November 7, 2024 • 59 mins
In 2022, Ethan Melzer pleaded guilty to plotting to help al Qaeda ambush and kill his entire unit while on a sensitive mission in Turkey. But Melzer's co-conspirators turned out to be a Canadian teenager and a government informant, not members of al Qaeda. And the satanic cult that drew him down this nazi rabbit hole turned out to have been run by a man on the FBI payroll.
Sources
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17286246/united-states-v-melzer
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69307006/united-states-of-america-v-melzer/
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/neo-nazi-1378280
https://www.wired.com/story/the-dangerous-exploits-of-an-extremist-fbi-informant/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
When we left off last week, it was April twenty first,
twenty twenty a US Army paratrooper Ethan Melzer was having
his first chat with the administrator of a telegram channel
for a group called rape Waffen, a splinter cell from
the Nazi terror organization Adam Woffen who was committed to
the Satanic cult called the Order of Nine Angles. Melzer
(00:30):
didn't know it at the time, but the user he
was chatting with was a psychologically unstable fifteen year old
in Canada, and it seems unlikely that either of them
had any idea that the teenager's online girlfriend was a
government informant. Over the course of the next five weeks,
Ethan Melzer developed a plan that he hoped would result
in the murder of forty of his fellow soldiers and
(00:53):
hopefully provoke a conflict in the Middle East that would
claim thousands more lives. I'm Molly Konger. This is weird,
little guys. Just a quick note at the top. I
(01:22):
do want to start off with a correction today. When
we were talking last week about the Hitler based dating
system used by the Satanic Nazi cult, I foolishly repeated
a claim that I'd read that the origin of feyan
was unknown, and that's on me. I should have double
check for myself. The order of nine angles marks the
(01:42):
passage of time in years since the birth of Hitler,
so twenty twenty four would be the year one thirty five,
and they write that date out as y F one
three five, where y F stands for a year of faeyan.
I did a little more digging around because I just
couldn't accept the explanation that there is no explanation.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
And of course, fayan.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Spelled fay e n is almost certainly derived from a
Middle English word faine fay n, an adverb meaning gladly
or joyfully, which in turn comes from the Old English gaffeon,
meaning to rejoice. So the Nazi wizards are at least
etymologically on track in their choice to refer to the
(02:28):
year since Hitler's birth as the year of rejoicing. You
don't got a hand it to him, but I had
to correct the record on that anyway. Back to the
foiled terror plot. Ethan Melzer was taken into custody on
May thirtieth, twenty twenty, when military authorities detained him He
(02:49):
was standing outside at Camp Betterly, part of a joint
Italian American military complex in Vicenza, Italy, with three dozen
of his fellow soldiers. They were waiting for the bus
that would take them to the air Stone, where they
would board a flight to Turkey. His platoon had been
assigned to a sensitive mission at in Serlic Air Base,
a Turkish air base near the Syrian border and one
(03:10):
of a handful of foreign bases where the US military
is known to store B sixty one nuclear bombs. His
platoon had spent the last few weeks receiving classified briefings
on their upcoming mission. They trained, drilled, and studied terrain maps.
They sat through a training about possible threat scenarios they
could encounter on their mission and how to spot them,
(03:31):
none of them knowing that the threat was there in
the room, because all the while Ethan Melzer was passing
every piece of information he learned on to his new
friends in the order of nine angles, every detail about
the mission, down to photos he clandestinely took of the
maps shown in the briefing was shared immediately with rape Waffen.
(03:54):
His platoon had originally been scheduled to deploy two days earlier,
on May twenty eighth. The soldiers standing there with their
packed bags waiting for the bus hadn't been told why
their departure date had been pushed back, but they were worried.
It meant something serious was going on. None of them
could have guessed, though, that it was one of their
own who meant them harm. But that is the end,
(04:16):
and I said we were going to start at the beginning.
Ethan Melzer was born in nineteen ninety eight to parents
who only married because his mother got pregnant. The marriage
didn't last. His father's mother seems to blame Ethan's mother
for this, and they weren't good with money. His father,
Nick Melzer, bought a house the couple couldn't afford, and
(04:38):
they filed for bankruptcy in two thousand and two, the
same year their marriage ended. His father traveled a lot
for work, so Ethan lived with his mother by her
own admission. Ethan's mother, Julie, suffered from alcoholism and a
variety of mental illnesses, though she didn't get diagnosed until
after her son's arrest, and judging by the court filings,
(04:58):
one thing everyone agree on is that his mother, Julie
struggled to provide a safe and stable home environment for Ethan.
She drank too much, She dated terrible men. She came
from a family of proud clansmen and dated men who
used racial slurs. She had a boyfriend who beat her
and her son. That same boyfriend had an older son
(05:20):
who allegedly sexually abused Ethan when he was still in
elementary school. Ethan's father remarried when he was nine, and
his new stepmother resented him. When his step siblings were born,
he saw even less of his father. There was no
room for this strange boy from her husband's previous marriage
and his stepmother's new family. When Ethan was in middle school,
(05:42):
his mother's parents died. This sent her into a deep
depression and her drinking got worse. And this left a
troubled young boy mostly on his own. He spent a
lot of time online. He got really into four chan.
He started smoking.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Pot in the eighth grade, and.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
His mother didn't seem to notice or care when he
skipped school to stay home and play video games and
get high, and she would sometimes even smoke pot with him.
The psychologist hired by his lawyers prepared a report that
expounds at length about this difficult period in Ethan's young life.
He was overweighted and unathletic. Who's uncool, Who's bullied? He
(06:25):
was starting to realize that he was gay, and that
terrified him. He liked art and music, not sports. The
men in his mother's life bullied him, the kids at
school bullied him, and he retreated deeper and deeper into
the Internet and into drugs. By his sophomore year of
high school, he was using ecstasy and meth. I think
(06:49):
it's important to note that none of this excuses anything.
It barely even explains it. I know plenty of wonderful
people who were fat gay nerds in middle school. I've
come to think of it. I know a lot of
really great adults who would tell you today and that
they are proud and happy to be fat gay nerds.
It's a great kind of person to be. But there's
(07:11):
no denying that it's a difficult state of affairs for
a middle schooler whose stepmother hates him and whose mom
cares more about getting drunk than making sure he gets
to school on time. That alone doesn't create a monster,
but you can, I think, find a place in your
heart to feel sorry for this little boy. It doesn't
(07:32):
mean you have to feel sorry for the man he became,
and it doesn't change what he did. But there was
a time when he could have been someone different. There
were days years ago when a little boy who wanted
to be loved and accepted and nurtured didn't get that.
(07:52):
It's okay to mourn the man who never was because
that sad boy went down the wrong path. He dropped
out of high school at the end of tenth grade,
which would have been in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
I think in.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Twenty sixteen is the date he gives for his earliest
criminal activity. This was also the year his mother remarried.
His mother describes this new husband as physically abusive, just
as her earlier boyfriends had been, and recounted an incident
in which he choked her until she lost consciousness. She
says her husband would also punch Ethan, and in one
(08:28):
notable incident, she says he punched Ethan repeatedly as he
lay on the couch trying to cover his face. So
Ethan moved out. He moved from flophouse to flophouse and
started dealing drugs. He shot another drug dealer. That shooting
the when we talked about a bit in the first
episode does seem well corroborated. I think it really did happen.
(08:51):
But there's also some mention of a possible earlier shooting,
an incident where he shot someone during an attempted mugging.
It's unclear if that when it is corroborated or not,
but according to the psychologist, it was after that second shooting,
the one we know was real, when he realized his
life was falling apart. So he got off drugs, moved
(09:13):
back into his mom's house, got a steady job at
a restaurant, and started thinking about getting his ged. His
manager at the restaurant recommended the Job Corps, a program
administered by the Department of Labor that provides educational opportunities
and job training for low income young adults. In September
of twenty eighteen, at twenty years old, Ethan Melzer enrolled
(09:35):
in the Job Core program. His time in the Job
Core Program is marked by intense contradiction. He was praised
for his positive attitude and his hard work. He was
enthusiastic about joining the military because of his overwhelming patriotism
and respect for family members who had served, but He
(09:56):
was also ravenously consuming texts produced by the Order Nine Angles,
the Satanic Nazi cult he would soon initiate himself into.
In an interview after Ethan's arrest, his Job Core career
counselor said.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Neo Nazis and white supremacists don't last a week here.
There is no way a kid who has those ideas
can hide their true colors when they are surrounded by
black people and I hear everything that goes on in
the dorms. Ethan showed no signs at all of being
a white supremacist.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Another Job Corp employee who worked with Ethan during his
time in the program said, the kids who come in
with those ideas never last long. They do come, but
they get into conflicts and they always leave. Another of
Ethan's instructors in the program said, if.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
You are a white supremacist, you won't make it here.
Job Corps has a zero tolerance policy. We've had kids
like that before and they only last a few days.
We know everything that goes on in the dorms we
have had. I had racist and anti American kids here
and they never make it. They can't hide it. We
always find.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Out they can always tell they always root those kids out.
Ethan was a model student. He showed no signs of
racism or anti Semitism. He was friendly and helpful, and
he got top marks on his evaluations in the category
(11:25):
of multicultural awareness. He was patriotic and looking forward to
serving his country. They can always tell, except he was
lying to everyone. It was during his time in the
job Corp program that he fell down the rabbit hole.
He started researching the Order of Nine Angles. He liked
(11:49):
what he saw. He downloaded the literature he would need
to self initiate. He was in contact with other members.
He was on his way to starting his own nexsion
before he finished the In December of twenty nineteen, just
three months into his nine months at job Corps, he
signed the paperwork to enlist.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
In the Army.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
He wouldn't head off to basic training until the following
June after completing his ged, but he knew what he
wanted to do afterwards, and he signed the documents committing
to it. In February of twenty nineteen, he created an
account on Discord, a messaging application originally favored mostly by
gamers as dagger Light. He joined a Discord server for
(12:30):
people interested in conspiracy theories and the occult. The court
filings don't say exactly which one, but I have a guess.
The nonprofit investigative journalism collective Unicorn Riot has an extensive
database of leaked discord chats. Most famously, they published the
entire planning chat where the Unite the Right rally. But
(12:52):
in the years since, this vault of leaked servers has
grown exponentially. Obviously, it's not every extremist discord server, so
we're really only looking at a sliver of what's out there.
But I did find an account I know to be
Ethan Melzer's in a discord server where most of the
discussion is about Flatter Earth, anti vax conspiracies, nine to
(13:14):
eleven trutherism. Things like that the excerpted messages contained in
the court documents aren't there in the unicorn Riot leaks.
