A school resource officer had pulled his 16-year-old son, Noah, aside. The FBI was involved, too.
They were concerned, Aaron Houran recounted to Raw Story, about a video that his son posted online purporting to show him burning an LGBTQ+ pride flag. Noah Houran talked of attending an unspecified “rally.”
The online content that caught the FBI’s attention appears to have also involved firearms, based on a reference Noah made in a subsequent Instagram post.
“There was an agent who came to school, who was talking to him, just to try to figure out, is this a fantasy, or could it become real?” Aaron Houran recalled by phone to Raw Story.
Noah Houran is one among a handful of white male teenagers who emerged as the national leadership cadre of 2119, a violent neo-Nazi youth group that uses encrypted social messaging platform Telegram to promote hate and recruit new members.
As detailed in a Raw Story report, authorities are investigating attacks targeting Jews and a Martin Luther King Jr. monument that were committed in 2119’s name in New Hampshire and North Carolina, respectively. Four members face felony hate crime charges for a vandalism spree that includes attacks on two separate synagogues, a mosque and a Masonic lodge in Florida.
The national leadership promoted 2119’s hate-fueled attacks through propaganda videos highlighting criminal acts while recruiting new members and expanding across the United States. While encouraging 2119’s active campaign of vandalism, national leaders cultivated a paramilitary aesthetic. They shared how-to manuals promoting mass shootings, industrial sabotage and race war. They aspire to violence.
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For Aaron Houran, it’s a living nightmare.
He told Raw Story that his son makes up stories to fit in with other teenagers on the internet. Whether true or not, Noah claimed in a Telegram chat that he has been a national socialist since he was 13 years old.
“A lot of it was for attention,” he added. “These people find you and pull you into their world, and you’re not lonely. Next thing you know, he’s a leader and he’s important.”
As a result of Noah’s online posts, he was kicked out of school, his father said.
In December, Noah made an announcement on Telegram that his father offered as evidence of his willingness to reform. He said that in January he would be “heading out west for a military academy.”
The announcement wasn’t entirely true: The Tar Heel ChalleNGe Academy in Salemburg, N.C., where Houran is currently enrolled in a six-month program, is only 90 miles from his home on the North Carolina coast.
Aaron Houran said his son’s decision to enroll in the academy, which is described as “a preventive rather than remedial at-risk youth program,” was motivated by a genuine desire to leave the white power movement.
The program, which is sponsored by the National Guard, “targets voluntary participants, 16- to 18 years of age, who have dropped out of school or are not satisfactorily progressing, are unemployed or under-employed, drug-free, and crime free.”
As a condition of his enrollment, Aaron Houran said his son is not allowed to have electronic devices.
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It appears that the last post Noah Houran made in his Telegram channel was on Jan. 5 — the day before he left for Salemburg — but the channel remained active after his departure.
Seven hours after Aaron Houran spoke to Raw Story, his son’s Telegram channel switched from public to private. Aaron Houran told Raw Story that he found his son’s password and deleted his Telegram account.
In contrast to Noah Houran, 2119 member Aiden Cuevas, who is 18, has given no public indication that he has any intentions of leaving the neo-Nazi group and he did not respond to requests for comment.
But in a voicemail to Raw Story, Kevin Cuevas, Aiden’s father, gave a taciturn response to questions about his son’s extremist involvement.
He initially attempted to cast doubt by pointing out his Puerto Rican heritage.
But when Raw Story responded with a voicemail presenting evidence of Cuevas’ involvement with 2119, the elder Cuevas responded with an air of resignation.
Kevin Cuevas acknowledged that he had asked his son “if he belongs” to 2119, and said Aiden’s response was that “he does not.”
He said his son no longer lives with him since he graduated from high school.
“I have relayed all your messages, and it is up to him now,” Kevin Cuevas said. “I have nothing further to add.”
Cuevas’ mother is an immigrant from Russia, and his Russian heritage is a point of pride that Aiden often emphasizes in chats with fellow neo-Nazis on Telegram.
Discussing his legal troubles with peers, Cuevas appeared to be especially bitter about the FBI seizing his Russian empire flag and a video game console.
“Took my f—ing Xbox lad,” Cuevas told Houran on Telegram. “They will strip you of everything they can possibly get away with.”
For one 2119 member, family was a prime reason he says he’s quitting the group.
