September 19, 2024 • 56 mins
A teenager who murdered two people outside of a gay bar in Slovakia, a teenager who stabbed five men at a mosque in Turkey, and a teenager who planned to destroy infrastructure in New Jersey had one thing in common: they'd all been reading terrorism manuals produced by a group of neonazi propagandists. A new indictment alleges two Americans are responsible for inciting acts of white supremacist terror all over the world.
Sources:
https://www.wired.com/story/terrorgram-collective-indictments/
https://www.antihate.ca/uk_first_add_terrorgram_collective_proscribed_groups
https://vsquare.org/bratislava-terrorist-radicalized-on-terrorgram-its-members-take-credit/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/canada-terrorism-far-right.html
https://www.antihate.ca/terrorgram_neo_nazi_collective_heart_international_arrests
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/terrorgram-collective-now-proscribed-as-terrorist-organisation
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
It was a little after seven pm on a warm
Wednesday evening in October of twenty twenty two. Urai Van
Koulik and Matuschhorvath were sitting outside of Taplaren, a gay bar,
and brought us lavas city center. Matushe was studying Chinese
at a nearby university. You or I was a drag
performer whose day job was designing the displays at a
(00:28):
clothing store. They were enjoying the evening outside of one
of the city's few dedicated queer spaces, and then they
were dead. They were shot by a teenager who left
behind a sixty five page neo Nazi manifesto before shooting
himself in a nearby park. August twelfth, twenty twenty four,
was a sunny afternoon in the Turkish city of z Kisheher.
(00:51):
A teenager wearing a skull mask and a bulletproof vest
walked into the tea garden outside of a mosque and
stabbed five men before being tackled to the ground. Two
left a manifesto glorifying mass murder. In July of twenty
twenty four, a teenager in New Jersey who'd been planning
to destroy power substations in New Brunswick was arrested at
the Newark Airport before he'd fly to Ukraine to join
(01:12):
the Russian Volunteer Corps, where he hoped to learn the
skills he'd need to carry out acts of terror here
at home. These three teenagers never met, but they had
something in common. A murderer in Slovakia, an attempted murderer
in Turkey. They were alone when they walked the familiar
streets of their town, stalking their victims. They were alone
(01:34):
when they shocked. They were alone when they stabbed. They
hunted human prey as lone wolves. But there are no
lone wolves, not really.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
The wolf pack is.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Online now, baying for more blood.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
Between nineteen sixty eight and twenty twenty one, one hundred
and five white men and women of action, half tinging
out upon themselves, wage war against the system, and our
racial enemies are saying, to the best of our brothers,
and this is our legacy of white Terrier.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
All three of these young men were incited to take
action by propaganda produced by the Terragram Collective, a one
synonymous group of militant neo Nazi accelerationists on the messaging
app telegram. All three of them were radicalized by a
thirty four year old dildo saleswoman from California, narrating the
manifestos of their idols, the mass shooters who came before them.
(02:33):
I'm Molly Konger and this is weird, little guys. Urai
(02:54):
Krachik died by suicide sometime overnight after he murdered two
people outside of a gay bar and brought us a
law on October twelfth, twenty twenty two. His body was
found in a nearby public park early the next morning,
but he didn't shoot himself right away. After fleeing the scene,
he got online. That was where he was most at home,
(03:16):
after all, That was where he became the man he
was in the moment he fired those shots. A few
hours before the attack, he tweeted out links to his manifesto.
After fleeing the scene of the shooting, he went home.
He told his parents what he had done. They argued,
but no one called the police. He left a handwritten
(03:37):
suicide note, retrieved a second gun from his father's safe,
and left the house again. His parents were the last
ones to see him alive. The city was crawling with
police that night, They were on high alert for the shooter,
worried he would act again, but even now that he
was armed with a fresh weapon, he didn't seek out
(03:59):
more targets. Krazik walked to a local park and checked
four chan on his phone. People were talking about him
about his attack. He wanted to see what they were saying.
Four Chan users quickly connected the shooting to his Twitter account.
As he'd walked home after the attack, he tweeted hashtag
(04:19):
brought a slava feeling no regrets?
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Isn't that funny?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
On four Chan, they were already discussing the manifesto he'd
tweeted out. One poster asked why would a Slovakian write
his manifesto in English? And this was the first post
the shooter replied to He wrote, because I felt like it.
If you're familiar with four chan, first of all, i'm sorry,
(04:47):
but if you've spent any time on there, you know
it's not a friendly place, and not just unfriendly to outsiders.
Even people who share similar ideologies are at each other's throats,
hurling insults, said engaging in an eternal competition to be
the nastiest person with an Internet connection. Posters mocked the
shooter for killing only two people, and asked why he'd
(05:09):
chosen such low value targets. Even as they celebrated the
deaths of his victims, they bullied the shooter for not
doing more, for not doing it better, for not doing
it differently. They were Monday morning quarterbacking Murder Life is
just a first person shooter game for the keyboard Warrior
mass shooting enthusiast. To these comments, Krazil replied that he'd
(05:34):
wanted to shoot the Slovakian Prime Minister at Ward Hager,
writing wish I could have gone higher, but whatever wanted
to bag the Prime Minister, but I didn't get lucky
with his car arriving. Later. News reports do in fact
confirm that he was seen that evening on security camera
footage outside the Prime Minister's home an hour before the shooting.
(05:55):
The same news report maps out his walk home after
the shooting, a route that took him through a largely
Jewish neighborhood. Rejik lamented on four Chan that night that
he had wanted to shoot the Kabbad House too, but
he'd run out of ammunition, writing wish I could pull
off more, got nearly no amm O bro posters on
(06:16):
four Chan were skeptical that the man replying to them
was truly the shooter himself, and demanded that he post
some kind of proof. A little after eleven thirty pm,
four hours after fleeing the scene of the shooting, he did.
It's dark wherever he was. You can't see anything in
the background. The flash illuminates only the subject of the selfie.
(06:38):
He's completely expressionless. There's no smile, no bravado, no fear even.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
There's just nothing. He's looking straight at.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
The camera, holding his phone with one hand and making
a finger gun that points directly at the viewer with
the other. Have a last selfie, he says. Most of
his posts on the four chan thread that night are
in English. It is the lingua franca of the site,
after all. But one user responds to this selfie in
(07:08):
Slovak translated. The comment reads, what happened boy? Why don't
you smile anymore? Reality set in? Did you fall for
the meme? Stupid?
Speaker 4 (07:19):
Right?
Speaker 2 (07:21):
The shooter replied to that comment in Slovak, saying, speak
for yourself. In attaching a second selfie, he's smiling this time,
kind of. It's hard to say you feel any sorrow
for a man who just murdered two people in cold
blood and then logged onto four Chan to take credit
for it. And I don't not really not for this murderer,
(07:46):
but he was just a boy once, a boy whose
fake smile shows the still slightly rounded cheeks of a
kid who won't live to see the last adolescent changes
to his face. His forced smile, a smile that doesn't
reach the eyes. That selfie taken in the dark, somewhere
in the trees on the edge of town will probably
stay with me.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
For a while.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
He engages with the four Chan thread for nearly an hour,
answering questions and repeatedly acquiescing to demands for proof that
it's really him. He posts a picture of a handwritten
note with a time and date, posts another selfie, this
time with his shoe on top of his head. This
is a common form of proof demanded on four Chan
to determine if you are really interacting with someone who
(08:29):
is who they say they are and in real time.
I guess the idea is that most people have a
shoe nearby, but most people don't have old photos of
themselves online with a shoe on their head, So if
you can produce such a photo on request. You probably
are the person in the photo and not just someone
using photos of a stranger that you found online. Another
(08:53):
user asks him to spell out the N word and
leaves on the ground and post a picture of that.
He says it would take too long to spell out
the whole word, and posts a blurry photo of leaves
arranged in the shape of the letter N. Another user
asks him what's going through your mind right now, and
he says, sad for my family, happy with my own life.
(09:16):
Nothing for the two f slurs soon a bit of lead.
Another user asks if he plans to spend decades in
prison or if he'll kill himself. He replies with two
words and hero, which is memespeak for dying by suicide.
(09:37):
His last four Chan posts was shortly before midnight. Four
Chan users are perpetually caught in between their desire for
and celebration of acts like this and their frustration that
this kind of thing makes them.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
All look bad.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
You know, it makes them look like exactly what they are,
the kind of people goading a teenage murderer into killing
himself writes, you have made everyone on this board look
like a terrorist. Is that what you wanted? Also repent
hell is real? His reply his final post reads only
(10:14):
not my problem. On Twitter, his final post was a
little after midnight in Slovak, he wrote see you on
the other side. A Slovak language news report says that
two days before the attack, he had called a mental
health crisis hotline. He said, I have to die, but
(10:35):
I am very afraid, and then he hung up. But
in his final hours he didn't call back. He didn't
call that hotline. He didn't turn himself in or seek help.
He sought reassurance and support from the place least likely
to provide it. He logged onto four Chan, hoping to
see his acts hailed as heroic, but they.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
Just laughed at him.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
He was dead before terogram canonized him, placing him in
the Pantheon of terror. He worshiped. Authorities in Slovakia weren't
able to ping his cell phone location until five am.
The cell phone provider didn't have any employees working overnight.
His body was found in the park around seven am.
(11:20):
It's not clear exactly when he died, but if I
had to put money on it, I'd guess he died
in real life shortly after he logged off. He posted
right up through the end, and that's all we really knew.
In October of twenty twenty two, the manifesto was online
for all to see. In the manifesto, he includes the
(11:41):
Terogram Collective in his list of special thanks at the end,
writing you know who you are. Thank you for your
incredible writing and art, for your political texts, for your
practical guides building the future of the White Revolution one
publication at a time. In the section of the manifesto
under the header recommended reading, he lists many of the
(12:03):
usual suspects. He was inspired by the christ Church mosque
shooting and recommends that shooter's manifesto. He praises the terrorist's Bible,
William Luther Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries, and even recommends
the prequel, an even sloppier novel called Hunter, But he
also recommends two other lesser known publications, two of the
(12:23):
four publications authored by the Terragram Collective. He lists these two,
Militant Accelerationism and The Hard Reset, last, writing, if the
other books give a theoretical and fictional base for our resistance,
these two provide the practical means for it. They also
go into a deeper dive into some issues, concepts, and things.
(12:45):
Anyone who seeks to fight Zog should know. These two
may be harder to find than the other books I listed,
but you can find them if you look in the
right places. The link between the Brodislava shooting and the
Tterogram Collective was never a secret. It was right there
all along. He said it himself. He recommended their propaganda
(13:06):
and thanked them in the acknowledgments. But when he was
posting on Fortune that night he lied about something earlier
in this Murderer's Q and a session. Someone asked him,
have you been talking to some other people over telegram,
discord or signal? And he replies, made my own decision
(13:27):
to do this. I had barely any dms with people
on telegram or wherever. And he later followed up with
their channel owners. Hence the annan part, don't know their names.
