Cultish (@cultish.skyfleet.blue)

The Cult News Network Michail Chkhikvishvili, a self-described cult leader who called himself “Commander Butcher”, did not look like a Hollywood vision of a contemporary terrorist, despite the bizarre, almost made-for-TV extremist actions he planned, such as having people dressed as Santa Claus hand out poison candies on the streets of New York. Chkhikvishvili appeared in a Brooklyn court last week as one might find an office IT tech: close-cropped hair and black-rimmed glasses, attentive, clear-spoken and cooperative as he was questioned about his understanding of a plea that could see him imprisoned for up to 18 years at his March sentencing. The 23-year-old Georgian neo-Nazi was in US federal court to plead guilty to charges of soliciting bombings, school shootings and other acts of hate-motivated violence across the US. It marked the end of an astonishing saga of plans for inciting and carrying out outlandish and appalling crimes. Chkhikvishvili was the leader of the aptly named Maniac Murder Cult, an international racist violent extremist group. He recruited people to commit violent acts, including plotting a mass casualty attack in New York City. But now – at least when finally facing a court of law – Chkhikvishvili expressed regret. “I’m going to do better with my life,” he told the court and explained that since being arrested in Moldova in May, he had been working out and going to church while in custody at the Metropolitan detention center in Brooklyn. He spoke about his depression and anxiety as a teenager and apologized to “those communities” he had targeted. Chkhikvishvili’s new demeanor stood in stark contrast to allegations that he encouraged violent crimes, including bombings and arsons, against racial minorities. In November 2023, Chkhikvishvili developed a scheme to have individuals dress up as Father Christmas and hand out poison-laced candy to racial minorities and directed an undercover FBI agent to target Jewish schools and Jewish children in Brooklyn with poison. He wanted the attack to be “a bigger action than Breivik”, a reference to Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi who killed 77 people in 2011, and had advised using “simple available stuff” to achieve maximum mayhem. “It also depends what you bomb, for public places you must use nails,” he advised, according to the government. Chkhikvishvili sent out manuals about creating and mixing lethal poisons and gases, including a “Haters Handbook” that outlined strategies for carrying out mass violence, including school shootings and “ethnic cleansing”. That manual, together with what the government calls “solicitations of violence”, is said to have inspired a livestreamed shooting at Antioch high school in Nashville, Tennessee, in January that left one student dead and another injured. Prosecutors also said that Chkhikvishvili solicited Nicholas Welker, AKA King of Wrath, the leader of the far-right Feuerkrieg Division, who last year pleaded guilty to conspiring to make death threats against a Brooklyn-based journalist. According to the government, Chkhikvishvili, who traveled to Brooklyn, New York, in 2022, wanted acolytes to record attacks. He told Welker to “just explain to them what membership means in MKY [Maniac Murder Cult] and what actions should be recorded in good quality; Beating, Arson, Killing … a Brutal Beating, Not Regular.” Chkhikvishvili’s plea comes as authorities are investigating a series of attacks in the US, including political murders of the rightwing debater Charlie Kirk and the Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman, and the radicalization of the would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks, raising pressing questions about online radicalization and how it conforms to simplistic but politically useful definitions of left/right orientation. In 2021, the Office for the Director of National Intelligence released an assessment that the “most lethal domestic violent extremist threats” to the US were racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists, or RMVE. Maniac Murder Cult finds its ideological underpinnings in Satanism and Nazism, according to researchers at the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. A report from the center said the group’s strain of militant accelerationist neo-fascist ideology was unique because it relied on individuals, as opposed to groups, to achieve its goals and discussed how the group was “redefining terrorism, recruitment, and mass violence”. Luke Baumgartner, research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, says that the international nature of Maniac Murder Cult is part of a nihilist violent extremist category of terrorist threats that US law enforcement is now paying more attention to. “They look to inspire people to carry out their own individual acts of terror or violence designed to desensitize others to the thought of violence. There are elements of different ideologies relating to neo-Nazism and jihadism, while at the same time idolizing school shooters, and that’s the point – violence for the sake of violence.” After the court accepted Chkhikvishvili’s guilty plea, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, said, “violent, nihilistic, racist groups” like the Maniac Murder Cult “are an ongoing threat to the American people – our vigilance will not waver as we protect our citizens”. Baumgartner says that RMVE groups are targeting younger people who cannot by definition be federal informants and may be more susceptible to extremist ideology. “They don’t have the development to recognise what they’re being exposed to as problematic,” he says. Gerard Filitti with the Lawfare Project says that the group’s antisemitic intent “wasn’t just another hate crime – this was a terrorist plot targeting Jewish children. A guilty plea is only the beginning. We need to dismantle the extremist networks that incubate this ideology, including the overseas organizations actively radicalizing Americans and exporting hatred into our communities.” But Baumgartner says the key into motivation may simply be notoriety and the perils of the internet age that lead some young people – nearly always young men – down rabbit holes of isolation and extremism. “They’re irony-poisoned internet guys trading in memes and trying to be offensive to get a reaction,” he says. “If there is an upside, it’s that pretty much everyone can agree that putting these types of people on the stand and behind bars is a good thing regardless of political spectrum.” Content retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/23/maniac-murder-cult-michail-chkhikvishvili-terrorism . https://cultnews.net/how-cult-leader-commander-butcher-plotted-to-sow-mayhem-across-us/