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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/2020/12/white-supremacist/

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Although terrorist attacks by far-right white supremacist and white supremacist groups existed long before the Trump era, the last four years have found such groups emboldened. And according to Associated Press reporter Amy Forliti, one plot that white supremacists had in mind for the Summer of 2021 involved attacking power stations in the southeastern United States.

Forliti reports that in an affidavit that was "mistakenly unsealed," the FBI alleges that an Ohio-based teenager and informant said he wanted the white supremacists to fast-track their plot if President Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. In addition to winning 306 electoral votes, President-elect Joe Biden defeated Trump by more than 7 million in the popular vote.

The NBC News reporter explains, "The teen was in a text group with more than a dozen people in the fall of 2019 when he introduced the idea of saving money to buy a ranch where they could participate in militant training, according to the affidavit, which was filed under seal along with a search warrant application in Wisconsin's Eastern U.S. District Court in March. The documents were inadvertently unsealed last week before the mistake was discovered and they were quickly sealed again."

Forliti notes that the teenager "also shared plans with a smaller group about a plot to create a power outage by shooting rifle rounds into power stations in the southeastern U.S. The teen called the plot 'Lights Out,' and there were plans to carry it out in the Summer of 2021, the affidavit states."

The teenager, according to Forliti, allegedly received a text from a white supremacist in Texas who said, "Leaving the power off would wake people up to the harsh reality of life by wreaking havoc across the nation." [NOVEL? TERROR?]

"The affidavit says the Ohio teen also spoke numerous times about creating Nazi militant cells around the country like those of the neo-Nazi network the Atomwaffen Division," Forliti explains. "Atomwaffen Division members have promoted 'accelerationism,' a fringe philosophy espousing mass violence to fuel society's collapse. More than a dozen people linked to the group or an offshoot called the Feuerkrieg Division have been charged with serious crimes in recent years."

Jennifer Thornton, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of Ohio, told NBC News that she couldn't offer more information about the plot but said, "we want to emphasize that there is no imminent public safety threat related to this matter."

The Trump era has seen some vicious attacks by White racists, from a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas on August 3, 2019 aimed specifically at Latinos to the October 27, 2018 attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. And earlier this year, a combination of white nationalists and militia extremists, according to the FBI, planned to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and possibly kill her.

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https://www.propublica.org/article/an-atomwaffen-member-sketched-a-map-to-take-the-neo-nazis-down-what-path-officials-took-is-a-mystery

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Atomwaffen Member Sketched a Map to Take the Neo-Nazis Down. What Path Officials Took Is a Mystery.

Some experts and former officials see the case as part of a larger pattern, evidence that federal agencies are understaffed and out of position in confronting the threat of white supremacist terrorism — even as the FBI’s latest report shows a spike in hate crimes for the third straight year.

by A.C. Thompson Nov. 20, 10:45 a.m. EST

Tampa police detective Kenneth Nightlinger, seated right, questions Atomwaffen member Devon Arthurs in May 2017. (Frontline)

DOCUMENTING HATE

Tracking Hate Crimes and Bias Incidents

This story was co-published with Frontline PBS.

It was a grisly scene inside Apartment 3722 at the Hamptons, a gated community in Tampa, Florida.

One body lay face up on the floor, wedged between a wall and an air mattress. A handgun was stuffed in a holster on the dead man’s waist. The other body, clad in a black T-shirt and shorts, was slumped back on a futon, a shattered and bloody iPhone on his lap. A police investigator would later write that the two men had been “shot multiple times at close range with an assault rifle.”

There were some obvious clues that this was no ordinary double homicide. Tacked to the wall near the bodies was a large black-and-white flag bearing the insignia of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, Adolf Hitler’s elite paramilitary unit. On a nearby shelf was a black Stahlhelm, the distinctive helmet worn by Nazi soldiers during World War II. There were multiple copies of “Mein Kampf” and a prominent place was reserved for “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel of race war in America that has inspired generations of terrorists, among them Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. A framed picture of McVeigh sat on a dresser.

About the Partnership

This story is part of an ongoing collaboration between ProPublica and Frontline. Watch “Documenting Hate: New American Nazis” on PBS on Nov. 20 at 9 p.m. Eastern, 8 Central, and online at pbs.org/frontline.

On that night in May 2017, the police quickly took two suspects into custody and developed a rough outline of what had happened. One of the suspects, Devon Arthurs, 18, said the victims were his roommates, and members of a neo-Nazi group called the Atomwaffen Division. Arthurs said that he’d decided to leave the group, and that he’d killed the men to keep them from carrying out what he said were their plans for violence.

The second suspect detained by police, Brandon Russell, also lived in the apartment. Russell told the authorities he’d just returned home from a weekend of training with the Florida Army National Guard. And then Russell revealed something that should have set off alarms among federal investigators assigned to track the growing threat from armed, violent right-wing extremists. He said, and the police quickly confirmed, that the single-car garage attached to the apartment was full of explosives.

Explosives experts from the Tampa Police Department and the local FBI field office soon found components of a crude pipe bomb as well as radioactive materials. The search turned up ammonium nitrate and nitromethane, the mixture used by McVeigh to destroy the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. There were sacks of explosive precursors, including potassium chloride, red iron oxide and potassium nitrate. There were homemade fuses fashioned from brass 5.56 mm rifle cartridges. In a closet, they found two Geiger counters.

And there was a cooler with the name Brandon scrawled on the lid in black marker. Inside, the investigators discovered HMTD — hexamethylene triperoxide diamine — a potent, highly volatile peroxide-based explosive. It has become a favored tool of terrorists both here and abroad, who cook it up in small batches using recipes circulating on the internet and in improvised weapons manuals.

At Tampa police headquarters, investigators put Arthurs and Russell in separate interrogation rooms. They wanted to know about the killings, about the neo-Nazi group and about the explosives.

Arthurs said the apartment had served as a nerve center for Atomwaffen Division, a white supremacist organization of 60 to 70 people that has spoken openly of its hopes of igniting race war in the United States. If the authorities could access the group’s encrypted online chats, Arthurs said, “it’d be easy to track down each member.” The interrogation was videotaped, and a recording was obtained by ProPublica and Frontline.

“The things that they’re planning were horrible. They’re planning bombings and stuff like that on countless people, they’re planning to kill civilian life,” Arthurs said. A detective asked if Atomwaffen had drawn up a list of specific targets. “Power lines, nuclear reactors, synagogues, things like that,” Arthurs replied.

“I’m telling you stuff that the FBI should be hearing,” Arthurs said, adding that he thought lives could be saved.

To this day, it is unclear if the FBI talked with Arthurs or what steps it took to shut down Atomwaffen. The FBI declined repeated requests to discuss the case. But this much is clear: Within months of Arthurs’ warnings, Atomwaffen members or associates had killed three more people.

It is frequently argued that the white men who murder in the name of racial purity are lone wolves, radicalized by the echo chamber of the alt-right internet. No one can reasonably expect authorities to stop a seemingly law-abiding citizen like Dylann Roof, the young man who killed nine black church members in South Carolina.

But the Atomwaffen case seems a fair test of the country’s intelligence abilities. And a close look at it suggests that much more could have been done to investigate an organization one of its founding members, Arthurs, was begging the authorities to shut down and offering his help to do so.

The cooler containing Atomwaffen founder Brandon Russell’s HMTD explosive. (Exhibit from U.S. vs. Brandon Russell)

Some experts and former officials see the case as part of a larger pattern, evidence that federal agencies are understaffed and out of position in confronting the threat of white supremacist terrorism even as the FBI’s latest report shows a spike in hate crimes for the third straight year.

