Two Californians have been charged with running a white supremacist group on the messaging app Telegram to inspire acts of violence across the United States.
According to the BBC, Dallas Erin Humber, 34, and Matthew Robert Allison, 37, are accused of leading the “Terrorgram” network, which urged members to carry out terror attacks in an effort to spark a race war.
Officials said the defendants used Terrorgram to distribute materials for bombs, to send lists of potential assassination targets and to encourage others to carry out their own attacks.
Prosecutors allege that Allison and Humber allegedly took over Terrorgram in 2022, after one of its leaders was arrested on terrorism offences.
In March last year, The Jewish News of Northern California reported that Humber, who at one time made a living selling dildos, had been exposed as the voice behind a prominent neo-Nazi extremist account promoting and celebrating killings and attempting to radicalise others.
The publication said that the 2019 move to Telegram “seems to have solidified her standing among the far right, where she began narrating memoirs by far-right extremists such as Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011.
The BBC reports that, according to the indictment, Terrorgram promoted “white supremacist accelerationism”, an ideology “centered on the belief that the white race is superior”, and that violence is necessary to bring about a “white ethnostate”.
At the helm of the network, the duo allegedly disseminated videos and posts called “The Hard Reset”, “White Terror” and “The List” − a list of “high value targets” that included a US senator, federal district court judge, and as well as state and local officials.
Prosecutors allege that multiple planned and actual attacks in past years could be tied to Terrorgram, including an October 2022 shooting in Slovakia at an LGBTQ bar, where two people were killed, and a stabbing attack in Turkey.
[Image: By Gregory Varnum – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29315952]