radical American terrorist (courtesy Raw Story)

According to the Tampa Bay Times, a member of the Florida National Guard was arrested on sunday and charged with “possessing an unregistered destructive device and unlawful storage of explosive material.” The story has a few twists. For one, he was only found out after he came home to find that two of his roommates had been murdered. Shortly afterward, the police showed up with his other roommate, who had confessed to the crime.

'Neo-Nazi' in Florida National Guard arrested after explosives found at Tampa Palms murder scene TAMPA — A man accused of shooting his two roommates Friday in a Tampa Palms apartment told police he shared neo-Nazi beliefs with the men until he converted to Islam then killed them because they showed disrespect for his faith. The revelations weren't over.

The shooter, Devon Arthurs, had killed the other two on friday afternoon, then gone to a nearby smokeshop, where he’d taken hostages. The police managed to defuse the situation and take him into custody. Arthurs then told them that he’d killed his roommates.

When the police arrived at the apartment they found Brandon Russell, who’d come home to find the bodies. Russel had just come back from a National Guard deployment.

In the garage, the police found a cooler full of explosives and several types of precursor chemicals. (The latter inside packages addressed to Russell—way to go, buddy!) They also discovered ammunition clips that appeared to have been rigged with fuses, apparently to use them as an explosive device.

Inside Russell’s bedroom, they found various neo-nazi paraphernalia and a framed photo of Timothy McVeigh.

When bomb technicians showed up to assess the situation, devices they carried alerted them to the presence of radiological sources, which turned out to be thorium and americium. The latter is commonly used in smoke detectors, while thorium is an alloying material and also used to be used in gas mantles. Thorium has a half-life of more than 14 billion years. While thorium is a naturally-occurring element, and is present in low amounts in drinking water, a fair amount of it packed into an explosive would cause a mess. One isotope, thorium-232 has a half-life of just over 14 billion years. Although this isotope is not terrible dangerous, its daughter nucleotides, isotopes of radium and radon, are not so harmless. The issue isn’t what these elements would do immediately, but the problem of having them spread over an area of a city in the long term.

Nonetheless, the important point is that this asshole seems to have been planning to explode one or more dirty bombs in the US. That’s not ok, regardless of how dangerous the element used is.

Police are not saying why Russell was not immediately arrested, nor why he was pulled over in Key Largo on sunday, when he was arrested. I presume that they were tailing him whilst they looked into whatever else was in the house, and who might his accomplices be, if any besides his roommates.

Russell admitted that he’s a nazi, and a member of an online group which calls itself Atomwaffen (Atomic Weapons) Division. According to Radar Online (tip o’ the hat to Raw Story), “[t]he group’s leader is reportedly a young nuclear physics student that’s trying to encourage members to conduct an attack similar to Timothy McVeigh‘s strike in Oklahoma City.”

(In the Radar Online article, a link inside that paragraph points to another article about Scientology. They seem to do that for no good reason at all.)

But you’re probably wondering about that murder mentioned at the top, and the “converted to Islam” part which was the apparent motive. Yeah, pretty strange, but perhaps not so much when one reads what else RO has to say about this group.

Neo-Nazi Nerds Recruiting Students At Top Universities To Carry Out ISIS Attacks A group of neo-Nazi nerds have been recruiting new members at top tier American universities, a world exclusive five-month investigation by RadarOnline.com has revealed. The hate-mongering eggheads, known as the Atomwaffen Division, are considered a potential threat because they’re aligned with Islamic terrorists and are encouraging attacks on the United States. … “Since the beginning of 2016, the alt-right adherents have been responsible for dozens of episodes of racist flier placement at universities and colleges across the country.” Other white supremacist groups aggressively recruiting college dorks are Identity Evropa, American Vanguard and The Right Stuff, according to the ADL.

Supposedly, the members of this group are big fans of Daesh. Hence, i suppose, one of their number actually converting to Islam.

Arthurs told investigators that all four roommates shared neo-Nazi beliefs until he converted to Islam, according to the complaint. "Arthurs stated that for some time before the murders, he had been privy to Russell participating in online neo-Nazi internet chat rooms where he threatened to kill people and bomb infrastructure."

This shouldn’t be taken lightly. These guys were in possession of a lot of explosives, and the radiological materials. Ask any federal investigator whether we’re overdue for a dirty bomb going off. There are very few who would tell you it’s all hype. Some people pooh-pooh the notion; they are fools. Just one of these things going off could make the cleanup after the anthrax attacks look like a breeze. And the required elements are too easily obtainable.

That this group supposedly also includes a nuclear physics student is also very worrying. No doubt the FBI is attempting to figure out who that is. This is reminiscent of the Aum Shinrikyo cult which enlisted a bunch of university students, military researchers, and others working for defense contractors in its bizarre and lethal attempts to create its own superweapons.

The Cult at the End of the World In 1984, guru Shoko Asahara had a one-room yoga school, a handful of devotees, and a dream: world domination. A decade later, Aum Supreme Truth boasted 40,000 followers in six countries and a worldwide network that brought it state-of-the-art lasers, lab equipment, and weaponry. Aum's story moves from the dense cities of postindustrial Japan to mountain retreats where samurai once fought, and then overseas – to Manhattan and Silicon Valley, Bonn and the Australian outback, and finally to Russia. It is there, in the volatile remains of the Soviet empire, that the cult found ready suppliers of military hardware, training, and, quite possibly, a nuclear bomb.

As the last election proceeded to go to ever and ever lower levels, i was repeatedly reminded of James Coates, a Chicago Tribune reporter who wrote a very good book about the extremist right in the US during the eighties and nineties, and how there was a disturbing connection between many of them.

Rooting for Armageddon Federal investigators began to uncover disturbing links between Posse adherents and other heavily armed racial extremists, including the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party and lesser-known neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic survivalist groups with names like Aryan Nations, the Christian Patriots Defense League and the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord - the latter of which maintained a heavily armed compound some 60 miles from where Kahl died. But it was a year and a half before Federal investigators began to decipher the links and discover how dangerous the network they formed was. That is also what James Coates's ''Armed and Dangerous'' is about - the rise of what he calls the survivalist right in America, a loosely linked network of armed racist revolutionaries bent on the overthrow of what they call the ZOG, or Zionist Occupational Government, and the establishment of an Aryan nation, or White Bastion, in its place.

It can’t be repeated enough: We’re down the rabbit hole. The Republican Party is in control of government thanks, in part, to the Russians. It’s Dear Leader is a lying scumbag whose right-hand man is a notorious white supremacist. His neo-nazi base is emboldened like no other time in US history. And tey are connected—with each other, and other like-minded nihilists—using encrypted communications. (And, of course, the Russians are probably right in there, too, stirring the pot.) And now some of those neo-nazis want to team up with—or at least emulate—Daesh.

We’re heading into stormy seas.