Col Zone Media.
When we left off last week, it was April twenty first, twenty twenty a US 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 Adam Woffen who 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 fifteen 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 forty of his fellow soldiers and hopefully provoke a conflict in the Middle East that would claim thousands more lives. I'm Molly Konger. This is weird, little guys. Just a quick note at the top. I
do want to start off with a correction today. When we were talking last week about the Hitler based dating system used by the Satanic Nazi cult, I foolishly repeated a claim that I'd read that the origin of feyan was unknown, and that's on me. I should have double
check for myself. The order of nine angles marks the passage of time in years since the birth of Hitler, so twenty twenty four would be the year one thirty five, and they write that date out as y F one three five, where y F stands for a year of faeyan. I did a little more digging around because I just couldn't accept the explanation that there is no explanation.
And of course, fayan.
Spelled fay e n is almost certainly derived from a Middle English word faine fay n, an adverb meaning gladly or joyfully, which in turn comes from the Old English gaffeon, 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 got a 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 thirtieth, twenty twenty, when military authorities detained him He was standing outside at Camp Betterly, 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 air Stone, where they
would board a flight to Turkey. His platoon had been assigned to a sensitive mission at in Serlic Air Base, a Turkish air base near the Syrian border and one of a handful of foreign bases where the US military is known to store B sixty one 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 twenty eighth. 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 nineteen ninety eight 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 two thousand and two, 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 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 clansmen 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 four chan. 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 overweighted and unathletic. Who's uncool, Who's 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. I've
come to think of it. I know a lot of really great adults who would tell you today and 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 tenth grade, which would have been in twenty sixteen.
I think in.
Twenty sixteen 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 when 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 when it 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 twenty eighteen, at twenty years old, Ethan Melzer enrolled in the Job Core program. His time in the Job Core 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 Nine Angles, the Satanic Nazi cult he would soon initiate himself into. In an interview after Ethan's arrest, his Job Core career counselor said.
Neo Nazis and white supremacists don't last a week here. There is no way a kid who has those ideas can hide their true colors when they are surrounded by black people and I hear everything that goes on in the dorms. Ethan showed no signs at all of being a white supremacist.
Another Job Corp 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. I had racist and anti American kids here and they never make it. They can't hide it. We always find.
Out they can always tell they always root those kids out. Ethan was a model student. He showed no signs of racism or anti Semitism. He was friendly and helpful, and he got top marks on his evaluations in the category of multicultural awareness. He was patriotic and looking forward to serving his country. They can always tell, except he was lying to everyone. It was during his time in the job Corp 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 nexsion before he finished the In December of twenty nineteen, 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 twenty nineteen, he created an account on Discord, a messaging application originally favored mostly by gamers as dagger Light. He joined a Discord server for people interested in conspiracy theories and the occult. The court filings don't say exactly which one, but I have a guess.
The nonprofit investigative journalism collective Unicorn Riot has an extensive database of leaked discord chats. Most famously, they published the entire planning chat where 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 Flatter Earth, anti vax conspiracies, nine to eleven 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 twenty nineteen and he posted, Hello, I have some questions about a group I found. Don't know if you walk help. The group he was asking about was Temple of Blood. Temple of Blood is maybe the most prominent North American nexxion of the Order of Nine Angles, and it is the nexion that is mixed up with Adam Woffin 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 twenty 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 two thousand and three, 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, Ali Winston and Jake Hanrahan spoke to Harvard law professor Alexander Natopov 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 Adamwoffin members, who was arrested in twenty twenty. Ali Winston's most recent investigation into this story indicates that Sutter may have been involved with the Order of Nine
Angles for years before becoming a paid government informant. So it might be disingenuous to say that Temple of Blood only exists because the government was paying the guy who ran it. He may well have started his own nexxion with or without the one hundred and forty thousand dollars 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. Martinette Press, the publishing house that produced 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 while 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 Adam Woffin 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. Been some rumblings within the movement that the
whole idea is a government operation. Sometimes that looks like a sort of no true Scotsman's 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 deradicalize them, it's to push radicalization to its most extreme limits, making it unpalatable, making the movement just too damn weird to keep up with. Like I said, that's a little convoluted. I don't know that the government is playing that kind of three dimensional chess with Nazis, but it is a
theory I've seen pushed around a little bit. But Joshua Caleb Sutter's story is a long and strange one all on its own, and I'm actually saving it until I get to a weird little guy I've been fascinated by for years. You see, we didn't find out that Sutter was an FBI informant until pretty recently, but a fellow white nationalist who'd known him for decades had been pointing
the finger at Sutter for years. Bill White is almost certainly the most prolific jailhouse lawyer in the white supremacist movement. I've spent oh god, probably close to one thousand dollar 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. The guards are mean to him, he was framed for a fight he claims another inmate started, he isn't getting adequate treatment for his mental health problems.
