Dave Emory’s entire lifetime of work is available on a flash drive that can be obtained HERE. The new drive is a 32-gigabyte drive that is current as of the programs and articles posted by the fall of 2017. The new drive (available for a tax-deductible contribution of $65.00 or more.)
WFMU-FM is podcasting For The Record–You can subscribe to the podcast HERE.
You can subscribe to e‑mail alerts from Spitfirelist.com HERE.
You can subscribe to RSS feed from Spitfirelist.com HERE.
You can subscribe to the comments made on programs and posts–an excellent source of information in, and of, itself HERE.
This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: This broadcast updates and highlights previous topics of discussion, focusing largely on online/Alt-Right/Nazi fascism and some of the malevolent communities that coalesce around various ideological manifestations of that phenomenon.
There has been little public recognition that many of the mass shooters whose activities have dominated much of the news cycle in recent years,have been immersed in one form or extremist far right ideology or another.
The release of ~1,200 pages of documents related to the Las Vegas shooting reveals that Stephen Paddock appears to have been “a sovereign citizen.” . . . . In the documents, those who encountered gunman Stephen Paddock say he expressed conspiratorial, anti-government beliefs characteristic of the far right . . . . But tantalizingly, people who encountered Paddock before his shooting say that he expressed conspiratorial, anti-government beliefs, which are characteristic of the far right. . . .”
Paddock’s actions are not unexpected for someone with his ideological mindset: ” . . . . In surveys conducted in 2014 and 2015, representatives of US law-enforcement ranked the risk of terrorism from the sovereign-citizen movement higher than the risk from Islamic extremism.”
Nazi/alt-right culture was a primary influence on accused Santa Fe (Texas) gunman Dimitrios Pagourtzis. ” . . . . Dimitrios Pagourtzis, the suspected gunman who opened fire at a Texas high school on Friday morning, apparently posted photos of neo-Nazi iconography online, according to social media accounts flagged by classmates and reviewed by The Daily Beast. . . . Other images on Pagourtzis’ now-deleted Facebook page suggest a possible interest in white supremacist groups. Pagourtzis uploaded a number of T‑shirts that feature Vaporwave-style designs. Vaporwave, a music and design movement, has spawned a related movement called Fashwave, which borrows the same aesthetic but applies them to neo-Nazi subjects. Pagourtzis’ Facebook header image was the cover of an album by musician Perturbator. Perturbator’s music has been co-opted by members of the Fashwave movement, BuzzFeed previously reported. Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer frequently includes Perturbator’s music in “Fashwave Fridays” posts. . . . .”
Initial press reports about the Santa Fe shooting discuss possible accomplices of Pagourtzis. Was he part of a group of some kind? “. . . . On Friday, authorities intended to question two other people: One was at the scene and had “suspicious reactions,” according to the governor, and another had drawn the scrutiny of investigators. . . .”
Pagourtzis, as we saw above, had taken to wearing a trench coat, even in 90 degree weather. Press reports have described him as a “copy-cat” killer, having imitated Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris of Columbine shooting fame. (Pagourtzis was too young to have memories of the incident, though he may well have absorbed information about the Columbine perpetrators.)
The media have, for the most part, not mentioned that Harris and Klebold were heavily influenced by Nazi culture. “. . . . Nineteen days before they were to graduate, Harris and Klebold seemed inseparable and troublesome. In Columbine’s hallways, they spoke broken German and referred often to ‘4–20,’ Hitler’s birthday and the day they chose for their assault. . . . Some Columbine students said the violent side of Harris and Klebold became more obvious in recent months. They became obsessively interested in World War II, Nazi imagery, Adolf Hitler. John House, 17, a Columbine senior, told reporters that when he went bowling with Klebold, ‘when he would do something good, he would shout ‘Heil Hitler’ and throw up his hand. It just made everyone mad.’ . . . .”
In FTR #995, we examined the Atomwaffen Neo-Nazi group. Atomwaffen member Andrew Oneschuk was about to join Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. ” . . . . . . . Andrew, who was one-eighth Ukrainian, took to the cause, chatting with fighters and their allies. He began formulating a plan to join the Azov Battalion, a notoriously brutal band of international fighters helping in the resistance against the Russians. . . . Andrew took it further, eventually adopting the online handle “Borovikov,” after a famous Russian neo-Nazi gang leader. That spring, he hung an SS flag in his bedroom as well as a giant swastika. . . .”
Online networking between resentful, sex-deprived men who call themselves “incels” (a contraction of “involuntary celibates”) overlap Nazi/Alt-Right elements. The ideological collision of the online “incels” and the #MeToo movement may well generate some truly pathological violence. “. . . . The alt-right, right-wing populism, men’s rights groups and a renewed white supremacist movement have capitalized on many white men’s feeling of loss in recent years. The groups vary in how they diagnose society’s ills and whom they blame, but they provide a sense of meaning and place for their followers. And as different extremist groups connect online, they draw on one another’s membership bases, tactics and worldviews, allowing membership in one group to become a gateway to other extremist ideologies as well. Today, for example, posts on Incel.me, an incel forum, debate joining forces with the alt-right and argue that Jews are to blame for incels’ oppression. On one thread, users fantasized that if they were dictators, they would not only create harems and enslave women, but also ‘gas the Jews.’ . . . . By dividing the world into us-versus-them and describing vast injustice at the hands of the supposedly powerful, these groups, experts say, can prime adherents for violence. . . .”
Incel culture is metastasizing into “lone-wolf”/leaderless resistance terrorism. ” . . . . In 2014, a gaming award ceremony set to honor the feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian received a bomb threat; an anonymous harasser threatened to detonate a device unless her award was rescinded. Before Milo Yiannopoulos was a well-known alt-right figure, feminists knew him as one of the primary architects of Gamergate, a movement of young men who harassed and threatened women in the videogaming industry. Two fans of Mr. Yiannopoulos were charged with shooting a protester outside of one of his speeches. . . .”
Nazi killer Anders Breivik embodied the overlap between Alt-Right white supremacy and institutionalized misogyny: ” . . . . On July 22, Breivik slaughtered 77 of his countrymen, most of them teenagers, in Oslo and at a summer camp on the island of Utøya, because he thought they or their parents were the kinds of ‘politically correct’ liberals who were enabling Muslim immigration. But Breivik was almost as voluble on the subjects of feminism, the family, and fathers’ rights as he was on Islam. ‘The most direct threat to the family is ‘divorce on demand,’ ’ he wrote in the manifesto he posted just before he began his deadly spree. ‘The system must be reformed so that the father will be awarded custody rights by default.’ The manosphere lit up. Said one approving poster at The Spearhead, an online men’s rights magazine for the ‘defense of ourselves, our families and our fellow men’: ‘What could be more ‘an eye for an eye’ than to kill the children of those who were so willing to destroy men’s families and destroy the homeland of men?’ . . . .”
The “psycho-political” polarization of the #MeToo movement and the “incels” misogynist community holds devastating potential.
Program Highlights Include:
- Journalist Ronan Farrow’s authorship of the New Yorker article that took down Harvey Weinstein. (For more discussion of the #MeToo Movement and weaponized feminism, see FTR #‘s 998, 999, 1000, 1001.)
- Farrow’s State Department work suggestive of involvement with the intelligence community. “. . . . Post-law school: Lands a job at the State Department, as a special advisor focusing on conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan. . . .”
- Farrow’s co-authorship of the New Yorker article that took down former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a major Trump nemesis, who was also criticizing and investigating other individuals and institutions associated with the Trump/GOP power elite. “. . . . Schneiderman had already been declared ‘the man the banks fear most’ by the liberal magazine ‘The American Prospect.’ . . . . In the days since November 9, Schneiderman fired off a letter warning Trump not to drop White House support of Obama’s Clean Power Plan, introduced a bill in the state Legislature to give New Yorkers cost-free contraception if the Affordable Care Act is dismantled, threatened to sue after Trump froze EPA funding of clean air and water programs, and joined a lawsuit that argues that Trump’s executive order on immigration is not just unconstitutional and un-American, but it brings profound harm to the residents of New York State. . . . He’s on the opposite side of the Clean Power Plan fight from Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, since named head of the EPA, and who Schneiderman labeled a ‘dangerous and unqualified choice.’ . . . . ”
- Schneiderman was also investigating the powerful, well-connected NXIVM cult, one of whose associates was Roger Stone, the long-time Trump/GOP dirty trickster who signaled the #MeToo takedown of Senator Al Franken.
1a. There has been little public recognition that many of the mass shooters whose activities have dominated much of the news cycle in recent years,have been immersed in one form or extremist far right ideology or another.
The release of ~1,200 pages of documents related to the Las Vegas shooting reveals that Stephen Paddock appears to have been “a sovereign citizen.”
In the documents, those who encountered gunman Stephen Paddock say he expressed conspiratorial, anti-government beliefs characteristic of the far right . . . .
. . . . But tantalizingly, people who encountered Paddock before his shooting say that he expressed conspiratorial, anti-government beliefs, which are characteristic of the far right.
In a handwritten statement, one woman says she sat near Paddock in a diner just a few days before the shooting, while out with her son. She said she heard him and a companion discussing the 25th anniversary of the Ruby Ridge standoff and the Waco siege. (Each of these incidents became touchstones for a rising anti-government militia movement in the 1990s.)
She says she heard him and his companion saying that courtroom flags with golden fringes are not real flags. The belief that gold-fringed flags are those of a foreign jurisdiction, or “admiralty flags”, is characteristic of so-called “sovereign citizens”, who believe, among other things, that the current US government, and its laws, are illegitimate.
“At the time,” her statement says, “I thought, ‘Strange guys’ and wanted to leave.”
Another man, himself currently in jail, says he met Paddock three weeks before the shooting for an abortive firearms transaction, in the carpark of a Bass Pro Shop. The man was selling schematic diagrams for an auto sear, a device that would convert semi-automatic weapons to full automatic fire. Paddock asked him to make the device for him, and the man refused.
At this point Paddock launched into a rant about “anti-government stuff … Fema camps”. Paddock said that the evacuation of people by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) after Hurricane Katrina was a a “dry run for law enforcement and military to start kickin’ down doors and … confiscating guns”.
“Somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves,” the man says Paddock told him. “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”
Why would someone be worried about Fema camps? Isn’t Fema there to help in emergencies?
Yes, but for decades Fema has been incorporated into conspiracy theories promulgated by the anti-government far right.
Some conspiracy-minded Americans believe that Fema’s emergency mission is a cover story. The real purpose of the agency is to build and maintain concentration camps, which will house dissident “patriots” after a declaration of martial law. The supposition is that the US government will turn on its citizens under the direction of the “New World Order”.
This sounds implausible. Where did this idea come from?
The short answer is that it has been a staple of the radical right for perhaps three decades.
The first version of the Fema camp conspiracy theory was in the newsletters of the far right “Posse Comitatus” movement in the early 1980s. It was an update, or an adaptation, of the fears of foreign subversion that have animated the American populist right since the high tide of nineteenth-century nativism.
Posse Comitatus, active especially in western states from the late 1960s, believed that the US was controlled by a Jewish conspiracy, which it referred to as ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government). It also promoted “Christian identity” theology, which held that the white race was the lost tribe of Israel, and that Jews were in league with Satan. At some point, they thought, America’s imposter government would round up and imprison white men.
Apart from developing anti-government beliefs, Posse Comitatus’s crank legal theories laid the groundwork for a still-flourishing “sovereign citizen” movement.
But the FEMA theory really took off during the rise of the militia movement in the 1990s. Movement entrepreneurs like John Trochmann of the Militia of Montana elaborated the story in newsletters and in his infamous “Blue Book”, which was filled with pictures allegedly showing camps, trains loaded with Russian tanks and the arrival of “black helicopters” in preparation for the supposedly imminent New World Order takeover.
Trochmann and others also claimed to have pictures of the facilities which would be used as concentration camps. These turned out to be army training grounds, federal prisons or as-yet unoccupied bases.
These theories were nevertheless prevalent in a movement that some scholars say had up to 5 million sympathizers at its height. Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people when he bombed a federal building in 1995, also emerged from this anti-government milieu. . . . .
1b. Note that members of the sovereign citizen movement are seen as domestic terrorists:
“Sovereign Citizen Movement;” wikipedia.org
. . . . Many members of the sovereign citizen movement believe that the United States government is illegitimate.[11] JJ MacNab, who writes for Forbes about anti-government extremism, has described the sovereign-citizen movement as consisting of individuals who believe that the county sheriff is the most powerful law-enforcement officer in the country, with authority superior to that of any federal agent, elected official, or local law-enforcement official.[12] This belief comes from the movement’s origins in the white-extremist group Posse Comitatus.[13][citation needed]
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) classifies some sovereign citizens (“sovereign citizen extremists”) as domestic terrorists.[14] In 2010 the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) estimated that approximately 100,000 Americans were “hard-core sovereign believers”, with another 200,000 “just starting out by testing sovereign techniques for resisting everything from speeding tickets to drug charges”.[15]
In surveys conducted in 2014 and 2015, representatives of US law-enforcement ranked the risk of terrorism from the sovereign-citizen movement higher than the risk from Islamic extremism.
2a. Nazi/alt-right culture was a primary influence on accused Santa Fe (Texas) gunman Dimitrios Pagourtzis.
Before allegedly killing at least eight people, he apparently posted online images of a Nazi medal, a musician favored by the alt-right, and a ‘born to kill’ T‑shirt.
Dimitrios Pagourtzis, the suspected gunman who opened fire at a Texas high school on Friday morning, apparently posted photos of neo-Nazi iconography online, according to social media accounts flagged by classmates and reviewed by The Daily Beast. . . .
. . . . On April 30, Pagourtzis apparently posted a T‑shirt with “born to kill” printed on the front, boasting that it was custom-made.
That same day, Pagourtzis posted multiple pictures of a duster jacket emblazoned with a variety of symbols including the Iron Cross, a German military award last given by the Nazis, and other pins. He said he equated the Iron Cross with “bravery.” Pagourtzis said a hammer and sickle meant “rebellion,” a rising sun meant “kamikaze tactics,” and a baphomet meant “evil.” . . . .
. . . . “The sketchy thing is, he wore a full-on black trench coat to school every day,” Thurman said, adding she hadn’t had a class with him since eighth grade. Montemayor said that in retrospect, Pagourtzis’ trench coat was odd.
“Why would you wear a trench coat when it’s 100 degrees outside? When he first started wearing that trench coat, it was during the winter.” But in the hotter months, Pagourtzis didn’t take it off.
Pagourtzis began wearing the coat at the beginning of the year.
“It’s like 90 degrees outside and this guy is still wearing a trench coat,” Thurman said. “It should have been noted. That’s a red flag right there.”
Other images on Pagourtzis’ now-deleted Facebook page suggest a possible interest in white supremacist groups. Pagourtzis uploaded a number of T‑shirts that feature Vaporwave-style designs. Vaporwave, a music and design movement, has spawned a related movement called Fashwave, which borrows the same aesthetic but applies them to neo-Nazi subjects.
Pagourtzis’ Facebook header image was the cover of an album by musician Perturbator. Perturbator’s music has been co-opted by members of the Fashwave movement, BuzzFeed previously reported. Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer frequently includes Perturbator’s music in “Fashwave Fridays” posts. . . .
2b. Initial press reports about the Santa Fe shooting discuss possible accomplices of Pagourtzis. Was he part of a group of some kind?
. . . . By Friday afternoon, the suspect was in custody at the Galveston County jail, where he is being held for capital murder. Federal authorities are seeking search warrants to find explosive devices at two residences. . . . Police said the gunman brought several of these devices into the school. It was unclear whether any went off. . . .
. . . . On Friday, authorities intended to question two other people: One was at the scene and had “suspicious reactions,” according to the governor, and another had drawn the scrutiny of investigators. . . .
3. Pagourtzis, as we saw above, had taken to wearing a trench coat, even in 90 degree weather. Press reports have described him as a “copy-cat” killer, having imitated Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris of Columbine shooting fame. (Pagourtzis was too young to have memories of the incident, though he may well have absorbed information about the Columbine perpetrators.)
The media, for the most part, have not mentioned that Harris and Klebold were heavily influenced by Nazi culture.
They hated jocks, admired Nazis and scorned normalcy. They fancied themselves devotees of the Gothic subculture, even though they thrilled to the violence denounced by much of that fantasy world. They were white supremacists, but loved music by anti-racist rock bands.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were bright young men who became social outcasts at their suburban Denver high school, and then built their own internal society by plucking strands from the pop whirlwind of cyberspace and fantasy games, the soundtrack of American youth, and a netherworld that glamorizes Nazi symbols and terrorist violence. . . .
. . . . An initial sketch of Harris and Klebold and the Trenchcoat Mafia to which they claimed membership emerged yesterday from interviews with friends, fellow students and neighbors, and from police and school officials. If the boys left behind any detailed explanation of their horrific final cries, no one has found it yet. . . .
. . . . Nineteen days before they were to graduate, Harris and Klebold seemed inseparable and troublesome. In Columbine’s hallways, they spoke broken German and referred often to “4–20,” Hitler’s birthday and the day they chose for their assault. . . .
. . . . Some Columbine students said the violent side of Harris and Klebold became more obvious in recent months. They became obsessively interested in World War II, Nazi imagery, Adolf Hitler.
John House, 17, a Columbine senior, told reporters that when he went bowling with Klebold, “when he would do something good, he would shout ‘Heil Hitler’ and throw up his hand. It just made everyone mad.” . . . .
4. In FTR #995, we examined the Atomwaffen Neo-Nazi group. Atomwaffen member Andrew Oneschuk was about to join Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.
“All-American Nazis” by Janet Reitman; Rolling Stone; 05/02/2018
How a senseless double murder in Florida exposed the rise of an organized fascist youth movement in the United States
Andrew Oneschuk and Jeremy Himmelman had been living in Tampa, Florida, for two weeks when, on Friday, May 19th, 2017, their roommate Devon Arthurs picked up an AK-47 rifle and shot them at close range. Oneschuk had just turned 18. Himmelman was 22. They’d been staying in a lush gated community near the University of South Florida, in a two-bedroom, terra-cotta condo rented by their fourth roommate, 21-year-old Brandon Russell, a rich kid from the Bahamas who worked at a gun shop and served in the Florida National Guard. Oneschuk, a prep-school dropout, was hoping to become a Navy SEAL. Himmelman also considered the military, though he was more of a drifter. Eighteen-year-old Arthurs, a pale, freckled kid who sometimes called himself “Khalid,” was unemployed and spent most of his time playing video games. All four had met one another online, in forums and chat rooms popular with the more extreme segment of the so-called alt-right. . . .
. . . . Increasingly, Andrew obsessed over issues like climate change and the Syrian refugee crisis. He’d also embraced an apocalyptic and conspiratorial worldview in which Western civilization was doomed, and he, a white male, was a victim. He was amazed at his parents’ complacency. Didn’t they realize blacks were responsible for 80 percent of the crime in America? he’d falsely claim, using statistics that seemed drawn from nowhere. “America is shit,” he said. “My generation is failing.” . . . .
. . . . Andrew, who was one-eighth Ukrainian, took to the cause, chatting with fighters and their allies. He began formulating a plan to join the Azov Battalion, a notoriously brutal band of international fighters helping in the resistance against the Russians. In January 2015, Andrew bought a fake passport and a one-way ticket to Kiev. The day before he was set to leave, having packed his camping gear and arranged for a limousine to Logan Airport, he casually told his mother on the way home from school, “I think I’m going to go to Ukraine.” . . . .
Emily had been concerned when Andrew went through his German-army phase, though some of her friends told her that they’d also thought the SS was cool when they were younger. “I don’t think they understood they were actually bad guys,” says Emily. “It’s more like the bad guys in Indiana Jones with the cool car.” But Andrew took it further, eventually adopting the online handle “Borovikov,” after a famous Russian neo-Nazi gang leader. That spring, he hung an SS flag in his bedroom as well as a giant swastika. . . .
5. Online networking between resentful, sex-deprived men who call themselves “incels” (a contraction of “involuntary celibates”) overlap Nazi/Alt-Right elements. The ideological collision of the online “incels” and the #MeToo movement may well generate some truly pathological violence.
. . . . . ‘Aggrieved Entitlement’
For white men across the Western world, special rights and privileges once came as a birthright. Even those who lacked wealth or power were assured a status above women and minorities.
Though they still enjoy preferential status in virtually every realm, from the boardroom to the courthouse, social forces like the Me Too movement are challenging that status. To some, any steps toward equality, however modest, feel like a threat.
“There’s just this sense that ‘we used to be in charge, and now we’re not the only ones in charge, so we’ve been attacked,’” said Lilliana Mason, a University of Maryland social scientist who studies group identity and politics.
“If you have a sense that you’re owed, that your deserved status is being threatened, then you start to fight for it,” Ms. Mason said.
Often that takes the form of lashing out at members of whatever social group dared to challenge the established hierarchy.
“You’d think that young men would be treated nicely by society because we are the builders and protectors of civilization,” wrote a user named connorWM1996 on r/MGTOW, a Reddit message board for men trying to escape what they see as oppression by female-dominated society. “But no of course not. We are treated like idiots who aren’t good for anything.”
Some of these men may go in search of more extreme ideologies that make sense of their feelings of anger and loss, and seem to provide a solution. Others merely stumble into them.
“Plenty of people feel like they don’t have status and don’t revolt about it,” Ms. Mason said. “But the people who do revolt are people who feel that they are owed status, and they’re not being given the status that traditional society should give them.”
The incel movement tells its adherents that society’s rules are engineered to unfairly deprive them of sex. That worldview lets them see themselves as both victims, made lonely by a vast conspiracy, and as superior, for their unique understanding of the truth.
Greasing Extremism’s Rails
Extremism has always existed, but until recently its spread was limited. To begin with, there was the basic challenge to any collective action: how to find and gather like-minded people dispersed across great distances. Beyond that, there was the social stigma against any ideas perceived as outside the mainstream.Social media has lowered both of those barriers.
Now, men looking for a way to explain — and justify — their anger need only a few clicks to encounter entire communities built up around promises to restore male power and control. In the past, those might have been relegated to a few bars or living rooms, but now they exist in darker corners of some of the most popular social networking sites. . . .
. . . . The alt-right, right-wing populism, men’s rights groups and a renewed white supremacist movement have capitalized on many white men’s feeling of loss in recent years. The groups vary in how they diagnose society’s ills and whom they blame, but they provide a sense of meaning and place for their followers.
And as different extremist groups connect online, they draw on one another’s membership bases, tactics and worldviews, allowing membership in one group to become a gateway to other extremist ideologies as well.
Today, for example, posts on Incel.me, an incel forum, debate joining forces with the alt-right and argue that Jews are to blame for incels’ oppression. On one thread, users fantasized that if they were dictators, they would not only create harems and enslave women, but also “gas the Jews.”
By dividing the world into us-versus-them and describing vast injustice at the hands of the supposedly powerful, these groups, experts say, can prime adherents for violence. . . .
6. Incel culture is metastasizing into “lone-wolf”/leaderless resistance terrorism.
“When Misogynists Become Terrorists” by Jessica Valenti; The New York Times; 4/26/2018.
. . . . Later, after Mr. Rodger’s 140-page manifesto was released — outlining his fury over still being a “kissless virgin” — his name became synonymous on misogynist forums with revenge on women who reject men. Chris Harper-Mercer, who shot and killed nine people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon in 2015, mentioned Mr. Rodger by name in a manifesto he wrote in which he complained about being 26 years old with “no girlfriend, a virgin.”
And now, in the aftermath of the attack in Toronto, men on incel communities are hailing the killer as a “new saint,” with commenters changing their avatars to Mr. Minassian’s picture in tribute.
Feminists have been warning against these online hate groups and their propensity for real-life violence for over a decade. I know because I’m one of the people who has been issuing increasingly dire warnings. After I started a feminist blog in 2004, I became a target of men’s‑rights groups who were angry with women about everything from custody battles to the false notion that most women lie about rape. In 2011, I had to flee my house with my young daughter on the advice of law enforcement, because one of these groups put me on a “registry” of women to target.
I was far from the only one. In 2014, a gaming award ceremony set to honor the feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian received a bomb threat; an anonymous harasser threatened to detonate a device unless her award was rescinded. Before Milo Yiannopoulos was a well-known alt-right figure, feminists knew him as one of the primary architects of Gamergate, a movement of young men who harassed and threatened women in the videogaming industry. Two fans of Mr. Yiannopoulos were charged with shooting a protester outside of one of his speeches.
Part of the problem is that American culture still largely sees men’s sexism as something innate rather than deviant. And in a world where sexism is deemed natural, the misogynist tendencies of mass shooters become afterthoughts rather than predictable and stark warnings.
The truth is that in addition to not protecting women, we are failing boys: failing to raise them to believe they can be men without inflicting pain on others, failing to teach them that they are not entitled to women’s sexual attention and failing to allow them an outlet for understandable human fear and foibles that will not label them “weak” or unworthy.
Not every attack is preventable, but the misogyny that drives them is. To stop all of this, we must trust women when they point out that receiving streams of death threats on Twitter is not normal and that online communities strategizing about how to rape women are much more than just idle chatter. There is no reason another massacre should happen.
7. Nazi killer Anders Breivik embodied the overlap between Alt-Right white supremacy and institutionalized misogyny:
“Leader’s Suicide Brings Attention to Men’s Rights Movement” by Arthur Goldwag; Intelligence Report [Southern Poverty Law Center]; 3/1/2012.
A little-noticed suicide last year focused attention on the hard-lined fringe of the men’s right movement. It’s not a pretty picture.
After 10 years of custody battles, court-ordered counseling and imminent imprisonment for non-payment of child support, Thomas James Ball, a leader of the Worcester branch of the Massachusetts-based Fatherhood Coalition, had reached his limit. On June 15, 2011, he doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire just outside the Cheshire County, N.H., Courthouse. He was dead within minutes.
In a lengthy “Last Statement,” which arrived posthumously at the Keene Sentinel, Tom Ball told his story. All he had done, he said, was smack his 4‑year-old daughter and bloody her mouth after she licked his hand as he was putting her to bed. Feminist-crafted anti-domestic violence legislation did the rest. “Twenty-five years ago,” he wrote, “the federal government declared war on men. It is time to see how committed they are to their cause. It is time, boys, to give them a taste of war.” Calling for all-out insurrection, he offered tips on making Molotov cocktails and urged his readers to use them against courthouses and police stations. “There will be some casualties in this war,” he predicted. “Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.”
