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This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: In FTR #967, we highlighted the Nazi group Atomwaffen, one of whose members was plotting an attack on a nuclear power plant. (The would be nuke terrorist was Brandon Russell, a Florida National Guardsman.)
New articles on the group disclose that they have been responsible for a number of recent murders around the country. More murders should be expected because Atomwaffen produces ISIS-style videos promoting mass neo-Nazi violence designed to sabotage and implode society.
FTR #888 details the work of Glenn Greenwald in running legal interference for the leaderless strategy advocated by the likes of James Mason and the National Alliance. Specifically, Citizen Greenwald freed up the likes of Atomwaffen et al from civil liability for their ISIS-style YouTube exhortations to violence and murder.
In FTR #437, we highlighted counter-culture fascism and the penchant of some to promote fascist outcroppings like the Charles Manson cultists to bohemians. Atomwaffen idolize both James Mason and his Siege newsletter and book, as well as one of Mason’s idols–Charles Manson. (Manson is pictured at right.)
Mason expressed support for the Nazi eugenics and euthanasia program. (We have discussed eugenics and euthanasia in numerous programs, including Miscellaneous Archive Shows M12 and M60, as well as FTR #‘s 117, 124, 140, 141, 534, 664, 908, and 909.)
He has company:
University College London (UCL) recently discovered that there’s been a secret eugenics conference hosted in its campus since 2014.
One prominent attendee to these conferences is Toby Young, the head of the New Schools Network – a network of “Free schools” — non-profit independent schools funded by the state. Another is Richard Lynn, the ‘academic’ who sits on the board of the Pioneer Fund and who provided the bulk of the work in The Bell Curve purporting to show racial difference in intelligence.
Attendees at the invite-only conference were told about the location at the last minute and asked not to mention it to anyone. Conference participants are inextricably linked with the Nazi/“Alt-Right” milieu.
We conclude with a very important op-ed column in The New York Times underscoring the continuity between American and German eugenics, the Nazi T‑4 program and GOP “austerity.” The Republicans and like-minded individuals like Princeton faculty member Peter Singer are advocating against the disabled is being “cost ineffective.”
” . . . . We often say what happened in Nazi Germany couldn’t happen here. But some of it, like the mistreatment and sterilization of the disabled, did happen here.
A reading of Hoche and Binding’s ‘Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life’ [a bedrock intellectual element of the 1920’s German eugenics movement–D.E.] shows the similarity between what they said and what exponents of practical ethics, such as Peter Singer, say about the disabled today. As recently as 2015, Singer, talking with the radio host Aaron Klein on his show, said, ‘I don’t want my health insurance premiums to be higher so that infants who can experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.’
These philosophers talk about the drain on ‘resources’ caused by lives lived with a disability, which eerily echoes what Hoche and Binding wrote about the ‘financial and moral burden’ on ‘a person’s family, hospital, and state’ caused by what they deem lives ‘unworthy of living.’ Experts point out the recent Republican health care proposals would strip Medicaid funding that helps the elderly, the poor and the disabled live healthier and more dignified lives.
A recent New York Times article quoted the Rev. Susan Flanders, a retired Episcopal priest, as saying: ‘What we’re paying for is something that many people wouldn’t want if they had a choice. It’s hundreds of dollars each day that could go towards their grandchildren’s education or care for the people who could get well.’ In the article, Flanders, whose father had Alzheimer’s, is described as ‘utterly unafraid to mix money into the conversation about the meaning of life when the mind deteriorates.’ Practical ethicists are similarly unafraid to do this. As were the Nazis. . . .”
With the Trump administration’s deregulation of agencies like the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration, the American people are going to be exposed to carcinogens, mutagens and unsafe food and pharmaceutical products. Years from now, the country is going to experience a big upswing in the incidence of cancer and other degenerative diseases, as well as birth deformities.
The strong possibility that this tsunami of degenerative disease and birth defects could overwhelm the health care system and lead to the implementation of an American T‑4 program is one to be taken very seriously.
Program Highlights Include:
- The confluence of Manson/Nazi cultists with esoteric Nazism, highlighted in, among other programs, FTR #‘s 991 and 992.
- Review of Manson victim Sharon Tate in the Los Angeles area campaign of Robert F. Kennedy.
- Review of Robert Kennedy’s statement to Tate and her husband Roman Polanski (as well as others) that he would re-open the investigation into his brother’s murder after getting to the White House.
- Review of Ed Butler’s attribution of the Tate/La Bianca killings to the Black Panthers or other “black militants.”
- Review of the probable Manson family authorship of the murder of Marina Habe, daughter of anti-fascist writer Hans Habe.
- Review of the affinity between the brilliant Nazi hacker Andrew Auerenheimer aka “Weev” and the Atomwaffen.
- Review of Weev’s participation in Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras’ party celebrating their receipt of the prestigious Polk award.
1a. In FTR #967, we highlighted the Nazi group Atomwaffen, some of whose members were plotting an attack on a nuclear power plant. New articles on the group disclose that they have been responsible for a number of recent murders around the country. More murders should be expected because Atomwaffen produces ISIS-style videos promoting mass neo-Nazi violence designed to sabotage and implode society.
FTR #888 details the work of Glenn Greenwald in running legal interference for the leaderless strategy advocated by the likes of James Mason and the National Alliance. Specifically, Citizen Greenwald freed up the likes of Atomwaffen et al from civil liability for their media exhortations to violence and murder.
The California man accused of killing a 19-year-old University of Pennsylvania student earlier this month is an avowed neo-Nazi and a member of one of the most notorious extremist groups in the country, according to three people with knowledge of the man’s recent activities.
The man, Samuel Woodward, has been charged in Orange County, California, with murdering Blaze Bernstein, who went missing in early January while visiting his family over winter break. Prosecutors allege that Woodward stabbed Bernstein more than 20 times before burying his body in an Orange County park where it was eventually discovered. The two men had attended high school together.
Woodward, 20, is set to be arraigned on Feb. 2 and has not yet entered a plea. Orange County prosecutors say they are examining the possibility that the killing was a hate crime — Bernstein was Jewish and openly gay — and some recent news reports have suggested that the alleged killer might hold far-right or even white supremacist political beliefs.
Now, three people with detailed knowledge of Woodward’s recent past have been able to shed more light on the young man’s extremist activities. They said Woodward was a member of the Atomwaffen Division, an armed Fascist group with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the U.S. government through the use of terrorism and guerrilla warfare.
The organization, which celebrates Hitler and Charles Manson, has been tied to four other murders and an elaborate bomb plot over the past eight months. Experts who study right-wing extremist movements believe Atomwaffen’s commitment to violence has made it one of the more dangerous groups to emerge from the new wave of white supremacists.
Two of the three people who described Woodward’s affiliations are friends of his; the other is a former member of Atomwaffen Division.
ProPublica’s revelations about Woodward’s background add a new element to a murder case that has attracted considerable local and national news coverage. But they also raise fresh concerns about groups like Atomwaffen Division, shadowy outfits of uncertain size that appear capable of genuine harm.
Woodward joined the organization in early 2016 and later traveled to Texas to attend Atomwaffen meetings and a three-day training camp, which involved instruction in firearms, hand-to-hand combat, camping and survival skills, the former member said. ProPublica has obtained photographs of Woodward at an outdoor Atomwaffen meeting in the scrubby Texas countryside. One of the photos depicts Woodward and other members making straight-armed Nazi salutes while wearing skull masks. In other pictures, Woodward is unmasked and easily identifiable.
The young man is proficient with both handguns and assault rifles, according to one person who participated in the Texas training and watched him shoot. That person also said that Woodward helped organize a number of Atomwaffen members in California.
Social media posts and chat logs shared by Woodward’s friends show that he openly described himself as a “National Socialist” or Nazi. He “was as anti-Semitic as you can get,” according to one acquaintance.
ProPublica contacted Orange County prosecutors regarding Woodward’s alleged neo-Nazi activities. Michelle Van Der Linden, a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s Office, said she couldn’t comment directly on the case, but said the investigation is ongoing, with detectives exploring all possible leads.
Woodward told police Bernstein had tried to kiss him while they were in the park, according to a sealed affidavit obtained by the Orange County Register.
…
Atomwaffen started in 2015 and is estimated to have about 80 members scattered around the country in small cells; the former member said the group’s ranks have grown since the lethal and chaotic “Unite the Right” rally last summer in Charlottesville, Virginia.