And so on.
But he's also been saying for years that he was framed for one of the things that sent him to prison. And central to that argument is his fervent belief that Joshua Caleb Sutter was working for the FBI. So when it turned out he'd been right about Sutter all along, I was stunned. I'm not saying I believe Bill when he says he didn't send those emails threatening to kill a prosecutor's wife, but it's intriguing that he was right
about any 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 twenty thirty seven, so I've got plenty of time.
The ratings of an incarcerated Nazi.
Aside, no one knew Joshua Caleb Sutter was an FBI informant until twenty twenty one, so Ethan Melser certainly didn't have any inkling about it when he started asking about Temple of Blood in February of twenty nineteen. 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 nine A, 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 Melser 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 Adam Woffen, and Ethan Melser posts, this is going to sound bad, but I want to go further down the rabbit hole. Say someone were to go all the way trying to look for these people. How bad of an
idea is that? Like out of ten? A few days after expressing his desire to go down the Satanic rabbit hole, Ethan Melzer is having a private conversation with a member of the Order of Nine Angles, and he's asking for the text that he'll need to read to get started. Within weeks, he had accumulated a large collection of PDFs and books about the Order of Nine Angles. He was communicating regularly with at least two members. He got a tattoo on his left forearm of an eight pointed star,
often referred to as the symbol of chaos. He was already deep into his new magical practice before he finished the job Corp program. Just a few weeks before he showed up for basic training, another user in the discord server warned him to be careful.
Not to dissuade you, but you're kind of playing with fire dagger. The Uniform Code of Military Justice has a few things to say about members of the armed forces holding affiliations with extremist groups. For thee, he 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 an nexsion with him, and was coming up with vetting procedures for members of his nexion. He suggested that
the group's motto should be total aryan victory. In June, he joined another Discord server, this one devoted to discussion of esoteric Nazism.
Some Discord servers.
Allow users to assign little labels to their account, visible to other users next to their name. In this server, Melzer selected the user labels Satanism and fascism to describe himself. Another user asked if he really believed in both, and he replied quickly yes, and then backtracked, saying not really just fascism, and claimed he was only joking about Satanism. In another server, someone asked him if he had already
initiated into the Order of Nine Angles. He said no, but in another chat that same afternoon he had been discussing the fact that if asked, ona initiates were supposed to deny it. It is interesting to note that the second leaked discord server I found Melzer in was one mainly used to chat about esoteric Nazism, and it is
also one in which Shanton Simpson appears. I couldn't find any evidence that Melser 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 and Georgia on June fourth, twenty nineteen, 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 one hundred and seventy third 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, unmasks and left hanging from lamp posts 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 members should take on this role for six to eighteen months, depending on the texture looking at and the nature and purpose of the insight role has shifted a little bit over time and on the source text. At it's most innocuous, it's just
that same left hand path magical notion of doing something transgressive. Right, you should do something antithetical to yourself to deepen your practice of magic, to truly test your sinister resolve, you should pick a lifestyle a role that is as close to the polar opposite of your own life, your own true nature as possible. You should be the opposite of yourself for a year. But the insight role is widely understood to be something a bit darker than a little
Antinomian role playing game. Your insight role should allow you to infiltrate and ultimately subvert some kind of institution. Religious orders, police departments, and the military are commonly suggested for this purpose, particularly when it comes to insight roles in policing or the military. This also provides an opportunity to gain training and access to weapons. It can also provide a suitable
environment for the practice of culling. That's human sacrifice. These are jobs where you may well have the opportunity to kill, and that's what he's referring to. In the months before he reported for active duty, Ethan Melzer rapidly became obsessed with and then initiated himself into the Order of Nine Angles. He may not have formed the plan before he told his career counselor that he wanted to enlist, but by the time he put on the uniform for the first time,
he was only pretending to be a soldier. This was an insight role. By April of twenty twenty, when Ethan Melzer was joining rape Waffen, he'd been studying the Order of Nine Angles for more than a year. In one way early discussion with another Rapewaffen 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, Adam Waffen Order of Nine Angles, were in the military, got in trouble in twenty nineteen 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 twenty nineteen over allegations that he was the current leader of Adam Woffin and was involved in the Order of
