By ALLIE SIMON

Emma Cott, a New York Times reporter, sat down with one of the primary leaders of the white supremacist group, the Alt-Right movement, and uncovered the key to their success.

Cott interviewed Elliot Kline, an Alt-Right leader who goes by the pseudonym Eli Mosley, after British fascist Oswald Mosley who tried to bring Nazism to England. Mosley made his transition from a Twitter-troll to a leader of the alt-right movement when he helped plan the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017. The rally ended in one fatality and more than a dozen wounded and was considered a success by the alt-right standards.

Eli Mosley, one of the Alt-Right movement leaders.

At an Alt-Right member’s home in Alexandria, Va., Cott did an on-camera interview with Mosley in which he told her that there is a huge connection between the military and Alt-Right. He said that he served in Iraq and found it “boring.”

According to Mosley, lots of alt-right members served in the military and were “disillusioned with the American political system,” including himself.

Cott’s in-depth research following her sit-down with Mosley led her to ask questions. She contacted the Army for confirmation of Mosley’s deployment and to not much surprise, she found he had never actually been deployed. Cott’s strong reporting skills led her to conclude that Mosley’s identity in the Alt-Right movement was based on a lie.

Not only did Mosley lie about going to Iraq, but he refused to admit it was not an internal computer error that led the Army to tell Cott that he was never actually deployed.

Because Mosley’s position within the movement is to help bring people together who share a common goal of becoming so-called “activists” in the white supremacist community, he pretends to be apart of the target audience: veterans.

Cott pieced together the fraudulence within the alt-right movement by concluding that the movement is filled with “Holocaust deniers and pseudo-intellectuals who spout unsubstantiated theories about the science behind racial difference.”

Mosley’s trick of lying to gain entrance and ranking within the white supremacist community does not differ from the strategies of his fellow Neo-Nazis. Cott claims that alt-right is merely a place, “where a weekend warrior can pass himself off as a disillusioned veteran of war.” The interview is merely a spotlight on Mosley caught in a lie.