The three year covert infiltration started by pulling on a single thread. A thread which began here in the Pacific Northwest with a national socialist black metal music festival (NSBM). A little yank revealed social networks behind the organization of this NSBM festival. One option distinguished itself from the rest, an innocuous discord server, “something like ‘Northwest Nature’, and the only vetting system they had was to send a picture proving you have white skin, and a few basic questions. We immediately realized these people were more of a threat”, says Cedar Watch, a crew of people who had formed to infiltrate and dismantle the white supremacists from the inside. They traced the threads of this network across the Pacific Northwest, and all the way to Florida. After the NSBM festival imploded of its own accord, Cedar Watch pivoted, honing in on the network of numerous white separatist cells that would emerge from this innocuous discord server and become a clandestine reincarnation of the white separatist ‘Northwest Pioneer Association’.

Revealed for the first time in Cedar Watch’s three part ‘Dragged into Moonlight‘ articles, the group known as the Northwest Pioneer Association (NPA) or ‘Torchlight’ was a white separatist project following in the footsteps of Richard Girnt Butler‘s plan to recreate Oregon’s storied racist history as a sundown state and Ku Klux Klan Refuge. The group sought to go even further, abandoning the United States altogether as a ‘lost cause’, and encouraged white supremacists to move to the PNW to accomplish this goal. Cedar Watch alleges in their introduction that the NPA’s end goal or “final solution”, so to speak, was the establishment of a sovereign white supremacist state, and to carry out campaigns of ethnic cleansing against queer people and racial minorities.

Cedar Watch says they lurked in the Northwest Pioneer Association’s online chat rooms for years, for the purpose of “learning their specific lingo and cultural norms so we could pass in our encounters.” Meanwhile Cedar Watch read the books they referenced, researched their specific strain of white supremacist ‘thought’ and researched their heroes. All of this to, “build a consistent presence [in the chat rooms] and gain [their] trust via consistency.” By covertly monitoring their channels, weaponizing telegram exploits, and even sometimes carefully prompting people to reveal personal details, Cedar Watch silently amassed a wealth of sensitive information on key members and mapped the entire digital history of the group. Membership included Marine Veterans, blue collar workers, terminally online edgelords, and even an active duty sailor working in close proximity to nuclear warheads. The association was allegedly led by Edwin Maynard aka “Mungo”, an accountant who lives in Estero, Florida according to ‘Dragged into Moonlight Part II.’ He primarily ran the network remotely through online forums that connected various cells, all going by different names but espousing the same white separatist ideology. Still, Cedar Watch eventually reached the limits of online monitoring and needed to dive deeper. They needed to cross the digital threshold and meet the white separatists in person.

“They had a concept of operational security, a long term strategic plan that involved building deep and focusing on quality over quantity in terms of recruiting, and they discouraged anti social behavior…. It was later clear they had a solid grasp of guerilla organizational forms and encouraged their members to get decent paying jobs… In short they had their shit together and were steadily growing a Northwest Territorial Imperative White Separatist community increasing in seriousness and quality.” – Cedar Watch

Though the member of Cedar Watch that I interviewed didn’t go into much detail regarding face to face meetings for the sake of protecting the group’s operations and members, they did say that, while “meeting up in person, a lot of their operational safeguards tend to melt away.” still they stressed that, “In person infiltration is not to be taken lightly… Small details can give away a lot. You’re putting yourself and everyone you care about at much greater risk.” They outlined three primary methods of in person operations: going undercover, physical surveillance from a distance, and flipping established members, emphasizing that one should “never put a comrade where you could put a social media account.”

This member of Cedar Watch was willing to share an anecdote from a similar albeit separate infiltration project into a NSBM event. While they were undercover, “One of the Nazi black metal dudes I had been befriending taps me on the shoulder to introduce me to someone. As soon as I turn around it immediately clicks in my brain that the person standing before me is a yet unidentified member of a NSBM band.” The Nazi immediately picked up on the infiltrator’s excitement and, thinking fast, they played it off as ‘fangirling’ over the band, an act that was helped by leveraging their genuine interest in NSBM bands and the occult. They were able to get their name by striking up a conversation, and pretended to take a phone call so they could slip a picture of his face. After that, they were “essentially able to break him”, pressuring him to cancel his shows, quit the band and leave the lifestyle behind.

Cedar Watch estimates that the Northwest Pioneer Association had around forty active members at its peak, with a core group of twenty and possibly as many as eighty additional people who were interested and sympathetic. “There were multiple cells in the Northwest, one in Oregon, one in Washington, and fragmented ones in Montana and Idaho. Mungo would go and visit them, talk strategy with them, send people looking to move to the PNW where there were numbers needed. When he talked people listened.” Mungo even allegedly had plans to make a permanent move to the Pacific Northwest in order to run the association more closely. All of that would change when Cedar Watch shined a light on the group, revealing their information networks, telegram channels, and the personal information of dedicated members.

“Enemies tend to fight when cornered, if you give them a way out, a lot of people take it.” Once the doxes began, members of NPA chapters began ditching the project in droves, becoming indispensable to Cedar Watch’s operation. “Neo-Nazis trying to make amends can be very useful, they don’t have to pretend, they just have to tap into their old self.” At the end of each successive dox, the group would add their email and invite members looking for another path to message them to avoid being doxed. They were then required to hand over any information on other members and remain in contact with a support group for a significant amount of time. Simultaneously pulling people out of the group, expanding Cedar Watch intelligence, and building a network of informants without risking the safety of Cedar Watch members.

By the time ‘Dragged into Moonlight Part III‘ was published in August, the NPA had reduced its size and burned its public telegram channels. However, members still maintained contacts with various groups like PNW Youth, Active Clubs, Northwest Front, and the Proud Boys. “It seems the NPA went into a panic and fell apart almost immediately,” laughs Cedar Watch. When Part III was published, one NPA cell, the ‘Portland Northwest Separatist Network’ was still active, though drastically reduced. Now, Cedar Watch is confident that this too has collapsed to only three remaining active members who distance themselves from the failed NPA project. As far as Cedar Watch is aware, Maynard’s planned move to the Pacific Northwest never materialized as a result of the published leaks.

Now Cedar Watch is happy to announce that “All of the groups we specifically targeted no longer have a public online presence… and seem to have been operationally neutralized with the exception of those three Portland wingnuts [of the ‘Portland Northwest Separatist Network’ cell]”. This member of Cedar watch went on to say that they believe that publishing the information is a matter of harm reduction, and in doing so their goal of neutralizing the group’s capacities seems to have been accomplished. Besides those “Portland Wingnuts”, there is still but one other public holdout, a ‘Northwest Territorial Imperative’ Telegram channel which has become a silent lonely ruin of a movement nobody wanted.

By patiently following a single thread for years, Cedar Watch was able to document and eventually unravel a growing neo nazi white separatist threat here in the Pacific Northwest. While the ideology the Northwest Pioneer Association followed is in no way a new phenomenon, it is thanks to efforts like those recounted here that keep such elements at bay and ensure Oregon strays further from its white supremacist roots. This trend, is not a ‘naturally occurring bend of history- as the progressive myth of history implies- but a grueling and intense daily struggle. It’s thanks to the collective effort of people like these members of Cedar Watch who are dedicated to this cause that keep these elements from materializing. But there is still much more work to be done, and there are always more threads to follow.

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Written by Azria Thorn, interview with a member of Cedar Watch, cedarwatch@proton.me

Sources:

Dragged into Moonlight: https://pugetsoundanarchists.org/dragged-into-moonlight-part-i/

Oregon’s racial discrimination laws: https://oregonremembrance.org/sunrise-project/the-history/

History of the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon: https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/ku_klux_klan/

Northwest Territorial Imperative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Territorial_Imperative

Richard Girnt Butler: https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/biography/richard-girnt-butler#impact

Dragged into Moonlight Part II: https://pugetsoundanarchists.org/dragged-into-moonlight-part-ii/

Dragged into Moonlight Part III: https://pugetsoundanarchists.org/dragged-into-moonlight-part-iii/

Patriot Front and Active Clubs: https://www.isdglobal.org/digital_dispatches/patriot-front-and-active-clubs-two-modern-models-of-white-nationalist-organizing/