For people who associate the men’s and fathers’ rights movements with New Age drum circles in the woods, the ferocity of Ball’s rhetoric, the horror of his act, and, in particular, the widespread and blatantly misogynistic reaction to it may come as something of a revelation. When the feminist Amanda Marcotte, a bête noire of the men’s rights movement, remarked that “setting yourself on fire is an extremely effective tool if your goal is to make your ex-wife’s life a living hell,” a poster at the blog Misandry.com went ballistic. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” he raged. “She is evil and such a vile evil that she is a disease that needs to be cut out of the human [consciousness] just like the rest of the femanazi ass harpies.”
Ball’s suicide brought attention to an underworld of misogynists, woman-haters whose fury goes well beyond criticism of the family court system, domestic violence laws, and false rape accusations. There are literally hundreds of websites, blogs and forums devoted to attacking virtually all women (or, at least, Westernized ones) — the so-called “manosphere,” which now also includes a tribute page for Tom Ball (“He Died For Our Children”). While some of them voice legitimate and sometimes disturbing complaints about the treatment of men, what is most remarkable is the misogynistic tone that pervades so many. Women are routinely maligned as sluts, gold-diggers, temptresses and worse; overly sympathetic men are dubbed “manginas”; and police and other officials are called their armed enablers. Even Ball — who did not directly blame his ex-wife for his troubles, but instead depicted her and their three children as co-victims of the authorities — vilified “man-hating feminists” as evil destroyers of all that is good.
This kind of woman-hatred is increasingly visible in most Western societies, and it tends to be allied with other anti-modern emotions — opposition to same-sex marriage, to non-Christian immigration, to women in the workplace, and even, in some cases, to the advancement of African Americans. Just a few weeks after Ball’s death, while scorch marks were still visible on the sidewalk in Keene, N.H., that was made clear once more by a Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik.
On July 22, Breivik slaughtered 77 of his countrymen, most of them teenagers, in Oslo and at a summer camp on the island of Utøya, because he thought they or their parents were the kinds of “politically correct” liberals who were enabling Muslim immigration. But Breivik was almost as voluble on the subjects of feminism, the family, and fathers’ rights as he was on Islam. “The most direct threat to the family is ‘divorce on demand,’” he wrote in the manifesto he posted just before he began his deadly spree. “The system must be reformed so that the father will be awarded custody rights by default.”
The manosphere lit up. Said one approving poster at The Spearhead, an online men’s rights magazine for the “defense of ourselves, our families and our fellow men”: “What could be more ‘an eye for an eye’ than to kill the children of those who were so willing to destroy men’s families and destroy the homeland of men?”
‘The Homeland of Men’
The men’s rights movement, also referred to as the fathers’ rights movement, is made up of a number of disparate, often overlapping, types of groups and individuals. Some most certainly do have legitimate grievances, having endured prison, impoverishment or heartrending separations from genuinely loved children.
Jocelyn Crowley, a Rutgers political scientist and the author of Defiant Dads: Fathers’ Rights Activists in America, says that most men who join real (as opposed to virtual) men’s rights groups aren’t seeking to attack the family court system so much as they are simply struggling to navigate it. What they talk most about when they meet face to face, she says, are strategies to deal with their ex-partners and have better relationships with their children.
But Molly Dragiewicz, a criminologist at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and the author of Equality With a Vengeance: Men’s Rights Groups, Battered Women, and Antifeminist Backlash, argues that cases in which fathers are badly treated by courts and other officials are not remotely the norm. The small percentage of divorces that end up in litigation are disproportionately those where abuse and other issues make joint custody a dubious proposition. Even when a woman can satisfactorily document her ex-husband’s abuse, Dragiewicz says, she is no more likely to receive full custody of her children than if she couldn’t.
The men’s movement also includes mail-order-bride shoppers, unregenerate batterers, and wannabe pickup artists who are eager to learn the secrets of “game”—the psychological tricks that supposedly make it easy to seduce women. George Sodini, who confided his seething rage at women to his blog before shooting 12 women, three of them fatally, was one of the latter. Before his 2009 murder spree at a Pittsburgh-area gym, he was a student — though clearly not a very apt one — of R. Don Steele, the author of How to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35. “I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me over an 18 or 25-year period,” Sodini wrote with the kind of pathos presumably typical of Steele’s readers.
Some take an inordinate interest in extremely young women, or fetishize what they see as the ultra-feminine (read: docile) characteristics of South American and Asian women. Others, who have internalized Christian “headship” doctrine, are desperately seeking the “submissive” women such doctrine celebrates. Still others are simply sexually awkward, and nonplussed and befuddled by society’s changing mores. The common denominator is their resentment of feminism and of females in general.
“It’s ironic,” the feminist writer Amanda Marcotte observes. “These [misogynist Web] sites owe their existence to feminism’s successes. At some point in the last couple of years, the zeitgeist hit a tipping point where female power — Hillary Clinton’s, Rachel Maddow’s, even Sarah Palin’s — stopped being questioned. Being sexist has become less acceptable than it used to be. This makes some men particularly anxious.” At the same time, of course, domestic violence and sex crimes are much more likely to be prosecuted than they were even a decade ago. Shelters, social services and legal aid are more available to most battered women than in the past.
But some experts argue that men’s rights groups have been remarkably successful. The groups, says Rita Smith, director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, “have taken over the way courts deal with custody issues, particularly when there are allegations of abuse,” largely by convincing them that there is such a thing as “Parental Alienation Syndrome” (PAS). (PAS is a supposed clinical disorder in which a child compulsively belittles one parent due to indoctrination by the other — frequently leveling false allegations of abuse. It is not recognized as a clinical disorder by either the American Psychiatric Association or the World Health Organization.) Citing studies that show that false domestic abuse accusations against men are far less common than men’s groups and PAS enthusiasts claim, Smith says the groups nevertheless have “been able to get custody evaluators, mediators, guardians ad litem and child protective service workers to believe that women and children lie about abuse.”
Threats and Abuse
One kind of abuse that is undeniable is the vilification of individual women on certain men’s group websites. The best example of that may be Register-Her, a registry of women who “have caused significant harm to innocent individuals either by the direct action of crimes like rape, assault, child molestation and murder, or by the false accusation of crimes against others.” The site was set up by Paul Elam, the blogger behind A Voice for Men, less than two weeks after Ball’s suicide. “If Mary Jane Rottencrotch decides to falsely accuse her husband of domestic violence in order to get the upper hand in a divorce,” Elam boasted on his Internet radio show, “we can publish all her personal information on the website, including her name, address, phone number … even her routes to and from work.”
Under a headline reading, “Why are these women not in prison?” the site features photos and information about some 250 alleged malefactors, including notorious women like Lorena Bobbitt and Tonya Harding, although Elam hasn’t made good on his threat to publish home addresses or phone numbers. Many of those listed received prison sentences for various crimes, but large numbers were acquitted in court, while others were never accused of any lawbreaking. A well-known feminist, for example, is listed for “anti-male bigotry,” which is compared to racism.
Elam’s site can be frightening to its targets. In one case, he offered a cash reward to the first reader to ferret out a pseudonymous feminist blogger’s real name. In another, Elam singled out a part-time blogger at ChicagoNow who describes herself as a “vegetarian park activist with two baby girls.” The woman’s mistake was to write about her discomfort with male adults helping female toddlers in the bathroom at her daughter’s preschool. The blogger conceded that she was being sexist, but wrote that “I’d rather be wrong than find out if I’m right.”
After the woman was listed, she was widely attacked on men’s movement sites. “I don’t always use the word ‘cunt’ to describe a woman,” one poster raged, “but when I do it’s because of reasons like these.” Shocked, the “Mommy blogger” took down her original post and apologized for her “demonization of men.”
It wasn’t enough. “You targeted fathers, and just fathers,” Elam rebuked her. “It strikes me that you have never really been held to account for any of your actions in life. It is quite likely that the concept of complete, selfless accountability is just completely foreign to you.” Over at the Reddit Mens Rights forum, another poster fumed: “This entire episode should be a warning to all those male hating feminists out there who believe that they are safe screaming their hate messages on the web. Finally, they are held accountable for their hate messages and finally the rest of the world will find out exactly what type of depraved people they really are.”
“I don’t know if Thomas James Ball ever visited this site,” Elam wrote on his blog when he started Register-Her. “What I do believe is, though, that he, if convinced to stay alive, would have been a hell of a soldier in this war.”
Soldiers in the War
The first shots in this so-called war on feminism were fired 22 years before Tom Ball’s suicide. On Dec. 6, 1989, Marc Lépine, a troubled 25-year-old computer student, strolled into the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Canada, carrying a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife. He walked into a classroom, ordered the men to leave, and lined the women up against a wall.
“I am fighting feminism,” he announced before opening fire. “You’re women, you’re going to be engineers. You’re all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists.”
By the time he turned the gun on himself, 14 women were dead and 10 were wounded; four men were hurt as well. The suicide note in Lépine’s pocket contained a list of 19 “radical feminists” he hoped to kill, and this: “I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker. … They want to keep the advantages of women … while seizing for themselves those of men.”
Today, that kind of rage is often directed at all women, not only perceived feminists. “Women don’t need the powers-that-be to get them to hate and use men,” the blogger Alcuin wrote recently. “They have always used men; maybe they have always hated us too.” Added another blogger, Angry Harry: “There are now, literally, billions of dollars, numerous empires, and millions of jobs that depend on the public swallowing the idea that women need to be defended from men.”
“A word to the wise,” offered the blogger known as Rebuking Feminism. “The animals women have become want one thing, resources and genes. … See them as the animals they have become and plan … accordingly.”
And many are quick to endorse violence against women. “There are women, and plenty of them, for which [sic] a solid ass kicking would be the least they deserve,” Paul Elam wrote in an essay with the provocative title, “When is it OK to Punch Your Wife?” “The real question here is not whether these women deserve the business end of a right hook, they obviously do, and some of them deserve one hard enough to leave them in an unconscious, innocuous pile on the ground if it serves to protect the innocent from imminent harm. The real question is whether men deserve to be able to physically defend themselves from assault … from a woman.”
For some, it’s more than just talk. In 2006, Darren Mack, a member of a fathers’ rights group in Reno, Nev., stabbed his estranged wife to death and then shot and wounded the family court judge who was handling his divorce.
That kind of violence continues right up to the present.
In Seal Beach, Calif. last Oct. 12, a day after Scott Evans Dekraai and his ex-wife had been in court to fight over custody of their 8‑year-old son (Dekraai had 56% custody but wanted full custody and “final decision making authority” on matters of the child’s education and medical treatment), Dekraai walked into the hair salon where his ex-wife worked armed with three handguns. There, he allegedly shot seven women, six of them fatally; he also is accused of killing two men — the salon’s owner, as he attempted to flee, and a man in a car outside.
8a. Ronan Farrow wrote the New Yorker piece that launched the Harvey Weinstein takedown.
8b. An important detail about Ronan Farrow, who played a fundamental role in breaking the Harvey Weinstein case, concerns his background in the State Department, specializing in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Farrow is the son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen. ” . . . . Post-law school: Lands a job at the State Department, as a special advisor focusing on conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan. . . .”
Farrow’s background strongly suggests intelligence community involvement.
. . . . Post-law school: Lands a job at the State Department, as a special advisor focusing on conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan. . . .
8c. Farrow continued his work for State in 2011. ” . . . . 2011: Starts working alongside Hillary Clinton with a lengthy title: Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for Global Youth Issues and director of the State Department’s Global Youth Issues office. . . .”
Harvey Weinstein was a major donor to the Democrats, including Hillary Clinton. Might Farrow have been doing opposition research on Clinton while working for her State Department?
. . . . 2011: Starts working alongside Hillary Clinton with a lengthy title: Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for Global Youth Issues and director of the State Department’s Global Youth Issues office. . . .
8d. Farrow also co-wrote the New Yorker article that took down New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a major Trump opponent who presided over the lawsuit against Trump University.
8e. Schneiderman was actively going after other members of the oligarchy as well.
“Will This Man Take Down Donald Trump?” by David Freedlander; Politico; 2/3/2017.
. . . . Schneiderman took up the state’s existing case against Trump University—New York wanted the school to drop the “university” from its name, since it was not chartered as an institution of higher learning and lacked a license to offer instruction—and as he pursued it over the next five years, he became the target of a relentless series of personal attacks from the Trump camp. Trump filed an ethics complaint alleging that Schneiderman offered to drop the suit in exchange for donations; he went on television to denounce Schneiderman as a hack and a lightweight, and said he was wasting millions of taxpayer dollars when he should have been going after Wall Street. (Never mind that Schneiderman had already been declared “the man the banks fear most” by the liberal magazine “The American Prospect.”) “The whole scorched-earth strategy towards those who would challenge him, we got a preview of,” says Schneiderman.
The Trump University suit eventually was settled for $25 million days after the election, despite the then president-elect’s repeated pledges never to settle. Schneiderman could have left it at that. But Schneiderman has let it be known that Trump is still in his crosshairs. In the days since November 9, Schneiderman fired off a letter warning Trump not to drop White House support of Obama’s Clean Power Plan, introduced a bill in the state Legislature to give New Yorkers cost-free contraception if the Affordable Care Act is dismantled, threatened to sue after Trump froze EPA funding of clean air and water programs, and joined a lawsuit that argues that Trump’s executive order on immigration is not just unconstitutional and un-American, but it brings profound harm to the residents of New York State.
He has a record of going not only after Trump, but going after people now in Trumpworld. He’s on the opposite side of the Clean Power Plan fight from Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, since named head of the EPA, and who Schneiderman labeled a “dangerous and unqualified choice.” He’s gone after Rex Tillerson, who as CEO of ExxonMobil defended his company from a Schneiderman investigation; since the election he’s begun investigating a reverse-mortgage business once led by Steven Mnuchin, the nominee to be the next Treasury secretary. . . .
8f. Prior to his professional demise, Schneiderman was investigating the NXIVM cult, with its many connections to powerful people, including Trump/GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone, who signaled the #MeToo takedown of Senator Al Franken. Might he have been linked to the takedown of Schneiderman?
. . . The Times Union reported on March 25 that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office was conducting a separate investigation of a nonprofit foundation associated with NXIVM that allegedly sponsored brain-activity and other human behavioral studies without any apparent oversight, according to court records. That investigation has been suspended due to the federal criminal investigation, officials said. . . .
. . . . The for-profit corporation NXIVM is based on a self-improvement curriculum called “Rational Inquiry.” Other high-profile names — including Republican campaign strategist and self-described political “dirty trickster” Roger Stone. . . . have taken NXIVM’s executive success courses or were found to have ties to the organization, according to Times Union reporting. . . .
Well look at that: It turns out the guy charged with intentionally starting the massive “Holy Fire” wildfire on the Cleveland National Forest in Southern California last week is a self-declared sovereign citizen. Surprise!:
“Forrest Gordon Clark has described himself on social media as an “interim congressman for Republic for Kansas” and has been involved in an organization that believes the U.S. government is not legitimate, according to J.J. MacNab, an expert on anti-government extremists.”
Yep, the guy who started the fire is a self-declared congressman for one of the many fake governments the sovereigns set up. In particular, Clark appears to be part of the “Restore America Plan” alternative government. Clark was even at its first gathering in 2010:
And while the precise motive for setting this fire isn’t quite clear, the fact that Clark actually sent a text messages to the area’s volunteer fire chief the week before the fires started threatening to start a fire makes it pretty clear that he wanted to get caught (or was just out of his mind):
And when trying to determine a motive, it’s worth noting that, as is typically the case with sovereign citizens, Clark’s beliefs went included just about any whacky conspiracy theory out there, including the QAnon/Pizzagate hoax. He is also convinced that the FBI murdered witnesses to the 2017 Las Vegas domestic terror attack by Stephen Paddock:
Once again, don’t forget that Stephen Paddock, himself, appears to have been a sovereign citizen who was terrified of government FEMA camps and was convinced that “somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves”.
So, as with the case of Stephen Paddock, we once again are facing an act by a sovereign citizen that could be the action of a lunatic but also fits the profile of the far right strategy of ‘leaderless resistance’ and calculated random acts of domestic terror.
It’s one of the signature characteristics of the sovereign movement: the members are so overtly detached from reality that it’s hard to determine if there’s any strategy behind their seemingly random and insane acts of violence or this just the manifestation of the insanity that infests the movement.
It’s also a good time to recall that one of the key strategies of far right organizations for seizing power is to create one horrible event after another for the purpose of effectively driving a society insane and taking advantage of vulnerabilities that collective insanity creates. It’s something that’s going to be increasingly important to keep in mind as the sovereigns and other far right individuals continue their domestic terror campaigns: their overt insanity is intended to be infectious. Maybe bullets are intended to be the infectious vectors or maybe fire. Either way, the violence and mayhem is meant to spread. It’s the underlying method to the madness.
It looks like the FBI investigation into the motive behind Stephen Paddock’s massacre in Las Vegas is officially ended with a “we have no idea what his motives were” conclusion. The FBI did conclude that Paddock was likely seeking some form of infamy and may have been inspire to follow in footsteps of his bank robber father. But beyond that, the FBI found no indication of particular motive and concluded that the gunman was not directed or inspired by any group and was not seeking to further any agenda.
This conclusion of no inspiration by any group or agenda of course is completely contradicted by the witnesses who claim to have overheard Paddock in the days before the shooting expressing views in line with the Sovereign Citizens. Recall the account of a woman claimed she sat near Paddock in a diner days before the attack where he talked about with a companion about the 25th anniversary of the Ruby Ridge standoff and the Waco siege and heard him and his companion saying that courtroom flags with golden fringes are not real flags, in keeping with the Sovereign Citizen belief that gold-fringed flags are those of a foreign jurisdiction, or “admiralty flags”. And recall the accounts of a man who claimed he Paddock tried to buy from him a device that would convert semi-automatic rifles to fully automatic weapons. The man claimed that Paddock launched into a rant about “anti-government stuff … Fema camps”. The man claims that Paddock told him that the evacuation of people by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) after Hurricane Katrina was a a “dry run for law enforcement and military to start kickin’ down doors and … confiscating guns”. And he says Paddock told him, “Somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves...Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”
So not only are there multiple independent accounts that point strongly towards Paddock being a follower of Sovereign Citizen ideologies, but if that account about Paddock saying “Somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves...Sometimes sacrifices have to be made” is accurate, that strongly implies that Paddock would want to carrying out his politically motivated attack while hiding his political motive. After all, if someone who is concerned about the government confiscating guns and wants to “wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves” proceeds to carry out a mass slaughter of the nature Paddock did (where he was found surrounded by an arsenal of guns in his hotel room), there is one very twisted obvious logic behind that kind of terrorism: carrying out an unprecedented massacre in order to prompt a wave of government gun confiscations with the hope of seeing the American far right backlash.
In other words, based on the circumstantial evidence, it looks like Paddock was making the bet that if he carried out an attack so horrific that the American government couldn’t resist some degree of gun confiscations, the mass armed insurrection that the American far right has long pined for would finally happen in response. And if that was indeed Paddock’s plan, of course he wouldn’t want to make his ideology clear. So based on the circumstantial publicly available evidence, not only does it look like Paddock had a political motive inspired by Sovereign Citizen beliefs but he also had a motive to hide those beliefs and for some reason the FBI has a motive to ignore this in its final report
“The gunman was not directed or inspired by any group and was not seeking to further any agenda.” He did not leave a manifesto or suicide note, and federal agents believe he had planned to fatally shoot himself after the attack, according to the report.
Paddock wasn’t directed or inspired by any group and wasn’t seeking to further any agenda. Those were the final findings of the FBI, which appears to completely ignore the witnesses accounts that point towards a heavily radicalized and deeply political individual who wanted to “wake up” America about the threat of government gun seizures.
The Las Vegas police also concluded that Paddock was a loner with no religious or political affiliations:
So we’ll see what, if any, additional information is eventually discovered about Paddock, his politics, and motive behind the attack. It’s hard to imagine that the FBI’s final report is really going to be the final examination of this case, especially given the “we have no idea” nature of their conclusions. But for now, for whatever reason, Paddock’s radicalized political beliefs appear to be such a sensitive subject by investigators that they’re acting like he didn’t have any.
Oh look, another American neo-Nazi domestic terrorist: a lieutenant in the US Coast Guard, Christophe Hasson, was arrested for plotting to a mass terror campaign modeled after Anders Breivik’s manifesto, with the idea of sparking a domestic conflict for the purpose of creating a white homeland. In addition to finding a stockpile of guns, Hasson appeared to have an interest in biological weapons and targeting the US food supply. In a 2017 letter, Hasson wrote, “I think a plague would be most successful but how do I acquire the needed/Spanish flu, botulism, anthrax not sure yet but will find something.” He also said in the letter that he would start with the biological attacks targeting the food supply and then would begin a “bombing/sniper campaign.”
There’s a parallel with the bizarre case of Cesar Sayoc, the Trump super-fan who mailed fake pipe-bombs to a Democratic politicians and media personalities: In addition to being a big Trump fan, Hasson had a long assassination target list of a number of Democratic politicians and left-leaning cable news personalities like Chris Hayes and Don Lemon. His web search history indicates that he’s done a number of searches about the kind of physical protection these individuals have and their home addresses. So the guy was very interested in causing both mass casualties but also targeted killings. The particular hit list investigators found was apparently created on January 19th of this year.
There’s also a big parallel with what appears to have been Stephen Paddock’s motive for the Las Vegas massacre: committing a horrific crime for the purpose of triggering a government crackdown that will fuel a ‘white backlash’ and hopefully trigger a civil war. Recall how Paddock was overheard by multiple witnesses shortly before the Vegas attack using sovereign citizen terminology, ranting about ‘FEMA camps’, and saying things like “Somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves...Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.” In the case of Hasson, he wrote that the “liberalist/globalist ideology is destroying traditional peoples (especially) white,” amd, “No way to counteract without violence. It should push for more crack down bringing more people to our side. Much blood will have to be spilled to get whitey off the couch. For some no amount of blood will be enough. They will die as will the traitors who actively work toward our demise. Looking to Russia with hopeful eyes or any land that despises the west’s liberalism. Excluding, of course, the Muslim scum. Who rightfully despite the west’s liberal degeneracy.”
Hasson wrote about his plans to increase the planned unrest by targeting both law enforcement and protestors: “During unrest target both sides to increase tension...In other words provoke gov/police to over react which should help to escalate violence. BLM protests or other left crap would be ideal to incite to violence.” He also wrote, “Food/fuel may be the key, if I can disrupt two or three weeks. When (people) start to loot steal protest dress as cop and shoot them. Burn down Apt complex, bar the doors first. Thermite on gas station tank.”
It’s also noteworthy that Hasson wrote a letter in September of 2017 to someone described as a “known American neo-Nazi leader” where he expresses his desires to do something to spark the fight for a white homeland. The letter was apparently sent seven weeks after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” neo-Nazi march. The Vegas shooting was on October 1, 2017, which is right around seven weeks after Charlottesville. So right around the same time Paddock commits the Vegas massacre, Hasson is writing to an American neo-Nazi leader about his desires to more or less do the same thing, but on an even larger scale.
So Hasson was explicitly planning on doing something that would bring a “crack down” of some sort that would bring “more people to our side” because “Much blood will have to be spilled to get whitey off the couch.” And he had a long list of left-wing assassination targets and wanted to become the American Anders Breivik. So it sounds like, once again, we have an American neo-Nazi domestic terror plot designed to catalyze a “crack down” (likely gun control legislation) that will “get whitey off the couch”. But in this case, the ‘getting whitey off the couch’ plans involve biowarfare:
“In a chilling court document, federal prosecutors explain how Hasson appeared to be researching the Norwegian terrorist, studying the mass killer’s manifesto and gathering weapons, ammunition and other supplies with the intention of carrying out a similar attack in the United States in an effort to become the American Anders Breivik. The Norwegian killed 77 people in his 2011 attack. Prosecutors did not reveal if Hasson had a specific date in mind for an attack and also didn’t say how he was discovered.”
An aspiring American Anders Breivik. That appears to be the primary template Christopher Hasson was working off of in his plans to “kill almost every last person on earth.” And central to his strategy is to commit a terror campaign that will provoke a government response which will “get whitey off the couch” and spark the kind of civil war that can exploited by the neo-Nazis to create a new ‘white homeland’. It also sounds quite a bit like Stephen Paddock’s motive:
Interestingly, it was in September 2017, seven weeks after the Charlottesville rally (so right before the Stephen Paddock Vegas massacre of October 1, 2017), Hasson sends a letter to an American neo-Nazi leader explaining how he was a skinhead before joining the military and his desire to use “focused violence” to “change minds” in the pursuit of a white homeland:
He also wrote another letter in September 2017 to unknown recipients about his use biological warfare and target the food supplies before starting a bombing/sniper campaign that would target both law enforcement and protestors for the purpose of inciting general violence:
Then there’s his long left-leaning assassination target list. It was apparently created on January 19th, underscoring that this plan was actively being worked on by Hasson very recently:
And, of course, there’s the anti-Semitism:
It’s also noteworthy that Hasson worked at the Coast Guard’s DC headquarters since 2016. Before that he was in the Marines and National Guard. So despite being a skinhead before joining the military he managed to join three different branches and ended up at the Coast Guard’s DC headquarters. It highlights how far up the chain of command a murderous neo-Nazi can apparently get without people noticing:
So we’re seeing shades of quite a few past neo-Nazi terrorist plots in Hasson’s scheme, which is no surprise given that he appears to have been inspired by a number of different neo-Nazi terrorists. And the common theme is a desperate desire to strategically inflict violence for the purpose of causing more violence and general mayhem for the ultimate purpose of facilitating some sort of neo-Nazi revolution and an eventual ‘white homeland’. And for the goal of killing off almost everyone on earth. It’s a reminder that when you hear neo-Nazis express a desire for a ‘white homeland’, the homeland they invariably have in mind is the entire planet and it will be achieved by killing off virtually everyone else.
In light of the recently discovered neo-Nazi plot by US coast guard lieutenant Christopher Hasson to carry out some sort of series of mass terror attacks designed to kill as many people as possible and inspired by the “leaderless resistance” model and the fact that Stephen Paddock’s attack on Las Vegas appears to have following the same “leaderless resistance” model, here’s an article that reminds us that “leaderless resistance” is becoming increasingly popular on the far right, which each new attack inspiring future attacks. Which is, of course, exactly how the strategy is supposed to work.
