Slow Decline

Nicholas Young had just become the first police officer in the United States to be arrested for a federal terrorism offense. As he was being processed into federal custody, FBI agents were searching his home, his truck, the backpack he'd been carrying at the time of the arrest, and his worklocker number forty five at the Metro Transit Police Department District two substation. Box after box of evidence was carried out

of his townhouse in northern Virginia. Agents collected nineteen firearms, eighteen thousand rounds of ammunition, seventy pieces of body armor, and sixty bladed weapons ranging from daggers to swords, But they also seized another kind of evidence. Nazi paraphernalia, a framed portrait of Hitler, a Nazi flag, a tie tack in the shape of an SS lightning bolt. On his hard drive, they found photos of a dinner party he'd hosted.

All of the guests were wearing Nazi SS uniforms. The agent's photographed, inventoried, and packed away dozens of pieces of evidence that could be used to show that Nicholas Young was a Nazi, but that wasn't what he was charged with. He was in prison for supporting ISIS, and there's a very good argument to be made that he didn't really do anything at all. I'm Molly Conger in this. It's weird, little guys. This is a story where nothing happens, no one really did anything. A lot of the key players

in this story don't even actually exist. The only crime Nicholas Young stands convicted of is a single count of providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization.

The only member of isis Nicholas Young, ever thought he knew was a confidential human source on the FBI payroll, and after years of prodding and encouragement, he sent this friend two hundred and forty five dollars worth of gift cards to the Google Play app store.

any other state. I think it's because they're really cheap here. They only charged I think ten dollars a year to put a personalized tag on your car, and it's fifty or seventy dollars in a lot of other states, and

Nicholas Young chose to pay ten dollars a year to drive around northern Virginia advertising his affinity for the Fry Corps. That's a term for the collection of loosely affiliated nationalists paramilitary groups that formed in Germany after World War One. They weren't Nazis technically, since there was no Nazi Party yet, but many leaders in the Free Corps would go on to join the Nazi Party, guys like Ernst Rome, Heinrich

Himmler and Rudolph Hess. They were the shock troops for what was to come, carrying out acts of extra judicial violence against left wing movements in Germany in the years after the First World War, and the kind of guy who romanticizes the idea of joining a nationalist street gang to beat up leftists is the kind of guy I'm interested to know more about, especially if that guy is a cop. So that's how he ended up in my notebook.

But like I said, his fondness for Nazi memorabilia has nothing at all to do with how he got arrested.

people who'd known a man named Zachary Chesser. Chesster was arrested earlier that summer, for threatening Trey Parker.

eventually sentenced to twenty five years in prison. But the court record in Young's case is pretty vague on the subject of Zachary Chessar. Intentionally so the prosecutor often refers to Chesser as a friend of Young's, but in reality they were barely passing acquaintances.

close to another man, a man named sale al Barmawi. The record is again very vague when it comes to why al Barmawi was the subject of this undercover operation, and he's never been arrested or charged with the crime, and it doesn't look like he lives in the United States anymore. But in two thousand and eight, al Barmawi was a member of the Muslim Student Association at George Mason University, so he may have crossed paths with Zachary

Chessar during that single semester that Chesser was enrolled. There After, Khalil met Young, though he kept in touch for about a year and a half. The undercover maintained a friendship with Young, meeting for dinner, watching movies at his house, going for.

attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. Alarming, right, But the government is less forthcoming about the fact that it was the undercover who introduced Young to al Khalifi, and the fact that el Khalifi was only arrested after he was provided with a fake gun and a fake bomb by the FBI agents who drove him to Washington, d c. And dropped him off to carry out the suicide attack they'd planned. I want to get one thing out of the way here. I'm not defending Nicholas Young,

certainly not defending ISIS. ISIS doesn't actually even come into the story. There's no real ISIS here. And when it comes to Nicholas Young, oh, he's a police officer with a house full of Hitler posters. You know, I'm not on his side here. That should be obvious, and I'm not denying that he made some alarming statements throughout the course of the investigation. In one conversation with the undercover, he was furious about the way that the FBI had

approached his friends and family when they were asking questions about whether he knew Zachary Chesser. He allegedly fantasized about finding out where the female agent lived so he could kidnap and torture her. That's a very scary thing to say. But when the undercover submitted his report about that conversation in March of twenty eleven, he wrote that he didn't think Young was serious. In other conversations with the undercover,

