December 26, 2024 • 60 mins
A teenager who murdered two people outside of a gay bar in Slovakia, a teenager who stabbed five men at a mosque in Turkey, and a teenager who planned to destroy infrastructure in New Jersey had one thing in common: they'd all been reading terrorism manuals produced by a group of neonazi propagandists. A new indictment alleges two Americans are responsible for inciting acts of white supremacist terror all over the world.
Original Air Date: 9.19.24
Sources:
https://www.wired.com/story/terrorgram-collective-indictments/
https://www.antihate.ca/uk_first_add_terrorgram_collective_proscribed_groups
https://vsquare.org/bratislava-terrorist-radicalized-on-terrorgram-its-members-take-credit/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/canada-terrorism-far-right.html
https://www.antihate.ca/terrorgram_neo_nazi_collective_heart_international_arrests
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/terrorgram-collective-now-proscribed-as-terrorist-organisation
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hey, Molly Hunger here, it's a holiday again. So even
though it's only been a few weeks since the last
time I said it was a little awkward to be
scrounging around for a rerun in a back catalog of
episodes that's only a few months deep. There I am again.
What can you do? It's not my fault. We pack
all our big holidays in so close together at the
(00:29):
end of the year, so there's no new Weird Little
Guy this week. This is an episode you may have
already listened to in the relatively recent past. The episode
I chose for this holiday rerun isn't exactly festive. It
has nothing to do with Christmas at all, and to
be honest, it's probably not great holiday listening. It's really depressing.
(00:53):
But I picked it for a reason. Earlier this month,
there was a school shooting in Wisconsin. There are a
lot of school shootings in America, more than two hundred
of them in twenty twenty four alone, according to data
from the gun violence prevention group every Town for Gun Safety.
And as I'm writing this, just a few days after
it happened and a week before you'll hear it, there's
(01:16):
a lot we still don't know about the shooting at
the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. A teacher
and a fourteen year old student were killed. Five more
students and one teacher were injured. The shooter, a fifteen
year old girl, took her own life a few minutes later.
(01:36):
Maybe this will have changed by next week, but today
we don't know for certain if the manifesto being circulated
online is authentic. Normally I wouldn't comment at all on
a document of unknown origin, but a number of listeners
have reached out to ask about a particular line, and
regardless of whether this turns out to have been authored
by the shooter herself, I was startled to see a
(01:59):
familiar name, Arda kosukietin the document refers to him as
the Ultimate Saint. It's chillingly specific language about a relatively
obscure figure one I talk a little bit about in
the episode You're about to hear. In August of twenty
twenty four, he stabbed several people outside of a mosque
(02:21):
in Turkey. In his manifesto, he states quite clearly that
he was motivated to carry out this attack by a
group called the Terogram collective the subject of this episode,
his name is almost entirely unknown outside of that very
small circle of online mass murder enthusiasts. I revisited a
(02:43):
thread today about the attack that was posted on Turkish
social media back when had happened just weeks after the incident.
One poster lamented that in less than a month it
was forgotten, but this week after the shooting in Wisconsin,
that threat is active again, with Turkish posters writing even
(03:04):
in Turkey he was forgotten and unknown overnight and asking
how a child in Wisconsin would even come to know
his name, let alone idolize him. Another user wrote, I
learned that a teenage school shooter in America took as
an example someone we make fun of in Turkey whose
name we don't even know, who attacks elderly people in
(03:26):
a mosque. This person we call a loser in Turkey
has become someone a teenager in America admires. The authenticity
of this alleged manifesto is still uncertain, but if it
is truly the work of a suicidal teenage girl who
took two lives before ending her own, describing arda Kosukiya
(03:46):
team as a saint, sets off alarm bells. Two of
the people behind the Terogram Collective may be behind bars now,
but their propaganda can still kill. So with that in mind,
here's an episode I recorded back in September. I'll be
back next year with more weird little guys. It was
(04:13):
a little after seven pm on a warm Wednesday evening
in October of twenty twenty two. Urai Van Koulik and
Matushorvath were sitting outside of Teplaren, a gay bar and
brought us lavas city center. Matusche was studying Chinese at
a nearby university. You or I was a drag performer
whose day job was designing the displays at a clothing store.
(04:35):
They were enjoying the evening outside of one of the
city's few dedicated queer spaces, and then they were dead.
They were shot by a teenager who left behind a
sixty five page neo Nazi manifesto before shooting himself in
a nearby park. August twelfth, twenty twenty four, was a
sunny afternoon in the Turkish city of his Kishiher. A
(04:57):
teenager wearing a skull mask and a bulletproof vest walked
into the tea garden outside of a mosque and stabbed
five men before being tackled to the ground. He too
left a manifesto glorifying mass murder. In July of twenty
twenty four, a teenager in New Jersey who'd been planning
to destroy power substations in New Brunswick was arrested at
the Newer airport before he'd fly to Ukraine to join
(05:18):
the Russian Volunteer Corps, where he hoped to learn the
skills he'd need to carry out acts of terror here
at home. These three teenagers never met, but they had
something in common. A murderer in Slovakia, an attempted murderer
in Turkey. They were alone when they walked the familiar
streets of their town, stalking their victims. They were alone
(05:39):
when they shock, They were alone when they stabbed. They
hunted human prey as lone wolves. But there are no
lone wolves, not really. The wolf Pack is online now,
baying for more blood.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Between nineteen sixty eight twenty one, one hundred and five
white men and women of Action have taken it upon
themselves to wage war against the system and our racial enemies.
Our saints are the best of our brothers, and this
is our legacy of white terror.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
All three of these young men were incited to take
action by propaganda produced by the Terragram Collective, a one
synonymous group of militant neo Nazi accelerationists on the messaging
app Telegram. All three of them were radicalized by a
thirty four year old dildo saleswoman from California, narrating the
manifestos of their idols, the mass shooters who came before them.
(06:39):
I'm Molly Conger and this is weird, little guys. Yurai
(07:00):
Krachik died by suicide sometime overnight after he murdered two
people outside of a gay bar and brought us lava
on October twelfth, twenty twenty two. His body was found
in a nearby public park early the next morning, but
he didn't shoot himself right away. After fleeing the scene,
he got online. That was where he was most at home,
(07:21):
after all, that was where he became the man he
was in the moment he fired those shots. A few
hours before the attack, he tweeted out links to his manifesto.
After fleeing the scene of the shooting, he went home.
He told his parents what he had done. They argued,
but no one called the police. He left a handwritten
(07:43):
suicide note, retrieved a second gun from his father's safe,
and left the house again. His parents were the last
ones to see him alive. The city was crawling with
police that night. They were on high alert for the shooter,
worried he would act again, but even now that he
was armed with a fresh weapon, he didn't seek out
(08:04):
more targets. Krazik walked to a local park and checked
four chan on his phone. People were talking about him
about his attack. He wanted to see what they were saying.
Four Chan users quickly connected the shooting to his Twitter account.
As he'd walked home after the attack, he tweeted hashtag
(08:25):
brought a Slava feeling no regrets? Isn't that funny? On
four Chan, they were already discussing the manifesto he'd tweeted out.
One poster asked why would a Slovakian write his manifesto
in English? And this was the first post the shooter
replied to He wrote, because I felt like it. If
(08:48):
you're familiar with four chan, first of all, i'm sorry,
but if you've spent any time on there, you know
it's not a friendly place, and not just unfriendly to outside.
Even people who share similar ideologies are at each other's throats,
hurling insults, and engaging in an eternal competition to be
the nastiest person with an Internet connection. Posters mocked the
(09:12):
shooter for killing only two people and asked why he'd
chosen such low value targets. Even as they celebrated the
deaths of his victims. They bullied the shooter for not
doing more, for not doing it better, for not doing
it differently. They were Monday Morning quarterbacking murder Life is
just a first person shooter game for the keyboard Warrior
(09:33):
mass shooting enthusiast. To these comments, Krazil replied that he'd
wanted to shoot the Slovakian Prime Minister at Ward Hager,
writing wish I could have gone higher, but whatever wanted
to bag the Prime Minister, but I didn't get lucky
with his car arriving later. News reports do in fact
(09:53):
confirm that he was seen that evening on security camera
footage outside the Prime Minister's home an hour before the shooting.
The same news report maps out his walk home after
the shooting, a route that took him through a largely
Jewish neighborhood. Rejik lamented on four Chan that night that
he had wanted to shoot the Kabbad house too, but
he'd run out of ammunition, writing wish I could pull
(10:16):
off more got nearly no amm o bro. Posters on
four Chan were skeptical that the man replying to them
was truly the shooter himself, and demanded that he post
some kind of proof. A little after eleven thirty p m.
Four hours after fleeing the scene of the shooting, he did.
It's dark wherever he was. You can't see anything in
(10:39):
the background. The flash illuminates only the subject of the selfie.
He's completely expressionless. There's no smile, no bravado, no fear
even there's just nothing. He's looking straight at the camera,
holding his phone with one hand and making a finger
gun that points directly at the viewer with the other.
(11:01):
Have a last selfie, he says. Most of his posts
on the four Chan thread that night are in English,
it is the lingua franca of the site, after all,
but one user responds to this selfie in Slovak translated.
The comment reads, what happened boy? Why don't you smile anymore?
Reality set in? Did you fall for the meme stupid right.
(11:26):
The shooter replied to that comment in Slovak, saying, speak
for yourself. In attaching a second selfie, he's smiling this time,
kind of. It's hard to say you feel any sorrow
for a man who just murdered two people in cold
blood and then logged onto four chan to take credit
for it. And I don't, not really, not for this murderer,
(11:52):
But he was just a boy once, a boy whose
fake smile shows the still slightly rounded cheeks of a
kid who won't live to see the last adolescent chaining
to his face his forced smile, a smile that doesn't
reach the eyes in that selfie taken in the dark,
somewhere in the trees on the edge of town, will
probably stay with me for a while. He engages with
(12:14):
the four chan thread for nearly an hour, answering questions
and repeatedly acquiescing to demands for proof that it's really him.
He posts a picture of a handwritten note with the
time and date, posts another selfie, this time with his
shoe on top of his head. This is a common
form of proof demanded on four Chan to determine if
you are really interacting with someone who is who they
(12:36):
say they are, and in real time. I guess the
idea is that most people have a shoe nearby, but
most people don't have old photos of themselves online with
a shoe on their head. So if you can produce
such a photo on request, you probably are the person
in the photo and not just someone using photos of
a stranger that you found online. Another user asked him
(13:00):
to spell out the N word and leaves on the
ground and post a picture of that. He says it
would take too long to spell out the whole word
and posts a blurry photo of leaves arranged in the
shape of the letter N. Another user asks him what's
going through your mind right now, and he says, sad
for my family, happy with my own life. Nothing for
(13:22):
the two f slurs soon a bit of lead. Another
user asks if he plans to spend decades in prison
or if he'll kill himself. He replies with two words
and hero, which is memespeak for dying by suicide. His
(13:42):
last four Chan post was shortly before midnight. Four Chen
users are perpetually caught in between their desire for and
celebration of acts like this and their frustration that this
kind of thing makes them all look bad, you know,
it makes them look like exactly what they are, the
kind of people goading a teenage murderer into killing himself.