While many of the new white extremist groups have consciously avoided using Nazi imagery, Atomwaffen has done the opposite. The name can mean “Atomic Weapons” in German, and the organization embraces Third Reich iconography, including swastikas, the Totenkopf, or death’s head insignia, and SS lightning bolts. The group frequently produces YouTube videos featuring masked Atomwaffen members hiking through the backcountry and firing weapons. They’ve also filmed themselves burning the U.S. Constitution and setting fire to the American flag at an Atomwaffen “Doomsday Hatecamp.”
Atomwaffen’s biggest inspiration seems to be James Mason, a long-time fascist who belonged to the American Nazi Party and later, during the 1970s, joined a more militant offshoot. During the 1980s, Mason published a newsletter called SIEGE, in which he eschewed political activism in favor of creating a new fascist regime through murder, small “lone wolf” terror attacks, and all-out war against the government. Mason also struck up a friendship with the late Charles Manson, who has become another hero for Atomwaffen.
The organization first gained a measure of national attention in May of last year, when 18-year-old Devon Arthurs, one of Atomwaffen’s founding members, was charged in state court in Tampa, Florida, with murdering two of his roommates, Andrew Oneschuk, 18, and Jeremy Himmelman, 22. Both victims were Atomwaffen loyalists.
The murders allegedly occurred after Arthurs traded Nazism for radical Islam. When police took Arthurs into custody, according to news accounts based on police reports, he claimed he had shot his former comrades because they had taunted him about his Muslim faith and plotted violent attacks to further their fascist agenda. Arthurs told investigators he killed Onsechuk and Himmelman “because they want to build a Fourth Reich.”
…
When law enforcement searched the apartment in Tampa, Florida, where Arthurs and the others lived, they found firearms, a framed photograph of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, rifles, ammunition, and a cooler full of a highly volatile explosive called HMTD. Investigators also discovered radioactive material in the home.
The bomb-making material belonged to a fourth roommate, Atomwaffen leader Brandon Russell, a Florida National Guardsman. Arthurs told authorities that Russell had been planning to blow up a nuclear power plant near Miami. Earlier this month Russell pleaded guilty in federal district court in Tampa to illegal possession of explosives and was sentenced to five years in federal prison.
Atomwaffen surfaced again in connection with a double homicide in Reston, Virginia, in December 2017. A 17-year-old neo-Nazi allegedly shot to death his girlfriend’s parents, Buckley Kuhn-Fricker and Scott Fricker, who had urged their daughter to break up with him. The accused, who shot himself as well but survived and remains hospitalized, was charged as a juvenile in state court in Virginia with two counts of homicide.
The 17-year-old was a big fan of Atomwaffen and James Mason, according to reporting by the Huffington Post, which examined his social media trail.
The former Atomwaffen member in contact with ProPublica said that the teen was more than a fan: He was in direct communication with the group.
“Their rhetoric is some of the most extreme we have seen,” said Joanna Mendelson, a senior researcher at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. The group, she said, views itself as the radical vanguard of the white supremacist movement, the frontline soldiers of an imminent race war.
While many of the new white extremist groups have consciously avoided using Nazi imagery, Atomwaffen has done the opposite. The name can mean “Atomic Weapons” in German, and the organization embraces Third Reich iconography, including swastikas, the Totenkopf, or death’s head insignia, and SS lightning bolts. The group frequently produces YouTube videos featuring masked Atomwaffen members hiking through the backcountry and firing weapons. They’ve also filmed themselves burning the U.S. Constitution and setting fire to the American flag at an Atomwaffen “Doomsday Hatecamp.” . . .
1b. In FTR #437, we highlighted counter-culture fascism and the penchant of some to promote fascist outcroppings like the Manson cultists to bohemians.
In FTR #809, we examined the wider political context of the Manson family killings, including the possible killing of Marina Habe. Sharon Tate, along with her husband Roman Polanski, were two of the key organizers of Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign in the L.A. area. Shortly before Bobby’s assassination, he disclosed to dinner guests at a function at the Tate/Polanski residence that, after his election, he would re-open the investigation into his brother’s murder. The ‘Alt-Right’ overlap Charles Manson’s hopes and dreams. Atomwaffen openly worships him.
Charles Manson is dead now, and we are the richer for it. Manson was a thief, a pimp and a murderous cult leader bent on race war. He was true scum.
No wonder some alt-righters are pouring out drinks for him.
“A great revolutionary,” said one commenter of Manson on the IronMarch neo-Nazi internet forum.
“The world really does feel a little emptier,” said another.
One bereaved bigot simply posted a Celine Dion lyric: “Near, far, wherever you are I believe that the heart does go on …”
“Hero.” “Champion.” “Warrior of Truth.” Such were the tributes used Monday to describe a demented butcher.
If you’re wondering who might rhapsodize a psychotic racist in this manner, the answer is other psychotic racists, many of whom belong to Atomwaffen Division, a particularly bloodthirsty and anti-American branch of the so-called alt-right that has made worshipping Manson a part of their cultish devotion to violent insurrection.
Even within the alt-right — a loose association of white supremacists and fascists — the Atomwaffen Division is considered extreme. The group, whose name translates to “Atomic Weapons Division,” puts out ISIS-style propaganda videos on YouTube that feature members clad in skull masks and camouflage outfits, sometimes on training exercises in the woods, often holding guns and the organization’s distinctive yellow-and-black nuclear-themed flags. In one video, members burn a copy of the U.S. Constitution on a grill.
pic.twitter.com/20BooyUUr2— SIEGE Culture (@siegeculture_) November 15, 2017
Atomwaffen is best known for a double homicide in Tampa this May, in which Devon Arthurs, a member of the group who had converted to a violent, fundamentalist version of Islam, shot and killed two of his roommates, who were also Atomwaffen members. A fourth roommate, Brandon Russell, was arrested later for having bomb-making equipment and radioactive material. Russell, too, was part of Atomwaffen. He had a framed photo of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in his bedroom.
Apocalyptic lunacy has always been part of far-right politics, and a vigorous strain of it runs through today’s alt-right white supremacist movement. It should come as no surprise, then, that Manson, whose once-upon-a-time status as a longhair could never obscure the swastika carved into his forehead, might serve as a new vessel of madness for today’s violent racists. In many ways, he was a forebear of groups like Atomwaffen and a bug-eyed prototype for the modern race warrior.
Manson’s deranged political teachings were a mish-mash of Scientology, occultism and Nazism, all bundled into an original end-of-days tale. Stay with me, he told his followers, and you’ll be saved from the coming race war.
“Manson was motivated by an apocalyptic belief in the imminent end of the world through a race war in which the White population was doomed to defeat,” Jeffrey Kaplan wrote in Encyclopedia of White Power: A Sourcebook on the Radical Racist Right. “The victorious Black population would in time realize that the White man is genetically more fit to govern, and would seek in vain for White survivors of the racial Holocaust to assume the reins of power. The Manson family, having survived the apocalypse by hiding in a timeless cave at the center of the world, would then emerge to take power.”
This worldview led Manson and his followers into an especially desolate part of Death Valley called Barker Ranch in 1969, where Time magazine described them as “holed up in run-down cabins” leading an “indolent, almost savage existence, singing Manson’s songs, dancing, swimming in a small pool, stealing cars for cash and picking through garbage for food.” Here they would dodge the apocalypse.
By the early 1980s, of course, Manson had failed to dodge his own downfall. He wasn’t in a timeless cave at the center of the world. He was in a cell in San Quentin, serving a life sentence for the gruesome murders of seven people. Manson had led his followers, known as The Family, in the 1969 slayings of actress Sharon Tate and six other people in a two-night killing spree in Los Angeles.
It was in prison that Manson started a correspondence with a longtime American neo-Nazi named James Mason, who would come to view “Charlie” as a prophet of hate. Mason was the type of man who considered Auschwitz a “damned nice place,” and his wingnut journey would take him from the heart of organized white supremacy to years of inept obscurity and, ultimately, back to a faint relevance in the Trump era thanks to the alt-right and Atomwaffen.
A fascist since he was 13, when he joined the youth movement of George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party, Mason had radicalized himself while watching black people take to the streets during the civil rights era. As a young adult, he set up Nazi booths at county fairs in southern Ohio, where he’d grown up.
“We should shoot for bringing down the system,” he would later say. “Destroy the system.”
Mason eventually left the American Nazi Party and joined a splinter group called the National Socialist Liberation Front. Some NSLF members were fans of Manson, which prompted Mason to begin researching the cult leader. In 1980, Mason reached out to the incarcerated Manson. The two began communicating regularly by mail and phone.
“What I discovered was a revelation equal to the revelation I received when I first found Adolf Hitler,” Mason would later explain.
Through “Charlie,” Mason came to understand that Hitler’s death had brought about the end of Western civilization. Every government in the world was now part of an anti-white global conspiracy run by “super capitalists” and “super communists.” Nothing about Western culture or its institutions could be salvaged. It would all have to be blown to smithereens.
