Terrorgram: Saints Culture
By Graham Macklin
What is Saints Culture?
Saints Culture – the glorification and veneration of extreme right terrorists – is a pivotal part of far-right digital culture in communities that support terrorism. The foremost adherents of Saint’s Culture are clustered around the so-called Terrorgram Collective, a loose consortium of Telegram channels whose aim is to promote accelerationist violence. Glorifying right-wing terrorists as “Saints” serves to transform their deeds from racist atrocities to quasi-religious acts. These acts are said to be righteously committed in “defense” of race and nation, which are perceived to be facing an existential threat from immigration, as reflected in the Great Replacement conspiracy.[1]
In the pantheon of far-right heroes, these Saints are believed to have sacrificed their lives for their race and are thus elevated to the status of “martyrs.” The concept of martyrdom within Saints Culture is, however, somewhat elastic since it also encompasses perpetrators who, rather than being killed during the commission of their crimes, surrendered themselves to responding police and were subsequently jailed for life. In a further inversion of the concept of martyrdom, the suffering that being a martyr entails is sometimes not born by the killer himself but by his victims. Whilst this notion of martyrdom is clearly at odds with general understandings of the concept, what is indisputable is that these figures are revered across certain online communities. Their names, birthdays, and the dates of their killings are celebrated and commemorated online in numerous ways. The most notable is a “Saints Calendar” that bears more than a passing resemblance to online manifestations of serial killer lore.
The propagation of Saints Culture serves as a tool to mobilize others within the movement to perpetrate their own acts of racist violence. Adherents believe that this violence will accelerate the demise of liberal democracy and that, from the carnage, a White ethnostate will arise.
Since the Christchurch attacks in 2019, extreme right violence has achieved a certain “cumulative momentum,”[2] in part because of Saint Culture’s aesthetic and rhetorical style. This style encourages individual identification with a killer and his actions while venerating those who seek to emulate them. The imagery produced to glorify such racist killers self-consciously draws upon the aesthetics of Christian iconography and sainthood, presenting them as religious figures and their manifestos as sacred texts.
Terrorgram channels deliberately target their consumers with a constant barrage of images and texts enjoining viewers to “Get the High Score” atop the “Leader Board” to encourage mass violence. Emulation becomes a process of competitive outbidding between individuals who have never met or perhaps even interacted with one another yet inhabit the same broad countercultural milieu online. In effect, individuals compete with one another to kill more and more people in hyper-mediatized ways such as livestreaming their attacks, videos of which are captured and recirculated to provide inspiration for further violence. Saints Culture thus works in tandem with the tendency towards gamifying violence.
A Short History of Saints Culture
Within the contemporary far right as a whole, the veneration of mass killers is still relegated to the margins, but it is not necessarily novel.[3] Pinpointing the emergence of a distinct Saints Culture as a subcultural practice is difficult since the development of far-right “death cults” has many predecessors, including within Nazi Germany.[4] In its most recent iteration, Saints Culture owes a great deal to the cultic dimension of post-war neo-Nazism, particularly as it arose in the United States in the works of James Mason. From the mid-1970s onwards Mason praised a succession of “murder men” whose actions he believed represented an action-packed alternative to his boredom with and anger at the “mass politics” strategy of the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP). Mason’s “Heroes of the Revolution” included numerous Nazi killers, as well as figures like Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a member of the Charles Manson Family who had tried to kill President Gerald Ford.[5]
Mason provided an early template for the worship of violent murders. From 1980 until 1986, he promoted “TOTAL WAR” by praising and promoting mass murder in his journal, Siege. Mason believed that if an attack were carefully calibrated and successfully perpetrated then it should be celebrated. “In revolution the price of failure is generally death,” he wrote, “don’t sell yourself cheap. MAKE IT COUNT.” Mason was enthused by racist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin whom he had known personally when they were both teenage members of the NSWPP.[6] From 1983 onwards, however, there were few Nazi mass murderers of note, and Mason turned to promoting virtually any act of violence against “the System” from whatever quarter, since he viewed this as a means “to break the boredom and the deadlock.”[7]
It was in the 2010s, however, that this dark fandom truly took root.[8] Building on an existing fanbase that already included Columbiners[9] and others engaged in online subcultures fascinated with serial killers and school shooters, this fandom gathered pace in the extreme right after Dylann Roof committed his racist atrocity in 2015. Incarcerated for life and currently under sentence of death, Roof quickly attracted an online community of neo-Nazi acolytes and agitators who called themselves the “Bowl Patrol” on account of Roof’s distinct haircut.[10] Whilst the Bowl Patrol gravitated around a single figure, it indicated the birth of a wider rhetorical, aesthetic, and strategic trend on the extreme right that exploded in the aftermath of Brenton Tarrant’s racist rampage in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, which left 51 people dead and many more injured.[11] It is no coincidence that Saints Culture appears particularly attractive to a subset of extreme right terrorists who are seeking “fame” and stature in the same way as a certain subsection of school shooters.