Those messages may have been shared in private channels or
deleted sometime before the discord was archived and published, or
maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree entirely, several of
(13:35):
the usernames that are visible in the government exhibits do
appear within this discord server, though, so even if it
wasn't this one in particular, it was one that shared
a lot of the same ideas and the same users.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
Either way.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Ethan got on Discord in February of twenty nineteen and
he posted, Hello, I have some questions about a group
I found. Don't know if you walk help. The group
he was asking about was Temple of Blood. Temple of
Blood is maybe the most prominent North American nexxion of
(14:11):
the Order of Nine Angles, and it is the nexion
that is mixed up with Adam Woffin during this time period.
I would be remiss if I did not also tell
you that the founder of the Temple of Blood, Joshua
Caleb Sutter, has been on the FBI payroll for more
than twenty years, and that certainly complicates the story a
(14:32):
little bit. Sutter came up in the Aryan Nations. He
is a longtime member of the movement. His relationship with
the FBI began in two thousand and three, when he
agreed to cooperate with the authorities after he got caught
up on a gun charge. In an article for Wired
earlier this year, Ali Winston and Jake Hanrahan spoke to
Harvard law professor Alexander Natopov about this kind of arrangement,
(14:55):
which she calls a deal with the devil. You can't
get from A to B without an informant, she said.
Sometimes to get close to criminals, you have to rely
on criminals. The FBI has refused to answer questions or
even comment on their relationship with Sutter, but the truth
finally came out during the trial of Caleb Cole, one
(15:18):
of the Adamwoffin members, who was arrested in twenty twenty.
Ali Winston's most recent investigation into this story indicates that
Sutter may have been involved with the Order of Nine
Angles for years before becoming a paid government informant. So
it might be disingenuous to say that Temple of Blood
only exists because the government was paying the guy who
(15:39):
ran it. He may well have started his own nexxion
with or without the one hundred and forty thousand dollars
he's been paid by the FBI. But maybe he wouldn't
have been allowed to operate with such impunity. Maybe he
wouldn't have had the resources to start and run. Martinette Press,
the publishing house that produced most of the ona materials
(16:01):
available in the United States today, Maybe his influence would
have been curtailed years and years ago before he could
propagate his violent, pedophilic ideology, sewing it into the minds
of young men who would kill for it. I think
one thing a lot of people get wrong when they
talk about paid informants like Sutter is a belief that
(16:26):
people like Sutter aren't sincere in their beliefs or actions,
and that they wouldn't be engaging in these things if
not for the inducement of the federal government. But the
movement is littered with true believers who make a little
money on the side snitching on people they don't like.
Plenty of them think they're clever enough to benefit from
(16:47):
the enragement. They think they can advance their own position
in the movement by having the state take out their rivals,
or they think they can curry favor with the authorities
by dropping a few tidbits of information here and there.
Just because he's getting paid to do it doesn't mean
he wouldn't be doing it otherwise, or that he doesn't
believe it. Sutter's lengthy career as a government informant, the
(17:11):
amount of blood in his wake, and the number of
zeros on his checks certainly make him an outlier, though
while admit so, I had to tell you that that's
unavoidable under the pseudonym Swiss discipline. Sutter was the one
who was really pushing the satanic ideology of the Order
of Nine Angles to the forefront of Adam Woffin in
(17:32):
the year after Brandon Russell's arrest. There's no denying that
did he do it because the government asked him to,
because he sincerely believed in the things he was saying?
Both neither it's impossible to know, and neither Sutter nor
the government are talking about it. Honestly, I think it
(17:55):
would be naive to believe either of them, even if
they did. Been some rumblings within the movement that the
whole idea is a government operation. Sometimes that looks like
a sort of no true Scotsman's situation.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
For Neo Nazis.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
You know, anyone in the movement who's talking like this
is clearly a government operative trying to make us all
look crazy. Another theory I've seen is a little intriguing,
if convoluted and very unlikely. But there are those within
the movement who believe that the government's interest in pushing
Satanism on them is a strategy aimed at getting them
(18:32):
to disengage. If someone is falling deeper and deeper into
extremist ideology and suddenly they're expected to sacrifice a goat
and drink its blood under the moonlight, they might say,
you know what, fuck it. This is too weird, this
is too weird.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
I can't do it.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
The idea here is that the goal isn't to deradicalize them,
it's to push radicalization to its most extreme limits, making
it unpalatable, making the movement just too damn weird to
keep up with. Like I said, that's a little convoluted.
I don't know that the government is playing that kind
(19:12):
of three dimensional chess with Nazis, but it is a
theory I've seen pushed around a little bit. But Joshua
Caleb Sutter's story is a long and strange one all
on its own, and I'm actually saving it until I
get to a weird little guy I've been fascinated by
for years. You see, we didn't find out that Sutter
(19:36):
was an FBI informant until pretty recently, but a fellow
white nationalist who'd known him for decades had been pointing
the finger at Sutter for years. Bill White is almost
certainly the most prolific jailhouse lawyer in the white supremacist movement.
(19:56):
I've spent oh god, probably close to one thousand dollar
paying ten cents a page over the last five years
or so buying copies of his ranting and raving court filings.
He's got a wide variety of grievances and conspiracy theories.
Most of his recent complaints are about unfair treatment inside
(20:18):
assorted federal prison facilities. The guards are mean to him,
he was framed for a fight he claims another inmate started,
he isn't getting adequate treatment for his mental health problems.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
And so on.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
But he's also been saying for years that he was
framed for one of the things that sent him to prison.
And central to that argument is his fervent belief that
Joshua Caleb Sutter was working for the FBI. So when
it turned out he'd been right about Sutter all along,
I was stunned. I'm not saying I believe Bill when
(20:53):
he says he didn't send those emails threatening to kill
a prosecutor's wife, but it's intriguing that he was right
about any at all. But I think it'll be a
minute before we get to my favorite vexatious litigant in
the federal prison system, so i'll leave it there. He's
not getting out until twenty thirty seven, so I've got
plenty of time.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
The ratings of an incarcerated Nazi.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Aside, no one knew Joshua Caleb Sutter was an FBI
informant until twenty twenty one, so Ethan Melser certainly didn't
have any inkling about it when he started asking about
Temple of Blood in February of twenty nineteen. In the discord,
he says he encountered the group in a Reddit post
and started looking into it. He says another Reddit user
(21:52):
told him it was connected to some shit called nine A,
and in the discord he says it's just morbid curiosity
that he's always been interested in really obscure shit. After
a bit of back and forth with the other users,
he finally says, so they're Nazi vampires. Okay then, and
(22:16):
he asks if there are groups out there that are
even more extreme. Another user asks him you want to
go full throttle, and Ethan Melser replies yes. A few
days later, in another discord server, he's asking again about
the Order of Nine Angles. He is again told that
(22:37):
they are a neo Nazi Satanic group with connections to
Adam Woffen, and Ethan Melser posts, this is going to
sound bad, but I want to go further down the
rabbit hole. Say someone were to go all the way
trying to look for these people. How bad of an
idea is that? Like out of ten? A few days
(23:00):
after expressing his desire to go down the Satanic rabbit hole,
Ethan Melzer is having a private conversation with a member
of the Order of Nine Angles, and he's asking for
the text that he'll need to read to get started.
Within weeks, he had accumulated a large collection of PDFs
and books about the Order of Nine Angles. He was
(23:22):
communicating regularly with at least two members. He got a
tattoo on his left forearm of an eight pointed star,
often referred to as the symbol of chaos. He was
already deep into his new magical practice before he finished
the job Corp program. Just a few weeks before he
showed up for basic training, another user in the discord
(23:44):
server warned him to be careful.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Not to dissuade you, but you're kind of playing with
fire dagger. The Uniform Code of Military Justice has a
few things to say about members of the armed forces
holding affiliations with extremist groups. For thee, he thought, if
you're serious about being initiated or whatever.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
He responded by asking if the army could search his phone.
Upon finding out that that very likely could happen, he
said he'd just delete everything before he got there. In
his last few weeks before his official enlistment date, he
was trying to convince other members of the Discord to
form an nexsion with him, and was coming up with
(24:26):
vetting procedures for members of his nexion. He suggested that
the group's motto should be total aryan victory. In June,
he joined another Discord server, this one devoted to discussion
of esoteric Nazism.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Some Discord servers.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Allow users to assign little labels to their account, visible
to other users next to their name. In this server,
Melzer selected the user labels Satanism and fascism to describe himself.
Another user asked if he really believed in both, and
he replied quickly yes, and then backtracked, saying not really
(25:07):
just fascism, and claimed he was only joking about Satanism.
In another server, someone asked him if he had already
initiated into the Order of Nine Angles. He said no,
but in another chat that same afternoon he had been
discussing the fact that if asked, ona initiates were supposed
(25:27):
to deny it. It is interesting to note that the
second leaked discord server I found Melzer in was one
mainly used to chat about esoteric Nazism, and it is
also one in which Shanton Simpson appears. I couldn't find
any evidence that Melser and Simpson ever interacted there on
this discord server, but it looks like their paths may
(25:50):
have crossed here before Melzer made the jump from discord
servers about the occult into telegram chats for terrorism, and
they found themselves together once again in rape Waffen. When
he reported to Fort Benning and Georgia on June fourth,
twenty nineteen, Ethan Melzer signed a statement of enlistment affirming
that he was not involved in any extremist groups or activities.
(26:14):
He was, in fact, almost certainly already self initiated into
the Order of nine Angles and was demonstrably very interested
in forming or joining a terrorist organization. After completing basic
training and airborne school, Ethan Melzer deployed with the one
hundred and seventy third Airborne Division to a base in Italy.
In his discord chats, he complained that he needed to
(26:36):
get some kind of fake book covers so that he
could read his sinister texts in front of his commanding
officer without drawing suspicion. He expressed a longing for the
day of the Rope, a phrase from the Turner Diaries
that refers to the day the race War really begins,
when the race traders are murdered, unmasks and left hanging
(26:56):
from lamp posts and bridges. When another user complained that
it felt like the race war would never come, he replied.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
I'm working on it. Okay, give me three years and
I got you, motherfucker. I'm in the Army specifically for this.
I mean I literally did join for this exact reason.
Can't really do anything when I'm in fucking Italy. My
unit is stationed in Italy.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
I'm in the Army specifically for this, That's what he said.
Ethan Melzer joined the Army as an insight role. The
insight role is a core tenet of the Order of
Nine Angles. You can think of it as a sort
of evil magical undercover assignment. A members should take on
(27:50):
this role for six to eighteen months, depending on the
texture looking at and the nature and purpose of the
insight role has shifted a little bit over time and
on the source text. At it's most innocuous, it's just
that same left hand path magical notion of doing something transgressive. Right,
you should do something antithetical to yourself to deepen your
(28:13):
practice of magic, to truly test your sinister resolve, you
should pick a lifestyle a role that is as close
to the polar opposite of your own life, your own
true nature as possible. You should be the opposite of
yourself for a year. But the insight role is widely
(28:34):
understood to be something a bit darker than a little
Antinomian role playing game. Your insight role should allow you
to infiltrate and ultimately subvert some kind of institution. Religious orders,
police departments, and the military are commonly suggested for this purpose,
(28:56):
particularly when it comes to insight roles in policing or
the military. This also provides an opportunity to gain training
and access to weapons. It can also provide a suitable
environment for the practice of culling. That's human sacrifice. These
are jobs where you may well have the opportunity to kill,
(29:20):
and that's what he's referring to. In the months before
he reported for active duty, Ethan Melzer rapidly became obsessed
with and then initiated himself into the Order of Nine Angles.
