‘HAIL HOLY TERROR’: Two US Citizens Charged with Running Online ‘Terrorgram Collective’

The U.S. government recently announced multiple charges against alleged leaders of the “Terrorgram Collective,” which does exactly what it sounds like — promoting terrorism on the messaging platform Telegram. In this case, the terrorism was white racial terror, complete with a “hit list” of U.S. officials and activists, a “White Terror” home movie glorifying “saints” who killed others, and instructions to destroy American infrastructure like electrical substation transformers. (Read the indictment.)

It was about chaos. Terrorgram promoted “white supremacist accelerationism,” which posited that society must be incited into civil war or apocalyptic confrontation to overthrow the existing system of government and establish a white nationalist state.

The group’s manifestos and chats sometimes seemed saturated with the customs of the online world: clapping emojis between each important word, bomb-making tutorial videos, trolling language, slogans so exaggerated they sounded ironic (“GLORY TO HOLY TERROR” in all caps).

Even though the group used technology to organize and promote its ideology, it was skeptical of technology—or at least some types of it. “Don’t let these technophiles have a day off!” read one post, urging readers to attack the local power grid.

“LEAVE. YOUR. PHONE. AT HOME,” said another. “Death to the network. Death to the system,” concluded a third. The group’s accelerationist manifesto was called “Hard Reset.”

But they seemed eager to use other technologies to spread the message. One Terrorgram publication was called “Do it for the Gram,” and Terrorgram administrators created audiobooks of the shootings’ manifestos, such as “A White Boy Summer to Remember.”

But Telegram, which combines a wider reach of channels and chats (unencrypted) with the ability to send direct messages (which can be encrypted), was a favorite place to recruit and share information. The government said Dallas Humber, 34, of Elk Grove, California, and Matthew Allison, 37, of Boise, Idaho, were the leaders of Terrorgram, which they apparently left in the open.

The group has consistently encouraged violence and emphasized that attackers must mentally prepare themselves to kill, lest they chicken out. However, neither Humber nor Allison have been accused of violence; they seem content to root for new martyrs to their cause.

The government is tracking several real-life killers in the Terrorgram community, including a 19-year-old from Slovakia who killed two people at a Bratislava LGBTQ+ bar in 2022 before sending his manifesto to Allison and then killing himself in a park. The manifesto specifically listed “Hard Reset” in its “Recommended Reading” section.