Last February, the now-defunct Telegram channel American Banderite Network (ABN), a pro-Ukraine neo-Nazi branding project created by a pair of teenage twins in Oregon, posted pictures from a supporter in Maine. Sandwiched between photos of Ukrainian ultra-nationalist patches and flags was an image of a young man in shorts, walking away from the camera down a snow-lined road.
In his online life, this ABN supporter goes by Nordic Maine, where he flits from one white nationalist Telegram chat to another, showing off his fascist patches and flags like an eager stamp collector or baseball card enthusiast. In real life his name is Ian Langille, a baby-faced 22-year-old who lives with his mother in Chapman, Maine, a small town in Aroostook County; the northern-most county in the state, up by the Canadian border.
Ian’s remote location (and lack of a car) has undermined his opportunities to network with white nationalists irl, and his awkward online presence has hampered his ability to find meaningful membership in any national orgs. To compensate, he self-identifies with branding efforts like ABN and the Groypers, where simple online cheerleading is enough to qualify as membership.
He’s tried to find irl nazi buddies. He once attempted to alleviate his isolation by creating his very own nazi group – Aroostook County Active Club (ACAC) – but that went nowhere. As a result, Ian has largely been reduced to the hoisting-up of white nationalist flags on his mom’s property and stickering his local area with hate propaganda.
But online he’s a nazi social butterfly, showing up in a wide variety of far-right spaces, where he regularly interacts with a stomach-turning smorgasbord of racist jerks, some of whom are outright accelerationists. We’ve even discovered him on Twitter attempting to bond with a 14-year-old fanboy of mass shooters. This alone warrants identifying “Nordic Maine”.
Ian lives with his mother and brother. We haven’t seen any direct evidence that they share his ideology, but we suspect that his mother has helped him take photos of himself with white nationalist paraphernalia; he has certainly used her property to fly his ultra-nationalist flags.
Ian claims his “parents” know his beliefs, but as far as we can tell his father isn’t involved in his life; also Ian is a liar.Still, someone gifted him a nazi-themed t-shirt for Christmas.
Ian regularly visits Presque Isle, a larger city down the road from Chapman, where he has extended family. The bulk of his stickering photos come from Presque Isle.
Identifying Langille was easy. For reasons known only to God and Ian, he decided to geo-tag his street on a “Nordic Maine Nationalists” Telegram channel. (This was the first incarnation of the project he would eventually call Aroostook County Active Club). From there it was just a matter of searching the social media of the street residents until we found a hit – and voila – our 22-year-old neo-Nazi sticker villain had a name.
Comparison of the transformer in front of Ian’s house, shown from opposite sides as seen on Google Maps (left), and one of Ian’s Telegram posts (right).Geolocation of two of Ian’s Telegram posts in Preque Isle, Maine.
Being an obsessive flag geek, it was no surprise to find Langille posting under his real name in a subreddit dedicated to flag geeks – r/vexillology (vexillology is the study of flags). What was a surprise was discovering that he’d posted a full face reveal there.
Langille holding up an old 1909 state of Maine flag, a design he has adopted for his personal nazi branding.
Once we had Ian’s ID, we reached out to Sam Winslow of the Massachusetts antifascist research project By Way of Plymouth to see if Langille was on the radar of any New Englanders. What we learned read like a noir detective novel, one where the detective was reluctantly following the trail of an oaf.
Sam Winslow and the Case of the Vexing Vexillologist
*This is the abridged version of Sam’s story. To read the full version, which includes extra in-depth regional backstory, click over to the By Way of Plymouth blog here.
It’s April 2023, and I’m having a hard time giving a damn about the incessant poster of a manchild I would later learn was born Ian Langille of Chapman ME.
At this early point the guy has two Telegram channels, one standard Nordic-Maine-Groyper channel (since deactivated but replaced) and one “uncensored” in flavor, both registered circa mid-January 2023. I can’t tell the difference. Both of them are largely white supremacist propaganda regurgitation channels. Buried in the cross-posts are his own occasional additions, largely involving Langille’s collection of gross white nationalist and neo-Nazi org merchandise, his (lack of) graphic design prowess, and his stickering efforts in Aroostook County.