Young admitted to torturing animals as a child. He talked about how much he hated the FBI and said that he believed it was possible to sneak weapons into the federal courthouse undetected, and he was paranoid who was always talking about using phones and taking the batteries out of his phone when he wasn't using it. He said he was stockpiling weapons, and he hinted that any cop who tried to search his house would run into problems. But again,

all of these conversations took place in twenty eleven. The undercover submitted the reports, but nothing rose to the level of a prosecutable crime. He was talking a lot of shit, but he owned those guns legally, and he didn't do anything. It's not my preferred dinner conversation, but legally speaking, fantasizing about jihad at the chilis in Alexandria, Virginia isn't terrorism. He did travel to Libya twice in twenty eleven to provide aid to anti Gaddaffi rebel forces during the Libyan

Civil War. He had a bumper sticker on his truck that said Libyan Civil War VET Siege of Misrata, And he really was in miss Rada in April and May of twenty eleven during some of the most brutal fighting there. On re entry into the United States after that trip, he told the ICE agent who interviewed him at the airport that he'd had to cut his trip short, returning home ten days earlier than he'd planned because things had

gotten too dangerous there. He returned to Libya a second time later that year, and he made no secret of either trip. Both times he was interviewed by a federal agent at the airport on his way home. When he was interviewed by the FBI after his second trip to Libya, they attempted to recruit him as a paid informant, and he declined.

since twenty ten moved on. One of the other men that he'd gotten close to was more interesting to the government, so the agent's focus shifted. Young was interviewed once more by the FBI later in twenty twelve when he was crossing the Canadian border after visiting a woman he'd been romantically involved with, but other than that, the investigation was dormant. Two years passed before the FBI sent Nicholas Young a new friend, a confidential human source who called himself Mo.

Young met with Moe twenty times in twenty fourteen.

to about things like this. To be fair, Young did eventually offer some advice about how to travel overseas without arousing suspicion, and he agreed to help Mo with his cover story by sending him a text that would corroborate the lie that he was going on vacation in Turkey. Young believed that his friend was going to Syria, and before Moe pretended to leave for Syria, the pair used computers at a FedEx store to set up special email addresses that they could use to communicate during the trip.

Young went to the FedEx store several times over the next year and a half to send and receive emails. In December of twenty fifteen, over a year after Mo pretended to leave for Syria, FBI agents came to Young's house twice to ask him if he knew anything about.

but Young didn't know that. In those interviews, he was consciously obstructing what he believed to be a real investigation,

but that wasn't really enough to pull the trigger on an indictment. They needed him to do something, something they could take to a grand jury. In July of twenty sixteen, an undercover agent posing as MO reached out to Young again.

He said, Isis needed gift cards. They needed someone in the West to buy gift cards and then send them the codes on the back, and they needed those gift cards because that's what they used to set up the messaging accounts that they used to communicate with supporters in the West. MO said they'd had guys in the UK who'd been buying the gift cards, but they stopped sending the codes. Young wrote back, why were the brothers in UK told to stop?

