Speaker 1: Col Zone Media. Hello everyone, Molly Conger here. This is,
Speaker 1: as you've probably noticed, a rerun. I'm enjoying some much
Speaker 1: needed time off at the moment. I hope you'll forgive me.
Speaker 1: This pair of episodes originally ran at the end of
Speaker 1: October and beginning of November of last year. It tells
Speaker 1: the story of Ethan Melzer, the United States Army private
Speaker 1: sentenced to more than forty years in prison or a
Speaker 1: failed plot to have his own unit ambushed during a
Speaker 1: sensitive mission in Turkey. It felt timely to re release
Speaker 1: this one now. The strange satanic Nazi cult that Melzer
Speaker 1: was drawn into as he planned for murder and mayhem.
Speaker 1: It's back in the news just recently. In March of
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five, a teenager in Wisconsin was arrested and
Speaker 1: charged with the murder of his mother and stepfather. On
Speaker 1: his phone, authorities found material related to the Order of
Speaker 1: Nine Angles, the same group Melzer had been involved in.
Speaker 1: It's too soon to say much about Nikita Kaysap, that
Speaker 1: teenager in Wisconsin. He's been charged at the state level
Speaker 1: in Wisconsin, and it looks like federal charges are probably
Speaker 1: coming down the line. At some point. Two I'm sure
Speaker 1: his story will be won for the show eventually, but
Speaker 1: it isn't quite over yet. For now, though, I can
Speaker 1: offer you a little insight into what can happen when
Speaker 1: a young man starts looking for answers in the Devil's
Speaker 1: chat room. On May twenty sixth, twenty twenty, a U. S.
Speaker 1: Army private stationed in Italy celebrated his twenty second birthday.
Speaker 1: He was blissfully unaware that the FBI had spent that
Speaker 1: day confirming his identity as the Nazi satanist who was
Speaker 1: trying to get Al Qaeda to wipe out his entire unit.
Speaker 1: Half a world away. That very same day, Minneapolis police
Speaker 1: officer Derek Chauvin knelt on an unarmed man's neck for
Speaker 1: nine minutes and twenty nine seconds. The man cried out,
Speaker 1: saying he couldn't breathe. He begged the officer not to
Speaker 1: kill him. He cried out for his mother, and then
Speaker 1: he fell silent. The murder of George Floyd was caught
Speaker 1: on camera by a bystander, and protests against this act
Speaker 1: of police brutality started within hours in the Minneapolis area.
Speaker 1: The video spread rapidly, and so did the protests in
Speaker 1: the months that followed, protest marches, rallies, and memorials were
Speaker 1: held in thousands of cities, reaching every state in the
Speaker 1: country and dozens of countries around the world. Millions of
Speaker 1: Americans took to the streets and public squares to protest
Speaker 1: police brutality, and in countless cities, the police responded by
Speaker 1: demonstrating the very brutality that people were protesting. Three days
Speaker 1: after the murder, then President Donald Trump tweeted, when the
Speaker 1: looting starts, The shooting starts. By Monday, June first, less
Speaker 1: than a week after George Floyd's murder, the president was
Speaker 1: publicly threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow
Speaker 1: him to use the military to put down civil disorder.
Speaker 1: Governors in more than thirty states activated the National Guard
Speaker 1: to assist state and local police in responding to the protests.
Speaker 1: Governors in twelve states deployed National Guard troops to Washington,
Speaker 1: d c. At the request of the Pentagon. On June second,
Speaker 1: a hundred members of the Ohio National Guard received orders
Speaker 1: that they'd be heading to the nation's capital that afternoon.
Speaker 1: The administrator of a small telegram channel for fans of
Speaker 1: a fascist YouTuber posted, they activated my unit and were
Speaker 1: getting real ammunition to shoot and to kill. He ended
Speaker 1: the message by saying rahoa, a portmanteau of the phrase
Speaker 1: racial holy war, a Nazi rallying cry. He told his
Speaker 1: followers that they may not hear from him again, but
Speaker 1: they might hear about him in the news. Some urged
Speaker 1: him not to do anything stupid. Others egged him on,
Speaker 1: telling him he should accelerate the collapse. They were thrilled
Speaker 1: at the possibility that full scale civil conflict could be
Speaker 1: incited by shooting into the crowd of protesters in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. Maybe the race war really was about to begin.
Speaker 1: Whether he was just ship posting, or if he really
Speaker 1: was considering kicking off the race war, we'll never know.
Speaker 1: If we're to take him at his word, always a
Speaker 1: shaky proposition. He was deployed with his National Guard unit
Speaker 1: at Lafayette Park, just outside the White House when FBI
Speaker 1: agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force showed up to
Speaker 1: have a chat. Soon after, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced
Speaker 1: that one of the National guardsmen he'd sent to DC
Speaker 1: was being called back. On June fifth, twenty twenty, Governor
Speaker 1: de Wine tweeted.
Speaker 2: I want to take a moment to address a situation
Speaker 2: regarding a member of the Ohio National Guard who was
Speaker 2: removed from the mission in Washington, d C. After the
Speaker 2: FBI uncovered information that this guardsman expressed white supremacist ideology
Speaker 2: on the Internet prior to the assignment.
Speaker 1: He didn't name the guardsman in question, and no explanation
Speaker 1: was offered about what exactly had been said, where it
Speaker 1: was said, or how the FBI came to see it.
Speaker 1: Jared Holt at right Wing Watch uncovered the small telegram
Speaker 1: channel where those comments had been made a few days later,
Speaker 1: and journalists at the nonprofit media collective Unicorn Riot quickly
Speaker 1: identified the man in question as Shandon Simpson, a member
Speaker 1: of the now defunct neo Nazi organization Vanguard America who
Speaker 1: had been photographed standing shoulder to shoulder with James Alex
Speaker 1: Fields Junior at the United Right rally in Charlettsville in
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, just hours before Fields committed a hate crime murder.
Speaker 1: But that still didn't explain why the governor of Ohio
Speaker 1: was making public statements about an FBI investigation into this guardsman,
Speaker 1: especially considering no charges had been filed. Simpson claims he
Speaker 1: was held in solitary confinement for a week, but the
Speaker 1: Ohio National Guard has disputed that claim. He was never
Speaker 1: charged with a crime and later received a general discharge
Speaker 1: from the National Guard. It wasn't until a federal criminal
Speaker 1: case against Ethan Melzer was unsealed two weeks later that
Speaker 1: the pieces fell into place. They hadn't been investigating Shandon
Speaker 1: Simpson at all. They just happened to come across his
Speaker 1: posts about murdering protesters in Washington, d C. While they
Speaker 1: were investigating somewhat else's plot to murder an entire platoon
Speaker 1: of United States Army paratroopers five thousand miles away. I'm
Speaker 1: Molly Conger, and this is weird, Little guys. This episode
Speaker 1: is coming out on Halloween. That didn't occur to me
Speaker 1: until halfway through the week. I don't have a great
Speaker 1: sense of time, even under the best of circumstances. But
Speaker 1: when I realized that, I ditched what I was working
Speaker 1: on and tried to come up with something halloweeny. I
Speaker 1: think that's something people do, right. I should have seasonal
Speaker 1: themed episodes, But what does it mean to do a
Speaker 1: Halloween episode of a show where every episode is about
Speaker 1: a monster, How can you go spookier than we already
Speaker 1: are getting every week? But then I realized, what's scarier
Speaker 1: than Satan himself? This story has all the classic weird
Speaker 1: little guy stuff. It's got neo Nazis, it's got white
Speaker 1: supremacist troops. It's got hate groups splintering off into new
Speaker 1: hate groups because of our cane internaccene, ideological squabbles and
Speaker 1: power struggles and personal beefs. It's got a foiled terror
Speaker 1: plot and a court record full of peerful letters from
Speaker 1: friends and family insisting that the young man they know
Speaker 1: really isn't as bad as you think. But this episode
Speaker 1: is a little different because the evil guys we're talking
Speaker 1: about aren't shying away from that label. They want you
Speaker 1: to think they're evil. They're devil worshiping, neo Nazis, hell
Speaker 1: bent on ending life as we know it. This episode
Speaker 1: is not about Shandon Simpson. Don't worry, Shandon, Today is
Speaker 1: not your day. When I met Shandon last year, while
Speaker 1: I was covering a pro Russia rally masquerading as an
Speaker 1: anti war protest at the Lincoln Memorial, he denied ever
Speaker 1: having been a member of Adam Waffen or any related groups. Now, personally,
Speaker 1: I don't think he was telling me the truth, but
Speaker 1: it's not exactly easy to prove someone was a member
Speaker 1: of a secret of organization and he's never been charged
Speaker 1: with anything, so I guess we'll just have to agree
Speaker 1: to disagree. But it can be said without dispute that
Speaker 1: Shandon Simpson was a member of a telegram channel for
Speaker 1: a group called rape Waffen. Yes, rape Waffen. I'm so
Speaker 1: sorry because that's what we're talking about today. And just
Speaker 1: a quick note at the top, this show doesn't have
Speaker 1: content warnings because it's always about something bad. I don't
Speaker 1: want to get into the discourse about content warnings. They
Speaker 1: certainly have their place, but this show is never not
Speaker 1: going to be about violence, and it would be redundant
Speaker 1: to mention it every time. But the particular subsect of
Speaker 1: Nazi Satanists we're talking about today are really really obsessed
Speaker 1: with sexual violence. I'm going to use the word rape
Speaker 1: a lot, but there aren't any descriptions of anyone actually
Speaker 1: being sexually assaulted. A few side characters do commit some
Speaker 1: sexual assaults, and we're found to possess child sexual abuse material,
Speaker 1: but we won't dwell on it in any kind of detail.
Speaker 1: But here's your exit ramp if you just aren't in
Speaker 1: the mood to hear me say the word rape thirty
Speaker 1: or forty times. The fact that Shandon Simpson was a
Speaker 1: member of the rape Waffen telegram channel is again undisputed.
Speaker 1: He said it himself, for what it's worth. Simpson has
Speaker 1: claimed that he was only a member of the chat
Speaker 1: because he was documenting the malevolent influence of Satanism on
Speaker 1: the fascist movement, which sounds incredibly stupid, but honestly, that
Speaker 1: might be the truth. And I'm not just saying that
Speaker 1: because he has threatened to sue me for merely repeating
Speaker 1: what was published by The Washington Post, which is that
Speaker 1: he was a member of rape Waffen. He takes issue
Speaker 1: with the implication that he was an ideological adherent of
Speaker 1: the group's satanic beliefs. He insists that being a member
Speaker 1: of the channel, which he again doesn't deny, doesn't mean
Speaker 1: he was a member of the group. I can kind
Speaker 1: of see that that might be true, but that's a
Speaker 1: distinction without a difference. To me, he was a member
Speaker 1: of rape Waffen the telegram channel, but he insists he
Speaker 1: was not a member of rape Waffen the group do
Speaker 1: without what you will, And this allegation got new life
Speaker 1: a few months ago when he was making a scene
Speaker 1: outside the Democratic National Convention with a hes Bula flag.
Speaker 1: Videos of him antagonizing people outside the venue got some
Speaker 1: traction online and people recognized him as a Nazi we've
Speaker 1: seen before, and that two year old Washington Post article
Speaker 1: about him started circulating again. So stupid games, stupid prizes,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Take it up with Jeff Bezos, I guess,
Speaker 1: and in his defense, to the degree I'm interested in
Speaker 1: such a thing, He did co author a document in
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, two years before he was outed as a
Speaker 1: member of the rape Waffen, chat with another former member
Speaker 1: of Adam Waffen, outlining the ways in which they felt
Speaker 1: the movement was being damaged by influential Adam Woffen member
Speaker 1: John Cameron Denton's embrace of Satanism. So maybe he was
Speaker 1: just in there collecting evidence. Who can really say. It's
Speaker 1: not like it really clears his name to say, you know, hey,
Speaker 1: I didn't have a huge issue with the Nazi stuff
Speaker 1: or the murders, but this blood magic devil thing is
Speaker 1: taking it in a bad direction. I know, I said,
Speaker 1: this episode is not about Shandon Simpson and it's not
Speaker 1: don't worry, But this ideological split within the Nazi terrorism
Speaker 1: enthusiast community over whether or not Satanism was cool is
Speaker 1: an important bit of context for where we're going. I
Speaker 1: promise Rape Waffen was one of the groups to crop
Speaker 1: up during this period of conflict within Adam Woffen about
Speaker 1: the growing influence within the group of the Order of
Speaker 1: Nine Angles, a militant Satanist occult organization that insists it
Speaker 1: isn't a Nazi group. It is hard to describe the
Speaker 1: Order of Nine Angles ONA for short, in a way
Speaker 1: that makes any sense, and that's intentional, I mean, quite
Speaker 1: literally and beyond the usual sort of esoteric nature of
Speaker 1: occult groups. Writings attributed to Ona invented a concept called
Speaker 1: Labyrinthos mythologicus. The idea is that the writings are intentionally contradictory,
Speaker 1: bordering on incomprehensible on purpose, and their true meaning is
Speaker 1: only legible to those who are worthy of interpreting them.