Nine Angles. Or maybe he meant Jarrett Smith, the Adam Woffin member, Satanist and infantry soldier arrested in twenty nineteen for distributing information about bomb making. Maybe he was talking about Kyle Bent, the U. S. Army specialist who was discharged in twenty nineteen 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 Vasilio's Pastolis, the Marine lance corporal who was court martialed in twenty eighteen over his ties to Adam Woffin. 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 Woffen member who called himself Frycorps and was considering joining the Marines. Those early months of twenty twenty were a lifetime ago, so maybe you don't remember the specifics, but the COVID nineteen 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 US 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 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 Keleethi, the second of three parts of an Ona text called the Black Book of Satan. It looks like the copy he has as the fully illustrated version with drawings by Christos Beast, an English musician named Richard Molt who was allegedly a member of Ona's Old Guard. With David Mayat and alone in his barracks, Melzer consumed the violent gore videos that were shared so
gleefully in those telegram channels. Found in his digital possession were things like a video that appears to show a black woman being lynched by a white man in front of a Confederate flag, and a photo of a woman who is bound and hooded being held at gunpoint by a man standing in front of a flag with the insignia for the Order of nine Angles. The court record specifically notes several videos he'd watched depicting jihadist attacks on US 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 Rapewaffen Chat. Soon after, the channel administrator, our Canadian teenager posting as Gulag Cult, asked him for more information about the deployment because another Rapewaffen 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 Gray Wolves, a Turkish ultnationalist fascist paramilitary group that the European Parliament considers an international terrorist organization. A week before he was scheduled to deploy, Melzer posted in at least two telegram chats for adherents of the Order of Nine Angles that he was a US 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 eighteen members. One of those members was Ethan Melzer, one was Gulug cult Our, fifteen year old Canadian, and one was a user who called herself Red hour Glass, and Red hour Glass 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 fifteen members of that chat room. Not much as known about Red hour Glass.
She may not even be a woman at all.
Who knows line 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 twenty twenty, which is when all of this went down.
They don't give a more specific date than that, just May of twenty twenty, 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 hour glass.
Maybe that means something else to you, but to me, a red hour glass 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 hour glass, 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 forty soldiers were killed at a Turkish air base.
A day later, Gurlug Cult.
Asked him, are we really planning a Jihati attack, and Melzer agreed they were. Gulug Cult joked that if Melzer got himself shit in this attack 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 US 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 Read Hourglass, and a fourth user the government calls co Conspirator III,
someone posting under the name Jaw with two ws. In this chat, Melzer promised to provide the group with the frequency and channels for the US Army radio communications so that they would be able to hear their victims deaths in real time. When the attack was carried out on May twenty fifth, the day before his twenty second birthday, Ethan Melzer may have gotten cold feet.
He suggested to the.
Chat that maybe they shouldn't attack his convoy at all. He still loved the idea of murdering a whole convoy of US soldiers. He just thought maybe it would be better for him to go on this deployment, spend a few months there researching the vulnerabilities of the place, you know, sending back more intel, and then they could carry out this attack on the unit sent to replace his a
few months from now. He promised that he was packing a burner phone so he'd be able to provide them with photographs of the whole base once he got there, and then he didn't post for a few days. Red hour Glass informed the FBI of the plot the next day, May twenty six, twenty twenty, That was Ethan Melser's twenty second 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 thirtieth. 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 twenty ninth, 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 hour Glass was working for the government all along or not, we don't know. But on the evening of May twenty ninth, she may or may not have even been the one using her phone
once she spilled the beans to the FBI. It may have been an actual FBI agent chatting with Ethan Melzer as Red Hourglass as he reaffirmed his commitment to the plan that night, Red Hourglass asked him, what makes you think you can actually get away with fucking with the US military and Melser replied, because I fly under the raidar already act completely normal around other people outside and don't talk about my personal life or beliefs with anyone.
