignia.

 

The far right and Ukraine’s military culture

 

Many Ukrainian military units using Nazi symbols are led by men shaped by Azov and the far-right milieu around it. For example, there is Oleksandr Kravtsov, the well-known commander of the Vedmedi unit, which was part of Azov. His body is covered in Nazi imagery, including 1488 — references to the white supremacist “14 Words” slogan coined by David Lane and the coded salute “Heil Hitler.” (“H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet.) Tattooed across his chest is the SS motto: “My Honor Is Loyalty.” He turned that slogan into the motto of his own unit. SS lightning bolts became part of its official insignia.

 

After returning from Russian captivity, Kravtsov’s unit was folded into the Ukrainian military structure — first the 36th Brigade, then the 39th Coastal Defense Brigade. Nothing changed. The SS symbols and motto remained.

 

Many commanders in the 3rd Assault Brigade also came out of Azov and still hold extremist views. Unsurprisingly, they openly embrace the corresponding symbolism. A subunit of the 3rd Assault Brigade adopted a modified insignia(replacing two grenades with three) of the Dirlewanger SS Brigade — one of the most notorious Nazi formations of World War II. In 2025, the brigade unveiled the emblem publicly at a memorial in Kyiv. No scandal followed.

 

Azov also normalized the Black Sun — a symbol born in Himmler’s SS cult headquarters at Wewelsburg Castle and now used globally by neo-Nazis and white supremacist terrorists, including the 2019 Christchurch mosque terroristin New Zealand and the recent San Diego Islamic Center shooter.

 

After 2022, Black Sun spread rapidly through Ukrainian military culture. It appeared in Azov-linked units such as the Decepticons platoon and the Mortarsunit of the 3rd Assault Brigade. Soon it migrated further — into units with no openly ideological profile at all — and became part of the insignia of the 156th Zvaha Battalion and the Unmanned Systems Battalion of the 110th Brigade named after Marko Bezruchko.

 

Azov mainstreamed another Nazi-linked emblem as well: the Wolfsangel, used historically by several Waffen-SS divisions. Rebranded as the “Idea of the Nation,” it became one of the most recognizable symbols in Ukraine’s wartime military culture. The symbol now appears far beyond Azov itself. The newly created Nachtigall Battalion — named after the Nachtigall Battalion formed by German military intelligence in 1941 — uses the same Wolfsangel-inspired insignia.

 

Some units within Ukraine’s military do not hide their fascination with the Third Reich's military culture. For example, the 422nd Regiment of Unmanned Systems calls itself “Luftwaffe” and uses virtually the same eagle as Hitler’s air force. Its commander, Mykola Kolesnyk, regularly appears with the symbol on patches and clothing. The unit even sells merchandise featuring the Nazi eagle — hoodies, mugs, T-shirts, caps, keychains — to fundraise for the war.

 

Not just aesthetic choices

 

The use of Nazi symbols in Ukraine’s military is not merely an aesthetic problem. It is moral, political, historical, and legal.

 

First, it represents a form of historical revisionism and the gradual rehabilitation of Nazism itself — a direct challenge to the postwar Western consensus built on the memory of World War II. Within far-right military culture, Nazi imagery is often wrapped in romanticized narratives about anti-Soviet struggle. In practice this trivializes the sacrifice of the seven million Ukrainians who fought Nazism in the ranks of the Red Army alongside the Western allies (in contrast to the 300,000 who served in various military formations and police units on the side of Nazi Germany). 

 

It also desecrates the memory of Nazism’s victims in Ukraine: 1.5 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, along with millions of Slavs, prisoners of war, Roma, the mentally ill, forced laborers, and countless others consumed by the machinery of racial extermination and exploitation. 

 

Second, the problem is not only historical. It is profoundly contemporary. Every SS rune, Black Sun, or Wolfsangel displayed by Ukrainian soldiers hands the Kremlin another propaganda victory. Russian propagandists do not need to invent imaginary Nazis in Kyiv. They simply point to the insignia openly worn by some of Ukraine’s most celebrated military units — including formations branded as “elite,” such as the 3rd Assault Brigade.

 

Third, there is also a glaring legal contradiction. By openly using Nazi imagery, these units violate Ukraine’s own 2015 memory laws, which explicitly ban the propaganda of the Nazi regime and the public use of its symbols. The law describes such acts as an insult to the memory of millions of victims and have penalties of up to five years in prison. 