“It’s just like a human organism that has ingested a fatal dose of poison,” Mason would explain. “[If] you fall asleep with it and try to ride it out, you’re going to die, but if you become suddenly, violently ill and expel that poison – even though the experience may be rather unpleasant – you at least have a chance to live. Manson called that Helter Skelter.”
So inspired by “Charlie” was Mason that he took the murderous cult leader’s advice and renamed his neo-Nazi organization Universal Order. Mason began writing a newsletter called “Siege” to promote Manson’s views as a continuation of Hitler’s philosophy. In 1992, Mason would collect these writings into a book that neo-Nazi skinhead leader Tom Metzger called “435 pages of hot revolutionary style white propaganda.”
For Mason and other white supremacists, Manson was almost a divine being, an atavistic incarnation of hate. The cult leader fit neatly into a strain of fascist magical realism called “Esoteric Hitlerism” that became popular after World War II when the Greek writer Savitri Devi proposed that Hitler was the ninth avatar of Vishnu and racist dupes somehow bought into it.
This type of crazy remains en vogue among the alt-right today, with notable exponents such as Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, a neo-Nazi hacker and the webmaster for The Daily Stormer, whose charismatic ravings make him the closest thing to a contemporary Manson in the movement. (Auernheimer has ties to Atomwaffen and after the Arthurs murders issued an overloud declamation about how he knew the shooter and the victims but had previously banned Arthurs from a Daily Stormer forum.)
But the effects of Manson on today’s white supremacist movement – in no small part thanks to Mason’s efforts – go beyond evil juju. Consider white separatism in the modern context. Organized racists in America these days like to call themselves “white nationalists.” This of course is partly a public relations gambit — “white nationalist” is maybe more palatable than “neo-Nazi” or “white supremacist” — but it’s also an accurate description of what they want.
Groups across the racist political spectrum want a White Nation, an ethno-state, somewhere in America for just the White Race. The three-piece-suit-wearing figurehead of the alt-right, Richard Spencer, is very open about this. So is veteran skinhead Jeff Schoep, the leader of the National Socialist Movement. As is KKK-enthusiast Brad Griffin, aka Hunter Wallace, a leader of The League of the South.
In 2000, Mason wrote Manson to thank him for this brand of white separatism. In a two-page history of the Universal Order he penned for Kaplan’s The Encyclopedia of White Power, Mason wrote:
Although few would realize or admit it, the gradual move away from “White Supremacy” toward White Separatism, from any hopes of recovering the U.S. government, toward establishing new, independent regions, is precisely what animated the creation of the Manson enclaves in the Death Valley during the 1960s. At issue is bare survival as a species as the world system begins to crumble and die.
Mason’s adulation of Manson made him somewhat of an outlier in the American neo-Nazi scene of the 1980s. And Manson veneration remains a prickly subject for current white nationalists. On Stormfront, another neo-Nazi forum, the commentary Monday about Manson’s passing mostly had a “Good riddance and thank God he’s dead” tenor. The Manson Family killed white people, after all. And Manson’s degeneracy reflects poorly on white supremacy.
But degeneracy has never prevented neo-Nazis from attracting supporters. For years, Mason’s “Charlie”-inspired insights were sought after by other prominent racists, including Metzger, who interviewed Mason for over an hour in 1993 for his “Race and Reason” show. When talk turned to violence, as it often does with far-right extremists, Mason clucked disapprovingly about a 1984 mass shooting in which a survivalist gunman took out his rage at “international bankers” by massacring 21 people in a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California. “It wouldn’t be such a bad thing if they would pick their targets a little more carefully,” he said.
Mason faded into relative obscurity for the rest of the ’90s and early aughts, when he was in and out of prison on weapons charges and for an inappropriate relationship with a 14-year-old girl, of whom he had taken nude photographs.
But in 2017, the year his hero “Charlie” would pass into the astral plane, Mason has found new relevance, and a fawning group of disciples in Atomwaffen.
Earlier this year Atomwaffen republished Mason’s book “Siege” online, and announced the launch of a new Universal Order website.
“JAMES MASON IS BACK!” read a July headline on the fascist zine Noose, an Atomwaffen site. After years of trying, the article said, Atomwaffen members had finally tracked down Mason for an exclusive interview!
And to the violent group’s absolute glee, Mason was still Mason, an unhinged admirer of Manson and mass murderers.
“My views on Manson have not changed,” he told an Atomwaffen member. “We had a society post-WW2 that was disintegrating, a mile a minute. We had a hippie generation, a country that was heading headlong into national suicide. Manson’s commune was solidly, solidly white.”
When asked for his thoughts on Anders Breivik, the far-right Norwegian terrorist convicted of killing 77 people in a bombing and mass shooting in 2011, Mason replied that Breivik was “dead-on.”
“I’m never gonna disown anybody who does something like that,” Mason said.
Elsewhere in the interview, Mason said he’s “mildly encouraged” by the rise of Donald Trump.
As recently as Sunday, one day before Manson died, Mason apparently wrote an article on the Universal Order website: a 1,400-word treatise praising Nazi eugenics and euthanasia.
No word from Siegeculture about Charlie’s death until we’ve completed our surprise. We have a memorial in the works, more on it later this week. Satanspeed. pic.twitter.com/3M0t3qWtNY— SIEGE Culture (@siegeculture_) November 20, 2017
Mason’s young devotees, meanwhile, have hinted on Twitter – another key radicalization platform – that they’re planning a memorial for “Charlie,” a more elaborate send-off for this proto-alt-right Hitlerian avatar of death and terror.
2a. Note Mason’s support for the Nazi eugenics and euthanasia program. (We have discussed eugenics and euthanasia in numerous programs, including Miscellaneous Archive Shows M12 and M60, as well as FTR #‘s 117, 124, 140, 141, 534, 664, 908, and 909, 995.)
University College London (UCL) recently discovered that there’s been a secret eugenics conference hosted in its campus since 2014.
One prominent attendee to these conferences is Toby Young, the head of the New Schools Network – a network of “Free schools” — non-profit independent schools funded by the state. Another is Richard Lynn, the ‘academic’ who sits on the board of the Pioneer Fund and who provided the bulk of the work in The Bell Curve purporting to show racial difference in intelligence.
Attendees at the invite-only conference were told about the location at the last minute and asked not to mention it to anyone.
University College London has launched an urgent investigation into how a senior academic was able to secretly host conferences on eugenics and intelligence with notorious speakers including white supremacists.
The London Conference on Intelligence was said to have been run secretly for at least three years by James Thompson, an honorary senior lecturer at the university, including contributions from a researcher who has previously advocated child rape.
One prominent attendee at the conference in May last year was Toby Young, the head of the government-backed New Schools Network, who ran into controversy over efforts to appoint him as a university regulator.
Young’s involvement in the conference was revealed by the London Student newspaper on Monday. Young announced early on Tuesday that he was stepping down as a director of the Office for Students.
Young has also resigned from his post on the Fulbright Commission, which oversees student scholarship programmes between British and US universities.
…
UCL said it had no knowledge of the conference, an invitation-only circle of 24 attendees, which could have led to a breach of the government’s Prevent regulations on campus extremism.
“UCL is investigating a potential breach of its room bookings process for events,” a spokesperson said.
“Our records indicate the university was not informed in advance about the speakers and content of the conference series, as it should have been for the event to be allowed to go ahead.”
UCL said it had contacted Thompson for an explanation. It has suspended approval for his hosting further conferences and speakers.
Young, in a speech to a similar conference in Canada last year, described the extreme measures that Thompson employed to keep the conference a secret.
“Attendees were only told the venue at the last minute, an anonymous ante-chamber at the end of a long corridor, called ‘lecture room 22’, and asked not to share this information with anyone else.
“One of the attendees, on discovering I was a journalist, pleaded with me not to write about the fact that he was there – he didn’t want his colleagues to find out,” Young said.
“But these precautions were not unreasonable, considering the reaction that any references to between-group differences in IQ generally provoke.”
Previous attendees included Richard Lynn, whom the US-based research group Southern Poverty Law Center labelled an “unapologetic eugenicist”, and the blogger Emil Kirkegaard, who has written supportively about pedophiles being allowed to have “sex with a sleeping child”.
The science writer and broadcaster Adam Rutherford said the background of the speakers suggested that “some pseudoscientific nonsense was being discussed”.
“There are some people at these meetings with some deeply obnoxious views that are also scientifically invalid – notably Richard Lynn,” Rutherford said.
Many of the ideas discussed at the conferences, which have been running since 2014, ran counter to the contemporary scientific consensus, according to Rutherford.
