Earlier this year, a Texas study found increased infant mortality rates in the 18 months after the state’s six-week abortion ban went into effect in 2021.

The latest study, which was penned by Parvati Singh and Dr. Maria Gallo and published in JAMA Pediatrics, built on that research. It took a look at infant mortality nationwide after Roe V. Wade was overturned in 2022.

The study found that infant mortality was up to seven percent higher than normal in certain months, which is equivalent to an average of 247 more deaths.

The jump was most pronounced—a 10 percent rise—among infants with congenital anomalies. That is likely due to more frail fetuses being carried to term amid abortion restrictions, the study suggested.

“I’m not sure that people expected infant mortality rates to increase following Dobbs. It’s not necessarily what people were thinking about,” Gallo told Ohio State News. “But when you restrict access to health care it can cause a broader impact on public health than can be foreseen.”

Singh agreed, telling CNN that the research “is evidence of a national ripple effect, regardless of state-level status.”

“This is the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “Mortality is the ultimate outcome of any health condition. This is a very, very acute indicator. It could be representative of underlying morbidity and underlying hardship.”

Singh told the first outlet that she now wants to explore maternal and infant mortality rates among various populations.

“There’s a broader human toll to consider,” she said, “including mental health consequences of being denied abortion care or being forced to carry a fetus with a fatal genetic abnormality to term.”

The post Infants Died at Higher Rates After Roe V. Wade Was Overturned appeared first on VICE.

Their job was to listen to thousands of oil and gas workers airing their concerns about the professional hazards and mental and physical toll of working on the frontlines for a company like Shell. Some days, the job meant hearing from contracted workers in the Global South complaining that they hadn’t been paid. Other times, it would be counseling those driven into a state of extreme mental disrepair by allegedly working 31 days straight to keep the pipeline running.

“There’d be times I would close my eyes to go to bed at night and I would just picture burning bodies bobbing around in a water that was on fire,” our Informer says at one point during the interview. “That was basically the nightmare they were talking about that could come true.” 

Think your job is stressful? In our Informer’s first week at Shell, the company had to deal with a spill that created an oil slick the size of Belgium just off the Nigerian coast.

Heavy shit indeed. You can watch the film now at YouTube or in the player below.

Now, here’s an interview about the interview, with VICE director Alexi Phillips. 

VICE: First of all, thanks for making this intensely depressing film for me to watch. I haven’t slept since.
Alexi Phillips: No worries.

How did the Shell informer first get in touch?
I can’t really disclose that.

Most of what’s talked about is disconcerting. How does this stuff stay out of the news?
Most of these spills happen in countries that don’t get much media attention. Every once in a while a massive event, like what happened in the Gulf of Mexico, makes the news but the fact that there are thousands of tiny spills every day is just seen as more of the status quo and not remarkable enough to be ‘breaking news.’

I was assuming the dangers of oil production would primarily be posed to the environment, or to members of the public whose lands or waters are suddenly destroyed by a big spill. I wasn’t expecting to hear that people actually working for these companies would be losing their lives, too.
Yeah, they are working in highly pressurized environments, with extremely combustible liquid and gas, so the risk is inherent—especially when they’re working offshore. But the danger is exacerbated by the crazy demands to continue pumping large quantities of oil, with a focus on profits above everything else.

What surprised you most about what the Shell informer had to say?
Sadly, I was not that surprised. In all honesty I think that was my big takeaway from the interview. There was nothing she could tell me about that industry that would shock me or that I couldn’t believe.

What changes do you hope these big oil companies to make in the future?
I hope they get more robustly regulated, as I think they have demonstrated they cannot be trusted with our future. 

What changes do you expect these big oil companies to make in the future?
I expect that they will talk a big talk and walk a tiny walk.

You can watch the latest episode of Informer now at YouTube.

When contacted for comment, Shell said: “Respect for human rights is fundamental to Shell’s core values of honesty, integrity and respect for people. Our approach is informed by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and is embedded into our existing framework, such as our Shell General Business Principles and our Code of Conduct. The Code of Conduct details how employees, contractors and anyone else acting on behalf of Shell must behave to live up to our business principles.”

The post The Haunting Nightmare Confessions of a Former Shell Consultant appeared first on VICE.

The fire has been classified as accidental. Per the report, the re-energization of the line caused sparks, which ignited overgrown vegetation at a surrounding utility pole. The overhead and energized power line fell to the ground, further igniting vegetation.

Investigators initially believed they had extinguished the fire, which started around 6:30 AM, but undetected smoldering material reignited the second phase of the fire hours later, just before 3 PM.

“We want to make abundantly clear to Lahaina and to our Maui community that our firefighters went above and beyond their due diligence to be as confident as they could be that the fire was completely extinguished before they left the scene,” Assistant Chief Jeffrey Giesea said, per NBC News.

According to the report, “Fed by extreme winds, the fire quickly grew out of control, jumped the bypass, and resulted in the subsequent conflagration from which our island community is still recovering.”

The fire destroyed over 2,000 structures and caused $6 billion in damages.

The report’s findings may or may not sway conspiracy theorists who believe the U.S. government used directed energy weapons to cause the deadly blazes to turn Maui into a “smart island.”

The post Investigation Reveals Cause of Deadly Maui Wildfire appeared first on VICE.

Children cutting the names of their abusers into themselves, children abusing younger siblings, teenagers killing their pets—all of it was celebrated as an accomplishment.  

“There was this 13-year-old girl,” said Ali, a former victim of this community, to whom VICE News is referring by a pseudonym. “On stream, she cut her entire body for them. She would do this sometimes daily. They called them cut shows. They would have her cut things into herself, and then they would allow others to tell her what to cut into herself. 

“This is the same girl that one leader had convinced to kill her kittens on stream.”

If you or somebody you know are being targeted or abused by sextortionists you do have options. If you can’t reach out to a loved one or law enforcement you can reach out to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and/or use their Take It Down app to anonymously remove your images from most platforms.

All of this happened on Discord, the immensely popular chat app, on a server known as “Cultist.” According to Ali, the goal was “to be the most evil.” If that sounds childish, that’s because it was. The abuse consisted of children victimizing other children. The community sustains itself on a cycle of violence in which victims, after sustaining immense abuse and trauma, turn into abusers themselves—often because they see it as the only way to escape their situation. 

VICE News has investigated this group for over a year and has found a sextortion ring that spans the globe and revels in the worst content imaginable. This reporting, based on information from victims, court documents, and interviews with experts, describes a community where children push other children into horrific self-harm, all for the sake of cruelty and clout—and all on some of the world’s most powerful platforms. Since being birthed half a decade or so ago, its activities, the scope of which isn’t clear even to the best-informed experts, have resulted in scores of victims and inspired several vigilantes, even as its ties to an occult neo-Nazi group and sensationalized descriptions of them have given rise to what amounts to a satanic panic.

It’s not difficult to understand why the group’s activities would inspire vigilantes and sensationalistic coverage.

One of the most popular forms of content the predators force victims into creating is known as a “cut sign.” This is when a victim carves their abuser’s name into their body. Content like this is used almost as social currency among the community—the more cut signs you have, the more power you wield. In some cases, according to victim statements and screenshots of group chats reviewed by VICE News, abusers have sold the opportunity to have their victims carve a buyer’s name into their skin.

There are entire Telegram channels just sharing cut signs—which, for some in the community, are considered relatively tame. Inside Cultist there were countless images of these signs and, according to Ali, the server left scores of victims in its wake. One of the heads of the server was a young man named Kalana Limkin, who was arrested in Hawaii in December and faces charges including possession of child pornography. Limkin, who went as “vore” in the server, has yet to go to court, but if found guilty, he will likely spend the rest of his life in prison.

“On stream, she cut her entire body for them. She would do this sometimes daily. They called them cut shows. They would have her cut things into herself…”

Ali, alongside other victims, spent months gathering information on Limkin, which they then provided to the FBI. This likely led to his arrest.

Since Limkin’s arrest Cultist has, for the first time in years, gone quiet. But it was just one part of an online ecosystem I will, for the sake of this article, be calling 764. 

‘The absolute worst, most vile form of human taboo’

764, strictly speaking, isn’t a site, or a place, or a group. It’s a network of online communities using several social media platforms (primarily Telegram, where the recruitment and spread of content occur, and Discord, where the actual abuse and grooming take place), with its own lingo, celebrities (typically the abusers), and hierarchy. There are multiple factions within the community, each headed by distinct leaders. 

“There are all types of people,” said Ali, who spent months being abused by a cult leader in Cultist who threatened to send explicit images of her to her family. After getting out she decided to fight back and aid others in getting out of these groups as well as collect information on the perpetrator. She reached out to VICE News after hearing her abuser was arrested in December. “There were a lot of predators, and there were a lot of victims. There was this mindset that they were trying to get new girls. They even groomed some of the current girls to try and recruit new girls to be groomed. 

“If you could get a girl that was ungroomed and then groom her for the first time, that gave you status,” she added. “To have a girl that you’re grooming, that ‘it’s her first time,’ was the goal for a lot of them.” 

The engine behind this nightmare factory is sextortion, a form of blackmail that’s becoming increasingly prevalent. In the broadest sense, it refers to a predator convincing a victim to send sexually explicit images of themselves, and then using that to bend the victim to their will—this most commonly involves money but can, for instance, involve threatening to send pictures to the victim’s parents if they don’t cut themselves. In many cases, these demands involve the creation of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, and “hurtcore” content, which focuses on the non-simulated infliction of pain and humiliation on children, typically toddlers. 

Read Next

Why Do Neo-Nazis Keep Getting Arrested For Child Sexual Abuse Material?

Coverage of 764 has often focused on supposed ties to the occult. This isn’t out of nowhere; Limkin and other people who have been arrested in connection to 764 have had connections to the Order of Nine Angles, an esoteric satanic group connected to neo-Nazism. While it’s true there exists some relationship, that relationship is thinner than it’s been made out to be. At the end of the day, these are children and pedophiles hurting children. 

‘To have a girl that you’re grooming, that ‘it’s her first time,’ was the goal for a lot of them.’

While it’s impossible to determine exactly how widespread the issue is, researchers who have investigated 764 for years tell VICE News they estimate the number of victims of organized sextortion groups to be in the hundreds. Collectively the members of 764 boast that they have left thousands of children traumatized; this is almost certainly not the case. As in many other online communities, clout is the ultimate goal of 764, and to be on top, you need to be the scariest, the baddest person. Exaggerations of both the depravity of the group and the number of its victims need not be taken at face value—the truth is bad enough.

What can be said without a shadow of a doubt is that the group exists and that law enforcement is taking it seriously. Over the past two years, several major players in the world of 764 have been arrested, and police are starting to recognize it as—according to court documents describing one member’s arrest—a “network that targets minor victims online, grooming and coercing them through threats, violence, blackmail and extortion to engage in destructive behavior, including producing child sexual abuse material (‘CSAM’) and engaging in self-mutilation, as well as violent acts against others.” 

VICE News has identified multiple 764-affiliated groups, but will not be naming them, both to avoid promoting them and because names are somewhat beside the point. The names for these factions are plentiful and similar, typically an arrangement of three or four numbers, or “sinister” words at times spelled using l33t (a modified form of English found online that replaces letters with numbers.) They exist on multiple social media platforms at once, and it’s not unheard of for them to change their names in the hopes of beating moderation. While there may be surface-level changes among the groups, their modus operandi remains the same and in many cases, they share overlapping membership. 

Ali, who was inside of the Cultist server, explained the layout. Alongside the normal channels one would find on Discord, like one meant to welcome new members and one for general discussion, there was a “nudes” channel that contained sexual images Limkin was sent—almost all of which came from minors—and a “cut signs” channel. She said all of this was publically available to anyone who joined the channel. The group had a bot that was programmed to see the self-reported age and gender of a new initiate to the group. If they met the criteria they would be marked as “groomable.” 

Several factions exist within the 764 ecosystem and, according to Ali, there exists a sort of rivalry between the leaders of the communities. The only way to win is to push your victims to the very limit. 

“There were animal abuse and sexual acts with animals, and there were also a few cases where they would (force) people who had younger siblings to either do something to the younger sibling or things like that,” said Ali, who added that one of the group’s goals was to drive a victim to suicide. “That’s what [Limkin] would have liked to be, but he wasn’t quite able to get it up to that point.”

Matthew Kriner, the director of intelligence at Middlebury University’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, told VICE News that 764 “peddles in the absolute worst, most vile form of human taboo, with the very strategic intention of using that to harm others and then perpetuate its existence.” 

VICE News has identified at least five people who have been arrested in the United States in connection to the group, but because the perpetrators are so young, researchers believe there may be more arrests hidden behind publication bans worldwide. All were arrested within the last five years, and their crimes are all connected to luring minors and child pornography. 

“There were also a few cases where they would (force) people who had younger siblings to either do something to the younger sibling…”

The group chats, which take place on both Telegram and Discord, are large, unruly things that are hard to keep track of. Almost all of the grooming typically happens in direct messages, where predators use a variety of tactics including love bombing or tricking a victim with photos of a minor they had previously sextorted. The group recruits from a wide array of sources, which include traditional social media platforms as well as games like Minecraft and Roblox. 

One of the primary areas where members focus attention are LGBTQ communities and ones devoted to topics like eating disorders and self-harm; they perceive these communities as vulnerable and more susceptible to their manipulation tactics.