 

Yet no one is prosecuted.

 

Why?

 

Because the Zelensky government — and President Volodymyr Zelensky himself as commander-in-chief — have made a political bargain with the far right. Since 2022, far-right activists and networks have flooded into the security and defense sector. In conditions of total war and chronic manpower shortages, this alliance became politically convenient, perhaps even inevitable. Now it is becoming entrenched.

 

The state depends on radicalized military formations for manpower and battlefield effectiveness. The far right, in turn, receives legitimacy, weapons, influence, and institutional protection. What emerged from wartime necessity is evolving into mutual dependence.

 

Ukraine’s Western partners have made their own bargain. They, too, depend on Ukrainian manpower to weaken Russia. And so they tolerate extremists inside Ukraine’s armed forces as long as those extremists continue fighting. More than that, they remain largely silent about the ideology and symbols involved, because acknowledging them would mean admitting an uncomfortable truth — that the neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine is not simply a Kremlin invention.

 Ukraine's military has a real Nazi problem

 

In their zeal to deconstruct Russian propaganda, Western elites have tried to hide the fact there are Third Reich extremists among Kyiv's ranks.

 

Marta HavryShko

June 2, 2026

 

When Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he claimed one of his goals was the country’s “denazification.” The Kremlin still uses this narrative as a cornerstone of its war propaganda.

 

Both Ukraine and the West reacted by dismissing the claim outright as a cynical abuse of Holocaust history. Politicians, media outlets, academics, and educational institutions rushed to prove that Putin’s argument was fraudulent. 

 

But in their zeal to deconstruct Russian propaganda, Western elites created a propaganda myth of their own: there are no Nazis in Ukraine. Or, if there are, they are supposedly isolated cranks with no influence.

 

This fiction required the whitewashing of Azov, a unit founded in 2014 by the neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine under the leadership of Andriy Biletsky. Azov became notorious for extremist ideology, Nazi symbolism, and allegations of war crimes in the Donbas. In 2018, the U.S. Congress banned the group from receiving American weapons, funding, or training. 

 

After Russia’s full-scale invasion, that stigma vanished almost overnight. Kyiv repackaged Azov, separating the most radical elements into a new formation, the 3rd Assault Brigade. Western media rebranded and whitewashed it. The language of “de-radicalization” and “depoliticization” became mainstream. Questioning this narrative became taboo and labeled as “Russian propaganda.” The result is a culture of deliberate silence.

 

Neo-Nazi networks are deeply embedded in parts of Ukraine’s military structure. Their presence is visible in units such as Azov, the Third Assault Brigade, the Russian Volunteer Corps, Bratstvo, the German Volunteer Corps, Karpatska Sich, and others. Yet Ukraine’s Western backers continue to arm, fund, and train these units without meaningful scrutiny.

 

Even more striking is the normalization of Nazi imagery itself. Official Ukrainian military channels and mainstream media regularly publish images of soldiers wearing swastikas, Waffen-SS insignia, and patches linked to neo-Nazi groups like Combat 18 and Misanthropic Division. This is no longer treated as scandalous. It has been normalized. 

 

Most disturbing of all, some Ukrainian military units have incorporated Nazi-linked symbols into their official insignia.

 

The far right and Ukraine’s military culture

 

Many Ukrainian military units using Nazi symbols are led by men shaped by Azov and the far-right milieu around it. For example, there is Oleksandr Kravtsov, the well-known commander of the Vedmedi unit, which was part of Azov. His body is covered in Nazi imagery, including 1488 — references to the white supremacist “14 Words” slogan coined by David Lane and the coded salute “Heil Hitler.” (“H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet.) Tattooed across his chest is the SS motto: “My Honor Is Loyalty.” He turned that slogan into the motto of his own unit. SS lightning bolts became part of its official insignia.

 

After returning from Russian captivity, Kravtsov’s unit was folded into the Ukrainian military structure — first the 36th Brigade, then the 39th Coastal Defense Brigade. Nothing changed. The SS symbols and motto remained.

 

Many commanders in the 3rd Assault Brigade also came out of Azov and still hold extremist views. Unsurprisingly, they openly embrace the corresponding symbolism. A subunit of the 3rd Assault Brigade adopted a modified insignia(replacing two grenades with three) of the Dirlewanger SS Brigade — one of the most notorious Nazi formations of World War II. In 2025, the brigade unveiled the emblem publicly at a memorial in Kyiv. No scandal followed.

