In 2022, Ethan Melzer pleaded guilty to plotting to help al Qaeda ambush and kill his entire unit while on a sensitive mission in Turkey. But Melzer's co-conspirators turned out to be a Canadian teenager and a government informant, not members of al Qaeda. And the satanic cult that drew him down this nazi rabbit hole turned out to have been run by a man on the FBI payroll. Sources https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17286246/united-states-v-melzer https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69307006/united-states-of-america-v-melzer/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/the-satanist-neo-nazi-plot-to-murder-u-s-soldiers-1352629/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/neo-nazi-1378280 https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/jack-teixiera-case-military-extremism-1234724461 https://www.wired.com/story/the-dangerous-exploits-of-an-extremist-fbi-informant/ https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/black-sky-thinking/ona-fascism-nazis-folk-horror-underground-occult/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Sometimes where a crime took place leads you to answer why the crime happened in the first place.
Hi, I'm Sloane Glass, host of the new true crime podcast, American Homicide.
In this series, we'll examine some of the country's most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story.
Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's been 30 years since the horror began.
911, what's your emergency?
He said he was gonna kill me!
In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster.
We thought the murders had ended.
But what if we were wrong?
Come back to Domino Beach.
I'll be waiting for you.
Listen to The Murder Years Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm going deep undercover.
It's hard to visualize you with hair.
To expose the secret world of professional shoplifting.
So you can make $1,000 a day shoplifting.
Yeah.
And I end up outside the mansion of the shoplifting queen herself.
I hear the cops.
Dude, I think we should go.
Listen to Queen of the Con Season 6, The California Girls, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.
From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech, brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose.
Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.
When we left off last week, it was April 21st, 2020, and U.S. Army paratrooper Ethan Melzer was having his first chat and U.S. 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 Atomwaffen that was committed to the satanic cult called the Order of Nine
Melzer didn't know it at the time, but the user he was chatting with was a psychologically unstable 15-year-old in Canada.
And it seems unlikely that either of them had any idea that the teenager's online girlfriend was a government informant.
Over the course of the next five weeks, Ethan Melzer developed a plan that he hoped would result in the murder of 40 of his fellow soldiers.
And, hopefully, provoke a conflict in the Middle East that would claim thousands more lives.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
Just a quick note at 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 Fein was unknown.
And that's on me.
I should have double-checked for myself.
The Order of Nine Angles marks the passage of time in years since the birth of Hitler, so 2024 would be the year 135, and they write that date out as YF-135, where YF stands for Year of Fayen.
I did a little more digging around because I just couldn't accept the explanation that there is no explanation, and of course, Fayen, spelled F-A-Y-E-N, is almost certainly derived from a Middle English word, fayn, F-A-Y-N, an adverb is almost certainly derived from a Middle English word, fayn, F-A-Y-N, an adverb meaning gladly or joyfully, which in turn comes from the Old English gefaen,
So the Nazi wizards are at least etymologically on track in their choice to refer to the year since Hitler's birth as the year of rejoicing.
You don't gotta 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 30, 2020.
When military authorities detained him, he was standing outside at Camp Ederle, 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 Incirlik Air Base, a Turkish airbase near the Syrian border, and one of a handful of foreign bases where the U.S. military is known to store B-61 nuclear bombs.
His platoon had spent the last few weeks receiving classified briefings on their upcoming mission.
They trained, drilled, and studied terrain maps.
They sat through a training about possible threat scenarios they could encounter on their mission and how to spot them.
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 onto his new friends in the Order of Nine Angles.
Every detail about the mission, down to photos he clandestinely took of the maps shown in the briefing, was shared immediately with Rape Waffen.
His platoon had originally been scheduled to deploy two days earlier, on May 28th.
The soldiers standing there with their packed bags, waiting for the bus, hadn't been told why their departure date had been pushed back, but they were worried it meant something serious was going on.
None of them could have guessed, though, that it was one of their own who meant them harm.
But that is the end.
And I said we were going to start at the beginning.
Ethan Melzer was born in 1998 to parents who only married because his mother got pregnant.
The marriage didn't last.