Speaker 1: So if you don't get it, that's because you aren't
Speaker 1: meant to. Because of Ona's decentralized leaderless structure. All members
Speaker 1: are self initiated. To join the Order of Nine Angles,
Speaker 1: you have to figure it out on your own. The
Speaker 1: texts are available, but the true process, apparently, is only
Speaker 1: revealed to you in the course of performing the ritual
Speaker 1: of self initiation. Part of the self initiation ritual involves
Speaker 1: walking into a river and imagining the moon's energy flowing
Speaker 1: into you, which sounds like a fine way to spend
Speaker 1: an evening. But it's not all moonlight skinny dipping. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of carving swastikas into your own arm with
Speaker 1: the razor blade and then smearing your blood all over
Speaker 1: a magical race war manifesto. I know, I know. These
Speaker 1: are Nazi wizards and they're doing blood magic to conjure
Speaker 1: demons to end the world. This is worse than the
Speaker 1: fact that the clan calls their chapters claverns, and the
Speaker 1: secretary of a clavern is called a clay wrap. It's
Speaker 1: so frustrating that these scary murderers all sound like fucking
Speaker 1: dorks for all the trappings of wizardry, though it might
Speaker 1: help to just think of them like any other kind
Speaker 1: of accelerationists. We've talked a lot about accelerationists. In other episodes,
Speaker 1: they want to destabilize society and force it into a
Speaker 1: collapse so that something new can be born, just like
Speaker 1: any right wing extremist taking shots at an electrical transformer.
Speaker 1: All this extra stuff about how they believe that collapse
Speaker 1: paves the way for the return of a messianic figure
Speaker 1: called Vindex, who will usher in a new social order
Speaker 1: called the Imperium, during which a new superior race of
Speaker 1: humans will evolve, and these new areans will colonize the galaxy.
Speaker 1: It's not important. It absolutely does not impact your ability
Speaker 1: to follow this story to know more about Nazi Jesus
Speaker 1: taking the Hitler Wizards to space. Quite frankly, I refuse
Speaker 1: to find out more information about the galactic Imperium. It
Speaker 1: sounds too stupid. In the end, I guess every cult
Speaker 1: ends up in space. You dig deep enough into just
Speaker 1: about any cult they're going to space, and like I said,
Speaker 1: it's confusing. On purpose. You could drive yourself to madness
Speaker 1: trying to parse out what's a metaphor what's a what's
Speaker 1: intentional obfuscation in the spirit of the sinister dialectic, what
Speaker 1: someone actually believes or what they're only pretending to believe.
Speaker 1: In one telegram message from a rape Waffen member, the
Speaker 1: poster jokes that if a federal agent is reading his
Speaker 1: private messages, quote, he has to read through hella esoteric
Speaker 1: conversation and probably still doesn't even understand it. And I'm
Speaker 1: not a federal agent, but I did read through some
Speaker 1: of those chats, and I gotta say he's right. It
Speaker 1: was hella esoteric and I didn't get all of it.
Speaker 1: And that's fine, because in the end, all you can
Speaker 1: really judge them by is their actions and their impact.
Speaker 1: Whether or not they truly believe the demonic Entityvindex is
Speaker 1: going to incarnate in human form and bring about the imperium,
Speaker 1: it doesn't really matter. So for as much time as
Speaker 1: I spent reading every available academic paper on the subject,
Speaker 1: which is surprisingly few, actually, I'm not sure it's going
Speaker 1: to do much good for me to explain more about
Speaker 1: the a causal realm. I'm sorry to any of the
Speaker 1: cool wizards in the listening audience, some of you are
Speaker 1: very nice people, but my general feeling about the ways
Speaker 1: in which magic and religion exist as driving forces in
Speaker 1: history is that it doesn't really matter what's real. If
Speaker 1: someone sincerely believes that they are practicing magic by engaging
Speaker 1: in ritual acts that in turn have a real world impact,
Speaker 1: you know, like an act of terrorism. What does it
Speaker 1: mean to say the magic isn't real? Does it matter
Speaker 1: if a spirit was really summoned to aid in this act,
Speaker 1: if in the end it still happened. And I say
Speaker 1: that not because I think any of you are listening
Speaker 1: to this on your drive to work and asking yourself, oh,
Speaker 1: are they really communing with Satanic deities on another plane
Speaker 1: of existence? I don't really think many of you are
Speaker 1: asking yourselves that, but a lot of you might be
Speaker 1: asking yourself, do they really believe they are doing that?
Speaker 1: And I think the answer is the same. Does it
Speaker 1: matter if they're only pretending to believe it? But it
Speaker 1: still guides the way they operate in this realm, you know,
Speaker 1: the real world. What difference does it make if I
Speaker 1: punched you in the face and then said, oh, I
Speaker 1: was only pretending I wanted to hurt you? Does that
Speaker 1: change the fact that your nose is bleeding? And as
Speaker 1: for the claims in some owner writings that the group
Speaker 1: is not inherently committed to neo NAT's or fascist ideologies,
Speaker 1: I'll give you the same answer. Adherents have claimed that
Speaker 1: their fondness for Nazi ideology is simply a manifestation of
Speaker 1: a core principle of left hand Path magic, that is,
Speaker 1: to be intentionally transgressive and provocative, to engage in the
Speaker 1: most taboo possible behavior, and to violate all conceivable social norms.
Speaker 1: These are things that make your magic more potent. There
Speaker 1: are onotechs that explicitly encourage the magical practitioner to adopt
Speaker 1: things like neo Nazi ideology, not because they believe it,
Speaker 1: but because it is part of this sinister strategy, and
Speaker 1: it will hasten the revolution required to bring about the imperium.
Speaker 1: And you know, you can tell me you don't actually
Speaker 1: believe the Nazi stuff you're saying. But if you're saying
Speaker 1: Nazi stuff, and you're doing Nazi stuff and your goal
Speaker 1: is for a demonic messiah to wipe out the Jews,
Speaker 1: your group is a Nazi group. If you think a
Speaker 1: supernatural entity is going to return to cleanse the world
Speaker 1: of subhumans to clear the path for a new Aryan race,
Speaker 1: that's Nazi stuff. No matter how you've tried to obscure
Speaker 1: that in your weird little texts. There is, of course,
Speaker 1: the obvious point that the Order of Nine Angles was
Speaker 1: for decades led by a British Nazi named David Mayat.
Speaker 1: Mayat is a strange and mysterious figure for another day,
Speaker 1: but it's worth pointing out that he was also a
Speaker 1: founding member of Combat eighteen, a UK based Nazi terrorist
Speaker 1: organization originally formed to act as the violent arm of
Speaker 1: the British National Party. Harold Covington, another weird Little Guy's
Speaker 1: recurring character, was also instrumental in forming Combat eighteen before
Speaker 1: he returned home to the US to try to get
Speaker 1: an ethno state going in Idaho, and one of Ona's
Speaker 1: more prolific authors under the pen name AA Moraine, was
Speaker 1: an English Nazi named Ryan Fleming. When he wasn't writing
Speaker 1: esoteric Nazi wizard books, Fleming was a regional organizer for
Speaker 1: the UK based terrorist organization National Action, and a pedophile
Speaker 1: in his spare time. He was arrested again in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one after violating a court order that prohibited him
Speaker 1: from having unsupervised contact with my nurse. The court order
Speaker 1: was put in place after his conviction in twenty seventeen
Speaker 1: for sexually abusing a fourteen year old girl he met
Speaker 1: on Facebook, and a conviction in twenty fourteen for imprisoning
Speaker 1: and sexually abusing a teenage boy. He served twenty two
Speaker 1: months for the first sex crime against a child and
Speaker 1: three years for the second one. When he was arrested
Speaker 1: for trying to do it a third time, he got
Speaker 1: six months, which means he must be out and about now.
Speaker 1: But I couldn't find any more recent news coverage. In
Speaker 1: the course of reat searching for this show, I read
Speaker 1: a lot of material that I do not enjoy. But
Speaker 1: I did not force myself to read this pedophile's wizard books.
Speaker 1: I just I didn't do it. I didn't do it
Speaker 1: this week. I'm not sure what it would have added.
Speaker 1: I'm kind of a completionist. I thought about it, but
Speaker 1: I didn't. I mean, I'm sure there are some really
Speaker 1: exciting passages in his book Sithane Vampiric Witchcraft of the
Speaker 1: dracon Covenant, and honestly, this description of Codex Aristarchus is
Speaker 1: a little tempting.
Speaker 2: From the bloodstained moors of West Yorkshire, England comes a
Speaker 2: genuinely a moral vampiric praxis, melding the black arts of
Speaker 2: predatory astral vamporism with a harsh ordeal based approach of
Speaker 2: the sinister Sevenfold way. In Codex Aristarchus AA, Moran presents
Speaker 2: the definitive collective work of the dracon Covenant, including vampiric theory,
Speaker 2: rights and methods by which the reader themselves can step
Speaker 2: upon the black path, the vamporee feeding upon the human herd,
Speaker 2: and taking the treacherous road to confrontation with the bleak,
Speaker 2: ascended masters the undead.
Speaker 1: Okay, I did, I did? I downloaded a copy of it,
Speaker 1: so I do have a copy of Codex Aristarchus. Maybe
Speaker 1: I'll let you know next week if I found out
Speaker 1: if vampires are real. My point is a lot of
Speaker 1: Nazi perverts are doing magical rituals, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: these influential figures within Adam Woffin are really encouraging it.
Speaker 1: So in twenty eighteen, this move towards Satanism was a
Speaker 1: big point of contention within the Accelerationist community. In twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: Adam Woffin's founder, Brandon Russell went to prison. He's back
Speaker 1: in prison now for something else. This was a different thing.
Speaker 1: It's come up a few times in other episodes. This
Speaker 1: was kind of a big moment in modern Nazi history,
Speaker 1: I guess. But Brandon Russell's roommate, Devin Arthur's, had murdered
Speaker 1: their other two roommates. Devin Arthur's conversion to Islam shortly
Speaker 1: before these murders is often misunderstood as evidence that he
Speaker 1: was getting out of Nazism, because why would a racist
Speaker 1: convert to Islam?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: But I think this conversation about this strange syncretism is
Speaker 1: better left for another day. I will, eventually, I promise,
Speaker 1: do an episode about the Hitler loving DC transit cop
Speaker 1: who went to prison for sending gift cards to Isis.
Speaker 1: But suffice it to say, for now, there is absolutely
Speaker 1: no contradiction inherent in an American neo Nazi getting really
Speaker 1: interested in the violent side of Islamic extremism, up to
Speaker 1: and including coverting to Islam. So after Devon Arthur's told
Speaker 1: the police that he had murdered Jeremy Himmelman and Andrew Onischuk,
Speaker 1: the cop searched the home that they'd all shared with
Speaker 1: Brandon Russell. The police found the dead bodies of two
Speaker 1: Adam Waffen members, obviously, but they also found Brandon Russell's
Speaker 1: bomb making supplies, so he was down for the count
Speaker 1: for a while, and in his absence, John Cameron Denton
Speaker 1: was among those Adam Woffin members whose influence grew within
Speaker 1: Adam Woffin. Denton used the pseudonym rape, just rape, that's
Speaker 1: what he was called. They called him rape and based
Speaker 1: on his Internet footprint. Denton had been involved with the
Speaker 1: Order of Nine Angles for several years already, and within
Speaker 1: Adam Woffin he quickly became a protege of James Mason,
Speaker 1: the elderly pedophile who served as the ideological adviser for
Speaker 1: Adam Woffin from its early days. James Mason is the
Speaker 1: author of Siege, a terrorist's handbook that was Adam Woffin's
Speaker 1: most important text, but he's also been to jail several
Speaker 1: times for possessing pornographic photographs of underage girls, sexual exploitation
Speaker 1: of a minor, and threatening his underage girlfriend with a gun.
Speaker 1: His fondness for blowing up the power grid is arrivaled
Speaker 1: only by his love of fifteen year old girls. He
Speaker 1: still regularly receives Nazi admirers at his home in Colorado,
Speaker 1: and when Adam Woffin was at its height. Making the
Speaker 1: trip out to see Mason was a pretty big deal,
Speaker 1: and of course every member of Adam Woffin had to
Speaker 1: read Siege. That sprawling collection of essays advocating for various
Speaker 1: ways and aspiring young terrorist might kick off the race war.
Speaker 1: Mason wrote Siege as a newsletter throughout the early to
Speaker 1: mid eighties. The essays were collected and published in book
Speaker 1: form in the early nineties, but it wasn't until twenty
Speaker 1: years later that the book really exploded onto the scene.
Speaker 1: I guess that's a bad choice of word it's given
Speaker 1: the amount of bombs built by guys who read it.
Speaker 1: But what I mean is it didn't become as popular
Speaker 1: as it is now until it was reborn as a
Speaker 1: PDF on the pages of the Iron March Forum in
Speaker 1: the early twenty tens, and that's where Adam Woffin was born.
