Caution: This story refers to racist and homophobic language.
Annie Nygard didn’t know what was happening.
The business owner from San Diego, who co-founded Restrained Grace, a company that creates and sells jewelry, gifts and fetish gear − and whose online profile uses the term “Antifa” − suddenly started getting dozens of hate-filled direct messages on social media. The messages poured in, telling Nygard to kill herself, sending death threats as well as “88,” a white supremacist term that stands for “Heil Hitler.”
“It was distressing,” said Nygard, who identifies as agender and uses she/they pronouns. “I already have complex post-traumatic stress disorder, so, logging on to all that hate is just triggering in general.”
Further north, in Sacramento, California, Unieke, a drag queen who appears at a local all-age drag show was being bombarded in the same way.
“I was getting photos sent to me of, like white power,” Unieke said. “People saying that my ‘day of the rope’ will come. People sending, like, monkey emojis and stuff like that — mostly just racist remarks.”
In recent weeks, attacks like this have repeated across the country: A Jewish university student in New Jersey bombarded with anti-Semitic messages; a trans man in Florida attacked for his identity; a Black YouTuber in Kentucky targeted because of his race. All found themselves flooded with racist and homophobic insults, memes, offensive photos and death threats.
What these people all had in common, but didn’t know, was that they had been chosen as targets by a vicious campaign of online “raids,” orchestrated by an account run by one of the internet’s most notorious white supremacists, using the secure messaging app Telegram.
For months, a USA TODAY investigation found, the Telegram channel “Project Mayhem” amassed more than 1,500 followers, who assisted in organized “raids” advertised on the channel.
The channel, which functions similarly to a Twitter account, would post a call to raid someone, usually identified by their social media accounts. Channel followers would then flood that person’s online presence with hatred.
But in recent weeks the channel took to fully “doxing” its targets — providing full names, addresses, phone numbers and emails of people the group wishes to target, as well as photos of them and their family members, including children.
According to the calls to action posted by Project Mayhem, most of the targets were chosen because they’re Black or LGBTQ or because they identify with the anti-fascist movement. Racial slurs abound.
“Let’s show this f—– what real white boys are like!” reads a post from April 3.
Another from April 2 spewed the N-word and said the targets would “hang from this theoretical treehouse.”
“Bully this antifa…” the channel posted March 30, adding another slur.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, who has monitored extremist activity since the 1980s, said she’s never seen a campaign that was as open, blatant, and targeted as this one.
“What’s so different about this is that it’s literally orchestrated,” Beirich said. “Harassment usually just arises almost out of the ether because people don’t like something somebody’s saying, and so they get mobbed online. But to direct attacks, that’s actually real nasty.”
Telegram did not respond to a request for comment by USA TODAY on Friday. Sometime between that inquiry and Monday morning, the Project Mayhem channel disappeared from the site.
More from this report:He pushed harassment ‘raids,’ sold racist paraphernalia online. He was in federal custody at the time
Harassment, but is it illegal?
While Americans enjoy significant freedom of speech because of the First Amendment, individuals do not have absolute free reign to use speech that internationally harasses or intimidates others, said Aaron Mackey, free speech and transparency litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“Generally speaking, publishing information that is publicly available about individuals is not, in itself, going to be creating potential legal liability,” Mackay said. “But it gets trickier if you are directing people, or directly inciting people, to engage in a pattern of threatening or harassing an individual.”
Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Virginia and author of two books on online harassment and privacy, said the bar to prosecute somebody for this sort of activity is even higher.
Successful prosecutions for online hate speech have to show a prolonged pattern of harassment against an individual, Citron said. Since Project Mayhem targets a new person every few days or even every few hours, it might not rise to the seriousness required to get the attention of prosecutors, Citron said.
“When law enforcement pays attention is when it’s targeted at a specific person, and it’s sustained, it’s not a one-off — it has to be what they call a ‘course of conduct.’ ” Citron said.
That’s at odds with the impact these “raids” can have on people’s lives, she acknowledges.
“For any one person, it’s 1,000 bee stings, and it is terrifying when you’re the subject of the targeting — terrifying and life threatening,” Citron said. “You may move, you may carry a gun, you may feel deeply unsafe, you may have people come to your home, right? So the consequences are profound and sustained for the victim. But for the perpetrators, any given perpetrator has to engage in a course of conduct.”
None of the targets of the online raids who spoke to USA TODAY said they had reported harassment or threats to law enforcement.
But Citron acknowledged Project Mayhem could be a case that sets a new precedent.
The campaign is documented in months of online postings. The founder of the campaign is clearly identified, and while no one victim was targeted for more than a few days, the relentless attacks could be construed as a “course of conduct,” she said.
And, in this instance, law enforcement doesn’t have to go far to find the man behind Project Mayhem. Indeed, even as he was directing many of these “raids,” he was in federal custody.
A campaign orchestrated by a man in federal custody
For years, Paul Nicholas Miller, a 34-year-old white supremacist from Florida, posted daily as Gypsy Crusader on Telegram, Gab and other websites, including identifying himself by that name in his livestream videos.
Miller announced the founding of an effort called Project Mayhem in Nov. 30, 2020.
“The Project Mayhem chat for organized raids on social media has been established,” Miller’s Telegram channel — Gypsy Crusader News Network — posted that day. “RAID! WELCOME TO PROJECT MAYHEM” appeared on the channel less than an hour later.
Miller first described his “targets” on his own channel. Later, he shared dozens of posts from a dedicated “Project Mayhem” channel. As Project Mayhem called for raids, Miller would post as himself in the discussions about the attacks. His Gypsy Crusader accounts would alert his followers to new Project Mayhem calls to action, announcing “RAID INCOMING.”
Miller also had a criminal record that traced to a 2007 drug arrest. When FBI agents raided his home in March 2021, they found he was illegally in possession of firearms. Miller went to prison for about two years, then was sent home in January under a supervised release program.
The Project Mayhem raids paused while Miller was in prison. But soon after his release, they began again.
And in recent weeks, the Project Mayhem posts became even more personal — openly “doxing” people and calling for their harassment and bullying.
After transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney raised far-right extremists’ ire last month by partnering with Bud Light beer, Project Mayhem posted what appear to be Mulvaney’s home address and phone numbers on Telegram. Mulvaney did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
Miller, at the time, was still in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons. The BOP’s inmate locator placed him as being under the purview of a Residential Reentry Management office in Philadelphia, and a spokesperson confirmed that meant Miller was either in a halfway house or under “home confinement.”
A few days after receiving questions from USA TODAY about how Miller could be allowed to participate in online “raids” while still in federal custody, the bureau issued a statement saying, “Out of an abundance of caution and in response to information recently received, Paul Miller was removed from community confinement and placed back into a secure facility.”
Posts on the Project Mayhem channel stopped about the same time.
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Overwhelming the hate
When Nygard first saw the flood of hateful messages in her inbox, she was dismayed. Her initial response was to start deleting the messages and blocking the accounts sending them.
But then she decided to try a different tactic, and posted a story on Instagram describing the experience to her more than 35,000 followers.
The response was amazing, she said.
“We had a flood of support messages, and a ton of trans people reached out to thank me for what I was doing — to keep going, because it’s important to just be present — to be public right now,” Nygard said. “And that very quickly overwhelmed all the hate — just all of those well-thought-out, crafted messages of love and support.”
She added:
“I think overall, I had a lot more faith in humanity restored by the experience, actually.”
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