He may not have formed the plan before he told
his career counselor that he wanted to enlist, but by
the time he put on the uniform for the first time,
(29:44):
he was only pretending to be a soldier. This was
an insight role. By April of twenty twenty, when Ethan
Melzer was joining rape Waffen, he'd been studying the Order
of Nine Angles for more than a year. In one
way early discussion with another Rapewaffen member, he said he
needed to be careful because he didn't want to end
(30:06):
up like another guy in their circle who got caught
while he was in the military.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
There are so many.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Guys that that could refer to that I can't actually
pin down who he might have meant just looking at
guys who have some sort of crossover. You know, Adam
Waffen Order of Nine Angles, were in the military, got
in trouble in twenty nineteen or so. That's actually a
surprisingly long list of guys. He may have been referring
(30:36):
to Army private Corwin Storm Carver, who was investigated in
twenty nineteen over allegations that he was the current leader
of Adam Woffin and was involved in the Order of
Nine Angles. Or maybe he meant Jarrett Smith, the Adam
Woffin member, Satanist and infantry soldier arrested in twenty nineteen
for distributing information about bomb making. Maybe he was talking
(30:59):
about Kyle Bent, the U. S. Army specialist who was
discharged in twenty nineteen after he was arrested for domestic
violence and the subsequent army investigation revealed that he too
was involved with the Order of Nine Angles. Or maybe
he was talking about Vasilio's Pastolis, the Marine lance corporal
who was court martialed in twenty eighteen over his ties
to Adam Woffin. There are plenty of possibilities here, and
(31:24):
they all point to the same grim reality. As Corwin
Carver said, soldiers make the best Nazis. It's just a fact,
and that's a fact. Ethan Melzer was well aware of.
The same week he's having this conversation about not wanting
to be another guy in the military caught doing what
(31:45):
he's doing, he advised another member of rape Waffen who
was considering joining the military to do it for the training, saying,
the ridiculous forced patriotism bullshit can go fuck itself. Just
play the game for four years and get the fuck out,
but stronger, smarter, and more dangerous.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
Of course, he gave the.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Same advice a few days later to a rape Woffen
member who called himself Frycorps and was considering joining the Marines.
Those early months of twenty twenty were a lifetime ago,
so maybe you don't remember the specifics, but the COVID
nineteen pandemic hit Italy pretty hard. I mean, it was
a pandemic.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
It hit us all pretty hard.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
But Italy had actual lockdowns, and so did the US military.
And so in those early months of the pandemic, stationed
in Italy, Ethan Melzer was more or less confined to
his barracks, and he used that time to really commit
to reading his sinister texts and to work his way
deeper into the online subculture surrounding it. Photos recovered from
(32:53):
his cell phone include one of Melzer wearing a ski
mask and holding up a copy of a book has
cut himself and smeared his own blood over a sigil
on the page.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
The book is opened to.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
If I had to guess based on the picture, I
think that's a copy of Keleethi, the second of three
parts of an Ona text called the Black Book of Satan.
It looks like the copy he has as the fully
illustrated version with drawings by Christos Beast, an English musician
named Richard Molt who was allegedly a member of Ona's
(33:28):
Old Guard. With David Mayat and alone in his barracks,
Melzer consumed the violent gore videos that were shared so
gleefully in those telegram channels. Found in his digital possession
were things like a video that appears to show a
black woman being lynched by a white man in front
of a Confederate flag, and a photo of a woman
(33:51):
who is bound and hooded being held at gunpoint by
a man standing in front of a flag with the
insignia for the Order of nine Angles. The court record
specifically notes several videos he'd watched depicting jihadist attacks on
US military forces, which may be where he got his
next big idea. Immediately after walking out of the briefing
(34:15):
room for his upcoming mission to Turkey, Melzer shared the
information with Rapewaffen Chat. Soon after, the channel administrator, our
Canadian teenager posting as Gulag Cult, asked him for more
information about the deployment because another Rapewaffen member, a user
called Kurt Kobani, needed to know. Gulag Cult told Melzer
(34:38):
that this other user, we'll just call him Kurt I Guess,
was a member of the Gray Wolves, a Turkish ultnationalist
fascist paramilitary group that the European Parliament considers an international
terrorist organization. A week before he was scheduled to deploy,
Melzer posted in at least two telegram chats for adherents
(34:58):
of the Order of Nine Angles that he was a
US Army soldier stationed in Italy and he was about
to deploy to Turkey. Gulag Cult forwarded several of Melzer's messages,
which contained sensitive details about the mission, to a chat
called the Order of Nine Rapes. That chat had just
(35:19):
eighteen members. One of those members was Ethan Melzer, one
was Gulug cult Our, fifteen year old Canadian, and one
was a user who called herself Red hour Glass, and
Red hour Glass would be the one to pull the
plug on the whole operation by reporting the plot to
(35:39):
the FBI. The FBI didn't arrest their own informant, and
they can't arrest a Canadian child. But you do have
to wonder what came of the other fifteen members of
that chat room. Not much as known about Red hour Glass.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
She may not even be a woman at all.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Who knows line she was Gulag Colt's girlfriend, Whether she
knew her internet boyfriend was really a child, we don't know.
She's referred to in the government's documents as a confidential source,
not an undercover employee, so she may be getting paid
(36:18):
by the FBI for the information she provides, but she
is not an FBI agent. One footnote indicates that she's
only been a source for the government since May of
twenty twenty, which is when all of this went down.
They don't give a more specific date than that, just
May of twenty twenty, So was she already a government
(36:40):
informant when she entered the Order of Nine rapes Chat
where this plan was hatched. Or did she only become
a government informant after the plan took shape and maybe
she felt compelled to report it. We can't know, but
her username is interesting.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
To me, red hour glass.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Maybe that means something else to you, but to me,
a red hour glass is a clear reference to the
markings on the abdomen of a black widow spider. I
don't want to draw the ire of any spider scientists
out there. I understand that the commonly held belief that
black widow spiders engage in sexual cannibalism isn't really supported
(37:24):
by the science. Those instances of female black widows devouring
their mates occur primarily in laboratory environments when the male
spider can't get away, but it is nevertheless something people believe.
So this red hour glass, this mysterious woman, is tricking
(37:46):
Gulag cult into thinking they are romantically involved. She's drawing
these young men into her web. Was she a black
widow bent on consuming these men's futures?
Speaker 1 (38:00):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Within the Order of Nine rapes Chat, a plan began
to form. If they could get the information about this
mission into the hands of al Qaeda, they could cause
a mass casualty incident. One user asked Melzer if he
understood that he too would likely die in the kind
of attack they're talking about. Melzer replied, if we were
(38:29):
to trigger this the right way, the amount of shit
it would cause would cover it. He felt like his
life quote would be absolutely meaningless in the amount of
shit it would cause if the plan worked, if these
forty soldiers were killed at a Turkish air base.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
A day later, Gurlug Cult.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
Asked him, are we really planning a Jihati attack, and
Melzer agreed they were. Gulug Cult joked that if Melzer
got himself shit in this attack would be his own fault,
and Melzer again expressed a total willingness to die if
it meant the plan was successful, saying, who gives a fuck?
(39:11):
The after effects of a convoy getting attacked would cover it.
It would be another war. I would have died successfully
because another ten year war in the Middle East would
definitely leave a mark. As the deployment date grew closer,
Melzer shared every detail about the mission with Gulag Cult,
the coordinates of the base, the number of US soldiers
(39:34):
and what kind of weapons they were issued, the purpose
and defensive capabilities of the U. S Army presence at
this base, the layout of the installation and the surrounding terrain,
and even the route his convoy would be taking to
get there. He shared information he'd received in briefings and trainings,
things like the fact that the base was home to
(39:55):
many non military employees who are not armed, and that
the Army was limited in the defenses available for this
convoy because they were operating by the rules of the
host government. Using the training he'd received about avoiding ambush
style attacks, he explained in detail how an effective attack
could work. Just days before the scheduled deployment, a new,
(40:19):
even smaller chat room was formed to finalize the details.
This one, called Operation hard Rock, was just four members, Melzer,
our Canadian teenager, Gulag Cult, our government informant Read Hourglass,
and a fourth user the government calls co Conspirator III,
(40:42):
someone posting under the name Jaw with two ws. In
this chat, Melzer promised to provide the group with the
frequency and channels for the US Army radio communications so
that they would be able to hear their victims deaths
in real time. When the attack was carried out on
(41:14):
May twenty fifth, the day before his twenty second birthday,
Ethan Melzer may have gotten cold feet.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
He suggested to the.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
Chat that maybe they shouldn't attack his convoy at all.
He still loved the idea of murdering a whole convoy
of US soldiers. He just thought maybe it would be
better for him to go on this deployment, spend a
few months there researching the vulnerabilities of the place, you know,
sending back more intel, and then they could carry out
(41:43):
this attack on the unit sent to replace his a
few months from now. He promised that he was packing
a burner phone so he'd be able to provide them
with photographs of the whole base once he got there,
and then he didn't post for a few days. Red
hour Glass informed the FBI of the plot the next day,
May twenty six, twenty twenty, That was Ethan Melser's twenty
(42:08):
second birthday and two days before the scheduled deployment date.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
The authorities were quickly able.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
To identify the platoon in question, and the deployment date
was pushed back to May thirtieth. The soldiers weren't told why.
Ethan Melzer had no idea his plans weren't a secret anymore.
When he posted in the Operation hard Rock chat on
May twenty ninth, the eve of the new scheduled departure date,
he said he was still committed to the plan. He
(42:36):
asked if it was possible to pull exact coordinates from
the metadata on photos that were taken with a cell phone.
He was hoping that if he was able to sneak
his burner phone out on patrol and snap pictures, his
co conspirators would be able to use the metadata to
pinpoint the exact locations of the areas of vulnerability in
the photos. Now, whether Red hour Glass was working for
(43:00):
the government all along or not, we don't know. But
on the evening of May twenty ninth, she may or
may not have even been the one using her phone
once she spilled the beans to the FBI. It may
have been an actual FBI agent chatting with Ethan Melzer
as Red Hourglass as he reaffirmed his commitment to the
(43:22):
plan that night, Red Hourglass asked him, what makes you
think you can actually get away with fucking with the
US military and Melser replied, because I fly under the
raidar already act completely normal around other people outside and
don't talk about my personal life or beliefs with anyone.
But he was starting to get nervous about the mission.
(43:44):
He deleted most of his old posts. If the plan
now was to attack the replacement convoy two months down
the road, he was going to be alive when the
investigation started, and he didn't want to get caught. Red
Hourglass needled him, saying, you deleted them because that's treason duh,
(44:05):
and he replied, KEK, that's k e K. It's a
substitute for LOL. The lore here is complicated and irrelevant,
but the short version is that keck originated with Korean
online gamers as a typed indication that the user is laughing,
and it eventually migrated into the American altright lexicon of
(44:29):
the twenty sixteen era. It's not important. The point is
he was laughing off what he knew to be true.
This was treasonous behavior. And Nat gets us back up
to where we started today. Ethan Melzer standing outside at
Camp Betterly with his platoon on May thirtieth, twenty twenty.
(44:53):
His bags were packed forty soldiers were waiting for the
bus that would take them to the airstrip. Inside Ethan
Melser's bag, they found two cell phones he really had
packed the burner phone that he'd promised to use to
take photographs of the military base. They also found two books,
The Sinister Tradition, a seminal text for adherents of the
(45:17):
Order of Nine Angles written by ONA Grandmaster Anton Long himself,
and a copy of Kodux Aristarchus, one of the ONA
texts authored by the English Nazi pedophile Ryan Fleming.
Speaker 1 (45:32):
I did give it a little skim this.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
Week, like I promised you last week, and it turns
out he's just talking about psychic vampirism. Sorry, so I
don't think vampires are real. Immediately after being taken into custody,
Ethan Melzer admitted that he had disclosed information about his
deployment to members of the rape Waffenchat. He admitted that
(45:54):
he had done so in order to facilitate an attack
on his fellow soldiers. He admitted that the messages had
been typed and sent by him. He agreed that his
actions were tantamount to treason, but as required by the
rules of the Order of Nine Angles. He repeatedly denied
(46:14):
that he was a member of the Order of Nine Angles.
As the case progressed, his lawyers argued that he was
just messing around online. He was addicted to posting. They
wanted to have a psychologist testify about internet addiction and
the phenomenon of people lying online for attention, inhabiting elaborate
(46:37):
fake identities online because they're high on likes and comments.
They argued that there was no actual chance of any
real attack ever taking place, leaning heavily on the fact
that the primary co conspirator was a child who had
recently been released from a psychiatric facility and who was
only pretending to be an adult with military training. The
(47:00):
Defense sentencing memo doesn't mention that the government believes that
co conspirators two and three.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
Were not lying.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
One of them really was based in Kurdistan, and the
other does appear to have actual connections to some kind
of jihadist organization. In his post arrest interviews, Melzer told
investigators that he hadn't been serious about any of it,
but that he'd felt pressured to provide information about the deployment,
(47:30):
so he made something up and that kind of falls apart,
considering the information he provided was real. He did provide actual,
correct information about this military base in Turkey and his
deployment to it, and he really did pack a burner
phone for his deployment. But he said it had never
(47:52):
even crossed his mind that the people he was talking
to were serious, and he certainly wasn't serious. He said
that he was only curious about the order of nine
angles because it was so weird, and he claimed that
the beliefs of the group were quote pretty much the
polar opposite of his own, which is interesting because that's
(48:14):
sort of the same language in a lot of ona
texts about the kind of insight role you should choose.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
You should choose something that is.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
The polar opposite of your own beliefs. He later claimed
that he'd only provided some information to the group in
order to gain their trust so he could learn more
about them, which is kind of what Shandon Simpson, that
Ohio National guardsmen we were talking about last week, has
been claiming all along about why he was in the
(48:43):
rape wop and chat rooms. So there's a lot of
guys in the terrorism planning chat that are claiming after
the fact that they were only pretending to support terrorism
in order to uncover how bad everybody else.
Speaker 1 (48:56):
In there really is.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
And Knowlser's attorneys maintained all the way through sentencing that
there was never any real possibility that anyone was going
to get hurt. Right, they're saying that this plan is
half baked at best, and it never would have actually worked.
It was just posts online and the guy he was
talking to turned out to be a kid anyway. But
(49:22):
maybe terrorism is kind of like magic. Right. We were
talking a little bit last week about how much does
it matter what's real, what you really believe. Does it
matter if you're actually communing with demonic entities and the
acausal realm, if the end result is still a specific,
(49:44):
concrete action in the real world. Does it matter if
you didn't know the person you were sharing classified military
intelligence with was a child, if that information still found
its way onto the broader Internet, resulting in a very
real to overhaul security protocols at a military base.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
And sometimes the law.
Speaker 2 (50:05):
Really is kind of like ritual magic in that way.
You can catch the same charge for something like armed
robbery whether the gun you were holding was real or not,
because it doesn't matter if it's a real gun that
shoots real bullets if the people you're pointing it at
think it is Ethan Melzer entered into a plea agreement
(50:29):
in June of twenty twenty two, just two weeks before
he was scheduled to stand trial. The agreement dropped most
of the charges on the indictment, which is a pretty
standard practice in a federal criminal case, so he was
convicted only on the charges of attempted murder of US
service members, provision and attempted provision of material support to terrorists,
(50:50):
and illegal transmission of national defense information.
Speaker 1 (50:54):
Pursue it.
Speaker 2 (50:55):
To that plea agreement, he was sentenced to five hundred
and forty months. That's forty five years in prison, assuming
he maintains good behavior and doesn't commit any new offenses
while incarcerated. The eighty five percent of that sentence that
he'll end up serving is a little over thirty eight years.
His scheduled release date is in November of twenty fifty eight.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
He'll be sixty years old.
Speaker 2 (51:21):
When entering his plea, he was asked and said that
he understood that the terms of this agreement included a
waiver of his right to appeal any sentence of five
hundred and forty months or less, and he got five
hundred and forty months. But in March of last year,
just a few days after his sentencing, his attorneys filed
(51:41):
an appeal asking for the case to be re sentenced,
citing a particular comment the judge made in his remarks
after pronouncing the sentence. The transcript of that hearing shows
the judge's remarks were fairly lengthy, covering nearly twenty pages
in the transcript. Judges usually offer some explanation of how
they arrived at their decision at a sentencing hearing. Some
(52:05):
are more succinct. Others enjoy waxing poetic about the nature
of justice or their feelings about a defendant's actions. There's
no jury in the room anymore, so judges can get
a little wild with it at this stage. It can
be kind of jarring to hear them drop the act
and actually have a deeply personal opinion. And Judge Gregory
(52:27):
Woods spoke at length. He explained, as judges often do,
the legal framework for calculating a sentence and the factors
that must be weighed. He summarized the facts of the
case and its procedural history. He highlighted pieces of evidence
that contributed to his decision. He referenced the mitigating factors
presented by the defense and explained why he didn't agree
(52:50):
with the defense's position that they warranted a downward departure.
And none of this is unusual or even remarkable. But
the appeal h just on the judge's use of the
phrase Judeo Christian values.
Speaker 3 (53:08):
Mister Melzer's crimes were pugnant. He betrayed the United States
of America. He betrayed the United States military. He targeted
for murder his fellow soldiers. He worked to aid Jahadis terrorists. Also,
he could achieve his nihilist goal of unreminding Judeo Christian
values and rupturing civilized society.
Speaker 2 (53:30):
Of the Order of Nine Angles. Judge Woods said, the
organization and mister Melzer opposed those Judeo Christian values because
they are good for civilization. His crimes were committed in
order to destroy civilization and look, to be honest, it
probably would have been better if he had not said that,
(53:51):
but it was a brief mention in a very lengthy
monologue that also emphasized that the defendant was not charged
or sentenced because of his beliefs, but for the actions
motivated by those beliefs. That single statement wasn't the basis
for the sentence. It was just a comment. But the
(54:13):
appeal argues that those comments constitute a sufficient appearance of
the sentence having been based on a constitutionally impermissible factor,
such as the defendants race or religious beliefs. The government
contends that not only had Melser waived his right to
appeal the sentence and his attorneys failed to object to
(54:33):
these comments when they were made, but the comments in
question don't raise an issue of constitutionality. If anything, the
judge was referring to the bias motivation for the crime,
not a characteristic of the defendant. There's a difference between
talking about a defendants race or a defendant's religion and
(54:54):
talking about the defendant's racial or religious motivation for a
I'm no judge, I'm not even a lawyer. I'm just
an enthusiastic consumer of the law. But I don't think
this appeal holds a lot of water. They're hoping to
get the case resentenced so they can have a second
(55:14):
shot at getting a sentence of fifteen years rather than
the forty five years currently on the books. If you're
listening to this, the day it came out oral argument
in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals was yesterday, November six,
twenty twenty four. The Second Circuit tends to be a
little speedier than some, but I've given up trying to
(55:38):
divine a court's timeline. It never works out. A final
opinion in Melzer's appeal could come as quickly as a
few weeks, but it's more likely we won't see an
opinion filed for a couple of months. Leaving aside the
comments at issue in the appeal, though, Judge Woods made
it clear how he felt about Ethan Melzer's crimes and
(55:59):
his aims that he regretted his actions, saying, in part,
mister Melser now expresses remorse as he is facing justice
for his crimes, but I frankly do not believe him.
Part of the methodology of his organization, as I understand it,
is that one should hide one's true intentions and commitment
(56:19):
to better achieve its goals, and over an extended period
of time, mister Melser effectively did just that. So I
do not trust his expression of remorse or that he
has truly renounced his commitment to violence. I hope it's true, but.
Speaker 1 (56:35):
I don't trust it.
Speaker 2 (56:37):
I think it is more likely that mister Melser is
playing another role to obtain leniency from the court, as
he played soldier while working in secret to murder servicemen.
So maybe the role of contrite federal prisoner is just
another mask. Either way, he is going to be behind
bars for a long time and he probably won't come
(57:00):
out a better man whenever that day comes. Sentencing is
meant to balance the need for punishment, rehabilitation, protection of
the public, and deterrence. But based on the comments made
at sentencing and the length of the sentence, this seems
to be almost entirely in the service of deterrence. This
(57:25):
isn't about preventing Ethan Melzer from doing this again. He
couldn't do this again. It's about sending a message to
everyone else who is considering joining the US military as
part of their plan to reinvent the world through bloodshed
with violent revolution and mass murder. But you have to
(57:47):
ask yourself if there's a more effective way to address
this underlying issue of young men enlisting in the military
because they dream of a race war this can't be
the only option. Ethan Melzer is currently being held at
FCI Marion, a medium security federal prison in Illinois that
(58:10):
I most strongly associate with being the place where a
man aptly nicknamed a crying Nazi befriended a man that
they call the Merchant of Death. But maybe now's not
the time to tell you about how a guy who
used to really publicly fantasize about raping me used to
watch Tucker Carlson every night in the prison wreck room
(58:31):
with the Russian arms dealer that Vladimir Putin traded Brittany
Griner for another time.
Speaker 1 (58:37):
Perhaps.
Speaker 2 (58:51):
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and reported by me, Molly Coner.
Our executive produces are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email
me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com,
(59:12):
but I probably will not answer it. You can exchange
conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the
Weird Little Guys subreddit. Please don't post anything that will
make you one of my weird little guys.
Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
When we left off last week, it was April twenty first,
twenty twenty a US Army paratrooper Ethan Melzer was having
his first chat with the administrator of a telegram channel
for a group called rape Waffen, a splinter cell from
the Nazi terror organization Adam Woffen who was committed to
the Satanic cult called the Order of Nine Angles. Melzer
(00:30):
didn't know it at the time, but the user he
was chatting with was a psychologically unstable fifteen year old
in Canada, and it seems unlikely that either of them
had any idea that the teenager's online girlfriend was a
government informant. Over the course of the next five weeks,
Ethan Melzer developed a plan that he hoped would result
in the murder of forty of his fellow soldiers and
(00:53):
hopefully provoke a conflict in the Middle East that would
claim thousands more lives. I'm Molly Konger. This is weird,
little guys. Just a quick note at the top. I
(01:22):
do want to start off with a correction today. When
we were talking last week about the Hitler based dating
system used by the Satanic Nazi cult, I foolishly repeated
a claim that I'd read that the origin of feyan
was unknown, and that's on me. I should have double
check for myself. The order of nine angles marks the
(01:42):
passage of time in years since the birth of Hitler,
so twenty twenty four would be the year one thirty five,
and they write that date out as y F one
three five, where y F stands for a year of faeyan.
I did a little more digging around because I just
couldn't accept the explanation that there is no explanation.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
And of course, fayan.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Spelled fay e n is almost certainly derived from a
Middle English word faine fay n, an adverb meaning gladly
or joyfully, which in turn comes from the Old English gaffeon,
meaning to rejoice. So the Nazi wizards are at least
etymologically on track in their choice to refer to the
(02:28):
year since Hitler's birth as the year of rejoicing. You
don't got a hand it to him, but I had
to correct the record on that anyway. Back to the
foiled terror plot. Ethan Melzer was taken into custody on
May thirtieth, twenty twenty, when military authorities detained him He
(02:49):
was standing outside at Camp Betterly, part of a joint
Italian American military complex in Vicenza, Italy, with three dozen
of his fellow soldiers. They were waiting for the bus
that would take them to the air Stone, where they
would board a flight to Turkey. His platoon had been
assigned to a sensitive mission at in Serlic Air Base,
a Turkish air base near the Syrian border and one
(03:10):
of a handful of foreign bases where the US military
is known to store B sixty one nuclear bombs. His
platoon had spent the last few weeks receiving classified briefings
on their upcoming mission. They trained, drilled, and studied terrain maps.
They sat through a training about possible threat scenarios they
could encounter on their mission and how to spot them,
(03:31):
none of them knowing that the threat was there in
the room, because all the while Ethan Melzer was passing
every piece of information he learned on to his new
friends in the order of nine angles, every detail about
the mission, down to photos he clandestinely took of the
maps shown in the briefing was shared immediately with rape Waffen.
(03:54):
His platoon had originally been scheduled to deploy two days earlier,
on May twenty eighth. The soldiers standing there with their
packed bags waiting for the bus hadn't been told why
their departure date had been pushed back, but they were worried.
It meant something serious was going on. None of them
could have guessed, though, that it was one of their
own who meant them harm. But that is the end,
(04:16):
and I said we were going to start at the beginning.
Ethan Melzer was born in nineteen ninety eight to parents
who only married because his mother got pregnant. The marriage
didn't last. His father's mother seems to blame Ethan's mother
for this, and they weren't good with money. His father,
Nick Melzer, bought a house the couple couldn't afford, and
(04:38):
they filed for bankruptcy in two thousand and two, the
same year their marriage ended. His father traveled a lot
for work, so Ethan lived with his mother by her
own admission. Ethan's mother, Julie, suffered from alcoholism and a
variety of mental illnesses, though she didn't get diagnosed until
after her son's arrest, and judging by the court filings,
(04:58):
one thing everyone agree on is that his mother, Julie
struggled to provide a safe and stable home environment for Ethan.
She drank too much, She dated terrible men. She came
from a family of proud clansmen and dated men who
used racial slurs. She had a boyfriend who beat her
and her son. That same boyfriend had an older son
(05:20):
who allegedly sexually abused Ethan when he was still in
elementary school. Ethan's father remarried when he was nine, and
his new stepmother resented him. When his step siblings were born,
he saw even less of his father. There was no
room for this strange boy from her husband's previous marriage
and his stepmother's new family. When Ethan was in middle school,
(05:42):
his mother's parents died. This sent her into a deep
depression and her drinking got worse. And this left a
troubled young boy mostly on his own. He spent a
lot of time online. He got really into four chan.
He started smoking.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Pot in the eighth grade, and.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
His mother didn't seem to notice or care when he
skipped school to stay home and play video games and
get high, and she would sometimes even smoke pot with him.
The psychologist hired by his lawyers prepared a report that
expounds at length about this difficult period in Ethan's young life.
He was overweighted and unathletic. Who's uncool, Who's bullied? He
(06:25):
was starting to realize that he was gay, and that
terrified him. He liked art and music, not sports. The
men in his mother's life bullied him, the kids at
school bullied him, and he retreated deeper and deeper into
the Internet and into drugs. By his sophomore year of
high school, he was using ecstasy and meth. I think
(06:49):
it's important to note that none of this excuses anything.
It barely even explains it. I know plenty of wonderful
people who were fat gay nerds in middle school. I've
come to think of it. I know a lot of
really great adults who would tell you today and that
they are proud and happy to be fat gay nerds.
It's a great kind of person to be. But there's
(07:11):
no denying that it's a difficult state of affairs for
a middle schooler whose stepmother hates him and whose mom
cares more about getting drunk than making sure he gets
to school on time. That alone doesn't create a monster,
but you can, I think, find a place in your
heart to feel sorry for this little boy. It doesn't
(07:32):
mean you have to feel sorry for the man he became,
and it doesn't change what he did. But there was
a time when he could have been someone different. There
were days years ago when a little boy who wanted
to be loved and accepted and nurtured didn't get that.
(07:52):
It's okay to mourn the man who never was because
that sad boy went down the wrong path. He dropped
out of high school at the end of tenth grade,
which would have been in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
I think in.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Twenty sixteen is the date he gives for his earliest
criminal activity. This was also the year his mother remarried.
His mother describes this new husband as physically abusive, just
as her earlier boyfriends had been, and recounted an incident
in which he choked her until she lost consciousness. She
says her husband would also punch Ethan, and in one
(08:28):
notable incident, she says he punched Ethan repeatedly as he
lay on the couch trying to cover his face. So
Ethan moved out. He moved from flophouse to flophouse and
started dealing drugs. He shot another drug dealer. That shooting
the when we talked about a bit in the first
episode does seem well corroborated. I think it really did happen.
(08:51):
But there's also some mention of a possible earlier shooting,
an incident where he shot someone during an attempted mugging.
It's unclear if that when it is corroborated or not,
but according to the psychologist, it was after that second shooting,
the one we know was real, when he realized his
life was falling apart. So he got off drugs, moved
(09:13):
back into his mom's house, got a steady job at
a restaurant, and started thinking about getting his ged. His
manager at the restaurant recommended the Job Corps, a program
administered by the Department of Labor that provides educational opportunities
and job training for low income young adults. In September
of twenty eighteen, at twenty years old, Ethan Melzer enrolled
(09:35):
in the Job Core program. His time in the Job
Core Program is marked by intense contradiction. He was praised
for his positive attitude and his hard work. He was
enthusiastic about joining the military because of his overwhelming patriotism
and respect for family members who had served, but He
(09:56):
was also ravenously consuming texts produced by the Order Nine Angles,
the Satanic Nazi cult he would soon initiate himself into.
In an interview after Ethan's arrest, his Job Core career
counselor said.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Neo Nazis and white supremacists don't last a week here.
There is no way a kid who has those ideas
can hide their true colors when they are surrounded by
black people and I hear everything that goes on in
the dorms. Ethan showed no signs at all of being
a white supremacist.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Another Job Corp employee who worked with Ethan during his
time in the program said, the kids who come in
with those ideas never last long. They do come, but
they get into conflicts and they always leave. Another of
Ethan's instructors in the program said, if.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
You are a white supremacist, you won't make it here.
Job Corps has a zero tolerance policy. We've had kids
like that before and they only last a few days.
We know everything that goes on in the dorms we
have had. I had racist and anti American kids here
and they never make it. They can't hide it. We
always find.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Out they can always tell they always root those kids out.
Ethan was a model student. He showed no signs of
racism or anti Semitism. He was friendly and helpful, and
he got top marks on his evaluations in the category
(11:25):
of multicultural awareness. He was patriotic and looking forward to
serving his country. They can always tell, except he was
lying to everyone. It was during his time in the
job Corp program that he fell down the rabbit hole.
He started researching the Order of Nine Angles. He liked
(11:49):
what he saw. He downloaded the literature he would need
to self initiate. He was in contact with other members.
He was on his way to starting his own nexsion
before he finished the In December of twenty nineteen, just
three months into his nine months at job Corps, he
signed the paperwork to enlist.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
In the Army.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
He wouldn't head off to basic training until the following
June after completing his ged, but he knew what he
wanted to do afterwards, and he signed the documents committing
to it. In February of twenty nineteen, he created an
account on Discord, a messaging application originally favored mostly by
gamers as dagger Light. He joined a Discord server for
(12:30):
people interested in conspiracy theories and the occult. The court
filings don't say exactly which one, but I have a guess.
The nonprofit investigative journalism collective Unicorn Riot has an extensive
database of leaked discord chats. Most famously, they published the
entire planning chat where the Unite the Right rally. But
(12:52):
in the years since, this vault of leaked servers has
grown exponentially. Obviously, it's not every extremist discord server, so
we're really only looking at a sliver of what's out there.
But I did find an account I know to be
Ethan Melzer's in a discord server where most of the
discussion is about Flatter Earth, anti vax conspiracies, nine to
(13:14):
eleven trutherism. Things like that the excerpted messages contained in
the court documents aren't there in the unicorn Riot leaks.
Those messages may have been shared in private channels or
deleted sometime before the discord was archived and published, or
maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree entirely, several of
(13:35):
the usernames that are visible in the government exhibits do
appear within this discord server, though, so even if it
wasn't this one in particular, it was one that shared
a lot of the same ideas and the same users.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
Either way.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Ethan got on Discord in February of twenty nineteen and
he posted, Hello, I have some questions about a group
I found. Don't know if you walk help. The group
he was asking about was Temple of Blood. Temple of
Blood is maybe the most prominent North American nexxion of
(14:11):
the Order of Nine Angles, and it is the nexion
that is mixed up with Adam Woffin during this time period.
I would be remiss if I did not also tell
you that the founder of the Temple of Blood, Joshua
Caleb Sutter, has been on the FBI payroll for more
than twenty years, and that certainly complicates the story a
(14:32):
little bit. Sutter came up in the Aryan Nations. He
is a longtime member of the movement. His relationship with
the FBI began in two thousand and three, when he
agreed to cooperate with the authorities after he got caught
up on a gun charge. In an article for Wired
earlier this year, Ali Winston and Jake Hanrahan spoke to
Harvard law professor Alexander Natopov about this kind of arrangement,
(14:55):
which she calls a deal with the devil. You can't
get from A to B without an informant, she said.
Sometimes to get close to criminals, you have to rely
on criminals. The FBI has refused to answer questions or
even comment on their relationship with Sutter, but the truth
finally came out during the trial of Caleb Cole, one
(15:18):
of the Adamwoffin members, who was arrested in twenty twenty.
Ali Winston's most recent investigation into this story indicates that
Sutter may have been involved with the Order of Nine
Angles for years before becoming a paid government informant. So
it might be disingenuous to say that Temple of Blood
only exists because the government was paying the guy who
(15:39):
ran it. He may well have started his own nexxion
with or without the one hundred and forty thousand dollars
he's been paid by the FBI. But maybe he wouldn't
have been allowed to operate with such impunity. Maybe he
wouldn't have had the resources to start and run. Martinette Press,
the publishing house that produced most of the ona materials
(16:01):
available in the United States today, Maybe his influence would
have been curtailed years and years ago before he could
propagate his violent, pedophilic ideology, sewing it into the minds
of young men who would kill for it. I think
one thing a lot of people get wrong when they
talk about paid informants like Sutter is a belief that
(16:26):
people like Sutter aren't sincere in their beliefs or actions,
and that they wouldn't be engaging in these things if
not for the inducement of the federal government. But the
movement is littered with true believers who make a little
money on the side snitching on people they don't like.
Plenty of them think they're clever enough to benefit from
(16:47):
the enragement. They think they can advance their own position
in the movement by having the state take out their rivals,
or they think they can curry favor with the authorities
by dropping a few tidbits of information here and there.
Just because he's getting paid to do it doesn't mean
he wouldn't be doing it otherwise, or that he doesn't
believe it. Sutter's lengthy career as a government informant, the
(17:11):
amount of blood in his wake, and the number of
zeros on his checks certainly make him an outlier, though
while admit so, I had to tell you that that's
unavoidable under the pseudonym Swiss discipline. Sutter was the one
who was really pushing the satanic ideology of the Order
of Nine Angles to the forefront of Adam Woffin in
(17:32):
the year after Brandon Russell's arrest. There's no denying that
did he do it because the government asked him to,
because he sincerely believed in the things he was saying?
Both neither it's impossible to know, and neither Sutter nor
the government are talking about it. Honestly, I think it
(17:55):
would be naive to believe either of them, even if
they did. Been some rumblings within the movement that the
whole idea is a government operation. Sometimes that looks like
a sort of no true Scotsman's situation.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
For Neo Nazis.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
You know, anyone in the movement who's talking like this
is clearly a government operative trying to make us all
look crazy. Another theory I've seen is a little intriguing,
if convoluted and very unlikely. But there are those within
the movement who believe that the government's interest in pushing
Satanism on them is a strategy aimed at getting them
(18:32):
to disengage. If someone is falling deeper and deeper into
extremist ideology and suddenly they're expected to sacrifice a goat
and drink its blood under the moonlight, they might say,
you know what, fuck it. This is too weird, this
is too weird.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
I can't do it.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
The idea here is that the goal isn't to deradicalize them,
it's to push radicalization to its most extreme limits, making
it unpalatable, making the movement just too damn weird to
keep up with. Like I said, that's a little convoluted.
I don't know that the government is playing that kind
(19:12):
of three dimensional chess with Nazis, but it is a
theory I've seen pushed around a little bit. But Joshua
Caleb Sutter's story is a long and strange one all
on its own, and I'm actually saving it until I
get to a weird little guy I've been fascinated by
for years. You see, we didn't find out that Sutter
(19:36):
was an FBI informant until pretty recently, but a fellow
white nationalist who'd known him for decades had been pointing
the finger at Sutter for years. Bill White is almost
certainly the most prolific jailhouse lawyer in the white supremacist movement.
(19:56):
I've spent oh god, probably close to one thousand dollar
paying ten cents a page over the last five years
or so buying copies of his ranting and raving court filings.
He's got a wide variety of grievances and conspiracy theories.
Most of his recent complaints are about unfair treatment inside
(20:18):
assorted federal prison facilities. The guards are mean to him,
he was framed for a fight he claims another inmate started,
he isn't getting adequate treatment for his mental health problems.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
And so on.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
But he's also been saying for years that he was
framed for one of the things that sent him to prison.
And central to that argument is his fervent belief that
Joshua Caleb Sutter was working for the FBI. So when
it turned out he'd been right about Sutter all along,
I was stunned. I'm not saying I believe Bill when
(20:53):
he says he didn't send those emails threatening to kill
a prosecutor's wife, but it's intriguing that he was right
about any at all. But I think it'll be a
minute before we get to my favorite vexatious litigant in
the federal prison system, so i'll leave it there. He's
not getting out until twenty thirty seven, so I've got
plenty of time.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
The ratings of an incarcerated Nazi.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Aside, no one knew Joshua Caleb Sutter was an FBI
informant until twenty twenty one, so Ethan Melser certainly didn't
have any inkling about it when he started asking about
Temple of Blood in February of twenty nineteen. In the discord,
he says he encountered the group in a Reddit post
and started looking into it. He says another Reddit user
(21:52):
told him it was connected to some shit called nine A,
and in the discord he says it's just morbid curiosity
that he's always been interested in really obscure shit. After
a bit of back and forth with the other users,
he finally says, so they're Nazi vampires. Okay then, and
(22:16):
he asks if there are groups out there that are
even more extreme. Another user asks him you want to
go full throttle, and Ethan Melser replies yes. A few
days later, in another discord server, he's asking again about
the Order of Nine Angles. He is again told that
(22:37):
they are a neo Nazi Satanic group with connections to
Adam Woffen, and Ethan Melser posts, this is going to
sound bad, but I want to go further down the
rabbit hole. Say someone were to go all the way
trying to look for these people. How bad of an
idea is that? Like out of ten? A few days
(23:00):
after expressing his desire to go down the Satanic rabbit hole,
Ethan Melzer is having a private conversation with a member
of the Order of Nine Angles, and he's asking for
the text that he'll need to read to get started.
Within weeks, he had accumulated a large collection of PDFs
and books about the Order of Nine Angles. He was
(23:22):
communicating regularly with at least two members. He got a
tattoo on his left forearm of an eight pointed star,
often referred to as the symbol of chaos. He was
already deep into his new magical practice before he finished
the job Corp program. Just a few weeks before he
showed up for basic training, another user in the discord
(23:44):
server warned him to be careful.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Not to dissuade you, but you're kind of playing with
fire dagger. The Uniform Code of Military Justice has a
few things to say about members of the armed forces
holding affiliations with extremist groups. For thee, he thought, if
you're serious about being initiated or whatever.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
He responded by asking if the army could search his phone.
Upon finding out that that very likely could happen, he
said he'd just delete everything before he got there. In
his last few weeks before his official enlistment date, he
was trying to convince other members of the Discord to
form an nexsion with him, and was coming up with
(24:26):
vetting procedures for members of his nexion. He suggested that
the group's motto should be total aryan victory. In June,
he joined another Discord server, this one devoted to discussion
of esoteric Nazism.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Some Discord servers.
Speaker 2 (24:44):
Allow users to assign little labels to their account, visible
to other users next to their name. In this server,
Melzer selected the user labels Satanism and fascism to describe himself.
Another user asked if he really believed in both, and
he replied quickly yes, and then backtracked, saying not really
(25:07):
just fascism, and claimed he was only joking about Satanism.
In another server, someone asked him if he had already
initiated into the Order of Nine Angles. He said no,
but in another chat that same afternoon he had been
discussing the fact that if asked, ona initiates were supposed
(25:27):
to deny it. It is interesting to note that the
second leaked discord server I found Melzer in was one
mainly used to chat about esoteric Nazism, and it is
also one in which Shanton Simpson appears. I couldn't find
any evidence that Melser and Simpson ever interacted there on
this discord server, but it looks like their paths may
(25:50):
have crossed here before Melzer made the jump from discord
servers about the occult into telegram chats for terrorism, and
they found themselves together once again in rape Waffen. When
he reported to Fort Benning and Georgia on June fourth,
twenty nineteen, Ethan Melzer signed a statement of enlistment affirming
that he was not involved in any extremist groups or activities.
(26:14):
He was, in fact, almost certainly already self initiated into
the Order of nine Angles and was demonstrably very interested
in forming or joining a terrorist organization. After completing basic
training and airborne school, Ethan Melzer deployed with the one
hundred and seventy third Airborne Division to a base in Italy.
In his discord chats, he complained that he needed to
(26:36):
get some kind of fake book covers so that he
could read his sinister texts in front of his commanding
officer without drawing suspicion. He expressed a longing for the
day of the Rope, a phrase from the Turner Diaries
that refers to the day the race War really begins,
when the race traders are murdered, unmasks and left hanging
(26:56):
from lamp posts and bridges. When another user complained that
it felt like the race war would never come, he replied.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
I'm working on it. Okay, give me three years and
I got you, motherfucker. I'm in the Army specifically for this.
I mean I literally did join for this exact reason.
Can't really do anything when I'm in fucking Italy. My
unit is stationed in Italy.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
I'm in the Army specifically for this, That's what he said.
Ethan Melzer joined the Army as an insight role. The
insight role is a core tenet of the Order of
Nine Angles. You can think of it as a sort
of evil magical undercover assignment. A members should take on
(27:50):
this role for six to eighteen months, depending on the
texture looking at and the nature and purpose of the
insight role has shifted a little bit over time and
on the source text. At it's most innocuous, it's just
that same left hand path magical notion of doing something transgressive. Right,
you should do something antithetical to yourself to deepen your
(28:13):
practice of magic, to truly test your sinister resolve, you
should pick a lifestyle a role that is as close
to the polar opposite of your own life, your own
true nature as possible. You should be the opposite of
yourself for a year. But the insight role is widely
(28:34):
understood to be something a bit darker than a little
Antinomian role playing game. Your insight role should allow you
to infiltrate and ultimately subvert some kind of institution. Religious orders,
police departments, and the military are commonly suggested for this purpose,
(28:56):
particularly when it comes to insight roles in policing or
the military. This also provides an opportunity to gain training
and access to weapons. It can also provide a suitable
environment for the practice of culling. That's human sacrifice. These
are jobs where you may well have the opportunity to kill,
(29:20):
and that's what he's referring to. In the months before
he reported for active duty, Ethan Melzer rapidly became obsessed
with and then initiated himself into the Order of Nine Angles.
