The Devil's Chat Room: Ethan Melzer, Pt. 1

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Also, media.

On May 26th, 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 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, when the looting starts, 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.

On June 2nd, 100 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 we're 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 shitposting 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 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 5th, 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 nonprofit 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 United 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'd 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.

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 is about a monster?

How can you go spookier than we already are getting every week?

But then I realized, what's scarier than Satan himself?

This story has all the classic weird 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 Adam Woffin 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 Rape Waffen.

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 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 Woffen 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 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 Woffen was one of the groups to crop up during this period of conflict within Adam Waffen 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 the razor blade and then smearing your blood all over a magical race war manifesto.

I know.

I know.

These are Nazi wizards and they're doing blood magic to conjure demons to end the world.

This is worse than the fact that the clan calls their chapters claverns and the secretary of a clavern is called a cligrap.

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 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.

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How are you supposed to stay on top of it all?

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It was an unimaginable crime.

It's four consecutive life terms for Brian Koberger, who killed the four University of Idaho students.

The defense are on a sinking ship.

It was clear at that point he was out of options.

Nearly 30 months of silence until.

Bombshell development Brian Koberger appearing set to accept a plea deal just five weeks before his quadruple murder trial was set to start.

No trial, no testimony.

He has pleaded guilty to five criminal counts, one of burglary, and then four counts of murder.

In this final season, we returned to Moscow with interviews from those still searching for answers.

Why did the prosecution take this?

They were holding all the cars.

How on earth could you make a deal?

What message does that send?

Listen to season three of the Idaho Massacre on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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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 communing 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 Ona texts 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 Myat.

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 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, Scythane, 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 Dracon Covenant, including vampiric theory, rites, and methods, 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 did.

I downloaded a copy of it, so I do have a copy of Codex Aristarchus.

Maybe I'll let you know next week if I found out if vampires are real.

My point is, a lot of Nazi perverts are doing magical rituals, and all of a sudden, these influential figures within Adam Woffen are really encouraging it.

So, in 2018, this move towards Satanism was a big point of contention within the accelerationist community.

In 2017, Adam Woffen'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 Arthur's, had murdered their other two roommates.

Devin Arthur's conversion to Islam shortly before these murders is often misunderstood as evidence that he was getting out of Nazism because why would a racist convert to Islam, 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 Arthur's 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 Adam Woffin members, obviously, but they also found Brandon Russell's bomb-making supplies.

So he was down for the count for a while.

And in his absence, John Cameron Denton was among those Adam Woffin members whose influence grew.

Within Adam Woffen, Denton used the pseudonym rape.

Just rape, that's what he was called.

They called him rape.

And based on his internet footprint, Denton had been involved with the Order of Nine Angles for several years already.

And within Adam Woffin, he quickly became a protege of James Mason, the elderly pedophile who served as the ideological advisor for Adam Waffen from its earliest days.

James Mason is the author of Siege, the terrorist's handbook that was Adam Waffin'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 Adam Waffen 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 Adam Woffen 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 McDonald.

Before McDonald was identified by Vice News in 2021, he was known only as Dark Foreigner.

Like Denton, McDonald has deep connections to the Order of Nine Angles.

And if you've ever seen almost any propaganda from groups like Adam Waffen, the Order of Nine Angles, Sonnen Krieg Division, The Bass, 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.

McDonald was arrested in Canada last year for facilitating terrorist activity.

And it was during this time period that Adam Woffin was splintering, spinning spinning off a variety of related groups like Sonnenkrieg Division, Feuerkrieg Division, the Northern Order, Feuerrschaft Division, and of course, Rape Waffen.

And a lot of these groups, like Adam Waffen 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:

U.S.

Army Private 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 sub-sect of some ideological predecessor.

In some cases, there's a question of whether a group even really existed at all, or if it was just a chat room for a particular 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 gonna 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 Woffen was a splinter from Adam Waffen.

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 Adam Waffen 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 RapeWaffin was, once again, open for recruiting.

The same week, that channel posted, among other things, instructions for making meth, a message that can't be viewed because it was found to violate the law, and the statement: quote:

We need to bring this world to total chaos if we want to change something.

We will do this through mass rape of infidels.

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 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 Noctullian 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 Ethan Melzer and Shandon Simpson.

So I can't tell you with any certainty who Sinister Noctullian 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 Noctullian never posted in the chat again after January 10th, 2020.

2020, which,

in a strange coincidence, is the same day that Adam Waffen 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 Adam Woffin members Johnny Garza, Cameron Shea, Taylor Parker DePepe, and Caleb Cole.

And the channel that was formed after Denton's arrest didn't last long either.

It was abandoned within weeks after Adam Woffin 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 Adam Waffen members about how to create weapons of mass destruction.

Jarrett Smith, too, was a member of Adam Waffen 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 Adam Waffen 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 Rapewafen.

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 YF135.

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, ONATECs start referring to it as year of Feyen,

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, YF77.

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 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 Numenous Way in your life?

Always working on some form of insight role, 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, an 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 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 Myat, 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 someone before

is murky.

A few days before his arrest, the Rapewaffin channel administrator messaged him and said, and I quote,

yo, can you give me some background, like some sinister deeds you've done?

Give me a break, man.

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 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 referred to it as well as something that happened.

And if the case had gone to trial, the government was prepared to put on witnesses, including someone who was prepared to testify that not only had Melzer told him about the shooting immediately after it happened, he 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 Adam Waffen in the years between Brandon Russell's first trip to federal prison and his second trip to federal prison and the eventual collapse of Adam Waffen.

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.

Weird Little Guys is a production of CoolZone 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 eternally patient and wildly talented Rory Gagan.

The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.

You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com, but I probably won't answer it.

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