(14:05):
One poster writes, you have made everyone on this board
look like a terrorist? Is that what you wanted? Also
repent hell is real? His reply his final post reads
only not my problem. On Twitter, his final post was
a little after midnight in Slovak, he wrote, see you
(14:28):
on the other side. A Slovak language news report says
that two days before the attack, he had called a
mental health crisis hotline. He said, I have to die,
but I am very afraid, and then he hung up.
But in his final hours he didn't call back. He
didn't call that hotline. He didn't turn himself in or
(14:52):
seek help. He sought reassurance and support from the place
least likely to provide it. He logged onto four Chan,
hoping to see his acts hailed as heroic, but they
just laughed at him. He was dead before terogram canonized him,
placing him in the pantheon of terror. He worshiped. Authorities
(15:13):
in Slovakia weren't able to ping his cell phone location
until five am. The cell phone provider didn't have any
employees working overnight. His body was found in the park
around seven am. It's not clear exactly when he died,
but if I had to put money on it, I'd
guess he died in real life shortly after he logged off.
(15:34):
He posted right up through the end, and that's all
we really knew. In October of twenty twenty two, the
manifesto was online for all to see. In the manifesto,
he includes the Terogram Collective in his list of special
thanks at the end, writing you know who you are.
Thank you for your incredible writing and art, for your
(15:56):
political texts, for your practical guides building the future of
the White Revolution one publication at a time. In the
section of the manifesto under the header recommended reading, he
lists many of the usual suspects. He was inspired by
the christ Church Mosque shooting and recommends that shooter's manifesto.
He praises the terrorist's bible, William Luther Pierce's novel The
(16:19):
Turner Diaries, and even recommends the prequel, an even sloppier
novel called Hunter, But he also recommends two other lesser
known publications. Two of the four publications authored by the
Terrogram Collective. He lists these two Militant Accelerationism and the
Hard Reset, last, writing, if the other books give a
(16:41):
theoretical and fictional base for our resistance, these two provide
the practical means for it. They also go into a
deeper dive into some issues, concepts, and things. Anyone who
seeks to fight Zog should know. These two may be
harder to find than the other books I listed, but
you can find them if you look in the right places.
(17:02):
The link between the Broadus Lava Shooting and the Teogram
Collective was never a secret. It was right there all along.
He said it himself. He recommended their propaganda and thanked
them in the acknowledgments. But when he was posting on
Fortune that night, he lied about something earlier. In this
Murderer's Q and a session, someone asked him, have you
(17:25):
been talking to some other people over telegram, discord or signal?
And he replies, made my own decision to do this.
I had barely any dms with people on telegram or wherever.
And he later followed up with their channel owners. Hence
the Annan part. Don't know their names. They produced good content,
(17:45):
though Craigich was trying to backtrack on his initial post
that he'd exchanged direct messages with anyone in the lead
up to the attack. The truth, as it turns out,
is that he wasn't just reading the material produced by
the teogram Collis, he was in active communication with its leaders.
This teenage murderer in Slovakia hadn't just posted his manifesto
(18:08):
online before the attack. He'd also sent it directly to
someone immediately after. He wanted to be certain that his
message got out, so he sent it to someone he
knew would spread it, someone who had helped him craft it.
He sent the manifesto to Matthew Allison, a man in
(18:29):
his thirties living in Boise, Idaho, earlier this month. In
September of twenty twenty four, Matthew Allison of Boise and
Dallas Humber of Elk Grove, California, were arrested in charge
in a fifteen count indictment with soliciting hate crimes, soliciting
the murder of federal officials, interstate threats, distributing information relating
(18:50):
to explosives, and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.
The pair are alleged to be the ringleaders of the
Terragram Collective, that association of pseudonymous posters on Telegram that
produce neo Nazi accelerationist propaganda, and now, according to the
Department of Justice, the Teogram Collective can also be called
(19:11):
a transnational terrorist group. According to the allegations in the indictment,
Krajik was an active member of the group's chat for
a year leading up to the shooting. And I guess
(19:36):
I should back up a little bit and explain a
little more about what's going on in these chats, as
much as I would really rather not. There are plenty
of Nazi chat rooms. There is no shortage of places
online where a racial slur enthusiast can log on and
share ideas with other guys who hate black people and
(19:57):
Jewish people, and gay people and immigrants and women and whatever.
Pick your flavor. It's out there in abundance. This is
something much darker. These are accelerationists, people who believe their
goals can only be achieved by driving society over the
brink and into total collapse. They believe that acts of
(20:18):
mass murder, terrorism, and destruction are the necessary course of
action to create the chaos required to allow a new
world to be born, a world built by and four
white men alone, and they aren't just talking about it.
The Terogram Collective has produced a series of what would
(20:39):
you call them, manuals, manifestos, zines, terrorism handbooks. They've put
out four written publications in one short documentary, all directed
at providing both inspiration and explicit instruction on how their
followers can commit acts of unspeakable violence. In the online spaces,
(21:01):
past acts are celebrated. One of the core elements of
the group's shared language is this pantheon of saints. It's
not the saints you're thinking of. This is a gruesome hagiography.
They've canonized mass shooters. They celebrate the Saint Day of
(21:22):
each shooter on the day of their atrocity. Robert Bowers, Unders,
Bravic Dylan Rue, Brenton Terran, Patrick Crusius, Anton London Peterson,
murderers from infamous to obscure, murderers from all over the world.
The criteria for sainthood are fivefold, race, motive, intent, score,
(21:43):
and worldview. The prospective saint must, of course, be white.
There is occasionally some debate in the Nazi community about
whether they should offer their begrudging respect for non white
mass murderers who nevertheless kill large numbers of people they
deem worthy targets, but the answer is generally no. So
(22:05):
while they would celebrate something like the Pulse night club shooting,
which killed nearly fifty people, most of whom were both
Latino and members of the queer community, that perpetrator cannot
be celebrated as a saint because he fails the first test.
He isn't white. Intent, motive, and worldview all feel like
they kind of describe the same thing. So I'm not
(22:28):
sure why there are five criteria when they probably could
have condensed it down to three. But the attack must
be deliberate, that's intent, committed in the spirit of our struggle,
that's motive, and be motivated by a white nationalist ideology.
Though they are willing to make some exceptions. There's a
little wiggle room here for attacks that are right wing
(22:49):
but not explicitly neo Nazi. And score means exactly what
you probably think it means. They're keeping score, they're counting bodies.
Sometimes if you log into the worst kind of place
during an active attack or in the immediate aftermath of one,
(23:10):
you'll see eager speculation that someone could be getting a
new high score like it's some kind of video game,
and there are no exceptions to this requirement. You cannot
become a terrogram saint with a score of zero. Someone
has to die. These ideas didn't originate with Matthew Allison
(23:33):
and Dallas Humber. Both of them have been members of
this online community for years since at least twenty nineteen.
In twenty twenty two, after the arrest of one of
the community's most prolific posters, they became the group's leaders.
A user who posted as Slovak Bro, Pavel Benedikue, was
arrested in Slovakia in early twenty twenty two and eventually
(23:54):
sentenced to six years in prison for his support of terrorism,
and Slovak Bro isn't the the only Tarogram author to
land himself in prison. Brandon Russell, the Adam Woffin founder,
currently awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy to blow up
the power grid in Baltimore, was in close communication with
members of the group before and after his arrest. He
(24:16):
appears to have participated in the creation of at least
some of the group's work. Two men in Canada were
arrested last fall with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police press
release alleging that they too had participated in the creation
of Tarogram manifestos. Their cases are ongoing and subject to
a publication ban in Canada, so the extent of their
involvement and the possibility that revelations in those cases had
(24:39):
some bearing on the investigation here in the US is
unknown right now, as the leaders of the Tarogram collective,
Dallas Humber and Matthew Allison, are alleged to have directly
contributed to acts of terrorism all over the world. Their
publications provided detailed instructions on how to make bombs, how
to make napalm at home with materials you can by
(25:00):
at the hardware store, the most efficient way to destroy
an electrical substation with rifle fire, and how to identify
the most valuable targets in your area, targets that could
be infrastructure or human. They maintained a document called the List,
a list of high value assassination targets. For each name
(25:23):
on the list, there was a little graphic like a
trading card. The target's name, home address, and photograph were
always featured, along with the reasons why they were considered
an enemy of the cause. Those reasons, as you might expect,
tended to be related to the target's identity. They're Jewish,
they're gay, they're an immigrant, or some other kind of
(25:45):
undesirable in their eyes. The names on the list include senators, judges,
a former federal prosecutor, state and local government officials, and
nonprofit employees. In their chats, they posted the list off
and would sometimes post individual members of the list alongside
encouragement to take action. In one exchange described in the indictment,
(26:08):
a member of the group chat asked if there were
any members of the list located in his area. The
administrator of the group responded with a trading card image
for a target in a city in the posters area.
The user replied, we already have this one, and asked
the channel administrator to tag him if any new names
were added to the list in his area. A user
(26:29):
the government alleges is Dallas. Humber replied, we'll do. A
week later, she tagged that same user with a new
name in the same city. He replied, very good, I'll
check in with my guys now. And it wasn't just
members of the list who were in danger. Humber and
Allison would routinely remind members of the group of the
(26:51):
kinds of targets they should be seeking out. In June
of twenty twenty three, Humber posted numerous exhortations to followers
that they should be targeting Gay Pride Month events, writing
in one post.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Mass shootings, arson, bombings, vehicle tax the list goes on
and the opportunities provided to you this month will be plentiful.
Don't let them go to waste. What's more impactful boycotting
target or getting dozens of targets in your sights and
taking them out permanently. Actions speak louder than words. Direct
(27:28):
lethal action speaks louder than any boycott This Pride month,
give us what we truly need, a new saint to
be proud of and a glorious new attack to celebrate.
You've got the means an opportunity. All you need is
the will. Don't breathe a word of what you're planning
to anyone, and make it count.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Make it count. That's a frequent refrain Make it Count
as the title of one of the group's terrorism manuals.
It's also the final line of the Broadesslava Shooters manifesto.
The line itself comes from Siege the collected Essays of
James Mason. If the Turner Diaries is their Bible, Siege
(28:11):
is perhaps a missile or a brevery. Maybe the analogy
doesn't hold. I don't know, but Mason is the godfather
of modern fascist terrorism. Read Siege was such a constant
directive in so many Nazi chats for so long that
it's more of a meme than an actual instruction. At
this point. Mason wrote the Siege Newsletter throughout the early
(28:34):
to mid eighties. The essays were collected and published in
book form in the early nineties, but the text languished
in relative obscurity until it was rediscovered by users of
the Nazi forum Iron March in the early twenty tens.
It's no coincidence that Adam Wafflin was born on the
pages of that forum, in the bubbling ideological soup, where
young men were exchanging their favorite passages of Siege. It's
(28:57):
a messy, sprawling six or so pages, depending on the
addition you've bootlegged from some terrorism chat room, and it's
mostly useless ramblings. There's a lot of repetitive content. It
wasn't written to be a book. To be fair, the
line Make It Count comes from the end of the
August nineteen eighty two newsletter in a missive titled Biting
(29:21):
the Bullet. Like much of the Device in Siege, this
essay is about taking action, about choosing the time, the target,
and the circumstances of your attack on the system, because
you may only get one chance to strike. The essay concludes,
quote in revolution, the price of failure generally is death.
