All posts tagged "2119"

Two rabbis sat down for dinner at Chabad Jewish Center in Pensacola, Fla.

The air on this July evening was warm and tranquil. A sense of peace filled the kitchen where the men shared their meal.

Suddenly, something crashed through the window, sending glass flying. The rabbis rushed over to investigate. Scrawled on the brick that lay on their floor: a swastika and the words “No Jews.”

Within days, local police arrested four white teenagers and collectively charged them with 18 felonies — not only in connection to the brick-throwing incident, but also for bigoted attacks on two area synagogues, a mosque and a Masonic lodge.

RELATED ARTICLE: Stalked by Nazis: How extremists tried to stop me from reporting on their violence

The group’s reputed ringleader, 17-year-old Waylon Fowler, initially denied responsibility. But he later admitted to an Escambia County sheriff’s deputy that he threw the brick. Fowler is also accused of throwing another brick — marked with swastikas, “SS” symbols and the words “Death to k----” — through the bathroom window at Temple Beth El.

That could have been the end of Fowler’s hate-filled story — the saga of a misguided boy and his friends who, when caught red-handed, vowed to right their ways.

Instead, the boys began taking an ever-darker path that, in their vision for America, includes a revolution leading to the collapse of the United States and a race war that drives Black people, Jews and LGBTQ+ people out of future whites-only homelands.

It’s a vision that has attracted young neo-Nazis across the country.

Raw Story spent four months investigating the 2119 Blood and Soil Crew, a nationwide network of teenage Nazis. The investigation revealed that Fowler now ranks among the leaders of the network.

In recent months, 2119 members have waged a campaign of targeted terror aimed at Jews, African Americans, LGBTQ+ people and leftists. Their targets include Florida, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Texas and California. In mid-November, 2119’s official Telegram channel suggested the group had expanded to 21 states.

The 2119 gang’s rise as a clandestine network of teenagers who promote and carry out acts of antisemitic and racist violence hasn’t been organic. The group has undertaken a concerted marketing strategy of recruiting children by appealing to their interests, such as online gaming and skateboarding.

Nazi youth associated with 2119 are now under investigation by the FBI, Raw Story has confirmed. The FBI is also actively assisting local police departments as law enforcement pursues crimes committed in the group’s name.

But this legal danger has only emboldened the Nazi teens. They’ve indicated even bigger plans for sowing hate and fear across the country. And they’re recruiting more and more disaffected children to their cause.

The group’s activity comes at a moment when social tension throughout America builds by the day.

Local crime spree, national emergence

Fowler’s neo-Nazi youth group first emerged in 2022 as an under-18 boys auxiliary to the burgeoning “active club” movement — a loose collection of white supremacists united by their interest in fight training, mixed martial arts and white nationalist activism.

After renaming itself Revolutionary White Brotherhood — some bricks that shattered Pensacola windows featured the initials “R.W.B” — the group resurfaced after the arrests of Fowler and his associates as “2119.”

The number is an alphanumeric code. Two represents “B” for “blood,” 1 represents “A” for “and,” and 19 represents “S” for “soil. “Blood and soil” is a slogan dating back to Nazi Germany that invokes a racial claim on land.

Using a newly formed channel on encrypted social media app Telegram, 2119 members gleefully celebrated Fowler’s deeds by circulating an image of the brick used in the Chabad Jewish Center attack. They fashioned Fowler a martyr, circulating a stylized image of him with boyish looks and tousled hair and peppered their communications with the hashtag #FreeWaylon.

The brick quickly became a symbol of action central to the group’s identity. Members in the various Telegram chats associated with 2119 often used the verb “bricking” and referred to themselves as “brickstas.”

A national leadership cadre that had been coalescing since 2022 had now shifted into high gear. Members shared unsettling characteristics: all white boys or young men in their mid- to late-teens who embraced extreme violence against Black people and members of other marginalized groups. They delighted in a catchphrase that encapsulates an extreme aspect of a segment of the hyperviolent, racist internet culture: — “total n— death.”

Other teenage neo-Nazis that gravitated to the 2119 banner steeped themselves in virulent hate and a paramilitary aesthetic that draws as much from the Irish Republican Army and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as the Third Reich.