The Role of Terrorgram
Much of the aesthetic style that accompanied the emergence of a distinct Saints Culture could be found in memes across 4chan and its derivatives following Tarrant’s terrorism. Over time, this content migrated to a series of Telegram channels. Telegram was itself beginning to enter a new phase which would aid the development of Saints Culture. Previously committed to promoting groups like Atomwaffen Division (AWD), following its demise many of these extreme right content creators abandoned “brands” and began to develop their own distinct identity as Terrorgram Collective.
Those behind such channels became increasingly focused upon promoting the concept of accelerationist violence through an array of images and how-to manuals. Saints culture became a central component encouraging and inciting violence since the perpetrators of such terrorism could be promoted as role models to be both honored and emulated and, if possible, for their efforts to be exceeded. Elevating racist killers to be “saints” devalues and demeans political, racial, and religious opponents, a strategy that is consciously promoted in the hope that someone viewing such content might also then aspire to sainthood by committing a similar atrocity until the distance between such acts of violence becomes a constant. Those who chose to follow such a path as self-appointed disciples of figures like Brenton Tarrant were, in their turn, anointed as saints as a means of encouraging further acts.[12]
By 2020 a list of fifty such saints was circulating online, featuring figures like James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King, as a means of linking contemporary violence to its broader historical antecedents. A less obvious figure to be visually venerated was Jim Jones, leader of the Peoples Temple cult who, in 1978, induced 918 of his followers to commit mass suicide at Jonestown, suggesting the traditional pantheon of far-right heroes was expanding to include anyone responsible for mass death.[13] Since then the Terrorgram Collective have branched out, glorifying racist killers from 1968 to the present through video. Within such heavily mediatized online spaces, the point of this constant barrage of imagery is to enjoin those consuming such content to see themselves reflected in this historic continuum rather than as isolated individuals. The Terrorgram Collective created another publication entitled “The Saints Encyclopedia” that is intended to achieve this end. This publication is comprised of the mugshots of racist murderers that the Collective hoped readers would emulate and was dedicated to Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch terrorist. Including quotes from the manifestos of the “inner-circle saints,” the publication is expressly designed to inspire “the Saints of tomorrow reading this today.”
Online communities were central for Juraj Krajčík, a Slovakian extreme right activist who murdered two people and injured a third outside an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava on 12 October 2022 before killing himself. In the “Special thanks” section of his manifesto, the killer thanked the “Terrorgram Collective” for their propaganda and guides.[14] The milieu immediately claimed him as “Terrorgram’s First Saint” not least because, it was later revealed, he had been in contact with at least one of its members prior to committing his atrocity, contact which appears to have extended to contributing to his manifesto indicating Terrorgram’s direct role helping to manufacture their own “saint.”[15] Indeed, the recent indictment against two Terrorgram leaders. Dallas Humber and Matthew Allison, highlights Humber stating to her chat group, which included Krajčík, that “If you became a Saint I’d narrate your book. That’s the cost of admission, so to speak.” “Dead targets or I don’t care,” she later added. Krajčík subsequently posted that he found a part of the Terrorgram book Hard Reset entitled “A letter to the disciples” to be one of the “best parts” of the book, highlighting the inspirational impact of Saints culture upon him. True to her word, after Krajčík committed his killings, Humber narrated his manifesto and turned it into an audio book.[16]
This was not the only direct connection between these online chat forums and offline violence that the Terrorgram Collective were actively soliciting through posts such as “sainthood criteria” (detailing what to do to qualify for sainthood) and a “path to sainthood” (detailing practical measures to achieve this status). On August 12, 2024, a Turkish teenager identified as Arda K., who was an active participant in Terrorgram Collective chats, donned a “siege mask,” helmet and tactical vest before livestreaming himself stabbing five people outside a mosque in Eskişehir, some 143 miles west of the Turkish capital, Ankara.[17] “Come and see how much humans I can cleanse,” he had posted beforehand. In his manifesto, he wrote of his desire to be recognized as a “saint”. Whilst they applauded his actions, the Terrorgram Collective refused to officially recognize him as a saint “because he’s not White… We can hail him anyway, we just can’t add him to the pantheon.”[18]
When focusing on these “successful” attacks, it is easy to overlook numerous other unsuccessful actors who were also clearly inspired by the rhetoric of Saints Culture, further highlighting its ongoing influence. In January 2024, for example, police arrested twenty-six-year-old Floridian Alexander Lightner following a series of internet postings threatening an act of mass casualty terrorism. One such post read “2024 there shall be saints u fuq”. During a search of his property, police discovered numerous firearms, a silencer, ammunition, and a bullet proof vest. He is currently awaiting trial at the time of writing.[19]
Conclusion
Governments and counterterrorist practitioners have taken seriously the notion of Saints Culture as a vector for violence. On April 22, 2024, the British government proscribed the Terrorgram Collective as a terrorist entity on the grounds it constituted “an online network of neo-fascist terrorists who produce and disseminate violent propaganda to encourage those who consume its content to engage in terrorist activity.” The proscription notice was explicit in its assertion that Terrorgram glorified extreme right-wing terrorists as saints and in doing so encouraged others to replicate such atrocities.
It is too early to judge what effect proscribing the Terrorgram Collective or the arrest of two of its leading protagonists may have upon the dissemination of “Saints Culture. Proscription may well prove less effective against digital networks than it has done against offline groups, in part because key nodes in this network are operated by individuals outside the United Kingdom. Proscription does, however, provide police with a powerful instrument through which they can compel tech companies to uphold their legal obligations regarding the removal of illegal terrorist content. Thus, proscription may still prove effective in disrupting these networks, at least within the United Kingdom. Whilst the arrest of Humber and Allison will undoubtedly have a profound impact on the operation of the Terrorgram Collective in the short term, it remains to be seen whether others will pick up the mantle and continue their work.
Speculation aside, the avid and ongoing promotion of Saints Culture online vividly illustrates what has long been established fact in terrorism research: that lone actors are rarely truly alone. They perpetrate their deeds with the support of a wider radical community. Contemporary far right terrorism is frequently described as being inherently “leaderless,” and without a discernible organizational structure, but the emergence and conscious promotion of Saints Culture suggests there are in fact “leaders” – those who have committed acts of mass casualty racist violence that set examples for other would-be terrorists to emulate. In this respect “Saints Culture” is important not just because it incites individuals to commit acts of racist terrorism but also because it provides a strategic direction for a section of the far right, a direction that is wedded to the notion that only mass violence can make their become reality.
Endnotes
[1] https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/academics/centers-initiatives/ctec/ctec-publications/robert-bowers-and-risk-misdefining
[2] Amarnath Amarasingam, Marc-André Argentino and Graham Macklin. “The Buffalo Attack: The Cumulative Momentum of Far-Right Terror.” 15, no. 7, 2022: https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-buffalo-attack-the-cumulative-momentum-of-far-right-terror/
[3] Arsenio Cuenca, “Death Cult in Hypermedia Environments: Martyrdom and Terrorism in the Neofascist Movement.” Perspectives on Terrorism, XVIII, no. 2, 2024: https://pt.icct.nl/sites/default/files/2024-06/Research%20article_Cuenca.pdf
[4] See for instance Anna Della Subin. Accidental Gods: On Race, Empire, and Men Unwittingly Turned Divine (Metropolitan Books 2022) and Jay W. Baird. To Die For Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Indiana University Press: 1990).
[5] Spencer Sunshine. Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism (Routledge 2024).
[6] Mel Ayton. Dark Soul of the South: The Life and Crimes of Racist Killer Joseph Paul Franklin (Potomac Books 2011).
[7] Spencer Sunshine. Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism (Routledge 2024).
[8] Ryan Broll. “Dark Fandoms: An Introduction and Case Study.” Deviant Behavior, 41, no. 6 (2020): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639625.2019.1596453
[9] This term refers to the cultic followers of deceased Columbine High school shooters that developed following the murders of 12 students, one teacher, and two dozen more injuries in 1999.
[10] “Alleged Leader Of Neo-Nazi Group Identified As Orangevale Resident Andrew Casarez,” CBS Sacramento, July 7, 2020: https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/alleged-leader-of-neo-nazi-group-identified-as-orangevale-resident-andrew-casarez/
[11] Graham Macklin. “The Christchurch Attacks: Livestream Terror in the Viral Video Age.” CTC Sentinel, 12, no. 6, 2019: https://ctc.westpoint.edu/christchurch-attacks-livestream-terror-viral-video-age/
[12] Erica Barbarossa. “The Three Phases of Terrorgram.” (Accelerationism Research Consortium 2024): https://www.accresearch.org/accreports/the-three-phases-of-terrorgram
[13] Jonathan Lewis, Joshua Molloy and Graham Macklin. “The Lineage of Violence: Saints Culture and Militant Accelerationist Terrorism.” Global Network on Extremism and Technology, April 27, 2023: https://gnet-research.org/2023/04/27/the-lineage-of-violence-saints-culture-and-militant-accelerationist-terrorism/
[14] Juraj Krajčík. “Manifesto”.
[15] Julia Kupper, Kacper Rękawek and Matthew Kriner, Terrorgram’s First Saint: Analyzing Accelerationist Terrorism in Bratislava. (Accelerationism Research Consortium: 2023): https://www.accresearch.org/accreports/terrorgrams-first-saint
[16] Department of Justice, “Leaders of Transnational Terrorist Group Charged with Soliciting Hate Crimes, Soliciting the Murder of Federal Officials, and Conspiring to Provide Material Support to Terrorists,” Department of Justice, September 9, 2024: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leaders-transnational-terrorist-group-charged-soliciting-hate-crimes-soliciting-murder
[17] “Teen wearing helmet and bulletproof vest livestreams stabbing rampage by mosque in Turkey, authorities say,” CBS News, August 13, 2024: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/turkey-teenager-stabbing-mosque/
[18] Department of Justice, “Leaders of Transnational Terrorist Group Charged with Soliciting Hate Crimes, Soliciting the Murder of Federal Officials, and Conspiring to Provide Material Support to Terrorists,” Department of Justice, September 9, 2024: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/leaders-transnational-terrorist-group-charged-soliciting-hate-crimes-soliciting-murder
[19] United States Attorney’s Office, Middle District of Florida. “Venice Man Charged With Threatening To Commit A Mass Casualty Event and Unlawful Possession Of A Silencer.” Department of Justice (January 18, 2024): https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/venice-man-charged-threatening-commit-mass-casualty-event-and-unlawful-possession
