Off Leash: Inside the Secret, Global, Far-Right Group Chat

[Nevilledog]

https://newrepublic.com/article/182008/erik-prince-secret-global-group-chat-off-leash?utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social

No paywall link
https://archive.li/vPlxP

In his book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, Erik Larson cites a cable sent to the State Department in June 1933 by a U.S. diplomat posted in Germany that provided a far more candid assessment of the Nazi leadership than the one that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration was then conveying to the public. “With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand,” read the cable, which was written five months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. “Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.

I’ve thought about that passage from the cable many times over the past several weeks as I’ve been reading excerpts from a private WhatsApp group chat established last December by Erik Prince, the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and younger brother of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education during President Donald Trump’s administration, who invited around 650 of his contacts in the United States and around the world to join. Prince, who has a long track record of financing conservative candidates and causes and extensive ties to right-wing regimes around the world, named the group—which currently has around 400 members—“Off Leash,” the same name as the new podcast that he’d launched the month before.

Among the group’s hottest topics:

• The “Biden Regime,” which a consensus of Off Leash participants who weighed in view as an ally of Islamic terrorists and other anti-American forces that needs to be crushed along with them and its partners in the deep state, such as former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, who “deserves to burn in hell,” Lara Logan shared with the group chat.

• The shortcomings of democracy that invariably resulted from extending the franchise to ordinary citizens, who are easily manipulated by Marxists and populists. “The West is at best a beautiful cemetery,” lamented Sven von Storch, whose aristocratic German family fled the country after World War II to Chile, where their son was raised before returning to the land of his ancestors, where he married the granddaughter of the Third Reich’s last de facto head of state, who was convicted at Nuremberg.

*snip*

[Kid Berwyn]

1. Splendid.

Remember: What they do overseas, they always bring home to do to us.

From the New Republic OP:

All of which makes Off Leash arguably more concerning, because the group can’t be dismissed as merely a collection of harmless cranks. Many of the participants, though not all household names, are wealthy and politically wired—which makes their incessant whining in the group chat about being crushed under the bootheel of the deep state particularly grating—and they will collectively become wealthier and more influential if Trump wins the November election. That’s especially true of the Americans in the group, but the same holds for the international figures because the global right will become immensely more powerful and emboldened if the former president returns to the White House. That prospect is a source of great hope to Off Leash participants. “Trump, Orban, Milei, it’s happening,” former Blackwater executive John LaDelfa posted to the group during a trip to Argentina on December 4, two days after Prince created it. “Around the Globe, we are the sensible, the rational, the majority. Don’t give in to fear. We will defeat the Marxists.”

Snip...

Prominent figures in the Off Leash crew are well known for their paleoconservative political views, but the private opinions expressed in the group chat are even more extreme and jarring than we normally see voiced publicly. Participants chirpily discussed the desirability of clamping down on democracy to deal with their enemies at home and regime change, bombings, assassinations, and covert action to take care of those abroad. The group’s overall bloodlust periodically proved to be too much for a few more judicious individual members, who in almost any other setting would be considered ultraconservatives but in the context of Off Leash sound like hippie peaceniks?. One of the dissidents—a National Rifle Association firearms instructor who runs a weapons company—joked that he was worried about an “unsupervised” subgroup of especially enthusiastic military adventurers that formed to discuss topics too “hot” for WhatsApp, saying, “I imagine their ‘to be bombed’ list is over 49 countries and growing.”

[Arne]

2. Perhaps this off leash gang

could use a box of Flea collars and Rabies shots.

[Kid Berwyn]

3. What ticks them off is the light of day.

UNLOCKED — American Monster — Erik Prince

Tenth in a series on US criminals accelerating global fascism

HEIDI SIEGMUND CUDA
bettedangerous.com, NOV 06, 2023

“We are seeing cross-pollination between groups that historically have not worked together. Criminals who may never meet, but who share one thing in common: greed.

“They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military. These individuals know who and what to target, and how best to do it. They are capitalists and entrepreneurs... master criminals who move between the licit and illicit worlds… They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government.”—Robert Mueller, Iron Triangles Speech, January 27, 2011

Erik Prince has a Hitler Youth haircut — a small detail that on its own would not be his worst offense, but when combined with court documents alleging genocidal tendencies it rings a loud and terrible alarm.

Snip...

His meeting in the Seychelles in January of 2017 with a Putin-linked banker Kirill Dmitriev — head of the state run investment firm Russian Direct Investment Firm — was investigated for being an attempt to set up a secret communication between Trump and Russia. Prince denied this, telling members of Congress it was a chance meeting, a “beer” in a bar, while on other business with UAE officials.

But in his testimony to Congress, he failed to mention he was joined by repeat sex offender and Blackwater lobbyist George Nader — a Lebanese-American businessman with ties to Trump’s orbit.

Nader is currently in prison — he pleaded guilty in 2020 to flying a 14-year-old boy from Europe to the US for sex, and transporting pornography depicting child sexual abuse and bestiality. It wasn’t the first time — he was convicted in the 1990s of transporting child pornography publications, and imprisoned in 2003 for sexually abusing ten boys in the Czech Republic.

Continues...

https://www.bettedangerous.com/p/unlocked-american-monster-erik-prince

Like cockroaches when the kitchen light comes on: They scatter for cover under the refrigerator when confronted with the truth.

And from one good guy who helped track all this from way back when...

The Splendid Blond Beast

excerpted from the book

The Splendid Blond Beast
by Christopher Simpson
Common Courage Press, 1995

EXCERPT...

Friedrich Nietzsche called the aristocratic predators who write society's laws "the splendid blond beast" precisely because they so often behave as though they are beyond the reach of elementary morality. As he saw things, these elites have cut a path toward a certain sort of excellence consisting mainly of the exercise of power at the expense of others. When dealing with ordinary people, he said, they "revert to the innocence of wild animals.... We can imagine them returning from an orgy of murder, arson, rape and torture, jubilant and at peace with themselves as though they had committed a fraternity prank-convinced, moreover, that the poets for a long time to come will have something to sing about and to praise.'' Their brutality was true courage, Nietzsche thought, and the foundation of social order.

Today genocide-the deliberate destruction of a racial, cultural, or political group-is the paramount example of the institutionalized and sanctioned violence of which Nietzsche spoke. Genocide has been a basic mechanism of empire and the national state since their inception and remains widely practiced in "advanced" and "civilized" areas. Most genocides in this century have been perpetrated by nation-states upon ethnic minorities living within the state's own borders; most of the victims have been children. The people responsible for mass murder have by and large gotten away with what they have done. Most have succeeded in keeping wealth that they looted from their victims; most have never faced trial. Genocide is still difficult to eradicate because it is usually tolerated, at least by those who benefit from it.

The Splendid Blond Beast examines how the social mechanisms of genocide often encourage tacit international cooperation in the escape from justice of those who perpetrated the crime...

According to psychologist Ervin Staub, who has studied dozens of mass crimes, genocidal societies usually go through an evolution during which the different strata of society literally learn how to carry out group murder. In his book The Roots of Evil, Staub contends that genocidal atrocities most often take place in countries under great political, economic, and often military stress. They are usually led by authoritarian parties that wield great power yet are insecure in their rule, such as the Nazis in Germany or the Ittihad (Committee of Union and Progress) in Turkey. The ideologies of such parties can vary in important respects, but they are nonetheless often similar in that they create unity among "in-group" members through dehumanization of outsiders. Genocidal societies also show a marked tendency toward what psychologists call "justworld" thinking: Victims are believed to have brought their suffering upon themselves and, thus, to deserve what they get.

Continues...

https://thirdworldtraveler.com/Genocide/SplendidBlondeBeast.html

Erik Prince has enlisted these NAZI types in his private army. Perhaps he believes he'll have a future role in the Fourth Reich.

[Arne]

5. This is not real,

but it is based on reality.
Remind you of any Senators?

[pecosbob]

4. Take back Congress, declare them a terrorist group and persona non grata.

That's my thoughts on the group.