His father's mother seems to blame Ethan's mother for this.
And they weren't good with money.
His father, Nick Melzer, bought a house the couple couldn't afford, and they filed for bankruptcy in 2002, the same year their marriage ended.
His father traveled a lot for work, so Ethan lived with his mother.
By her own admission, Ethan's mother, Julie, suffered from alcoholism and a variety of mental illnesses, though she didn't get diagnosed until after her son's arrest.
And judging by the court filings, 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 Klansmen and dated men who used racial slurs.
She 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 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 sent her into a deep depression, and her drinking got worse.
And this left a troubled young boy mostly on his own.
He spent a lot of time online.
He got really into 4chan.
He started smoking pot in the 8th grade.
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 overweight and unathletic.
He was uncool.
He 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 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.
Come to think of it, I know a lot of really great adults who would tell you today that 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.
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 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 10th grade, which would have been in 2016, I think.
And 2016 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 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 flop house to flop house and started dealing drugs.
He shot another drug dealer.
The one we talked about a bit in the first episode does seem well corroborated.
I think it really did happen.
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 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 2018, at 20 years old, Ethan Melzer enrolled in the Job Corps program.
His time in the Job Corps 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 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 Corps career counselor said, Neo-Nazis and white supremacists don't last a week here.
There is no way a kid who has those ideas can hide their true colors when they are surrounded by black people.
And I hear everything that goes on in the dorms.
Ethan showed no signs at all of being a white supremacist.
Another Job Corps employee who worked with Ethan during his time in the program said, Another of Ethan's instructors in the program said, If 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.
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 serving his country.
They can always tell.
Except he was lying to everyone.
It was during his time in the Job Corps 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 to self-initiate.
He was in contact with other members.
He was on his way to starting his own Nexion before he finished the program.
In December of 2019, 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 to do afterwards and he signed the documents committing to it.
In February of 2019, 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 which one, but I have a guess.
The non-profit investigative journalism collective Unicorn Riot has an extensive database of 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, 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 flat-earth, anti-vax conspiracies, 9-11 trutherism, things like that.
The excerpted messages contained in the court documents aren't there in the Unicorn Riot leaks.
Those messages may have been shared in private channels or deleted sometime before the Discord was archived and published.
Or maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree entirely.
Several of the usernames that are visible in the government exhibits do appear within this Discord server, though.
So even if it wasn't this one in particular, it was one that shared a lot of the same ideas and the same users.
Either way, Ethan got on Discord in February of 2019.
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 asking about was Temple of Blood.
Temple of Blood is maybe the most prominent North American nexion of the Order of Nine Angles.
And it is the nexion that is mixed up with Atomwaffen during this time period.
I would be remiss if I did not also tell you that the founder of the Temple of Blood, Joshua Caleb Sutter, has been on the FBI payroll for more than 20 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 2003, when he agreed to cooperate with the authorities after he got caught up on a gun charge.
In an article for Wired earlier this year, Allie Winston and Jake Hanrahan spoke to Harvard Law professor Alexandra Natapoff 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 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 Atomwaffen members who was arrested in 2020.
Ali Winston's most recent investigation into this story indicates that Sutter may have been involved with the Order of Nine Angles for years before becoming a paid government informant, so it might be disingenuous to say that Temple of Blood only exists because the government was paying the guy who ran it.
He may well have started his own Nexion with or without the $140,000 he's been paid by the FBI. But maybe he wouldn't have been allowed to operate with such impunity.
Maybe he wouldn't have had the resources to start and run Martinet 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, 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 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 arrangement.
They think they can advance their own position in the movement by having the state take out their rivals, or they think they can curry favor with the authorities by dropping a few tidbits of information here and there.
Just because he's getting paid to do it doesn't mean he wouldn't be doing it otherwise or that he doesn't believe it.
Sutter's lengthy career as a government informant, the amount of blood in his wake and the number of zeros on 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 Atomwaffen in the year after Brandon Russell's arrest.
There's no denying that.
Did he do it because the government asked him to?
Because he sincerely believed in the things he was saying?
Both?
Neither?
It's impossible to know, and neither Sutter nor the government are talking about it.
Honestly, I think it would be naive to believe either of them, even if they did.
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 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, 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 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 de-radicalize them.
It's to push radicalization to its most extreme limits, making it unpalatable, making the movement just too damn weird to keep up with.
Like I said, that's a little convoluted.
I don't know that the government is playing that kind of three-dimensional chess with Nazis, but it is a theory I've seen pushed around a little bit.
But Joshua Caleb Sutter's story is a long and strange one all on its own.
And I'm actually saving it until I get to a weird little guy I've been fascinated by for years.
You see, we didn't find out that Sutter was an FBI informant until pretty recently.
But a fellow white nationalist who'd known him for decades had been pointing the finger at Sutter for years.
Bill White is almost certainly the most prolific jailhouse lawyer in the white supremacist movement.
I've spent, oh God, probably close to a 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 recent complaints are about unfair treatment inside assorted federal prison facilities.
You know, 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.
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 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 2037, so I've got plenty of time.
Vibdotanum Vib.no.
Vi er på, ja.
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Sjekk ut Vib.no.
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Whenever a homicide happens, two questions immediately come to mind.
Who did this and why?
And sometimes the answer to those questions can be found in the where.
Where the crime happened.
I'm journalist Sloan Glass, and I host the new podcast, American Homicide.
Each week, we'll explore some of this country's most infamous and mysterious murders.
And you'll learn how the location of the crime became a character in the story.
On American Homicide, we'll go coast to coast and visit places like the wide-open New Mexico desert, the swampy Louisiana bayou, and the frozen Alaska wilderness.
And we'll learn how each region of the country holds deadly secrets.
So join me, Sloan Glass, on the new true crime podcast, American Homicide.
Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's been 30 years since the horror began.
911, what's your emergency?
Someone, he said he was going to kill me!
Three decades since our small beach community was terrorized by a serial killer.
Maybe, my dear Courtney, we're not done after all.
In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster.
No one was safe.
No one could stop it.
Police spun their wheels.
Politicians spun the truth, while fear gripped us tighter with every body that was found.
We thought it was over.
We thought the murders had ended.
But what if we were wrong?
Come back to Domino Beach, Courtney.
Come home.
I'll be waiting for you.
Listen to The Murder Years Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.
From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.
This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to the leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.
Don't get me wrong, though.
I love technology.
I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.
I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.
Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts.
Check out betteroffline.com.
Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who, on October 16th, 2017, was murdered.
There are crooks everywhere you look now.
The situation is desperate.
My name is Manuel Delia.
I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unearths the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks.
Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state.
And she paid the ultimate price.
Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The ratings of an incarcerated Nazi aside, no one knew Joshua Caleb Sutter was an FBI informant until 2021.
So Ethan Melzer certainly didn't have any inkling about it when he started asking about Temple of Blood in February of 2019.
In the Discord, he says he encountered the group in a Reddit post and started looking into it.
He says another Reddit user told him it was connected to some shit called O9A.
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 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.
Yes.
A few days later, in another Discord server, he's asking again about the Order of Nine Angles.
He is again told that they are a neo-Nazi satanic group with connections to Atomwaffen.
And Ethan Melzer posts, This is going to sound bad, but I want to go further down the rabbit hole.
Say someone were to go all the way trying to look for these people.
How bad of an idea is that?
Like, out of ten.
A few days 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 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 Corps program.
Just a few weeks before he showed up for basic training, another user in the Discord server warned him to be careful.
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 food for thought if you're serious about being initiated or whatever.
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 Nexion with him, and was coming up with vetting procedures for members of his Nexion.
He suggested that the group's motto should be, Total Aryan Victory.
In June, he joined another Discord server, this one devoted to discussion of esoteric Nazism.
Some Discord servers allow users to assign little labels to their account, visible to other users next to their name.
In this server, Melzer selected the user labels Satanism and Fascism to describe himself.
Another user asked if he really believed in both, and he replied quickly, yes, and then backtracked, saying, not really, just fascism, and claimed he was only joking about Satanism.