Speaker 1: In the years since, Siege has been updated, revised, and
Speaker 1: republished several times under the pseudonym Vincent Snyder. John Cameron
Speaker 1: Denton edited the fourth edition of Siege, adding a new
Speaker 1: final chapter and updating the artwork with the help of
Speaker 1: Canadian neo Nazi and graphic designer Patrick Gordon MacDonald. Before
Speaker 1: McDonald was identified by Vice News in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: he was known only as Dark Foreigner. Like Denton, McDonald
Speaker 1: has deep connections to the Order of Nine Angles, and
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen almost any propaganda from groups like
Speaker 1: Adam Woffin, the Order of Nine Angle, sonen Kreeg Division,
Speaker 1: the Base, or any of these other little offshoots in
Speaker 1: that milieu, you have almost certainly seen Dark Foreigners artwork.
Speaker 1: He was prolific. He set the tone, he set the style.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine he's still making the artwork for these
Speaker 1: kinds of groups, but the style remains, and his style
Speaker 1: greatly influenced the online culture around Saint worship, which we
Speaker 1: talked about in the Terrogram episode. A lot of the
Speaker 1: images circulating on telegram in the early days of forming
Speaker 1: this culture around the canonization of mass murderers were images
Speaker 1: made by Patrick MacDonald. McDonald was arrested in Canada last
Speaker 1: year for facilitating terrorist activity, and it was during this
Speaker 1: time period that Adam Woffin was splintering, spinning off a
Speaker 1: variety of re related groups like Sonnen Kreeg Division, feuer
Speaker 1: Krieg Division, the Northern Order for Hairshoft Division, and of
Speaker 1: course rape Waffen and a lot of these groups, like
Speaker 1: Adam Woffen at the time, are deeply steeped in the
Speaker 1: beliefs of the Order of Nine Angles. And it was
Speaker 1: within this rape Waffen telegram chat that we finally find
Speaker 1: the subject of this story. US Army private Ethan Pheelin Melzer.
Speaker 1: He was arrested three days after his twenty second birthday
Speaker 1: and a few days before he planned to die alongside
Speaker 1: forty other soldiers in an attack he hoped al Qaida
Speaker 1: would carry out based on classified military information he'd provided.
Speaker 1: He was hoping it would start a war. There is
Speaker 1: always going to be disagreement about whether a group is
Speaker 1: or isn't a splinter faction or a sub sect of
Speaker 1: some ideological predecessor. In some cases, there's a question of
Speaker 1: whether a group even really existed at all, or if
Speaker 1: it was just a chat room for a particular click
Speaker 1: within another organization, or if it was just a meme.
Speaker 1: There are probably not more than a few dozen researchers
Speaker 1: out there who know enough about this particular moment in
Speaker 1: time that, if they're listening to this, are shaking their
Speaker 1: heads in dismay at my characterization of some detail or another,
Speaker 1: but it's as close as we're going to get sort
Speaker 1: of a dissertation, so good enough, because it's difficult now,
Speaker 1: years later to piece back together the scraps of archived
Speaker 1: materials from these banned chat rooms to sort out what
Speaker 1: rape Waffen ever really was. The earliest remnants I can
Speaker 1: find of rape Waffen date back to the summer of
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, but I really wouldn't be surprised if someone
Speaker 1: produced to me evidence that it existed in private chats
Speaker 1: for months prior to that. The group's telegram channels were
Speaker 1: banned at various points, forcing them to reinvent themselves over
Speaker 1: and over again, sometimes forming new channels every couple of weeks.
Speaker 1: The channel's administrator was explicit in stating that rape Waffen
Speaker 1: was a splinter from Adam Woffen, and in every online
Speaker 1: space where rape Waffen members were posting, their involvement in
Speaker 1: and support for the Order of Nine Angles was terribly
Speaker 1: explicit in every sense of the word. And so as
Speaker 1: Adam Woffin is falling apart over this debate, rape Waffen
Speaker 1: is taking a boldly pro Satanism stance and they claim
Speaker 1: to have nexxions, which is the ona term for a
Speaker 1: cell in the United States, Canada, Australia, Russia, Portugal, and
Speaker 1: other unlisted countries. In November of twenty nineteen, a channel
Speaker 1: that was just called rape in all caps posted that
Speaker 1: rape waften was once again open for recruiting. The same week,
Speaker 1: that channel posted, among other things, instructions for making meth,
Speaker 1: a message that can't be viewed because it was found
Speaker 1: to violate the law, and the statement quote we need
Speaker 1: to bring this world to total chaos. If we want
Speaker 1: to change something, we will do this through mass rape
Speaker 1: of infidels. In the chat, members shared videos of women
Speaker 1: being raped, as well as more standard accelerationist fair you know,
Speaker 1: gore videos, footage of atrocities committed in Wars, mass shooting,
Speaker 1: live streams, isis beheading videos, the usual things like that,
Speaker 1: and if I haven't mentioned it yet in some other episode,
Speaker 1: I would like to say, you don't need to try
Speaker 1: to find these things. I can't stop you. I'm not
Speaker 1: telling you what to do. I'm not your boss or
Speaker 1: your mom, but I'm telling you you don't have to
Speaker 1: these chats in particular, you probably wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: find they're gone for the most part. But in general,
Speaker 1: I know that curiosity can be a very powerful thing.
Speaker 1: But unless this is a particular area of research for
Speaker 1: you in a professional or academic capacity, there's really nothing
Speaker 1: to gain from trying to see it for yourself. I
Speaker 1: promise you. Having the ability to quickly scroll past a
Speaker 1: gift of a woman being shot in the head and
Speaker 1: having the involuntary, instant reaction of categorizing that as the
Speaker 1: final moments of a particular person's life from a particular
Speaker 1: video that I wish I'd never seen, is not a
Speaker 1: skill I wanted. Sometimes I have to close the chat
Speaker 1: and pull up a picture of what that woman looked
Speaker 1: like when she was alive, smiling, because she wasn't a gift.
Speaker 1: She wasn't just the moment of her death. She was
Speaker 1: a young woman trying to make a life for herself.
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to gatekeep Nazi gore videos or whatever.
Speaker 1: I just want you to know you don't need to
Speaker 1: see them if it helps at all. If this is
Speaker 1: something that you need, you have my permission to not
Speaker 1: find out more. There's no valor in making yourself sick,
Speaker 1: and these chat rooms can be really disturbing places. So
Speaker 1: if hopefully you're not familiar with the messaging app Telegram,
Speaker 1: there are both chats and channels. That is, there are
Speaker 1: spaces on Telegram where only the channel owner can post,
Speaker 1: and you can subscribe to see their posts, and there
Speaker 1: are also chat rooms where every member can post messages
Speaker 1: and have conversations with one another. I don't know if
Speaker 1: I could possibly have explained that in a way that
Speaker 1: sounded more elderly. I do know how to use the Internet,
Speaker 1: I promise, and the channel administrator for most of these
Speaker 1: official rape Waffen channels with someone using the names Sinisterius
Speaker 1: or Sinistrous rape. The member chat, however, was run by
Speaker 1: a user called Sinister Noctulian. A Noctulian is a practitioner
Speaker 1: within this particular subset of being a Nazi wizard. In
Speaker 1: all my research, through court documents and publicly available research
Speaker 1: and reporting, the only two people ever concretely identified as
Speaker 1: having been members of rape Waffen chats and channels on
Speaker 1: Telegram were Ethan Melzer and Shandon Simpson. So I can't
Speaker 1: tell you with any certainty who Sinister Noctulian could be.
Speaker 1: It wasn't either of them. It wasn't Ethan or Shandon.
Speaker 1: But I can tell you without implying anything in particular,
Speaker 1: that it is interesting to me that Sinister Noctulian never
Speaker 1: posted in the chat again after January tenth, twenty twenty, which,
Speaker 1: in a strange coincidence, is the same day that Adam
Speaker 1: Waffen member John Kirby Kelly was arrested by the FBI.
Speaker 1: Two days later, a message from Sinister Noctulian was forwarded
Speaker 1: by another user into the rape Waffen channel. Now the
Speaker 1: archive is so fragmented, you know, collecting these broken links
Speaker 1: and old screenshots from the Internet's darkest corners, So it
Speaker 1: isn't one hundred percent clear to me where the message
Speaker 1: was originally posted. It may have been a private message
Speaker 1: that the recipient then forwarded to a broader audience. But
Speaker 1: on January twelfth, twenty twenty, two days after John Kirby
Speaker 1: Kelly was arrested, the user called Sinister Noctulian sent a
Speaker 1: message to someone on Telegram and it said in jail lol,
Speaker 1: snuck my cell in. And the message was accompanied by
Speaker 1: a one second long video showing the inside of a
Speaker 1: jail cell, and the camera sort of pans shakily and
Speaker 1: quickly over the legs of the person holding the cell phone.
Speaker 1: They're lying on the cot in the cell, and they
Speaker 1: appear to be wearing the blue disposable scrubs that jails
Speaker 1: put on prisoners when they transport them from one facility
Speaker 1: to another. I think the idea is that the uniform
Speaker 1: belongs to the jail, and so if you go to
Speaker 1: a different jail, the first jail doesn't want to lose
Speaker 1: that uniform. The point is, we don't know who Sinister
Speaker 1: Noctulian is, but if anyone is familiar with what the
Speaker 1: segregation cells inside the Alexandria City Jail look like. I
Speaker 1: did try to find images online, but there aren't a
Speaker 1: lot of pictures of the insides of jail cells. But
Speaker 1: he was arrested in Alexandria, and the jail in Northern
Speaker 1: Virginia that has the contract with the federal prison system
Speaker 1: to hold detainees would probably be the Alexandria City Jail.
Speaker 1: So if you know what the inside of those cells
Speaker 1: look like, let me know. I'm just curious. And in
Speaker 1: this constant cycle of death and rebirth of these chats,
Speaker 1: a new telegram channel was formed in March of twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: and this time the channel administrator was a user called
Speaker 1: Iron Cult. The channel announced the following month, in April,
Speaker 1: that Sinistrous Rape would be taking an indefinite hiatus. Again,
Speaker 1: it's hard to say whose Sinistrous Rape might have been,
Speaker 1: but I will just note in an unrelated fashion that
Speaker 1: John Cameron Denton Rape himself was arrested in February of
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, along with Adam Woffin members Johnny Garza, Cameron Shay, Taylor,
Speaker 1: Parker de Pepe, and Caleb Cole. And the channel that
Speaker 1: was formed after Denton's arrest didn't last long either. It
Speaker 1: was abandoned within weeks after Adam Woffen member Timothy Wilson
Speaker 1: was killed in a shootout with the FBI while they
Speaker 1: were trying to arrest him while he was trying to
Speaker 1: blow up a hospital in Missouri. And Wilson had only
Speaker 1: come under investigation because his name came up after the
Speaker 1: arrest of Jarrett Smith, a soldier stationed in Kansas who
Speaker 1: was arrested in twenty nineteen for distributing information to other
Speaker 1: Adam Woffen members about how to create weapons of mass destruction.
Speaker 1: Jarrett Smith, too was a member of Adam Woffin and
Speaker 1: a Satanist. A new rape Waffen channel was formed a
Speaker 1: few days after Timothy Wilson's death. One of the first
Speaker 1: posts was a recipe for a bomb. There's no clear
Speaker 1: eva evidence that was ever produced in any of these
Speaker 1: cases that would let me tell you with certainty that
Speaker 1: any of those Adam Woffen members were also members of
Speaker 1: the rape Waffen channels. But a lot of Rapewaffen posters
Speaker 1: disappeared suddenly in the early months of twenty twenty, and
Speaker 1: the ones remaining grew intensely paranoid about infiltration by informants
Speaker 1: and federal agents. And you've probably guessed by now, since
Speaker 1: we're talking about it, that paranoia did not protect them.
Speaker 1: And so it was during this period of intense turnover
Speaker 1: within rape Waffen itself that Ethan Melzer finds the group.
Speaker 1: Just four days after the channel administrator had announced that
Speaker 1: Sinistrous Rape was on hiatus, Melzer was exchanging private messages
Speaker 1: with the channel's new administrator. Now in the court documents,
Speaker 1: this user is only identified as the channel administrator or
Speaker 1: co conspirator. I. They don't list the username, so I
Speaker 1: don't know if it was ironed cults. Again, I'm trying
Speaker 1: to piece together a very fragmented record, so they could
Speaker 1: be referring to a chat I don't see, but he
Speaker 1: was chatting with a channel administrator and the government never
Speaker 1: names this person, but they do indicate in a footnote
Speaker 1: that based on their investigation, they believe that this individual
Speaker 1: is a Canadian teenager posing as a former paratrooper. And
Speaker 1: this is, believe it or not, not, the only time
Speaker 1: that a literal child in a foreign country has tricked
Speaker 1: members of the United States military into becoming a Nazi terrorist. Like,
Speaker 1: they need to have some kind of training, specifically about
Speaker 1: how to not get fooled into joining an online terror
Speaker 1: cell run by a kid. I mean, I guess if
Speaker 1: you could keep them out of all terror cells, that
Speaker 1: really solves the whole problem. Is probably a better goal.
Speaker 1: But oh my god, it is really embarrassing for the
Speaker 1: whole world to know that our troops are this gullible.
