October 31, 2024 • 54 mins
In June of 2020, US Army Private Ethan Melzer was arrested for leaking information about his unit's deployment to Turkey with the intention of causing a mass casualty incident. The plot was hatched in a Telegram chat room for a group calling itself Rapewaffen, an Atomwaffen splinter cell that was committed to the beliefs of a neonazi satanic cult called the Order of Nine Angles. This episode follows the rise of satanism within Atomwaffen and the chaos that influence caused.
Sources:
https://unicornriot.ninja/2020/national-guard-soldier-who-deployed-to-dc-identified-as-neo-nazi/
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/neo-nazi-1378280
https://hopenothate.org.uk/2020/06/23/the-rapewaffen-telegram-channel/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Coozone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
On May twenty sixth, twenty twenty, a U. S. Army
private stationed in Italy celebrated his twenty second birthday. He
was blissfully unaware that the FBI had spent that day
confirming his identity as the Nazi Satanist who was trying
to get Al Qaeda to wipe out his entire unit.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Half a world away.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
That very same day, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt
on an unarmed man's neck for nine minutes. In twenty
nine seconds, the man cried out, saying.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
He couldn't breathe.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
He begged the officer not to kill him. He cried
out for his mother, and then he fell silent. The
murder of George Floyd was caught on camera by a
bystander in Protests against this act of police brutality started
within hours in the Minneapolis area. The video spread rapidly,
(01:05):
and so did the protests. In the months that followed,
protest marches, rallies, and memorials were held in thousands of cities,
reaching every state in the country and dozens of countries
around the world. Millions of Americans took to the streets
and public squares to protest police brutality, and in countless cities,
(01:25):
the police responded by demonstrating the very brutality that people
were protesting. Three days after the murder, then President Donald
Trump tweeted, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. By Monday,
June first, less than a week after George Floyd's murder,
the president was publicly threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act,
(01:47):
which would allow him to use the military to put
down civil disorder. Governors in more than thirty states activated
the National Guard to assist state and local police in
responding to the protests. Governors in twelve states deployed National
Guard troops to Washington, d C. At the request of
the Pentagon. On June second, a hundred members of the
(02:07):
Ohio National Guard received orders that they'd be heading to
the nation's capital that afternoon. The administrator of a small
telegram channel for fans of a fascist YouTuber posted, they
activated my unit and were getting real ammunition to shoot
and kill.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
He ended the message by.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Saying rahoa a portmanteau of the phrase racial holy war,
a Nazi rallying cry. He told his followers that they
may not hear from him again, but they might hear
about him in the news. Some urged him not to
do anything stupid, others egged him on, telling him he
(02:49):
should accelerate the collapse. They were thrilled at the possibility
that full scale civil conflict could be incited by shooting
into the crowd of protesters in Washington, d C. Maybe
the race war really was about to begin. Whether he
was just ship posting, or if he really was considering
kicking off the race war.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
We'll never know.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
If we're to take him at his word, always a
shaky proposition. He was deployed with his National Guard unit
at Lafayette Park just outside the White House when FBI
agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force showed up to
have a chat. Soon after, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced
that one of the National guardsmen he'd sent to DC
was being called back. On June fifth, twenty twenty, Governor
(03:35):
de Wine tweeted, I.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
Want to take a moment to address a situation regarding
a member of the Ohio National Guard who was removed
from the mission in Washington, d C. After the FBI
uncovered information that this guardsman expressed white supremacist ideology on
the Internet prior to the assignment.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
He didn't name the guardsman in question, and no explanation
was offered about what exactly had been said, where it
was said, or how the FBI came to see it.
Jared Holt at right Wing Watch uncovered the small telegram
channel where those comments had been made a few days later,
and journalists at the nonprofit media collective Unicorn Riot quickly
(04:19):
identified the man in question as Shandon Simpson, a former
member of the now defunct neo Nazi organization Vanguard America,
who had been photographed standing shoulder to shoulder with James
Alex Fields Junior at the United the Right rally in
Charlettsville in twenty seventeen, just hours before Fields committed a
hate crime murder. But that still didn't explain why the
(04:40):
governor of Ohio was making public statements about an FBI
investigation into this guardsman, especially considering no charges had been filed.
Simpson claims he was held in solitary confinement for a week,
but the Ohio National Guard has disputed that claim. He
was never charged with a crime and later received a
general discharge from the National Guard. It wasn't until a
(05:04):
federal criminal case against Ethan Melzer was unsealed two weeks
later that the pieces fell into place. They hadn't been
investigating Shandon Simpson at all. They just happened to come
across his posts about murdering protesters in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
While they were investigating.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Someone else's plot to murder an entire platoon of United
States Army paratroopers five thousand miles away. I'm Molly Conger
in this is weird, Little Guys. This episode is coming
(05:54):
out on Halloween. That didn't occur to me until halfway
through the week. I don't have a great sense of
even under the best of circumstances. But when I realized that,
I ditch what I was working on and tried to
come up with something halloweeny. I think that's something people
do right. I should have seasonal themed episodes. But what
(06:16):
does it mean to do a Halloween episode of a
show where every episode is about a monster? How can
you go spookier than we already are getting every week?
Speaker 4 (06:28):
But then I.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Realized what's scarier and Satan himself. This story has all
the classic weird little guy stuff. It's got neo Nazis,
it's got white supremacist troops. It's got hate groups splintering
off into new hate groups because of our cane interna scene,
ideological squabbles and power struggles and personal beefs. It's got
(06:52):
a foiled terror plot, and a court record full of
peerful letters from friends and family insisting that the young
man they know really isn't as bad as you think.
But this episode is a little different because the evil
guys were talking about aren't shying away from that label.
They want you to think they're evil. They're devil worshiping,
(07:17):
neo Nazis, hell bent on ending life as we know it.
This episode is not about Shandon Simpson. Don't worry, Shandon.
Today is not your day. When I met Shandon last year,
while I was covering a pro Russia rally masquerading as
an anti war protest at the Lincoln Memorial, he denied
(07:38):
ever having been a member of Adam Waffen or any
related groups. Now, personally, I don't think he was telling
me the truth, but it's not exactly easy to prove
someone was a member of a secret of organization, and
he's never been charged with anything, So I guess we'll
just have to agree to disagree, but it can be
(07:59):
said without dispute that Shandon Simpson was a member of
a telegram channel for a group called rape Waffen. Yes,
rape Waffen. I'm so sorry because that's what we're talking
about today. And just a quick note at the top,
this show doesn't have content warnings because it's always about
(08:22):
something bad. I don't want to get into the discourse
about content warnings. They certainly have their place, but this
show is never not going to be about violence, and
it would be redundant to mention it every time.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
But the particular.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Subsect of Nazi Satanists we're talking about today are really
really obsessed with sexual violence. I'm going to use the
word rape a lot, but there aren't any descriptions of
anyone actually being sexually assaulted. A few side characters do
commit some sexual assaults, and we're found to possess child
(09:01):
sexual abuse material, but we won't dwell on it in
any kind of detail. But here's your exit ramp if
you just aren't in the mood to hear me say
the word rape thirty or forty times. The fact that
Shandon Simpson was a member of the rape Waffen telegram
channel is again undisputed. He said it himself.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
For what it's worth.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Simpson has claimed that he was only a member of
the chat because he was documenting the malevolent influence of
Satanism on the fascist movement, which sounds incredibly stupid, but honestly,
that might be the truth. And I'm not just saying
that because he has threatened to sue me for merely
(09:48):
repeating what was published by the Washington Post, which is
that he was a member of rape Waffen. He takes
issue with the implication that he was an ideological adherent
of the group's satanic beliefs. He insists that being a
member of the channel, which he again doesn't deny, doesn't
mean he was a member of the group. I can
(10:10):
kind of see that that might be true, but that's
a distinction without a difference. To me, he was a
member of Rapewaffen the Telegram Channel, but he insists he
was not a member of rape Waffen.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
The group.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Do without what you will, and this allegation got new
life a few months ago when he was making a
scene outside the Democratic National Convention with a Hesbula flag.
Videos of him antagonizing people outside the venue got some
traction online and people recognized him as a Nazi we've
seen before, and that two year old Washington Post article
(10:45):
about him started circulating again.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
So stupid games, stupid brizes, etc.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Take it up with Jeff Bezos, I guess, and in
his defense, to the degree I'm interested in such a thing,
He did co author a document in twenty eighteen, two
years before he was outed as a member of the
Rape Waffen chat with another former member of Adam Waffen
outlining the ways in which they felt the movement was
being damaged by influential Adam Woffen member John Cameron Denton's
(11:16):
embrace of Satanism. So maybe he was just in there
collecting evidence. Who can really say. It's not like it
really clears his name to say, you know, hey, I
didn't have a huge issue with the Nazi stuff or
the murders, but this blood magic devil thing is taking
it in a bad direction.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
I know.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
I said, this episode is not about Shandon Simpson, and
it's not don't worry. But this ideological split within the
Nazi terrorism enthusiast community over whether or not Satanism was
cool is an important bit of context for where we're.
Speaker 4 (11:55):
Going, I promise.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Rapewaffen was one of the groups to crop up during
this period of conflict within Adam Woffen about the growing
influence within the group of the Order of Nine Angles,
a militant Satanist occult organization that insists it isn't a
Nazi group. It is hard to describe the Order of
Nine Angles ONA for short, in a way that makes
(12:22):
any sense, and that's intentional, I mean, quite literally, beyond
the usual sort of esoteric nature of occult groups. Writings
attributed to ONA invented a concept called Labyrinthos mythologicus. The
idea is that the writings are intentionally contradictory, bordering on
(12:44):
incomprehensible on purpose, and their true meaning is only legible
to those who are worthy of interpreting them. So if
you don't get it, that's because you aren't meant to.