“Human variation is, of course, real. But the proportion of genetic difference that is reflected in the characteristics that we can see is minuscule.
“What that means is that evolution is deceptive in this regard: we broadly use skin colour and hair texture – visual cues to class people into races but they are terrible reflections of overall genetic difference,” Rutherford said.
“In fact, there is more genetic diversity within Africa than in the rest of the world. Two black Africans are more likely to be more different to each other than they are to a white person or even an east Asian.”
Lynn told the Guardian: “I have written numerous papers on race differences in intelligence and their genetic basis. These have been published in academic journals.”
Kirkegaard did not respond to requests for comment. But Thompson told the Daily Telegraph that the conference’s main subject was how IQ was inherited between different groups and races. “Eugenics is one topic, but many topics are discussed,” he said.
Young said he attended last year’s London Conference on Intelligence as research for the speech he later gave in Canada, which was “about the history of controversies provoked by intelligence researchers”. He said he “thought the conference in London might provide me with some material – and it did”.
———-
2b. Eugenics conference organizer James Thompson was fully aware of the nature of the individuals he’s inviting to his invite-only annual secret conferences. His colleagues/attendees are birds of the same feather as James Mason et al.
A eugenics conference held annually at University College London by an honorary professor, the London Conference on Intelligence, is dominated by a secretive group of white supremacists with neo-Nazi links, London Student can exclusively reveal.
Content note: This article contains references to racism, anti-Semitism and child abuse.
The conference has taken place at UCL four times since its inception in 2014, and now even boasts its own YouTube channel bearing the UCL logo.
UCL have told London Student that they are investigating the conference. A spokesperson said: “We are an institution that is committed to free speech but also to combatting racism and sexism in all forms.”
UCL professor David Colquhoun expressed disbelief that the university would host such “pseudoscience” and stated that the organiser, Professor James Thompson, “clearly doesn’t understand genetics.”
“The actual genetic difference between humans, with respect to race or sex, is absolutely miniscule compared to what they have in common,” he told London Student.
Among the speakers and attendees over the last four years are a self-taught geneticist who argues in favour of child rape, multiple white supremacists, and ex-board member of the Office for Students Toby Young.
A central figure in the London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) is the white nationalist, extremist Richard Lynn, who has called for the “phasing out” of the “populations of incompetent cultures.” Lynn, who is President of the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), spoke at the conference 2015 and 2016, along with four of the six members of the UISR’s Academic Advisory Council.
Lynn’s UISR runs the journal Mankind Quarterly, whose founders include a leading member of Mussolini’s eugenics taskforce, and whose board once boasted Nazi Joseph Mengele’s personal mentor.
Six members of the current board, including editor-in-chief Gerhard Meisenberg, spoke at both the 2015 and 2016 conferences, while a further 16 LCI speakers have written for the journal in recent years. In total, 82% of those who spoke at both 2015 and 2016 conferences are directly associated with either UISR or Mankind Quarterly.
The UISR is bankrolled by Lynn and Meisenberg’s Pioneer Fund, a Southern Poverty Law Centre-listed hate group founded by Nazi sympathisers with the purpose of promoting “racial betterment”.
Beneficiaries of the fund include a magazine devoted to a “penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question,” and Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance, whose conferences have hosted prominent far-right figures Richard Spencer (an white supremancist who gained prominence after Trump’s election), Nick Griffin (ex-leader of the British National Party), and David Duke (another white supremacist, and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan).
Helmuth Nyborg, a member of the UISR Academic Advisory Council, gave a lecture at last year’s American Renaissance conference which argued that Denmark’s gene pool would suffer from immigration from the Middle East. Nyborg spoke at the LCI in both 2015 and 2016. He has written numerous articles for Mankind Quarterly as well as a book for the UISR memorializing the former head of the Pioneer Fund, white nationalist J. P. Rushton.
James Thompson, the honorary UCL academic who acts as the host of the conference, is a member of the UISR Academic Advisory Council. His political leanings are betrayed by his public Twitter accoun, where he follows prominent white supremacists including Richard Spencer (who follows him back), Virginia Dare, American Renaissance, Brett Stevens, the Traditional Britain Group, Charles Murray and Jared Taylor.
Thompson is a frequent contributor to the Unz Review, which has been described as “a mix of far-right and far-left anti-Semitic crackpottery,” and features articles such as ‘America’s Jews are Driving America’s Wars’ and ‘What to do with Latinos?’. His own articles include frequent defences of the idea that women are innately less intelligent than men (1, 2, 3, and 4), and an analysis of the racial wage gap which concludes that “some ethnicities contribute relatively little,” namely “blacks.”
Writer and geneticist Adam Rutherford told London Student that, based on the titles and abstracts, some of the views presented were a “pseudoscientific front for bog-standard, old-school racism”.
“As soon as you begin to speak about black people and IQ you have a problem, because genetically-speaking ‘black people’ aren’t one homogenous group,” Rutherford said. “Any two people of recent African descent are likely to be more genetically distinct from each other than either of them is to anyone else in the world.”
Another major organiser of the LCI is Emil Kirkegaard, who has attended all four conferences and even designed the website. Although he refers to himself as a “polymath” and Thompson describes him as a “very bright young guy”, Kirkegaard is not an academic. His highest qualification is a Bachelor’s in linguistics.
Having dropped out of his Masters degree, instead preferring to be “self-taught in various subjects”, Kirkegaard now runs OpenPsych, a platform for non-peer reviewed psychology papers, along with Davide Piffer of Mankind Quarterly. Piffer is a fellow LCI-speaker, and was praised by Richard Lynn as having done “brilliant work identifying the genes responsible for race differences in intelligence.”
Authors on OpenPsych include Kevin MacDonald, described by the Southern Poverty Law Centre as “the neo-Nazi movement’s favourite academic”, who praised Anders Breivik as a “serious political thinker with a great many insights and some good practical ideas on strategy.”
John Fuerst, a fellow of the UISR, spoke at LCI 2015 and 2016, and frequently collaborates with Kirkegaard on OpenPsych. As well as writing variousblogs, which he describes as “race realist”, , he also frequently posts anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on Facebook. When questioned about his popularity on the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront, he stated that he had “no beef against…“Neo-Nazis”.”
Kirkegaard’s own personal blog is home to topics such as ‘Is miscegenation bad for your kids?’ and how one could empirically verify a Jewish conspiracy. His Facebook features alt-right ‘promotional videos’ and once featured a friend’s Nazi salute with the caption ‘There will be an heir to the Führer.’
By far the most disturbing of part of Kirkegaard’s internet presence, however, is a blog-post in which he justifies child rape. He states that a ‘compromise’ with paedophiles could be:
“having sex with a sleeping child without them knowing it (so, using sleeping medicine. If they dont notice it is difficult to see how they cud be harmed, even if it is rape. One must distinguish between rape becus the other was disconsenting (wanting to not have sex), and rape becus the other is not consenting, but not disconsenting either.”
He qualifies this with a note that “bodily harm” would undermine this justification, and especially “with small children since their bodily openings are not large enuf [sic] for a regular sized male penis. To avoid this one shud [sic] not penetrate.”
Kirkegaard’s reputation as a scientific advocate for neo-Nazism was increased last April when he appeared on Tara McCarthy’s ‘Reality Calls’ to discuss “the future of eugenics.” McCarthy was banned from YouTube for alleging a Jewish conspiracy to commit “white genocide”, supports deporting naturalized citizens and “killing them if they resist”, and said that she hopes “zero” migrants crossing the Mediterranean “make it alive”..
Kirkegaard is not the only LCI speaker to feature on McCarthy’s show. Adam Perkins of King’s College London appeared on the show to discuss his controversial book, ‘The Welfare Trait’. He provoked uproar last year when he shared images of data from one of Kirkegaard’s papers on immigrant crime rates, with the caption “Trump’s Muslim ban makes sense in human capital terms”..
“This is so old-school as to be laughable,” Dr Rutherford said of the views discussed at the LCI. While the views may simply be “bad science”, according to Rutherford, they play into UCL’s “deep and rich history of scientific racism”.
He explained: “Francis Galton, the brilliant but overtly racist UCL academic, may have given the world many valuable ideas, but also created eugenics as a pseudoscientific idea. UCL’s Galton chair, named in his honour, was first occupied by Karl Pearson, another overt racist.”
…
2c. A very important op-ed column in The New York Times underscored the continuity between American and German eugenics, the Nazi T‑4 program and GOP “austerity.” The Republicans and like-minded individuals like Princeton faculty member Peter Singer are advocating against the disabled is being “cost ineffective.”
“The Nazis’ First Victims Were the Disabled” by Kenny Fries; The New York Times; 9/13/2017.