 

Azov also normalized the Black Sun — a symbol born in Himmler’s SS cult headquarters at Wewelsburg Castle and now used globally by neo-Nazis and white supremacist terrorists, including the 2019 Christchurch mosque terroristin New Zealand and the recent San Diego Islamic Center shooter.

 

After 2022, Black Sun spread rapidly through Ukrainian military culture. It appeared in Azov-linked units such as the Decepticons platoon and the Mortarsunit of the 3rd Assault Brigade. Soon it migrated further — into units with no openly ideological profile at all — and became part of the insignia of the 156th Zvaha Battalion and the Unmanned Systems Battalion of the 110th Brigade named after Marko Bezruchko.

 

Azov mainstreamed another Nazi-linked emblem as well: the Wolfsangel, used historically by several Waffen-SS divisions. Rebranded as the “Idea of the Nation,” it became one of the most recognizable symbols in Ukraine’s wartime military culture. The symbol now appears far beyond Azov itself. The newly created Nachtigall Battalion — named after the Nachtigall Battalion formed by German military intelligence in 1941 — uses the same Wolfsangel-inspired insignia.

 

Some units within Ukraine’s military do not hide their fascination with the Third Reich's military culture. For example, the 422nd Regiment of Unmanned Systems calls itself “Luftwaffe” and uses virtually the same eagle as Hitler’s air force. Its commander, Mykola Kolesnyk, regularly appears with the symbol on patches and clothing. The unit even sells merchandise featuring the Nazi eagle — hoodies, mugs, T-shirts, caps, keychains — to fundraise for the war.

 

Not just aesthetic choices

 

The use of Nazi symbols in Ukraine’s military is not merely an aesthetic problem. It is moral, political, historical, and legal.

 

First, it represents a form of historical revisionism and the gradual rehabilitation of Nazism itself — a direct challenge to the postwar Western consensus built on the memory of World War II. Within far-right military culture, Nazi imagery is often wrapped in romanticized narratives about anti-Soviet struggle. In practice this trivializes the sacrifice of the seven million Ukrainians who fought Nazism in the ranks of the Red Army alongside the Western allies (in contrast to the 300,000 who served in various military formations and police units on the side of Nazi Germany). 

 

It also desecrates the memory of Nazism’s victims in Ukraine: 1.5 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, along with millions of Slavs, prisoners of war, Roma, the mentally ill, forced laborers, and countless others consumed by the machinery of racial extermination and exploitation. 

 

Second, the problem is not only historical. It is profoundly contemporary. Every SS rune, Black Sun, or Wolfsangel displayed by Ukrainian soldiers hands the Kremlin another propaganda victory. Russian propagandists do not need to invent imaginary Nazis in Kyiv. They simply point to the insignia openly worn by some of Ukraine’s most celebrated military units — including formations branded as “elite,” such as the 3rd Assault Brigade.

 

Third, there is also a glaring legal contradiction. By openly using Nazi imagery, these units violate Ukraine’s own 2015 memory laws, which explicitly ban the propaganda of the Nazi regime and the public use of its symbols. The law describes such acts as an insult to the memory of millions of victims and have penalties of up to five years in prison. 

 

Yet no one is prosecuted.

 

Why?

 

Because the Zelensky government — and President Volodymyr Zelensky himself as commander-in-chief — have made a political bargain with the far right. Since 2022, far-right activists and networks have flooded into the security and defense sector. In conditions of total war and chronic manpower shortages, this alliance became politically convenient, perhaps even inevitable. Now it is becoming entrenched.

 

The state depends on radicalized military formations for manpower and battlefield effectiveness. The far right, in turn, receives legitimacy, weapons, influence, and institutional protection. What emerged from wartime necessity is evolving into mutual dependence.

 

Ukraine’s Western partners have made their own bargain. They, too, depend on Ukrainian manpower to weaken Russia. And so they tolerate extremists inside Ukraine’s armed forces as long as those extremists continue fighting. More than that, they remain largely silent about the ideology and symbols involved, because acknowledging them would mean admitting an uncomfortable truth — that the neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine is not simply a Kremlin invention.

