The U.S. military, straining to fill recruitment quotas during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, dropped longstanding bars against felons, neo-Nazis, people with psychiatric conditions, and recruits with racist tattoos — and that decision, investigative journalist Matt Kennard argues, helped build the conditions for the current Trump presidency.
Kennard laid out the case on The Chris Hedges Report on Wednesday, discussing his book Irregular Army, first published in 2012. Kennard is an investigative journalist and co-founder of Declassified UK, a news outlet covering British national security issues. He previously worked as a staff writer for the Financial Times and wrote The Racket, which he describes as documenting how the United States rigs the global economy for its elite.
What happens when the most powerful military in history opens its doors to the people it once kept out? Kennard says the answer is already arriving home. He told Hedges there are now two million veterans of the war on terror in the United States, and that figure includes thousands of neo-Nazi white supremacists and tens of thousands of gang members who, in his words, “are not coming home to become priests.”
The recruits who wanted training, not war
Kennard said he interviewed several neo-Nazi and hard-right veterans for the book, and that one of his most striking findings was their sense of betrayal and abandonment. Many of them, he said, did not believe in the war on terror at all.
“Many of them said the reason they signed up and went out to the Middle East was because they wanted to get training courtesy of the US taxpayer and bring that training back to the United States,” Kennard said. He described their stated goal as preparation for what they call “RaHoWa” — racial holy war — an envisioned civil war between the races that ends, in their view, with a white supremacist regime in Washington.
He recounted interviewing Forrest Fogarty, a neo-Nazi veteran. According to Kennard, Fogarty said a commander told him, “I like the fact you’re a Nazi,” and sent him on the hardest missions. Kennard said many of the neo-Nazi veterans he spoke with described being welcomed rather than scrutinized.
Kennard identified Fogarty as a member of Hammerskin Nation, which he said the Anti-Defamation League considers the most violent skinhead group in the United States.
A program for felons, and a massacre
Kennard tied the loosened standards to what he called the moral waiver program, which he said allowed felons and people guilty of serious misdemeanors to serve when they previously could not.
He pointed to the 2006 Mahmudiyah killings as a direct link between that policy and atrocity. Kennard said a group of US soldiers went to a house south of Baghdad, separated a 14-year-old girl from her family, killed her father and sisters, raped her, killed her, and burned the house down. The soldiers initially blamed insurgents, he said, a claim the military accepted until a soldier who had a crisis of conscience revealed what happened. Kennard said Steven D. Green was the leader of the group and that Green had entered the military through the moral waiver program with convictions that would previously have disqualified him.
From the Barracks to the Pentagon
Is this still history, or is it now policy? Kennard argued the dynamic has been institutionalized at the highest level. He pointed to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who Kennard said has a Jerusalem cross tattooed on his chest — imagery Kennard described as neo-crusader — and the Arabic word “kafir,” meaning infidel, tattooed on his arm.
Kennard noted reports that in 2021 Hegseth was barred from serving at President Joe Biden’s inauguration after a fellow service member flagged his tattoos as extremist. He said Hegseth told his confirmation hearing that the military would not focus on extremist activity, characterizing such efforts as a political witch hunt by liberals. Kennard called that a green light.
The White House unveiled a new counterterrorism strategy targeting narco-terrorists, Islamic terrorists, and what the Trump administration calls violent left-wing extremists, with the far right absent from the list. A 2024 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies finding that right-wing extremists killed 112 people over the past decade, compared with 13 killed in left-wing attacks and 82 killed in jihadist attacks.
The Trump administration has leveled federal fraud charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, accused SPLC of improperly raising millions of dollars to secretly pay leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups for inside information.
Not Only the Right: Democrat’s Have Problems Too
The collision of military service and Nazi-linked imagery does not stop at one party. Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine, admitted in October 2025, that a tattoo on his chest had been covered so it no longer reflects an image widely recognized as a Nazi symbol.
Platner, an oyster farmer and first-time political candidate, said he got the skull and crossbones tattoo in 2007, when he was in his 20s and in the Marine Corps. It happened during a night of drinking while he was on leave in Croatia, he said. Platner claims that he was unaware until recently that the image has been associated with Nazi police.
His campaign initially said he would remove the tattoo, but Platner said he chose to cover it with another tattoo because of the limited options where he lives in rural Maine.
“Going to a tattoo removal place is going to take a while,” Platner said. “I wanted this thing off my body.”
In an interview with WGME in October 2025, Platner said he had never been questioned about the tattoo’s connections to Nazi symbols in the 20 years he had it. He said it was there when he enlisted in the Army, which requires an examination for tattoos of hate symbols.
Trauma, cover-up, and whistleblowers
Kennard argued the story is not only about ideology but about trauma. He said U.S. soldiers have far higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than comparable militaries — citing estimates around 30 percent in the U.S. against four or five percent in the U.K. — and said they were not adequately treated. He said the military lengthened tours and shortened the gaps between them to make up for recruitment shortfalls, and gave soldiers prescription drugs to keep them fighting.
“They’re vaunted as heroes and they come back and they’re not and they’re treated like dirt effectively,” Kennard said, arguing that this disaffection pushed many veterans toward Trump’s rhetoric.
Kennard said institutions worked to cover up the problem, leaving whistleblowers as the main source of information. He named Jeffrey Stoleson, who he said served in Iraq and photographed gang graffiti — including references to MS-13, the Crips, and the Bloods — on blast walls around Baghdad and other cities. Kennard said Stoleson was effectively persecuted and eventually left the military.
The War on Terror Produced Trump
Kennard’s central thesis is that Trump is not the outlier his critics describe.
“The conditions for Trump were all created during the war on terror,” he said, pointing to the concentration of executive power, which Kennard attributed to former Vice President Dick Cheney and the surveillance powers of the Patriot Act.
The war on terror as a bipartisan project, Kennard said the Obama administration continued the same policies that the Democrats supported under President George W. Bush. Kennard drew a historical parallel to the rise of fascism after World War I in Italy and Germany, arguing that demagogues often exploit reservoirs of disaffected, disillusioned veterans.
Kennard described Hegseth as a Christian nationalist who he believes holds end-times beliefs, and said analysts have noted that those purged from the Pentagon have been disproportionately Black. Kennard said Hegseth has been accused of rape and paid off the accuser, and cited a New Yorker report that Hegseth led a chant to “kill all Muslims” at one point in his career.
On ICE, Kennard said the agency draws heavily from veterans and far-right groups such as the Proud Boys, and operates with what he called impunity signaled from the top by figures including White House adviser Stephen Miller.
Kennard closed by warning that the trend is global, pointing to Reform in the United Kingdom and Nigel Farage, and said the phenomenon’s heart is in Washington and with Trump. The good news, he offered with sarcasm, is incompetence: “I wouldn’t trust him to make me a sandwich,” he said of Hegseth, arguing the administration smashes things up without strategy.