A still from an October 2023 propaganda video displays 2119's paramilitary aesthetic. Source: Telegram

The exact size of 2119’s membership is unknown. But a source knowledgeable with the group’s internal dynamics said it numbers in the hundreds. While that figure could not be independently verified, Raw Story has confirmed at least 20 self-identified 2119 members that participate in group activities. They live throughout the country, from California to Texas to New Hampshire.

The white power ethos embraced by members of 2119 draws from a loose collective of extreme Telegram accounts known as Terrorgram. Together, they promote acts of domestic terror and destruction that range from mass murder to attacks on the power grid.

A steady diet of gore videos and images — a photo of nude, Black female body missing her head stands out for its depravity — and instruction manuals for industrial sabotage swirl amid unyielding racist discourse.

But while spectacular and devastating, those modes of violence — by the 2119 members’ own admission — rarely allow the perpetrators to stay on the offensive and effectively network with one another.

The 2119 teenage neo-Nazis have instead embraced what’s for them a more scalable and sustainable — although no less disquieting — model of racist criminal violence.

Considered in isolation, the attacks across several states might be classified as acts of youthful vandalism and criminal mischief. Juvenile perpetrators who police catch might expect lenient punishments — ones that could be expunged as they reached adulthood.

But by 2119’s acknowledgement, these acts are deliberately designed to terrorize Jews and Black people. They offer 2119 members high propaganda value with relatively low risk to themselves.

These attacks also provide 2119 a model for a continuous, insidious feedback loop of documenting crimes, incorporating footage into propaganda videos and recruiting new members. Newly minted 2119 adherents, largely from rural and suburban communities, franchise the brand by committing new crimes in the group’s name. The process repeats and metastasizes.

A post on 2119's Telegram channel in October 2023 documents the network's propaganda efforts in three different states. Source: Telegram

Internal communications reviewed by Raw Story indicate that group members believe their status as children gives them a critical advantage — the impunity to commit acts of targeted terror against innocent people, while laying the groundwork for a future that they hope will allow them to commit murder on a grand scale.

When asked why he wasn’t already killing Black people, one former 2119 member responded, “When the system collapses, that’s the plan.”

Rapid radicalization

The 2119 leaders’ ambitions are chilling and plain in their voluminous online posts.

Their actions preceding prior run-ins with law enforcement speak even more loudly.

Aiden Cuevas, one of 2119’s most enthusiastic promoters, was charged as a juvenile in Alabama with terroristic threatening. He exhorted his peers to assault Black people “to save the white race.”

Aaron Alligood, a longtime member from Georgia, said that he wants “total collapse to happen” and has spoken of this desire to “stick a pistol” in a Black person’s nose, using a racial slur instead of “Black.”

Noah Houran, a 17-year-old from North Carolina described as “a 2119 OG,” distributed the IRA’s guerilla warfare handbook and a sniper training manual on his Telegram channel and expressed approval in response to a news story about a house that was booby-trapped with explosives in anticipation of a police raid.

Mathew David Bair, a 34-year–old Marine Corps veteran who joined 2119 last year, has unapologetically advocated for assassinating judges.

Members of 2119 likewise glorify mass shooters as “saints,” said Emily Kaufman, the associate director for investigative research at the ADL Center on Extremism, an anti-hate organization.

Kaufman noted that 2119 members also display the influences of the most extreme violent faction of the white power movement — what experts call “accelerationism” — “geared towards recruiting youth.”

Accelerationism is a tendency within the white power movement that seeks to hasten the collapse of American society for the purpose of creating conditions favorable to the rise of white ethno-states. Accelerationists reject political methods for achieving the movement’s objectives.

One 2119 member — Alligood — directly endorsed accelerationism on Telegram in December 2022: “I want total collapse to happen.”

Racist and antisemitic intimidation

When the authorities released Fowler on bond around Sept. 1, Georgia-based Aaron Alligood hailed his freedom as a signal that 2119 was on solid ground.

“Good news, Waylon is out on bail,” Alligood wrote in a Telegram chat with an extensive audience of racist skinheads from as far away as Southern California and the Balkans. “And the feds don’t got a case on him.”

Fowler, the reputed 2119 ringleader, awaits trial later this year in Pensacola, having pleaded not guilty to all charges. His freedom appears emboldening.

Since September, 2119 members have allegedly committed at least three additional hate crimes, twice tagging buildings in Laconia, N.H. with antisemitic graffiti and defacing a Martin Luther King Jr. monument in Concord, N.C.

Raw Story has independently confirmed vandalism incidents in at least four different states during the past 12 months that incorporated 2119’s various monikers.