 

Michael Roberts. Global profits: an upward turn?

by Michael Roberts

At the end of 2025, corporate profits in the major economies accelerated after stagnating in 2024. The global figure below is calculated from a weighted (by GDP) average of profits in the US, UK, Japan, Germany and China (taken from national accounts and in national currencies).   

Average annual growth in global corporate profits during the 2010s – the decade of what I have called the Long Depression since the Great Recession of 2008-9 – was 3.9%.  But in the first half of the 2020s, the average growth rate has doubled to 7.7%, although that’s still way less than the 16.1%  average growth rate in the credit-fuelled decade of the 2000s. There were only two periods of a fall in global profits: the mini-‘profits recession at the end of 2015 and in the pandemic slump of 2020.

In the ten years before 2007, China’s corporate sector led the way with an average annual rise of 26.7% in profits, more than three times higher than in Japan and the US.  But the picture changed in the 2010s, as China’s profits growth rate dropped away sharply.  Profits growth also slowed in the other economies, with the exception of Japan.  In the 2020s, so far, average profits growth in Japan and the US has increased, with the US rate more than doubling compared to the 2010s.  Both German and British corporate profits growth has been dismal in the first quarter of the 21st century.  So in terms of profits, Japanese capital has done very well, the US corporates too, while European capital has performed poorly.

What are we to make of this?  Well, the 2020s figures suggest that capital in the major economies is not heading for a slump, with the exception of Germany, where profits growth confirms the current recessionary environment.

If we zone in on the US, using the Basu-Wasner calculation of profits from official data, we find that in the 2020s, annual profits growth has been higher than even in the neo-liberal period of the 1980s. The higher figure in the 1970s is due to higher inflation.

Source: https://dbasu.shinyapps.io/Profitability/

The rate of profit on corporate capital is defined in Marxian terms as total profit (surplus value) divided by the stock of capital (fixed and circulating assets) held by companies plus the cost of employing labour in production. The overall rate of profit in the US economy has been modestly declining since the end of neo-liberal recovery period in the late 1990s.  But if you isolate the productive sector of the US economy (ie exclude real estate, finance, insurance and government), then the rate of profit on productive assets fell sharply through the 2010s to the end of the pandemic slump in 2020.  This explains the Great Recession of 2008-9 and the pandemic slump of 2020. But since then, the profitability of productive assets has risen.

What is the reason for the recovery in overall profits and the profitability of capital in the US – and for that matter in Japan?  This is disputed.  In a recent article, Ruchir Sharma, chair of the Rockefeller Foundation, reckons that US profits growth has only accelerated because of rising government budget deficits.  Falling taxation on corporate profits and rising government subsidies have boosted profits. “Overall corporate earnings have risen from 7 per cent of GDP in the late 1990s to 11 per cent today. The dynamism of American business has played a role, but so have tax cuts and government spending. Lately the US deficit has risen to more than 6 per cent of GDP and a deficit that high reflects a large transfer of income to households and corporations.” Sharma concludes that “deficits have accounted for more than half of corporate profits, twice the level of the dotcom era. Strip away government support, and US profits look less extraordinary.”  

Here, Sharma relies on the so-called Kalecki equation, which boils down to the proposition that investment drives profits, not vice versa.  If a government runs up a big budget deficit, in other words, ‘dissaves’, it can boost investment and thus profits. “So, under a well-established accounting formula, the Kalecki-Levy Equation, corporate profits are in part a mirror image of the government’s deficit. Based on this framework, deficits were the single largest contributor to the increase in earnings as a share of GDP since the late 1990s.”

But as I have argued on many occasions and posts, the Kalecki identity (profits=investment) is just that, an identity.  It does not show the causal direction. Does investment drive profits and does government ‘dissaving’ (deficits) drive up profits?  In my view, that causal direction is back to front.  In capitalism, profits drive investment.  And if we start from that direction, then the rise in profits is not due to government spending, but can only be due to a rise in the rate of exploitation of workers, as expressed in a rise in the share of profits in the US economy relative to wages. Corporate profits as a share of US GDP are at record highs.

Profits are not rising because of excessive government spending, but because there has been a sharp fall in labour’s share of national income – to an historic low.

If this rise in profit share can be sustained and accelerated, then the US rate of profit may well rise further from here.  Much will depend on whether the huge investment being made by the AI companies and their potential clients in data centres will deliver a step change in profits (by shedding labour and thus reducing the relative wage bill).  As Sharma said in a previous article of his: the US economy is now ‘one big bet on AI’.  