He may not have formed the plan before he told
his career counselor that he wanted to enlist, but by
the time he put on the uniform for the first time,
(29:44):
he was only pretending to be a soldier. This was
an insight role. By April of twenty twenty, when Ethan
Melzer was joining rape Waffen, he'd been studying the Order
of Nine Angles for more than a year. In one
way early discussion with another Rapewaffen member, he said he
needed to be careful because he didn't want to end
(30:06):
up like another guy in their circle who got caught
while he was in the military.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
There are so many.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Guys that that could refer to that I can't actually
pin down who he might have meant just looking at
guys who have some sort of crossover. You know, Adam
Waffen Order of Nine Angles, were in the military, got
in trouble in twenty nineteen or so. That's actually a
surprisingly long list of guys. He may have been referring
(30:36):
to Army private Corwin Storm Carver, who was investigated in
twenty nineteen over allegations that he was the current leader
of Adam Woffin and was involved in the Order of
Nine Angles. Or maybe he meant Jarrett Smith, the Adam
Woffin member, Satanist and infantry soldier arrested in twenty nineteen
for distributing information about bomb making. Maybe he was talking
(30:59):
about Kyle Bent, the U. S. Army specialist who was
discharged in twenty nineteen after he was arrested for domestic
violence and the subsequent army investigation revealed that he too
was involved with the Order of Nine Angles. Or maybe
he was talking about Vasilio's Pastolis, the Marine lance corporal
who was court martialed in twenty eighteen over his ties
to Adam Woffin. There are plenty of possibilities here, and
(31:24):
they all point to the same grim reality. As Corwin
Carver said, soldiers make the best Nazis. It's just a fact,
and that's a fact. Ethan Melzer was well aware of.
The same week he's having this conversation about not wanting
to be another guy in the military caught doing what
(31:45):
he's doing, he advised another member of rape Waffen who
was considering joining the military to do it for the training, saying,
the ridiculous forced patriotism bullshit can go fuck itself. Just
play the game for four years and get the fuck out,
but stronger, smarter, and more dangerous.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
Of course, he gave the.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Same advice a few days later to a rape Woffen
member who called himself Frycorps and was considering joining the Marines.
Those early months of twenty twenty were a lifetime ago,
so maybe you don't remember the specifics, but the COVID
nineteen pandemic hit Italy pretty hard. I mean, it was
a pandemic.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
It hit us all pretty hard.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
But Italy had actual lockdowns, and so did the US military.
And so in those early months of the pandemic, stationed
in Italy, Ethan Melzer was more or less confined to
his barracks, and he used that time to really commit
to reading his sinister texts and to work his way
deeper into the online subculture surrounding it. Photos recovered from
(32:53):
his cell phone include one of Melzer wearing a ski
mask and holding up a copy of a book has
cut himself and smeared his own blood over a sigil
on the page.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
The book is opened to.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
If I had to guess based on the picture, I
think that's a copy of Keleethi, the second of three
parts of an Ona text called the Black Book of Satan.
It looks like the copy he has as the fully
illustrated version with drawings by Christos Beast, an English musician
named Richard Molt who was allegedly a member of Ona's
(33:28):
Old Guard. With David Mayat and alone in his barracks,
Melzer consumed the violent gore videos that were shared so
gleefully in those telegram channels. Found in his digital possession
were things like a video that appears to show a
black woman being lynched by a white man in front
of a Confederate flag, and a photo of a woman
(33:51):
who is bound and hooded being held at gunpoint by
a man standing in front of a flag with the
insignia for the Order of nine Angles. The court record
specifically notes several videos he'd watched depicting jihadist attacks on
US military forces, which may be where he got his
next big idea. Immediately after walking out of the briefing
(34:15):
room for his upcoming mission to Turkey, Melzer shared the
information with Rapewaffen Chat. Soon after, the channel administrator, our
Canadian teenager posting as Gulag Cult, asked him for more
information about the deployment because another Rapewaffen member, a user
called Kurt Kobani, needed to know. Gulag Cult told Melzer
(34:38):
that this other user, we'll just call him Kurt I Guess,
was a member of the Gray Wolves, a Turkish ultnationalist
fascist paramilitary group that the European Parliament considers an international
terrorist organization. A week before he was scheduled to deploy,
Melzer posted in at least two telegram chats for adherents
(34:58):
of the Order of Nine Angles that he was a
US Army soldier stationed in Italy and he was about
to deploy to Turkey. Gulag Cult forwarded several of Melzer's messages,
which contained sensitive details about the mission, to a chat
called the Order of Nine Rapes. That chat had just
(35:19):
eighteen members. One of those members was Ethan Melzer, one
was Gulug cult Our, fifteen year old Canadian, and one
was a user who called herself Red hour Glass, and
Red hour Glass would be the one to pull the
plug on the whole operation by reporting the plot to
(35:39):
the FBI. The FBI didn't arrest their own informant, and
they can't arrest a Canadian child. But you do have
to wonder what came of the other fifteen members of
that chat room. Not much as known about Red hour Glass.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
She may not even be a woman at all.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Who knows line she was Gulag Colt's girlfriend, Whether she
knew her internet boyfriend was really a child, we don't know.
She's referred to in the government's documents as a confidential source,
not an undercover employee, so she may be getting paid
(36:18):
by the FBI for the information she provides, but she
is not an FBI agent. One footnote indicates that she's
only been a source for the government since May of
twenty twenty, which is when all of this went down.
They don't give a more specific date than that, just
May of twenty twenty, So was she already a government
(36:40):
informant when she entered the Order of Nine rapes Chat
where this plan was hatched. Or did she only become
a government informant after the plan took shape and maybe
she felt compelled to report it. We can't know, but
her username is interesting.
Speaker 1 (36:59):
To me, red hour glass.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Maybe that means something else to you, but to me,
a red hour glass is a clear reference to the
markings on the abdomen of a black widow spider. I
don't want to draw the ire of any spider scientists
out there. I understand that the commonly held belief that
black widow spiders engage in sexual cannibalism isn't really supported
(37:24):
by the science. Those instances of female black widows devouring
their mates occur primarily in laboratory environments when the male
spider can't get away, but it is nevertheless something people believe.
So this red hour glass, this mysterious woman, is tricking
(37:46):
Gulag cult into thinking they are romantically involved. She's drawing
these young men into her web. Was she a black
widow bent on consuming these men's futures?
Speaker 1 (38:00):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Within the Order of Nine rapes Chat, a plan began
to form. If they could get the information about this
mission into the hands of al Qaeda, they could cause
a mass casualty incident. One user asked Melzer if he
understood that he too would likely die in the kind
of attack they're talking about. Melzer replied, if we were
(38:29):
to trigger this the right way, the amount of shit
it would cause would cover it. He felt like his
life quote would be absolutely meaningless in the amount of
shit it would cause if the plan worked, if these
forty soldiers were killed at a Turkish air base.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
A day later, Gurlug Cult.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
Asked him, are we really planning a Jihati attack, and
Melzer agreed they were. Gulug Cult joked that if Melzer
got himself shit in this attack would be his own fault,
and Melzer again expressed a total willingness to die if
it meant the plan was successful, saying, who gives a fuck?
(39:11):
The after effects of a convoy getting attacked would cover it.
It would be another war. I would have died successfully
because another ten year war in the Middle East would
definitely leave a mark. As the deployment date grew closer,
Melzer shared every detail about the mission with Gulag Cult,
the coordinates of the base, the number of US soldiers
(39:34):
and what kind of weapons they were issued, the purpose
and defensive capabilities of the U. S Army presence at
this base, the layout of the installation and the surrounding terrain,
and even the route his convoy would be taking to
get there. He shared information he'd received in briefings and trainings,
things like the fact that the base was home to
(39:55):
many non military employees who are not armed, and that
the Army was limited in the defenses available for this
convoy because they were operating by the rules of the
host government. Using the training he'd received about avoiding ambush
style attacks, he explained in detail how an effective attack
could work. Just days before the scheduled deployment, a new,
(40:19):
even smaller chat room was formed to finalize the details.
This one, called Operation hard Rock, was just four members, Melzer,
our Canadian teenager, Gulag Cult, our government informant Read Hourglass,
and a fourth user the government calls co Conspirator III,
(40:42):
someone posting under the name Jaw with two ws. In
this chat, Melzer promised to provide the group with the
frequency and channels for the US Army radio communications so
that they would be able to hear their victims deaths
in real time. When the attack was carried out on
(41:14):
May twenty fifth, the day before his twenty second birthday,
Ethan Melzer may have gotten cold feet.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
He suggested to the.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
Chat that maybe they shouldn't attack his convoy at all.
He still loved the idea of murdering a whole convoy
of US soldiers. He just thought maybe it would be
better for him to go on this deployment, spend a
few months there researching the vulnerabilities of the place, you know,
sending back more intel, and then they could carry out
(41:43):
this attack on the unit sent to replace his a
few months from now. He promised that he was packing
a burner phone so he'd be able to provide them
with photographs of the whole base once he got there,
and then he didn't post for a few days. Red
hour Glass informed the FBI of the plot the next day,
May twenty six, twenty twenty, That was Ethan Melser's twenty
(42:08):
second birthday and two days before the scheduled deployment date.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
The authorities were quickly able.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
To identify the platoon in question, and the deployment date
was pushed back to May thirtieth. The soldiers weren't told why.
Ethan Melzer had no idea his plans weren't a secret anymore.
When he posted in the Operation hard Rock chat on
May twenty ninth, the eve of the new scheduled departure date,
he said he was still committed to the plan. He
(42:36):
asked if it was possible to pull exact coordinates from
the metadata on photos that were taken with a cell phone.
He was hoping that if he was able to sneak
his burner phone out on patrol and snap pictures, his
co conspirators would be able to use the metadata to
pinpoint the exact locations of the areas of vulnerability in
the photos. Now, whether Red hour Glass was working for
(43:00):
the government all along or not, we don't know. But
on the evening of May twenty ninth, she may or
may not have even been the one using her phone
once she spilled the beans to the FBI. It may
have been an actual FBI agent chatting with Ethan Melzer
as Red Hourglass as he reaffirmed his commitment to the
(43:22):
plan that night, Red Hourglass asked him, what makes you
think you can actually get away with fucking with the
US military and Melser replied, because I fly under the
raidar already act completely normal around other people outside and
don't talk about my personal life or beliefs with anyone.
But he was starting to get nervous about the mission.
(43:44):
He deleted most of his old posts. If the plan
now was to attack the replacement convoy two months down
the road, he was going to be alive when the
investigation started, and he didn't want to get caught. Red
Hourglass needled him, saying, you deleted them because that's treason duh,
(44:05):
and he replied, KEK, that's k e K. It's a
substitute for LOL. The lore here is complicated and irrelevant,
but the short version is that keck originated with Korean
online gamers as a typed indication that the user is laughing,
and it eventually migrated into the American altright lexicon of
(44:29):
the twenty sixteen era. It's not important. The point is
he was laughing off what he knew to be true.