Speaker 1: I mean, just like national security wise, that doesn't seem
Speaker 1: great for us. So in April twenty first, twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: Ethan Melzer is finally chatting with someone from rape Waffen
Speaker 1: and he's chatting with this teenager that he thinks is
Speaker 1: an adult veteran, and he asks if he can join
Speaker 1: rape Waffen. They don't mention this in the court record,
Speaker 1: but April twenty first is the day after Hitler's birthday,
Speaker 1: which would have made this the first day of the
Speaker 1: new year. For adherence to the order of nine angles. See,
Speaker 1: they have their own calendar that starts on April twenty,
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty nine, the day Hitler was born. So eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety is year one, and it makes twenty twenty four
Speaker 1: the year one thirty five, and they y F one
Speaker 1: three five. The YF used to stand for year of
Speaker 1: the Furor, which makes perfect sense if we're talking about,
Speaker 1: you know, years since Hitler was born, but sometimes in
Speaker 1: the early two thousands, ONA tech start referring to it
Speaker 1: as year of Feean, which makes no sense. One academic
Speaker 1: article I found claimed that no one actually knows where
Speaker 1: that originated or what it derives from, but within ONA
Speaker 1: the claim is that it means year of rejoicing. I
Speaker 1: guess we've been rejoicing ever since Hitler was born. Like
Speaker 1: it's still a Hitler thing. And in the spirit of honesty,
Speaker 1: I do have a confession to make For years, I
Speaker 1: have assumed that the Order of Nine Angles invented this
Speaker 1: Hitler based dating system, right, Like, surely no one else
Speaker 1: is corny enough to invent a whole new hit Bler
Speaker 1: based calendar. So imagine my surprise and quite frankly embarrassment
Speaker 1: when I stumbled across a few months ago an old
Speaker 1: letter written by Mattias Cole to William Luther Pierce in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six. So it's on the original American Nazi
Speaker 1: Party letterhead with their po box in Alexandria, and it
Speaker 1: stated twenty two January y f seventy seven. So the
Speaker 1: Wizards didn't invent the Hitler calendar. I guess George Lincoln
Speaker 1: Rockwell did. But I'm sorry I've gotten lost again. Sometimes
Speaker 1: I just feel like all roads are taking me back
Speaker 1: to William Luther Peers. It's just inescapable. So this Canadian
Speaker 1: child right tells Ethan Melzer that initiation into the Order
Speaker 1: of Nine Angles is a prerequisite from membership in rape Waffen. Like,
Speaker 1: we can't even continue talking about you getting into rape
Speaker 1: Waffen until you become a wizard. Elser assures him, Oh,
Speaker 1: I've already done that. I've already self initiated, no worries,
Speaker 1: and with that out of the way, the teenager begins
Speaker 1: vetting the soldier for rape waff in membership.
Speaker 2: Are you ready to cause damage both mentally, physically and
Speaker 2: magically and be serious? I already have so, yes. How
Speaker 2: do you incorporate the sinister numinous way in your life?
Speaker 2: Always working on some form of insight role, work in
Speaker 2: the pathways when I have time? Building up to internal adept.
Speaker 1: Internal adept here refers to the fourth of the seven
Speaker 1: levels through which a member of the Order of Nine
Speaker 1: Angles can progress. So you start as a neophyte, then
Speaker 1: you're an initiate, an external adept, internal adept, Master, grand Master,
Speaker 1: and eventually immortal. I don't know that anyone has ever
Speaker 1: achieved immortal adherence said that very few members actually progressed
Speaker 1: to those upper levels, and so if Melzer was working
Speaker 1: up to internal adept in April of twenty twenty, that
Speaker 1: means he was at the time an external adept. To
Speaker 1: become an external adept you have to engage in a
Speaker 1: ritual where you lie down on the ground all night
Speaker 1: without moving or falling asleep. To be fair, that's probably
Speaker 1: a lot harder than it sounds, but it still sounds
Speaker 1: like child's play compared to the requirement to advance again,
Speaker 1: because to become an internal adept, a practitioner must withdraw
Speaker 1: from society completely for several months, living alone in the
Speaker 1: wild with no contact with society or no modern conveniences.
Speaker 1: And before you even attempt the necessary ritual to advance
Speaker 1: to internal adept, an external adept should practice culling. That
Speaker 1: is human sacrifice. Now, I don't want to be entirely
Speaker 1: sensationalistic about this. Right when we're talking about esoteric occult text,
Speaker 1: when you're talking about magic, not everything is literal. A
Speaker 1: lot of practitioners will say that, well, culling is symbolic.
Speaker 1: This human sacrifice can be metaphorical some ritualized performance during
Speaker 1: a ceremony. But I've read more ONA literature than I
Speaker 1: would have preferred, and generally it seems like they mean it.
Speaker 1: Members should kill in an essay called culling as art
Speaker 1: Anton Long, the ONA grand Master most researchers believe, is
Speaker 1: actually just David Myyat wrote, some humans, by nature, by character,
Speaker 1: are rotten, worthless, and this rotten character is revealed by
Speaker 1: their deeds. It is beneficial to remove them, to cull them.
Speaker 1: It doesn't sound like that's a metaphor and long or
Speaker 1: David Mayant has written multiple treatises on culling, advising that
Speaker 1: culling should target quote the sworn enemy, any of whom
Speaker 1: are deemed acceptable targets. That doesn't sound like a metaphor.
Speaker 1: And that's what was on Ethan Melser's mind that day.
Speaker 1: As an external adept, he was actively working towards a
Speaker 1: plan that would result in a mass casualty incident in
Speaker 1: the short term and if he was lucky, thousands more
Speaker 1: deaths in the war he hoped would follow. The question
Speaker 1: of whether or not Ethan Melzer had ever tried to
Speaker 1: kill someone before is Murky. A few days before his arrest,
Speaker 1: the rape Waffen Channel administrator messaged him and said, and
Speaker 1: I quote, yo, can you give me some background, like
Speaker 1: some sinister deeds you've done? You can't break man as so.
Speaker 1: Melser claimed that as a teenager, he'd been working in
Speaker 1: the Louisville, Kentucky area as a street level drug dealer
Speaker 1: for a gang called the Bounty Hunter Bloods. In January
Speaker 1: of twenty seventeen, he arranged to meet with someone to
Speaker 1: purchase the marijuana, and instead of paying for the drugs,
Speaker 1: he ran, and when the seller gave chase, the men
Speaker 1: struggled and Melser shot him. Now, Melzer was never arrested
Speaker 1: for drug dealing, let alone shooting a man, So you
Speaker 1: might think he was making that up to impress the
Speaker 1: other wizards. Maybe if you're from Louisville, you're saying, oh,
Speaker 1: of course I know the bounty hunter bloods, But to
Speaker 1: be honest, I didn't known they had bloods in Kentucky.
Speaker 1: It sounds fully made up to me. Investigative journalist Ali
Speaker 1: Winston wrote on a piece for Rolling Stone that a
Speaker 1: record's request to the Louisville Metropolitan Police produced no responsive
Speaker 1: record of an incident matching the details provided here. But
Speaker 1: the shooting is laid out in some pretty clear detail
Speaker 1: in the prosecution sentencing memorandum, and the defense doesn't dispute it.
Speaker 1: In fact, they referred to it as well as something
Speaker 1: that happened, And if the case had gone to trial,
Speaker 1: the government was prepared to put on witnesses, including someone
Speaker 1: who was prepared to testify that not only had Melzer
Speaker 1: told him about the shooting immediately after it happened. He
Speaker 1: actually knew the victim and was aware that the man's
Speaker 1: humorous had been shattered by the bullet and he had
Speaker 1: permanently lost the use of that arm. And a witness
Speaker 1: who had been Melzer's roommate at the time planned to
Speaker 1: testify that he was aware of Melzer's drug dealing activities
Speaker 1: during that time period. He'd seen photographs of the bullet wound.
Speaker 1: So I guess he really did shoot a guy in
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen. But we are not talking about Ethan Melzer
Speaker 1: because he was a drug dealer who shot another drug
Speaker 1: dealer in a drug deal in Louisville in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: We're talking about Ethan Melzer because in twenty twenty, he
Speaker 1: was charged with conspiracy to murder US nationals, attempted murder
Speaker 1: of US nationals, conspiracy to murder US service members, attempted
Speaker 1: murder of US service members, provision of material support to terrorists,
Speaker 1: conspiracy to murder and mame in a foreign country, conspiracy
Speaker 1: to injure property of a foreign government, and illegal transmission
Speaker 1: of national defense information. So, if you listened to the
Speaker 1: episode a couple of weeks ago, when we were talking
Speaker 1: about how it's relatively uncommon for someone to be charged
Speaker 1: for lying on their enlistment page work about being involved
Speaker 1: with an extremist group. Well, Ethan Melzer is someone I
Speaker 1: was thinking about specifically when I said usually, by the
Speaker 1: time it's obviously lied about this, the situation has gotten
Speaker 1: a little more serious than lying on a form. So
Speaker 1: it sounds like they could have hit him with that
Speaker 1: charge too. But at this point, why bother. And now
Speaker 1: that we are more than halfway through this story, now
Speaker 1: that you have a little context for where our weird
Speaker 1: little guy ended up, which is Federal prison. Now that
Speaker 1: you know something about a silly sounding but frightening Nazi
Speaker 1: satanic cult and the messy situation within Adam Woffin in
Speaker 1: the years between Brandon Russell's first trip to Federal prison
Speaker 1: and his second trip to Federal prison and the eventual
Speaker 1: collapse of Adam Woffin. Now I can start from the
Speaker 1: beginning of Ethan Melzer's story, But unfortunately, because I started
Speaker 1: so far from the beginning, I'll have to get to
Speaker 1: the end next week. I know this feels like a
Speaker 1: little bit of a bait and switch. I told you
Speaker 1: this was going to be about Ethan Melzer trying to
Speaker 1: get al Qaida to kill a bunch of soldiers in
Speaker 1: service of his advancement in a neo Nazi Satanic cult,
Speaker 1: and we didn't even get to that. But words like
Speaker 1: Nazi and Satanic cult are such loaded terms and ones
Speaker 1: that have been abused and exploited to trigger a specific
Speaker 1: kind of fear response in you. So I felt like
Speaker 1: I owed it to you to give you this sort
Speaker 1: of convoluted history that led to him being in that
Speaker 1: chat room and to show you why I'm using those
Speaker 1: words and why they are absolutely appropriate here. So I
Speaker 1: hope you'll come back next week to see how it
Speaker 1: all ended. When we left off last week, it was
Speaker 1: April twenty first, twenty twenty, a US Army paratrooper Ethan
Speaker 1: Melzer was having his first chat with the administrator of
Speaker 1: a telegram channel for a group called rape Waffen, a
Speaker 1: splinter cell from the Nazi terror organization Adam Waffen who
Speaker 1: was committed to the Satanic cult called the Order of
Speaker 1: Nine Angles. Melzer didn't know it at the time, but
Speaker 1: the user he was chatting with was a psychologically unstable
Speaker 1: fifteen year old in Canada, and it seems unlikely that
Speaker 1: either of them had any idea that the teenager's online
Speaker 1: girlfriend was a government informant. Over the course, so the
Speaker 1: next five weeks, Ethan Melzer developed a plan that he
Speaker 1: hoped would result in the murder of forty of his
Speaker 1: fellow soldiers and hopefully provoke a conflict in the Middle
Speaker 1: East that would claim thousands more lives. I'm molly conger,
Speaker 1: this is weird, little guys. Just a quick note at
Speaker 1: the top. I do want to start off with a
Speaker 1: correction today. When we were talking last week about the
Speaker 1: Hitler based dating system used by the Satanic Nazi cult,
Speaker 1: I foolishly repeated a claim that I'd read that the
Speaker 1: origin of Faean was unknown, and that's on me. I
Speaker 1: should have double checked for myself. The order of nine
Speaker 1: angles marks the passage of time in years since the
Speaker 1: birth of Hitler, so twenty twenty four would be the
Speaker 1: year one thirty five, and they write that date out
Speaker 1: as y F one three five, where y F stands
Speaker 1: for year of Feyan. I did a little more digging
Speaker 1: around because I just couldn't accept the explanation that there
Speaker 1: is no explanation, And of course Feyan spelled fay e
Speaker 1: n is almost certainly derived from a Middle English word
Speaker 1: fane fay n, an adverb meaning gladly or joyfully, which
Speaker 1: in turn comes from the Old English gafeon, meaning to rejoice.
Speaker 1: So the Nazi wizards are at least etymologically on track
Speaker 1: in their choice to refer to the year since Hitler's
Speaker 1: birth as the year of rejoicing. You don't got a
Speaker 1: hand it to him, but I had to correct the
Speaker 1: record on that. Anyway, back to the foiled terror plot.
Speaker 1: Ethan Melzer was taken into custody on May thirtieth, twenty time.
Speaker 1: When military authorities detained him, he was standing outside at
Speaker 1: Camp Utterly, part of a joint Italian American military complex
Speaker 1: in Vicenza, Italy, with three dozen of his fellow soldiers.
Speaker 1: They were waiting for the bus that would take them
Speaker 1: to the airstrip where they would board a flight to Turkey.