And it also makes a point that’s going to have grim fascinating political repercussions over the next couple of years as the calls for impeaching President Trump increase: the fact that the Trump administration is so friendly to the neo-Nazis actually fuels this leaderless resistance strategy in two key ways. First, the overt sympathy the Trump administration has for the far right sends the signal that the federal government won’t be cracking down on the movements if they act. Secondly, the neo-Nazis are sympathetic for Trump and so the persecution narrative Trump has created for himself where everything is a ‘witch hunt’ by the deep state out to get him can actually fuel some of this neo-Nazi violence, either because the neo-Nazis legitimately want revenge or because they simply feel the political climate would make it a great recruitment opportunity. Hasson, for instance, was a major Trump fan and had been doing online searches for terms like “civil war if trump impeached” in the weeks before his arrest. And that raises the question of whether or not the US is in store for a wave of neo-Nazi domestic terror attacks should the investigations into Trump start leading towards impeachment:
“The year and a half since the Unite the Right far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, ended in mayhem, the death of a protester and political turmoil, has been a rough time for the public facing and ostensibly political arm of the white supremacist movement in America. Those who marched in Charlottesville have to a large degree retreated, fleeing lawsuits, doxxing and personal scandal. Still, while public marches appear to be fewer and fewer, the period since Charlottesville has also been marred by individual episodes of extreme violence, suggesting that the wave of white supremacy that seemed to crest in Charlottesville is not so much receding as just changing in nature.”
It’s a ghastly possibility: the political failure of Charlottesville, which was supposed to be a kind of ‘coming out’ moment for the far right, was followed by a period of extreme violence by individuals, suggesting that we’re seeing a change in tactics. The hope that Trump would mainstream the neo-Nazis (instead of just playing footsie with them in public) dissipated and now the far right is more violent than it has been in years, despite having one of the most sympathetic administrations they could have hoped for. The far right’s affinity for Trump appears to be fueling violence, which is not unprecedented. It’s what happened under Reagan:
And that affinity for Trump appears to be making the neo-Nazis especially violent in response to the threat of removing Trump from office. Or the threat of Trump simply not winning reelection in 2020:
And then there’s the fact that neo-Nazi groups dedicated to terrorist “leaderless resistance” and mass casualty attacks already exist, like Attomwaffen:
And according to Keegan Hankes, of the SPLC, the ideas of leaderless resistance have become ubiquitous on the far right. Even the ‘moderate’ parts of the far right are embracing the idea. And that means the potential pool of candidates for the kind of suicide terror attacks that Hasson was plotting and Paddock carried out is probably a lot bigger than it used to be:
So that’s all something to keep in mind as we enter into the possible impeachment phase of the Trump era. The US obviously can’t allow the threat of neo-Nazi violence to effectively blackmail the nation into not impeaching a president who should be removed from office, but it doesn’t hurt to be aware of the fact that most ‘deplorable’ elements of Trump’s base happen to be neo-Nazis who increasingly follow the ‘leader resistance’ domestic terror model and generally view Trump as their dear leader.
The white supremacist strategy ‘leaderless resistance’ involving the mass slaughter of civilians made its way to New Zealand yesterday with the twin terror attacks on two mosques, killing at least 49 people and injuring dozens of others. And, surprise!, it appears that the attacker was inspired by Anders Breivik. That’s according to his manifesto the 28 year old Australian born attacker, Brenton Tarrant, put online just before the attack. He also livestreamed the attack on Facebook, adopting an ISIS-style approach of using the grizzly images of the attack to essentially celebrate and promote it to his target audience of fellow white supremacists.
It’s also worth noting that, at this time, it’s still not entirely clear if Tarrant was working alone or had help and police have not yet said if he was responsible for the shooting at both mosques. So it’s possible this was done by neo-Nazi team and Tarrant is essentially playing a role as the ‘lone gunman’. Two other armed people were arrested but the nature of their involvement remains a mystery.
Tarrant’s manifesto largely echoes the same ‘whites are being replaced by non-whites’ arguments found in Breiviks’ manifesto and most white nationalist content these days. Tarrant stated the intent of the attack was to intimidate Muslims and general and make them less inclined to immigrate to Western nations. He also framed it as revenge for Muslim terror attacks in Europe, with a specific reference to a 2017 attack in Stockholm. Interestingly, Tarrant’s manifesto also claims that he got approval for the attack from the same “Knights Templar” group that Breivik also claimed he was in contact with.
Tarrant describes himself as a white nationalist and fascist and covered his rifle with Nazi symbolism (like a “14”). His manifesto included a “black sun”. In keeping with a theme we see over and over with these ‘leaderless resistance’ attacks, Tarrant claims that one of the goals of the attack was to further polarize and destabilize the West with the hope of sparking a civil war in the United States that will result in a separate ethnostates:
“The gunman rambled on about the supposed aims for the attack, which included reducing immigration by intimidating immigrants and driving a wedge between NATO and the Turkish people. He also said he hoped to further polarize and destabilize the West, and spark a civil war in the United States that would ultimately result in a separation of races. The attack has had the opposite impact, with condemnation of the bloodshed pouring in from all quarters of the globe, and calls for unity against hatred and violence.”
Neo-nazi terror attacks intended to provoke backlashes and spark civil wars. It’s an increasingly prominent theme in the age of Trump. So it’s particularly appropriate that Tarrant specifically named Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose”:
But it appears to be Anders Breivik in particular who most directly inspired the attack. And he even claimed to be in contact with the same Knights Templar organization Breivik also claimed to have been in contact with before his terrorist attack in Oslo:
So it will be quite interesting to see what help Tarrant actually had. Especially since two other people were arrested at the scene of the crime and were armed and police have yet to determine whether or not Tarrant was responsible for both mosque attacks:
So there’s an abundance of overlap with past neo-Nazi terror attacks. Which, of course, is by design since the ‘leaderless resistance’ terror paradigm is intended to inspire copycats. It’s part of what makes the streaming video of the attack so disturbing: it’s exactly the kind of content that the most sociopathic members of society will gravitate towards and that is the target audience for neo-Nazi recruitment.
And as the following piece by Josh Marshall reminds us, the general worldview expressed by Tarrant in his manifesto — a fixation on ‘white genocide’, ‘replacement’, and hysteria over non-white immigration — are now basically mainstream ideas for the contemporary American right-wing:
“We’re digging into the details of this horrific massacre that unfolded overnight (US time) in New Zealand. There is a 74 page manifesto in which the alleged killer described his aims, motivations, etc. There are some oddities to the document in that it combines explicit declarations of support for some of the most notorious racist, anti-immigrant murderers of the early 21st century. It is also filled with some of what we might commonly on social media call trolling, sarcastically or provocatively overstated comments. We shouldn’t see this as in conflict. It’s a mode of expression deeply rooted in the subculture. But I want to take some time to describe how deeply tied this killer’s worldview, politics and aims are rooted in the rightist anti-immigrant politics which are now mainstreamed in the United States”
Whether it’s the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Dylan Roof’s massacre, the slaughter in Pittsburgh, the far right hysteria over ‘white genocide’ and ‘replacement’ is one of the defining features of today’s American far right. And that includes far right Republicans in congress like Steve King:
So, with all that in mind, check out the response President Trump had to a question about the attacks and his views on the dangers of white nationalism: Trump is, of course, not very concerned about it because “I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems”:
““I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems. I guess if you look at what happened in New Zealand perhaps that’s the case. I don’t know enough about it yet. They’re just learning about the person and the people involved. But it’s certainly a terrible thing, a terrible thing.””
It’s just a small group of people. Right.
And notice how Trump says “they’re just learning about the person and the people involved” which implicitly leaves open the possibility that the Tarrant and his possible accomplices aren’t actually neo-Nazis. And, lo and behold, that is exactly the theory being pushed by Rush Limbaugh. According to Limbaugh, the shooter is a “leftist who writes the manifesto and then goes out and performs the deed purposely to smear his political enemies, knowing he’s going to get shot in the process”:
“Citing how “crazy” the left is, Limbaugh added that there is an “ongoing theory” that the shooter is a “leftist who writes the manifesto and then goes out and performs the deed purposely to smear his political enemies, knowing he’s going to get shot in the process.””
Keep in mind that a central part of the strategy employed by Tarrant, Roof, and the rest of these neo-Nazi terrorists is to carry out an attack that is so horrific that it provokes some sort of backlash like new gun control laws. And then that backlash is supposed to catalyze a far right counter-backlash of whites leading to a civil war. And a key ingredient for that counter-backlash is the sense that the initial backlash is unjustified and targeting white conservatives. So by pushing the meme that this attack was actually part of some sort of diabolical left-wing attack designed to smear right-wingers, Limbaugh is actually playing a critical role in this entire ‘leaderless resistance-to-civil-war’ strategy.
So as we can see, the people behind the attack in New Zealand intended to be part of a global neo-Nazi disinformation/propaganda campaign intended to divide the West and spark civil wars. And within that broader disinformation/propaganda campaign and they have A LOT of global accomplices.
Here’s a pair of stories that should be viewed in the context of the much larger story of the systematic manner US law enforcement downplays the domestic terror threats presented by the US far right:
First, here’s a story from back in November about a Washington State elected representative, Matt Shea, who was found to be distributing a rather disturbing manual. It was a four-page document outlining the “Biblical Basis for War”, and includes a point-by-point description of how a Christian theocracy could be established by waging a hypothetical holy war. Oh, and Shea has been reelected four times:
“Five-term Washington state Rep. Matt Shea has been circulating a manual for holy war in the United States, the Seattle Times reported.”
A five-term state representative was distributing this manual. A manual that advocated killing all males who don’t submit to Shea’s planned Biblical theocracy:
And Shea doesn’t just have ties to white nationalists. He’s also a big Cliven Bundy fan. Of course:
And note how Shea didn’t appear to refute any of the content of this how-to manual after it was leaked. He doubled-down:
So that all got referred to the FBI, where is was presumably it was considered just harmless puffery by a bunch of harmless good ‘ol boys.
And here’s an update on the kinds of activities Rep. Shea has been up to with three fellow far right schemers: according to leaked chats between Shea and a group of associates, they were seriously plotting survielling, harassing, and violently attacking members of Antifa. This was apparently all prompted by the right-wing hoax about ‘Antifa supersoldiers’ planning violent attacks November 4th, 2017. Recall how even DHS appeared to be taken in by this blatant hoax. Shea and his associates also took this seriously, or at least pretended to. And in their anticipation of this antifa supersoldier attack they planned on conducting psy-ops that included stalking the homes, cars, workplaces, and even child daycare locations of local Antifa members. The scheming went beyond survielling to talk of actual violence and waging some sort of false flag psychological warfare operation using the symbols of Russian anti-communist groups as a way of spreading paranoia:
“The men talked about the broad outlines of what they appeared to consider to be a looming civil war. They also discussed using symbols from what they understood to be Russian anti-communist groups as a way of spreading paranoia among their adversaries.”
A looming civil war. That’s how Shea and his co-conspirators appeared to interpret the internet joke about an “Antifa revolt” on November 4th. And note how one of the four co-conspirators, Anthony Bosworth, participated in the Bundy standoff at Malheur national wildlife refuge apparently at Shea’s request. So Shea is quite active in the area of stoking armed insurrections:
And in addition to ideas like stalking their targets’ children’s daycare centers there were a number of suggestions of violence. And Shea never protested:
The plans also included using the symbols of a Russian anti-communist group to sow paranoia. Keep in mind, if they had pulled this part off it’s entirely possible we would have seen a national freakout over Russia anti-communist groups operating in the US:
And note how, despite FBI investigation into Shea’s distribution of the holy war pamphlet back in November, that doesn’t appear to have had any repercussions for Shea in the Washington state legislature other than losing some donors. He’s still a representative in good standing and introduced bills that get Republican support:
While Shea denies there were any real plans for violence, the Republican sheriff of Spokane county comes right out and calls Shea’s associates dangerous. And when one of the co-conspirator, Jack Robertson, is asked about the leaking of these plans, he makes a reference to wanting a warrior leader if you’re heading into war, which isn’t a very compelling denial of the charges:
So that’s another example of the kind of far right domestic terror threat that the FBI and DHS apparently view as not a real threat.
And in related news, remember Christopher Hasson, the neo-Nazi member of the Coast Guard who was found plotting mass terror attacks and a list of targets? Yeah, it turns out the government hasn’t actually charged Hasson with any terror-related charges so his public defender is trying to get him released. Yep.
Here’s a followup on the story of Matt Shea, the far right Washington State representative who published a manual on waging Biblical Holy war and was discovered to have taken part in a chat group where they plotted survielling, harassing, and potentially assaulting antifa members: Shea continues to issue no denials that he took part in the plot but asserts that he personally never advocated violence and was just trying to protect his community from dangerous antifa members.
Now Shea is trying to discredit Jason Wilson, the author of the Guardian article that revealed Shea’s secret plot. What is Shea doing to discredit Wilson? By linking to an article critical of Wilson from the Australian website XYZ.net.au. Oh, and it turns out XYZ is white nationalist website:
“XYZ is akin to a slightly more extreme Australian version of Breitbart News that regularly takes aim at mainstream outlets such as the Guardian and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.”
A slightly more extreme Australian version of Breitbart News. In other words, the kind of site that laments opposition to White Nationalism and questions the Holocaust. That’s the site that wrote the article Shea used to defend himself:
And, again, note how Shea continues to not dispute any of the facts regarding his participation in the chat group where they plotting their spying/psyop/violence campaign against antifa members:
And note the Washington State Republicans’ response to Shea’s linking to a white nationalist website to defend himself against accusations that he’s a white nationalist: House minority leader J.T. Wilcox explains he talked to Shea about it and that was it. As Wilcox put it, “He can link to whatever he wants...Everybody has their own Facebook page”. In other words, it’s no big deal:
So it appears the Washington State Republicans have a bit of a ‘Steve King’ problem on their hands. Recall how Iowa Representative Steve King has been openly flirting with white nationalism for years without any sort of rebuke from his Republican colleagues. King’s antics kept getting more and more overt until he finally crossed some sort of white-supremacist-love threshold that even the GOP could no longer ignore when he questioned whey terms like “white supremacy” and “white nationalism” are considered negative now. But even though King was stripped of his committee assignments after all that, the GOP still hasn’t kicked him out of the party.
Will Matt Shea ever finally cross the kind of line that gets him seriously rebuked by his fellow Washington State Republicans? We’ll see, but at this point it’s clear that distributing a manual on waging Holy War and engaging in a secret far right plot to stalk, harass, and beat up antifa members doesn’t actually cross that line for Washington State’s GOP.
And in related news, Steve King just claimed that the experience of being stripped of his committee assignments gave him insight into how Jesus felt after getting crucified.
Here’s a profoundly disturbing update to the case of Christopher Hasson, the neo-Nazi Coast Guard officer who was caught stockpiling weapons, compiled a hit-list of prominent left-wing media personalities and politicians, and reportedly dreams of killing off almost everyone on the planet using biological weapons:
For starters, the guy was just ordered to be released on bail, albeit under supervision. This is due to the fact that prosecutors have yet to bring terrorism charges against him. He was called a “domestic terrorist” in the initial court filings but he didn’t face actual terrorism charges. When Hasson was detained in February the judge agreed to keep Hasson in custody but said he was willing to revisit his decision if prosecutors didn’t bring more serious charges within two weeks. Those new charges hadn’t happened and Hasson’s defense attorney has been pushing to get him released from custody while awaiting trial. Hasson’s attorney also wrote in a court filing last week that prosecutors recently disclosed that they don’t expect to seek any additional charges. So it remains to be seen if terrorism charges, or anything more than the existing weapons and drug possession charges, will be brought forward but in a new court filing this week prosecutors urged the judge to keep him in custody pending trial on firearms and weapons charges and the judge clearly disagreed.
The second highly disturbing update to this case is in the new court filing prosecutors issued they made a chilling allegation: Hassan planned on assassinating Supreme Court justices. Specifically, Hasson did an internet search for ‘are supreme court justices protected’ about two weeks before he searched for the home addresses of two Supreme Court justices “within minutes before and after searching firearm sales websites.” Prosecutors also note he was in illegal possession of unregistered and unmarked silencers. So the neo-Nazi Coast Guard lieutenant who appears to have been plotting a targeted assassination campaign with the goal of triggering a race war and mass murder on a much larger scale just got release on bail.
First, here’s an article about the new court filing that mentions Hasson’s plans for assassinating Supreme Court justices, his possession of silencers, and the then-ongoing fight for Hasson’s release due to a lack of terrorism charges:
“During the February detention hearing, U.S. Magistrate Judge Charles Day agreed to keep Hasson held in custody but said he was willing to revisit his decision if prosecutors didn’t bring more serious charges within two weeks.”
All they needed to do was bring terrorism charges to prevent Hasson from being released pending trial. But somehow, despite the abundance of evidence, those charges were never brought forward. And according to Hasson’s attorney, the prosecutors told her last week that there were be no additional charges beyond the existing weapons and drug charges. Prosecutors did label Hasson a “domestic terrorist” in their February court filing but never actually charged him with plotting terror:
And this lack of terror charges took place despite the fact that Hasson’s search history demonstrates an interest in assassinating two Supreme Court justices:
And then there’s the fact that Hasson sent himself a draft of letter he was sending to a neo-Nazi leader were Hasson advocated for “focused violence”, which is exactly what assassinating Supreme Court justices should be considered: strategic focused neo-Nazi violence:
Now we’re learning that he head illegal silencers too:
And none of that was enough to keep Hasson detained because he was never actually charged with any terrorism-related offenses:
“U.S. Magistrate Judge Charles Day noted on Thursday that 50-year-old Christopher Hasson hasn’t been charged with any terrorism related offenses. Hasson was arrested Feb. 15 and is awaiting trial on firearms and drug charges. Prosecutors say he created a hit list of prominent Democrats, two Supreme Court justices, network TV journalists and social media company executives.”
So it’s going to be quite interesting to see what the conditions are for Hasson’s eventual release. What’s the safe and appropriate way to release someone who was plotting both mass casualty terror attacks and targeted assassinations? We’ll see what the court decides.
It’s also worth asking the question of what would have happened to Hasson if he wasn’t facing gun and drug charges? What if his guns were all legal and he didn’t have all that illegal tramadol. Would he be facing any charges at all at this point?
Finally, it’s worth asking the question of what kind of constitutional crisis could be sparked if a neo-Nazi kills off one of the left-leaning Supreme Court justices only to have President Trump — a president who has made stoking stochastic white nationalist terror one of his specialties — nominates another far right nut job as a replacement. What kind of damage what that do to the long-term credibility of the court? Let’s hope that question remains a hypothetical. Especially now that the US government just sent a signal to every neo-Nazi in the US that they’ll get kid glove treatment. Or, rather, another signal to every neo-Nazi in the US that they’ll get kid glove treatment.
Oh look, another neo-Nazi was caught preparing a series of domestic terror attacks. This time in Las Vegas. Again.
First, recall that multiple witnesses recounted Steven Paddock expressing far right ‘sovereign citizen’ views before his attack on a Las Vegas and ranted about how “Somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves,” and “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.” So this latest report of a newly discovered neo-Nazi terror attack on Las Vegas is really the discovery of a followup neo-Nazi attack on Vegas following Paddock’s attack, despite the fact that there appears to be a deep official reluctance to acknowledge that Paddock was a far right domestic terrorist.
The newly discovered planned attack involves a 23 year old man, Conor Climo, found to be using encrypted messaging apps to communicate with various neo-Nazis to plan attacks on snyagogues and an gay bar in the Las Vegas area. The specific neo-Nazi group was the Feuerkrieg Division, an offshoot of Atomwaffen. Climo was briefly in the news in 2016 after he was found to be patrolling his neighborhood with an AR-style rifle. He stopped the armed patrols following the media exposure.
Climo reportedly used Discord for his encrypted communications. Recall how Discord has been extensive used by neo-Nazis including planning the August 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, VA.
The FBI was tipped off about these communications with Feuerkrieg Division from an FBI source in April of this year. Climo discussed a plan to burn down a Vegas-area synagogue on May 10 with the source. 13 days later, the FBI’s own undercover employee began chatting with Climo. When the FBI raided Climo’s home a few days ago they found the components for building a bomb, including thermite. During the raid, Climo reportedly told the FBI he started communicating with the neo-Nazis in late 2017. So his communications with fellow neo-Nazis went on for a nearly a year and a half.
Climo also told agents that during this time he attempted to recruit a homeless person to help him surveil a synagogue, which didn’t pan out. That apparently started in October of 2017. Recall that Paddock’s attack was on October 1, 2017. So right after Paddock’s attack, this neo-Nazi starts recruiting homeless people for his own attack.
His envisioned attack on the LGBTQ bar wasn’t just a ‘lone wolf’ attack. He wanted multiple teams of neo-Nazis to operate all at once. So Climo was interested in dropping the ‘lone wolf’ pretense generally favored by the neo-Nazis.
Climo also told agents that he eventually left the Feuerkrieg Division because he was bored with the lack of action. Yep, an Atomwaffen offshoot wasn’t extreme enough for the guy:
“During the search, Climo allegedly told a law-enforcement officer that he began communicating with members of the neo-Nazi group the Feuerkrieg Division using the encrypted chat platform Discord at the end of 2017.”
So Climo basically joined the Feuerkrieg Division at the end of 2017, but then left because he was “bored” with “their inaction”:
And according to the following article, when the FBI raided his home, they didn’t simply find the circuitry that could be used to build a bomb. They found thermite. Recall how investigators found radioactive materials and explosives at the apartment of the Atomwaffen cell in Florida that was planning an attack on a nuclear power plant. So this is the second Atomwaffen-affiliated group found to be planning a terror attack and in possession of with explosives:
“The FBI executed a search warrant at his home on Aug. 8 and found thermite, sulfuric acid, a soldering iron, circuit boards and other bomb-making components, according to the complaint.”
It sounds like there were a lot more than just hype behind Climo’s plans.
It’s also worth noting that the confidential FBI informant and the FBI’s own undercover agents were apparently on this Discord chat service. So you have to wonder whether or not these kinds of stories about the FBI infiltrating these encrypted groups will have much of an impact the willingness of neo-Nazi groups to use these platforms to remotely communicate and coordinate. At the same time, the fact that Climo was apparently in contact with this Atomwaffen offshoot and planning various attacks for a year and a half before this FBI informant tipped off the FBI about his plans demonstrates the utility of these platforms for terrorists even knowing they might be infiltrated:
Finally, here’s an article from May of 2018 that points to another way Climo may have been in contact with Atomwaffen affiliates: authorities learned about an Atomwaffen training camp that had been operating in Southern Nevada earlier in 2018. The group spent a couple of days camping in rural Nye County, training with weapons and making propaganda videos to recruit more members:
“Law enforcement said the group spent a couple of days camping in rural Nye County, training with weapons and making propaganda videos to recruit more members.”
Did Climo make any trips out to those Atomwaffen training camps in Las Vegas area last year? At that point we don’t know. But, again, he didn’t actually need to meet them in person. That’s what the internet is for these days: Cat videos and neo-Nazis propaganda.
So Las Vegas just avoided another domestic terror attack by a neo-Nazi, making this a great time for authorities and the media to finally acknowledge that Stephen Paddock was a far right domestic terrorist. Or we can just wait for the next neo-Nazi plot against Las Vegas to finally acknowledge that.
A woman, Michelle Kolts, was arrested in Florida today after her parents notified authorities that she had two dozen pipe bombs in her room. It sounds like she’s a white supremacist. Surprise! A number of books related to domestic terrorism and murder were found in her home, including “The Turner Diaries”, along with an “astonishing” number of weapons.
This wasn’t the first time authorities got a tip about Kolts. In August of 2018, a book publisher raised concerns about Kolts order multiple terrorist manifestos. According the Hillsborough County Sheriff, Kolts had become “consumed” with the Columbine massacre and the Oklahoma City bombing:
“Online records show that Kolts was arrested at her job. Kolts was then taken to her home where she admitted to making the bombs, according to Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister. Her home is located along the 5000 block of Jagged Cloud Drive. Kolts was taken into custody just before midnight on October 3. Those records show that Kolts is being held on a bond of $180,000. Among her possessions was a copy of the white supremacist book, “The Turner Diaries.””
Yeah, finding pipe bombs and copies of the The Turner Diaries in someone’s home is a pretty big red flag right. And as the following article describes, these pipe bombs were clearly built for maximum casualties, containing nails and metallic pellets. The article states she had “dozens of books and DVDs about murder, mass killing, domestic terrorism and bomb making,” and describes the particular books she ordered last year that cause a publisher to notify authorities: books on bomb-making instructions. She was interviewed by authorities at the time and said she didn’t intend on harming anyone, so she was deemed not to be a threat to herself or anyone else:
“A bomb squad responded and rendered the home safe, the sheriff said. Each pipe bomb contained nails, metallic pellets or a combination of both, he said. It would have taken “less than 60 seconds per device to add the powder and fuse materials she already possessed to detonate each bomb.””
All of the materials required to detonate these bombs were in her possession, including the powder and fuse materials. That’s how close she potentially was to using these things. And she even admitted to detective they were meant to hurt people (which is kind of undeniable but she admitted it). So she appears to have had the intent to use them.
And note that, while the content she ordered from the online publisher last year is described as “anarchist and bomb-making instructions”, keep in mind that anarchist books (like the Anarchist Cookbook) are a known place white supremacists can go to learn how to make all sorts of bombs and other lethal devices. So the fact that she was ordering content that could be described as ‘anarchist’ probably isn’t really indicative of her political leanings:
The fact that she was infatuated with the Columbine shooting and the Oklahoma City bombing (both carried out by far right ideologues) and possessed a copy of The Turner Diaries is, on the other hand, much more indicative of her political leanings. Nazi leanings in this case.
At this point there’s no information on whether or not Kolts was in contact with other extremists, but it’s worth recalling the numerous Florida-based instances of far right terrorism in recent years. Hillsborough County, where Kolts lived, is where Tampa is located. Tampa also happens to be the location of Atomwaffen cell that was discovered after Devon Arthurs killed his roommates/cellmates and told authorities he did it because they were planning on attacking a nuclear power plant in order to cause a meltdown (with the long-term goal of setting up a Fourth Reich in Florida). Might Kolts have been in contact with Atomwaffen affiliates in the area? Then there was the Parkland school shooting carried about by Nicholas Cruz and the strange trolling of journalists conducted immediately after the attack that appeared to be designed to preemptively discredit Cruz’s associations with the “Republic of Florida” neo-Nazi militia. But we also can’t forget that, in the age of strongly encrypted communications apps and the explosion of online neo-Nazi recruitment activity, there’s no reason to assume Kolts was necessarily network with local neo-Nazis.
At the same time, 24 pipe bombs seems like a lot of bombs for one person to plan to use. And that raises another question: was Kolts making these bombs on behalf of a larger domestic terrorist network? Perhaps, but let’s also recall the Florida-based Trump super-fan Cesar Sayoc, who was arrested and convicted for sending non-functioning pipebombs to Democratic lawmakers and cable news channels. So it’s possible Kolts was planning a similar mail pipe bomb campaign, but this time with fully functioning bombs.
