Burning Hate: Bowl Cut Betrayal
This is the story of Dallas Medina, and the second installment in the Burning Hate series - stories of the men who marched with tiki torches on August 11, 2017. Read the introductory piece here. Read the first installment here.
This isn't the first story I've told about this photograph. Teddy Joseph von Nukem, the man in the black shirt in the dead center, was exhilarated to see it go viral, printed in full color on the front pages of newspapers around the world. He later texted his friend Christopher Cantwell that the photo had "fantastic aesthetics," and he's right, if you're into that sort of thing. The framing of the mob in front of the Rotunda, the raised torches, the faces contorted mid-chant – it's quite striking. He was proud, telling Cantwell that he looked "sexy AF" and "the most alpha."
But this isn't a story about Teddy von Nukem because Teddy von Nukem is dead. On the snowy morning of January 30, 2023, he walked out to his hay shed, pressed the muzzle of his 9mm to his chest and shot himself, just missing his heart. He still had a faint pulse when his wife, the mother of his five children, found him. He was pronounced dead in Missouri while a federal judge in Arizona watched the clock impatiently, waiting for him to arrive for his drug trafficking trial. It wasn't until two weeks after von Nukem's death at 35 that I uncovered his other crime: he had been the unknown seventh assailant in the brutal beating of Deandre Harris in a parking garage on August 12, 2017. He died by suicide before having to answer for an attempted lynching or the 15 kilos of fentanyl stuffed under the seats of his SUV.
No, that picture that could tell a dozen stories, but this one is about Ted's friend Dallas.
Dallas Jerome Nicholas Medina was born in Ohio on April 19, 1992 to parents Brian and Margaret Medina. Portage County, Ohio court records show paperwork echoes of an unstable childhood, with his parents divorcing before his first Christmas, child support unpaid so long that bench warrants were issued, disorderly conduct charges, and a home sold in a sheriff's auction after a foreclosure. In 1993, the Akron Beacon Journal reported that his grandmother was hospitalized after a beating by a neighbor who claimed Medina's grandmother strangled his German Shepherd to death with a chain. As recently as this month, Medina's father was posting conspiracy theories about false flag mass shootings and misogynistic memes on facebook. I tell you this not out of some misguided effort to explain who he became. It doesn't.
I first came to know Dallas Medina as 'Mosin-Nagant,' a curious pseudonym for an American neo-nazi, given the namesake Soviet rifle's role in ending the lives of so many German Nazi soldiers. 'Mosin' appeared on several episodes of a short-lived podcast called The Bowlcast, a Nazi podcast not to be confused with the Australian ten-pin bowling podcast of the same name. The show emerged from an online culture of worship for Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof, known for his bowl cut hairstyle and the 2015 murders of nine African American worshippers during Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The men behind the podcast called themselves 'The Bowl Patrol' and delighted in sharing graphic threats against their enemies (a list which included but was not limited to: Jews, Black people, all women, 'race traitors' and race mixers, immigrants, Asian people, Hispanic people, disabled people, fat people, and even people on their own side who they felt didn't go far enough). In chat rooms, on message boards, and in their podcasts, Roof's admirers praised his actions and those of other white supremacist mass shooters around the world, listing them out in a perverse pantheon of "Saints" with kill counts next to their names.
Their enthusiasm for mass shootings caused tension in their own right wing extremist online communities, with accusations that this level of 'fedposting' (online posts that would tend to attract the attention of federal law enforcement) was so intentionally provocative that the posters must themselves be informants or undercover agents seeking to entrap others in the movement. And that's where the feud began.
It's impossible to talk about August 11, 2017 without talking about Christopher Cantwell. You may remember him as the proudly hateful star of Vice's Race and Terror documentary about Unite the Right. Or maybe you just remember him as 'the crying nazi,' a name earned by his tearful message to the camera upon learning that he was wanted on felony charges after that weekend. While he held no torch that night, Cantwell was at the center of the brawl and discharged quite a bit of pepper spray at the counter protesters at the base of the statue, two of whom swore out a complaint.
At Cantwell's November 9, 2017 preliminary hearing on the felony charges, his supporters filled several rows in the gallery, something I've rarely seen from white supremacists in any of the cases I've followed. Some were there to testify, including Ted von Nukem. Von Nukem, whom Cantwell later wrote he'd known since 2014, testified proudly that he'd fought at Cantwell's side that night, claiming it was all self-defense.