But he was starting to get nervous about the mission. He deleted most of his old posts. If the plan now was to attack the replacement convoy two months down the road, he was going to be alive when the investigation started, and he didn't want to get caught. Red Hourglass needled him, saying, you deleted them because that's treason duh, and he replied, KEK, that's k e K. It's a
substitute for LOL. The lore here is complicated and irrelevant, but the short version is that keck originated with Korean online gamers as a typed indication that the user is laughing, and it eventually migrated into the American altright lexicon of the twenty sixteen era. It's not important. The point is he was laughing off what he knew to be true. This was treasonous behavior. And Nat gets us back up
to where we started today. Ethan Melzer standing outside at Camp Betterly with his platoon on May thirtieth, twenty twenty. His bags were packed forty soldiers were waiting for the bus that would take them to the airstrip. Inside Ethan Melser'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 adherents of the Order of Nine Angles written by ONA Grandmaster Anton Long himself, and a copy of Kodux 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 guardsmen we were talking about last week, has been claiming all along about why he was in the
rape wop and 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 Knowlser'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 and 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 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 twenty twenty two, 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 US service members, provision and attempted provision of material support to terrorists, and illegal transmission of national defense information.
Pursue it.
To that plea agreement, he was sentenced to five hundred and forty months. That's forty five years in prison, assuming he maintains good behavior and doesn't commit any new offenses while incarcerated. The eighty five percent of that sentence that he'll end up serving is a little over thirty eight years. His scheduled release date is in November of twenty fifty eight.
He'll be sixty 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 five hundred and forty months or less, and he got five hundred and forty months. But in March of last year, just a few days after his sentencing, his attorneys filed an appeal asking for the case to be re sentenced, citing a particular comment the judge made in his remarks
after pronouncing the sentence. The transcript of that hearing shows the judge's remarks were fairly lengthy, covering nearly twenty 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 h just on the judge's use of the phrase Judeo Christian values.
Mister Melzer's crimes were pugnant. He betrayed the United States of America. He betrayed the United States military. He targeted for murder his fellow soldiers. He worked to aid Jahadis terrorists. Also, he could achieve his nihilist goal of unreminding Judeo Christian values and rupturing civilized society.
Of the Order of Nine Angles. Judge Woods said, the organization and mister Melzer opposed those Judeo Christian values because they are good for civilization. His crimes were committed in order to destroy civilization and look, to be honest, it probably would have been better if he had not said that, but it was a brief mention in a very lengthy monologue that also emphasized that the defendant was not charged or sentenced because of his beliefs, but for the actions
motivated by those beliefs. That single statement wasn't the basis for the sentence. It was just a comment. But the appeal argues that those comments constitute a sufficient appearance of the sentence having been based on a constitutionally impermissible factor, such as the defendants race or religious beliefs. The government contends that not only had Melser 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 bias motivation for the crime, not a characteristic of the defendant. There's a difference between talking about a defendants race or a defendant's religion and talking about the defendant's racial or religious motivation for a 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 fifteen years rather than the forty five 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 six, twenty twenty four. 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 aims that he regretted his actions, saying, in part, mister Melser now expresses remorse as he is facing justice for his crimes, but I frankly do not believe him.
Part of the methodology of his organization, as I understand it, is that one should hide one's true intentions and commitment to better achieve its goals, and over an extended period of time, mister Melser 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 mister Melser 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 is going to be behind bars for a long time and he probably won't come out a better man whenever that day comes. Sentencing is meant to balance the need for punishment, rehabilitation, protection of
the public, and deterrence. But based on the comments made at sentencing and the length of the sentence, this seems to be almost entirely in the service of deterrence. This isn't about preventing Ethan Melzer from doing this again. He couldn't do this again. It's about sending a message to everyone else who is considering joining the US military as part of their plan to reinvent the world through bloodshed
with violent revolution and mass murder. But you have to ask yourself if there's a more effective way to address this underlying issue of young men enlisting in the military because they dream of a race war this can't be the only option. Ethan Melzer is currently being held at FCI Marion, a medium security federal prison in Illinois that I most strongly associate with being the place where a man aptly nicknamed 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 wreck 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 reported by me, Molly Coner. Our executive produces are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot 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.