Sweden
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greta thunberg
https://www.ecowatch.com/greta-thunberg-nobel-peace-prize-2631637803.html
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US extremists are rattled by new sanctions against global terrorism group
How scammers use psychology to create some of the most convincing internet cons
Jordan Green January 15, 2025
The State Department has applied the “specially designated global terrorist” designation to the Terrorgram Collective in a groundbreaking move that for the first time sanctions a transnational white supremacist terrorist group with a significant presence in the United States.
The announcement on Monday — one week before President Biden leaves office — justified the designation based on the group “posing a significant risk of committing, or having participated in training to commit acts of terrorism, that threaten the security of United States nationals or national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” Terrorgram is an amalgam of the words “terror” and “Telegram,” the latter of which is a social media platform used by members to distribute propaganda.
“This is the first time you’ve seen a white supremacist group that had members or supporters in the U.S. receive the designation,” Seamus Hughes, a researcher at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center at the University of Nebraska, told Raw Story.
Two of the group’s leaders, Dallas Erin Humber of California and Matthew Robert Allison of Idaho, were indicted last year on charges that included conspiracy, solicitation of hate crimes, solicitation of the murder of federal officials, and conspiracy to provide material support for terrorists. Two other individuals, Brandon Russell — founder of the neo-Nazi terror group Atomwaffen Division — and Andrew Takhistov, who each face federal charges related to plots to attack the power grid, are also linked to Terrorgram.
The indictment against Humber and Allison describes Terrorgram as “a network of channels, group chats, and users on Telegram that promote white supremacists accelerationism: an ideology centered on the belief that the white race is superior; that society is irreparably corrupt and cannot be saved by political action; and that violence and terrorism is necessary to ignite a race war and ‘accelerate’ the collapse of the government and the rise of a white ethnostate.”
Terrorgram is not the first transnational white supremacist terrorist group to be sanctioned by the State Department. In 2020, under the first Trump administration, the State Department applied the “specially designated global terrorist” identification to the Russian Imperial Movement, which was implicated in a series of bombings in 2016 and 2017 that targeted refugee shelters in Sweden. Nordic Resistance Movement, a group founded in Sweden, was added to the list last June.
The specific bans designated groups and individuals from holding property and financial interests in the United States, while also prohibiting U.S. citizens from engaging in financial transactions with them.
Following the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., the Russian Imperial Movement invited the organizers to visit its paramilitary training camps in St. Petersburg, according to Nathan Sales, a former Trump administration State Department counterterrorism official who testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Sales said there is no evidence that the Charlottesville organizers accepted the invitation, but the following month, Russian Imperial Movement leaders traveled to the United States to network with white supremacists, and one posed for a photo with the group’s flag in front of the White House.
“What is most interesting for me is this represents the first time when a designation would have ramifications for U.S. prosecutors,” Hughes said. “There’s not a cadre of Russian Imperial Movement adherents in the U.S., whereas there is a good number of individuals that were drawn to Terrorgram in the U.S.”
Hughes said the designation will give prosecutors the ability to request terrorism enhancements during sentencing.
“It helps for them to tell the story to a jury that this is not just a bunch of angry people online, but an actual terrorist group,” he added.
The designation is also likely to make social media companies more reluctant to allow members and associates to organize on their platforms.
“Because tech companies can face legal risks if they provide services to designated groups or individuals, sanctions can prompt them to sever ties with those listed as terrorists,” Sales testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee back in 2022.
The announcement about the State Department sanction against Terrorgram is already causing ripples of unease across Telegram.
Reacting to the announcement on Monday, a neo-Nazi channel that advertises itself as a source of “tradecraft to evade authorities online,” posted: “We all know we are operating on borrowed time here on Telegram. It is unfortunate, as it is a hell of an app.”
The post went on to say that users should not trust Pavel Durov, the Russian founder and CEO of Telegram, to protect their data.
“We don’t want any of our admins or subscribers to wind up in federal prison over ironically being part of a ‘terror group,’” the post continued. “With no publicly available criteria to determine guilt or association, the juice is not worth the squeeze. It doesn’t make sense to maintain a presence where the enemy has the advantage.”
Prior to the arrests of two American leaders last September, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced charges against two unnamed Ontario men “alleged to have participated in the creation of Terrorgram Collective manifestos and Atomwaffen Division recruiting videos.”