In a chatroom on the encrypted messaging platform Telegram a few months later, Medina joked about how Cantwell's supporters – himself among them – must have looked to outsiders that day, posting, "Yeah man we were terrible optics. 6 guys from Ohio came to show moral support." Another user asked him how 'Ted' (referring to von Nukem) was doing since then, to which Medina replied, "Fine I suppose. Our little group just fell apart after Cville. Everyone went their own way."
Medina and von Nukem had fallen out of touch and 'Mosin-Nagant' had fallen in with the cult of Dylann Roof worshippers.
After a bit of time in the local jail, a stint living with Elliott Kline in northern Virginia cut short by an arrest for public intoxication, and an unconscionable amount of harassment directed at his victims, Cantwell took a plea in July 2018. He pled down to misdemeanor assault charges, got off with time served, and was banished from the Commonwealth of Virginia for five years. By the time he went home to New Hampshire, the first three episodes of The Bowlcast were hosted on Cantwell's website alongside his own 'Radical Agenda' podcast, which opened with his catchphrase, "Ok, fuck it: Nazi time!" Cantwell himself was the special guest on the first episode of The Bowlcast, crudely titled "Cantwell Takes the Bowl Pill."
But alliances built on blood and soil are a house built on sand. The mass shooting enthusiasts that made up the Bowl Patrol weren't predisposed to caring friendships, loyalty, and kindness. By late 2018, the thin-skinned Cantwell was starting to chafe at the rough jokes they made at his expense. The ensuing battle of prank phone calls, police reports, white power rap diss tracks (including an admittedly pretty funny one by torch marcher and Bowl Patrol member Dave Fassler), mocking memes, and chatroom beefs sounds incredibly juvenile, but while the conduct was childish, the content was gruesome. In February 2019, the members of the Bowl Patrol used their admin privileges on Cantwell's website, which he'd given them so they could post their Dylann Roof fan club podcast, to make several blog posts they considered jokes. Cantwell considered them criminal acts. He reported them to the FBI.
If not for the falling out between Cantwell and the Bowl Patrol, we may not know Dallas Medina's name today. It was Cantwell who, in February 2019, unmasked 'Mosin-Nagant' in an effort to get even for 'Mosin's' prank calls to his Radical Agenda podcast. And it may well have been Dallas Medina's former friend Ted von Nukem who revealed the true identity of 'Mosin-Nagant' to Cantwell. Cantwell was desperate for information on his new nemesis, calling 'Mosin' an "enemy hostile."
The months-long feud is best memorialized in Hilary Sargent's brilliant first piece in her series on Cantwell's eventual federal trial for extortionate threats. To spoil the ending, Cantwell wasn't satisfied with doxing Dallas Medina. In June of 2019, he sent an escalating series of threats to Benjamin Lambert, a member of the Bowl Patrol under the pseudonym 'Cheddar Mane.' Cantwell wanted more than Medina - he wanted the leader of the Bowl Patrol. He wanted 'Vic Mackey's' real name and he wanted 'Cheddar' to know he'd do anything to get it.
Lambert was wearing a Bowlcast sweatshirt depicting the outline of Dylann Roof's infamous bowl haircut when FBI agents first made contact with him. He cooperated in the federal investigation that followed, testifying for the government about the threats Cantwell had made about Lambert's wife and young children. In early 2021, Cantwell was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison for threatening to rape the wife of a fellow Nazi over an online spat.
Seven months after the pre-dawn raid on his New Hampshire apartment that found him in his underwear playing Pokémon on his Nintendo, Cantwell was behind bars awaiting trial when antifascist researchers finally uncovered the identity of the man until then known only as 'Vic Mackey' – the man Cantwell would serve federal time for trying to find. In the wake of that revelation, the man behind the memes, the self-proclaimed HBIC of Bowl Patrol, Andrew Casarez was brought to court on a red flag order in Sacramento. After Andrew Casarez lost his gun, 'Vic Mackey' went quiet.
