Brandon Russell, arguably some of the influential figures within the American neofascist revival of the previous decade, is on trial this week over an alleged plot to knock out Baltimore’s energy grid and set off a race warfare.
The 29-year-old cofounder of the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi guerrilla group that was chargeable for 5 homicides and quite a few bomb plots earlier than the FBI dismantled it in 2020, Russell was arrested by federal brokers in February 2023 alongside along with his girlfriend, Sarah Clendaniel. If convicted of his prices of conspiring to destroy an power facility, Russell may face 20 years behind bars because of a previous conviction and the potential penalty for his present prices.
Russell’s case represents one of many final gasps of the Biden administration’s hard-charging strategy to tackling violent far-right extremism that’s all however assured to vary throughout US president Donald Trump’s second time period in workplace. It additionally gives a singular look inside federal legislation enforcement’s investigation into an insidious accelerationist propaganda community that mixes neo-Nazi ideology with nihilist, Columbine-style violence to encourage mass casualty occasions in the USA and past.
Russell allegedly hatched the plot to black out Baltimore whereas, in accordance with prosecutors, collaborating in a noxious, prolific propaganda community hellbent on fomenting violence and chaos. The Terrorgram Collective, which took its title following an enormous inflow of neo-Nazis to Telegram on the finish of the final decade, ran a number of channels on the messaging app and developed a sequence of “how-to” home terrorism manuals that sought to encourage disaffected younger women and men into committing mass casualty occasions. Terrorgram is at present designated a “tier one” extremism menace by the US Division of Justice.
Up to now, Terrorgram has launched 4 publications—a mix of ideological motivation, mass-murder worship, neofascist indoctrination, and how-to manuals for chemical weapons assaults, infrastructure sabotage, and ethnic cleaning. Court docket information point out there are not less than three unreleased Terrorgram Collective compendiums, together with “The Saint Encyclopedia” of the far-right mass killers they venerate, together with Anders Breivik, Brenton Tarrant, and Timothy McVeigh; and “The Record,” a set of politicians, authorities officers, enterprise leaders, journalists, activists, and different individuals deemed official assassination targets.
The screeds seem to have straight impressed a sequence of ideologically motivated assaults world wide, together with a 2022 mass capturing at an LGBTQ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, profitable assaults on energy infrastructure in North Carolina and comparable failed plots in Baltimore and New Jersey, and a stabbing spree within the Turkish metropolis of Eskisehir. There are at present greater than a dozen separate federal prosecutions round the USA that contain individuals alleged to be core Terrorgram Collective members or people allegedly impressed towards violent assaults on infrastructure or civilians.
In one of many Biden administration’s final coverage strikes in opposition to right-wing extremism, on January 13, the State Division formally categorized the Terrorgram Collective as a Overseas Terrorist Group, an inventory often reserved for militant teams that maintain territory and have a proper real-world paramilitary construction versus a free propaganda community that seeks to encourage mass casualty occasions. Whereas it isn’t distinctive—the British Dwelling Workplace formally proscribed Terrorgram as an extremist group final Might, and Russell’s Atomwaffen Division was banned by the UK, Australia, and Canada—it’s more likely to be the final such motion taken towards neo-Nazi teams by the USA authorities for the foreseeable future.