His personal stickers are the New England Independence pine tree symbol inside the Waffen-SS shield. They also contain the URL to his personal Telegram channel. The URL is, if I recall, occasionally misspelled somehow. There’s also this image, which I originally thought was an admission that he doesn’t know how a hat is supposed to sit on a head.
Me asking “where’s the lower bound of the frame?” now would prove to be incredibly funny 18 months later. At this time, though, I believe the simple carelessness in this shit composition is emblematic of the man boy: his graphic designs, his information security, his typing style, any amount of effort he puts into something, all of him whiffing of half-ass.
Sometimes his photos include half of his face. It’s usually not the same half from photo to photo, which would be great if I had the urge to spend a week in Presque Isle, the city in Maine to which I managed to geo-locate most of his personal stickerings, asking who this loser was. Other times the photos include his collection of neo-Nazi flags and patches and shirts. He’s a neo-Nazi merch guy, all day, every day. It’s a bit of a blessing; at least he’s not spending his money on guns, optics, and ammunition.
A review of his channels indicates that he’s seeking lonely neo-Nazis in his area, though. During late January 2023, Langille made a series of posts featuring his stickering efforts in and around Presque Isle. The slaptags were largely Will2Rise and Active Club products, but also included Langille’s personal stickers (this time with the Telegram URL spelled right). Under the photos in the Telegram posts was this text: “if your a nationalist in Aroostook county contact @pinetreemaine to crew up.” He makes two posts like this over two days. In the 28-and-a-half hour window between these two posts, Langille posts 32 separate times. Most are, again, cross-posts of other neo-Nazi and white nationalist content. Some are his own. They’re all shit. I file this “posting more than once an hour if sleep doesn’t exist” piece of information away for later.
The Telegram channels Langille recirculates, it occurs to me, are a grab-bag of different groups, some with conflicting ideologies or actual conflict between them. The simultaneous boosting of Patriot Front and the Nationalist Social Club, especially, twig my radar.
See, there’s this history between the New-England-local Patriot Front guys and NSC-131. I’ve spoken about it at great length in the past. The story started with Tommy Rousseau demoting and then eventually expelling Chris Hood from Patriot Front in 2019 for, among other things, forming the splinter group inside his local chapter that would eventually become NSC-131. From there it escalated into NSC-131 members interviewing to join PF, setting up fake vetting interviews, and violently jumping anyone who showed up to run said interviews. Rousseau and Hood hate each other, there’s so much bad blood there.
There’s no way anyone with active lines of communication to either of these orgs is going to get away with boosting both, no way that one of them is not going toYELL at this boy to cool his shit, to pick a side. I begin to suspect that Langille has no idea which direction is up. I file this piece of inference away, right next to the bit about Langille’s posting frequency.
At one point, I decide to reach out to Langille myself. Armed with a fresh Telegram sock, I expressed interest in getting more familiar with the NordicMaine posting lifestyle. Langille is immediately, gratingly hostile.
I admit that I’m not the best at putting my foot in a neo-Nazi sock and pretending to “be one of the goys.” Still, I think again to Chris Hood. For all the flaws, faults, and follies that Hood exemplifies, it can be said that Hood is a decently-skilled organizer on a social basis. I’ve spoken with him a handful of times, through socks and through voice calls. His attitude is not immediately repellent. He’s friendly. He’s even known to try convincing antifascists to jump ship to his side! It has worked exactly never, but still, the intention is notable. Moreover, I’m aware of a handful of people like Langille – you know, terminally online losers – in Hood’s orbit. Hood hates them! Keeps them around to shit on for getting nothing done.
I take these three pieces of information about Langille – his poster’s sickness, his apparent ignorance of local fascist history in contrast to his obsession with their aesthetics and merch, and his odious personality – and I write him off. I decide he’s beneath my immediate attention. In the fullness of time, he will get his, at my hands or someone else’s. At the moment, though, I had more pressing matters to which I needed to attend.