They produced good content. Though Craigich was trying to backtrack
on his initial post that he'd exchanged direct messages with
anyone in the lead up to the attack, the truth,
(13:50):
as it turns out, is that he wasn't just reading
the material produced by the Telegram Collective he was in
active communication with its leaders. This age murderer in Slovakia
hadn't just posted his manifesto online before the attack. He'd
also sent it directly to someone immediately after. He wanted
(14:10):
to be certain that his message got out, so he
sent it to someone he knew would spread it, someone
who had helped him craft it. He sent the manifesto
to Matthew Allison, a man in his thirties living in Boise, Idaho,
earlier this month. In September of twenty twenty four, Matthew
(14:32):
Allison of Boise and Dallas Humber of Elk Grove, California,
were arrested in charge in a fifteen count indictment with
soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials, interstate threats,
distributing information relating to explosives, and conspiring to provide material
support to terrorists. The pair are alleged to be the
(14:52):
ringleaders of the Terragram Collective, that association of pseudonymous posters
on telegram that produced Neo Nazi acceleration propaganda and now,
according to the Department of Justice, the Terogram Collective can
also be called a transnational terrorist group According to the
allegations in the indictment, Krajik was an active member of
(15:13):
the group's chat for a year.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Leading up to the shooting. And I guess I should
back up a little bit and explain a little more.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
About what's going on in these chats, as much as
I would really rather not. There are plenty of Nazi
chat rooms. There is no shortage of places online where
a racial slur enthusiast can log on and share ideas
with other guys who hate black people and Jewish people,
and gay people, and immigrants and women and whatever. Pick
(15:56):
your flavor. It's out there in abundance. This is something
much darker. These are accelerationists, people who believe their goals
can only be achieved by driving society over the brink
and into total collapse.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
They believe that.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Acts of mass murder, terrorism, and destruction are the necessary
course of action to create the chaos required to allow
a new world to be born, a world built by
and four white men alone.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
And they aren't just talking about it.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
The Terogram Collective has produced a series of what would
you call them manuals, manifestos, zines, terrorism handbooks. They've put
out four written publications in one short documentary, all directed
at providing both inspiration and explicit instruction on how their
followers can commit acts of unspeakable violence. In their online spaces,
(16:55):
past acts are celebrated. One of the core elements of
the group's ship language is this pantheon of saints. It's
not the saints you're thinking of. This is a gruesome hagiography.
They've canonized mass shooters. They celebrate the Saint Day of
(17:16):
each shooter on the day of their atrocity. Robert Bowers, Unders,
Bravic Dylan Rue, Brenton, Terran, Patrick Crusius, Anton London Patterson,
murderers from infamous to obscure murderers from all over the world.
The criteria for sainthood are fivefold, race, motive, intent, score,
(17:38):
and worldview. The prospective saint must, of course, be white.
There is occasionally some debate in the Nazi community about
whether they should offer their begrudging respect for non white
mass murderers, who nevertheless kill large numbers of people they
deem worthy targets, but the answer is generally no. They
(18:00):
would celebrate something like the Pulse night club shooting, which
killed nearly fifty people, most of whom were both Latino
and members of the queer community. That perpetrator cannot be
celebrated as a saint because he fails the first test.
He isn't white. Intent, motive, and worldview all feel like
they kind of describe the same thing. So I'm not
(18:22):
sure why there are five criteria when they probably could
have condensed it down to three. But the attack must
be deliberate, that's intent, committed in the spirit of our struggle,
that's motive, and be motivated by a white nationalist ideology.
Though they are willing to make some exceptions. There's a
little wiggle room here for attacks that are right wing
(18:44):
but not explicitly neo Nazi. And score means exactly what
you probably think it means. They're keeping score, they're counting bodies.
Sometimes if you log into the worst kind of place
during an active attack or in the immediate aftermath of one,
(19:04):
you'll see eager speculation that someone could be getting a
new high score, like it's some kind of video game.
And there are no exceptions to this requirement. You cannot
become a Terogram saint with a score of zero. Someone
has to die. These ideas didn't originate with Matthew Allison
(19:27):
and Dallas Humber. Both of them have been members of
this online community for years since at least twenty nineteen.
In twenty twenty two, after the arrest of one of
the community's most prolific posters, they became the group's leaders.
A user who posted as Slovak bro Pavel Benedick, was
arrested in Slovakia in early twenty twenty two and eventually
(19:48):
sentenced to six years in prison for his support of
terrorism and Slovak Brough isn't the only Terogram author to
land himself in prison. Brandon Russell, the Adam Woffin founder,
currently awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy to blow up
the power grid in Baltimore, was in close communication with
members of the group before and after his arrest. He
(20:10):
appears to have participated in the creation of at least
some of the group's work. Two men in Canada were
arrested last fall, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police press
release alleging that they too had participated in the creation
of Tarogram manifestos. Their cases are ongoing and subject to
a publication ban in Canada, so the extent of their
involvement and the possibility that revelations in those cases had
(20:33):
some bearing on the investigation here in the US is
unknown right now. As the leaders of the Tarogram collective,
Dallas Humber and Matthew Allison, are alleged to have directly
contributed to acts of terrorism.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
All over the world.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Their publications provided detailed instructions on how to make bombs,
how to make napalm at home with materials you can
buy at the hardware store, the most efficient way to
destroy an electrical substation with rifle fire, and how to
identify the most valuable targets in your area, targets that
could be infrastructure or human. They maintained a document called
(21:11):
the List, a list of high value assassination targets. For
each name on the list, there was a little graphic
like a trading card. The target's name, home address, and
photograph were always featured, along with the reasons why they
were considered an enemy of the cause. Those reasons, as
you might expect, tended to be related to the target's identity.
(21:34):
They're Jewish, they're gay, they're an immigrant, or some other
kind of undesirable in their eyes. The names on the
list include senators, judges, a former federal prosecutor, state and
local government officials, and non profit employees. In their chats,
they posted the list often, and would sometimes post individual
(21:56):
members of the list alongside encouragement to take action. In
one exchange described in the indictment, a member of the
group chat asked if there were any members of the
list located in his area. The administrator of the group
responded with a trading card image for a target in
a city in the poster's area. The user replied, we
already have this one, and asked the channel administrator to
(22:19):
tag him if any new names were added to the
list in his area. A user the government alleges is Dallas.
Humber replied, we'll do. A week later, she tagged that
same user with a new name in the same city.
He replied, very good, I'll check in with my guys now.
(22:39):
And it wasn't just members of the list who were
in danger. Humber and Allison would routinely remind members of
the group of the kinds of targets they should be
seeking out. In June of twenty twenty three, Humber posted
numerous exhortations to followers that they should be targeting Gay
Pride Month events, writing in one post.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Mass shootings, arson bombings, vehicle tax The list goes on,
and the opportunities provided to you this month will be plentiful.
Don't let them go to waste. What's more impactful boycotting
target or getting dozens of targets in your sights and
taking them out permanently. Actions speak louder than words. Direct
(23:22):
lethal action speaks louder than any boycott. This Pride month,
give us what we truly need, a new saint to
be proud of and a glorious new attack to celebrate.
You've got the means an opportunity. All you need is
the will. Don't breathe a word of what you're planning
to anyone, and make it count.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Make it count. That's a frequent refrain. Make it Count
as the title of one of the group's terrorism manuals.
It's also the final line of the broadess Lava Shooters Manifesto.
The line itself comes from seed the collected essays of
James Mason. If the Turner Diaries is their Bible, siege
(24:05):
is perhaps a missile or a brevery. Maybe the analogy
doesn't hold. I don't know, but Mason is the godfather
of modern fascist terrorism read Siege was such a constant
directive in so many Nazi chats for so long that
it's more of a meme than an actual instruction. At
this point. Mason wrote the Siege newsletter throughout the early
(24:28):
to mid eighties. The essays were collected and published in
book form in the early nineties, but the text languished
in relative obscurity until it was rediscovered by users of
the Nazi forum Iron March in the early twenty tens.
It's no coincidence that Adam Wafflin was born on the
pages of that forum, in the bubbling ideological soup where
young men were exchanging their favorite passages of Siege. It's
(24:52):
a messy sprawling six hundred or so pages, depending on
the addition you've bootlegged from some terrorism chat room. It's
mostly useless ramblings. There's a lot of repetitive content. It
wasn't written to be a book, to be fair. The
line make it count comes from the end of the
August nineteen eighty two newsletter, in a missive titled Biting
(25:15):
the Bullet. Like much of the avice in Siege, this
essay is about taking action, about choosing the time, the target,
and the circumstances of your attack on the system, because
you may only get one chance to strike. The essay concludes,
quote in revolution, the price of failure generally is death.
(25:36):
So whatever you do, and whatever course you choose, don't
sell yourself cheap. Make it count. Make it count. The
Collective's Terrorism Guide by the same name and The Hard
Reset both contain diagrams of electrical transformers and instructions for
damaging them, released around the same time, both in June
(25:58):
of twenty twenty two. Make It Counts a light fourteen pages.
It's more propaganda than manual. The page titled Blackout is
dominated by a large graphic of a rifle with a
scope and big neon text that reads, in all caps,
locate substation, range find shoot transformers, flee undetected, which I
(26:22):
guess are technically instructions. They're just not very good ones.
The Hard Reset, on the other hand, is a nearly
three hundred page compilation of essays, graphics, manuals, and just
a nightmarish collection of fonts and colors that would make
a graphic designer weep around. Halfway through, there's a section
(26:45):
containing incredibly detailed instructions, complete with diagrams for sabotaging all
manner of infrastructure, how to derail a train, how to
damage a cell phone tower, things to consider when bombing
a truck depot, ways you might contaminate a municipal water
treatment planned, and of course four pages of advice on
sabotaging the power grid. Alongside mass shootings, attacks on the
(27:09):
power grid are the group's favorite fixation. We talked a
little bit about the concept in another episode a few
weeks ago, Lights Out about the Nazi paramilitary marines who
hope to knock out power in the Pacific Northwest. They
thought it would provide cover for a planned series of assassinations.
Those guys never got a chance to read the Terragram
(27:29):
collective manuals on the subject, they were arrested before they
were written. But as I said in an episode, this
idea has been popular in right wing circles for decades.
