'Part of war is terror': A new neo-Nazi group is trying to capitalize on the Moore County power grid attack

An offshoot of the now-defunct neo-Nazi terror group Atomwaffen Division is undertaking a propaganda push related to the attack on the power grid earlier this month in Moore County that resulted in widespread power outages affecting about 40,000 customers.

The morning after the power grid attack, which coincided with a protest against a drag show in Southern Pines, neo-Nazi accelerationists on a private Telegram channel began to speculate about the involvement of the National Socialist Resistance movement, or NSRF.

The contents of the chats in the “Uncle Ted’s Cabin” channel — named in honor of the anarcho-primitivist terrorist Ted Kaczynski — were obtained by an infiltrator, who leaked them to the White Rose Society, a volunteer research collective in Australia. The chats, which cover a period from early November through Dec. 9, were provided exclusively to Raw Story. Antifascist researchers in North Carolina who tweet under the @arelephanteau and @M1523751 accounts also helped corroborate information and develop reporting for this story.

“It’s reasonable to say that individuals associated with or familiar with the NSRF in the accelerationist ecosystem are portraying Moore County as likely being perpetrated by NSRF,” said Matthew Kriner, the managing director of the Accelerationist Research Consortium and a senior research scholar at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute.

In addition to the private chats speculating aboutthe NSRF’s potential involvement in the attack, a banner was discovered on an overpass across US Highway 1 near the town of Vass in Moore County on Sunday that included a link to the group’s public Telegram channel. The banner drop in Moore County followed a vandalism incident almost 50 miles to the northeast at a senior center in Apex that hosted a Pride holiday celebration with a drag performance and a Hannukah celebration over the weekend.

Social media posts promoting the distribution of NSRF propaganda in Moore County are pushing messaging to other neo-Nazis that calls on them to “destroy the system” and “take real action.”

Speculation about NSRF’s potential involvement role in the Moore County power grid attack cropped up in the Uncle Ted’s Cabin channel around 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on Dec.4. Following a post with a link to a news article about the power, one user used a racial slur to suggest that someone else in the chat had carried out the attack.

“You know some NSRF dudes are from NC,” a member with the username Wülf commented.

In a subsequent comment on Dec. 4, Wülf wrote, “‘They want you to blow up a power grid’ and then NSRF proceeds to send us PDFs over [sic] every single substation in the US HAHAHAHAHA.”

Wülf claims to have participated in the NSRF’s private chats, and to have advised them to not waste time with “normies.”

The FBI declined to comment for this story.

The NSRF launched in September, as a result of a schism within the National Socialist Order, with members of the new group charging in a founding statement that an occultist element within the National Socialist Order was “turning it into a group dedicated to Satanism.”

The National Socialist Order in turn emerged from the remnants of Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi terror group founded in 2015, which was shut down in 2020. Members of Atomwaffen were responsible for a string of murders in 2017, and its first leader, an Army National Guard member named Brandon Clint Russell, was jailed after plotting to sabotage nuclear power plants in Florida. Russell’s successor, John Cameron Denton, was subsequently sentenced to prison for his role in a swatting conspiracy against Old Dominion University, among other targets. In its September 2022 communique, the founders of National Socialist Resistance Front pledged to “build on the legacy left by Atomwaffen Division.”

“NSRF presents as another rotating face of a network of neo-fascist accelerationist groups that’s constantly emerging and dissolving,” Kriner said.

As noted in NSRF’s name, the group’s ideology is explicitly neo-Nazi, and it takes an accelerationist stance that rejects movement building and electoral politics in favor of waging terroristic violence with the aim of bringing about a societal collapse. The group worships Adolf Hitler as “the Aryan spirit made into flesh” and calls on white people to “be armed and ready for combat at a moment’s notice.”

The NSRF’s extermininationist position is openly described in its founding statement, which calls for Jews to “be excised from the Earth” and “all lesser races” to “be eliminated.” Similarly, it calls for LGBTQ+ people to “be cleansed from the Earth,” while neurodivergent people and so-called “invalids” are described as “parasites.”

The founding statement also calls for the elimination of religions that are not “totally subservient to the values of national socialism” and seeks to exclude women from positions of influence in politics, education and the military.

A discussion on the Uncle Ted’s Cabin channel about organizational distinctions sheds light on the porous nature of relationships between groups in the accelerationist space.

One member wondered aloud about the difference between a group called Zcell and “other groups like NSRF and NSO.”

