Author Archives: Searchlight Team

USA: Hate-spewing Terrorgram channels lose key motivators

A significant blow befell the transnational network of neo-nazi accelerationists when two leaders of the so-called Terrorgram Collective were arrested. On 6 September, US federal law enforcement arrested a former sex-toy salesperson in California and, 450 miles away, a video editor who went by the pseudonym “DJ Couchplant” in Idaho. Devin Burghardt reports.

Terrorgram is a decentralised network of neo-nazi accelerationist groups, influencers and meme channels on the social networking platform Telegram. Terrorgram is vanguardist in orientation, promoting stochastic terror to “accelerate” the collapse of today’s liberal democracies and replace them with all-white ethnostates. The Terrorgram Collective has become one of the most influential and dangerous conglomerations in the Terrorgram network.

“Using the Telegram platform,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco in a statement, “the two advanced their heinous white supremacist ideology, solicited hate crimes, and provided guidance and instructions for terrorist attacks on critical infrastructure and assassinations of government officials.”

Federal prosecutors charged two leaders of the Terrorgram Collective, Dallas Humber and Matthew Allison, with a long list of felonies, including one count of conspiracy, four counts of soliciting hate crimes, three counts of soliciting the murder of federal officials, three counts of doxing federal officials, one count of threatening communications, two counts of distributing bombmaking instructions, and one count of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. If convicted, they could each face a sentence of up to 220 years in prison.

Incitement to crime

Humber and Allison are alleged to have operated Terrorgram channels and group chats, where they solicited users to commit attacks. The indictment also alleges that the two “provided instructions and guidance to equip Terrorgram users to carry out those attacks”.

As leaders of the Terrorgram Collective, Humber and Allison allegedly contributed to and disseminated Terrorgram videos and publications that “provide specific advice for carrying out crimes, celebrate white supremacist attacks, and provide a hit list of ‘high-value targets’ for assassination”.

The hit list included US federal, state and local officials, as well as leaders of companies and non-governmental organisations, many of whom were targeted because of race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation or gender identity. The murder of “high-value targets”, Terrorgram extolled, “would sow chaos and further accelerate the government’s downfall”.

Although hiding behind online pseudonyms, the identities of the two Terrorgram Collective leaders were first exposed by antifascist researchers more than one year before the arrest.

From sex toys to neo-nazi terror manuals

First identified by antifascist researchers at Left Coast Right Watch, 34-year-old Dallas Humber, of Elk Grove, California, once reviewed sex toys online but was drawn into the online world of hardcore racist terror.

Online, Humber was known by many names, including “Miss Gorehound”. She became “the Narrator” of Terrorgram, gaining online notoriety for narrating audiobooks of terror manifestos and white supremacist propaganda. Humber also published the “Saint Calendar”, a compilation of white supremacist terror attack anniversaries that followers were encouraged to celebrate.

Before her arrest, she had been in communication with Dylann Roof, the white nationalist who murdered nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, and Brandon Russell, founder of a neo-nazi accelerationist group Atomwaffen Division, convicted on charges of possessing explosive materials and later indicted for plotting to attack electric substations in Baltimore.

The Terrorgram Collective published an audiobook in which Humber read aloud text imploring neo-nazis to attack power grids. “Peppered all over the country are power distribution substations that keep electricity flowing,” she narrated. “Sitting ducks. Worthy prey. They are largely unprotected and often in remote locations. They can be struck at with ease, and it can be done without getting caught, allowing for multiple to be hit in a spree.”

Such attacks on the power grid, Humber read, were “unquestionably more effective than shooting up random n****rs” because “with the power off, when the lights don’t come back on, all hell will break loose, making conditions desirable for our race to once again take back what is ours”.

When Humber was arrested, federal authorities found white nationalist patches, Nazi paraphernalia, 3D printed firearms, ammunition, trigger extenders, SIM cards and flash drives, according to court documents.

The white revolution will be Telegrammed

Matthew Robert Allison, who is aged 37, grew up in Southern California and Utah. In 2008, he moved to Boise, Idaho. In addition to being a video editor and failed artist “DJ Couchplant,” he had tried to become a right-wing influencer for years. As Left Coast Right Watch noted when they identified his role in the Terrorgram Collective, before taking on a role with the network, Allison had been involved in numerous efforts to promote online white nationalism, including White Lives Matter and White American Media.

He was the Terrorgram Collective’s video editor, manager of the network’s channels and publisher.

According to a detention motion, when he was arrested, “he was wearing a backpack containing zip ties, duct tape, a gun, ammunition, a knife, lock-picking equipment, two phones and a thumb drive”. Among the items found in Allison’s apartment were a rifle and more ammunition, an “Atomwaffen mask”, a “go bag” with $1,500 cash, “baggies of pills”, a passport, SIM cards and a black balaclava.

Transnational bigoted bloodshed

The indictment further specifies three international incidents where Terrorgram users were incited to commit acts “in furtherance of white supremacist accelerationism”.

The first listed was an attack on an LGBTQ bar in Slovakia on 12 October 2022. Juraj Krajčík, aged 19 years, opened fire outside a popular LGBTQ bar in Bratislava, killing two people and wounding a third. Before killing himself, he tweeted a link to a 65‑page manifesto he had authored advocating the extermination of LGBTQ people, Jews and Black people. Krajčík cited the texts of other white supremacist mass shooters, whom he called “saints”.

He gave “special thanks” to the online community that had radicalised him. “Terrorgram Collective,” he wrote. “You know who you are … Building the future of the White revolution, one publication at a time.” As with the writings of other racist mass murderers, the Terrorgram Collective turned Krajčík’s genocide manifesto into an audiobook to inspire others.

The second incident cited was a planned infrastructure attack on energy facilities in New Jersey. Andrew Takhistov was arrested in July for allegedly recruiting someone to attack an electrical substation.

According to the authorities, he unsuspectingly made contact with an undercover agent, with whom he discussed a plan to attack an electrical substation. The two drove to a power substation, and Takhistov provided information on how to construct Molotov cocktails and avoid detection. He also discussed various “strategies for terrorist attacks, including rocket and explosives attacks against synagogues”.

The third incident involved a knife attack at a mosque in Turkey on 12 August. Wearing a skull mask and a tactical vest with a sonnenrad patch, a symbol used by nazis and white supremacists, an 18-year-old armed with a hatchet and two knives livestreamed himself stabbing multiple people near a mosque in Eskişehir, in northern Turkey. He wounded at least five people and was later detained by police. The attacker had shared copies of his manifesto, the manifesto of the Slovakian mass murderer, and publications of the Terrorgram Collective as documents “useful” to those planning attacks.

Humber wrote of the attacker online: “He was 100% our guy. But he’s not White so I can’t give him an honorary title. We still celebrating his attack tho, he did it for Terrorgram.” Humber added in a separate post: “We can’t add him to the Pantheon, but yeah, it’s a great development regardless, inspiring more attacks is the goal and anyone claiming to be an Accelerationist should support them.”

What with the arrests of Humber and Allison in the USA and the August arrest of the Russian-born founder of Telegram Pavel Durov in Paris for failing to curb illegal content on the platform, Terrorgram activists are panicked that their days of free reign on the platform could be over.         

Pictures:

Hate symbol The neo‑nazi Terrorgram Collective’s logo combines the SS Panzer Division insignia with the Telegram logo

Hate agitators
Among other incitements, Dallas Humber (far left) and Matthew Allison (left) called on neo-nazis to attack power grids, leading an undercover agent to detain one of their followers, who also included Slovakian Juraj Krajčík (bottom left), who killed two people and injured one, and an unnamed Turkish convert (bottom right), who wore a skull mask as he attacked and injured five people. The Terrorgram Collective also published white supremacists propaganda (centre), a selection of which was audio recorded by Humber

This article first appeared in the Autumn 2024 issue of Searchlight

Nigel Farage and Traditional Unionists: Discord and disunity

Reform UK’s former party chair Ben Habib has hit out at leader Nigel Farage, writes Ian McGreal, accusing him of ditching former Unionist allies in Northern Ireland

Nigel Farage is again being accused of political dishonesty, and this time the name calling is not from those he likes to call “Remoaners”, but from his own side.