(29:42):
So whatever you do, and whatever course you choose, don't
sell yourself cheap. Make it count. Make it Count. The
Collective's Terrorism Guide by the same name and The Hard
Reset both contain diagrams of electrical transformers and instruction for
damaging them, released around the same time, both in June
(30:04):
of twenty twenty two. Make It Count as a light
fourteen pages, it's more propaganda than manual. The page titled
Blackout is dominated by a large graphic of a rifle
with a scope and big neon text that reads in
all caps, locate substation, range, find shoot transformers, flee undetected,
(30:27):
which I guess are technically instructions, they're just not very
good ones. The Hard Reset, on the other hand, is
a nearly three hundred page compilation of essays, graphics manuals,
and just a nightmarish collection of fonts and colors that
would make a graphic designer weep Around. Halfway through, there's
(30:50):
a section containing incredibly detailed instructions, complete with diagrams, for
sabotaging all manner of infrastructure. How to derail a train,
how to damage a cell phone tower, things to consider
when bombing a truck depot, ways you might contaminate a
municipal water treatment plant, And of course, four pages of
advice on sabotaging the power grid. Alongside mass shootings, attacks
(31:15):
on the power grid are the group's favorite fixation. We
talked a little bit about the concept in another episode
a few weeks ago, Lights Out about the Nazi paramilitary
marines who hoped to knock out power in the Pacific Northwest.
They thought it would provide cover for a planned series
of assassinations. Those guys never got a chance to read
the Terragram collective manuals on the subject, they were arrested
(31:38):
before they were written. But as I said in that episode,
this idea has been popular in right wing circles for decades.
Take out the power, chaos ensues something something Step three,
then race war. The middle part never really gets fleshed out,
(31:58):
but they all seem very convinced that something happens right
after it gets dark that causes a race war. I'm
not really sold on that logic, but they are bound
and determined to put holes in a substation. Nevertheless, the
indictment lists numerous occasions on which Dallas Humber encourages her
followers to take the advice provided in the manuals and
(32:19):
attack the grid. In December of twenty twenty two, after
these still unsolved attacks on electrical infrastructure in Jones County,
North Carolina on November eleventh, and Moore County on December third,
Humber posted encouragement for anyone planning a similar grid attack,
advising them not to let second thoughts or fear of
failure or fear of getting caught demotivate them. Do not
(32:42):
let this big mistake happen to you, she wrote in
all caps, reminding them to have a plan, carry it out,
and keep their mouths shut. A few days later, she.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Wrote, maybe that person could be you, lining up your
sights on these metal behemoths from the tree line, squeezing
the trigger and retreating from the area with a shitting
grin on your face, knowing the chaos you've just unleashed.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
And after a third, still unsolved attack was carried out
just a month later in Randolph County, North Carolina, Humber
posted again.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Everyone, please take a moment to congratulate yourselves. It seems
as though this avenue of attack, an incredibly effective one
at that has really caught on. I like to think
that all our hard work in detailing its effectiveness and
showing our community how easy it is not only to do,
but to get away with, has helped encourage this death
to the grid, death the system.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
So the Terogram Collective isn't exactly taking credit for the
grid attacks in North Carolina, but they aren't not taking
credit for it either. She does credit herself and the
group with popularizing the idea. She speculates that perhaps the
attacker or attackers had read her work, read her words,
and listened to her voice and decided to act, But
(34:06):
there's no claim made that she knows who did it,
and maybe she doesn't. We don't actually know whether these
attacks were committed by someone inspired by the Terrogram Collective
at all, even if they were ideologically motivated. She didn't
invent the idea, and a similar attack out in Washington
State during the same time period was actually committed by
(34:27):
a pair of would be thieves who thought they could
get cash out of ATMs during a power outage. So
maybe it wasn't a terrorist at all, but if it was,
it is entirely possible that an attacker inspired by her
work was operating based off of a one directional relationship,
that this person consumed the content and acted on it
(34:48):
without ever actually having a conversation with the author. We
didn't learn until much later, though, that this wasn't the
case with the shooting in Broadislava, and we do you
know that at least one would be grid attacker was
definitely in that chat and definitely in communication with the
Tterogram collective. Andrew Takestov was arrested in July of twenty
(35:24):
twenty four at the Newark Airport. He was on his
way to Ukraine to join the Russian Volunteer Corps, a
neo Nazi paramilitary group of Russian citizens inside Ukraine who
opposed the Putin government. Takeistov had been a member of
the Tarogram collective chat since at least January of twenty
twenty four. And in January of twenty twenty four, he
(35:44):
made a new friend online. It isn't stated outright in
his charging documents or in the cases against Humber and Allison,
but it sounds like he made this friend in the
Tarogram chat, and this friend turned out to be an
undercover FBI agent around this same time. In January of
twenty twenty four, Takestov asks in the Terogram chat for
(36:08):
recommendations for quote documentaries about our guys made by our guys,
and he asks if anyone has more content like White Terror,
which is the twenty four minute documentary the Collective put
out in October of twenty twenty two. The video is
a compilation of descriptions of over one hundred white supremacist
(36:28):
attacks carried out between nineteen sixty eight and twenty twenty two.
It is, in their words, their litany of the Saints.
Humber narrates the video herself. She is the voice of Terogram,
but she's not very skilled voice actor, and that's not
just my opinion. The website Militant Wire, a publication that
(36:50):
writes about political violence all over the world, wrote of
her narration.
Speaker 4 (36:55):
It is both striking and seemingly incongruous to the material
the way a young, average female voice devoid of ghoulish
stylization or of discernible malice and hatred not only celebrates
acts of terrorism while parroting well established neo Nazi tropes
and slogans, but perhaps most of all, the unburden and
rather natural way that this young woman uses the most
(37:16):
cutting of racial slurs and homophobic pejoratives. It is one
thing to see edgy young men describe mass murderer Dylan
Rufe as Saint Rufe on a message board, for example,
and quite another to hear a young woman say it
aloud and without traceable irony.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
She sounds bored as she lists shootings, bombings, arsons and stabbings,
just droning out this list of the dead. The video
was published just days after the shooting had brought us Lava,
but it had already been finalized before the attack, so
he's not in it. The list of their murderer's heroes
(37:54):
ends with the Buffalo Supermarket shooter from May of twenty
twenty two, but the video concludes with Humbers. There's deadpan
reading of an ominous message. The list is always growing,
and you could join it.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
And to the saints of tomorrow watching this today, know
that when you succeed, you will be celebrated with reverence,
and your sacrifice.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Will not be in vain.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
Hail the Saints, and hail are glorious and bloody. Legacy
of white hair.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
When Takeistav asked if they had any more content like
that video, Humber replied with a file an audio recording
of her reading the Jacksonville Dollar General Shooters Manifesto. The manifesto,
entitled A White Boy Summer to Remember, had just been
released that month by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Department. Humber quickly
(38:49):
recorded the audiobook version for the Terogram Collective, as she
had with many manifestos before it. Her audio recording of
the Broados Lava Shooters Manifesto was released to the chat
within a week of that attack, just as she'd promised
Kragik it would be before he died a few months later.
In April of twenty twenty four, Talkistov posted again thanking
(39:10):
Humber for links to videos providing instructions on attacking energy facilities.
One video in particular had instructions for using my lar
balloons to damage power lines their conductive metal surface can
start a fire when it comes into contact with electrical infrastructure.
Takistanv was so pleased with this advice, it seems that
he thought he might like to try it. Later that summer,
(39:34):
he met up with his new friend from the chat room,
though one he didn't know was an undercover FBI agent. Together,
they drove around New Jersey looking at substations. Takistov proudly
shared the instructions for how to carry out the attack,
directing his friend to use mylar balloons to short circuit
the transformer. He followed up by sending his friend a
(39:55):
copy of the hard Reset, telling him quote, it's really
the only thing you need. It has ideology, it has
how to guides, It has ideas for funny things. It
goes into how you should plan it. It really goes
into the thought process. Takstov told the agent his new
friend that his plan was to fly to Ukraine and
volunteer with the Russian Volunteer Corps. He'd chosen that group
(40:18):
in particular because, according to the indictment quote, the group
was openly national socialist and more importantly, specialized in assassinations
attacks on power grids and other infrastructure. Sabotage, so he
hoped to go over there, get some training, do a
little fighting, and then return home with new skills he
(40:39):
could use here. He instructed his new friend not to
be idle in his absence, that while Takistov was gone,
he expected his new friend to carry out at least
one attack, perhaps the attack on the substation they'd been discussing.
He also recommended getting a rifle and a cheap burner phone.
The burner phone wasn't for communication, though, it was to
(41:02):
be used to determine if a cell tower had been
sufficiently damaged by rifle rounds that it no longer transmitted
a signal. So you take the phone out, you start
shooting at the tower, and if the phone still has bars,
keep shooting. In July, just a few days before he
would board the plane to Ukraine, Takistov met up with
(41:23):
his new friend one last time. This time they drove
out to a warehouse full of trucking equipment. Takistov explained
to the undercover agent how he should access the facility
to damage equipment with a Molotov cocktail. He also suggested
some strategies for derailing trains. He essentially talked through almost
all of the infrastructure related attacks suggested by the Terogram
(41:46):
Collective publication that he'd already shared with the agent, and
then he tried to get on a plane. Takistov did
not make his flight. On July tenth, he was arrested
at the airport. He's not due back in court until October,
but he is the attacker two listed in the indictment
against Alice Humber and Matthew Allison. That indictment lists three
(42:09):
individuals that the government is confident they can prove were
incited to action directly by the Terogram Collective. Attacker one
is the Broadislava shooter. Attacker three is the teenager who
stabbed five men outside of a mosque in Turkey last month.
He was taken into custody alive, and as far as
reporting I can find, all of his victims are expected
(42:32):
to survive. The teenager, identified by Turkish press only by
his first name and last initial, arda K, was acknowledged
by the Terogram Collective but not canonized as a saint.
He failed, although his intent, ideology, and worldview are consistent
with the kind of murderer they're looking for. The teenager
(42:55):
failed to take any lives, and more importantly, he isn't white.
After the attack, Dallas Humber wrote in the chat, he
included the Tarogram books and other Saint manifestos in his file, Dump,
gives shout outs to the other Saints in his manifesto
and references several hard Reset passages. He was one hundred
(43:15):
percent our guy, but he's not white, so I can't
give him an honorary title. We can still celebrate his attack,
though he did it for Tarogram. She followed up later
on writing we can hail him anyway. We just can't
add him to the pantheon. But yeah, it's a great
development regardless. Inspiring more attacks is the goal, and anyone
(43:39):
claiming to be an accelerationist should support them. It isn't
specified in the court documents whether our Decae had ever
directly participated in the Tarogram collective chats, but he certainly
read their work. He wasn't just inspired by some shared ideology.
He cites them directly in this manifesto. Manifesto, however, is
(44:02):
written in Turkish, which you'd expect because there's something a
little strange about the manifesto Urikrazik left behind. It's in English.
That's not entirely extraordinary. He spoke English, though he'd never
spent any time in an English speaking country. He probably
would have learned it in school. He watched American television
(44:24):
shows and movies. He had access to American music. He
participated in online spaces where English is the primary language.
But the manifesto is in perfect English. And I don't
mean perfect English like from a textbook, something you could
achieve through study. It's native English. It has idioms and
(44:46):
terms of phrase and even mistakes that only a native
English speaker would really use. And that's not my opinion.
According to an analysis by forensic linguist Julia Kupper published
by the Accelerationism Research Consortium, the manifesto was almost certainly
written by a native English speaker who grew up in
(45:07):
the United States, probably someone with a good education, and
someone a bit older than Crachick, someone maybe in their forties.