Because of ona's decentralized, leaderless structure, all members are self
initiated to join the Order of Nine Angles, you have
(13:08):
to figure it out on your own. The texts are available,
but the true process, apparently is only revealed to you
in the course of performing the ritual of self initiation.
Part of the self initiation ritual involves walking into a
river and imagining the moon's energy flowing into you, which
(13:28):
sounds like a fine way to spend an evening. But
it's not all moonlight skinny dipping. There's a lot of
carving swastikas into your own arm with the razor blade
and then smearing your blood all over a magical race
war manifesto. I know, I know, these are Nazi wizards
and they're doing blood magic to conjure demons to end
(13:49):
the world. This is worse than the fact that the
clan calls their chapters claverns, and the secretary of a
clavern is called a cli wrap. It's so frustrating that
these scary murderers all sound like fucking dorks for all
the trappings of wizardry, though it might help to just
(14:10):
think of them like any other kind of accelerationists. We've
talked a lot about accelerationists in other episodes.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
They want to.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Destabilize society and force it into a collapse so that
something new can be born, just like any right wing
extremists taking shots at an electrical transformer. All this extra
stuff about how they believe that collapse paves the way
for the return of a messianic figure called Vindex, who
will usher in a new social order called the Imperium,
(14:38):
during which a new superior race of humans will evolve
and these new areans will colonize the galaxy. It's not important.
It absolutely does not impact your ability to follow this
story to know more about Nazi Jesus taking the Hitler
Wizards to space. Quite frankly, I refuse to find out
more information about the Galactic Imperium. It sounds too stupid.
(15:03):
In the end, I guess every cult ends up in space.
You dig deep enough into just about any cult they're
going to space, And like I said, it's.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Confusing on purpose.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
You could drive yourself to madness trying to parse out
what's a metaphor what's a joke, what's intentional obfuscation in
the spirit of the sinister dialectic, what someone actually believes
or what they're only pretending to believe. In one telegram
message from a rape Waffen member, the poster jokes that
if a federal agent is reading his private messages quote,
(15:42):
he has to read through hella esoteric conversation and probably
still doesn't even understand it and I'm not a federal agent,
but I did read through some of those chats, and
I gotta say he's right. It was hella esoteric, and
I didn't get all of it. And that's fine, because
in the end, all you can really judge them by
(16:03):
is their actions and their impact. Whether or not they
truly believe the demonic entity index is going to incarnate
in human form and bring about the imperium, it.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
Doesn't really matter.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
So for as much time as I spent reading every
available academic paper on the subject, which is surprisingly few, actually,
I'm not sure it's going to do much good for
me to explain more about the a causal realm. I'm
sorry to any of the cool wizards in the listening audience,
some of you are very nice people, but my general
(16:54):
feeling about the ways in which magic and religion exist
as driving forces in history is that it doesn't really
matter what's real. If someone sincerely believes that they are
practicing magic by engaging in ritual acts that in turn
have a real world impact, you know, like an act
of terrorism, What does it mean to say the magic
(17:17):
isn't real? Does it matter if a spirit was really
summoned to aid in this act if in the end
it still happened. And I say that not because I
think any of you are listening to this on your
drive to work and asking yourself, oh, are they really
communing with Satanic deities on another plane of existence? I
(17:41):
don't really think many of you are asking yourselves that,
but a lot of you might be asking yourself, do
they really believe they are doing that?
Speaker 1 (17:51):
And I think the answer is the same. Does it matter.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
If they're only pretending to believe it? But it's still
God the way they operate in this realm, you know,
the real world. What difference does it make if I
punched you in the face and then said, oh, I
was only pretending I wanted to hurt you. Does that
change the fact that your nose is bleeding? And as
(18:18):
for the claims in some owner writings that the group
is not inherently committed to neo Nazi or fascist ideologies.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
I'll give you the same answer.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Adherents have claimed that their fondness for Nazi ideology is
simply a manifestation of a core principle of left hand
path magic, that is, to be intentionally transgressive and provocative,
to engage in the most taboo possible behavior, and to
violate all conceivable social norms. These are things that make
(18:49):
your magic more potent. There are ono techs that explicitly
encourage the magical practitioner to adopt things like neo Nazi ideology,
not because they believe it, but because it is part
of this sinister strategy, and it will hasten the revolution
required to bring about the imperium. And you know, you
(19:12):
can tell me you don't actually believe the Nazi stuff
you're saying. But if you're saying Nazi stuff, and you're
doing Nazi stuff and your goal is for a demonic
messiah to wipe out the Jews, your group is a
Nazi group. If you think a supernatural entity is going
to return to cleanse the world of subhumans to clear
(19:34):
the path for a new aryan race, that's Nazi stuff,
no matter how you've tried to obscure that in your
weird little texts. There is, of course the obvious point
that the Order of Nine Angles was for decades led
by a British Nazi named David Mayat. Mayat is a
strange and mysterious figure for another day, but it's worth
(19:58):
pointing out that he was also a found member of
Combat eighteen, a UK based Nazi terrorist organization originally formed
to act as the violent arm of the British National Party.
Harold Covington, another Weird Little Guy's recurring character, was also
instrumental in forming Combat eighteen before he returned home to
the US to try to get an Ethno state going
(20:19):
in Idaho and one of Ona's more prolific authors under
the pen name AA Moraine, was an English Nazi named
Ryan Fleming. When he wasn't writing esoteric Nazi wizard books,
Fleming was a regional organizer for the UK based terrorist
organization National Action, and a pedophile in his spare time.
(20:42):
He was arrested again in twenty twenty one after violating
a court order that prohibited him from having unsupervised contact
with miners. The court order was put in place after
his conviction in twenty seventeen for sexually abusing a fourteen
year old girl he met on Facebook, and a conviction
in twenty fourteen for imprisoning and sexually abusing a teenage boy.
(21:05):
He served twenty two months for the first sex crime
against a child and three years for the second one.
When he was arrested for trying to do it a
third time. He got six months, which means he must
be out and about now. But I couldn't find any
more recent news coverage. In the course of researching for
this show, I read a lot of material that I
(21:27):
do not enjoy. But I did not force myself to
read this pedophile's wizard books. I just I didn't do it.
I didn't do it this week. I'm not sure what
it would have added. I'm kind of a completionist. I
thought about it, but I didn't. I mean, I'm sure
there are some really exciting passages in his book Sithane
(21:49):
Vampiric Witchcraft of the Dracon Covenant, and honestly this description
of Codex Aristarkus is a little temping.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
From the bloodstained moors of West Yorkshire, England comes a
genuinely a moral vampiric praxis, melding the black arts of
predatory astral vampirism with a harsh ordeal based approach of
the sinister sevenfold way. In Codex Aristarchus, AA Moran presents
the definitive collective works of the Dracon Covenant, including vampiric theory,
(22:27):
rights and methods by which the reader themselves can step
upon the black path of the vamporee, feeding upon the
human herd, and taking the treacherous road to confrontation with
the bleak, ascended masters the undead.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Okay, I did, I did?
Speaker 2 (22:46):
I downloaded a copy of it, so I do have
a copy of Codex Aristarchus. Maybe I'll let you know
next week if I found out if vampires were real.
My point is a lot of Nazi perverts are doing
magical rituals, and all of a sudden, these influential figures
within Adam Woffin are really encouraging it. So in twenty eighteen,
(23:11):
this move towards Satanism was a big point of contention
within the Accelerationist community. In twenty seventeen, Adam Woffin's founder,
Brandon Russell went to prison. He's back in prison now
for something else. This was a different thing. It's come
up a few times in other episodes. This was kind
of a big moment in modern Nazi history, I guess.
(23:33):
But Brandon Russell's roommate, Devin Arthur's had murdered their other
two roommates. Devin Arthur's conversion to Islam shortly before these
murders is often misunderstood as evidence that he was getting
out of Nazism, because why would a racist convert to Islam?
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Right?
Speaker 2 (23:51):
But I think this conversation about this strange syncretism is
better left for another day. I will, eventually, I promise,
do an episode about the Hitler loving d C transit
cop who went to prison for sending gift cards to Isis.
But suffice it to say for now, there is absolutely
(24:13):
no contradiction inherent in an American neo Nazi getting really
interested in the violent side of Islamic extremism, up to
and including converting to Islam. So after Devin Arthur's told
the police that he had murdered Jeremy Himmelman and Andrew Onishuk,
the cop searched the home that they'd all shared with
(24:34):
Brandon Russell. The police found the dead bodies of two
Adam Waffen members, obviously, but they also found Brandon Russell's
bomb making supplies, so he was down for the count
for a while, and in his absence, John Cameron Denton
was among those Adam Waffen members whose influence grew within
(24:56):
Adam Woffin. Denton used the pseudonym rape just rape. That's
what he was called. They called him rape, and based
on his Internet footprint, Denton had been involved with the
Order of Nine Angles for several years already, and within
Adam Woffin he quickly became a protege of James Mason,
(25:19):
the elderly pedophile who served as the ideological adviser for
Adam Woffin from its earliest days.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
James Mason is the.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Author of Siege, the terrorist's handbook that was Adam Woffin's
most important text, but he's also been to jail several
times for possessing pornographic photographs of underage girls, sexual exploitation
of a miner, and threatening his underage girlfriend with a gun.
His fondness for blowing up the power grid is rivaled
(25:46):
only by his love of fifteen year old girls. He
still regularly receives Nazi admirers at his home in Colorado,
and when Adam Woaffin was at its height, making the
trip out to see Mason was a pretty big deal,
and of course every member of Adam Woffin had to
read Siege, that sprawling collection of essays advocating for various
(26:09):
ways and aspiring young terrorist might kick off.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
The Race War.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Mason wrote Siege as a newsletter throughout the early to
mid eighties. The essays were collected and published in book
form in the early nineties, but it wasn't until twenty
years later that the book really exploded onto the scene.
I guess that's a bad choice of words given the
amount of bombs built by guys who read it. But
what I mean is it didn't become as popular as
(26:36):
it is now until it was reborn as a PDF
on the pages of the Iron March Forum in the
early twenty tens, and that's where Adam Woffin was born.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
In the years.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Since, Siege has been updated, revised, and republished several times
under the pseudonym Vincent Snyder. John Cameron Denton edited the
fourth edition of Siege, adding a new final chapter and
updating the artwork with the help of Canadian neo Nazi
and graphic designer Patrick Gordon McDonald. Before McDonald was identified
(27:12):
by Vice News in twenty twenty one, he was known
only as Dark Foreigner. Like Denton, McDonald has deep connections
to the Order of Nine Angles, and if you've ever
seen almost any propaganda from groups like Adam Waffen, the
Order of Nine Angle, Sonnen Kreig Division, the Bass or
(27:32):
any of these other little offshoots in that milieu. You
have almost certainly seen Dark Foreigner's artwork. He was prolific.
He set the tone, he set the style. I can't
imagine he's still making the artwork for these kinds of groups,
but the style remains, and his style greatly influenced the
(27:54):
online culture around Saint worship, which we talked about in
the Teogram episode. A lot of the images circulating on
telegram in the early days of forming this culture around
the canonization of mass murderers were images made by Patrick MacDonald.
McDonald was arrested in Canada last year for facilitating terrorist activity.
(28:18):
And it was during this time period that Adam Woffen
was splintering, spinning off a variety of related groups like
Sunnin Kreeg Division, feuer Krieg Division, the Northern Order for
Harshoft Division, and of course Rapewaffen, and a lot of
these groups, like Adam Woffin at the time, are deeply
steeped in the beliefs of the Order of Nine Angles,
(28:42):
and it was within this rape Waffen telegram chat that
we finally find the subject of this story US Army
private Ethan Pheelin Melzer.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
He was arrested three days.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
After his twenty second birthday and a few days before
he planned to die alongside fort day other soldiers in
an attack he hoped al Qaida would carry out based
on classified military information he'd provided. He was hoping it
would start a war. There is always going to be
(29:25):
disagreement about whether a group is or isn't a splinter
faction or a sub sect of some ideological predecessor. In
some cases, there's a question of whether a group even
really existed at all, or if it was just a
chat room for a particular click within another organization, or
(29:45):
if it was just a meme. There are probably not
more than a few dozen researchers out there who know
enough about this particular moment in time that, if they're
listening to this, are shaking their heads in dismay at
my characterization of some detail or another. But it's as
close as we're going to get short of a dissertation,
(30:05):
So good enough, because it's difficult now years later to
piece back together the scraps of archived materials from these
banned chat rooms to sort out what rape Waffen, ever,
really was the earliest remnants I can find of rape
Waffen date back to the summer of twenty nineteen, but
(30:28):
I really wouldn't be surprised if someone produced to me
evidence that it existed in private chats. For months prior
to that, the group's telegram channels were banned at various points,
forcing them to reinvent themselves over and over again, sometimes
forming new channels every couple of weeks. The channel's administrator
(30:49):
was explicit in stating that rape Waffen was a splinter
from Adam Woffen, and in every online space where rape
Waffen members were posting, their involvement in and support for
the Order of Nine Angles was terribly explicit in every
sense of the word. And so as Adam Woffin is
(31:09):
falling apart over this debate, rape Waffen is taking a
boldly pro Satanism stance and they claim to have nexxions,
which is the on a term for a cell in
the United States, Canada, Australia, Russia, Portugal and other unlisted countries.
(31:31):
In November of twenty nineteen, a channel that was just
called rape in all caps posted that rape Waffen was
once again open for recruiting. The same week that channel posted,
among other things, instructions for making meth, a message that
can't be viewed because it was found to violate the law,
(31:52):
and the statement quote we need to bring this world
to total chaos. If we want to change something, we
will do this through mass rape of infidels. In the chat,
members shared videos of women being raped, as well as
more standard accelerationist fair you know, gore videos, footage of
(32:13):
atrocities committed in Wars, mass shooting, live streams, isis, beheading videos, the.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Usual things like that.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
And if I haven't mentioned it yet in some other episode,
I would like to say, you don't need to try
to find these things. I can't stop you. I'm not
telling you what to do.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
I'm not your.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Boss or your mom, but I'm telling you you don't
have to.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
These chats.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
In particular, you probably wouldn't be able to find. They're
gone for the most part. But in general, I know
that curiosity can be a very powerful thing. But unless
this is a particular area of research for you in
a professional or academic capacit, there's really nothing to gain
from trying to see it for yourself.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
I promise you.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Having the ability to quickly scroll past a GIF of
a woman being shot in the head and having the involuntary,
instant reaction of categorizing that as the final moments of
a particular person's life from a particular video that I
wish i'd never seen, is not a skill I wanted.
(33:27):
Sometimes I have to close the chat and pull up
a picture of what that woman looked like when she
was alive, smiling, because she wasn't a GIF. She wasn't
just the moment of her death. She was a young
woman trying to make a life for herself. I'm not
trying to gatekeep Nazi gore videos or whatever. I just
(33:52):
want you to know you don't need to see them
if it helps it all. If this is something that
you need, you have my permission to not find out more.
There's no valor in making yourself sick. And these chat
rooms can be really disturbing places. So if hopefully you're
(34:15):
not familiar with the messaging app Telegram, there are both
chats and channels. That is, there are spaces on Telegram
where only the channel owner can post, and you can
subscribe to see their posts, and there are also chat
rooms where every member can post messages and have conversations
with one another. I don't know if I could possibly
(34:38):
have explained that in a way that sounded more elderly.
I do know how to use the Internet, I promise,
and the channel administrator for most of these official rape
Waffen channels with someone using the names Sinisterius or Sinistrous Rape.
The member chat, however, was run by a user called
(35:00):
Sinister Noctulian. Noctulian is a practitioner within this particular subset
of being a Nazi wizard. In all my research, through
court documents and publicly available research and reporting, the only
two people ever concretely identified as having been members of
(35:22):
rape Waffen chats and channels on Telegram were Ethan Melzer
and Shandon Simpson. So I can't tell you with any
certainty who Sinister Noctulian could be. It wasn't either of them.
It wasn't Ethan or Shandon. But I can tell you,
without implying anything in particular, that it is interesting to
(35:44):
me that Sinister Noctulian never posted in the chat again
after January tenth, twenty twenty, which, in a strange coincidence,
is the same day that Adam Waffen member John Kirby
Kelly was arrested by the FBI. Two days later, a
message from Sinister Noctulian was forwarded by another user into
(36:07):
the rape Waffen channel. Now the archive is so fragmented,
you know, collecting these broken links and old screenshots from
the internet's darkest corners, so it isn't one hundred percent
clear to me where the message was originally posted. It
may have been a private message that the recipient then
forwarded to a broader audience. But on January twelfth, twenty
(36:29):
twenty two days after John Kirby Kelly was arrested, the
user called sinister Noctulian sent a message to someone on
telegram and it said in jail loll snuck my cell in.
And the message was accompanied by a one second long
video showing the inside of a jail cell and the
(36:51):
camera sort of pans shakily and quickly over the legs
of the person holding the cell phone. They're lying on
the cot in the set well, and they appear to
be wearing the blue disposable scrubs that jails put on
prisoners when they transport them from one facility to another.
I think the idea is that the uniform belongs to
(37:12):
the jail, and so if you go to a different jail,
the first jail doesn't want to lose that uniform. The
point is, we don't know who Sinister Noctulian is, but
if anyone is familiar with what the segregation cells inside
the Alexandria City Jail look like. I did try to
find images online, but there aren't a lot of pictures
(37:35):
of the insides of jail cells. But he was arrested
in Alexandria, and the jail in Northern Virginia that has
the contract with the federal prison system to hold detainees
would probably be the Alexandria City Jail. So if you
know what the inside of those cells look like, let
me know.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
I'm just curious.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
And in this constant cycle of death and rebirth of
these chats, a new telegram channel was formed in March
of twenty twenty, and this time the channel administrator was
a user called iron Cult. The channel announced the following month,
in April, that sinistress Rape would be taking an indefinite hiatus. Again,
(38:15):
it's hard to say who sinistrous Rape might have been,
but I will just note in an unrelated fashion that
John Cameron Denton rape himself, was arrested in February of
twenty twenty, along with Adam Woffin members Johnny Garza, Cameron Shay, Taylor,
Parker de Pepe, and Caleb Cole, and the channel that
(38:36):
was formed after Denton's arrest didn't last long either. It
was abandoned within weeks after Adam Woffen member Timothy Wilson
was killed in a shootout with the FBI while they
were trying to arrest him while he was trying to
blow up a hospital in Missouri. And Wilson had only
come under investigation because his name came up after the
(38:57):
arrest of Jarrett Smith, soldier stationed in Kansas, who was
arrested in twenty nineteen for distributing information to other Adam
Waffen members about how to create weapons of mass destruction.
Jarrett Smith, too was a member of Adam Woffin and
a Satanist. A new Rapewaffen channel was formed a few
days after Timothy Wilson's death. One of the first posts
(39:22):
was a recipe for a bomb. There's no clear evidence
that was ever produced in any of these cases that
would let me tell you with certainty that any of
those adam Waffen members were also members of the rape
Waffen channels. But a lot of Rapewaffen posters disappeared suddenly
in the early months of twenty twenty, and the ones
(39:44):
remaining grew intensely paranoid about infiltration by informants and federal agents.
