The Devil's Chat Room: Ethan Melzer, Part 1In June of 2020, US Army Private Ethan Melzer was arrested for leaking information about his unit's deployment to Turkey with the intention of causing a mass casualty incident. The plot was hatched in a Telegram chat room for a group calling itself Rapewaffen, an Atomwaffen splinter cell that was committed to the beliefs of a neonazi satanic cult called the Order of Nine Angles. This episode follows the rise of satanism within Atomwaffen and the chaos that influence caused.Original air date: 10/31/24A Deal With the Devil: Ethan Melzer, Part 2In 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.Original air date: 11/7/24Part 1 Sources:https://unicornriot.ninja/2020/national-guard-soldier-who-deployed-to-dc-identified-as-neo-nazi/ https://www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch/post/ohio-national-guard-member-sent-home-for-white-supremacist-views-is-likely-a-fascist-youtuber https://www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch/post/ohio-national-guard-soldier-pulled-from-mission-in-d-c-appears-on-neo-fascist-podcast-says-hes-being-discharged https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/05/fbi-national-guardsman-expressed-white-supremacist-ideology-303924 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.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2020-06-02/military-begins-staging-around-washington-to-quell-george-floyd-protests https://hopenothate.org.uk/2020/06/23/the-rapewaffen-telegram-channel/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/soldiers-cases-highlight-reach-of-white-extremism-into-us-military/2020/06/25/0203532e-b582-11ea-9b0f-c797548c1154_story.html https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/atomwaffen-division https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/sites/default/files/2022-06/REDACTED%20CTEC__TAT%20Accelerationism%20Report%20.pdf https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/academics/centers-initiatives/ctec/ctec-publications/dangerous-organizations-and-bad-actors https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-56044179 https://gnet-research.org/2023/09/25/the-significance-of-dark-foreigners-arrest/ Ariel Koch (2024) The ONA Network and the Transnationalization of Neo-Nazi-Satanism, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 47:10, 1172-1199, DOI: 10.1080/1057610X.2021.2024944Mathieu Colin (01 Jul 2024): “And the Devil Marches with Us”: Aesthetics and Accelerationism in the Order of Nine Angles, Terrorism and Political Violence, DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2024.2365749Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Emelie Chace-Donahue (07 Mar 2023): The Order of Nine Angles: Cosmology, Practice & Movement, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, DOI: 10.1080/1057610X.2023.2186737Shanon Shah, Jane Cooper & Suzanne Newcombe (19 Apr 2023): Occult Beliefs and the Far Right: The Case of the Order of Nine Angles, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, DOI: 10.1080/1057610X.2023.2195065Part 2 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.
Music Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's April 2020.
A woman announces on Facebook that she has COVID and won't be seeking medical attention.
I didn't want to be talked out of this plan.
Then she disappears.
Uh, anyone else think this is strange?
I just had to know.
Listen to What Happened to Talena Czar on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back.
It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O 'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, and I'm the host of the On Purpose podcast, and I'm excited for my next episode with Khloe Kardashian.
God, I've been through so many things that at this point I would rather not feel than feel because feeling is too much for me to handle.
I am Chloe Cardagio.
I'm not just a TV show.
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Call Zone Media Music Hello, everyone.
Molly Conger here.
This is, as you've probably noticed, a rerun.
I'm enjoying some much-needed time off at the moment.
I hope you'll forgive me.
This pair of episodes originally ran at the end of October and beginning of November of last year.
It tells the story of Ethan Melzer, the United States Army private sentenced to more than 40 years in prison for a failed plot to have his own unit ambushed during a sensitive mission in Turkey.
It felt timely to re-release this one now.
The strange, satanic Nazi cult that Melzer was drawn into as he planned for murder and mayhem is back in the news.
Just recently, in March of 2025, a teenager in Wisconsin was arrested and charged with the murder of his mother and stepfather.
On his phone, authorities found material related to the Order of Nine Angles, the same group Melzer had been involved in.
It's too soon to say much about Nikita Kasap, that teenager in Wisconsin.
He's been charged at the state level in Wisconsin, and it looks like federal charges are probably coming down the line at some point, too.
I'm sure his story will be one for the show, eventually.
But it isn't quite over yet.
For now, though, I can offer you a little insight into what can happen when a young man starts looking for answers in the devil's chat room.
Thank you.
On May 26, 2020, a U.S. Army private stationed in Italy celebrated his 22nd birthday.
He was blissfully unaware that the FBI had spent that day confirming his identity as the Nazi Satanist who was trying to get Al-Qaeda to wipe out his entire unit.
Half a world away, that very same day, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on an unarmed man's neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds.
The man cried out, saying he couldn't breathe.
He begged the officer not to kill him.
He cried out for his mother.
And then he fell silent.
The murder of George Floyd was caught on camera by a bystander, and protests against this act of police brutality started within hours in the Minneapolis area.
The video spread rapidly, and so did the protests.
In the months that followed, protest marches, rallies, and memorials were held in thousands of cities, reaching every state in the country and dozens of countries around the world.
Millions of Americans took to the streets and public squares to protest police brutality.
And in countless cities, the police responded by demonstrating the very brutality that people were protesting.
Three days after the murder, then-President Donald Trump tweeted, The shooting starts.
By Monday, June 1st, less than a week after George Floyd's murder, the president was publicly threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to use the military to put down civil disorder.
Governors in more than 30 states activated the National Guard to assist state and local police in responding to the protests.
Governors in 12 states deployed National Guard troops to Washington, D.C. at the request of the Pentagon.
A hundred members of the Ohio National Guard received orders that they'd be heading to the nation's capital.
That afternoon, the administrator of a small telegram channel for fans of a fascist YouTuber posted, They activated my unit and were getting real ammunition to shoot and kill.
He ended the message by saying, Rahoa, a portmanteau of the phrase, racial holy war, a Nazi rallying cry.
He told his followers that they may not hear from him again, but they might hear about him in the news.
Some urged him not to do anything stupid.
Others egged him on, telling him he should accelerate the collapse.