The Canadian arrests in December 2023 followed an 18-month investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. That timeframe puts the launch of the investigation roughly in June 2021, the time of the first Terrorgram publication Militant Accelerationism, according to a Southern Poverty Law Center investigation.
Federal prosecutors allege that Humber and Allison joined Terrorgram in 2019, and became leaders of the group in the summer of 2022, “after one previous leader was arrested and charged with terrorism offenses and another became aware that he was the subject of a terrorism related investigation.”
Following Humber and Allison’s arrests, three foreign nationals appear to have taken over leadership of Terrorgram. The State Department designation identifies Ciro Daniel Amorim Ferreira of Brazil, Noah Licul of Croatia and Hendrik Walh-Muller of South Africa as “leaders of the Terrorgram Collective” and “specially designated global terrorists.”
Terrorgram is linked to two other federal prosecutions in the United States beyond Humber and Allison. Russell, the Atomwaffen founder, was arrested in February 2023 and charged alongside codefendant Sarah Beth Clendaniel in an alleged plot to carry out a coordinated attack on electrical substations designed to create a widespread power outage in Baltimore.
While Terrorgram is not directly mentioned in charging documents for the case, a review of Russell’s Telegram chats by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that he forwarded a Terrorgram document called Make It Count to another Telegram user.
Court filings by the government also allege that Russell told an FBI confidential human source that they should use Mylar balloons to short out a power transformer. That tactic is recommended in another Terrorgram publication The Hard Reset, which is described by the government as including “detailed information on how to attack a substation, including the use of Mylar balloons.”
The State Department announcement references a planned energy facility attack by Andrew Takhistov in New Jersey last summer without directly naming him.
Takhistov’s charging documents allege that he “claimed to have taken a role in the publication of” The Hard Reset and that he sent a PDF of the document to an FBI undercover employee. Takhistov allegedly praised The Hard Reset as “the only thing you need” to plan a white supremacist terror attack.
Takhistov was active in the Terrorgram group chats, and Humber posted an Audiobook promoting white supremacist murder in January 2024 in response to a request from Takhistov, according to government court filings. Later, according to the government, Takhistov thanked a Terrorgram chat administrator for posting a video “with instructions for using Mylar balloons to commit an attack on an energy facility.”
Lawyers for Takhistov and Russell could not be reached for comment for this story prior to publication.
The State Department announcement listing Terrorgram as a terrorist entity cited the Biden administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, released in June 2021. The framework highlighted the government’s efforts to assess whether foreign entities could meet the criteria for the “specially designated global terrorist” designation.
“These designations are part of a broader U.S. government effort to address the transnational dimensions of the threat posed by [racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist] actors and reflect the Biden-Harris administration’s continued commitment to countering domestic terrorism, which includes REMVE and white identity terrorism,” the State Department said.
The emphasis on tackling white supremacist terrorism under the Biden administration has been embraced by an array of agencies in addition to State, including Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI.
The commitment across the federal government to combating white supremacist terrorism under Biden’s leadership built on a growing consensus within the agencies that took hold during the first Trump administration. It remains unclear whether the second Trump administration will maintain the same course.
“In fact, we viewed it as such a critical threat that back in June of 2019, under my leadership, we elevated racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism to our highest threat priority, on the same level with ISIS and homegrown violent extremists, where it remains to this day,” FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2021.
Wray was appointed to lead the FBI by Trump in 2017.
Kash Patel, who has been named by Trump to replace Wray in the incoming administration, has expressed skepticism towards the government’s focus on “domestic terrorism.”
“Whistleblowers have revealed in multiple ways how the Deep State is continuing to weaponize the power of the state against internal dissidents,” he wrote in his book Government Gangsters. “To pump up public support for their attacks on conservative Americans, the FBI leadership has been reportedly pushing agents to artificially inflate data on domestic terrorism to make the problem seem much worse than it is.”
Asked for clarification on Patel’s views, a Trump transition spokesperson previously pledged to Raw Story that Patel will “protect Americans from terrorism as the agency’s director.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trumps-new-adviser-calls-himself-the-anti-dr-fauci-and-is-pushing-a-controversial-herd-immunity-approach-and-medical-experts-are-worried-report/
proponents of the “herd immunity” approach to the coronavirus pandemic have been arguing that if enough Americans are infected with COVID-19 and survive, the disease will be largely neutralized in the United States — an approach that many medical experts vehemently disagree with, including expert immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci. But according to Washington Post sources, this is an approach that is being aggressively pushed by one of President Donald Trump’s top coronavirus advisers: Dr. Scott Atlas, who joined the president’s team earlier this month.
Atlas, journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Josh Dawsey report in the Post,“is urging the White House to embrace a controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, while taking steps to protect those in nursing homes and other vulnerable populations, according to five people familiar with the discussions.”
Atlas’ approach, Abutaleb and Dawsey explain, “relies on lifting restrictions so the healthy can build up immunity to the disease rather than limiting social and business interactions to prevent the virus from spreading.”
The “herd immunity” approach to the pandemic has been used in Sweden, but it has been rejected and sharply criticized by medical experts in many other European countries — which, in contrast to Sweden, embraced comprehensive social distancing policies. Abutaleb and Dawsey note that “Sweden’s approach has gained support among some conservatives who argue that social distancing restrictions are crushing the economy and infringing on people’sliberties.”
Paul Romer, a professor at New York University, told the Post that the Trump Administration “faces some pretty serious hurdles in making” a herd immunity argument — noting, “One is a lot of people will die, even if you can protect people in nursing homes. Once it’s out in the community, we’ve seen over and over again, it ends up spreading everywhere.”
One of the Post’s sources, described by Abutaleb and Dawsey as a “senior administration official,” told the Post that Atlas considers himself the “anti-Dr. Fauci” and strongly disagrees with the social distancing recommendations of Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx — both of whom are part of Trump’s coronavirus task force in the White House. Fauci has warned that easing social distancing restrictions prematurely will have deadly results, and the summer surges of COVID-19 in Florida, Texas, Georgia and other Sun Belt states with Republican governors bear that out.
Eric Topol, the cardiologist who heads the Scripps Research Translational Institute in San Diego, slammed Topol as a source of “misinformation” — telling the Post, “This is really unfortunate to have this fellow Scott Atlas, who was basically recruited to crowd out Tony Fauci and the voice of reason. Not only do we not embrace the science, but we repudiate the science by our president — and that has extended by bringing in another unreliable misinformation vector.”
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https://thinkprogress.org/europe-bans-one-of-americas-most-prominent-white-supremacists-34b34726f623/
no lx twt
Europe bans one of America’s most prominent white supremacists
Jared Taylor claims he can no longer travel through the continent.
CASEY MICHEL
MAR 31, 2019, 10:06 AM
American white supremacist Jared Taylor says that he can no longer travel throughout Europe. CREDIT : YOUTUBE
AMERICAN WHITE SUPREMACIST JARED TAYLOR SAYS THAT HE CAN NO LONGER TRAVEL THROUGHOUT EUROPE. CREDIT : YOUTUBE
Jared Taylor, one of the most prominent white supremacists in the U.S., claimed on his website on Friday that he’d been “banned from Europe” until 2021.
The ban came as Taylor attempted to transfer in Switzerland for a flight to Finland. According to Taylor, Swiss police informed him that Polish authorities had barred Taylor from traveling through the Schengen Zone, a 26-country area of Europe allowing visa-free travel.
“I will spend the night at the airport, and tomorrow I will be deported,” Taylor wrote. “I am free to walk around the terminal, I can make phone calls and use the internet, and I have a meal voucher that is supposed to last me for the next 12 hours. The officer kept my passport, though, and won’t give it back to me until I board the flight home.”[twt]
Jason Wilson
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@jason_a_w
Jared Taylor of American Renaissance says he has been banned from Europe until 2021, seemingly at the instigation of Poland, where he has given talks to nationalist groups (via @FFRAFAction)
36
7:46 AM - Mar 30, 2019
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Taylor had been planning on speaking atwhite supremacist conferences in Scandinavia, including one on Saturday in Stockholm that featured other well-known fascists like Mark Collett and Greg Johnson.
View image on Twitter
Anti-Fascism & Far Right
@FFRAFAction
??MINI-THREAD??
Further evidence of transnational organising on extreme right.
Today in Stockholm Sweden there is an international alt-right/Identitarian conference - Scandza Forum.
This is now an annual event. It was held in Oslo in 2017 & Stockholm last year
4:01 AM - Mar 30, 2019
It’s unclear why Polish authorities issued a blanket ban against Taylor. Taylor attributed the ban to a 2018 trip to the country, where he gave multiple television interviews. During that trip, Taylor said that Polish police said he was “spreading a totalitarian ideology.”
Taylor is best-known for cloaking his white supremacy behind a facade of so-called “race realism,” which claims that intellectual differences between races are inherent. He gained prominence in 2016, when Richard Spencer — one of the most well-known faces of the so-called “alt-right” movement that backed then-candidate Donald Trump — cited Taylor as his mentor.
As it is, Taylor is the latest white supremacist prohibited from traveling to certain other countries to spread his ideology. Spencer has likewise been banned from Europe, also at the request of Polish authorities. Milo Yiannopoulos, who has worked closely with white supremacists in the past, was also recently banned from Australia, and Lauren Southern, who claims she’s not a white supremacist, has been banned from traveling to the U.K..
The move to bar Taylor — and having European countries enforce their borders against unwanted individuals — sent other white supremacists into fits. One, Hunter Wallace, said the “moral rot of Europe can’t possibly get much deeper,” a take echoed by Scott Greer, who wrote for Richard Spencer’s white supremacist journal. Nicholas Fuentes, who attended the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, described it as a “stab in the back.”
The ban also comes alongside increased scrutiny about trans-national white supremacy, much of which emanates from the U.S. Taylor has long served as one of the most well-traveled mouthpieces, having toured North America, Europe, and Russia to push his brand of hatred. The ban also comes less than a month after a white supremacist shooter killed 50 Muslims in a New Zealand mosque, the most violent act of white supremacist terror in years.
In “The Brink,” Bannon’s big professional push is two-pronged. First, he’s focused on establishing his 501(c)4, COAR (Citizens of the American Republic), an organization that aims to boost Republican turnout despite Bannon having no formal ties with the party. Second, he’s founding The Movement with the goal of unifying nationalist, mostly racist, organizations across Europe. At an international convention scheduled for January (that didn’t end up taking place), participants were to hammer out a plan for the EU parliamentary election in May that would tip the whole continent to the right.
One of the movie’s most memorable scenes has Bannon meeting in a hotel room with alt-right leaders from throughout the continent. Present are Flemish Parliament member Filip Dewinter, an overt admirer of the SS, along with Sweden’s Kent Ekeroth of the Swedish Democrats, a party rooted in white nationalism, and Italy’s deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, of the right-wing populist group Brothers of Italy. They do little more than express frustration, generally holding their tongues in the presence of Klayman’s camera. Then, in later encounters, Bannon denies meeting some of them, brushing questions off with a Trumpian answer: “We were at the same dinner event one time, but I don’t know him.”
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9/18 big alt rt win, break pol consensus/sys
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https://www.ecowatch.com/volvo-electric-cars-2453719182.html
Volvo Announces 'Historic End' to Combustion Engine, All Cars Going Electric
Volvo Cars announced Wednesday that every car it launches from 2019 will have an electric motor, marking a "historic end" to the internal combustion engine.
This makes Volvo the first traditional carmaker to fully embrace electrification.
"This is a clear commitment towards reducing our carbon footprint as well as contributing to better air quality in our cities," Håkan Samuelsson, president and chief executive, said. He then stated goals of selling 1 million electrified cars by 2025.
The company will still produce older Volvos with pure combustion engines after 2019, but its latest move signals its eventual phasing out conventional gas guzzlers. As the New York Times noted, other major car manufacturers have introduced EVs or hybrids to their line but none have entirely ditched making new cars powered solely by gasoline or diesel fuel.
"This is about the customer," Samuelsson added. "People increasingly demand electrified cars and we want to respond to our customers' current and future needs."
The automaker is based in Sweden but is owned by China's Geely Automobile Holdings, which produces electric vehicles for China, a major market for battery-powered cars.
Volvo said it will launch five fully electric cars between 2019 and 2021. The rest of its fleet will comprise of plug-in hybrid cars and mild hybrid cars.
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