Elk Grove Woman Led Neo-Nazi Terror Group That Sought to Spark Race War, Feds Say

A Sacramento-area woman known as the “Lolita of the Far Right” and identified as one of the leaders of an online white supremacist terrorist group has been arrested and charged with soliciting murder and hate crimes around the world.

The Justice Department charged Dallas Humber, 34, of Elk Grove and Matthew Allison, 37, of Boise, Idaho, with 15 counts, including soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists as part of a group known as the Terrorgram Collective.

“The defendants’ goal was to ignite a race war, accelerate the collapse of what they viewed as an irreparably corrupt government, and bring about a white ethnostate,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who leads the department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a press conference on Monday.

Humber and Allison used the social media platform Telegram to celebrate white supremacist attacks around the world, provide advice for carrying out terrorist acts and solicit racially motivated violence, according to an indictment unsealed Monday in federal court in Sacramento.

“This indictment reflects the department’s response to the new technological face of white supremacist violence, as those seeking mass violence expand their reach online to encourage, solicit, and facilitate terrorist activities,” Clarke said.

“Technology evolves, and we keep up. These charges reveal that the department will come after violent white supremacists with every legitimate means at our disposal.”

The group also disseminated a hit list of “high-value targets,” including a sitting U.S. senator and a federal judge who were viewed as enemies of white supremacy, prosecutors alleged.

Humber and Allison were motivated by white supremacist accelerationism, a fringe philosophy that calls for escalating violence and destruction to bring about social collapse to replace democratic government with a new white nationalist order.

Their social media group, the Terrorgram Collective, is a network of neo-Nazi propaganda channels that fuse the glorification of political violence with a distinctive, heavily edited visual aesthetic, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. These channels share memes extolling the idea of race war, instructions for 3-D printing weapons, extremist literature and manifestos, and praise for white supremacist terrorists, dubbed “Saints.”

Many of these channels came into existence in 2019, and by 2020, they had grown their subscriber counts from tens or hundreds into the thousands, according to the SPLC, which monitors hate groups by tracking data from Telegram’s API (application programming interface).

By then, Humber was already well acquainted with the online far right, according to the antifascist watchdog site Left Coast Right Watch, which outlined a “two-decade trek through the underworld of the internet” during which she primarily posted using aliases such as “Ms. Gorehound” and “pretty_dictator.”

Following a trail of online breadcrumbs, antifascist researchers identified and unmasked Humber’s identity in early 2023, HuffPost reported that year. The researchers pieced together a story of a young woman radicalized in her adolescence by posting online in far-right corners of websites like LiveJournal and DeviantArt, developing a following as a teen for creating and sharing Nazi-inspired anime art.

Humber and Allison joined Terrorgram in 2019, and in the summer of 2022, they became leaders after one previous leader was arrested and another became aware that he was being investigated, according to the indictment.

They are also accused of disseminating instructional manuals and videos to carry out lethal and effective attacks.

The acts allegedly incited by Humber and Allison “are not just words,” said Assistant Attorney General Matt Olsen from the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

In October 2022, a 19-year-old identifying as a white supremacist in Slovakia shot and killed two people and injured a third outside a popular gay bar in Bratislava. In his manifesto, he directly credited the Terrorgram Collective for their “writing, art, and political texts” and thanked them for their “practical guides,” according to the indictment.

The terroristic network immediately exploited the events in Bratislava and dubbed the gunman “Terrorgram’s First Saint.”

Immediately after the shooting, Humber recorded an audiobook of the shooter’s 65-page manifesto and stated that the gunman’s words would “resonate intensely with [the listener’s] soul,” according to Left Coast Right Watch.

Last year, after an attack on an energy substation in North Carolina, Humber praised Terrogram for the network’s efforts to encourage such acts, Olsen said in Monday’s press conference.

This summer, another active participant in the channels was arrested for planning a similar attack in New Jersey.

And just last month, an 18-year-old in Turkey livestreamed himself stabbing five people outside a mosque. The attacker shared multiple terrorism publications with others before committing the attack. Humber allegedly posted in a group chat after the attacks, saying: “He is 100% our guy.”

“It would be difficult to overstate the danger and risks that this group posed. And their reach is as far as the internet because of the platform that they’ve created,” Olsen said.

Humber was set to appear in federal court in Sacramento on Monday afternoon for her initial appearance on these charges. Allison will appear in federal court in Boise, Idaho, on Tuesday afternoon.

If convicted of all charges, they face a maximum of 220 years in prison, according to the Justice Department.

The charges against the Terrorgram Collective leaders were announced weeks after the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov at the Paris airport in August on charges of publishing extremist and illegal content. Durov’s arrest has sparked discussions about free speech and whether tech platforms can and should be held responsible for user-generated content.