Take out the power, chaos ensues, something something step three,
then race war. The middle part never really gets fleshed out,
(27:52):
but they all seem very convinced that something happens right
after it gets dark that causes a race war. I'm
not really sold on that logic, but they are bound
and determined to put holes in a substation. Nevertheless, the
indictment lists numerous occasions on which Dallas Humber encourages her
followers to take the advice provided in the manuals and
(28:13):
attack the grid. In December of twenty twenty two, after
these still unsolved attacks on electrical infrastructure in Jones County,
North Carolina on November eleventh, and Moore County on December third,
Humber posted encouragement for anyone planning a similar grid attack,
advising them not to let second thoughts or fear of failure,
or fear of getting caught demotivate them. Do not let
(28:36):
this big mistake happen to you, she wrote in all caps,
reminding them to have a plan, carry it out, and
keep their mouths shut. A few days later, she wrote.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
Maybe that person could be you lining up your sights
on these metal behemoths from the tree line, squeezing the
trigger and retreating from the area with a shitting grin
on your face, knowing the chaos you've just unleashed.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
And after a third still unsolved attack was carried out
just a month later in Randolph County, North Carolina, Humber posted.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Again everyone please take a moment to congratulate yourselves. It
seems as though this avenue of attack, an incredibly effective
one at that has really caught on. I like to
think that all our hard work in detailing its effectiveness
and showing our community how easy it is not only
to do but to get away with, has helped encourage
(29:29):
this death to the grid, death to the system.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
So the Terrogram Collective isn't exactly taking credit for the
grid attacks in North Carolina, but they aren't not taking
credit for it either. She does credit herself and the
group with popularizing the idea. She speculates that perhaps the
attacker or attackers had read her work, read her words,
and listened to her voice and decided to act, But
(30:00):
there's no claim made that she knows who did it,
and maybe she doesn't. We don't actually know whether these
attacks were committed by someone inspired by the Terrogram Collective
at all, even if they were ideologically motivated. She didn't
invent the idea, and a similar attack out in Washington
State during the same time period was actually committed by
(30:21):
a pair of would be thieves who thought they could
get cash out of ATMs during a power outage, So
maybe it wasn't a terrorist at all, but if it was,
it is entirely possible that an attacker inspired by her
work was operating based off of a one directional relationship,
that this person consumed the content and acted on it
(30:43):
without ever actually having a conversation with the author. We
didn't learn until much later, though, that this wasn't the
case with the shooting in Broadislava, and we do know
that at least one would be grid attacker was definitely
in that chat and definitely in communit vacation with the
Tarogram collective. Andrew Takestov was arrested in July of twenty
(31:18):
twenty four at the Newark Airport. He was on his
way to Ukraine to join the Russian Volunteer Corps, a
neo Nazi paramilitary group of Russian citizens inside Ukraine who
opposed the Putin government Takeistov had been a member of
the Tarogram collective chat since at least January of twenty
twenty four, and in January of twenty twenty four he
(31:38):
made a new friend online. It isn't stated outright in
his charging documents or in the cases against Humber and Allison,
but it sounds like he made this friend in the
Tterogram chat, and this friend turned out to be an
undercover FBI agent around this same time. In January of
twenty twenty four, Takeistov asks in the Terogram chat for
(32:03):
recommendations for quote documentaries about our guys made by our guys,
and he asks if anyone has more content like White Terror,
which is the twenty four minute documentary the Collective put
out in October of twenty twenty two. The video is
a compilation of descriptions of over one hundred white supremacist
(32:23):
attacks carried out between nineteen sixty eight and twenty twenty two.
It is, in their words, their litany of the Saints.
Humber narrates the video herself. She is the voice of Terogram,
but she's not very skilled voice actor, and that's not
just my opinion. The website Militant Wire, a publication that
(32:44):
writes about political violence all over the world, wrote of
her narration.
Speaker 5 (32:49):
It is both striking and seemingly incongruous to the material
the way a young, average female voice, devoid of ghoulish
stylization or of discernible malice and hatred, not only celebrates
acts of terrorism while parroting well established neo Nazi tropes
and slogans, but perhaps most of all, the unburden and
rather natural way that this young woman uses the most
(33:11):
cutting of racial slurs and homophobic pejoratives. It is one
thing to see edgy young men describe mass murder Dylan
Rufe as Saint Rufe on a message board, for example,
and quite another to hear a young woman say it
aloud and without traceable irony.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
She sounds bored as she lists shootings, bombings, arsons and stabbings,
just droning out this list of the dead. The video
was published just days after the shooting in broad us Lava,
but it had already been finalized before the attack, so
he's not in it. The list of their murderer's heroes
(33:48):
ends with the Buffalo Supermarket shooter from May of twenty
twenty two, but the video concludes with Humber's deadpan reading
of an ominous message. The list is always growing, and
you could join it.
Speaker 4 (34:04):
And to the saints of tomorrow watching this today, know
that when you succeed, you will be celebrated with reverence,
and your sacrifice will not be in vain. Hail the saints,
and hail are glorious. And bloody legacy of white hair.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
When Takestav asked if they had any more content like
that video, Humber replied with a file an audio recording
of her reading the Jacksonville Dollar General Shooters Manifesto. The manifesto,
entitled A White Boy Summer to Remember, had just been
released that month by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Department. Humber quickly
(34:43):
recorded the audiobook version for the Teogram Collective, as she
had with many manifestos before it. Her audio recording of
the Broados Lava Shooters Manifesto was released to the chat
within a week of that attack, just as she'd promised
Kraigik it would be before he died a few months later.
In April of twenty twenty four, Takistov posted again thanking
(35:05):
Humber for links to videos providing instructions on attacking energy facilities.
One video in particular had instructions for using my lar
balloons to damage power lines. Their conductive metal surface can
start a fire when it comes into contact with electrical infrastructure.
Takistanv was so pleased with this advice, it seems that
he thought he might like to try it. Later that summer,
(35:28):
he met up with his new friend from the chat room,
though one he didn't know as an undercover FBI agent. Together,
they drove around New Jersey looking at substations. Takistov proudly
shared the instructions for how to carry out the attack,
directing his friend to use my lar balloons to short
circuit the transformer. He followed up by sending his friend
(35:49):
a copy of the hard Reset, telling him quote, it's
really the only thing you need. It has ideology, it
has how two guides, it has ideas for funny things.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
It goes into how you should plan it.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
It really goes into the thought process. Takustov told the
agent his new friend that his plan was to fly
to Ukraine and volunteer with the Russian Volunteer Corps. He'd
chosen that group in particular because, according to the indictment quote,
the group was openly national socialist and more importantly, specialized
in assassinations, attacks on power grids and other infrastructure sabotage.
(36:26):
So he hoped to go over there, get some training,
do a little fighting, and then return home with new
skills he could use here. He instructed his new friend
not to be idle in his absence that while Takistov
was gone, he expected his new friend to carry out
at least one attack, perhaps the attack on the substation
(36:46):
they'd been discussing. He also recommended getting a rifle and
a cheap burner phone. The burner phone wasn't for communication, though,
it was to be used to determine if a cell
tower had been sufficiently dead imaged by rifle rounds that
it no longer transmitted a signal. So you take the
phone out, you start shooting at the tower, and if
(37:08):
the phone still has bars, keep shooting. In July, just
a few days before he would board the plane to Ukraine,
Takistav met up with his new friend one last time.
This time they drove out to a warehouse full of
trucking equipment. Takistov explained to the undercover agent how he
should access the facility to damage equipment with a Molotov cocktail.
(37:30):
He also suggested some strategies for derailing trains. He essentially
talked through almost all of the infrastructure related attacks suggested
by the Terogram collective publication that he'd already shared with
the agent, and then he tried to get on a plane.
Takistov did not make his flight. On July tenth, he
(37:52):
was arrested at the airport.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
He's not due back.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
In court until October, but he is the attacker too
listed in the indict against Dallas Humber and Matthew Allison.
That indictment lists three individuals that the government is confident
they can prove were incited to action directly by the
Terogram Collective. Attacker IE is the broadest lava shooter. Attacker
(38:16):
three is the teenager who stabbed five men outside of
a mosque in Turkey last month. He was taken into
custody alive, and as far as reporting I can find,
all of his victims are expected to survive. The teenager,
identified by Turkish press only by his first name and
last initial, Arda K, was acknowledged by the Terogram Collective
(38:37):
but not canonized as a saint.
Speaker 3 (38:40):
He failed.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Although his intent, ideology, and worldview are consistent with the
kind of murderer they're looking for, the teenager failed to
take any lives, and more importantly.
Speaker 3 (38:53):
He isn't white.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
After the attack, Dallas Humber wrote in the chat he
included the terror books and other saint manifestos in his file.
Dump gives shout outs to the other saints in his
manifesto and references several hard Reset passages. He was one
hundred percent our guy. But he's not white, so I
can't give him an honorary title. We can still celebrate
(39:17):
his attack, though he did it for Terogram. She followed
up later on writing we can hail him anyway. We
just can't add him to the pantheon. But yeah, it's
a great development regardless. Inspiring more attacks is the goal,
and anyone claiming to be an accelerationist should support them.
(39:38):
It isn't specified in the court documents whether our Decae
had ever directly participated in the Tarogram collective chats, but
he certainly read their work. He wasn't just inspired by
some shared ideology. He cites them directly in this manifesto.
His manifesto, however, is written in Turkish, which you'd expect
(40:00):
because there's something a little strange about the manifesto Uraikrazech
left behind. It's in English. That's not entirely extraordinary. He
spoke English, though he'd never spent any time in an
English speaking country. He probably would have learned it in school.
He watched American television shows and movies. He had access
(40:20):
to American music. He participated in online spaces where English
is the primary language. But the manifesto is in perfect English.
And I don't mean perfect English like from a textbook,
something you could achieve through study. It's native English. It
has idioms and terms of phrase and even mistakes that
(40:44):
only a native English speaker would really use. And that's
not my opinion. According to an analysis by forensic linguist
Julia Kupper published by the Accelerationism Research Consortium, the manifesto
was almost certainly written by a native English speaker who
grew up in the United States, probably someone with a
(41:05):
good education, and someone a bit older than Crazick, someone
maybe in their forties. The obvious answer then is, well,
he plagiarized it, right. It's copy paste, and that's surprisingly common.
A lot of manifestos lift large portions of their text
from other similar documents. But Copper checked he hadn't. This
(41:29):
isn't copy pasta, this isn't someone else's manifesto. This was
an original work, but Crechick couldn't have written it. Copper
conducted a forensic linguistic analysis on the manifesto. The handwritten
suicide note several hundred tweets from his account and the
four chan posts made the night of the shooting. She
(41:50):
concluded that a second author was involved in both the
manifesto and some of the tweets, but that the four
chan posts and the suicide note were written by him alone.
