‘Terrorgram’ Charges Show US Has Had Tools to Crack Down on Far-Right Terrorism All Along

On Monday, United States prosecutors in Sacramento, California, unveiled a 15-count indictment accusing Dallas Erin Humber, 34, and Matthew Robert Allison, 37, of serving as core members of a virulent neo-Nazi propaganda network that solicited attacks on federal officials, power infrastructure, people of color, and material support for acts of terrorism both within the US and overseas.

The group, known as the Terrorgram Collective, has produced four publications to date—a blend of ideological motivation, mass murder worship, neofascist indoctrination, and how-to manuals for chemical weapons attacks, infrastructure sabotage, and ethnic cleansing. The screeds have directly inspired a series of ideologically motivated attacks around the world, including a 2022 mass shooting at an LGBTQ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia; successful attacks on power infrastructure in North Carolina and similar failed plots in Baltimore and New Jersey; and a stabbing spree in the Turkish city of Eskisehir.

Federal prosecutors allege Humber, Allison, and other Terrorgram Collective members were in the process of compiling a fifth, yet-to-be-released publication devoted to a pantheon of “saints”—neofascist mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh and Anders Breivik. The point of this guide, prosecutors claim, was to “inspire Terrorgram users to commit acts of violence.”

Humber and Allison were both federal targets as early as early 2023, but authorities appear to have waited for a year and a half to compile evidence of potential attacks around the world, and for the British government’s decision this April to formally ban the Terrorgram Collective, before filing an indictment that could land the defendants in prison for more than two centuries. To date, American authorities have charged at least four individuals allegedly involved in the Terrorgram Collective with terrorism-related offenses.

While the arrests are not the first targeting the Terrorgram Collective—Slovakian Pavol “SlovakBro” Beňadik and former Atomwaffen Division founder Brandon Russell hold that honor—the charges against Humber and Allison represent a major change from how the FBI and US Department of Justice approach diffuse “accelerationist” terrorism—the nihilist brand of neofascism that seeks to speed up societal collapse and the ascent of a Fourth Reich through mass shootings, bombings, and other acts of terrorism by “lone wolf” actors. Relying on the UK government’s April order declaring the Terrorgram Collective a banned terrorist group and a little-employed section of the “material support for terrorism” section of the US criminal code, federal prosecutors are finally taking an aggressive, whole-of-law approach to violent neofascist extremism.

“What it shows is exactly what I’ve been arguing for years: All the tools they need to do this work, they have,” says Michael German, a former FBI special agent and a liberty and national security fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, an NYU School of Law nonprofit. German points to years of arguments by the FBI and Department of Justice that they are hamstrung by existing laws when it comes to tackling violent extremists within the United States. “It also reveals the false separation that the government makes about international and domestic terrorism—white supremacy has always been transnational.”

In 2018, German coauthored a study of federal domestic terrorism prosecutions that argued existing laws were sufficient to tackle domestic terrorism, pointing to a particular statute used to charge Humber and Allison with material support. “It’s the material support statute the DOJ forgot,” says German.

The UK’s order against the Terrorgram Collective provided American authorities a basis for labeling a diffusive, ostensibly domestic propaganda group as a “transnational terrorist organization” in a detention motion filed on Tuesday, potentially opening Humber and Allison up to deleterious additional charges and sentencing enhancements. In other words, the US is treating Terrorgram in ways similar to how it has treated Islamist terrorist organizations.

“I would think of this case more like an old-school terrorism investigation, where you have a leadership cell that pushed info to followers and radicalized them into action,” says Seamus Hughes, a terrorism researcher at the University of Nebraska Omaha, of the indictment’s allegations against Humber and Allison.

The role of undercover agents in at least two of the Terrorgram federal prosecutions, the DOJ’s repeated citation of the group’s outlawed status in Great Britain as basis for labeling it a transnational terrorism organization, and the alleged targeting of power infrastructure by participants in the propaganda network, Hughes says, all point to US law enforcement taking a new approach to tackling violent right-wing extremism.

“The vast majority of material support cases are jihadi, but right here, they [allegedly] inspired an individual to plot an attack against a power plant,” he adds. “That’s critical infrastructure and is the lynchpin for the material support of terrorism charge.”

The power infrastructure plot Hughes references is the case of Andrew Takhistov, an 18-year-old New Jersey man charged in July with soliciting another individual to attack energy facilities. Court documents describe Tahkistov as a virulently hateful young man who fantasized about attacking a synagogue and participated in a March 2024 demonstration by an Atlantic City–based “active club” in support of jailed neo-Nazi leader Robert Rundo, was ever-present in the Terrogram Collective’s Telegram channels.

Along with allegedly circulating propaganda from the Terrorgram Collective and urging lone-wolf attacks, the feds claim in court records that Tahkistov bragged about participating in the production of the group’s “Hard Reset” publication, describing it as “the perfect starting guide” for a lone-wolf terrorist. “It has ideology, it has how-to guides, it has ideas for funny things, it goes into how you should plan it, it goes into the thought process,” Takhistov allegedly told an undercover FBI agent with whom he plotted the erstwhile attack on power stations near North Brunswick and New Brunswick, New Jersey.

These details were included in Tahkistov’s indictment, which also outlined his alleged plans to travel to Russia and join the Russian Volunteer Corps, a neo-Nazi combat battalion fighting for the Ukrainian military, which was founded by Denis Kapustin, an Azov Movement–connected extremist who tried to help Rundo flee the US in 2018, in order to gain weapons expertise and military training that would allow him to carry out more effective acts of ideologically motivated terrorism once back in the United States.

Takhistov is in custody and will next appear in court on October 9. He has pleaded not guilty.