“[The victims] do not have the typical life,” said Ali. “There’s a lot of them that have been abused, either physically or sexually. There’s a high rate of sexually abused girls in there.”

A young woman who we will be calling Jessie in this story told VICE News she first learned of 764 groups in a community for anorexia. Jessie says she was the victim of a high-profile member of one 764 faction, and that her content is still being shared. Her abuser has not yet been arrested.

However they find a victim, the predator will, at a certain point, have the minor send them sexual images. A typical sextortionist asks for money when they’ve received this content—financial sextortion against young boys makes up the majority of the crimes—but not those in this group. These predators will ask the victim to make content for them, which can range from cut signs to killing a family pet to abusing a younger sibling. 

According to court documents, and the testimony of those who have been inside the groups, the victims are almost all children. The perpetrators likewise skew young—a 17-year-old in Texas was just sentenced to 80 years in prison for child pornography crimes committed within the group—but there are certainly some older people in the group. Richard Densmore, a veteran in his 40s, was arrested in late January in connection to Limkin’s group. He faces charges in connection to possessing and coercing a minor into making CSAM on a live stream, and court documents allege young girls cut allusions to Densmore into their skin. Several sources have told VICE News that the Discord server Densmore ran was connected to 764—a claim corroborated by court documents. One mentioned Densmore by name before he was arrested. 

Through his lawyer, Densmore offered VICE News no comment but pointed toward his not-guilty plea. 

While the predators find their victims in communities across the internet, their primary home is on Telegram and Discord where they constantly play a whack-a-mole game with moderators; as one server is taken down, they’ll hop to another platform, organize another server, and hop back. 

The way that 764 collects and distributes the content it creates—it creates online locations to host images and personal information of their victims in things they’ve dubbed “lorebooks”—makes it easy for someone who has been tormented by the group to be revictimized. Some of those in the community are revictimized by multiple predators. Ali said that some get to a place where they believe this is the only way they can maintain a “relationship dynamic and that is why it’s so hard for a lot of the victims to get out of.”

For some, the only way to escape the abuse that was being inflicted on them was to inflict abuse on others. 

You Can Get Help

During the worst days of her abuse, Jessie wouldn’t leave her room. 

“I didn’t eat anything. I didn’t drink anything,” she told VICE News. “I was vomiting nothing but stomach bile and crawling to my fridge to get food. I was very much not OK. It’s extremely traumatizing.” 

This is a common dynamic among victims of these gangs; to be one is an intensely isolating experience, and several told VICE News they felt like they were trapped and had no options. Kathryn Rifenbark, the director of survivor services at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, or NCMEC, told VICE News that it’s important for victims to know there are options available to them. If they feel they can’t reach out to a loved one in their life, they can reach out to an organization like NCMEC.

“So many children feel a lack of hope and feel a lot of despair in those moments and we have seen children that have taken their own lives due to the distress that these situations cause them,” said Rifenbark. “So it’s very important that they identify someone that they can reach out to to help them and know that they are not alone. We help many children every single day, so they’re not alone and there is help out there for them.”

There are also tools like Take It Down (operated by NCMEC), which youths can anonymously use to aid them in removing content that is being used to abuse them. The tool works by issuing a unique digital fingerprint to content, which platforms can use to track the image and take it down. This can be done without informing a parent or law enforcement or giving any sort of personal information. 

‘So many children feel a lack of hope and feel a lot of despair in those moments and we have seen children that have taken their own lives…’

Some of the victims that VICE News spoke to about 764 found themselves going back into the communities to see if their content continued to be shared. Jessie told VICE News she knows that her former abuser is using her images to catfish minors into his sextortion ring and that she is in a continuous battle to counter it. 

“The stuff that ends up on my phone by joining these groups to try and see where he’s sending my nudes and when I see these minors being like harmed … It’s a lot on me,” Jessie said. “I’m angry. I’m very angry and I’m upset and I feel like it’s like my duty in life right now to do anything I can to get him in trouble.”

Stephen Sauer, the director of CyberTip.ca—a Canadian tipline focused on sextortion and giving aid to children in dangerous situations—told VICE News that many people who have dealt with the trauma caused by these crimes constantly worry about their content reemerging. 

“That comes as a long-term issue because they’re constantly worried about being recognized,” said Sauer. “We have some kids who are and young adults actually who were victimized as children that are constantly searching for their abuse material online to get it removed.”

Oftentimes, the predators threaten victims’ families, especially if they can coerce personal information out of their victims. 

“When there are threats involving your family, because it feels like your actions that you’ve taken have now affected the people around you, that’s like a really scary thing,” said Ali. “It feels easier to comply than to tell somebody about it, especially if they’re threatening you if you tell someone about it. But it’s just another way to scare you into continuing.”

If you have any knowledge about 764 sextortion groups or the Order of Nine Angles, please feel free to reach out to Mack Lamoureux and VICE News in confidence at mack.lamoureux@VICE.com.

Like any enterprising online community looking for members, the group finds its victims in an array of places. A GNET piece written by Marc-André Argentino, Barrett Gay, and M.B. Tyler called “764: The Intersection of Terrorism, Violent Extremism, and Child Sexual Exploitation” is the best piece of literature publicly available about the group. In it, the authors write that 764 has a “presence on YouTube, Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, X (formerly Twitter), Telegram, Twitch, TikTok, Steam, Mega, and Roblox,” which they use for both promotion and recruitment. What’s more, the group is sharing tips on how to snare young people into its web. 

“People don’t understand how quickly some of these communications can happen,” Sauer told VICE News. “I think there’s a lot to be said about the fact that the offending community out there has kind of come together and are educating one another.”

When reached for comment, Meta removed the accounts flagged by VICE News as examples of 764 affiliated profiles and stated they’re aware of the problem and are actively investigating it in tandem with NCMEC. Spokespeople for Mega and Snapchat told VICE News they have a zero-tolerance policy for sextortion and have taken several steps to address the problem. 

“The stuff that ends up on my phone by joining these groups to try and see where he’s sending my nudes and when I see these minors being like harmed, it’s a lot…”

Jessie said even after she removed herself from the abuse at times she would be targeted again. In some cases her former abuser even contacted her current partner to brag about what he did to her. But now, since she’s spoken to people and gotten help, he doesn’t wield the same power he once did. 

“He’s unsettling, very unsettling. There is something wrong with him. It’s like there’s like a light in his head that’s actually missing,” Jessie told VICE News. “But I’m not scared of him, like at all.” 

A growing problem

One of the most popular apps among teenagers—Discord—is, for many in 764, the primary grooming and abusing grounds. 

A Discord spokesperson told VICE News the company has been aware and proactively combatting the 764 threat since 2021 as well as partnering with law enforcement and researchers. They called the threat “significant” and said that anything they encounter they report to NCMEC and law enforcement. They did not share any hard numbers about the amount of groups the company has taken down or accounts it’s banned, but said Discord has been attempting to proactively detect the group. Working with NCMEC, they use hashes generated by their Take It Down program to track CSAM and identify groups sharing it.

“We find that they organize on more encrypted platforms and attempt to share out [information about a new server] when they do get back up and running on Discord before we take them down again,” said a Discord spokesperson.

When asked if they were working with other platforms to combat 764, the spokesperson declined to get into details but added they were taking an “ecosystem-based approach.” 

According to Discord’s self-reporting, the number of accounts it has removed from the platform in connection to “child safety” is exploding. On its transparency page, the company states it removed 37,000 accounts for child safety in the last quarter of 2022; that number exploded to 116,000 in the final quarter of 2023. 

The FBI declined to comment on the issue but did point me to a briefing about the threat of sextortion. According to the FBI, the majority of extortion it’s seeing is financial and primarily comes from overseas threats. In the briefing, the FBI said that from October 2021 to March 2023 it received over 13,000 reports of sextortion of minors, which led to “at least 20 suicides.” The problem appears to be accelerating at a dangerous rate—from October 2022 to March 2022 the FBI saw a 20 percent increase in reporting. This data is consistent with NCMEC’s; the group says that between 2021 and 2023 the number of online enticement reports they received on its tip line increased by 323 percent

All of these numbers should be taken more as directional than definitive. It’s unclear to what extent rising numbers reflect more reporting and enforcement, as opposed to more abuse; law enforcement sources pointed out to VICE News that factors such as a platform rolling out a reporting tool in a new language or new country can lead to massive spike in reports without any detectable increase in prohibited activity. But it does appear the problem is getting worse.

‘Child pornography is probably (his) least egregious crime’

Last year, 17-year-old Bradley Cadenhead was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to nine counts including possessing and promoting child pornography. Speaking about the content found in Cadenhead’s possession, one officer who worked on the case told a local news outlet, “The child pornography is probably the least egregious crime he has committed; he is a scary kid.” 

Cadenhead was only 16 when he was arrested. His case can give us a possible hint at the orgins of 764.

According to court documents obtained by VICE News, Cadenhead said that he first became obsessed with violent pictures and videos at age 10, and that this fascination grew as he aged. Eventually, he met a person on Minecraft with whom he cultivated this fascination. Then, as the court documents state, he started “a group called 764.” In the online world he created, Cadenhead’s influence over the members of his server was “extreme” and, according to the documents, he considered himself a cult leader.

Before him, there was a sextortion group called CVLT, which became infamous when Kaleb Merritt, one of its members, traveled across multiple states to find one of his online victims, a 12-year-old girl, in real life and rape her multiple times. Merritt, then 21, met his victim on Instagram and began to abuse her online before traveling from Spring County, Texas to Bassett, Georgia to find her in person. According to court documents, Merritt camped out behind his victim’s home for several days, coercing her into meeting up with him in his tent where he then raped her and took photos of her nude. Merritt was eventually sentenced to 350 years in 2022 for his crimes. 

Limkin’s court documents refer to 764 and CVLT, the groups Cadenhead and Merrit were in. 

“Limkin was an associate of the groups known as ‘CVLT’ and ‘764’ and identified as the founder of the splinter group, ‘Cultist’, which focused on more specific behaviors, such as promoting child pornography, child exploitation, sexual extortion, and trafficking, doxing, swatting, ‘fed’ing,’ manipulation, animal cruelty and self-harm of minors,” read his documents. 

Now, this isn’t a problem just localized to North America. Both the perpetrators and victims can be found across the globe. Some of the most shocking crimes tied to this group can be found overseas. 

In late January, Brazilian police announced they arrested two teenagers in “Operation Discord,” and while the reports don’t specifically name 764, the modus operandi is the same. The teenagers were at the center of a sextortion ring that was built around “coercing children and teenagers to send intimate videos; practiced self-harm with administrators’ usernames and a swastika design; and committed animal abuse.” One of the teenagers was caught with CSAM on their mobile phone. 

In 2022, a German teenager who was living with a Romanian foster family attacked a 74-year-old woman, beat her to the ground, and cut her throat. He filmed the attack and shared it online. Just days before it the teenager had attacked another senior citizen pushing him down a flight of stairs and cutting his face. That elderly man lived. 

The crime was investigated by the Romanian outlet Libertatea and German publication Der Spiegel, which reported the teen’s indictment said he committed the attack “to provide content with a high degree of violence within the online groups he was part of.” When investigators searched his computer, they found CSAM and content with extreme violence. A journalist covering the case spotted several faded tattoos on the young man’s body at a court hearing, including a swastika, the username of a well-known leader in the group, and, written on his forearm in faded ink, three digits. 

“764.”

Traps and propaganda

Reporting on a community like 764 is exceptionally difficult, not just because it involves extremely unsettling material but because it involves CSAM that is, with incredibly narrow exceptions, categorically illegal to view or possess. This means that not only are journalists highly limited in their ability to investigate, but so are most of the sources on whom they normally rely, such as academics, activists, independent researchers, and even all but the most specialized law enforcement officials. 

Things are even more restrictive in Canada, where I am located than in the U.S.; child pornography is defined here not simply as the vile material one thinks of initially, but also as any sort of visual or written material that describes, advocates for, or “counsels sexual activity with a person under the age of eighteen years.” 

“I’m guessing you need these,” one source I worked with said after dropping off screenshots corroborating some information, “because you, for whatever reason, don’t want to or can’t check them yourself.” He was correct.

Reporting on this group, then, meant circumnavigating the extremities of this extremist community. There are many areas that I would not and could not investigate myself, because it would put me at risk of engaging with illegal material. I had to rely on specialist researchers, infiltrators, and abuse survivors to walk me into the legal sides of the community and provide me with screenshots and video clips showing the inner workings of the sextortion rings. 

Despite these difficulties, the group has proven to be a bona fide hit for some in the true-crime world. How could a neo-Nazi satanic cult that’s grooming children not be? 

What is driving the actual acts, though, is far more murky than you’ll ever learn in a minute-long TikTok video warning you to never let your children use Discord. Evidence that VICE News gathered and researchers who spoke to VICE News suggest that while the group has certainly adopted aesthetics from the Order of Nine Angles, a fascist occult group focused on destabilizing society, and there are certainly some elements within it, this is not what is driving the crimes. 

‘It wasn’t ever like ‘you’re doing this for Satan’ or even brought up.’

O9A has been the focus of researchers and law enforcement for years now, and it has been tied to multiple crimes, including many involving CSAM. At the risk of simplifying a complicated group, the goal of O9A is to weaken society by attacking taboos and norms, and few things are more taboo than CSAM. To push their goal they infiltrate other groups and try to distort them to their own end. The group’s influence could be prominently found in neo-Nazi accelerationist groups like Atomwaffen and The Base. 