The first agent wrote, let's hope he goes one more step further and his colleague replied just one more step, to which the first agent responded one huge step with four exclamation points, and the second agent wrote one small step for US, one giant leap for slow decline, slow decline. Sometimes they would just write SD. That was Nicholas Young's

code name. They'd been calling him that for years. In the summer of twenty sixteen, six years into their investigation, they were frustrated he was too cautious, too slow, too unwilling to take a next step. They decided to ratchet up the pressure. They sent him more and more emails from MO about the importance of the work he was doing over there.

bought a handful of Google Play gift cards. Finally, in July twenty eighth, twenty sixteen, Nicholas Young sent a text containing twenty two sixteen digit codes, each one from the back of a Google play gift card redeemable for ten or fifteen dollars. The total value was two hundred and forty five dollars. The best Buy receipt was still in his backpack when he was arrested a few days later. So he didn't do it right. I mean he did it.

He bought the gift cards. And when he bought the gift cards, he really did believe their purpose was to allow ISIS to set up messaging accounts to communicate with prospective fighters in the West. That's what Moe told him they were for. There was no coded language. There's no room for misunderstanding here. Most said they were for ISIS, So technically yes, that is material support for terrorism. He doesn't deny that he bought the gift cards or that

he texted the codes to Mow. That's not in dispute. The real drama in this case is the unhinged trial strategy pursued by the government. Remember I said at the top of the episode that I was surprised to see that the jury had been shown so much evidence of Nicholas Young's collection of Nazi memorabilia. It was his fondness for Hitler that first brought this case to my attention, But ultimately that part of his life had nothing to do with this case. So how did it wind up

in the record at all? If you're not someone who spends a lot of time sitting in a courtroom, you might not be asking yourself that. After all, why wouldn't a jury get to see all the weird shit they found in this guy's house? Isn't everything the cops found in their evidence? I know I'm about to tell you that the judge in this case was asked that question

and he decided the answer was yes. But typically the answer to that question is no. Pictures of this guy's Nazi themed dinner party in two thousand and seven are very interesting to me, but they don't actually tell a jury anything meaningful about whether or not he knowingly financed terrorism in twenty six sixteen. Not to get boring about it, but this is a pretty textbook example of something that fails to satisfy the only two federal rules of evidence that I could name for you off the top of

my head. It's both irrelevant and highly prejudicial. Relevance is easy to explain. That's rule four oh one, and it reads evidence is relevant if a it has a tendency to make a fact more or less probable than it would be without the evidence, and b the fact is of consequence in determining the action. That's pretty straightforward. It does just what it says on the tin. You know, does seeing this piece of evidence tell you anything about

the facts at issue in this case? Does knowing he had a Nazi tattoo on his neck give you any valuable information about the gift cards? It really doesn't easy enough. I know I'm always telling you I didn't go to law school, but Rule four h three and its state court equivalents are something I hear argument about in I

think every case I've ever sat through. Quote the court may exclude relevant evidence if its probative value is substantially outweighed by a danger of one or more of the following unfair prejudice, confusing the issues, misleading a jury, undue delay, wasting time, or needlessly presenting cumulative evidence. So sometimes evidence that gets excluded is relevant. It passes the relevance test, it would help a jury make a determination about the facts,

but it's inflammatory, it's prejudicial. Its probative value, so whether or not it tells you anything is outweighed by the prejudicial impact it would have. There's information to be learned from it, but there's a real likelihood that it could, for example, make the jury too emotional to be fair and impartial. Sometimes that means that a jury won't see particularly graphic crime scene or autopsy photos because those would upset them without meaningfully adding to their understanding of the case.

In a lot of cases where I hear this argued, it's usually because the defense doesn't want the jury to be told about their client's affiliation with a hate group. They might file emotion ahead of time, asking the court to prohibit any mention of it, or prohibit the introduction of evidence that a defendant who did something like assault a black person or vandalize a synagogue. They might not want evidence introduced that they have a swastika tattoo or something.