Then it is May 2023. My research buddy, who’d tipped me off to Langille in the first place, tells me that Langille has a new, third Telegram channel. The URL is clearly his – t.me/nordicmaine – and the name of the channel is “aroostook county active club.” There are three Telegram users in it, and one of them, the only one ever saying anything, is Langille. I am annoyed, distractedly so, at Langille trying to will himself into relevance.
I happen to be aware of a Rhode-Island-local bank robber turned Proud Boy who had moved up to Aroostook County in the last couple of years. I wonder briefly if NordicMaine – I don’t know him as Ian Langille yet – is somehow this Proud Boy, before I remember that I’ve seen both halves of Langille’s face, as well as all of that Proud Boy’s face in a single photo, who would definitely be ashamed to let himself descend into whatever shape Langille was melting into. They can’t possibly be the same people. I still desperately want to keep Langille written off. There is no floor to how little I want to care, no ceiling to my contempt at the idea of devoting attention to him.
Then, it is barely the next day. Langille’s main channel gets boosted by the Proud-Boys-controlled Western Chauvinist Telegram. No, I say. No no no. You cannot make me. I don’t want this guy to be an up-and-comer. He is a low-hanging fruitcake. I, ever the fool, feel entitled to (and have been specifically called upon to write up) a better class of villain. Still, the urge to commit myself to duty rises up my back. A neo-Nazi is a neo-Nazi, especially one looking like he might make connections with my violence-enjoying locals. Even then, there’s a furious and dismissive arrogance in me that tells me this guy is worth exactly no one’s time.
Then, it is a month later: June 2023. Langille’s main channel gets boosted by the Bay State Active Club. Local to Massachusetts, this BSAC is just the local Patriot Front members: Mark Hayden, Sal Munafo, Brian Harwood, man-who-is-decidedly-not-from-here Alex Beilman (I was even working on Beilman’s dossier that month, finally scoring a hat trick of me having better things to do than pay attention to Langille), future North Brookfield Town Selectman Vaughn Schlegel for like five minutes, etc. I am still in what strikes me now as a deep denial, my brain telling me that this sticker-kiddie’s upward movement can’t last. I tell my research buddy that Langille is “where infosec goes to die.” My research buddy replies that Langille has attached, I shit you not, what appears to be his own STREET ADDRESS SANS STREET NUMBER to the ACAC chat’s profile page in Telegram.
It’s with the following energy that I log into the Aroostook County North Registry of Deeds, having registered an account to research the unnamed Proud Boy mentioned above, to finally and grudgingly commit myself to identifying Langille:
(You may ask “who is this sour-faced clown woman?” and “is that theater she’s wildly gesticulating in covered in a fine layer of gore?” and I will respond “don’t ask questions” and “just go read Kill 6 Billion Demons.”)
I’m maybe two, three hours into cross-referencing homeowners on Langille’s supposed street in Chapman ME with potential social media accounts when my research buddy tells me another antifascist researcher more experienced than I already has Langille’s ID. I thank the cosmos. This braying Gooberwaffen jackass isn’t my problem anymore! Someone else is going to take care of it. I can move on, like I’ve finished reading a fun obituary for someone I didn’t like.
My research buddy, much more astute and persistent with the social media tracking than I, pops Langille back into my attention every now and then. At some point shortly after getting boosted by BSAC, they relate that the Active Club Telegram channel made fun of Langille for running ACAC as a “solo” Active Club. Langille shuttered ACAC’s Telegram chat not long after, having accomplished nothing.
After a few months, they also spot Langille in the Patriot Youth chats, Patriot Youth being a Patriot Front project to indoctrinate kids into white nationalism via Roblox. At another point, there’s a Gab account full of masked selfies and more merch photos. A couple of Langille’s new photos from somewhere include a pair of Hammershades, suggesting he’d developed a fondness for the Blood Tribe.