Aaron Alligood cited the risk to his parents and siblings as a reason for leaving 2119,, along with legal peril. Raw Story could not confirm Alligood’s age, but a page on a athletics website indicates that he is now a sophomore in high school.
“It got too hot,” Alligood told Raw Story last month. “I realized that it was leading me to a pathway of destruction. You’ve seen how some of the legal stuff shapes up to this. I don’t want to be a part of it anymore.”
It’s clear that Alligood’s parents disapproved of his extremist activity.
A year ago, in January 2023, he reported to his neo-Nazi associates on Telegram that his parents forced him to burn some white supremacist stickers that he received in the mail. Alligood said he lied to his parents by telling them that he was “tricked” into ordering the stickers, and that in fact he loved Black people.
He said he had wanted to earnestly explain his racist beliefs to his parents, but feared they would disown him.
“Try living with a father that is cuckservative,” Alligood complained last year. The insult he threw at his father — who coached African-American football players for Berrien High School until his retirement in May 2023 — denotes a weak-willed conservative who treats minorities, women and liberals as equals.
Alligood’s parents could not be reached for comment for this story.
Agonizing realization for parents
Teenage 2119 members have quickly radicalized online to commit in-real-life criminal acts targeting minority groups, said Emily Kaufman, the associate director for investigative research at the ADL Center on Extremism, an anti-hate organization.
“Anytime we see the move from online to on-the-ground, it’s concerning,” Kaufman said, adding that the rhetoric they’re using is different from that of a white supremacist groups such as Patriot Front, which might use “some innocuous propaganda with a QR code.
“This is a different strategy of ‘look how far we’re willing to go with the extreme rhetoric,’” she said.
White supremacy and other toxic content is so ubiquitous on the Internet that it’s almost impossible to avoid, said Dana Coester, a professor at Reed College of Media at West Virginia University who is researching youth online radicalization.
Parents often ask her how they will know that their child is being exposed to white supremacy or other dangerous ideologies, and Coester tells them that if the children are online they’re encountering it through memes, game chats and other content.
“My heart goes out to parents,” Coester said. “This is a completely different landscape than the one they grew up under.”
She added that parents need to come with a large dose of humility when they grapple with the online content their children are consuming.
“There are two kinds of parents I interact with,” she said. “The parents in the room with hollow eyes that are saying, ‘Omigod, yes. I’m terrified. I’m dismayed.’ The other kind of parent will be, ‘Not my kid. No, my kid would never do something like this.’ I always feel more concerned about the parents who are so sure rather than the parents who are agonized.”
Raising children to hate
Then there are is a completely different subset of parents — those who are raising their children to hate.
Mathew David Bair is a 34-year-old Marine Corps veteran from Pennsylvania.
Bair is also a father who joined 2119 relatively late in the group’s development, and he’s one of the few members older than 18.
At the end of last year, Bair posted a photo of his 4-year-old son posing in front of a swastika and the numbers “2-1-1-9,” written in graffiti.
Asked by Raw Story about the dynamic of a thirtysomething adult organizing with teenagers, Bair volunteered that he wouldn’t be opposed to his eldest daughter, who is 14, dating one of the young 2119 members.
“If she would bring home one of you, what is it that I would want as a father?” Bair told Raw Story. “I think this dude saying ‘n—’ online is a lot more of a man than this person pushing sex surgeries. It’s a weird line to draw.”
In the same way that people normalize transgenderism through drag queen story hours, Bair said he wants to see the swastika normalized to “strike fear into people’s hearts.”
Aaron Houran lamented that there are older extremists cultivating children on the Internet. It’s not just Bair, but also older members of neo-Nazi active clubs and racist skinhead crews who have mentored 2119 members.
He might have added that it’s also 16- and 17-year-olds who have been marinating in extreme Internet culture since they were adolescents, and now have the clout and seniority to influence younger children.
“It’s a crazy world with so much going on,” Houran said. “It’s easy to fall into these traps. It’s sad that there are people trying to take advantage of these kids and change them into the same hateful pieces of s--- that they are.”
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About this investigation: This is the second in a two-part Raw Story series about youth neo-Nazi organization 2119. The first part revealed 2119’s violent aspirations and the group’s inner workings. 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.
Aileen Cannon during her U.S. Senate confirmation hearing on July 29, 2020, to become a U.S. District Court judge for the Southern District of Florida.
Source: U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary