Documenting Hate Tracking Hate Crimes and Bias Incidents

 The California man accused of killing a 19-year-old University of Pennsylvania student earlier this month is an avowed neo-Nazi and a member of one of the most notorious extremist groups in the country, according to three people with knowledge of the man’s recent activities.

 The man, Samuel Woodward, has been charged in Orange County, California, with murdering Blaze Bernstein, who went missing in early January while visiting his family over winter break. Prosecutors allege that Woodward stabbed Bernstein more than 20 times before burying his body in an Orange County park where it was eventually discovered. The two men had attended high school together.

 Woodward, 20, is set to be arraigned on Feb. 2 and has not yet entered a plea. Orange County prosecutors say they are examining the possibility that the killing was a hate crime — Bernstein was Jewish and openly gay — and some recent news reports have suggested that the alleged killer might hold far-right or even white supremacist political beliefs.

 Now, three people with detailed knowledge of Woodward’s recent past have been able to shed more light on the young man’s extremist activities. They said Woodward was a member of the Atomwaffen Division, an armed Fascist group with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the U.S. government through the use of terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Stay Informed Get ProPublica’s Daily Digest.

 The organization, which celebrates Hitler and Charles Manson, has been tied to four other murders and an elaborate bomb plot over the past eight months. Experts who study right-wing extremist movements believe Atomwaffen’s commitment to violence has made it one of the more dangerous groups to emerge from the new wave of white supremacists.

 Two of the three people who described Woodward’s affiliations are friends of his; the other is a former member of Atomwaffen Division.

 ProPublica’s revelations about Woodward’s background add a new element to a murder case that has attracted considerable local and national news coverage. But they also raise fresh concerns about groups like Atomwaffen Division, shadowy outfits of uncertain size that appear capable of genuine harm.

 Woodward joined the organization in early 2016 and later traveled to Texas to attend Atomwaffen meetings and a three-day training camp, which involved instruction in firearms, hand-to-hand combat, camping and survival skills, the former member said. ProPublica has obtained photographs of Woodward at an outdoor Atomwaffen meeting in the scrubby Texas countryside. One of the photos depicts Woodward and other members making straight-armed Nazi salutes while wearing skull masks. In other pictures, Woodward is unmasked and easily identifiable.

 The young man is proficient with both handguns and assault rifles, according to one person who participated in the Texas training and watched him shoot. That person also said that Woodward helped organize a number of Atomwaffen members in California.

 Social media posts and chat logs shared by Woodward’s friends show that he openly described himself as a “National Socialist” or Nazi. He “was as anti-Semitic as you can get,” according to one acquaintance.

 ProPublica contacted Orange County prosecutors regarding Woodward’s alleged neo-Nazi activities. Michelle Van Der Linden, a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s Office, said she couldn’t comment directly on the case, but said the investigation is ongoing, with detectives exploring all possible leads.

 Woodward told police Bernstein had tried to kiss him while they were in the park, according to a sealed affidavit obtained by the Orange County Register.

 Woodward’s defense lawyer, Edward Munoz, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 On Wednesday, Bernstein’s parents spoke to reporters about the loss of their son, but said they were not interested in talking about any information they had on the investigation of his death. Police Stood By As Mayhem Mounted in Charlottesville State police and National Guardsmen watched passively for hours as self-proclaimed Nazis engaged in street battles with counter-protesters. ProPublica reporter A.C. Thompson was on the scene and reports that the authorities turned the streets of the city over to groups of militiamen armed with assault rifles.

 The Los Angeles Times quoted his mother, Jeanne Pepper Bernstein, as saying she had worried during her son’s life that he might be a target — because he was small, and Jewish, and gay.

 “I was concerned sending him out into the big world,” she said. “But at some point you have to let go and they leave the nest and fly. I couldn’t protect him from everything.”

 Atomwaffen started in 2015 and is estimated to have about 80 members scattered around the country in small cells; the former member said the group’s ranks have grown since the lethal and chaotic “Unite the Right” rally last summer in Charlottesville, Virginia.

 While many of the new white extremist groups have consciously avoided using Nazi imagery, Atomwaffen has done the opposite. The name can mean “Atomic Weapons” in German, and the organization embraces Third Reich iconography, including swastikas, the Totenkopf, or death’s head insignia, and SS lightning bolts. The group frequently produces YouTube videos featuring masked Atomwaffen members hiking through the backcountry and firing weapons. They’ve also filmed themselves burning the U.S. Constitution and setting fire to the American flag at an Atomwaffen “Doomsday Hatecamp.”

 Atomwaffen’s biggest inspiration seems to be James Mason, a long-time fascist who belonged to the American Nazi Party and later, during the 1970s, joined a more militant offshoot. During the 1980s, Mason published a newsletter called SIEGE, in which he eschewed political activism in favor of creating a new fascist regime through murder, small “lone wolf” terror attacks, and all-out war against the government. Mason also struck up a friendship with the late Charles Manson, who has become another hero for Atomwaffen.

 The organization first gained a measure of national attention in May of last year, when 18-year-old Devon Arthurs, one of Atomwaffen’s founding members, was charged in state court in Tampa, Florida, with murdering two of his roommates, Andrew Oneschuk, 18, and Jeremy Himmelman, 22. Both victims were Atomwaffen loyalists.

 The murders allegedly occurred after Arthurs traded Nazism for radical Islam. When police took Arthurs into custody, according to news accounts based on police reports, he claimed he had shot his former comrades because they had taunted him about his Muslim faith and plotted violent attacks to further their fascist agenda. Arthurs told investigators he killed Onsechuk and Himmelman “because they want to build a Fourth Reich.”

 While Arthurs initially confessed to the killings, he has pleaded not guilty and the case is ongoing. In early January, a judge ordered a psychiatrist to determine whether Arthurs is mentally competent to stand trial.

 When law enforcement searched the apartment in Tampa, Florida, where Arthurs and the others lived, they found firearms, a framed photograph of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, rifles, ammunition, and a cooler full of a highly volatile explosive called HMTD. Investigators also discovered radioactive material in the home.

 The bomb-making material belonged to a fourth roommate, Atomwaffen leader Brandon Russell, a Florida National Guardsman. Arthurs told authorities that Russell had been planning to blow up a nuclear power plant near Miami. Earlier this month Russell pleaded guilty in federal district court in Tampa to illegal possession of explosives and was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

 Atomwaffen surfaced again in connection with a double homicide in Reston, Virginia, in December 2017. A 17-year-old neo-Nazi allegedly shot to death his girlfriend’s parents, Buckley Kuhn-Fricker and Scott Fricker, who had urged their daughter to break up with him. The accused, who shot himself as well but survived and remains hospitalized, was charged as a juvenile in state court in Virginia with two counts of homicide.

 The 17-year-old was a big fan of Atomwaffen and James Mason, according to reporting by the Huffington Post, which examined his social media trail.

 The former Atomwaffen member in contact with ProPublica said that the teen was more than a fan: He was in direct communication with the group.

 “Their rhetoric is some of the most extreme we have seen,” said Joanna Mendelson, a senior researcher at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. The group, she said, views itself as the radical vanguard of the white supremacist movement, the frontline soldiers of an imminent race war. ||||| Documenting Hate Tracking Hate Crimes and Bias Incidents

 Late last month, ProPublica reported that the California man accused of killing a gay and Jewish University of Pennsylvania student was an avowed neo-Nazi and a member of Atomwaffen Division, one of the country’s most notorious extremist groups.

 The news about the murder suspect, Samuel Woodward, spread quickly throughout the U.S., and abroad. Woodward was accused of fatally stabbing 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein and burying his body in an Orange County park.

 The report, it turns out, was also taken up in the secretive online chats conducted by members of Atomwaffen Division, a white supremacist group that celebrates both Hitler and Charles Manson.

 “I love this,” one member wrote of the killing, according to copies of the online chats obtained by ProPublica. Another called Woodward a “one man gay Jew wrecking crew.”

 More soon joined in.

 “What I really want to know is who leaked that shit about Sam to the media,” a third member wrote.

 At least one member wanted to punish the person who had revealed Woodward’s affiliation with Atomwaffen.

 “Rats and traitors get the rope first.”

 Encrypted chat logs obtained by ProPublica — some 250,000 messages spanning more than six months — offer a rare window into Atomwaffen Division that goes well beyond what has surfaced elsewhere about a group whose members have been implicated in a string of violent crimes. Like many white supremacist organizations, Atomwaffen Division uses Discord, an online chat service designed for video gamers, to engage in its confidential online discussions.

 In a matter of months, people associated with the group, including Woodward, have been charged in five murders; another group member pleaded guilty to possession of explosives after authorities uncovered a possible plot to blow up a nuclear facility near Miami. Lucas Waldron/ProPublica

 The group’s propaganda makes clear that Atomwaffen — the word means “nuclear weapons” in German — embraces Third Reich ideology and preaches hatred of minorities, gays and Jews. Atomwaffen produces YouTube videos showing members firing weapons and has filmed members burning the U.S. Constitution and setting fire to the American flag. But the organization, by and large, cloaks its operations in secrecy and bars members from speaking to the media.

 The chat logs and other material obtained by ProPublica provide unusually extensive information about the group’s leaders, wider makeup, and potential targets, indicating:

 The group may have as many as 20 cells around the country, small groups of indeterminate size in Texas, Virginia, Washington, Nevada and elsewhere. Members armed with assault rifles and other guns have taken part in weapons training in various locations over the last two years, including last month in the Nevada desert near Death Valley.

 Members have discussed using explosives to cripple public water systems and destroy parts of the electrical power grid. One member even claimed to have obtained classified maps of the power grid in California. Throughout the chats, Atomwaffen members laud Timothy McVeigh, the former soldier who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168, including numerous children. Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof and Anders Breivik, the Norwegian extremist who massacred 77 people, also come in for praise.

 Woodward posted several messages in the days after Bernstein’s murder, but before he was arrested and charged. In one thread, he told his fellow Atomwaffen members that he was thinking about the “passing of life” and was “truly grateful for our time together.” An Atomwaffen propaganda flier

 Woodward, 20, has pleaded not guilty in the Bernstein case. Prosecutors have said they are exploring whether the murder constituted a hate crime and detectives are now investigating what role, if any, Atomwaffen might have played in the homicide. Woodward and Bernstein had known each other in high school in California, and appear to have reconnected somehow shortly before the killing.