I’ll return to that story in my next post.

The Efforts the US Mass Media Goes to in Order to Deny There is Such a Thing as a US Working Class.

Richard Mellor

I received a message from someone who had just seen this on my You Tube channel and liked it. I can't remember if I posted it to the blog here and couldn't find it. So I thought I'd repost it as it is about the class question that is so often obscured or outright hidden in US society. The obsession with identity politics is one of the methods used to avoid promoting the class issue in the US. They have done a good job of it, the mass media has convinced millions of Americans that they are middle class and this term is used to describe workers in the media. The serious journals of capitalism like the WSJ or Business Week use it though, they know that most working people never read them. 

Graham Platner: Another Rising Star Emerges in The Democratic Party

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED

05-31-2026

I agree with a lot of what he says, he speaks to the very basic things people desire and need. But he's not the first one to do that. And, he's right, capitalism makes us sick though he doesn't give the culprit a name.  What is his solution? As far as I can see it is in transforming the Democratic Party in to party that can bring about the reform he talks about in this video. I believe that experience teaches us that this is not the case.. 

Look at AOC. Look at Sanders or Mamdani, so many will fall in to place as they refuse to recognise that there is only one way any of these, mild reforms really, can be realised and that is through a mass movement, a working class mass movement that would welcome small capitalists like Graham Platner as allies in this struggle. 

Small capitalists, that middle layer, are also super exploited by big business. Some of them can move to the right but some can move to the left and be allies of  workers and the labor movement depending on the balance of class forces and the program, strategy and tactics of the workers' movement. They will, as will most workers, be drawn to a program that speaks to their needs and a movement that has the power to win it.

In addition, an independent political party of the working class opposed to both the big business parties is key, none of what he says is possible without that development. How that will develop is another issue, but as a mass movement on the ground develops it is inevitable in my mind that it will take political expression, candidates will arise out of that movement, maybe individually at first who can say. The ability to trap such movements and usher them in to the Democratic Party is waning. 

I will wait and see what he does when the power gives him options. Mamdani has no program for dealing with them. They are ruthless, they are killers. Both Democrats and Republicans have supported, armed and defended a genocide. Only a powerful and committed movement of the working class, committed to ending this system of production and building an economic system of production based on human need not profit can accomplish this social transformation. 

It's not about integrity, he seems like a decent guy. That's not the issue; the road to hell is paved with good intentions. 

The mid terms are looking to be very interesting indeed and we can return to this issue again.

Tortured For Trying To Get Food to Starving People. US and Israel, Rogue States.

Richard Mellor

A horrific account of what it was like when the Zionist regime kidnapped members of the flotilla that was attempting to get food to a starving population in Ga*a. The most disconcerting aspect of this is it’s not shocking at all. It’s par for the course for the Israeli Offense Forces and what this woman describes here has been happening to Palestinian Muslims for decades. This regime, backed by the US and its western partners considers itself untouchable but support for Israel in the US and throughout the world is declining. 

 

The woman in this video points out that some of her torturers had American accents. By most accounts there are some 20,000 Americans serving in the IOF. Many of them are dual citizens which is a result of the Zionist regime’s policy that anyone from any country in the world who claims to be Jewish immediately receives Israeli citizenship and the US has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.  Many of the settlers are Americans. These fanatics will be returning home and many have done so but are IOF reservists. They will be a threat to us all.

 

The victims of this latest kidnapping, a direct violation of international law, stress that what they are suffering does not compare to what the Palestinian people are forced to endure at the hands of this genocidal Apartheid,  state. The Zionists could not do this without the support from the US and the US taxpayer. But that support is waning.

 

The activities of this US settler colony in West Asia is a threat to Jewish people throughout the world. Zionism cannot survive without anti-Semitism, or Jew hatred, as Arabs are Semites.  Where anti-Semitism is absent, Zionism will create it, and it’s important to remember that.

 

Were it not for social media, despite its negative aspects, the true nature of the Israeli regime would have not been so exposed as it is now. The behavior we are witnessing the indigenous people of Palestine have been forced to endure for decades since the creation of Israel by western imperial powers over 70 years ago. 

 

This will not end well for Israel or the rest of the world. But end it will.

