Tag: nazis

They’re Hunting Nazis. New England Is a Target-Rich Environment

VULNERABLE COMMUNITIES IN New England are increasingly under threat by a violent, neo-Nazi gang with “revolutionary” delusions of transforming the region into a white ethnostate.

The actions, tactics, and command structure of the hate group NSC-131 are the focus of an exhaustive new investigation by the anti-fascist research organization Task Force Butler. Accusing NSC-131 of “terrorism,” the investigation denounces the group’s “explicit purpose” as engaging in “harassment against religious, racial, and ethnic minorities,” as well as “the LGBTQIA+ community, and others deemed ‘enemies.’”

Task Force Butler unveiled its 300-page report Tuesday as a road map for police and prosecutors to step up “civil and criminal legal action” against these white supremacists. Kris Goldsmith, Task Force Butler’s CEO, describes NSC-131’s delusional ideology to Rolling Stone in stark terms: “They are white separatists. They want to use violence to make New England white.”

NSC-131 stands for “Nationalist Social Club-Anti-Communist Action.” (The digits 1 and 3 correspond to the numerical position of A and C in the alphabet.) It is classified as a “neo-Nazi” group by both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. NSC-131, and two top leaders, have also been targeted by the attorney general of New Hampshire in a civil action for “violating the New Hampshire Civil Rights Act” for allegedly unfurling racist banners on a Portsmouth overpass.

NSC-131 did not respond to Rolling Stone’s requests to speak to its legal counsel or to address the central claims of the Task Force Butler report. But in a fundraising appeal for its New Hampshire legal defense, NSC-131 has defended its “pro-White activism” as protected “free speech,” while blasting government authorities for being “captured by anti-White partisans.”

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The Complicated Legacy Of The V-2 Rocket And Its Designer

In the final installment of his series of articles on the history of the V-2 rocket, historian Dr. Charlie Hall explores the legacy of the V-2 in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Be sure to read parts one and two in our series on the terrorizing Nazi weapon that failed to change the course of World War II, but drastically altered warfare and gave birth to mankind’s access to space, and the man behind it.

In February 1970, at a ceremony attended by the governor of Alabama, a U.S. senator, various other local dignitaries, and his wife and three children, Wernher von Braun was honored with a plaque in the state of Huntsville. The plaque listed his achievements in both missile development and the U.S. space program and concluded by saying that “he will forever be respected and admired by his local fellow citizens.”

The plaque did not mention von Braun’s membership of the Nazi Party or the SS, his meetings with Adolf Hitler, his frequent visits to the Mittelwerk underground factory where V-2 rockets were built by slave laborers in appalling conditions, or the number of people killed in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands in 1944-45 by the rockets he designed. When he died in 1977, von Braun was remembered not as a Nazi war criminal, but as an American hero with a favorable legacy that he had worked hard to cement.

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Christian Crowdfunding Site Hosting Neo-Nazi Trying to Build Whites-Only Community

The rightwing Christian alternative to GoFundMe is allowing a neo-Nazi leader to raise thousands of dollars on their platform, according to online records reviewed by VICE News.

GiveSendGo, which had already made headlines for allowing far-right groups like the Proud Boys raise millions of dollars off of its platform, is currently hosting a former Marine and neo-Nazi named Christopher Pohlhaus, who among other activities, wants to build an all-white community in Maine. 

Pohlhaus has commanded a sizable Telegram following for years and once gave a live stream on how best to hypothetically shoot truckers in order to disrupt the supply chain. He has also had connections to everyone from Riley June Williams—the January 6 attacker who broke into then Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office—to NSC-131, a neo-Nazi activist network in New England that was founded by a former member of a designated terrorist group. 

Despite those credentials, GiveSendGo, a site that promotes itself as the “#1 Free Christian Fundraising Site”, has yet to boot Pohlhaus from their platform. GiveSendGo was notified at least twice last year about the avowed neo-Nazi and his affiliations to the violent far-right. In September, an analyst at the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), a non-profit terrorism watchdog, contacted GiveSendGo to say Pohlhaus was using it as a platform for making money and establishing a white nationalist community. 

Pohlhaus served in the Marines for four years in the 2000s and gained prominence among the far-right when he promoted a countrywide and racist banner drop on the first anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. Pohlhaus then planned a migration among some of his followers to turn Maine into an all-white ethnostate. He took the cause to GiveSendGo, where Pohlhaus began to raise money for a homestead in a remote part of the state that could one day serve as a community and a place where his group can “train.” So far, records from the fundraising site show he has accumulated just over $2000, with two large donations over $800 each, coming nearly two months ago (the campaign also received 23 “prayers”, which is a button on GiveSendGo pages). 

Within that span of time, Pohlhaus caused outrage when he and several other members of his group, which he calls a tribe, showed up armed at a children’s drag queen story event in Ohio, giving the Sieg Heil salute with their arms, yelling racial slurs, and reportedly chanting “there will be blood!”

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Neo-Nazi Leader ‘ilovehate5150’ Charged for Threatening to Kill Journalist

An American neo-Nazi who went by online names such as “King ov Wrath” and “ilovehate5150” has been arrested for allegedly threatening to kill a reporter who was covering his terrorist organization. 

Nicholas Welker was taken into custody by the FBI Tuesday after allegedly helping to create an internet meme that explicitly threatened the life of a U.S. journalist and then sending it directly to the reporter on Twitter. Welker has been charged with conspiracy to transmit threatening communications. 

The reporter nor the outlet is not named in the court documents. 

Welker was an alleged leader within the international neo-Nazi group, Feuerkrieg Division (FKD), according to court documents. In addition to his other pseudonyms, he also allegedly went by “DankTree2316.”

The Feuerkrieg Division is a now-disbanded neo-Nazi group that was openly accelerationist—meaning it wanted to hasten the collapse of society to build a white ethnostate from the ashes—and had ties to a plethora of violent crimes committed by young men, many of them minors. Members of the group have been charged with child abuse, assault, and plotting violent actions. 

Like many other online neo-Nazi groups, the Feuerkrieg Division loves to use memes as propaganda. So when the group allegedly felt threatened by a reporter looking into them, Welker and his fellow neo-Nazis went to work.

The piece of propaganda in particular showed a photo of the journalist with a gun pointed at their head with messages “race traitor,” “journalist fuck off,” and ”you have been warned.” The meme also contained their name and place of employment. Welker allegedly had asked another neo-Nazi to create it and when he saw his vision come to life he responded with an emoji featuring a smiling face covered in hearts. 

Welker then allegedly sent the threats directly to the reporter on Twitter asking him if he’s seen their latest work. According to the court documents, an FBI agent was able to ascertain Welker’s identity because of the work of antifascist researchers and remarkably sloppy operational security. After antifascist researchers outted Welker, he confirmed it within the Feuerkrieg Division chatrooms. A month later, he followed up by writing: “Nicholas Hazen Welker Santa Clara County Department of Corrections. That’s my information[.] In case I go missing”, before providing a date of birth.

The Department of Justice described the Feuerkrieg Division as a racially motivated violent extremist group that had “cells in multiple states.” The group took inspiration from Atomwaffen Division and was expressively accelerationist in nature. Like others within this community of groups, they drew from an aesthetic that embraced terrorism and violence. 

The Feuerkrieg Division was initially founded in the Balkans by a 13-year-old Estonia boy who was going by “Commander.” The group became known for the violent actions of its members, death threats, and propaganda. In 2019, U.K. police arrested one member for plotting a mass shooting attack and sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl.  One British teenager who was a leader pleaded guilty to 12 terrorism charges in 2021, making him one of Britain’s youngest convicted terrorists. The group was declared a terrorist organization by the U.K. in 2020. 

Like other groups in this community, the Feuerkrieg Division had ties to the Order of Nine Angles, a satanic neo-Nazi group connected to child abuse and violent crimes. 

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Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State

The response to the “Covid-19 pandemic” has much in common with the birth of the Third Reich. Agamben (2021, 8), for example, likens the emergency legislation passed in 2020 to the suspension of the Weimar Constitution in 1933, and Davis (2021b) explains how, through a raft of legislation being rammed through Parliament while the population’s attention is focused elsewhere, the UK is being turned into a constitutional dictatorship. UK government agencies now have the mandates to commit crimes with impunity; protests will be effectively criminalized or shut down under extraordinary police powers; online dissent will be censored; and journalists will no longer be allowed to report any information deemed contrary to the “national interest” (Davis 2021b).

The “Covid-19 pandemic” functions as the Big Lie on which this is all premised, i.e. a lie so huge that ordinary people would not imagine it to be possible. To quote Mein Kampf:

“Because the […] masses […] are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”(Hitler 1969, 134)

As Rancourt et al. (2021) demonstrate scientifically, there was no viral pandemic, only what Davis (2021a), based on several hundred pages of argumentation, calls a “pseudopandemic,” modelled on the fake “swine flu pandemic” of 2009 (Fumento 2010). Yet, because of the propaganda and the applied behavioural psychology deployed as part of the psychological warfare targeting the unconscious mind, cognitive dissonance prevents many people from seeing or admitting this, even when presented with the evidence. Propaganda specialist Mark Crispin Miller reflects: “I used to think it tasteless to compare our system to Nazi Germany. I no longer think so” (2021, 30 mins).

Hitler was, perhaps, the first to see that liberal democracy can be subverted by playing on the unconscious fears of the masses. If an existential threat is presented, the masses can be induced to sacrifice liberty for the promise of security. At a visceral level, they are

“far more satisfied by a doctrine which tolerates no rival [promises security] than by the grant of liberal freedom. They neither realize the impudence with which they are […] terrorized, nor the outrageous curtailment of their human liberties, for in no way does the delusion of this doctrine dawn on them.”(cited in Fromm 1942, 191)

This is the model of imposing authority in a climate of terror. The masses can be terrorized into surrendering their liberties, and it will never occur to them that they have been lied to on a monumental scale — that the threat was fictitious. Thus, for example, while Hitler lambasted international bankers and reparation payments for bringing Germany to its knees, the truth was that German reparations payments fell to around one eighth of previous levels following the Hoover Moratorium (1931) and Lausanne Agreement (1932), the Bank for International Settlements managed Nazi gold, and the Nazis continued to honour their Young Plan obligations even during World War II.

The same playbook of using a Big Lie to generate mass fear for authoritarian purposes has been evident in “Covid-19.” Klaus Schwab practically announced as much in June 2020:

“Most people, fearful of the danger posed by COVID-19 [in a] a life-or-death kind of situation […] will agree that in such circumstances public power can rightfully override individual rights. Then, when the crisis is over, some may realize that their country has suddenly been transformed into a place where they no longer wish to live.”(Schwab and Malleret 2020, 117)

By the time the lie is exposed, it is too late, “for the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying” (Hitler 1969, 134). Again, Schwab seems familiar with this principle: there will be no going back to how things were, because “the cut which we have now is much too strong in order not to leave traces” (cited in Clark 2020). Schwab’s protégé, Yuval Noah Harari, also belongs to the conspiracy of expert liars: “If you repeat a lie often enough,” he claims, “people will think it’s the truth. And the bigger the lie, the better, because people won’t even think about how something so big can be a lie.”

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Neo-Nazi Homeschoolers Defend Their ‘Wholesome’ Pro-Hitler Network

The Ohio couple at the center of the Nazi homeschooling scandal have spoken publicly about their online community of Hitler-loving parents and have defended their actions as “just extra fun” and “so wholesome.”

Predictably, they have also blamed “antifa” for negative coverage of their pro-Hitler homeschooling network.

Katja and Logan Lawrence were unmasked last month as the couple running the Dissident Homeschool network from their home in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, in reports from VICE News and HuffPost, which were based on a report from the anti-fascist research group known as the Anonymous Comrades Collective.

Starting in late 2021, the couple ran a now-deleted Telegram channel with over 2,500 members, and shared their own classroom resources, weaving  Hitler quotes, antisemitic themes, and white supremacist ideologies into their math lessons and homework assignments.

In their first public comments since they were unmasked, the Lawrences staunchly defended their actions.

“The chat was so wholesome,” Katja Lawrence told the Nazi-promoting website Justice Report in an interview published on Monday. “It was mostly homeschooling moms that were lifting each other up when things got difficult.”

In reality the content shared in the channel was deeply racist, including a lesson plan to mark the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. last month that described the assassinated civil rights leader as a “deceitful, dishonest, riot-inciting negro.” 

The Lawrences blasted the mainstream media for “cherry-picking” the neo-Nazi aspects of their lesson plans, claiming that these were “just fun extras” they added to the regular curriculum they taught their four young children.

“We were deliberately made to look very unappealing,” Katja Lawrence said.

Since the news broke, the Lawrences have departed their home and are currently living in a house provided by another local family with close ties to Logan Lawrence, according to residents of Upper Sandusky who have spoken to VICE News on the condition of anonymity over fears of retribution by the family involved.

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American Federal ‘Policy Advisor’ Posts Pic in Ukrainian Nazi Badge on Twitter

Paul Massaro, a Senior Policy Advisor at the federally-run US Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, posted and then deleted a photo on Twitter of himself donning a Ukrainian military badge depicting infamous Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.

Paul Massaro runs one of the most aggressively pro-Ukraine accounts on Twitter while using his federal foreign policy position to advocate for expanding the Russo-Ukrainian War. Recently, he posted a photograph of himself wearing a Ukrainian badge that depicts Stepan Bandera, a highly controversial figure in Ukrainian politics who collaborated with Hitler’s Nazis and was considered a war criminal by the United States and other allied nations.

“Hey, look what I’ve got,” Massaro tweeted, attaching a photograph of himself wearing his Nazi Bandera badge while sitting in front of a Ukrainian flag hanging from his wall.

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Zelensky Shares Photo of Ukrainian Soldier with Nazi Insignia — Again

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has posted a photo of a soldier sporting a symbol used by a notorious German unit that killed civilians in World War II. It’s not the first time Ukrainian soldiers and paramilitaries were photographed displaying insignia and tattoos associated with Nazism.

On Sunday, Zelensky posted several photos on his Instagram account, including an image of a Ukrainian soldier resting in a trench.

The black-and-white skull-head patch on the soldier’s left shoulder is similar to the ‘totenkopf’ (death’s head) insignia used by the 3rd SS Tank Division, an elite unit infamous for massacring civilians in France and the Eastern Front, including Polish Jews. The unit’s first commander, Theodor Eicke, had managed the Dachau concentration camp before the war.

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The High School ‘Asshole’ Who Became a Blackface-Wearing Neo-Nazi Homeschool Dad

When Logan Lawrence was unmasked last week as the co-founder of a neo-Nazi homeschooling network, some of his friends and former classmates said the news immediately rang true.

Lawrence, 36, who grew up in Upper Sandusky and until recently worked for his family’s insurance company, left a litany of signs of his racist beliefs over the years. He mocked Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on his middle school intercom, had an obsession with WWII history in high school, and, later, dressed in racist garb at a local bar.

In now-deleted photos posted to the Facebook page of the Shotzy’s Bar and Grill restaurant in Upper Sandusky, which is owned by the sister of Logan’s best man at his wedding, Logan was photographed at multiple Halloween parties in blackface and other racist costumes. VICE News has confirmed with multiple people that it was Logan in the pictures. A representative of Shotzy’s Bar and Grill did not respond to a request for comment on the pictures.

One person who was at Logan’s wedding and at the parties where Logan wore these costumes, said she was not surprised at last week’s revelations.

“Logan has always been an asshole and the people who know him aren’t shocked,” she told VICE News.

Logan and his wife Katja Lawrence were unmasked last week as the operators of a neo-Nazi homeschool network, known as Dissident Homeschool on Telegram, by the anti-fascist researchers at the Anonymous Comrades Collective. The Telegram group has thousands of members, and shares classroom resources infused with Adolf Hitler quotes, antisemitic themes and white supremacist ideologies. Last year, Katja Lawrence said on a podcast that the reason she started the group was because she was “having a rough time finding Nazi-approved school material for [her] homeschool children.”

Now, Lawrence,  who worked as a web designer for years and designed the local sheriff’s website and the website of Shotzy’s Bar and Grill, shares examples of how her family embraces Nazi ideology, including baking a Fuhrer cake for Hitler’s birthday and a recording of her children shouting “sieg heil.”

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Neo-Nazi Couple Arrested For Alleged Plot To ‘Completely Destroy’ Baltimore

A neo-Nazi couple was arrested and charged with conspiracy to damage power substations encircling Baltimore City that would “completely destroy” the metro area, according to Department of Justice (DoJ) court documents. 

On Monday, DoJ prosecutors announced Florida resident Brandon Clint Russell, an alleged leader of the neo-Nazi terror group Atomwaffen Divison, and Catonsville resident Sarah Beth Clendaniel conspired to destroy power substations with gunfire. 

“It would probably permanently completely lay this city to waste if we could do that successfully,” Clendaniel allegedly said last month, according to the criminal complaint. 

The DoJ said Russell analyzed the metro area with open-source maps detailing critical infrastructure locations. He allegedly said the attack on more than one electrical substation would unleash a “cascading failure” that would plunge the city into darkness. 

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