In another server, someone asked him if he had already initiated into the order of nine angles.
He said no, but in another chat that same afternoon, he had been discussing the fact that, if asked, Ona initiates were supposed to deny it. .
It is interesting to note that the second leaked Discord server I found Melzer in was one mainly used to chat about esoteric Nazism, and it is also one in which 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 once again in Rape Waffen.
When he reported to Fort Benning in Georgia on June 4, 2019, 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 a terrorist organization.
After completing basic training and airborne school Ethan Melzer deployed with the 173rd 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.
He expressed a longing for the Day of the Rope, a phrase from the Turner Diaries that refers to the day the race war really begins, when the race traitors are murdered en masse and left hanging from lampposts and bridges.
When another user complained that it felt like the race war would never come, he replied, 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.
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 this role for 6 to 18 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.
At its most innocuous, it's just that same left-hand path magical notion of doing something transgressive, right?
You should do something antithetical to yourself to deepen your practice of magic.
To truly test your sinister resolve, you should pick a lifestyle, a role that is as close to the polar opposite of your own life, your own true nature, as possible.
You should be the opposite of yourself for a year.
But the insight role is widely understood to be something a bit darker than a little antinomian role-playing game.
Your insight role should allow you to infiltrate and ultimately subvert some kind of institution.
Religious orders, police departments, and the military are commonly suggested for this purpose.
Particularly when it comes to insight roles in policing or the military, this also provides an opportunity to gain training and access to weapons.
It can also provide a suitable environment for the practice of culling.
That's human sacrifice.
These are jobs where you may well have the opportunity to kill.
And that's what he's referring to.
In the months before he reported for active duty, Ethan Melzer rapidly became obsessed with, and then initiated himself into, the Order of Nine Angles.
He may not have formed the plan before he told his career counselor that he wanted to enlist, but by the time he put on the uniform for the first time, he was only pretending to be a soldier.
This was an insight role.
By April of 2020, when Ethan Melzer was joining Rape Waffen, 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 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, Atomwaffen, Order of Nine Angles, were in the military, got in trouble in 2019 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 2019 over allegations that he was the current leader of Atomwaffen and was involved in the Order of Nine Angles.
Or maybe he meant Jarrett Smith, the Atomwaffen member, Satanist, and infantry soldier arrested in 2019 for distributing information about bomb making.
Maybe he was talking about Kyle Benton, the U.S. Army specialist who was discharged in 2019 after he was arrested for domestic violence, and the subsequent Army investigation revealed that he, too, was involved with the Order of Nine Angles.
Or maybe he was talking about Vasilios Pistolas, the Marine Lance Corporal who was court-martialed in 2018 over his ties to Atomwaffen.
There are plenty of possibilities here, and they all point to the same grim reality.
As Corwin Carver said, soldiers make the best Nazis.
It's just a fact.
And that's a fact Ethan Melzer was well aware of.
The same week he's having this conversation about not wanting to be another guy in the military, caught doing what he's doing, he advised another member of Rape Waffen, who was considering joining the military, to do it for the training.
Saying, the ridiculous forced patriotism bullshit can go fuck itself.
Just play the game for four years and get the fuck out.
But stronger, smarter, and more dangerous, of course.
He gave the same advice a few days later to a Rape Waffen member who called himself Fry Corps and was considering joining the Marines.
Those early months of 2020 were a lifetime ago, so maybe you don't remember the specifics.
But the COVID-19 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 U.S. military.
And so in those early months of the pandemic, stationed in Italy, Ethan Melzer was more or less confined to his barracks.
And he used that time to really commit to reading his sinister texts and to work his way deeper into the online subculture surrounding it.
Photos recovered from his cell phone include one of Melzer wearing a ski mask and holding up a copy of a book.
He has cut 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 Kelethi, the second of three parts of an Ona text called The Black Book of Satan.
It looks like the copy he has is the fully illustrated version with drawings by Christos Beast, an English musician named Richard Moult, who was allegedly a member of Ona's Old Guard with David Myatt.
And alone in his barracks, Melzer consumed the violent gore videos that were shared so gleefully in those telegram channels.
Found in his digital possession were things like a video that appears to show a black woman being lynched by 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 he'd watched depicting jihadist attacks on U.S. 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 RapeWoff in chat.
Soon after, the channel administrator, our Canadian teenager posting as Gulag Cult, asked him for more information about the deployment, because another Rape Waffen 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 Grey Wolves, a Turkish ultranationalist fascist paramilitary group that the European Parliament considers an international terrorist organization.
A week before he was scheduled to deploy, Melzer posted in at least two telegram chats for adherents of the Order of Nine Angles that he was a U.S. Army soldier stationed in Italy and he was about to deploy to Turkey.
Gulag Cult forwarded several of Melzer's messages, which contained sensitive details about the mission, to a chat called The Order of Nine Rapes.
That chat had just 18 members.
One of those members was Ethan Melzer.
One was Gulag Cult, our 15-year-old Canadian.
And one was a user who called herself Red Hourglass.
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 child.
But you do have to wonder what came of the other 15 members of that chat room.
Not much is 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.
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 2020, which is when all of this went down.
They don't give a more specific date than that, just May of 2020.
So 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.
Red Hourglass.
Maybe that means something else to you, but to me, a red hourglass is a clear reference to the markings on the abdomen of a black widow spider.
I don't want to draw the ire of any spider scientists out there.
I understand that the commonly held belief that black widow spiders engage in sexual cannibalism isn't really supported 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 hourglass, this 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, a plan began to form.
If they could get the information about this mission into the hands of Al-Qaeda, they could cause a mass casualty incident.
One user asked Melzer if he understood that he too would likely die in the kind of attack they're talking about.
Melzer replied, If we were 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 40 soldiers were killed at a Turkish airbase.
A day later, Gulag Kolt asked him, Are we really planning a jihadi attack?
And Melzer agreed.
They were.
Gulag Kolt joked that if Melzer got himself shot in this attack, it 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 aftereffects 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 U.S. soldiers and what kind of weapons they were issued, the purpose and defensive capabilities of the U.S. Army presence at this base, the layout of the installation and the surrounding terrain, and even the route his convoy would be taking to get there.
He shared information he'd received in briefings and trainings, things like the fact that the base was home to many non-military employees who are not armed, and that the army was limited in the defenses available for this convoy because they were operating by the rules of the host government.
Using the training he'd received about avoiding ambush-style attacks, he explained in detail how an effective attack could work.
Just days before the scheduled deployment, a new, even smaller chat room was formed, to finalize the details.
This one, called Operation Hard Rock, was just four members.
Melzer, our Canadian teenager Gulag Cult, our government informant Red Hourglass, and a fourth user the government calls Co-Conspirator 3, someone posting under the name Jaw with two W's.
In this chat, Melzer promised to provide the group with the frequency and channels for the US Army radio communications, so that they would be able to hear their victims' deaths in real time when the attack was carried out.
Now it's a Lyn Cup at Coprix, and on Thursday for all COP-med members, Pizza Grandiosa, just 30 kroner.
Only on Thursday at Coprix.
For Tort!
Whenever a homicide happens, two questions immediately come to mind.
Who did this and why?
And sometimes the answer to those questions can be found in the where.
Where the crime happened.
I'm journalist Sloane Glass, and I host the new podcast, American Homicide.
Each week, we'll explore some of this country's most infamous and mysterious murders.
And you'll learn how the location of the crime became a character in the story.
On American Homicide, we'll go coast to coast and visit places like the wide-open New Mexico desert, the swampy Louisiana bayou, and the frozen Alaska wilderness.
And we'll learn how each region of the country holds deadly secrets.
So join me, Sloan Glass, on the new true crime podcast, American Homicide.
Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.
From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.
This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to the leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.
Don't get me wrong, though.
I love technology.
I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.
I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.
Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts.
Check out betteroffline.com.
It's been 30 years since the horror began.
911, what's your emergency?
Someone, he said he was going to kill me!
Three decades since our small beach community was terrorized by a serial killer.
Maybe, my dear Courtney, we're not done after all.
In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster.
No one was safe.
No one could stop it.
Police spun their wheels.
Politicians spun the truth, while fear gripped us tighter with every body that was found.
We thought it was over.
We thought the murders had ended.
But what if we were wrong?
Come back to Domino Beach, Courtney.
Come home.
I'll be waiting for you.
Listen to The Murder Years, Season 2, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who, on October 16th, 2017, was murdered.
There are crooks everywhere you look now.
The situation is desperate.
My name is Manuel Delia.
I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhearts the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks.
Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state.
And she paid the ultimate price.
Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On May 25th, the day before his 22nd birthday, the day before his 22nd 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 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 of the plot the next day, May 26, 2020.
That was Ethan Melzer's 22nd 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 30.
The soldiers weren't told why.
Ethan Melzer had no idea his plans weren't a secret anymore when he posted in the Operation Hard Rock chat on May 29th, 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 cellphone.
He was hoping that if he was able to sneak his burner phone out on patrol and snap pictures, his co-conspirators would be able to use the metadata to pinpoint the exact locations of the areas of vulnerability in the photos.
Now, whether Red Hourglass was working for the government all along or not, We don't know.
But on the evening of May 29th, she may or may not have even been the one using her phone.
Once she spilled the beans to the FBI, it may have been an actual FBI agent chatting with Ethan Melzer as Red Hourglass.
As he reaffirmed his commitment to the plan that night, Red Hourglass asked him, What makes you think you can actually get away with fucking with the U.S. military?
And Melzer replied, Because I fly under the radar already, act completely normal around other people outside, and don't talk about my personal life or beliefs with anyone.
But he was starting to get nervous about the mission.
He deleted most of his old posts.
If the plan now was to attack the replacement convoy two months down the road, he was going to be alive when the investigation started.
And he didn't want to get caught.
Red Hourglass needled him, saying, you deleted them because that's treason, duh.
And he replied, Kek.
That's K-E-K. It's a substitute for LOL. The lore here is complicated and irrelevant, but the short version is that Kek originated with Korean online gamers as a typed indication that the user is laughing.
And it eventually migrated into the American alt-right lexicon of the 2016 era.
It's not important.
The point is, he was laughing off what he knew to be true.
This was treasonous behavior.
And that gets us back up to where we started today.
Ethan Melzer, standing outside at Camp Ederle with his platoon on May 30th, 2020.
His bags were packed.
Forty 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 adherence of the Order of Nine Angles written by Ona Grandmaster Anton Long himself, and a copy of Codex 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, so I don't think vampires are real.
Immediately after being taken into custody, Ethan Melzer admitted that he had disclosed information about his deployment to members of the Rape Waffenchat.
He admitted that he had done so in order to facilitate an attack on his fellow soldiers.
He admitted that the messages had been typed and sent by him.
He agreed that his actions were tantamount to treason.
But, as required by the rules of the Order of Nine Angles, he repeatedly denied that he was a member of the Order of Nine Angles.
As the case progressed, his lawyers argued that he was just messing around online.
He was addicted to posting.
They wanted to have a psychologist testify about internet addiction and the phenomenon of people lying online for attention, inhabiting elaborate fake identities online because they're high on likes and comments.
They argued that there was no actual chance of any real attack ever taking place, leaning heavily on the fact that the primary co-conspirator was a child who had recently been released from a psychiatric facility and who was only pretending to be an adult with military training.
The 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, 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 kind of falls apart, considering the information he provided was real.
He did provide actual, correct information about this military base in Turkey and his deployment to it.
And he really did pack a burner phone for his deployment.
But he said it had never even crossed his mind that the people he was talking to were serious, and he certainly wasn't serious.
He said that he was only curious about the order of nine angles because it was so weird.
And he claimed that the beliefs of the group were, quote, pretty much the polar opposite of his own.
Which is interesting because that's sort of the same language in 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 Guardsman we were talking about last week, has been claiming all along about why he was in the Rape Wappin chat rooms.
So there's a lot of guys in the terrorism planning chat that are claiming after the fact that they were only pretending to support terrorism in order to uncover how bad everybody else in there really is.