Researchers believe there is a strong chance that the origins of 764 were tied to the O9A, but they’ve since grown apart. Both Ali and Jessie told VICE News that while they saw satanic imagery, that’s as far as it ever went. 

“It wasn’t a satanic cult,” said Ali. “There wasn’t really a satanic aspect in it. There are a few people who are Satanists, but it was more just like a group of hatred and child stuff. 

“It wasn’t ever like ‘you’re doing this for Satan’ or even brought up.’” 

As always with 764, the truth is murky, because the claims of connections to the O9A aren’t without merit. Angel Almeida, a member of the 764 collective who was arrested in 2021, is its most obvious link to O9A. Almeida, like the rest of those arrested in connection to the group, is facing a plethora of child pornography charges in New York. 

“The defendant attempted to incite and spread violence—sharing images of himself brandishing a firearm, of children being bound and raped, and of animals being stabbed and beaten,” reads the court response related to Almeida’s motion to suppress evidence. “He targeted minors online, including Jane Doe-1 and Jane Doe-2, desensitizing them to violence by distributing CSAM and, in the case of Jane Doe-2, inundating her with 764 doctrines. And he coerced these victims into producing pornographic content of themselves. With Jane Doe-2, the defendant’s coercion went so far as to hold her at gunpoint, drink her blood, and engage in criminal sexual acts.”

It was found that upon Almeida’s arrest, he had multiple physical objects connected to O9A, including patches, a flag, books, and a piece of paper with either his or one of his victim’s blood on it, seemingly connected to an occult O9A ritual. 

764 users have also tied themselves to other esoteric groups that are on the radar of terrorism researchers. This includes sharing neo-Nazi manifestos within their community and promoting mass killings. One Eastern European group in particular, which VICE News will not be naming, has declared a “partnership” with the 764 community. 

Because of the extreme crimes and its portrayal of itself as a “global satanic pedophile cult,” 764 has been the focus of some citizen journalists in the true-crime realm on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. Researchers worry they’re sharing propaganda of the cult and falling into some of the traps the group sets to entice victims into their webs. 

In many cases, the crumbs that have been left online were left specifically by the group in the hopes of enticing people to search them out or making them out to be something they’re not. These traps include Reddit posts written by victims, which is one I fell for, things written on Urban Dictionary, posts made on TikTok, and so on. 

Barret Gay and M.B. Tyler, two of the authors of the GNET piece about 764, told VICE News that the abusers within 764 want to be portrayed as an all-powerful cult, which elevates the group into something larger than it is. Sensationalistic and overly simplistic coverage of the groups, say experts, plays into its hands.

“People trying to do vigilante-style coverage actually may end up helping these perpetrators more than it would be hurting them,” said Tyler. “Covering this like ‘look at this spooky creepy scary thing weird thing we found on the internet’ isn’t helping anyone. 

“They’re just spreading propaganda without meaning to,” he added. “They’re doing more harm than good.”

Cyber vigilantism

The shocking and extreme nature of the crimes has unsurprisingly attracted some who want to fight back. 

In the spring of 2023, Tar, a man who infiltrated the groups, first got in touch with me. He told me that I had played right into a trap laid for 764 on Reddit. A 764 abuser had posed as a victim warning others not to look into 764—the hope was this would pique a macabre interest in the group and send possible victims looking. A screenshot of my request to speak to the fake poster was shared among the group. 

Tar runs a group, which VICE promised not to name, that actively tries to hunt down the groomers and turn the tables on them. What this group and others like it do is oftentimes illegal. Some of the hunters will repost sextortion content, which means they are sharing CSAM—a clearly illegal act. Tar and his group knew what they did was skirting the legal system and didn’t have any qualms about it. They believed they were on the moral side of the fight.

“At the end of the day, I think these groups need to be brought to light because the average Joe Schmo doesn’t realize how much information their child is leaving, and sometimes it’s not even a child, it could be the parents,” Tar said. “They don’t realize what kind of digital footprint that they’re leaving and that’s what these guys are preying on.”

Cyber vigilantism is as old as the internet, and while many of those who partake in online “pedo-hunting” likely believe they’re helping, it is something that experts don’t recommend. This kind of action can bring vigilantes into contact with illegal material, make them susceptible to becoming victims themselves, and interfere with and possibly ruin law enforcement investigations. 

“The laws that are in place really need to be in place,” said Sauer. “That’s one of the reasons why an organization like ours is important because we do have a lens into what’s happening in all these online spaces. Even if it’s a limited lens we can provide that type of information without overexposing.”

Tar and his group are far from the only community that is attempting to push back or shine a light on 764. There are a plethora of “pedo hunting” channels on Telegram that have attempted to show the horrors that lurk within these chatrooms. They tend to share CSAM, something that is every bit as illegal when done by those who believe they’re doing so righteously as when done by those who have produced the material. 

Members of Tar’s group, however, took the fight directly to those within 764. They would try to get themselves into the good graces of predators by being useful—some would even edit the abuser’s videos showing off their victims, one of a variety of “jobs.” These jobs are things that need to be done to keep the community sustainable, and include things like serving as a “librarian” who will host the content. Tar told VICE News that many of the sextortionists, children with large egos, would be relatively loose with their info inside the private areas. 

“People get more comfortable and they speak more freely about their acts and things that they’ve done to children in the past or things that they want to do to children,” said Tar. “People will post images of themselves because they fly so close to the Sun that they want their fucking wings to melt.”

The group would attempt to collect information on the sextortionists and use it to either dox the abusers on a site known for hosting people’s data or actively extort them. Tar showed VICE screenshots showing that within the chats, the groomers were extremely aware that they were open to being targeted by law enforcement groups and would even share videos of themselves being raided. Tar believes that these groups are selling the content they create in this room where children are abused. “I would presume that that would be recorded and sold on the dark web,” they said. 

Tar said he once saw a group of children get pulled into orbit in less than 10 minutes—he shared evidence of this with VICE News—by a young woman on TikTok who was initially a victim. Once in a group chat with the abuser, a graphic video of a child abusing themselves sexually was shared. All the children initially reacted in horror but were then told to share it with other people to shock them as they were.

“Yo, [the name of the groomer], I’m going to spread all your CP on Telegram,” you can hear one of the people say. “I’m going to traumatize kids. Fuck their lives homie. Let’s see who should we start with?” 

According to Kriner this kind of activity—getting in too deep—makes it hard for both an abuser and victim to leave. 

“Once you engage with that taboo. It’s so far gone for many people that you can’t just walk away as if it never happened. You sort of get stuck. Either you commit further to it, or you have to incur the costs of what you did. And those costs can be extraordinarily high.”

Surviving an online hell

When Ali heard that Limkin was arrested, she couldn’t believe her ears. 

“I was in shock, I was relieved I could not believe it,” she said. “I was just so shocked that something had actually been done because so many of the girls who report things that have happened to them online it does not carry through whatsoever.

“I called my mom right away and was like ‘Hey, like I guess whose finally in prison!’”

Ali is now working on healing after her experience within the group, but she’s wary of Limkin’s associates, who are still out there. She knows that while Cultist is still down, there are other servers active, and even the news about his arrest would drive users to this community, where they will fall into the horrific web of these sextortionists. 

“I know a lot of them have deactivated their social media or Discord accounts because of this arrest, which makes me happy in a way, but also not, because now they can’t be caught for what they’ve been doing if they have this time [to protect themselves]” said Ali.

‘You can get out of it’

She wants other young people to not implicitly trust someone because they’re younger. 

“You don’t think that a 17-year-old is going to be an awful pedophilic pervert or someone who could cause harm to you because you associate age with power a lot of the time. So I think it’s really important to realize that even though they might be close to your age they are not normal people, and they do have the capacity to hurt you or to harm you, to extort you.”

Furthermore, she wants others who have been in her situation to know it’s not their fault. That you can escape the hold your abusers have on you and come out the other side. Those she was dealing with followed through on their threats and sent content of her to her parents and said the worst-case scenario was survivable. 

“It’s not your fault that they took the person you are and manipulated it to extort you,” she said. “You can get out of it. You can talk to the police. You can get protection if you’re worried about them doing something to you or your family. A lot of it is empty threats to get you to continuously comply.

“There is a way out. Talk to someone. It’s better than constantly feeling trapped in a situation like that.”

If you or somebody you know are being targeted or abused by sextortionists you do have options. If you can’t reach out to a loved one or law enforcement you can reach out to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and/or use their Take It Down app to anonymously remove your images from most platforms.

This story has been updated to reflect the fact Discord has been knowledgable about 764 and combatting it since 2021.

The post The Vile Sextortion and Torture Ring Where Kids Target Kids appeared first on VICE.

Righter is represented by the attorneys who have filed a series of previous lawsuits against Ballard and OUR. The first was brought by women who say they were subjected to sexual coercion while on purported anti-trafficking missions with Ballard. A married couple has also filed suit, alleging that Ballard and OUR’s behavior led to their separation. Righter’s lawsuit centers on sexual misconduct she says took place while she was volunteering for OUR as an undercover operative and on the disastrous eye and facial injuries she sustained during a training exercise conducted by OUR in 2021, in which her orbital bone was destroyed. 

Ballard, a PR representative said to represent him, and the SPEAR Fund, a new anti-trafficking organization with which he’s affiliated, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Nor did Cooper or OUR.

Ballard has previously defended the use of what he calls the “couples ruse,” in which women would, he has said, pose as male OUR operators’ wives or girlfriends on missions to prevent the male operators from having to sexually touch trafficked women and girls. The women, for their part, say this was a pretext for Ballard—who, they say, invoked the authority of God and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—to exploit them sexually, coercing them into intimacy which he said was necessary to save children and fool traffickers. 

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Righter previously outlined her experiences to VICE News, the first time she’d ever spoken about this series of events to journalists. She recounted a trip to the British Virgin Islands with Ballard and Cooper in which, she said, Ballard relentlessly tried to get her to have sex with Cooper, to whom she had been assigned to as a couples ruse partner. Righter also said that the trip was essentially a luxury vacation, with the group quarantining on a private island owned by OUR allies. Following that, Righter says, Ballard and his couples ruse partner spent hours in bars, massage parlors, and strip clubs across the islands, supposedly looking for evidence of trafficking, while Righter and Cooper trailed them in a car. Righter also said that on the apparent say-so of God, Ballard impulsively assigned her to be the primary operative communicating with a suspected trafficker, texting with him from the United States on a burner phone given to her by OUR. Righter told VICE News that she came to believe that OUR’s methods were “creating a market” for trafficking victims; the man did not appear to have access to trafficked women or underage girls, and she feared that asking him to find young women for a party would lead to women or girls being trafficked who had not been previously. 

OUR has previously denied creating demand for trafficking victims.

Disquieted by this experience, Righter returned to the United States and resolved to only remain involved with OUR if she could work on a team that was not headed by Ballard. That led to her attending a training at a CrossFit gym owned by OUR, where she was kneed in the head during a grappling exercise where operators were instructed to dive for a fake knife at the center of the mat. Cooper took her to a hospital, and OUR eventually paid medical bills resulting from the accident.

The description of events in the lawsuit mirrors what Righter has previously described to VICE News; the suit also accuses OUR of being reckless with the safety and wellbeing of its operators, who were central to the group’s public image and fundraising success. 

“It became very evident to Plaintiff that OUR only focused on allowing its celebrity founder, defendant Tim Ballard, to live the lavish lifestyle of a wealthy sex tourist and sexually manipulate and abuse employees, contractors, and volunteers under the guise of saving children by implementing the COUPLES RUSE,” one section of the suit reads. “OUR’s focus to be worshiped as ‘celebrity heroes’ was so intense that it overrode concerns about the safety and welfare of the very operators at the center of OUR’s fundraising.”

The allegations against Ballard and OUR have also widened into increased scrutiny of one of their most high-profile allies, Sean Reyes, Utah’s attorney general. Reyes has participated in undercover OUR missions, defended the group’s use of intelligence from a psychic medium named Janet Russon, and listed himself on LinkedIn as a producer of Sound of Freedom, the heavily-fictionalized box office hit based on Ballard’s supposed exploits. State legislators have commissioned an audit into, among other things, whether the relationship between Ballard and Reyes compromised the latter’s judgment or led to the inappropriate use of state resources. Legislators have suggested that the audit could lead to Reyes’ impeachment.

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To add to Ballard’s woes, the Salt Lake Tribune reported last week that Ballard is also under criminal investigation in Lindon, Utah, after one of the women suing him filed a police report there. In response, Ken Krogue, the president of the SPEAR Fund, a new anti-trafficking group where Ballard is identified as a “senior adviser,” issued a statement attempting to cast doubt on whether the criminal investigation is real. (It is, according to records on which the Tribune reported and which VICE News independently reviewed after filing a public-records request with Lindon police.) The statement reads, in full: 

We have not been informed of a complaint by any of the women to law-enforcement, nor have we been contacted by any law enforcement agency.

The fact that a purported criminal complaint has been leaked to the media is even further evidence of the true intent behind this charade. It is designed to stir up a media frenzy, to harm the reputation of Mr. Ballard, and to impede his and others’ efforts to fight the sex trafficking industry.

A private citizen has no authority to initiate a criminal investigation or prosecution. While any citizen can submit a complaint to law-enforcement, it is up to law-enforcement to determine whether or not to investigate, and then it is up to prosecutors to determine whether or not to prosecute. The fact that one or more of the women suddenly supposedly realized that they were victimized by a crime raises questions as to their credibility and intentions that will be answered in the pending litigation.”