 Law enforcement, both federal and state, have said little about what they make of Atomwaffen. But organizations dedicated to tracking and studying hate groups have been calling attention to what they regard as the group’s considerable threat.

 “We haven’t seen anything like Atomwaffen in quite a while,” said Keegan Hankes, a researcher who tracks the group for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “They should be taken seriously because they’re so extreme.”

 Jeffrey Kaplan, a historian, has studied racial extremists for decades and edited the Encyclopedia of White Power. In an interview, he suggested that Atomwaffen is dangerous, but that talk in their propaganda and private conversations of aims such as toppling the U.S. government amounted to what he called a kind of “magical thinking.” Kaplan said such groups often contain a handful of diehards who are willing to commit crimes and many more wannabes who are unwilling to do much more than read fascist literature.

 “It’s very hard to go from talking about violence to looking a guy in the eyes and killing him,” said Kaplan, a professor of national security studies at King Fahd Defense College in Saudi Arabia.

 Where We’ve Identified Atomwaffen Division Members Through interviews and internal records, ProPublica was able to identify Atomwaffen members in at least 23 states. Lucas Waldron and Rob Weychert/ProPublica

 “Politics are useless. Revolution is necessary.”

 ProPublica has identified five key Atomwaffen members through information provided by law enforcement investigators, internal Atomwaffen records, outside experts and a former group member.

 Those records and interviews make clear that John Cameron Denton is the leader of Atomwaffen. Denton, 24, grew up in Montgomery, Texas, a small town about 30 miles north of Houston. Public records show Denton currently lives in the nearby town of Conroe, a few miles to the south of Montgomery.

 ProPublica has obtained several photos of Denton. In one, Denton, who is short and wiry, has a bulky combat shotgun slung over his shoulder. He seems to favor camouflage pants and black T-shirts emblazoned with the logos of National Socialist Black Metal bands, a fringe subgenre of heavy metal music that mixes Satanic and Nazi themes.

 “Politics are useless. Revolution is necessary,” Denton said in a chat post expressing the Atomwaffen worldview.

 Records and interviews show Denton goes by the name Rape in the online conversations, and he appears to be involved in nearly every aspect of the organization. He shapes Atomwaffen’s ideology, chooses designs for its distinctive black-and-white posters and online propaganda, and selects the books that new recruits must study as part of their initiation, said a former Atomwaffen member interviewed by ProPublica. Denton’s younger brother, Grayson Patrick Denton, 19, is also a member, according to the chat logs and interviews; within the group, he goes by Leon, an homage to a Belgian fascist who fought with the SS. John Cameron Denton Alias: Rape John Cameron Denton is the leader of Atomwaffen Division. The 24-year-old grew up in Montgomery, Texas, and lives outside Houston.

 The leader’s identity was first revealed last month in a report by the Anti-Defamation League. Afterward, Denton was seething. “They think they can stop RAPE!? THEY THINK THEY CAN STOP ME!?!,” Denton wrote in one chat message.

 Neither Denton brother responded to messages seeking comment.

 Just how many people belong to Atomwaffen is unknown. The ex-member told ProPublica that the group has enlisted about 80 members across the country, many of whom joined after the deadly events in Charlottesville last summer.

 An internal Atomwaffen document obtained by ProPublica shows members scattered across 23 states and Canada. The group’s largest chapters are based in Virginia, Texas and Washington, according to a message posted in the chats by an Atomwaffen recruiter last summer.

 “Each chapter operates independently,” wrote the recruiter. “We want men who are willing to be the boots on the ground. Joining us means serious dedication not only to the Atomwaffen Division and its members, but to the goal of Total Aryan Victory.”

 A review of the chat logs shows messages posted by people using more than 100 different user names. Access to the discussions is tightly controlled, and it is unclear if some members post under multiple usernames.

 Denton has helped build the organization around the ideas expressed in an obscure, hyper-violent book: “Siege.” The 563-page book collects and organizes the monthly newsletters produced during the 1980s by an old-line neo-Nazi activist named James Mason. It is required reading for all Atomwaffen members and serves as the backbone for the organization’s ideology, worldview and training program.

 When Mason began publishing his newsletter in 1980, he was bitter and deeply dismayed. He had devoted his life to the fascist cause, joining the American Nazi Party in the mid-1960s, at the age of 14. But the movement had completely failed.

 For Mason, the way forward was obvious: He no longer wanted to convince the masses of the rightness of Nazism. They would never get it. Now was the time for true believers to go underground and launch a clandestine guerrilla war aimed at bringing down “The System.”

 “Siege” is essentially a long string of essays celebrating murder and chaos in the name of white supremacy. In Mason’s view, Dan White, the local politician who assassinated San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and gay civil rights leader Harvey Milk, was a hero.

 Mason proposed the creation of a White Liberation Front composed of small armed squads that would “hide in wilderness areas,” moving frequently from location to location while striking out in a string of “hit-and-run engagements.” Mason based this proposed organization on the short-lived National Socialist Liberation Front, a small splinter group of the American Nazi Party that formed in 1969 and espoused the strategic use of political terrorism. Grayson Patrick Denton Aliases: Nazgul, Leon Grayson Patrick Denton is the 19-year-old brother of Atomwaffen leader John Cameron Denton. He is a member of the Texas cell.

 The chat logs show that Denton and other Atomwaffen figures are in contact with Mason, who is 65 and is said to be living in Denver, Colorado; in one online conversation, Samuel Woodward wrote about meeting with Mason face to face along with other Atomwaffen members. In chats, members frequently post pictures of Mason and revere him as a brilliant, under-appreciated thinker.

 ProPublica was unable to contact Mason.

 Jeffrey Kaplan, the academic at King Fahd Defense College in Riyadh, interviewed Mason in the 1990s and spoke to ProPublica about Mason’s outlook and the groups he inspires, such as Atomwaffen.

 He describes Mason as “a true believer.”

 “Now he’s got a following, which he didn’t have for the last 30 years,” Kaplan said. “He’s got some kids who’ve rediscovered him. He must be in heaven.”

 As Kaplan sees it, groups such as Atomwaffen — would-be Nazi guerrillas devoted to white revolution in the U.S. — are “akin to cults,” and are propelled by a quasi-religious faith that they will ultimately prevail. He continued, “What else would sustain you when everyone hates you?”

 John Cameron Denton, based on interviews and the material obtained by ProPublica, comes across as something of a cult leader. Lately he has been pushing for Atomwaffen members to pool money and purchase land in rural areas so they can “get the fuck off the grid,” and begin implementing their revolutionary agenda. The former member said Denton envisions using this network of Atomwaffen compounds to launch attacks against targets in the U.S.

 The leader is already girding for a confrontation with law enforcement. “I do expect that one day I'll get raided,” wrote Denton in one chat message. “I'm not gonna have a shoot out or anything stupid like that, but I just dont rule out possibilities because I know the govt doesnt play by the rules."

 “You would want to target things like substations, water filtration plants, etc.”

 Late last month, Atomwaffen held a three-day training session — or “Hate Camp” in the group’s parlance — deep in the Nevada desert. The event was organized by an Atomwaffen leader, Michael Lloyd Hubsky, who calls himself Komissar, according to the chat logs. Michael Lloyd Hubsky Alias: Komissar Hubsky, 29, lives in Las Vegas and leads Atomwaffen’s Nevada cell. In online chats he discussed blowing up the U.S. power grid and natural gas lines.

 A 29-year-old resident of Las Vegas, Hubsky holds both a concealed weapons permit and a security guard license, and is a big fan of high-powered military-style firearms. In one post he discussed a favorite weapon: a Czech-made rifle called a CZ Scorpion that, Hubsky said, he’d converted to fully automatic and equipped with a flash suppressor.

 In another message, Hubsky wrote that he was planning on getting an “FFL” — federal firearms license — so he could “manufacture” guns.

 “I can literally become our armory in the event we need it,” Hubsky bragged.

 The former member said Atomwaffen has a rule: Don’t talk about the group’s terrorist ambitions in online chats or on social media. Those sorts of conversations are only supposed to happen in person. But Hubsky, at times, has been less than discreet outside the group’s confidential chats.

 “So in any war, you need to cut off your enemy’s ability to shoot, move and communicate,” Hubsky wrote in a September 2017 message posted in a discussion on white nationalism that occurred in a non-Atomwaffen chat room. “You would want to target things like: Substations, water filtration plants, etc.” ProPublica has obtained Hubsky’s statements from that online conversation.

 Hubsky wrote that he had “a map of the US power grid.”

 “West-coast only,” he added in the message. “Classified map. Had someone with special permissions get it.” John Cameron Denton, left, in an undated photograph with other white supremacists

 Hubsky also discussed blowing up natural gas lines.

 “You put a home-made thermite grenade on those,” he wrote. While other types of infrastructure — like water lines – figured in Hubsky’s discussions, hitting the power grid was, in his view, the most devastating and effective attack possible. Destroying electricity infrastructure, Hubsky wrote, “would by default take out the internet because it relies on power to operate.”

 In a telephone conversation and subsequent series of text messages with ProPublica, Hubsky at first denied being a member of Atomwaffen. But he later offered to discuss the group at length if his name was not made public, an arrangement ProPublica declined. Hubsky acknowledged that he owns a CZ Scorpion assault rifle — even sharing a picture of the weapon — but said it was not fully automatic. He concluded the exchange by saying he had retained a lawyer.

 Hubsky’s organization of the three-day Hate Camp in Nevada began with a proposal to the group late last year. He offered to arrange it so the group could hone its combat skills. There would be shooting and hand-to-hand sparring at a secret location on the edge of Death Valley.

 Atomwaffen had already held a Hate Camp in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois during the fall of 2017. At least 10 members from different states attended, with some driving in from as far away as Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma and New Jersey. In the Pacific Northwest, cell members had converged on an abandoned cement factory, known as “Devil's Tower” near the small town of Concrete, Washington, where they had screamed “gas the kikes, race war now!” while firing off round after round from any array of weapons, including an AR-15 assault rifle with a high capacity drum magazine.

 The training sessions were documented in Atomwaffen propaganda videos. Kaleb J. Cole Alias: Khimaere Atomwaffen’s Washington chapter leader is Kaleb J. Cole. Cole, who owns an AK-47 assault rifle with a large-capacity magazine, helped organize arms training sessions in Washington and Nevada. He also works on the group’s visual propaganda.

 Members had also organized smaller training sessions, such as the one last year in Texas that had drawn Blaze Bernstein’s alleged murderer, Samuel Woodward. The Texas training attended by Woodward took place in the countryside outside San Antonio and involved 10 members of the Texas cell who took part in firearms, survival and weapons instruction.

 Hubsky scheduled his training camp during the last weekend in January. Atomwaffen’s Washington chapter leader Kaleb J. Cole, who uses the alias Khimaere, agreed to help organize the desert training session in Nevada, which the group started calling the Death Valley Hate Camp.

 “Bring your uniform, rifle/sidearm, and whatever camping gear you need,” he wrote. Cole, who is 22 and lives close to the Canadian border in the town of Blaine, is a National Socialist Black Metal enthusiast who holds a concealed firearms permit and owns an AK-47. In 2015, while Cole was living in Bellingham, police responded to a report that he had “Nazi memorabilia” in his residence, according to Lt. Danette Beckley of the Bellingham Police Department; he was also reported to police in the island town of Anacortes for allegedly harassing a Jewish grocery store owner by a waving a Nazi flag in front of the business, according to two law enforcement sources.

 The former Atomwaffen member told ProPublica that Cole wields a significant degree of influence over the organization’s propaganda, recruitment and organization. ProPublica could not reach Cole for comment.

 When the group got out to the desert, Hubsky made sure they shot photos and videos to be used in Atomwaffen recruiting clips. In one picture obtained by ProPublica, an Atomwaffen member is standing at the base of a sand dune showing off a military-grade weapon — an MCX Virtus rifle made by Sig Sauer — while holding a flag bearing the Atomwaffen insignia, a black shield bearing the symbol for radioactivity. Another member, clutching an assault rifle, is also in the photo.

 Hubsky returned from Death Valley enthused and eager to do more training. He uploaded a memo to the Atomwaffen chat. Members would now be required to join Front Sight, a “private combat training facility” outside of Las Vegas in the small desert town of Pahrump. Front Sight, the memo said, could provide classes in “Uzi and full auto M16 combat, as well as knife fighting, hand to hand combat,” and instruction in climbing and rappelling.

 “I don't know anything about this group,” Bill Cookston, Front Sight’s director of operations, said this week. “If anyone were to be doing something against the law or in a radical manner, we would look into that.”

 Shortly afterward, Michael Meacher, Front Sight’s CEO, said the training center had sent Hubsky a letter refunding his membership fees and informing the Las Vegas resident that he was banned from the facility for life.

 “Not that the faggot kike didn’t deserve to die.”

 Before Samuel Woodward was jailed on charges of murdering Blaze Bernstein, he frequently participated in the Atomwaffen chats. First he used the handle Saboteur. Later he posted under the name Arn.

 Often, Woodward sounded like a typical 20-year-old. He enthused about video games (BioShock, Skyrim) and TV shows (he liked the early seasons of “Trailer Park Boys,” a Canadian comedy series). He complained about not having a girlfriend. Read More About Woodward California Murder Suspect Said to Have Trained With Extremist Hate Group The 20-year-old man charged in Orange County with killing a gay Jewish college student earlier this month is said to have belonged to Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group.

 But Woodward also railed at “mongrels and jews” and gays.

 He praised Mein Kampf and seemed to regard “Siege” as something akin to divine revelation; from his perspective, violence and society-shaking mayhem were the only options for a true Nazi.

 That orientation attracted him to outlaw groups like the National Socialist Underground, a German organization that carried out a massive terror spree between 2001 and 2011, robbing 14 banks, planting bombs and murdering 10 people, most of them immigrants. “The NSU was pretty cool,” Woodward wrote.

 In one conversation, Woodward discussed the Bosnian Civil War of the 1990s, during which Serbian soldiers and paramilitary fighters raped thousands of Bosnian Muslim women as part of an infamous campaign of ethnic cleansing. “The only acceptable case of miscegenation is what the serbs did to captured bosniak women,” he wrote in November 2017.

 Woodward liked the idea of using rape to terrorize women of color, whom he saw as his foes. “Force them to carry around the spawn of their master and enemy,” he wrote.

 ProPublica sought comment on the chats from Woodward’s lawyer, Edward Munoz, but did not get a response.

 On Jan. 26, ProPublica published a story revealing Woodward’s belief in Nazism and exposing his involvement with Atomwaffen.

 While the article attracted the attention of Atomwaffen members, who promptly posted it to their online chats, no one in the group expressed any sympathy for Bernstein, the young man Woodward allegedly murdered. They made jokes about his slaying and used slurs to describe him. If there was worry, it was about Woodward possibly having to do time behind bars for the murder.

 “Sam did something stupid,” wrote one member. “Not that the faggot kike didn’t deserve to die. Just simply not worth a life in prison for.”

 Sean Michael Fernandez, an Atomwaffen leader in Texas, even saw an upside for the group. Fernandez, who used the alias Wehrwolf, believed that Atomwaffen actually stood to benefit from the increased notoriety stemming from Woodward’s affiliation with the neo-Nazi group and the Bernstein murder.

 “We’re only going to inspire more ‘copycat crimes’ in the name of AWD. All we have to do is spread our image and our propaganda,” Fernandez wrote on Jan. 30. Sean Michael Fernandez Alias: Wehrwolf Sean Michael Fernandez is a leader of the Texas cell.

 He continued: “The growing fear is what we set out to do and it’s working EXACTLY how I wanted it to since we took over ‘leadership.’ I couldn't have planned this better, seriously.”

 For his part, Denton, the national Atomwaffen leader, felt betrayed. ProPublica had interviewed a former member for the story; still, Denton believed that someone currently within the ranks was sharing information with the media. “Looks like AWD needs another purging,” he wrote.

 Members began speculating about who was talking to outsiders. Was it a current member? Was it someone they’d kicked out recently?

 Members also directed their rage toward the media. As they saw it, Woodward was the one being victimized. Now that his involvement with Atomwaffen had spilled out into the public sphere, Orange County prosecutors might hit him with hate crimes charges — charges that could potentially add years to a prison sentence.

 “We really owe those jews at ProPublica,” wrote one member.

 Woodward posted many hundreds of messages to the Atomwaffen chats. But on Jan. 5, he typed out a few lines that are quite distinct from all the rest. In them, the raging young man suddenly became highly sentimental. Two days earlier, according to prosecutors, he had buried Bernstein’s lifeless body in a park in Lake Forest, California.

 Now Woodward explained that he was reflecting on mortality.

 “hey everyone,” he wrote. “i just wanted to let you all know i love you so much.” ||||| It’s fact, not fantasy. In the last four years, at least 13 young men have inflicted tragedies after steeping their psyches in hate forums, websites and across social networking apps.

 Some have scythed into cultural consciousness. Millions know the name Dylann Storm Roof. But many millions more have never heard of neo-Nazi hate group Atomwaffen Division (AWD) and the Iron March forum — the online race-hate incubator where AWD met, recruited and congregated.

 Nevertheless, that forum and this group exemplify recent trends in the more youthful strains of online extremism and radicalization. Many eventual recruits appear to be joining online social networks before becoming members of an established hate group.

 And as organized hate groups recruit and centralize in relative obscurity online before ever manifesting “irl” (“in real life”), the void of domestic efforts to counter radicalization grows as fast as young potential recruits move across the web and transition between apps.

 In less than a year, AWD has proven how young men, some in their teens and early 20s, can steepen the arc of their own radicalization when they gather together. The group has also attracted peers via slick, sophisticated digital propaganda, much of which directed traffic to Iron March (IM) before that forum was taken offline in the fall of 2017.

 Though it has been in existence since at least October 2015, AWD is only now grabbing headlines, as five murders have been linked to either members, like Devon Arthurs, 18; alleged members, like Samuel Woodward, 20; or individuals, like Nicholas Giampa, 17, who associated closely with the group online.

 Giampa stands accused of executing his girlfriend’s parents, Buckley Kuhn-Fricker, 43, and Scott Fricker, 48. The pair intervened to remove Giampa from their daughter’s life when the depths of his support of violent race-hate became apparent. According to Huffington Post, his Twitter feed shows, “a 17-year-old who’d drifted beyond the trolling of his teenage peers on the internet far-right and was fully in thrall to the racist, apocalyptic fantasia of white nationalism ... [who] tweeted about his hatred of transgender people and his admiration for Adolf Hitler. He tweeted about using Jews as target practice.”

 But what nurtured these young men’s propensity for violence? In the case of AWD, much has been made of the group’s fetishizing of Charles Manson and their cherishing of an obscure neo-Nazi polemic called SIEGE, a work that stridently promotes terrorism.

 Behind such references stands James Mason, who produced SIEGE as a newsletter from 1980 until the summer of 1986. Mason’s presence in the organized neo-Nazi movement in this country stretches back to the mid-1960s, when he was just 14 years old.

 For AWD members, it’s not about “Helter Skelter” or the gory details of the Manson Family murders alone. It’s about racial terrorism, The Family and its murders – and their broader cultural impact. Here Mason serves as a philosophical totem and provides a template for action.

 To miss the significance of Mason’s influence in the dark, sensational luster of Manson is to lose a vital recognition; SIEGE and AWD are obsessed with a racial revolution, not a cultural one like Manson’s.

 AWD has only recently begun associating itself so synonymously with Mason and SIEGE, and that’s a dangerous development. Mason and his writings preach the praxis of leaderless, cell-structured terrorism and white revolution. Furthermore, there is a plethora of terrorists and fringe texts beyond Mason’s that motivate and inspire the group. Many of these texts are valued in other sectors of the far-right. Importantly, Mason “achieved” much within neo-Nazism before he was out of his 20s: This is important for young men who, sometimes literally, are gathering around Mason and steeping themselves in his revolutionary philosophy and polemics.

 They, too, hope to “achieve,” but understanding what that means is equally challenging and vital.

 “GTK! RWN!”: Iron March begins

 T he Daily Stormer’s creator, Andrew Anglin, recently claimed that his target demographic includes children as young as 11.

 Certainly, without the aesthetic, slang and meme-laden milieu of the Daily Stormer, the IM forum would not have developed the way it did. The forum is an extension of, and reaction to, how neo-Nazi influencers built a contemporary movement online over the last several years. Launched in September 2011 and July 2013 respectively, IM and Daily Stormer did not develop as counterpoints, but as complements to one another.

 IM’s slogan, “Gas the Kikes! Race War Now! 1488! Boots on the Ground!” was designed to inflame.

 The Iron March crest.

 IM became home base for those who were personally invested in neo-Nazism, fascism and organized white extremism on a global scale. There, they debated, debased and denigrated, sometimes even each other, and plotted securing a future for whites and their children –—violently if necessary. There, the canonical works of global fascism evolved into active discussion threads: “For My Legionaries/ Corneliu Z. Codreanu,” “The Doctrine Of Fascism/ Benito Mussolini,” “Excerpts From Speeches/ José Antonio Primo De Rivera.” One early thread was titled, “Fascist Bookstores, Blogs, Resources.”

 The creator of the thread “What is this Forum for?,” put forth the following:

 This forum exists for discussing human psychology and two specific issues that are very relevant to our political interests:

 1. Propaganda, manipulation and influence. Giving speeches, making allies and turning enemy against enemy. The art of psychological warfare. 2. Miscommunication, Confirmation Bias and other afflictions that stand in the way of progressing our interests and how to overcome them. Knowing your enemy in order to destroy him and knowing your ally in order not to offend him because you understand the same word as different things. Other topics that still relate to both psychology and politics will also be welcome.

 Another thread, “American Futurism Workshop,” was dedicated to the exploration of how best to inject the tenets of Italian Futurism — an important social and artistic movement that helped inspire the rise of fascism in Italy — into contemporary American society. The fact that much of the “Futurism” thread has been reproduced on the SIEGE-Culture web site, one of AWDs new online hubs, evidences how the forum’s influence endures.

 IM was the incubator for U.S.-based hate groups like American Vanguard, formed in 2015, which eventually birthed Vanguard America in 2017. James Fields, before he allegedly killed Heather Heyer and injured many others, held one of Vanguard America’s shields in Charlottesville, Virginia.

 The United Kingdom-based neo-Nazi National Action (NA), whose youth-oriented aspirations and aesthetic helped inspire the founding of other groups internationally, including AWD and arguably Vanguard America, was also connected to IM. In December 2016, around three years after NA’s formation, it became the first-ever neo-Nazi group outlawed as a terrorist organization by the U.K. government. That was five months before the first Atomwaffen-linked murders occurred.

 Beyond Anglin and Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer — the hacker and dedicated neo-Nazi involved with Daily Stormer who encourages the mass-downloading of White Supremacy 2.0 into the minds of the young recruits — there are individuals like “Charles Zeiger.”

 “Zeiger” is the alias of a prolific writer at Daily Stormer and head editor of IM’s webzine, NOOSE, formerly hosted at ropeculture.org. Zeiger’s work was also featured on NA’s Wordpress blog.

 Amongst the aforementioned influencers and dozens of texts presented on IM, James Mason and his SIEGE found a new, young, niche audience, particularly among AWD members and sympathizers.

 After languishing in obscurity for decades, Mason has been rediscovered.

 By the time it was taken offline on September 24, 2017, 1,653 unique usernames had been registered on IM. The forum’s legacy demonstrates that for those who have moved on from the forum and are putting boots on the ground, memes are no longer their preferred ammunition — now, it’s bullets.

 “Powered by Hate”: Building the SIEGE-Pill Mill

 On May 19, 2017, Devon Arthurs allegedly murdered two other members of Atomwaffen Division, Andrew Oneschuk, 18, and Jeremy Himmelman, 22, in the suburban Tampa, Florida, apartment they shared with the group’s leader, Brandon Russell, 21. Russell was recently convicted of charges related to explosive materials found on the premises, and Arthurs awaits trial.

 Since Russell’s imprisonment, AWD and James Mason have become nearly synonymous. The result is an even more terrorist-minded version of the group than what existed under Russell, a cadre that fetishizes violence as its core doctrine.

 In late June, barely a month after the Tampa murders, AWD launched a new website and YouTube page. In December much of the same content was uploaded to a Bitchute account — a peer-to-peer video service favored by individuals and organizations banned from conventional video hosting services.

 Under Russell, AWD had announced itself primarily via fliering and stickering college and university campuses at night, mostly between December 2015 and April 2017.

 However, a new phase of AWD is now underway. Only one fliering incident has occurred since May 19. That’s when their YouTube page shifted away from campus exploits to footage of tactical training with assault rifles and other weapons, urging viewers to step out from behind their computer screens and take action.

 On October 24, 2017, another new website was registered and hosted via Cloudflare: SIEGE-Culture (S-C).

 With Russell in prison, AWD’s most influential member goes by the handle “Rape” in online forums, and calls himself “Vincent Snyder on the S-C site, Rape publishes under the pen name “Vincent Snyder.” On its “Staff” page, five of the eight individuals pictured evidence allegiance to, or membership in, AWD. Snyder’s photo appears next to Mason’s.

 Mason’s influence is evident on that site’s “Worldview” page:

 “What we are creating here is something that James Mason attempted to put into form but because of circumstance it never was implimented [sic] until the year of 2017 when Atomwaffen Division discovered and met James Mason. Ryan and Vincent Snyder both agreed to help him publish his works, but through the development of the website we have decided to take the proper course of action with SIEGE. Too long has the movement trapped people into a mindset of chasing their own tail. Those of you who are in here, perhaps, will create history. That is our intention.”

 The page’s banner features Mason and Charles Manson’s faces flanking either side of the Universal Order’s (UO) logo. UO is the terroristic neo-Nazi philosophy Mason launched in 1982 under the tutelage of Manson. As Mason describes in SIEGE and elsewhere, the ideas behind the Universal Order would not have been possible without his years of correspondence with Manson, who suggested the UO name and logo.

 James Mason, seated, with "Vincent Snyder."

 Mason’s association with Manson, and his interpretation of Manson’s ideas, developed after Mason spent years in the organized neo-Nazi movement. During that time, he gravitated toward increasingly radical, terroristic-minded figureheads and efforts.

 Mason wrote in SIEGE that his correspondence with the imprisoned Manson could be construed as cheap, mere shock value. But as the 560-pages of Mason’s text suggest, Manson is not the skeleton key for understanding AtomWaffen. Mason’s own neo-Nazi influences and beliefs in chorus with the Universal Order philosophy offer a more accurate portrait.

 Mason began reconfiguring his own sustained belief in the need for neo-Nazi terror cells willing to strike at American culture under the control of Jewish influences, which he dubs “the System.” Mason had already been moving toward that conclusion on his own for the better part of 15 years.

 During that time, Mason began networking. As an adolescent he idolized George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party (ANP), which he first tried to join at just 14. Through Rockwell, Mason also met William Pierce — the eventual founder of the National Alliance, author of The Turner Diaries and this country’s most influential neo-Nazi to date. Pierce also helped shepherd young Mason into the ANP. After Rockwell was murdered by a former Nazi Party member in August 1967, Pierce and Mason joined its successor, the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP). There, Mason came into contact with another Pierce protégé, Joseph Tommasi.

 Tommasi was still in his teens when Pierce convinced him to pilot a youth effort within the NSWPP, one that would flier college campuses, fight with leftists and liberals and mount a foreboding challenge to the radical left on campus. Although Pierce soon left the NSWPP, disgusted by leader Matt Koehl’s propensity for costume-oriented activism and pageantry, Tommasi and Mason stayed on. Despite Tommasi’s youth, his profile and influence grew and Koehl began to view him as a potential rival for party leadership.

 Tommasi’s speeches and writing, ideas about propaganda and desire for street-level confrontation further influenced Mason. In SIEGE, he calls Tommasi’s 1974 leaflet, “POLITICAL TERROR,” a “work of the most incredible genius.”

 In 1973, Tommasi was ejected from the NSWPP. Convinced that mass movement-oriented neo-Nazism was useless, he founded the National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF) in March 1974. The Front modeled its name (taken from the Vietnamese Liberation Front), aesthetics, personality and doctrine on radical leftist groups, like the terrorist Weather Underground.

 The NSLF sought to announce itself above ground through its actions only, while existing otherwise as an underground, revolutionary terrorist cell, the first of its kind in American neo-Nazism. Mason eventually followed Tommasi out of the NSWPP, but Tommasi was murdered in August 1975 by an NSWPP party member standing guard at its headquarters in El Monte, California.

 After Mason started the SIEGE newsletter in 1980, he was increasingly adopting Manson’s ideas and perfecting the ideas Tommasi first catalyzed. “In the manner prescribed by Tommasi,” he writes, “‘Our most eloquent statements will not be made in courtrooms, but in the streets of Jew-Capitalist America.’” He continues elsewhere in the text, underscoring that “Tommasi's secret was that he essentially stopped talking and started doing. He said that all talk, all discussion, was counter-revolutionary. The situation has been talked to death and still they go on talking! Tommasi also knew the real difference between useless effort and effective action practically applied.”

 Political propaganda.

 After making his first Manson-centered propaganda poster while piloting a one-man effort, the National Socialist Movement, Mason decided to reach out to the Manson Family. He first wrote to Family members Sandra Good and Lynette, after learning they were imprisoned in Alderson, West Virginia. With their endorsement, Mason eventually made contact with Manson himself. Through this correspondence, Mason was convinced he had discovered a supreme template for a white supremacist revolution. He described the Manson Family and their captivating exploits as a model for the white race’s survival.

 By 1982, Mason fully embraces such ideas, introducing the Universal Order philosophy via the pages of SIEGE.

 Mason believed the Universal Order could encourage others to enact a Tommasi-esque program of terror with the level of notoriety that the Manson family achieved and enjoyed for decades. Only through such infamy could neo-Nazi terror cells accelerate the collapse of “the System.” After that, Mason and his acolytes could institute a balance and order by instituting a version of National Socialism that eschews left/right political binaries. This would solidify the existence of the white race over its enemies.

 “We don’t want to ‘hurt’ the System, we want to KILL IT [sic]!,” he writes.

 Thus, Mason installed Manson and the Manson Family into his canon of idols, alongside Rockwell, Tommasi and, to a lesser-but-important extent, William Pierce. Following after those “Crazy Men of Destiny,” Mason regarded Manson as “the more current and up-to-date” version of Tommasi’s terrorist doctrine.

 “Manson represents the great divide between those persons who imagine there are still are choices to be made casually on the basis of Establishment mores and those who have a profound, individual sense of ‘no going back.’ I believe it is this - and not the abstract idea of ‘realism’ - that is the great sustainer and inner-flame of all true revolutionaries.”

 Like Mason’s other idols, Manson represents equal parts philosopher and revolutionary, with an irrepressible desire for violent action.

 Mason recognized the Manson Family as a “racial-socialist colony” — a collective of like-minded individuals from the same race who coalesced for survival within and against a nation riddled with disorder. In Manson, Mason cultivates a totem for the revolutionary potential of the individual and the collective, where both disappear into one another.

 Throughout SIEGE, Mason is driven by an urgency rooted in one hope — if only National Socialists could come together like The Family and captivate the nation through action, which in practice means lone wolf racial terrorism.

 This is the danger that Atomwaffen Division poses, whether members act as individuals or as cells; forget the shock value of Manson. Behind Mason is an entire canon of terrorist doctrine.

 “Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma City fame”: Distributing the SIEGE-Pill

 The SIEGE-Culture website presents a future for neo-Nazism through the lens of James Mason, in the hope that others will see the future the way he does.

 As Ryan Schuster, publisher of SIEGE’s second edition, writes in his introduction:

 SIEGE is to be used as a cookbook and guide. It is sincerely hoped this edition will prevail the vigilant(e) [sic] intelligence to heed a clarion call, wage battles of attrition, and act in a manner commensurate to Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma City fame.

 With its “Library” page, S-C extends that guide through a trove of texts on racial terror. Many present ludicrous visions of the white race fighting epic battles against immense opposition. Texts from Völkisch and Nazi esotericists, like Guido von List and Savitri Devi, sit alongside the Bhagavad Gita, valued for its predictions of the Kali Yuga, or the “Age of Vice.”

 In online neo-Nazi circles, satanic texts are providing the most fodder for debate. Many are unsure and others angry about what Atomwaffen now represents.

 Two of the three texts in question are The Devil’s Notebook by Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, and Hostia: Secret Teachings of the Order of Nine Angles (O9A), a three-volume collection of manuscripts penned by O9A members. They comprise codices of O9A’s beliefs and practices.

 Decades ago, the O9A allegedly came under the control of infamous British neo-Nazi David Myatt, who converted to radical Islam, but renounced his conversion eight years later and returned to esoteric spirituality. The group holds an important position in the niche, international nexus of occult, esoteric, and/or satanic neo-Nazi groups.

 The third book is Iron Gates, written by a member of the U.S.-based Tempel ov Blood, a sub-sect of O9A describing itself as “a hybrid between a traditional satanic coven and a (religious) militant order.” The novel’s description on Amazon reads as follows:

 “IRON GATES is a sci-fi horror / post-apocalyptic novel, detailing a bleak view of the spiritual horrors of the world-to-come. Set seventy years after a worldwide nuclear conflagration, IRON GATES allows the reader a sight into a nightmarish landscape populated by even more nightmarish characters in a hideous future which leaves little to the imagination. Brutal and unsparing, it is not suitable for readers under 18. Readers should be advised of extreme graphic content.”

 Atomwaffen member with Iron Gates graffiti.

 One Amazon reviewer writes, “This is a great book. I'm glad my good comrade Ryan wrote this book. Give it a read if you're into Rape [sic] stories and post-apocalyptic child stabing [sic].”

 AWD’s turn to the occult and promotion of the hyper-sadistic is disturbing. Why would AWD push its members toward brutal, dehumanizing violence?

 Though many in organized neo-Nazism are not convinced their turn toward the occult is sincere, others are reaching for their long knives. Some are accused of being “Noctulains,” O9A-devotees who claim to infiltrate fringe political groups, neo-Nazis among them, to reorient them toward satanism.

 Whether AWD is morphing or being infiltrated is unclear. AWD’s turn, though, resembles occult neo-Nazi groups before them, like the O9A, that meld religious and political extremism — two powerful conduits for violence. With such a turn, AWD is moving beyond the quotient of the culturally forbidden, of fliers broadcasting hate and offensive memes, and down a path toward tragedy.

 “The future awaits…”: The Torch is Passed

 Charles Manson holds a certain appeal to those who are attracted to such forbidden ideas. That’s particularly true for young people who revel in transgressing against society’s restrictions. It’s not surprising that Atomwaffen Division — under the stewardship of Mason — courts those who embrace cultural taboos beyond neo-Nazism to pinpoint new recruits.

 In a 1987 videotaped interview with AMOK Press, Mason characterized his fascination with “the forbidden” as crucial to his own recruitment into neo-Nazism and acceptance of Manson’s influence:

 “I won’t try to deny, especially in connection with the current Manson connection, that there was the element of the forbidden, or the rebellious, involved there, and to me at that time [during his teen years] Commander Rockwell and certainly the image of Adolf Hitler embodied the furthest extreme of that. And so that just pulled me in like a magnet.”

 In SIEGE, Mason makes clear his intention to recruit youth, and acknowledges Manson’s magnetic power in such a capacity:

 “And YOUTH is the name to be applied to the group of people among whom you will find a majority of those who DEMAND RESULTS, not Right Wing bullshit. Manson explains that the older a person becomes, the more frozen they are in the programmed ways the System has inculcated them with. [....] The most adept social and political movers of all times have known that, in order to have a successful movement, you must get 'em [sic] while they are YOUNG! [....] It is Youth that has the most to lose, that has traditionally been the most idealistic and action-minded. Charles Manson exerts a fascination over Youth today, in the en- tire West, more so by far than anyone else even remotely attuned to what we're trying to do.”

 He also noted that “Young, wild, American, anti-Establishment” individuals might be more easily attracted to Manson than Hitler. “Manson scares people,” he writes, “but he does so in the way they LIKE [sic] to be scared. There is no huge, vague, ugly ‘thing’ attached to Manson as there is to Hitler.” He writes similarly about Tommasi as an emblem, whose revolutionary praxis he describes as “the very same thing as Adolf Hitler.”

 “In Joseph Tommasi I see represented a number of things. All of the martyred comrades I can see in Tommasi. The young, especially, from the rank-and-file. In him I can still see the hope for the future arising out of the ashes and the dust of the former Movement for which he served as a soldier. He represents the clearness of mind and hardness of spirit to not only abandon the past for lost but to attack the present as the only means for achieving a future. And that future is entirely in the hands of those National Socialists serious enough to be called revolution.”

 AWD members are getting SIEGE-pilled through total immersion in Mason’s teleology. Now, they are challenging the established far-right and far-left with their eagerness to perpetrate violence.

 Accused killer Nicholas Giampa submerged himself in this dark pool. Whatever his other troubles, his exposure to AWD’s fetishizing of mass murder and promotion of racial terrorism should provoke grave concern.

 Since his journey in organized white supremacy began, Mason is, perhaps more than ever, seeing his ideas realized “irl.” He has witnessed SIEGE-pilled young men push themselves to action through his designs. This new generation of men might remind Mason of his younger self. And they, in turn, are idolizing him, his writings and his actions with uncanny devotion — just as Mason himself idolizes Charles Manson.

 The logo for the Universal Order philosophy.

 Late in SIEGE, Mason expressed that, perhaps, he could push his philosophy of terroristic neo-Nazism no further:

 “I have done what I could to inject - subtlely [sic] and overtly - as many of Manson's ideas into Movement thought as possible. I have had limited success. But having accomplished this much, I can only hope that the seeds have been planted and the torch passed….”

 Among those who seeded Mason’s extremism, Rockwell and Tommasi were both killed by fellow white supremacists, years before Mason assumed lone control of the SIEGE newsletter. In the years since he ceased its publication and its first book edition was published, both William Pierce and Charles Manson have died.

 But Mason is alive. And with the inception of SIEGE-Culture and his collaboration with the young cell members that comprise Atomwaffen Division, his hands are on the torch along with theirs.

 An ouroboros wreaths the Universal Order’s logo (above), which Manson helped Mason conceive and design. With AWD and Mason’s discovery of one another, the snake is no longer eating its tail. Its tail and head have virtually disappeared into one another.

Summary: – The body of a 19-year-old U of Penn student was found last month in a California park, and as details of Blaze Bernstein's murder continue to emerge, so, too, does a disturbing picture of suspected killer Sam Woodward, 20, and the white supremacist group he's said to belong to. ProPublica dives deep into Atomwaffen Division ("Atomwaffen" means "nuclear weapons" in German), whose internal message boards lit up after Bernstein's killing. Members both celebrated Woodward as a "one man gay Jew wrecking crew" and raged that one of their own may have leaked Woodward's AWD affiliation. Although the group is open about their hatred of minorities, Jews, and gays—and their love of Hitler and Charles Manson—it's a notoriously secretive bunch that doesn't take kindly to "rats and traitors." ProPublica got its hands on about 250,000 AWD messages from encrypted logs on Discord, a chat platform meant for gamers but popular with white supremacist groups, with startling revelations. The messages offer a frightening glimpse into the group's leaders, where members are located (as many as 20 cells may exist in several US states), and what "potential targets" may be, including water and electric utilities. "We haven't seen anything like Atomwaffen in quite a while," a Southern Poverty Law Center researcher says. "They should be taken seriously because they're so extreme." Others, though, think while some members may be dangerous, most just indulge in "magical thinking" about government overthrows and spend their time reading fascist lit. "It's very hard to go from talking about violence to looking a guy in the eyes and killing him," one expert says. ProPublica's in-depth take also includes details on AWD's supposed leader, who goes by the nickname "Rape," and the ire ProPublica itself received after it tied Woodward to AWD in a Jan. 26 article. "We really owe those jews at ProPublica," one member wrote in a chat message. More on AWD here.


SOCHI, February 6 (RIA Novosti) – Organizers of the Sochi Winter Olympics are hoping a spectacular opening ceremony will get the criticism-beleaguered Games off to a flying start Friday at the Fisht stadium.

 Millions of dollars have been spent on the ceremony orchestrated by Konstantin Ernst, the influential director of Russia’s Channel One, and participants have been sworn to secrecy.

 The benchmark for opening ceremonies is that of the 2012 London Summer Games, directed by filmmaker Danny Boyle, which won plaudits from critics and fans alike and surprised spectators by keeping a lid beforehand on what and who would appear in the show.

 Russian organizers have also maintained a tight grip on information about the ceremony.

 One Olympics volunteer who had attended the final rehearsal gave a thumbs-up sign and smiled when asked about the ceremony, and said: “It was amazing, great, but I can't say anything about it.”

 The only leak in the last week was from faux-lesbian Russian pop duo tATu, who said they were reforming for the ceremony, only to later delete a tweet and an announcement on Facebook. Britain’s Spice Girls famously reformed for the London ceremony.

 But with less than 24 hours to go until the opening ceremony of the Sochi Winter Games, some details have slipped out.

 After all, rehearsing in a stadium with a capacity of 45,000 in a city of 340,000 means that a lot of people have seen some of Friday’s show.

 © RIA Novosti. Winter Olympics: Facts and Figures

 Indeed, of six people fairly randomly approached Thursday, four had been to the final rehearsal on February 4, all of them said they loved it and three were willing to talk about what they had seen.

 “It was simply fantastic,” said housewife Yekaterina Andreyeva. “I had high hopes, but it exceeded my expectations.”

 The rehearsal only covered part of the real show that will be beamed live around the world.

 We were told that they had kept some secrets from us, said one Olympic Park worker who declined to give her name, but judging by the rehearsal there will definitely be a run-through of Russian history.

 “It shows all of Russian history, apart from the revolution,” said a smiling Yury, another Olympic Park worker, who declined to give his surname. “There is no Lenin or Stalin.”

 Among the scenes depicted are the 14th-century Battle of Kulikovo that saw Russians defeat their Golden Horde rulers for the first time, the epic war with Napoleon's forces and World War II.

 Izvestia newspaper previously reported that Peter the Great and a Gogolesque troika would also make an appearance.

 However, two of the three spectators willing to comment also said there was a section dedicated to the industrialization of the country in the 1930s under Stalin, a section likely to cause controversy if it depicts the positive side of the country's new industry but fails to show the human cost. Millions of people died during Stalin's push to turn the Soviet Union into an industrial power.

 Ваш браузер не поддерживает данный формат видео. ©Marina Spirina 2014 Winter Olympic Medals Delivered to Sochi Zoom InAdd to blog Add video to blog You may place this material on your blog by copying the code. <object width="480" height="360" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://static-c.rian.ru/i/swf/riavideocv2.swf"><param name="movie" value="http://static-c.rian.ru/i/swf/riavideocv2.swf" /><param name="scale" value="noorder" /><param name="wmode" value="window" /><param name="devicefont" value="true" /><param name="flashvars" value="file=http%3A%2F%2Fnfw.aurora-video.ru%2Fflv%2Fplaylist.aspx%3Fid%3D243559%2526fmt=xml%2526adv=0%2526img=http%3A%2F%2Fen.ria.ru%2Fimages%2F18726/37/187263714.jpg%26amp%3B©right=%C2%A0RIA%20NovostiMarina%20Spirina&info_url=http://en.ria.ru/services/media/187262751-info.html&videofilesize=13.57Mb&videolen=127 s.&blog_url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.ria.ru%23blogcode&video_url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.ria.ru%2Fvideo%2F&skin_locale=eng"/></object> Ваш браузер не поддерживает данный формат видео. ( 2:07 / 13.57Mb / просмотров видео: 3282) RIA NovostiMarina Spirina 2014 Winter Olympic Medals Delivered to Sochi Zoom Out

 The opening ceremony of the London Games famously showed the British industrial revolution as a rolling sea of countryside replaced by factories and steam engines.

 Those who had seen the final rehearsal in Sochi said there were a lot of special effects and that some of the action took place above the audience, with performers flying past on wires.

 “I had to crane my neck to see,” said Andreyeva.

 One of Andreyeva's favorite parts, she said, was a scene in which a soldier danced a waltz from the iconic 1970s Soviet movie “A Hunting Accident.”

 “That waltz is part of our culture,” said Andreyeva. “It is so powerful.”

 At the rehearsal, extras filled in for the athletes and dignitaries.

 “Instead of the president there was some other guy,” said the female Olympic Park worker.

 © RIA Novosti. Sochi 2014: Winter Olympics venues

 Few of the musicians and groups that will play on the night were there, though Yury did say that Na-Na, a famous 1990s boy band, made an appearance. None of the others interviewed remembered that part.

 There was one hint that tATu may take part after all. When the Russian Olympic athletes were introduced, one of tATu’s best known hits – “Not Gonna Get Us” – blasted around the stadium, said the female Olympic employee.

 There are also some clues as to who the other special guests will be.

 The team in London had a somewhat easier job of concealing the identities of the stars due to appear in the opening ceremony.

 Paul McCartney or the Spice Girls could have been in London in August 2012 for any number of reasons, but if you spot a Russian star in Sochi on the eve of the Games then there is a good chance that come Friday evening, you will see them in the Fisht stadium.

 It only took a short walk around Sochi on Wednesday to bump into tennis champ Maria Sharapova and former heavyweight boxer Nikolai Valuev.

 A crowd of young kids flocked around Sharapova on Thursday at the tennis school where she first played the game that has made her famous – and made her millions. She is also in town to commentate on the Olympic Games for US broadcaster NBC.

 Ваш браузер не поддерживает данный формат видео. ©Dmitry Makievsky, Petr Kasatkin IOC President Thomas Bach Tries Out Bobsled Simulator in Sochi Zoom InAdd to blog Add video to blog You may place this material on your blog by copying the code. <object width="480" height="360" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://static-c.rian.ru/i/swf/riavideocv2.swf"><param name="movie" value="http://static-c.rian.ru/i/swf/riavideocv2.swf" /><param name="scale" value="noorder" /><param name="wmode" value="window" /><param name="devicefont" value="true" /><param name="flashvars" value="file=http%3A%2F%2Fnfw.aurora-video.ru%2Fflv%2Fplaylist.aspx%3Fid%3D243488%2526fmt=xml%2526adv=0%2526img=http%3A%2F%2Fen.ria.ru%2Fimages%2F18722/64/187226473.jpg%26amp%3B©right=%C2%A0RIA%20NovostiDmitry%20Makievsky%2C%20Petr%20Kasatkin&info_url=http://en.ria.ru/services/media/187226470-info.html&videofilesize=5.05Mb&videolen=45 s.&blog_url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.ria.ru%23blogcode&video_url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.ria.ru%2Fvideo%2F&skin_locale=eng"/></object> Ваш браузер не поддерживает данный формат видео. ( 0:45 / 5.05Mb / просмотров видео: 2493) RIA NovostiDmitry Makievsky, Petr Kasatkin IOC President Thomas Bach Tries Out Bobsled Simulator in Sochi Zoom Out

 Sharapova lived in Sochi for four years until the age of six, and used to practice against the wall at the club with her father. She remembered how she would play in the cold.

 “I was in a fur coat and you had all of those tourists walking by thinking that my father and I were crazy," she said.

 Sharapova is taking part in the opening ceremony, she told RIA Novosti, but refused to say what she would do. Not even an invitation to mime her role rather than talk about it could persuade her to open up.

 On Thursday, Buranovskiye Babushki – the elderly ethno-pop girl group that was a hit at Eurovision 2012 – turned up in Sochi and also seem likely contenders to perform at the ceremony.

 Andreyeva will not go to the opening ceremony, but said she had fond memories of the rehearsal and of the audience when leaving the stadium. “Nobody pushed anyone, everyone smiled,” she said. ||||| 18.54 The flame is lit, the fireworks go off! They're not that... oh wait here we go! OK that was pretty spectacular. And with that, the 2014 Winter Olympics are underway!

 18.53 Well to where the flame is to be lit. You know what I mean. The cauldron. Here we go...

 18.52 One of the six lighting the torch is a Russian ice hockey goalie. The size of that guy is absurd! Right they're all running out of the stadium towards the flame.

 18.49 Here's the Olympic flame and it's being delivered by the hometown girl Maria Sharapova. Suddenly every teenage boy reading this liveblog wishes they'd watched this rather than leaving it to me.

 18.46 Each sport is represented by a 3D action figure made of projected stars. It's a very cool effect and presents Hazel Irvine with her 243rd opportunity of the night to describe something as "a powerful sequence." Hazel just doesn't miss and gobbles the chance up once again.

 18.43 But now we have rollerbladers skating around over projections of stars that appear on the floor of and, somehow, above the stadium. That's quite impressive it has to be said.

 18.42 The oaths are taken as we wait for...

 18.39 Sorry, that one was a bit full-on for my ears.

 18.36 The Russian flag is raised and is followed, to the strains of more opera, by the Olympic one. Fun fact: I live above an opera singer, which is surprisingly pleasant in the mornings.

 18.34 If you're looking for a pithy summary of the big parade bit earlier: it was quite spectacular, as you'd expect at the price, but exactly what Danny Boyle did, only with Russia.

 18.27 Rather than the traditional release of doves of peace, we've got Swan Lake. It looks more like jellyfish to me.

 18.26 Thomas Bach is now urging fans to enjoy the games before handing over to Vladimir Putin. Putin will not be happy when he realises he's been duped by his TV (see below), is he?

 18.22 Wait, WHAT?

 18.18 Praxis: Russia is wonderful.

 18.16 Thomas Bach, the IOC President, takes to the podium. He spends a whole minute saying "welcome".

 18.15 Suit #1 switches to English: "Our games will be cool" he says. "When we all come together in all our diversity-" and then he's remarkably not drowned out with a massive "eff off" for that disingenuous nonsense.

 18.14 Give me an ECB press conference.

 18.10 Time for the speeches now. When someone says something interesting and denounces Russia's homophobic policies I'll let you know. In the meantime, have a look at the photos linked to up above while I sit through the platitudes.

 18.09 Now a video montage of the journey of the torch. It went into space! Space! As well as the bottom of the world's deepest lake; I don't know that works. In conclusion from this montage though, Russia (and space) is pretty.

 18.06 A few moments ago some giant stone heads went floating through the stadium. I would have mentioned it earlier but for the paroxysms of terror. Now the little girl from the beginning is back... excpet is that the same little girl? I'm sure she had different hair before. She's floating up into the sky on a red balloon.

 18.04 The BBC commentary is very earnestly explaining the symbolism of each performance art piece. I don't have a producer researching these things myself, so I'm refusing to cheat and copy what they say.

 18.01 It goes dark and spotlights roam the stadium. Now blueprints are being projected on to the floor and the sound of industrial machinery. This apparently represents the formation of the iron curtain, then we move on to the space race. Sadly they don't launch an actual rocket, which they probably could have done with their £30bn+ budget. It's backed by some lovely new wave music though.

 18.00 Right now that's ov- THE RED MACHINE HAS ROLLED TO A STOP! I GET IT NOW!

 17.55 Now there are giant girders floating about along with geometric shapes and, er, a train or a rocket. It's all drenched in red light. There's what appears to be... you know what you figure out what this is meant to be. I think it has something to do with Russia.

 17.51 Things your liveblogger knows inside and out: 1. The history of Northampton Saints Rugby Club in the professinal era, 2. Radiohead's back catalogue, 3. The first nine seasons of The Simpsons. Things your liveblogger knows nothing about: 1. Ballroom dancing, 2. Classical music. Guess what I'm liveblogging right now.

 17.47 We've now got ballroom dancing. It's incredibly elegant and apparently a representation of War and Peace. Imagine if Strictly Come Dancing had a budget of more than a fiver and wasn't broadcast from a provincial working men's club. And didn't have the bank manager from the Nationwide adverts in it.

 17.45 This all looks great from the GTA-style top-down camera angle, but I'm not convinced that those in the stadium will really appreciate the projections as much, especially those in the lower seats.

 17.42 A cartoon ship with real men marching about on its deck is sailing across the stadium, because of course it is. This actually looks genuinely brilliant, weird as it may be. This is actually a real live thing!

 17.41 If you'd like to get a better idea of what I'm struggling desperately to describe, it's worthwhile looking at The very best pics from the opening ceremony.

 17.38 It's turned into a big carnival now. There are Kossak dancers, gymnasts, dancing enormous chess pieces made of candy, huge inflatable bears chasing huge inflatable teapots and that little girl from the beginning. Now they're all levatating into the sky. What the hell is in my coffee?

 17.34 Now in the stadium the "snow" is flooding in as the Troika (three white horses akin to those you might find in a provincial town Christmas display) draw "the sun" (a red ring) across the top of the stadium. The "ice" melts and we have a fairytale Russian city below! Ta-da!

 Actually that Troika/sun combo is 65m long, which is pretty impressive.

 17.31 Now the story of Russia through the ages, told by medium of a lavish historical epic starring apparently-famous Russian actors and with no dialogue. It's also entirely bloodless, so I'm not going to recognise any of the key moments in Russian history that I'm remotely familiar with. Sorry.

 17.30 Uhhh cat? Jaguar? Ocelot?

 17.29 Now for an ice-skating giant bear, rabbit and, uh, cheetah.

 17.28 Serious news alert: Turkish officials are reporting that there was an attempted hijacking on a plane bound for Ukraine with the intention to divert it to Sochi. The situation has now been resolved.

 17.25 They're mixing that song with Daft Punk's 'Harder Better Faster Stronger'. If Daft Punk are actually playing I'll retract every cynical and sarcastic sentiment I've conveyed so far.

 17.24 I've just realised the music Russia are parading to is 'Not Gonna Get Us', Tatu's minor follow-up hit that I'd forgotten about. They don't appear to be performing.

 17.22 Here comes Team Russia. The crowd are a lot more excited about this than you or I, let's be honest.

 17.20 You know I really like the Belarussian flag. But now the biggest cheer of the parade as here come Jamaica's bobsleigh team!

 17.18 My kind editor Mike Adamson has given me a headband to help me get through this. He said it's going to be an effort and if this parade isn't near the end he's going to be right.

 17.15 Finland?! France?! How the eff are we back to F?!

 17.09 Now the largest team ever to appear at a Winter games. YOO ESS A! YOO ESS A!

 17.08 Here are the fireworks from earlier. Pretty cool, eh?

 17.02 Norway emerge wearing shiny grey flatcaps. It's like if The Jetsons were hipsters.

 16.58 The bad, bad dubstep to which the athletes are entering is apparently being mixed by the side of the stage. It sounds like his hands must be really, really cold.

 16.55 Lithuania's green-on-green combo doesn't really work, writes your sartorial expert. Like if Norwich City's kit ran in the wash.

 16.49 Here come Spain, followed by Italy. The athlete's parade is always the worst part of the opening ceremony and this year we have a record 88 bleedin' countries in it. Bah!

 16.45 Wow, that German team kit is something else. Here's Olivia Bergin of this parrish with her take on the weird and not-so-wonderful outfits some of the athletes will be wearing.

 16.42 Here comes Team GB! And they're done. That was fast. Is this really going to take two and a half hours?

 16.38 We're on to the Bs! Oddly the British Virgin Islands emerge ahead of Belarus. As I said, the Cyrillic alphabet is weird.

 16.35 Right so that projection. It seems the satellite zooms in on each particular country and the live picture of said country fills up the entire stadium floor. The middle of said floor opens up and a Close Encounters-esque ramp opens up for the teams to emerge from. Like this, actually.

 16.34 Well that was a brisk opening wasn't it? We're into the endless athletes' parade now, which doesn't impress Twitterer Ben Grier:

 <noframe>Twitter: bengrier. - Bringing the athletes on already? That's so boring</noframe>

 16.32 OK that projection of the globe is pretty impressive. It's a live satellite feed from space. Here comes team Greece first up. No chance I'm trying to spell the name of the flag bearer, sorry.

 16.28 As the men dressed as James Bond belt out the anthem, a lot more people in brightly-lit white, red and blue LED suits take to the pitch and form the Russian National flag. It's all very Daft Punk again. Oh and now they're shuffling up and down to make the flag ripple. It's kinda cool, I guess, if you ignore everything you've read about Russia in recent weeks.

 16.26 We'll now have the Russian national anthem while I try to contain my mirth at that.

 16.25 Oh dear. Five giant flakes of snow descend and open up into the Olympic rings. But...

 16.22 Is that an actual wolf? Wait, no it's animatronic. There's now a 180-strong chorus standing in the swirling snow, which is presumably not real.

 16.21 The whole thing is being played out to some lovely opera. I preferred Daft Punk though. Sorry.

 16.19 Through some admittedly impressive tricks of light and strings, the little girl is flying by the moon across Russia's varying landscapes. There are 4km of rails on the roof of the stadium getting these nine landscapes to float across the top of the stadium. Danny Boyle's influence is obvious here.

 16.17 Fireworks come out the top of the stadium! Of the 3,500 available, I'd say there's a good 120 there. Now the little girl is on stage, but has strings coming from her arms. Ahh it is a real little girl, flying a kite, which is now lifting her high into the sky. Crikey that looks terrifying!

 16.16 C sounds like Z, is about the 15th letter and stands for Sputnik.

 16.15 A low-key start as we watch a slideshow of a young Russian girl giving us an A-Z of Russian history. I say A-Z, but it's a Russian alphabet, where H follows M and is for Nabakov. This is going to be hard work.

 16.13 I've just been informed that they've spent in excess of £30bn on these games! This had better be spectacular; you could actually make Game of Thrones for that!

 16.09 With five minutes to go until the start, here's a look inside the Fisht stadium. Fisht, incidentally, is the name of a mountain rather than what Sean Connery punches you with.

 16.02 Matthew Pinsent is giving us his previews of Great Britain's medal hopefuls and is so tough he isn't even wearing gloves! If you're interested in having a look at Team GB's hopefuls then why not have a look at our gallery up the top?

 15.58 I can hear Daft Punk coming from the stadium. 'One More Time', if you're interested.

 15.52 Alternatively, here's Marie Wood, who sends us this photo of her own anti-homophobia protest, one of many we've seen throughout the day.

 15.50 Here's our very own Jonathan Liew with a succinct summary of the BBC's coverage so far.

 <noframe>Twitter: Jonathan Liew - Ten minutes into their Sochi coverage and the BBC have already given us gay rights, a</p> <p> <strong>15.34</strong> Comedian <strong>Paul Sinha </strong>has alternative worries about these games: </p> <p> <iframe src="https://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/html/TwitterEmbed/Version1/web19443.html" width="460" height="115" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" id="tweetframe43181303825434214617384305611391787425"><noframe>Twitter: Paul Sinha - 98 gold medal events ? Won't somebody please think of the quizzers ?</noframe>

 15.30 Here we go then. The Beeb's opening credits look like they cost a fortune. They do actually look pretty cool.

 15.28 Have you missed these guys? No, me neither.

 15.26 The best song ever to come out of Manchester, hands down. We are going to be watching one of these:

 15.20 Right-o there is apparently a "pre-show" going on for those poor, poor folk lucky enough to have tickets. Word has it that this is where Tatu will be playing, rather than at the ceremony itself. So that one Russian pop song you know? You won't hear it.

 15.13 Apparently our LGBT activists have been arrested in St Petersburg for displaying a banner that quoted the sixth “fundamental principle of Olympism” from the Olympic charter (“Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement”). Interestingly that forms part of today's Google doodle too, as Claire Carter reports.

 14.55 This is what it looks like outside the park at the moment. Enjoy that while I get coffee.

 14.49 Apparently Konstantin Ernst, made a joke earlier. This amuses me because "ernst" is German for "serious" and because I am easily amused. Ernst also put together the Eurovision Song Contest in Moscow a while back, so this could be stunningly tacky. There will also be 3,500 fireworks used at the Fisht Stadium, which is surprisingly awkward to type. The ceremony is due to last an hour and a half or so.

 14.38 If, like me, you can't wait until the new season of Game of Thrones, you might as well watch the BBC's trailer for their coverage of the Games. It's as unsubtle a nod as you'll see, even featuring Charles Dance. They just stop short of adding "winter is coming" in an ominous voice because, as you obviously know, Dance's character wouldn't say that, would he? Anyway, here's Game of Thrones.

 14.00 Afternoon all. Or, if you're reading this from the ceremony in Sochi, добрый вечер! Yes folks, that there's an example of the high-octane, incredibly skilled and utterly thrilling Googling action you can expect to see from me today. The answers to questions like "Where the hell have tATu been since 'All the Things She Said'?" and "how on Earth do you spell that?!" are at my fingertips. I'm Dan Lucas, and I'll be actually watching an opening ceremony so you don't have to.

 The Winter Olympics are thought by many, your liveblogger today included, to be far, far more exciting than their summer counterpart. This the first of Telegraph Sport's liveblogs of the tournament, although this one is unique as we're not going to be talking about sport all that much. Instead we have dancing, costumes, Tatu and a rotating image of the earth to point and laugh gasp in wonder at.

 Actually that thing about the rotating image of the Earth intrigues me. To recap: "We have created a special flooring where there is going to be an image of the earth projected. The earth will be rotating and we are going to project the image of the earth from outer space and every time a country is announced the earth will rotate in such a way so we can see the particular part of the earth where that country is. You are going to fall down on to that country and then there will be a ramp opening, and the athletes will appear from the heart of their country's territory and will walk up on to the stadium."

 It's going to be fun to see how this works for some of the smaller countries. I imagine Russia have designed this with themselves in mind, not quite figuring how fully-grown human beings are going to emerge out of a scale image of, say, Cyrpus. It'll be like clowns coming out of a car, I guess.

 The ceremony gets underway at 20.14 local time (geddit?), which is 4.14pm here in London. The BBC is going to start their coverage at 3.30pm, so in the meantime don't hesitate to get involved. Otherwise I'm going to start thinking about what I'd do if I was in charge of the ceremony and report on that for a couple of hours or so.

 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Jack Lundy writes...

 The ceremony will bring together more than 40 heads of state and delegations. More than 3,000 young talents from schools, as well as professional artistic groups, will take part in many of the scenes, which include professional dance, ballet, acrobatic and circus performances. More than 6000 costumes have been made for the participants of the show.

 Russian band t.A.T.u. will perform at the ceremony, producer Konstantin Ernst explaining: "They are one of the few popular Russian bands that are also known in other countries. The Olympic anthem will be performed in Russian by Anna Netrebko, our famous opera diva."

 Ernst joked that Vladimir Putin won't be copying the Queen and jumping out of a helicopter, as she did during the London 2012 opening ceremony. But he will welcome spectators and declare the Games open.

 Ernst, saying the ceremony will be two hours and 30 minutes and celebrate Russia's history, continued: "We made the ceremony in such a way that the athletes' march will be more dynamic than before. We have created a special flooring where there is going to be an image of the earth projected. The earth will be rotating and we are going to project the image of the earth from outer space and every time a country is announced the earth will rotate in such a way so we can see the particular part of the earth where that country is. You are going to fall down on to that country and then there will be a ramp opening, and the athletes will appear from the heart of their country's territory and will walk up on to the stadium, which I think is very much in line with ancient Greek tradition. They will arrive at the stadium just like the ancient heroes of Greece, and they will be arriving from the heart of their nation.

 "We made a mental journey back into the history of Russia, bearing in mind that we would be working for billions of viewers across the globe and we want them to experience this love of Russia. We want to carry a very strong emotional message for this unprecedented international audience."

 The name of the final torchbearer before the lighting of the Olympic cauldron remains a closely guarded secret. ||||| Travelers heading to Sochi for the Winter Olympics on nonstop flights from the U.S. will have to keep their liquids in their checked baggage.

 The Department of Homeland Security is temporarily banning all liquids from carry-on bags on nonstop flights from the U.S. to Russia.

 "As always our security posture, which at all times includes a number of measures both seen and unseen, will continue to respond and appropriately adapt to protect the American people from an ever evolving threat picture," a DHS official said. "These measures include intelligence gathering and analysis, deployment of cutting edge technology, random canine team searches at airports, federal air marshals, federal flight deck officers, temporarily restricting certain items and more security measures both visible and invisible to the public."

 The ban follows a warning from Homeland Security that terrorists could try to hide explosives in toothpaste tubes to detonate at the Olympics, which officially begin tomorrow.

 RELATED: Airlines warned of possible Olympics toothpaste bombs

 Delta Air Lines posted a notice on its website of the temporary ban:

 "The U.S. Transportation Security Administration has directed that no liquids, gels, aerosols and powders of any size be permitted onboard flights between the United States and the Russian Federation in any passenger cabin of service. These items may be placed in customers' checked baggage. Prescription medications will be allowed.

 Russian aviation authorities had already banned liquids in carry-on bags on domestic flights.

 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1dtUBo6 ||||| What time it's on and what to watch out for

 Alexander Demianchuk / Reuters Fireworks over the Fisht Olympic Stadium at the Olympic Park during a rehearsal of the opening ceremony in Sochi, on Feb. 4, 2014.

 The Sochi Winter Olympics are set to get underway Thursday — but before the sporting events really start to get heated, there’s a another kind of spectacle to enjoy: The opening ceremony, a time-honored tradition of national pride wherein host countries very literally make a show of one-upping whichever nation held the previous Games.

 What time is the opening ceremony?

 The opening ceremony will actually happen Friday, Feb. 7 at 11 a.m. EST, but NBC decided it will delay airing the spectacle in the U.S. until 7:30 p.m. Weirdly, this is actually a day after the athletic competitions begin.

 How can I watch?

 If you’ve got a television, you’ll find the opening ceremony on your local NBC affiliate at 7:30 p.m EST. NBC is live-streaming every single Winter Olympics sporting event on its website and mobile apps, but alas, it’s not streaming the opening ceremony. Aereo, if it’s available in your area, provides an Internet-based option for those sans-TV. Otherwise, call up your local sports bar and see if they’re playing the ceremony.

 What’s Russia got planned?

 It’s hard to say exactly what’s hiding behind the Iron Curtain. There was a fireworks test this week, so we can safely expect some Putin-approved pyrotechnics. Daniel Ezralow, a Broadway choreographer famous for Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, is leading a cast of about 80 professional dancers and hundreds of volunteers in a performance about “20th-century Russia,” he told People, so look out for performers with MAD dance moves, we guess.

 Russia’s world-famous for its classical composers, and several top contemporaries are expected to play a role in the opening ceremony. Russian pop band t.A.T.u, two teenagers who semi-pretended to be lesbians and were briefly crazy-popular in the mid-2000s, is rumored to be playing, whatever such a thing might say about Russia’s treatment of gay people. No word on an appearance by Springfield, Missouri indie-pop rockers Somebody Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin — but we’re crossing our пальцы.

 What’s up with the Parade of Nations?

 The Parade of Nations is one of the best known Olympic spectacles. It’s when all the athletes representing their respective countries in the Games get to walk around an arena decked out in patriotic colors while in alphabetical order by country name. That last part is very important — if a country leaves alphabetical order, it’s automatically disqualified from the Games. Or so I’m told.

 This year there’s a twist: The countries will be introduced in alphabetical order according to their Russian spelling. Per Olympic tradition, Greece goes first, alphabet be damned. In Sochi, thanks to Cyrillic, Ireland is relieved of its typical role as an awkward buffer between Iran, Iraq and Israel. Russia, as the host nation, will go last.

 MORE: Game On: Highlights From Day One

 Who’s carrying the Stars and Stripes?

 That’ll be 36-year old Todd Lodwick, a Nordic combined skier who’s been to the Olympics six times.

 And the flame? What’s the deal?

 Arguably the most important part of the opening ceremonies is the lighting of the official Olympic flame, which symbolizes Prometheus’ theft of fire from the Greek god Zeus (and the 2012 film Prometheus’ theft of my $12.75). Part of Olympics tradition is that the torch makes a relay trip around the world before it’s used to light the flame at the opening ceremonies. Before this year’s games, the Olympic torch (used to light the flame) went on its longest pre-Games relay in Olympic history, traveling to the North Pole, Europe’s highest mountain peak and the International Space Station. Sadly, one torchbearer died of a heart attack shortly after carrying the torch through a part of western Siberia.

 A double-rumor-with-a-twist this year: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s supposed girlfriend, a former Olympics champion, is rumored to be lighting the Olympic flame this year. This Olympics has more rumors than Fleetwood Mac.

 How long will this thing be?

 Previous ceremonies have clocked in at around four hours, or about half the length of the average Lord of the Rings Director’s Cut.

 Will this be as British as the 2012 opening ceremony?

 Not even in the slightest. The opening ceremony for 2012′s Summer Olympics had a distinctly British flavor, with polite nods to British history, jokes about Queen Elizabeth and appearances by famous British rockers The Who. Russia’s show, while still largely under wraps, will be much more, well, Russian. Expect classical music, ballerinas and, who knows, maybe even bears.

 Who’s Russia trying to beat?

 China. China’s opening ceremony was outstanding. ||||| Fireworks over the Fisht Stadium at the Olympic Park during the rehearsal of the opening ceremony.

 Much secrecy surrounds the Sochi Olympics opening ceremony, but we know one thing for certain: If the rest of the Games are any indication, then the scale planned by Vladimir Putin’s Olympic Committee will go unmatched in size and pomp.

 You can expect the ceremony to be a grand retrospective of Russia’s history from medieval times to the present, complete with ancient warriors and modern-day Cossacks, tzars and pop idols, golden-domed cathedrals and make-believe space journeys.

 What follows is a brief introduction to some of the sights and characters that might make an appearance during Friday’s extravaganza, which airs at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time on NBC.

Summary: – The Olympics opening ceremony starts at precisely 11:14am Eastern time today—that's 20:14 in Sochi, meant to "symbolize the year of the first-ever Russian Winter Games," the official press release explains. (NBC won't air the ceremony until 7:30pm Eastern, Time notes.) What to expect? RIA Novosti reports that the multimillion-dollar spectacle is top secret, with participants having been sworn to silence, but we already know a good deal: The Olympic anthem will be sung in Russian by opera singer Anna Netrebko. Russian band tATu will also perform, the Telegraph reports. (Amusingly, the ceremony producer explains that tATu is "one of the few popular Russian bands that are also known in other countries.") Vladimir Putin will be there, of course, to declare the games open. But he won't be parachuting into the ceremony, the producer jokes. As for the final torchbearer and any other special guests, though, those are still secret. (Putin's rumored girlfriend, a past Olympics champ, is whispered to be the one lighting the flame.) The two-and-a-half-hour extravaganza will celebrate Russia's history, and will include more than 40 heads of state and delegations; more than 3,000 school-age participants; professional dance, acrobatic, and circus performers; and more than 6,000 costumes. "It shows all of Russian history, apart from the revolution," says an Olympic Park worker who saw a rehearsal. "There is no Lenin or Stalin." Expect other Russian traditions, like Matryoshka nesting dolls and troika (a carriage driven by three horses), to somehow make an appearance, the Christian Science Monitor reports. There will be a "special flooring" showing a projected image of the Earth that rotates, and athletes will march up "from the heart of their country's territory," the producer says. "They will arrive at the stadium just like the ancient heroes of Greece." The countries are announced in alphabetical order, but this year, they'll be in alphabetical order according to their Russian spelling. Two exceptions: Greece is always announced first, and the host nation last. Needless to say, security at Olympic Park got even tighter today, USA Today reports. No one is allowed in without tickets and credentials, and the number of police and military officers roaming about is rising. And, following a warning about toothpaste explosives, the TSA is banning carry-on liquids on all US-to-Russia flights.