The group makes scant effort to conceal its criminal intent. An “action report” it published online baldly states: “Members/associates of the crew are known to have a militant/violent reputation, and embrace confrontation with political/racial enemies.”

Impatience with standard-issue MAGA activism

When voters elected Donald Trump president in 2016, most of 2119’s members were elementary schoolers.

But they came of age during a time when Trump, as a candidate and president, demonized Muslims, attacked transgender Americans and generally shattered democratic norms.

They watched many Republicans cheer the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and jeer subsequent congressional inquiries and criminal trials. And they have seen multitudes of conservatives, from community agitators to federal lawmakers, fully commit to culture-war attacks on LGBTQ+ people, Black history and even library books.

Raised on internet violence, racism and homophobia, the children who gravitated to 2119 helped build their own, unique communion of hate. They could be as extreme and unmoored as they pleased. They operated free from adult-led, optics-conscious white power groups such as Patriot Front or extreme MAGA movements organized around the cult of Trump.

Patriot Front, for one, “failed to make any change in a matter of 6 years,” Alligood complained on Telegram in December. He dismissed Patriot Front’s activism as indistinguishable from MAGA, adding that he encountered the group’s members at a Trump rally — and he was not impressed.

Now, in 2024, Trump is once again all but guaranteed to become the Republican presidential nominee.

But for 2119 members, it’s not enough to be MAGA. It’s not enough to just support Trump.

The 2119 children aspire to something beyond Trump.

For them, it’s about “activism” that spreads fear, if not outright violence.

National 2119 leadership on FBI's radar

Two 2119 devotees in particular have made direct action their calling card of intimidation.

Eight days before his 16th birthday, in November 2022, the FBI summoned Noah Houran at his high school on the North Carolina coastline.

The agents asked Noah about a video he posted that he claimed showed him burning an LGBTQ+ pride flag. They quizzed him about an online statement he made about plans to attend an unspecified rally.

The agents wanted to know if Noah’s online statements were merely his fantasies, or if he really intended to carry out an act of violence.

Anti-LGBTQ+ violence was cresting at the time. Hysterical rhetoric among conservative politicians and right-wing media personalities braided into a mounting harassment campaign aimed at drag shows. The protests drew far-right groups, sometimes armed, ranging from the Proud Boys to avowed neo-Nazis.

The hostile political climate spilled over into fatal violence on Nov. 19, 2022, when a shooter gunned down five people at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colo. As an indicator of the legitimate concern about mass shootings targeting the LGBTQ+ community, the Club Q shooting took place only three days after the date Noah Houran reported to Aaron Alligood that he had been questioned by the FBI.

Noah Houran was a hiking enthusiast whose interest in nature extended to eco-terrorism. A Telegram channel Houran created in October 2023 served as a distribution hub for texts written by Ted Kaczynski, who died in prison last year while serving time for the murders of three people during a 17-year bombing campaign carried out from a cabin in rural Montana.

One of Houran’s posts displayed a photo of a shed built from salvaged materials that was captioned, “Here’s my Ted K cabin, built it about 2 years ago.”

A screengrab from Noah Houran's Telegram channel shows his interest in eco-terrorist Ted Kaczynski. Source: Telegram

Less than two months after Houran was questioned by the FBI, Aiden Cuevas announced on Telegram chat that he was in legal trouble, while reassuring his peers that “just in case they get my phone I took off everything affiliating with 2119.”

“I’m on probation for some bulls— charge of terroristic threat (by the FBI of course),” he said.

Cuevas, who in November said he was 18 years old, told his friends he would be serving a sentence at the Mt. Meig’s campus, an Alabama juvenile correctional facility outside of Montgomery.

Raw Story was unable to find any record of Cuevas’ case. It is likely sealed, as he would have been a juvenile at the time of the offense. But in January 2019, WBRC-TV 6 in Birmingham, Ala., reported that a juvenile in Madison County was charged with making a terrorist threat to Thompson High School in Alabaster, Ala..

Cuevas lived in Madison County, which surrounds Huntsville, more than 100 miles to the north.

An Instagram post, made in November 2023, appears to show Noah Houran dressed in camouflage and aiming a rifle. The firearm, with the exception of the scope, is blurred out. Responding to a commenter who said he was “afraid to show his gun,” Noah wrote that he would “rather not repeat 2022” — an allusion to his run-in with the FBI agents.