Speaker 1: His platoon had been assigned to a sensitive mission at
Speaker 1: in Serlic Air Base, a Turkish air base near the
Speaker 1: Syrian border and one of a handful of foreign bases
Speaker 1: where the US military is known to store B sixty
Speaker 1: one nuclear bombs. His platoon had spent the last few
Speaker 1: weeks receiving classified briefings on their upcoming mission. They trained, drilled,
Speaker 1: and studied terrain maps. They sat through a training about
Speaker 1: possible threat scenarios they could encounter on their mission and
Speaker 1: how to spot them, none of them knowing that the
Speaker 1: threat was there in the room, because all the while
Speaker 1: Ethan Melzer was passing every piece of information he learned
Speaker 1: on to his new friends in the order of nine angles,
Speaker 1: every detail about the mission, down to photos he clandestinely
Speaker 1: took of the maps shown in the briefing was shared
Speaker 1: immediately with rape Waffen. His platoon had originally been scheduled
Speaker 1: to deploy two days earlier, on May twenty eighth. The
Speaker 1: soldiers standing there with their packed bags waiting for the
Speaker 1: bus hadn't been told why their departure date had been
Speaker 1: pushed back, but they were worried. It meant something serious
Speaker 1: was going on. None of them could have guessed, though,
Speaker 1: that it was one of their own who meant them harm.
Speaker 1: But that is the end, and I said we were
Speaker 1: going to start at the beginning. Ethan Melzer was born
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety eight to parents who only married because
Speaker 1: his mother got pregnant. The marriage didn't last. His father's
Speaker 1: mother seems to blame Ethan's mother for this, and they
Speaker 1: weren't good with money. His father, Nick Melzer, bought a
Speaker 1: house the couple couldn't afford, and they filed for bankruptcy
Speaker 1: in two thousand and two, the same year their marriage ended.
Speaker 1: His father traveled a lot for work, so Ethan lived
Speaker 1: with his mother by her own admission. Ethan's mother, Julie,
Speaker 1: suffered from alcoholism and a variety of mental illnesses, though
Speaker 1: she didn't get diagnosed until after her son's arrest, and
Speaker 1: judging by the court filings, one thing everyone can agree
Speaker 1: on is that his mother, Julie struggled to provide a
Speaker 1: safe and stable home environment for Ethan. She drank too much,
Speaker 1: She dated terrible men. She came from a family of
Speaker 1: proud clansmen and dated men who used racial slurs. She
Speaker 1: had a boyfriend who beat her and her son. That
Speaker 1: same boyfriend had an older son who allegedly sexually abused
Speaker 1: Ethan when he was still in elementary school. Ethan's father
Speaker 1: remarried when he was nine, and his new stepmother resented him.
Speaker 1: When his step siblings were born, he saw even less
Speaker 1: of his father. There was no room for this strange
Speaker 1: boy from her husband's previous marriage and his stepmother's new family.
Speaker 1: When Ethan was in middle school, his mother's parents died.
Speaker 1: This her into a deep depression and her drinking got worse.
Speaker 1: And this left a troubled young boy mostly on his own.
Speaker 1: He spent a lot of time online. He got really
Speaker 1: into four chan. He started smoking pot in the eighth grade,
Speaker 1: and his mother didn't seem to notice or care when
Speaker 1: he skipped school to stay home and play video games
Speaker 1: and get high, and she would sometimes even smoke pot
Speaker 1: with him. The psychologist hired by his lawyers prepared a
Speaker 1: report that expounds at length about this difficult period in
Speaker 1: Ethan's young life. He was overweighted and unathletic. He was uncool,
Speaker 1: was bullied. He was starting to realize that he was gay,
Speaker 1: and that terrified him. He liked art and music, not sports.
Speaker 1: The men in his mother's life bullied him, the kids
Speaker 1: at school bullied him, and he retreated deeper and deeper
Speaker 1: into the Internet and into drugs. By his sophomore year
Speaker 1: of high school, he was using ecstasy and meth. I
Speaker 1: think it's important to note that none of this excuses anything.
Speaker 1: It barely even explains it. I know plenty of wonderful
Speaker 1: people who were fat gay nerds in middle school. I've
Speaker 1: come to think of it. I know a lot of
Speaker 1: really great adults who would tell you today and that
Speaker 1: they are proud and happy to be fat gay nerds.
Speaker 1: It's a great kind of person to be. But there's
Speaker 1: no denying that it's a difficult state of affairs for
Speaker 1: a middle schooler whose stepmother hates him and whose mom
Speaker 1: cares more about getting drunk than making sure he gets
Speaker 1: to school on time. That alone doesn't create a monster.
Speaker 1: But you can, I think, find a place in your
Speaker 1: heart to feel sorry for this little boy. It doesn't
Speaker 1: mean you have to feel sorry for the man he became,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't change what he did. But there was
Speaker 1: a time when he could have been someone different. There
Speaker 1: were days years ago when a little boy who wanted
Speaker 1: to be loved and accepted and nurtured didn't get that
Speaker 1: it's okay to mourn the man who never was because
Speaker 1: that sad boy went down the wrong path. He dropped
Speaker 1: out of high school at the end of tenth grade,
Speaker 1: which would have been in twenty sixteen. I think in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen is the date he gives for his earliest
Speaker 1: criminal activity. This was also the year his mother remarried.
Speaker 1: His mother describes this new husband as physically abusive, just
Speaker 1: as her earlier boyfriends had been, and recounted an incident
Speaker 1: in which he choked her until she lost consciousness. She
Speaker 1: says her husband would also punch Ethan, and in one
Speaker 1: notable incident, she says he punched Ethan repeatedly as he
Speaker 1: lay on the couch trying to cover his face. So
Speaker 1: Ethan moved out. He moved from flophouse to flophouse and
Speaker 1: started dealing drugs. He shot another drug dealer. That shooting,
Speaker 1: the one we talked about a bit in the first episode,
Speaker 1: does seem well corroborated. I think it really did happen.
Speaker 1: But there's also some mention of a possible earlier shooting,
Speaker 1: an incident where he shot someone during an attempted mugging.
Speaker 1: It's unclear if that one is corroborated or not, but
Speaker 1: according to the psychologist, it was after that second shooting,
Speaker 1: the one we know was real, when he realized his
Speaker 1: life was falling apart. So he got off drugs, moved
Speaker 1: back into his mom's house, got a steady job at
Speaker 1: a restaurant, and started thinking about getting his ged. His
Speaker 1: manager at the restaurant recommended the Job Corps, a program
Speaker 1: administered by the Department of Labor that provides educational opportunities
Speaker 1: and job training for low income young adults. In September
Speaker 1: of twenty eighteen, at twenty years old, Ethan Melzer enrolled
Speaker 1: in the job Core program. His time in the Job
Speaker 1: Core Program is marked by intense contradiction. He was praised
Speaker 1: for his positive attitude and his hard work. He was
Speaker 1: enthusiastic about joining the military because of his overwhelming patriotism
Speaker 1: and respect for family members who had served, but he
Speaker 1: was also ravenously consuming texts produced by the Order of
Speaker 1: Nine Angles, the Satanic Nazi cult he would soon initiate
Speaker 1: himself into. In an interview after Ethan's arrest, his Job
Speaker 1: Core career counselor said.
Speaker 2: Neo Nazis and white supremacists don't last a week here.
Speaker 2: There is no way a kid who has those ideas
Speaker 2: can hide their true colors when they are surrounded by
Speaker 2: black people, and I hear everything that goes on in
Speaker 2: the terms. Ethan showed no signs at all of being
Speaker 2: a white supremacist.
Speaker 1: Another job Core employee who worked with Ethan during his
Speaker 1: time in the program said, the kids who come in
Speaker 1: with those ideas never last long. They do come, but
Speaker 1: they get into conflicts and they always leave. Another of
Speaker 1: Ethan's instructors in the program said, if.
Speaker 2: You are a white supremacist, you won't make it here.
Speaker 2: Job Corps has a zero tolerance policy. We've had kids
Speaker 2: like that before and they only last a few days.
Speaker 2: We know everything that goes on in the dorms. We
Speaker 2: have had racist and anti American kids here and they
Speaker 2: never make it. They can't hide it. We always find out.
Speaker 1: They can always tell. They always root those kids out.
Speaker 1: Ethan was a model student. He showed no signs of
Speaker 1: racism or anti Semitism. He was friendly and helpful, and
Speaker 1: he got top marks on his evaluations in the category
Speaker 1: of multicultural awareness. He was patriotic and looking forward to
Speaker 1: serving his country. They can always tell, except he was
Speaker 1: lying to everyone. It was during his time in the
Speaker 1: job Corp program that he fell down the rabbit hole.
Speaker 1: He started researching the Order of Nine Angles. He liked
Speaker 1: what he saw. He downloaded the literature he would need
Speaker 1: to self initiate. He was in contact with other members.
Speaker 1: He was on his way to starting his own necsion
Speaker 1: before he finished the program. In December of twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: just three months into his nine months at job Corps,
Speaker 1: he signed the paperwork to enlist in the Army. He
Speaker 1: wouldn't head off to basic training until the following June
Speaker 1: after completing his ged, but he knew what he wanted
Speaker 1: to do afterwards, and he signed the documents committing to it.
Speaker 1: In February of twenty nineteen, he created an account on Discord,
Speaker 1: a messaging application originally favored mostly by gamers as dagger Light.
Speaker 1: He joined a Discord server for people interested in conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories and the occult. The court filings don't say exactly
Speaker 1: which one, but I have a guess. The non profit
Speaker 1: investigative journalism collective Unicorn Riot has an extensive database of
Speaker 1: life leaked Discord chats. Most famously, they published the entire
Speaker 1: planning chat for the Unite the Right rally. But in
Speaker 1: the years since, this vault of leaked servers has grown exponentially. Obviously,
Speaker 1: it's not every extremist discord server, so we're really only
Speaker 1: looking at a sliver of what's out there. But I
Speaker 1: did find an account I know to be Ethan Melzer's
Speaker 1: in a discord server where most of the discussion is
Speaker 1: about flatter Earth, anti vax conspiracies, nine to eleven trutherism,
Speaker 1: things like that the excerpted messages contained in the court
Speaker 1: documents aren't there in the Unicorn riot leaks. Those messages
Speaker 1: may have been shared in private channels or deleted sometime
Speaker 1: before the discord was archived and published, or maybe i'mbarking
Speaker 1: up the wrong tree entirely. Several of the usernames that
Speaker 1: are visible in the government exhibits do appear within this
Speaker 1: discord server, though, so even if it wasn't this one
Speaker 1: in particular, it was one that shared a lot of
Speaker 1: the same idea and the same users. Either way. Ethan
Speaker 1: got on discord in February of twenty nineteen and he posted, Hello,
Speaker 1: I have some questions about a group I found. Don't
Speaker 1: know if you all could help. The group he was
Speaker 1: asking about was Temple of Blood. Temple of Blood is
Speaker 1: maybe the most prominent North American nexsion of the Order
Speaker 1: of Nine Angles, and it is the nexion that is
Speaker 1: mixed up with Adam Woffin during this time period. I
Speaker 1: would be remiss if I did not also tell you
Speaker 1: that the founder of the Temple of Blood, Joshua Caleb Sutter,
Speaker 1: has been on the FBI payroll for more than twenty years,
Speaker 1: and that certainly complicates the story a little bit. Sutter
Speaker 1: came up in the Aryan Nations. He is a longtime
Speaker 1: member of the movement. His relationship with the FBI began
Speaker 1: in two thousand and three, when he agreed to cooperate
Speaker 1: with the authorities after he got caught up up on
Speaker 1: a gun charge. In an article for Wired earlier this year,
Speaker 1: Ali Winston and Jake Hanrahan spoke to Harvard law professor
Speaker 1: Alexandre Natopov about this kind of arrangement, which she calls
Speaker 1: a deal with the devil. You can't get from A
Speaker 1: to B without an informant, she said. Sometimes to get
Speaker 1: close to criminals, you have to rely on criminals. The
Speaker 1: FBI has refused to answer questions or even comment on
Speaker 1: their relationship with Sutter, but the truth finally came out
Speaker 1: during the trial of Caleb Cole, one of the Adamwoffin members,
Speaker 1: who was arrested in twenty twenty. Ali Winston's most recent
Speaker 1: investigation into this story indicates that Sutter may have been
Speaker 1: involved with the Order of Nine Angles for years before
Speaker 1: becoming a paid government informant, So it might be disingenuous
Speaker 1: to say that Temple of Blood only exists because the
Speaker 1: government was paying the guy who ran it. He may
Speaker 1: well have started his own nexxion with or without the
Speaker 1: one hundred and forty thousand dollars he's been paid by
Speaker 1: the FBI, But maybe he wouldn't have been allowed to
Speaker 1: operate with such impunity. Maybe he wouldn't have had the
Speaker 1: resources to start and run Martinette Press, the publishing house
Speaker 1: that produces most of the ona materials available in the
Speaker 1: United States today. Maybe his influence would have been curtailed
Speaker 1: years and years ago before he could propagate his violent,
Speaker 1: pedophilic ideology, sewing it into the minds of young men
Speaker 1: who would kill for it. I think one thing a
Speaker 1: lot of people get wrong when they talk about paid
Speaker 1: informants like Sutter is a belief that people like Sutter
Speaker 1: aren't sincere in their beliefs or actions, and that they
Speaker 1: wouldn't be engaging in these things if not for the
Speaker 1: inducement of the federal government. But the movement is littered
Speaker 1: with true believers who make a little money on the
Speaker 1: side snitching on people they don't like. Plenty of them
Speaker 1: think they're clever enough to benefit from the enragement. They
Speaker 1: think they can advance their own position in the movement
Speaker 1: by having the state take out their rivals, or they
Speaker 1: think they can curry favor with the authorities by dropping
Speaker 1: a few tidbits of information here and there. Just because
Speaker 1: he's getting paid to do it doesn't mean he wouldn't
Speaker 1: be doing it otherwise, or that he doesn't believe it.
