The posts on the white supremacy forum Iron March called for a paramilitary force that would operate as a “modern day SS.”
As Iron March users traded messages, a vision for a new group began to emerge: buying land in remote, predominantly white areas of the United States; networking with locals; stockpiling weapons and supplies; and eventually starting a guerilla race war.
“As time goes on in this conflict, we will expand our territories and slowly take back the land that is rightfully ours,” one of the users wrote. “This will be a ground war very reminiscent of Iraq.”
That fit well with what Liam Collins — a New Jersey man who often went by the name Niezgoda online — had been thinking when he hatched the idea. Everyone in the group, he wrote, should spend time in the military. He was enlisting in the Marines, he said — “for the cause.”
This July, Collins was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in a 2020 plot to attack the power grid in Idaho. He was arrested shortly after he was kicked out of the military in September 2020 for making racist posts on Iron March. During Collins’ time in the Marine Corps, he had recruited at least two other Marines to join his effort, according to a federal indictment.