 

Ken Klippenstein Exclusive: New Intel Agency Eyes AI Data Center Critics

Exclusive: New Intel Agency Eyes AI Data Center Critics

Congress has its own CIA and it’s sounding the alarm about anti-AI grievances

Dan Boguslaw and Ken Klippenstein

May 28 2026

The intelligence report this story is based on comes courtesy of freelancer Daniel Boguslaw. If you’d like to see more like this, please become a paid subscriber so we can hire him! — Ken

Subscribed

As rage about artificial intelligence and the data centers powering it grows, Congress is taking notice — not with any legislation or law, but by spying on public opposition.

A newly created intelligence agency of the Congress (yes, it has its own now) is warning that legislators are in danger from an angry public. The U.S. Capitol Police Intelligence Services Bureau, created after January 6 and in parallel to the 18-member Executive Branch intelligence community, laid out the warning in an internal intelligence report produced in April.

“ISB has prepared this Intelligence Note to provide the US Capitol Police and law enforcement personnel with information related to recent threats and attacks likely linked to grievances concerning data centers,” the report says.

	Data Center Intelligence Note 420KB ∙ PDF file
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There’s only one problem: the report admits that there is no evidence of any actual threat to Congress.

“The US Capitol Police is not investigating any data center-motivated threats to Members of Congress,” the report says. 

Nonetheless, it goes on to warn that artificial intelligence “related policies introduced on the Hill and in local communities are likely to continue drawing opposition, increasing potential concerns for public officials.”

The Congressional intelligence office that authored the report was formed in the aftermath of January 6th and justified to bring the congressional police force “in line” with federal intelligence agencies and thereby gain more access to the massive existing intelligence community. The “intelligence note” was also distributed to police organizations and state-level fusion centers across the country.

“We now have a world class intelligence operation,” then-Chief of the U.S. Capitol Police Thomas Manger said last May. “We are significant players in the intelligence community in the Washington, D.C., region and, frankly, all over the country … Whereas before, we were basically just — we were consumers of information. The FBI would give us intelligence, other agencies would give us intelligence. Now we are gathering our own."

The motivation for the report appears to be an attack on the home of Indianapolis city councilman Ron Gibson. Gibson, a supporter of a local data center project, reported to police that someone had fired 13 gunshots through his door and left a note on his porch that read “No data centers.” No suspect has yet been arrested.

The intelligence report reveals that the Intelligence Services Bureau is monitoring social media content critical of data centers, looking for potential threats.

“You can be damn sure there are thousands more rounds where this comes from, and if you keep voting for data centers, we will all begin returning to the early days of American freedom and express ourselves via violence over words,” one user posted.

“Threatening the politicians who actually make decisions is actually logical,” another social media user posts. “I would rather shooters shoot up the senate than a high school [sic].”

Neither of these comments represents an actionable threat, the Capitol Police notes.

The report also summarizes crimes associated with data centers, including one committed over five years ago.

One example is that of Seth Pendley, who was arrested five years ago in 2021 and charged with attempting to blow up a data center in Northern Virginia. The Capitol Police connect him to Congress by noting that at some point he claimed to have “brought a sawed-off assault rifle into DC but left the weapon in his car, before proceeding to the US Capitol building but not entering it on January 6, 2021.” Pendley is incarcerated 600 miles away from D.C. in Terre Haute, Indiana.

What is clear is that data centers have become an overwhelmingly unpopular issue for American voters. A Gallup poll from this month found that seven in ten Americans oppose the local construction of data centers for AI. Their concerns range from the environmental pollution to the increased utility prices generated by data center water and electricity use.

The Intelligence Services Bureau report briefly touches on these concerns and more, identifying “possible government use of AI to spy on Americans,” “environmental impacts,” “rising energy costs,” and “loss of jobs in certain industries” as reasons why Americans oppose their construction. The report does not examine why activism regarding AI and data centers is anything other than free speech.

Grasping for evidence of increased criminal dangers, the report dedicates a full page to threats made against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is neither an elected official, nor within the purview of the Capitol Police.

Altman blamed the attack on “incendiary” news media coverage, writing in his blog that “I have underestimated the power of words and narratives.” In other words, AI leaders like Altman see the problem as one of controlling what the public says.

Congress, now in the intelligence business, is responding by focusing on the threat of the American public rather than the threat to the American public.

Subscribe if you wish Congress would pass laws, not intelligence dossiers