According to Covers analysis, there are some telltale signs of
two writers at work. When Krajik posted a photo on
fourtune that night to prove he was who he said
(42:11):
he was, he showed a handwritten note with the date
on it, and we know he wrote this himself, and
in European fashion, he wrote the date day, month year,
not month day year, as Americans would do. The manifesto,
though uses an American date format. In his tweets, there
(42:34):
are style shifts that seem to indicate two people may
have had access to the account. Changes in tone and vocabulary,
and the way that punctuation is used, shifting between the
European style and the American style of where commas and
periods go on either side of a quotation or parentheses.
The American English style of formatting began appearing in the
(42:55):
tweets in May of twenty twenty two, the month he
claims he began working on the manifesto and the plan
in Earnest. Kupper's report was published in early twenty twenty three,
just six months after the attack and more than a
year before the extent of Crojick's involvement with the terrogram
chat administrators came to light after their arrests. It raises
(43:17):
some questions we may not get answers to. Perhaps the
criminal proceedings against Alison and Humber will result in Twitter
producing some records that could show more than one person
logging into the account, but maybe not. There may be
no satisfying conclusion to this mystery. But if an older, educated,
(43:40):
native English speaking American author wrote most of that manifesto,
it certainly confers some responsibility onto that author for the
attack that accompanied it. The co author of the manifesto
didn't pull the trigger, but they may as well have.
If Humber and Allison are being prosecuted for their contributions
(44:00):
to this attack, in particular, whether or not they had
fore knowledge whether or not they participated in the crafting
of this manifesto would be a significant factor in the prosecution.
But who are these people? Who is Matthew Allison, Who
is Dallas Humber? How did they end up running a
transnational terrorist organization that goads young men into committing acts
(44:23):
of terrorism? Matthew Allison wasn't revealed as a Terrogram collective
administrator until this indictment was unsealed. We didn't know his
name until he was arrested, but Dallas Humber was unmasked
a year and a half ago. Researchers at Left Coast
Right Watch and independent investigative journalism outlet covering politics and
(44:45):
extremism identified Humber in March of twenty twenty three. The
story was confirmed and re reported by Huffington Post soon after.
Dallas Humber was miss Gorehound the Voice of Terror. The
story is a truly bizarre one. I'll link it in
the show notes, and I highly recommend checking out this
(45:07):
story in particular and Left Coast Right Watch in general.
They were able to locate the earliest days of Humber's
journey to becoming the Voice of White Terror. When she
was just thirteen, she was active on sites like deviant
Art and live journal, where she described herself as a
hopeless fangirl for serial killers. Their digital archaeology shows that
(45:29):
Humber has been making fan art for murderers for over
twenty years. She was describing herself as a National Socialist
in her online journal as early as two thousand and four,
when she was just fourteen. By twenty fourteen, she was
using one of the monikers she carried through to the present,
little Miss Gorehound. Quoting from lcrw's twenty twenty three write
(45:51):
up on Humber quote, her earliest interest in gurro art
had become a full blown gore fetish. In its purest form,
guro is meant to simultaneously evoke a sense of eroticism
and grotesqueness. It's meant to make the viewer uncomfortable. At
its worst, it can only be described as hen Tai snuff.
(46:13):
Nearly all of her art from this period features abused women.
LCRW has chosen not to share the images as they
depict scenes of torture, dismemberment, and explicit sexual violence. For
the most part, the only women that aren't being subjected
to violence and brutality are perpetuating it against other women.
The men, however, are portrayed as strong, powerful, and heroic,
(46:37):
and by twenty nineteen, Humber had found her new online
home terrogram her now nearly twenty year old hobby of
creating gore art was right at home in an online
community devoted to celebrating mass murder. And now she wasn't
just drawing pictures of killers, she was drawing pictures for them.
(46:59):
She posted photos on Telegram of her correspondence with convicted
mass murderer Dylan Rufe. Several outlets have reported on these letters,
and they do point out that they were unable to
confirm with prison officials how often Humber was corresponding with Rufe,
but the images she posted matched the handwriting and style
of known samples of Roof's letters. In one letter she posted,
(47:22):
Rufe requests a drawing from her. He asks for quote
a wizard with mean slash, unfriendly eyebrows or a dragon
or an unfriendly eyebrowed wizard writing a dragon.
Speaker 3 (47:36):
End quote.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
I hope that's the only time I ever have to
quote Dylan Roof. The little Miss Gorehound account posted a
photo of the finished drawing of the unfriendly looking wizard
with the caption finished Dylan's Wizard hashtag Saint Mail. She
also claimed to have written cards to Brenton Tarrant, imprisoned
(47:59):
in New Zealand. The murders of fifty one worshippers at
mosques in christ Church and to Anders Bravic, imprisoned in
Norway for the murder of seventy seven people, most of
whom were children. It's unclear what, if anything, Humber does
for a day job these days, but lcrw is write
up uncovered that for many years she made a living
(48:21):
as a dildo saleswoman using the pseudonym techs Hunter. But
after that article was published, nothing happened, nothing changed. We
knew who she was, but nobody made a move to intervene,
and she carried on as she always had. Shannon Foley
(48:43):
Martinez told Huffington Post back in March of twenty twenty
three that quote, it is an absolute given that terrogram
will inspire more shootings if left unchecked, and she's in
the heartbreaking position of knowing exactly what she's talking about.
Shannon was radicalized by a boyfriend as a teenager, but
quickly left the movement and has since dedicated decades of
(49:03):
her life to the ugly work of trying to keep
other people's children from falling prey to the recruiters who
target vulnerable teens. But the government waited and waited. They
watched too. I'm sure we know they had undercover agents
in the group, But they waited over a year. They
(49:24):
waited until more attacks took place. They waited until an
eighty seven year old man was stabbed outside of his mosque.
They waited while more and more young men were fed
heaping servings of rotten propaganda. They waited until September of
twenty twenty four, a few weeks after that stabbing in Turkey.
(49:45):
In a piece published in Wire a few days after
the indictment, investigative journalist Ali Winston offers an intriguing explanation
for the timing. While most of the charges in the
indictment could have been brought at any time, things like
soliciting the murder of a federal AffA, disseminating information about explosives,
threatening communications, and so on, they've been doing that for years.
(50:08):
The final charge of this fifteen count indictment is a
violation of Chapter eighteen, Section two three three nine A
conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists. And this is
the most serious charge on the indictment. This is the
one that could put them away forever. And this charge
(50:29):
was only made possible by a decision earlier this year
by the Government of the United Kingdom. In April of
twenty twenty four, the UK formally added the Terragram Collective
to its list of proscribed terrorist entities. A Home Office
announcement in April.
Speaker 6 (50:45):
Reads the Telegram Collective has been prescribed as a terrorist
organization today after Parliament approved a draft order laid on Monday,
the twenty second of April. This order makes belonging to
the Terogram Collective or inviting support for the group criminal offense,
with a potential prison sentence of fourteen years, which can
be handed down alongside or in place of a fine.
(51:07):
In addition, Section fifty eight makes it a criminal offense
for a person to collect or possess information which is
likely to be useful to a person committing or repairing
for acts of terrorism, including where individual views or accesses
documents or records containing information of that kind. The Teogram
Collective has now been added to the list of prescribed
organizations in the UK, alongside eighty other organizations.
Speaker 2 (51:32):
And with that announcement, Terogram is now a foreign terrorist organization.
And because people died and at least one of the incidents,
the government laid out in the indictment. As an act
the defendants insided they could go away for life. As
Ali Winston put it in that Wired article quote, In
other words, the US is treating Terogram in ways similar
(51:55):
to how it has treated Islamist terrorist organizations. Terrorism researcher
Seamus Hughes told Winston, quote, I would think of this
case more like an old school terrorism investigation, where you
have a leadership cell that pushed info to followers and
radicalized them into action. Cases involving this particular charge are
(52:16):
typically those involving groups like ISIS or al Qaida. I
don't think we've seen this used before against white nationalist
domestic terror organizations. Using this legal framework against a group
like the Terrogram collective may signal a shift in the
DOJ's strategy for targeting white nationalist terrorism in the United States.
(52:38):
It's a big swing, as Hughes said, quote, it shows
that either the FEDS are trying to make a point
or they were very concerned about these particular actors, and
maybe it's both right. It was long past time to
do something, anything, anything at all about the most significant
(52:59):
network of neo Nazi terrorist propaganda on the English speaking Internet.
Speaker 3 (53:04):
People have already died.
Speaker 2 (53:06):
There's every reason to believe the undercover agents they had
in the group knew that more people would die if
something didn't disrupt the organization. And maybe the Justice Department
is just feeling a little more willing to use the
tools they have to do something about right wing extremism
more generally, this is obviously a much more seismic shift
(53:27):
in policy. But we were just talking last week about
the false statements charges against a soldier who allegedly lied
about his extremist activities, and those charges were unusual and
perhaps indicative of a shift in policy and strategy. I
suppose it doesn't behoove me to make wilder speculations than
the experts are willing to make, So we'll stick with
(53:47):
what Seamus Hughes told Ally Winston. A case like this
had to get sign off at the highest levels. Somebody
in the DOJ wanted this network shut down. When the
pair were arrested earlier this month, authorities searched their homes.
Dallas Humber had three D printed guns, high capacity magazines,
(54:09):
a short barreled rifle, unregistered firearms, a lot of Nazi propaganda,
her own manifestos, and a notebook listing the white supremacist
attackers with whom she corresponds, including Dylan Roof. When Matthew
Allison was arrested, he was quote wearing a backpack containing
zip ties, duct tape, a gun, ammunition, a knife, lock
(54:32):
picking equipment, two phones, and a thumb drive. After his arrest,
Allison was advised of his rights, but waived them and
quickly confessed in a recorded interview to engaging in the
acts alleged in the indictment. The pair are currently held
without bond, with the government citing their own statements about
their willingness to die in a shootout rather than be arrested,
(54:54):
about Allison's go bag, which indicates a desire to flee
the country, the severe of the charges which could send
them to prison for the rest of their lives, and
their own prior statements expressing a willingness to murder or
to have murdered people they suspect. Our cooperating witnesses against
other Terogram members like Brendan Russell. These cooperating witnesses have
(55:17):
been given permission by the government to testify in a
closed court room without being named. In Brandon Russell's case
for Humber and Allison. There is not currently a date
set for their next appearance in court, and with Humber
and Allison in custody, the current version of the Tterogram.
Speaker 3 (55:34):
Collective is dead.
Speaker 2 (55:37):
But what does that mean? This is only one head
of a hydra. Just as new leaders emerged after Slovak
Borough was arrested in twenty twenty two, just as Brandon
Russell continued to communicate with Humber after his arrest in
twenty twenty three, a new poster will rise to take
their place. Hopefully this case signals a shift and the
(55:57):
government's approach to throwing of roadblocks in the paths of
aspiring Nazi terrorists. Because a dildo saleswoman from California and
a failed DJ from Idaho may spend the rest of
their lives behind bars, but it's only a matter of
time where for a new voice starts whispering white terror
into the ears and impressionable teenage boys who are desperate
(56:20):
to die in a way that will impress four Chan posters.