In the midst of a widening gyre of lawsuits and investigations, Ballard appears to be quietly attempting to rehabilitate his image. Over the weekend, he launched the second season of The Tim Ballard Podcast, rebranding it as a joint venture with his wife Katherine. In the episode, the two do not discuss the allegations against Ballard, but do discuss the discomfort Katherine felt with what she understood his undercover missions required her husband to do.

Update: After publication, OUR provided the following statement to VICE News:

The allegation that OUR is the alter ego of Tim Ballard is false.  Since its inception, OUR has carefully upheld its obligations as an independent 501(c)(3) with appropriate governance and accountability structures, which are now under review by present management.  We will defend the organization against the plaintiff’s misguided attempts to create confusion by painting a false narrative about OUR. The current leadership of OUR has increased its commitment to provide a safe, respectful and harassment-free environment, and we are deeply sorry for any harm or distress that Tim Ballard’s actions may have caused to anyone associated with OUR.

While Tim Ballard was the public face of the organization during his tenure as CEO, he directly participated in less than 1% of OUR’s operations between January 2020 and his departure in June 2023, and his operations were not representative of the vast majority of OUR’s work. OUR is currently conducting, on average, five commissions per week, which include a combination of boots on the ground, intelligence gathering, and contributing resources to law enforcement worldwide.

November 22:

Attorneys from Bienert Katzman Littrell Williams LLP, a law firm in San Clemente, California, released this statement on behalf of Tim Ballard:

We are counsel for Tim Ballard and look forward to fighting these claims and revealing all of their inaccuracies. We note that none of these suits have been served on Tim, and instead seem intended as a vehicle to wrongly attack him as opposed to properly initiating legal proceedings. The Ballards will not let what they view as politically charged false claims deter them from continuing their mission of saving children from the scourge of trafficking. We very much look forward to litigation on the merits of these accusations in the courtroom.

The post Marine Veteran Sues Tim Ballard and OUR Over Sexual Assault Claims, Injuries Suffered In Training appeared first on VICE.

But on second glance, a few customers spotted something amiss. One asked: “I’m confused, is this for a bike? This is a picture of a pistole (sic) brace.”

The thinly-veiled answer from another shopper gave away the true nature of the item: an accessory designed to be attached to the back of an AR-style pistol or other large handgun, enabling it to be shouldered and fired like a rifle, improving the shooter’s aim and control over the weapon.

“This grip helps you ride your bike with more stability,” the reply said. “Added bonus, makes a little more up close and personal if you shoulder this grip thus giving you even more driving accuracy.”

The listing, which was removed by Amazon after the company received an inquiry from VICE News, was one of more than two dozen “stabilizing braces” available on the site despite a policy banning sales and new federal regulations aimed at restricting ownership.

President Joe Biden announced plans to tighten rules on stabilizing braces in April 2021, weeks after a shooter using a gun equipped with one killed 10 people at a Colorado supermarket. A brace was also found on the weapon used in a shooting that left nine dead in 2019 in Dayton, Ohio.

The rules took effect in January and require certain “weapons with ‘stabilizing braces’ or similar attachments” to be registered with the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) by May 31. Those who fail to register “short-barreled rifles” risk a felony and up to 10 years in prison if they don’t comply or get rid of their gun.

The rule change has been met with at least seven lawsuits from pro-gun advocacy groups and red state leaders. The ATF estimates that at least 3 million stabilizing braces are already in circulation in the United States, and those fighting to block Biden’s policy argue it risks criminalizing responsible gun owners who bought something that was previously deemed legal.

A spokesperson for the ATF told VICE News the new policy “does not outlaw the sale or possession of stabilizing braces,” so merely having one uninstalled or selling them on Amazon is not illegal. But Amazon’s terms of use for third-party sellers offering products on the platform “prohibits the listing or sale of all firearms,” including “pistol stabilizing braces” and similar folding or collapsible stocks.

Justin Wagner, senior director of Investigations at Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for gun control, told VICE News that the listings for stabilizing braces, even those disguised as bike parts, “are in plain violation of Amazon’s own policies.”

“Amazon’s firearms accessory sale policy only works if it’s enforced,” Wagner said. “Our nation’s largest online retailers shouldn’t be offering dangerous products that make shootings deadlier, let alone with free two-day shipping.”

A spokesperson for Amazon sent a statement to VICE News that said sales of “non-fixed gun stocks and pistol stabilizing braces” are prohibited on the site, and that “the products in question were evasively listed, have been removed, and we are taking corrective action.”

“Amazon does not tolerate illegal or evasive behavior, and we enforce bad actors that make factual misrepresentations to customers,” the spokesperson said. “Third party sellers are independent businesses and are required to follow all applicable laws, regulations, and Amazon policies when listings items for sale. We continuously monitor our store, and have measures in place to prevent prohibited products from being listed.”

A handful of listings for stabilizing braces disguised as other items remained available as of Friday morning on Amazon, even after the company’s efforts to purge the site.

The listings reviewed by VICE News showed gun braces available in multiple categories across Amazon’s site, including in the section for “Tools & Home Improvement.” Some were advertised as “gunsmithing tools” or other parts.

The post advertising bike grips was not exactly discreet. Several buyers left reviews with comments that slyly described enhancing their weapons, and a few posted photos of the obvious gun part actually installed on the end of bicycle handlebars.

“My bicycle goes as fast as a motorcycle now and is very comfortable to ride with these handlebar grips,” wrote one five-star reviewer who gave the name Retired American Patriot. “I highly recommend them for those smaller bicycles that you want to have a full size bicycle feel.”

AR-style weapons can be modified into various configurations, and the pistol and rifle versions are similar in many ways, including firing the same calibers of bullets. The particulars over which weapons are legal to own without special federal paperwork are governed by the National Firearms Act, originally passed in 1934 to combat a crime wave in the Bonnie and Clyde era, when lawmakers wanted to restrict “short-barreled” rifles that could be easily concealed.

The ATF initially ruled in 2012 that the law did not apply to stabilizing braces and then doubled-down in 2017, calling them “perfectly legal accessories for large handguns or pistols,” unless “employed as a shoulder stock,” in which case any rifle with a barrel less than 16-inches long requires registration. Stabilizing braces proliferated in recent years, and most of the items for sale on Amazon appeared to be knock off versions of name-brand models made by major manufacturers.

Lawsuits challenging the Biden administration’s new brace rules argue the restrictions are arbitrary and won’t work as intended to prevent shootings. In one case filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and the Gun Owners of America, the lawyers wrote: “This makes absolutely no sense from the perspective of ‘public safety’ or common sense, as a person can lawfully possess, without NFA registration, both a handgun (short) and rifle (long) version of the same platform firearm (such as an AR-15 or AK-47), but cannot possess a ‘short barreled rifle’ (medium) version of the same platform.”

The new federal rules exclude items “that are objectively designed and intended as a ‘stabilizing brace’ for use by individuals with disabilities.” Some versions can be strapped to the forearm, enabling shooters to aim and fire when they wouldn’t otherwise be able.

Whether the new rules remain in effect will be up to the courts. Other challenges to the ATF regulatory decisions have scored victories in recent weeks, including cases involving “bump stock” devices and untraceable “ghost guns.”

Even if Amazon wipes out stabilizing braces from its site, the items are still widely available online and will be for the foreseeable future, since they are perfectly legal to buy, sell, and own—right up until they are installed on a short-barreled rifle.

Cody Wisniewski, senior attorney for constitutional litigation at the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), one of the groups that has challenged the brace restrictions, told VICE News that companies like Amazon are ultimately free to decide what they buy and sell, even as public pressure grows to restrict online sales of guns and accessories.

“FPC is deeply concerned that a massive segment of American society is prevented from engaging in lawful speech and conduct online,” Wisniewski said. “While such policies are neither moral nor wise, we respect that private property owners may set their own rules.”

Amazon shoppers who posted about the brace disguised as bike handlebars also seemed well aware of the possibility they could be breaking the law if they bought the part and had it installed on an unregistered short-barreled rifle. One misspelled the acronym for ATF and asked: “Will aft’s customer service reps visit my home if I buy this?”

To which one customer replied with an apparent suggestion for how to dispose of the evidence: “Kinda of hard to argue if your bike somehow ends up at the bottom of a lake.”

Follow Keegan Hamilton on Twitter: @keegan_hamilton

The post Amazon Sellers Disguised Banned Gun Parts as Bike Handlebars appeared first on VICE.

But it wasn’t just flashy displays of defiance and edgy memes that made the Boogaloo Bois infamous: That year, Boogaloo members racked up charges for shooting at police stations, plotting to sabotage the power grid, participating in a conspiracy to kidnap the governor of Michigan, and even attempting to sell arms to Hamas. 

But the breaking point for the government was when a Boogaloo Boi murdered two law enforcement officers in California. The DOJ formed a task force to investigate anti-government extremists and the FBI began knocking on doors. Six months later, almost as quickly as these floral-shirted militants had materialized on American streets, the Boogaloo Bois disappeared from public view. Even Dunn hung up his Hawaiian shirt, changed his phone number, got a job at a county jail, and laid low for a while. 

The sudden disappearance of the Boogaloos fueled speculation that the slew of DOJ investigations and arrests had literally taken them off the board—perhaps destroying the movement forever. “The fact of the matter is the FBI won,” a once-prominent Boogaloo from Texas recently wrote online. 

While it’s true that the threat of prosecution caused the Boogaloo Bois to lower their profile, the fierce anti-government ideology underpinning the movement never went anywhere. And now, the Boogaloo Bois appear to be regrouping, plotting their public comeback to coincide with what many fear could be a tense, even violent, presidential election season. 

In the last six months, the Boogaloo Bois have returned to Facebook and are using the platform to funnel new recruits (and “OG Bois”) into smaller subgroups, with the goal of coordinating offline meet-ups and training, according to data obtained by the Tech Transparency Project and shared exclusively with VICE News. They’re posting propaganda videos, guides to sniper training and guerilla warfare, and how-tos for assembling untraceable ghost guns. “The Bois are back in town,” declared a member of one of the new groups. (Facebook deleted many of the groups after VICE News reached out for this story.)

Dunn, now 22 and recently returned from fighting Russia as a volunteer soldier for Ukraine, once again calls himself a Boogaloo Boi and is consumed by fantasies of becoming a martyr on the streets at the hands of the U.S. government by refusing to comply with police orders and fighting back. He says he’s 100 percent in support of an “armed revolt.”

“We all die there in the street, at the hands of the National Guard or whatever. That would spark a revolution in the state of Virginia, which would spill over into other states,” Dunn told VICE News recently. “I don’t see it as a lone wolf act of somebody blowing up a building or an attack on anything, but as a defense of liberty, creating martyrs in the name of the Constitution and freedom.”

Dunn claims he’s training with a group of more than 100 Boogaloos in Virginia that calls itself “Sons of Liberty” and threatens to go to battle if Virginia tries to pass gun safety legislation. “We will go to war,” said Dunn. “We will fight, we will die, and we will kill.” 

The perfect storm for an anti-government movement

Since about 2015, extremely online gun enthusiasts have used “Boogaloo”—drawn from the title of the 1984 breakdancing film Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo—as a meme to signal a coming civil war or uprising. 

This fantasy formed the basis of a community that started on 4chan’s /k/ weapon’s board and later moved to Facebook, where it continued to grow, drawing in an array of shitposters, preppers, hardline libertarians, militia dudes, gun dudes, supporters for former President Donald Trump, plus some neo-Nazis and white nationalists. 

At the outset of 2020, it was a free-for-all for the Boogaloo on Facebook, where they developed a shared language of memes, often coding violent rhetoric or threats with layers of irony. There, they came up with homophones for Boogaloo to skirt early moderation efforts; “Blue Igloo” or “Big Luau” were popular examples and inspired the Hawaiian shirt aesthetic as well as the images of igloos that they feature on their flag. 

Anything about Boogaloo Bois or anti-government groups we should know about? Send email tips to tess.owen@vice.com or on wire @tesstess.

The first sign that the online community was morphing into a real-life movement was in January 2020, at an annual gun rally in Richmond, Virginia. Amid the thousands of grizzled gun owners who’d come to the Capitol to protest pending gun bills that day were a group of young, heavily armed men. Their gear was decorated with colorful patches, including one featuring Pepe the Frog (the cartoon character co-opted by 4chan and the “alt-right”), with the words “Boogaloo Boys.” Another held a sign saying “I Dream of a Boogaloo.” 

Anger over COVID-19 lockdowns opened the floodgates for anti-government sentiment, creating ripe conditions for the Boogaloo Bois’ ideology. After George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 sparked a national racial justice movement, the Boogaloo Bois saw an opportunity to advance their goals of societal unrest. 

Boogaloo Bois and their Hawaiian shirts suddenly became mainstays of American protests across the political spectrum. And on Facebook, they were able to reach, radicalize, and recruit “normies” into their ranks. 

It wasn’t until Steven Carrillo, a Boogaloo Boi and Air Force staff sergeant, shot and killed a federal security officer and a sheriff’s deputy in California, that Facebook took action against the Boogaloo movement. In late June 2020, they banned the Boogaloo movement, declaring it a “dangerous network” for “actively promoting violence against civilians, law enforcement and government officials and institutions.” 

Carrillo, who is currently serving a 41-year prison sentence, encountered the Boogaloo movement on Facebook during a particularly difficult time in his life. He’d recently returned from a deployment in Kuwait, lost his wife to suicide, and attempted to take his own life several times, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, which charted how he was radicalized into the movement. (Last year, the sister of the murdered federal security officer filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Facebook’s parent company Meta, seeking to hold it liable for her brother’s death. VICE News asked Meta about the status of the case. “We work closely with experts to address the broader issue of internet radicalization,” a Meta spokesperson said. “These claims are without legal basis.”) 

“I was frustrated in 2020, because I knew these guys were dangerous, I knew this was happening, I saw regular people getting radicalized in these groups, and I saw the algorithms pushing people towards the Boogaloo,” said Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, a big tech watchdog that’s been tracking the Boogaloo on Facebook since it emerged. “Now, once again, we’re seeing the same ramp-up. We’re seeing current and former military engaging in these groups. And the calls for violence are even more explicit than they were.” 

One anti-government meme group, “Sounds like Something the ATF Would Say,” has recently been flooded with explicit Boogaloo content, and now has over 100,000 followers. The Tech Transparency Project found that the group had gained over 2,000 followers in the last few weeks alone. 

Boogaloo Bois were using that group to siphon off users into smaller groups (at times even using QR codes to redirect them). Those groups easily skirted Facebook bans by simply misspelling well-known terms associated with their movement. The fact they were able to do that is an example of what Paul claims is “shitty moderation.” 

But a spokesperson for Meta told VICE News that they’re operating in an “adversarial space, where perpetrators constantly try to find new ways around our policies, which is why we  keep investing heavily in people, technology, research and partnerships to stay ahead of them to help keep people safe from extremist activity.” 

“The water is not boiling but the flame is on”

Boogaloos have also been circulating a newly redrawn “manifesto,” a sign that the once-sprawling (and often hard-to-pin-down) movement is honing and narrowing its ideology. 

“If it is radical and extreme to simply want to be left alone, then we will be radical, and we will be extremists,” the 22-page document states. “One does not shake the hornets’ nest and complain of the venom.”

“The difference between now and 2020 is they have their ideology figured out,” said Paul. “I’m extremely concerned because with these new Boog groups, there’s no longer any effort to appear to be careful in terms of what they’re posting. They’re going straight to the ‘kill tyrants.’ ‘kill congresspeople’ memes.” 

They’re plotting their return at a moment when anti-FBI sentiment has surged in mainstream discourse, thanks in part to the baseless “fedsurrection” conspiracy claiming federal agents orchestrated the Capitol riot to smear Trump supporters.

“The difference between now and 2020 is they have their ideology figured out”

The biggest impetus for the Boogaloo’s recent return to Facebook, says Paul, was the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-lago property last August. That raid triggered a wave of violent threats from MAGA-world and calls for civil war. Days after the raid, a Trump supporter with a nail gun attempted to storm into the FBI’s office in Cincinnati. (He was later killed following a police standoff in a nearby cornfield.) 

One member of a Boogaloo Facebook group responded to the news, posting an image of a nail gun. 

Even as the Boogaloo movement retreated to the shadows in recent years, its trappings lingered. The online firearms marketplace guns.com now sell their own Hawaiian shirt, emblazoned with their company logo. FenixAmmo sells a “Big Luau Competition Jersey” in Hawaiian print, as well as stickers with the Boogaloo flag (featuring a stripe of Hawaiian print and an igloo in the top left corner). One person is even selling a “Blood of Tyrants” wine. 

Given the growing normalization of anti-government rhetoric, experts fear that it wouldn’t take much for the Boogaloo Bois to return to the streets. 

“The water is not boiling but the flame is on, and the water is still hot,” said Jon Lewis, research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “It won’t take much to get to that point again like we saw in 2020, where there is sufficient cause to mobilize.” 

Paranoia, paranoia

According to George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, there were 49 arrests of people affiliated with the Boogaloo movement from 16 states between January 2020 and July 2022. A trickle of Boogaloo arrests continue to the present day. 

In January, an active-duty U.S. marine who expressed support for the Boogaloo movement online was arrested for his alleged role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Last month, federal law enforcement seized 11 guns, a silencer, body armor, more than 1,000 rounds of ammo, and several pounds of explosive material from Timothy Zegar, an alleged Boogaloo Boi from Springfield, Missouri. Federal prosecutors say he was “trafficking” firearms, despite having a prior felony conviction from a 2014 high-speed chase. 

In court documents, prosecutors noted that in 2020 Zegar posted in a Facebook group that the “end game is capturing the senate and house and publicly executing them” and said he was willing to be “a martyr for the cause.” 

The FBI said that they do not, under any circumstances, investigate an ideology. “The FBI can never open an investigation based solely on protected First Amendment activity,” a spokesperson for the Bureau told VICE News. “We cannot and do not investigate ideology.”

But Zegar’s arrest is a pretty good example of federal law enforcement’s approach to the Boogaloo movement, often arresting people they might be particularly concerned about on relatively low-level federal offenses, like gun violations or interstate threats.

It’s a strategy that many in the movement are all too aware of. “I know the feds watch my show,” Boogaloo-adjacent podcaster Joshua Smith said during a broadcast of his show in November. “Trust me when I say that the federal government wants to make an example of any ‘Boi’ they can find and pick up for any reason. If they could get you on a fucking driving offense, they’re gonna find a way to put you in jail.”

It’s not exactly paranoia. At least 52 percent of Boogaloo arrests in George Washington University’s tracker were the result of an operation involving an informant or undercover agent. By the end of 2020, Boogaloo chats were rife with finger pointing, with many accusing one another of being a “fed.”

Dunn, in particular, faced a barrage of accusations that he was a “fed” or cooperating with the government, which he adamantly denies. Boogaloo Bois continue to accuse one another of working with the federal government, but such accusations are now so commonplace that they’ve almost become a meme in themselves. (The paranoia about federal infiltration exacerbated infighting between various cells, which had partly stemmed from the vague political orientation of the Boogaloo Bois—some chapters aligned themselves with leftist anarchists, others welcomed neo-Nazis into the fold.)

Leaving the Boogaloo Bois

For some Boogaloo Bois, the mere threat of federal investigation was enough of a reality check to get them to cut ties with the movement.

That was the case for Blake from Oklahoma, who was just 18 when he became a Boogaloo Boi in 2020. (Blake has asked that we withhold his last name, as he is trying to move on with his life after leaving the movement). 

“I didn’t really have any friends. I was just some loner high school kid that had nothing going for him,” said Blake. “So, I joined an extremist group, if you will.” 

His involvement in the movement never escalated to real-world meet-ups, but he makes no bones about the fact that, over time, he became enmeshed with some dangerous people online. “You had guys coming in, saying that they wanted to blow stuff up or shoot people,” said Blake, recalling his time in some Boogaloo-adjacent Telegram channels.

“I left the group because I didn’t want to go to jail. In fact, I was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and I was told, it’s either leave, or continue down the path and get yourself in trouble,”claimed Blake. “I was just a kid at the time.”

“The best way I can describe the movement as I see it nowadays is a terrorist organization that doesn’t commit acts of terror,” he added. 

And while getting a visit from the FBI might have been enough to scare off some Boogaloo Bois, others are unfazed by the prospect of federal surveillance. “Always expect the feds to know what you’re going to do and just embrace it, accept it, and learn to plan on the fly,” said Dunn. “As long as we keep our nose clean and don’t plan illegal things beforehand, there’s no way for the feds to prevent it.” 

This marks a concerning shift for those on the outside watching the Boogaloo movement evolve. 

“A lot of people aren’t afraid of the federal government or the FBI anymore,” said Blake. “There are people out there that I knew personally, that openly talked about slaughtering federal agents, like dragging them and politicians into the streets and killing them. They have no fear. They don’t care.”

“You can’t prosecute your way out of a narrative”

Boogaloo Bois like Blake, who joined the movement for a sense of belonging rather than deep ideological affiliation, might have been low-hanging fruit for the FBI. 

But others who harbored genuine animus towards the federal government pose a bigger challenge. 

John Subleski and Addam Turner, both from Louisville, Kentucky, were prominent figures in a local Boogaloo cell called the United Pharaoh’s Guard—until they wound up in prison in 2021. Subleski was arrested for using social media to incite a riot, and Turner for using social media to make interstate threats. 

They’re both currently on supervised release, and have agreed to stay off social media for the time being. “I’m not allowed on any of those [platforms] anymore, because that’s part of my agreement, the government doesn’t want me telling people what happened on the internet or rallying the troops,” Subleski said. “I’m biding my time until I can get back online and cyberbully the government I guess.”

And although neither Subleski nor Turner expressed a desire to eventually rejoin the movement, they did say that their experience in the criminal justice system only affirmed the anti-government ideology that led them to the Boogaloo movement in the first place. 

Subleski, who came to the movement with years of experience in the anti-government and militia movement under his belt, had been familiar with the Boogaloo meme since its inception online, around 2015. Louisville emerged as a particularly intense flashpoint for the racial justice protests of summer 2020, because of localized anger over the police killing Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker and resident, in a botched drug raid.

Subleski and others in the United Pharaoh’s Guard would go out to protests dressed for war, equipped with guns, zip ties, smoke grenades, flash bangs, a flare gun, and a drone camera. He got his first visit from the FBI that September. He said at first, it seemed like the feds just wanted to “build rapport.”  From that initial visit, Subleski’s Facebook posts grew increasingly unhinged—later cataloged in a federal complaint. 

Subleski’s biggest regrets from his time in the Boogaloo is trusting people in the movement who he believes ultimately betrayed him by talking to the feds (seven members of the United Pharaoh’s Guard were taken into federal custody for questioning, but only he and Turner wound up facing charges). 

“I regret allowing some people to get as close to myself and others as I did, for it to fall apart the way it did,” Subleski said. Turner’s biggest regret was how public he was about his affiliation in the movement online. 

“I don’t regret getting involved,” said Turner. “Did I learn things and would I do it differently next time? Absolutely.” 

Both Subleski and Turner believe that they were only arrested because the government wanted to silence them, and that, in many ways, they were “proved right.”

Asked whether Subleski could still relate to the person he was when he joined the Boogaloo in 2020, he said he wasn’t sure. 

“I think he’s in there, I think. I don’t know if I can say that I still relate to that person or not, but I know that person’s in me,” Subleski said. “I think that person is in all people, and I think it’s just a matter of what it would take to wake that up inside of somebody.” 

The return of the Boogaloo movement despite aggressive law enforcement action over recent years is a salient reminder that the criminal justice system isn’t really a panacea for ideological problems. “That’s always going to be the challenge here,” said Lewis from George Washington University. “You can’t prosecute your way out of a narrative.”

And what’s more: FBI infiltration and arrests seems to have made some in the movement even angrier towards the government. 

“The people that were arrested, the people that were charged, they just made us more angry, they made us more hateful towards the government,” said Dunn. “That hatred for the U.S. government is just sitting there. We’re thinking. We’re learning to be smart.”

Follow Tess Owen on Twitter.

The post The Boogaloo Bois Are Plotting a Bloody Comeback: ‘We Will Go to War’ appeared first on VICE.

The attendees included several high-ranking Mexican officials, along with a few bigwigs from other U.S. law enforcement agencies. At least one person left wondering how the host, who was celebrating his 50th birthday, managed to score a taxpayer-funded house so large and outside the zones typically authorized for housing for senior U.S. officials in Mexico City. One person described the house as a “mega-mansion.”

The party was one of several events that contributed to the downfall of regional director Nick Palmeri, who quietly retired from the DEA last year one day before he was due to be fired. Parts of his undoing, including allegedly improper meetings with defense attorneys who represent cartel members, have recently been made public. But there’s far more to the story, including bitter infighting at the highest levels of the DEA, allegedly culminating with Palmeri telling his boss to “go fuck himself.”

VICE News spoke with more than half a dozen federal law enforcement sources who knew or worked with Palmeri, and reviewed documents, emails, and other records. Palmeri himself sat for an extensive interview for the first time since leaving the DEA, defending his actions while acknowledging some mistakes.

“I’m not saying it was misconduct,” Palmeri said. “I probably could have used better judgment.”

Multiple sources said Palmeri, a former NYPD officer, was part of a group of DEA leaders dubbed by those outside their circle “The New York Mafia.” Even after Palmeri’s tenure in Mexico ended under a black cloud, he was given a position that afforded access to sensitive information back at DEA headquarters. By retiring before he was fired, Palmeri also secured what sources called a “golden parachute” with full retirement benefits, although Palmeri and his attorney dispute that characterization.

“Nick’s retirement was based on how much money he put into his retirement system,” Palmeri’s lawyer, Joel Kirkpatrick, told VICE News. “That’s what it is. There’s nothing extra put in.”

Palmeri has been the subject of investigations by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and the DEA’s Office of Professional Responsibility. He’s been accused of flouting rules about travel and expenses, and potentially creating conflicts of interest by being overly friendly with defense attorneys. He even asked one lawyer who has represented drug defendants for help navigating his child support case, which has not been previously reported.

Meanwhile, a senior DEA official who oversaw Palmeri, Matt Donahue, was allegedly forced out of his job and into early retirement after blowing the whistle, according to sources. 

Donahue, VICE News has learned, is currently in litigation with the DEA before the federal Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), which handles labor disputes. Palmeri has also challenged the DEA’s handling of his firing before the MSPB, and his attorney said an appeal over the outcome is pending. Because of the ongoing litigation and concerns about losing their jobs, the sources who discussed the situation requested anonymity. Most served within the DEA or worked closely with the DEA in Mexico.