That concern intensified after the massacre of 11 Jewish worshipers last month at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. John Cohen and George Selim, former senior officials in the Department of Homeland Security, criticized what they say has been the disinvestment in programs and efforts meant to help protect against the threat of far-right attacks. Task forces have been disbanded, they said, and recent efforts to reconstitute what they termed an “intelligence infrastructure” for domestic terrorism have lagged.

The government’s own data underlines the threat. A 2017 Government Accountability Office report said “far-right extremism” was responsible for 62 of the 85 lethal extremist incidents in the U.S. from the day after 9/11 through 2016, while Islamist extremist violence was responsible for 23 of the incidents. The report said far-right extremism had killed 106 people over those years.

Contacted by ProPublica and Frontline, Cohen, now a professor at Rutgers University, said he stood by his public critique.

“We know what the problem is, but every time there’s another one of these attacks all we hear is, ‘Oh, this is shocking, this is horrible, our prayers are with the people, who would have imagined this ever would have happened?’” Cohen said. “No, it’s very imaginable because it’s happening on a regular basis in this country. We’re just not doing enough to stop it.”

The authorities dispatched to the Tampa apartment seemed unprepared to deal with this particular brand of terrorism. The police detectives and FBI agent who interviewed Arthurs and Russell appear to have given little credence to the evidence discovered in the apartment, or to Arthurs’ allegations that the group was plotting terrorist attacks and mass murders.

While Arthurs was taken to the county jail on homicide charges, police and FBI agents released Russell, who claimed that he used the explosives to power model rockets. An officer even drove Russell back to the murder scene so he could retrieve his car.

What happened next could well have been a disaster. Within hours, Russell acquired an AR-15-style assault rifle and a bolt-action hunting rifle. He loaded homemade body armor and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition into his car, and set off for the Florida Keys with another Atomwaffen member. He was eventually arrested by sheriff’s deputies in Monroe County. They were shocked by the weapons and ammunition they found in the car. There was no luggage. No food. Russell didn’t seem prepared for an extended trip, they said.

“When we found all the weapons, we were convinced that we had just stopped a mass shooting,” recalled Deanna Torres, one of the deputies who captured Russell, who would eventually plead guilty to federal explosives charges.

Five former law enforcement agents spoke to ProPublica and Frontline about the handling of Arthurs and Russell. Most said they were baffled by the decision to release Russell.

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Tampa police and local prosecutors would not discuss the case.

Atomwaffen didn’t disband in the aftermath of the Tampa arrests. The group continued to recruit new members, staging “hate camps” in at least two states that included weapons training. And the group’s violence went unhindered.

In December 2017, a 17-year-old Atomwaffen follower was arrested on suspicion of murdering the parents of his ex-girlfriend after they ended their daughter’s relationship with the neo-Nazi. A month later, Samuel Woodward was charged with killing a gay Jewish college student in California. Woodward, ProPublica reported in the following days, had participated in weapons training with Atomwaffen members in Texas in the months after the Tampa slayings. Woodward’s fellow Atomwaffen members cheered online when he was arrested, calling him a “one man gay jew wrecking crew.”

In response to questions about DHS’s readiness to combat white supremacist violence, DHS Press Secretary Tyler Houlton issued a statement:

“The Department of Homeland Security is committed to combating all forms of violent extremism, especially movements that espouse racial supremacy or bigotry. DHS takes all threats to the homeland, both foreign and domestic, very seriously and to suggest otherwise is an affront to the men and women of DHS that work tirelessly every day to ensure the safety of the American people. We will continue to work hand-in-hand with our federal, state and local partners to carry out our mission of keeping our country safe.”

Brandon Russell met Devon Arthurs online, on a site called Tinychat that provides video chat services, Arthurs said. Both young men lived in Florida — Brandon in Tampa, Devon in Longwood, a suburb north of Orlando. Wearing headsets, the two would sit at their computers and talk deep into the night.

Eventually, their conversations moved over to Iron March, a now-defunct neo-Nazi forum with the tagline “race war now!” On Iron March, Russell posted photos of himself posing with a Mossberg shotgun while wearing a white T-shirt bearing the words “Natural Born Killers” and an image of a Nazi eagle. Online, he celebrated school shooters like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris (Columbine High School) and Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech); mass murderer Anders Breivik (a self-proclaimed National Socialist who killed 77 people in Norway); and Hitler.

In addition to his fascination with fascism and acts of violence, Russell had one more obsession: nuclear weapons. He posted instructions online for building improvised nuclear reactors — it's not clear how realistic these plans were — and studied nuclear physics as an undergraduate at the University of South Florida.

When Russell launched Atomwaffen in 2015, Arthurs was one of the first recruits to the group. Arthurs began gravitating toward Nazi beliefs at 13 or 14, according to his father, Alan Arthurs, who said he’s still mystified by his son’s interest in Nazism. “I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't know why,” he told Frontline and ProPublica.

Russell’s jail booking photo. He is currently serving a five-year prison term. (Frontline)

In the spring of 2017, Devon Arthurs and Russell moved into the Tampa apartment. Arthurs had dropped out of high school and had no job. But Alan Arthurs believes his son and Russell were making lengthy road trips to sell illegal firearms in states far from Florida.

In time, Russell and Arthurs were joined in the Tampa apartment by Andrew Oneschuk, 18, and Jeremy Himmelman, 22, two Atomwaffen members from Massachusetts.

Oneschuk and Himmelman were the dead men police discovered in the apartment on the night of May 19, 2017.

Alan Arthurs said his son called him after the shooting and confessed to killing the pair. Over the ensuing hours, Arthurs told a shifting series of stories about his motives. He told his father he’d killed them to head off Atomwaffen’s terrorist plans. He said something similar to investigators. But he also offered an even stranger version: that he’d converted to Islam and supported ISIS, and that he’d killed the two men because they mocked his newfound religion. A judge has since ruled Arthurs mentally incompetent to stand trial.

In his interrogation shortly after his arrest, Arthurs said he was aware of his mental health problems and wished he’d been hospitalized long before. He said that people might not think he looked like a terrorist, but that he had been engaged in dark and dangerous conduct.

And then, in quite composed fashion, he sketched out in great detail both the terrorist ambitions of Atomwaffen and the tactics law enforcement might use to infiltrate the group and bring it down. He warned the Tampa detective leading the questioning, Kenneth Nightlinger, against underestimating the group. Repeatedly, he tried to push back against what he seemed to regard as the detective’s skepticism.

Arthurs said Atomwaffen drew inspiration from The Order, a neo-Nazi terrorist group active during the 1980s. Led by Robert Mathews, the organization believed the U.S. had been taken over by a shadow government of powerful Jews. The Order bombed a synagogue and in 1984 assassinated Alan Berg, a prominent Jewish radio host who lived in Denver.

Russell and Atomwaffen “venerate” The Order, Arthurs said in his interview with detectives. “These people, they have no human empathy like we do.”

“These people ... they know exactly how to build, they knew exactly how to build bombs that could've destroyed this entire building,” Arthurs said.

Nightlinger often pressed for more information.

“Do you know about specific plans that these two individuals had?” the detective asked, referring to Oneschuk and Himmelman.

Arthurs said the men were planning on blowing up power lines near a major highway. They were going to use the HMTD to do it.

The detective pressed further.

“Did Brandon ever specifically talk about doing anything similar to that? To any government buildings?”

“Oh, absolutely. All the time,” Arthurs answered.

“Any specific ones?”

“Government offices, federal buildings,” Arthurs said.

The detective at one point tried to assure Arthurs that he and others would act on his information.

“This is absolutely serious stuff,” said Nightlinger, encouraging Arthurs to pass on “any information” that could be used to combat “these misguided individuals.”

Arthurs apologized for seeming flustered.

“I'm not trying to sound like a schizo cause I know that I'm trampling over words and stuff,” he said.

“No, no, you're in control, man,” Nightlinger said. “You're good, keep going.”

And Arthurs did.

Arthurs told the detective that Russell acquired guns and trained him and the other roommates in how to handle them. He said while Russell had joined the Florida Army National Guard, he’d used the American flag as a doormat to the apartment. He warned that if Russell was given the chance, he’d easily be able to reacquire the explosives that had been confiscated from the garage.

And repeatedly Arthurs offered to help law enforcement round up Atomwaffen members and dismantle the organization. He’d open up his computer. And he thought it would be easy to penetrate the computers of the others.

“You think having your computer, an FBI agent as you requested, sit down and go over this stuff, you think then you would open some eyes?” Nightlinger asked.

“Yeah, I definitely do,” Arthurs said. “I think that it would open some eyes to a much bigger thing than what happened today, and I think that I could definitely, basically save a lot of lives overall.”

Police and federal agents discovered HMTD and other explosive materials in Russell and Arthurs’ Tampa garage. (Exhibit from U.S. vs. Brandon Russell)

At one point, the detective seemed persuaded. Nightlinger suggested he would pass the word to the appropriate agents in the FBI.

“I mean they're actually going to be actually be made aware of this and they're going to do their homework,” he said. “Just to make sure you're not talking out your ass about something here in order to maybe gain some favorable treatment.”

The FBI would not answer questions about its handling of the Tampa case, saying that the investigation remains open. Agents have questioned former Atomwaffen members in at least two states, according to individuals with direct knowledge of the inquiry.

In a statement, the FBI said: “The FBI is not permitted to discuss any facet of the Brandon Russell investigation. The decision not to discuss this investigation was made in accordance with Department of Justice Guidelines and FBI Rules and Regulations.”

ProPublica and Frontline reviewed the crime scene photos and police reports from the Tampa apartment with Kerry Myers, a former FBI bomb tech who investigated the Oklahoma City bombing.

“They were making bombs,” Myers said. “This is a bomb maker's workshop.”

Myers added that the materials were enough “to blow up a car, blow up an airplane, blow up a bus. We have the same basic explosive kit here that the Boston Marathon bombers had.”

Alan Arthurs, who had watched his son’s involvement in Nazism develop over the years and seems to have been the first person Devon called after the killings, told ProPublica and Frontline he has never been interviewed by FBI agents. The local Tampa detectives didn’t question Alan Arthurs until June 5, 2017, more than two weeks after the crimes, according to Police Department records.

At the Tampa apartment, investigators recovered one of Russell’s notebooks, which contained a hand-drawn map of a quarry located between Orlando and Tampa. The map included GPS coordinates for the quarry and a description of its operations. Such facilities often use high-powered explosives to blast through rock. McVeigh stole blasting caps from a mining operation before the Oklahoma City attack.

The quarry in Florida, a sand mine, is owned by E.R. Jahna Industries. Reached for comment, company executive Adell Jahna said that he had never heard of Atomwaffen and that the company had never been contacted by local law enforcement or the FBI in connection with the case.

During his interrogation, Devon Arthurs had not only warned of Atomwaffen’s violent ambitions, but said repeatedly that the organization had attracted U.S. military personnel as members and was aiming to recruit more.

Arthurs said Russell, the group's founder, had signed up for the Florida Army National Guard in part to get the kind of combat training he might put to use for Atomwaffen. Russell had been drilling in Pinellas Park with the 53rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team on the day of the murders. In his own interview with Tampa police, Russell said he expected his unit to be deployed in 2018 and was considering the Army as a career.

“He joined specifically for the knowledge and the training, and he wants to use that training against the government,” Arthurs said of Russell during his police interrogation. “These people join the military specially to get training. To get access to equipment.” The ultimate goal, Arthurs continued, was to become more equipped to kill people.

Defense Department directives and the regulations of each military branch bar service members from engaging in white supremacist activity. Service members can face criminal charges and expulsion from the military for violating these policies.

After Russell’s arrest, the Florida Guard mounted an investigation into his activities while in uniform. Three weeks after Russell was jailed, the Guard wrapped up its inquiry. In a report, the Guard listed some of the troubling things it had found:

Russell had a tattoo of the Atomwaffen logo on his right shoulder. The investigator on the case noted that the U.S. military did not maintain a database of tattoos that might have been used to screen for troubling affiliations.

Two of Russell’s superiors had warned him about his conduct after he repeatedly “vocalized his hatred for homosexuality and ‘faggots.’”

Russell had “seemed very anxious to receive body armor, and keep his military issued gear.”

But the investigation concluded that Russell had not sought to recruit other soldiers for Atomwaffen, and that he “did not present consistent characteristics that would have led a reasonable person to suspect Russell held such radical beliefs.” Investigators determined there had been no negligence in allowing Russell into the Guard or in his continued presence in its ranks.

The two-page summary of the investigation, obtained by ProPublica and Frontline, contains no references to Arthurs’ statements to authorities about other possible Atomwaffen members in the military. Nor does it contain any evidence that the Guard had alerted officials in other military branches to the potential presence of Atomwaffen in their ranks.

Russell bought this rifle after he was released from custody by Tampa police and the FBI. (Exhibit from U.S. vs. Brandon Russell)

The Florida Army National Guard did not respond to repeated requests for an interview regarding Russell.

This year, ProPublica and Frontline identified seven Atomwaffen members with military experience, including Russell.

The Pentagon did not respond to detailed requests from ProPublica and Frontline to discuss Atomwaffen and its possible recruitment of current or former military members.

In a statement, a Pentagon spokeswoman, Maj. Carla Gleason of the Air Force, said: “The DoD uses a multi-level approach to learn as much as possible about potential new soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines so we can assess whether they should be extended the privilege to serve in the military. While we can't guarantee that every person who enters the service will be free from holding extremist thoughts, various screening tools provide us the best opportunity to identify those who do not share our values.”

Kathleen Belew, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, has studied the historic links between the white power movement and the U.S. armed forces. White power groups, she said, have long drawn from the ranks of the military. And former soldiers have become leaders of white supremacist groups over the decades.

Aryan Nations chief Richard Butler did a stint in the Army. KKK Grand Dragon Louis Beam served in Vietnam, as did White Patriot Party leader Frazier Glenn Miller. In 2014, after decades of involvement with white extremist groups, Miller murdered three people outside of a pair of Jewish institutions in Overland Park, Kansas. He was eventually sentenced to death and is awaiting execution.

Belew is careful to say that the members of the military who wind up affiliated with white supremacist groups constitute “a tiny, not even statistically significant percentage” of total service members. But those few, she said, have often played “an enormously important role” in organizing such groups and carrying out their bloodiest actions.

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Belew said, white power groups increasingly modeled themselves on the U.S. military and began to focus on recruiting “both veterans and active-duty troops in order to run boot camps” and “create paramilitary training facilities.” As the movement grew more extreme, she said, it sought out people who could build improvised explosives or accurately fire a submachine gun.

Atomwaffen has certainly embraced that tactic. Current and former soldiers have participated in what the group calls “hate camps,” secret weapons training conducted in a number of states around the country over the last two years.

Those who have studied the relationship between military service and white supremacist ideology say soldiers can become deeply disillusioned when fighting controversial wars with little in the way of clear victories. They may return angry and damaged, animated by a degree of nihilism.

One Atomwaffen member who saw combat in Afghanistan discussed his emotional demons in the group’s private online chats. The man wrote that he had “nightmares about seeing people i know blown up” and felt guilt about inadvertently killing women and children.

ProPublica and Frontline interviewed a former Atomwaffen member who had served overseas in the Army. He would only speak if his identity was not revealed and asked us to call him Jeremiah.

“There were a lot of people that were disenchanted with the mission. I'd say about half of the guys in my unit,” Jeremiah said. “I think a lot of guys, they’re lost and they want hope. They’re looking for answers.”

Somehow he found those answers on Iron March, the now-defunct online neo-Nazi hangout that Russell used to launch Atomwaffen. According to Jeremiah, Atomwaffen “definitely wanted to appeal to veterans.” Within the organization, “people looked up to the military guys,” he said.

He said he encountered other racial extremists during his time in the Army: “There’s a good amount of them. They keep quiet for the most part about it, especially when they're in because they can get in a lot of trouble.”

But it’s unclear how seriously the military is taking the matter. The former member said he’s never been contacted by military investigators.

ProPublica and Frontline interviewed more than 20 officials with direct knowledge of the military’s handling of felony-level criminal investigations. Most said racial extremists were a low priority for military police and detectives with elite military law enforcement units like the Army Criminal Investigation Division and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which polices the Navy and Marine Corps. Military investigators are more focused on street gangs operating within the armed forces, sexual assault and illegal drugs, the officials said.

Roughly a year after Russell’s arrest in Tampa, an Army investigator told ProPublica and Frontline that the Army’s CID unit had not opened an investigation into Russell and his neo-Nazi organization. Several military officials said Army CID had no jurisdiction in Russell’s case because he was a member of the Florida Guard and not an active-duty soldier.

Have You Encountered White Supremacists or Neo-Nazis in the Military? Tell Us.

We want to know more about these service members. We want to know what the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines are doing about them.

Ranks of Notorious Hate Group Include Active-Duty Military

A Marine took part in the violent assaults in Charlottesville last summer and later bragged about it online with other members of Atomwaffen, an extremist group preparing for a race war. The involvement of current or former service members — often with sophisticated weapons training — in white supremacist groups has long been a concern.

ProPublica and Frontline published their initial reporting on the nexus between Atomwaffen and the military in May. Since then, the Marine Corps has taken action against Atomwaffen member Vasillios Pistolis, a lance corporal on active duty. Pistolis, who had allegedly participated in assaults during the Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacist rally in 2017, was court-martialed and ousted from the corps. In interviews, Pistolis admitted having been a member of Atomwaffen but denied being in Charlottesville.

In response to that earlier reporting, U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., in May wrote a letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis requesting details on the Pentagon’s efforts to rid the ranks of white supremacists.

Replying to Ellison, the Defense Department said that it had received “27 reports of extremist activity (domestic) by Service members over the past five years.” Military investigators, the letter continued, had investigated 25 of these reports; ultimately, 18 service members from across the military had been disciplined or forced out of the armed forces.

Gleason, the Pentagon spokeswoman, said she couldn’t provide information on individual cases but stated, “Our standards are clear; participation in extremist activities has never been tolerated and is punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” She added that commanders are “encouraged to be preventive and pro-active, and they are doing that.”

We took the Pentagon’s letter to Ellison to retired Maj. Gen. John Altenburg, who served as the Army’s deputy judge advocate general, the second-highest-ranking JAG officer in the Army. Altenburg said he was persuaded that the military is taking proper action against offenders in its ranks.

“I’m pleased to see that they’re doing all this,” Altenburg said of the 18 cases of discipline handed down by the Pentagon. “This looks very thorough to me and looks like they’re on top of it.”

He noted that the Pentagon letter did not distinguish between white supremacists and other types of political extremists.

At the Southern Poverty Law Center, Heidi Beirich was skeptical of the Defense Department’s figures, calling them “laughable.”

“Hate groups are telling their people to join the military, and this was something that's been documented, both in FBI reports and in DHS reports,” said Beirich, who heads the center’s Intelligence Project. “There’s not only going to be 27 of them, in a military force of, I don’t know, one and a half to two million people in the United States, who are under arms.”

Last year, nearly 25 percent of active-duty service members surveyed by the Military Times said they’d encountered white nationalists within the ranks. The publication polled more than 1,000 service members.

Beirich questioned the Pentagon’s willingness to root out white supremacists. “We keep sending stuff to the military, examples of people, saying: ‘You should look at this guy. He looks like he might be in violation,’” she said. “Most of the time we never even hear anything back from them.”

Documenting Hate: New American Nazis

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/11/20/new_american_nazis_inside_the_white

GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Nearly a month after a gunman opened fire at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh killing 11 Jewish worshipers, we spend the rest of the hour looking at the rise of neo-Nazis in America. Tonight, a new documentary airs around the country by Frontline and ProPublica reporter A.C. Thompson. It’s titled Documenting Hate: New American Nazis.

PERSON: [inaudible] we’re under fire. We’re under fire. He’s got an automatic weapon. He’s firing out of the front of the synagogue.

A.C. THOMPSON: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 27th 2018.

PERSON: It’s already [inaudible] Please send the medics up here!

PERSON: I’ve got one alive. We’re evac-ing one right now. [inaudible]

A.C. THOMPSON: Robert Bowers storms into the Tree of Life synagogue with an AR-15 and kills 11 Jewish worshipers.

PERSON: [inaudible] suspect’s talking about, uh, all these Jews need to die.

PITTSBURGH POLICE SPOKESMAN CHRIS TOGNERI: We have multiple casualties inside the synagogue. We have three officers who have been shot.

FBI SPECIAL AGENT BOB JONES: Members of the Tree of Life synagogue conducting a peaceful service in their place of worship were brutally murdered by a gunman targeting them simply because of their faith.

A.C. THOMPSON: Another act of terror in America, the country again left to ask, “Where does this hate come from? Could it have been prevented?”

REPORTER: It has just been 24 hours since Robert Bowers stormed into this synagogue and said, “I just want to kill Jews.”

A.C. THOMPSON: Over the past few years, I’ve been reporting on a resurgent white supremacist movement. I’ve seen its ideas migrate into the mainstream. I’ve seen violence in cities across the country. And now this—what looks to be the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in American history. And I fear there will be more to come.

AMY GOODMAN: Synagogue gunman Robert Bowers had a long history of openly railing against Jews and immigrants on social media sites, circulating racist memes and asserting Jews are the enemy of white people. In his posts, Bowers made specific and repeated threats against Jews, including one just before allegedly attacking the Tree of Life synagogue. He wrote, “HIAS”—he was referring to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society—”HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people”—referring to the caravan and the immigrants on the border.

On the same day that Bowers opened fire in the Pittsburgh synagogue, a neo-Nazi named Edward Clark that Bowers had been communicating with took his own life in Washington, D.C. The man’s brother, Jeffrey Clark, has since been arrested on weapons charges. The brothers were both linked to the violent white supremacist group Atomwaffen. Well, for more, we go to Boston, where we’re joined by A.C. Thompson, correspondent for FRONTLINE PBS, reporter for ProPublica. His investigation Documenting Hate: New American Nazis premieres tonight on PBSstations around the country and online at pbs.org/frontline.

A.C., welcome back to Democracy Now! for this second of your series. You posted that report about what happened on the same day Bowers opened fire in Pittsburgh, in Washington, D.C. Why don’t you begin there?

A.C. THOMPSON: This is a fascinating, fascinating aspect of this story and disturbing. So we all know what happened in Pittsburgh. We have Robert Bowers. We have a man who was spewing anti-Semitic racist invective online. He was using the platform Gab to network with other white supremacists. He is accused of going into the Tree of Life synagogue and killing 11 worshipers, attacking police and so forth.