We’ll see what, if any, additional information is learned about who Kolts was, what her motivations were, and who she may have been interacting with when formulating these plans. But at this point, given the extensive and growing underground networking of extremists, it would be pretty surprising if she was actually working alone.
Here’s an article that highlights the increasingly ISIS-like nature of white supremacists movements in the internet age: CNN has an interview of several former female members of the ‘Alt Right’ group Identity Evropa , one the key groups behind the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, neo-Nazi march. Identity Evropa has since rebranded itself as the American Identity Movement. But the piece is about much more than just the experience of members of Identity Europa since it describes how they would network and party with with all sorts of different figures from across the ‘Alt Right’ movement including leaders like Richard Spencer. Much of what they describe is exactly what one would expect for women in a hyper-misogynistic movement in terms of the second-class status of the women in the movement. Like how the women were often the ones with jobs financially supporting their neo-Nazi boyfriends who would spend their days making podcasts talking about how women shouldn’t have jobs. The piece describes how these movements ‘joke’ about how white women are ruining Western civilization through promiscuity and voting for liberals and the only way to save it is to impose a kind of neo-Nazi Sharia law on women and treat them like property. But it’s not really a joke for these movements. They really believe this and these views appear to have been largely internalized by the interviewed women when they were members of the group.
Interestingly, the article makes the case that today’s white supremacists movements are even more misogynistic than in the past, in large part because today’s Nazi movements are so heavily ideologically overlapping and recruiting from the Incel movement.
So that’s another ‘achievement’ for today’s white supremacist movements: it’s more misogynistic than ever thanks to all the Incels:
“Samantha changed her look and her demeanor. She bought dresses with full skirts and nipped-in waists, clothes with which she wanted to project an “all-American, delicate sexuality.” Samantha said, “I wanted to be more feminine, I wanted to be more desirable, I wanted to be more appreciated, I wanted to feel smart. So I just played into these roles. And the standards for how women are treated in there are pretty low, so I was able to lean into that and make that work for me.””
Samantha was ‘leaning into’ being a subjugated female Nazi. It’s not the kind of thing one normally hears about women ‘leaning into’ but that’s how ‘Samantha’ viewed it at the time. The low standards for the treatment of women was an opportunity she could embrace to ironically rise through the ranks. But no matter how high she rose, it was rising through the ranks of an organization that wanted to treat her and other women as property. The ‘joke’ was that a Nazi ‘Sharia’ law needed to be imposed on women, except it’s not a joke. And when she left, she was met with death threats and a reminder that she was viewed as little more than a Nazi-baby-making machine:
But it’s not just that the women are treated like chattel in these movements. They’re also often the ones who actually have jobs and earn an income for their Nazi boyfriends who feel women deserve to be humiliated and raped. As she put it, “Like 70 percent of the time, the women earn the money and the men do podcasts. And they do podcasts about how women shouldn’t have jobs”. And as all of the interviewed women described, they really did internalize these views at the time. They put up with being treated like trash because thought they were trash:
As Jessica Reaves of the ADL observes, today’s ‘Alt Right’ neo-Nazis are far more hostile to women than white supremacist movements of the past, in part because it’s so heavily influenced by the “Incels”. It’s why the jokes about “white sharia” and treating women like property aren’t jokes. The Incels strongly believe this stuff and they are some of the prime recruitment targets for white supremacist groups. The extreme misogyny is now at the core of modern day white supremacy:
As we can see, today’s “white supremacy” movements are better described as “white male incel supremacy” movements. Sure, far right movements have almost always been misogynistic and viewed women as vessels for making white babies. But thanks to all the Incels, today’s white supremacists have achieved unprecedented levels of hyper-misogyny that typically reserved for groups like ISIS.
So if anyone is still trying to figure out what costume to wear for Halloween this year, keep in mind that the popular “Handmaid’s Tale” costume from last year doubles as a female ‘Alt Right’ costume. There’s some costume reuse potential there.
Now that an impeachment inquiry over #UkraineGate is officially moving forward in the US House of Representatives following yesterday’s largely party-line vote – a vote where none of the Republicans voted in support of the inquiry – at the same time the 2020 election cycle is gathering steam, it’s pretty clear that the extreme and dangerous nature of the Republican Party is only going to get more extreme an dangerous over the never year and will likely include many more right-wing threats of a civil war. Republican congressman Louie Gohmert exlicitly invoked the specter of a civil war on the House floor in response to the vote and as Charlie Pierce points out, this kind of rhetoric is likely to become a key defense of President Trump simply because there aren’t really any good defenses for Trump based on the facts of the case. As more and more facts come out regarding the Trump/Giuliani fiasco in Ukraine, portraying the entire inquiry as a coup and threatening civil war is going to be the only defense left. As a consequence, it seems that one of the defining features of contemporary US politics – stochastic right-wing ‘lone wolf’ domestic terrorism encouraged by extremist rhetoric Trump and the right-wing media complex specialize in that encourages individuals to commit acts of politically motivated violence – is only going to grow over the next year.
And don’t forget that the stochastic ‘lone wolf’ right-wing terrorism that’s going to take place in response to the impeachment proceedings is also part of that ‘civil war’ defense of Trump. It’s a threat in the form of individual acts of domestic terror that promise more and worse to come. In other words, there is going to be a perverse incentive to provoke right-wing domestic terror in response to the impeachment drive and then blame the violence on the impeachment.
With that chilling context in mind, here’s a reminder that the kind of ‘micro-targeting’ the Trump campaign utilized in 2016 via companies like Cambridge Analytica is going to be the perfect tool for targeting and encouraging exactly the kind of unstable individuals who are most inclined to commit those acts of ‘lone wolf’ terror. As Newsweek recently reported, Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie recently made a disturbing admission about the nature of the micro-targeting they were engaged in during the 2016 election cycle: Steve Bannon was using Cambridge Analytica to specifically identify and target “incels”, a core component of the modern ‘Alt Right’ that has spawned a number of domestic terror attacks, because they are “easy to manipulate”.
Yep, manipulating the “incels” with micro-targeted ads designed to provoke emotions. The Trump campaign already has experience with this. And that’s why it’s going to be important to keep in mind that the upcoming stochastic terror isn’t just going to be inflamed by the words of public figures like President Trump. Online advertising, which is about to kick into overdrive for 2020, can also play a role in provoking ‘lone wolf’ stochastic violence:
“At a talk at the Emmanuel Centre in London on Monday, he said that Bannon viewed them as easy victims for manipulation as they were “lacking economic opportunities” and were more prone to “conspiratorial thinking.””
Easy victims for manipulation and prone to “conspiratorial thinking”. That sounds like incels. And while the ‘manipulation’ in 2016 may have been in the form of trying to get the incels to register to vote for Donald Trump, there’s no reason to assume the manipulation is going to be limited to that goal in 2020, especially with an impeachment inquiry taking place. As the GOP has already made clear, they’re going to be waging a grievance and rage-based campaign heading into 2020. It’s the perfect recipe for giving political cover to the kind of messaging that can incite angry unstable individuals like incels to acts of violence:
Also keep in mind that this kind of extremist micro-targeting doesn’t need to be limited to incels and doesn’t need to be done by a political campaign. Any group with the required resources – like large databases of detailed profiles on voters – can potentially target the kind of people prone to the unhinged garbage conspiracy theories that are wildly popular on the right-wing these days. For instance, what about all the easily manipulated QAnon folks? You can be sure they’re going to be getting tailored messages...messages about how the impeachment drive is all an attempt to stop Trump from exposing evil Satanic pedophile elites running the world.
So we’ll see how many impeachment-related acts of domestic terror take place over the next year but it seems likely we’ll at least see a few as long as threatening civil war remains a core GOP defense of Trump. We won’t know whether or not it was words of Trump or some right-wing pundit that triggered it or inflammatory online ads intentionally micro-targeted at psychological vulnerable individuals. That’s how stochastic terror works. We can’t identify a single direct source. But it seems like a good bet that the most unhinged individuals the right-wing can identify are going to be micro-targeted with the most inflammatory messaging because, as Christopher Wylie reminds us, that’s literally how Cambridge Analytica operated. Find the psychologically vulnerable and trigger them. It’s Steve Bannon’s playbook.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the micro-targeting doesn’t necessarily have to happen via social media platforms like Facebook. Recall how researchers found 173 online gaming chatrooms on the wildly popular gaming platform Steam where neo-Nazis were pumping out content glorifying school shooters and encouraging gamers to shoot up their own schools. Online gaming platforms, which are inherently difficult to moderate due to the large number of separate chat sessions and the wide range of languages used, are clearly a very useful medium for conducting a stochastic terror campaign. Well, as the following article from 2017 reminds us, it was when Steve Bannon was trying to build a business in online gaming markets that he realized the political potential of “rootless white males” via online gaming platforms (a description that sounds very similar to Wylie’s description of Bannon’s target ‘incel’ demographic). IGE — the online business he started where Chinese players were paid to play World of Warcraft to collect items in the game that could be sold for real money online — wasn’t a success but that experience appears to have been critical for developing Bannon’s understanding how online communities dominated by young males could be channeled into what would become the ‘Alt Right’.
As the article notes, when Bannon took over Breitbart in 2012, he hired the ‘Alt Right’ icon Milo Yiannopoulos to be the technology reporter. Yiannopoulos ended up dedicating much of that technology coverage to cultural issues like ‘Gamergate’. Gamergate — the virulent male-dominated backlash to feminist critiques about the frequently misogynistic portrayal of women in videogames that blew up in 2014 — in turn ended up creating the kind of online cultural zeitgeist within the gaming community, where feminism was portrayed as some sort of existential threat to males, that effectively infused the online gaming culture with both ‘incel’ and neo-Nazi memes and led to rise of the ‘Alt Right’ troll culture where misogyny and neo-Nazi went mainstream online. Gamegate was a proto-‘Alt Right’ phenomena. So one of the roles Steve Bannon played in the rise of the ‘Alt Right’ was the role he first played in cultivating the rise of the ‘incel’ culture through the promotion of Gamergate.
In other words, Steven Bannon really does have the pulse of the ‘incel’ community. He helped build it. And he recognizes the importance of online gaming chatrooms in propagating it. So when it comes to utilizing these platforms for spreading the kind of memes that fuel stochastic terror, Bannon was a trailblazer:
““I realized Milo could connect with these kids right away,” Bannon told Green. “You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.””
A political army. That’s how Bannon saw the online ‘rootless white male’ dominated gamer community after his experience with IGE. And then he took over Breitbart, helped turn ‘Gamergate’ into a major right-wing cultural issue, and helped turn that army of gamers into a ‘Alt Right’ troll army ready to wage online meme wars for Trump and other far right politicians. Neo-Nazi incels were literally Bannon’s vision and he helped make it a reality:
As we can see, when Steve Bannon was having Cambridge Analytica target the ‘single rootless white male’ demographic for a campaign of pro-Trump conspiracy theories in 2016, this was merely the latest iteration of his direct targeting of this demographic.
So as stochastic terror threats increasingly become the GOP’s last line of defense of President Trump in the #UkraineGate impeachment proceedings, it’s going to be important to keep in mind that if the far right oligarchy backing Trump decides to trigger some incels and other members of the ‘Alt Right’ into carrying out violence as a deadly act of political theater to demonstrate the ‘anger’ over Trump’s impeachment, Steve Bannon is more than capable of making that happen. He is the incel whisperer.
It sounds like Atomwaffen has some competition in the category of ‘craziest neo-Nazi group’: seven members of a relatively new neo-Nazi outfit, called “The Base”, were arrested in recent days. Three members of the group were arrested for plotting the murder of a couple in Georgia who are members of Antifa. Another three were arrested for plotting a series of violent attacks at a recent pro-gun-rights rally in Virginia this week. A seventh member was arrested in Wisconsin as part of this nationwide arrest of Base members. He was charged with vandalizing a synagogue in Racine with Nazi imagery back in September.
The planned attacks in Virginia were intended to spark a civil war. How were they planning on sparking a civil war with a neo-Nazi attack? By ambushing unsuspecting civilians and police officers. They also had plans to poison water supplies and derail trains. The idea appears to be to create as much chaos as possible in the hopes that the situation spirals out of control. As a further sign of their ambitions, they also had food reserves packed that they thought could last for months. As we should expect for a group with plans like this, The Base is described as an “accelerationist” neo-Nazi group, meaning they intend on using acts of violence and terrorism to actively destabilize society in the hopes of sparking a civil war and furthering their ambitions for a white ethnostate. In other words, they’re the kind of group that worships the most violent neo-Nazi figures like James Mason and Charles Manson.
As the following article describes, one of the members of the group that was planning attacks at the gun rally, Brian Mark Lemley Jr., was a “cavalry scout” in the U.S. Army. Another member, Patrik Jordan Mathews, is a former combat engineer in Canadian Armed Forces reservist. So this was a group with real military training. As the second article below describes, Mathews and Lemley actually built a fully-automatic assault rifle from part.
The third member of this group, William Garfield Bilbrough IV, has repeatedly expressed an interest in traveling to Ukraine to fight alongside “nationalists” for several months according to prosecutors. Yep, there’s a Ukrainian angle to this neo-Nazi story as we should expect at this point. It’s another sign of the wild success Ukraine’s neo-Nazis, in particular the Azov movement, have had in turning Ukraine into a global hub of neo-Nazi activity.
Prosecutors tell us that these members would communicate with each other on a members-only encrypted communication app, where they described plans of mounting a terrorist campaign that asked members to form three-man “Trouble Trio” cells. So these two groups of three neo-Nazis was presumably a reflection of that three-man terrorist-cell structure. But it doesn’t sound like they were intent on remaining anonymous to each other. The three members arrested for the murder plot in Georgia, Luke Austin Lane, Michael Helterbrand, and Jacob Kaderli, were reportedly also in contact with Mathews and they had plans to establish and participate in paramilitary training camps (something we’ve seen with Atomwaffen’s “hate camps”). As a sign of the “accelerationst” nature of this group that’s reflected in the plans to spark a war with a terror attack at the gun rally, one of the posts in the chat group included the call to use terrorism as the start of an insurgency, saying, “No need to wait until all conditions for revolution exist — guerrilla insurrection can create them. Insurgency begins as a terrorist campaign.” The post was accompanied by an image of an armed person watching an explosion.
Ok, here’s the first article describing the arrest of Mathews, Lemley, and Bilbrough and their plans to spark a civil war at the Virginia gun rally this week by killing civilians and police officers:
“Last month, a closed-circuit television camera and microphone installed by investigators in a Delaware home captured Mathews talking about the Virginia rally as a “boundless” opportunity.”
A “boundless opportunity” for terror. That’s literally how this “Trouble Trio” of Mathews, Lemley, and Bilbrough viewed the gun rights rally. But they were just talking about shooting unsuspecting civilians and police. They were also talking about poisoning water supplies and derailing trains. Their scheme also raises the question of whether or not they were planning on shooting the anti-gun activists or the pro-gun activists, or both? But they weren’t planning on a suicide attack where the identity of the attackers would be soon discovered. They were packing food supplies that were would last for months suggesting they wanted this to be an anonymous attack. So were they planning on hoping the attack would be blamed on Antifa members? That part of this plan still needs to be clarified:
And while two out of the three members of this terrorist cell already had military training, the third one without military training repeatedly expressed a desire to travel to Ukraine and presumably gain combat experience by joining one of the neo-Nazis militias:
Ok, now here’s an article that describes the arrest of three Base members in Georgia over their planned murder of an Antifa couple. The article mentions how The Base appears to have been founded in July of 2018 for the purpose of recruiting racists for a “violent insurgency” against minorities and the US government. The group communicates over an encrypted app, where members discuss their plans of mounting a terrorist campaign using three-man “Trouble Trio” cells. The article also mentions plans for creating paramilitary training camps and mentions how Lemley and Mathews built their own fully-automatic assault rifle. But they don’t appear to be planning terror attacks that directly get attributed to the group. Instead, group leaders encourage members to remain covert and split the group into regional chapters for security and fostered an amount of autonomy in order to have “plausible deniability” for its actions, according to prosecutors. But the leaders still encourage members to commit terrorist acts even if they don’t feel like all the conditions for a “revolution” currently exist. The way they describe it, the terrorism will create those revolutionary conditions:
“The affidavit describes The Base as a “white racially motivated violent extremist group.” It says those arrested plotted to incite a race war and then establish a “white ethno-state.” The group was founded in July 2018 to organize and recruit racists for a “violent insurgency” against the United States government as well as non-white groups.”
The Base was founded in July of 2018 and here we are in January of 2020 with the arrest of multiple groups actively planning violent attacks. In the case of the Virginia gun rally the intended victims were going to be randomly selected, but with the members arrested in Georgia the attacks were specifically targeting Antifa members:
And the arrest of these two groups of three members appears to be a reflection of structure of this group, where members are communicate over encrypted apps but are asked to form “Trouble Trios” for carrying out actual terrorism, which helps the group maintain “plausible deniability”:
And at least in the case of the “Trouble Trios” targeting the Virginia gun rally, they had the kind of military training that left them capable of building improvised explosive devices and fully automatic machine guns:
So as we can see, Atomwaffen really has competition. Because The Base sure sounds A LOT like Atomwaffen. You have to wonder how much overlap there is between the groups’ membership. Given the compartmentalized nature of the membership and the fact that the groups are both actively recruiting the most violence-prone Nazis they can find.
It also worth noting that since Mathews entered the US illegally he’s technically an “illegal immigrant,” arguably making him the most dangerous illegal alien in the US. It’s more than a little ironic given the far right fixation on the dangers of illegal immigration. It’s going to be grimly interesting to see how much attention Fox News pays to this particular story about an extremely dangerous illegal immigrant terrorist.
As fears of the spread of the coronavirus inside prisons continues to grow, the release of the lowest risk prisoners is an obvious solution an an long-overdue solution in many cases given the gross over-incarceration of American society. Release of non-violent prisoners who probably shouldn’t have ever been in prison in the first could be one of the few positive outcomes of the pandemic. With that in mind, here’s a pair of articles about the release of a prisoner in response to the virus who is one of the last people on the planet who should be released from prison. That would be the release of Augustus Sol Invictus, the Satanist neo-Nazi who has the distinction of writing the first draft of the so-called “Charlottesville Statement” for the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally.
First, recall how Invictus was arrested in January of this year for kidnapping his wife at gunpoint and forced her to drive to Florida with him. Well, he’s been sitting in prison since his arrest. And despite being turned down in his prior attempts to be released on bail — with the judge calling him a flight risk and threat to public safety — the judge had a significant change of heart in light of the coronavirus outbreak. Now he’s out and about, with no requirements that he wear an ankle monitor or keep in contact with law enforcement. He only needs to return to York County, SC, for court appearances. That’s it. Otherwise he’s allowed to wander around fraternize with his Atomwaffen Nazi terrorist buddies.
Not that jail prevented him from communicating with Atomwaffen. It turns out Invictus was regularly updating his website while in jail. He even posted images of his court hearings. This is a good time to recall how neo-Nazis — in particular the “accelerationist” neo-Nazis like Atomwaffen — have already been found to be excited about using COVID-19 as a means of accelerating the collapse of society. And one of the leaders of the “accelerationist” Nazis — someone who openly advocates for an armed Nazi insurrection — was allowed to communicate with his fellow accelerationists from jail and has now been released:
“The judge did not order Invictus to wear an ankle monitor or keep in contact with law enforcement. Hall only required Invictus to return to York County for court appearances.”
Not even an ankle monitor. Just let him wander around and meet up with his Atomwaffen friends so they can talk about their shared worship of Charles Manson and plot mass death and destruction and trust that he’ll show up again for his court hearing. That’s what just happened:
But as the following article describes, it’s not like Invictus wasn’t able to communicate with his fellow Nazis while he was sitting in jail. He was literally documenting his court case on his own website. According to 16th Circuit Solicitor Jenny Desch when she was arguing against his release, Invictus has been making social media postings about his treatment in jail and he’s been trying to circumvent jail officials’ ability to see the messages he’s been sending out to “followers” by claiming the communications were attorney-client privilege. So he hasn’t just been openly talking to his followers on his website and social media postings. He’s also apparently been trying to send secret messages via his lawyer, which is a pretty deadly situation as we’ve seen with cases like Matthew Hale sending messages to his Nazi followers to kill a judge’s family. But now that’s he’s been released there’s no more need for these surreptitious forms of communication with his Nazi followers. He can just go talk them in person:
“Invictus has issued social media postings about his treatment by authorities since being jailed in York County for more than two months, 16th Circuit Solicitor Jenny Desch said in court Friday. Invictus also has tried to circumvent jail officials ability to see correspondence that Invictus has sent out to “followers” of his politics by claiming the communications were attorney-client privilege, Desch said.”
Messages were being sent through lawyer his “followers” and he tried to keep it secret by claiming attorney-client privilege. That’s more than a little alarming. And note how his attorney doesn’t dispute that he “does have some followers.” that he’s been communicating with online. On a website that advocates for a violent Nazi uprising:
And now Augustus Sol Invictus — the Satanic Nazi who authored the original “Unite the Right” statement intended to unify the far right right — is back out on the streets and free to network with his fellow Manson worshipers and scheme how they can best exploit the viral pandemic to accelerate the collapse of society. It wasn’t the best example of how to do early prisoner releases in response to a pandemic. Perhaps even the worst example.
Here’s an update on the investigation into the Operation “Lights Out”, the ‘accelerationist’ white supremacists plot to take down the US electrical grid. A plot that was initially planned for 2024 but was going to be moved up in the event of a Trump loss in 2020:
First, we’re learning that the previous affidavit that revealed this investigation was unsealed by mistake last week along with a search warrant application, so this is a story that was never intended to be public. Related to this is the fact that the individuals under investigation haven’t actually been charged with any crimes yet. Yep. They’re just walking around.
We’re learning more about how US authorities learned about the plot. It apparently was discovered when a Canadian man attempted to cross the US border. When asked about his business he said he was visiting the then-17 year old in Ohio. Border agents then discovered Nazi and white supremacists images on his phone.
Regarding the plot, we’re told that the planning began in fall of 2019, when the then-17-year old involved in the plot introduced to more than a dozen people the idea of saving money to buy a ranch where they could participate in military training. The teen wanted the group to be “operational” (capable of violence and activism) by 2024. But it sounds like the plans for “Lights Out” was shared with a smaller group of people. They were going to form an 18 person unit called “The Front” to attack electrical substations and the timeline for that plan had already been moved up to the summer of 2020. So the US was potentially months away from a major neo-Nazi-created blackout across regions of the US:
“The Ohio teen, who was 17 at the time, also shared plans with a smaller group about a plot to create a power outage by shooting rifle rounds into power stations in the southeastern U.S. The teen called the plot “Light’s Out” and there were plans to carry it out in the summer of 2021, the affidavit states.”
They talked about Operation “Light’s Out”, recruited for it, and even met in person, with a target date of the summer of 2021. As the following article describes, they also shared information about bomb-making and military operations online. And in February of 2020, when three of plotters met in person while under surveillance, the group was thought to be transporting parts to build untraceable assault rifles. So there’s no shortage of crimes to potentially charge this group with. And yet, as the following article describes, none of the plotter have actually been arrested or charged with crimes. The investigation is described as ongoing:
“An informant is said to have tipped investigators off to information about bomb-making and military operations shared by the Ohio teenager online. According to the informant, the teen had suggested a mission he dubbed “Lights Out,” wherein they would form a group of 18 people called “The Front” and shoot up electrical substations.”
It’s a plot so inspired by white supremacist literature that even the selected number of people in “The Front” was 18, a neo-Nazi numerological symbol.
But the group hasn’t been plotting entirely in secret. There’s clearly an informant and authorities already conducted surveillance on a meeting between three of the plotters in February. And yet no one has been charged yet. The investigation is ongoing. And when the Ohio teen — who appears to be the driving force behind this — gets kicked out of his house he ends up in Tennessee, where he is later arrested trespassing with an AR15 part. So these guys are free and moving about in the US:
The list of potential crimes includes conspiracy, solicitation to commit a violent crime, distribution of information relating to explosives, destruction of an energy facility, and providing material support to terrorists. But no actual terrorism charges. It’s a reminder that the US doesn’t actually have law covering domestic terrorism.
So we’ll see what, if any, crimes this group is eventually charged with. We’ll also see if the charges are limited to the three core plotters or if any of the other more than dozen people involved end up facing charges too. Or maybe not see because it will be too dark after the massive blackouts.
Explosion in Nashville that damaged dozens of buildings is believed to be an intentional act
By Dakin Andone and Hollie Silverman, CNN
Updated 2:15 PM ET, Fri December 25, 2020
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/25/us/nashville-explosion/index.html
Here’s a story out of Aspen, Colorado, over the weekend that disturbingly relates to “Operation Black Out”, the recently uncovered white supremacist plot to cause a regional blackout in the US via simultaneous attacks on the US electrical grid’s critical infrastructure:
The natural gas infrastructure of Aspen was vandalized over the holiday weekend in what is described as an intentional disruption of service, resulting in the thousands of homes going without heat or hot water during one of the busiest times of the year for the tourist destination. It’s worth keeping in mind that tampering with the natural gas system could end up being a lot more deadly than simply cutting off service. Here’s the part that is eerily similar to the neo-Nazi infrastructure plots: the natural gas service was disrupted at three different locations at roughly the same time.
So a group of people was clearly behind this. And this group decided to leave a ‘clue’ of sorts at one of the three locations, leaving an “Earth First!” message scrawled on one of the pipes. There’s no indication from anyone associated with the “Earth First!” eco-extremist organization that the group was behind it. We are told, however, that whoever carried this out had to have some familiarity with the system. So just as we’re learning about an investigation into a white supremacist plot to carry out simultaneous attacks on US critical infrastructure, we have what almost seems like a nuisance attack on the natural gas infrastructure of Aspen with a message left behind drawing attention to “Earth First!”. Are we looking at a neo-Nazi trial run of some sort?:
“All three locations were hit around the same time, he said, though it was not clear Monday how many people were involved or why Aspen was targeted. Anyone with information about the vandalism should call the Aspen Police Department at 970–920-5400 and follow the prompts to report it.”
Unless we’re looking a single very speedy saboteur, this is a plot that would presumably involve at least three people. And while this is being described by authorities as primarily “vandalism”, it’s clearly more than just vandalism. Flow lines were tampered with and gas lines were turned off, and one resident reported hearing “uncommon sounds” from a natural gas station. Someone who knew what they were doing was behind this:
And given that they are leaving ‘clues’ that it was “Earth First!” behind it, we can reasonably speculate that whoever did this probably doesn’t have warm feelings towards left-wingers and environmentalists.