Palmeri was once a rising star in the DEA, helping to wipe an entire Colombian cartel off the map and recouping hundreds of millions of dollars worth of drug money. But in Mexico, his style clashed with a senior leader who didn’t like the way he operated.

“He’s not a bureaucrat, I’ll give him that,” said Ruben Oliva, a Miami-based lawyer who represents major drug cartel leaders, including a Colombian kingpin whose case Palmeri worked on. “And you know what? And that’s his problem. He’s a cowboy.”

In response to a detailed list of questions about Palmeri, a DEA official told VICE News: “The DEA holds its 10,000 employees to the highest standards of conduct and professionalism. While we cannot comment on the details of specific personnel matters, when an employee is found to have not lived up to those standards DEA takes decisive action, including removal from the agency.”

Know something about the DEA’s operations in Mexico? Contact the author at keegan.hamilton@vice.com

Palmeri’s critics say his short-lived and contentious tenure in Mexico was entirely predictable, blaming the DEA’s leadership for creating the scandal by putting him in charge of one of the agency’s most high-profile positions, a post responsible not just for Mexico but also Canada and Central America. 

“It was no surprise to anyone when the train went off the rails,” said one DEA source. “It was like fuck, we saw this coming. They picked the wrong person.” 

Mariachi diplomacy

A few weeks before Palmeri’s 50th birthday in October 2020, DEA agents in California arrested Mexico’s former national secretary of defense, Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, on charges of narco-corruption. Caught off guard, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador lashed out at the DEA and “the meddling by all these agencies in Mexico.”

“They came into the country with complete freedom,” López Obrador said at the time. “They did whatever they wanted.”

Behind the scenes, López Obrador was threatening to restrict DEA operations in Mexico. Palmeri, who had taken over leadership of the DEA in Mexico City earlier in the year, wanted to repair the relationship with his senior counterparts in Mexican federal law enforcement—so he decided to invite some of them to his birthday party.

“What better way to engender diplomacy than by inviting someone to your house to participate in such a personal event?” Palmeri told VICE News. “What better way than to invite them, in a professional manner, to your birthday party?”

One former senior federal law enforcement official scoffed at that explanation.

“If you did throw an event for the Mexican counterparts, it wouldn’t be on your birthday, it would be more in furtherance of your work,” the source said. “It would be a small gathering at best to discuss operations, not a birthday party.”

Palmeri invited the Mexican officials and their wives to a home that the U.S. government was renting for him and his family in the State of Mexico, just outside the city limits of the capital. Typically, housing for U.S. officials is limited to a handful of wealthy neighborhoods in Mexico City, partly for security reasons. But the pandemic had complicated the search for a residence that Palmeri and his wife found suitable. 

One person familiar with the situation said that because of Palmeri’s high-level job “he was still going to get a sweet place no matter what.” But, the source said, the Palmeris maneuvered for more. The place Palmeri and his wife found to their liking was a large rental property about a 20-minute drive from the U.S embassy. The location was unusual, one source said, and the house bordering on ostentatious.

“He had a mega-mansion in the State of Mexico,” the source said. “We’re not even supposed to be there.” 

Documentation from the U.S. embassy’s housing office shows that his superiors approved the arrangements. The records show Palmeri was spending around $11,000 per month for housing from July into early October of 2020, and around $16,000 per month for late October and into November. The housing allotment for a four-person household like Palmeri’s typically maxes out at just under $6,000 per month, which is still expensive by Mexico City standards, but Palmeri said everything he did went through the proper channels.

“It was a large house with a large property,” he said. “But it was at the government rate—it was at or below the government rate.”

Palmeri eventually moved into another stately home in a posh neighborhood of Mexico City, but sources say the birthday party attracted attention to the fact that he was living large.

“He committed the mistake of inviting all the executives from all the other agencies,” one person said. “And even though those executives have nice houses, it’s nothing compared to that. This house was better than the ambassador’s house, right? That’s the level.”

After the party, Palmeri filed an expense report with the DEA, requesting to be reimbursed for the costs of hosting the Mexican counterparts. Palmeri said the total amount was $736.20, a fraction of the total he spent on the event. The reimbursement was initially authorized by DEA leadership, Palmeri said, but it later came back to haunt him.

On Jan. 25 of this year, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released a report summary describing the “misuse” of DEA funds in Mexico. Palmeri was not mentioned by name in the report, but it described “funds for the Regional Director’s birthday party.”

“The Regional Director lacked candor for omitting references to the fact that the representation funds were for the Regional Director’s birthday party, in violation of DEA policy,” the report said.

“That’s his problem. He’s a cowboy.”

During the course of the investigation, “the regional Director was removed from DEA due to a separate DEA investigation,” the report said. “Criminal prosecution of the regional director was declined.”

Palmeri still maintains the party was a diplomatic success, helping to reestablish a bond with his Mexican counterparts during the Cienfuegos debacle. Under pressure from Mexico, the U.S. ultimately dropped the charges against the general and allowed him to return home a free man.

“We took a huge dip and we needed to do damage control,” Palmeri said. “I got it back up as good as it was gonna be.”

‘I resent this whole Sopranos thing.’

While some staffers at the U.S. embassy were raising eyebrows at Palmeri’s housing arrangements, others questioned his conduct around the office. While most DEA officials tend to prefer the buttoned-down look, Palmeri was known to sometimes wear more casual attire.

“It’s funny as hell actually,” one source said. “Every DEA guy goes to the embassy in a suit and tie. Here’s Nick in his Sopranos tracksuit, or designer jeans, shirt down to belly button, the whole New York guido thing.”

One former senior U.S. official in Mexico, Tim Sloan, country attaché for the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF), said that at least for important meetings with the U.S. ambassador, Palmeri was always dressed in a suit and tie.

“Nick was always squared away and professional,” Sloan said. “The DEA guys I know loved him. He was a cop’s cop.”

Palmeri also pushed back against the allegation he did not dress professionally: “I don’t own a tracksuit at all,” he said. “I resent this whole Sopranos thing, because it’s just catty. It’s petty.”

A New York City native, Palmeri started his career with the city’s police department before joining the DEA in 1997 and climbing the ranks. Documents reviewed by VICE News say Palmeri “had no prior discipline with DEA,” before he ran into trouble in Mexico. On the contrary, he was a decorated agent with a stellar record and “numerous DEA performance awards.” 

Palmeri had done a tour of duty at the DEA’s office in Guadalajara, Mexico, from 2004 to 2009, and when the top job in Mexico City opened up in mid-2019, he decided to apply. Beyond a promotion to the DEA’s uppermost echelon, known as “senior executive service,” Palmeri said the job offered the chance to do impactful work. He felt he was qualified for the post, which oversees employees in more than two dozen offices across the region.

“I understood the Mexican culture, which is a necessity if you’re going to be successful,” he said.

Multiple sources and documents reviewed by VICE News describe a conflict that brewed almost immediately between Palmeri and his predecessor in Mexico, Donahue, who had advocated for another candidate to fill the regional director position.

Donahue’s attorney, Rob Feitel, declined to comment.

Donahue moved to DEA headquarters to serve as the deputy chief of foreign operations, and he became Palmeri’s supervisor in early 2021. In February of that year, Palmeri sent an email asking Donahue for permission and funds to travel to Florida on DEA business. He planned to attend a meeting of DEA supervisors in Tampa, then travel to Miami to meet with a confidential source and two defense attorneys before flying back to Mexico. 

Emails reviewed by VICE News show Donahue raising concerns because Palmeri intended to meet with the defense attorneys without any other DEA personnel present.

“I did not plan on bringing anyone with me to the defense attorney meetings, they want to speak generally about serving up defendants in Mexico,” Palmeri wrote to Donahue.

In his emails, Palmeri described one of the lawyers as representing “heavy hitters” from the cartel world who now cooperated with the DEA. The other lawyer, he wrote, “represented a bunch of Colombians and Venezuelans with links to Mexico.” 

Donahue wrote back: “Definitely cancel that portion of the trip and meeting with those attorneys (yes, I have concerns).”

Undeterred, Palmeri decided to take the trip to Miami on his personal vacation time. A couple hours after receiving Donahue’s directive, documents show, Palmeri emailed a colleague from the DEA in Mexico, a person who was in the U.S. recovering from a severe case of COVID, with the message: “Cu in Miami.”

Palmeri would later tell DEA investigators—and VICE News—that he simply misunderstood Donahue’s order to cancel the trip, assuming it was fine to proceed as long as he paid his own way. DEA investigators wrote that his excuse “lacks credibility,” and that he had seemingly made “an immediate and deliberate decision” to disobey an order.

“Your intentional disregard of your supervisor’s instructions calls into question your reliability as not only a DEA employee, but as a supervisor,” the DEA wrote to Palmeri.

Palmeri’s wife, Laura, also tagged along on the Florida trip. Their first stop was Feb. 25, 2021, at the home of a DEA confidential source, who lived on a farm outside Miami. They brought a bottle of wine to the meeting, and Palmeri helped himself to a glass. 

The DEA guys I know loved him. He was a cop’s cop.

The source, an informant who leveraged connections with criminals to help the DEA, had worked on cases with Palmeri dating back to 2010, according to records. The source “was not currently providing information regarding any specific pending investigation,” but Palmeri hoped to debrief him about “new intel, trends, knowledge, regarding money-laundering, drug trafficking, crypto, etc. that he may provide.”

Palmeri brought another DEA agent along for the meeting, documents show, but that agent was not fluent in Spanish and could not follow the conversation. Nobody took notes.

While Palmeri and his source discussed DEA business, their wives “sat at the far end of the picnic table engaged in their own conversation.”

Palmeri later acknowledged, according to one document, that the presence of his wife at the source meeting “was not optimal.”

“The meeting had the appearance of a social interaction,” DEA investigators wrote, “and there was no contemporaneous official DEA documentation concerning the substance of this debrief, both of which violate DEA policy.”

The agent who accompanied Palmeri later returned with a fluent Spanish speaker to meet the source again and officially “memorialize the conversation” with DEA paperwork. But that didn’t happen until nearly two months later—after Palmeri had come under scrutiny.

‘You don’t talk to a fucking defense attorney.’

After the meeting at the source’s farm, Palmeri and his wife drove to the home of a defense attorney named David Macey in the Florida Keys, where they stayed for two nights. Palmeri said he considered it a personal visit. Documents show he later told investigators that “some DEA-related topics were discussed,” although he felt that Macey “did not have the type of access to Mexico that would have been useful to DEA.”

“I hadn’t had a case with David Macey since 2013,” Palmeri told VICE News. “We had no cases going on. There was nothing going on between us as far as active cases, potential cases, nothing. And so the relationship would have morphed into friendship. There’s nothing nefarious about it. We weren’t making grand plans on DEA topics.”

Macey did not respond to requests for comment.

Palmeri said at one point he and Macey were smoking cigars together when the subject of Palmeri’s child support case in New York came up. His oldest daughter had recently turned 23 and graduated from college, Palmeri explained, and he was in the process of trying to stop the payments since she was now an adult. Palmeri was handling the matter himself but struggling to make headway. Macey offered to help.

Palmeri recalled Macey telling him: “Send me the stuff, I’ll look at it, and I’ll tell you what to write.” 

Later, Palmeri said, he paid Macey $1,000 for his services “because I didn’t want the appearance of a conflict.”

Palmeri’s meetings in Florida have come under the most scrutiny since his departure from the DEA, partly due to the fact that other DEA agents have recently faced criminal charges for allegedly taking payments from defense lawyers in exchange for sensitive information. 

While Palmeri has not been accused of that type of wrongdoing, DEA sources said he should have known about the potential appearance of impropriety.

“You don’t talk to a fucking defense attorney, never,” one source said. “The only time is with the presence of a U.S. Attorney you’re working an investigation with, and even then you give heads up and ask if it’s OK. It’s so out of bounds what he did, there’s no way anyone can articulate it.”

After leaving Macey’s home in the Keys, Palmeri and his wife returned to Miami for another meeting. Their host was Ruben Oliva, a high-powered defense attorney who had represented a Colombian cartel leader who Palmeri had helped investigate.

Oliva also brought his wife along, and the group of four dined at a restaurant called Tutto Pasta. Oliva recalled it as nothing fancy, and sent an AmEx receipt of the tab for $286.52. 

Oliva told VICE News that he and Palmeri discussed the decision to invite senior Mexican officials to his birthday party following the Cienfuegos arrest the previous October. The birthday invite was an unorthodox but effective way for Palmeri to rebuild trust, Oliva said.

“That’s how you do things in Mexico,” Oliva said. “That’s how you mend fences.” 

After Palmeri came under investigation for the meeting, he disclosed that his wife, who he met while working for the DEA in Guadalajara, had a financial relationship with Oliva, doing part-time translation work at his law firm. Oliva said the work was minimal, totaling less than $2,000 per year in payments for work unrelated to cases that involved Palmeri.

Oliva provided an email to VICE News from Palmeri’s wife saying her husband had consulted the DEA’s Ethics & Standards of Conduct Unit about the arrangement. The advice, which records show was requested after the Miami meeting, said he should recuse himself from any cases where his wife’s work intersects with cases “under the jurisdiction of your region.”

The letter included an end note that the opinion “does not address any conflicts that might arise with those attorneys with whom you have developed a personal relationship.”