The story that comes out after that is really bizarre, fascinating and disturbing. And this is the story. We have two brothers in Washington, D.C. They are part of the white nationalist scene, and they start out sort of hanging out with Richard Spencer and that crew and they gravitate more and more and more to the full Nazi fringe. They get involved with Vanguard America, which is one of the groups that marched in Charlottesville, one of the groups tied to the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville.

And then what we know after that, looking through the chat logs of the extreme neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, we know that one of the brothers shows up in those chat logs as somebody who was hanging out with Atomwaffen’s Northern Virginia contingent. His online handle shows up in there, communicating with other northern Virginia people, people from his area.

Police go to the scene of—to the house that the two brothers shared recently, and they find Atomwaffen literature as well. By this time, one of the brothers, Edward Clark, has committed suicide. He committed suicide on the morning of the synagogue massacre, right around the time of the synagogue massacre. And the other brother, Jeffrey Clark, gets arrested for weapons charges, for having high-capacity magazines, ammunition magazines. And they find all this racist literature and Atomwaffen literature.

So now what we’re looking at is this Atomwaffen Division, extreme neo-Nazi group, being tied to this incredible act of violence in Pittsburgh. And we’re really not sure where the story is going to go from here, but it is a really interesting, disturbing development.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A.C., I want to turn back to your investigation, Documenting Hate: New American Nazis. This clip is about the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen.

A.C. THOMPSON: Atomwaffen was founded in 2015 by Brandon Russell, a national guardsman in his early 20s. He moved into this apartment complex with three other members of the group. One of them, an 18-year-old high school dropout named Devon Arthurs, would bring Atomwaffen to the attention of the authorities.

REPORTER: Friday night, Tampa police arrested 18-year-old Devon Arthurs. He confessed to killing his roommates, 22-year-old Jeremy Himmelman and 18-year-old Andrew Oneschuk.

REPORTER: Arthurs told cops a fourth roommate, Brandon Russell, participates in neo-Nazi chat rooms.

HALEY HINDS: The common thread that connected all four roommates was neo-Nazi beliefs.

A.C. THOMPSON: Why had Arthurs apparently shot two of his roommates? His father agreed to talk to me about what happened that day.

ALLEN ARTHURS: I was working in my office and the cell phone went off and it was Devon, and he said, “Dad, I’m sorry. I’ve really messed up. I’ve really messed up.” I said, “What’s the matter, buddy? What’s going on?” “The two guys, the two that were staying or whatever, they’re dead. I shot them. They upset me and I shot them.” I tried to hold it together, and I said, “Put the gun down or any weapon down and go turn yourself in, right now. Right now.” All I was hearing was “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, dad. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I said, “Just turn yourself in.”

A.C. THOMPSON: Allen Arthurs says Devon began gravitating to neo-Nazi ideas when he was 13 or 14 years old.

A.C. THOMPSON: Is this Junior ROTC? What is—?

ALLEN ARTHURS: Yeah, that’s ROTC, in high school.

A.C. THOMPSON: He was really interested in the military.

ALLEN ARTHURS: That’s what he said.

A.C. THOMPSON: What you think he was really interested in?

ALLEN ARTHURS: There were two other brothers and another member of that ROTC that were obviously into the neo-Nazi stuff.

A.C. THOMPSON: So you think he was joining the ROTC group because there were other kids that were into Naziism in the group?

ALLEN ARTHURS: Yes, definitely. And he had gone to [inaudible]—

A.C. THOMPSON: Arthurs says his relationship with his son became increasingly strained.

ALLEN ARTHURS: By that–cause—by that time, we weren’t talking, and I didn’t even—you know.

A.C. THOMPSON: Devon ended up dropping out of high school. He eventually moved into the Tampa apartment with Russell and the other Atomwaffen members.

A.C. THOMPSON: Did you ever talk to Devon since the incident?

ALLEN ARTHURS: He said that he would not—when he figured out what Brandon was going to do, he couldn’t live with himself. That’s all he has ever said to me.

A.C. THOMPSON: Tampa police refused to talk to us about the case, but I obtained video of Devon Arthur’s police interview. Over and over, he tells detectives about Atomwaffen.

DEVON ARTHURS: Atomwaffen Division is a terrorist organization. It’s a neo-Nazi organization that I was a part of. But the things that they were planning were horrible. There are planning bombings and stuff like that on countless people. They were planning to kill civilian life.

UNKNOWN POLICE: Were they specific in their plans?

DEVON ARTHURS: Uh, power lines, nuclear reactors. Uh, synagogues.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Nuclear reactors, synagogues. That was neo-Nazi Devon Arthur in his police interview after allegedly shooting and killing two fellow members of Atomwaffen. A.C. Thompson, take us back to the founding of Atomwaffen and how the group has developed.

A.C. THOMPSON: It is a really interesting story. Atomwaffen develops the way a lot of these groups develop now, out of the online world. It starts with young men conversing on a fascist forum called Iron March. And on that forum, Devon [sic] Russell would post memes about how he loved school shooters, about how he loved Adolf Hitler. He posted a picture of himself carrying a Mossberg shotgun with a t-shirt that said “Natural Born Killers” and a Nazi eagle below it.

And at one point in 2015, he said, “Hey, I’m starting this group. I have been thinking about it for a long time. If you want to get involved, contact me. We’re going to be about the militant stuff. We’re one to be about sort of armed struggle for the fascist cause to take over the government and start a race war and impose our fascist ideas on this country.” And that’s how he got followers. People joined up with the group that way.

And it networked using the internet, using modern communications tools, so that there have been nodes of the group created all over the country that are all sort of linked using encrypted chats, using various tools to keep them in communication. We now think there are somewhere between 50 and 80 members of the group. We know there’s members in Canada. We know people in Australia have gotten involved. And we know that the group is linked to five different murders.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What about their ideological guru that you talk about, James Mason? Who is he and what is his relationship to the group?

A.C. THOMPSON: James Mason was kind of an obscure figure in the neo-Nazi movement. He had been involved with the American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell, he had been involved with other neo-Nazi groups but he was not really a main player. Mason’s deal is he says, “Hey, we’re not going to create Nazism, fascism in America through the ballot box. We’re not going to do it through politics. We’re not going to do it through political protest. We’re going to do it through the gun. And the way that we’re going to do this is terrorism, assassination, acts of hyper-violence and just general chaos. We’re going to collapse the system and then we will take charge.”

And that message, which he promulgated in a newsletter called Siege throughout the '80s, has been adopted by this new generation of white supremacists who say, “Yeah, that's what we want to do. That’s the most extreme thing we can do. Let’s do it.” And they have sort of adopted him as their guru, as their intellectual eminence.

AMY GOODMAN: How important are these people? How many are there? And let’s go back, A.C., to when President Obama first came into office, this report on the threat of white supremacy and domestic terrorists that was squelched by right-wing congressmembers who demanded it not be released. Is this what they were tracking?

A.C. THOMPSON: Yeah. This is exactly what they were tracking. I think we should say also it was retracted eventually by the Obama administration. Yeah, that is when this whole thing starts ticking up–2008, 2009. You see resistance to the first African American president in this country. You see dissatisfaction from veterans coming home from wars that have been very hard on them, and they’re returning to a disastrous economy and having difficulties fitting in, in some cases. And you see anger about potential gun control legislation.

What has happened since then is all of these things have ticked up, they’ve escalated and now we’re in a much more dangerous place than even Daryl Johnson at DHS was predicting at that time. One of the things that he predicted is he said, “Look, I’m concerned that these returning veterans will get involved with these groups. We have seen it in the past. It may happen again.” And that is exactly what has happened.