It’s also worth recalling that “Operation Lights Out” plot appeared to specifically target the electrical grid in Colorado Springs. Might this have been the some of the same individuals? We don’t know, but the whole story is a reminder that the critical infrastructure available for attack by the far right includes the highly explosive natural gas infrastructure. It’s also a reminder that when “Operation Lights Out” or something similar is eventually carried out, we probably shouldn’t be too surprised if “Earth First!” is given credit.
@Pterrafractyl–
With the Nashville bombing as background, it looks as though the Trumpian “Serptent’s Accelarationist” agenda is under way.
Keep up the great work!
Best,
Dave
@Dave: Regarding the Nashville Christmas day bombing, here’s something worth noting about the AT&T building that appears to have been the target of the attack: That building is reportedly unusually resistant to exactly that kind of bomb attack. The building was built by AT&T during its 20th century monopoly heyday with thick concrete intended to withstand large explosions and other attacks. As a result, we’re told that the building really did work as designed and protected much of the telecommunications equipment inside. So if Warner really was targeting the AT&T building as many suspect, it wasn’t nearly as damaging as intended which is pretty remarkable given the scale of the damage:
“The AT&T switching center is one of several such facilities throughout the country that were uniquely designed to withstand the force unleashed by the Nashville explosion, according to Ed Amoroso, a retired AT&T chief security officer who now teaches at New York University.”
It’s weird to think that AT&T got lucky with this bombing, but in the fact that Anthony Quinn Warner seemingly targeted one of AT&T’s bomb-resistant buildings indicates it could have easily been a lot worse for AT&T, with most of the equipment inside the building reportedly shielded from the blast:
Now, at this point we still don’t know what the motive was for the bombing and whether or not the AT&T building was necessarily the target. But based on reports about Warner’s history and interests, the suspicions that he may have targeted the AT&T building due to one or more of the many far right conspiracy theories involving 5G wireless technology — theories that have been rampant during the COVID-19 pandemic — may be correct. Because it sounds like Warner was interested in classic “Illuminati” high-weirdness conspiracy theories like the idea that shape-shifting lizard people are running the world. And he was apparently interested enough in these topics that he is believed to have spent time hunting for alien life forms in state park.
We’re also getting more information on Warner’s bomb-making background. It turns out the police were contacted and warned about Warner constructing bombs in his RV back in 2019. This came about when Warner’s girlfriend at the time, Pamela Perry, contacted a local Republican attorney, Ray Throckmorton. Throckmorton had previously represented both Perry and Warner. Throckmorton contacted the police letting them know Perry was distraught and threatening to kill herself and that she also feared Warner would harm her. Throckmorton then told the police that Warner “talks about the military and bomb-making.” When police arrived at Warner’s home, Perry told the police that Warner was building bombs in his RV. But it sounds like the RV was never searched and that was the end of the story. Until Christmas Day, of course. So while we don’t have reports yet that Warner had military experience and training, it sounds like he had a fascination with the military and clearly had spent some time developing his bomb-building skills:
“Some writings found by investigators believed to be associated with Warner, who was killed in the Christmas Day RV explosion, contain ramblings about assorted conspiracy theories, sources said.”
What types of conspiracy ramblings of Warner did investigators find? We don’t know, but Warner was apparently into alien hunting so that gives us an idea of where his head was at. And while we are told investigators have looked into whether or not Warner had an interest in 5G technology, we aren’t told if he really was focused on the 5G conspiracy theories. Although it wouldn’t be a stretch given the alien interest:
And we know he’s been working on this bomb since at least August of 2019. So he presumably wasn’t driven primarily by COVID-related conspiracies since COVID-19 wasn’t an issue in August of 2019. But it’s certainly possible COVID-related conspiracies pushed Warner over the line from just building the bomb to actually using it:
Finally, here’s a look at how the far right is responding to the Nashville bombing. In particular, the QAnon movement, which has proved itself capable of contorting virtually any situation to fit its narrative. As we should expect, the responses range from questioning Warner’s identity and whether or not it was all a giant hoax, to celebrating the bombing. Lin Wood, the attorney who has been leading the legal quest to overturn the 2020 election based on allegations of massive voter fraud, has already come out questioning whether or not the RV was the source of the explosion at all. Interestingly, there’s one figure who we would expect to say something about the bombing who has said nothing at all so far: President Trump. It’s been a non-response response from Trump ever since the bombing. So at the same time the QAnon movement is torn over whether or not to dismiss the bombing as a government false flag attack or embrace Warner as one of their own, President Trump is remaining oddly silent and therefore ambiguously supportive of all of the speculation:
“The theorizing didn’t stop at anonymous Twitter accounts. Lin Wood, an attorney attempting to overturn the election in President Donald Trump’s favor, appeared to cast doubt on the bombing in multiple tweets. In one, he included Warner’s name in a tweet about false accusations. In another, he tweeted pictures of a ruined stretch of Nashville’s downtown, noting that “that RV sure packed a powerful punch. Or did it?””
Pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood isn’t so sure the RV actually caused the explosion. How about Trump himself? We have no idea, because he hasn’t said a thing:
Don’t forget that if Warner was indeed following far right conspiracy theories when he carried out this act, that almost certainly would have been a pro-Trump far right conspiracy theory and the intent of the bombing would have likely been for the purpose of somehow helping Trump stay in power. So from Trump’s perspective, the Nashville Christmas day bombing was potentially a bombing done on his behalf. And if Trump does somehow manage to cling to power it would have to come through some sort of mass far right violent insurgency at this point. In other words, Trump needs a lot more bombings and attacks on critical infrastructure now. The kind of insurgency that could create the kind of chaos required for a ‘Serpents Walk’-style power grab. Martial law is something parts of the Trump camp is demanding right now anyway as a pretext for redoing the election. If that martial law is brought about by a far right terror campaign, so be it. In that sense, Anthony Quinn Warner gave President Trump the greatest Christmas present Trump could have ever asked for right now: the gift of hope. Hope that the bombing might inspire a whole army of QAnon “boomer bombers” over the next few weeks who are willing to die to keep Trump in office. Trump presumably doesn’t want to say anything that might jinx his possible Christmas miracle.
Here’s a set of articles related to the growing trail of evidence tying the January 6 Capitol insurrectionists with “accelerationist” violent extremist groups like Atomwaffen:
First, we’re now learning that Riley June Williams — the woman previously identified as the person who stole a laptop from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office — is the same woman who was found wearing the skull facemask and voicing “accelerationist” slogans in a “fashwave” video on a neo-Nazi encrypted chat server. Surprise!
Also we’ll also see, according to the ex-boyfriend of Williams, she planned on giving the laptop to a friend living in Russia who was planning on selling it to Russian intelligence. The FBI is reportedly investigating these claims but hasn’t found any evidence ot back them up, and Williams’s ex now says the transfer to the friend in Russia never happened for some reason.
So is the story about a friend a Russia just complete BS? That’s an obvious possibility. But as we’ll see, there’s another intriguing possibility for who that ‘friend in Russia’ may be in light of the videos showing Williams’s accelerationist leanings: was this ‘friend in Russia’ Rinaldo Nazzaro, the recently revealed founder of “The Base”? As we’ll see, Nazzaro is indeed living in Russia, ostensibly to be closer to the family of his Russian wife. And he’s accused by some of having ties to Russian intelligence, charges he denies.
As we’ll also see, part of what makes Nazzaro such a mysterious figure is that, despite the claims of ties to Russian intelligence, he has undeniable ties to the US national security state. Nazzaro, who comes from a wealthy family and has an Ivy League education, reportedly worked with US special forces, the FBI, the Marines, and DHS as an intelligence analyst in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a focus on insurgency tactics.
Nazzaro’s career past was made public by Nazzaro himself, who posted the letters of commendation in order to address the growing suspicions within the neo-Nazi community that Nazzaro is actually a federal informant running a sting operation. Suspicions that are fueled in part by Nazzaro’s highly atypical background for a neo-Nazi and the fact that he appeared to come out of nowhere a few years ago when he set out to form The Base, without any known previous far right activity.
Initially, Nazzaro’s far right interests were centered around the concept of the “Northwest Front”, a white ethnostate to be created in the Pacific Northwest. The group was run by Harold Covington, who died in 2018.
Another thing worth recalling regarding the claims that Nazzaro is associated with Russian intelligence is that that, a little over a year ago, there were seven members of The Base arrested for various violent plots. One of them, William Garfield Bilbrough IV, had expressed an interest in traveling to Ukraine to fight alongside “nationalists” in order to get military experience. So Bilgrough wanted to join groups in Ukraine that would have been extremely anti-Russian and fighting Russian-backed separatists.
So is Nazzaro the ‘friend in Russia’ who Riley Williams supposedly planned on passing Nancy Pelosi’s stolen laptop to? We’re forced to speculate at this point, but the data points are aligning in compelling ways. Williams appears to be affiliated with either Atomwaffen or The Base, and the founder of The Base just happens to be located in Russia.
And if Nazzaro is indeed Williams’s friend in Russia, that raises another set of disturbing questions: was Nazzaro involved with helping to organize the insurrection? He is an expert in insurgencies, after all.
And more generally, if it turns out at least some of the people involved in conceiving of the Capitol insurrection were themselves accelerationists, that potentially provides an answer to one of the most baffling questions about that event: what on earth where they thinking would be accomplished? Did they actually think storming the Capitol and arresting or killing members of Congress would somehow result in Trump being reinstalled as president? That part of the plan never made sense...unless the Capitol insurrection was intended to be an accelerationist act. An action designed to do little more than destabilize society and lead to further violence. From that perspective, the Capitol insurrection made a lot of sense. And arguably succeeded. American society has been undeniably destabilized.
So was the Capitol insurrection intended to be an accelerationist event? A destabilizing action primarily designed to foster larger destabilizing actions in the future? Keep in mind that, for an event as chaotic as the insurrection, there could have been multiple groups each with their own motives and goals. Some may have genuinely thought they were about to trigger an immediate political revolution that day. But as we’ll see, figures like Nazzaro aren’t planning on one-day revolutions. They’re planning on long-term domestic terror campaigns that build on themselves. So the possibility that at least some of the members of that insurrectionary mob were actively there with an accelerationist mind-set is something investigators need to be keeping in mind, even if plenty of non-accelerationists were in the crowd.
Ok, first, here’s a look at the new discovery of neo-Nazi videos of a woman who appears to be Williams wearing skull masks and voicing accelerationist slogans:
“In the video, the woman dances to music while a voice plays over the top stating: “Hammer was right all along. There is no political solution. All that is left is acceleration. Heil Hitler.””
All that is left is acceleration. It’s pretty explicit. So we know Williams pals around with the far right. But what about her ‘friend in Russia’ who was supposed to receive the laptop? At this point we don’t even know if this person exists, because the claim that she was planning on sending the laptop to a friend in Russia came from an ex-boyfriend, who went on to claim the exchange never happened and the FBI can’t find any evidence of this:
“The FBI has no supporting evidence for the ex-lover’s claim. Regardless, even if a laptop was taken, it appears not to have made its way into Russian hands—the ex-partner said that the deal “fell through for unknown reasons and Williams still has the computer device or destroyed it.” Pelosi’s aide Drew Hammill noted on Twitter last week that an office laptop was stolen, but said that it was “only used for presentations.””
What became of Nancy Pelosi’s laptop? We still don’t know. Maybe Williams still has it or destroyed it, but it apparently never made it to Russia.
So was that story about a friend in Russia just garbage being peddled to confuse investigators? It’s plausible. But with the recent revelations that the leader of the accelerationist group The Group has been living in Russia, we have to consider the possibility that Williams’s friend in Russia really was Rinaldo Nazzaro. And if it was indeed Nazzaro, we have to consider the possibility that the Capitol insurrection was, in part, planned by Nazzaro, someone with extensive work combating insurgencies and therefore someone who knows how to wage one too:
“VICE News previously reported that Nazzaro was said to have worked with U.S special forces on the Pentagon’s dime. (Previously, the BBC reported that Nazzaro was an FBI analyst and had been a contractor with the Department of Defense.)”
We already knew Nazzro worked with US special forces, and had worked as an FBI analyst. And now we’re learning that he also worked as a DHS intelligence analyst in the kind of work that gave him a real tradecraft and understanding of insurgency. That’s the guy now leading one of the newest accelerationist neo-Nazi groups operating today. And note how the letters he posted were apparently mid-career. You have to wonder what other highly sensitive areas the guy was working on over the past couple of decades:
And to get a better sense of just how extensive Nazzaro’s military contractor background is, here’s a New York Magazine piece from almost a year ago describing Nazzaro’s highly unusual background as a neo-Nazi accelerationist figurehead. He really was a “prep-school Nazi” who went on to become a defense-contractor Nazi, and yet his extremist views were apparently hidden from virtually everyone the entire time. Even after he secretly set out to start The Base a few years ago and was operating under aliases like “Roman Wolf” or “Norman Spear”. It was only after his identity was revealed that the world, including those closest to him, learned the guy wasn’t just a neo-Nazi but an exceptionally violent neo-Nazi who was planning on utilizing his knowledge of insurgency to wave an accelerationist collapse of society:
“After the sweep of arrests and the outing of Nazzaro, the neo-Nazi community quickly coalesced around the idea that he’d been a government agent running a sting operation, but a researcher I spoke with at the Southern Poverty Law Center doesn’t give much weight to that sentiment, noting that white supremacists are constantly accusing each other of being government agents. Tobin, for his part, reportedly believed Nazzaro to be a Russian spy, which isn’t a totally crazy idea. It’s well established that white nationalists are fanboys of nationalist, authoritarian Vladimir Putin — marching in Charlottesville, they chanted “Russia is our friend!,” and former KKK grand wizard David Duke has said that Russia offers “an unmatched opportunity to help protect the longevity of the white race” — and the lovefest goes both ways. Russia’s bot and troll hordes amplified far-right memes during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the country’s support for extreme-right politicians across Europe has been widely noted. The New York Times recently reported that the FBI, driven by intelligence that Russia is actively trying to nudge American extremist groups toward violence, is looking closely at Nazzaro’s Russian ties, and in particular at one neo-Nazi group’s funding (it is unclear whether that group is the Base).”
Suspicions about Nazzaro suddenly rose following a string of arrests in late 2019 and early 2020 and then the public outing of Nazzaro. Was he a government plant? Given is highly unusual background, you can’t blame them for suspecting it: It was only in December 2017, months after the Nazzaro family moved to Russia, that he began posting online under the “Norman Spear”, talking about guerilla warfare and the Northwest Front. He was completely new the scene but with exactly the kind of skill set the far right craves. In other words, for neo-Nazis frustrated by the backlash of Charlottesville, Nazzaro was too good to be true:
But also note the interesting timing in Nazzaro’s only emerging in late December 2017 and the fact that this was months of the Unite the Right rally triggered a public backlash: at that point, the far right in the US was trying to decide if it’s still worth trying to put forward a ‘nice Nazi’ public face that could win over more the public. And here was Nazzaro, bristling with insurgency tactics, telling the far right to drop the nice guy act and just go for the rapid violent destabilization of society. So it isn’t just that Nazzaro popped out of no where. He popped out of no where at a crucial cross-roads for the far right and advocated going in the direction of accelerating violence.
It was the kind of path that apparently virtually no one expected of him. At the same time, as we look at his past, the questions of when he became radicalized are far from the only major question raised. The guy really did have a spooky history. He drops out of college in 1994 for reasons that are unclear, and shows up in 1999 doing a two-month internship with the National Defense Council Foundation, a think-tank that just happens to have a focus on asymmetric warfare:
In 2002, Nazzaro begins his career as a defense contractor, incorporating Omega Solutions International, before moving to Arlington the next year. Around this time, he gets engaged with a woman stations in the psychological operations division at Fort Bragg:
In 2007, Nazzaro leaves Arlington for Manhattan and relocates in company in New York. This is when he met his future wife Lyudmila Sergeyeva:
Flash forward a decade to the winter of 2017, Nazzaro has received Russian citizenship and the Nazzaros move to Russia. What Nazzaro was up to during that decade is unclear, but all indications are he was continuing his work as a defense contractor:
And as we saw, it was just months later, in December 2017, when “Norman Spear” appeared online to advocate for an al Qaeda-style form of accelerationist domestic terrorism. It really is a remarkable background for an aspiring neo-Nazi terrorist leader.
So we have to ask: Does Riley Williams consider Rinaldo Nazzaro to be a US asset? If so, Nazzaro presumably wasn’t the intended recipient of Pelosi’s laptop. But if it turns out Williams and Nazzaro are indeed on good terms with each other that really would make Nazzaro a prime candidate for being the ‘Russian friend’ Williams allegedly had in mind for receiving the laptop. Keep in mind that when Williams made that video, it was probably done as a show of her support for the accelerationist cause which suggests it was intended to be shared with fellow accelerationists. So if it wasn’t Atomwaffen she was sharing that with it was probably The Base.
And that all, again, is why it’s increasingly looking like the answer to the question of “what were the insurrectionists thinking they were going to accomplish?” is, at least for the accelerationists in the crowd, probably something like “more and more violence in the future...all according to the plan.”
As we learn more about the number ‘accelerationist’ neo-Nazis playing prominent roles in the January 6 Capitol insurrection — notably Riley Williams, appears to be an accelerationist possibly associated with The Base — one of the questions raised about the future direction of the MAGA movement is whether or not the US is poised to see a surge in the ‘sovereign citizen’ movement. Because while the accelerationist neo-Nazis and sovereign citizens aren’t identical, there’s no denying the immense ideological overlap and a burning desire to utterly dismantle to the US. And yet the aesthetics of the sovereign citizens — with more of an emphasis on ‘patriotism’ vs the creation of ethnostates — might hold a much broader appeal to a MAGA base that views itself as ‘the good guys’ in a cosmic struggle between good and evil. In other words, if MAGA land is poised to ‘accelerate’, perhaps we should expect it to ‘accelerate’ under a sovereign citizen ‘patriotic’ banner.
And as we’ll see in the following pair of articles, part of the appeal of the sovereign citizen movement to Donald Trump’s followers is the sovereign citizen idea that the US government was replaced by an illegal invalid government during the Civil War, and the REAL inauguration day is therefore March 4, the original inauguration day in the US constitution. And under that logic, Joe Biden is not the real president, paving the way for Donald Trump to return to office as the...19th president. It’s an idea that has taken root in exactly the place you would expect: the QAnon movement, a movement desperate to right the wrong of Trump leaving office and finally actually predict something correctly for once:
“The idea borrows heavily from the sovereign citizens movement, which revolves around the theory that followers get to decide which laws to abide by because the true, original U.S. government has been secretly replaced by a new, illegitimate system. Sovereign citizens clog courts with convoluted legal filings, declaring they are not required to pay taxes and immune to punishment for breaking the law. There are various beliefs among the sovereign citizens about when the switch to the illegitimate government happened, but for the purposes of its overlap with the QAnon community, that date has been pinned down to 1871.”
QAnon is merging with the sovereign citizens, and now they have a joined cause. The cause of opposition to illegal federal government installed in 1871. We probably should have seen this coming:
Keep in mind that with QAnon believers now embracing a sovereign citizen worldview, that not only puts them in opposition to the current government but everything that’s happened in the US since the civil war. The historic scope of the QAnon madness is expanding, quite literally.
So are we poised to see a new round of far right violence at the Capitol tomorrow? According to the Capitol police, yes, we are poised to see exactly that scenario which is why the US Capitol is going to be an extra high alert for the next few days:
“The information in the bulletin is sourced to an FBI intelligence report from late February that describes the an alleged plot by the “Three Percenters militia group to use diversionary tactics such as detonating a bomb” to draw law enforcement away from the Capitol prior to an attempt by the group to take over the U.S. Capitol, according to a law enforcement source.”
A plot to detonate a bomb to draw law enforcement away from the Capitol prior to an attempt by the group to take it over. It’s a plan with eerie parallels to the Michigan militia coup plot of last year that involved blowing up a bridge nearby the governor’s home for the purpose of drawing law enforcement away while they executed their kidnapping at the governor. You have to wonder if some the same people are involved with both plots.
But at least it sounds like it’s probably going to be extremely obvious the plot is going to be executed if it’s about to happen because it involves having 50,000 militia members descend on the Capitol and taking it over:
At the same time, while the odds of 50,000 “Three Percenters” descending on the Capitol seems unlikely simply because there probably aren’t 50,000 Three Percenters in existence, if this is a Three Percenter + QAnon operation, getting 50,000 people to the Capitol is a lot more plausible. It’s part of what makes this story so disturbing: QAnon is being positioned to convert into like the shock troops for the militias:
Finally, note the ominous security warning that goes well beyond the next few days at the Capitol: attacks against critical infrastructure are seen as increasingly likely:
So as we’ve been warned, don’t get too cozy if we end up making it through the next few days without another insurrection. After all, even if the the Three Percenters don’t get their March 4 ‘inauguration’, they’re still clearly getting one helluva Q‑fueled recruitment drive. The GOP is basically the GQP at this point, so if the QAnon movement starts flocking to groups like the Three Percenters, the Three Percenters are going to have to change their name to the Six Percenters or something. Don’t forget about the story of the “Red Storm” encrypted Discord server that was set up in 2018 specifically to facilitate coordination between QAnon followers with the broader neo-Nazi movement. They’ve been working at building these bridges for a while. Which means March 4, 2025 could be a very dark day...assuming we don’t have a darker day before then. Keep an eye on all that critical infrastructure.
Was a Las Vegas-style massacre narrowly avoided at tonight’s MLB All-Star Game in Denver? That’s the big question still lingering days after four people were arrested at a hotel near the game stadium on Friday following a tip from the hotel staff of a large cache of weapons at the hotel. A hotel that happens to be across the street from Coors Field. Police found 16 long guns, body armor, hundreds of rounds of ammunition from two rooms at the hotel following the arrest of three men and a woman: Richard Platt, 42; Gabriel Rodriguez, 48; Ricardo Rodriguez, 44, and Kanoelehua Serikawa, 43. It sounds like authorities see Ricardo Rodriguez as the leader of this incident. Rodriguez claims to have worked for multiple federal agencies over the past decade-plus. Rodriguez said he designs and builds guns and then donates them to military veterans. So he sounds like someone with the skills to make an untraceable gun.
Additionally, it turns out the suspects were scheduled to check out of the hotel on Friday, but Ricardo Rodriguez had actually requested a longer stay with a room with a balcony. And one of the two rooms did indeed have a balcony view of the downtown area. Additionally, one of the three arrested men reportedly posted on Facebook he was going to “go out in a big way,” referencing a recent divorce. So that’s all rather ominous.
And yet, as of today, authorities aren’t suspecting some sort of terrorism. Because in addition to all the guns, they also found large quantities of narcotics and cash in these hotel rooms. So while fears of a Vegas-style attack were what prompted the arrests, authorities are no longer fearing some sort of domestic terror event was just averted. Instead, it sounds like authorities are leaning towards some sort of narcotics and/or guns transaction that just coincidentally happened to be at a hotel. Or at least that’s the public explanation so far. It is notable that authorities still don’t claim to have a solid idea of what this group was actually planning. Was this a drug transaction involving someone who happened to have a large cache of guns? And why lay them out all over the hotel room where the maid can find them? Those kinds of questions remain entirely unanswered at this point in the investigation. Keep in mind that authorities aren’t going to be inclined to tell the public that they don’t actually know if there was a planned mass casualty event at tonight’s big event. It’s part of what makes this story difficult to dismiss as just a random drug/gun transaction.
As we’ll see, it sounds like most of these guns were brought there by Platt. In one interview below, Ricardo Rodriguez describes Platt as someone who would never harm his community and Rodriguez insists he would have intervened if Platt showed any signs of planning a mass attack. And yet he also calls Platt someone who he met for the first time the day before their arrest, having connected via mutual friends. Rodriguez said Platt recommended they stay at the Maven Hotel near Coors Field, which sounded great to Rodriguez who wanted to be part of the All-Star Game experience. Rodriguez claims he doesn’t know what Platt had in mind with the guns other than selling or trading them and collecting them for friends, telling reporters, “He had a lot of guns, he did...I don’t know what his intentions were from my understanding selling them and trading them. That was about it.”
Adding to the ominous nature of this incident are the actual weapons in this cache: Rodriguez describes Platt’s weapons cache as consisting of these long guns include at least two sniper rifles. The way Rodriguez described the scene, “They had a sniper rifle, probably two of them, two or three mid-sized assault rifles, AK-47s, another short entry weapon, to the average person it’s a TEC‑9, like an Uzi, numerous firearms.” It’s unclear who the “They” is that Rodriguez is referring to in that statement, suggesting he perhaps arrived there with Kanoelehua Serikawa? It’s one of the many unanswered questions in a story with basically no answers so far. Other than the answers being given by authorities that the public has nothing to worry about.
Finally, it’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t a normal MLB All-Star game. This is a highly politicized game due to the fact that the MLB relocated it out of Georgia following the GOP-controlled George state government’s passage of new highly restrictive voting laws. The GOP is even running ads reminding viewers of that controversy during the game. So we don’t really have to wonder what a possible political motive would be for a mass casualty event. The decision to move the game to Denver enraged the far right.
So we have four people with a large cache of weapons, ammunition, and even sniper rifles in the hotel across the street from a highly politicized All-Star Game and requesting balcony seats. And one of these four people recently declared on Facebook that he’s going to “go out in a big way” following a divorce. It’s the kind of situation where you really have to hope this was merely drug/guns deal gone horribly awry:
“A preliminary assessment indicated the stash of guns appears to be connected to a possible illegal transaction involving drugs and guns, according to an internal law enforcement memo obtained by ABC News.”
The preliminary assessment points towards a guns and/or drugs sale. And based on the criminal history of the people involved that sounds quite plausible. The problem remains that authorities still don’t know why this group was there. It remains a mystery:
And adding to that mystery is the fact that they were supposed to check out of the hotel on Friday but Ricardo Rodriguez had actually requested a longer the stay, along with a room with a balcony. And as we’ll see, at least one of the two rooms they rented did indeed have a balcony overlooking downtown Denver when they were arrested. Now, if they were indeed interested in the All-Star game or viewing the festivities, an extended stay in a room with a balcony would be an obvious choice. It’s just an obvious choice for shooting up the game too:
“The man whom prosecutors believe was the “leader” of the group of four people arrested Friday at the Maven Hotel on suspicion of weapons and drug offenses was supposed to check out of the two rooms he rented on Friday, but asked to stay for longer and requested a room with a balcony, according to police documents.”