The idea is that you don't want the prosecutor to be able to flood the jury with a bunch of images that will leave them thinking, damn, this is a really bad guy and he needs to be punished. The jury is supposed to decide if the state has proved the elements of the case. The jury decides did this

person do this crime not. Is this defendant a good person. So, even if the evidence might contribute a little bit to their understanding of the facts of the case, it may be that this evidence is more likely to sway the jury into making a decision for the wrong reasons. And, to be honest, most of the time I hear this argued, I feel like the jury should have gotten to hear it. They deserve to hear about the racist shit this guy's

getting up to in his extra curriculars.

evidence about one of the organizer's past. There was plenty of evidence about statements leading up to, during, and immediately after the rally, but in a case involving a racially motivated violent conspiracy, the judge felt it was unfairly pres judicial to tell the jury that one of the defendants had previously been convicted of something you could fairly call a racially motivated violent conspiracy, specifically that he'd want stolen machine guns from the army and given them to the

clan so they could start a race war. So I was under the impression that the bar was pretty high for this kind of thing. So as I'm picking through the filings in the Nicolas Young case, it seemed very weird to me that they were able to convince a judge to let them show the jury so many pictures of Hitler. What does Hitler have to do with Jihad? Why would pictures of his Nazi tattoos help a jury decide if he was guilty of buying a gift card

for Isis. Unfortunately for you, the answer is another boring bit of legalese. The defense wanted to argue that this was a case of entrapment. That word doesn't mean when you think it means. I can promise you, unless you practice criminal law, I can almost guarantee you that whatever you think entrapment means is not what a judge thinks it means. An undercover cop doesn't have to tell you they're a cop, even if you ask. They can lie

to you about anything and everything. Undercovers and informants can do illegal stuff with you. It can even be entirely their idea. They can buy you the gun, put it in your hand, and drive you to the crime scene. Almost every scenario you can think of for an undercover cop is so outrageously over the top. Complicit in the planning and execution of a crime isn't entrapment.

writing down in the middle of the night. Of the hundreds of terrorism cases brought by the DJ in the first decade after nine to eleven, Thomas Frampton wrote quote in the popular press, the improbability of such plots has generated skepticism. Several authors have suggested that the FBI, in its zeal to demonstrate tangible success in the fight against terrorism,

has been improperly manufacturing nonexistent terrorist schemes. The FBI is catching guys who almost did something they were never going to do. But despite the fact that almost all of the terrorism related prosecutions in the United States are based on sting operations where the would be terrorist was induced, coached, and aided every step of the way by a copper informant, no one has ever prevailed in court by asserting an

entrapment defense. So what is entrapment? In order to successfully argue entrapment, you have to show that a state actor, so a copper, a paid informant, induced you to commit the crime, and that you lacked the predisposition to have done it on your own. The first part's easy. The informant and the undercover agent coaxed him into it.

unless you were predisposed to doing things like that. Right, If you weren't the kind of person who had a natural predisposition to commit this crime, you wouldn't have This crime is obviously in your nature. For this part of the test, there are some courts that use what's called an objective test, asking the question would this have worked on a reasonable person? But most courts, including the federal courts, use a subjective standard. So the question becomes, was this

particular defendant predisposed to committing this crime? Now? I read a couple of papers, but if you ask me, this is the law saying does the defendant have bad vibes? And the answer, it turns out, is always yeah. Determining whether someone is predisposed towards crime is alarmingly vibes based. It's not just a question of your criminal history. You know, have you done something like this before? Have you even

tried to do something like this before? No. It opens up the door for an exploration of your character, and that's something that's normally very much off limits in a criminal trial. As Prampton wrote, quote, the defense is unusual because it makes a searching inquiry into the defendant's character

or criminal propensities the centerpiece of the criminal trial. This stands in marked contrast to the traditional focus of Anglo American criminal jurisprudence, which generally spurns such evidence as irrelevant

to the central issue of moral blameworthiness for a particular volitional criminal act. In a twenty fourteen report, Human Rights Watch suggests that it may not even be possible for an entrapment defense to work in a terrorism case. The nature of the argument requires the jury to make a determination about the defendant's character. They're not deciding if the defendant is guilty or not guilty of the crime. They're deciding if this is an innocent person.

