CZM Rewind: The Devil's Chatroom

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media. Hello everyone, Molly Conger here. This is,
as you've probably noticed, a rerun. I'm enjoying some much
needed time off at the moment. I hope you'll forgive me.

(00:22):
This pair of episodes originally ran at the end of
October and beginning of November of last year. It tells
the story of Ethan Melzer, the United States Army private
sentenced to more than forty years in prison or a
failed plot to have his own unit ambushed during a
sensitive mission in Turkey. It felt timely to re release
this one now. The strange satanic Nazi cult that Melzer

(00:46):
was drawn into as he planned for murder and mayhem.
It's back in the news just recently. In March of
twenty twenty five, a teenager in Wisconsin was arrested and
charged with the murder of his mother and stepfather. On
his phone, authorities found material related to the Order of
Nine Angles, the same group Melzer had been involved in.

(01:09):
It's too soon to say much about Nikita Kaysap, that
teenager in Wisconsin. He's been charged at the state level
in Wisconsin, and it looks like federal charges are probably
coming down the line. At some point. Two I'm sure
his story will be won for the show eventually, but
it isn't quite over yet. For now, though, I can

(01:30):
offer you a little insight into what can happen when
a young man starts looking for answers in the Devil's
chat room. On May twenty sixth, twenty twenty, a U. S.
Army private stationed in Italy celebrated his twenty second birthday.

(01:53):
He was blissfully unaware that the FBI had spent that
day confirming his identity as the Nazi satanist who was
trying to get Al Qaeda to wipe out his entire unit.
Half a world away. That very same day, Minneapolis police
officer Derek Chauvin knelt on an unarmed man's neck for
nine minutes and twenty nine seconds. The man cried out,

(02:16):
saying he couldn't breathe. He begged the officer not to
kill him. He cried out for his mother, and then
he fell silent. The murder of George Floyd was caught
on camera by a bystander, and protests against this act
of police brutality started within hours in the Minneapolis area.

(02:40):
The video spread rapidly, and so did the protests in
the months that followed, protest marches, rallies, and memorials were
held in thousands of cities, reaching every state in the
country and dozens of countries around the world. Millions of
Americans took to the streets and public squares to protest
police brutality, and in countless cities, the police responded by

(03:03):
demonstrating the very brutality that people were protesting. Three days
after the murder, then President Donald Trump tweeted, when the
looting starts, The shooting starts. By Monday, June first, less
than a week after George Floyd's murder, the president was
publicly threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow

(03:24):
him to use the military to put down civil disorder.
Governors in more than thirty states activated the National Guard
to assist state and local police in responding to the protests.
Governors in twelve states deployed National Guard troops to Washington,
d c. At the request of the Pentagon. On June second,
a hundred members of the Ohio National Guard received orders

(03:46):
that they'd be heading to the nation's capital that afternoon.
The administrator of a small telegram channel for fans of
a fascist YouTuber posted, they activated my unit and were
getting real ammunition to shoot and to kill. He ended
the message by saying rahoa, a portmanteau of the phrase

(04:09):
racial holy war, a Nazi rallying cry. He told his
followers that they may not hear from him again, but
they might hear about him in the news. Some urged
him not to do anything stupid. Others egged him on,
telling him he should accelerate the collapse. They were thrilled
at the possibility that full scale civil conflict could be

(04:32):
incited by shooting into the crowd of protesters in Washington,
d C. Maybe the race war really was about to begin.
Whether he was just ship posting, or if he really
was considering kicking off the race war, we'll never know.
If we're to take him at his word, always a
shaky proposition. He was deployed with his National Guard unit

(04:53):
at Lafayette Park, just outside the White House when FBI
agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force showed up to
have a chat. Soon after, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced
that one of the National guardsmen he'd sent to DC
was being called back. On June fifth, twenty twenty, Governor
de Wine tweeted.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
I want to take a moment to address a situation
regarding a member of the Ohio National Guard who was
removed from the mission in Washington, d C. After the
FBI uncovered information that this guardsman expressed white supremacist ideology
on the Internet prior to the assignment.

Speaker 1 (05:34):
He didn't name the guardsman in question, and no explanation
was offered about what exactly had been said, where it
was said, or how the FBI came to see it.
Jared Holt at right Wing Watch uncovered the small telegram
channel where those comments had been made a few days later,
and journalists at the nonprofit media collective Unicorn Riot quickly

(05:55):
identified the man in question as Shandon Simpson, a member
of the now defunct neo Nazi organization Vanguard America who
had been photographed standing shoulder to shoulder with James Alex
Fields Junior at the United Right rally in Charlettsville in
twenty seventeen, just hours before Fields committed a hate crime murder.
But that still didn't explain why the governor of Ohio

(06:18):
was making public statements about an FBI investigation into this guardsman,
especially considering no charges had been filed. Simpson claims he
was held in solitary confinement for a week, but the
Ohio National Guard has disputed that claim. He was never
charged with a crime and later received a general discharge
from the National Guard. It wasn't until a federal criminal

(06:41):
case against Ethan Melzer was unsealed two weeks later that
the pieces fell into place. They hadn't been investigating Shandon
Simpson at all. They just happened to come across his
posts about murdering protesters in Washington, d C. While they
were investigating somewhat else's plot to murder an entire platoon

(07:02):
of United States Army paratroopers five thousand miles away. I'm
Molly Conger, and this is weird, Little guys. This episode

(07:30):
is coming out on Halloween. That didn't occur to me
until halfway through the week. I don't have a great
sense of time, even under the best of circumstances. But
when I realized that, I ditched what I was working
on and tried to come up with something halloweeny. I
think that's something people do, right. I should have seasonal

(07:50):
themed episodes, But what does it mean to do a
Halloween episode of a show where every episode is about
a monster, How can you go spookier than we already
are getting every week? But then I realized, what's scarier
than Satan himself? This story has all the classic weird

(08:13):
little guy stuff. It's got neo Nazis, it's got white
supremacist troops. It's got hate groups splintering off into new
hate groups because of our cane internaccene, ideological squabbles and
power struggles and personal beefs. It's got a foiled terror
plot and a court record full of peerful letters from
friends and family insisting that the young man they know

(08:37):
really isn't as bad as you think. But this episode
is a little different because the evil guys we're talking
about aren't shying away from that label. They want you
to think they're evil. They're devil worshiping, neo Nazis, hell
bent on ending life as we know it. This episode

(08:59):
is not about Shandon Simpson. Don't worry, Shandon, Today is
not your day. When I met Shandon last year, while
I was covering a pro Russia rally masquerading as an
anti war protest at the Lincoln Memorial, he denied ever
having been a member of Adam Waffen or any related groups. Now, personally,

(09:21):
I don't think he was telling me the truth, but
it's not exactly easy to prove someone was a member
of a secret of organization and he's never been charged
with anything, so I guess we'll just have to agree
to disagree. But it can be said without dispute that
Shandon Simpson was a member of a telegram channel for
a group called rape Waffen. Yes, rape Waffen. I'm so

(09:47):
sorry because that's what we're talking about today. And just
a quick note at the top, this show doesn't have
content warnings because it's always about something bad. I don't
want to get into the discourse about content warnings. They
certainly have their place, but this show is never not
going to be about violence, and it would be redundant