They wanted a balcony and they got at least one room with a balcony, overlooking the downtown area. But they couldn’t get the room booked through Monday night. Did they have other hotels in the area booked for the weekend? Were those rooms also within shooting distance of Coors Field? These are the kinds of questions we have better hope investigators are asking:
And then there’s the Facebook post by one of the three men involved about plans to “go out in a big way.”:
Which one of these men planned to “go out in a big way?” Was it Platt? If so, that only adds to the ominousness. Because as Ricardo Rodriguez describes in the following interview, there were at least two sniper rifles in Platt’s mystery arsenal:
“Rodriguez said he arrived in Denver from Washington state last Thursday, intending to move to Colorado. He said mutual friends introduced him to Richard Platt, 42, who he met for the first time on Thursday. He said Platt recommended they stay at the Maven Hotel near Coors Field, which struck a chord with Rodriguez.”
They’re all just friends of friends. Friends of friends who decided to meet for the first time at the hotel next to the All-Star Game so they could be part of the experience. But when they met, Rodriguez couldn’t help but notice the large cache of weapons, including multiple sniper rifles. That had to be quite interesting to Rodriguez, who claims he designs and builds guns and then donates them to military veterans. But Rodriguez said Platt claimed he was collecting them for friends and to sell or trade them. That’s his story and he’s sticking with it:
So was this whole thing really just a drugs and guns transaction? It’s plausible. The problem is there are a number of other plausible scenarios that fit these data points. Again, this sporting event effectively had a political hex placed on it when the MLB relocated the game and that was before the US formally entered a period of insurrectionary politics. The idea that some nutjob might want to shoot up the All-Star game for political motives is simply much more plausible than it was even a year ago. It’s part of why the rapid dismissal of any ties to a domestic terror plot are so unsettling given the complete lack of any official explanation for what was actually happening. “We don’t know what was happening but we do know it didn’t involved planned political violence” is a much more difficult public message to convincingly sell these days.
Don’t forget, we still don’t have an official motive for Stephen Paddock. Plenty of under-explored leads, but no official answer.
With the question of whether or not Steve Bannon will finally face justice following the House January 6 Committee’s vote to hold Bannon in contempt of congress yesterday, here’s a legal update on another domestic terror movement in the US: Atomwaffen. There have been a number of Atomwaffen-related legal rulings this year.
First, there have been a number of legal developments this year in the story of the Atomwaffen intimidation campaign targeting journalists and activists. The apparent leaders of the plot were Kaleb Cole and Cameron Shea. Recall how Cole had his guns seized by Seattle authorities as part of a new state “Red Flag” law that allows for the preemptive seizure of weapons from individuals deemed to be a threat to the public health. Cole lost access to his guns for 1 year. He then apparently moved to Texas and engaged in this multistate domestic terror plot targeting the journalists and activists who covered the group. Cole was just last month of 5 felonies in relation to the plot and faces up to a decade in prison. She was sentenced to three years in prison and is slated to be released some time in late 2022/early 2023
Next, turning to an August 30th update from Nick Martin’s The Informant, we learn that Atomwaffen cell leader Brandon Russell was released from prison back in August, after serving a little more than four years on his 5 year sentence. Recall how Russell was arrested in 2017 in connection to a plot to assault a Florida nuclear power plant in the hopes of inducing a nuclear meltdown and forcing the depopulation of Florida for the purpose of establishing a Fourth Reich. As Martin points out, during his time in prison, Russell managed to release a propaganda video that named multiple people who he claimed had betrayed the group and thanks others for their loyalty. The judge did NOT order Russell to avoid contact with other Atomwaffen members upon his release.
Finally, back in March, we got the sentencing for Taylor Parker-Dipeppe, a member of a Florida-based Atomwaffen cell who took part in the intimidation plot. Parker-Dipeppe managed to avoid prison based, in part, on the fact that he’s transgendered and severly bullied as a child. It sounds like joining Atomwaffen was in part a reaction to his childhood circumstances. Interestingly, Parker-Dipeppe is the only member of the Florida cell charged in relation to this plot even though it sounds like the entire cell was involved in the intimidation campaign. Might this have to do with the fact that the Florida cell is described as “10 boys, around 15 to 16 years old”? It’s unclear, but it sounds like Atomwaffen’s Florida cell is basically a bunch of kids. Or was.
Finally, it turns out Atomwaffen doesn’t exist anymore. That was the announcement by James Mason back in September of 2020, in response to all the member arrests. But that doesn’t mean the group is over. It’s just been rebranded as the National Socialist Order (NSO). So going forward, the crazies neo-Nazi group in the US is technically the NSO. And the only member of this group facing jail time going forward is Kaleb Cole. In other words, the NSO is probably experiencing a pretty nice membership drive for a ‘new’ group.
Ok, first, here’s a look at the conviction of Kaleb Cole. A conviction that might come with a decade in prison. Or maybe a much shorter sentence. We’ll see:
“The jury deliberated for about 90 minutes Wednesday following a two-day trial before convicting 25-year-old Kaleb Cole of five felony charges, including conspiracy, mailing threatening communications and interfering with a federally protected activity. He could face a decade in prison when Judge John C. Coughenour sentences him in January.”
Kaleb Cole could be facing up to a decade in prison over the intimidation campaign he organized. Will he actually receive a sentence that long? We’ll see. We’ll also so how much of a factor the extreme nature of this case — like the fact that Cole engaged in this intimidation conspiracy after authorities preemptively sized his guns due to the fact that he was actively planning on a race war and starting “hate camps” — plays into the sentencing:
But as the following August 30 update from Nick Martin’s The Informant reminds us, there should be no expectation that Cole actually serves a decade in prison. Or even receives anything close to that sentence. That became clear following the sentencing of Brandon Russell, who was released from prison on August 23 after a serving four years on a five year sentence. Prosecutors originally wanted 11 years for Russell. Again, don’t forget what Russell was planning: triggering a nuclear meltdown that would force the depopulation of Florida so a Fourth Reich could be established there. And now he’s out an about again, without even being ordered to avoid contact with other Atomwaffen members.
Additionally, there was the sentencing of one of Cole’s other co-conspirators in the intimidation plat: Cameron Shea, who was sentenced to three years in prison and could be released in late 2022/early 2023. So while it was looking like Atomwaffen’s leadership was largely rotting away in prison last year, that’s largely changed. The leaders are out again or soon to be:
“Prosecutors asked for Russell to be sentenced to 11 years in prison, saying he would continue to pose a danger and that he “must be stripped from the ability to harm the public for as long as possible.” The judge sentenced him to five years. He ended up serving 85 percent of that, which is standard for federal inmates.”
Prosecutors asked for 11 years, got 5 years, and Brandon Russell ended up serving 4. And now he’s out of prison, despite releasing threatening videos while in prison, and is apparently free to contact other Atomwaffen members. It’s the kind of story that should dampen expectations for whatever sentence Cole ultimately gets:
And then there was the sentencing of Cameron Shea, Cole’s co-conspirator in intimidation campaign. Shea was sentenced to three years in prison and is likely to be let out some time in the next year or so. All in all, a fairly light sentence for some engaging in what amounts to a domestic terror campaign designed to intimidate the journalists covering their other domestic terror campaigns:
And that brings us to Taylor Parker-Dipeppe, a transgender neo-Nazi deemed a low-level participant in this intimidation plot. Parker-Dipeppe received no prison time in a ruling that weighed heavily his personal circumstances as an emotionally bullied transgendered youth. Interestingly, Parker-Dipeppe was the one member of the Florida Atomwaffen cell facing state or federal charges at all over the plot even though it sounds like the entire Florida cell was involved. Why is that? We don’t know, but we’re told the cell is consists of group or about 10 boys, mostly 15 and 16 years old. Parker-Dipeppe even had the distinction of being the only Florida member with a car. It raises the question of whether or not the other members are too young for prosecutors to charge as adults. If so, it points towards a pretty dark strategy by Atomwaffen: recruit them at such a young enough age to confer potential legal protections for their domestic terror:
“Parker-Dipeppe was a low-level part of the conspiracy, which authorities have said was planned by Cameron Brandon Shea, of Redmond, Washington, and Kaleb J. Cole, who moved from Seattle to Texas after Seattle police seized his guns in 2019 under an “extreme risk protection order” that suggested he was planning a race war. Cole is due to face trial in September, and Shea is scheduled to plead guilty next week.”
Taylor Parker-Dipeppe was apparently a key Florida connection in this multi-state Atomwaffen conspiracy to intimidate. He was also literally the only Florida member with a car in a group that was otherwise more 15–16 year old boys:
So all of the rest of these Florida cell members are presumably out and about, doing whatever it is stray Atomwaffen members might do. Although probably not under the “Atomwaffen” banner anymore following James Mason’s declaration that Atomwaffen is now defunct following the series of member arrests. Defunct and apparently replaced with a new group, the National Socialist Order (NSO):
“Online, the National Socialist Order has established a new website that features many of the militant hallmarks of the Atomwaffen Division, including references to James Mason, a prominent neo-nazi who lives in Denver.”
Yeah, they aren’t exactly fooling anyone. James Mason himself even announced Atomwaffen was disbanding back in March of 2020, following all the arrests, and then proceeded to make videos referencign the new National Socialist Order. It’s purely a rebranding exercise:
Are Atomwaffen’s “hate camps” going to become National Socialist Order hate camps? It sure looks likely. But on the plus side, at least the lone member of the Florida cell who had a car is no long part of the group. That should make the commute out to those hate camps a little more difficult.
Just how vulnerable is the US electrical grid to a terror attack? It’s a question that’s popped up with disturbing regularity in recent years. There was the high powered sniper attack on the Metcalf electrical grid back in 2013 the day after the Boston Bombing that remains unsolved. More recently, there was the far right “Lights Out” plot discovered involving a group of far right followers of James Mason who were preemptively planning in the fall of 2019 a domestic terror campaign attacking the US electrical grid that would be unleashed across the US in the event of Donald Trump losing the 2020 election. And now we’re getting a new chapter to this going story of the growing attempts to take down the US electrical grid:
The first known case of a “modified unmanned aircraft system likely being used in the United States to specifically target energy infrastructure” was just disclosed in an October 28 memo from the FBI, DHS, and National Counterterrorism Center. The incident took place in July 2020 at a Pennsylvania power substation, when a small drone was apparently intentionally crashed into the rooftop of a substation in an attempt to disable it. The drone was modified to create a “short circuit to cause damage to transformers or distribution lines, based on the design and recovery location.” As we’re going to see, it was a DJI Mavic 2 drone that costs $2,000-$4,000 new online, although this particular one was heavily used. So the cost of this attack was the cost of purchasing a heavily used drone that costs $2,000-$4,000 new, which means it cost almost.
Importantly, whoever did it got away with it anonymously. The drone had identifying information scratched off and at this point the operator remains unknown. So unless the person who did this used their last bit of money to purchase this drone, they’re presumably going to be able to repeat this until they figure out how to get it right. That’s a big part of what makes this story so disturbing. It was a trial run on a form of domestic terror attack that can potentially be repeatedly executed anonymously for cheap:
“The July 2020 incident is the first known case of a “modified unmanned aircraft system likely being used in the United States to specifically target energy infrastructure,” states the October 28 memo from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center. That statement is based on a review of drone incidents dating back to 2017.”
The age of modified attack drones is upon us. Modified totally anonymous attack drones:
And while the this particular attack didn’t actually take down the electrical substation, as the following article describes, the principle of making these kinds of attacks on substations to take down a grid is a tried and tested concept. For example, F‑117 Nighthawk stealth jets dropped cluster bombs loaded with graphite filament submunitions over Serbia in 1999 to take down the electrical grid. And as the article also describes, the drone used in this attack isn’t a large drone. It’s a fairly small DJI Mavic 2s quadcopter-type drone that can be purchased for $2,000-$4,000 online. That’s it. And in this case it was a heavily used drone, which could presumably be purchased for much cheaper. So while this particular attack may not have succeeded in taking down the grid, whoever did it can presumably afford to try it again. And again. Until they get it right:
“It’s unclear how much of a threat this particular drone posed in its modified configuration. The apparent intended method of attack would appear to be grounded, at least to some degree, in actual science. The U.S. military employed Tomahawk cruise missiles loaded with spools of highly-conductive carbon fiber wire against power infrastructure to create blackouts in Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991. F‑117 Nighthawk stealth combat jets dropped cluster bombs loaded with BLU-114/B submunitions packed with graphite filament over Serbia to the same effect in 1999.”
The idea of taking down the electrical grid with an attack by attacking separate components and waiting for the system to fail isn’t some fantasy. It’s a proven military tactic. What isn’t yet proven is if it can be accomplished with small drones. But when these drones are as affordable as the new DJI Mavic 2s, just $2,000-$4,000 new, it’s really just a matter of time before someone figures out how to do this:
Also keep in mind that cheap drones allows for another scary possibility: large numbers of drones being used to attack different parts of the grid simultaneously. Drone swarms are only going to get more and more affordable.
And note the other highly disturbing application of these cheap drones: targeted assassinations. Anonymous assassinations using off-the-shelf cheap technology if done right. These are the kinds of skill sets that are presumably being quietly developed today:
How long before the Secret Service has its own squad of interceptor drones routinely hovering around VIPs? It’s probably just a matter of time. It’s a reminder that, while this story should certainly prompt greater concern about the vulnerability of electrical grids to drone attacks, the electrical grid is really just one example of the kind of thing that might be vulnerable to a drone attack. Pretty much anything is potentially vulnerable to a drone attack with enough creativity. And trial and error. Practice makes perfect, especially when it comes to drone-based society-destabilization campaigns.
Here’s a story that falls into a class of stories that should serve as a growing red flag over the danger of the next insurrection involving Maidan-style false flag attacks. It’s also a story that gives us an update on whether or not the ‘Boogaloo Bois’ movement is still active in the post-Trump era. Yes, they’re stlll active. And still plotting attacks on police:
Two men Washington State men were indicted on federal charges a couple weeks ago on charges tied to the building of explosive devices intended for use on law enforcement. Daniel James Anderson of Kennewick and Connor Duane Goodman of Auburn were both self-described members of the “Verified Bois” and accused of regularly conducting training exercises where they would practice “small unit tactics, raids, firearms handling and manipulation, and survival skills” as they discussed their hopes of attacking police “whom they perceived to engage in over-aggressive law enforcement action.” Goodman is even alleged to have discussed loading a vehicle with the explosive Tannerite to turn the vehicle into a rolling IED during a May 2021 meeting. Goodman is described as the leader of the group.
But it went beyond just talk of IED. In June 2021, Anderson and Goodman allegedly obtained a load of fireworks from a tribal reservation in eastern Washington and delivered them to an FBI informant. Anderson received five Thundercracker KK0033 fireworks from a “confidential source,” and later told the source that he planned to make handheld IEDs that could “be used at protests or thrown over the front line of law enforcement officers and explode behind them.” Anderson used the fireworks to construct homemade explosive devices in glass mason jars, asserting they could “throw birdshot at least 20 yards.” Anderson allegedly told the informant that he wanted to attach ball bearings to them that would act as shrapnel. Two months later, Anderson told the source he designed the devices. In September 2021, Anderson described his devices on social media as “distraction devices” and said they “aren’t training tools. I wouldn’t be anywhere near this thing. It’s going to throw shrapnel like a MF.”
It’s unclear how many other people were involved with the group. There was clearly an unnamed FBI informant. And there are references to Goodman and Anderson training other members of the “Verified Bois” in these various survival and fighting tactics. So it sounds like this was a real plot. They really were building IEDs and really did have plans on using them at some sort of protest. But we have no idea how large this plot was. Neither do we known whether or not their planned attacks on the police were intended to be carried out at a left-wing protest — in keeping with the previous Boogaloo plots like the attack led by Steven Carrillo that the GOP repeatedly blamed on left-wing protestors — or if they were intending to carry out a non-false flag direct attack on police at some sort of pro-Trump rally. So while it remains unclear what exactly the Vigilante Bois were fighting for, they were clearly preparing for a fight. The kind of fight where they lob an IED at police from a crowd and run away:
“According to the indictment, members of the “Verified Bois” regularly conducted training exercises where they would practice “small unit tactics, raids, firearms handling and manipulation, and survival skills” as they discussed their hopes of attacking police “whom they perceived to engage in over-aggressive law enforcement action.””
How many other members of the “Verified Bois” are there? We have no idea at this point. We just know about Anderson, Goodman, and an unnamed FBI informant who appears to have be been involved with the creation of the IEDs:
And now here’s an article that gives a little more details on the nature of the IEDs: glass mason jars they called “distraction devices” that could “throw birdshot at least 20 yards.” We also learn that Goodman is considered the leader of the group. Keep in mind that we were told it was Goodman who talks about loading a vehicle with the explosive Tannerite to turn the vehicle into a rolling IED:
“Anderson, 26, used commercial fireworks to construct homemade explosive devices in glass mason jars, according to a sworn statement by Special Agent Justin Bodes of the FBI. Goodman is identified as the leader of the group who provided Anderson with a shotgun at a meeting in September.”
Glass mason jar distraction devices that could “throw birdshot at least 20 yards.” That certainly would be a distraction.
And note how were told Anderson is in custody, but theres mention of Goodman’s status. As the following article states, its not known if Goodman has been arrested. It raises the question of whether or not he’s on the run, which raises additional questions about just how many other members of this group there are out there. The fact that Anderson was bragging about his IEDs on social media in Sept 2021 suggests Goodman might not have too much difficulty getting in touch with members of the larger “Boogaloo” network:
“Anderson was arrested and taken into custody in December 2021. It is not known if or when Goodman was arrested. No pleas have been entered at this time.”
Is Goodman just walking around? If so, odds are he’s in contact with other members of the group or fellow travelers. The might include the other unnamed “Verified Bois” members who received direct training from and Goodman and Anderson. Or it might involve networking with whoever they were communicating with over social media. But it’s pretty clear this was a plot that included more people than just Goodman and Anderson:
Again, keep in mind that while the history of the Boogaloo movement suggests we should expect that they were planning on using these devices at a left-wing protest as part of a false flag attack, we can’t rule out plans to use the devices at some sort of pro-Trump rally. It’s not like there’s a shortage of elements on the far right who would love to see open warfare between Trump supporters and the government. So who knows, maybe they were planning on escalating tensions between Trump’s supporters and police in the hopes of sparking a full blown civil war. There’s a range of viable schemes that would fall into the ‘Boogaloo’ agenda. When burning down society is your main goal you actually have a lot of options.
The normalization of mass gun violence in the US has long been one of the most disturbing features of US society. And while the ease of the normalization is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this phenomena — with little beyond ‘thoughts and prayers’ being imaginable as a national response — there’s another recurring feature to these events that was prominently on display in the latest mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas two days ago: a bizarrely slow response by police. As reports are now indicating, the authorities spent more than an hour preparing to enter the classroom where the gunman had barricaded himself. Mystery surrounds many aspects of the latest shooting, but it’s that painfully slow police response that appears to have observers the most exasperated.
At the same time, we still have no real idea as to what actually motivated the now-deceased shooter, 18 year old Salvador Ramos. And may never get those answers. So with the prospect looming of this being another mass school shooting for which there giant questions — questions about both the motive and the response — but no available answers, here’s a pair of article that are a reminder that the US barely dodged another mass school slaughter just a month ago in a case that has a number of parallels to the slaughter in Uvalde. That would be the attack on Edmund Burke School, an elite private prep school in the DC area, on April 22. No one was killed, but four people were shot, including a 12 year old student. That lack of a death count appears to have resulted in the story largely falling down the memory hole. But as we’re going to see, the story remains very unanswered and bizarre.
The gunman was a 23 year old Filipino-American man, Raymond Spencer, had no known ties to the school. Described as a ‘loner’, Spencer had been living with his parents until around a year ago, at which point he started renting an apartment in Virginia. Starting in January of this year he started renting a single bedroom 5th floor apartment in DC, which ended up being the apartment from which he launched the attack on the school. It’s not known how Spencer got the money to pay for two apartments.
The attack took place at 3:18 PM, minutes before students were set to be released from school. If it had happened just five minutes later, the hundreds of students leaving to be picked up by their parents could have been hit.
Spencer unleashed over two hundred rounds towards the school from his apartment and then apparently retreated to his bathroom and waited for the police to arrive. And while no motive has been established for the attack, there were a number of clues. For starters, Spencer was an avid member of 4Chan, and even began posting on the site about his school shooting just minutes after shooting at 3:20 PM. He even posted a video of the shooting itself captured from his digital rifle scope. And his posted this under an account using his real name. So Raymond Spencer clearly wanted to be caught and killed. It was an act of murder suicide.
Another clue about Spencer’s motives came in the form of a poster found on the wall on his DC apartment. The poster depicted “Yakub”, a black man with an enlarged head that’s part of the mythology of the Nation of Islam. That presence of that poster has been used to suggest that Spencer was a follower of the Nation if Islam, but as we’re going to see, the image has already been adopted by 4Chan culture and meme-ified into a white supremacist joke.
Spencer continued posting on 4Chan for another 15 minutes. AT 3:24 PM, he posted, “Dear God please forgive me,” and at 3:30 he posted, “They’re in the wrong part of the building right now searching XD.” Spencer made his last post on 4Chan at 3:36 PM, writing “Waiting for police to catch up with me.” And that brings us to the other extremely bizarre aspect of this story: Spencer’s apartment wasn’t entered by police until around 8:30 PM, roughly five hours after the shooting. This is despite the fact that police were able to identify the 5th floor apartment building where the shots came from almost right away. Spencer even had a camera set up outside his apartment door, making it completely obvious which apartment he was located it. But it sounds like police were worried that the door could be boobytrapped. They were also concerned that Spencer wasn’t actually in the apartment and had slipped away resulting in a public communication declaring Spencer a person of interest at 7:30 PM. And that whole time, Spencer was sitting in his bathroom, waiting for the police the arrive. He is assumed to have shot himself when they finally breached his apartment door, five hours after the initial attack that sent four people to the hospital with bullet wounds.
Yes, a Filipino-American young man who appears to have been radicalized on 4Chan tried to carry out a mass school shooting and almost succeeded. He did succeed in hitting a 12 year old girl. The intent was there. His apartment was identified almost immediately as the source of the shooting. Yet it took five hours for authorities to actually enter his apartment. And this whole story was barely covered by the media and basically fell down the memory hole. So as the investigation into the massacre in Uvalde and the delayed police response plays out,
it’s going to be interesting to see if there’s any further attention given to this near-massacre from just a month ago that largely remains a giant 4Chan-inspired mystery:
“Peterson, who grew up in Southeast Washington, was stunned that there weren’t more casualties. The gunfire seemed timed for the school’s 3:15 p.m. dismissal. Five more minutes and the alley would have been filled with students.”
This elite DC prep school was just five minutes away from experiencing another mass slaughter of students. Instead, they got ‘lucky’ with ‘only’ four people shot, including a 12 year old student, and no one killed. That was just over a month ago. And yet, as we can see in this report, almost nothing is known about why Raymond Spencer did this. Or even basic information like how he was paying for two apartments. But it sounds like there are also questions around the modifications that he made to his rifles to turn them into automatic weapons capable of firing 600–900 rounds a minute. The police are apparently still investigating how he did that. Did Spencer modify those weapons using a novel technique?
But perhaps the most disturbing question is why did it take five hours to find and breach Spencer’s apartment. Based on the available details it sounds like the police were able to identify the apartment window Spencer was firing from relatively early on. And yet it was as if they couldn’t find this apartment for hours:
We’re even told that police were instructed to search every apartment in the build by 5:30 PM. That’s over two hours after the shooting and long after the window of the apartment was identified and Spencer himself joked on 4Chan about how the police were searching the wrong part of the building. Spencer even had camera equipment set up outside the apartment. And then spent another three hours waiting to enter and even sent out public communications about how the police wanted to speak with Spencer. Yes, there was uncertainty about whether or not Spencer was the shooter or if the door was boobytrapped, but it’s hard to see how that uncertainty created such a long delay. Very little about this story makes sense:
And then there’s the ultimate question here: what was the motive? Why this school? We continue to have no idea, although investigators note the poster on the wall of one of his apartments of an image associated with the Nation of Islam:
Was this avid reader of 4Chan — a site that has long hosted one of the largest white supremacist communities in the world — also a Nation of Islam adherent? Don’t forget Spencer is of Filipino heritage, so he’s not exactly the target audience for either the white supremacy of 4Chan or the worldview of the Nation of Islam. So what’s with this poster? Well, as the following article points out, that particular image has long been turned into a 4Chan meme. An ironic meme used to justify white supremacy. So while we still don’t really know what motivated Spencer to do this — outside of an obvious desire to die — the circumstantial evidence suggests he was just following along with the dominant 4Chan culture. A 4chan culture that glorifies school shooters:
“On a poster hanging in the apartment where Spencer died was a cartoon of a Black man with an enlarged head. It’s a deeply ironic reference to Nation of Islam theology – which holds that a Black scientist named Yakub created the white race more than 6,000 years ago. 4chan co-opted the concept more recently, caricaturing it along the way, to justify its own white supremacist philosophy.”
While Spencer clearly wanted to send some sort of message with this final act, it still remains entirely unclear what that message actually was intended to be. And perhaps that’s the message. An embrace of random chaos and nihilism. We don’t know. But the fact that he chose to put that poster in this “snipers nest” apartment and was posting on 4Chan throughout the shooting tells us who is target audience was in this shooting. He was trying to impress his community. A white nationalist virtual community that loves school shootings and the general collapse of society.
We’ll see if the Uvalde massacre end up bringing any additional scrutiny to last month’s school attack in DC. And maybe we’ll even see some sort of discovered motive that can be directly tied back to the extremist community Spencer belonged to. Maybe, but don’t hold your breath waiting for it.
One thing went inexplicably wrong after another after another. That’s the general story we’re getting out of investigators into last week’s school shooting at Uvalde elementary school. A story with details that keep changing. Changing details like...
* Authorities initially said the gunman was in custody. (he wasn’t)
* He was confronted before entering the school (he wasn’t)
* He intially entered the school at 11:40 am (he entered at 11:33 am)
* Officers “without hesitation tried to make entry into that school,” but were stopped by the gunman firing at them (they waited over an hour)
* The gunman was killed at 12:40 PM (he was killed at 12:50 PM)
Other changing details include...
* The gunman was wearing body armor (he wasn’t)
* Responding officers didn’t enter the school to rescue their own children (that did happen)
It’s that constantly shifting narrative, coupled with the disturbing videos of parents being tased after pleading with police outside the school to do something, that is leaving people asking very basic questions about actually happened. Not just in terms of what the gunman did but also the actions by law enforcement. Or lack of actions.