Oliva first crossed paths with Palmeri in the case of Enrique Calle Serna, alias Comba, leader of the violent Rastrojos gang in Colombia. A specialist in “cooperators,” drug traffickers who agree to plead guilty and help U.S. authorities in exchange for a reduced sentence, Oliva had brokered a deal where Comba turned himself in and agreed to help dismantle his entire organization. Comba forfeited over $450 million combined to the U.S. and Colombian governments, with Palmeri working the money laundering aspects of the case for the DEA.

“He would go and meet with my guy every day,” Oliva recalled. “My guy paid a lot of money. And not voluntarily, I might add. One prosecutor described it this way, ‘Wow, with Comba, we really scraped the cookie dough out of that bowl.’ What he (Palmeri) did is unprecedented.”

Oliva said after spending hours with Palmeri, along with other agents and federal prosecutors, sitting together with Comba during debriefings, they kept in touch and remained cordial. By the time they met for their meal in 2021, Oliva said, Comba had already served his time. Oliva said he and his client had nothing to gain from Palmeri, and so he felt the meeting was perfectly proper. It was business as usual, with Oliva offering support from other cooperator clients should Palmeri need help in Mexico.

“If you ever need anything, they might be able to help you, they’re an asset,” Oliva said, recalling the conversation. “Feel free to call me. I’m happy to help you. Happy to help the feds. That’s it.”

While Palmeri insisted the meal with Oliva was “a social visit” on his own time, records show he also argued that he was there trying to “drum up business” for the DEA. 

“If someone has ill motives, then it could be bad,” Palmeri said. “But there’s no ill motives here. This is all for the benefit of the government. The government didn’t lose. This wasn’t any benefit to Nick Palmeri.”

The boys from New York

In early March 2021, shortly after Palmeri returned from Florida, he messaged Donahue again to request permission to travel from Mexico City to Guadalajara. When Donahue refused to allow the trip—which was unusual given that it was within Palmeri’s territory in Mexico—there was a blow up between the two men. 

“The straw that broke the camel’s back was [Palmeri] told his boss to go fuck himself,” one source said.

Palmeri later told DEA investigators he “believed the denial was personal.” Documents show Donahue told DEA investigators that Palmeri “used vulgar language and insults,” including telling Donahue that he was “being such an asshole.” Palmeri also allegedly told Donahue to “do [his] fucking job,” to “go fuck [himself],” according to documents.

Palmeri later admitted to DEA investigators that his language was “unprofessional,” and that he had “never spoken to a person like that” before in his life. Palmeri also claimed, according to one document, that Donahue had provided “misrepresentations” of curse words used on their call “to falsely intensify the charge.”

On March 25, 2021, Donahue sent a letter to the DEA’s Office of Professional Responsibility raising concerns about Palmeri, accusing him of “poor judgment, insubordination, conduct unbecoming, and failure to follow directions.” 

“As the highest ranking DEA representative in Mexico, RD Palmeri is a symbol of US federal law enforcement,” Donahue wrote. “The appearance of impropriety can have a significant impact on DEA’s reputation with our foreign and domestic law enforcement counterparts.”

The DEA launched an internal investigation and in June 2021 Palmeri was reassigned from Mexico City to Washington, D.C., and replaced with an acting regional director. Palmeri was being “temporarily” reassigned from Mexico, according to an email sent to DEA employees, to serve as the “associate deputy assistant administrator in the Office of Special Intelligence to lead and direct increased support to investigative efforts in Mexico and other foreign regions.” 

Sources say Palmeri received a per diem from the government that allowed him to stay at the Ritz Carlton while working in Washington. Multiple people said Palmeri kept his security clearance, and one person said his  job was “in the most secure facility DEA has, with the most sensitive information available.” 

Asked about his position after leaving Mexico, Palmeri told VICE News: “My integrity was never really questioned.”

As for the Ritz, Palmeri said it was within his authorized budget: “I never requested more than a penny over the government rate”

At the same time, Palmeri was under investigation by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. Part of that case focused on money used to fund the DEA’s Sensitive Investigative Unit (SIU) in Mexico, in which Mexican federal police officers undergo special vetting and training in the U.S. and then work closely with the DEA. The program has been plagued by scandals, including an intelligence leak that led to a massacre in 2011, and more recent reports of corruption and dysfunction.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was [Palmeri] told his boss to go fuck himself

In the report summary released earlier this year, the Office of the Inspector General reported finding “indications that multiple offices within the region under the regional director’s supervision were inappropriately requesting and documenting the use of SIU funds.”

“Donahue went out, Palmeri went in, there was a lack of oversight of the SIU,” one source said. “I don’t want to use the word misappropriation of funds, but it was certainly a violation of DEA policy relating to expenditures of SIU money.”

As the allegations piled up, the DEA decided it was time to part ways with Palmeri. On Jan. 14, 2022, the DEA sent a “proposed removal action” listing the reasons why the agency planned to fire him: “For failure to follow instructions, lack of candor, conduct unbecoming, and poor judgment.” 

“Throughout the OPR investigation you attempted to minimize your conduct,” the DEA told Palmeri. On his meetings in Florida, the agency wrote: “At a minimum, this commingling of personal and professional matters with defense attorneys could give rise to an appearance of impropriety… Your failure to understand this raises questions concerning your judgment.”

Palmeri disputed the charges, but after learning that he would be fired, he opted for “involuntary retirement” from the DEA on March 14, 2022. The move allowed him to receive a standard retirement package based on his salary as a senior DEA official.

“He gets a golden parachute,” one source said. “The person who ultimately pays the price is Matt [Donahue] for whistleblowing.”

Palmeri’s lawyer said his client was within his rights to retire rather than be fired: “There was nothing special about his retirement,” Kirkpatrick said. “No golden parachute or the agency —wink wink—said, ‘Go ahead and retire so we don’t have to deal with this.’ If that was the case, we would have negotiated something more significant.” 

Palmeri is said to be close with Ray Donovan, a former special agent in charge of the DEA’s New York Office. Donovan played an important role in the capture of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and later served as the DEA’s chief of operations, and remains with the agency.

Donovan and other veterans of the DEA’s New York office are said to look out for each other. 

“Within the DEA, there are cliques and in senior management when they come up, they bring their people in, like in any corporation,” one source explained. “There is a New York mafia in the DEA. You take care of your boys from New York.”

Asked about the so-called “New York Mafia,” Palmeri told VICE News: “The treatment I received was for merit, not for any personal relationship.” If anything, he said, DEA officials from New York “were less inclined to help because of the perception that one might have, it worked in the opposite effect.”

But another source described a sort of patronage system in the upper ranks of the DEA.

“These are all guys that worked together or worked cases together and have continuing relationships and got to the upper levels,” the person said “And as they get higher and higher, they think no rules apply. ”

For those who were fed up with Palmeri in Mexico, the fact that he was able to retire rather than be fired remains galling.

“He violated DEA policy, laws, and common sense,” one source said. “The shit he did was just egregious.”

Another source called out Donovan specifically for enabling Palmeri’s behavior.  (Donovan was not Palmeri’s direct supervisor.)

“He failed to supervise the guy,” the source said. “He (Palmeri) transferred to Mexico and fucked up so bad that within a year he had to resign. That kind of conduct is ingrained. It means you’ve gotten away with bullshit before.”

The DEA declined to make Donovan available for an interview with VICE News.

Oliva, one of the attorneys who met with Palmeri, blamed Donahue for holding a grudge and trying to get Palmeri fired.

“Nick did his job and he did it really well,” Oliva said. “He was barely there [in Mexico] before they pulled him out. It was because this guy Matt Donahue declared war on him.”

Donahue, sources say, also opted to retire from the DEA rather than commit to a mandatory reassignment late in his career and on short notice from DEA headquarters to Bogotá. He now works in the private sector, according to LinkedIn.

According to a document reviewed by VICE News, Donahue has filed a “whistleblowing action” related to Palmeri. Donahue is also said to be “the target of several EEO complaints,” a reference to the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, which protects against workplace discrimination.  

Multiple sources told VICE News they were happy to see Palmeri gone, even if it meant Donahue was also forced out in the process.

“What message did that send?” one source asked. “It shows a leader is breaking the rules. And if a leader is breaking rules, everyone can break the rules.”

Follow Keegan Hamilton on Twitter: @keegan_hamilton

Nathaniel Janowitz and Miguel Fernández-Flores contributed reporting.

Correction: A previous version of this story said the DEA’s Ray Donovan was recently in the courtroom for the Genaro García Luna trial. This was not the case.

The post Inside the Scandal That Took Down the DEA’s ‘Cowboy’ Chief in Mexico appeared first on VICE.

Logan and Katja Lawrence were unmasked last week as the operators of a neo-Nazi homeschool network with thousands of members, known as Dissident Homeschool on Telegram, by VICE News and the Huffington Post based on research from an anti-fascist research group called the Anonymous Comrades Collective.

The Lawrences openly advocate white supremacist ideologies with the aim of making the  children they teach, they’ve said, “become wonderful Nazis.” Katja Lawrence said she initially started the group because she “was having a rough time finding Nazi-approved school material for [her] homeschool children,” and has shared lesson plans that include Hitler quotes, pictures of a cake she baked for Hitler’s birthday, and a recording of her children saying ”sieg heil” in unison.

Days after the news broke, the Ohio Department of Education said that it was investigating the Lawrences and the neo-Nazi homeschool network. Stephanie Siddens, the interim superintendent of public instruction at the Department of Education, told VICE News that  she was “outraged and saddened” by the news, adding that “there is absolutely no place for hate-filled, divisive and hurtful instruction in Ohio’s schools, including our state’s home-schooling community.”

But, in a new statement to VICE News, the findings from the Department of Education’s investigation seem to have concluded that there is simply nothing the department can do, or would do, to sanction the Lawrences or anyone else doing something similar due to the state’s homeschool policies.

“While there are certain minimum requirements for home education, the Department of Education is not involved in the excusal of a particular student from attendance in order to participate in home education,” the department said in a summary of its findings shared with VICE News. “Moreover, the district superintendent’s review of home education is limited to ensuring that the minimum educational requirements are met and that the academic assessment report shows that a child is demonstrating reasonable proficiency.”

Eric Landversicht, the superintendent in Wyandot County, where the Lawrences live, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the findings or whether the department spoke to him as part of their investigation.

Please send tips about the Lawrences or the neo-Nazi homeschool network to David Gilbert at david.gilbert@vice.com. For Signal, DM @Daithaigilbert on Twitter.

The department’s statement did not reference the Lawrences and the neo-Nazi homeschool network and instead focused on the home schooling regulations in the state. “Parents or guardians who decide to educate their children at home are responsible for choosing the curriculum and course of study,” the statement says. “They select the curriculum and educational materials and take responsibility for educating their children.”

A spokesperson for the department did not immediately respond to VICE News’ question about whether their investigation has not been closed.

The Upper Sandusky Police Department and the Wyandot Sheriff’s office both told VICE News that there are no investigations under way into the Lawrences or their homeschooling group.

There are currently over 51,000 homeschooled children in Ohio. While the state has some rules in place to try and ensure homeschooled children are receiving a proper education, those involved in Ohio’s homeschooling system say that oversight is minimal.

“The amount of oversight is just shocking to me because there’s really no oversight, it’s basically just a rubber stamp,” Megan, a mother who homeschools her child in Ohio, told VICE News. “Nobody really seems to know what anybody’s doing because people like to have freedom and  they just do what they want. Everything just seems to happen very fast.”

Megan, whose last name has been withheld due to safety concerns, also said that while other states require homeschool children to take part in standardized testing and meet in person with teachers to assess their child’s development, “Ohio has none of that.”

“You can just basically pick your curriculum, and the superintendent doesn’t really have a lot of say,” Megan said.

Republicans in the Ohio Senate are pushing several pieces of legislation which would relax homeschool oversight even further. A bill sponsored by Republican lawmakers in Ohio would increase the amount of tax breaks that homeschool parents can receive annually from $250 to $2,000.

“If programs that perpetuate antisemitism, hatred, and bigotry are something the Ohio legislature and Ohio Department of Education unleashed when it allowed unfettered access to the structure of Ohio public education, then it must revisit those unwise decisions,” Rep. Marcy Kaptur told VICE News. “Hate should not be foisted on future generations or on Ohio’s communities. Ohio’s state government leaders must address this apparent failure of the system they created.”

Some lawmakers have also sought to downplay the significance of the revelations about the Nazi homeschool network, claiming it is an isolated situation.

“I hope we’re long past the point in our society where we take the actions of one person or a small group of people and paint the entire group as though somehow they’re participating in that,” Senate President Matt Huffman told News 5 Cleveland, speaking about homeschooling.

Other lawmakers are angry about the lack of guardrails for homeschooling in Ohio.

“I think we can all agree this is a broken system,” Democrat Rep. Casey Weinstein told VICE News in response to the Department of Education findings.

“Unless you support ridiculous conspiracy theories or if you want to make sure your child ‘becomes a wonderful Nazi,’ then it’s time to add some guardrails and transparency to how home schools are managed in Ohio,” Weinstein said. “These people are grooming children to be Nazis and we need to do something about it. Full stop.”

Huffman, who is trying to push a bill through the Ohio Senate that will further gut public school funding and redirect it towards private schools, attacked other lawmakers he claimed were trying to use the revelations to help themselves politically.

“I hope, frankly, that people will not try to take some political advantage or policy advantage… basically trying to decide that a couple of sociopaths somewhere in Ohio who are doing strange things that… somehow should affect the policy of the rest of the state is anathema to me,” Huffman said.