I sit facing the young German neurologist, across a small table in a theater in Hamburg, Germany. I’m here giving one-on-one talks called “The Unenhanced: What Has Happened to Those Deemed ‘Unfit’,” about my research on Aktion T4, the Nazi “euthanasia” program to exterminate the disabled. “I’m afraid of what you’re going to tell me,” the neurologist says. I’m not surprised. I’ve heard similar things before.
But this time is different — the young man sitting across from me is a doctor. Aktion T4 could not have happened without the willing participation of German doctors. I have a personal stake in making sure this history is remembered. In 1960, I was born missing bones in both legs. At the time, some thought I should not be allowed to live. Thankfully, my parents were not among them.
I first discovered that people with disabilities were sterilized and killed by the Nazis when I was a teenager, watching the TV mini-series “Holocaust” in 1978. But it would be years before I understood the connections between the killing of the disabled and the killing of Jews and other “undesirables,” all of whom were, in one way or another, deemed “unfit.” The neurologist does not know much about what I’m telling him. While he does know that approximately 300,000 disabled people were killed in T4 and its aftermath, he doesn’t know about the direct connection between T4 and the Holocaust.
He doesn’t know that it was at Brandenburg, the first T4 site, where methods of mass killing were tested, that the first victims of Nazi mass killings were the disabled, and that its personnel went on to establish and run the extermination camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor.
Three years earlier, when I first arrived in Germany, I was consistently confronted with the treatment of those with disabilities under the Third Reich. But I soon realized I had to go back even farther. In the 1920s, the disabled were mistreated, sterilized, experimented on and killed in some German psychiatric institutions. In 1920, the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche and the jurist Karl Binding published their treatise, “Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life,” which became the blueprint for the exterminations of the disabled carried out by the Third Reich.
In Dr. Ewald Melzer’s 1923 survey of the parents of the disabled children in his care, they were asked: “Would you agree definitely to a painless shortcut of your child’s life, after it is determined by experts that it is incurably stupid?” The results, which surprised Melzer, were published in 1925: 73 percent responded they were willing to have their children killed if they weren’t told about it. I am also Jewish.
At the Karl Bonhoeffer psychiatric hospital in the Berlin suburb of Wittenau, where the exhibition “A Double Stigma: The Fate of Jewish Psychiatric Patients” was held, I learned about, as the exhibition title suggests, how Jewish patients were doubly stigmatized by being separated from other patients, denied pastoral care, and were cared for not at the expense of the Reich but by Jewish organizations. Jewish patients were singled out for early extermination; by December 1942, the destruction of the Jewish patient population at Wittenau was complete. The young neurologist in Hamburg did not know this history.
It is only at the end of my talk with the neurologist that I notice he wears a hearing aid. I want to ask if he knows about “100 Percent,” the film produced by deaf Germans to show they could assimilate and be productive citizens who worked. Did he know the hereditary deaf were singled out not only by the German authorities but also by those with acquired deafness who tried to save themselves?
Too often, even those of us with disabilities do not know our own history. Not many people know about disability history in the United States. They do not know that in the United States in 1927, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that “three generations of imbeciles are enough” as part of his opinion in Buck v. Bell, in which the Supreme Court ruled that compulsory sterilization of the “unfit” was constitutional. This decision has never been expressly overturned.
Many Americans still do not know about the so-called “ugly laws,” which in many states, beginning in the late 1860s, deemed it illegal for persons who were “unsightly or unseemly” to appear in public. The last of these laws was not repealed until 1974. Why is it important to know this history? We often say what happened in Nazi Germany couldn’t happen here. But some of it, like the mistreatment and sterilization of the disabled, did happen here.
A reading of Hoche and Binding’s “Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life” shows the similarity between what they said and what exponents of practical ethics, such as Peter Singer, say about the disabled today. As recently as 2015, Singer, talking with the radio host Aaron Klein on his show, said, “I don’t want my health insurance premiums to be higher so that infants who can experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.”
These philosophers talk about the drain on “resources” caused by lives lived with a disability, which eerily echoes what Hoche and Binding wrote about the “financial and moral burden” on “a person’s family, hospital, and state” caused by what they deem lives “unworthy of living.” Experts point out the recent Republican health care proposals would strip Medicaid funding that helps the elderly, the poor and the disabled live healthier and more dignified lives.
A recent New York Times article quoted the Rev. Susan Flanders, a retired Episcopal priest, as saying: “What we’re paying for is something that many people wouldn’t want if they had a choice. It’s hundreds of dollars each day that could go towards their grandchildren’s education or care for the people who could get well.” In the article, Flanders, whose father had Alzheimer’s, is described as “utterly unafraid to mix money into the conversation about the meaning of life when the mind deteriorates.” Practical ethicists are similarly unafraid to do this.
As were the Nazis. Third Reich school textbooks included arithmetic problems on how much it would cost to care for a person with a disability for a lifetime. Three years ago, I was the only visitor at a museum dedicated to the history of the Reinickendorf area of Berlin. The museum building was once part of Wiesengrund, which, in 1941, housed the “wards for expert care” of the Municipal Hospital for Children.
Down a hall with fluorescent lighting, in a white-walled room, were 30 wooden cribs. On each of the cribs was a history of a child, some as young as a few months old. This was the room in which these infants and children were experimented on and killed: the 30-bed Ward 3, the “ward for expert care” at Wiesengrund. My heart raced; my breath shortened. I couldn’t stay in that room for long. The room evoked the first four weeks of my own life spent in an incubator. Nobody knew if I would live or die.
What kind of society do we want to be? Those of us who live with disabilities are at the forefront of the larger discussion of what constitutes a valued life. What is a life worth living? Too often, the lives of those of us who live with disabilities are not valued, and feared. At the root of this fear is misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and a lack of knowledge of disability history and, thus, disabled lives.
Looking Back from 1984
Oh look at that: the 19 year old gunman who just killed 17 students at his former high school and insure many more was part of a white supremacist group called the Republic of Florida (ROF) that seeks to create a “white ethnostate” in Florida:
“The ADL said ROF leader Jordan Jereb told them Cruz was associated with his group. Jereb, who is based in Tallahassee, said Cruz was brought into the group by another member and had participated in one or more ROF training exercises in the Tallahassee area, the ADL said. Law enforcement officials have not confirmed the link.”
So Cruz participated in Republic of Florida (ROF) “training exercises.” And what kind of training might that be? This is a good time to recall the story of the Atomwaffen member who wanted to attack a nuclear plant near Miami for the purpose of causing a meltdown, clearing out the eastern seaboard, and building a new Fourth Reich. And also a good time to recall the stories about how Atomwaffen creates ISIS-like videos of them training in the woods and the Atomwaffen “training camps” include instruction in firearms, hand-to-hand combat, camping and survival skills.
Is that the kind of “training” Cruz was getting from the ROF? It’s a question that needs answering given that the leader of the “Republic of Florida” fully admits the group is seeking to create “white ethnostate” in Florida while assure us all that his group is not a terrorist organization:
And note that three former classmates told ABC News that Cruz “marched with the group frequently and was often seen with Jereb”. So it sounds like this ROF group had noticeable public presence of some sort in that area:
So did the ROF actively train Cruz to be a “lone wolf” domestic terrorist? Well, it turns out that Jareb was ‘gabbing’ about exactly this kind of scenario on “Gab”, a social media tool favored by the Alt Right, a few weeks before the attack. Jereb praised Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik as a “hero” and posted a diagrammed strategy for using the Republic of Florida militia to create “lone wolf activists”:
“In the weeks before the attack, on Gab, a social media network sometimes used by white nationalists, Jereb had recently praised Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik as a “hero.” He also posted a diagrammed strategy for using the Republic of Florida militia to create “lone wolf activists.””
Praising Breivik as a hero and diagramming how the Republic of Florida can create “lone wolf activists.” That sure sounds like this attack was exactly what the ROF was trying to achieve. Especially given the training video fo the group showing members practicing military maneuvers in camouflage clothing and saluting each other while Nazi music plays in the background:
And yet Jareb claims he didn’t know Cruz personally (the three schoolmates in the above article would beg to differ) and that his group had no idea this attack was coming...this from the guy who just posted about creating “lone wolf activists.”
All in all, if this group wasn’t an extension of Atomwaffen, they’re pretty clearly close allies.
@Pterrafractyl–
Both of your most recent comments are characteristically important and underscore a key point I’ve been making about Citizen Greenwald.
His association with Auerenheimer appears much more than cypherpunk/libertarian.
Greenwald ran legal interference for the “lone wolf/leaderless resistance strategy,” freeing advocates of this type of mayhem from civil liability.
But for Greenwald’s efforts, the families of the victims and surviving victims themselves might have been able to sue Jareb and the ROF.
Keep up the great work,
Dave
This AP Article, printed in the Dailey Mail, 02/16/2018. It talks about how a country with liberal Euthanasia laws is strating to abuse the protections and killing unwilling victrims without following the procedures and protections. It shows how the abuses can become commonplace and institutionalized, once the slipper slope begins to diminish the value of life or put a price on it.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5399059/Death-dementia-patient-stirs-Belgium-euthanasia-fears.html#ixzz57iNADtUU
Outrage as dementia patient who never asked to die is euthanized at request of family in Belgium
Patient, whose identity was not disclosed, was euthanized at the family’s request
Dementia sufferer in Belgium ‘lacked the mental capacity to ask for euthanasia’
Some experts say the case as documented in the letter amounts to murder
Case has sparked anger in country with some of the world’s most liberal euthanasia laws
By Associated Press
PUBLISHED: 03:48 EST, 16 February 2018 | UPDATED: 06:30 EST, 16 February 2018
A row has broken out in Belgium after a dementia patient who never asked to die was euthanized at the family’s request.
The case is described in a letter written by a doctor who resigned from Belgium’s euthanasia commission in protest over the group’s actions on this and other cases.
It has raised concerns about weak oversight in a country with some of the world’s most liberal euthanasia laws.
Some experts say the case as documented in the letter amounts to murder; the patient lacked the mental capacity to ask for euthanasia and the request for the bedridden patient to be killed came from family members.
The co-chairs of the commission say the doctor mistakenly reported the death as euthanasia.
Although euthanasia has been legal in Belgium since 2002 and has overwhelming public support, critics have raised concerns in recent months about certain practices, including how quickly some doctors approve requests to die from psychiatric patients.
The AP revealed a rift last year between Dr. Willem Distelmans, co-chair of the euthanasia commission, and Dr. Lieve Thienpont, an advocate of euthanasia for the mentally ill.
Distelmans suggested some of Thienpont’s patients might have been killed without meeting all the legal requirements. Prompted by the AP’s reporting, more than 360 doctors, academics and others have signed a petition calling for tighter controls on euthanasia for psychiatric patients.
Euthanasia — when doctors kill patients at their request — can be granted in Belgium to people with both physical and mental health illnesses. The condition does not need to be fatal, but suffering must be ‘unbearable and untreatable.’
It can only be performed if specific criteria are fulfilled, including a ‘voluntary, well-considered and repeated’ request from the person.
But Belgium’s euthanasia commission routinely violates the law, according to a September letter of resignation written by Dr. Ludo Vanopdenbosch, a neurologist, to senior party leaders in the Belgian Parliament who appoint members of the group.
The most striking example took place at a meeting in early September, Vanopdenbosch writes, when the group discussed the case of a patient with severe dementia, who also had Parkinson’s disease. To demonstrate the patient’s lack of competence, a video was played showing what Vanopdenbosch characterized as ‘a deeply demented patient.’
The patient, whose identity was not disclosed, was euthanized at the family’s request, according to Vanopdenbosch’s letter. There was no record of any prior request for euthanasia from the patient.
After hours of debate, the commission declined to refer the case to the public prosecutor to investigate if criminal charges were warranted.
Vanopdenbosch confirmed the letter was genuine but would not comment further about the specific case details.
The two co-chairs of the euthanasia commission, Distelmans and Gilles Genicot, a lawyer, said the doctor treating the patient mistakenly called the procedure euthanasia, and that he should have called it palliative sedation instead. Palliative sedation is the process of drugging patients near the end of life to relieve symptoms, but it is not meant to end life.
‘This was not a case of illegal euthanasia but rather a case of legitimate end-of-life decision improperly considered by the physician as euthanasia,’ Genicot and Distelmans said in an email.
Vanopdenbosch, who is also a palliative care specialist, wrote that the doctor’s intention was ‘to kill the patient’ and that ‘the means of alleviating the patient’s suffering was disproportionate.’
I don’t know another word other than murder to describe this
Psychiatric director, Dr. An Haekens
Though no one outside the commission has access to the case’s medical records — the group is not allowed by law to release that information — some critics were stunned by the details in Vanopdenbosch’s letter.
‘It’s not euthanasia because the patient didn’t ask, so it’s the voluntary taking of a life,’ said Dr. An Haekens, psychiatric director at the Alexianen Psychiatric Hospital in Tienen, Belgium. ‘I don’t know another word other than murder to describe this.’
Kristof Van Assche, a professor of health law at the University of Antwerp, wrote in an email the commission itself wasn’t breaking the law because the group is not required to refer a case unless two-thirds of the group agree — even if the case ‘blatantly disregards’ criteria for euthanasia.
But without a request from the patient, the case ‘would normally constitute manslaughter or murder,’ he wrote. ‘The main question is why this case was not deemed sufficiently problematic’ to prompt the commission to refer the case to prosecutors.
Vanopdenbosch, who in the letter called himself a ‘big believer’ in euthanasia, cited other problems with the commission. He said that when he expressed concerns about potentially problematic cases, he was immediately ‘silenced’ by others. And he added that because many of the doctors on the commission are leading euthanasia practitioners, they can protect each other from scrutiny, and act with ‘impunity.’
Vanopdenbosch wrote that when cases of euthanasia are identified that don’t meet the legal criteria, they are not forwarded to the public prosecutor’s office as is required by law, but that the commission itself acts as the court.
In the 15 years since euthanasia was legalized in Belgium, more than 10,000 people have been euthanized, and just one of those cases has been referred to prosecutors.
Genicot and Distelmans said the group thoroughly assesses every euthanasia case to be sure all legal conditions have been met.
‘It can obviously occur that some debate emerges among members but our role is to make sure that the law is observed and certainly not to trespass it,’ they said. They said it was ‘absolutely false’ that Vanopdenbosch had been muzzled and said they regretted his resignation.
This article “Inside Atomwaffen As It Celebrates a Member for Allegedly Killing a Gay Jewish College Student” was published by ProPublica. The writers wereA.C. Thompson, Ali Winston, and Jake Hanrahan, Feb. 23, 5 a.m. EST
I
Key Quotes from the article include:
* Authorities uncovered a possible plot to blow up a nuclear facility near Miami.
* Atomwaffen — the word means “nuclear weapons” in German — embraces Third Reich ideology and
* The group may have as many as 20 cells around the country,
* Members have discussed using explosives to cripple public water systems and destroy parts of the electrical power grid. One member even claimed to have obtained classified maps of the power grid in California. Throughout the chats, Atomwaffen members laud Timothy McVeigh, the former soldier who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168, including numerous children. Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof and Anders Breivik, the Norwegian extremist who massacred 77 people, also come in for praise.
* Joining us means serious dedication not only to the Atomwaffen Division and its members, but to the goal of Total Aryan Victory.
* White Liberation Front composed of small armed squads that would “hide in wilderness areas,” moving frequently from location to location while striking out in a string of “hit-and-run engagements.”
* Atomwaffen — would-be Nazi guerrillas devoted to white revolution in the U.S. — are “akin to cults
* Atomwaffen held a three-day training session — or “Hate Camp” in the group’s parlance — deep in the Nevada desert.
* [I]n a discussion on white nationalism that occurred in a non-Atomwaffen chat room. “You would want to target things like: Substations, water filtration plants, etc.”
* Hubsky also discussed blowing up natural gas lines.
* [T]he National Socialist Underground, a German organization that carried out a massive terror spree between 2001 and 2011, robbing 14 banks, planting bombs and murdering 10 people, most of them immigrants. “The NSU was pretty cool,” Woodward wrote.
* Atomwaffen actually stood to benefit from the increased notoriety stemming from Woodward’s affiliation with the neo-Nazi group and the Bernstein murder.
https://www.propublica.org/article/atomwaffen-division-inside-white-hate-group?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=1519363029
In a matter of months, people associated with the group, including Woodward, have been charged in five murders; another group member pleaded guilty to possession of explosives after authorities uncovered a possible plot to blow up a nuclear facility near Miami.
The group’s propaganda makes clear that Atomwaffen — the word means “nuclear weapons” in German — embraces Third Reich ideology and preaches hatred of minorities, gays and Jews. Atomwaffen produces YouTube videos showing members firing weapons and has filmed members burning the U.S. Constitution and setting fire to the American flag. But the organization, by and large, cloaks its operations in secrecy and bars members from speaking to the media.
The group may have as many as 20 cells around the country, small groups of indeterminate size in Texas, Virginia, Washington, Nevada and elsewhere. Members armed with assault rifles and other guns have taken part in weapons training in various locations over the last two years, including last month in the Nevada desert near Death Valley.
Members have discussed using explosives to cripple public water systems and destroy parts of the electrical power grid. One member even claimed to have obtained classified maps of the power grid in California. Throughout the chats, Atomwaffen members laud Timothy McVeigh, the former soldier who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168, including numerous children. Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof and Anders Breivik, the Norwegian extremist who massacred 77 people, also come in for praise.
An internal Atomwaffen document obtained by ProPublica shows members scattered across 23 states and Canada. The group’s largest chapters are based in Virginia, Texas and Washington, according to a message posted in the chats by an Atomwaffen recruiter last summer.
“Each chapter operates independently,” wrote the recruiter. “We want men who are willing to be the boots on the ground. Joining us means serious dedication not only to the Atomwaffen Division and its members, but to the goal of Total Aryan Victory.”
Mason proposed the creation of a White Liberation Front composed of small armed squads that would “hide in wilderness areas,” moving frequently from location to location while striking out in a string of “hit-and-run engagements.” Mason based this proposed organization on the short-lived National Socialist Liberation Front, a small splinter group of the American Nazi Party that formed in 1969 and espoused the strategic use of political terrorism.
The chat logs show that Denton and other Atomwaffen figures are in contact with Mason, who is 65 and is said to be living in Denver, Colorado.
“Now he’s got a following, which he didn’t have for the last 30 years,” Kaplan said. “He’s got some kids who’ve rediscovered him.
As Kaplan sees it, groups such as Atomwaffen — would-be Nazi guerrillas devoted to white revolution in the U.S. — are “akin to cults,” and are propelled by a quasi-religious faith that they will ultimately prevail.
The former member said Denton envisions using this network of Atomwaffen compounds to launch attacks against targets in the U.S.
Late last month, Atomwaffen held a three-day training session — or “Hate Camp” in the group’s parlance — deep in the Nevada desert. The event was organized by an Atomwaffen leader, Michael Lloyd Hubsky, who calls himself Komissar, according to the chat logs.
Hubsky wrote in a September 2017 message posted in a discussion on white nationalism that occurred in a non-Atomwaffen chat room. “You would want to target things like: Substations, water filtration plants, etc.”
Hubsky wrote that he had “a map of the US power grid.”
Hubsky also discussed blowing up natural gas lines. ...he had retained a lawyer.
Members would now be required to join Front Sight, a “private combat training facility” outside of Las Vegas in the small desert town of Pahrump. Front Sight, the memo said, could provide classes in “Uzi and full auto M16 combat, as well as knife fighting, hand to hand combat,” and instruction in climbing and rappelling.
That orientation attracted him to outlaw groups like the National Socialist Underground, a German organization that carried out a massive terror spree between 2001 and 2011, robbing 14 banks, planting bombs and murdering 10 people, most of them immigrants. “The NSU was pretty cool,” Woodward wrote.
ProPublica sought comment on the chats from Woodward’s lawyer, Edward Munoz, but did not get a response.
Fernandez, who used the alias Wehrwolf, believed that Atomwaffen actually stood to benefit from the increased notoriety stemming from Woodward’s affiliation with the neo-Nazi group and the Bernstein murder.
“We’re only going to inspire more ‘copycat crimes’ in the name of AWD. All we have to do is spread our image and our propaganda,” Fernandez wrote on Jan. 30.
This article is about missing plutonium that has not been disclosed to the public.
https://www.publicintegrity.org/2018/07/16/21834/plutonium-missing-government-says-nothing
Plutonium is missing, but the government says nothing
Losses of civilian nuclear material are usually disclosed but when the government loses nuclear bomb ingredients it stays mum
By Patrick MaloneR. Jeffrey Smith 5:55 am, July 16, 2018 Updated: 3:15 pm, July 20, 2018
Plutonium, radioactive cesium and several radiation detectors were stolen from a rental car parked in this lot outside of a San Antonio hotel.
Two security experts from the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory drove to San Antonio, Texas, in March 2017 with a sensitive mission: to retrieve dangerous nuclear materials from a nonprofit research lab there.
Their task, according to documents and interviews, was to ensure that the radioactive materials did not fall into the wrong hands on the way back to Idaho, where the government maintains a stockpile of nuclear explosive materials for the military and others.
To ensure they got the right items, the specialists from Idaho brought radiation detectors and small samples of dangerous materials to calibrate them: specifically, a plastic-covered disk of plutonium, a material that can be used to fuel nuclear weapons, and another of cesium, a highly radioactive isotope that could potentially be used in a so-called “dirty” radioactive bomb.
But when they stopped at a Marriott hotel just off Highway 410, in a high-crime neighborhood filled with temp agencies and ranch homes, they left those sensors on the back seat of their rented Ford Expedition. When they awoke the next morning, the window had been smashed and the special valises holding these sensors and nuclear materials had vanished.
More than a year later, state and federal officials don’t know where the plutonium – one of the most valuable and dangerous substances on earth – is. Nor has the cesium been recovered.
No public announcement of the March 21 incident has been made by either the San Antonio police or by the FBI, which the police consulted by telephone. When asked, officials at the lab and in San Antonio declined to say exactly how much plutonium and cesium were missing. But Idaho lab spokeswoman Sarah Neumann said the plutonium in particular wasn’t enough to be fashioned into a nuclear bomb.
It is nonetheless now part of a much larger amount of plutonium that over the years has gone quietly missing from stockpiles owned by the U.S. military, often without any public notice.
Unlike civilian stocks, which are closely monitored by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and openly regulated – with reports of thefts or disappearances sent to an international agency in Vienna — the handling of military stocks tended by the Department of Energy is much less transparent.
The Energy Department, which declined comment for this story, doesn’t talk about instances of lost and stolen nuclear material produced for the military. It also has been less willing than the commission to punish its contractors when they lose track of such material, several incidents suggest.
That nontransparent approach doesn’t match the government’s rhetoric.
Protecting bomb-usable materials, like the plutonium that went missing in San Antonio, “is an overriding national priority,” President Obama’s press office said in a fact sheet distributed during the fourth and final Nuclear Security Summit that he hosted in late March 2016, a Washington event attended by more than 50 heads of state.
The administration boasted in the declaration that America’s security standards for military-grade materials “meet or exceed the recommendations for civilian nuclear materials” made by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency. It also touted the strength of its tracking of such materials, which it said would “ensure timely detection and investigation of anomalies, and deter insider theft/diversion.”
The United States also boasted about its transparency, explaining that it “has published studies and reviews of nuclear security incidents, including lessons learned and corrective actions taken.”
President Donald Trump, speaking to a military audience at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, on Aug. 21, 2017, parroted the Obama administration’s refrain that “we must prevent nuclear weapons and materials from coming into the hands of terrorists and being used against us, or anywhere in the world for that matter.”
The Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, released in February, similarly emphasized the threat posed by nuclear terrorism, and asserted that “preventing the illicit acquisition of a nuclear weapon, nuclear materials, or related technology and expertise by a violent extremist organization is a significant U.S. national security priority.”
But America’s record of safeguarding such materials isn’t sterling. Gaps between the amount of plutonium that nuclear weapons companies have produced and the amount that the government can actually locate occur frequently enough for officials to have created an acronym for it – MUF, meaning “material unaccounted for.”
Just a cat or a brick
The gaps have shown up at multiple nodes in the production and deployment cycle for nuclear arms: at factories where plutonium and highly-enriched uranium have been made, at storage sites where the materials are held in reserve, at research centers where the materials are loaned for study, at waste sites where they are disposed, and during transit between many of these facilities.
Production of the bomb materials was so frantic during the Cold War that a total of roughly six tons of the material – enough to fuel hundreds of nuclear explosives – has been declared as MUF by the government, with most of it presumed to have been trapped in factory pipes, filters, and machines, or improperly logged in paperwork. (That figure, which dates from 2012, has not been publicly updated.)
For nearly 40 years, “DOE officials and their predecessors … did not have an effective capability within their accounting systems to know if significant quantities of” bomb-grade uranium were being diverted to illicit use, according to Charles Ferguson, a physicist who is now director of the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board at the National Academies of Sciences.
The Government Accountability Office declared in Sept. 2015 that the department also had never conducted an authoritative inventory of the location and quantity of plutonium loaned by the United States to other nations, and that eleven foreign sites with U.S.-made bomb-grade uranium had not been visited by U.S. inspectors in the previous 20 years. Many sites inspected before 2010 lacked rigorous security systems, the GAO warned.
Asked for comment, National Nuclear Security Administration spokesman Greg Wolfe said in an email on June 29 that his agency is still working with DOE on that inventory, three years later. He did not say when it would be finished.
Regarding transfers to academic researchers, government agencies, or commercial firms within the United States, the Energy Department’s inspector general concluded in 2009 –the most recent public accounting – that at least a pound of plutonium and 45 pounds of highly-enriched uranium loaned from military stocks had been officially listed until 2004 as securely stored, when in fact it was missing.
As little as nine pounds of highly-enriched uranium (the weight of an average cat) or 7 pounds of plutonium (the weight of a brick) can produce a functioning nuclear warhead, according to Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. So the missing amount in this category alone — the MUF stemming from loans to researchers from military stocks — is still enough to produce at least five nuclear bombs comparable to those that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, experts say. Plutonium in any quantity is also highly carcinogenic.
The amount, respectively, of highly-enriched uranium and plutonium needed to make a nuclear weapons.
Nuclear Threat Initiative
“Considering the potential health risks associated with these materials and the potential for misuse should they fall into the wrong hands, the quantities written off were significant,” the inspector general’s report stated. It also harshly criticized the Energy Department for failing to correct dozens of poor accounting and monitoring practices flagged in a probe of the problem eight years earlier.The Energy Department, the inspector general said in its report, still “may be unable to detect lost or stolen material.” No independent probe of the department’s capabilities has been conducted since then. When asked whether the GAO conclusions were still valid, a spokesman for the department did not respond.
Russians know even less about their own missing bomb materials
The United States is not alone in its uncertainty about the location of bomb-usable materials. U.S. officials who have studied Russia’s production practices say its accounting system has many of the shortcomings that America’s had, if not more, partly because the Russian factory logbooks were routinely jiggered to match official state production quotas.
Russia hasn’t tried to look more deeply into these records to assess the actual quantities of material it produced and can locate now, and thus the size of its own MUF. More than a decade ago, according to U.S. experts, some of its top physicists turned aside efforts by specialists in the United States to collaborate on a study of it. The U.S. National Intelligence Council has repeatedly said that Russian accounting was so poor that undetected smuggling likely occurred.
The details of how or why U.S. nuclear materials go missing from military stocks – or the quantity of such materials involved in individual incidents — are not disclosed by the government. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission annually publishes a tally of lost, missing or stolen radioactive material from civilian nuclear stocks (those typically used for oil and gas exploration, medical purposes, academic research and nuclear power).
In a Jan. 2018 report, for example, the NRC stated during the previous year, eight such items had gone missing and two had not been recovered. None were of the type or quantity useable in a nuclear weapon. Whenever additional material goes missing, the NRC discloses it publicly.
The Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit Washington group that wants to tighten the security of nuclear materials around the globe, noted in a 2015 report that the civilian stocks subject to the most transparent and uniform monitoring amount to just 17 percent of all those held by governments. “The absence of any international standards” for securing and monitoring the remaining 83 percent in military hands is dangerous, the group said.
Concern that nuclear materials are being sought around the world to deliberately cause harm is real, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. In a 2017 report, the international agency identified 270 times between 1993 and 2016 when individuals acquired nuclear materials “for trafficking or malicious use.” Twelve involved highly-enriched uranium, and two targeted plutonium. Some of these cases were “more organized, better resourced and … involved perpetrators with a track record in trafficking nuclear/radioactive material,” the report said.
Incidents related to trafficking or malicious use, 1993–2016
Over the past quarter century the International Atomic Energy Agency, which tracks and monitors bomb-useable material across the globe, uncovered 270 times when someone tried or succeeded to get such materials with ‘malicious intent.’ As of 2016, the last year of available data, these nefarious activities constitute 9 percent of all incidents tracked by the agency. The IAEA reports the incidents include a range of quantities and the problem persists even today.
Number of incidents
1994
1996
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
2008
2010
2012
2014
2016
0
5
10
15
20
25
International Atomic Energy Agency
Sloppiness in transit
Ensuring appropriate protections are in place for military-related nuclear materials has ironically proven a lot harder than implementing tight security for civilian nuclear materials, said Miles Pomper, a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, who participated in the NTI study. “Politically and diplomatically, it’s a lot more difficult,” Pomper said. “We’re not having significant conversations on this issue.”
In the San Antonio incident, the San Antonio police were dumbfounded that the experts from Idaho did not take more precautions. They “should have never left a sensitive instrument like this unattended in a vehicle,” said Carlos Ortiz, spokesman for the San Antonio Police Department.
Radioactive material recoveries
The personnel from Idaho National Laboratory whose gear was stolen were part of the Off-Site Radioactive Source Recovery Program based at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, with an annual budget of about $17 million. Overseen by the National Nuclear Security Administration, the program has scooped up more than 38,000 bits of radioactive material loaned to research centers, hospitals and academic institutions since 1999 – averaging 70 such missions a year. No state has returned more borrowed nuclear materials than Texas, where the recovery program has collected 8,566 items.
Details of the incident were pieced together by the Center for Public Integrity from a police report obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request after a brief description of the incident appeared in an internal Energy Department report.
While the Idaho National Laboratory depicted the site of the theft – a Marriott hotel parking lot — in a report to the Energy Department as a secure spot with high walls on two sides, a clear line of sight to the hotel’s front door, and patrolling guards, San Antonio police statistics show that theft was just one of 87 at the Marriott hotel or its parking lot in 2016 and 2017.
Ortiz said the department called an FBI liaison to a joint terrorism taskforce, who advised them to take as many fingerprints in the car as possible. But detectives found no useable prints, no worthwhile surveillance video of the crime, and no witnesses. A check of local pawn shops – to see if someone had tried to sell the sensors – turned up nothing.
One of the Idaho National Laboratory specialists told them, Ortiz said, “that it wasn’t an important or dangerous amount” of plutonium. So they closed the investigation to avoid “chasing a ghost,” Ortiz said.
Idaho National Laboratory spokeswoman Sarah Neumann responded that “from INL’s perspective, the theft was taken seriously” and properly reported to the police and the Energy Department. But she declined to say if those involved faced any internal consequences. “There is little or no danger from these sources being in the public domain,” she said.
Lab documents state that a month after the incident, one of the specialists charged with safeguarding the equipment in San Antonio was given a “Vision Award” by her colleagues. “Their achievements, and those of their colleagues at the laboratory, are the reasons our fellow citizens look to INL to resolve the nation’s big energy and security challenges,” Mark Peters, the lab director, said in an April 21, 2017, news release.
At the end of the fiscal year 2017, the Energy Department awarded the lab contractor that employed the guards assigned to pick up the nuclear material, Battelle Energy Alliance LLC, an “A” grade and described their overall performance as “excellent.” It further awarded them 97 percent of their available bonuses, providing $15.5 million in profit, and in December 2017 the Department of Energy announced a five-year extension of Battelle’s contract to operate Idaho National Laboratory, giving the contractor the job until at least 2024.
The image on the left deptics plutonium samples, comparable in size to one that’s been missing from Idaho State University for at least 14 years, beside a U.S. quarter. On the right, a Ludlum 3030 radiation meter like the one shown here was stolen from Idaho National Laboratory employees along with other detectors and samples of plutonium and cesium in March 2017.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission / Department of Energy
The NRC, in contrast, has imposed six financial penalties on civilian institutions that lost or mishandled nuclear materials in the past year and a half alone (it has imposed and then waived penalties on another 20 institutions during this period). The largest penalty imposed was $22,500 against Qal-Tek Associates, a radiation detector manufacturer in Idaho Falls, for failing to “contain” radioactive materials during their transport, according to a published notice of the fine.
The most recent NRC fine was imposed this May against Idaho State University for its inability to find a quarter-sized piece of plutonium in a radiation meter that it had borrowed from Idaho National Laboratory in 1991. An Idaho State University employee conducting an inventory of such materials last October expected to find 14 of the Plutonium-239 pieces, each weighing less than four-hundredths of an ounce, but found just 13. The inspector reported this discrepancy to the university’s radiation safety officer, who in turn reported it to the NRC.
The NRC imposed fines totaling $8,500 for the college’s mishandling of the plutonium, and the years-long delay in reporting it missing. Idaho State University paid the fines June 6, according to Cornelis Van der Schyf, the university’s vice president for research and dean of the graduate school. The missing plutonium’s whereabouts remain unknown.
(Update: July 20, 2018, 1:30 pm: In a letter to Energy Secretary Rick Perry following publication of this article, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D‑Tex.), who represents San Antonio, expressed concern about the missing radioactive materials and asked Perry to explain why the public was not notified when the theft occurred. He also asked Perry to detail any other such incidents in Texas over the past five years, asked for a personal briefing on the problem, and said he hopes Perry takes seriously “a culture of nuclear security and prudence.”)