They were thrilled at the possibility that full-scale civil conflict could be incited by shooting into the crowd of protesters in Washington, D.C., Maybe the race war really was about to begin.
Whether he was just shitboasting or if he really was considering kicking off the race war, we'll never know.
If we're to take him at his word, always a shaky proposition, he was deployed with his National Guard unit at Lafayette Park, just outside the White House, when FBI agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force showed up to have a chat.
Soon after, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced that one of the National Guardsmen he'd sent to D.C. was being called back.
On June 5, 2020, Governor DeWine tweeted, I want to take a moment to address a situation regarding a member of the Ohio National Guard who was removed from the mission in Washington, D.C. after the FBI uncovered information that this guardsman expressed white supremacist ideology on the Internet prior to the assignment.
He didn't name the guardsman in question, and no explanation was offered about what exactly had been said, where it was said, or how the FBI came to see it.
Jared Holt at Right Wing Watch uncovered the small telegram channel where those comments had been made a few days later, and journalists at the non-profit media collective Unicorn Riot quickly identified the man in question as Shandon Simpson, a former member of the now-defunct neo-Nazi organization Vanguard America.
who had been photographed standing shoulder to shoulder with James Alex Fields Jr. at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, just hours before Fields committed a hate crime murder.
But that still didn't explain why the governor of Ohio was making public statements about an FBI investigation into this guardsman, especially considering no charges had been filed.
Simpson claims he was held in solitary confinement for a week, but the Ohio National Guard has disputed that claim.
He was never charged with a crime and later received a general discharge from the National Guard.
It wasn't until a federal criminal case against Ethan Melzer was unsealed two weeks later that the pieces fell into place.
They hadn't been investigating Shandon Simpson at all.
They just happened to come across his posts about murdering protesters in Washington, D.C. while they were investigating someone else's plot.
to murder an entire platoon of United States Army paratroopers 5,000 miles away.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
I'm Molly Conger.
This episode is coming out on Halloween.
That didn't occur to me until halfway through the week.
I don't have a great sense of time, even under the best of circumstances.
But when I realized that, I ditched what I was working on and tried to come up with something Halloween-y.
I think that's something people do, right?
They should have seasonal themed episodes.
But what does it mean to do a Halloween episode of a show where every episode...
It's about a monster.
How can you go spookier than we already are getting every week?
But then I realized, what's scarier than Satan himself?
This story has all the classic weird little guy stuff.
It's got neo-Nazis.
It's got white supremacist troops.
It's got hate groups splintering off into new hate groups because of arcane, internecine ideological squabbles and power struggles and personal beefs.
It's got a foiled terror plot and a court record full of tearful letters from friends and family insisting that the young man they know really isn't as bad as you think.
But this episode is a little different because the evil guys we're talking about aren't shying away from that label.
They want you to think they're evil.
They're devil-worshipping neo-Nazis hell-bent on ending life as we know it.
This episode is not about Shandon Simpson.
Don't worry, Shandon.
Today is not your day.
When I met Shandon last year while I was covering a pro-Russia rally masquerading as an anti-war protest at the Lincoln Memorial, He denied ever having been a member of Atomwaffen or any related groups.
Now, personally, I don't think he was telling me the truth.
But it's not exactly easy to prove someone was a member of a secretive organization, and he's never been charged with anything, so I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
But it can be said, without dispute, that Shandon Simpson was a member of a telegram channel for a group called Rapewaffen.
Yes, rape-waffen.
I'm so sorry.
Because that's what we're talking about today.
And just a quick note at the top, this show doesn't have content warnings, because it's always about something bad.
I don't want to get into the discourse about content warnings, they certainly have their place, but this show is never not going to be about violence, and it would be redundant to mention it every time.
But the particular subsect of Nazi Satanists we're talking about today are really, really obsessed with sexual violence.
I'm going to use the word rape a lot.
But there aren't any descriptions of anyone actually being sexually assaulted.
A few side characters do commit some sexual assaults and were found to possess child sexual abuse material, but we won't dwell on it in any kind of detail.
But here's your exit ramp if you just aren't in the mood to hear me say the word rape 30 or 40 times.
The fact that Shandon Simpson was a member of the Rape Waffen Telegram channel is, again, undisputed.
He said it himself.
For what it's worth, Simpson has claimed that he was only a member of the chat because he was...
Documenting the malevolent influence of Satanism on the fascist movement, which sounds incredibly stupid.
But honestly, that might be the truth.
And I'm not just saying that because he has threatened to sue me for merely repeating what was published by the Washington Post, which is that he was a member of Rape Waffen.
He takes issue with the implication that he was an ideological adherent of the group's satanic beliefs.
He insists that being a member of the channel, which he, again, doesn't deny, doesn't mean he was a member of the group.
I can kind of see that that might be true, but that's a distinction without a difference to me.
He was a member of Rape Waffen, the Telegram channel, but he insists he was not a member of Rape Waffen, the group.
Do with that what you will.
And this allegation got new life a few months ago when he was making a scene outside the Democratic National Convention with a Hezbollah flag.
Videos of him antagonizing people outside the venue got some traction online, and people recognized him as a Nazi we've seen before.
And that two-year-old Washington Post article about him started circulating again.
So, stupid games, stupid prizes, etc.
Take it up with Jeff Bezos, I guess.
And in his defense, to the degree I'm interested in such a thing, he did co-author a document in 2018, two years before he was outed as a member of the Rape Waffen chat, with another former member of Adam Waffen outlining the ways in which they felt the movement was being damaged by influential Adam Waffen member John Cameron Denton's embrace of Satanism.
So...
Maybe he was just in there collecting evidence.
Who can really say?
It's not like it really clears his name to say, you know, hey, I didn't have a huge issue with the Nazi stuff or the murders, but this blood magic devil thing is taking it in a bad direction.
I know I said this episode is not about Chandon Simpson, and it's not.
Don't worry.
But this ideological split within the Nazi terrorism enthusiast community over whether or not Satanism was cool is an important bit of context for where we're going, I promise.
Rape Waffen was one of the groups to crop up during this period of conflict within Atomwaffen about the growing influence within the group of the Order of Nine Angles, a militant Satanist occult organization that insists it isn't a Nazi group.
It is hard to describe the Order of Nine Angles, Ona for short, in a way that makes any sense.
And that's intentional.
I mean, quite literally, beyond the usual sort of esoteric nature of occult groups, writings attributed to Ona invented a concept called Labyrinthos Mythologicus.
The idea is that the writings are intentionally contradictory, bordering on incomprehensible on purpose, and their true meaning is only legible to those who are worthy of interpreting them.
So, if you don't get it, that's because you aren't meant to.
Because of Ona's decentralized, leaderless structure, all members are self-initiated.
To join the order of nine angles, you have to figure it out on your own.
The texts are available, but the true process, apparently, is only revealed to you in the course of performing the ritual of self-initiation.
Part of the self-initiation ritual involves walking into a river and imagining the moon's energy flowing into you, which sounds like a fine way to spend an evening, but it's not all moonlight skinny dipping.
There's a lot of...
Carving swastikas into your own arm with a razor blade and then smearing your blood all over a magical race war manifesto.
I know.
I know.
These are Nazi wizards and they're doing blood magic to conjure demons to end the world.
This is worse than the fact that the Klan calls their chapters Claverns and the secretary of a Clavern is called a Kligrap.
It's so frustrating that these scary murderers all sound like fucking dorks.
For all the trappings of wizardry, though, it might help to just think of them like any other kind of accelerationists.
We've talked a lot about accelerationists in other episodes.
They want to destabilize society and force it into a collapse so that something new can be born.
Just like any right-wing extremist taking shots at an electrical transformer.
All this extra stuff about how they believe that collapse paves the way for the return of a messianic figure called Vindex, who will usher in a new social order called the Imperium, during which a new superior race of humans will evolve and these new Aryans will colonize the galaxy.
It's not important.
It absolutely does not impact your ability to follow this story to know more about Nazi Jesus taking the Hitler wizards to space.
Quite frankly, I refuse to find out more information about the Galactic Imperium.
It sounds too stupid.
In the end, I guess every cult ends up in space.
You dig deep enough into just about any cult.
They're going to space.
And like I said, it's confusing on purpose.
You could drive yourself to madness trying to parse out what's a metaphor, what's a joke, what's intentional obfuscation in the spirit of the sinister dialectic, what someone actually believes or what they're only pretending to believe.
In one telegram message from a Rape Waffen member, the poster jokes that if a federal agent is reading his private messages, quote, he has to read through hella esoteric conversation and probably still doesn't even understand it.
And I'm not a federal agent, but I did read through some of those chats, and I gotta say, he's right.
It was hella esoteric, and I didn't get all of it.
And that's fine.
Because in the end, all you can really judge them by is their actions and their impact.
Whether or not they truly believe the demonic entity Vindex is going to incarnate in human form and bring about the Imperium doesn't really matter.
Imperium Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid.
Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
And he was just staring at me.
And they had secrets of their own to share.
Gilbert King, I'm the son of...
Jeremy Lynn Scott.
I was no longer just telling the story.
I was part of it.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known.
If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail.
I would have never existed.
I never expected to find myself in this place.
Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Bone Valley, Season 2. Jeremy.
Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
I'm Soledad O 'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s.
Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along a towpath near the E&O Canal.
So when she was killed in a wealthy neighborhood...
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back, behind the heart.
...the police arrived in a heartbeat.
Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump Jr. was arrested.
He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black.
Only one woman dared defend him, civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree.
Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist.
Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Next.
It's the early days of COVID.
April 2020.
A woman in a small town in Oklahoma makes a strange post to Facebook.
And then...
I'm on day nine of this virus and I am pretty sure it has reached my lungs.
I made the decision at the onset that if it got bad enough, I would not go to the hospital.
Pretty quickly, a ragtag group of women on the internet start their own investigation.
It felt like I was living out one of my fantasy dreams of being a detective.
But the world they uncover...
is beyond their wildest imagination.
How did this happen?
Listen to What Happened to Talena Czar on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
you you Hey, my name's Jay Shetty, and I'm the host of On Purpose.
And I'm excited for my next episode with Khloe Kardashian.
God, I've been through so many things that at this point I would rather not feel than feel because feeling is too much for me to handle.
All right, we're ready.
I am Khloe Kardashian.
Khloe Kardashian, everybody.
Khloe Kardashian.
No one understands how it's I'm Not Just a TV Show.
There would be times that I was like, I don't even want to go out to the grocery store because I feel like I know what they're thinking about me.
And that was scary to me because I've never been in a dark place for that long.
You've always taken care of others.
Have you discovered anything about why you've seen yourself take on that role in so many relationships in your life?
How do you even find the courage to trust again?
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So, for as much time as I spent reading every available academic paper on the subject, which is surprisingly few, actually, I'm not sure it's going to do much good for me to explain more about...
The Acausal Realm.
I'm sorry to any of the cool wizards in the listening audience, some of you are very nice people, but my general feeling about the ways in which magic and religion exist as driving forces in history is that it doesn't really matter what's real.
If someone sincerely believes that they are practicing magic by engaging in ritual acts that in turn have a real-world impact, you know, like an act of terrorism, What does it mean to say the magic isn't real?
Does it matter if a spirit was really summoned to aid in this act if, in the end, it still happened?
And I say that not because I think any of you are listening to this on your drive to work and asking yourself, oh, are they really commuting with satanic deities on another plane of existence?
I don't really think many of you are asking yourselves that.
But a lot of you might be asking yourself, do they really believe they are doing that?
And I think the answer is the same.
Does it matter?
If they're only pretending to believe it, but it still guides the way they operate in this realm, you know, the real world, what difference does it make?
If I punched you in the face and then said, oh, I was only pretending I wanted to hurt you.
Does that change the fact that your nose is bleeding?
And as for the claims in some owner writings that the group is not inherently committed to neo-Nazi or fascist ideologies, I'll give you the same answer.
Adherents have claimed that their fondness for Nazi ideology is simply a manifestation of a core principle of left-hand path magic.
That is, to be intentionally transgressive and provocative, To engage in the most taboo possible behavior and to violate all conceivable social norms.
These are things that make your magic more potent.
There are Onateks that explicitly encourage the magical practitioner to adopt things like neo-Nazi ideology.
Not because they believe it, but because it is part of this sinister strategy and it will hasten the revolution required to bring about the Imperium.
And, you know, You can tell me you don't actually believe the Nazi stuff you're saying, but if you're saying Nazi stuff, and you're doing Nazi stuff, and your goal is for a demonic messiah to wipe out the Jews, your group is a Nazi group.
If you think a supernatural entity is going to return to cleanse the world of subhumans to clear the path for a new Aryan race, that's Nazi stuff.
No matter how you've tried to obscure that in your weird little texts.
There is, of course, the obvious point that the Order of Nine Angles was for decades, led by a British Nazi named David Myatt.
Myatt is a strange and mysterious figure for another day, but it's worth pointing out that he was also a founding member of Combat 18. A UK-based Nazi terrorist organization originally formed to act as the violent arm of the British National Party.
Harold Covington, another weird little guy's recurring character, was also instrumental in forming Combat 18 before he returned home to the U.S. to try to get an ethnostate going in Idaho.
And one of Ona's more prolific authors, under the pen name A.A. Moraine, was an English Nazi named Ryan Fleming.
When he wasn't writing esoteric Nazi wizard books, Fleming was a regional organizer for the UK-based terrorist organization National Action and a pedophile in his spare time.
He was arrested again in 2021 after violating a court order that prohibited him from having unsupervised contact with minors.
The court order was put in place after his conviction in 2017 for sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl he met on Facebook.
And a conviction in 2014 for imprisoning and sexually abusing a teenage boy.
He served 22 months for the first sex crime against a child and three years for the second one.
When he was arrested for trying to do it a third time, he got six months, which means he must be out and about now, but I couldn't find any more recent news coverage.
In the course of researching for this show, I read a lot of material that I do not enjoy.
But I did not force myself to read this pedophile's wizard books.
I just, I didn't do it.
I didn't do it this week.
I'm not sure what it would have added.
I'm kind of a completionist.
I thought about it, but I didn't.
I mean, I'm sure there are some really exciting passages in his book Scythain, Vampiric Witchcraft of the Dracon Covenant.
And honestly?
This description of Codex Aristarchus is a little tempting.
From the bloodstained moors of West Yorkshire, England, comes a genuinely amoral vampiric praxis melding the black arts of predatory astral vampirism with a harsh ordeal-based approach of the sinister Sevenfold Way.
In Codex Aristarchus, A.A. Moran presents the definitive collective works of the Drakon Covenant, including vampiric theory, rites, and methods, by By which the reader themselves can step upon the black path of the Vampiree, feeding upon the human herd and taking the treacherous road to confrontation with the bleak Ascended Masters, the Undead.
Okay, I did.
I downloaded a copy of it, so I do have a copy of Codex Aristarchus.
Maybe I'll let you know next week if I found out if vampires are real.
My point is, a lot of Nazi perverts are doing magical rituals, and all of a sudden, these influential figures within Atomwaffen are really encouraging it.
So in 2018, this move towards Satanism was a...
Big point of contention within the accelerationist community.
In 2017, Atomwaffen's founder, Brandon Russell, went to prison.
He's back in prison now for something else.
This was a different thing.
It's come up a few times in other episodes.
This was kind of a big moment in modern Nazi history, I guess.
But Brandon Russell's roommate, Devin Arthurs, had murdered their other two roommates.
Devin Arthurs' conversion to Islam shortly before these murders is...
Often misunderstood as evidence that he was getting out of Nazism, because why would a racist convert to Islam, right?
But I think this conversation about this strange syncretism is better left for another day.
I will eventually, I promise, do an episode about the Hitler-loving DC transit cop who went to prison for sending gift cards to ISIS.
But suffice it to say for now, There is absolutely no contradiction inherent in an American neo-Nazi getting really interested in the violent side of Islamic extremism, up to and including converting to Islam.
So after Devin Arthurs told the police that he had murdered Jeremy Himmelman and Andrew Onishuk, the cops searched the home that they'd all shared with Brandon Russell.
The police found the dead bodies of two Atomwaffen members, obviously.
But they also found Brandon Russell's bomb-making supplies.
So he was down for the count for a while.
And in his absence, John Cameron Denton was among those Atomwaffen members whose influence grew.
Within Atomwaffen, Denton used the pseudonym rape.
Just rape, that's what he was called.
They called him rape.
And based on his internet footprint, Denton had been involved with the Order of Nine Angles for several years already.
And within Atomwaffen, he quickly became a protege of James Mason, the elderly pedophile who served as the ideological advisor for Atomwaffen from its earliest days.
James Mason is the author of Siege, the terrorist's handbook that was Atomwaffen's most important text.
But he's also been to jail several times for possessing pornographic photographs of underage girls, sexual exploitation of a minor, and threatening his underage girlfriend with a gun.
His fondness for blowing up the power grid is rivaled only by his love of 15-year-old girls.
He still regularly receives Nazi admirers at his home in Colorado, and when Adam Waffen was at its height, making the trip out to see Mason was a pretty big deal.
And, of course, every member of Atomwaffen had to read Siege.
That sprawling collection of essays advocating for various ways an aspiring young terrorist might kick off the race war.
Mason wrote Siege as a newsletter throughout the early to mid-80s.
The essays were collected and published in book form in the early 90s, but it wasn't until 20 years later that the book really exploded onto the scene.
I guess that's a bad choice of words, given the amount of bombs built by guys who read it.
But what I mean is, it didn't become as popular as it is now until it was reborn as a PDF on the pages of the Iron March Forum in the early 2010s.
And that's where Atomwaffen was born.
In the years since, Siege has been updated, revised, and republished several times.
Under the pseudonym Vincent Snyder, John Cameron Denton edited the fourth edition of Siege, adding a new final chapter and updating the artwork with the help of Canadian neo-Nazi and graphic designer Patrick Gordon MacDonald.
Before MacDonald was identified by Vice News in 2021, he was known only as Dark Foreigner.
Like Denton, MacDonald has deep connections to the Order of Nine Angles.
And if you've ever seen almost any propaganda, From groups like Atomwaffen, The Order of Nine Angles, Sonnenkrieg Division, The Base, or any of these other little offshoots in that milieu, you have almost certainly seen Dark Foreigner's artwork.
He was prolific.
He set the tone.
He set the style.
I can't imagine he's still making the artwork for these kinds of groups, but the style remains.
And his style greatly influenced the online culture around Saint worship, which we talked about in the Terrogram episode.
A lot of the images circulating on Telegram in the early days of forming this culture around the canonization of mass murderers were images made by Patrick MacDonald.
MacDonald was arrested in Canada last year for facilitating terrorist activity.
And it was during this time period that Atomwaffen was splintering, spinning off a variety of related groups like Sonnenkrieg Division, Feuerkrieg Division, the Northern Order, Feuerschaft And a lot of these groups, like Atomwaffen at the time, are deeply steeped in the beliefs of the Order of Nine Angles.
And it was within this Rape Waffen telegram chat that we finally find the subject of this story.
Ethan Phelan Melzer.
He was arrested three days after his 22nd birthday and a few days before he planned to die alongside 40 other soldiers in an attack he hoped Al-Qaeda would carry out based on classified military information he'd provided.
He was hoping it would start a war.
There is always going to be disagreement about whether a group is or isn't a splinter faction or a subsect of some ideological predecessor.
In some cases, there's a question of whether a group even really existed at all, or if it was just a chat room for a particular clique within another organization, or if it was just a meme.
There are probably Not more than a few dozen researchers out there who know enough about this particular moment in time that, if they're listening to this, are shaking their heads in dismay at my characterization of some detail or another.
But it's as close as we're going to get short of a dissertation.
So, good enough.
Because it's difficult now, years later, to piece back together the scraps of...
Archived materials from these banned chat rooms to sort out what Rape Waffen ever really was.
The earliest remnants I can find of Rape Waffen date back to the summer of 2019, but I really wouldn't be surprised if someone produced to me evidence that it existed in private chats for months prior to that.
The group's telegram channels were banned at various points, forcing them to reinvent themselves over and over again, sometimes forming new channels every couple of weeks.
The channel's administrator was explicit in stating that Rape Waffen was a splinter from Atomwaffen.
And in every online space where Rape Waffen members were posting, their involvement in and support for the Order of Nine Angles was terribly explicit in every sense of the word.
And so as Atomwaffen is falling apart over this debate, Rape Waffen is taking a Boldly, pro-Satanism stance.
And they claim to have nexions, which is the ona term for a cell, in the United States, Canada, Australia, Russia, Portugal, and other unlisted countries.
In November of 2019, a channel that was just called RAPE, in all caps, posted that Rape Waffen was, once again, open for recruiting.
The same week, that channel posted, among other things, instructions for making meth, a message that can't be viewed because it was found to violate the law, and the statement, quote, In the chat, members shared videos of women being raped, as well as more standard accelerationist fare.
You know, gore videos, footage of atrocities committed in wars, mass shooting live streams, ISIS beheading videos, the usual things like that.
And if I haven't mentioned it yet in some other episode, I would like to say you don't need to try to find these things.
I can't stop you.
I'm not telling you what to do.
I'm not your boss or your mom.
But I'm telling you, you don't have to.
These chats in particular, you probably wouldn't be able to find.
They're gone for the most part.
But in general, I know that curiosity can be a very powerful thing.
But unless this is a particular area of research for you in a professional or academic capacity, there's really nothing to gain from trying to see it for yourself.
I promise you.
Having the ability to quickly scroll past a GIF of a woman being shot in the head and having the involuntary instant reaction of categorizing that as the final moments of a particular person's life from a particular video that I wish I'd never seen is not a skill I wanted.
Sometimes I have to close the chat and pull up a picture of what that woman looked like when she was alive, smiling.
Because she wasn't a GIF.
She wasn't just the moment of her death.
She was a young woman trying to make a life for herself.
I'm not trying to gatekeep Nazi gore videos or whatever.
I just want you to know you don't need to see them.
If it helps at all, if this is something that you need, you have my permission to not find out more.
There's no valor in making yourself sick, and these chat rooms can be really disturbing places.
So if, hopefully, you're not familiar with the messaging app Telegram, there are both chats and channels.
That is, there are spaces on Telegram where only the channel owner can post, and you can subscribe to see their posts.
And there are also chat rooms where every member can post messages and have conversations with one another.
I don't know if I could possibly have explained that in a way that sounded more elderly.
I do know how to use the internet, I promise.
And the channel administrator for most of these official rape-waffen channels was someone using the names Sinisterious or Sinistrous Rape.
The member chat, however, was run by a user called Sinister Noctulian.
A Noctulian is a practitioner within this particular subset of being a Nazi wizard.
In all my research through court documents and publicly available research and reporting, the only two people ever concretely identified as having been members of Rape Waffen chats and channels on Telegram were So I can't tell you with any certainty who Sinister Noctulian could be.
It wasn't either of them.
It wasn't Ethan or Shandon.
But I can tell you, without implying anything in particular, that it is interesting to me that Sinister Noctulian never posted in the chat again after January 10th, 2020.
Which...
In a strange coincidence, is the same day that Atomwaffen member John Kirby Kelly was arrested by the FBI.
Two days later, a message from Sinister Noctulian was forwarded by another user into the Rape Waffen channel.
Now, the archive is so fragmented, I'm, you know, collecting these broken links and old screenshots from the internet's darkest corners, so it isn't...
100% clear to me where the message was originally posted.
It may have been a private message that the recipient then forwarded to a broader audience, but on January 12th, 2020, two days after John Kirby Kelly was arrested, the user called Sinister Noctulian sent a message to someone on Telegram, and it said, In jail, LOL.
Snuck my cell in.
And the message was accompanied by a one second long video showing the inside of a jail cell and the camera sort of pans shakily and quickly over the legs of the person holding the cell phone.
They're lying on the cot in the cell and they appear to be wearing the blue disposable scrubs that jails put on prisoners when they transport them from one facility to another.
I think the idea is that...
The uniform belongs to the jail, and so if you go to a different jail, the first jail doesn't want to lose that uniform.
The point is, we don't know who Sinister Noctulian is.
But if anyone is familiar with what the segregation cells inside the Alexandria City Jail look like, I did try to find images online, but there aren't a lot of pictures of the insides of jail cells.
But he was arrested in Alexandria.
And the jail in Northern Virginia that has the contract with the federal prison system to hold detainees would probably be the Alexandria City Jail.
So if you know what the inside of those cells look like, let me know.
I'm just curious.
And in this constant cycle of death and rebirth of these chats, a new Telegram channel was formed in March of 2020.
And this time, the channel administrator was a user called Iron Cult.
The channel announced the following month in April that Sinistrous Rape would be taking an indefinite hiatus.
Again, it's hard to say who Sinistrous Rape might have been.
But I will just note, in an unrelated fashion, that John Cameron Denton, Rape himself, was arrested in February of 2020, along with Atomwaffen members Johnny Garza, Cameron Shea, Taylor Parker de Pepe, and Caleb Cole.
And the channel that was formed after Denton's arrest didn't last long either.
It was abandoned within weeks after Atomwaffen member Timothy Wilson was killed in a shootout with the FBI while they were trying to arrest him while he was trying to blow up a hospital in Missouri.
And Wilson had only come under investigation because his name came up after the arrest of Jarrett Smith, a soldier stationed in Kansas who was arrested in 2019.
For distributing information to other Atomwaffen members about how to create weapons of mass destruction.
Jarrett Smith, too, was a member of Atomwaffen and a Satanist.
A new Rape Waffen channel was formed a few days after Timothy Wilson's death.
One of the first posts was a recipe for a bomb.
There's no clear evidence that was ever produced in any of these cases that would let me tell you with certainty.
That any of those Atomwaffen members were also members of the Rape Waffen channels.
But a lot of Rape Waffen posters disappeared suddenly in the early months of 2020, and the ones remaining grew intensely paranoid about infiltration by informants and federal agents.
And you've probably guessed by now, since we're talking about it, that paranoia did not protect them.
And so it was during this period of intense turnover within Rape Waffen itself that Ethan Melzer finds the group.
Just four days after the channel administrator had announced that Sinistrous Rape was on hiatus, Melzer was exchanging private messages with the channel's new administrator.
Now, in the court documents, this user is only identified as the channel administrator or co-conspirator one.
They don't list.
The username.
So I don't know if it was Iron Cult.
Again, I'm trying to piece together a very fragmented record so they could be referring to a chat.
I don't see.
But he was chatting with a channel administrator.
And the government never names this person, but they do indicate in a footnote that, based on their investigation, they believe that this individual is a Canadian teenager posing as a former paratrooper.
And this is, believe it or not, Not the only time that a literal child in a foreign country has tricked members of the United States military into becoming a Nazi terrorist.
Like, they need to have some kind of training specifically about how to not get fooled into joining an online terror cell run by a kid.
I mean, I guess if you could keep them out of all terror cells, that really solves the whole problem.
It's probably a better goal.
But oh my god, it is really embarrassing for the whole world to know that our troops are this gullible.
I mean, just like, national security-wise, that doesn't seem great for us.
So on April 21st, 2020, Ethan Melzer is finally chatting with someone from Rape Waffen.
And he's chatting with this teenager that he thinks is an adult veteran.
And he asks if he can join Rape Waffen.
They don't mention this in the court record, but April 21st is the day after Hitler's birthday, which would have made this the first day of the new year for adherence to the Order of Nine Angles.
See, they have their own calendar that starts on April 20th, 1889, the day Hitler was born.
So...
1890 is year one, and it makes 2024 the year 135.
And they write it YF-135.
The YF used to stand for year of the Führer, which makes perfect sense if we're talking about, you know, years since Hitler was born.
But sometime in the early 2000s, Onatek start referring to it as year of Fein, which makes no sense.
One academic article I found claimed that no one actually knows where that originated or what it derives from.
But within Ona, the claim is that it means year of rejoicing.
I guess we've been rejoicing ever since Hitler was born.
Like, it's still a Hitler thing.
And in the spirit of honesty, I do have a confession to make.
For years.
I have assumed that the Order of Nine Angles invented this Hitler-based dating system, right?
Like, surely no one else is corny enough to invent a whole new Hitler-based calendar.
So imagine my surprise, and quite frankly embarrassment, when I stumbled across a few months ago an old letter written by Matthias Kohl to William Luther Pierce in 1966.
So it's on the original American Nazi Party letterhead with their P.O. Box in Alexandria, and it's dated 22 January, YF 77. So the wizards didn't invent the Hitler calendar.
I guess George Lincoln Rockwell did.
But I'm sorry, I've gotten lost again.
Sometimes I just feel like all roads are taking me back to William Luther Pierce.
It's just inescapable.
So this Canadian child, Right?
Tells Ethan Melzer that initiation into the Order of Nine Angles is a prerequisite for membership in Rape Waffen.
Like, we can't even continue talking about you getting into Rape Waffen until you become a wizard.
And Melzer assures him, oh, I've already done that.
I've already self-initiated.
No worries.
And with that out of the way, the teenager begins vetting the soldier for Rape Waffen membership.
Are you ready to cause damage both mentally, physically, and magically?
And be serious?
I already have, so yes.
How do you incorporate the sinister, numinous way in your life?
Always working on some form of insight roll, working the pathways when I have time, building up to internal adept.
Internal adept, here, refers to the fourth of the seven levels.
Through which a member of the Order of Nine Angles can progress.
So you start as a neophyte, then you're an initiate, then external adept, internal adept, master, grandmaster, and eventually immortal.
I don't know that anyone has ever achieved immortal.
Adherents have said that very few members actually progressed to those upper levels.
And so if Melzer was working up to internal adept in April of 2020, That means he was at the time an external adept.
To become an external adept, you have to engage in a ritual where you lie down on the ground all night without moving or falling asleep.
And to be fair, that's probably a lot harder than it sounds, but it still sounds like child's play compared to the requirement to advance again.
Because to become an internal adept...
A practitioner must withdraw from society completely for several months, living alone in the wild with no contact with society or no modern conveniences.
And before you even attempt the necessary ritual to advance to internal adept, an external adept should practice culling.
That is, human sacrifice.
Now, I don't want to be entirely sensationalistic about this, right?
When we're talking about esoteric occult texts, when you're talking about magic, not everything is literal.
A lot of practitioners will say that, well, culling is symbolic.
This human sacrifice can be metaphorical, some ritualized performance during a ceremony.
But I've read more Ona literature than I would have preferred.
And generally, it seems like they mean it.
Members should kill.
In an essay called Culling as Art, Anton Long, the ONA Grandmaster most researchers believe is actually just David Myatt, wrote, Some humans, by nature, by character, are rotten, worthless.
And when this rotten character is revealed by their deeds, it is beneficial to remove them.
To cull them.
It doesn't sound like that's a metaphor.
And Long, or David Myatt, has written multiple treatises on culling, advising that culling should target, quote, the sworn enemy, any of whom are deemed acceptable targets.
That doesn't sound like a metaphor.
And that's what was on Ethan Melzer's mind that day.
As an external adept, he was actively working towards a plan that would result in a mass casualty incident in the short term.
And if he was lucky, thousands more deaths in the war he hoped would follow.
The question of whether or not Ethan Melzer had ever tried to kill someone before is murky.
A few days before his arrest, the Rape Waffen Channel administrator messaged him and said, And I quote, And so Melzer claimed that as a teenager, he'd been working in the Louisville, Kentucky area as a street-level drug dealer for a gang called the Bounty Hunter Bloods.
In January of 2017, he arranged to meet with someone to purchase some marijuana, and instead of paying for the drugs, He ran.
And when the seller gave chase, the men struggled, and Melzer shot him.
Now, Melzer was never arrested for drug dealing, let alone shooting a man.
So you might think he was making that up to impress the other wizards.
Maybe if you're from Louisville, you're saying, oh, of course, I know the bounty hunter bloods.
But, to be honest, I didn't know they had bloods in Kentucky.
It sounds fully made up to me.
Investigative journalist Allie Winston wrote in a piece for Rolling Stone that a records request to the Louisville Metropolitan Police produced no responsive record of an incident matching the details provided here.
But the shooting is laid out in some pretty clear detail in the prosecution's sentencing memorandum.
And the defense doesn't dispute it.
In fact, they refer to it as well as something that happened.
And if the case had gone to trial, the government was prepared to put on witnesses, including someone who was prepared to testify that not only had Melzer told him about the shooting immediately after it happened, he actually knew the victim and was aware that the man's humerus had been shattered by the bullet and he had permanently lost the use of that arm.
And a witness who had been Melzer's roommate at the time planned to testify that he was aware of Melzer's drug-dealing activities during that time period and...
He'd seen photographs of the bullet wound.
So, I guess he really did shoot a guy in 2017?
But we are not talking about Ethan Melzer because he was a drug dealer who shot another drug dealer in a drug deal in Louisville in 2017.
We're talking about Ethan Melzer because in 2020, he was charged with conspiracy to murder U.S. nationals.
Attempted murder of U.S. nationals, conspiracy to murder U.S. service members, attempted murder of U.S. service members, provision of material support to terrorists, conspiracy to murder and maim in a foreign country, conspiracy to injure property of a foreign government, and illegal transmission of national defense information.
So if you listened to the episode a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about...
How it's relatively uncommon for someone to be charged for lying on their enlistment paperwork about being involved with an extremist group?
Well, Ethan Melzer is someone I was thinking about specifically when I said, usually by the time it's obvious they lied about this, the situation has gotten a little more serious than lying on a form.
So, it sounds like they could have hit him with that charge too, but at this point, why bother?
And now that we are more than halfway through this story, now that you have a little context for where our weird little guy ended up, which is federal prison, now that you know something about a silly-sounding but frightening Nazi satanic cult and the messy situation within Atomwaffen and the years between Brandon Russell's first trip to federal prison and his second trip to federal prison and the eventual collapse of Atomwaffen,
Now I can start from the beginning of Ethan Melzer's story.
But unfortunately, because I started so far from the beginning, I'll have to get to the end next week.
I know this feels like a little bit of a bait and switch.
I told you this was going to be about Ethan Melzer trying to get Al-Qaeda to kill a bunch of soldiers in service of his advancement in a neo-Nazi satanic cult.
And we didn't even get to that.
But words like Nazi and...
Satanic cult are such loaded terms and ones that have been abused and exploited to trigger a specific kind of fear response in you.
So I felt like I owed it to you to give you this sort of convoluted history that led to him being in that chat room and to show you why I'm using those words and why they are absolutely appropriate here.
So...
I hope you'll come back next week to see how it all ended.
Thank you.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid.
Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
And he was just staring at me.
And they had secrets of their own to share.
Gilbert came.
I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
I was no longer just telling the story.
I was part of it.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known.
If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail.
I would have never existed.
I never expected to find myself in this place.
Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Bone Valley, Season 2. Jeremy.
Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
I'm Soledad O 'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s.
Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along a towpath near the E&O Canal.
So when she was killed in a wealthy neighborhood...
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back, behind the heart.
The police arrived in a heartbeat.
Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump, Jr. was arrested.
He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black.
Only one woman dared defend him.
Civil rights lawyer W. Roundtree.
Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist.
Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's the early days of COVID, April 2020.
A woman in a small town in Oklahoma makes a strange post to Facebook and then disappears.
I'm on day nine of this virus and I am pretty sure it has reached my lungs.
I made the decision at the onset that if it got bad enough, I would not go to the hospital.
Pretty quickly, a ragtag group of women on the internet start their own investigation.
It felt like I was living out one of my fantasy dreams of being a detective.
But the world they uncover...
is beyond their wildest imagination.
How did this happen?
Listen to What Happened to Talena Czar on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
you you Hey, my name's Jay Shetty, and I'm the host of On Purpose.
And I'm excited for my next episode with Khloe Kardashian.
God, I've been through so many things that at this point I would rather not feel than feel because feeling is too much for me to handle.
All right, we're ready.
I am Khloe Kardashian.
Khloe Kardashian, everybody.
Khloe Kardashian.
No one understands how it's I'm Not Just a TV Show.
There would be times that I was like, I don't even want to go out to the grocery store because I feel like I know what they're thinking about me.
And that was scary to me because I've never been in a dark place for that long.
You've always taken care of others.
Have you discovered anything about why you've seen yourself take on that role in so many relationships in your life?
How do you even find the courage to trust again?
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When we left off last week, it was April 21st, 2020, 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, It was committed to the satanic cult called the Order of Nine Angles.
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 break.
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 fain, F-A-Y-N, an adverb meaning gladly or joyfully.
Which, in turn, comes from the Old English gefan, meaning to rejoice.
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 30th, 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 on to his new friends in the order of nine angles.
Every detail about the mission, down to photos he clandestinely took of the maps shown in the briefing, was shared immediately with Rape Waffen.
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 eighth 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 flophouse to flophouse and started dealing drugs.
He shot another drug dealer.
That shooting, the one we talked about a bit in the first episode, Does seem well corroborated.
I think it really did happen.
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, Another Job Corps employee who worked with Ethan during his time in the program said,
The kids who come in with those ideas never last long.
They do come, but they get into conflicts and they always leave.
Another of Ethan's instructors in the program said, If 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 antisemitism.
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 DaggerLight, 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 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.
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 enragement.
They think they can advance their own position in the movement by having the state take out their rivals or...
They think they can curry favor with the authorities by dropping a few tidbits of information here and there.
Just because he's getting paid to do it doesn't mean he wouldn't be doing it otherwise or that he doesn't believe it.
Sutter's lengthy career as a government informant, the 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.
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.
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.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid.
Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
And he was just staring at me.
And they had secrets of their own to share.
Gilbert came.
I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
I was no longer just telling the story.
I was part of it.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known.
If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail.
I would have never existed.
I never expected to find myself in this place.
Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Bone Valley, Season 2. Jeremy.
Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
I'm Soledad O 'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s.
Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along a towpath near the E&O Canal.
So when she was killed in a wealthy neighborhood...
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back, behind the heart.
The police arrived in a heartbeat.
Within 40 minutes, a man named Raymond Crump, Jr. was arrested.
He was found nearby, soaking wet, and he was black.
Only one woman dared defend him.
Civil rights lawyer, Dubby Roundup.
Join me as we unravel this story with a crazy twist.
Because what most people didn't know is that Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's the early days of COVID, April 2020.
A woman in a small town in Oklahoma makes a strange post to Facebook and then disappears.
I'm on day nine of this virus and I am pretty sure it has reached my lungs.
I made the decision at the onset that if it got bad enough, I would not go to the hospital.
Pretty quickly, a ragtag group of women on the internet start their own investigation.
It felt like I was living out one of my fantasy dreams of being a detective.
But the world they uncover...
is beyond their wildest imagination.
How did this happen?
Listen to What Happened to Talena Czar on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
you you you you Hey, my name's Jay Shetty, and I'm the host of On Purpose.
And I'm excited for my next episode with Khloe Kardashian.
God, I've been through so many things that at this point I would rather not feel than feel because feeling is too much for me to handle.
All right, we're ready.
I am Khloe Kardashian.
Khloe Kardashian, everybody.
Khloe Kardashian.
No one understands how it's I'm Not Just a TV Show.
There would be times that I was like, I don't even want to go out to the grocery store because I feel like I know what they're thinking about me.
And that was scary to me because I've never been in a dark place for that long.
You've always taken care of others.
Have you discovered anything about why you've seen yourself take on that role in so many relationships in your life?
How do you even find the courage to trust again?
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Music by Ben Thede 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.
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 10. 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 kinda 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 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 traders 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.
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.
Then 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, 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 Rape Waffen 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 adherence 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 after-effects of a convoy getting attacked would cover it.
It would be another war.
I would have died successfully, because another ten-year war in the Middle East would definitely leave a mark.
As the deployment date grew closer, Melzer shared every detail about the mission with Gulag Cult, the coordinates of the base, The number of 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 U.S. Army radio communications.
so that they would be able to hear their victims'deaths in real time when the attack was carried out.
On May 25th, 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 U.S. 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 cell phone.
He was hoping that if he was able to sneak his burner phone out on patrol and snap pictures...
His co-conspirators would be able to use the metadata to pinpoint the exact locations of the areas of vulnerability in the photos.
Now, whether Red Hourglass was working for the government all along or not, we don't know.
But on the evening of May 29, 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, And Melzer replied, 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, kick.
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 communing 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 resentenced, 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.
Also, 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 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.
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, 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 U.S. 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 a crying Nazi befriended a man that they call the Merchant of Death.
But maybe now's not the time to tell you about how a guy who used to really publicly fantasize about raping me used to watch Tucker Carlson every night in the prison 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 Gagin.
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.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's April 2020.
A woman announces on Facebook that she has COVID and won't be seeking medical attention.
I didn't want to be talked out of this plan.
Then she disappears.
Uh, anyone else think this is strange?
I just had to know.
How did this happen?
Listen to What Happened to Talena Zar on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.
Or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Soledad O 'Brien, and on my new true crime podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to 1964, to the cold case of artist Mary Pinchot Meyer.
She had been shot twice, in the head and in the back.
It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression.
John F. Kennedy.
Listen to Murder on the Towpath with Soledad O'Brien on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, and I'm the host of the On Purpose podcast, and I'm excited for my next episode with Khloe Kardashian.
God, I've been through so many things that at this point I would rather not feel than feel because feeling is too much for me to handle.
I am Khloe Kardashian.
Khloe Kardashian, everybody.
Khloe Kardashian.
I'm not just a TV show.
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