The obvious answer then, is, well, he plagiarized it, right.
It's copy paste, and that's surprisingly common.
Speaker 4 (45:25):
A lot of.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Manifestos lift large portions of their text from other similar documents.
But Copper checked he hadn't. This isn't copy pasta this
isn't someone else's manifesto. This was an original work, but
Crachick couldn't have written it. Copper conducted a forensic linguistic
analysis on the manifesto, the handwritten suicide note, several hundred
(45:50):
tweets from his account, and the four Chan posts made
the night of the shooting. She concluded that a second
author was involved in both the manifesto and some of
the tweets, but that the four Chan posts and the
suicide note were written by him alone. According to covers analysis,
there are some telltale signs of two writers at work.
(46:13):
When Krajik posted a photo on four Chan that night
to prove he was who he said he was, he
showed a handwritten note with a date on it, and
we know he wrote this himself, and in European fashion
he wrote the date day month year, not month day
year as Americans would do. The manifesto, though uses an
(46:36):
American date format. In his tweets, there are style shifts
that seem to indicate two people may have had access
to the account. Changes in tone and vocabulary and the
way that punctuation is used, shifting between the European style
and the American style of where commas and periods go
on either side of a quotation or parentheses. The American
(46:59):
English style of formatting began appearing in the tweets in
May of twenty twenty two, the month he claims he
began working on the manifesto and the plan in Earnest
Cupper's report was published in early twenty twenty three, just
six months after the attack and more than a year
before the extent of Crojick's involvement with the terrogram chat
administrators came to light after their arrests. It raises some
(47:22):
questions we may not get answers to. Perhaps the criminal
proceedings against Alison and Humber will result in Twitter producing
some records that could show more than one person logging
into the account, but maybe not. There may be no
satisfying conclusion to this mystery. But if an older, educated,
(47:45):
native English speaking American author wrote most of that manifesto,
it certainly confers some responsibility onto that author for the
attack that accompanied it. The co author of the manifesto
didn't pull the trigger, but they may as well have
if Humber and Allison are being prosecuted for their contributions
(48:06):
to this attack. In particular, whether or not they had
fore knowledge. Whether or not they participated in the crafting
of this manifesto would be a significant factor in the prosecution.
But who are these people? Who is Matthew Allison? Who
is Dallas Humber? How did they end up running a
transnational terrorist organization that goads young men into committing acts
(48:28):
of terrorism. Matthew Allison wasn't revealed as a Terrogram collective
administrator until this indictment was unsealed. We didn't know his
name until he was arrested, but Dallas Humber was unmasked
a year and a half ago. Researchers at Left Coast
Right Watch and independent investigative journalism outlet covering politics and
(48:50):
extremism identified Humber in March of twenty twenty three. The
story was confirmed and re reported by Huffington Post soon after.
Dallas Humber was miss Gorehound, the voice of Terrogram. The
story is a truly bizarre one. I'll link it in
the show notes and I highly recommend checking out this
(49:12):
story in particular and Left Coast Right Watch in general.
They were able to locate the earliest days of Humber's
journey to becoming the voice of White Terror when she
was just thirteen, She was active on sites like deviant
Art and live journal, where she described herself as a
hopeless fangirl for serial killers. Their digital archaeology shows that
(49:35):
Humber has been making fan art for murderers for over
twenty years. She was describing herself as a National Socialist
in her online journal as early as two thousand and four,
when she was just fourteen. By twenty fourteen, she was
using one of the monikers she carried through to the present,
little Miss Gorehound. Quoting from lcrw's twenty twenty three write
(49:57):
up on Humber quote, her earliest interest in gurro art
had become a full blown gore fetish. In its purest form,
gurro is meant to simultaneously evoke a sense of eroticism
and grotesqueness. It's meant to make the viewer uncomfortable. At
its worst, it can only be described as hen Tai snuff.
(50:19):
Nearly all of her art from this period features abused women.
LCRW has chosen not to share the images as they
depict scenes of torture, dismemberment, and explicit sexual violence. For
the most part, the only women that aren't being subjected
to violence and brutality are perpetuating it against other women.
The men, however, are portrayed as strong, powerful, and heroic,
(50:43):
and by twenty nineteen, Humber had found her new online
home terrogram. Her now nearly twenty year old hobby of
creating gore art was right at home in an online
community devoted to celebrating mass murder, and now she wasn't
just drawing pictures of killers, she was drawing pictures for them.
(51:05):
She posted photos on Telegram of her correspondence with convicted
mass murderer Dylan Rufe. Several outlets have reported on these letters,
and they do point out that they were unable to
confirm with prison officials how often Humber was corresponding with Rufe,
but the images she posted matched the handwriting and style
of known samples of Roofe's letters. In one letter she posted,
(51:27):
Rufe requests a drawing from her. He asks for quote
a wizard with mean slash, unfriendly eyebrows, or a dragon
or an unfriendly eyebrowed wizard writing a dragon. End quote.
I hope that's the only time I ever have to
quote Dylan Rufe. The Little Miss Gorehound account posted a
(51:51):
photo of the finished drawing of the unfriendly looking wizard,
with the caption finished Dylan's Wizard hashtag Saint Mail. She
also claimed to have written cards to Brenton Tarrant, imprisoned
in New Zealand for the murders of fifty one worshippers
at mosques in christ Church, and to Anders Bravic, imprisoned
(52:12):
in Norway for the murder of seventy seven people, most
of whom were children. It's unclear what, if anything, Humber
does for a day job these days, but LCRWS write
up uncovered that for many years she made a living
as a dildo saleswoman using the pseudonym techs Hunter. But
(52:33):
after that article was published, nothing happened, nothing changed. We
knew who she was, but nobody made a move to intervene,
and she carried on as she always had. Shannon Foley
Martinez told Huffington Post back in March of twenty twenty
three that quote, it is an absolute given that terrogram
(52:55):
will inspire more shootings if left unchecked. In the heartbreaking
position of knowing exactly what she's talking about, Shannon was
radicalized by a boyfriend as a teenager, but quickly left
the movement and has since dedicated decades of her life
to the ugly work of trying to keep other people's
children from falling prey to the recruiters who target vulnerable teens.
(53:17):
But the government waited and waited. They watched too. I'm
sure we know they had undercover agents in the group.
But they waited over a year. They waited until more
attacks took place. They waited until an eighty seven year
old man was stabbed outside of his mosque. They waited
(53:38):
while more and more young men were fed heaping servings
of rotten propaganda. They waited until September of twenty twenty four,
a few weeks after that stabbing in Turkey. In a
piece published in Wire a few days after the indictment,
investigative journalist Ali Winston offers an intriguing explanation for the timing.
(54:00):
While most of the charges in the indictment could have
been brought at any time, things like soliciting the murder
of a federal official, disseminating information about explosives, threatening communications,
and so on, they've been doing that for years. The
final charge of this fifteen count indictment is a violation
of Chapter eighteen, Section two three, three nine a conspiracy
(54:23):
to provide material support to terrorists, and this is the
most serious charge on the indictment. This is the one
that could put them away forever. And this charge was
only made possible by a decision earlier this year by
the Government of the United Kingdom. In April of twenty
twenty four, the UK formally added the Terogram Collective to
(54:44):
its list of proscribed terrorist entities. A Home Office announcement
in April.
Speaker 5 (54:50):
Reads the Terregram Collective has been prescribed as a terrorist
organization today after Parliament approved a draft order laid on Monday,
the twenty six of April. This order makes belonging to
the Teogram Collective or inviting support for the group a
criminal offense, with a potential prison sentence of fourteen years,
which can be handed down alongside or in place of
(55:11):
a fine. In addition, Section fifty eight makes it a
criminal offense for a person to collect or possess information
which is likely to be useful to a person committing
or repairing for acts of terrorism, including where an individual
views or accesses documents or records containing information of that kind.
The Telegram Collective has now been added to the list
of prescribed organizations in the UK alongside eighty other organizations.
Speaker 2 (55:38):
And with that announcement, Terogram is now a foreign terrorist organization.
And because people died and at least one of the
incidents the government laid out in the indictment as an act,
the defendants insided they could go away for life. As
Ali Winston put it in that Wired article quote, In
other words, the US is treating terror in ways similar
(56:01):
to how it has treated Islamist terrorist organizations. Terrorism researcher
Seamus Hughes told Winston, quote, I would think of this
case more like an old school terrorism investigation, where you
have a leadership cell that pushed info to followers and
radicalized them into action. Cases involving this particular charge are
(56:22):
typically those involving groups like ISIS or al Qaida. I
don't think we've seen this used before against white nationalist
domestic terror organizations. Using this legal framework against a group
like the Terrogram collective may signal a shift in the
DOJ's strategy for targeting white nationalist terrorism in the United States.
(56:44):
It's a big swing, as Hughes said, quote, it shows
that either the FEDS are trying to make a point
or they were very concerned about these particular actors, and
maybe it's both right. It was long past time to
do something, anything, anything at all about the most significant
(57:05):
network of neo Nazi terrorist propaganda on the English speaking Internet.
People have already died. There's every reason to believe the
undercover agents they had in the group knew that more
people would die if something didn't disrupt the organization. And
maybe the Justice Department is just feeling a little more
willing to use the tools they have to do something
(57:27):
about right wing extremism more generally. This is obviously a
much more seismic shift in policy. But we were just
talking last week about the false statements charges against a
soldier who allegedly lied about his extremist activities, and those
charges were unusual and perhaps indicative of a shift in
policy and strategy. I suppose it doesn't behoove me to
(57:49):
make wilder speculations than the experts are willing to make,
so we'll stick with what Seamus Hughes told Ally Winston.
A case like this had to get sign off at
the highest levels. Somebody in the DOJ wanted this network
shut down. When the pair were arrested earlier this month,
authorities searched their homes. Dallas Humber had three D printed guns,
(58:13):
high capacity magazines, a short barreled rifle, unregistered firearms, a
lot of Nazi propaganda, her own manifestos, and a notebook
listing the white supremacist attackers with whom she corresponds, including
Dylan Roof. When Matthew Allison was arrested, he was quote
wearing a backpack containing zip ties, duct tape, a gun, ammunition,
(58:37):
a knife, lockpicking equipment, two phones, and a thumb drive.
After his arrest, Allison was advised of his rights, but
waived them and quickly confessed in a recorded interview to
engaging in the acts alleged in the indictment. The pair
are currently held without bond, with the government citing their
own statements about their willingness to die in a shootout
(58:58):
rather than be arrested, about Allison's go bag, which indicates
a desire to flee the country, the severity of the
charges which could send them to prison for the rest
of their lives, and their own prior statements expressing a
willingness to murder or to have murdered people they suspect
our cooperating witnesses against other Terogram members like Brendan Russell.
(59:21):
These cooperating witnesses have been given permission by the government
to testify in a closed court room without being named.
In Brandon Russell's case. For Humber and Allison, there is
not currently a date set for their next appearance in court,
and with Humber and Allison in custody, the current version
of the Terogram collective is dead. But what does that mean?
