What is the Biden administration going to do about it?
Illustration by Deena So Oteh
In late October of 2020, Lance Corporal Joseph Mercurio, a Marine with the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment, hit “send” on an Instagram comment: “The Jewish religion is that of Satan,” he wrote responding to a photograph of me. His username on Instagram, “joe88mercurio,” incorporated a known neo-Nazi code: 88 stands for “Heil Hitler,” as “H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet.
In his bio, he stated his affiliation with the Marines: “USMC 0331,” a numerical designation indicating that he was responsible for handling machine guns in direct combat. Below it, he included a quote from an interview with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer “There is no equality in nature, there’s difference” and a quote from the white supremacist band Skrewdriver, from a song lauding Nazi troops in World War II as the “forces of light” in a “holy war.”
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