And Meltzer'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 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 commuting with demonic entities in the acausal realm if the end result is still a specific 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?
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 entered into a plea agreement in June of 2022, 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 U.S. service members, provision and attempted provision of material support to terrorists, and illegal transmission of national defense information.
Pursuant to that plea agreement, he was sentenced to 540 months.
That's 45 years in prison.
Assuming he maintains good behavior and doesn't commit any new offenses while incarcerated, the 85% of that sentence that he'll end up serving is a little over 38 years.
His scheduled release date is in November of 2058.
He'll be 60 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 540 months or less.
And he got 540 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 judge's remarks were fairly lengthy, covering nearly 20 pages 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 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.
He summarized the facts of the case and its procedural history.
He highlighted pieces of evidence that contributed to his decision.
He referenced the mitigating factors presented by the defense and explained why he didn't agree with the defense's position that they warranted a downward departure.
And none of this is unusual or even remarkable.
But the appeal hinges on the judge's use of the phrase, Judeo-Christian values.
Mr.
Melzer's crimes were repugnant.
He betrayed the United States of America.
He betrayed the United States military.
He targeted for murder his fellow soldiers.
He worked to aid jihadist terrorists.
All so he could achieve his nihilist goal of undermining Judeo-Christian values and rupturing civilized society.
Of the Order of Nine Angles, Judge Woods said,"...the organization and Mr.
Melzer opposed those Judeo-Christian values because they are good for civilization.
His crimes were committed in order to destroy civilization." And look, to be honest, it probably would have been better if he had not said that.
But it was a brief mention in a very lengthy monologue that also emphasized that the defendant was not charged or sentenced because of his beliefs, but for the actions motivated by those beliefs.
That single statement wasn't the basis for the sentence.
It was just a comment.
But the appeal 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 Melzer waived his right to appeal the sentence, and his attorneys failed to object to these comments when they were made, but the comments in question don't raise an issue of constitutionality.
If anything, the judge was referring to the biased motivation for the crime, not a characteristic of the defendant.
There's a difference between talking about a defendant's race or a defendant's religion and talking 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 15 years, rather than the 45 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 6th, 2024.
The Second Circuit tends to be a little speedier than some, but I've given up trying to divine a court's timeline.
It never works out.
A final opinion in Melzer's appeal could come as quickly as a few weeks, but it's more likely we won't see an opinion filed for a couple of months.
Leaving aside the comments at issue in the appeal, though, Judge Woods made it clear how he felt about Ethan Melzer's crimes and his claims that he regretted his actions, saying in part, Mr.
Melzer 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, Mr.
Melzer 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 Mr.
Melzer is playing another role to obtain leniency from the court, as he played soldier while working in secret to murder servicemen.
So, maybe the role of contrite federal prisoner is just another mask.
Either way, he's 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, 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 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 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 the Crying Nazi befriended a man that they call the Merchant of Death.
But maybe now's not the time to tell you about how a guy who used to really publicly fantasize about raping me used to watch Tucker Carlson every night in the prison rec room with the Russian arms dealer that Vladimir Putin traded Brittany Griner for.
Another time, perhaps.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
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 weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com, but I probably will not answer it.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Please don't post anything that will make you one of my Weird Little Guys.
Weird Little Guys.
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Sometimes where a crime took place leads you to answer why the crime happened in the first place.
Hi, I'm Sloane Glass, host of the new true crime podcast, American Homicide.
In this series, we'll examine some of the country's most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story.
Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's been 30 years since the horror began.
911, what's your emergency?
He said he was going to kill me!
In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster.
We thought the murders had ended.
But what if we were wrong?
Come back to Domino Beach.
I'll be waiting for you.
Listen to The Murder Years Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm going deep undercover.
It's hard to visualize you with hair.
To expose the secret world of professional shoplifting.
So you can make $1,000 a day shoplifting.
Yeah.
And I end up outside the mansion of the shoplifting queen herself.
I hear the cops.
Dude, I think we should go.
Listen to Queen of the Con Season 6, The California Girls, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.
From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose.