Raw Story confirmed Cuevas’ identity as a 2119 member who posted on Telegram under the screen name “Bozak” by matching biographical details such as his mother’s birthplace in the Chuvash Republic in Russia, and his father’s U.S. Army assignment in Japan.

'The fascist pipeline'

Mathew David Bair, a 34-year-old Marine Corps veteran from Pennsylvania, meanwhile, came out of the extreme end of the MAGA movement, having been active with the Proud Boys when they stormed the U.S. Capitol in January 2021. He appears to be one of the few members of 2119 older than 18 years old.

After Jan. 6, 2021, Bair increasingly gravitated to an array of far-right groups that embraced national socialism more explicitly than the Proud Boys.

“The fascist pipeline is very real, as you well know,” Bair said. “I was in a direct pipeline chapter.”

A well-publicized fistfight between Proud Boys and neo-Nazis in June 2023 appeared to hasten his transition. By November, he began heavily promoting 2119 on his Telegram channel.

In a phone call with Raw Story, Bair confirmed he is now a 2119 member.

The difference between the Proud Boys and younger groups such as 2119, Bair said, is that the Proud Boys tend to attract older men who join to fulfill a need for friendship. The younger members of 2119 are more ideologically committed and less concerned about concealing their racist beliefs, he said.

He said he admired the 2119 members for their brashness.

“When these young ones, when they’re talking to their peer groups — to take the step and proclaim your viewpoint, even talking surface level, they might not mention Hitler, but they’ll say, “Have you read Mein Kampf?”

Bair described Trump’s supporters as a natural constituency for Nazism, while condescendingly treating them as if they are clinging to outdated political norms.

“Regardless of your opinion on Trump,” he wrote on Telegram, “his MAGA following incorporates a large number of people who would be our guys if they could break the matrix.”

‘An untapped market full of white children'

In recent months, recruiting children to 2119’s hate-filled cause has become a top group priority.

For example, in August, Cuevas praised a Telegram channel called Robloxwaffen Division — a coupling of “Roblox,” a popular online game geared for youth, and “Waffen,” the combat branch of the Nazi Party’s Schutzstaffel, or SS.

Cuevas hailed the teenagers behind Robloxwaffen as “geniuses.”

“They are reaching an untapped market full of white children that could potentially change their worldview and get them into the movement just from some fun on Roblox,” he said.

In January, the creator of Robloxwaffen — a teenager known only by his Telegram nickname “Patrius” — posted a Roblox-generated scene that simulated the 1999 Columbine massacre with two avatars holding assault rifles while striking a pose between rows of bookshelves. While his age is unknown, “Patrius” has said he isn’t old enough to drive.

That hasn’t stopped the violent ideations of “Patrius” from becoming even more acute. Earlier this month he threatened to “bomb” a gathering at a skating rink to raise awareness for National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day — adding the obligatory disclaimer, “in Roblox.”

Aiden Cuevas posted a photo of himself in a Telegram chat in early 2023. Source: Telegram

Cuevas, for his part, counseled fellow neo-Nazi teenagers to immerse themselves in subcultures, such as skateboarding, where they can easily make friends.

“I myself choose to target younger whites, still in high school that are lonely and all they want is a tight group of friends to have fun with,” Cuevas wrote.

Cuevas reported that he met a girl who was skateboarding alone after his local skate park had closed, and “she thought the swastikas were cool and had never seen ‘Nazis’ before.”

He boasted that in the past three weeks he had met “4 young white men that have seen my flag and hung out with my friends while we [will] be casually racist and throw up Romans,” referring to Nazi salutes.

‘Death squad'

Since its inception in May 2022, under the moniker “American Columbian Movement,” the 2119 group has made propaganda videos a key recruiting tool — one they consider essential to their growth and the advancement of their long-term goals.

One shows 2119 members marching to an anti-abortion rally.

“Nat soc death squad,” the teenagers chant in a robotic drone, a reference to the “national socialism” of the Nazis. The children occasionally giggle during the bizarre video.

As recently as December 2023, Cuevas and two other young men dressed in skull masks and protested outside a drag show in Albertville, Ala. The event organizer reviewed Cuevas’ Telegrams posts boasting of his involvement in the protest, and confirmed that she saw the men there.

Another early outing for the members of what would become 2119 took place in 2022, when they attempted to disrupt a May Day cookout in Pensacola. The event was co-hosted at a local park by two far-left organizations, the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Democratic Socialists of America.

“We were cleaning up,” Sarah Brummet, a Party for Socialism and Liberation organizer, recalled in an interview with Raw Story. “Some kids came tearing through the park. They were yelling something. We couldn’t really hear it.”

They only learned later from a video that the boys were yelling, “F— you, you f—ing socialist slimy little s—.” After the socialists left the park, the teenage Nazis left flyers reading, “Commies stay off our street.”

“It was like they were afraid to confront us, and they were making agitation for the Internet,” Brummet told Raw Story.

When the official 2119 Blood and Soil Crew Telegram channel launched in September 2022, the group began churning out content that positioned it as a digital-era Ku Klux Klan teen auxiliary.

An eight-second video clip posted on the channel in November 2022 included the caption: “Pensacola lads out on patrol searching for Antifas! We protect our community!”

In another evocation of the Klan, a 2119-connected X account published a video showing a flier affixed to a front porch support post reading, “Attention! You have been visited by the 2119 Crew. We are pro-white, pro-Christian national socialists; anti-communist, anti-woke, anti-Zionist.”

Aaron Alligood of Georgia has indicated in online chats that he’s been involved with 2119 since at least October 2022. He also immersed himself in the Terrorgram community, as 2119’s on-the-ground activities became more aggressive.

Alligood became close with both co-administrators of the “P.A.W.G. Ops” channel, an acronym for Primal Aryan Warlord Gang.

A cross-country runner whose father was the head football coach at Berrien High School in Georgia until last year, Alligood became particularly close with Skyler Philippi, one of the channel’s co-administrators.

Philippi called Alligood a “little brother.” Raw Story was unable to determine Alligood’s age, but a runner profile indicates that he is currently a sophomore in high school.

“Like I said, keep your spirits high and play s— smart,” Philippi counseled Alligood. “We will prevail. Be the little man to a big man Hitler would be proud of. Go start reading Mein Kampf tonight.”

Like other Terrorgram channels, the Primal Aryan Warlord Gang celebrated racially-motivated mass murder, valorizing the shooters as “saints,” and promoted attacks on the energy grid. When anti-fascist researchers attributed a fatal shooting in Slovakia to a member of the Terrorgram community, participants in the chat congratulated themselves.

An administrator of the Primal Aryan Warlord Gang channel celebrate a mass shooting in Slovakia. Aaron Alligood, a 2119 member, was a frequent contributor to the chat. Source: Telegram

Terrorgram has been publicly credited for spawning one mass shooter, and here was one of the administrators of a channel where Alligood was a frequent commenter claiming victory.

Alligood’s involvement with the channel came to an abrupt end in January 2023, when one of the channel’s co-administrators was arrested at his home in Rustburg, Va. for conspiring with two other white supremacists to commit a bank robbery.

Shortly after the arrest, the FBI seized Aaron Alligood’s cell phone and laptop, he recounted on a Telegram chat with fellow white supremacists several months later. Although there is no public record of the seizure, Alligood confirmed the incident in a recent interview with Raw Story.

Meanwhile, the 2119 members’ online extremism was also manifesting in aggressive behavior on the ground.

In March 2023, a handful of 2119 members showed up to counter-protest a celebration of International Women’s Day hosted by the PSL in Pensacola. There’s no indication that Alligood, who lived in Georgia, was there.

Brummet described the incident as “a marked escalation.”

“They came up and they started standing close over our members and they were yelling racial slurs,” Brummet recalled. “We were speaking to a lot of things we identify as major social problems and the role of the existing capitalist system in that. They were yelling, ‘F the Jews.’”

2119 members disrupt an International Women's Day celebration in Pensacola, Fla. in March 2023.roar-assets-auto.rbl.ms

‘Sounds like you fear the brick'

Following the arrests of Waylon Fowler and his co-defendants in Pensacola, Fla. for their antisemitic hate spree in late July, a gusher of local news coverage followed.

The brick inscribed with a swastika instantly became the group’s singular totem of power — an implied threat.

It also became a liability.

Alligood turned to a white power activist named David William Fair, who runs a separate white power group that is friendly with 2119, for advice. He confided that his girlfriend was concerned about his involvement in extremist activity.

Fair advised caution.

“I don’t want you in jail just as much as she don’t,” Fair said on Telegram. “Brick through the finance building is fun and all. But not worth your youth.”

Cuevas interrupted the heart-to-heart conversation between Fair and Alligood by posting a cutout of the brick used to vandalize the Chabad Jewish Center from the photo published in the Pensacola News Journal.

“Sounds like you fear the brick,” he quipped.

“I’m angry at the brick bc it got good boys put behind bars,” Fair replied.

“It rooted out the weak,” Cuevas shot back. “The others are out and will get thru it ez.”

Aiden Cuevas, posting under the screen name "Bozak bzk" valorizes an antisemitic attack by fellow 2119 member Waylon Fowler in an October 2023 Telegram message. Source: Telegram

Cuevas was likely referring to the Ferry brothers, Kessler and Nicholas. Kessler Ferry, Fowler’s 18-year-old co-defendant, admitted to a Pensacola police detective that he drove Fowler to Chabad Jewish Center.

Randall Etheridge, who is representing both Ferry brothers, told Raw Story his clients are fully cooperating with law enforcement, and that they were “ordered” to drive the Fowler brothers to the crime scenes.

Fowler and his younger brother have pleaded not guilty to all charges. His grandparents, with whom the boys live, referred Raw Story’s questions to their attorney, who declined to comment.

When another member chat asked about 2119, David Fair felt compelled to vouch for the members while also attempting to shield them from the consequences of the alleged crimes in Pensacola.

In an audio recording obtained by Raw Story, Fair identified “Bozak,” who is Cuevas, and “AllenWrench,” who is Alligood, along with “Constantine,” who remains unidentified, as “guys inside” 2119.

Fair opined that 2119’s critics were “insecure,” adding a homophobic slur. They might be “hooligans” who spray-painted swastikas, he said. But so what?

In the recording, Fair acknowledged the alleged crimes in Pensacola, but attempted to insulate the national 2119 leadership from them.

“You know, that was from a local crew of boys that did something objectively stupid, and it shouldn’t have happened,” Fair said. “But that’s not really something on the crew.”

David Fair, the leader of Southern Sons Active Club, discusses 2119 on a Telegram chat for racist skinheads in late 2023.roar-assets-auto.rbl.ms

Multiple comments on Telegram show that “Constantine,” Alligood and Noah Houran were involved in assessing prospective members to determine if they were suitable material for 2119.

Chatting online with other extremists in early December, Alligood claimed to be on “house arrest.”

Reached by Raw Story for this story, Alligood initially claimed he quit 2119 after he was partially doxed by anonymous antifascist researchers. The researchers were able to identify Alligood because his mother posted a photo of him on her Facebook page posing with a deer he had killed, and Alligood posted the exact same photo on the official Blood and Soil Crew channel.

A Facbook post by a family member shows Aaron Alligood posing with a buck (left); the same photo, with Alligood's face redacted, identifies him with the "Georgia Chapter" on the Blood and Soil Crew Telegram channel. Sources: Facebook, Telegram

But when Raw Story offered Alligood evidence that he had continued to promote 2119 online and helped members network, he walked back his statement by claiming instead that he never did any “IRL,” or in-real-life, activities after he was doxed.

Alligood admitted to Raw Story that “house arrest” didn’t mean he was legally confined to his house, but rather, it was a way of saying that he had been grounded by his parents.

Commenting on Telegram in early December, Alligood said he was “looking forward to f---ing leaving this house so I can actually meet you n------.

“Oh yeah, it’s gonna be on,” he added. “Thinking about doing a country tour with 2119.”

When contacted by Raw Story in late January for this story, Alligood said he had decided to leave 2119 a couple days earlier.

At one point, Alligood said he would be willing to check in with Raw Story once a month to provide assurances that he continues to avoid any associations with other neo-Nazis.

“I promise you I’ll walk away,” he said. “I’m done with that.”

Antisemitic hate arrives in New Hampshire

The antisemitic vandalism spree in Pensacola had provided 2119 with a degree of notoriety, at least in Florida.

But 2119 members faced a question: How could they extend their brand across the country?

On the weekend of Rosh Hashanah 2023, six weeks after Waylon Fowler and his co-defendants were arrested in Florida, a man ambling down a central New Hampshire walking path discovered antisemitic graffiti on the abandoned Laconia State School building.

The graffiti included the “2-1-1-9” tag, a swastika and a crossed-out Jewish star.

It also said the word “f—,” followed by the name of a specific Jewish person in Laconia whose identity Raw Story has agreed to withhold. Following the person’s name: an antisemitic slur and the words “go to hell.”

Local news reports noted that a year earlier, graffiti depicting Nazi symbols and antisemitic messages had been found at the Laconia Public Library and a local park. A couple months later, police found antisemitic graffiti at the state school property.

The group has had a presence in New England since at least October 2022, when the original 2119 channel displayed a banner described as “a new flag for our folk in New England!”

City Manager Kirk Beattie told the Laconia Daily Sun that the recent graffiti in September 2023 marked an escalation by “calling out a member of the Laconia Jewish community.”

The official 2119 Telegram channel posted a video two weeks later that interspersed images of the graffiti at the Laconia State School and the earlier incident at the public library with images of members stepping on a Black Lives Matter flag and carrying an ammunition box. The video ended with the URL for the Telegram channel and the invitation to “join today.”

Law enforcement struggles

Laconia police have taken note that the graffiti at the state school included 2119’s Telegram address spray-painted onto a nearby water tower. That Telegram channel then displayed a video publicizing the crime.

Detective Eric Benoit, who was assigned to the case, reported that he could not determine who submitted the footage to 2119’s Telegram channel.

Telegram is designed in a way that makes it difficult for law enforcement to investigate user communications. For that reason, Benoit said, Laconia police aren’t putting legal pressure on Telegram to release the information.

Benoit reported that the investigation had so far uncovered no suspects, and he requested that efforts “be suspended pending new information or suspect leads.”

The following month, in October 2023, vandals spray-painted the “2-1-1-9” tag on a Martin Luther King Jr. monument in Concord, N.C. Two days after the vandalism was discovered, the official 2119 Telegram channel posted a link to a local news story, accompanied by the comment, “Hitting the news once again.”

Sgt. Gary Mearite, supervisor of the Concord Police Department’s criminal investigation division, told Raw Story that investigators have struggled to develop leads.

Currently, Mearite said, the Concord police are reviewing Telegram channels that have reposted images of the vandalism “and see if we can work our way back.”

“We’re still investigating,” he said. “It takes a long time.”

Rep. Alma Adams (D-NC), whose district includes Concord, N.C., expressed fury and frustration at the situation. She condemned the vandalism as an act that “shows an appalling absence of basic decency or empathy.”

“I don’t know if it’s social media raising the mirror closer to our faces, the lingering isolation from the pandemic, or something more sinister, but the rise in hatred in this country is apparent,” the congresswoman told Raw Story. “Hate is contagious. Those who catch the illness can only expel it onto others. They seek nothing more than to divide us and then spread their darkness in the void. They want us to hate each other like they hate us. We cannot give in, no matter how we’re provoked.”

In November, 2119 struck again in New England, spray-painting a swastika and the “2-1-1-9” tag on the Belknap County Democratic Party headquarters in downtown Laconia. The perpetrator glued fliers to the windows. One featured a swastika with the slogan, “Save the planet and your race,” while the other featured a quote by American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell.

On the same day as the attack on the Democratic Party headquarters, someone placed a bogus order to deliver pizzas to the home of the Jewish community member who was named in the earlier graffiti incident at the state school building.

Elected officials in New Hampshire have also condemned 2119’s attacks.

“The people who did this are domestic terrorists,” Mayor Andrew Hosmer told The Laconia Daily Sun. “They want to strike fear in you — not just our Jewish brothers and sisters, but anyone that disagrees with them.”

Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH) posted on X: “This antisemitic vandalism is part of a surge in hateful attacks on the Jewish community across the country. There is simply no place for bigotry and hate in our society, and we must speak with one voice to condemn it.”

Shortly after the antisemitic harassment in Laconia, 2119 announced that Telegram had deleted its channel.

This hardly deterred them. They simply created a new Telegram channel, and more notably, the 2119 members turned to the broader neo-Nazi community for help promoting the group’s it so they could continue their propaganda push.

“I think the feds ordered our account deleted, with the recent incident in Laconia,” Alligood wrote. “Shout-outs of the channel would be appreciated.”

One member of the chat, unfamiliar with the incident, asked what happened in Laconia.

“Constantine,” the 2119 leader, replied: “2119 Member may or may not allegedly spray-painted the Democrat HQ and left a s— ton of fliers.”

He quickly added: “2119 takes no responsibility for the action taken.”

