Naval Air Forces spokesman Cmdr. Ron Flanders confirmed to Task and Purpose on Friday that David Cole Tarkington had been booted from the service following an investigation into reports of his ties to the Atomwaffen Division.
“His separation was administrative in nature, and I am not able to go into details,” Flanders said, although he did not explicitly reveal whether the investigation led to the separation.
Tarkington’s affiliation with the neo-Nazi organization was alleged by Gizmodo last month in an exposé that described him as “a prolific Atomwaffen recruiter who is now a sailor in the US Navy.”
The article claimed Tarkington was a frequent poster under the screen name “The Yank” on the now-defunct white supremacist forum Iron March. While the message board has been offline since late 2017, an anonymous hacker published an archived SQL database dump in November 2019 which included Iron March members’ usernames, email addresses, forum posts, private messages and IP addresses.
“The Yank” was detailed to have sent 224 private messages and posted 377 times on Iron March from September 2014 to December 2016. Gizmodo said Tarkington attempted to enlist 12 Iron March users in the Atomwaffen Division within this period.
Tarkington, who joined the Navy in July 2019 and reached the position of naval aviation machinist mate's apprentice, is alleged to have recruited John Cameron Denton, a “former leader” of the Atomwaffen Division who was arrested on February 26 for his role in a swatting conspiracy, according to the US Department of Justice. Swatting refers to the act of making a deceptive call or alert to emergency services to get them to swarm a particular address.
According to the DoJ release on the matter, Denton “allegedly stated that it would be good if he was ‘raided’ for the swatting because it would be viewed as a top tier crime” and would bring publicity to the Atomwaffen Division. He currently faces up to five years in prison if convicted of conspiracy to commit an offense against the US.
A separate DoJ news release in February listed two individuals, Cameron Brandon Shea and Kaleb Cole, as affiliates of the neo-Nazi organization who assisted with its creation of Molotov cocktails and posters with Nazi symbols, guns and masked figures.
The two Atomwaffen Division associates were arrested for their roles in a conspiracy to “intimidate journalists and activists with whom they disagreed,” Assistant US Attorney General for National Security John Demers noted. Also arrested were Taylor Ashley Parker-Dipeppe and Johnny Roman Garza, the release noted.
