Eric Lichtblau
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
a more traditional Orange County public school.
He was still a loner who didn't quite fit in, but at least he didn't stick out quite so much.
But by then he had burrowed himself into these online extremist sites that were much easier to come by.
Yeah, he kept what he called a journal of hate in which he lashed out against virtually every minority group.
He would tell stories about going online and posing as a gay person himself.
Either on gay dating sites or just even non-gay dating sites, luring people into thinking he was gay and then getting off on the thrill of scaring them and making them think up until the last minute that he was really gay and then...
sort of coming out of the closet and then revealing he was not and scaring them, sometimes even meeting them in person, he said.
And there was evidence in court that was produced with other people other than the eventual victim where he did this.
You know, he wrote in his journal, they think they're going to get hate-crimed.
And that was a real thrill for him.
Yeah.
I mean it's atomic bomb.
So Atomwaffen was one of dozens and dozens of these new neo-Nazi groups that began sprouting up in the mid-2010s.
many of them an outgrowth of a network, an online network called Iron March, that grew in record numbers that were sprouting white supremacy and neo-Nazism of young men, almost all of them in their late teens or early 20s, that were preaching racism
the replacement theory of white men having to take back America from this growing threat that was posed by minorities from the left who posed an existential threat to the white man and
reestablish white dominance in their society.
So Atomwaffen Division was started by a handful of guys in Florida.
Key among them was a nuclear physics student named Brandon Russell in Florida.
who was quite a gifted science student and quite adept in building bombs.
And he stockpiled a whole cache of weapons in his garage and was...