It’s April 2024, and I see Langille’s on Twitter, having registered some two months before me finding him. I hate him. Still, I bring this finding to my research buddy, whose response is exactly: “NOOOO”
Then it’s August 2024, and I get hailed by a researcher out of the Pacific Northwest. It concerns a useless man I had all but forgotten about. I finally learn his name for certain, if not how to pronounce it. Langille and members of his family had been on my list of suspects, but he hadn’t been the primary guy I’d been looking at for the handful of hours I’d spent looking at it. I get told a couple of fresh stories. They’re a laugh!
With his real name, we find his Reddit username; it is, I shit you not, /u/Ian_langille, and he’s a frequent poster in vexillology subreddits, posting about his various fascist flags. There’s one photo of Langille holding an America First PAC flag, while wearing a skull mask, that seems to have been taken by his mother.
A figure visible in a mirror behind Langille shares a resemblance with her, certainly, with hair and height in common. I don’t know how onboard she is with this, if she’s supportive or uncomfortable. I also don’t know if she understands the meaning of the skull mask he wore, or the vitriol the flag represented.
I feel vindicated in my dismissiveness of Langille, of his uselessness, his adhesion to his social media clients, his gadfly tendency to hover around anyone who will tolerate him for a moment, and how his obsession with displaying his merch prevents him from actually effecting any meaningful change in the world.
It’s September 2024, the time of me writing this, and I am reviewing Langille’s Telegram channels to build this historical account of a man who will die of natural causes, alone, stagnant, unloved, and having brought no joy to a world not tainted by his caustic, irony-poisoned hatreds. His “[redacted] uncensored” channel, which has been operating on Telegram for the better part of two years and has racked up thousands upon thousands of posts, only has 35 subscribers.
I find, among his posts, an attempt to brigade a June 2023 news story about a man who had started an LGBTQ+ hotline back in the 80s. It’s a touching piece about people finding each other during the HIV/AIDS epidemic and caring for one another. Langille got nothing done, of course. Taking umbrage over the man’s residency in Aroostook County, Langille said to his channel he wanted help to “ratio” the story. There is no visible ratio. If there was, there would probably be more views on the thing.
I also find that on July 4th of the previous year, not long after I was thanking the stars that this guy was someone else’s problem, Langille shared a post from “171 Action,” a handful of people who think they’re a neo-Nazi street crew out of Missouri, Illinois, and Eastern Kansas. Langille’s repost is of a “member” action in “Arstook, Maine” that clearly included some of Langille’s personal stickers. I sense a desperation to join a group, any group, no matter how geographically distant from him. To the best of my knowledge, this Telegram feed never shares any actions out of Maine again.
By October, 171 Action had rebranded as the “Bullion State Nationalists.” They posted, on Halloween, in bold font alongside some graffiti on a rock: “Quit being terminally online and go outside.” Langille reposted it to his personal Telegram, apparently without a drop of self-awareness. I chuckle, bitterly, in the present. BSN has since gone silent, abound with unconfirmed rumors of legal trouble, and their channel set to private.
He clearly, so badly, wants to be someone. I think he wants to be a badass, someone intimidating that the people he hates will fear, or someone who will motivate and inspire people who think like he does to violent and awful action. I think he has no idea how to do either of those things. He just buys shirts and patches and flags and stickers, and feeds money into a hate machine of which he wishes he could be a cog, a servo, a capacitor, some functional and integral part. He wears the shirts and sticks the patches to his backpack and hangs the flags and posts the stickers in public, taking photos all the while, and insists he is one of them. An addict insisting he is somehow indispensable to the pushers selling him his supply.
It’s likely, both from his own spinning wheels and from what indications of neo-Nazi opinion of him have come to my attention, that his pushers think he’s a joke. Not even a funny one. What is the Great Pagliacci without his act? Just a depressing clown in need of therapy.
Another post on July 22nd of the same year really encapsulates the experience of learning about Langille, just wraps up who he is with an uninspiring, matte gray bow. He posted photos of his backpack, adorned with his shitty racist patches, and some of his neo-Nazi flags, hung on trees, somewhere in a Maine forest. He was clearly the photographer. No one was helping him take photos, to allow him to pose with his flags or his patch-festooned backpack.
The last of this series of six photos is what I think must’ve been behind him as he staged his flags: an empty, open field under a sunny summer day. He was alone, in nature, sure, but in his ideology and drive to do something too. He could’ve been doing anything else, but instead he was putting his neo-Nazi flags in trees, taking photos of them like it meant something.
The caption he attached to this post was “Total aryan victory for maine”. Sure, buddy. Sure.
Stumptown eventually plugs the totenkopf, the one toward the top of my missive, into reverse image search. Turns out it wasn’t Langille’s composition at all. It was an IronMarch propaganda design! What’s more, the lower bound of the frame was missing because he never bothered to re-add it after cropping off Iron March’s branding. Turns out the whiff of half-ass becomes a full-blown stench when you get close enough.
Toward the end of the month, Stumptown sends me a screenshot of Langille’s Twitter account. In a post featuring a shitty fashwave edit of one of Langille’s selfies, he states “leftists better get ready for another Greensboro.” He credits another Twitter user with making the photo edit; Stumptown explains to me that this user is a 14-year-old, part of a youth network of online neo-Nazis who idolize mass shooters.
The arrogance does not fall from my eyes, but there is a new clarity. Langille is incompetent, and no one with any sense in the sphere he wants to influence will have anything to do with him, but he still has potential to blunder or brute-force himself into a niche. That niche may be radicalizing other people younger and more stupid than he is, people on his wavelength. I feel a pang of guilt for the other local antifascist researcher, the one who already has Langille’s ID in hand. In my attempts to reach out and make them aware of activity swirling around Langille, to urge them, I learned they had taken a much-needed mental health break. (If you’re reading this, friend, you deserve it, I love you, and I hope you’re okay.)
I think of Terrorgram. I think of guro fetishist Dallas Humber and failed influencer Matthew Allison, trying to build a legacy atop a pile of bodies murdered by other people in hatred that Humber and Allison themselves fostered and encouraged. I think of the vacuum that exists in that niche now, given that Humber and Allison both are facing down serious consequences for their acts. I think of a preposterously unlikely future of Langille indoctrinating young racist idiots into full-blown neo-Nazi ideology, convincing them to make attempts at mass casualty events, and trying to make his own pile of bodies upon which he could sit, smartphone in hand, unable to log off.
There is now a clock hanging over Ian Langille’s head. No one can see it, we don’t know how much time is on it, and we don’t know if it even really exists, but I can hear it. I know it’s ticking down to something tragic and potentially bloody. I must assume that there is no time. There is much work to be done, and it must be done soon.
As Sam has pointed out, Ian Langille aka Nordic Maine is just fine with having contradicting loyalties. For example, he considers himself a Groyper and is very much a fan of their titular leader Nick Fuentes, but at the same time he promotes white nationalist groups who despise Fuentes. As a result his aesthetics often code as Groyper, but with a more extreme edge. He’s been a mod for the Groyper “Cozy Corner” chat on Telegram, while also enthusing over flag designs with violent Siege nazis who believe Fuentes is a gay Mexican twink who deserves death.
It might seem incongruous, but it’s just who he is. Ian throws whatever ingredients he pleases into his nazi soup. We found him caping for Ukrainian nationalists in the American Banderite Network (ABN) Telegram chat, but a year earlier he’d been regularly singing the praises of Russia on his personal Telegram channels. He gives no coherent explanation for this switch. It feels like a child abandoning an old toy for a new one. Last fall he began buying all the slick Ukrainian ultra-nationalist merch he could get his hands on and now he’s a mouth-breathing RDK and Azov billboard.
All of that hate has taken Langille to the place where modern lonely haters go: online hate chats. His Nordic Maine account pops up regularly in a variety of white supremacist spaces on Telegram – from chats run by active clubs and other white nationalist fitness fraternities to groups run by recently indicted associates of the Terrorgram Collective.
In January 2023, for example, Langille appeared in an old Blood & Soil / 2119 neo-Nazi chat to pitch his doomed Aroostook County Active Club. Nine months later, in the white nationalist Patriot Youth chat, the then-leader of 2119 poked fun at Ian as “the anime guy” and said that too much anime was why he was rejected as a member.
Nordic Maine has appeared in even darker spaces. For example, in January 2024 we found him in the White Legion chat run by Andrew Takhistov aka Cossack. Ian was also in other chats with Takhistov, a fellow Ukraine partisan who was an open advocate of militant accelerationism. In February, after the leader of ABN was exposed and subsequently dropped an “I quit” post in the ABN chat, Langille was the first to react to the abrupt announcement with “?”, followed by Takhistov who dropped his own question mark. Five months later, Takhistov was arrested after trying to recruit an undercover law enforcement agent to attack energy stations.
Ian Langille in the White Legion chat.Ian Langille and Andrey Takhistov questioning the sudden departure of ABN’s teenage founder.
As you can see, despite Langille’s buffoonish nazi gadfly persona, he has proximity to and sympathizes with violent accelerationists.
This is why we were alarmed when, in early September, Langille received a personalized terrorwave-style video edit of one of his dorky “I’m a nazi poseur posing with my nazi flag” pictures. The twitter account that made this edit for Ian belongs to a 14-year-old boy in Washington State who is part of an online network of very young wannabe terror tots who idolize “Saints” – racially and politically motivated far-right terrorists who commit acts of mass violence – and obsessively produce edits of fetishized mass-shooter events. They also post copious amounts of gore, rape threats and neo-Nazi propaganda. They are, of course, extremely immature and lonely teenagers who openly struggle with mental health issues; that Langille has been befriending accounts from this network concerns us.
Ian thanks a 14-year-old for making a personalized video edit of his nazi propaganda.
Soon after Ian received his personalized edit, he began sharing other edits made or provided by the 14-year-old; like one celebrating the Buffalo mass shooter. This kind of parasocial reciprocation creates the shallow online bonding that can help nudge a kid from ironic nazi posting into a fully radicalized little hate machine. It’s dangerous territory.
Ian Langille and the 14-year-old wishing for the death of black people due to a right-wing misinformation smear campaign against Haitian immigrants..
Organizationally, Langille is an insignificant racist. But he does get around online and he has made virtual pals, like the Ohio Active Club twitter account who regularly discoursed with Ian and shared his content before his nordicmainegroyper account was suspended. An anime enthusiast and shit-tier meme lord like Ian has the potential to create an effective bridge between a kid bonding over edgelord posting and more serious characters who mean it when they call for violence.
Nordic Maine bragging about a terror patch in a Tennessee white nationalist chat.
Langille has even begun showing off an Atomwaffen Division patch, the symbol of a former nazi terror group. Wherever Ian is headed in life, it’s nowhere good.
For this, and all the rest, Ian Henry Langille is a threat to the community.
![Screenshot from a Telegram chat log (channel: [redacted] uncensored). Nordic Maine says: "canuckistan just banned the ability to protest drag shows. the city of calgray which is in fucking ALBERTA. pedo dyke mayor."](https://stumptownresearchcollective.noblogs.org/files/2024/10/22-uncensored-23-03-11-canuckistan-1024x334.png)
![Left: Screenshot from the Patriot Youth chat. Among the chatter Constantine2119 says, "Oh look its nordic maine the anime guy."
Right: Screenshot from the Patriot Youth chat. Among the chatter Constantine2119 says, "yeah you used to have much more [anime]. The reason why you got rejected from 2119."](https://stumptownresearchcollective.noblogs.org/files/2024/10/23-24-patriot-youth-1024x518.png)
![Ian posts a video clip of himself standing in the forest with nazi flags and a totenkapf skull and cross bones with a german helmet covering his face. He says, "Leftists better get ready for another Greensboro. Shoutout to [redacted] for making this edit."](https://stumptownresearchcollective.noblogs.org/files/2024/10/27-NordicMaineX-24-09-07-Chud1488.png)