And you've probably guessed by now, since we're talking about it,
that paranoia did not protect them.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
And so it was.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
During this period of intense turnover within rape Waffen itself
that Ethan Melzer finds the group. Just four days after
the channel administrator had announced that Sinistrous Rape was on hiatus,
Melzer was exchanging private messages with the channel's new administrator. Now,
in the court documents, this user is only identified as
(40:22):
the channel administrator or co conspirator Ie. They don't list
the username, so I don't know if it was Ironed Cults. Again,
I'm trying to piece together a very fragmented record, so
they could be referring to a chat I don't see,
but he was chatting with a channel administrator and the
government never names this person, but they do indicate in
(40:43):
a footnote that based on their investigation, they believe that
this individual is a Canadian teenager posing as a former paratrooper.
And this is, believe it or not, not the only
time that a literal child in a foreign country has
(41:04):
tricked members of the United States military into becoming a
Nazi terrorist. Like, they need to have some kind of training,
specifically about how to not get fooled into joining an
online terror cell run by a kid.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
I mean, I guess if you could keep.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Them out of all terror cells, that really solves the
whole problem is probably a better goal. But oh my god,
it is really embarrassing for the whole world to know
that our troops are this gullible. I mean, just like
national security wise, that doesn't seem great for us. So
(41:42):
in April twenty first, twenty twenty, Ethan Melzer is finally
chatting with someone from rape Waffen and he's chatting with
this teenager that he thinks is an adult veteran, and
he asks if he can join rape Waffen. They don't
mention this in the court, but April twenty first is
(42:02):
the day after Hitler's birthday, which would have made this
the first day of the new year for adherence to
the Order of Nine Angles.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
See, they have.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
Their own calendar that starts on April twenty, eighteen eighty nine,
the day Hitler was born. So eighteen ninety is year one,
and it makes twenty twenty four the year one thirty five,
and they write it YF one three five.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
The YF used to stand for.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
Year of the Furor, which makes perfect sense if we're
talking about, you know, years since Hitler was born, but
sometimes in the early two thousands on a tech start
referring to it as year of Faean, which makes no sense.
One academic article I found claimed that no one actually
knows where that originated or what it derives from, but
(42:57):
within Ona the claim is that it means year of rejoicing.
I guess we've been rejoicing ever since Hitler was born,
like it's still a Hitler thing. And in the spirit
of honesty, I do have a confession to make. For years,
I have assumed that the Order of Nine Angles invented
(43:18):
this Hitler based dating system, right Like, surely no one
else is corny enough to invent a whole new Hitler
based calendar, So imagine my surprise, and quite frankly embarrassment
when I stumbled across a few months ago an old
letter written by Mattias Cole to William Luther Pearce in
(43:41):
nineteen sixty six. So it's on the original American Nazi
Party letterhead with their po box in Alexandria, and it
stated twenty two January y f seventy seven. So the
Wizards didn't invent the Hitler calendar. I guess Lincoln Rockwell did.
(44:02):
But I'm sorry I've gotten lost again. Sometimes I just
feel like all roads are taking me back to William
Luther Peers.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
It's just inescapable.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
So this Canadian child right tells Ethan Melzer that initiation
into the Order of Nine Angles is a prerequisite for
membership in rape Waffen, Like, we can't even continue talking
about you getting into rape Waffen until you become a wizard,
and Melzer assures him, oh, I've already done that. I've
already self initiated. No worries, And with that out of
(44:33):
the way, the teenager begins vetting the soldier for rape
Waffen membership.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
Are you ready to cause damage both mentally, physically and magically,
and be serious? I already have so yes, how do
you incorporate the sinister numanous way in your life? Always
working on some form of insight role, work in the
pathways when I have time building up to internal a debt.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
Internal adept here refers to the fourth of the seven
levels through which a member of the Order of Nine
Angles can progress. So you start as a neophyte, then
you're an initiate, an external adept, internal adept, Master, grand Master,
and eventually immortal. I don't know that anyone has ever
(45:24):
achieved immortal. Adherents have said that very few members actually
progress to those upper levels, and so if Melzer was
working up to internal adept in April of twenty twenty,
that means he was at the time an external adept.
To become an external adept, you have to engage in
(45:44):
a ritual where you lie down on the ground all
night without moving or falling asleep. And to be fair,
that's probably a lot harder than it sounds, but it
still sounds like child's play compared to the requirement to
advance again, because to become an internal adept, a practitioner
(46:05):
must withdraw from society completely for several months, living alone
in the wild with no contact with society or no
modern conveniences, and before you even attempt the necessary ritual
to advance to internal adept, an external adept should practice culling.
(46:27):
That is human sacrifice. Now, I don't want to be
entirely sensationalistic about this, right when we're talking about esoteric
occult texts, when you're talking about magic, not everything is literal.
A lot of practitioners will say that, well, culling is symbolic.
(46:50):
This human sacrifice can be metaphorical some ritualized performance during
a ceremony. But I've read more on than I would
have preferred, and generally it seems like they mean it.
Members should kill. In an essay called culling as art
(47:12):
Anton Long, the Ona grand Master most researchers believe is
actually just David Myyatt wrote, some humans by nature, by character,
are rotten, worthless, and when this rotten character is revealed
by their deeds, it is beneficial to remove them, to
(47:32):
cull them. It doesn't sound like that's a metaphor, and
Long or David Mayatt has written multiple treatises on culling,
advising that culling should target quote the sworn enemy, any
of whom are deemed acceptable targets. That doesn't sound like
(47:56):
a metaphor, and that's what was on Ethan Mel's mind
that day. As an external adept, he was actively working
towards a plan that would result in a mass casualty
incident in the short term, and if he was lucky,
thousands more deaths in the war he hoped would follow.
(48:18):
The question of whether or not Ethan Melzer had ever
tried to kill someone before is murky. A few days
before his arrest, the rape Waffen Channel administrator messaged him
and said, and I quote, yo, can you give me
some background, like some sinister deeds you've done?
Speaker 1 (48:40):
I can't break man.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
As a Melzer claimed that as a teenager, he'd been
working in the Louisville, Kentucky area as a street level
drug dealer for a gang called the Bounty Hunter Bloods.
In January of twenty seventeen, he arranged to meet with
someone to purchase the marijuana, and instead of paying for
the drugs, he ran and when the seller gave chase,
(49:04):
the men struggled and Melser shot him. Now, Melzer was
never arrested for drug dealing, let alone shooting a man,
so you might think he was making that up to
impress the other wizards. Maybe if you're from Louisville, you're saying, oh,
of course I know the bounty hunter bloods, But to
(49:26):
be honest, I didn't know they had bloods in Kentucky.
It sounds fully made up to me. Investigative journalist Ali
Winston wrote on a piece for Rolling Stone that a
record's request to the Louisville Metropolitan Police produced no responsive
record of an incident matching the details provided here. But
the shooting is laid out in some pretty clear detail
(49:49):
in the prosecution sentencing memorandum, and the defense doesn't dispute it.
In fact, they referred to it as well as something
that happened, and if the case had gone to trial,
the government was prepared to put on witnesses, including someone
who was prepared to testify that not only had Melzer
told him about the shooting immediately after it happened, he
(50:10):
actually knew the victim and was aware that the man's
humorous had been shattered by the bullet and he had
permanently lost the use of that arm. And a witness
who had been Melser's roommate at the time planned to
testify that he was aware of Melzer's drug dealing activities
during that time period, and he'd seen photographs of the
bullet wound. So I guess he really did shoot a
(50:34):
guy in twenty seventeen. But we are not talking about
Ethan Melzer because he was a drug dealer who shot
another drug dealer in a drug deal in Louisville in
twenty seventeen. We're talking about Ethan Melzer because in twenty
twenty he was charged with conspiracy to murder US nationals,
(50:55):
attempted murder of US nationals, conspiracy to murder US service members,
attempted murder of US service members, provision of material support
to terrorists, conspiracy to murder and maame in a foreign country,
conspiracy to injure property of a foreign government, and illegal
transmission of national defense information. So if you listen to
(51:18):
the episode a couple of weeks ago when we were
talking about how it's relatively uncommon for someone to be
charged for lying on their enlistment paperwork about being involved
with an extremist group, well, Ethan Melzer is someone I
was thinking about specifically when I said usually, by the
time it's obviously lied about this, the situation has gotten
(51:41):
a little more serious than lying on a form, so
it sounds like they could have hit him with that charge.
Speaker 1 (51:47):
Too, But at this point, why bother.
Speaker 2 (51:52):
And now that we are more than halfway through this story,
Now that you have a little context for where our
weird little guy ended up, which is federal prison. Now
that you know something about a silly sounding but frightening
Nazi Satanic cult and the messy situation within Adam Woffin
in the years between Brandon Russell's first trip to Federal
(52:13):
prison and his second trip to Federal prison and the
eventual collapse of Adam Woffin. Now I can start from
the beginning of Ethan Melzer's story, But unfortunately, because I
started so far from the beginning, I'll have to get
to the end next week. I know this feels like
(52:34):
a little bit of a bait and switch. I told
you this was going to be about Ethan Melzer trying
to get al Qaida to kill a bunch of soldiers
in service of his advancement in a neo Nazi Satanic.
Speaker 1 (52:42):
Cult, and we didn't even get to that.
Speaker 2 (52:45):
But words like Nazi and Satanic cult are such loaded
terms and ones that have been abused and exploited to
trigger a specific kind of fear response in you. So
I felt like I owed it to you to give
you this sort of convoluted history that led to him
(53:08):
being in that chat room, and to show you why
I'm using those words and why they are absolutely appropriate here.
So I hope you'll come back next week to see
how it all ended. We'd Little Guys is a production
(53:35):
of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and
recorded by me Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie
Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the
eternally patient and wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music
was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at
Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com, but I
(53:57):
probably won't answer it. You can exchange conspiracy theories about
the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Don't post anything that will make you one of my
Weird Little Guys
Coozone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
On May twenty sixth, twenty twenty, a U. S. Army
private stationed in Italy celebrated his twenty second birthday. He
was blissfully unaware that the FBI had spent that day
confirming his identity as the Nazi Satanist who was trying
to get Al Qaeda to wipe out his entire unit.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Half a world away.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
That very same day, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt
on an unarmed man's neck for nine minutes. In twenty
nine seconds, the man cried out, saying.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
He couldn't breathe.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
He begged the officer not to kill him. He cried
out for his mother, and then he fell silent. The
murder of George Floyd was caught on camera by a
bystander in Protests against this act of police brutality started
within hours in the Minneapolis area. The video spread rapidly,
(01:05):
and so did the protests. In the months that followed,
protest marches, rallies, and memorials were held in thousands of cities,
reaching every state in the country and dozens of countries
around the world. Millions of Americans took to the streets
and public squares to protest police brutality, and in countless cities,
(01:25):
the police responded by demonstrating the very brutality that people
were protesting. Three days after the murder, then President Donald
Trump tweeted, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. By Monday,
June first, less than a week after George Floyd's murder,
the president was publicly threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act,
(01:47):
which would allow him to use the military to put
down civil disorder. Governors in more than thirty states activated
the National Guard to assist state and local police in
responding to the protests. Governors in twelve states deployed National
Guard troops to Washington, d C. At the request of
the Pentagon. On June second, a hundred members of the
(02:07):
Ohio National Guard received orders that they'd be heading to
the nation's capital that afternoon. The administrator of a small
telegram channel for fans of a fascist YouTuber posted, they
activated my unit and were getting real ammunition to shoot
and kill.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
He ended the message by.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Saying rahoa a portmanteau of the phrase racial holy war,
a Nazi rallying cry. He told his followers that they
may not hear from him again, but they might hear
about him in the news. Some urged him not to
do anything stupid, others egged him on, telling him he
(02:49):
should accelerate the collapse. They were thrilled at the possibility
that full scale civil conflict could be incited by shooting
into the crowd of protesters in Washington, d C. Maybe
the race war really was about to begin. Whether he
was just ship posting, or if he really was considering
kicking off the race war.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
We'll never know.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
If we're to take him at his word, always a
shaky proposition. He was deployed with his National Guard unit
at Lafayette Park just outside the White House when FBI
agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force showed up to
have a chat. Soon after, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced
that one of the National guardsmen he'd sent to DC
was being called back. On June fifth, twenty twenty, Governor
(03:35):
de Wine tweeted, I.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
Want to take a moment to address a situation regarding
a member of the Ohio National Guard who was removed
from the mission in Washington, d C. After the FBI
uncovered information that this guardsman expressed white supremacist ideology on
the Internet prior to the assignment.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
He didn't name the guardsman in question, and no explanation
was offered about what exactly had been said, where it
was said, or how the FBI came to see it.
Jared Holt at right Wing Watch uncovered the small telegram
channel where those comments had been made a few days later,
and journalists at the nonprofit media collective Unicorn Riot quickly
(04:19):
identified the man in question as Shandon Simpson, a former
member of the now defunct neo Nazi organization Vanguard America,
who had been photographed standing shoulder to shoulder with James
Alex Fields Junior at the United the Right rally in
Charlettsville in twenty seventeen, just hours before Fields committed a
hate crime murder. But that still didn't explain why the
(04:40):
governor of Ohio was making public statements about an FBI
investigation into this guardsman, especially considering no charges had been filed.
Simpson claims he was held in solitary confinement for a week,
but the Ohio National Guard has disputed that claim. He
was never charged with a crime and later received a
general discharge from the National Guard. It wasn't until a
(05:04):
federal criminal case against Ethan Melzer was unsealed two weeks
later that the pieces fell into place. They hadn't been
investigating Shandon Simpson at all. They just happened to come
across his posts about murdering protesters in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
While they were investigating.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Someone else's plot to murder an entire platoon of United
States Army paratroopers five thousand miles away. I'm Molly Conger
in this is weird, Little Guys. This episode is coming
(05:54):
out on Halloween. That didn't occur to me until halfway
through the week. I don't have a great sense of
even under the best of circumstances. But when I realized that,
I ditch what I was working on and tried to
come up with something halloweeny. I think that's something people
do right. I should have seasonal themed episodes. But what
(06:16):
does it mean to do a Halloween episode of a
show where every episode is about a monster? How can
you go spookier than we already are getting every week?
Speaker 4 (06:28):
But then I.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Realized what's scarier and Satan himself. This story has all
the classic weird little guy stuff. It's got neo Nazis,
it's got white supremacist troops. It's got hate groups splintering
off into new hate groups because of our cane interna scene,
ideological squabbles and power struggles and personal beefs. It's got
(06:52):
a foiled terror plot, and a court record full of
peerful letters from friends and family insisting that the young
man they know really isn't as bad as you think.
But this episode is a little different because the evil
guys were talking about aren't shying away from that label.
They want you to think they're evil. They're devil worshiping,
(07:17):
neo Nazis, hell bent on ending life as we know it.
This episode is not about Shandon Simpson. Don't worry, Shandon.
Today is not your day. When I met Shandon last year,
while I was covering a pro Russia rally masquerading as
an anti war protest at the Lincoln Memorial, he denied
(07:38):
ever having been a member of Adam Waffen or any
related groups. Now, personally, I don't think he was telling
me the truth, but it's not exactly easy to prove
someone was a member of a secret of organization, and
he's never been charged with anything, So I guess we'll
just have to agree to disagree, but it can be
(07:59):
said without dispute that Shandon Simpson was a member of
a telegram channel for a group called rape Waffen. Yes,
rape Waffen. I'm so sorry because that's what we're talking
about today. And just a quick note at the top,
this show doesn't have content warnings because it's always about
(08:22):
something bad. I don't want to get into the discourse
about content warnings. They certainly have their place, but this
show is never not going to be about violence, and
it would be redundant to mention it every time.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
But the particular.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Subsect of Nazi Satanists we're talking about today are really
really obsessed with sexual violence. I'm going to use the
word rape a lot, but there aren't any descriptions of
anyone actually being sexually assaulted. A few side characters do
commit some sexual assaults, and we're found to possess child
(09:01):
sexual abuse material, but we won't dwell on it in
any kind of detail. But here's your exit ramp if
you just aren't in the mood to hear me say
the word rape thirty or forty times. The fact that
Shandon Simpson was a member of the rape Waffen telegram
channel is again undisputed. He said it himself.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
For what it's worth.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Simpson has claimed that he was only a member of
the chat because he was documenting the malevolent influence of
Satanism on the fascist movement, which sounds incredibly stupid, but honestly,
that might be the truth. And I'm not just saying
that because he has threatened to sue me for merely
(09:48):
repeating what was published by the Washington Post, which is
that he was a member of rape Waffen. He takes
issue with the implication that he was an ideological adherent
of the group's satanic beliefs. He insists that being a
member of the channel, which he again doesn't deny, doesn't
mean he was a member of the group. I can
(10:10):
kind of see that that might be true, but that's
a distinction without a difference. To me, he was a
member of Rapewaffen the Telegram Channel, but he insists he
was not a member of rape Waffen.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
The group.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Do without what you will, and this allegation got new
life a few months ago when he was making a
scene outside the Democratic National Convention with a Hesbula flag.
Videos of him antagonizing people outside the venue got some
traction online and people recognized him as a Nazi we've
seen before, and that two year old Washington Post article
(10:45):
about him started circulating again.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
So stupid games, stupid brizes, etc.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Take it up with Jeff Bezos, I guess, and in
his defense, to the degree I'm interested in such a thing,
He did co author a document in twenty eighteen, two
years before he was outed as a member of the
Rape Waffen chat with another former member of Adam Waffen
outlining the ways in which they felt the movement was
being damaged by influential Adam Woffen member John Cameron Denton's
(11:16):
embrace of Satanism. So maybe he was just in there
collecting evidence. Who can really say. It's not like it
really clears his name to say, you know, hey, I
didn't have a huge issue with the Nazi stuff or
the murders, but this blood magic devil thing is taking
it in a bad direction.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
I know.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
I said, this episode is not about Shandon Simpson, and
it's not don't worry. But this ideological split within the
Nazi terrorism enthusiast community over whether or not Satanism was
cool is an important bit of context for where we're.
Speaker 4 (11:55):
Going, I promise.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Rapewaffen was one of the groups to crop up during
this period of conflict within Adam Woffen about the growing
influence within the group of the Order of Nine Angles,
a militant Satanist occult organization that insists it isn't a
Nazi group. It is hard to describe the Order of
Nine Angles ONA for short, in a way that makes
(12:22):
any sense, and that's intentional, I mean, quite literally, beyond
the usual sort of esoteric nature of occult groups. Writings
attributed to ONA invented a concept called Labyrinthos mythologicus. The
idea is that the writings are intentionally contradictory, bordering on
(12:44):
incomprehensible on purpose, and their true meaning is only legible
to those who are worthy of interpreting them. So if
you don't get it, that's because you aren't meant to.
Because of ona's decentralized, leaderless structure, all members are self
initiated to join the Order of Nine Angles, you have
(13:08):
to figure it out on your own. The texts are available,
but the true process, apparently is only revealed to you
in the course of performing the ritual of self initiation.
Part of the self initiation ritual involves walking into a
river and imagining the moon's energy flowing into you, which
(13:28):
sounds like a fine way to spend an evening. But
it's not all moonlight skinny dipping. There's a lot of
carving swastikas into your own arm with the razor blade
and then smearing your blood all over a magical race
war manifesto. I know, I know, these are Nazi wizards
and they're doing blood magic to conjure demons to end
(13:49):
the world. This is worse than the fact that the
clan calls their chapters claverns, and the secretary of a
clavern is called a cli wrap. It's so frustrating that
these scary murderers all sound like fucking dorks for all
the trappings of wizardry, though it might help to just
(14:10):
think of them like any other kind of accelerationists. We've
talked a lot about accelerationists in other episodes.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
They want to.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Destabilize society and force it into a collapse so that
something new can be born, just like any right wing
extremists taking shots at an electrical transformer. All this extra
stuff about how they believe that collapse paves the way
for the return of a messianic figure called Vindex, who
will usher in a new social order called the Imperium,
(14:38):
during which a new superior race of humans will evolve
and these new areans will colonize the galaxy. It's not important.
It absolutely does not impact your ability to follow this
story to know more about Nazi Jesus taking the Hitler
Wizards to space. Quite frankly, I refuse to find out
more information about the Galactic Imperium. It sounds too stupid.
(15:03):
In the end, I guess every cult ends up in space.
You dig deep enough into just about any cult they're
going to space, And like I said, it's.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Confusing on purpose.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
You could drive yourself to madness trying to parse out
what's a metaphor what's a joke, what's intentional obfuscation in
the spirit of the sinister dialectic, what someone actually believes
or what they're only pretending to believe. In one telegram
message from a rape Waffen member, the poster jokes that
if a federal agent is reading his private messages quote,
(15:42):
he has to read through hella esoteric conversation and probably
still doesn't even understand it and I'm not a federal agent,
but I did read through some of those chats, and
I gotta say he's right. It was hella esoteric, and
I didn't get all of it. And that's fine, because
in the end, all you can really judge them by
(16:03):
is their actions and their impact. Whether or not they
truly believe the demonic entity index is going to incarnate
in human form and bring about the imperium, it.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
Doesn't really matter.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
So for as much time as I spent reading every
available academic paper on the subject, which is surprisingly few, actually,
I'm not sure it's going to do much good for
me to explain more about the a causal realm. I'm
sorry to any of the cool wizards in the listening audience,
some of you are very nice people, but my general
(16:54):
feeling about the ways in which magic and religion exist
as driving forces in history is that it doesn't really
matter what's real. If someone sincerely believes that they are
practicing magic by engaging in ritual acts that in turn
have a real world impact, you know, like an act
of terrorism, What does it mean to say the magic
(17:17):
isn't real? Does it matter if a spirit was really
summoned to aid in this act if in the end
it still happened. And I say that not because I
think any of you are listening to this on your
drive to work and asking yourself, oh, are they really
communing with Satanic deities on another plane of existence? I
(17:41):
don't really think many of you are asking yourselves that,
but a lot of you might be asking yourself, do
they really believe they are doing that?
Speaker 1 (17:51):
And I think the answer is the same. Does it matter.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
If they're only pretending to believe it? But it's still
God the way they operate in this realm, you know,
the real world. What difference does it make if I
punched you in the face and then said, oh, I
was only pretending I wanted to hurt you. Does that
change the fact that your nose is bleeding? And as
(18:18):
for the claims in some owner writings that the group
is not inherently committed to neo Nazi or fascist ideologies.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
I'll give you the same answer.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Adherents have claimed that their fondness for Nazi ideology is
simply a manifestation of a core principle of left hand
path magic, that is, to be intentionally transgressive and provocative,
to engage in the most taboo possible behavior, and to
violate all conceivable social norms. These are things that make
(18:49):
your magic more potent. There are ono techs that explicitly
encourage the magical practitioner to adopt things like neo Nazi ideology,
not because they believe it, but because it is part
of this sinister strategy, and it will hasten the revolution
required to bring about the imperium. And you know, you
(19:12):
can tell me you don't actually believe the Nazi stuff
you're saying. But if you're saying Nazi stuff, and you're
doing Nazi stuff and your goal is for a demonic
messiah to wipe out the Jews, your group is a
Nazi group. If you think a supernatural entity is going
to return to cleanse the world of subhumans to clear
(19:34):
the path for a new aryan race, that's Nazi stuff,
no matter how you've tried to obscure that in your
weird little texts. There is, of course the obvious point
that the Order of Nine Angles was for decades led
by a British Nazi named David Mayat. Mayat is a
strange and mysterious figure for another day, but it's worth
(19:58):
pointing out that he was also a found member of
Combat eighteen, a UK based Nazi terrorist organization originally formed
to act as the violent arm of the British National Party.
Harold Covington, another Weird Little Guy's recurring character, was also
instrumental in forming Combat eighteen before he returned home to
the US to try to get an Ethno state going
(20:19):
in Idaho and one of Ona's more prolific authors under
the pen name AA Moraine, was an English Nazi named
Ryan Fleming. When he wasn't writing esoteric Nazi wizard books,
Fleming was a regional organizer for the UK based terrorist
organization National Action, and a pedophile in his spare time.
(20:42):
He was arrested again in twenty twenty one after violating
a court order that prohibited him from having unsupervised contact
with miners. The court order was put in place after
his conviction in twenty seventeen for sexually abusing a fourteen
year old girl he met on Facebook, and a conviction
in twenty fourteen for imprisoning and sexually abusing a teenage boy.
(21:05):
He served twenty two months for the first sex crime
against a child and three years for the second one.
When he was arrested for trying to do it a
third time. He got six months, which means he must
be out and about now. But I couldn't find any
more recent news coverage. In the course of researching for
this show, I read a lot of material that I
(21:27):
do not enjoy. But I did not force myself to
read this pedophile's wizard books. I just I didn't do it.
I didn't do it this week. I'm not sure what
it would have added. I'm kind of a completionist. I
thought about it, but I didn't. I mean, I'm sure
there are some really exciting passages in his book Sithane
(21:49):
Vampiric Witchcraft of the Dracon Covenant, and honestly this description
of Codex Aristarkus is a little temping.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
From the bloodstained moors of West Yorkshire, England comes a
genuinely a moral vampiric praxis, melding the black arts of
predatory astral vampirism with a harsh ordeal based approach of
the sinister sevenfold way. In Codex Aristarchus, AA Moran presents
the definitive collective works of the Dracon Covenant, including vampiric theory,
(22:27):
rights and methods by which the reader themselves can step
upon the black path of the vamporee, feeding upon the
human herd, and taking the treacherous road to confrontation with
the bleak, ascended masters the undead.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Okay, I did, I did?
Speaker 2 (22:46):
I downloaded a copy of it, so I do have
a copy of Codex Aristarchus. Maybe I'll let you know
next week if I found out if vampires were real.
My point is a lot of Nazi perverts are doing
magical rituals, and all of a sudden, these influential figures
within Adam Woffin are really encouraging it. So in twenty eighteen,
(23:11):
this move towards Satanism was a big point of contention
within the Accelerationist community. In twenty seventeen, Adam Woffin's founder,
Brandon Russell went to prison. He's back in prison now
for something else. This was a different thing. It's come
up a few times in other episodes. This was kind
of a big moment in modern Nazi history, I guess.
(23:33):
But Brandon Russell's roommate, Devin Arthur's had murdered their other
two roommates. Devin Arthur's conversion to Islam shortly before these
murders is often misunderstood as evidence that he was getting
out of Nazism, because why would a racist convert to Islam?
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Right?
Speaker 2 (23:51):
But I think this conversation about this strange syncretism is
better left for another day. I will, eventually, I promise,
do an episode about the Hitler loving d C transit
cop who went to prison for sending gift cards to Isis.
But suffice it to say for now, there is absolutely
(24:13):
no contradiction inherent in an American neo Nazi getting really
interested in the violent side of Islamic extremism, up to
and including converting to Islam. So after Devin Arthur's told
the police that he had murdered Jeremy Himmelman and Andrew Onishuk,
the cop searched the home that they'd all shared with
(24:34):
Brandon Russell. The police found the dead bodies of two
Adam Waffen members, obviously, but they also found Brandon Russell's
bomb making supplies, so he was down for the count
for a while, and in his absence, John Cameron Denton
was among those Adam Waffen members whose influence grew within
(24:56):
Adam Woffin. Denton used the pseudonym rape just rape. That's
what he was called. They called him rape, and based
on his Internet footprint, Denton had been involved with the
Order of Nine Angles for several years already, and within
Adam Woffin he quickly became a protege of James Mason,
(25:19):
the elderly pedophile who served as the ideological adviser for
Adam Woffin from its earliest days.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
James Mason is the.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Author of Siege, the terrorist's handbook that was Adam Woffin's
most important text, but he's also been to jail several
times for possessing pornographic photographs of underage girls, sexual exploitation
of a miner, and threatening his underage girlfriend with a gun.
His fondness for blowing up the power grid is rivaled
(25:46):
only by his love of fifteen year old girls. He
still regularly receives Nazi admirers at his home in Colorado,
and when Adam Woaffin was at its height, making the
trip out to see Mason was a pretty big deal,
and of course every member of Adam Woffin had to
read Siege, that sprawling collection of essays advocating for various
(26:09):
ways and aspiring young terrorist might kick off.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
The Race War.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Mason wrote Siege as a newsletter throughout the early to
mid eighties. The essays were collected and published in book
form in the early nineties, but it wasn't until twenty
years later that the book really exploded onto the scene.