This was treasonous behavior. And Nat gets us back up
to where we started today. Ethan Melzer standing outside at
Camp Betterly with his platoon on May thirtieth, twenty twenty.
(44:53):
His bags were packed forty soldiers were waiting for the
bus that would take them to the airstrip. Inside Ethan
Melser's bag, they found two cell phones he really had
packed the burner phone that he'd promised to use to
take photographs of the military base. They also found two books,
The Sinister Tradition, a seminal text for adherents of the
(45:17):
Order of Nine Angles written by ONA Grandmaster Anton Long himself,
and a copy of Kodux Aristarchus, one of the ONA
texts authored by the English Nazi pedophile Ryan Fleming.
Speaker 1 (45:32):
I did give it a little skim this.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
Week, like I promised you last week, and it turns
out he's just talking about psychic vampirism. Sorry, so I
don't think vampires are real. Immediately after being taken into custody,
Ethan Melzer admitted that he had disclosed information about his
deployment to members of the rape Waffenchat. He admitted that
(45:54):
he had done so in order to facilitate an attack
on his fellow soldiers. He admitted that the messages had
been typed and sent by him. He agreed that his
actions were tantamount to treason, but as required by the
rules of the Order of Nine Angles. He repeatedly denied
(46:14):
that he was a member of the Order of Nine Angles.
As the case progressed, his lawyers argued that he was
just messing around online. He was addicted to posting. They
wanted to have a psychologist testify about internet addiction and
the phenomenon of people lying online for attention, inhabiting elaborate
(46:37):
fake identities online because they're high on likes and comments.
They argued that there was no actual chance of any
real attack ever taking place, leaning heavily on the fact
that the primary co conspirator was a child who had
recently been released from a psychiatric facility and who was
only pretending to be an adult with military training. The
(47:00):
Defense sentencing memo doesn't mention that the government believes that
co conspirators two and three.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
Were not lying.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
One of them really was based in Kurdistan, and the
other does appear to have actual connections to some kind
of jihadist organization. In his post arrest interviews, Melzer told
investigators that he hadn't been serious about any of it,
but that he'd felt pressured to provide information about the deployment,
(47:30):
so he made something up and that kind of falls apart,
considering the information he provided was real. He did provide actual,
correct information about this military base in Turkey and his
deployment to it, and he really did pack a burner
phone for his deployment. But he said it had never
(47:52):
even crossed his mind that the people he was talking
to were serious, and he certainly wasn't serious. He said
that he was only curious about the order of nine
angles because it was so weird, and he claimed that
the beliefs of the group were quote pretty much the
polar opposite of his own, which is interesting because that's
(48:14):
sort of the same language in a lot of ona
texts about the kind of insight role you should choose.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
You should choose something that is.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
The polar opposite of your own beliefs. He later claimed
that he'd only provided some information to the group in
order to gain their trust so he could learn more
about them, which is kind of what Shandon Simpson, that
Ohio National guardsmen we were talking about last week, has
been claiming all along about why he was in the
(48:43):
rape wop and chat rooms. So there's a lot of
guys in the terrorism planning chat that are claiming after
the fact that they were only pretending to support terrorism
in order to uncover how bad everybody else.
Speaker 1 (48:56):
In there really is.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
And Knowlser's attorneys maintained all the way through sentencing that
there was never any real possibility that anyone was going
to get hurt. Right, they're saying that this plan is
half baked at best, and it never would have actually worked.
It was just posts online and the guy he was
talking to turned out to be a kid anyway. But
(49:22):
maybe terrorism is kind of like magic. Right. We were
talking a little bit last week about how much does
it matter what's real, what you really believe. Does it
matter if you're actually communing with demonic entities and the
acausal realm, if the end result is still a specific,
(49:44):
concrete action in the real world. Does it matter if
you didn't know the person you were sharing classified military
intelligence with was a child, if that information still found
its way onto the broader Internet, resulting in a very
real to overhaul security protocols at a military base.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
And sometimes the law.
Speaker 2 (50:05):
Really is kind of like ritual magic in that way.
You can catch the same charge for something like armed
robbery whether the gun you were holding was real or not,
because it doesn't matter if it's a real gun that
shoots real bullets if the people you're pointing it at
think it is Ethan Melzer entered into a plea agreement
(50:29):
in June of twenty twenty two, just two weeks before
he was scheduled to stand trial. The agreement dropped most
of the charges on the indictment, which is a pretty
standard practice in a federal criminal case, so he was
convicted only on the charges of attempted murder of US
service members, provision and attempted provision of material support to terrorists,
(50:50):
and illegal transmission of national defense information.
Speaker 1 (50:54):
Pursue it.
Speaker 2 (50:55):
To that plea agreement, he was sentenced to five hundred
and forty months. That's forty five years in prison, assuming
he maintains good behavior and doesn't commit any new offenses
while incarcerated. The eighty five percent of that sentence that
he'll end up serving is a little over thirty eight years.
His scheduled release date is in November of twenty fifty eight.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
He'll be sixty years old.
Speaker 2 (51:21):
When entering his plea, he was asked and said that
he understood that the terms of this agreement included a
waiver of his right to appeal any sentence of five
hundred and forty months or less, and he got five
hundred and forty months. But in March of last year,
just a few days after his sentencing, his attorneys filed
(51:41):
an appeal asking for the case to be re sentenced,
citing a particular comment the judge made in his remarks
after pronouncing the sentence. The transcript of that hearing shows
the judge's remarks were fairly lengthy, covering nearly twenty pages
in the transcript. Judges usually offer some explanation of how
they arrived at their decision at a sentencing hearing. Some
(52:05):
are more succinct. Others enjoy waxing poetic about the nature
of justice or their feelings about a defendant's actions. There's
no jury in the room anymore, so judges can get
a little wild with it at this stage. It can
be kind of jarring to hear them drop the act
and actually have a deeply personal opinion. And Judge Gregory
(52:27):
Woods spoke at length. He explained, as judges often do,
the legal framework for calculating a sentence and the factors
that must be weighed. He summarized the facts of the
case and its procedural history. He highlighted pieces of evidence
that contributed to his decision. He referenced the mitigating factors
presented by the defense and explained why he didn't agree
(52:50):
with the defense's position that they warranted a downward departure.
And none of this is unusual or even remarkable. But
the appeal h just on the judge's use of the
phrase Judeo Christian values.
Speaker 3 (53:08):
Mister Melzer's crimes were pugnant. He betrayed the United States
of America. He betrayed the United States military. He targeted
for murder his fellow soldiers. He worked to aid Jahadis terrorists. Also,
he could achieve his nihilist goal of unreminding Judeo Christian
values and rupturing civilized society.
Speaker 2 (53:30):
Of the Order of Nine Angles. Judge Woods said, the
organization and mister Melzer opposed those Judeo Christian values because
they are good for civilization. His crimes were committed in
order to destroy civilization and look, to be honest, it
probably would have been better if he had not said that,
(53:51):
but it was a brief mention in a very lengthy
monologue that also emphasized that the defendant was not charged
or sentenced because of his beliefs, but for the actions
motivated by those beliefs. That single statement wasn't the basis
for the sentence. It was just a comment. But the
(54:13):
appeal argues that those comments constitute a sufficient appearance of
the sentence having been based on a constitutionally impermissible factor,
such as the defendants race or religious beliefs. The government
contends that not only had Melser waived his right to
appeal the sentence and his attorneys failed to object to
(54:33):
these comments when they were made, but the comments in
question don't raise an issue of constitutionality. If anything, the
judge was referring to the bias motivation for the crime,
not a characteristic of the defendant. There's a difference between
talking about a defendants race or a defendant's religion and
(54:54):
talking about the defendant's racial or religious motivation for a
I'm no judge, I'm not even a lawyer. I'm just
an enthusiastic consumer of the law. But I don't think
this appeal holds a lot of water. They're hoping to
get the case resentenced so they can have a second
(55:14):
shot at getting a sentence of fifteen years rather than
the forty five years currently on the books. If you're
listening to this, the day it came out oral argument
in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals was yesterday, November six,
twenty twenty four. The Second Circuit tends to be a
little speedier than some, but I've given up trying to
(55:38):
divine a court's timeline. It never works out. A final
opinion in Melzer's appeal could come as quickly as a
few weeks, but it's more likely we won't see an
opinion filed for a couple of months. Leaving aside the
comments at issue in the appeal, though, Judge Woods made
it clear how he felt about Ethan Melzer's crimes and
(55:59):
his aims that he regretted his actions, saying, in part,
mister Melser now expresses remorse as he is facing justice
for his crimes, but I frankly do not believe him.
Part of the methodology of his organization, as I understand it,
is that one should hide one's true intentions and commitment
(56:19):
to better achieve its goals, and over an extended period
of time, mister Melser effectively did just that. So I
do not trust his expression of remorse or that he
has truly renounced his commitment to violence. I hope it's true, but.
Speaker 1 (56:35):
I don't trust it.
Speaker 2 (56:37):
I think it is more likely that mister Melser is
playing another role to obtain leniency from the court, as
he played soldier while working in secret to murder servicemen.
So maybe the role of contrite federal prisoner is just
another mask. Either way, he is going to be behind
bars for a long time and he probably won't come
(57:00):
out a better man whenever that day comes. Sentencing is
meant to balance the need for punishment, rehabilitation, protection of
the public, and deterrence. But based on the comments made
at sentencing and the length of the sentence, this seems
to be almost entirely in the service of deterrence. This
(57:25):
isn't about preventing Ethan Melzer from doing this again. He
couldn't do this again. It's about sending a message to
everyone else who is considering joining the US military as
part of their plan to reinvent the world through bloodshed
with violent revolution and mass murder. But you have to
(57:47):
ask yourself if there's a more effective way to address
this underlying issue of young men enlisting in the military
because they dream of a race war this can't be
the only option. Ethan Melzer is currently being held at
FCI Marion, a medium security federal prison in Illinois that
(58:10):
I most strongly associate with being the place where a
man aptly nicknamed a crying Nazi befriended a man that
they call the Merchant of Death. But maybe now's not
the time to tell you about how a guy who
used to really publicly fantasize about raping me used to
watch Tucker Carlson every night in the prison wreck room
(58:31):
with the Russian arms dealer that Vladimir Putin traded Brittany
Griner for another time.
Speaker 1 (58:37):
Perhaps.
Speaker 2 (58:51):
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and reported by me, Molly Coner.
Our executive produces are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email
me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com,
(59:12):
but I probably will not answer it. You can exchange
conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the
Weird Little Guys subreddit. Please don't post anything that will
make you one of my weird little guys.
Host
Molly Conger
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