“Nothing,” a member named Skinhead responded. “Groups are gay.” Then, articulating a model of cell-style action and using the N-word as a codeword for compatriots, he added, “Get busy with yourself and a couple real n----- only.”

In the weeks leading up to the Moore County power grid attack, members of the Uncle Ted’s Cabin channel distributed multiple terror manuals that encourage mass shootings and industrial sabotage. Neo-Nazi members of the chat also championed a publication called “The Garden,” which includes an analysis of the 2013 Metacalf power station attack in California and a list purporting to identify the 15 “most critically important electric substations in the United States.” The mission of the publication, which espouses an anarcho-primitivist viewpoint influenced by Kaczynski, is described in the publication as “to organize coherent and direct action against the global techno-industrialist system,” while justifying millions of resulting deaths as “well worth the cost.” While the author of “The Garden” claims to oppose both antiracism and fascism, they advocate for building a network of cell-style groups — a organizing model that has been embraced by the white power movement going back at least to the 1980s.

In a Dec. 7 post in the Uncle Ted’s Cabin, Wülf appears to credit the channel with helping to inspire the Moore County attack.

“Don’t you think it’s funny that three substations got attacked after the gardens pdf was posted here a few days ago?” he wrote.

The NSRF’s agitation around the Moore County attack while stopping short of claiming responsibility reflects a tightrope accelerationists are forced to walk between evading detection by law enforcement and leveraging the propaganda benefit of publicity.

Rinaldo Nazzaro — founder of the Base, an accelerationist that emerged on the heels of Atomwaffen — expressed criticism of the perpetrators of the Moore County attack for not claiming responsibility.

“Yes, I am presuming the attack was politically motivated,” he wrote in a Telegram post four days after the attack. “My point is that if it is politically motivated, it’s useless without clear explicit messaging…. To make a significant political impact, an attack such as this one needs to at least appear organized even if it’s not. Why? Because generally speaking, lone wolves are one-and-done operators who aren’t viewed as a threat to national security. However, organized political violence is viewed as a national security issue because it’s a phenomenon which signifies a much deeper and widespread dissatisfaction within society, i.e. the potential beginning of an insurgency.”

The members of the Uncle Ted’s Cabin channel grappled with the same tension. In November, they set up a separate channel on TamTam, a Russian-owned messaging app, which they mistakenly believed would be less likely to remove their content than Telegram. In chats on TamTam, participants wrestled with the tension between operational security and the propaganda value of publicizing acts of terror.

Referencing footage that they identified as being filmed by a friendly accelerationist group, a user named mortarenthusiast wrote, “Idk if they are larping but its not really a good idea to share recon footage to public chats which are most certainly being monitored.”

A user named Goon disagreed.

“The movement needs the propaganda,” he said. “I personally wouldn’t do it, but I can’t hate the guys that do.”

Wülf also endorsed distributing the footage.

“Part of war is terror, and this is why AQ/ISIS post videos like this,” he wrote, referring to the Islamic terror groups al-Qaeda and Daesh. “It also encourages other people to take action and shows just how easy it is if you plan accordingly.”

Only two days before the Moore County power grid attack, Uncle Ted’s Cabin was kicked off of TamTam, following a report by the New York-based nonprofit Counter Extremism Project. In a report released on Dec. 1, the nonprofit reported that TamTam removed 18 channels that promoted “neo-Nazi accelerationism and acts of terrorism.”

According to the Counter Extremism Project, the channels “posted bomb-making instructions and encouraged other activities meant to create a ‘climate of anxiety’ and fear.” The nonprofit also reported that the channels circulated white supremacist mass-shooter manifestoes, videos from neo-Nazi groups like Atomwaffen and the National Socialist Order and a book “that calls for lone actor violence, workplace violence, attacks on infrastructure, law enforcement, politicians, people of color, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Latinos and LGBTQ+ people.”

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper has condemned the NSRF banner drop, tweeting on Monday: “Violence and threats against Jewish communities are on the rise all across the world. White supremacy and antisemitism will not be tolerated in North Carolina, and our state stands strong against this hate.”

Meanwhile, the neo-Nazi accelerationist group has continued its propaganda campaign beyond the banner drop. A recruitment video showing at least six members dressed in skull masks and tactical gear, and conducting firearms training and performing a straight-arm “Sieg Heil” salute in front of a Nazi flag, began circulating on social media on Sunday.