(10:11):
to mention it every time. But the particular subsect of
Nazi Satanists we're talking about today are really really obsessed
with sexual violence. I'm going to use the word rape
a lot, but there aren't any descriptions of anyone actually
being sexually assaulted. A few side characters do commit some

(10:34):
sexual assaults, and we're found to possess child sexual abuse material,
but we won't dwell on it in any kind of detail.
But here's your exit ramp if you just aren't in
the mood to hear me say the word rape thirty
or forty times. The fact that Shandon Simpson was a

(10:55):
member of the rape Waffen telegram channel is again undisputed.
He said it himself, for what it's worth. Simpson has
claimed that he was only a member of the chat
because he was documenting the malevolent influence of Satanism on
the fascist movement, which sounds incredibly stupid, but honestly, that

(11:18):
might be the truth. And I'm not just saying that
because he has threatened to sue me for merely repeating
what was published by The Washington Post, which is that
he was a member of rape Waffen. He takes issue
with the implication that he was an ideological adherent of
the group's satanic beliefs. He insists that being a member
of the channel, which he again doesn't deny, doesn't mean

(11:42):
he was a member of the group. I can kind
of see that that might be true, but that's a
distinction without a difference. To me, he was a member
of rape Waffen the telegram channel, but he insists he
was not a member of rape Waffen the group do
without what you will, And this allegation got new life

(12:04):
a few months ago when he was making a scene
outside the Democratic National Convention with a hes Bula flag.
Videos of him antagonizing people outside the venue got some
traction online and people recognized him as a Nazi we've
seen before, and that two year old Washington Post article
about him started circulating again. So stupid games, stupid prizes,

(12:27):
et cetera. Take it up with Jeff Bezos, I guess,
and in his defense, to the degree I'm interested in
such a thing, He did co author a document in
twenty eighteen, two years before he was outed as a
member of the rape Waffen, chat with another former member
of Adam Waffen, outlining the ways in which they felt

(12:47):
the movement was being damaged by influential Adam Woffen member
John Cameron Denton's embrace of Satanism. So maybe he was
just in there collecting evidence. Who can really say. It's
not like it really clears his name to say, you know, hey,
I didn't have a huge issue with the Nazi stuff

(13:08):
or the murders, but this blood magic devil thing is
taking it in a bad direction. I know, I said,
this episode is not about Shandon Simpson and it's not
don't worry, But this ideological split within the Nazi terrorism
enthusiast community over whether or not Satanism was cool is

(13:30):
an important bit of context for where we're going. I
promise Rape Waffen was one of the groups to crop
up during this period of conflict within Adam Woffen about
the growing influence within the group of the Order of
Nine Angles, a militant Satanist occult organization that insists it
isn't a Nazi group. It is hard to describe the

(13:54):
Order of Nine Angles ONA for short, in a way
that makes any sense, and that's intentional, I mean, quite
literally and beyond the usual sort of esoteric nature of
occult groups. Writings attributed to Ona invented a concept called
Labyrinthos mythologicus. The idea is that the writings are intentionally contradictory,

(14:20):
bordering on incomprehensible on purpose, and their true meaning is
only legible to those who are worthy of interpreting them.
So if you don't get it, that's because you aren't
meant to. Because of Ona's decentralized leaderless structure. All members
are self initiated. To join the Order of Nine Angles,

(14:44):
you have to figure it out on your own. The
texts are available, but the true process, apparently, is only
revealed to you in the course of performing the ritual
of self initiation. Part of the self initiation ritual involves
walking into a river and imagining the moon's energy flowing
into you, which sounds like a fine way to spend

(15:06):
an evening. But it's not all moonlight skinny dipping. There's
a lot of carving swastikas into your own arm with
the razor blade and then smearing your blood all over
a magical race war manifesto. I know, I know. These
are Nazi wizards and they're doing blood magic to conjure
demons to end the world. This is worse than the

(15:29):
fact that the clan calls their chapters claverns, and the
secretary of a clavern is called a clay wrap. It's
so frustrating that these scary murderers all sound like fucking
dorks for all the trappings of wizardry, though it might
help to just think of them like any other kind
of accelerationists. We've talked a lot about accelerationists. In other episodes,

(15:53):
they want to destabilize society and force it into a
collapse so that something new can be born, just like
any right wing extremist taking shots at an electrical transformer.
All this extra stuff about how they believe that collapse
paves the way for the return of a messianic figure
called Vindex, who will usher in a new social order

(16:13):
called the Imperium, during which a new superior race of
humans will evolve, and these new areans will colonize the galaxy.
It's not important. It absolutely does not impact your ability
to follow this story to know more about Nazi Jesus
taking the Hitler Wizards to space. Quite frankly, I refuse

(16:34):
to find out more information about the galactic Imperium. It
sounds too stupid. In the end, I guess every cult
ends up in space. You dig deep enough into just
about any cult they're going to space, and like I said,
it's confusing. On purpose. You could drive yourself to madness

(16:57):
trying to parse out what's a metaphor what's a what's
intentional obfuscation in the spirit of the sinister dialectic, what
someone actually believes or what they're only pretending to believe.
In one telegram message from a rape Waffen member, the
poster jokes that if a federal agent is reading his
private messages, quote, he has to read through hella esoteric

(17:20):
conversation and probably still doesn't even understand it. And I'm
not a federal agent, but I did read through some
of those chats, and I gotta say he's right. It
was hella esoteric and I didn't get all of it.
And that's fine, because in the end, all you can
really judge them by is their actions and their impact.

(17:44):
Whether or not they truly believe the demonic Entityvindex is
going to incarnate in human form and bring about the imperium,
it doesn't really matter. So for as much time as

(18:09):
I spent reading every available academic paper on the subject,
which is surprisingly few, actually, I'm not sure it's going
to do much good for me to explain more about
the a causal realm. I'm sorry to any of the
cool wizards in the listening audience, some of you are
very nice people, but my general feeling about the ways

(18:31):
in which magic and religion exist as driving forces in
history is that it doesn't really matter what's real. If
someone sincerely believes that they are practicing magic by engaging
in ritual acts that in turn have a real world impact,
you know, like an act of terrorism. What does it

(18:52):
mean to say the magic isn't real? Does it matter
if a spirit was really summoned to aid in this act,
if in the end it still happened. And I say
that not because I think any of you are listening
to this on your drive to work and asking yourself, oh,
are they really communing with Satanic deities on another plane

(19:14):
of existence? I don't really think many of you are
asking yourselves that, but a lot of you might be
asking yourself, do they really believe they are doing that?
And I think the answer is the same. Does it
matter if they're only pretending to believe it? But it

(19:36):
still guides the way they operate in this realm, you know,
the real world. What difference does it make if I
punched you in the face and then said, oh, I
was only pretending I wanted to hurt you? Does that
change the fact that your nose is bleeding? And as
for the claims in some owner writings that the group

(19:57):
is not inherently committed to neo NAT's or fascist ideologies,
I'll give you the same answer. Adherents have claimed that
their fondness for Nazi ideology is simply a manifestation of
a core principle of left hand Path magic, that is,
to be intentionally transgressive and provocative, to engage in the

(20:19):
most taboo possible behavior, and to violate all conceivable social norms.
These are things that make your magic more potent. There
are onotechs that explicitly encourage the magical practitioner to adopt
things like neo Nazi ideology, not because they believe it,
but because it is part of this sinister strategy, and

(20:42):
it will hasten the revolution required to bring about the imperium.
And you know, you can tell me you don't actually
believe the Nazi stuff you're saying. But if you're saying
Nazi stuff, and you're doing Nazi stuff and your goal
is for a demonic messiah to wipe out the Jews,

(21:04):
your group is a Nazi group. If you think a
supernatural entity is going to return to cleanse the world
of subhumans to clear the path for a new Aryan race,
that's Nazi stuff. No matter how you've tried to obscure
that in your weird little texts. There is, of course,
the obvious point that the Order of Nine Angles was

(21:24):
for decades led by a British Nazi named David Mayat.
Mayat is a strange and mysterious figure for another day,
but it's worth pointing out that he was also a
founding member of Combat eighteen, a UK based Nazi terrorist
organization originally formed to act as the violent arm of
the British National Party. Harold Covington, another weird Little Guy's

(21:48):
recurring character, was also instrumental in forming Combat eighteen before
he returned home to the US to try to get
an ethno state going in Idaho, and one of Ona's
more prolific authors under the pen name AA Moraine, was
an English Nazi named Ryan Fleming. When he wasn't writing
esoteric Nazi wizard books, Fleming was a regional organizer for

(22:11):
the UK based terrorist organization National Action, and a pedophile
in his spare time. He was arrested again in twenty
twenty one after violating a court order that prohibited him
from having unsupervised contact with my nurse. The court order
was put in place after his conviction in twenty seventeen
for sexually abusing a fourteen year old girl he met

(22:34):
on Facebook, and a conviction in twenty fourteen for imprisoning
and sexually abusing a teenage boy. He served twenty two
months for the first sex crime against a child and
three years for the second one. When he was arrested
for trying to do it a third time, he got
six months, which means he must be out and about now.

(22:55):
But I couldn't find any more recent news coverage. In
the course of reat searching for this show, I read
a lot of material that I do not enjoy. But
I did not force myself to read this pedophile's wizard books.
I just I didn't do it. I didn't do it
this week. I'm not sure what it would have added.
I'm kind of a completionist. I thought about it, but

(23:17):
I didn't. I mean, I'm sure there are some really
exciting passages in his book Sithane Vampiric Witchcraft of the
dracon Covenant, and honestly, this description of Codex Aristarchus is
a little tempting.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
From the bloodstained moors of West Yorkshire, England comes a
genuinely a moral vampiric praxis, melding the black arts of
predatory astral vamporism with a harsh ordeal based approach of
the sinister Sevenfold way. In Codex Aristarchus AA, Moran presents
the definitive collective work of the dracon Covenant, including vampiric theory,

(24:03):
rights and methods by which the reader themselves can step
upon the black path, the vamporee feeding upon the human herd,
and taking the treacherous road to confrontation with the bleak,
ascended masters the undead.

Speaker 1 (24:21):
Okay, I did, I did? I downloaded a copy of it,
so I do have a copy of Codex Aristarchus. Maybe
I'll let you know next week if I found out
if vampires are real. My point is a lot of
Nazi perverts are doing magical rituals, and all of a sudden,
these influential figures within Adam Woffin are really encouraging it.

(24:46):
So in twenty eighteen, this move towards Satanism was a
big point of contention within the Accelerationist community. In twenty seventeen,
Adam Woffin's founder, Brandon Russell went to prison. He's back
in prison now for something else. This was a different thing.
It's come up a few times in other episodes. This
was kind of a big moment in modern Nazi history,

(25:08):
I guess. But Brandon Russell's roommate, Devin Arthur's, had murdered
their other two roommates. Devin Arthur's conversion to Islam shortly
before these murders is often misunderstood as evidence that he
was getting out of Nazism, because why would a racist
convert to Islam?

Speaker 2 (25:26):
Right?

Speaker 1 (25:27):
But I think this conversation about this strange syncretism is
better left for another day. I will, eventually, I promise,
do an episode about the Hitler loving DC transit cop
who went to prison for sending gift cards to Isis.
But suffice it to say, for now, there is absolutely

(25:49):
no contradiction inherent in an American neo Nazi getting really
interested in the violent side of Islamic extremism, up to
and including coverting to Islam. So after Devon Arthur's told
the police that he had murdered Jeremy Himmelman and Andrew Onischuk,
the cop searched the home that they'd all shared with

(26:10):
Brandon Russell. The police found the dead bodies of two
Adam Waffen members, obviously, but they also found Brandon Russell's
bomb making supplies, so he was down for the count
for a while, and in his absence, John Cameron Denton
was among those Adam Woffin members whose influence grew within

(26:33):
Adam Woffin. Denton used the pseudonym rape, just rape, that's
what he was called. They called him rape and based
on his Internet footprint. Denton had been involved with the
Order of Nine Angles for several years already, and within
Adam Woffin he quickly became a protege of James Mason,

(26:55):
the elderly pedophile who served as the ideological adviser for
Adam Woffin from its early days. James Mason is the
author of Siege, a terrorist's handbook that was Adam Woffin's
most important text, but he's also been to jail several
times for possessing pornographic photographs of underage girls, sexual exploitation

(27:15):
of a minor, and threatening his underage girlfriend with a gun.
His fondness for blowing up the power grid is arrivaled
only by his love of fifteen year old girls. He
still regularly receives Nazi admirers at his home in Colorado,
and when Adam Woffin was at its height. Making the
trip out to see Mason was a pretty big deal,

(27:37):
and of course every member of Adam Woffin had to
read Siege. That sprawling collection of essays advocating for various
ways and aspiring young terrorist might kick off the race war.
Mason wrote Siege as a newsletter throughout the early to
mid eighties. The essays were collected and published in book
form in the early nineties, but it wasn't until twenty

(28:00):
years later that the book really exploded onto the scene.
I guess that's a bad choice of word it's given
the amount of bombs built by guys who read it.
But what I mean is it didn't become as popular
as it is now until it was reborn as a
PDF on the pages of the Iron March Forum in
the early twenty tens, and that's where Adam Woffin was born.

(28:23):
In the years since, Siege has been updated, revised, and
republished several times under the pseudonym Vincent Snyder. John Cameron
Denton edited the fourth edition of Siege, adding a new
final chapter and updating the artwork with the help of
Canadian neo Nazi and graphic designer Patrick Gordon MacDonald. Before

(28:47):
McDonald was identified by Vice News in twenty twenty one,
he was known only as Dark Foreigner. Like Denton, McDonald
has deep connections to the Order of Nine Angles, and
if you've ever seen almost any propaganda from groups like
Adam Woffin, the Order of Nine Angle, sonen Kreeg Division,

(29:07):
the Base, or any of these other little offshoots in
that milieu, you have almost certainly seen Dark Foreigners artwork.
He was prolific. He set the tone, he set the style.
I can't imagine he's still making the artwork for these
kinds of groups, but the style remains, and his style

(29:29):
greatly influenced the online culture around Saint worship, which we
talked about in the Terrogram episode. A lot of the
images circulating on telegram in the early days of forming
this culture around the canonization of mass murderers were images
made by Patrick MacDonald. McDonald was arrested in Canada last

(29:51):
year for facilitating terrorist activity, and it was during this
time period that Adam Woffin was splintering, spinning off a
variety of re related groups like Sonnen Kreeg Division, feuer
Krieg Division, the Northern Order for Hairshoft Division, and of
course rape Waffen and a lot of these groups, like

(30:11):
Adam Woffen at the time, are deeply steeped in the
beliefs of the Order of Nine Angles. And it was
within this rape Waffen telegram chat that we finally find
the subject of this story. US Army private Ethan Pheelin Melzer.
He was arrested three days after his twenty second birthday

(30:32):
and a few days before he planned to die alongside
forty other soldiers in an attack he hoped al Qaida
would carry out based on classified military information he'd provided.
He was hoping it would start a war. There is

(30:57):
always going to be disagreement about whether a group is
or isn't a splinter faction or a sub sect of
some ideological predecessor. In some cases, there's a question of
whether a group even really existed at all, or if
it was just a chat room for a particular click
within another organization, or if it was just a meme.

(31:20):
There are probably not more than a few dozen researchers
out there who know enough about this particular moment in
time that, if they're listening to this, are shaking their
heads in dismay at my characterization of some detail or another,
but it's as close as we're going to get sort
of a dissertation, so good enough, because it's difficult now,

(31:43):
years later to piece back together the scraps of archived
materials from these banned chat rooms to sort out what
rape Waffen ever really was. The earliest remnants I can
find of rape Waffen date back to the summer of
twenty nineteen, but I really wouldn't be surprised if someone
produced to me evidence that it existed in private chats

(32:06):
for months prior to that. The group's telegram channels were
banned at various points, forcing them to reinvent themselves over
and over again, sometimes forming new channels every couple of weeks.
The channel's administrator was explicit in stating that rape Waffen
was a splinter from Adam Woffen, and in every online

(32:29):
space where rape Waffen members were posting, their involvement in
and support for the Order of Nine Angles was terribly
explicit in every sense of the word. And so as
Adam Woffin is falling apart over this debate, rape Waffen
is taking a boldly pro Satanism stance and they claim

(32:50):
to have nexxions, which is the ona term for a
cell in the United States, Canada, Australia, Russia, Portugal, and
other unlisted countries. In November of twenty nineteen, a channel
that was just called rape in all caps posted that

(33:11):
rape waften was once again open for recruiting. The same week,
that channel posted, among other things, instructions for making meth,
a message that can't be viewed because it was found
to violate the law, and the statement quote we need
to bring this world to total chaos. If we want
to change something, we will do this through mass rape

(33:34):
of infidels. In the chat, members shared videos of women
being raped, as well as more standard accelerationist fair you know,
gore videos, footage of atrocities committed in Wars, mass shooting,
live streams, isis beheading videos, the usual things like that,

(33:56):
and if I haven't mentioned it yet in some other episode,
I would like to say, you don't need to try
to find these things. I can't stop you. I'm not
telling you what to do. I'm not your boss or
your mom, but I'm telling you you don't have to
these chats in particular, you probably wouldn't be able to

(34:18):
find they're gone for the most part. But in general,
I know that curiosity can be a very powerful thing.
But unless this is a particular area of research for
you in a professional or academic capacity, there's really nothing
to gain from trying to see it for yourself. I

(34:38):
promise you. Having the ability to quickly scroll past a
gift of a woman being shot in the head and
having the involuntary, instant reaction of categorizing that as the
final moments of a particular person's life from a particular
video that I wish I'd never seen, is not a
skill I wanted. Sometimes I have to close the chat

(35:02):
and pull up a picture of what that woman looked
like when she was alive, smiling, because she wasn't a gift.
She wasn't just the moment of her death. She was
a young woman trying to make a life for herself.
I'm not trying to gatekeep Nazi gore videos or whatever.

(35:25):
I just want you to know you don't need to
see them if it helps at all. If this is
something that you need, you have my permission to not
find out more. There's no valor in making yourself sick,
and these chat rooms can be really disturbing places. So

(35:46):
if hopefully you're not familiar with the messaging app Telegram,
there are both chats and channels. That is, there are
spaces on Telegram where only the channel owner can post,
and you can subscribe to see their posts, and there
are also chat rooms where every member can post messages

(36:07):
and have conversations with one another. I don't know if
I could possibly have explained that in a way that
sounded more elderly. I do know how to use the Internet,
I promise, and the channel administrator for most of these
official rape Waffen channels with someone using the names Sinisterius

(36:27):
or Sinistrous rape. The member chat, however, was run by
a user called Sinister Noctulian. A Noctulian is a practitioner
within this particular subset of being a Nazi wizard. In
all my research, through court documents and publicly available research

(36:49):
and reporting, the only two people ever concretely identified as
having been members of rape Waffen chats and channels on
Telegram were Ethan Melzer and Shandon Simpson. So I can't
tell you with any certainty who Sinister Noctulian could be.
It wasn't either of them. It wasn't Ethan or Shandon.

(37:11):
But I can tell you without implying anything in particular,
that it is interesting to me that Sinister Noctulian never
posted in the chat again after January tenth, twenty twenty, which,
in a strange coincidence, is the same day that Adam
Waffen member John Kirby Kelly was arrested by the FBI.

(37:35):
Two days later, a message from Sinister Noctulian was forwarded
by another user into the rape Waffen channel. Now the
archive is so fragmented, you know, collecting these broken links
and old screenshots from the Internet's darkest corners, So it
isn't one hundred percent clear to me where the message
was originally posted. It may have been a private message

(37:56):
that the recipient then forwarded to a broader audience. But
on January twelfth, twenty twenty, two days after John Kirby
Kelly was arrested, the user called Sinister Noctulian sent a
message to someone on Telegram and it said in jail lol,
snuck my cell in. And the message was accompanied by

(38:20):
a one second long video showing the inside of a
jail cell, and the camera sort of pans shakily and
quickly over the legs of the person holding the cell phone.
They're lying on the cot in the cell, and they
appear to be wearing the blue disposable scrubs that jails
put on prisoners when they transport them from one facility

(38:41):
to another. I think the idea is that the uniform
belongs to the jail, and so if you go to
a different jail, the first jail doesn't want to lose
that uniform. The point is, we don't know who Sinister
Noctulian is, but if anyone is familiar with what the
segregation cells inside the Alexandria City Jail look like. I

(39:04):
did try to find images online, but there aren't a
lot of pictures of the insides of jail cells. But
he was arrested in Alexandria, and the jail in Northern
Virginia that has the contract with the federal prison system
to hold detainees would probably be the Alexandria City Jail.
So if you know what the inside of those cells
look like, let me know. I'm just curious. And in

(39:28):
this constant cycle of death and rebirth of these chats,
a new telegram channel was formed in March of twenty twenty,
and this time the channel administrator was a user called
Iron Cult. The channel announced the following month, in April,
that Sinistrous Rape would be taking an indefinite hiatus. Again,

(39:48):
it's hard to say whose Sinistrous Rape might have been,
but I will just note in an unrelated fashion that
John Cameron Denton Rape himself was arrested in February of
twenty twenty, along with Adam Woffin members Johnny Garza, Cameron Shay, Taylor,
Parker de Pepe, and Caleb Cole. And the channel that

(40:09):
was formed after Denton's arrest didn't last long either. It
was abandoned within weeks after Adam Woffen member Timothy Wilson
was killed in a shootout with the FBI while they
were trying to arrest him while he was trying to
blow up a hospital in Missouri. And Wilson had only
come under investigation because his name came up after the

(40:30):
arrest of Jarrett Smith, a soldier stationed in Kansas who
was arrested in twenty nineteen for distributing information to other
Adam Woffen members about how to create weapons of mass destruction.
Jarrett Smith, too was a member of Adam Woffin and
a Satanist. A new rape Waffen channel was formed a
few days after Timothy Wilson's death. One of the first

(40:54):
posts was a recipe for a bomb. There's no clear
eva evidence that was ever produced in any of these
cases that would let me tell you with certainty that
any of those Adam Woffen members were also members of
the rape Waffen channels. But a lot of Rapewaffen posters
disappeared suddenly in the early months of twenty twenty, and

(41:17):
the ones remaining grew intensely paranoid about infiltration by informants
and federal agents. And you've probably guessed by now, since
we're talking about it, that paranoia did not protect them.
And so it was during this period of intense turnover
within rape Waffen itself that Ethan Melzer finds the group.

(41:40):
Just four days after the channel administrator had announced that
Sinistrous Rape was on hiatus, Melzer was exchanging private messages
with the channel's new administrator. Now in the court documents,
this user is only identified as the channel administrator or
co conspirator. I. They don't list the username, so I

(42:01):
don't know if it was ironed cults. Again, I'm trying
to piece together a very fragmented record, so they could
be referring to a chat I don't see, but he
was chatting with a channel administrator and the government never
names this person, but they do indicate in a footnote
that based on their investigation, they believe that this individual
is a Canadian teenager posing as a former paratrooper. And

(42:27):
this is, believe it or not, not, the only time
that a literal child in a foreign country has tricked
members of the United States military into becoming a Nazi terrorist. Like,
they need to have some kind of training, specifically about
how to not get fooled into joining an online terror

(42:50):
cell run by a kid. I mean, I guess if
you could keep them out of all terror cells, that
really solves the whole problem. Is probably a better goal.
But oh my god, it is really embarrassing for the
whole world to know that our troops are this gullible.
I mean, just like national security wise, that doesn't seem

(43:11):
great for us. So in April twenty first, twenty twenty,
Ethan Melzer is finally chatting with someone from rape Waffen
and he's chatting with this teenager that he thinks is
an adult veteran, and he asks if he can join
rape Waffen. They don't mention this in the court record,

(43:33):
but April twenty first is the day after Hitler's birthday,
which would have made this the first day of the
new year. For adherence to the order of nine angles. See,
they have their own calendar that starts on April twenty,
eighteen eighty nine, the day Hitler was born. So eighteen

(43:54):
ninety is year one, and it makes twenty twenty four
the year one thirty five, and they y F one
three five. The YF used to stand for year of
the Furor, which makes perfect sense if we're talking about,
you know, years since Hitler was born, but sometimes in
the early two thousands, ONA tech start referring to it

(44:17):
as year of Feean, which makes no sense. One academic
article I found claimed that no one actually knows where
that originated or what it derives from, but within ONA
the claim is that it means year of rejoicing. I
guess we've been rejoicing ever since Hitler was born. Like

(44:39):
it's still a Hitler thing. And in the spirit of honesty,
I do have a confession to make For years, I
have assumed that the Order of Nine Angles invented this
Hitler based dating system, right, Like, surely no one else
is corny enough to invent a whole new hit Bler

(45:00):
based calendar. So imagine my surprise and quite frankly embarrassment
when I stumbled across a few months ago an old
letter written by Mattias Cole to William Luther Pierce in
nineteen sixty six. So it's on the original American Nazi
Party letterhead with their po box in Alexandria, and it

(45:22):
stated twenty two January y f seventy seven. So the
Wizards didn't invent the Hitler calendar. I guess George Lincoln
Rockwell did. But I'm sorry I've gotten lost again. Sometimes
I just feel like all roads are taking me back
to William Luther Peers. It's just inescapable. So this Canadian

(45:45):
child right tells Ethan Melzer that initiation into the Order
of Nine Angles is a prerequisite from membership in rape Waffen. Like,
we can't even continue talking about you getting into rape
Waffen until you become a wizard. Elser assures him, Oh,
I've already done that. I've already self initiated, no worries,
and with that out of the way, the teenager begins

(46:07):
vetting the soldier for rape waff in membership.

Speaker 2 (46:13):
Are you ready to cause damage both mentally, physically and
magically and be serious? I already have so, yes. How
do you incorporate the sinister numinous way in your life?
Always working on some form of insight role, work in
the pathways when I have time? Building up to internal adept.

Speaker 1 (46:34):
Internal adept here refers to the fourth of the seven
levels through which a member of the Order of Nine
Angles can progress. So you start as a neophyte, then
you're an initiate, an external adept, internal adept, Master, grand Master,
and eventually immortal. I don't know that anyone has ever

(46:57):
achieved immortal adherence said that very few members actually progressed
to those upper levels, and so if Melzer was working
up to internal adept in April of twenty twenty, that
means he was at the time an external adept. To
become an external adept you have to engage in a

(47:17):
ritual where you lie down on the ground all night
without moving or falling asleep. To be fair, that's probably
a lot harder than it sounds, but it still sounds
like child's play compared to the requirement to advance again,
because to become an internal adept, a practitioner must withdraw

(47:38):
from society completely for several months, living alone in the
wild with no contact with society or no modern conveniences.
And before you even attempt the necessary ritual to advance
to internal adept, an external adept should practice culling. That

(48:00):
is human sacrifice. Now, I don't want to be entirely
sensationalistic about this. Right when we're talking about esoteric occult text,
when you're talking about magic, not everything is literal. A
lot of practitioners will say that, well, culling is symbolic.

(48:23):
This human sacrifice can be metaphorical some ritualized performance during
a ceremony. But I've read more ONA literature than I
would have preferred, and generally it seems like they mean it.
Members should kill in an essay called culling as art

(48:45):
Anton Long, the ONA grand Master most researchers believe, is
actually just David Myyat wrote, some humans, by nature, by character,
are rotten, worthless, and this rotten character is revealed by
their deeds. It is beneficial to remove them, to cull them.

(49:08):
It doesn't sound like that's a metaphor and long or
David Mayant has written multiple treatises on culling, advising that
culling should target quote the sworn enemy, any of whom
are deemed acceptable targets. That doesn't sound like a metaphor.

(49:31):
And that's what was on Ethan Melser's mind that day.
As an external adept, he was actively working towards a
plan that would result in a mass casualty incident in
the short term and if he was lucky, thousands more
deaths in the war he hoped would follow. The question

(49:51):
of whether or not Ethan Melzer had ever tried to
kill someone before is Murky. A few days before his arrest,
the rape Waffen Channel administrator messaged him and said, and
I quote, yo, can you give me some background, like
some sinister deeds you've done? You can't break man as so.

(50:15):
Melser claimed that as a teenager, he'd been working in
the Louisville, Kentucky area as a street level drug dealer
for a gang called the Bounty Hunter Bloods. In January
of twenty seventeen, he arranged to meet with someone to
purchase the marijuana, and instead of paying for the drugs,
he ran, and when the seller gave chase, the men

(50:37):
struggled and Melser shot him. Now, Melzer was never arrested
for drug dealing, let alone shooting a man, So you
might think he was making that up to impress the
other wizards. Maybe if you're from Louisville, you're saying, oh,
of course I know the bounty hunter bloods, But to

(50:59):
be honest, I didn't known they had bloods in Kentucky.
It sounds fully made up to me. Investigative journalist Ali
Winston wrote on a piece for Rolling Stone that a
record's request to the Louisville Metropolitan Police produced no responsive
record of an incident matching the details provided here. But
the shooting is laid out in some pretty clear detail

(51:22):
in the prosecution sentencing memorandum, and the defense doesn't dispute it.
In fact, they referred to it as well as something
that happened, And if the case had gone to trial,
the government was prepared to put on witnesses, including someone
who was prepared to testify that not only had Melzer
told him about the shooting immediately after it happened. He

(51:43):
actually knew the victim and was aware that the man's
humorous had been shattered by the bullet and he had
permanently lost the use of that arm. And a witness
who had been Melzer's roommate at the time planned to
testify that he was aware of Melzer's drug dealing activities
during that time period. He'd seen photographs of the bullet wound.

(52:03):
So I guess he really did shoot a guy in
twenty seventeen. But we are not talking about Ethan Melzer
because he was a drug dealer who shot another drug
dealer in a drug deal in Louisville in twenty seventeen.
We're talking about Ethan Melzer because in twenty twenty, he

(52:24):
was charged with conspiracy to murder US nationals, attempted murder
of US nationals, conspiracy to murder US service members, attempted
murder of US service members, provision of material support to terrorists,
conspiracy to murder and mame in a foreign country, conspiracy
to injure property of a foreign government, and illegal transmission

(52:46):
of national defense information. So, if you listened to the
episode a couple of weeks ago, when we were talking
about how it's relatively uncommon for someone to be charged
for lying on their enlistment page work about being involved
with an extremist group. Well, Ethan Melzer is someone I
was thinking about specifically when I said usually, by the

(53:09):
time it's obviously lied about this, the situation has gotten
a little more serious than lying on a form. So
it sounds like they could have hit him with that
charge too. But at this point, why bother. And now
that we are more than halfway through this story, now
that you have a little context for where our weird

(53:31):
little guy ended up, which is Federal prison. Now that
you know something about a silly sounding but frightening Nazi
satanic cult and the messy situation within Adam Woffin in
the years between Brandon Russell's first trip to Federal prison
and his second trip to Federal prison and the eventual
collapse of Adam Woffin. Now I can start from the

(53:55):
beginning of Ethan Melzer's story, But unfortunately, because I started
so far from the beginning, I'll have to get to
the end next week. I know this feels like a
little bit of a bait and switch. I told you
this was going to be about Ethan Melzer trying to
get al Qaida to kill a bunch of soldiers in
service of his advancement in a neo Nazi Satanic cult,

(54:16):
and we didn't even get to that. But words like
Nazi and Satanic cult are such loaded terms and ones
that have been abused and exploited to trigger a specific
kind of fear response in you. So I felt like
I owed it to you to give you this sort

(54:38):
of convoluted history that led to him being in that
chat room and to show you why I'm using those
words and why they are absolutely appropriate here. So I
hope you'll come back next week to see how it
all ended. When we left off last week, it was

(55:24):
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 Waffen who
was committed to the Satanic cult called the Order of
Nine Angles. Melzer didn't know it at the time, but

(55:46):
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, so the
next five weeks, Ethan Melzer developed a plan that he
hoped would result in the murder of forty of his
fellow soldiers and hopefully provoke a conflict in the Middle

(56:10):
East that would claim thousands more lives. I'm molly conger,
this is weird, little guys. Just a quick note at

(56:36):
the top. I 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 Faean was unknown, and that's on me. I
should have double checked for myself. The order of nine

(56:56):
angles marks the 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 year of Feyan. I did a little more digging
around because I just couldn't accept the explanation that there

(57:16):
is no explanation, And of course Feyan spelled fay e
n is almost certainly derived from a Middle English word
fane fay n, an adverb meaning gladly or joyfully, which
in turn comes from the Old English gafeon, meaning to rejoice.
So the Nazi wizards are at least etymologically on track

(57:41):
in their choice to refer to the 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 time.

(58:01):
When military authorities detained him, he was standing outside at
Camp Utterly, 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 airstrip 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

(58:23):
Syrian border and one 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

(58:44):
how to spot them, 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

(59:05):
immediately with rape Waffen. 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,

(59:25):
that it was one of their own who meant them harm.
But that is the end, 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

(59:48):
weren't good with money. His father, Nick Melzer, bought a
house the couple couldn't afford, and 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

(01:00:08):
she didn't get diagnosed until after her son's arrest, and
judging by the court filings, one thing everyone can 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

(01:00:30):
had a boyfriend who beat her and her son. That
same boyfriend had an older son 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

(01:00:50):
boy from her husband's previous marriage and his stepmother's new family.
When Ethan was in middle school, his mother's parents died.
This 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 pot in the eighth grade,

(01:01:15):
and 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. He was uncool,

(01:01:37):
was bullied. He 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

(01:01:59):
of high school, he was using ecstasy and meth. I
think 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

(01:02:19):
they are proud and happy to be fat gay nerds.
It's a great kind of person to be. But there's
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.

(01:02:40):
But you can, I think, find a place in your
heart to feel sorry for this little boy. It doesn't
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

(01:03:01):
to be loved and accepted and nurtured didn't get that
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. I think in

(01:03:22):
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

(01:03:43):
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 one we talked about a bit in the first episode,
does seem well corroborated. I think it really did happen.

(01:04:06):
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 one 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

(01:04:27):
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

(01:04:50):
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

(01:05:10):
was also ravenously consuming texts produced by the Order of
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 2 (01:05:27):
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 terms. Ethan showed no signs at all of being
a white supremacist.

Speaker 1 (01:05:45):
Another job Core 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 2 (01:06:02):
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 racist and anti American kids here and they
never make it. They can't hide it. We always find out.

Speaker 1 (01:06:23):
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
of multicultural awareness. He was patriotic and looking forward to

(01:06:45):
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
what he saw. He downloaded the literature he would need

(01:07:06):
to self initiate. He was in contact with other members.
He was on his way to starting his own necsion
before he finished the program. In December of twenty nineteen,
just three months into his nine months at job Corps,
he signed the paperwork to enlist in the Army. He
wouldn't head off to basic training until the following June
after completing his ged, but he knew what he wanted

(01:07:29):
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 people interested in conspiracy
theories and the occult. The court filings don't say exactly

(01:07:51):
which one, but I have a guess. The non profit
investigative journalism collective Unicorn Riot has an extensive database of
life leaked Discord chats. Most famously, they published the entire
planning chat for the Unite the Right rally. But in
the years since, this vault of leaked servers has grown exponentially. Obviously,

(01:08:13):
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 eleven trutherism,
things like that the excerpted messages contained in the court

(01:08:34):
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'mbarking
up the wrong tree entirely. Several of the usernames that
are visible in the government exhibits do appear within this
discord server, though, so even if it wasn't this one

(01:08:56):
in particular, it was one that shared a lot of
the same idea and the same users. Either way. 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 all could help. The group he was

(01:09:17):
asking about was Temple of Blood. Temple of Blood is
maybe the most prominent North American nexsion of 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,

(01:09:40):
has been on the FBI payroll for more than twenty years,
and that certainly complicates the story a 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 up on

(01:10:00):
a gun charge. In an article for Wired earlier this year,
Ali Winston and Jake Hanrahan spoke to Harvard law professor
Alexandre Natopov about this kind of arrangement, 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

(01:10:23):
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 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

(01:10:45):
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 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

(01:11:06):
operate with such impunity. Maybe he wouldn't have had the
resources to start and run Martinette Press, the publishing house
that produces most of the ona materials available in the
United States today. Maybe his influence would have been curtailed
years and years ago before he could propagate his violent,

(01:11:26):
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 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

(01:11:48):
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 the enragement. They
think they can advance their own position in the movement
by having the state take out their rivals, or they

(01:12:08):
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 amount of
blood in his wake, and the number of zeros on

(01:12:29):
his checks certainly make him an outlier, though I'll 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 the year
after Brandon Russell's arrest. There's no denying that did he

(01:12:52):
do it because the government asked him to, because he's
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 would be
naive to believe either of them, even if they did.

(01:13:14):
There have 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 for neo nazis.
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,

(01:13:36):
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
to disengage. If someone is falling deeper and deeper into
extremist ideology and suddenly they're expected to sacrifice a goat

(01:13:57):
and drink its blood under the moonlight, they might say,
you know what, fuck it, this is too weird, This
is too weird. I can't do it. 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,

(01:14:18):
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 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,

(01:14:40):
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 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

(01:15:06):
jailhouse lawyer in the white supremacist movement. I've spent oh god,
probably close to one thousand dollars 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

(01:15:29):
recent complaints are about unfair treatment inside 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 and so on.
But he's also been saying for years that he was
framed for one of the things that sent him to prison,

(01:15:53):
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
he says he didn't send those emails threatening to kill
a prosecutor's wife, but it's intriguing that he was right

(01:16:14):
about anything 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 the ratings of an incarcerated Nazi. Aside,

(01:16:45):
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 discoord,
he says he encountered the group in a Reddit post
and started looking into it. He says another Reddit user

(01:17:06):
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

(01:17:30):
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 Melzer 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

(01:17:52):
they are a neo Nazi Satanic group with connections to
Adam Waffen, and Ethan Melser posts, this is going to
sound bad, but I want to go further down the
rabbit hole, say someone, Or 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

(01:18:15):
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

(01:18:36):
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 Court program. Just a few weeks before he
showed up for basic training, another user in the discord

(01:18:58):
server warned him to be careful.

Speaker 2 (01:19:02):
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, just for thought, if you're
serious about being initiated or whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:19:20):
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 a nexsion with him, and was coming up with

(01:19:40):
vetting procedures for members of his netsion. 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. Some discord servers allow users to assign
little labels to their account, visible to other users, next

(01:20:03):
to their name. In this server, Melser 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, just fascism and claimed
he was only joking about Satanism. In another server, someone

(01:20:28):
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 to deny it. It
is interesting to note that the second leaked discord server
I found melzer In, was one mainly used to chat

(01:20:50):
about esoteric Nazism, and it is also one in which
Shandon Simpson appears. I couldn't find any evidence that Melzer
and Simpson ever interacted there on this discord server, but
it looks like their paths may have crossed here before
Melzer made the jump from discord servers about the occult
into telegram chats for terrorism, and they found themselves together

(01:21:13):
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. He was, in fact,
almost certainly already self initiated into the Order of Nine
Angles and was demonstrably very interested in forming or joining

(01:21:36):
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 get some kind of
fake book covers so that he could read his sinister
texts in front of his commanding officer without drawing suspicion.

(01:21:59):
He expressed 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 on masts and left hanging from lamp posts and bridges.
When another user complained that it felt like the Race
War would never come, he replied.

Speaker 2 (01:22:22):
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 1 (01:22:40):
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 member should take on

(01:23:04):
this role for six to eighteen months, depending on the
text you're looking at, and the nature and purpose of
the insight role has shifted a little bit over time
and depending on the source text. And 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

(01:23:26):
yourself to deepen your 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

(01:23:47):
insight role is widely understood to be something a bit
darker than a little en Toonomian 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, particularly when it

(01:24:11):
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, and that's what

(01:24:36):
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, he

(01:24:59):
was only pretending to to be a soldier. This was
an insight role. By April of twenty twenty, when Ethan
Melzer was joining Rapewaffen, he'd been studying the Order of
Nine Angles for more than a year. In one early
discussion with another rape Waffen member, he said he needed
to be careful because he didn't want to end up

(01:25:20):
like another guy in their circle who got caught while
he was in the military. There are so many 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

(01:25:42):
trouble in twenty nineteen or so. That's actually a surprisingly
long list of guys. He may have been referring to
Army private Corwin Storm Carver, who was investigated in twenty
nineteen over allegations that he was the current leader of
Adam Woffen and was involved in the Order of Nine Angles.

(01:26:02):
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 about Kyle Benton,
the US 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

(01:26:25):
Order of Nine Angles. Or maybe he was talking about
Vasilios Pistols, the Marine lance corporal who was court martialed
in twenty eighteen over his ties to Adam Waffin. There
are plenty of possibilities here, and they all point to
the same grim reality. As Corwin Carver said, soldiers make

(01:26:45):
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 he's doing, he advised
another member of Rapewaffen who was considering joining the military
to do it for the training, saying the ridiculous forced

(01:27:09):
patriotism bullshit can go fuck itself. Just play the game
for four years and get the fuck out, but stronger, smarter,
and more dangerous. Of course, he gave the same advice
a few days later to a rape Waffen member who
called himself Frei Corps and was considering joining the Marines.