And that brings us to the following pair of really disturbing new revelations. Revelations that directly contradict previously released details. First, we just learned that the back door of the school was not in fact propped open with a rock by a teacher. It had been propped open earlier in the day. But that teacher became alarmed when the gunman first crashed his car into the fence of the school and called 911. She removed that rock and closed the back door while she was on the phone call with the 911 operator. And yet, we are told this door didn’t lock after being close. Investigators are still trying to determine why this door, which was designed to secure the exterior and lock automatically, didn’t lock that day. So some sort of unexpected mechanical failure played a crucial role in how the events of that day played out. There were two entryways into that school. If that back door happened been left inexplicably open there’s a good chance the gunman couldn’t have entered.
Also keep in mind that the gunman reportedly warned people online 10 days before the shooting that he was planning something big on that day. Think about how bizarre it is that this individual decides in advance to commit some sort of gun massacre days in advance, and a key element to his success was a weirdly malfunctioning door lock.
The second set of recent revelations involves the decision by Uvalde school district police chief Pedro “Pete” Arredondo that the gunman had “transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject,” which was the ostensible justification for hte more than hour long delay in entering that classroom. On its face it was a bizarre decision. But as we’re going to see, it turned out to be far more unjustifiable because it turns out there were multiple sources of information flowing to law enforcement confirming that there were people still alive in the classrooms. First, it sounds like students started phoning 911 around 30 minutes after Ramos first entered the school. It’s not known if Arredondo was aware of those 911 phone calls when he made the ‘barricaded suspect’ determination.
But those 911 phone calls weren’t the only source of information about the status of the people inside those classrooms. It also turns out that one of the teachers who was killed that day, Eva Mireles, is the wife of one of the Uvalde school district police officers, Ruben Ruiz. Mireles called Ruiz during the attack and told him she was dying. Ruiz was on the scene but reportedly prevented from entering the school by his fellow officers. So while it’s maybe conceivable that the 911 phone calls weren’t being relayed to the law enforcement commander in the scene — although that still sounds rather implausible — it’s utterly inconceivable that they weren’t aware of the phone call from Ruiz’s wife. People were obviously still alive in that classroom.
And that’s all why more and more people are calling for a major investigation into what actually happened, including the “Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas” police union, as the community of Uvalde braces itself from the next round of inexplicable revelations:
“Since the shooting, officials have faced withering criticism over the series of details that they have released about the shooting, only to later say that information was incorrect. Authorities initially said the gunman exchanged fire with a school police officer outside, only to later say this never happened; they also said the shooter was wearing body armor but reversed course on that as well.”
What’s next? Which crucial detail is going to turn out to be an inversion of reality? That’s the context of this latest revelation about the propped open door that never war: it’s only the latest detail surrounding this event that turned out to be wrong or fabricated. How can the investigator get so much wrong unless there was some sort of initial coverup? That’s the disturbing meta-question hanging over all of these other question:
And note how we don’t have to take this teacher at her word that she rushed back to close the door. She was on the phone with 911 at the time. There’s going to be a recording of this:
So how does a door designed to prevent external entry, and which literally had to be propped open with a rock, not lock when that rock is removed? Of all of the points of failure that facilitating this attack, the failure of that door locking mechanism is perhaps the most inexplicable because there was no human failure involved. A simple mechanical device apparently just didn’t work.
But that device failure was then followed by a series of human decisions that, while not necessarily inexplicable, have yet to be explained. It sounds like the school district police chief Arredondo has even stopped responding to the requests from investigators:
What caused Arredondo to almost immediately conclude that the situation “transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject”? It’s the biggest question looming over this whole thing. Of all the decisions that could have been made at that moment, why that decision? After all, as we’ve now learned, while the bulk of the shooting that took place inside that classroom transpired in the initial minutes, that doesn’t mean there aren’t injured people bleeding out. Every minute counts for shooting victims. Even if you assume the shooter had already done all of the shooting he had planned to do in the opening minutes that’s no excuse for just waiting for an extended negotiation.
And that brings us to one of the other ‘WTF?!’ revelations about this event that we just learned: it turns out one of the shot school teachers spent time on the phone with her husband who happened to be one of the Uvalde school district police officers on the scene outside of the school. We’re told this officer was prevented from entering the school by the other officers, in keeping with the decision to treat it as a ‘barricaded subject’ situation
But beyond that, we’re also told that children in the classroom began calling 911 around 30 minutes after the gunman entered the school. Any assumptions that everyone but the shooter was already dead was being actively refuted in real-time by the children. So there were two direct sources of information to law enforcement that people were still alive in the classroom: the students calling 9/11 and the teacher directly calling her police officer husband who as on the scene:
“The latest detail about the teacher’s phone call to her husband is potentially an important one — suggesting that at least one of the officers arriving at the scene had information from inside the classrooms that could have informed the decision by the police to delay entry. A question remained as to whether 911 calls from children inside the classrooms, starting 30 minutes after the gunman arrived, were communicated to the commander at the scene.”
It wasn’t just this police officer who received calls from inside the classrooms. The children reportedly started calling 911 around 30 minutes after the Ramos arrived. So there were calls coming from inside the classroom going to both 911 and directly to one of the officers directly outside. Keep in mind that the decision to transition the situation from an “active shooter” to a “barricaded suspect” scene was presumably predicated on the assumption that no one other than the shooter was left alive in room. That’s why questions about whether or not this information was conveyed to the commander at the scene are both crucial to the situation and also rather absurd. Of course they were aware there were people still alive in that room. Officer Ruiz were literally being preventing from going into the school by other officers on the scene. Obviously he told them about the call he just received from his wife:
But for all of the questions directed as Arredondo and the officers immediately on the scene, note how the outrage expressed by the Texas law enforcement union over how this all unfolded isn’t just directed at Arredondo. They were explicit in their condemnation of Governor Abbot and the head of the state police Steven McGraw. It’s another clue about the clusterf*ck going on here: the law enforcement union is pointing fingers all the way to the top:
What’s next? What other critical details are going to turn out to be wrong or fabrications? We’ll see. But it’s pretty clear that we haven’t heard the last inexplicable revision on this story. We can be confident of that. But with even the police union pointing fingers at everyone include the governor and state chief of police, the question of whether or not we’re ever going to get a sensible explanation for what actually happened remains a very open question.
Here’s a pair of articles about the July 4 parade attack in Highland Park, IL, and the ongoing role online chatrooms popular with gaming communities in creating online radicalizing communities. Recall how the popular gaming app, Steam, was found to be hosting a large number of forums dedicated to celebrating school shooters and other mass murderers.
In this case, the shooter, Robert “Bobby” Crimo, III, preferred to hang out in the online Discord chat server with the name “SS”. Keep in mind that Discord has been extensive used by neo-Nazis including planning the August 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, VA. Also recall how, in 2019, Conor Climo, a Las Vegas area man, was arrested planning a mass neo-Nazi terror attack in coordination with an Atomwaffen offshoot, Feuerkrieg Division. That attack was planned on a Discord server. Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron spent months openly planning his attack on a Discord server and even invited a small group of people onto a Discord server to view his plan approximately 30 minutes before the attack. So when another mass murderer pops up emanating from one of these online communities, the question is once again raised: how many people are inhabiting these anonymous radicalization breeding grounds and what’s being done to address them?
As we’re going to see, part of what complicates this story is the fact that Crimo’s act wasn’t done in the name of any overt political ideology, unlike other mass murderers like Payton Gendron who posted a political manifesto that made his intentions abundantly clear. That lack of any political statement has led to all sorts of head scratching around Crimo’s possible motives. Head scratching and furious denials that he was in any way enthralled by the same far right nihilistic ideology that captivated and motivated figures like Gendron or Climo.
And as we’re also going to see, Crimo’s politics were pretty clear, despite the lack of a manifesto. Beyond a predilection for posting extremely graphic videos depicting acts of violence, Crimo reportedly had a predilection for posting exactly the kind of content that one would expect from a young far right individual, like complaining about “communists” and even posting a pic of himself wearing a Pepe the Frog t‑shirt. He even attended a September 2020 Trump rally. But two members of this online “SS” online community who agreed to speak with the press insist that Crimo was apolitical and gave no hints of planning such an attack. They also insist that “SS” stands for “Sleep Squad” and no one on the forum in any way supports Nazism. They also point to the Where’s Waldo outfit Crimo was wearing at the Trump rally and suggest that it was all an ironic joke and he wasn’t really a Trump supporter because he was actually just apolitical. The convergence of clues pointing towards a far right ideology was all a coincidence, according to these “SS” Discord community members. So was it all a coincidence? Because if not, that implies the extremist community Crimo was a part of are engaged in an ongoing coverup if their extremism:
“Robert “Bobby” E. Crimo III, the Highland Park suspect who was arrested hours after the shooting on Monday, left a sprawling online footprint, including on Discord, YouTube, Twitter and other social platforms. Under his rap name “Awake,” Crimo posted music videos on his YouTube channel that included depictions of mass murder, while on his own Discord server, Crimo shared nihilistic political memes and comments.”
Bobby Crimo was just posting apolitical darkly humorous memes to this Discord community. He was posting nihilistic political memes and depictions of mass murder. That’s far from apolitical. If someone has zero interest in all things politics, that’s apolitical. But when someone wants to watch everyone die and the world burn, that’s about as a political as you can get. Politically awful, yes, but violent nihilism is absolutely political. The kind of political views apparently shared within this Discord community. That’s one of the key points about seemingly apolitical mass killers like Crimo to keep in mind: it only looks apolitical if you make the mistake of assuming burning down society isn’t a political act:
And then there’s the overtly political statements, like Unicorn Riot’s discovery of posts by Crimo complaining about all the “commies”. That’s pretty political. Also note that Unicorn Riot also found a pic of Crimo wearing a ‘Pepe the Frog’ t‑shirt. The political clues just keep building:
It’s also important ot keep in mind that, while the fundamentally political nature of Crimo’s seemingly apolitical violent nihilism contrasts with the overtly hyper-political nature of Payton Gendron Discord-fueled shooting spree, the two shooters were ultimately catering to the same audience: people radicalized online who want to watch the world burn. An extreme far right audience:
Also note the ominously scandalous nature of Discord’s repeated involvement in these mass shootings: it’s scandalous in part because Discord actually had the ability to review content on the servers. But that only happens if content gets flagged. In other words, while these Discord communities can in theory be moderated, they are are effectively self-policing. And if Discord ever does take steps to crack down on this kind of extremism, these communities will just relocate to platforms like Telegram that lack these moderation capabilities entirely:
Finally, note this intriguing reference to Discord removing accounts that were “creating fake Discord chat logs to trick law enforcement and media outlets.” So what kind of trickery was going on? The kind of trickery that obscures the violent nature of what’s happen on these servers?
And that apparent attempt to confuse law enforcement and the media about the nature of these online communities brings us to the following Rolling Stone piece that includes interviews with two members of Crimo’s online community. Both insist that Crimo wasn’t political at all but was just into dark ironic humor and memes. Both also insist that the forum itself, dubbed “SS”, merely a humorous online community for the “Sleepy Squad” and that Crimo never showed any hints of planning a violent attack. When asked about photos of Crimo at a 2020 Trump rally, we are told he was just there as a joke, pointing to the Where’s Waldo? outfit he was wearing at the rally...as if that outfit somehow signifies that it was all a joke and in no way a show of support for Trump.
So at the same time we are told Crimo posted extremely violent videos on this Discord server not long before the attack, we’re also told by the community itself that Crimo gave no sign of planning the attack in advance. It’s the kind of storyline that either suggests these members of the Discord community are lying to media or that the posting of graphically violent videos was just such a normal thing on this server that they weren’t seen as a warning sign by the rest of the community. Or both:
“Bennett Brizes refers to Robert E. Crimo III by his rapper name when discussing his longtime online friend. Crimo was arrested on Monday in connection with the Fourth of July parade shooting that killed seven people and injured 30 others in Highland Park, Illinois. Early reports on Crimo have noted his attendance at a Trump rally alongside other inferences as evidence of an ideological extremist. But multiple online friends insist to Rolling Stone the Crimo they knew was more apolitical troll than extreme ideologue.”
Despite all the clues pointing towards Crimo having adopted a violent extremist ideology online — clues like Crimo’s repeated posts of extremely violent videos and even his 2020 attendance at a Trump rally, Crimo’s online friends insist that this is all a giant misunderstanding and this online community was simply about ironic humor. The “SS” stands for “Sleepy Squad” and the creep cross-like symbol Crimo created that happens to look a symbol used by the Finnish far-right faction Suomen Sisu is purely coincidental. And when Crimo attended a Trump rally it wasn’t a reflection of right-wing sympathies but was all just a big joke, as if a Where’s Waldo? shirt somehow turns his presence at a Trump rally into an ironic act. That’s the narrative this online community is asking us to believe:
Is this all just a case of missed clues? Or something much worse? Let’s hope investigators are seriously looking into how someone waving this many red flags could ‘slip through the cracks’ like this. It’s all a grim reminder that when society ignores the growing overlap between the kind of ‘burn it all down’ nihilism openly embraced by Bobby Crimo and the ‘burn it all down if we don’t get to run everything’ mainstream far right ideology, that should probably qualify as ‘missing a red flag’ being waved right before our eyes. Over and over.
It happened again. There was another attack on the US power grid. This time it was in Moore County, North Carolina. Power to nearly the entire county went down Saturday evening. And once again, the attack appears to have been carried out by simply incapacitating key substations with a rifle. It’s expected to take days to repair the damage.
Recall the December 2020 story about “Operation Lights Out”, the white supremacist plot to simultaneously take down the power grid across the US by firing high-powered rifles at electrical grid power substations. It was a plot eerily reminiscent of the military-style attack on the PG&E Metcalf power grid substation in 2013 with a rifle that took place the day after the Boston Marathon bombing and caused a massive strain on the regional power supply. And it was determined by experts at the time that if multiple such an attack was carried out simultaneously it could cause a massive regional blackout.
That the Metcalf attack sniper was never identified but investigators did eventually conclude that it was likely done by an insider. And as we’re going to see, authorities have already concluded that whoever carried out this latest attack also knew what they were doing.
While investigators are confident whoever carried out the attack knew what they were doing, their investigation appears to have hit a wall, with no group claiming credit for the attack or any known motive. And yet, as we’re also going to see, there’s actually some pretty compelling circumstantial evidence for the motive. Because it turns out the power outage coincided with a drag queen show that local far right activists had been aggressively protesting as part of the growing organized right-wing fixation with the LGBT community, like the Council for National Policy’s Project Blitz. Not only were there dozens of protesters outside the show at the time, but one of the organizers of those protests, Emily Grace Rainey, posted on Facebook after the outage that she knew the cause of it. It also turns out Rainey helped to organized a group who traveled to DC for January 6, 2021, so this was someone with a history of flirting with political extremism making these claims. Police subsequently spoke with Rainey, who claims to have informed them that God caused the outage, and they appear to have concluded she had nothing to do with the attack. But it doesn’t sound like the attendees of the drag show are satisfied with that investigation, and that’s where it stands at this point. Also keep in mind that this is just weeks after the deadly mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, underscoring the increasingly violent nature of that far right focus on drag queens being actively and aggressively cultivated by right-wing political networks.
So we know at least one person who knew what they were doing in taking down an entire county’s power supply is still out there, and investigators have no solid leads or a motive. As per usual, like almost every other attack of this nature:
““The person who did this knew what they were doing,” said Moore County Sheriff Ronnie Fields, who described the attack as deliberate. “It appears they were trying to shut down the county.” Officials do not have a motive or suspect.”
Whoever did this knew what they were doing. That’s self-apparent from the effectiveness of the attack. The attacks at these two locations managed to take down power for nearly the entire county. And yet, with no groups taking credit, investigators appear to be at a loss in terms of suspects. This is despite the circumstantial evidence connecting the attacks and the start of a drag queen show that had become a focal point for local far right protests. Not only was there a large group of people outside the drag show protesting it when the attack first happened, but the timing of the attack appears to have aligned with the start of the show:
So beyond the general questions of who was behind this attack, we have to ask whether or not local investigators are even taking it seriously. And that brings us the following report fleshing out the kinds of clues authorities have to work with in this investigation. Clues like the social media postings by Moore County resident Emily Grace Rainey, a vocal opponent of the drag show who posted an invitation to the draw show protest earlier that day, and then posted on Facebook, “The power is out in Moore County and I know why.” It turns out Rainey organized a group of Moore County residents who traveled to DC on January 6, 2021, so she’s not someone unfamiliar with extreme political acts. But Sheriff Fields appears to have already concluded Rainey had no connection to the attack. According to Rainey, “I told them that God works in mysterious ways and is responsible for the outage. I used the opportunity to tell them about the immoral drag show and the blasphemies screamed by its supporters.” And that was enough to convince investigators. That’s all part of the disturbing context of this story: not only does this appear to be the latest attempt to terrorize the LGBT community over the ‘groomer’ drag show hysteria being actively cultivated by powerful groups like the Council for National Policy, but it’s not clear that it’s being seriously investigated. Which sounds like a recipe for more coincidentally-time attacks on Moore County’s power supply:
“”We’re looking at a pretty sophisticated repair with some pretty large equipment, so we do want citizens to be prepared that this will be a multi-day restoration for most customers extending potentially as long as Thursday,” he said.”
This wasn’t a minor disruption. It’s a multi-day restoration process involving the replacement of large pieces of equipment. Which, again, hints at sophisticated actors who knew what they were doing and have the ability to do it again. So it’s worth noting how Moore County, home of many civilian and military workers at Fort Bragg, doesn’t have a shortage of people with the kinds of backgrounds and skills needed to pull off something like that:
And just as there’s on shortage of people with the skills needed to pull of this attack, there’s also no shortage of people like Emily Grace Rainey with a grudge against that drag show. And yet it doesn’t look like investigators are seriously looking into that possibility:
It doesn’t sound like the drag show attendees are satisfied with the investigation so far and it’s not hard to see why. This sure looks like an attack directed at the Moore County LGBT community, but it’s not clear local law enforcement is taking that seriously. But, of course, this wasn’t just an attack on the local LGBT community even if they were the intended targets. The whole county was attacked. That’s part of what’s going to be grimly interesting to see play out: who will the Moore County residents ultimately blame for this disruption in their lives? The apparent anti-LGBT bigots who apparently hate drag queens so much that they blacked out the whole county to prevent that show? Or blame the drag queens for inciting God’s wrath? It’s pretty clear who Emily Grace Rainey and her fellow travelers want the public to blame. We’ll see if she succeeds, likely in the form of more unsolved attacks to come that are somehow blamed on God’s hatred of drag queens.
Either someone is getting a lot of practice taking down the power grid or a lot people are getting at least some practice. Because stories about physical attacks on parts of the US power grid are becoming increasingly common events in the US, punctuated with a quadruple attack on Tacoma’s power substations on Christmas morning resulting in fires that caused substantial damage. Making that the latest grid attack in the US Pacific Northwest in the last couple of months. As we’re going to see, the Moore County, NC, grid attack a few weeks ago was preceded by at least six attacks in Oregon and Washington in the latter half of November. Two of those attacks were done with firearms, one in Washington and one in Oregon. So a variety of methods — some with firearms, some without, all effective apparently — were being tested out by a still unknown parties in the region a month before the quadruple Christmas Day attack in Tacoma.
It’s a disturbing trend, punctuated by a persistent lack of suspects. It’s hard to imagine they aren’t going to keep striking. And with all the experience they’re getting, it’s hard to imagine they won’t be delivering more and more effective strikes.
And as the third article below describes, neo-Nazis and accelerationists have been cheering on the attacks and posting details instructions on how to carry out more, along with tips on where to strike next. So while we may not have solid suspects, we can pretty reason suspect the people behind the Tacoma Christmas Day grid attack are at least aligned with the people who have been behind so many of the other grid attacks in recent years. Who are probably Nazis and fellow travelers as usual.
Ok, first, here’s a report on the quadruple Tacoma attacks and note how all four attacks involved fires that cause substantial damage:
“Like the three local vandalism incidents that preceded it, authorities said a blaze broke out at the fourth substation after “suspect(s) gained access to the fenced area and vandalized the equipment which caused the fire.” Power was cut to homes in two surrounding neighborhoods, Kapowsin and Graham — the latter of which has a population of roughly 32,000 — although police did not specify exactly how many outages occurred and said power had been restored to most affected homes by midnight.”
Four Christmas morning substation break-ins and blazes for Tacoma by people who clearly knew what to do to cause a lot of damage. Someone waged a ‘War on Christmas’ in Tacoma and won. With no suspects, as usual with these types of crimes. Including the six other attacks on electrical power sites in the Pacific Northwest since in the latter half of November. The Moore County, NC, attack isn’t the only context here. There’s far more local context. As the following article describes, two of those six attacks were eerily similar to the Moore County attack in how they involved the use of firearms to strategically inflict major damage on the grid. But it’s a complete lack of suspects that unites all of these attacks at the same time they appear to be accelerating:
“Portland General Electric, the Bonneville Power Administration, Cowlitz County Public Utility District and Puget Sound Energy have confirmed a total of six separate attacks on electrical substations they manage in Oregon and Washington. Attackers used firearms in at least some of the incidents in both states, and some power customers in Oregon and Washington experienced at least brief service disruption as a result of the attacks.”
Six separate attacks on the power grid in Oregon and Washington since mid-November. And the day after the FBI issues a memo to utilities warning of attacks, the Moore County, NC, attack takes place. It’s some pretty alarming context to that still unsolved Moore County attack. At least two of those six incidents involve firearms, one in each state, and one thing all of these attacks have in common is no suspect:
And as the security specialist investigating the Bonneville Power Administration attack reminds us his memo, extremist groups have not just been calling for attacks on the grid but posting instructions:
Is this the same group running around committing all these attacks? Or a bunch of different attackers following the same instructions? We don’t know because no one is ever caught. But as the following Newsweek piece reminds us, group that monitor extremists have been warning about the enthusiastic promotion of attacks on the grid by neo-Nazis and accelerationists with online manuals on how to do it and suggested targets. So while the complete lack of suspects means we don’t know whether or not this latest wave of power grid attacks was the handiwork of some sort of ‘lone wolves’ who follow this extremist content, they’re the obvious suspects at this point:
““Thesituation in Moore County offers only a glimpse into the chaos that attacks such as this can cause, and larger scale assaults could bring disruption on a statewide or even national level,” Purdue said, referencing “a steady slew of manifestos, social media posts, videos and even instruction manuals on this kind of attack being produced by extremists over the past few years””
There’s no shortage of potential suspects for these attacks when no one is ever arrested. But it’s hard not to notice that the online neo-Nazi communities are enthusiastically pushing an ‘attack the grid’ message, along with detailed instructions on how to attack and suggestions on where to hit next and this has been a growing trend over the last few years:
It’s also worth noting that the initial suspect in the Moore County attacks — Emily Grace Rainey, who led a group of people to the Capitol on Jan 6 — is former U.S. Army psychological operations officer. That’s a rather interesting for a number of reasons. For starters, there’s the psychological warfare nature of power grid attacks. From the accelerationist/Atomwaffen standpoint, taking down the grid is PsyOp at its core. But also the way she publicly drew attention to herself as an obvious potential suspect when she posted on Facebook that she knew the cause of the blackout, only to tell police it was God’s wrath over the drag show. Rainey isn’t some random MAGA fan. She was a psychological operations officer. Should a suspect ever be identified for that attack it will be interesting to see what, if any, ties they have to Rainey. Because a military psychological operations officer who led a Jan 6 group drawing attention to herself in the way she did with the Moore County blackout just adds to the questions about what ties she might have to this attack that apparently still completely lacks an official suspect:
What types of celebrations and future attack tips were these online communities sharing after the Tacoma attacks? Who knows but we can be sure they were elated. It was another big win for whoever is doing this. And another big win for their accelerationist fans.
@Pterrafractyl–
Something to consider in this regard is the philosophy of the late David Lane, driver of the getaway car in the murder of talk show host Alan Berg and an iconic white supremacist, whose Fourteen Words are the inspiration for C14, the government-subsidized auxiliary police/militia unit in Ukraine.
Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism by Mattias Gardell; Duke University Press [SC]; Copyright 2003 by Duke University Press; ISBN 0–8223-3071–7; pp. 200–201.
. . . . Endorsing Beam’s leaderless strategy, [David] Lane argued for tactical separation between an open propaganda arm and an underground paramilitary arm termed WOTAN (Will of the Aryan Nation). The function of the overt wing is to “counter system sponsored propaganda, to educate the Folk, to provide a man pool from which the covert or military arm can be [recruited] . . . and build a revolutionary mentality” (David Lane 1994a, 26). Since the open racial propagandist “will be under scrutiny,” Lane emphasized that the cadres involved need to “operate within the [legal] parameters” and keep “rigidly separated” from the military underground. The WOTAN paramilitary “must operate in small, autonomous cells, the smaller, the better, even one man alone,” and it was “incumbent” that no “system attention” was to be drawn “to the overt cadres” (ibid., 27). The aim of the military underground was, Lane hammered down, to “hasten the demise of the system before it totally destroys our gene pool” (26). Revolutionary activity meant utilizing “fire, bombs, guns, terror, disruption and destruction. Weak points in the infrastructure of an industrialized society are primary targets. Whatever and whoever perform valuable service for the system is [sic] targets, human or otherwise. Special attention and merciless terror are visited upon those White men who commit race treason.” (27). 11
Lane was aware of, but indifferent to, the possibility that his message might contribute to inspiring a lone wolf with a warrior complex to commit an act of blind terror along the lines of the Oklahoma City bombing, which counted fifteen children among the victims killed. “There are only those who are for our cause and those who are our enemies . . . the masses are selfish, greedy asses. They have always been and they always will be.” . . .
But of course, Lane was just a “nut” and his philosophy could never find sympathy in any kind of governing structure, no?
Best,
Dave
Well that’s new: It looks like there might actually be apprehended suspects in the case of the Christmas Day quadruple power grid attacks in the Tacoma area. It’s a refreshing change for a kind of story where ‘no suspects’ is usually a defining feature. Two men have been arrested in the investigation and have already admitted to the crime.
Case closed, right? Well, this is were this case is starting to sound awfully familiar: the two have told investigators that they carried out the attack purely for the purpose of knocking power out so they could rob a store. That’s their story and it appears investigators are buying it. Yep.
Now, it does appear that the two did indeed carry out a burglary. But, as we’re going to see, that’s still a highly questionable set of alleged motives for this crime. For starters, why would you need to attack four power stations hundreds of miles apart just to take the power out at a store? And more importantly, why the fourth attack, which happen hours after the burglary.
And then there’s the fact that this happened in the wake of six unexplained attacks on the power grid in Oregon and Washington just weeks before this happened amid a growing far right online fervor for exactly these kinds of attacks. And then there’s the still-unexplained Moore County, NC, attacks. Evidence just keeps piling up that the US power grid is a major target for extremist attacks. No suspects are ever found. And yet, when we have a string of grid attacks that does indeed yield suspects, investigators appear to be ready to accept the “we did it to rob the store” plea. That’s perhaps the biggest story here: the fact that investigators finally caught the culprits in one of these grid attacks and yet still seem eager to not actually carry out a full investigation:
“According to court documents, the two men broke into the four substations and manipulated the high side breaks causing the outages but did not steal or cut any wire. They reportedly told law enforcement they cut the power so they could rob a nearby business.”
They attacked four separate substations in an attempt to create a blackout that would give them the opportunity to steal from the cash register at a ‘nearby business’. That’s the remarkably absurd story Matthew Greenwood and Jeremy Crahan are apparently telling police following their arrests. Even more remarkable is that the investigators appear to buy their story. Although if there’s one detail that lends weight to preposterous plan it’s the fact that the two were caught due to their decisions to carry around their cellphones with them during each of the four attacks. In other words, these weren’t particularly sophisticated criminals.
Still, you don’t need to be a criminal mastermind to avoid doing things that don’t make any sense at all in accomplishing your crimes. Like four separate substation attacks over a broad area just to knock out the power at a local business. Especially when the fourth substation attack is over 12 hours after the initial attack. It doesn’t add up:
So when exactly were all of these attacks? Well, according to the following Vice article, the first attack took place at 2:30 am on Christmas morning. The second and third attacks happened several hours later. The fourth attack didn’t happen until 7:30 pm. So the attacks actually took place over a 17 hour timespan:
“The attacks came as all eyes were on the national power grid following similar attacks in North Carolina, Oregon, and Washington state. /While far-right actors have previously shared instructions on how to attack grids, no groups nor individuals have been caught or laid claim to the other attacks.”
This didn’t happen in a vacuum. Their quadruple Christmas Day attack on Tacoma’s power grid was preceded by a string of attacks across the Pacific Northwest along with the Moore County, NC, attack. And while we know that far right groups are actively pushing followers to execute exactly these kinds of attacks, NONE of these attacks have had anyone claiming attribution or giving a motive. In other words, it appears that the far right’s strategy of attacking the power grid doesn’t include taking credit for it. Quite the opposite, the intent appears to be to just cause social stress and chaos.
That aggressive under-the-radar promotion of attacks on the grid, coupled with a complete absence of public credit for these attacks, is a key part of the context of this case. All indications are that the groups targeting the power grid don’t want public credit. Yes, they want to take the grid down, but they don’t actually want the public blame.
Also note the puzzling timeline here: the first attack happened at 2:30 am, with the second and third attacks taking place several hours later, and a fourth attack at 7:30 pm, 17 hours after the first attack. Are we expected to believe that they decided to knock power out over a wide area over in a series of attacks that spanned 17 hours just to rob a store? Apparently, yes, that’s what we’re expected to believe. At least that’s what investigators appear to be accepting as a motive:
So with this timeline, we have to ask: when exactly was that store robbed? And where was this store located with respect to the areas that lost power in these attacks? Was the power at the store not out after the first attack, leading the two to conclude that the second and third attacks were needed? Those details are still largely missing from the story we’re getting. But as the following pair of articles make clear, the burglary apparently happened after the second and third attacks, which happened around 5:30 am according to the above timeline. Which makes that fourth attack all the more bizarre.
Ok, first, here’s a report that specifies that the burglary happened following the attacks on the Graham and South Hill power stations:
“Crahan is accused of going inside the fourth substation. After the Graham and South Hill attacks, the two went to a nearby company where Crahan drilled out a lock and Greenwood entered to steal from the cash register while the electricity was off, according to Tucher. That company is not mentioned in the complaint.”
So after the Graham and South Hill attacks, the two proceeded to rob the still-unnamed local store. Which raises the question: when did the Graham and South Hill attacks take place? Are these the second and third attacks? Or third and fourth attacks? In other words, did they carry out the fourth attack before or after their robbery?
The answer to that question isn’t clear in that report since there’s only a single reference to the “South Hill” power grid site. But we can get clarity on that question from the following article that was originally published on Christmas morning, hours before the fourth attack that evening. And as we can see, the Graham and South Hill attacks were the second and third attacks of that day. So Greenwood and Cahan apparently robbed that store after the second and third attacks that morning, and then decided to carry out a fourth attack later that evening for some random reason. At least that’s the story investigators are buying:
“The sheriff’s office reported that a third substation on South Hill, operated by Puget Sound Energy, was also attacked earlier Sunday”
And there we have it. The third station attacked that day was the South Hill station. So it was after that third attack that the two carried out their robbery.
And then, hours later, they made the fourth substation attack. Why? Who knows? And why were three attacks needed in the first place to carry before carrying out the burglary? We have know idea about that either. And based on the way the investigation is going, it doesn’t look like we’ll ever get an answer. At least not an answer that doesn’t end up raising more questions about whether or not there’s a real investigation happening.
It’s long felt like just a matter of time before the far right targeting of the US electrical grid manages to succeed in causing a major catastrophe. You can’t say they aren’t trying. In just the last several months along we’ve seen the grid attacks on Moore County, NC, followed by a string of unexplained attacks in Oregon and Washington State. A few weeks later, there was the quadruple-Christmas Day attacks on substations in the Tacoma, WA, area.
Now, as we subsequently saw, the perpetrators of those quadruple Christmas-Day attacks were eventually caught, giving investigators a story about how the attacks were carried out to execute a burglary at a local business. As we also saw, investigators appeared to buy that story entirely, despite the fact that the fourth attack on the Tacoma grid took place hours after the burglary. So while the Tacoma attacks are official just part of a petty crime plot, it’s not exactly a compelling official investigative conclusion.
And that brings us to the latest story about a grid attack plot in the US. A story that should sound awfully familiar: Atomwaffen co-founder Brandon Russell was just arrested on charges of plotting a Baltimore-area grid attack. Co-plotter Sarah Clendaniel was also charged. Russell and Clendaniel reportedly both met while the two were both in prison.
Recall how Russell was first sent to prison following the twin murders of two of his roommates by a fourth roommate, Devon Arthurs, back in 2017. All four roommates were members of Atomwaffen, but A it turns out Arthurs had recent converted to Islam and decided to kill his roommates over their “disrespect” for his new religion. When police arrived, they discovered enough explosives to make a bomb. Arthurs told police Russell — a former member of the Florida National Guard — was plotting a mortar attack on a Miami-area nuclear plant. The plan was to force a depopulation of Florida with the goal of setting up a Fourth Reich. Arthurs also told police that Russell had the knowledge to build a nuclear bomb. Police found two radiactive substances on the premises: Thorium and Americium. That’s the person who was just charged with plotting Baltimore-area grid attacks. The Atomwaffen co-found who was previous sent to prison after plotting a Miami-area nuclear meltdown.
In terms of the specific attacks they had in mind, the Baltimore plot sounds less like what Russell was plotting in 2017 and more like the recent string of attacks involving the direct targeting of electrical substations with firearms. Using open-source information, Russell and Clendaniel identified five substations in the Baltimore area that, once incapacitated, would create a “cascade” that would end up taking down the grid for an extended period of time.
Now, in terms of the timing of the plot, it’s worth noting that it appears that Russell began this latest round of plotting in the summer of 2022, while he was out of prison on supervised release. Recall how Russell was released in August of 2021, after serving only four years out of his five year sentence. So how was Russell plotting new attacks while out on supervised release? Well, it sounds like he was using an encrypted app to communicate with an unnamed individual. That unnamed individual turned out to be an FBI informant. It’s another part of this story: it appears that the plot could still be underway had that third individual not turned out to be an FBI informant while Russell was out of prison on supervised released. That’s how easy it is to carry out grid attacks in the modern era. Even people on supervised release from prison can do it with today’s encrypted communications tools. As long as they aren’t plotting with an informant, of course:
“According to prosecutors, their plan was to attack with gunfire five substations that serve the Baltimore area. In conversations about the plot, according to court documents, Clendaniel “described how there was a ‘ring’ around Baltimore and if they hit a number of them all in the same day, they ‘would completely destroy this whole city.’””
A plot to shoot up multiple substations around Baltimore with an intent on causing the kind of damage that couldn’t be quickly repaired. That was their plan, which sure sounds a lot like what various groups have actually been doing around the US over the last several months, from Moore County, NC, to the Christmas-day attacks in Tacoma. That’s a big part of the context of this story: they are charged with plotting the kind of domestic terrorism activity that’s been surging in recent months:
But then there’s the other chilling context of this story: Brandon Russell isn’t just a co-founder of Atomwaffen. He was also already sent to prison on charges of plotting attacks against a Florida nuclear power plant! Beyond that, when police searched his home in Tampa following the murder of his fellow Atomwaffen roommates by a third roommate, Devon Arthurs, the police not only found enough explosives to build a bomb but also found two radioactive substances: Thorium and Americium. Arthurs told police Russell, a former member of the Florida National Guard, was both planning on attacking a Miami-area nuclear power plant with mortars but was also had the technical knowledge to build a nuclear bomb. Russell wasn’t simply sent to prison for planning attacks on the electrical grid. He was planning attacks on a nuclear power plant and was in possession of radioactive substances:
Now, regarding the fact that Sarah Clendaniel’s semiautomatic weapon had been seized in a dispute with a neighbor, it’s worth recalling the episode of another Atomwaffen leader, Caleb Cole, who had his guns seized by Seattle authorities back in 2019 as part of a new state “Red Flag” law that allows for the preemptive seizure of weapons from individuals deemed to be a threat to the public health. Cole lost access to his guns for 1 year. Also recall how Russell was released from prison early, in August of 2021, after serving little more than four years of his sentence. It sounds like the plotting for these new grid attacks apparently starting in the summer of 2022. So Russell was plotting new attacks less than a year after his early release. Imagine that:
Less that an a year after his early supervised release, Brandon Russell’s terror plotting begins anew. Over an encrypted app, when Russell first started encouraging a third unnamed individual to start attack substations. A third individual who fortunately turned out to be an FBI informant:
“The FBI also obtained a “manifesto” by Clendaniel that allegedly references Adolf Hitler and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. ”
A “manifesto” with references to Hitler and the Unabomber. Yeah, that’s more or less what we should have expected. This is a good time to recall how police reportedly found a framed picture of Timothy McVeigh in Russell’s Tampa bedroom.
And note how Russell apparently started this latest round of plotting in June of 2022 this an FBI informant over an encrypted app, while he was out on supervised release. It raises the question: what if the informant wasn’t an informant? Would this plot still be ongoing?
We’ll see how long before Russell’s next supervised release. But that doesn’t mean he’s returning to a terrorism hiatus. Don’t forget that Russell and Clendaniel began communicating in 2018, when they were both in separate prison locations. And as the above article noted, Russell began communicating with the FBI informant while he was still in prison. We’re living in the golden age of clandestine communications. If Brandon Russell has ideas to share he’s going to have the means to do so. And he’s clearly got a lot of ideas to share. Increasingly popular actionable ideas.
There’s no shortage of disturbing political stories these days. It’s part of what makes it all so disturbing. But It’s the kind of shocking and disturbing story that extra disturbing simply because it’s not really all that shocker anymore. If anything, it would be shocking if such plots weren’t being concocted:
A 58 year old man, Mark Adams Prieto, was arrested for plotting a mass domestic error attack a concert. While the exact concert to be attacked wasn’t clear, what was clear is that Prieto was intent on killing as many black people as possible and leaving behind all sorts of symbols to indicate it was a white supremacist attack on the black community. The goal was to trigger a full blown race war by the November Election, with a message of “we’re going to fight back now, and every whitey will be the enemy across the whole country,” and to shout “whities out here killing, what’s we gonna do” and “KKK all the way,” according to the the affidavit.
But Prieto wasn’t plotting a lone wolf attack, and here’s where it gets extra troubling. It sounds like the FBI learned about the plot thanks to a source that Prieto was trying to recruit for the plot. According to this source, he’s known Prieto for a few years as a vendor at gun shows. Prieto reportedly preferred cash exchanges so he could avoid the ATF. The source describes chatting with Prieto maybe 15 times over the past three years and how Prieto’s rhetoric has gotten more and more unhinged over time as the conversation grew from small talk to politics. It was within the last year that Prieto started “advocating for a mass shooting,” and specifically targeting Blacks, Jews or Muslims.
So how serious was Prieto about this attack? Well, we’re told he brought it up with the source and an undercover agent on On January 21 of this year, asking for their help targeting a rap concert in Atlanta.
About a month later, Prieto went to a gun show in Phoenix and asked the source and the undercover FBI agent whether they still planned to participate in the attack. The next day, Prieto is alleged to have sold a firearm to the undercover agent for $2,000.
On March 23, at another gun show, Prieto told the undercover agent he still planned to go forward with the attack and that it has to happen before the election because “they might have everything in place you can’t even drive, you’ll be stopped,” if they waited until after election day. He also suggested the the target would likely be a rap concert at State Farm Arena in Atlanta scheduled to take place May 14 and May 15, or sometime in June or July. The next day, Prieto sold the agent an AR-15 for $1000 and told him to use it during the attack.
In April, the undercover FBI agent saw Prieto at another gunshow and asked him if the May attack is still on. Prieto said he wanted to push the attack back. Prieto was ultimately arrested on May 14, driving east through New Mexico.
At another gun show in April in Prescott Valley, the affidavit says, when the undercover agent asked Prieto whether the attack would still take place in May, he said he wanted to push it back. Prieto was arrested on a New Mexico interstate on May 14. While he admitted to authorities in devising the plot, he insisted he had decided to call it off and was just driving to his mother’s home in Florida. We Prieto on a scouting/planning mission?
The source also describes how Prieto appears to be convinced that Joe Biden will declare martial law shortly after the election. That conviction is apparently part of the motive for triggering a race war before the election, telling the source, “If you wait till after the election, they might have everything in place you can’t even drive, you’ll be stopped...I want to try to put the guns in place by then if we can’t do it before they put everything in place.”
We’re also told that this conviction that martial law is going to be declared shortly after the election is an increasingly popular far right narrative. The idea being that Biden will “steal” the election and then declare martial law. It’s not just Prieto convinced of this this. Which is the kind of phenomena that a variety of interpretations. For example, it could be a narrative that assumes Trump wins the election outright and Biden imposes martial law as part of some sort of last ditch attempt to attempt to hold onto power. A kind of far right fantasy narrative.
But there is a plausible scenario that could make the predictions of Martial Law a lot more reasonable: if some sort of armed national super insurrection is planned for immediately after Election Day (or maybe even on Election Day), especially if it looks like Trump lost. If that’s the case, then yeah, it would also be reasonable to assume Biden is going to declare martial law shortly after Election Day as part of his “theft”. And it would also imply that this plot is just one small element of a much broader plot. Was that partly what explained Prieto’s recruitment fairly casual acquaintance?
That possibility of a much broader planning for organized political violence brings us to one of the other more disturbing aspects of this plot: Prieto wasn’t just trying to recruit this anonymous source who he apparently exclusively knew through chats at gun shows. Prieto was also trying to recruit an FBI under who was acting as the source’s associate. Prieto was apparently cast a pretty wide net in putting together his death squad. So was Prieto just being a remarkably casual terror recruiter? Or is this a reflection of just how widespread talk of mass violence is within the kind of far right communities that gravitate to gun shows?
And then we get to a the following potentially disturbing detail: Prieto apparently claims to have fought in Ukraine as a mercenary and “Killed Russian soldiers”. It’s the kind of boast that strongly suggests some sort of contact with Ukrainian Nazis. And yet, we are told by the FBI that Prieto had no passport and there was no evidence of international travel.
So was the Ukrainian mercenary comment purely self-hype? Or is the FBI perhaps leaving some details out in its investigation of Prieto’s past? Let’s hope it’s the former scenario and not the latter, but this is a good time to recall one of the most disturbing details about what is still the deadliest mass shooting in US history: despite witnesses recounting how Steven Paddock expressed classic far right sentiments about government FEMA camps and how ‘something has to be done’ to ‘wake the American people up’ — making statements like “Somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves,” and “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made” — the official investigation into Paddock appears to have ignore that angle entirely, leaving the motive for the shooting still a complete mystery. Now, in Paddock’s case, the ‘logic’ was presumably that an attack he was planning would force some sort of strict new gun regulations that would basically force conservative gun owners into open revolt. But for whatever reason, the FBI just really doesn’t want the American public to know about the possibility that the deadliest mass shooting in US history was an attempt to ‘wake people up’ by a lunatic convinced some sort of federal plot against conservatives was looming. Which was a possibility that clearly pointed to potential accomplices or folks egging him on to do it. That’s part of the context of this investigation to keep in mind when we hear about the dismissals that Prieto ever left the country.
And, and lest we forget, note the bump stocks Paddock used in that attack to convert his semiautomatic weapons into automatic weapons — and that the Trump administration banned following the attack — were just re-legalized by the Supreme Court last week. In other words, Prieto would have had a real shot of hitting the “deadliest in US history” count thanks to that ruling were it not for the anonymous source tipping authorities off:
“The source said “Prieto believes that martial law will be implemented shortly after the 2024 election and that a mass shooting should occur prior” to its implementation, and asked the source in late 2023 if they were “ready to kill a bunch of people,” which indicated to authorities his desire to recruit people to assist him in carrying out an attack, according to the affidavit.”
Looming martial law necessitates a mass domestic terror attack before the martial law thwarts its possibility. A domestic terror attack designed to make it clear that it was racially motivated with the hopes of sparking a full blown national race war. A race war must break out before Joe Biden can impose martial law following the election. That’s the demented logic that appears to be at work with this plot:
And note how Prieto spoke about the plot with the FBI source a number of times, and yet it sounds like the two had really only met around 15 times at gun shows. In other words, these weren’t particularly close associates. And yet, Prieto was not just trying to recruit this source but the FBI agents pretending to be the source’s associates. It’s a rather surprising level of casualness in recruiting for a domestic terror attack that raises the question of how ‘normal’ or routine this kind of talk/plotting is these days. Was Prieto wasn’t mentioning his plot to anyone else? If so, did those other people even bother reporting it, or is this just kind of expected by now?
And that question about the potentially broader extent of Prieto’s network of plotters brings us another disturbing detail in this case: while Prieto had no passport and there was no evidence of international travel, Prieto told the FBI source that he had fought in Ukraine as a mercenary and “killed Russian soldiers”:
“How prepared Prieto was to carry out his plans is unclear. He allegedly told the FBI source that he had fought in Ukraine as a mercenary and “killed Russian soldiers,” but according to investigators, Prieto had no passport and there was no evidence of international travel.”
Was Prieto just lying in an attempt to hype up his military experience? Did he managed to travel to Ukraine undetected? We have no idea but let’s hope the FBI is seriously investigating the latter scenario. But also keep in mind that, whether or not Prieto actually traveled to Ukraine, it’s very plausible he’s had plenty of contact with all sorts of Ukrainian far right groups. Online communications are the default possibility. But let’s not forget the network that’s taken place between Ukraine and US fascist groups, like the 2018 trip to Europe by three members of the California-based “Rise Above Movement” neo-Nazi group to meet and train at a European fascist gather hosted by the Azov Battalion. Was Prieto in contact with domestic extremists who are, in turn, networking with Ukrainian fascists? Who knows but it’s something worth investigating.
And don’t forget: the FBI utterly refused to even acknowledge a potential far right angle to motive for Steven Paddock’s Las Vegas massacre, despite witnesses hearing him expressing such sentiments in the weeks leading up to the attack. For whatever reason, the idea that Paddock engaged in an intentional massacre to ‘wake up’ the public was deemed to be too dangerous to admit.
But also note how Prieto’s plot appears to be following an increasingly popular far right narrative about how Joe Biden is going to impose martial law shortly after the election. It’s the kind of narrative that could be interpreted in a variety of disturbing ways. On the one hand, perhaps it’s a narrative that assumes Trump wins the election outright and Biden imposes martial law as part of some sort of last ditch attempt to attempt to hold onto power. It’s more fantasy than anything. But on the other hand, there is a plausible scenario that could make the predictions of Martial Law a lot more reasonable: if some sort of armed insurrection is planned for immediately after Election Day (or maybe even on Election Day). If that’s the case, then yeah, it would also be reasonable to assume Biden is going to declare martial law shortly after Election Day. At least assuming Trump loses:
How widespread are Prieto’s views at this point? A conviction that the upcoming election will be stolen by Joe Biden obviously isn’t something Prieto came up with on his own. And that, again, is what makes this story so disturbing. Because at this point, given the intensity of the far right’s fervor over getting Trump back in the White House, it’s hard to imagine a plot like this not getting hatched right now. Which, of course, also means it’s hard to imagine this is the only one.
Fingers crossed for more anonymous tip offs from people who don’t want to see a nationwide race war this year. We’re obviously going to need them.
On one level it’s a shock to the system. But at the same time, it’s almost something we should have expected by now: About a week and a half after Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts issued his cryptic July 2 declaration of a “Second American Revolution” that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”, Donald Trump was nearly nearly assassinated at a rally. Days before the RNC convention is slated to begin. A dark day for what’s left of America’s democracy. But almost perfect for that planned Second American Revolution.
So was the gunman a ‘leftist’? Not exactly. Instead, the 20 year old now-deceased gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, is turning out to be oddly difficult to define. Not only are the accounts of those who knew him generally pretty vague, but often very contradictory. On the one hand, we’re hearing from Crooks’s former high school classmates a kind of ‘classic’ picture of a school shooter of a relentlessly bullied loner prone to wearing camouflage hunting gear. But other former classmates give a very different account of a shy quiet nerdy history and computer buff who got good grades, had a small circle of friends, and was overall not political or prone to extremism. And who wasn’t ever bullied based on their experiences.
We’re also told Crooks tried out for the junior varsity rifle team but failed to make it. In other words, he wasn’t the best shot. But we’re also told he joined a Pittsburgh area shooting club, the Clairton Sportmen’s Club, which has confirmed he’s was a member. So maybe he had been practicing?
And what about the motivation? Well, no motivation has been identified so far, but many have pointed to the seemingly contradictory details that Crooks gave a $15 donation to the Democrat-aligned Act Blue on January 20, 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, but was also registered as a Republican. Keep in mind that Crooks was born on September 20, 2003, meaning he was just 17 on January 20, 2021, and hadn’t yet graduated highs chool. Which strongly suggest that $15 donation came before he registered as a Republican. But it’s not like a small donation or part registration is remotely explanatory for an act like this which makes the question of who he was in contact with all the more relevant.
But then we get this other vague clue left by the gunmen: he was wearing a t‑shirt for Demolition Ranch, a popular Youtube channel dedicated to guns and explosives. Again, did he have any friends at this gun club where he was presumably improving his aim? Because guns were clearly a big part of his life.
Of course, given the incredibly close range he was allowed to fire from, Crooks didn’t exactly need the best aim, which makes his missing of Trump all the more remarkable. And that brings us to what is likely the most absurd part of this entire story: not only was the roof that Crooks fired from apparently not secured in advance of Trump’s rally, but eyewitnesses saw him crawling on the roof with his rifle and tried in vain to alert the police. One man claims he spent 3–4 minutes trying to tell police, which apparently just had no idea what was going on. We are also told by law enforcement sources that the police “lost track” of Crooks on the rooftop, which is pretty amazing that the eyewitnesses apparently didn’t have this problem.
So we have an apparent assassination attempt less than two weeks after Kevin Roberts’s “Second American Revolution” comments and right before the RNC convention — perfect timing from a political momentum standpoint — with a gunman who seems to defy motivation. A gunman who was inexplicably allowed to get as close as he did for reasons that defy all standard Secret Service protocols and despite eyewitnesses warning police for minutes in advance. On the one hand, it’s a shock. But given the disturbing history of US political assassinations that seem to defy logic but somehow always serve to the benefit of reactionary political forces, this is also probably what we should expected at this point:
“The significance of the attempt on Trump’s life — and the highly polarized climate in which it has occurred — has left many looking for answers. While law enforcement has, thus far, not announced a motive, some of Trump’s allies have been eager to blame Biden and other Democrats for the shooting. Relatively little is known about Crooks and the few details that have been uncovered about his life do not yet fit with any clear political narrative. The suspected gunman was apparently wearing a t‑shirt from “Demolition Ranch,” a popular YouTube channel dedicated to firearms, during the shooting. Public records indicate he was a registered Republican, but campaign finance records show he made a $15 donation earmarked for Progressive Turnout PAC, a Democratic-aligned group, on Jan. 20, 2021, the day of Biden’s inauguration.”
A registered Republican wearing a “Demolition Ranch” t‑shirt signifying an interest in guns and explosives. But with a lone 2021 $15 political contribution to the Democrat-aligned Act Blue on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration. That’s quite a mishmash of contradictory signals for the 20 year old shooter. Except, not really all that contradictory if you think about the fact that graduated High School in 2022 and he would have been 17 years old on January 20 of 2021 (he was born on September 20, 2003) and therefore presumably registered as a Republican after that donation. Young adults can go through some pretty dramatic political changes. It’s not hard to imagine he somehow soured on the Biden administration by the time he registered as a Republican. And then who knows where his politics went in recent years.
What is unambiguously contradictory is the characterizations were getting from his former classmates. First, we have the group describing him as just a quiet kid who got good grades and didn’t really seem to have any strong political leanings:
Another former classmate goes on to describe how Crooks was quiet and shy but did indeed have a small group of friends:
But then we get to another group of classmates who describe him as someone who was bullied relentlessly and often wore “hunting” gear. These are two very different sets of recollections from people who grew up with him:
So that’s an oddly discordant set of recollections from a variety of people who apparently knew Crooks for a number of years.
But then we get another interesting recollection from a former classmate. Crooks tried out for the high school rifle team but failed to make it. In other words, he wasn’t a very good shot. At least not in high school. But then we learn about one social club that Crooks has reportedly joined since high school: the Clairton Sportmen’s Club, a Pittsburgh area shooting club. So if he was doing any in person socializing, it sounds like that’s where he would have done it.
We also get a rather amazing update from the local police regarding how it was that Crooks was allowed to set up his position on the roof of that building while eye witnesses were shouting at police about it for minutes before the shooting started. According to law enforcement sources, officers lost track of him before the shooting began. Which is pretty amazing since the eye witnesses were apparently able to see him the whole time: