When law student Dawson Maloney, 23, died in February of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound at an energy facility in Nevada, his car carrying multiple firearms and a flamethrower, he didn’t leave a manifesto. But while his exact motives are unknown, his tactics and some of the materials he possessed resembled those of a subset of right-wing extremists who have targeted infrastructure with violence.
In a message to his mother sent before the incident, Maloney described himself as “a ‘dead terrorist son’ and stated he felt he had an obligation to carry out his act,” according to local law enforcement officials.[1] He rammed his weapons-loaded car through the gates of the power station. In his motel room, investigators found literature that Hatewatch has identified as popular with white power accelerationists, a subset of the white supremacist movement that sees violence as the sole means to usher in a whites-only state.[2]
During a press conference, local and federal law enforcement authorities said that they had chosen to treat the incident as “a terrorism-related event” due to its location and the materials involved. However, they did not say why Maloney chose the southern Nevada facility, which rests on the border of California and Arizona and is more than 2,500 miles from his home in upstate New York, as his target.[3] Authors of Garden, a niche online zine that some white power accelerationists promoted in 2022 and 2023, described Maloney’s attempted target as one of a few dozen “critical electric substations,” saying that if these were destroyed, “most, if not all of the country would be plunged into a chaotic blackout.’’[4] At least one of those who promoted the zine went on to plan his own attack on Baltimore-area substations, according to The Guardian.
The recent incident in Nevada follows more than a decade of attempted or successful attacks on critical infrastructure appearing to involve right-wing extremism. Luke Baumgartner, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, told Hatewatch that he had counted 31 instances of right-wing extremists attacking or attempting to attack infrastructure such as government buildings, transportation, and healthcare or financial institutions between 2016 and 2025.[5]
Of those plots, Baumgartner identified 12 successful attacks targeting energy facilities alone. In Maryland, Tennessee, Ohio, New Jersey and elsewhere, federal authorities have disrupted plots involving right-wing extremists targeting energy infrastructure. “The focus on the energy sector has to do probably with the attention that it receives, and just how reliant a lot of people are on that,” Baumgartner said.[6]
Since early 2020, federal authorities have been largely successful in breaking up the leadership of groups or online networks that promote white power accelerationism. Extremists who espouse this form of accelerationism see modern society as irredeemable and encourage acts of extreme violence or terrorism to bring about its collapse, so as to usher in a whites-only state. Prominent proponents include groups or networks like The Base, Atomwaffen Division and “Terrorgram,” a loose network of extreme neo-Nazi channels on Telegram tied to multiple racist attacks. But the persistence of accelerationist-driven attacks or plots on infrastructure shows how their tactics have persisted in a decentralized online movement.
A cache of fascist literature
When investigators searched Maloney’s room at the El Rancho Boulder Motel — located less than a 15-minute drive from the Hoover Dam — they found a cache of extremist literature, occultist works and military field guides.[7]
During a press conference, Sheriff Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) characterized these publications as spanning a range of ideologies, representing extreme right-wing, left-wing, white supremacist and antigovernment viewpoints.[8]
From photos that the LVMPD made available to the public, it’s unclear which books the LVMPD believed were associated with left-wing or antigovernment viewpoints. Hatewatch was able to identify three books — Harassment Architecture, Gothic Violence and Might Is Right — that have circulated among white supremacist communities that espouse violence and terrorism as tactics.
Mike Mahoney, a neo-Nazi activist and former Breitbart News writer who writes under the pen name “Mike Ma,” self-published his transgressive fiction books Harassment Architecture and Gothic Violence in 2019 and 2021 respectively. Both have regularly appeared within white power online spaces, where extremists quote the books or circulate PDF copies.
Both follow a nonlinear narrative and indulge in reactionary, anti-technology themes.
Harassment Architecture includes explicit appeals to use “acceleration” to bring about “the collapse.” The book also makes repeated references to attacks on infrastructure.
“I hear some people are making homemade explosives and knocking down cell towers. I hear some people are making homemade explosives and disintegrating local power substations,” Mahoney writes in a section called “Three Feet on the Gas.”[9]
Elsewhere, Mahoney describes using explosives to target large power plants.[10]
“Let me cover you with plastic explosives and take you on a field trip to the largest power station in America,” Mahoney writes. In a parenthetical, he adds: “Please note: Do not do any of these things. Especially do not cover your face and destroy the many and largely unprotected power stations and cell towers. Electricity is a ghost, but one you can catch and kill. Do not do that. Do not become the sort of person who gets really good at blowing power stations up while never getting caught.”[11]
In Gothic Violence, Mahoney follows rowdy surfers as they cause chaos and attack infrastructure throughout Florida. In one section, these proponents of “mass surf terrorism” use what Mahoney describes as a “mobile tactical high energy laser” to attack local news stations, various targets in Tampa and Cape Canaveral.[12]
Mahoney frames discussions of violence as fictious or satirical. But his white power accelerationist fans appear to feel otherwise. On Telegram, an app popular with white power accelerationists, channels have shared excerpts from Mahoney’s books alongside stylized photos of firearms or clips of neo-Nazis shooting rifles. One video from 2024 that a Terrorgram-affiliated channel shared on Telegram features a brief audio excerpt from Gothic Violence that later cuts to a video of a man shouting “I fucking hate [N-word]s” before firing a semiautomatic rifle.
Another book that investigators found in Maloney’s motel room in Nevada was Might Is Right, an angry, hyper-individualist screed penned by the pseudonymous “Ragner Redbeard” in 1896. Mark Derby, a writer and historian, published evidence in a 2017 book identifying “Redbeard” as a New Zealand-born activist known as Arthur Desmond. Derby described Desmond’s book as “patchy and incoherent” and reflective of a form of “extreme libertarianism.”[13] Desmond filled Might Is Right with racist and antisemitic diatribes, and advocates that strong men be unconcerned with “weak” principles such as morality or equality.
“What power on earth can permanently keep the Negro on a parity with the Anglo-Saxon?” Desmond writes in Might Is Right.[14] He condemns equality, writing that the notion “that ‘all men are created equal’ … [is] as stupid and unscientific, as to assert that all dogs, cattle, apes and trees are created equal.”[15] He contrasts “a government of the Noblest and the Best” with one of “slaves and usurous [sic] Jews.”[16]
“There’s a big gulf between the way the book was received in its own time and the way it’s received now,” Derby told Hatewatch, highlighting its appeal among some labor organizers at the time of Might Is Right’s release for its emphasis on using power and strength to leverage political change.[17]
Desmond’s modern fans, he pointed out, are far more likely to run in certain countercultural circles, as well as the far right.[18] Katja Lane, the wife of infamous neo-Nazi David Lane, released her own edited volume of Might Is Right in 1999.[19] The perpetrator of a 2019 shooting that killed three people and injured dozens more at a garlic festival in northern California encouraged his followers to read Might Is Right on social media before the attack.
For these right-wing extremists, Might Is Right’s focus on the power of the individual to oppress and subordinate those they deem inferior through any means necessary appears to be much of its appeal.
“But it is to be taken seriously because it is dangerous,” Derby added.[20]
PDF circulated in accelerationist neo-Nazi chats highlighted target
A prominent neo-Nazi convicted in 2025 of conspiring to damage or destroy energy facilities helped circulate an online zine that appeared to highlight the southern Nevada facility that Maloney selected.
Garden is an anti-tech publication that launched in March 2021. Its most prominent authors included Theodore John Kaczynski, otherwise known as the “Unabomber,” some of whose prison-era writing was published as an excerpt in Garden’s first issue.[21] Kaczynski, who murdered three people as part of a nationwide mail-bombing campaign between 1978 and 1995, rejected both leftism and fascism in favor of premodern primitivism that he believed would be implemented through violent revolution. Though the authors of Garden say they don’t encourage their readers to engage in illegal activities, they, like Kaczynski, stated their goal was “to organize coherent and direct action against the global techno-industrialist system.”[22] Garden devotes particular focus to the electrical grid, saying “a chaotic blackout” could be “the beginning of an anti-tech revolution.”[23]
Garden’s third issue, published sometime in 2022 according to online archives, includes an analysis of a 2013 attack on the Metcalf substation outside of San Jose, California, where gunmen opened fire on the transformers.[24] The attack resulted in more than $15 million worth of damage.
The same issue includes addresses and coordinates for at least three dozen substations throughout the country.[25] On three separate occasions, it highlights the facilities located outside of Boulder City, Nevada, where Maloney attempted to carry out his attack.
In a section on “paths,” or high-voltage lines that transmit power throughout the western coast of the United States and Canada, Garden names two paths, 27 and 46, that include the Marketplace and McCullough substations located outside of Boulder City, Nevada.[26] In another section, titled “The Nine,” Garden lists nine substations that its authors believe are the “most critical.” Three of them are located outside of Boulder City.[27]
Local news reports didn’t list the name of the targeted facility. A public information officer for the LVMPD and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which law enforcement said owned the affected facility, didn’t respond to Hatewatch’s request for the name of the substation. But news outlets reported that the facility was located on Eldorado Valley Drive. The address and description appear to match an address given to the McCullough substation in Clark County public records, where Boulder City is located.
“McCullough substation is a very critical substation. I don’t know what the impact would be,” Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission from 2009 to 2013. “It could be a subregional impact, and I don’t know how long it would persist.”[28]
It’s unclear if Maloney had read or was aware of Garden. But chats that Hatewatch obtained showed other white power accelerationists circulating issues of Garden, particularly the one on substations, throughout 2022. “‘They want you to blow up a power grid’ and then NSRF proceeds to send us PDFs over every single substation in the US HAHAHAHAHA,” wrote a user named “Wülf” in a white power accelerationist chat on Telegram in December 2022, according to a screenshot provided to Hatewatch by journalist Jordan Green. He added: “The Gardens list is a future plan for NSRF.”
“NSRF” refers to the National Socialist Resistance Front, a now-defunct neo-Nazi group that was led by former members of Atomwaffen Division, as Hatewatch previously reported.
Atomwaffen Division co-founder Brandon Russell, who Hatewatch previously reported recruited for NSRF, also circulated the online zine in chatrooms popular with white power accelerationists. Court documents indicate that Russell drew inspiration from Garden for his own plot targeting Baltimore-area power plants, according to evidence presented at his 2025 trial.[29]
Prosecutors showed the jury evidence that Russell appeared to have copied-and-pasted lists of substations from Garden into Telegram chats with the source when discussing potential targets. At one point during the trial, prosecutors showed a list of substations that Russell sent the confidential source on Telegram alongside the section of Garden issue 3 titled “The Fifteen.” The source confirmed that the text matched. [30]
‘You must think big picture’
Extremists of all stripes have endorsed or carried out attacks on critical infrastructure, which the U.S. government defines as those “assets, systems, and networks” whose “incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect.” These systems have faced threats ranging from “state actors with sophisticated cyber capabilities, nonstate criminal organizations (often with financial motives), insider threats, and domestic terrorists or other extremist groups,” according to a 2024 report from the RAND Corp.[31]
Threats to the grid, as a result, have remained a constant concern. “I don’t know if there’s an uptick that I can see,” Wellinghoff, who was leading the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission when the 2013 attack on the Metcalf substation took place, told Hatewatch.[32]
“It’s the softest and most impactful target that they can take out without killing someone. Or at least not directly,” Matthew Kriner, executive director at the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, told Hatewatch in an interview.[33]
Recent court cases involving right-wing extremists and infrastructure attacks have included repeated references to Terrorgram, the loose network of neo-Nazi propagandists who encouraged their followers to commit acts of terrorism and mass murder. Russell and other affiliates of the collective published multiple guides and produced propaganda encouraging infrastructure attacks, particularly on the grid.
One of these publications, a 14-page PDF called “Make It Count” that prosecutors attributed to Russell during his 2025 trial, included stylized guides to carrying out attacks on power plants, cell towers and targeted assassinations.
“The current system, or technological society in which we live enables this,” Russell wrote in the guide. “So long as the power turns on, the status quo, the downward decline of our race, and the increase in nonwhites in our lands will carry on unhindered.”[34]
The consequences of this focus on infrastructure can be seen in federal court documents. In addition to Russell and his co-conspirator Sarah Beth Clendaniel, other extremists have incorporated the network’s violent, revolutionary messaging into their own attempted attacks on electrical infrastructure.
In February 2022, three men — Christopher Brenner Cook, Jonathan Allen Frost and Jackson Matthew Sawall — pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists in connection to a series of planned attacks on substations. The men, who authorities said were members of the neo-Nazi group The Front, had planned to attack transformers using rifles. On a memo pad in Sawall’s home, according to court documents, he had written down a slogan that federal prosecutors said “encapsulates the coconspirators’ state of mind … ‘Revolution is our solution.’”[35]
In July 2024, authorities arrested Andrew Takhistov of New Jersey as he was preparing to travel to Ukraine to reportedly join a nationalist group fighting against Russia. In an indictment, authorities said that Takhistov had discussed using Molotov cocktails and other explosives against local substations, as well as Jewish community centers.
During a conversation with an undercover officer, according to the indictment, Takhistov praised the Terrorgram publication “The Hard Reset.”[36]
Then, in November 2024, officials accused Skyler Philippi, who described himself as a former affiliate of the neo-Nazi groups Atomwaffen Division and the National Alliance, of planning to use a drone rigged with explosives to attack substations. In conversations with undercover agents, Philippi said he had studied previous attacks on the power grid in North Carolina and California and determined that rifles would be insufficient to cause significant, long-lasting damage.[37]
Philippi pleaded guilty in September 2025 to attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and to attempting to destroy an energy facility.
The arrests of Russell, Clendaniel and other key figures associated with Terrorgram have left it largely rudderless. But the network’s intense focus on infrastructure has found its way, at least partially, into other extremist circles.
In November 2025, federal authorities accused Marek Cherkaoui — an alleged affiliate of 764, an extremist group that exploits and promotes harm to children — of cyberstalking and terroristic threats.[38] The government and researchers refer to groups like 764 as “nihilistic violent extremists,” or NVEs. These groups, Kriner told Hatewatch, seek “harm for the sake of sowing chaos.” For some NVEs, the aesthetics and tactics of Terrorgram are appealing, though they may not share the same rigid ideological goals.[39]
Cherkaoui has since pleaded not guilty to both charges.[40]
Though the indictment largely focuses on Cherkaoui soliciting child sexual abuse material and threatening minors, it includes a passing reference to Cherkaoui circulating material promoting attacks on the grid. In a chat, Cherkaoui reportedly sent links to a website called “Terrorgram Publications” and a “Power Grid Sabotage Manual.”[41]
In court documents, it’s unclear what Cherkaoui intended to do with these materials.
Image at top: Photo illustration by the SPLC. (Source images from iStock.)
Citations
[1] Las Vegas Metropolitan Police. “BREAKING: Law enforcement agencies discuss terrorism incident near Boulder City.” YouTube, February 20, 2026.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Anonymous. “The Best Lack All Conviction.” Garden, 2022, 11.
[5] Luke Baumgartner, interview with author, March 2, 2026.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, “Law enforcement agencies discuss terrorism incident,” at 4:11-20.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ma, Mike. Harassment Architecture. Independently published, 2019, 87-88
[10] Ibid., 26-27.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ma, Mike. Gothic Violence. Independently published, 2021,103-104.
[13] Mark Derby, interview with author, March 10, 2026.
[14] Redbeard, Ragner. Might is Right. Dil Pickle Press, 1927, 61
[15] Ibid., 59
[16] Ibid., 44
[17] Derby, interview with author, March 10, 2026.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Derby, Mark. “’Devils are in demand’ — Arthur Desmond’s ‘Might is Right’ and its present-day influence on the far-right.” In Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Matthew Cunningham, Marinus La Rooij, and Paul Spoonley. (Otago University Press, 2022).
[20] Derby, interview with author, March 10, 2026.
[21] Kaczynski, Theodore John. “The Road to Revolution.” Garden, March 15, 2021, 12.
[22] Anonymous, “The Best Lack All Conviction,” 4.
[23] Ibid., 11.
[24] Ibid., 19.
[25] Ibid., 31.
[26] Ibid., 35-36.
[27] Ibid., 39.
[28] Jon Wellinghoff, interview with author, March 3, 2026.
[29] United States vs. Brandon Russell, PACER, 573. (4th Cir. 2025).
[30] Ibid., 574.
[31] Bridget R. Kane, et al., Threats to Critical Infrastructure: A Survey (RAND Corporation, 2024), 4.
[32] Wellinghoff, interview with author, March 3, 2026.
[33] Matthew Kriner, interview with author, March 5, 2026.
[34] Anonymous. Make It Count: A Guide for the 21st Century Accelerationist. Terrorgram Collective, 2022, 2.
[35] United States vs. Christopher B. Cook, CourtListener, Doc. #83. (S.D. Ohio 2022).
[36] United States vs. Andrew Takhistov, CourtListener, Doc. #1 (D. New Jersey 2024).
[37] United States vs. Skyler Philippi, CourtListener, Doc #1 (M.D. Tennessee 2024).
[38] United States vs. Marek Cherkaoui, CourtListener, Doc #1 (D. New Jersey 2025).
[39] Kriner, interview with author, March 5, 2026.
[40] United States vs. Cherkaoui, Doc. #22.
[41] United States vs. Cherkaoui, Doc. #1.
