Leaked chats show neo-Nazi leader encouraging followers to attack infrastructure: report

The Southern Poverty Law Center has obtained leaked chat messages purportedly showing avowed neo-Nazi leader Brandon Russell encouraging his followers to attack critical pieces of American infrastructure with the hopes of sparking a race war.

The SPLC says the chats show that Russell, who was indicted earlier this year for a plot to attack a series of substations that serve the city of Baltimore, saw the attacks as crucial for his goal of creating racial Armageddon in the United States.

Among other things, the chats show Russell and his allies sharing infrastructure maps with one another with a particular focus on power substations and railways.

The hope was to begin the attacks and then inspire copycats to take matters into their own hands at other locations.

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"Terror spreads like butter," read the caption of one video posted in the chats.

The central document in the leaked chats is a manifesto called "Make it Count," which was circulated among followers of Atomwaffen Division (AWD), a group that Russell founded. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes the manifesto as "a series of exhortations to terrorist acts interspersed with garish or grisly images, mirroring the hyper-stylized, neo-Nazi aesthetic popularized by AWD’s propaganda."

In one particularly grisly passage in the document, the authors chide the mass shooter who targeted Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo for not taking on a more high-profile target.

"While you can shoot a grocery store full of [n-word]s, you are treating the symptoms of the cancer, not the cause," the manifesto stated. "You must select targets that do the most damage to the system and spark revolution and chaos.”

Read more about the leaked chats here.