(59:45):
This is only one head of a hydra. Just as
new leaders emerged after Slovak Borough was arrested in twenty
twenty two, just as Brandon Russell continued to communicate with
Humber after his arrest in twenty twenty three, a new
poster will rise to take their place. Hopefully, this case
signals a shift in the government's approach to throwing up
roadblocks in the paths of aspiring Nazi terrorists. Because a
(01:00:09):
dildo saleswoman from California and a failed DJ from Idaho
may spend the rest of their lives behind bars, but
it's only a matter of time before a new voice
starts whispering white terror into the ears of impressionable teenage
boys who're desperate to die in a way that will impress,
four Chan posters.
Speaker 1 (01:00:33):
Weird Little Guys is a production of cool zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hey, Molly Hunger here, it's a holiday again. So even
though it's only been a few weeks since the last
time I said it was a little awkward to be
scrounging around for a rerun in a back catalog of
episodes that's only a few months deep. There I am again.
What can you do? It's not my fault. We pack
all our big holidays in so close together at the
(00:29):
end of the year, so there's no new Weird Little
Guy this week. This is an episode you may have
already listened to in the relatively recent past. The episode
I chose for this holiday rerun isn't exactly festive. It
has nothing to do with Christmas at all, and to
be honest, it's probably not great holiday listening. It's really depressing.
(00:53):
But I picked it for a reason. Earlier this month,
there was a school shooting in Wisconsin. There are a
lot of school shootings in America, more than two hundred
of them in twenty twenty four alone, according to data
from the gun violence prevention group every Town for Gun Safety.
And as I'm writing this, just a few days after
it happened and a week before you'll hear it, there's
(01:16):
a lot we still don't know about the shooting at
the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. A teacher
and a fourteen year old student were killed. Five more
students and one teacher were injured. The shooter, a fifteen
year old girl, took her own life a few minutes later.
(01:36):
Maybe this will have changed by next week, but today
we don't know for certain if the manifesto being circulated
online is authentic. Normally I wouldn't comment at all on
a document of unknown origin, but a number of listeners
have reached out to ask about a particular line, and
regardless of whether this turns out to have been authored
by the shooter herself, I was startled to see a
(01:59):
familiar name, Arda kosukietin the document refers to him as
the Ultimate Saint. It's chillingly specific language about a relatively
obscure figure one I talk a little bit about in
the episode You're about to hear. In August of twenty
twenty four, he stabbed several people outside of a mosque
(02:21):
in Turkey. In his manifesto, he states quite clearly that
he was motivated to carry out this attack by a
group called the Terogram collective the subject of this episode,
his name is almost entirely unknown outside of that very
small circle of online mass murder enthusiasts. I revisited a
(02:43):
thread today about the attack that was posted on Turkish
social media back when had happened just weeks after the incident.
One poster lamented that in less than a month it
was forgotten, but this week after the shooting in Wisconsin,
that threat is active again, with Turkish posters writing even
(03:04):
in Turkey he was forgotten and unknown overnight and asking
how a child in Wisconsin would even come to know
his name, let alone idolize him. Another user wrote, I
learned that a teenage school shooter in America took as
an example someone we make fun of in Turkey whose
name we don't even know, who attacks elderly people in
(03:26):
a mosque. This person we call a loser in Turkey
has become someone a teenager in America admires. The authenticity
of this alleged manifesto is still uncertain, but if it
is truly the work of a suicidal teenage girl who
took two lives before ending her own, describing arda Kosukiya
(03:46):
team as a saint, sets off alarm bells. Two of
the people behind the Terogram Collective may be behind bars now,
but their propaganda can still kill. So with that in mind,
here's an episode I recorded back in September. I'll be
back next year with more weird little guys. It was
(04:13):
a little after seven pm on a warm Wednesday evening
in October of twenty twenty two. Urai Van Koulik and
Matushorvath were sitting outside of Teplaren, a gay bar and
brought us lavas city center. Matusche was studying Chinese at
a nearby university. You or I was a drag performer
whose day job was designing the displays at a clothing store.
(04:35):
They were enjoying the evening outside of one of the
city's few dedicated queer spaces, and then they were dead.
They were shot by a teenager who left behind a
sixty five page neo Nazi manifesto before shooting himself in
a nearby park. August twelfth, twenty twenty four, was a
sunny afternoon in the Turkish city of his Kishiher. A
(04:57):
teenager wearing a skull mask and a bulletproof vest walked
into the tea garden outside of a mosque and stabbed
five men before being tackled to the ground. He too
left a manifesto glorifying mass murder. In July of twenty
twenty four, a teenager in New Jersey who'd been planning
to destroy power substations in New Brunswick was arrested at
the Newer airport before he'd fly to Ukraine to join
(05:18):
the Russian Volunteer Corps, where he hoped to learn the
skills he'd need to carry out acts of terror here
at home. These three teenagers never met, but they had
something in common. A murderer in Slovakia, an attempted murderer
in Turkey. They were alone when they walked the familiar
streets of their town, stalking their victims. They were alone
(05:39):
when they shock, They were alone when they stabbed. They
hunted human prey as lone wolves. But there are no
lone wolves, not really. The wolf Pack is online now,
baying for more blood.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
Between nineteen sixty eight twenty one, one hundred and five
white men and women of Action have taken it upon
themselves to wage war against the system and our racial enemies.
Our saints are the best of our brothers, and this
is our legacy of white terror.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
All three of these young men were incited to take
action by propaganda produced by the Terragram Collective, a one
synonymous group of militant neo Nazi accelerationists on the messaging
app Telegram. All three of them were radicalized by a
thirty four year old dildo saleswoman from California, narrating the
manifestos of their idols, the mass shooters who came before them.
(06:39):
I'm Molly Conger and this is weird, little guys. Yurai
(07:00):
Krachik died by suicide sometime overnight after he murdered two
people outside of a gay bar and brought us lava
on October twelfth, twenty twenty two. His body was found
in a nearby public park early the next morning, but
he didn't shoot himself right away. After fleeing the scene,
he got online. That was where he was most at home,
(07:21):
after all, that was where he became the man he
was in the moment he fired those shots. A few
hours before the attack, he tweeted out links to his manifesto.
After fleeing the scene of the shooting, he went home.
He told his parents what he had done. They argued,
but no one called the police. He left a handwritten
(07:43):
suicide note, retrieved a second gun from his father's safe,
and left the house again. His parents were the last
ones to see him alive. The city was crawling with
police that night. They were on high alert for the shooter,
worried he would act again, but even now that he
was armed with a fresh weapon, he didn't seek out
(08:04):
more targets. Krazik walked to a local park and checked
four chan on his phone. People were talking about him
about his attack. He wanted to see what they were saying.
Four Chan users quickly connected the shooting to his Twitter account.
As he'd walked home after the attack, he tweeted hashtag
(08:25):
brought a Slava feeling no regrets? Isn't that funny? On
four Chan, they were already discussing the manifesto he'd tweeted out.
One poster asked why would a Slovakian write his manifesto
in English? And this was the first post the shooter
replied to He wrote, because I felt like it. If
(08:48):
you're familiar with four chan, first of all, i'm sorry,
but if you've spent any time on there, you know
it's not a friendly place, and not just unfriendly to outside.
Even people who share similar ideologies are at each other's throats,
hurling insults, and engaging in an eternal competition to be
the nastiest person with an Internet connection. Posters mocked the
(09:12):
shooter for killing only two people and asked why he'd
chosen such low value targets. Even as they celebrated the
deaths of his victims. They bullied the shooter for not
doing more, for not doing it better, for not doing
it differently. They were Monday Morning quarterbacking murder Life is
just a first person shooter game for the keyboard Warrior
(09:33):
mass shooting enthusiast. To these comments, Krazil replied that he'd
wanted to shoot the Slovakian Prime Minister at Ward Hager,
writing wish I could have gone higher, but whatever wanted
to bag the Prime Minister, but I didn't get lucky
with his car arriving later. News reports do in fact
(09:53):
confirm that he was seen that evening on security camera
footage outside the Prime Minister's home an hour before the shooting.
The same news report maps out his walk home after
the shooting, a route that took him through a largely
Jewish neighborhood. Rejik lamented on four Chan that night that
he had wanted to shoot the Kabbad house too, but
he'd run out of ammunition, writing wish I could pull
(10:16):
off more got nearly no amm o bro. Posters on
four Chan were skeptical that the man replying to them
was truly the shooter himself, and demanded that he post
some kind of proof. A little after eleven thirty p m.
Four hours after fleeing the scene of the shooting, he did.
It's dark wherever he was. You can't see anything in
(10:39):
the background. The flash illuminates only the subject of the selfie.
He's completely expressionless. There's no smile, no bravado, no fear
even there's just nothing. He's looking straight at the camera,
holding his phone with one hand and making a finger
gun that points directly at the viewer with the other.
(11:01):
Have a last selfie, he says. Most of his posts
on the four Chan thread that night are in English,
it is the lingua franca of the site, after all,
but one user responds to this selfie in Slovak translated.
The comment reads, what happened boy? Why don't you smile anymore?
Reality set in? Did you fall for the meme stupid right.
(11:26):
The shooter replied to that comment in Slovak, saying, speak
for yourself. In attaching a second selfie, he's smiling this time,
kind of. It's hard to say you feel any sorrow
for a man who just murdered two people in cold
blood and then logged onto four chan to take credit
for it. And I don't, not really, not for this murderer,
(11:52):
But he was just a boy once, a boy whose
fake smile shows the still slightly rounded cheeks of a
kid who won't live to see the last adolescent chaining
to his face his forced smile, a smile that doesn't
reach the eyes in that selfie taken in the dark,
somewhere in the trees on the edge of town, will
probably stay with me for a while. He engages with
(12:14):
the four chan thread for nearly an hour, answering questions
and repeatedly acquiescing to demands for proof that it's really him.
He posts a picture of a handwritten note with the
time and date, posts another selfie, this time with his
shoe on top of his head. This is a common
form of proof demanded on four Chan to determine if
you are really interacting with someone who is who they
(12:36):
say they are, and in real time. I guess the
idea is that most people have a shoe nearby, but
most people don't have old photos of themselves online with
a shoe on their head. So if you can produce
such a photo on request, you probably are the person
in the photo and not just someone using photos of
a stranger that you found online. Another user asked him
(13:00):
to spell out the N word and leaves on the
ground and post a picture of that. He says it
would take too long to spell out the whole word
and posts a blurry photo of leaves arranged in the
shape of the letter N. Another user asks him what's
going through your mind right now, and he says, sad
for my family, happy with my own life. Nothing for
(13:22):
the two f slurs soon a bit of lead. Another
user asks if he plans to spend decades in prison
or if he'll kill himself. He replies with two words
and hero, which is memespeak for dying by suicide. His
(13:42):
last four Chan post was shortly before midnight. Four Chen
users are perpetually caught in between their desire for and
celebration of acts like this and their frustration that this
kind of thing makes them all look bad, you know,
it makes them look like exactly what they are, the
kind of people goading a teenage murderer into killing himself.
(14:05):
One poster writes, you have made everyone on this board
look like a terrorist? Is that what you wanted? Also
repent hell is real? His reply his final post reads
only not my problem. On Twitter, his final post was
a little after midnight in Slovak, he wrote, see you
(14:28):
on the other side. A Slovak language news report says
that two days before the attack, he had called a
mental health crisis hotline. He said, I have to die,
but I am very afraid, and then he hung up.