Speaker 1: Sutter's lengthy career as a government informant, the amount of
Speaker 1: blood in his wake, and the number of zeros on
Speaker 1: his checks certainly make him an outlier, though I'll admit
Speaker 1: so I had to tell you that that's unavoidable under
Speaker 1: the pseudonym Swiss discipline. Sutter was the one who was
Speaker 1: really pushing the Satanic ideology of the Order of nine
Speaker 1: Angles to the forefront of Adam Woffin in the year
Speaker 1: after Brandon Russell's arrest. There's no denying that did he
Speaker 1: do it because the government asked him to, because he's
Speaker 1: sincerely believed in the things he was saying. Both neither
Speaker 1: it's impossible to know, and neither Sutter nor the government
Speaker 1: are talking about it. Honestly, I think it would be
Speaker 1: naive to believe either of them, even if they did.
Speaker 1: There have been some rumblings within the movement that the
Speaker 1: whole idea is a government operation. Sometimes that looks like
Speaker 1: a sort of no true Scotsman's situation for neo nazis.
Speaker 1: You know, anyone in the movement who's talking like this
Speaker 1: is clearly a government operative trying to make us all
Speaker 1: look crazy. Another theory I've seen is a little intriguing,
Speaker 1: if convoluted and very unlikely. But there are those within
Speaker 1: the movement who believe that the government's interest in pushing
Speaker 1: Satanism on them is a strategy aimed at getting them
Speaker 1: to disengage. If someone is falling deeper and deeper into
Speaker 1: extremist ideology and suddenly they're expected to sacrifice a goat
Speaker 1: and drink its blood under the moonlight, they might say,
Speaker 1: you know what, fuck it, this is too weird, This
Speaker 1: is too weird. I can't do it. The idea here
Speaker 1: is that the goal isn't to deradicalize them, it's to
Speaker 1: push radicalization to its most extreme limits, making it unpalatable,
Speaker 1: making the movement just too damn weird to keep up with.
Speaker 1: Like I said, that's a little convoluted. I don't know
Speaker 1: that the government is playing that kind of three dimensional
Speaker 1: chess with Nazis, but it is a theory I've seen
Speaker 1: pushed around a little bit. But Joshua Caleb Sutter's story
Speaker 1: is a long and strange one all on its own,
Speaker 1: and I'm actually saving it until I get to a
Speaker 1: weird little guy I've been fascinated by for years. You see,
Speaker 1: we didn't find out that Sutter was an FBI informant
Speaker 1: until pretty recently, but a fellow white nationalist who'd known
Speaker 1: him for decades had been pointing the finger at Sutter
Speaker 1: for years. Bill White is almost certainly the most prolific
Speaker 1: jailhouse lawyer in the white supremacist movement. I've spent oh god,
Speaker 1: probably close to one thousand dollars paying ten cents a
Speaker 1: page over the last five years or so buying copies
Speaker 1: of his ranting and raving court filings. He's got a
Speaker 1: wide variety of grievances and conspiracy theories. Most of his
Speaker 1: recent complaints are about unfair treatment inside assorted federal prison facilities.
Speaker 1: The guards are mean to him. He was framed for
Speaker 1: a fight he claims another inmate started, he isn't getting
Speaker 1: adequate treatment for his mental health problems and so on.
Speaker 1: But he's also been saying for years that he was
Speaker 1: framed for one of the things that sent him to prison,
Speaker 1: and central to that argument is his fervent belief that
Speaker 1: Joshua Caleb Sutter was working for the FBI. So when
Speaker 1: it turned out he'd been right about Sutter all along,
Speaker 1: I was stunned. I'm not saying I believe Bill when
Speaker 1: he says he didn't send those emails threatening to kill
Speaker 1: a prosecutor's wife, but it's intriguing that he was right
Speaker 1: about anything at all. But I think it'll be a
Speaker 1: minute before we get to my favorite vexatious litigant in
Speaker 1: the federal prison system, so i'll leave it there. He's
Speaker 1: not getting out until twenty thirty seven, so I've got
Speaker 1: plenty of time the ratings of an incarcerated Nazi. Aside,
Speaker 1: no one knew Joshua Caleb Sutter was an FBI informant
Speaker 1: until twenty twenty one, so Ethan Melser certainly didn't have
Speaker 1: any inkling about it when he started asking about Temple
Speaker 1: of Blood in February of twenty nineteen. In the discoord,
Speaker 1: he says he encountered the group in a Reddit post
Speaker 1: and started looking into it. He says another Reddit user
Speaker 1: told him it was connected to some shit called nine A,
Speaker 1: and in the discord he says it's just morbid curiosity
Speaker 1: that he's always been interested in really obscure shit. After
Speaker 1: a bit of back and forth with the other users,
Speaker 1: he finally says, so they're Nazi vampires. Okay then, and
Speaker 1: he asks if there are groups out there that are
Speaker 1: even more extreme. Another user asks him you want to
Speaker 1: go full throttle, and Ethan Melzer replies yes. A few
Speaker 1: days later, in another discord server, he's asking again about
Speaker 1: the Order of nine Angles. He is again told that
Speaker 1: they are a neo Nazi Satanic group with connections to
Speaker 1: Adam Waffen, and Ethan Melser posts, this is going to
Speaker 1: sound bad, but I want to go further down the
Speaker 1: rabbit hole, say someone, Or to go all the way
Speaker 1: trying to look for these people. How bad of an
Speaker 1: idea is that? Like out of ten? A few days
Speaker 1: after expressing his desire to go down the Satanic rabbit hole,
Speaker 1: Ethan Melzer is having a private conversation with a member
Speaker 1: of the Order of Nine Angles, and he's asking for
Speaker 1: the text that he'll need to read to get started.
Speaker 1: Within weeks, he had accumulated a large collection of PDFs
Speaker 1: and books about the Order of Nine Angles. He was
Speaker 1: communicating regularly with at least two members. He got a
Speaker 1: tattoo on his left forearm of an eight pointed star,
Speaker 1: often referred to as the symbol of chaos. He was
Speaker 1: already deep into his new magical practice before he finished
Speaker 1: the job Court program. Just a few weeks before he
Speaker 1: showed up for basic training, another user in the discord
Speaker 1: server warned him to be careful.
Speaker 2: Not to dissuade you, but you're kind of playing with
Speaker 2: fire Dagger. The Uniform Code of Military Justice has a
Speaker 2: few things to say about members of the Armed Forces
Speaker 2: holding affiliations with extremist groups, just for thought, if you're
Speaker 2: serious about being initiated or whatever.
Speaker 1: He responded by asking if the Army could search his phone.
Speaker 1: Upon finding out that that very likely could happen, he
Speaker 1: said he'd just delete everything before he got there. In
Speaker 1: his last few weeks before his official enlistment date, he
Speaker 1: was trying to convince other members of the Discord to
Speaker 1: form a nexsion with him, and was coming up with
Speaker 1: vetting procedures for members of his netsion. He suggested that
Speaker 1: the group's motto should be total aryan Victory. In June
Speaker 1: he joined another discord server, this one devoted to discussion
Speaker 1: of esoteric Nazism. Some discord servers allow users to assign
Speaker 1: little labels to their account, visible to other users, next
Speaker 1: to their name. In this server, Melser selected the user
Speaker 1: labels Satanism and fascism to describe himself. Another user asked
Speaker 1: if he really believed in both, and he replied quickly yes,
Speaker 1: and then backtracked saying not really, just fascism and claimed
Speaker 1: he was only joking about Satanism. In another server, someone
Speaker 1: asked him if he had already initiated into the Order
Speaker 1: of Nine Angles. He said no, but in another chat
Speaker 1: that same afternoon he had been discussing the fact that
Speaker 1: if asked, ona initiates were supposed to deny it. It
Speaker 1: is interesting to note that the second leaked discord server
Speaker 1: I found melzer In, was one mainly used to chat
Speaker 1: about esoteric Nazism, and it is also one in which
Speaker 1: Shandon Simpson appears. I couldn't find any evidence that Melzer
Speaker 1: and Simpson ever interacted there on this discord server, but
Speaker 1: it looks like their paths may have crossed here before
Speaker 1: Melzer made the jump from discord servers about the occult
Speaker 1: into telegram chats for terrorism, and they found themselves together
Speaker 1: once again in rape Waffen. When he reported to Fort
Speaker 1: Benning and Georgia on June fourth, twenty nineteen, Ethan Melzer
Speaker 1: signed a statement of enlistment affirming that he was not
Speaker 1: involved in any extremist groups or activities. He was, in fact,
Speaker 1: almost certainly already self initiated into the Order of Nine
Speaker 1: Angles and was demonstrably very interested in forming or joining
Speaker 1: a terrorist organization. After completing basic training and airborne school,
Speaker 1: Ethan Melzer deployed with the one hundred and seventy third
Speaker 1: Airborne Division to a base in Italy. In his discord chats,
Speaker 1: he complained that he needed to get some kind of
Speaker 1: fake book covers so that he could read his sinister
Speaker 1: texts in front of his commanding officer without drawing suspicion.
Speaker 1: He expressed longing for the day of the rope, a
Speaker 1: phrase from the Turner Diaries that refers to the day
Speaker 1: the Race War really begins when the race traders are
Speaker 1: murdered on masts and left hanging from lamp posts and bridges.
Speaker 1: When another user complained that it felt like the Race
Speaker 1: War would never come, he replied.
Speaker 2: I'm working on it. Okay, give me three years and
Speaker 2: I got you, motherfucker. I'm in the Army specifically for this.
Speaker 2: I mean, I literally did join for this exact reason.
Speaker 2: Can't really do anything when I'm in fucking Italy. My
Speaker 2: unit is stationed in Italy.
Speaker 1: I'm in the Army specifically for this, That's what he said.
Speaker 1: Ethan Melzer joined the Army as an insight role. The
Speaker 1: insight role is a core tenet of the Order of
Speaker 1: nine Angles. You can think of it as a sort
Speaker 1: of evil, magical undercover assignment. A member should take on
Speaker 1: this role for six to eighteen months, depending on the
Speaker 1: text you're looking at, and the nature and purpose of
Speaker 1: the insight role has shifted a little bit over time
Speaker 1: and depending on the source text. And it's most innocuous,
Speaker 1: it's just that same left hand path magical notion of
Speaker 1: doing something transgressive. Right, you should do something antithetical to
Speaker 1: yourself to deepen your practice of magic. To truly test
Speaker 1: your sinister resolve, you should pick a lifestyle a role
Speaker 1: that is as close to the polar opposite of your
Speaker 1: own life, your own true nature as possible. You should
Speaker 1: be the opposite of yourself for a year. But the
Speaker 1: insight role is widely understood to be something a bit
Speaker 1: darker than a little en Toonomian role playing game. Your
Speaker 1: insight role should allow you to infiltrate and ultimately subvert
Speaker 1: some kind of institution. Religious orders, police departments, and the
Speaker 1: military are commonly suggested for this purpose, particularly when it
Speaker 1: comes to insight roles in policing or the military. This
Speaker 1: also provides an opportunity to gain training and access to weapons.
Speaker 1: It can also provide a suitable environment for the practice
Speaker 1: of culling. That's human sacrifice. These are jobs where you
Speaker 1: may well have the opportunity to kill, and that's what
Speaker 1: he's referring to. In the months before he reported for
Speaker 1: active duty, Ethan Melzer rapidly became obsessed with and then
Speaker 1: initiated himself into the Order of Nine Angles. He may
Speaker 1: not have formed the plan before he told his career
Speaker 1: counselor that he wanted to enlist, but by the time
Speaker 1: he put on the uniform for the first time, he
Speaker 1: was only pretending to to be a soldier. This was
Speaker 1: an insight role. By April of twenty twenty, when Ethan
Speaker 1: Melzer was joining Rapewaffen, he'd been studying the Order of
Speaker 1: Nine Angles for more than a year. In one early
Speaker 1: discussion with another rape Waffen member, he said he needed
Speaker 1: to be careful because he didn't want to end up
Speaker 1: like another guy in their circle who got caught while
Speaker 1: he was in the military. There are so many guys
Speaker 1: that that could refer to that I can't actually pin
Speaker 1: down who he might have meant, just looking at guys
Speaker 1: who have some sort of crossover, you know, Adam Waffen
Speaker 1: Order of Nine Angles, were in the military got in
Speaker 1: trouble in twenty nineteen or so. That's actually a surprisingly
Speaker 1: long list of guys. He may have been referring to
Speaker 1: Army private Corwin Storm Carver, who was investigated in twenty
Speaker 1: nineteen over allegations that he was the current leader of
Speaker 1: Adam Woffen and was involved in the Order of Nine Angles.
Speaker 1: Or maybe he meant Jarrett Smith, the Adam Woffin member,
Speaker 1: Satanist and infantry soldier arrested in twenty nineteen for distributing
Speaker 1: information about bomb making. Maybe he was talking about Kyle Benton,
Speaker 1: the US Army specialist who was discharged in twenty nineteen
Speaker 1: after he was arrested for domestic violence and the subsequent
Speaker 1: Army investigation revealed that he too was involved with the
Speaker 1: Order of Nine Angles. Or maybe he was talking about
Speaker 1: Vasilios Pistols, the Marine lance corporal who was court martialed
Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen over his ties to Adam Waffin. There
Speaker 1: are plenty of possibilities here, and they all point to
Speaker 1: the same grim reality. As Corwin Carver said, soldiers make
Speaker 1: the best Nazis. It's just a fact, and that's a fact.
Speaker 1: Ethan Melzer was well aware of the same week he's
Speaker 1: having this conversation about not wanting to be another guy
Speaker 1: in the military caught doing what he's doing, he advised
Speaker 1: another member of Rapewaffen who was considering joining the military
Speaker 1: to do it for the training, saying the ridiculous forced
Speaker 1: patriotism bullshit can go fuck itself. Just play the game
Speaker 1: for four years and get the fuck out, but stronger, smarter,
Speaker 1: and more dangerous. Of course, he gave the same advice
Speaker 1: a few days later to a rape Waffen member who
Speaker 1: called himself Frei Corps and was considering joining the Marines.
Speaker 1: Those early months of twenty twenty were a lifetime ago,
Speaker 1: so maybe you don't remember the specifics, but the COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen pandemic hit Italy pretty hard. I mean it was
Speaker 1: a pandemic. It hit us all pretty hard. But Italy
Speaker 1: had actual lockdowns, and so did the US military. And
Speaker 1: so in those early months of the pandemic. Stationed in Italy,
Speaker 1: Ethan Melzer was more or less confined to his barracks,
Speaker 1: and he used that time to really commit to reading
Speaker 1: his sinister texts and to work his way deeper into
Speaker 1: the online subculture surrounding it. Photos recovered from his cell
Speaker 1: phone include one of Melzer wearing a ski mask and
Speaker 1: holding up a copy of a book. He has cut
Speaker 1: himself and smeared his own blood over a sigil on
Speaker 1: the page the book is opened to. If I had
Speaker 1: to guess based on the picture, I think that's a
Speaker 1: copy of Keleethi, the second of three parts of an
Speaker 1: Ona text called the Black Book of Satan. It looks
Speaker 1: like the copy he has as the fully illustrated version
Speaker 1: with drawings by Christos Beast, an English musician named Richard
Speaker 1: Molt who was allegedly a member of Ona's Old Guard.
Speaker 1: With David Mayant and alone in his barracks, Melzer consumed
Speaker 1: the violent gore videos that were shared so gleefully in
Speaker 1: those telegram channels. Found in his digital possession were things
Speaker 1: like a video that appears to show a black woman
Speaker 1: being lynched by white men in front of a Confederate flag,
Speaker 1: and a photo of a woman who is bound and
Speaker 1: hooded being held at gunpoint by a man standing in
Speaker 1: front of a flag with the insignia for the Order
Speaker 1: of nine Angles. The court record specifically notes several videos
Speaker 1: he'd watched depicting jihadist attacks on US military forces, which
Speaker 1: may be where he got his next big idea. Immediately
Speaker 1: after walking out of the briefing room for his upcoming
Speaker 1: mission to Turkey, Melzer shared the information with rapewaff and Chat.
Speaker 1: Soon after, the channel administrator, our Canadian teenager posting as
Speaker 1: gulag Cult, asked him for more information about the deployment
Speaker 1: because another Rapewaffen member, a user called Kurt Kobani, needed
Speaker 1: to know. Gulag Cult told Melzer that this other user,
Speaker 1: we'll just call him kurt I Guess, was a member
Speaker 1: of the Gray Wolves, a Turkish ulternational most fascist paramilitary
Speaker 1: group that the European Parliament considers an international terrorist organization.
Speaker 1: A week before he was scheduled to deploy, Melzer posted
Speaker 1: in at least two telegram chats for adherents of the
Speaker 1: Order of Nine Ankles that he was a US Army
Speaker 1: soldier stationed in Italy and he was about to deploy
Speaker 1: to Turkey. Gulag Cult forwarded several of Melzer's messages, which
Speaker 1: contained sensitive details about the mission, to a chat called
Speaker 1: the Order of Nine Rapes. That chat had just eighteen members.
Speaker 1: One of those members was Ethan Melzer, one was Gulag Cult,
Speaker 1: our fifteen year old Canadian, and one was user who
Speaker 1: called herself Red hour Glass. And Red Hourglass would be
Speaker 1: the one to pull the plug on the whole operation
Speaker 1: by reporting the plot to the FBI. The FBI didn't
Speaker 1: arrest their own informant, and they can't arrest a Canadian ship.
Speaker 1: But you do have to wonder what came of the
Speaker 1: other fifteen members of that chat room. Not much is
Speaker 1: known about Red Hourglass. She may not even be a
Speaker 1: woman at all. Who knows, but online she was Gulag
Speaker 1: Colt's girlfriend. Whether she knew her internet boyfriend was really
Speaker 1: a child, we don't know. She's referred to in the
Speaker 1: government's documents as a confidential source, not an undercover employee,
Speaker 1: so she may be getting paid by the FBI for
Speaker 1: the information she provides, but she is not an FBI agent.
Speaker 1: One footnote indicates that she's only been a source for
Speaker 1: the government since May of twenty twenty, which is when
Speaker 1: all of this went down. They don't give a more
Speaker 1: specific date than that, just May of twenty twenty. So
Speaker 1: was she already a government informant when she entered the
Speaker 1: Order of Nine Rapes chat where this plan was hatched.
Speaker 1: Or did she only become a government informant after the
Speaker 1: plan took shape and maybe she felt compelled to report it.
Speaker 1: We can't know. But her username is interesting to me,
Speaker 1: red hour glass. Maybe that means something else to you,
Speaker 1: but to me, a red hour glass is a clear
Speaker 1: reference to the markings on the abdomen of a black
Speaker 1: widow spider. I don't want to draw the ire of
Speaker 1: any spider scientists out there. I understand that the commonly
Speaker 1: held belief that black widow spiders engage in sexual cannibalism
Speaker 1: isn't really supported by the science. Those instances of female
Speaker 1: black widows devouring their mates occur primarily in laboratory environments
Speaker 1: when the male spider can't get away, but it is
Speaker 1: nevertheless something people believe. So this red hour glass, this
Speaker 1: mysterious woman is tricking Gulag Cult into thinking they are
Speaker 1: romantically involved. She's drawing these young men into her web.
Speaker 1: Was she a black widow bent on consuming these men's futures?
Speaker 1: I don't know. Within the Order of Nine rapes Chat,
Speaker 1: a plan began to form. If they could get the
Speaker 1: information about this mission into the hands of al Qaeda,
Speaker 1: they could cause a mass casualty incident. One user asked
Speaker 1: Melzer if he understood that he too would likely die
Speaker 1: in the kind of attack they're talking about. Melzer replied,
Speaker 1: if we were to trigger this the right way, the
Speaker 1: amount of shit it would cause would cover it. He
Speaker 1: felt like his life quote would be absolutely meaningless in
Speaker 1: the amount of shit it would cause if the plan worked.
Speaker 1: If these forty soldiers were killed at a Turkish air
Speaker 1: A day later, Gulug Cult asked him are we really
Speaker 1: planning a Jihati attack? And Melzer agreed they were. Gulug
Speaker 1: Cult joked that if Melzer got himself shot in this
Speaker 1: attack would be his own fault, and Melzer again expressed
Speaker 1: a total willingness to die if it meant the plan
Speaker 1: was successful, saying, who gives a fuck? The after effects
Speaker 1: of a convoy getting attacked would cover it. It would be
Speaker 1: another war. I would have died successfully because another ten
Speaker 1: year war in the Middle East would definitely leave a mark.
Speaker 1: As the deployment date grew closer, Melzer shared every detail
Speaker 1: about the mission with Gulag Cult, the coordinates of the base,
Speaker 1: the number of US soldiers and what kind of weapons
Speaker 1: they were issued, the purpose and defensive capabilities of the
Speaker 1: US Army presence at this base, the layout of the
Speaker 1: installation and the surrounding terrain, and even the his convoy
Speaker 1: would be taking to get there. He shared information he'd
Speaker 1: received in briefings and trainings, things like the fact that
Speaker 1: the base was home to many non military employees who
Speaker 1: are not armed, and that the Army was limited in
Speaker 1: the defenses available for this convoy because they were operating
Speaker 1: by the rules of the host government using the training
Speaker 1: he'd received about avoiding ambush style attacks. He explained in
Speaker 1: detail how an effective attack could work. Just days before
Speaker 1: the scheduled deployment, a new, even smaller chat room was
Speaker 1: formed to finalize the details. This one, called Operation hard Rock,
Speaker 1: was just four members Melzer, our Canadian teenager, Gulag Cult
Speaker 1: our government informant Read Hourglass, and a fourth user the
Speaker 1: government calls co Conspirator III, someone posting under the name
Speaker 1: Jaw with two ws. In this chat, Melser promised to
Speaker 1: provide the group with the frequency and channels for the
Speaker 1: US Army radio communications so that they would be able
Speaker 1: to hear their victims deaths in real time. When the
Speaker 1: attack was carried out on May twenty fifth, the day
Speaker 1: before his twenty second birthday, Ethan Melzer may have gotten
Speaker 1: cold feet. He suggested to the chat that maybe they
Speaker 1: shouldn't attack his convoy at all. He still loved the
Speaker 1: idea of murdering a whole convoy of US soldiers. He
Speaker 1: just thought maybe it would be better for him to
Speaker 1: go on this deployment, spend a few months there researching
Speaker 1: the vulnerabilities of the place, you know, sending back more intel,
Speaker 1: and then they could carry out this attack on the
Speaker 1: unit sent to replace his a few months from now.
Speaker 1: He promised that he was packing a burner phone so
Speaker 1: he'd be able to provide them with photographs of the
Speaker 1: whole base once he got there, and then he didn't
Speaker 1: post for a few days. Red Hourglass informed the FBI
Speaker 1: of the plot the next day, May twenty sixth, twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: That was Ethan Melzer's twenty second birthday and two days
Speaker 1: before the scheduled deployment date. The authorities were quickly able
Speaker 1: to identify the platoon in question, and the deployment date
Speaker 1: was pushed back to May thirtieth. The soldiers weren't told why.
Speaker 1: Ethan Melzer had no idea His plans weren't a secret anymore.
Speaker 1: When he posted in the Operation hard Rock chat on
Speaker 1: May twenty ninth, the eve of the new scheduled departure date,
Speaker 1: he said he was still committed to the plan. He
Speaker 1: asked if it was possible to pull exact coordinates from
Speaker 1: the metadata on photos that were taken with a cell phone.
Speaker 1: He was hoping that if he was able to sneak
Speaker 1: his burner phone out on patrol and snap pictures, his
Speaker 1: co conspirators would be able to use the metadata to
Speaker 1: pinpoint the exact locations of the areas of vulnerability in
Speaker 1: the photos. Now, whether Red hour Glass was working for
Speaker 1: the government all along or not, we don't know, But
Speaker 1: on the evening of May twenty ninth, she may or
Speaker 1: may not have even been the one using her phone
Speaker 1: once she spilled the beans to the FBI. It may
Speaker 1: have been an actual FBI agent chatting with Ethan Melzer
Speaker 1: as Red Hourglass as he reaffirmed his commitment to the
Speaker 1: plan that night, Red Hourglass asked him, what makes you
Speaker 1: think you can actually get away with fucking with the U. S. Military,
Speaker 1: and Melser replied, because I fly under the raidar already
Speaker 1: act completely normal around other people outside and don't talk
Speaker 1: about my personal life or beliefs with any one. But
Speaker 1: he was starting to get nervous about the mission. He
Speaker 1: deleted most of his old posts. If the plan now
Speaker 1: was to attack the replacement convoy two months down the road,
Speaker 1: he was going to be alive when the investigation started,
Speaker 1: and he didn't want to get caught. Red Hourglass needled him, saying,
Speaker 1: you deleted them because that's treason, duh, And he replied, kek,
Speaker 1: that's k e K. It's a substitute for LOL. The
Speaker 1: lore here is complicated and irrelevant, but the short version
Speaker 1: is that keck originated with Korean online gamers as a
Speaker 1: typed indication that the user is laughing, and it eventually
Speaker 1: migrated into the American altright lexicon of the twenty sixteen era.
Speaker 1: It's not important. The point is he was laughing off
Speaker 1: what he knew to be true. This was treasonous behavior.
Speaker 1: And that gets us back up to where we started today.