I guess that's a bad choice of words given the
amount of bombs built by guys who read it. But
what I mean is it didn't become as popular as
(26:36):
it is now until it was reborn as a PDF
on the pages of the Iron March Forum in the
early twenty tens, and that's where Adam Woffin was born.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
In the years.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Since, Siege has been updated, revised, and republished several times
under the pseudonym Vincent Snyder. John Cameron Denton edited the
fourth edition of Siege, adding a new final chapter and
updating the artwork with the help of Canadian neo Nazi
and graphic designer Patrick Gordon McDonald. Before McDonald was identified
(27:12):
by Vice News in twenty twenty one, he was known
only as Dark Foreigner. Like Denton, McDonald has deep connections
to the Order of Nine Angles, and if you've ever
seen almost any propaganda from groups like Adam Waffen, the
Order of Nine Angle, Sonnen Kreig Division, the Bass or
(27:32):
any of these other little offshoots in that milieu. You
have almost certainly seen Dark Foreigner's artwork. He was prolific.
He set the tone, he set the style. I can't
imagine he's still making the artwork for these kinds of groups,
but the style remains, and his style greatly influenced the
(27:54):
online culture around Saint worship, which we talked about in
the Teogram episode. A lot of the images circulating on
telegram in the early days of forming this culture around
the canonization of mass murderers were images made by Patrick MacDonald.
McDonald was arrested in Canada last year for facilitating terrorist activity.
(28:18):
And it was during this time period that Adam Woffen
was splintering, spinning off a variety of related groups like
Sunnin Kreeg Division, feuer Krieg Division, the Northern Order for
Harshoft Division, and of course Rapewaffen, and a lot of
these groups, like Adam Woffin at the time, are deeply
steeped in the beliefs of the Order of Nine Angles,
(28:42):
and it was within this rape Waffen telegram chat that
we finally find the subject of this story US Army
private Ethan Pheelin Melzer.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
He was arrested three days.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
After his twenty second birthday and a few days before
he planned to die alongside fort day other soldiers in
an attack he hoped al Qaida would carry out based
on classified military information he'd provided. He was hoping it
would start a war. There is always going to be
(29:25):
disagreement about whether a group is or isn't a splinter
faction or a sub sect of some ideological predecessor. In
some cases, there's a question of whether a group even
really existed at all, or if it was just a
chat room for a particular click within another organization, or
(29:45):
if it was just a meme. There are probably not
more than a few dozen researchers out there who know
enough about this particular moment in time that, if they're
listening to this, are shaking their heads in dismay at
my characterization of some detail or another. But it's as
close as we're going to get short of a dissertation,
(30:05):
So good enough, because it's difficult now years later to
piece back together the scraps of archived materials from these
banned chat rooms to sort out what rape Waffen, ever,
really was the earliest remnants I can find of rape
Waffen date back to the summer of twenty nineteen, but
(30:28):
I really wouldn't be surprised if someone produced to me
evidence that it existed in private chats. For months prior
to that, the group's telegram channels were banned at various points,
forcing them to reinvent themselves over and over again, sometimes
forming new channels every couple of weeks. The channel's administrator
(30:49):
was explicit in stating that rape Waffen was a splinter
from Adam Woffen, and in every online space where rape
Waffen members were posting, their involvement in and support for
the Order of Nine Angles was terribly explicit in every
sense of the word. And so as Adam Woffin is
(31:09):
falling apart over this debate, rape Waffen is taking a
boldly pro Satanism stance and they claim to have nexxions,
which is the on a term for a cell in
the United States, Canada, Australia, Russia, Portugal and other unlisted countries.
(31:31):
In November of twenty nineteen, a channel that was just
called rape in all caps posted that rape Waffen was
once again open for recruiting. The same week that channel posted,
among other things, instructions for making meth, a message that
can't be viewed because it was found to violate the law,
(31:52):
and the statement quote we need to bring this world
to total chaos. If we want to change something, we
will do this through mass rape of infidels. In the chat,
members shared videos of women being raped, as well as
more standard accelerationist fair you know, gore videos, footage of
(32:13):
atrocities committed in Wars, mass shooting, live streams, isis, beheading videos, the.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Usual things like that.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
And if I haven't mentioned it yet in some other episode,
I would like to say, you don't need to try
to find these things. I can't stop you. I'm not
telling you what to do.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
I'm not your.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Boss or your mom, but I'm telling you you don't
have to.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
These chats.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
In particular, you probably wouldn't be able to find. They're
gone for the most part. But in general, I know
that curiosity can be a very powerful thing. But unless
this is a particular area of research for you in
a professional or academic capacit, there's really nothing to gain
from trying to see it for yourself.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
I promise you.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Having the ability to quickly scroll past a GIF of
a woman being shot in the head and having the involuntary,
instant reaction of categorizing that as the final moments of
a particular person's life from a particular video that I
wish i'd never seen, is not a skill I wanted.
(33:27):
Sometimes I have to close the chat and pull up
a picture of what that woman looked like when she
was alive, smiling, because she wasn't a GIF. She wasn't
just the moment of her death. She was a young
woman trying to make a life for herself. I'm not
trying to gatekeep Nazi gore videos or whatever. I just
(33:52):
want you to know you don't need to see them
if it helps it all. If this is something that
you need, you have my permission to not find out more.
There's no valor in making yourself sick. And these chat
rooms can be really disturbing places. So if hopefully you're
(34:15):
not familiar with the messaging app Telegram, there are both
chats and channels. That is, there are spaces on Telegram
where only the channel owner can post, and you can
subscribe to see their posts, and there are also chat
rooms where every member can post messages and have conversations
with one another. I don't know if I could possibly
(34:38):
have explained that in a way that sounded more elderly.
I do know how to use the Internet, I promise,
and the channel administrator for most of these official rape
Waffen channels with someone using the names Sinisterius or Sinistrous Rape.
The member chat, however, was run by a user called
(35:00):
Sinister Noctulian. Noctulian is a practitioner within this particular subset
of being a Nazi wizard. In all my research, through
court documents and publicly available research and reporting, the only
two people ever concretely identified as having been members of
(35:22):
rape Waffen chats and channels on Telegram were Ethan Melzer
and Shandon Simpson. So I can't tell you with any
certainty who Sinister Noctulian could be. It wasn't either of them.
It wasn't Ethan or Shandon. But I can tell you,
without implying anything in particular, that it is interesting to
(35:44):
me that Sinister Noctulian never posted in the chat again
after January tenth, twenty twenty, which, in a strange coincidence,
is the same day that Adam Waffen member John Kirby
Kelly was arrested by the FBI. Two days later, a
message from Sinister Noctulian was forwarded by another user into
(36:07):
the rape Waffen channel. Now the archive is so fragmented,
you know, collecting these broken links and old screenshots from
the internet's darkest corners, so it isn't one hundred percent
clear to me where the message was originally posted. It
may have been a private message that the recipient then
forwarded to a broader audience. But on January twelfth, twenty
(36:29):
twenty two days after John Kirby Kelly was arrested, the
user called sinister Noctulian sent a message to someone on
telegram and it said in jail loll snuck my cell in.
And the message was accompanied by a one second long
video showing the inside of a jail cell and the
(36:51):
camera sort of pans shakily and quickly over the legs
of the person holding the cell phone. They're lying on
the cot in the set well, and they appear to
be wearing the blue disposable scrubs that jails put on
prisoners when they transport them from one facility to another.
I think the idea is that the uniform belongs to
(37:12):
the jail, and so if you go to a different jail,
the first jail doesn't want to lose that uniform. The
point is, we don't know who Sinister Noctulian is, but
if anyone is familiar with what the segregation cells inside
the Alexandria City Jail look like. I did try to
find images online, but there aren't a lot of pictures
(37:35):
of the insides of jail cells. But he was arrested
in Alexandria, and the jail in Northern Virginia that has
the contract with the federal prison system to hold detainees
would probably be the Alexandria City Jail. So if you
know what the inside of those cells look like, let
me know.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
I'm just curious.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
And in this constant cycle of death and rebirth of
these chats, a new telegram channel was formed in March
of twenty twenty, and this time the channel administrator was
a user called iron Cult. The channel announced the following month,
in April, that sinistress Rape would be taking an indefinite hiatus. Again,
(38:15):
it's hard to say who sinistrous Rape might have been,
but I will just note in an unrelated fashion that
John Cameron Denton rape himself, was arrested in February of
twenty twenty, along with Adam Woffin members Johnny Garza, Cameron Shay, Taylor,
Parker de Pepe, and Caleb Cole, and the channel that
(38:36):
was formed after Denton's arrest didn't last long either. It
was abandoned within weeks after Adam Woffen member Timothy Wilson
was killed in a shootout with the FBI while they
were trying to arrest him while he was trying to
blow up a hospital in Missouri. And Wilson had only
come under investigation because his name came up after the
(38:57):
arrest of Jarrett Smith, soldier stationed in Kansas, who was
arrested in twenty nineteen for distributing information to other Adam
Waffen members about how to create weapons of mass destruction.
Jarrett Smith, too was a member of Adam Woffin and
a Satanist. A new Rapewaffen channel was formed a few
days after Timothy Wilson's death. One of the first posts
(39:22):
was a recipe for a bomb. There's no clear evidence
that was ever produced in any of these cases that
would let me tell you with certainty that any of
those adam Waffen members were also members of the rape
Waffen channels. But a lot of Rapewaffen posters disappeared suddenly
in the early months of twenty twenty, and the ones
(39:44):
remaining grew intensely paranoid about infiltration by informants and federal agents.