In the course of the federal investigation sparked by the warring race warriors, the FBI sought to interview nearly every member of the Bowl Patrol and their names were confirmed by an FBI agent on the record during testimony at Cantwell's trial. Their Telegram chats, once teeming with gore, pornographic GIFs, rape jokes, and murder threats were abandoned. 'Mosin-Nagant' wiped his online accounts. No new episodes of The Bowlcast were released. There were indignant recriminations, accusations of snitching, and infighting full of misremembered timelines and self-serving recollections of facts. But mostly, there was silence.
Christoper Cantwell was released from federal prison at the end of November 2022, still bitter about the feud that put him there and still carrying the anger of being the only man to do time over the torch march.
After a few pandemic years of not thinking much about 'Mosin-Nagant,' the man I only really knew from a podcast with a recurring segment about raping me to death, there was a moment of synchronicity. I have a terrible habit of wasting an afternoon looking for nothing in particular, browsing dockets and transcripts, keyword searching the internet's dark corners, hopeful that some bit of digital flotsam floating by will catch on something in my memory. And in a coincidence for the ages, I was looking at a docketed hearing that was happening. It was happening right then, 400 miles away. An extradition hearing for Dallas Medina. The indictment remained sealed in Albemarle County, but the Portage County docket told me everything I needed to know - Medina was being held at the Portage County Jail as a fugitive wanted by the University of Virginia Police Department on the charge of "Burn Object: Intimidate Pub Prop." That is, burning an object with the intent to intimidate on public property. And that could only mean one thing.
Dallas Medina was arrested in Portage County, Ohio in March 31, 2023. He waived his right to an extradition hearing and waited in jail for 13 days before a Portage County judge agreed to a $10,000 bond on the condition that Medina turn himself in to authorities in Virginia within three business days. His mother put the required 10% of the bond amount on her credit card on April 12.
Last night, three business days after his release in Ohio, Dallas Medina turned himself in. A magistrate in Albemarle County, without the knowledge of the Commonwealth's Attorney's office, released him on his own recognizance with instructions to appear in court this morning. After leaving the magistrate's office in the lobby of the jail, Medina posted in Christopher Cantwell's telegram channel, "I guess the cats out of the bag now." Shockingly, given their history, he had reached out to Cantwell for help, asking him how to get in touch with Elmer Woodard, the attorney who represented Cantwell on his criminal charges in Albemarle in 2018.
Before Judge Cheryl Higgins in Albemarle Circuit Court this morning, Dallas Medina was soft spoken and polite. He told her he was in the process of retaining counsel, but it wasn't Elmer Woodard's name he gave - it was local defense attorney Mike Hallahan, whose bombastic performance as Daniel Borden's defense attorney is still the single strangest thing I've ever witnessed in a courtroom. Judge Higgins released Medina with instructions to return for another hearing on May 5. He is to remain in Virginia until that bond review hearing.
After the hearing, I met Dallas Medina for the first time. No longer 'Mosin-Nagant,' Medina seemed tired and overwhelmed. I asked him if things hadn't worked out with Elmer and he gave a noncommittal sort of gesture. I told him I've seen Hallahan in court – he's a bit of a firecracker. Medina said he'd met with Hallahan earlier that morning, pointing toward a bench nearby. "We were sitting right there and a bird shat on us, I don't know what that means." I told him I've heard that's good luck, but I don't think he wasn't feeling particularly lucky.
He asked me my opinion on the indictments. "Do you think we should all go to jail for this? Like a thousand people?" I offered up the example of the January 6 prosecutions, asking, "At what point does quantity dilute individual responsibility?" He scoffed, "Yeah but those guys were retards, throwing furniture and stuff." It doesn't matter what I think. It doesn't matter that I'm not sure this is a tool that can enact any meaningful justice – it's just what's happening. I'm just taking the notes.
I asked him about Ted. He didn't elaborate on their falling out and I didn't press. Medina said he didn't know why von Nukem left Ohio for Missouri and didn't know how his former friend had ended up crossing the Mexican border into Arizona with a car full of fentanyl. He nodded ruefully, taking a drag off his cigarette, when I asked if it really was Ted who'd given his name to Cantwell in 2019. "You antifascist people want to know how to deter people from becoming white nationalists? Become a white nationalist." The movement eats its own, with enough venom for friends and enemies alike.
He held out his hand. Reflexively, I reached for it. We shook hands and he said, "No hard feelings." As we parted ways in front of the courthouse, Medina said, "Take care of yourself."