The vast bulk of service members are decent, wonderful people. My father served in the Army; my grandfather served in the Army. I can tell you this. But there has consistently been this small, hard-core of members who get involved with these white power groups like Atomwaffen and and up doing pretty serious damage to the country.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: On this issue, though, given the fact this group is so small, you’re mentioning that many of them come out of military experience. The reality is that our country has been in virtually perpetual war—

A.C. THOMPSON: Right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —so there has been a constant churn of soldiers going out to fight the enemy, learning how to kill and coming back to the country. I’m wondering what your sense is, this situation of perpetual war, how it has affected not just the veterans who might get involved in these extremist groups, but also who might be susceptible once they are back in civilian life to this picture painted by a Trump or another political conservative of the need to fight the enemy?

A.C. THOMPSON: You put it exactly right. And that’s actually what we hear from the veterans who have gotten involved with the white power movement. They say, “Perpetual war.” They say, “We have been sent of these wars that have been disastrous, that have ruined our friends, that we’ve seen horrible, horrible things happen. And now we feel broken and we feel damaged, and we’re looking around for answers.”

And where they’re finding answers—honestly, some of them are finding answers in progressive politics, in really decent causes, and some of them are finding answers in neo-Nazism. I was just reading chat messages sent by one member of Atomwaffen who served in Afghanistan. He said, “The small moral part of me that still exists has nightmares about the people I know being blown up, about seeing them blown up in combat.”

And he says,”And I feel guilt because I was a squad automatic gunner with a belt-fed machine gun, and I remember killing women and children inadvertently, accidentally, and I feel great guilt about it.” And the thing that happens then is this guilt and anger is being channeled into this obviously incredibly noxious neo-Nazi ideology. But you’ve nailed it, exactly. This perpetual war is having damaging effects back here.

AMY GOODMAN: A.C. Thompson, we have to break for 30 seconds, then we’re going to come back. Correspondent for FRONTLINE PBS, reporter for ProPublica. His investigation Documenting Hate: New American Nazis premieres tonight on PBSstations and online at pbs.org/frontline. When we come back, we continue with A.C. Thompson to look at the connections between the U.S. military and white supremacy. Stay with us.

Chat Site for Gamers Got Overrun by the Alt-Right. Now It’s Fighting Back.

Discord’s invite-only chat rooms are where the deadly Charlottesville march was planned.

Since then leakers and the SPLC have been rooting out neo-Nazis, one at a time.

Kelly Weill

04.16.18 4:54 AM ET

The Daily Beast

Discord wanted to create a chat platform for gamers. Instead it’s attracted a community of white supremacists.

Discord is a free voice and text app with invite-only chat rooms, but those private servers quickly found a new fanbase with hate groups, who wanted to discuss plans in secret. After white supremacist groups were revealed to have used Discord to plan the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year, Discord started banning those groups en masse. But purging hate from the private chat rooms is no easy task.

In early April, the media collective Unicorn Riot leaked more than a year of Discord logs leaked from the now-defunct neo-Nazi group The Traditionalist Worker Party. The leaked logs showed the TWP’s dramatic implosion after an affair and alleged assault among the party’s leaders in March. The chat logs also show a splinter group of former TWP members starting their own Discord chat room to discuss launching a new white supremacist group.

The chat logs were the latest in a series of leaked messages from neo-Nazi Discord chat rooms, called “servers.” But those servers shouldn’t have been online at all. After the Unite the Right rally, Discord shut down chat rooms associated with the rally and announced “action against white supremacy, Nazi ideology, and all forms of hate.”

The public declaration put Discord ahead of larger social media platforms like Twitter, where white supremacist Richard Spencer was verified as recently as November. (He remains on Twitter, albeit without his verified status.)

Discord told The Daily Beast it has also begun working with the Southern Poverty Law Center to combat hate groups on the platform, although it did not specify the details of the arrangement.

“Although some far-right extremists continue to return to the platform, Discord’s decision to ban the most well-known communities has deprived them of a place to openly organize, plan, and promote their poisonous ideologies,” Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, said in a statement. “Discord’s pledge to continue to combat extremist organizing on their platform is critical. This fight is not going to end tomorrow. Other tech companies who struggle with these same issues should know it’s always the right policy decision to reject organized hatred.”

But unlike Facebook and Twitter, Discord’s semi-private nature lets more hate speech go undetected. Discord told The Daily Beast it does not read users’ messages, and relies on users to report behavior that violates the app’s terms of service.

“This fight is not going to end tomorrow. Other tech companies who struggle with these same issues should know it’s always the right policy decision to reject organized hatred.”

— Heidi Beirich, SPLC

“Discord has a Terms of Service (ToS) and Community Guidelines that we ask all of our communities and users to adhere to,” a spokesperson said. “These specifically prohibit harassment, threatening messages, calls to violence or any illegal activity. Though we do not read people’s private messages, we do investigate and take immediate action against any reported ToS violation by a server or user. We will continue to be aggressive to ensure that Discord exists for the community we set out to support—gamers.”

The reliance on users to report abuse appears to have led some neo-Nazis to think of the platform as a safe space.

“I think the alt-right has relied on Discord as a means of communication across distances, with the expectation that what’s happening, or what they can talk about is secure,” Ryan Lenz, a senior investigative reporter with the Southern Poverty Law Center, told The Daily Beast.

Even after alt-right Discord logs leaked last August, revealing how neo-Nazis planned the Unite the Right rally, some groups still believed their messages were safe on the chat app.

“Don’t let reporters know what platform we communicate on,” Zaine Deal, a former TWP member wrote on Discord on Christmas Day, 2017.

Other extremist groups also lingered on the platform. In February, ProPublica reported on a Discord server for the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group that has been implicated in four murders in recent months.The ProPublica report revealed Atomwaffen members celebrating the most recent murder, that of Jewish teenager Blaze Bernstein.

Shortly after the report, Discord banned Atomwaffen and other white supremacist groups, including the Nordic Resistance Movement, Iron March, and European Domas.

But keeping the groups off Discord is another matter. The Daily Beast observed one 4chan-affiliated Discord group shuffle across at least three Discord servers, always posting a link to a backup chat room in case their primary room was banned.

“I think time and time again, especially in the aftermath of Charlottesville, we’ve seen that Discord is not as secure as the alt-right thought it would be,” Lenz said, “and that many of their unsavory ideas or true intentions have been laid bare by leaks and otherwise communications on the platform.”

Kelly Weill

kelly.weill@thedailybeast.com

USMC

https://www.propublica.org/article/atomwaffen-division-hate-group-active-duty-military

no lnx

18-year-old, excited by his handiwork at the bloody rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer, quickly went online to boast. He used the handle VasillistheGreek.

“Today cracked 3 skulls open with virtually no damage to myself,” the young man wrote on Aug. 12, 2017.

Vasillios Pistolis had come to the now infamous Unite the Right rally eager for such violence. He belonged to a white supremacist group known as Atomwaffen Division, a secretive neo-Nazi organization whose members say they are preparing for a coming race war in the U.S. In online chats leading up to the rally, Pistolis had been encouraged to be vicious with any counterprotestors, maybe even sodomize someone with a knife. He’d responded by saying he was prepared to kill someone “if shit goes down.”

About This Partnership

This story is part of an ongoing collaboration between ProPublica and Frontline that includes documentaries scheduled to begin on PBS in August 2018.