out at emotions hearing. Assistant US Attorney Gordon Kromberg argued that quote, the Nazi stuff in this case is very much related to the.

right wing accelerationists and Salafi jihadists. I'd intended to devote a little more time to exploring that in this episode, but I think it's a longer conversation for another day. There's been some interesting writing in just the last five years on the nature of this trend within some fringe online spaces of melding the narrative and esthetics of neo Nazism and Islamic extremism. The trend itself isn't necessarily new, but all of the scholarship I can find is fairly recent.

But it is out there, and we've already talked in passing about several examples of this phenomenon. Remember Brandon Russell, the founder of Adam Woffen. Back in twenty eighteen, he was sharing a house in Florida with three other members of his neo Nazi terrorist organization when one of them, Devon Arthur's, murdered the other two. Arthur's had recently converted

to Islam. And remember Ethan Melzer, the young Army private who communicated classified troop movements to someone that he thought was in Al Qaida because he thought a little had would help kick off the kind of worldwide violence necessary for the race war envisioned by his particular brand of

neo Nazism. And in a more general sense, it's not even all that rare to see your average neo Nazi terror enthusiasts talking about things like white Shariah or white Jihad, borrowing the language and symbolism, or drawing inspiration from groups like al Qaeda or ISIS, And in a broad sense, they do have things in common. On the extreme end of both of these ideologies, you have misogyny, homophobia, anti semitism,

glorification of violence. Think about terogram, where you have the idolization of the mass shooters that they call saints, these people who have killed and died for the cause. What is that if not a martyr. White supremacists have been calling for RAHOA for decades. That's a shortened form of the phrase racial holy war.

time to do a little more reading. So I'm not saying there's no basis for an argument that Nicholas Young's interest in Nazi memorabilia could potentially be relevant to his material support of ISIS. There is room here for a conversation about some interplay between his belief in these ideologies. But I am saying that I thought about it. I considered the facts of the case that are on the record.

I read a pretty significant chunk of the extant literature on syncretic extremism, and I gotta say I think they violated the civil rights of this Hitler enthusiast. I take no pleasure in telling you that Nicholas Young is an extremely unsympathetic individual. No one is more upset than I am that I have to tell you that. I don't think they were fair to the cop with the Nazi tattoos, and he say some pretty wild stuff about jihad.

you offer up an expert. And then what follows is just a loosely connected series of largely unsubstantiated statements and anecdotes, and it all somehow adds up to the conclusion that Nazis and Isis both hate Jewish people, thus making them ideologically similar in such a significant way that it would be common and expected for someone to drift from one

worldview into the other. And he ends with the bold pronouncement that quote, I conclude that evidence in individual's affinity for Nazism is related to the question of whether that individual is predisposed to supporting militant Islamist groups. This report

was written shortly after the case was filed back in twenty seventeen, and at that time there was no meaningful existing scholarship on this phenomenon. He cites none. It doesn't exist. The academic writing produced on the topic in the last few years does recognize the existence of this ideological soup that exists at the far fringes, But most of the authors I've read seem to agree that it's not common, it's not universal, and it's not well documented enough to

make a conclusion like that. When you read a study, you should look into how it came to be written, who wrote it, what's their background, what did they study, where did they work, did someone pay for it?

what they've been paid to say. But it's not weird to pay an expert for their time, and serving as an expert witness can be a significant time commitment. So question answered not a huge red plaque. His background appears to be in Islamic extremism, both as a past participant and a current researcher. After dabbling briefly in Islamic extremism, he went to work in a nonprofit called the Investigative

Project on Terrorism. The IPT is one of the leading purveyors of pseudo academic Islamophobia, and it's cited as an example of groups with quote thinly veiled political motives typically infused with poor scholarship and extremely selective reporting in a twenty fifteen issue of Critical Studies on Terrorism. After a brief stint there, doctor Grtnstein Ross moved on to the Foundation for Defense of Democrat, where he's been since two

thousand and seven. The FDD claims to have been founded in the aftermath of nine to eleven to address the global threat of terrorism, but the original incorporation paperwork shows that it was founded in April of two thousand and one, several months before nine to eleven, and the original stated purpose of the organization was providing quote education meant to

enhance Israel's image in North America. They revised that mission statement after nine to eleven, and they've sought to distance themselves from their original mission as a pro Israel lobbying group, but public disclosures of their lobbying expenditures show a disproportionate interest in pro Israel and anti Iran measures. A founding board member and a primary donor to FDD is Trump

Megadnor and former Home Depot CEO Bernie Marcus. And. After Trump's win in twenty sixteen, several analysts of the Foundation left, claiming the organization was limiting criticism of Trump in their analysis. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has been called an anti Muslim fringe group by Duke University sociologist Christopher Bale. Farid Hafez, a political scientist at Salzburg University, identified FDD as a key player in what he calls a transatlantic

network of Islamophobia. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, has accused the Foundation of knowingly peddling falsehoods

to push for war with Iran. The progressive think tank Institute for Policy Studies has noted that while the organization is quote an ardent critic of terrorism, it has not criticized actions taken by Israel against Palestinians that arguably fall into this category, and for what it's worth, Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has designated the Foundation as a foreign terrorist organization. So I guess two can play at that game.

And the prosecutor who put this expert on the stand is no stranger to accusations of Islamophobia of his own. Gordon Kromberg has been called a loose cannon by legal ethicists and has been accused of personal animus against Muslim defendants. When the subject of a grand jury subpoena requested a postponement until after Ramadan.

He's no good for us here. He has no fingernails left, though he denies making light of the fact that Ali was being tortured. In another case of an American accused of supporting a foreign terrorist organization, Kromberg explicitly instructed the jury to disregard testimony offered by Muslim witnesses because their religion teaches that it is acceptable to lie to non believers.

Law professor Wadis Said told The Intercept in twenty twenty one that Kromberg has a history of provocative stances and quote. The positions that he has taken are quite tendentious and even vindictive in terms of his mindset toward the person he's targeting.

That was real evidence. He really did have those things in his home. I just don't think it was appropriate

to use them as evidence in this case. But throughout the case, Kromberg claimed that Nicholas Young had attended a neo Nazi rally in two thousand and one, and in a later article published by doctor Gartnstein Ross in the Journal of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, he suggests that this is evidence that Young actually converted to Islam in two thousand and seven, six years later because of his interest in Nazism, as evidence by his attendance at this

Neo Nazi rally. The problem is that didn't happen. A former classmate test In two thousand and one. They were both taking a course on European racism taught by Professor Aaron Gillette at George Mason University. As part of a class project. The two students attended a dinner hosted by a neo Nazi group where British fascist Mark Catterill would be speaking. Their professor arranged for them to attend and even interviewed Catterall after his speech. Mark Catterall was living

in Virginia at the time. Running a group called the American Friends of the British National Party, and the dinner was organized by the neo Nazi group National Alliance. And

here's a weird little guy's Easter egg. I think that this was one of those weekly dinners that was hosted by Sam Francis at a Thai restaurant in northern Virginia, those dinners that a Ron Paul Staffer was outed as occasionally attending, but characterizing a school project, one that had been signed off on by their history professor as evidence that the defendant had a history of attending Nazi rallies, which in turn shows that he's predisposed to trying to

fund isis that's outrageous. Like I said, Nicholas Young is not a sympathetic character. He's definitely a weird little guy. There are a lot of salacious details about his interests that were, in my opinion, improperly presented to the jury under other circumstances. It's the kind of stuff I would expect to see in a case where a guy really did try to do some kind of terrorism, the kind

of terrorism I write about. But they charged him for buying some gift cards, which he did do sure, but only after a six year investigation involving hundreds of man hours, a team of handlers, a two year relationship with an undercover agent, another two year relationship with a paid informant, an active encouragement to commit the crime in question. Throughout the case, the prosecution implied that Young had committed a

wide variety of other crimes. In one filing, it's implied that he had bomb making materials, but none were presented as evidence and he wasn't charged with it. There are repeated assertions that he's been illegally purchasing steroids online and having them shipped from overseas. They even claim to have found illegal steroids in his home on the day of

the arrest. He's accused of plotting to smuggle guns into a courthouse, of plotting to kidnap an FBI agent, of joining a terrorist organization in Libya, but it wasn't charged with any of that. Did they think they couldn't prove those things? Were they padding out the allegations to make the underlying case look more serious?

in sting operations that target Muslim Americans. This former FBI agent Mike Jerman wrote in his recent book Policing White Supremacy, the material support for Terrorism statute is quote used in FBI sting operations that manufacture terrorism threats to produce statistical accomplishments, so law enforcement resources are disproportionately allocated to combating foreign terrorism, which then results in agents being quote pressured to demonstrate

their success even if no genuine plots exist. This is a question I keep running into on the show. What is terrorism? Whose crimes matter to us more importantly, whose crimes matter to the government. What kinds of violence are unacceptable? What kinds of violence are allowed? What message is being communi in the decisions that they make about who, how,

and when to prosecute and for what. Despite a twenty seventeen report from the United States Government Accountability Office which showed that right wing extremists are responsible for three times the number of domestic attacks as compared to Islamic extremists, we don't use the same words.

not how we talk about it. As Bruce Hoffman wrote in his book God's Guns and Sedition, terrorism as it is currently defined in American law treats domestic terror and foreign terror very differently, and in the book he refers to this case directly, noting that Young was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The average sentence for this charge providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization is thirteen

point five years. Domestic terrorism, on the other hand, often results in significantly shorter sentences, even in cases where we've used the word, even in cases where the crime is much more serious. I mean, first of all, you can't even get charged with an equivalent offense. You are free to materially support organizations that absolutely should be called a domestic terrorist organization without consequence. That's allowed. You can't send a ten dollars gift card to ISIS, but you can

give everything you own to Adam Woffin. Hoffmann lists several contrasting examples. So Brendan Russell, the founder of Adam Woffin, was arrested in twenty eighteen after officers found his bomb making workshop while they were investigating the double homicide committed inside his home by his roommate. Russell was released in twenty twenty one after serving most of a three year sentence, and he immediately got back to work planning another active domestic terrorism.

for Muslims. Of course, the last twenty five years have been an unending litany of civil rights violations, but it also prevents us from appropriately addressing any other form of terrorism. The inability to recognize terror when it is something other than Post nine to eleven hysteria leads to right wing

extremist violence being deprioritized. Terrorism investigations are thorough. I mean, think about Zachary Chesser, right, the FBI spent six years investigating a man that he spoke to twice over a year before he made an online threat against the creators

of a cartoon. But right wing extremist violence, because we can't call it terrorism, is quickly relegated to lone wolf territory, and there's little attention page of the environment that radicalized the perpetrator or potential sources of support and encouragement within his network. If the government put even ten percent of that energy into investigating and prosecuting far right extremists. They'd

be drowning in prosecutions. It would not take six years to catch your average American neo Nazi agreeing to engage in a terrorist act.

an official statement about the severity of the crime. It's a legal framework, sure, but it's a statement about what matters. Maybe there's no grand theory of change that I can offer you here. Giving the government more tools for prosecution probably won't really help. They're already making ideal, logical choices

about how to use the tools they have. I guess the only real takeaway from this story is that no one is ever going to text you demanding the codes off the back of a gift card for any legitimate reason.

theme music was composed by Brad Diggert. You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably.