The Machines of Darkness – The Story of Terrorgram

"Due to current events, we have updated the publication date of our May 5 article to today's date. The content remains unchanged."

It didn’t begin with a gunshot. It began with a link. A channel. A message in a dark corner of the web. And like a plunge out of civilization into a world of shadow and filth, thousands found themselves drawn in - enticed by a promise: purity through blood, order through violence, history through terror.

Terrorgram - that’s what they called their digital construct, a structure they saw as a bulwark against the "decline of the white race." A network, loosely structured, yet ideologically fused together, like the branches of a tree whose roots had long since rotted. Neo-Nazis, apologists for genocide, youths intoxicated by emptiness - they gathered on Telegram, a platform whose founder, Pavel Durov, once declared that freedom of speech was “more important than the fear of terrorism.”

And so Terrorgram grew. Unhindered. Unregulated. And unstoppable. While Western democracies busied themselves with defining hate, here it was systematically organized. A global network, emerging from Canada, Slovakia, California. With links to Brazil, South Africa, Croatia. The language: English, German, Slovak. Memes, instructions, calls to murder.

The faces behind it - Matthew Althorpe, the small-town Canadian who ran the Telegram channel Terrorwave Refined; Dallas Humber, a DJ with neon-colored hair and Nazi fervor; Pavol Beňadik, a computer science student from western Slovakia who not only compiled explosive manuals but also actively recruited teenagers - among them Juraj Krajčík. A 19-year-old student who, in October 2022, shot and killed two people outside an LGBTQ bar in Bratislava before killing himself. He was just 16 when he first joined Beňadik’s chats. Terrorgram posthumously declared him a “saint.”

The “saints” - that was the most gruesome invention of this network. A new iconography of terror: Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people in New Zealand. Timothy McVeigh, who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168. Dylann Roof, who murdered nine Black worshippers in Charleston. They were celebrated with calendars, propaganda videos, literarily stylized manuals for destruction. It was a new language of fascism - aestheticized, digitized, globalized.

What they created was an ecosystem of hate. Over 600 channels circulated bomb-making instructions, addresses of politicians, techniques for poisoning water systems, propaganda for the “White Terror.” Humber herself narrated the manifesto of the Dollar General shooter Ryan Palmeter — a document that used the N-word 183 times. Her sign-off: “Let’s get this party started, Terrorbros.”

Like a dark inversion of influencer culture, Terrorgram emerged — not for fashion or fitness, but for murder and anarchy. And the platform Telegram? It remained silent. For years. Islamists, according to a classified bulletin from the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange in 2019, were systematically removed. The white supremacists were not. Only under media pressure did Telegram act.

What We Saw When We Infiltrated

We managed to infiltrate the network directly. For weeks, we observed their chats, their internal operations, their ideology in real time. What we saw wasn’t the anarchic play of confused teenagers. It was a system - almost militarily organized. Working groups, editorial calendars, archive structures. Code language, hierarchical roles, unique greetings. They called themselves “Terrorbros,” “Saint Watchers,” “Holy Curators.” Everyone knew their assignment.

What stood out was the number of German-speaking accounts. Not only in distributing content, but also in coordination. IP data, profile names, archive mirrors, internal screenshots: many leads pointed to Saxony, Thuringia, Bavaria. Some of the PDFs featured passages in German - precise, legally phrased, with references to known vulnerabilities in German infrastructure plans.

A key role was played by channels that openly referenced NSDAP ideology, fused with state-of-the-art tech. One channel, operated out of Leipzig, analyzed explosion data and entered it into automated spreadsheets — including projected blast radii. The group structure resembled paramilitary cells. References to groups such as Der Dritte Weg, Blood & Honour, and Freies Thüringen appeared repeatedly. Private chats even mentioned ties to the AfD-affiliated youth group “Junge Alternative.” - (since disbanded) -

One admin - Tiwaz_Brandenburg - maintained an archive of over 2,000 files: propaganda videos, weapon blueprints, lists of so-called “traitors.” In one chat, they debated whether Halle/Saale station could be considered a “soft target.” The context was tactical, not just ideological.

Another user — Nordlicht18 — distributed German translations of parts of Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto. He cited “the necessity to dismantle the myth of civil society.” This wasn’t merely hate against the foreign - it was a deliberate attack on the democratic foundation itself.

The Erosion of Reality

Terrorgram wasn’t a loose network — it was a calculated project to erode reality. Their strategy mirrored hybrid warfare: memes instead of bullets, PDFs instead of tanks, propaganda instead of ammunition, but with the same destructive intent. Their aim was to radicalize youth, arm them, canonize them - and then turn them into martyrs of digital fascism.

In a post published just hours after the Bratislava attack, Humber wrote: “The war has begun. Our task is to accelerate it.” And accelerate - that was the keyword. The ideology of Terrorgram was steeped in militant accelerationism, the belief that terrorist attacks should hasten the collapse of society.

The New Disguise

Today, after raids, indictments, and international sanctions, much of the network is gone — but not disappeared. The chats were shut down, yes. But many of the protagonists have migrated to new platforms. Chief among them: X — the former Twitter — now the new home of Terrorgram aesthetics. Once again, there are saints. Once again, Hitler memes. Once again, videos glorifying the murder of minorities.

The digital masks are new. But the voices behind them remain the same.

And while Telegram promises to cooperate with authorities — and its once-celebrated founder Pavel Durov now faces charges in France — one thing remains unspoken: the fascism of today no longer wears a uniform.

And a net that protects them.

To be continued…