Brandon Russell, arguably one of the most influential figures in the American neofascist revival of the past decade, is on trial this week over an alleged plot to knock out Baltimore’s power grid and trigger a race war.
The 29-year-old cofounder of the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi guerrilla organization that was responsible for five homicides and a number of bomb plots before the FBI dismantled it in 2020, Russell was arrested by federal agents in February 2023 along with his girlfriend, Sarah Clendaniel. If convicted of his charges of conspiring to destroy an energy facility, Russell could face life behind bars thanks to a prior conviction and the potential penalty for his current charges.
Russell’s case represents one of the last gasps of the Biden administration’s hard-charging approach to tackling violent far-right extremism that is all but guaranteed to change during US president Donald Trump’s second term in office. It also offers a unique look inside federal law enforcement’s investigation into an insidious accelerationist propaganda network that mixes neo-Nazi ideology with nihilist, Columbine-style violence to inspire mass casualty events in the United States and beyond.
Russell allegedly hatched the plot to black out Baltimore while, according to prosecutors, participating in a noxious, prolific propaganda network hellbent on fomenting violence and chaos. The Terrorgram Collective, which took its name following a massive influx of neo-Nazis to Telegram at the end of the last decade, ran several channels on the messaging app and developed a series of “how-to” domestic terrorism manuals that sought to inspire disaffected young men and women into committing mass casualty events. Terrorgram is currently designated a “tier one” extremism threat by the US Department of Justice.
To date, Terrorgram has released four publications—a blend of ideological motivation, mass-murder worship, neofascist indoctrination, and how-to manuals for chemical weapons attacks, infrastructure sabotage, and ethnic cleansing. Court records indicate there are at least three unreleased Terrorgram Collective compendiums, including “The Saint Encyclopedia” of the far-right mass killers they venerate, including Anders Breivik, Brenton Tarrant, and Timothy McVeigh; and “The List,” a collection of politicians, government officials, business leaders, journalists, activists, and other people deemed legitimate assassination targets.
The screeds appear to 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. There are currently more than a dozen separate federal prosecutions around the United States that involve people alleged to be core Terrorgram Collective members or individuals allegedly inspired toward violent attacks on infrastructure or civilians.
In one of the Biden administration’s last policy moves against right-wing extremism, on January 13, the State Department formally classified the Terrorgram Collective as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, a listing usually reserved for militant groups that hold territory and have a formal real-world paramilitary structure as opposed to a loose propaganda network that seeks to inspire mass casualty events. While it is not unique—the British Home Office formally proscribed Terrorgram as an extremist organization last May, and Russell’s Atomwaffen Division was banned by the UK, Australia, and Canada—it is likely to be the last such action taken toward neo-Nazi groups by the United States government for the foreseeable future.