One of Pistolis’ victims that weekend was Emily Gorcenski, a data scientist and trans woman from Charlottesville who had shown up to confront the rally’s hundreds of white supremacists. In an online post, Pistolis delighted in how he had “drop kicked” that “tranny” during a violent nighttime march on the campus of the University of Virginia. He also wrote about a blood-soaked flag he’d kept as a memento.

“Not my blood,” he took care to note.

At the end of the weekend that shocked much of the country, Pistolis returned to his everyday life: serving in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Of the many white supremacist organizations that have sprung up in the past few years, Atomwaffen is among the more extreme, espousing the overthrow of the U.S. government through acts of political violence and guerrilla warfare.

Journalists with ProPublica and Frontline gained insight into Atomwaffen’s ideology, aims and membership after obtaining seven months of messages from a confidential chat room used by the group’s members. The chat logs, as well as interviews with a former member, reveal Atomwaffen has attracted a mixture of young men — fans of fringe heavy metal music, a private investigator, firearms aficionados — living in more than 20 states.

But a number are current or former members of the U.S. military. ProPublica and Frontline have identified three Atomwaffen members or associates who are currently employed by the Army or Navy. Another three served in the armed forces in the past. Pistolis, who remains an active-duty Marine, left Atomwaffen in a dispute late in 2017 and joined up with another white supremacist group. Reporters made the identifications through dozens of interviews, a range of social media and other online posts, and a review of the 250,000 confidential messages obtained earlier this year.

Pistolis in his Marine Corps dress uniform. He posted this selfie to his Facebook page.

Joshua Beckett, who trained Atomwaffen members in firearms and hand-to-hand combat last fall, served in the Army from 2011 to 2015, according to service records. Online, Beckett, 26, has said that he worked as a combat engineer while in the army. Combat engineers are the army’s demolitions experts.

In Atomwaffen chats, Beckett, using the handle Johann Donarsson, said he was building assault rifles and would happily construct weapons for his fellow members. “Give me the parts and the receiver and I’ll get it all together for you,” Beckett wrote in August 2017.

Beckett also wrote about suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of combat in Afghanistan, and how his time in uniform caused him to radically revise his political beliefs, prompting him to abandon mainstream conservatism in favor of National Socialism.

In online discussions, Beckett encouraged Atomwaffen members to enlist in the military, so as to become proficient in the use of weaponry, and then turn their expertise against the U.S. government, which he believed to be controlled by a secret cabal of Jews.

“The army itself woke me up to race and the war woke me up to the Jews,” Beckett wrote, adding, “The US military gives great training…you learn how to fight, and survive.”

Another Atomwaffen member used the chats to talk about the combat he saw during the U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan.

“I was in the infantry in the army in Afghanistan and did a lot of…shit,” the member wrote. He said the Army wanted him to become a chemical weapons specialist, but he chose to join the infantry. He spent his time, he wrote, blasting “lead into sand niggers.”

ProPublica and Frontline specifically identified Pistolis and Beckett through interviews with a former Atomwaffen member who knew them, the group's internal records, and the men's digital footprints. In his online activities, Pistolis left many clues to his identity, including pictures of himself he uploaded to private white supremacist chat rooms and photos of himself on his public Facebook page. Beckett’s internet handles and Facebook content also helped us to confirm him as the man who had spent five years in the Army before joining Atomwaffen.

Reporters contacted Beckett via phone and Facebook messages, but did not get a response. Beckett’s Facebook page features an image of Donald Trump driving a white convertible emblazoned with the number 1488, a white supremacist code, and a call for whites to jump in the car.

In a series of phone and email exchanges, Pistolis claimed he did not attend the Charlottesville rally and did not assault Gorcenski or anyone else. His online messages about Gorcenski, he said, were nothing more than jokes. He admitted to harboring “alt right” or white supremacist beliefs, though he claimed he had “infiltrated” Atomwaffen on behalf of another extremist group and was never actually a member.

Pistolis, who indicated to reporters that he is stationed in North Carolina, pulled down his personal Twitter account shortly after being contacted by ProPublica and Frontline. He also took down his account on Gab, a discussion channel favored by white supremacists, many of whom have been banned from Twitter and other social media platforms. His postings indicate that after leaving Atomwaffen last November — other members accused him of risking unwanted attention for the group by showing up with Atomwaffen flag at a rally in Tennessee — he became an active participant in online forums involving the Traditionalist Workers Party, another neo-Nazi group.

Since May 2017, three people involved with Atomwaffen have been charged with five murders. Devon Arthurs, an early Atomwaffen recruit, is facing trial for allegedly murdering two other members of the group in Florida. A teenager in Virginia stands accused of killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents, who had tried to keep their daughter away from him; the 17-year-old, who was in the process of joining Atomwaffen, is being tried as a juvenile. Atomwaffen member Samuel Woodward, 20, has pleaded not guilty in the slaying of Blaze Bernstein, a gay, Jewish college student whose body was discovered in a Southern California park early this year. Authorities believe Woodward stabbed Bernstein more than 20 times.

Despite the mounting body count, it is unclear just how aggressive law enforcement — at the federal or local level — has been in investigating the group. None of the men charged in the homicides had a military background.

The FBI had no comment when asked about Atomwaffen.

One Atomwaffen member caught up in a high-profile criminal case has a quite direct link to the armed forces.

Atomwaffen’s founder, Brandon Russell, 22, was arrested last year after investigators discovered a cache of weapons, detonators and volatile chemical compounds in his home, including a cooler full of HMTD, a powerful explosive often used by bomb-makers, and ammonium nitrate, the substance used by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City attack. Russell was also in possession of two radioactive isotopes, americium and thorium. In September 2017, he pleaded guilty to a single charge of unlawful possession of explosives and was later sentenced to five years in federal prison.

At the time of his arrest, Russell, 22, had been serving in the 53rd Brigade Special Troops Battalion of Florida’s Army National Guard. A spokesman for the Marine Corps, Major Brian Block, said the corps would be looking into Pistolis and would likely open a formal probe into his activities last summer.

“There is no place for racial hatred or extremism in the Marine Corps,” Block said in a written statement. “Bigotry and racial extremism run contrary to our core values.”

He added, “The guidance to Marines is clear: Participation in supremacist or extremist organizations or activities is a violation of Department of Defense and Marine Corps orders” and can lead to expulsion from the service.

Contacted by ProPublica and Frontline, Carla Gleason, a Department of Defense spokesperson and Air Force major, said the military relies on its commanders to identify problematic activities and respond judiciously.

“What we’re doing is empowering commanders at every level to counsel service members on their conduct, and take disciplinary action where appropriate,” she said.

“We do recognize the right to free speech and thought,” said Gleason. But, she added, the Department of Defense insists that service members observe the military’s policies prohibiting discrimination and extremist behavior.

ProPublica and Frontline documented Pistolis’ role in Charlottesville through an analysis of photos and video footage from the rally and his own online admissions, including a statement Pistolis posted to an Atomwaffen chat room saying he “kicked Emily gorcenski” during the march at the University of Virginia.

ProPublica and Frontline contacted the University of Virginia Police Department to check the accuracy of the material involving Pistolis at the Unite the Right Rally, and to see if there was an investigation underway. Sgt. Casey Acord reviewed the material and later said his agency would investigate Pistolis’ apparent role in the melee that occurred during the torch-lit march on school property.

Reporters also showed pictures, video and chat posts to Gorcenski, the activist attacked in Charlottsville. While she didn’t suffer any significant physical injuries that night, the experience, Gorcenski said, was profoundly traumatizing — and she has faced frequent harassment from fascists and white supremacists since the rally. She said she plans to move out of the country.

Gorcenski quickly identified Pistolis as the man who kicked her.

“He’s telling the truth in these logs about what happened,” she said.

Like many white supremacist groups, Atomwaffen initially coalesced in cyberspace — the founders and early members met each other through a fascist discussion forum called Iron March, which is now defunct. But in the past few years, the organization — it is estimated to have 80 to 100 members — has moved into the real world.

Atomwaffen has conducted weapons and other training exercises in at least four states, according to the chat logs and interviews. Current and former members of the military have found that their skills are highly valued by Atomwaffen and have assumed leadership roles within the group. Drawing on their battlefield experience, Marines and soldiers have helped to shape the group into a loose collection of armed cells, according to the chat logs and people with direct knowledge of the organization.

There has long been a worrisome if not fully understood nexus between the military and the white supremacist movement. Over the past half-century, many of the movement’s key leaders have come from the ranks of the military, including George Lincoln Rockwell, commander of the American Nazi Party, Ku Klux Klan leader Louis Beam, and Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler.

Pete Simi, co-author of the book “American Swastika” and an associate professor at Chapman University in California, said white supremacists often draw inspiration from the armed forces.

“Extremist culture tends to be paramilitary — the Klan, for instance, is a clearly paramilitary organization, it was started by former military officers,” said Simi. “A lot of traditional neo-Nazi groups tend to emulate military structure … Some skinhead groups do that as well.”

Inside Atomwaffen As It Celebrates a Member for Allegedly Killing a Gay Jewish College Student

ProPublica obtained the chat logs of Atomwaffen, a notorious white supremacist group. When Samuel Woodward was charged with killing 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein last month in California, other Atomwaffen members cheered the death, concerned only that the group’s cover might have been blown.

Organizations like Atomwaffen, he said, “need military people who have explosives experience, firearms experience, combat fighting experience” that they can pass on to other members. But there’s also another factor, in Simi’s view. “I think there’s also a credibility aspect to it, in that it gives more credibility to the group to have people who served in the U.S. military. It brings a certain gravitas.”

The results are jarring in a number of ways, not least because each branch of the armed forces has regulations that bar service members from joining white supremacist organizations. Army policy, for example, forbids soldiers from participating in “extremist groups” that foster “racial, gender, or ethnic hatred or intolerance.” The Marine Corps has a similar regulation, Order 1900.16, which mandates swift penalties for Marines caught engaging in “extremist or supremacist activities.”

Air Force directives note that airmen who participate in racist organizations can face court martial for disobedience.

For Simi, a key question is whether the Department of Defense and various military branches are effectively enforcing these policies by screening volunteers as they enter the service and thoroughly investigating reports of extremist activity by service members. If the figures in the Military Times survey “are anywhere close to credible, then there’s clearly a problem that isn’t being addressed,” Simi said.

A former Marine who currently works for a government intelligence agency told ProPublica and Frontline that the military’s seriousness about combating white supremacists in its ranks can vary.

“At the command level — and publicly — the military takes any extremism seriously,” the ex-Marine said. “There is a zero-tolerance policy regarding Nazis. We defeated them in World War II, and they have no business currently serving in the U.S. military.”

“At the unit level, I believe there’s a willful ignorance,” the former Marine added. “‘If neo-Nazis aren’t allowed to enlist in the military, and if nobody I know is a neo-Nazi, there must not be any within my unit’ seems to be the standard. It’s difficult to take seriously that which you don’t believe exists.”

Pistolis appears to have gotten involved in the neo-Nazi movement long before he joined the armed forces. In online conversations with members of Atomwaffen, Pistolis said that he’d started hanging around with the National Socialist Movement “and other skinheads” when he was 16. He listed some of his favorite books: “Mein Kampf” was one; the autobiography of American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell was another. A third was “The Turner Diaries,” the notorious 1978 novel about race war in America that inspired McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

Pistolis said in the chats he was also a fan of “Siege,” a 563-page tome preaching the virtues of assassination, political terrorism and guerrilla warfare against the U.S. government that has become something of a bible for Atomwaffen members.

After joining Atomwaffen, Pistolis took on a leadership role in the summer of 2017, running the North Carolina cell and vetting new recruits to the group, according to the chat messages as well as a former member.

Before the Unite the Right rally, Pistolis, who is slim with dark close-cropped hair and a distinctive widow’s peak, sketched out designs for two flags he wanted to bring to the event. One was yellow and black and featured a coiled snake poised to strike and the logo of the Golden Dawn, a Greek fascist party linked to murders and violence in that country. On the other flag, he blended the stars-and-bars of the Confederate battle flag with the Sonnenrad, a circular emblem used by the Nazis and adopted by the new generation of white supremacists.

In online chats with other neo-Nazis, Pistolis shared this photo. He had the flag – a mash-up of the Confederate battle flag and the Nazi Sonnenrad symbol – made specifically for the Charlottesville rally. (Courtesy of Unicorn Riot)

Pistolis paid a company to manufacture the flags and shared a picture of them online in a private chat room for people attending the rally; the chat logs were obtained by Unicorn Riot, a leftist media collective.

Over a span of roughly two months, Pistolis posted at least 82 messages in the chat room, which was hosted by Discord, an online messaging service aimed at video gamers.

His views were quite clear: Charlottesville Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy, who is African American, was a “monkey” in a fancy suit. He shared photos of Bellamy and Charlottesville Mayor Michael Signer, who is Jewish, captioned with the words, “Niggers, Jews…Bad News.”

In Charlottesville, Pistolis, wearing a black-and-white Adidas track suit, was among the hundreds of torch-bearing young men who marched onto the campus of the University of Virginia after sunset on Aug. 11 chanting “blood and soil,” a slogan of the Third Reich, and performing straight-arm Nazi salutes. Photos and video from that night show Pistolis participating in the event.

The march ended at a monument to Thomas Jefferson, where the white supremacists were met by a small group of anti-fascist counterprotesters, many of them students, who had gathered at the foot of the statue. There was pushing and punching. Pistolis ran through the crowd and launched a flying kick at Gorcenski.

“He traveled here from out of state with the intent to do violence,” said Gorcenski. “His own statements match up perfectly to what’s happened.

“The military is supposed to protect American civilians and here we see that our soldiers are attacking American civilians — and celebrating it.”

The melee that night immediately intensified, as white supremacists bludgeoned the counterprotesters with lit torches and streams of pepper spray shot in all directions. Dozens of men attacked the anti-fascists.

Pistolis was front and center, according to his post. He told his fellow Atomwaffen members how to spot him in videos of the altercation that were popping up on YouTube. “If you see a guy in a tracksuit that’s me,” Pistolis wrote.

Another Atomwaffen member reminded Pistolis that he could face a court martial if he was arrested for brawling.

“So don’t get caught doing stupid shit,” wrote the Atomwaffen member, an Army soldier.

The day after the torch march, Pistolis was fighting again, this time in the streets surrounding Charlottesville’s Emancipation Park. He was carrying one of the flags he’d had specially made for the rally and wearing a black baseball cap, combat boots, and a T-shirt with the stylized skull logo of the Punisher, the comic book vigilante.

At least two photos taken by a Getty Images photographer capture him smashing a counterprotester with the wooden flagpole.

Later, Pistolis shared a photo of the aftermath with his friends in Atomwaffen. The blue and red flag was splattered with blood. He said he’d “cracked a skull” and left “3 mother fuckers bleeding.”

Another member asked if he could share the “bloody flag” picture on Atomwaffen’s Twitter account.

About a month after the rally, Pistolis got into an online conversation with an Atomwaffen member from Virginia. Unite the Right was “so much fun,” the Virginia man wrote.

Pistolis promptly uploaded two photos of himself from that weekend.

“I can confir[m],” he wrote.