But Democrats say that a change in the education system in Ohio needs to start by addressing the issues uncovered by the Nazi homeschool revelations in Upper Sandusky.

“Some Republicans in Ohio are in such a rush to turn our public education system upside down that they’re missing the blind spots in other areas of education, like the lack of transparency when it comes to homeschooling that was exposed by the Neo-Nazi curriculum being taught and amplified in Upper Sandusky,”  Rep. Jessica Miranda told VICE News.

The Dissident Homeschool group on Telegram operated by the Lawrences was deleted earlier this week. A new group with the same name was set up, but so far no content has been posted in the channel and it’s unclear if the Lawrences are involved.

The post Ohio Department of Education Says It Won’t Do Anything About Neo-Nazi Homeschoolers appeared first on VICE.

The Florida Republican governor’s aggressive move to fundamentally change the character of New College, a tiny public liberal arts school with fewer than 700 students in Sarasota, is his latest plan to dramatically remake Florida’s educational system in his image and build his right-wing bona fides ahead of a likely presidential run. In a few short weeks he’s appointed a hard-right board of trustees who promptly fired the school president and are promising wholesale changes to remake the college in their image. And it’s left the school’s tight-knit community shaken to its core.

“This last month has felt a little dystopian. These people like DeSantis and the people he’s appointed, they clearly don’t know what New College is, but they’re trying to control what we’re learning and who we are,” Madison Markham, a fourth year sociology major, told VICE News.

Students on campus see DeSantis’ aggressive efforts as part of a wider program of right-wing educational indoctrination—an effort that could go national if he becomes president.

Students on campus say they feel like they’ve been turned into guinea pigs in a right-wing social experiment.

“New College is unique in terms of how quickly and aggressively and brazenly things are moving. But this is very much a part of a broader push against educational freedom,” said Alex Obraud, a third-year anthropology major. “This school is a test case of how far you can take censorship and push politics in public schools.”

Students have mobilized in protest. They held a rally last week that drew hundreds to speak out against DeSantis’ efforts, and a fundraiser to “Save New College and Educational Freedom” had raised nearly $100,000 on GoFundMe as of Tuesday. The organizers say the money will be used to “help our coalition build capacity and infrastructure to organize and fight back against this partisan attack on New College and educational freedom across America.”

But a harsh reality is already setting in. At a board meeting last week, members of DeSantis’ newly minted right-wing school board sat patiently as students, parents, and community members raged against their plans—before moving right along with their plot.

Right-wing education activist Christopher Rufo, the board’s most controversial new appointee, repeatedly grinned and chuckled during the meeting’s public comment period. When one member of the audience yelled “Your opinion don’t matter” at Rufo as the new trustee proposed closing the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion office and firing all of its employees, Rufo had a cold retort: “It does matter, actually, unfortunately for you.”

The board quickly proved Rufo right. They moved swiftly to fire New College President Patricia Okker, a leader widely beloved by students, in what she described in a final teary speech as a “hostile takeover”—and signaled their intention to replace her with a longtime Republican lawmaker. They made clear they’d soon do away with the school’s DEI office while hinting at significant changes to come with the school’s curriculum.

The battle over New College is just the latest salvo in DeSantis’ educational culture war—one that’s made him a hero on the right and is fueling his chances at the Republican nomination in 2024.

Kacie Bates was one of the many students who couldn’t get a spot in the actual meeting room for the board hearing. They’d been at a student rally they helped organize to protest the board’s actions, a protest that drew hundreds. Since the board had set up the hearing room to limit public attendance, they retreated to their dorm afterwards with friends to watch the livestream. They’d known what was on the agenda, but that didn’t make it any less painful to witness Okker’s removal.

“We just cried. We just cried during the speech, for her ending remarks as the president,” Bates told VICE News. “It just broke our hearts.”

The battle over New College is just the latest salvo in DeSantis’ educational culture war—one that’s made him a hero on the right and is fueling his chances at the Republican nomination in 2024. DeSantis championed last year’s deeply controversial “don’t say gay” law, which puts severe restrictions on discussion of LGBTQ issues and gender identity in Florida classrooms, and recently pushed through his “Stop WOKE” law, which restricts how teachers can discuss race and diversity.

That law has led some school districts to close their libraries until all their books can be vetted to make sure they’re in compliance and avoid felony charges. Just last week, after DeSantis said he’d block a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies because it was too leftist, the College Board announced it would drop some topics and scholars to avoid his ire.

There are commonalities to these efforts. A claim that the educational system is biased against conservatives and white people and teachers are pushing extreme leftist agendas, and a move to end this supposed left-wing indoctrination by legislating a system of right-wing indoctrination under the guise of fairness and impartiality that at best glosses over or leaves out unflattering parts of American history and minorities’ experiences and at worst actively whitewashes things to paint the U.S. in a more flattering light.

DeSantis and his allies have specifically singled out diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and the once-obscure “critical race theory,” which isn’t actually taught in K-12 schools, but which Rufo has played a key role in turning into a catch-all label for teaching history critical of America. 

And New College is an easy punching bag, with DeSantis blaming the school’s long-running financial struggles on its hippie culture.

“We are going to eliminate all DEI and CRT bureaucracies in the state of Florida…it really serves as an ideological filter, a political filter,” DeSantis said at a press conference alongside Rufo just hours before the trustee meeting. “New College has really embraced that, and that’s part of the reason I think it hasn’t been successful.” 

DeSantis and his allies have been explicit about what they want to do with New College, which has long been a bastion for LGBTQ students and offered a less structured learning experience, and as such is an easy school for him to caricature.

The school has always leaned left, embraced the weird and quirky, and proudly touted its motto of “educating free thinkers, risk takers and trailblazers.” Three quarters of students identified as liberal or very liberal, with just 3 percent saying they were conservative in a 2019 survey; When a speaker at the rally mentioned that the school was full of hippies, students cheered.

And the school’s academics operate differently than many colleges and universities. Students receive qualitative written “narrative evaluations” of their work instead of grades. In between semesters, students have a month to work on independent study projects where they’re encouraged to follow their academic whims.

The school board members DeSantis put in charge of New College are a cadre of deeply conservative education activists.

While the governor and his new trustees have railed against so-called indoctrination of students and insist they just want a school open to students of all viewpoints, the example they’re aiming for is far from a neutral campus. DeSantis’ chief of staff and his education secretary both said that they hoped to transform the school into a “Hillsdale of the South,” referencing the conservative, Christian private college in Michigan that is a feeder school for right-wing politics and has close ties to both DeSantis and Trump.

The school board members DeSantis put in charge of New College are a cadre of deeply conservative education activists. Rufo, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, was a key player in making critical race theory a right-wing bogeyman, and has now pivoted to decrying what he calls “gender, grooming and trans ideology in schools.” Another DeSantis appointee is Eddie Speir, the founder of a Christian high school in Bradenton, who has publicly floated the idea of firing every single professor at the college. (Professors at New College and leaders in the United Florida Faculty union, which represents New College faculty, told VICE News they believe such a move would be a blatantly illegal violation of the faculty’s collective bargaining agreement.) 

They’re joined by Matthew Spalding, a dean at Hillsdale College, and Charles Kesler, a professor at Claremont McKenna College and senior fellow at the hard-right Claremont Institute. Spalding and Kesler were both deeply involved in then-President Trump’s “1776 Commission,” whose report sought to frame America in the best light possible by whitewashing the sins of the past.

The school’s new interim president will be former Republican state House Speaker Richard Corcoran, who more recently served as DeSantis’ education commissioner. 

Corcoran told a Hillsdale National Leadership Seminar last summer that education was “100% ideological.” 

“Education is our sword. That’s our weapon. Our weapon is education,” he declared.

Rufo has also used martial terms to describe their efforts. “We are now over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within,” he said shortly after being appointed to the board of directors. “Under the leadership of Gov. DeSantis, our all-star board will demonstrate that the public universities, which have been corrupted by woke nihilism, can be recaptured, restructured, and reformed.”

“Education is our sword. That’s our weapon. Our weapon is education.”

In his constant search for new targets in the culture war that fuels his support with his base, DeSantis has a bully’s knack for finding easy targets—marginalized communities, fringe lefties who make for easy straw men. He’s always looking for new libs to own, and a campus with a large LGBTQ population and a shoes-optional attitude is perfect for his goals. And the attacks on the New College have hit the campus’s LGBTQ students the hardest.

Bates, who identifies as queer, said that they had felt much more at home at New College after transferring in from another liberal arts school, where they said they felt they “couldn’t really truly be my authentic self.” 

It was “terrifying,” Bates said, when they found out who DeSantis had appointed to the board.

Sam Sharf, a second-year sociology major and organizer for the New College campus group Students for Educational Freedom, began transitioning at the end of high school. She says New College gave her opportunities she wouldn’t have had elsewhere in Florida. 

“[If] I went to another state school, especially early on in my transition when I was 18…it would have been a lot more hostile and would have been way harder to develop as a person when you’re being judged for your decisions and life,” Sharf said. “There aren’t many colleges around the country, probably not in the world, that offer that same social support to LGBT students.”

In his constant search for new targets in the culture war that fuels his support with his base, DeSantis has a bully’s knack for finding easy targets—marginalized communities, fringe lefties who make for easy straw men.

And while DeSantis argued his intervention will help current and future students academically, multiple students said the stress of what they felt was an assault on their community had made it hard to stay focused on academics.

Bates, who’s studying chemistry, said they’d enthusiastically begun their midwinter independent study project looking at how different dyes affected solar panel absorption, but that the chaos swirling around the school had proven a depressing distraction.

“Because of that news, I was not really able to put my whole heart into my [Independent Study Project] project, which was very disappointing,” they said. “When I was in the lab I would be able to work on my projects but once I got out of the lab and sat down, it was just really hard to take care of myself or focus on anything other than what was happening. I’ve just been emotionally exhausted. It’s a very frustrating and scary situation that is completely out of my control.”

New College theater and dance professor Diego Villada said that he’d had to cancel a final dress rehearsal for a show that was opening just days later “because the students were distraught” after the board meeting.

The college does face its challenges. It has a long history of financial struggles—part of the reason it went from being a private college to part of Florida’s public university system in the first place—and is often an afterthought for those focused on Florida’s higher education system. It has suffered from decades of neglect and occasional hostility from Florida’s legislature, which has been in unified GOP hands since the mid-1990s.

New College’s physical infrastructure isn’t in great shape—one former student association president recently wrote that their first impression of the college upon arrival was that it “was in desperate need of a pressure wash,” and multiple students complained that student housing and facilities were in disrepair.

“The school is deeply underfunded and it’s lacking resources,” Sharf told VICE News. “The dorms are old and falling apart… These are problems that New College students have been talking about forever.”

A 2019 study the school commissioned under its last president found that many students complained the school didn’t do enough to prepare them for life after college, and suggested more emphasis on education that could be put towards potential career interests—something DeSantis has encouraged.

Enrollment has dipped in recent years, something DeSantis and his allies have pounced on as proof that the school is failing. He’s promised $15 million to improve the school next year, with $10 million a year after that. But it’s not like the school is an educational backwater.

New College ranks fifth in the nation on U.S. News’ list of the top public liberal arts schools, right behind the four U.S. military academies.

Nearly three dozen students have been awarded the prestigious Fulbright scholarship in just the past five years, a significant number given the school enrolls fewer than 700 students and that only 2,000 Fulbright scholarships are awarded to U.S. students in an average year. All students have to complete a thesis project to graduate, a rigorous step not required at many colleges and universities. 

New College ranks fifth in the nation on U.S. News’ list of the top public liberal arts schools, right behind the four U.S. military academies. Overall, U.S. News ranks New College 76th among liberal arts colleges nationally. Hillsdale, the conservative Christian school that DeSantis’ chief of staff says is the model New College should strive for, isn’t that far ahead, at number 48.

And unlike most colleges on that list, New College is actually affordable: It costs Floridian students less than $7,000 a year, and is one of the only liberal arts colleges in the nation with in-state tuition.

While DeSantis and his allies have routinely painted New College as a bastion of woke leftist indoctrination lacking in academic rigor, students say nothing could be further from the truth.

Markham, a fourth-year sociology major, said they’d been assigned to read as much Adam Smith as they had Karl Marx.

“If there’s indoctrination going on, I can tell you it’s being very well-hidden in any of the classes.”

Joshua Epstein, a quantitative economics major, told VICE News that he’d actually become “far more conservative” in his first year at New College, due to what he’d learned in his economics classes. He said he had “never read a page of Marx”—but had been influenced by studying libertarian economist Milton Friedman.

“If there’s indoctrination going on, I can tell you it’s being very well-hidden in any of the classes,” Epstein said. “My two main career aspirations are corporate lawyer and investment banker. So the idea that I am, by any standard, woke, is a joke.”

Antonia Ginsberg-Klemmt, a fifth-year student, said that she’s “never ever felt pressured to do anything or feel anything, or think anything. I love that because it’s a very free place for you to be yourself.”

Most of the students VICE News talked to said they planned to stick it out at New College through graduation, but many had friends who were discussing transferring out. And they mourned that future generations wouldn’t have the chance at the same experience they’d had before DeSantis turned his gaze on the school.

“I just feel absolutely devastated for future students, because they won’t have the same access to such a beautiful community as we did,” said Bates.

The post What it’s Like When Ron DeSantis Takes Over Your College appeared first on VICE.