Unfair Park from p4 In that chat group, the feds claim Frost wrote that an explosion could serve as a good distraction while they shot up substation transformers with powerful rifles. Cook sug- gested using a propane tank. “THINK BIG,” Frost wrote, according to documents. “We can delay police response by an additional 5-10 minutes if our distraction plans succeed.” In Columbus, officials say, the three had also intended to vandalize a mosque and cut down a telephone pole but were thwarted after a traffic stop. Thinking that it was the end of the line, Sawall ingested the fentanyl pill. Somehow, he survived. From there, Cook and Frost headed to Texas to ramp up recruitment efforts and continue outlining their attack, according to documents. Once in Katy, the two split after another police encounter; Cook trekked more than 160 miles northeast to Jasper, where he would stay with a juvenile recruit. Then, in August 2020, the FBI searched each of the alleged schemers’ residences. But Frost’s attorney, Samuel Shamansky, said it’s important to recognize that as with all press releases, the Justice Department’s narrative outlining the guilty pleas is pro- motional material. The reality of the case is far more nuanced and complicated than what the government has trumpeted, he said. Shamansky argued that the press release fails to note Frost’s level of remorse and re- habilitation efforts, as well as his commit- ment to remedy his past and “very regrettable misbehavior.” “We have an out- standing and experienced jurist assigned to this matter who will follow the law and ren- der a just and appropriate sentence,” he added. For years, there have been attempts by white supremacist and antigovernment ex- tremists to attack major power installations, said Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. Certain extremists have attempted to pro- voke an insurrection by disrupting electrical substations. White supremacists also seek wide- spread disturbance to other services, such as water and sewage, Beirich said. These three had “fantastical ideas” that they be- lieved would incite a race war and bring about their ideal ethnostate. The plan would certainly be difficult to pull off. One needs the proper training to effectively hamstring the nation’s power grids, she said — training that this trio apparently didn’t have. Still, some veterans and ex-cops, as well as current ones, have worked their way into extremist groups and could possess capabil- ities “far beyond” what the defendants had, Beirich said. Even though the three plotters were in over their heads, she warned, “This is not something to be taken lightly.” The feds say Cook was put in charge of 6 6 recruitment efforts. He circulated a book list of strongly recommended titles, including A Squire’s Trial, a beginner’s guide to fascism, and Siege, which emphasizes violence as a means of gaining power. Court docs also show Cook looked for younger recruits. The older they were, he reasoned, the more likely they’d be undercover cops. Juveniles can be violent, too. In 2020, an Estonian neo-Nazi leader who christened himself “Commander” online was tied to plans to attack a synagogue and a major news network in the U.S. Seemingly at odds with the goliath magnitude of the plot was Commander’s age: 13. Beirich notes there’s another reason why extremists focus on the young: They’re eas- ier to influence and radicalize. “That’s why so many civil rights organizations are screaming and yelling about the fact that you’ve got kids on social media and on the internet who are being exposed to things that they really shouldn’t be exposed to,” she said. “It’s a really dangerous situation.” Defense attorney Shamansky similarly argued that the internet had helped radical- ize Frost. “My poor client got into this be- havior by picking up on all this conspiracy shit that swirls on the internet,” he said. “He got sucked into it.” Many who are attracted to white su- premist ideology live solitary lives, ex- plained Christian Picciolini, a former neo-Nazi skinhead and founder of the Free Radicals Project, a now-defunct nonprofit seized his stockpile of military-style guns and other weapons, possibly preventing what one Seattle official called a would-be “massacre.” Driving his blue Ford Focus, Cole then ditched the Pacific Northwest for Texas, Denton’s stomping grounds. Washington authorities claim to have prevented a massacre, but at times, white supremacists do quench their bloodthirst. Members of Atomwaffen were linked to five killings in three states between 2017 and 2018, according to NPR. One of the victims, who’d been fatally stabbed and hastily bur- ied in a California park, was gay and Jewish. “The views that [Atomwaffen] articulate are white supremacists on steroids,” Joanna Mendelson, an extremism expert with the Anti-Defamation League, told NPR in 2018. “And what is the change they want to see? Real-world violence. Real-world apocalyp- tic violence.” Atomwaffen’s very name is built on car- nage. Its German-to-English translation is “atomic weapon.” The group follows accel- erationism, a set of strategies aimed at col- lapsing the current political system through using violence, said Matthew Kriner, the “The views that [Atomwaffen] articulate are white supremacists on steroids. And what is the change they want to see? Real-world violence. Real-world apocalyptic violence.” – JOANNA MENDELSON, ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE focused on reformation. The internet serves as the best way to engage potential recruits, many of whom suffer from social awkward- ness or disconnection. “But let’s not blame the internet, please,” Picciolini said by email. “It still takes bad ac- tors on the internet to make the internet bad.” Early one day in February 2020, the neighbors were startled by the loud bang. Law enforcement descended on a small gray house on a quiet street in Montgomery, a small town roughly an hour northwest of Houston. Kaleb Cole, 24, was one of the in- tended targets. A member of the dangerous neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, Cole was wanted for cyberstalking and threatening the group’s enemies, KHOU-11 reported at the time. He lived with Atomwaffen’s leader, 26-year-old John Cameron Denton, who stood accused of “swatting” journalists and federal officials. (Swatting is a phenomenon whereby false emergencies are reported so that armed police barge into unsuspecting victims’ homes, potentially leading to vio- lent encounters.) Last May, Denton — who went by the nickname “Rape” — was sentenced to 41 months behind bars, according to the Coun- ter Extremism Project. This January, Cole was sentenced to seven years. Before his arrest, authorities believed that Cole had been training in Washington state to commit heinous acts of violence, ac- cording to KHOU-11. Police there eventually managing director at the Accelerationism Research Consortium. While terrorist orga- nizations like the Irish Republican Army as- pire to effect political change, accelerationists want to completely rewrite the structure of global power. Accelerationism is an idea that stems from a rejection of liberalism and democ- racy, Kriner said. Instead of striving for equality and freedom, many accelerationists believe that society should be divided along racial or classist lines. Some also abide by the basic supremacist tenet that they’re an elite while others are just “too dumb to be a part of the system.” White supremacists and white national- ists make up the largest portion of accelera- tionists today, Kriner said. Many want to return to a hierarchical structure, similar to a feudal system. (Feudalism in medieval Eu- rope, for example, saw land held in ex- change for labor or service.) Some think the West is in the zenith of moral decay. They reason that if this rot is inevitable and the system will soon reset, then why not just drive faster through it? Today, accelerationists aim to abolish the world’s democratic liberal systems, said Kri- ner, who’s also a senior research scholar at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism. We should all be worried about the decline of democratic belief in our country, he added: “It is as strong as we al- low it to be.” Atomwaffen followers disguise them- selves by wearing skull masks and train in camouflage. They embrace satanic and Nazi imagery and hero-worship Adolf Hitler. Yet they also revere an unlikelier icon: Charles Manson, the leader of a warped hippie cult whose members committed nine murders in summer 1969. Part of why Atomwaffen looks up to Manson is because of his doomsday proph- ecy of an impending, decentralized race war, Kriner said. Manson began to use the term “Helter Skelter,” lifted from the title of a Beatles song, to refer to the looming conflict that never came. Atomwaffen later adopted Manson’s cul- tic behavior and promotion of murder for the sake of prompting broader societal ruin, Kriner said. The Helter Skelter notion fits “very nicely with the other ideological strain in especially the early Atomwaffen space, which was siege-ism,” he continued. “So we have Manson, the weird cult-serial-killer guy, and then we have [James] Mason.” A former American Nazi Party leader, James Mason is the 69-year-old author of Siege, the book that’s required reading for many new white supremacist recruits. Ma- son was in contact with Manson and saw him as a kindred spirit in certain ways, Kri- ner said. Because of that, the neo-Nazi in- culcated in the Atomwaffen members he’d groomed that Manson was a good godhead. Even though Atomwaffen’s acceleration- ist ideology hinges on Mason’s ideas, he doesn’t feel responsibility for their crimes and denies membership in the group. In a 2019 news segment, a reporter with Den- ver’s KUSA peppered a gruff Mason with questions while he walked down the street at a brisk clip. His response to the allegation that his writings inspired violence in the name of a race war? “I say don’t do it,” in- sisted Mason, looking ever the part of a white-haired grandfather in aviator glasses. “But if you’re going to do it, for God’s sake: Do it right.” ▼ REAL ESTATE NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE N BOOMERS, MILLENIALS AND GEN ZERS HAVE SOMETHING IN COMMON IN DALLAS COUNTY: THEY LIKELY CAN’T BUY A HOME. BY MICHAEL MURNEY o matter their age, aspiring home- buyers in Dallas County have some tough numbers to face. Prices in the Dallas-Fort Worth housing market are among the fastest growing in the country: Home prices in the area swelled by more than 25% last year alone, the biggest jump of any market in the country. The aver- age DFW-area home cost a bit over $275,000 at the start of 2021; by the end of the year, that same house cost about $345,000. A new study from Point2, a prominent real estate research company, bears more grim news for people of almost any age looking to buy a house. According to the study, the vast majority of baby boomer, millennial and Gen Z buy- ers can’t afford a home listed at the Dallas- Fort Worth metro area’s median price point of $372,535. Though ballooning home prices are es- pecially bad in North Texas, homeowner- ship prospects for each of these groups don’t look much better outside of >> p8 MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 MARCH 24–30, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com