And you've probably guessed by now, since we're talking about it,
that paranoia did not protect them.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
And so it was.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
During this period of intense turnover within rape Waffen itself
that Ethan Melzer finds the group. Just four days after
the channel administrator had announced that Sinistrous Rape was on hiatus,
Melzer was exchanging private messages with the channel's new administrator. Now,
in the court documents, this user is only identified as
(40:22):
the channel administrator or co conspirator Ie. They don't list
the username, so I don't know if it was Ironed Cults. Again,
I'm trying to piece together a very fragmented record, so
they could be referring to a chat I don't see,
but he was chatting with a channel administrator and the
government never names this person, but they do indicate in
(40:43):
a footnote that based on their investigation, they believe that
this individual is a Canadian teenager posing as a former paratrooper.
And this is, believe it or not, not the only
time that a literal child in a foreign country has
(41:04):
tricked members of the United States military into becoming a
Nazi terrorist. Like, they need to have some kind of training,
specifically about how to not get fooled into joining an
online terror cell run by a kid.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
I mean, I guess if you could keep.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Them out of all terror cells, that really solves the
whole problem is probably a better goal. But oh my god,
it is really embarrassing for the whole world to know
that our troops are this gullible. I mean, just like
national security wise, that doesn't seem great for us. So
(41:42):
in April twenty first, twenty twenty, Ethan Melzer is finally
chatting with someone from rape Waffen and he's chatting with
this teenager that he thinks is an adult veteran, and
he asks if he can join rape Waffen. They don't
mention this in the court, but April twenty first is
(42:02):
the day after Hitler's birthday, which would have made this
the first day of the new year for adherence to
the Order of Nine Angles.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
See, they have.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
Their own calendar that starts on April twenty, eighteen eighty nine,
the day Hitler was born. So eighteen ninety is year one,
and it makes twenty twenty four the year one thirty five,
and they write it YF one three five.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
The YF used to stand for.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
Year of the Furor, which makes perfect sense if we're
talking about, you know, years since Hitler was born, but
sometimes in the early two thousands on a tech start
referring to it as year of Faean, which makes no sense.
One academic article I found claimed that no one actually
knows where that originated or what it derives from, but
(42:57):
within Ona the claim is that it means year of rejoicing.
I guess we've been rejoicing ever since Hitler was born,
like it's still a Hitler thing. And in the spirit
of honesty, I do have a confession to make. For years,
I have assumed that the Order of Nine Angles invented
(43:18):
this Hitler based dating system, right Like, surely no one
else is corny enough to invent a whole new Hitler
based calendar, So imagine my surprise, and quite frankly embarrassment
when I stumbled across a few months ago an old
letter written by Mattias Cole to William Luther Pearce in
(43:41):
nineteen sixty six. So it's on the original American Nazi
Party letterhead with their po box in Alexandria, and it
stated twenty two January y f seventy seven. So the
Wizards didn't invent the Hitler calendar. I guess Lincoln Rockwell did.
(44:02):
But I'm sorry I've gotten lost again. Sometimes I just
feel like all roads are taking me back to William
Luther Peers.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
It's just inescapable.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
So this Canadian child right tells Ethan Melzer that initiation
into the Order of Nine Angles is a prerequisite for
membership in rape Waffen, Like, we can't even continue talking
about you getting into rape Waffen until you become a wizard,
and Melzer assures him, oh, I've already done that. I've
already self initiated. No worries, And with that out of
(44:33):
the way, the teenager begins vetting the soldier for rape
Waffen membership.
Speaker 3 (44:40):
Are you ready to cause damage both mentally, physically and magically,
and be serious? I already have so yes, how do
you incorporate the sinister numanous way in your life? Always
working on some form of insight role, work in the
pathways when I have time building up to internal a debt.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
Internal adept here refers to the fourth of the seven
levels through which a member of the Order of Nine
Angles can progress. So you start as a neophyte, then
you're an initiate, an external adept, internal adept, Master, grand Master,
and eventually immortal. I don't know that anyone has ever
(45:24):
achieved immortal. Adherents have said that very few members actually
progress to those upper levels, and so if Melzer was
working up to internal adept in April of twenty twenty,
that means he was at the time an external adept.
To become an external adept, you have to engage in
(45:44):
a ritual where you lie down on the ground all
night without moving or falling asleep. And to be fair,
that's probably a lot harder than it sounds, but it
still sounds like child's play compared to the requirement to
advance again, because to become an internal adept, a practitioner
(46:05):
must withdraw from society completely for several months, living alone
in the wild with no contact with society or no
modern conveniences, and before you even attempt the necessary ritual
to advance to internal adept, an external adept should practice culling.
(46:27):
That is human sacrifice. Now, I don't want to be
entirely sensationalistic about this, right when we're talking about esoteric
occult texts, when you're talking about magic, not everything is literal.
A lot of practitioners will say that, well, culling is symbolic.
(46:50):
This human sacrifice can be metaphorical some ritualized performance during
a ceremony. But I've read more on than I would
have preferred, and generally it seems like they mean it.
Members should kill. In an essay called culling as art
(47:12):
Anton Long, the Ona grand Master most researchers believe is
actually just David Myyatt wrote, some humans by nature, by character,
are rotten, worthless, and when this rotten character is revealed
by their deeds, it is beneficial to remove them, to
(47:32):
cull them. It doesn't sound like that's a metaphor, and
Long or David Mayatt has written multiple treatises on culling,
advising that culling should target quote the sworn enemy, any
of whom are deemed acceptable targets. That doesn't sound like
(47:56):
a metaphor, and that's what was on Ethan Mel's mind
that day. As an external adept, he was actively working
towards a plan that would result in a mass casualty
incident in the short term, and if he was lucky,
thousands more deaths in the war he hoped would follow.
(48:18):
The question of whether or not Ethan Melzer had ever
tried to kill someone before is murky. A few days
before his arrest, the rape Waffen Channel administrator messaged him
and said, and I quote, yo, can you give me
some background, like some sinister deeds you've done?
Speaker 1 (48:40):
I can't break man.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
As a Melzer claimed that as a teenager, he'd been
working in the Louisville, Kentucky area as a street level
drug dealer for a gang called the Bounty Hunter Bloods.
In January of twenty seventeen, he arranged to meet with
someone to purchase the marijuana, and instead of paying for
the drugs, he ran and when the seller gave chase,
(49:04):
the men struggled and Melser shot him. Now, Melzer was
never arrested for drug dealing, let alone shooting a man,
so you might think he was making that up to
impress the other wizards. Maybe if you're from Louisville, you're saying, oh,
of course I know the bounty hunter bloods, But to
(49:26):
be honest, I didn't know they had bloods in Kentucky.
It sounds fully made up to me. Investigative journalist Ali
Winston wrote on a piece for Rolling Stone that a
record's request to the Louisville Metropolitan Police produced no responsive
record of an incident matching the details provided here. But
the shooting is laid out in some pretty clear detail
(49:49):
in the prosecution sentencing memorandum, and the defense doesn't dispute it.
In fact, they referred to it as well as something
that happened, and if the case had gone to trial,
the government was prepared to put on witnesses, including someone
who was prepared to testify that not only had Melzer
told him about the shooting immediately after it happened, he
(50:10):
actually knew the victim and was aware that the man's
humorous had been shattered by the bullet and he had
permanently lost the use of that arm. And a witness
who had been Melser's roommate at the time planned to
testify that he was aware of Melzer's drug dealing activities
during that time period, and he'd seen photographs of the
bullet wound. So I guess he really did shoot a
(50:34):
guy in twenty seventeen. But we are not talking about
Ethan Melzer because he was a drug dealer who shot
another drug dealer in a drug deal in Louisville in
twenty seventeen. We're talking about Ethan Melzer because in twenty
twenty he was charged with conspiracy to murder US nationals,
(50:55):
attempted murder of US nationals, conspiracy to murder US service members,
attempted murder of US service members, provision of material support
to terrorists, conspiracy to murder and maame in a foreign country,
conspiracy to injure property of a foreign government, and illegal
transmission of national defense information. So if you listen to
(51:18):
the episode a couple of weeks ago when we were
talking about how it's relatively uncommon for someone to be
charged for lying on their enlistment paperwork about being involved
with an extremist group, well, Ethan Melzer is someone I
was thinking about specifically when I said usually, by the
time it's obviously lied about this, the situation has gotten
(51:41):
a little more serious than lying on a form, so
it sounds like they could have hit him with that charge.
Speaker 1 (51:47):
Too, But at this point, why bother.
Speaker 2 (51:52):
And now that we are more than halfway through this story,
Now that you have a little context for where our
weird little guy ended up, which is federal prison. Now
that you know something about a silly sounding but frightening
Nazi Satanic cult and the messy situation within Adam Woffin
in the years between Brandon Russell's first trip to Federal
(52:13):
prison and his second trip to Federal prison and the
eventual collapse of Adam Woffin. Now I can start from
the beginning of Ethan Melzer's story, But unfortunately, because I
started so far from the beginning, I'll have to get
to the end next week. I know this feels like
(52:34):
a little bit of a bait and switch. I told
you this was going to be about Ethan Melzer trying
to get al Qaida to kill a bunch of soldiers
in service of his advancement in a neo Nazi Satanic.
Speaker 1 (52:42):
Cult, and we didn't even get to that.
Speaker 2 (52:45):
But words like Nazi and Satanic cult are such loaded
terms and ones that have been abused and exploited to
trigger a specific kind of fear response in you. So
I felt like I owed it to you to give
you this sort of convoluted history that led to him
(53:08):
being in that chat room, and to show you why
I'm using those words and why they are absolutely appropriate here.
So I hope you'll come back next week to see
how it all ended. We'd Little Guys is a production
(53:35):
of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and
recorded by me Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie
Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the
eternally patient and wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music
was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at
Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com, but I
(53:57):
probably won't answer it. You can exchange conspiracy theories about
the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Don't post anything that will make you one of my
Weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.