Speaker 1 (56:27):
Weird Little Guys is the production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 5 (56:30):
For more from cool Zone.
Speaker 1 (56:31):
Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us
out on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 3 (56:37):
Or Wherever You get Here podcast
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
It was a little after seven pm on a warm
Wednesday evening in October of twenty twenty two. Urai Van
Koulik and Matuschhorvath were sitting outside of Taplaren, a gay bar,
and brought us lavas city center. Matushe was studying Chinese
at a nearby university. You or I was a drag
performer whose day job was designing the displays at a
(00:28):
clothing store. They were enjoying the evening outside of one
of the city's few dedicated queer spaces, and then they
were dead. They were shot by a teenager who left
behind a sixty five page neo Nazi manifesto before shooting
himself in a nearby park. August twelfth, twenty twenty four,
was a sunny afternoon in the Turkish city of z Kisheher.
(00:51):
A teenager wearing a skull mask and a bulletproof vest
walked into the tea garden outside of a mosque and
stabbed five men before being tackled to the ground. Two
left a manifesto glorifying mass murder. In July of twenty
twenty four, a teenager in New Jersey who'd been planning
to destroy power substations in New Brunswick was arrested at
the Newark Airport before he'd fly to Ukraine to join
(01:12):
the Russian Volunteer Corps, where he hoped to learn the
skills he'd need to carry out acts of terror here
at home. These three teenagers never met, but they had
something in common. A murderer in Slovakia, an attempted murderer
in Turkey. They were alone when they walked the familiar
streets of their town, stalking their victims. They were alone
(01:34):
when they shocked. They were alone when they stabbed. They
hunted human prey as lone wolves. But there are no
lone wolves, not really.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
The wolf pack is.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Online now, baying for more blood.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
Between nineteen sixty eight and twenty twenty one, one hundred
and five white men and women of action, half tinging
out upon themselves, wage war against the system, and our
racial enemies are saying, to the best of our brothers,
and this is our legacy of white Terrier.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
All three of these young men were incited to take
action by propaganda produced by the Terragram Collective, a one
synonymous group of militant neo Nazi accelerationists on the messaging
app telegram. All three of them were radicalized by a
thirty four year old dildo saleswoman from California, narrating the
manifestos of their idols, the mass shooters who came before them.
(02:33):
I'm Molly Konger and this is weird, little guys. Urai
(02:54):
Krachik died by suicide sometime overnight after he murdered two
people outside of a gay bar and brought us a
law on October twelfth, twenty twenty two. His body was
found in a nearby public park early the next morning,
but he didn't shoot himself right away. After fleeing the scene,
he got online. That was where he was most at home,
(03:16):
after all, That was where he became the man he
was in the moment he fired those shots. A few
hours before the attack, he tweeted out links to his manifesto.
After fleeing the scene of the shooting, he went home.
He told his parents what he had done. They argued,
but no one called the police. He left a handwritten
(03:37):
suicide note, retrieved a second gun from his father's safe,
and left the house again. His parents were the last
ones to see him alive. The city was crawling with
police that night, They were on high alert for the shooter,
worried he would act again, but even now that he
was armed with a fresh weapon, he didn't seek out
(03:59):
more targets. Krazik walked to a local park and checked
four chan on his phone. People were talking about him
about his attack. He wanted to see what they were saying.
Four Chan users quickly connected the shooting to his Twitter account.
As he'd walked home after the attack, he tweeted hashtag
(04:19):
brought a slava feeling no regrets?
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Isn't that funny?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
On four Chan, they were already discussing the manifesto he'd
tweeted out. One poster asked why would a Slovakian write
his manifesto in English? And this was the first post
the shooter replied to He wrote, because I felt like it.
If you're familiar with four chan, first of all, i'm sorry,
(04:47):
but if you've spent any time on there, you know
it's not a friendly place, and not just unfriendly to outsiders.
Even people who share similar ideologies are at each other's throats,
hurling insults, said engaging in an eternal competition to be
the nastiest person with an Internet connection. Posters mocked the
shooter for killing only two people, and asked why he'd
(05:09):
chosen such low value targets. Even as they celebrated the
deaths of his victims, they bullied the shooter for not
doing more, for not doing it better, for not doing
it differently. They were Monday morning quarterbacking Murder Life is
just a first person shooter game for the keyboard Warrior
mass shooting enthusiast. To these comments, Krazil replied that he'd
(05:34):
wanted to shoot the Slovakian Prime Minister at Ward Hager,
writing wish I could have gone higher, but whatever wanted
to bag the Prime Minister, but I didn't get lucky
with his car arriving. Later. News reports do in fact
confirm that he was seen that evening on security camera
footage outside the Prime Minister's home an hour before the shooting.
(05:55):
The same news report maps out his walk home after
the shooting, a route that took him through a largely
Jewish neighborhood. Rejik lamented on four Chan that night that
he had wanted to shoot the Kabbad House too, but
he'd run out of ammunition, writing wish I could pull
off more, got nearly no amm O bro posters on
(06:16):
four Chan were skeptical that the man replying to them
was truly the shooter himself, and demanded that he post
some kind of proof. A little after eleven thirty pm,
four hours after fleeing the scene of the shooting, he did.
It's dark wherever he was. You can't see anything in
the background. The flash illuminates only the subject of the selfie.
(06:38):
He's completely expressionless. There's no smile, no bravado, no fear even.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
There's just nothing. He's looking straight at.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
The camera, holding his phone with one hand and making
a finger gun that points directly at the viewer with
the other. Have a last selfie, he says. Most of
his posts on the four chan thread that night are
in English. It is the lingua franca of the site,
after all. But one user responds to this selfie in
(07:08):
Slovak translated. The comment reads, what happened boy? Why don't
you smile anymore? Reality set in? Did you fall for
the meme? Stupid?
Speaker 4 (07:19):
Right?
Speaker 2 (07:21):
The shooter replied to that comment in Slovak, saying, speak
for yourself. In attaching a second selfie, he's smiling this time,
kind of. It's hard to say you feel any sorrow
for a man who just murdered two people in cold
blood and then logged onto four Chan to take credit
for it. And I don't not really not for this murderer,
(07:46):
but he was just a boy once, a boy whose
fake smile shows the still slightly rounded cheeks of a
kid who won't live to see the last adolescent changes
to his face. His forced smile, a smile that doesn't
reach the eyes. That selfie taken in the dark, somewhere
in the trees on the edge of town will probably
stay with me.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
For a while.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
He engages with the four Chan thread for nearly an hour,
answering questions and repeatedly acquiescing to demands for proof that
it's really him. He posts a picture of a handwritten
note with a time and date, posts another selfie, this
time with his shoe on top of his head. This
is a common form of proof demanded on four Chan
to determine if you are really interacting with someone who
(08:29):
is who they say they are and in real time.
I guess the idea is that most people have a
shoe nearby, but most people don't have old photos of
themselves online with a shoe on their head, So if
you can produce such a photo on request. You probably
are the person in the photo and not just someone
using photos of a stranger that you found online. Another
(08:53):
user asks him to spell out the N word and
leaves on the ground and post a picture of that.
He says it would take too long to spell out
the whole word, and posts a blurry photo of leaves
arranged in the shape of the letter N. Another user
asks him what's going through your mind right now, and
he says, sad for my family, happy with my own life.
(09:16):
Nothing for the two f slurs soon a bit of lead.
Another user asks if he plans to spend decades in
prison or if he'll kill himself. He replies with two
words and hero, which is memespeak for dying by suicide.
(09:37):
His last four Chan posts was shortly before midnight. Four
Chan users are perpetually caught in between their desire for
and celebration of acts like this and their frustration that
this kind of thing makes them.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
All look bad.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
You know, it makes them look like exactly what they are,
the kind of people goading a teenage murderer into killing
himself writes, you have made everyone on this board look
like a terrorist. Is that what you wanted? Also repent
hell is real? His reply his final post reads only
(10:14):
not my problem. On Twitter, his final post was a
little after midnight in Slovak, he wrote see you on
the other side. A Slovak language news report says that
two days before the attack, he had called a mental
health crisis hotline. He said, I have to die, but
(10:35):
I am very afraid, and then he hung up. But
in his final hours he didn't call back. He didn't
call that hotline. He didn't turn himself in or seek help.
He sought reassurance and support from the place least likely
to provide it. He logged onto four Chan, hoping to
see his acts hailed as heroic, but they.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
Just laughed at him.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
He was dead before terogram canonized him, placing him in
the Pantheon of terror. He worshiped. Authorities in Slovakia weren't
able to ping his cell phone location until five am.
The cell phone provider didn't have any employees working overnight.
His body was found in the park around seven am.
(11:20):
It's not clear exactly when he died, but if I
had to put money on it, I'd guess he died
in real life shortly after he logged off. He posted
right up through the end, and that's all we really knew.
In October of twenty twenty two, the manifesto was online
for all to see. In the manifesto, he includes the
(11:41):
Terogram Collective in his list of special thanks at the end,
writing you know who you are. Thank you for your
incredible writing and art, for your political texts, for your
practical guides building the future of the White Revolution one
publication at a time. In the section of the manifesto
under the header recommended reading, he lists many of the
(12:03):
usual suspects. He was inspired by the christ Church mosque
shooting and recommends that shooter's manifesto. He praises the terrorist's Bible,
William Luther Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries, and even recommends
the prequel, an even sloppier novel called Hunter, But he
also recommends two other lesser known publications, two of the
(12:23):
four publications authored by the Terragram Collective. He lists these two,
Militant Accelerationism and The Hard Reset, last, writing, if the
other books give a theoretical and fictional base for our resistance,
these two provide the practical means for it. They also
go into a deeper dive into some issues, concepts, and things.
(12:45):
Anyone who seeks to fight Zog should know. These two
may be harder to find than the other books I listed,
but you can find them if you look in the
right places. The link between the Brodislava shooting and the
Tterogram Collective was never a secret. It was right there
all along. He said it himself. He recommended their propaganda
(13:06):
and thanked them in the acknowledgments. But when he was
posting on Fortune that night he lied about something earlier
in this Murderer's Q and a session. Someone asked him,
have you been talking to some other people over telegram,
discord or signal? And he replies, made my own decision
(13:27):
to do this. I had barely any dms with people
on telegram or wherever. And he later followed up with
their channel owners. Hence the annan part, don't know their names.