Speaker 1: Ethan Melzer standing out at Camp Utterly with his platoon
Speaker 1: on May thirtieth, twenty twenty. His bags were packed. Orty
Speaker 1: soldiers were waiting for the bus that would take them
Speaker 1: to the airstrip. Inside Ethan Melzer's bag, they found two
Speaker 1: cell phones. He really had packed the burner phone that
Speaker 1: he'd promised to use to take photographs of the military base.
Speaker 1: They also found two books, The Sinister Tradition, a seminal
Speaker 1: text for adherents of the Order of Nine Angles written
Speaker 1: by ONA Grandmaster Anton Long himself, and a copy of
Speaker 1: Kodux Aristarchus, one of the ONA texts authored by the
Speaker 1: English Nazi pedophile Ryan Fleming. I did give it a
Speaker 1: little skim this week like I promised you last week,
Speaker 1: and it turns out he's just talking about psychic vampirism. Sorry,
Speaker 1: so I don't think vampires are real. Immediately after being
Speaker 1: taken into custody, Ethan melzer Is admitted that he had
Speaker 1: disclosed information about his deployment to members of the rape Waffenchat.
Speaker 1: He admitted that he had done so in order to
Speaker 1: facilitate an attack on his fellow soldiers. He admitted that
Speaker 1: the messages had been typed and sent by him. He
Speaker 1: agreed that his actions were tantamount to treason, but as
Speaker 1: required by the rules of the Order of Nine Angles,
Speaker 1: he repeatedly denied that he was a member of the
Speaker 1: Order of Nine Angles. As the case progressed, his lawyers
Speaker 1: argued that he was just messing around online. He was
Speaker 1: addicted to posting. They wanted to have a psychologist testify
Speaker 1: about Internet addiction and the phenomenon of people lying online
Speaker 1: for attention, inhabiting elaborate fake identities online because they're high
Speaker 1: on likes and comments. They argued that there was no
Speaker 1: actual chance of any real attack ever taking place, leaning
Speaker 1: heavily on the fact that the primary co conspirator was
Speaker 1: a child who had recently been released from a psychiatric
Speaker 1: facility and who was only pretending to be an adult
Speaker 1: with military training. The Defense sentencing memo doesn't mention that
Speaker 1: the government believes that co conspirators two and three were
Speaker 1: not lying. One of them really was based in Kurdistan,
Speaker 1: and the other does appear to have actual connections to
Speaker 1: some kind of jihadist organization. In his post arrest interviews,
Speaker 1: Melzer told investigators that he hadn't been serious about any
Speaker 1: of it, but that he'd felt pressured to provide information
Speaker 1: about the deployment, so he made something up, and that
Speaker 1: kind of falls apart considering the information he provided was real.
Speaker 1: He did provide actual, correct information about this military base
Speaker 1: in Turkey and his deployment to it, and he really
Speaker 1: did pack a burner fund for his deployment. But he
Speaker 1: said it had never even crossed his mind that the
Speaker 1: people he was talking to were serious, and he certainly
Speaker 1: wasn't serious. He said that he was only curious about
Speaker 1: the Order of nine Angles because it was so weird,
Speaker 1: and he claimed that the beliefs of the group were
Speaker 1: quote pretty much the polar opposite of his own, which
Speaker 1: is interesting because that's sort of the same language in
Speaker 1: a lot of ona texts about the kind of insight
Speaker 1: role you should choose. You should choose something that is
Speaker 1: the polar opposite of your own beliefs. He later claimed
Speaker 1: that he'd only provided some information to the group in
Speaker 1: order to gain their trust so he could learn more
Speaker 1: about them, which is kind of what Shandon Simpson, that
Speaker 1: Ohio National guardsmen we were talking about last week, has
Speaker 1: been claiming all along about why he was in the
Speaker 1: rapewop and chat rooms. So there's a lot of guys
Speaker 1: in the terrorism place chat that are claiming after the
Speaker 1: fact that they were only pretending to support terrorism in
Speaker 1: order to uncover how bad everybody else in there really is.
Speaker 1: And Melser's attorneys maintained all the way through sentencing that
Speaker 1: there was never any real possibility that anyone was going
Speaker 1: to get hurt. Right, they're saying that this plan is
Speaker 1: half baked at best, and it never would have actually worked.
Speaker 1: It was just posts online and the guy he was
Speaker 1: talking to turned out to be a kid anyway. But
Speaker 1: maybe terrorism is kind of like magic. Right. We were
Speaker 1: talking a little bit last week about how much does
Speaker 1: it matter what's real, what you really believe. Does it
Speaker 1: matter if you're actually communing with demonic entities and the
Speaker 1: a causal realm, if the end result is still a specific,
Speaker 1: concrete action in the real world. Does it matter if
Speaker 1: you didn't know the person you were sharing classified military
Speaker 1: intelligence with was a child, if that information still found
Speaker 1: its way onto the broader internet, resulting in a very
Speaker 1: real need to overhaul security protocols at a military base.
Speaker 1: And sometimes the law really is kind of like ritual
Speaker 1: magic in that way. You can catch the same charge
Speaker 1: for something like armed robbery whether the gun you were
Speaker 1: holding was real or not, because it doesn't matter if
Speaker 1: it's a real gun that shoots real bullets if the
Speaker 1: people you're pointing it at think it is. Ethan Melzer
Speaker 1: entered into a plea agreement in June of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: just two weeks before he was scheduled to stand trial.
Speaker 1: The agreement dropped most of the charges on the indictment,
Speaker 1: which is a pretty standard practice in a federal criminal case,
Speaker 1: so he was convicted only on the charges of attempted
Speaker 1: murder of US service members, provision and attempted provision of
Speaker 1: material support to terrorists, and illegal transmission of National Defense
Speaker 1: Information pursue it to that plea agreement, he was sentenced
Speaker 1: to five hundred and forty months. That's forty five years
Speaker 1: in prison, assuming he maintains good behavior and doesn't commit
Speaker 1: any new offenses while incarcerated. The eighty five percent of
Speaker 1: that sentence that he'll end up serving is a little
Speaker 1: over thirty eight years. His scheduled release date is in
Speaker 1: November of twenty fifty eight. He'll be sixty years old.
Speaker 1: When entering his plea, he was asked and said that
Speaker 1: he understood that the terms of this agreement included a
Speaker 1: waiver of his right to appeal any sentence of five
Speaker 1: hundred and forty months or less, and he got five
Speaker 1: hundred and forty months. But in March of last year,
Speaker 1: just a few days after his sentencing, his attorneys filed
Speaker 1: an appeal asking for the case to be re sentenced,
Speaker 1: citing a particular comment the judge made in his remarks
Speaker 1: after pronouncing the sentence. The transcript of that hearing shows
Speaker 1: the judges' remarks were fairly lengthy, covering nearly twenty pages.
Speaker 1: In the transcript, judges usually offer some explanation of how
Speaker 1: they arrived at their decision at a sentencing hearing. Some
Speaker 1: are more succinct. Others enjoy waxing poetic about the nature
Speaker 1: of justice or their feelings about a defendant's actions. There's
Speaker 1: no jury in the room anymore, so judges can get
Speaker 1: a little wild with it at this stage. It can
Speaker 1: be kind of jarring to hear them drop the act
Speaker 1: and actually have a deeply personal opinion. And Judge Gregory
Speaker 1: Woods spoke at length. He explained, as judges often do,
Speaker 1: the legal framework for calculating a sentence and the factors
Speaker 1: that must be weighed. We summarized the facts of the
Speaker 1: case and its procedural history. He highlighted pieces of evidence
Speaker 1: that contributed to his decision. We referenced the mitigating factors
Speaker 1: presented by the defense. Explained why he didn't agree with
Speaker 1: the defense's position that they warranted a downward departure. And
Speaker 1: none of this is unusual or even remarkable. But the
Speaker 1: appeal hinges on the judge's use of the phrase Judeo
Speaker 1: Christian values.
Speaker 2: Mister Melzer's crimes were pugnant. He betrayed the United States
Speaker 2: of America, He betrayed the United States military. He targeted
Speaker 2: for murder his fellow soldiers he worked to aid Jahadis terrorists.
Speaker 2: Also he could achieve his nihilist goal of unreminding Judaeo
Speaker 2: Christian values and rupturing civilized society.
Speaker 1: Of the Order of Nine Angles. Judge Woods said, the
Speaker 1: organization and mister Melzer opposed those Judeo Christian values because
Speaker 1: they are good for civilization. His crimes were committed in
Speaker 1: order to destroy civilization and look, to be honest, would
Speaker 1: have been better if he had not said that. But
Speaker 1: it was a brief mention in a very lengthy monologue
Speaker 1: that also emphasized that the defendant was not charged or
Speaker 1: sentenced because of his beliefs, but for the actions motivated
Speaker 1: by those beliefs. That single statement wasn't the basis for
Speaker 1: the sentence. It was just a comment. But the appeal
Speaker 1: argues that those comments constitute a sufficient appearance of the
Speaker 1: sentence having been based on a constitutionally impermissible factor, such
Speaker 1: as the defendant's race or religious beliefs. The government contends
Speaker 1: that not only had Melser waived his right to appeal
Speaker 1: the sentence and his attorneys failed to object to these
Speaker 1: comments when they were made, but the comments in question
Speaker 1: don't raise an issue of constitutionality. If anything, the judge
Speaker 1: was referring to the bias motivation for the crime, not
Speaker 1: a characteristic of the defendant. There's a difference between talking
Speaker 1: about a defendants race or a defendant's religion and talking
Speaker 1: about the defendant's racial or religious motivation for a crime.
Speaker 1: I'm no judge, I'm not even a lawyer. I'm just
Speaker 1: an enthusiastic consumer of the law. But I don't think
Speaker 1: this appeal holds a lot of water. They're hoping to
Speaker 1: get the case resentenced so they can have a second
Speaker 1: shot at getting a sentence of fifteen years rather than
Speaker 1: the forty five years currently on the books. If you're
Speaker 1: listening to this, the day it came out oral argument
Speaker 1: in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals was yesterday, November six,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four. The Second Circuit tends to be a
Speaker 1: little speedier than some, but I've given up trying to
Speaker 1: divine a court's timeline. It never works out. A final
Speaker 1: opinion in Melzer's appeal could come as quickly as a
Speaker 1: few weeks, but it's more likely see an opinion filed
Speaker 1: for a couple of months. Leaving aside the comments at
Speaker 1: issue in the appeal, though, Judge Woods made it clear
Speaker 1: how he felt about Ethan Melser's crimes and his claims
Speaker 1: that he regretted his actions, saying, in part, mister Melser
Speaker 1: now expresses remorse as he is facing justice for his crimes,
Speaker 1: but I frankly do not believe him. Part of the
Speaker 1: methodology of his organization, as I understand it, is that
Speaker 1: one should hide one's true intentions and commitment to better
Speaker 1: achieve its goals, and over an extended period of time,
Speaker 1: mister Melser effectively did just that. So I do not
Speaker 1: trust his expression of remorse or that he has truly
Speaker 1: renounced his commitment to violence. I hope it's true, but
Speaker 1: I don't trust it. I think it is more likely
Speaker 1: that mister Melser is playing another role to obtain leniency
Speaker 1: from the court, as he played soldier while working in
Speaker 1: secret to murder servicemen. So maybe the role of contrite
Speaker 1: federal prisoner is just another mask. Either way, he is
Speaker 1: going to be behind bars for a long time and
Speaker 1: he probably won't come out a better man whenever that
Speaker 1: day comes. Sentencing is meant to balance the need for punishment, rehabilitation,
Speaker 1: protection of the public, and deterrence. But based on the
Speaker 1: comments made at sentencing and the length of the sentence,
Speaker 1: this seems to be almost entirely in the service of deterrence.
Speaker 1: This isn't about preventing Ethan Melzer from doing this again.
Speaker 1: He couldn't do this again. It's about sending a message
Speaker 1: to everyone else who is considering joining the US military
Speaker 1: as part of their plan to reinvent the world through bloodshed,
Speaker 1: with violent revolution and mass murder. But you have to
Speaker 1: ask yourself if there's a more effective way to address
Speaker 1: this underlying issue of young men enlisting in the military
Speaker 1: because they dream of a race war. This can't be
Speaker 1: the only option. Ethan Melzer is currently being held at
Speaker 1: FCI Marion, a medium security federal prison in Illinois that
Speaker 1: I most strongly associate with being the place where a
Speaker 1: man aptly nicknamed a crying Nazi befriended a man that
Speaker 1: they call the Merchant of Death. But maybe now's not
Speaker 1: the time to tell you about how a guy who
Speaker 1: used to really publicly fantasize about raping me used to
Speaker 1: watch Tucker Carlson every night in the prison wreck room
Speaker 1: with the Russian arms dealer that Vladimir Putin traded Brittany
Speaker 1: Griner for another time. Perhaps. Weird Little Guys is a
Speaker 1: production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written
Speaker 1: and recorded by me, Molly Coner. Our executive producers are
Speaker 1: Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by
Speaker 1: the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed
Speaker 1: by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little
Speaker 1: Guys podcast at gmail dot com, but I probably will
Speaker 1: not answer it. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
Speaker 1: show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Speaker 1: Please don't post anything that will make you one of
Speaker 1: my Weird Little Guys