Wealthy property developer Ben Habib left the Tories and became an MEP for Farage’s Brexit Party at the 2019 European election, in the dying days of Tory Prime Minister Theresa May’s failed efforts to resolve Brexit’s contradictions. He was the party’s lead candidate in London.

In March 2023, Farage’s front man Richard Tice made Habib co-deputy leader of Reform UK and, in February 2024, he was the party’s most successful parliamentary by-election candidate when he gained 13% at Wellingborough. Then, only days after the general election, Farage sacked him as deputy leader.

By that time Habib was already well known as Reform UK’s most enthusiastic Unionist. For years he has campaigned regularly with the former Labour MP Kate (now Baroness) Hoey and Jim Allister, a barrister who leads the hardline Ulster party, Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV). Habib, Hoey and Allister even launched a joint legal action against the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Leading TUV members (as Searchlight has previously exposed) included two veteran National Front (NF) activists, Paul Kingsley and John Hiddleston. At the general election Hiddleston campaigned in Belfast South & Mid Down. His fascist activism dates back to his student days at Queen’s University Belfast, and he edited the NF’s journal British Ulsterman before heading to South Africa to campaign for parties that were extreme even by the standards of the apartheid regime.

Kingsley is another who always saw himself in the intellectual vanguard of fascism, active in three far-right parties, the NF, the National Party and the British Democratic Party. This year, he was part of the TUV team in East Belfast, as well as acting as one of the party’s strategists at head office.

In advance of this year’s general election, strongly influenced by Habib, Reform UK and TUV announced an alliance. The problem is that Farage himself has never shown much enthusiasm for the Ulster cause, and soon after his dramatic return to the party as its effective leader as well as owner, Farage ignored the pact and endorsed two of TUV’s rivals in the Democratic Unionist Party.

Excluded

All seemed to be forgiven when TUV leader Jim Allister defeated one of these Farage-backed candidates, Ian Paisley Junior, and became the party’s first Westminster MP. Ever since his election, Allister has been hand in glove with Reform in what amounts to a House of Commons group of six Reform-TUV MPs.

But Farage chose not to invite Allister or anyone else from TUV to Reform UK’s annual conference in September. Allister maintained a diplomatic silence, but Habib is not so tactful, and at the start of October hit out in articles for the Belfast News Letter and the Daily Express.

Reform’s former deputy leader lashed out at Farage, accusing him of ignoring his “obligation” to “save Northern Ireland”. He spelled out what was already obvious, that since Farage resumed the leadership “our wonderful alliance seems to have ended”. After the early fumbling in the election campaign, Habib wrote, “now it seems Reform has positively rejected the alliance. There is no common cause” made between its MPs and Allister. Habib concluded that if Farage failed to challenge the government “to finish the job of Brexit and save Northern Ireland/the country, there will be little point to Reform”.

This is the latest in a series of attacks on the party by Habib since the general election, and there is no sign of him toning down his remarks. We can expect him to try to become a spokesman for dissidents inside Reform. Right now, the constitution gives no one but Farage any power, but if he is serious about democratising the party, then these dissidents will have to be given a voice. This is a dangerous situation, especially now that Reform’s members have been led to expect further electoral success.

As he showed during the Southport riots, Farage is happy to play with incendiary rhetoric but then back down, frustrating those in his party who hope either for extreme racism or extreme Unionism.

If Loyalist paramilitaries return to the streets, trying to wreck the Protocol and eventually undermine the Good Friday Agreement, Farage will have to get off the fence. The signs are that, as with his anti-immigrant rhetoric, he will be happy to play with matches but run away from the fire.       

This article first appeared in the Autumn 2024 issue of Searchlight   

From the archive: Police operation that seized a UK neo-nazi arsenal – with a little help from a Searchlight mole

At a time when gun ownership was far more lax than today, a group of fascists set about stockpiling a vast arms cache. However, with a little help from a British Movement insider, the police operation into their activities led to arrests and convictions. Martyn Lester looks back on the events

Forty-five years ago this autumn, police bomb squad officers investigating an incendiary attack in Birmingham carried out – with help from other units and forces – a number of raids in the West Midlands and West Mercia, in which they discovered not only evidence related to the firebombing but a cache of dozens of guns.

Seven individuals were arrested and charged with a variety of offences.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the media ignored the case, but it did not cause quite the stir it would today. Younger readers will perhaps not be fully aware that the possession of handguns was legal back in 1979, albeit under a licensing regime, so stories headlined “Man has collection of guns” were not quite the red flag they would be now.

What this does not really excuse, though, is the media’s lack of follow-through, at the time of the arrests, in questioning the “who” rather than the “what” of the alleged offences. As far as we know, Searchlight was the only publication in the country to report to its readers that four of the seven men arrested were known neo-nazis – British Movement (BM) and National Front (NF) activists – a mainstream media oversight that still seems extraordinary to this day.

The conspiracy did not come to trial for more than a year, but when it did Birmingham Crown Court heard some hair-raising details.

The case began, ostensibly, as an investigation into an attack on a Job Centre in Birmingham, where a lighted smoke cartridge was pushed through the letterbox and “Jobs for Whites” was spray-painted on the door. In saying “ostensibly”, we do not mean that the attack was not properly investigated, but that behind the bomb squad raids lay an intelligence operation by Birmingham Special Branch, who had (if only after forceful prompting by a worried informant) accepted that local fascist Rod Roberts (top right) was stockpiling weapons.

Nazi host

Roberts, a technician at the Birmingham University Medical School, was sufficiently highly regarded by the BM to have been entrusted with providing lodgings (in his own flat) for David Duke when the Ku Klux Klan leader visited the UK in March 1978. The same flat was used, on 20 April 1979, to host a joint BM and NF celebration of Adolf Hitler’s birthday.

Police arrived at the party after a neighbour reported that men wearing uniforms and armbands were waving a gun on the flat’s balcony (it turned out to be a replica).

That August Roberts was again entrusted with babysitting duties, this time for German neo-nazi Manfred Roeder, who had fled his homeland after being given a prison sentence and was in the UK illegally. Birmingham Special Branch were aware of this, but by this time they were running an observation operation on Roberts over possible firearms offences, and opted to ignore Roeder rather than show their hand and give Roberts a chance to cover his tracks over the more serious crimes.

Police arrests

The police finally made their move at the end of October, acting on intelligence that Roberts and fellow BM member Harvey Stock (bottom right) were the men behind the Birmingham Job Centre attack. (Hilariously, it later emerged that the two had set out to attack the city’s Race Relations offices but failed to find them, and hit the Job Centre rather than go home totally thwarted – thus giving the impression of being two men who couldn’t locate their own arses using both hands and a set of wing mirrors.)

Raids on the two men’s homes unearthed thousands of racist stickers and, in Roberts’ flat, an illegally held Mauser pistol. Encouraged by the latter find, the police engaged the help of their West Mercia counterparts, who raided the farm of Roberts’ parents near Worcester. Buried in a pigsty they found a large cache of weapons, including a Sten-style submachine gun, 10 rifles of various types, well over a dozen pistols and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

The bulk of the charges – and later the punishment – fell on Roberts. He pleaded guilty to 10 charges of weapons possession and one of arson. At two further trials, he pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to acquire the Mauser and conspiracy to incite racial hatred. Both juries found him guilty. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.

Three of the seven men convicted in the case do not seem to have been politically motivated, merely opportunist criminals lured by money.

Like Roberts, two of them were imprisoned. Jon Stokes was sentenced to two years after pleading guilty to five charges of theft from his employers, local gun makers Webley and Scott. And Reginald Cox, who was the manager of a firearms dealer, went down for three years for a mixture of firearms crimes and sexual offences against minors. Part-time firearms dealer Ian Gilmore got off more lightly, with a suspended sentence.

Lenient sentences

From the perspective of 2024, what readers will probably find difficult to swallow is how leniently Roberts’ three fellow fascists were treated.

Like Roberts, Stock pleaded guilty to the Job Centre incendiary attack. And, like Roberts, he was found to be in possession of thousands of stickers, described as “mostly of the ‘Pull a trigger on a n****r’, ‘Death to n****er loving white slags’ and ‘Asian shit get out of Britain or die’ variety”. In his home, police found copies of the US nazi paper Stormer, with paperwork naming him as an approved UK distributor of the paper.

As well as being a BM member, Stock was a former NF press officer who had lost his post following a Searchlight exposé about him selling KKK and nazi material. On top of his uncontested arson charge, the jury found Stock guilty of conspiracy to incite racial hatred. The judge gave him a suspended sentence.

Another of the politically motivated conspirators, fanatical nazi Robert Giles, who was a member both of BM and the National Socialist Party UK, pleaded guilty to carrying an offensive weapon (a flick-knife). He was found guilty by the jury of conspiring with Roberts to obtain the Mauser pistol. In a statement to the police, he referred to “my führer, Adolf Hitler” and allegedly denounced the police operation as a “typically Jewish-inspired plot”. He, too, received a suspended sentence.

The fourth politically motivated defendant, NF member Harold Simcox, was found guilty of two charges of illegally possessing firearms, and again received a suspended sentence.

Searchlight intel

In the light of the robust, no‑nonsense sentences being handed out in the wake of Southport-related riots, the fact that four of the defendants in this case did not serve so much as a day behind bars, despite pleading or being found guilty, probably seems astonishing. But what we are looking at, through the telescope of time, is not two-tier but two‑era policing.

It was a time when neo-nazis could (and definitely did) join perfectly legal pistol and rifle shooting clubs, and when the new Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was under pressure to repeal the Race Relations Act. It was a time when it did not, sadly, feel all that surprising that judges would hand out suspended sentences to gun‑toting fascists.

As a final thought, what we did not, for obvious reasons, report at the time was that the police operation pivoted on intelligence supplied by (yes, you can tick it off on your bingo card) a fearless Searchlight mole in the BM. But his story must wait for another day …  

Thug who threw missiles at police during firebomb attack on Tamworth hotel is latest Patriotic Alternative ‘political prisoner’

“£2000 GIFTED TO FAMILY OF POLITICAL PRISONER JORDAN WINYARD” screams the latest Trump-style, all-caps announcement from the, as ever, over-excitable collecting tin rattlers Patriotic Alternative. If only they’d spent just a tiny bit of the tens of thousands that have flowed into their begging bowl this year on a spelling checker, it would have told them that the’ve missed the ’R’ out of ’GRIFTED’.

From there on, it’s the usual ’two-tier smear’ strategy. He’s a good lad really. He didn’t actually do anything. It’s his little kids who are being punished by not having their dad home for Christmas. He’s banged up, they wail: ”for throwing ’missiles’ during a protest. Nobody has ever explained exactly what these missiles were supposed to have been”.

Well, first off, it wasn’t a ’protest’ but a riot. It was the infamous attack on Tamworth’s Holiday Inn, which the mob attempted to burn down using several petrol bombs. They also attacked the police, throwing projectiles including bottles and bricks.

No doubt Winyard disguised himself by wearing a pig mask throughout this frolicking to prevent the police or anyone else identifying him as a man doing… er… absolutely nothing wrong If no one went into the specifics of Winyard’s missiles in court, it was probably because they felt that reciting the details would just be wasting the court’s time. He had, you see, already pleaded guilty to violent disorder. The three-year sentence was really only to be expected.

We do, of course, feel sorry for these kids, but the only reason they will be having a crappy Christmas is because Daddy Pig decided to go out and be a violent thug.

’Political prisoner’ our arse.

The bigots of Baggot Street: a stain on Dublin publishing

Bryan Wall exposes a Dublin-based company whose texts peddle ‘the great replacement theory’, ‘Marxist cults’ and ‘the climate change hoax’ by anti-Semitic and white supremacist authors

An international publisher of anti-Semitic, white supremacist and conspiracy theorist literature is operating from Dublin. Omnia Veritas, translated roughly as “Truth conquers all things”, has been in business for the past 11 years. The company was originally registered in 2013 by Childéric Marcelou and David Marcelou, listed respectively as secretary and director. According to Irish Companies Registration Office documents, David was based in Passage West, County Cork, while Childéric gave an address in Grenade, France.

Recent updates show the company now has a registered office on Baggot Street in Dublin and a new key principal, Florian Ventura.

Ventura is owned by a parent company, Omnia Publica International, which holds all the shares in Omnia Veritas. Company documents also seem to show that it is based at an address in Belize. Although recent profits for the company’s Irish-based wing seem to be minimal, with assets amounting to €2,806, older financial returns show a rather different picture. In 2019, the company reported assets of over €96,000.

The company’s web store is a who’s who of US and French anti-Semites and white supremacists. Among the authors on sale is Eustace Mullins, a notorious and virulent US bigot who wrote the tracts Adolf Hitler: An Appreciation and The Biological Jew,not to mention countless others on topics ranging from biblical reinterpretations of anti-Semitism to the US Federal Reserve.

In The Biological Jew, Mullins writes: “Treason, fraud, perversion, all the hallmarks of Jewish life among the gentiles in the Diaspora. And it is parasitism.” Mullins was also a widely respected leader among the US militia movement in the 1990s following publication in 1952 of a book on the US Federal Reserve, where he argued that the US banking system was merely a tool of the Rothschilds.

Another title is The Dispossessed Majority by Wilmot Robertson, which is a pseudonym for Sumner Humphrey Ireland. This promotes an early version of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and is one of David Duke’s favourites. Robertson argues that white people are being overtaken by “minorities”, calling for a white ethnostate and the deportation of all Jewish people.

Also available is the manifesto of James von Brunn, who in 2009 opened fire in Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum. A virulent anti-Semite with a long criminal history, von Brunn murdered special police officer Stephen Johns and engaged in a brief firefight with two others before he was wounded.

Conspiracists

The tomes of Adolf Hitler, Julio Meinvielle, Edwige Thibaut, Archibald Ramsay, Myron Fagan and Deirdre Manifold can also be purchased from the website. One of the more recent additions to the company’s portfolio is Irishman Emmet Connor. Promoting his new book on the so-called Marxist cult, in which he lays the blame for all the world’s ills at the feet of Marxism, he appeared in September in a livestream interview with Ireland First’s president Derek Blighe.

Blighe, who was unsuccessful in both the local and European Parliamentary elections this year, appears to be leading the charge among Ireland’s far right for the upcoming general election. Aside from almost daily canvassing updates on social media, he attacks the government, opposition, the left in general and its supposed collective responsibility for what he sees as “uncontrolled mass immigration” to Ireland. Not content with one conspiracy theory, he opines that climate change is a “scam”.

During his interview with Connor, Blighe again attacked climate change as a hoax and pontificated on the dangers of open borders, while Connor discussed the “Marxist international conspiracy”. Society, it would appear, has been infiltrated from top to bottom by Marxism, with Connor proclaiming that the government, education system, civil service, police force, and even climate change activists, feminists and vegans, are all part of an “ideological war”.

During an interview in June, Connor repeated the long-debunked conspiracy theory that COVID-19 had originated in a lab in Wuhan, claiming that this “obviously means the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, is involved”.

Connor’s social media is replete with shares of posts from Ireland’s most prolific race-baiting publication, Gript, along with retweets of well-known Irish far-right agitators and anti-trans activists, such as former soldier Mike Connell and Jana Lunden. Echoing some of his fellow Omnia Veritas authors, in early October he wrote on his X account: “All white populations will be forced to become second-class citizens in their own countries, since according to the ideology of Marxism, this is fair and justifiable.”

It is a disturbing evolution of Irish politics that a general election candidate could host someone with such views and links without any pushback. Ten years ago, it would have been unbelievable, today, it is becoming the norm.