Humber and Allison are longtime radicals. Humber’s radicalization appeared to start decades ago, per a report by extremism researchers at Left Coast Right Watch. Research obtained by this reporter shows Humber ran more than two dozen extreme right-wing propaganda channels on Telegram, which circulated the Terrorgram Collective’s material as well as other accelerationist content.

In recent years, aside from narrating audio books of neofascist manifestos and propaganda tracts, Humber also corresponded with convicted domestic terrorist Dylann Roof and with Atomwaffen Division founder Brandon Russell, who ended up joining their collective. “There’s no quitting our worldview. It’s a lifelong commitment,” Humber allegedly told Russell in a recorded jailhouse call following the latter’s arrest in February 2023. Her participation in the network, according to a March 15, 2022, Telegram post included in court filings by prosecutors, was to mold potential terrorists for action. “No military is fighting for us. No govt is protecting our people and defending our interests. The ONLY people fighting for us are lone wolves,” Humber wrote, in reference to a teenager she was trying to indoctrinate. “He’s like 18 yo and seems very impressionable, I’m trying to radicalize him.”

When the FBI raided Humber’s Elk Grove home last week, they recovered reams of Nazi propaganda, 3D-printed firearms—including a homemade AR-15 pattern rifle—a short-barreled rifle, a 3D printer, unregistered handguns, and high-capacity magazines, which remain illegal in California. She remains held without bail.

Allison, who was born in Southern California, lives in a high-end apartment building in downtown Boise, Idaho, and, according to court documents, does not hold a steady job. He doesn’t appear to have a criminal record, aside from a June 2022 misdemeanor. There are very few traces of Allison online, but details cobbled together by researchers indicate he drifted steadily to the right from 2018 onward, starting with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s content and then moving steadily in the direction of Timothy McVeigh, The Order founder Robert Jay Mathews, and finally, the skull-masked, nihilistic neofascism popularized by the Atomwaffen Division at the end of the last decade.

Under the alias “BanThisChannel,” Allison was one of the most prolific disseminators of Terrorgram’s propaganda materials and was prolific in extreme-right-wing Telegram channels, commiserating with other SoCal skinheads about racial attacks in days gone by and connecting other individuals to militant groups like the Atomwaffen Division. Research obtained by this reporter indicates he worked part-time as a video producer and was the editor who compiled a number of “sizzle reels” for the Terrorgram Collective’s propaganda output online, including a set entitled “The BTC Movie Trilogy” that Takhistov sought out for inspiration.

Nineteen-year-old Slovakian teenager Juraj Krajčík, the perpetrator of the 2022 Bratislava massacre, was in extensive contact with Humber and Allison for at least a year prior to the attack, and sent his manifesto to Allison after he carried out his mass murder, which explicitly cited Terrorgram Collective publications and thanked the group for inspiring him to act. Allison then circulated the manifesto through the group’s Telegram channels. The group proceeded to claim Krajčík as “their first saint.”

Allison’s commitment to neofascism and white supremacy appears to have run deep—“I won’t quit til I’m dead. my only goal in life is to fucking destroy the enemy,” Allison declared in a Telegram post cited by federal prosecutors. Both he and Humber, according to a government detention motion, sought to identify the informant in Brandon Russell’s criminal case. Allison advocated adding the suspected snitch to “The List” (a collection of federal officials, journalists, businessmen, and other perceived enemies circulated by the Terrorgram Collective as potential assassination targets), while Humber allegedly told Russell in a recorded jailhouse call in August 2023 that she had photographs of the suspected informant and was running them through facial recognition software.

When Allison was arrested last week, authorities say, he had a backpack loaded with what appeared to be a “bug-out kit” comprised of zip ties, a gun, duct tape, ammunition, a knife, lockpicking tools, two phones, and a thumb drive. When law enforcement searched his apartment, they turned up an assault rifle, two laptops, an external hard drive, and another “go bag” containing $1,500 in cash, clothes, a passport, ziplock bags full of pills, ammunition, a skull mask balaclava, sim cards, and a birth certificate.

In a videotaped interview following his arrest, Allison allegedly confessed to his participation in the Terrorgram Collective and “engaging in acts alleged in the General Allegations of the Indictment.”

Law enforcement consider Humber and Allison threats to their community, and to authorities as well: Humber allegedly worked with Russell to try to identify a suspected government witness in the Atomwaffen Division founder’s current criminal case in Baltimore, according to recorded jailhouse phone calls. Witnesses in Russell’s upcoming trial this November will testify in a closed courtroom to avoid being identified, a highly unusual precaution. In a sealing motion, prosecutors state that not only are additional arrests of Terrogram Collective members likely, but the group’s membership poses a severe danger to law enforcement and cooperating witnesses alike: “Defendants’ many associates, both in the United States and internationally, may seek to harm perceived law enforcement or law enforcement cooperators in retribution for their role in this investigation.”

Allison is currently detained without bail and is set to appear in federal court in Boise on September 18 for a detention hearing.

The volume of evidence laid out against Humber and Allison in both the indictment and detention motion, says Hughes, shows the feds have significantly altered their approach to both far-right terrorism and particularly “lone wolf” accelerationists who have perpetrated massacres ranging from Christchurch in 2019 to Buffalo in 2022.

“When they go further than they have in the past to lay out the transnational connections and overlay a material support charge, it shows that either the feds are trying to make a point, or they were very concerned about these particular actors,” Hughes says.

Senior attorneys from the DOJ’s Civil Rights and National Security divisions are listed on the court filings in this matter, another indication that the top ranks of the Biden administration’s Justice Department called the shots on the Terrorgram Collective investigation.

“To build a case in this fashion is a decision that gets made at Main Justice,” Hughes says. “Someone high up decided to sign off on this.”