But in his final hours he didn't call back. He
didn't call that hotline. He didn't turn himself in or
(14:52):
seek help. He sought reassurance and support from the place
least likely to provide it. He logged onto four Chan,
hoping to see his acts hailed as heroic, but they
just laughed at him. He was dead before terogram canonized him,
placing him in the pantheon of terror. He worshiped. Authorities
(15:13):
in Slovakia weren't able to ping his cell phone location
until five am. The cell phone provider didn't have any
employees working overnight. His body was found in the park
around seven am. It's not clear exactly when he died,
but if I had to put money on it, I'd
guess he died in real life shortly after he logged off.
(15:34):
He posted right up through the end, and that's all
we really knew. In October of twenty twenty two, the
manifesto was online for all to see. In the manifesto,
he includes the Terogram Collective in his list of special
thanks at the end, writing you know who you are.
Thank you for your incredible writing and art, for your
(15:56):
political texts, for your practical guides building the future of
the White Revolution one publication at a time. In the
section of the manifesto under the header recommended reading, he
lists many of the usual suspects. He was inspired by
the christ Church Mosque shooting and recommends that shooter's manifesto.
He praises the terrorist's bible, William Luther Pierce's novel The
(16:19):
Turner Diaries, and even recommends the prequel, an even sloppier
novel called Hunter, But he also recommends two other lesser
known publications. Two of the four publications authored by the
Terrogram Collective. He lists these two Militant Accelerationism and the
Hard Reset, last, writing, if the other books give a
(16:41):
theoretical and fictional base for our resistance, these two provide
the practical means for it. They also go into a
deeper dive into some issues, concepts, and things. Anyone who
seeks to fight Zog should know. These two may be
harder to find than the other books I listed, but
you can find them if you look in the right places.
(17:02):
The link between the Broadus Lava Shooting and the Teogram
Collective was never a secret. It was right there all along.
He said it himself. He recommended their propaganda and thanked
them in the acknowledgments. But when he was posting on
Fortune that night, he lied about something earlier. In this
Murderer's Q and a session, someone asked him, have you
(17:25):
been talking to some other people over telegram, discord or signal?
And he replies, made my own decision to do this.
I had barely any dms with people on telegram or wherever.
And he later followed up with their channel owners. Hence
the Annan part. Don't know their names. They produced good content,
(17:45):
though Craigich was trying to backtrack on his initial post
that he'd exchanged direct messages with anyone in the lead
up to the attack. The truth, as it turns out,
is that he wasn't just reading the material produced by
the teogram Collis, he was in active communication with its leaders.
This teenage murderer in Slovakia hadn't just posted his manifesto
(18:08):
online before the attack. He'd also sent it directly to
someone immediately after. He wanted to be certain that his
message got out, so he sent it to someone he
knew would spread it, someone who had helped him craft it.
He sent the manifesto to Matthew Allison, a man in
(18:29):
his thirties living in Boise, Idaho, earlier this month. In
September of twenty twenty four, Matthew Allison of Boise and
Dallas Humber of Elk Grove, California, were arrested in charge
in a fifteen count indictment with soliciting hate crimes, soliciting
the murder of federal officials, interstate threats, distributing information relating
(18:50):
to explosives, and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.
The pair are alleged to be the ringleaders of the
Terragram Collective, that association of pseudonymous posters on Telegram that
produce neo Nazi accelerationist propaganda, and now, according to the
Department of Justice, the Teogram Collective can also be called
(19:11):
a transnational terrorist group. According to the allegations in the indictment,
Krajik was an active member of the group's chat for
a year leading up to the shooting. And I guess
(19:36):
I should back up a little bit and explain a
little more about what's going on in these chats, as
much as I would really rather not. There are plenty
of Nazi chat rooms. There is no shortage of places
online where a racial slur enthusiast can log on and
share ideas with other guys who hate black people and
(19:57):
Jewish people, and gay people and immigrants and women and whatever.
Pick your flavor. It's out there in abundance. This is
something much darker. These are accelerationists, people who believe their
goals can only be achieved by driving society over the
brink and into total collapse. They believe that acts of
(20:18):
mass murder, terrorism, and destruction are the necessary course of
action to create the chaos required to allow a new
world to be born, a world built by and four
white men alone, and they aren't just talking about it.
The Terogram Collective has produced a series of what would
(20:39):
you call them, manuals, manifestos, zines, terrorism handbooks. They've put
out four written publications in one short documentary, all directed
at providing both inspiration and explicit instruction on how their
followers can commit acts of unspeakable violence. In the online spaces,
(21:01):
past acts are celebrated. One of the core elements of
the group's shared language is this pantheon of saints. It's
not the saints you're thinking of. This is a gruesome hagiography.
They've canonized mass shooters. They celebrate the Saint Day of
(21:22):
each shooter on the day of their atrocity. Robert Bowers, Unders,
Bravic Dylan Rue, Brenton Terran, Patrick Crusius, Anton London Peterson,
murderers from infamous to obscure, murderers from all over the world.
The criteria for sainthood are fivefold, race, motive, intent, score,
(21:43):
and worldview. The prospective saint must, of course, be white.
There is occasionally some debate in the Nazi community about
whether they should offer their begrudging respect for non white
mass murderers who nevertheless kill large numbers of people they
deem worthy targets, but the answer is generally no. So
(22:05):
while they would celebrate something like the Pulse night club shooting,
which killed nearly fifty people, most of whom were both
Latino and members of the queer community, that perpetrator cannot
be celebrated as a saint because he fails the first test.
He isn't white. Intent, motive, and worldview all feel like
they kind of describe the same thing. So I'm not
(22:28):
sure why there are five criteria when they probably could
have condensed it down to three. But the attack must
be deliberate, that's intent, committed in the spirit of our struggle,
that's motive, and be motivated by a white nationalist ideology.
Though they are willing to make some exceptions. There's a
little wiggle room here for attacks that are right wing
(22:49):
but not explicitly neo Nazi. And score means exactly what
you probably think it means. They're keeping score, they're counting bodies.
Sometimes if you log into the worst kind of place
during an active attack or in the immediate aftermath of one,
(23:10):
you'll see eager speculation that someone could be getting a
new high score like it's some kind of video game,
and there are no exceptions to this requirement. You cannot
become a terrogram saint with a score of zero. Someone
has to die. These ideas didn't originate with Matthew Allison
(23:33):
and Dallas Humber. Both of them have been members of
this online community for years since at least twenty nineteen.
In twenty twenty two, after the arrest of one of
the community's most prolific posters, they became the group's leaders.
A user who posted as Slovak Bro, Pavel Benedikue, was
arrested in Slovakia in early twenty twenty two and eventually
(23:54):
sentenced to six years in prison for his support of terrorism,
and Slovak Bro isn't the the only Tarogram author to
land himself in prison. Brandon Russell, the Adam Woffin founder,
currently awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy to blow up
the power grid in Baltimore, was in close communication with
members of the group before and after his arrest. He
(24:16):
appears to have participated in the creation of at least
some of the group's work. Two men in Canada were
arrested last fall with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police press
release alleging that they too had participated in the creation
of Tarogram manifestos. Their cases are ongoing and subject to
a publication ban in Canada, so the extent of their
involvement and the possibility that revelations in those cases had
(24:39):
some bearing on the investigation here in the US is
unknown right now, as the leaders of the Tarogram collective,
Dallas Humber and Matthew Allison, are alleged to have directly
contributed to acts of terrorism all over the world. Their
publications provided detailed instructions on how to make bombs, how
to make napalm at home with materials you can by
(25:00):
at the hardware store, the most efficient way to destroy
an electrical substation with rifle fire, and how to identify
the most valuable targets in your area, targets that could
be infrastructure or human. They maintained a document called the List,
a list of high value assassination targets. For each name
(25:23):
on the list, there was a little graphic like a
trading card. The target's name, home address, and photograph were
always featured, along with the reasons why they were considered
an enemy of the cause. Those reasons, as you might expect,
tended to be related to the target's identity. They're Jewish,
they're gay, they're an immigrant, or some other kind of
(25:45):
undesirable in their eyes. The names on the list include senators, judges,
a former federal prosecutor, state and local government officials, and
nonprofit employees. In their chats, they posted the list off
and would sometimes post individual members of the list alongside
encouragement to take action. In one exchange described in the indictment,
(26:08):
a member of the group chat asked if there were
any members of the list located in his area. The
administrator of the group responded with a trading card image
for a target in a city in the posters area.
The user replied, we already have this one, and asked
the channel administrator to tag him if any new names
were added to the list in his area. A user
(26:29):
the government alleges is Dallas. Humber replied, we'll do. A
week later, she tagged that same user with a new
name in the same city. He replied, very good, I'll
check in with my guys now. And it wasn't just
members of the list who were in danger. Humber and
Allison would routinely remind members of the group of the
(26:51):
kinds of targets they should be seeking out. In June
of twenty twenty three, Humber posted numerous exhortations to followers
that they should be targeting Gay Pride Month events, writing
in one post.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Mass shootings, arson, bombings, vehicle tax the list goes on
and the opportunities provided to you this month will be plentiful.
Don't let them go to waste. What's more impactful boycotting
target or getting dozens of targets in your sights and
taking them out permanently. Actions speak louder than words. Direct
(27:28):
lethal action speaks louder than any boycott This Pride month,
give us what we truly need, a new saint to
be proud of and a glorious new attack to celebrate.
You've got the means an opportunity. All you need is
the will. Don't breathe a word of what you're planning
to anyone, and make it count.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Make it count. That's a frequent refrain Make it Count
as the title of one of the group's terrorism manuals.
It's also the final line of the Broadesslava Shooters manifesto.
The line itself comes from Siege the collected Essays of
James Mason. If the Turner Diaries is their Bible, Siege
(28:11):
is perhaps a missile or a brevery. Maybe the analogy
doesn't hold. I don't know, but Mason is the godfather
of modern fascist terrorism. Read Siege was such a constant
directive in so many Nazi chats for so long that
it's more of a meme than an actual instruction. At
this point. Mason wrote the Siege Newsletter throughout the early
(28:34):
to mid eighties. The essays were collected and published in
book form in the early nineties, but the text languished
in relative obscurity until it was rediscovered by users of
the Nazi forum Iron March in the early twenty tens.
It's no coincidence that Adam Wafflin was born on the
pages of that forum, in the bubbling ideological soup, where
young men were exchanging their favorite passages of Siege. It's
(28:57):
a messy, sprawling six or so pages, depending on the
addition you've bootlegged from some terrorism chat room, and it's
mostly useless ramblings. There's a lot of repetitive content. It
wasn't written to be a book. To be fair, the
line Make It Count comes from the end of the
August nineteen eighty two newsletter in a missive titled Biting
(29:21):
the Bullet. Like much of the Device in Siege, this
essay is about taking action, about choosing the time, the target,
and the circumstances of your attack on the system, because
you may only get one chance to strike. The essay concludes,
quote in revolution, the price of failure generally is death.
(29:42):
So whatever you do, and whatever course you choose, don't
sell yourself cheap. Make it count. Make it Count. The
Collective's Terrorism Guide by the same name and The Hard
Reset both contain diagrams of electrical transformers and instruction for
damaging them, released around the same time, both in June
(30:04):
of twenty twenty two. Make It Count as a light
fourteen pages, it's more propaganda than manual. The page titled
Blackout is dominated by a large graphic of a rifle
with a scope and big neon text that reads in
all caps, locate substation, range, find shoot transformers, flee undetected,
(30:27):
which I guess are technically instructions, they're just not very
good ones. The Hard Reset, on the other hand, is
a nearly three hundred page compilation of essays, graphics manuals,
and just a nightmarish collection of fonts and colors that
would make a graphic designer weep Around. Halfway through, there's
(30:50):
a section containing incredibly detailed instructions, complete with diagrams, for
sabotaging all manner of infrastructure. How to derail a train,
how to damage a cell phone tower, things to consider
when bombing a truck depot, ways you might contaminate a
municipal water treatment plant, And of course, four pages of
advice on sabotaging the power grid. Alongside mass shootings, attacks
(31:15):
on the power grid are the group's favorite fixation. We
talked a little bit about the concept in another episode
a few weeks ago, Lights Out about the Nazi paramilitary
marines who hoped to knock out power in the Pacific Northwest.
They thought it would provide cover for a planned series
of assassinations. Those guys never got a chance to read
the Terragram collective manuals on the subject, they were arrested
(31:38):
before they were written. But as I said in that episode,
this idea has been popular in right wing circles for decades.
Take out the power, chaos ensues something something Step three,
then race war. The middle part never really gets fleshed out,
(31:58):
but they all seem very convinced that something happens right
after it gets dark that causes a race war. I'm
not really sold on that logic, but they are bound
and determined to put holes in a substation. Nevertheless, the
indictment lists numerous occasions on which Dallas Humber encourages her
followers to take the advice provided in the manuals and
(32:19):
attack the grid. In December of twenty twenty two, after
these still unsolved attacks on electrical infrastructure in Jones County,
North Carolina on November eleventh, and Moore County on December third,
Humber posted encouragement for anyone planning a similar grid attack,
advising them not to let second thoughts or fear of
failure or fear of getting caught demotivate them. Do not
(32:42):
let this big mistake happen to you, she wrote in
all caps, reminding them to have a plan, carry it out,
and keep their mouths shut. A few days later, she.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Wrote, maybe that person could be you, lining up your
sights on these metal behemoths from the tree line, squeezing
the trigger and retreating from the area with a shitting
grin on your face, knowing the chaos you've just unleashed.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
And after a third, still unsolved attack was carried out
just a month later in Randolph County, North Carolina, Humber
posted again.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Everyone, please take a moment to congratulate yourselves. It seems
as though this avenue of attack, an incredibly effective one
at that has really caught on. I like to think
that all our hard work in detailing its effectiveness and
showing our community how easy it is not only to do,
but to get away with, has helped encourage this death
to the grid, death the system.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
So the Terogram Collective isn't exactly taking credit for the
grid attacks in North Carolina, but they aren't not taking
credit for it either. She does credit herself and the
group with popularizing the idea. She speculates that perhaps the
attacker or attackers had read her work, read her words,
and listened to her voice and decided to act, But
(34:06):
there's no claim made that she knows who did it,
and maybe she doesn't. We don't actually know whether these
attacks were committed by someone inspired by the Terrogram Collective
at all, even if they were ideologically motivated. She didn't
invent the idea, and a similar attack out in Washington
State during the same time period was actually committed by
(34:27):
a pair of would be thieves who thought they could
get cash out of ATMs during a power outage. So
maybe it wasn't a terrorist at all, but if it was,
it is entirely possible that an attacker inspired by her
work was operating based off of a one directional relationship,
that this person consumed the content and acted on it
(34:48):
without ever actually having a conversation with the author. We
didn't learn until much later, though, that this wasn't the
case with the shooting in Broadislava, and we do you
know that at least one would be grid attacker was
definitely in that chat and definitely in communication with the
Tterogram collective. Andrew Takestov was arrested in July of twenty
(35:24):
twenty four at the Newark Airport. He was on his
way to Ukraine to join the Russian Volunteer Corps, a
neo Nazi paramilitary group of Russian citizens inside Ukraine who
opposed the Putin government. Takeistov had been a member of
the Tarogram collective chat since at least January of twenty
twenty four. And in January of twenty twenty four, he
(35:44):
made a new friend online. It isn't stated outright in
his charging documents or in the cases against Humber and Allison,
but it sounds like he made this friend in the
Tarogram chat, and this friend turned out to be an
undercover FBI agent around this same time. In January of
twenty twenty four, Takestov asks in the Terogram chat for
(36:08):
recommendations for quote documentaries about our guys made by our guys,
and he asks if anyone has more content like White Terror,
which is the twenty four minute documentary the Collective put
out in October of twenty twenty two. The video is
a compilation of descriptions of over one hundred white supremacist
(36:28):
attacks carried out between nineteen sixty eight and twenty twenty two.
It is, in their words, their litany of the Saints.
Humber narrates the video herself. She is the voice of Terogram,
but she's not very skilled voice actor, and that's not
just my opinion. The website Militant Wire, a publication that
(36:50):
writes about political violence all over the world, wrote of
her narration.
Speaker 4 (36:55):
It is both striking and seemingly incongruous to the material
the way a young, average female voice devoid of ghoulish
stylization or of discernible malice and hatred not only celebrates
acts of terrorism while parroting well established neo Nazi tropes
and slogans, but perhaps most of all, the unburden and
rather natural way that this young woman uses the most
(37:16):
cutting of racial slurs and homophobic pejoratives. It is one
thing to see edgy young men describe mass murderer Dylan
Rufe as Saint Rufe on a message board, for example,
and quite another to hear a young woman say it
aloud and without traceable irony.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
She sounds bored as she lists shootings, bombings, arsons and stabbings,
just droning out this list of the dead. The video
was published just days after the shooting had brought us Lava,
but it had already been finalized before the attack, so
he's not in it. The list of their murderer's heroes
(37:54):
ends with the Buffalo Supermarket shooter from May of twenty
twenty two, but the video concludes with Humbers. There's deadpan
reading of an ominous message. The list is always growing,
and you could join it.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
And to the saints of tomorrow watching this today, know
that when you succeed, you will be celebrated with reverence,
and your sacrifice.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Will not be in vain.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
Hail the Saints, and hail are glorious and bloody. Legacy
of white hair.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
When Takeistav asked if they had any more content like
that video, Humber replied with a file an audio recording
of her reading the Jacksonville Dollar General Shooters Manifesto. The manifesto,
entitled A White Boy Summer to Remember, had just been
released that month by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Department. Humber quickly
(38:49):
recorded the audiobook version for the Terogram Collective, as she
had with many manifestos before it. Her audio recording of
the Broados Lava Shooters Manifesto was released to the chat
within a week of that attack, just as she'd promised
Kragik it would be before he died a few months later.
In April of twenty twenty four, Talkistov posted again thanking
(39:10):
Humber for links to videos providing instructions on attacking energy facilities.
One video in particular had instructions for using my lar
balloons to damage power lines their conductive metal surface can
start a fire when it comes into contact with electrical infrastructure.
Takistanv was so pleased with this advice, it seems that
he thought he might like to try it. Later that summer,
(39:34):
he met up with his new friend from the chat room,
though one he didn't know was an undercover FBI agent. Together,
they drove around New Jersey looking at substations. Takistov proudly
shared the instructions for how to carry out the attack,
directing his friend to use mylar balloons to short circuit
the transformer. He followed up by sending his friend a
(39:55):
copy of the hard Reset, telling him quote, it's really
the only thing you need. It has ideology, it has
how to guides, It has ideas for funny things. It
goes into how you should plan it. It really goes
into the thought process. Takstov told the agent his new
friend that his plan was to fly to Ukraine and
volunteer with the Russian Volunteer Corps. He'd chosen that group
(40:18):
in particular because, according to the indictment quote, the group
was openly national socialist and more importantly, specialized in assassinations
attacks on power grids and other infrastructure. Sabotage, so he
hoped to go over there, get some training, do a
little fighting, and then return home with new skills he
(40:39):
could use here. He instructed his new friend not to
be idle in his absence, that while Takistov was gone,
he expected his new friend to carry out at least
one attack, perhaps the attack on the substation they'd been discussing.
He also recommended getting a rifle and a cheap burner phone.
The burner phone wasn't for communication, though, it was to
(41:02):
be used to determine if a cell tower had been
sufficiently damaged by rifle rounds that it no longer transmitted
a signal. So you take the phone out, you start
shooting at the tower, and if the phone still has bars,
keep shooting. In July, just a few days before he
would board the plane to Ukraine, Takistov met up with
(41:23):
his new friend one last time. This time they drove
out to a warehouse full of trucking equipment. Takistov explained
to the undercover agent how he should access the facility
to damage equipment with a Molotov cocktail. He also suggested
some strategies for derailing trains. He essentially talked through almost
all of the infrastructure related attacks suggested by the Terogram
(41:46):
Collective publication that he'd already shared with the agent, and
then he tried to get on a plane. Takistov did
not make his flight. On July tenth, he was arrested
at the airport. He's not due back in court until October,
but he is the attacker two listed in the indictment
against Alice Humber and Matthew Allison. That indictment lists three
(42:09):
individuals that the government is confident they can prove were
incited to action directly by the Terogram Collective. Attacker one
is the Broadislava shooter. Attacker three is the teenager who
stabbed five men outside of a mosque in Turkey last month.
He was taken into custody alive, and as far as
reporting I can find, all of his victims are expected
(42:32):
to survive. The teenager, identified by Turkish press only by
his first name and last initial, arda K, was acknowledged
by the Terogram Collective but not canonized as a saint.
He failed, although his intent, ideology, and worldview are consistent
with the kind of murderer they're looking for. The teenager
(42:55):
failed to take any lives, and more importantly, he isn't white.
After the attack, Dallas Humber wrote in the chat, he
included the Tarogram books and other Saint manifestos in his file, Dump,
gives shout outs to the other Saints in his manifesto
and references several hard Reset passages. He was one hundred
(43:15):
percent our guy, but he's not white, so I can't
give him an honorary title. We can still celebrate his attack,
though he did it for Tarogram. She followed up later
on writing we can hail him anyway. We just can't
add him to the pantheon. But yeah, it's a great
development regardless. Inspiring more attacks is the goal, and anyone
(43:39):
claiming to be an accelerationist should support them. It isn't
specified in the court documents whether our Decae had ever
directly participated in the Tarogram collective chats, but he certainly
read their work. He wasn't just inspired by some shared ideology.
He cites them directly in this manifesto. Manifesto, however, is
(44:02):
written in Turkish, which you'd expect because there's something a
little strange about the manifesto Urikrazik left behind. It's in English.
That's not entirely extraordinary. He spoke English, though he'd never
spent any time in an English speaking country. He probably
would have learned it in school. He watched American television
(44:24):
shows and movies. He had access to American music. He
participated in online spaces where English is the primary language.
But the manifesto is in perfect English. And I don't
mean perfect English like from a textbook, something you could
achieve through study. It's native English. It has idioms and
(44:46):
terms of phrase and even mistakes that only a native
English speaker would really use. And that's not my opinion.
According to an analysis by forensic linguist Julia Kupper published
by the Accelerationism Research Consortium, the manifesto was almost certainly
written by a native English speaker who grew up in
(45:07):
the United States, probably someone with a good education, and
someone a bit older than Crachick, someone maybe in their forties.
The obvious answer then, is, well, he plagiarized it, right.
It's copy paste, and that's surprisingly common.
Speaker 4 (45:25):
A lot of.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Manifestos lift large portions of their text from other similar documents.
But Copper checked he hadn't. This isn't copy pasta this
isn't someone else's manifesto. This was an original work, but
Crachick couldn't have written it. Copper conducted a forensic linguistic
analysis on the manifesto, the handwritten suicide note, several hundred
(45:50):
tweets from his account, and the four Chan posts made
the night of the shooting. She concluded that a second
author was involved in both the manifesto and some of
the tweets, but that the four Chan posts and the
suicide note were written by him alone. According to covers analysis,
there are some telltale signs of two writers at work.
(46:13):
When Krajik posted a photo on four Chan that night
to prove he was who he said he was, he
showed a handwritten note with a date on it, and
we know he wrote this himself, and in European fashion
he wrote the date day month year, not month day
year as Americans would do. The manifesto, though uses an
(46:36):
American date format. In his tweets, there are style shifts
that seem to indicate two people may have had access
to the account. Changes in tone and vocabulary and the
way that punctuation is used, shifting between the European style
and the American style of where commas and periods go
on either side of a quotation or parentheses. The American
(46:59):
English style of formatting began appearing in the tweets in
May of twenty twenty two, the month he claims he
began working on the manifesto and the plan in Earnest
Cupper's report was published in early twenty twenty three, just
six months after the attack and more than a year
before the extent of Crojick's involvement with the terrogram chat
administrators came to light after their arrests. It raises some
(47:22):
questions we may not get answers to. Perhaps the criminal
proceedings against Alison and Humber will result in Twitter producing
some records that could show more than one person logging
into the account, but maybe not. There may be no
satisfying conclusion to this mystery. But if an older, educated,
(47:45):
native English speaking American author wrote most of that manifesto,
it certainly confers some responsibility onto that author for the
attack that accompanied it. The co author of the manifesto
didn't pull the trigger, but they may as well have
if Humber and Allison are being prosecuted for their contributions
(48:06):
to this attack. In particular, whether or not they had
fore knowledge. Whether or not they participated in the crafting
of this manifesto would be a significant factor in the prosecution.
But who are these people? Who is Matthew Allison? Who
is Dallas Humber? How did they end up running a
transnational terrorist organization that goads young men into committing acts
(48:28):
of terrorism. Matthew Allison wasn't revealed as a Terrogram collective
administrator until this indictment was unsealed. We didn't know his
name until he was arrested, but Dallas Humber was unmasked
a year and a half ago. Researchers at Left Coast
Right Watch and independent investigative journalism outlet covering politics and
(48:50):
extremism identified Humber in March of twenty twenty three. The
story was confirmed and re reported by Huffington Post soon after.
Dallas Humber was miss Gorehound, the voice of Terrogram. The
story is a truly bizarre one. I'll link it in
the show notes and I highly recommend checking out this
(49:12):
story in particular and Left Coast Right Watch in general.
They were able to locate the earliest days of Humber's
journey to becoming the voice of White Terror when she
was just thirteen, She was active on sites like deviant
Art and live journal, where she described herself as a
hopeless fangirl for serial killers. Their digital archaeology shows that
(49:35):
Humber has been making fan art for murderers for over
twenty years. She was describing herself as a National Socialist
in her online journal as early as two thousand and four,
when she was just fourteen. By twenty fourteen, she was
using one of the monikers she carried through to the present,
little Miss Gorehound. Quoting from lcrw's twenty twenty three write
(49:57):
up on Humber quote, her earliest interest in gurro art
had become a full blown gore fetish. In its purest form,
gurro is meant to simultaneously evoke a sense of eroticism
and grotesqueness. It's meant to make the viewer uncomfortable. At
its worst, it can only be described as hen Tai snuff.
(50:19):
Nearly all of her art from this period features abused women.
LCRW has chosen not to share the images as they
depict scenes of torture, dismemberment, and explicit sexual violence. For
the most part, the only women that aren't being subjected
to violence and brutality are perpetuating it against other women.
The men, however, are portrayed as strong, powerful, and heroic,
(50:43):
and by twenty nineteen, Humber had found her new online
home terrogram. Her now nearly twenty year old hobby of
creating gore art was right at home in an online
community devoted to celebrating mass murder, and now she wasn't
just drawing pictures of killers, she was drawing pictures for them.
(51:05):
She posted photos on Telegram of her correspondence with convicted
mass murderer Dylan Rufe. Several outlets have reported on these letters,
and they do point out that they were unable to
confirm with prison officials how often Humber was corresponding with Rufe,
but the images she posted matched the handwriting and style
of known samples of Roofe's letters. In one letter she posted,
(51:27):
Rufe requests a drawing from her. He asks for quote
a wizard with mean slash, unfriendly eyebrows, or a dragon
or an unfriendly eyebrowed wizard writing a dragon. End quote.
I hope that's the only time I ever have to
quote Dylan Rufe. The Little Miss Gorehound account posted a
(51:51):
photo of the finished drawing of the unfriendly looking wizard,
with the caption finished Dylan's Wizard hashtag Saint Mail. She
also claimed to have written cards to Brenton Tarrant, imprisoned
in New Zealand for the murders of fifty one worshippers
at mosques in christ Church, and to Anders Bravic, imprisoned
(52:12):
in Norway for the murder of seventy seven people, most
of whom were children. It's unclear what, if anything, Humber
does for a day job these days, but LCRWS write
up uncovered that for many years she made a living
as a dildo saleswoman using the pseudonym techs Hunter. But
(52:33):
after that article was published, nothing happened, nothing changed. We
knew who she was, but nobody made a move to intervene,
and she carried on as she always had. Shannon Foley
Martinez told Huffington Post back in March of twenty twenty
three that quote, it is an absolute given that terrogram
(52:55):
will inspire more shootings if left unchecked. In the heartbreaking
position of knowing exactly what she's talking about, Shannon was
radicalized by a boyfriend as a teenager, but quickly left
the movement and has since dedicated decades of her life
to the ugly work of trying to keep other people's
children from falling prey to the recruiters who target vulnerable teens.
(53:17):
But the government waited and waited. They watched too. I'm
sure we know they had undercover agents in the group.
But they waited over a year. They waited until more
attacks took place. They waited until an eighty seven year
old man was stabbed outside of his mosque. They waited
(53:38):
while more and more young men were fed heaping servings
of rotten propaganda. They waited until September of twenty twenty four,
a few weeks after that stabbing in Turkey. In a
piece published in Wire a few days after the indictment,
investigative journalist Ali Winston offers an intriguing explanation for the timing.
(54:00):
While most of the charges in the indictment could have
been brought at any time, things like soliciting the murder
of a federal official, disseminating information about explosives, threatening communications,
and so on, they've been doing that for years. The
final charge of this fifteen count indictment is a violation
of Chapter eighteen, Section two three, three nine a conspiracy
(54:23):
to provide material support to terrorists, and this is the
most serious charge on the indictment. This is the one
that could put them away forever. And this charge was
only made possible by a decision earlier this year by
the Government of the United Kingdom. In April of twenty
twenty four, the UK formally added the Terogram Collective to
(54:44):
its list of proscribed terrorist entities. A Home Office announcement
in April.
Speaker 5 (54:50):
Reads the Terregram Collective has been prescribed as a terrorist
organization today after Parliament approved a draft order laid on Monday,
the twenty six of April. This order makes belonging to
the Teogram Collective or inviting support for the group a
criminal offense, with a potential prison sentence of fourteen years,
which can be handed down alongside or in place of
(55:11):
a fine. In addition, Section fifty eight makes it a
criminal offense for a person to collect or possess information
which is likely to be useful to a person committing
or repairing for acts of terrorism, including where an individual
views or accesses documents or records containing information of that kind.
The Telegram Collective has now been added to the list
of prescribed organizations in the UK alongside eighty other organizations.
Speaker 2 (55:38):
And with that announcement, Terogram is now a foreign terrorist organization.
And because people died and at least one of the
incidents the government laid out in the indictment as an act,
the defendants insided they could go away for life. As
Ali Winston put it in that Wired article quote, In
other words, the US is treating terror in ways similar
(56:01):
to how it has treated Islamist terrorist organizations. Terrorism researcher
Seamus Hughes told Winston, quote, I would think of this
case more like an old school terrorism investigation, where you
have a leadership cell that pushed info to followers and
radicalized them into action. Cases involving this particular charge are
(56:22):
typically those involving groups like ISIS or al Qaida. I
don't think we've seen this used before against white nationalist
domestic terror organizations. Using this legal framework against a group
like the Terrogram collective may signal a shift in the
DOJ's strategy for targeting white nationalist terrorism in the United States.
(56:44):
It's a big swing, as Hughes said, quote, it shows
that either the FEDS are trying to make a point
or they were very concerned about these particular actors, and
maybe it's both right. It was long past time to
do something, anything, anything at all about the most significant
(57:05):
network of neo Nazi terrorist propaganda on the English speaking Internet.
People have already died. There's every reason to believe the
undercover agents they had in the group knew that more
people would die if something didn't disrupt the organization. And
maybe the Justice Department is just feeling a little more
willing to use the tools they have to do something
(57:27):
about right wing extremism more generally. This is obviously a
much more seismic shift in policy. But we were just
talking last week about the false statements charges against a
soldier who allegedly lied about his extremist activities, and those
charges were unusual and perhaps indicative of a shift in
policy and strategy. I suppose it doesn't behoove me to
(57:49):
make wilder speculations than the experts are willing to make,
so we'll stick with what Seamus Hughes told Ally Winston.
A case like this had to get sign off at
the highest levels. Somebody in the DOJ wanted this network
shut down. When the pair were arrested earlier this month,
authorities searched their homes. Dallas Humber had three D printed guns,
(58:13):
high capacity magazines, a short barreled rifle, unregistered firearms, a
lot of Nazi propaganda, her own manifestos, and a notebook
listing the white supremacist attackers with whom she corresponds, including
Dylan Roof. When Matthew Allison was arrested, he was quote
wearing a backpack containing zip ties, duct tape, a gun, ammunition,
(58:37):
a knife, lockpicking equipment, two phones, and a thumb drive.
After his arrest, Allison was advised of his rights, but
waived them and quickly confessed in a recorded interview to
engaging in the acts alleged in the indictment. The pair
are currently held without bond, with the government citing their
own statements about their willingness to die in a shootout
(58:58):
rather than be arrested, about Allison's go bag, which indicates
a desire to flee the country, the severity of the
charges which could send them to prison for the rest
of their lives, and their own prior statements expressing a
willingness to murder or to have murdered people they suspect
our cooperating witnesses against other Terogram members like Brendan Russell.
(59:21):
These cooperating witnesses have been given permission by the government
to testify in a closed court room without being named.
In Brandon Russell's case. For Humber and Allison, there is
not currently a date set for their next appearance in court,
and with Humber and Allison in custody, the current version
of the Terogram collective is dead. But what does that mean?
(59:45):
This is only one head of a hydra. Just as
new leaders emerged after Slovak Borough was arrested in twenty
twenty two, just as Brandon Russell continued to communicate with
Humber after his arrest in twenty twenty three, a new
poster will rise to take their place. Hopefully, this case
signals a shift in the government's approach to throwing up
roadblocks in the paths of aspiring Nazi terrorists. Because a
(01:00:09):
dildo saleswoman from California and a failed DJ from Idaho
may spend the rest of their lives behind bars, but
it's only a matter of time before a new voice
starts whispering white terror into the ears of impressionable teenage
boys who're desperate to die in a way that will impress,
four Chan posters.
Speaker 1 (01:00:33):
Weird Little Guys is a production of cool zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Molly Conger
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