(01:27:30):
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. It hit us all pretty hard. But Italy
had actual lockdowns, and so did the US military. And
so in those early months of the pandemic. Stationed in Italy,

(01:27:53):
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 his cell
phone include one of Melzer wearing a ski mask and
holding up a copy of a book. He has cut

(01:28:15):
himself and smeared his own blood over a sigil on
the page the book is opened to. 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

(01:28:35):
with drawings by Christos Beast, an English musician named Richard
Molt who was allegedly a member of Ona's Old Guard.
With David Mayant 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

(01:28:57):
like a video that appears to show a black woman
being lynched by white men in front of a Confederate flag,
and a photo of a woman 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

(01:29:17):
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 room for his upcoming
mission to Turkey, Melzer shared the information with rapewaff and Chat.
Soon after, the channel administrator, our Canadian teenager posting as

(01:29:39):
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 that this other user,
we'll just call him kurt I Guess, was a member
of the Gray Wolves, a Turkish ulternational most fascist paramilitary

(01:30:01):
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 of the
Order of Nine Ankles 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

(01:30:24):
contained sensitive details about the mission, to a chat called
the Order of Nine Rapes. That chat had just eighteen members.
One of those members was Ethan Melzer, one was Gulag Cult,
our fifteen year old Canadian, and one was user who

(01:30:45):
called herself Red hour Glass. And Red Hourglass would be
the one to pull the plug on the whole operation
by reporting the plot to the FBI. The FBI didn't
arrest their own informant, and they can't arrest a Canadian ship.
But you do have to wonder what came of the
other fifteen members of that chat room. Not much is

(01:31:07):
known about Red Hourglass. She may not even be a
woman at all. Who knows, but online 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,

(01:31:31):
so she may be getting paid 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

(01:31:53):
was she already a government 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 to me,

(01:32:15):
red hour glass. 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

(01:32:38):
isn't really supported 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

(01:32:58):
mysterious woman is tricking 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?
I don't know. Within the Order of Nine rapes Chat,

(01:33:21):
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,

(01:33:43):
if we were 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
A day later, Gulug Cult asked him are we really

(01:34:05):
planning a Jihati attack? And Melzer agreed they were. Gulug
Cult joked that if Melzer got himself shot 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? The after effects

(01:34:27):
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 and what kind of weapons

(01:34:49):
they were issued, the purpose and defensive capabilities of the
US Army presence at this base, the layout of the
installation and the surrounding terrain, and even the 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 many non military employees who

(01:35:12):
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, even smaller chat room was

(01:35:35):
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, someone posting under the name

(01:35:58):
Jaw with two ws. In this chat, Melser 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 May twenty fifth, the day

(01:36:27):
before his twenty second birthday, Ethan Melzer may have gotten
cold feet. He suggested to the 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

(01:36:49):
the vulnerabilities of the place, you know, sending back more intel,
and then they could carry out 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 Hourglass informed the FBI

(01:37:13):
of the plot the next day, May twenty sixth, twenty twenty.
That was Ethan Melzer's twenty second birthday and two days
before the scheduled deployment date. The authorities were quickly able
to identify the platoon in question, and the deployment date
was pushed back to May thirtieth. The soldiers weren't told why.

(01:37:35):
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
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

(01:37:57):
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
the government all along or not, we don't know, But
on the evening of May twenty ninth, she may or

(01:38:19):
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
plan that night, Red Hourglass asked him, what makes you
think you can actually get away with fucking with the U. S. Military,

(01:38:42):
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 any one. But
he was starting to get nervous about the mission. He
deleted most of his old posts. If the plan now
was to attack the replacement convoy two months down the road,

(01:39:04):
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, And he replied, kek,
that's k e K. It's a substitute for LOL. The

(01:39:25):
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 the twenty sixteen era.
It's not important. The point is he was laughing off

(01:39:47):
what he knew to be true. This was treasonous behavior.
And that gets us back up to where we started today.
Ethan Melzer standing out at Camp Utterly with his platoon
on May thirtieth, twenty twenty. His bags were packed. Orty

(01:40:07):
soldiers were waiting for the bus that would take them
to the airstrip. Inside Ethan Melzer'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 Order of Nine Angles written

(01:40:30):
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. I did give it a
little skim this week like I promised you last week,
and it turns out he's just talking about psychic vampirism. Sorry,

(01:40:52):
so I don't think vampires are real. Immediately after being
taken into custody, Ethan melzer Is admitted that he had
disclosed information about his deployment to members of the rape Waffenchat.
He admitted that 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

(01:41:16):
agreed that his actions were tantamount to treason, but as
required by the rules of the Order of Nine Angles,
he repeatedly denied 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

(01:41:38):
addicted to posting. They wanted to have a psychologist testify
about Internet addiction and the phenomenon of people lying online
for attention, inhabiting elaborate 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

(01:42:00):
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 Defense sentencing memo doesn't mention that
the government believes that co conspirators two and three were
not lying. One of them really was based in Kurdistan,

(01:42:24):
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, so he made something up, and that

(01:42:44):
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 fund for his deployment. But he
said it had never even crossed his mind that the

(01:43:05):
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 sort of the same language in

(01:43:28):
a lot of ona texts about the kind of insight
role you should choose. You should choose something that is
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

(01:43:51):
been claiming all along about why he was in the
rapewop and chat rooms. So there's a lot of guys
in the terrorism place chat that are claiming after the
fact that they were only pretending to support terrorism in
order to uncover how bad everybody else in there really is.

(01:44:12):
And Melser'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

(01:44:34):
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
a causal realm, if the end result is still a specific,

(01:44:55):
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 need to overhaul security protocols at a military base.

(01:45:16):
And sometimes the law 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

(01:45:39):
entered into a plea agreement 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, and illegal transmission of National Defense

(01:46:03):
Information pursue it 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

(01:46:26):
November of twenty fifty eight. He'll be sixty years old.
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

(01:46:46):
hundred and forty months. But in March of last year,
just a few days after his sentencing, his attorneys filed
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 judges' remarks were fairly lengthy, covering nearly twenty pages.

(01:47:08):
In the transcript, judges usually offer some explanation of how
they arrived at their decision at a sentencing hearing. Some
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

(01:47:28):
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
Woods spoke at length. He explained, as judges often do,
the legal framework for calculating a sentence and the factors
that must be weighed. We summarized the facts of the

(01:47:50):
case and its procedural history. He highlighted pieces of evidence
that contributed to his decision. We referenced the mitigating factors
presented by the defense. Explained why he didn't agree with
the defense's position that they warranted a downward departure. And
none of this is unusual or even remarkable. But the

(01:48:11):
appeal hinges on the judge's use of the phrase Judeo
Christian values.

Speaker 2 (01:48:20):
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 Judaeo
Christian values and rupturing civilized society.

Speaker 1 (01:48:42):
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, would
have been better if he had not said that. But

(01:49:03):
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 appeal

(01:49:25):
argues that those comments constitute a sufficient appearance of the
sentence having been based on a constitutionally impermissible factor, such
as the defendant's 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 these

(01:49:45):
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 talking

(01:50:06):
about the defendant's racial or religious motivation for a crime.
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
shot at getting a sentence of fifteen years rather than

(01:50:30):
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

(01:50:50):
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 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 Melser's crimes and his claims

(01:51:12):
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 to better
achieve its goals, and over an extended period of time,

(01:51:35):
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
I don't trust it. 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

(01:51:57):
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 out a better man whenever that
day comes. Sentencing is meant to balance the need for punishment, rehabilitation,

(01:52:21):
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 isn't about preventing Ethan Melzer from doing this again.
He couldn't do this again. It's about sending a message

(01:52:45):
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
ask yourself if there's a more effective way to address
this underlying issue of young men enlisting in the military

(01:53:06):
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
I most strongly associate with being the place where a
man aptly nicknamed a crying Nazi befriended a man that

(01:53:29):
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
with the Russian arms dealer that Vladimir Putin traded Brittany
Griner for another time. Perhaps. Weird Little Guys is a

(01:54:04):
production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written
and recorded by me, Molly Coner. Our executive producers 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, but I probably will

(01:54:25):
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

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