Feds catching up with 2119?

Tucked into the crevices of their bluster, profanity and grotesque racism, some of the 2119 members have quietly been expressing concern that law enforcement might be catching up to them.

“I’m surprised the feds haven’t been on 2119s ass since the whole Pensacola fiasco,” Alligood remarked to Houran on Telegram in mid-September.

“I’m sure they are,” Houran replied. “We just don’t know it yet.”

Detective Joseph Taschetta told Raw Story that the FBI has assisted the Pensacola Police Department in its investigation of the antisemitic vandalism spree. Likewise, Sgt. Mearite at the Concord Police Department said one of his vice officers contacted an FBI task force officer to obtain information about the 2119 group. And multiple outlets have reported that the FBI is assisting the investigation by the Laconia Police Department.

The FBI declined to confirm or deny that the agency is investigating 2119.

“We would also point out that the FBI investigates individuals who commit or intend to commit violence and other criminal activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security,” a spokesperson for the FBI National Press Office told Raw Story. “Our focus is not on membership in particular groups but on criminal activity. We are committed to upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans and will never open an investigation solely on First Amendment protected activity.”

Bair, for one, is well acquainted with law enforcement.

In 2018, he unsuccessfully sued the city of York, Pa., and its police department for civil rights violations because an officer allegedly assaulted him during an arrest for disorderly conduct.

During his deposition, Bair told the opposing counsel that he had received multiple concussions while playing soccer in high school and while on combat deployment with the Marine Corps in the Middle East — all of which went untreated. He said he was court-martialed out of the Marine Corps for larceny and sale of classified materials during a deployment to Djibouti, and served one year in the Navy brig in Chesapeake, Va.

Following his military service, Bair said he checked himself into a sober living house in Colorado, and has been in and out of prison for domestic violence and burglary.

Bair, who specialized in demolition in the Marine Corps, told Raw Story that he likes Terrorgram for the “aesthetics.”

“It’s like what the Proud Boys did,” he said. “Nobody promotes the acts themselves, but here’s the information. Read it your goddamn self.”

A still from a video published by 2119 member Mathew Bair shows a flier on a chain-link fence that reads "Shoot your local judge." Source: Telegram

Asked about a video he posted showing a flier with the words “Shoot your local judge” that includes a URL to the 2119 Telegram channel, Bair suggested that the “judge” referenced on the flier was a kind of handgun — a Taurus Judge.

He responded with equanimity when asked whether he thought someone might interpret the sign as an endorsement for shooting a judge in a court of law.

“That’s all right,” Bair said.

Bair then volunteered that he lives close to where an anti-feminist extremist went to a federal judge’s home in New Jersey during 2020 and fatally shot her son.

A future for 2119?

In response to Raw Story’s reporting, some 2119 members have gone dark on Telegram.

Others, such as Bair, remain defiant. The recent exposure, which also includes a new reference page by the Anti-Defamation League, might cause 2119 to rebrand once again, or potentially splinter.

Bair told Raw Story he expects 2119 will be leading large Nazi marches ahead of the 2024 election.

That seems unlikely given the group’s philosophy of spreading hate while avoiding public scrutiny. And if evidence were needed that his words should be treated with skepticism, Bair mentioned his interview with Raw Story on his Telegram channel, writing, “There’s a lesson about misinformation and misdirection here.”

But now that 2119 is a known entity, history suggests the individual members could put on new costumes to evade scrutiny from law enforcement, antifascist researchers, the media and communities at large.

So don’t look for the young white boys and men steeped in terror doctrines to march under a banner reading “2-1-1-9.” Next time 2119 members show up on the streets of American cities and towns, it’s plausible they’ll have migrated to completely new neo-Nazi groups. And regardless of what mantle they claim, they’ll likely downplay their group identity while merging with other fledgling groups in a bid to project maximum force.

The 2119 members, however, appear unyielding as they continue to propagate hate, lionize those who attack the power grid and laud racially-motivated mass shooters.

* * *

About this investigation: This is the first in a two-part series about youth neo-Nazi organization 2119. The second part, published here, examines how parents navigate the challenges posed by online youth radicalization. A first-person account about the threats and harassment reporter Jordan Green has received as a result of his coverage of 2119 may be found here.

This project draws upon numerous interviews, primary sources and accounts of 2119’s members and activities, along with information uncovered by Appalachia Research Club, an anonymous antifascist research collective.