They produced good content. Though Craigich was trying to backtrack
on his initial post that he'd exchanged direct messages with
anyone in the lead up to the attack, the truth,
(13:50):
as it turns out, is that he wasn't just reading
the material produced by the Telegram Collective he was in
active communication with its leaders. This age murderer in Slovakia
hadn't just posted his manifesto online before the attack. He'd
also sent it directly to someone immediately after. He wanted
(14:10):
to be certain that his message got out, so he
sent it to someone he knew would spread it, someone
who had helped him craft it. He sent the manifesto
to Matthew Allison, a man in his thirties living in Boise, Idaho,
earlier this month. In September of twenty twenty four, Matthew
(14:32):
Allison of Boise and Dallas Humber of Elk Grove, California,
were arrested in charge in a fifteen count indictment with
soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials, interstate threats,
distributing information relating to explosives, and conspiring to provide material
support to terrorists. The pair are alleged to be the
(14:52):
ringleaders of the Terragram Collective, that association of pseudonymous posters
on telegram that produced Neo Nazi acceleration propaganda and now,
according to the Department of Justice, the Terogram Collective can
also be called a transnational terrorist group According to the
allegations in the indictment, Krajik was an active member of
(15:13):
the group's chat for a year.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Leading up to the shooting. And I guess I should
back up a little bit and explain a little more.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
About what's going on in these chats, as much as
I would really rather not. There are plenty of Nazi
chat rooms. There is no shortage of places online where
a racial slur enthusiast can log on and share ideas
with other guys who hate black people and Jewish people,
and gay people, and immigrants and women and whatever. Pick
(15:56):
your flavor. It's out there in abundance. This is something
much darker. These are accelerationists, people who believe their goals
can only be achieved by driving society over the brink
and into total collapse.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
They believe that.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Acts of mass murder, terrorism, and destruction are the necessary
course of action to create the chaos required to allow
a new world to be born, a world built by
and four white men alone.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
And they aren't just talking about it.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
The Terogram Collective has produced a series of what would
you call them manuals, manifestos, zines, terrorism handbooks. They've put
out four written publications in one short documentary, all directed
at providing both inspiration and explicit instruction on how their
followers can commit acts of unspeakable violence. In their online spaces,
(16:55):
past acts are celebrated. One of the core elements of
the group's ship language is this pantheon of saints. It's
not the saints you're thinking of. This is a gruesome hagiography.
They've canonized mass shooters. They celebrate the Saint Day of
(17:16):
each shooter on the day of their atrocity. Robert Bowers, Unders,
Bravic Dylan Rue, Brenton, Terran, Patrick Crusius, Anton London Patterson,
murderers from infamous to obscure murderers from all over the world.
The criteria for sainthood are fivefold, race, motive, intent, score,
(17:38):
and worldview. The prospective saint must, of course, be white.
There is occasionally some debate in the Nazi community about
whether they should offer their begrudging respect for non white
mass murderers, who nevertheless kill large numbers of people they
deem worthy targets, but the answer is generally no. They
(18:00):
would celebrate something like the Pulse night club shooting, which
killed nearly fifty people, most of whom were both Latino
and members of the queer community. That perpetrator cannot be
celebrated as a saint because he fails the first test.
He isn't white. Intent, motive, and worldview all feel like
they kind of describe the same thing. So I'm not
(18:22):
sure why there are five criteria when they probably could
have condensed it down to three. But the attack must
be deliberate, that's intent, committed in the spirit of our struggle,
that's motive, and be motivated by a white nationalist ideology.
Though they are willing to make some exceptions. There's a
little wiggle room here for attacks that are right wing
(18:44):
but not explicitly neo Nazi. And score means exactly what
you probably think it means. They're keeping score, they're counting bodies.
Sometimes if you log into the worst kind of place
during an active attack or in the immediate aftermath of one,
(19:04):
you'll see eager speculation that someone could be getting a
new high score, like it's some kind of video game.
And there are no exceptions to this requirement. You cannot
become a Terogram saint with a score of zero. Someone
has to die. These ideas didn't originate with Matthew Allison
(19:27):
and Dallas Humber. Both of them have been members of
this online community for years since at least twenty nineteen.
In twenty twenty two, after the arrest of one of
the community's most prolific posters, they became the group's leaders.
A user who posted as Slovak bro Pavel Benedick, was
arrested in Slovakia in early twenty twenty two and eventually
(19:48):
sentenced to six years in prison for his support of
terrorism and Slovak Brough isn't the only Terogram author to
land himself in prison. Brandon Russell, the Adam Woffin founder,
currently awaiting trial on charges of conspiracy to blow up
the power grid in Baltimore, was in close communication with
members of the group before and after his arrest. He
(20:10):
appears to have participated in the creation of at least
some of the group's work. Two men in Canada were
arrested last fall, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police press
release alleging that they too had participated in the creation
of Tarogram manifestos. Their cases are ongoing and subject to
a publication ban in Canada, so the extent of their
involvement and the possibility that revelations in those cases had
(20:33):
some bearing on the investigation here in the US is
unknown right now. As the leaders of the Tarogram collective,
Dallas Humber and Matthew Allison, are alleged to have directly
contributed to acts of terrorism.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
All over the world.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Their publications provided detailed instructions on how to make bombs,
how to make napalm at home with materials you can
buy at the hardware store, the most efficient way to
destroy an electrical substation with rifle fire, and how to
identify the most valuable targets in your area, targets that
could be infrastructure or human. They maintained a document called
(21:11):
the List, a list of high value assassination targets. For
each name on the list, there was a little graphic
like a trading card. The target's name, home address, and
photograph were always featured, along with the reasons why they
were considered an enemy of the cause. Those reasons, as
you might expect, tended to be related to the target's identity.
(21:34):
They're Jewish, they're gay, they're an immigrant, or some other
kind of undesirable in their eyes. The names on the
list include senators, judges, a former federal prosecutor, state and
local government officials, and non profit employees. In their chats,
they posted the list often, and would sometimes post individual
(21:56):
members of the list alongside encouragement to take action. In
one exchange described in the indictment, a member of the
group chat asked if there were any members of the
list located in his area. The administrator of the group
responded with a trading card image for a target in
a city in the poster's area. The user replied, we
already have this one, and asked the channel administrator to
(22:19):
tag him if any new names were added to the
list in his area. A user the government alleges is Dallas.
Humber replied, we'll do. A week later, she tagged that
same user with a new name in the same city.
He replied, very good, I'll check in with my guys now.
(22:39):
And it wasn't just members of the list who were
in danger. Humber and Allison would routinely remind members of
the group of the kinds of targets they should be
seeking out. In June of twenty twenty three, Humber posted
numerous exhortations to followers that they should be targeting Gay
Pride Month events, writing in one post.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Mass shootings, arson bombings, vehicle tax The list goes on,
and the opportunities provided to you this month will be plentiful.
Don't let them go to waste. What's more impactful boycotting
target or getting dozens of targets in your sights and
taking them out permanently. Actions speak louder than words. Direct
(23:22):
lethal action speaks louder than any boycott. This Pride month,
give us what we truly need, a new saint to
be proud of and a glorious new attack to celebrate.
You've got the means an opportunity. All you need is
the will. Don't breathe a word of what you're planning
to anyone, and make it count.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Make it count. That's a frequent refrain. Make it Count
as the title of one of the group's terrorism manuals.
It's also the final line of the broadess Lava Shooters Manifesto.
The line itself comes from seed the collected essays of
James Mason. If the Turner Diaries is their Bible, siege
(24:05):
is perhaps a missile or a brevery. Maybe the analogy
doesn't hold. I don't know, but Mason is the godfather
of modern fascist terrorism read Siege was such a constant
directive in so many Nazi chats for so long that
it's more of a meme than an actual instruction. At
this point. Mason wrote the Siege newsletter throughout the early
(24:28):
to mid eighties. The essays were collected and published in
book form in the early nineties, but the text languished
in relative obscurity until it was rediscovered by users of
the Nazi forum Iron March in the early twenty tens.
It's no coincidence that Adam Wafflin was born on the
pages of that forum, in the bubbling ideological soup where
young men were exchanging their favorite passages of Siege. It's
(24:52):
a messy sprawling six hundred or so pages, depending on
the addition you've bootlegged from some terrorism chat room. It's
mostly useless ramblings. There's a lot of repetitive content. It
wasn't written to be a book, to be fair. The
line make it count comes from the end of the
August nineteen eighty two newsletter, in a missive titled Biting
(25:15):
the Bullet. Like much of the avice in Siege, this
essay is about taking action, about choosing the time, the target,
and the circumstances of your attack on the system, because
you may only get one chance to strike. The essay concludes,
quote in revolution, the price of failure generally is death.
(25:36):
So whatever you do, and whatever course you choose, don't
sell yourself cheap. Make it count. Make it count. The
Collective's Terrorism Guide by the same name and The Hard
Reset both contain diagrams of electrical transformers and instructions for
damaging them, released around the same time, both in June
(25:58):
of twenty twenty two. Make It Counts a light fourteen pages.
It's more propaganda than manual. The page titled Blackout is
dominated by a large graphic of a rifle with a
scope and big neon text that reads, in all caps,
locate substation, range find shoot transformers, flee undetected, which I
(26:22):
guess are technically instructions. They're just not very good ones.
The Hard Reset, on the other hand, is a nearly
three hundred page compilation of essays, graphics, manuals, and just
a nightmarish collection of fonts and colors that would make
a graphic designer weep around. Halfway through, there's a section
(26:45):
containing incredibly detailed instructions, complete with diagrams for sabotaging all
manner of infrastructure, how to derail a train, how to
damage a cell phone tower, things to consider when bombing
a truck depot, ways you might contaminate a municipal water
treatment planned, and of course four pages of advice on
sabotaging the power grid. Alongside mass shootings, attacks on the
(27:09):
power grid are the group's favorite fixation. We talked a
little bit about the concept in another episode a few
weeks ago, Lights Out about the Nazi paramilitary marines who
hope to knock out power in the Pacific Northwest. They
thought it would provide cover for a planned series of assassinations.
Those guys never got a chance to read the Terragram
(27:29):
collective manuals on the subject, they were arrested before they
were written. But as I said in an episode, this
idea has been popular in right wing circles for decades.
Take out the power, chaos ensues, something something step three,
then race war. The middle part never really gets fleshed out,
(27:52):
but they all seem very convinced that something happens right
after it gets dark that causes a race war. I'm
not really sold on that logic, but they are bound
and determined to put holes in a substation. Nevertheless, the
indictment lists numerous occasions on which Dallas Humber encourages her
followers to take the advice provided in the manuals and
(28:13):
attack the grid. In December of twenty twenty two, after
these still unsolved attacks on electrical infrastructure in Jones County,
North Carolina on November eleventh, and Moore County on December third,
Humber posted encouragement for anyone planning a similar grid attack,
advising them not to let second thoughts or fear of failure,
or fear of getting caught demotivate them. Do not let
(28:36):
this big mistake happen to you, she wrote in all caps,
reminding them to have a plan, carry it out, and
keep their mouths shut. A few days later, she wrote.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
Maybe that person could be you lining up your sights
on these metal behemoths from the tree line, squeezing the
trigger and retreating from the area with a shitting grin
on your face, knowing the chaos you've just unleashed.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
And after a third still unsolved attack was carried out
just a month later in Randolph County, North Carolina, Humber posted.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Again everyone please take a moment to congratulate yourselves. It
seems as though this avenue of attack, an incredibly effective
one at that has really caught on. I like to
think that all our hard work in detailing its effectiveness
and showing our community how easy it is not only
to do but to get away with, has helped encourage
(29:29):
this death to the grid, death to the system.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
So the Terrogram Collective isn't exactly taking credit for the
grid attacks in North Carolina, but they aren't not taking
credit for it either. She does credit herself and the
group with popularizing the idea. She speculates that perhaps the
attacker or attackers had read her work, read her words,
and listened to her voice and decided to act, But
(30:00):
there's no claim made that she knows who did it,
and maybe she doesn't. We don't actually know whether these
attacks were committed by someone inspired by the Terrogram Collective
at all, even if they were ideologically motivated. She didn't
invent the idea, and a similar attack out in Washington
State during the same time period was actually committed by
(30:21):
a pair of would be thieves who thought they could
get cash out of ATMs during a power outage, So
maybe it wasn't a terrorist at all, but if it was,
it is entirely possible that an attacker inspired by her
work was operating based off of a one directional relationship,
that this person consumed the content and acted on it
(30:43):
without ever actually having a conversation with the author. We
didn't learn until much later, though, that this wasn't the
case with the shooting in Broadislava, and we do know
that at least one would be grid attacker was definitely
in that chat and definitely in communit vacation with the
Tarogram collective. Andrew Takestov was arrested in July of twenty
(31:18):
twenty four at the Newark Airport. He was on his
way to Ukraine to join the Russian Volunteer Corps, a
neo Nazi paramilitary group of Russian citizens inside Ukraine who
opposed the Putin government Takeistov had been a member of
the Tarogram collective chat since at least January of twenty
twenty four, and in January of twenty twenty four he
(31:38):
made a new friend online. It isn't stated outright in
his charging documents or in the cases against Humber and Allison,
but it sounds like he made this friend in the
Tterogram chat, and this friend turned out to be an
undercover FBI agent around this same time. In January of
twenty twenty four, Takeistov asks in the Terogram chat for
(32:03):
recommendations for quote documentaries about our guys made by our guys,
and he asks if anyone has more content like White Terror,
which is the twenty four minute documentary the Collective put
out in October of twenty twenty two. The video is
a compilation of descriptions of over one hundred white supremacist
(32:23):
attacks carried out between nineteen sixty eight and twenty twenty two.
It is, in their words, their litany of the Saints.
Humber narrates the video herself. She is the voice of Terogram,
but she's not very skilled voice actor, and that's not
just my opinion. The website Militant Wire, a publication that
(32:44):
writes about political violence all over the world, wrote of
her narration.
Speaker 5 (32:49):
It is both striking and seemingly incongruous to the material
the way a young, average female voice, devoid of ghoulish
stylization or of discernible malice and hatred, not only celebrates
acts of terrorism while parroting well established neo Nazi tropes
and slogans, but perhaps most of all, the unburden and
rather natural way that this young woman uses the most
(33:11):
cutting of racial slurs and homophobic pejoratives. It is one
thing to see edgy young men describe mass murder Dylan
Rufe as Saint Rufe on a message board, for example,
and quite another to hear a young woman say it
aloud and without traceable irony.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
She sounds bored as she lists shootings, bombings, arsons and stabbings,
just droning out this list of the dead. The video
was published just days after the shooting in broad us Lava,
but it had already been finalized before the attack, so
he's not in it. The list of their murderer's heroes
(33:48):
ends with the Buffalo Supermarket shooter from May of twenty
twenty two, but the video concludes with Humber's deadpan reading
of an ominous message. The list is always growing, and
you could join it.
Speaker 4 (34:04):
And to the saints of tomorrow watching this today, know
that when you succeed, you will be celebrated with reverence,
and your sacrifice will not be in vain. Hail the saints,
and hail are glorious. And bloody legacy of white hair.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
When Takestav asked if they had any more content like
that video, Humber replied with a file an audio recording
of her reading the Jacksonville Dollar General Shooters Manifesto. The manifesto,
entitled A White Boy Summer to Remember, had just been
released that month by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Department. Humber quickly
(34:43):
recorded the audiobook version for the Teogram Collective, as she
had with many manifestos before it. Her audio recording of
the Broados Lava Shooters Manifesto was released to the chat
within a week of that attack, just as she'd promised
Kraigik it would be before he died a few months later.
In April of twenty twenty four, Takistov posted again thanking
(35:05):
Humber for links to videos providing instructions on attacking energy facilities.
One video in particular had instructions for using my lar
balloons to damage power lines. Their conductive metal surface can
start a fire when it comes into contact with electrical infrastructure.
Takistanv was so pleased with this advice, it seems that
he thought he might like to try it. Later that summer,
(35:28):
he met up with his new friend from the chat room,
though one he didn't know as an undercover FBI agent. Together,
they drove around New Jersey looking at substations. Takistov proudly
shared the instructions for how to carry out the attack,
directing his friend to use my lar balloons to short
circuit the transformer. He followed up by sending his friend
(35:49):
a copy of the hard Reset, telling him quote, it's
really the only thing you need. It has ideology, it
has how two guides, it has ideas for funny things.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
It goes into how you should plan it.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
It really goes into the thought process. Takustov told the
agent his new friend that his plan was to fly
to Ukraine and volunteer with the Russian Volunteer Corps. He'd
chosen that group in particular because, according to the indictment quote,
the group was openly national socialist and more importantly, specialized
in assassinations, attacks on power grids and other infrastructure sabotage.
(36:26):
So he hoped to go over there, get some training,
do a little fighting, and then return home with new
skills he could use here. He instructed his new friend
not to be idle in his absence that while Takistov
was gone, he expected his new friend to carry out
at least one attack, perhaps the attack on the substation
(36:46):
they'd been discussing. He also recommended getting a rifle and
a cheap burner phone. The burner phone wasn't for communication, though,
it was to be used to determine if a cell
tower had been sufficiently dead imaged by rifle rounds that
it no longer transmitted a signal. So you take the
phone out, you start shooting at the tower, and if
(37:08):
the phone still has bars, keep shooting. In July, just
a few days before he would board the plane to Ukraine,
Takistav met up with his new friend one last time.
This time they drove out to a warehouse full of
trucking equipment. Takistov explained to the undercover agent how he
should access the facility to damage equipment with a Molotov cocktail.
(37:30):
He also suggested some strategies for derailing trains. He essentially
talked through almost all of the infrastructure related attacks suggested
by the Terogram collective publication that he'd already shared with
the agent, and then he tried to get on a plane.
Takistov did not make his flight. On July tenth, he
(37:52):
was arrested at the airport.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
He's not due back.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
In court until October, but he is the attacker too
listed in the indict against Dallas Humber and Matthew Allison.
That indictment lists three individuals that the government is confident
they can prove were incited to action directly by the
Terogram Collective. Attacker IE is the broadest lava shooter. Attacker
(38:16):
three is the teenager who stabbed five men outside of
a mosque in Turkey last month. He was taken into
custody alive, and as far as reporting I can find,
all of his victims are expected to survive. The teenager,
identified by Turkish press only by his first name and
last initial, Arda K, was acknowledged by the Terogram Collective
(38:37):
but not canonized as a saint.
Speaker 3 (38:40):
He failed.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Although his intent, ideology, and worldview are consistent with the
kind of murderer they're looking for, the teenager failed to
take any lives, and more importantly.
Speaker 3 (38:53):
He isn't white.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
After the attack, Dallas Humber wrote in the chat he
included the terror books and other saint manifestos in his file.
Dump gives shout outs to the other saints in his
manifesto and references several hard Reset passages. He was one
hundred percent our guy. But he's not white, so I
can't give him an honorary title. We can still celebrate
(39:17):
his attack, though he did it for Terogram. She followed
up later on writing we can hail him anyway. We
just can't add him to the pantheon. But yeah, it's
a great development regardless. Inspiring more attacks is the goal,
and anyone claiming to be an accelerationist should support them.
(39:38):
It isn't specified in the court documents whether our Decae
had ever directly participated in the Tarogram collective chats, but
he certainly read their work. He wasn't just inspired by
some shared ideology. He cites them directly in this manifesto.
His manifesto, however, is written in Turkish, which you'd expect
(40:00):
because there's something a little strange about the manifesto Uraikrazech
left behind. It's in English. That's not entirely extraordinary. He
spoke English, though he'd never spent any time in an
English speaking country. He probably would have learned it in school.
He watched American television shows and movies. He had access
(40:20):
to American music. He participated in online spaces where English
is the primary language. But the manifesto is in perfect English.
And I don't mean perfect English like from a textbook,
something you could achieve through study. It's native English. It
has idioms and terms of phrase and even mistakes that
(40:44):
only a native English speaker would really use. And that's
not my opinion. According to an analysis by forensic linguist
Julia Kupper published by the Accelerationism Research Consortium, the manifesto
was almost certainly written by a native English speaker who
grew up in the United States, probably someone with a
(41:05):
good education, and someone a bit older than Crazick, someone
maybe in their forties. The obvious answer then is, well,
he plagiarized it, right. It's copy paste, and that's surprisingly common.
A lot of manifestos lift large portions of their text
from other similar documents. But Copper checked he hadn't. This
(41:29):
isn't copy pasta, this isn't someone else's manifesto. This was
an original work, but Crechick couldn't have written it. Copper
conducted a forensic linguistic analysis on the manifesto. The handwritten
suicide note several hundred tweets from his account and the
four chan posts made the night of the shooting. She
(41:50):
concluded that a second author was involved in both the
manifesto and some of the tweets, but that the four
chan posts and the suicide note were written by him alone.
According to Covers analysis, there are some telltale signs of
two writers at work. When Krajik posted a photo on
fourtune that night to prove he was who he said
(42:11):
he was, he showed a handwritten note with the date
on it, and we know he wrote this himself, and
in European fashion, he wrote the date day, month year,
not month day year, as Americans would do. The manifesto,
though uses an American date format. In his tweets, there
(42:34):
are style shifts that seem to indicate two people may
have had access to the account. Changes in tone and vocabulary,
and the way that punctuation is used, shifting between the
European style and the American style of where commas and
periods go on either side of a quotation or parentheses.
The American English style of formatting began appearing in the
(42:55):
tweets in May of twenty twenty two, the month he
claims he began working on the manifesto and the plan
in Earnest. Kupper's report was published in early twenty twenty three,
just six months after the attack and more than a
year before the extent of Crojick's involvement with the terrogram
chat administrators came to light after their arrests. It raises
(43:17):
some questions we may not get answers to. Perhaps the
criminal proceedings against Alison and Humber will result in Twitter
producing some records that could show more than one person
logging into the account, but maybe not. There may be
no satisfying conclusion to this mystery. But if an older, educated,
(43:40):
native English speaking American author wrote most of that manifesto,
it certainly confers some responsibility onto that author for the
attack that accompanied it. The co author of the manifesto
didn't pull the trigger, but they may as well have.
If Humber and Allison are being prosecuted for their contributions
(44:00):
to this attack, in particular, whether or not they had
fore knowledge whether or not they participated in the crafting
of this manifesto would be a significant factor in the prosecution.
But who are these people? Who is Matthew Allison, Who
is Dallas Humber? How did they end up running a
transnational terrorist organization that goads young men into committing acts
(44:23):
of terrorism? Matthew Allison wasn't revealed as a Terrogram collective
administrator until this indictment was unsealed. We didn't know his
name until he was arrested, but Dallas Humber was unmasked
a year and a half ago. Researchers at Left Coast
Right Watch and independent investigative journalism outlet covering politics and
(44:45):
extremism identified Humber in March of twenty twenty three. The
story was confirmed and re reported by Huffington Post soon after.
Dallas Humber was miss Gorehound the Voice of Terror. The
story is a truly bizarre one. I'll link it in
the show notes, and I highly recommend checking out this
(45:07):
story in particular and Left Coast Right Watch in general.
They were able to locate the earliest days of Humber's
journey to becoming the Voice of White Terror. When she
was just thirteen, she was active on sites like deviant
Art and live journal, where she described herself as a
hopeless fangirl for serial killers. Their digital archaeology shows that
(45:29):
Humber has been making fan art for murderers for over
twenty years. She was describing herself as a National Socialist
in her online journal as early as two thousand and four,
when she was just fourteen. By twenty fourteen, she was
using one of the monikers she carried through to the present,
little Miss Gorehound. Quoting from lcrw's twenty twenty three write
(45:51):
up on Humber quote, her earliest interest in gurro art
had become a full blown gore fetish. In its purest form,
guro is meant to simultaneously evoke a sense of eroticism
and grotesqueness. It's meant to make the viewer uncomfortable. At
its worst, it can only be described as hen Tai snuff.
(46:13):
Nearly all of her art from this period features abused women.
LCRW has chosen not to share the images as they
depict scenes of torture, dismemberment, and explicit sexual violence. For
the most part, the only women that aren't being subjected
to violence and brutality are perpetuating it against other women.
The men, however, are portrayed as strong, powerful, and heroic,
(46:37):
and by twenty nineteen, Humber had found her new online
home terrogram her now nearly twenty year old hobby of
creating gore art was right at home in an online
community devoted to celebrating mass murder. And now she wasn't
just drawing pictures of killers, she was drawing pictures for them.
(46:59):
She posted photos on Telegram of her correspondence with convicted
mass murderer Dylan Rufe. Several outlets have reported on these letters,
and they do point out that they were unable to
confirm with prison officials how often Humber was corresponding with Rufe,
but the images she posted matched the handwriting and style
of known samples of Roof's letters. In one letter she posted,
(47:22):
Rufe requests a drawing from her. He asks for quote
a wizard with mean slash, unfriendly eyebrows or a dragon
or an unfriendly eyebrowed wizard writing a dragon.
Speaker 3 (47:36):
End quote.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
I hope that's the only time I ever have to
quote Dylan Roof. The little Miss Gorehound account posted a
photo of the finished drawing of the unfriendly looking wizard
with the caption finished Dylan's Wizard hashtag Saint Mail. She
also claimed to have written cards to Brenton Tarrant, imprisoned
(47:59):
in New Zealand. The murders of fifty one worshippers at
mosques in christ Church and to Anders Bravic, imprisoned in
Norway for the murder of seventy seven people, most of
whom were children. It's unclear what, if anything, Humber does
for a day job these days, but lcrw is write
up uncovered that for many years she made a living
(48:21):
as a dildo saleswoman using the pseudonym techs Hunter. But
after that article was published, nothing happened, nothing changed. We
knew who she was, but nobody made a move to intervene,
and she carried on as she always had. Shannon Foley
(48:43):
Martinez told Huffington Post back in March of twenty twenty
three that quote, it is an absolute given that terrogram
will inspire more shootings if left unchecked, and she's in
the heartbreaking position of knowing exactly what she's talking about.
Shannon was radicalized by a boyfriend as a teenager, but
quickly left the movement and has since dedicated decades of
(49:03):
her life to the ugly work of trying to keep
other people's children from falling prey to the recruiters who
target vulnerable teens. But the government waited and waited. They
watched too. I'm sure we know they had undercover agents
in the group, But they waited over a year. They
(49:24):
waited until more attacks took place. They waited until an
eighty seven year old man was stabbed outside of his mosque.
They waited while more and more young men were fed
heaping servings of rotten propaganda. They waited until September of
twenty twenty four, a few weeks after that stabbing in Turkey.
(49:45):
In a piece published in Wire a few days after
the indictment, investigative journalist Ali Winston offers an intriguing explanation
for the timing. While most of the charges in the
indictment could have been brought at any time, things like
soliciting the murder of a federal AffA, disseminating information about explosives,
threatening communications, and so on, they've been doing that for years.
(50:08):
The final charge of this fifteen count indictment is a
violation of Chapter eighteen, Section two three three nine A
conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists. And this is
the most serious charge on the indictment. This is the
one that could put them away forever. And this charge
(50:29):
was only made possible by a decision earlier this year
by the Government of the United Kingdom. In April of
twenty twenty four, the UK formally added the Terragram Collective
to its list of proscribed terrorist entities. A Home Office
announcement in April.
Speaker 6 (50:45):
Reads the Telegram Collective has been prescribed as a terrorist
organization today after Parliament approved a draft order laid on Monday,
the twenty second of April. This order makes belonging to
the Terogram Collective or inviting support for the group criminal offense,
with a potential prison sentence of fourteen years, which can
be handed down alongside or in place of a fine.
(51:07):
In addition, Section fifty eight makes it a criminal offense
for a person to collect or possess information which is
likely to be useful to a person committing or repairing
for acts of terrorism, including where individual views or accesses
documents or records containing information of that kind. The Teogram
Collective has now been added to the list of prescribed
organizations in the UK, alongside eighty other organizations.
Speaker 2 (51:32):
And with that announcement, Terogram is now a foreign terrorist organization.
And because people died and at least one of the incidents,
the government laid out in the indictment. As an act
the defendants insided they could go away for life. As
Ali Winston put it in that Wired article quote, In
other words, the US is treating Terogram in ways similar
(51:55):
to how it has treated Islamist terrorist organizations. Terrorism researcher
Seamus Hughes told Winston, quote, I would think of this
case more like an old school terrorism investigation, where you
have a leadership cell that pushed info to followers and
radicalized them into action. Cases involving this particular charge are
(52:16):
typically those involving groups like ISIS or al Qaida. I
don't think we've seen this used before against white nationalist
domestic terror organizations. Using this legal framework against a group
like the Terrogram collective may signal a shift in the
DOJ's strategy for targeting white nationalist terrorism in the United States.
(52:38):
It's a big swing, as Hughes said, quote, it shows
that either the FEDS are trying to make a point
or they were very concerned about these particular actors, and
maybe it's both right. It was long past time to
do something, anything, anything at all about the most significant
(52:59):
network of neo Nazi terrorist propaganda on the English speaking Internet.
Speaker 3 (53:04):
People have already died.
Speaker 2 (53:06):
There's every reason to believe the undercover agents they had
in the group knew that more people would die if
something didn't disrupt the organization. And maybe the Justice Department
is just feeling a little more willing to use the
tools they have to do something about right wing extremism
more generally, this is obviously a much more seismic shift
(53:27):
in policy. But we were just talking last week about
the false statements charges against a soldier who allegedly lied
about his extremist activities, and those charges were unusual and
perhaps indicative of a shift in policy and strategy. I
suppose it doesn't behoove me to make wilder speculations than
the experts are willing to make, So we'll stick with
(53:47):
what Seamus Hughes told Ally Winston. A case like this
had to get sign off at the highest levels. Somebody
in the DOJ wanted this network shut down. When the
pair were arrested earlier this month, authorities searched their homes.
Dallas Humber had three D printed guns, high capacity magazines,
(54:09):
a short barreled rifle, unregistered firearms, a lot of Nazi propaganda,
her own manifestos, and a notebook listing the white supremacist
attackers with whom she corresponds, including Dylan Roof. When Matthew
Allison was arrested, he was quote wearing a backpack containing
zip ties, duct tape, a gun, ammunition, a knife, lock
(54:32):
picking equipment, two phones, and a thumb drive. After his arrest,
Allison was advised of his rights, but waived them and
quickly confessed in a recorded interview to engaging in the
acts alleged in the indictment. The pair are currently held
without bond, with the government citing their own statements about
their willingness to die in a shootout rather than be arrested,
(54:54):
about Allison's go bag, which indicates a desire to flee
the country, the severe of the charges which could send
them to prison for the rest of their lives, and
their own prior statements expressing a willingness to murder or
to have murdered people they suspect. Our cooperating witnesses against
other Terogram members like Brendan Russell. These cooperating witnesses have
(55:17):
been given permission by the government to testify in a
closed court room without being named. In Brandon Russell's case
for Humber and Allison. There is not currently a date
set for their next appearance in court, and with Humber
and Allison in custody, the current version of the Tterogram.
Speaker 3 (55:34):
Collective is dead.
Speaker 2 (55:37):
But what does that mean? This is only one head
of a hydra. Just as new leaders emerged after Slovak
Borough was arrested in twenty twenty two, just as Brandon
Russell continued to communicate with Humber after his arrest in
twenty twenty three, a new poster will rise to take
their place. Hopefully this case signals a shift and the
(55:57):
government's approach to throwing of roadblocks in the paths of
aspiring Nazi terrorists. Because a dildo saleswoman from California and
a failed DJ from Idaho may spend the rest of
their lives behind bars, but it's only a matter of
time where for a new voice starts whispering white terror
into the ears and impressionable teenage boys who are desperate
(56:20):
to die in a way that will impress four Chan posters.
Speaker 1 (56:27):
Weird Little Guys is the production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 5 (56:30):
For more from cool Zone.
Speaker 1 (56:31):
Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us
out on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 3 (56:37):
Or Wherever You get Here podcast
Host
Molly Conger
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