Goofy DJ, Accused Terrorgram Leader — ProPublica

Early last year, Matthew Allison could be found at the Space Banana dance club, awkwardly swaying to his own beat. Clutching the cheapest house beer, he’d greet people with a bear hug, a broad grin and his familiar, “Yo, bro!” salutations.

Allison, then a 37-year-old convenience store worker and Saturday-night DJ, seemed to like everyone he met in Boise, Idaho’s small electronic dance music scene. And most people seemed to like him back.

He was so gentle, former friends remember, that for a time he eschewed honey so as not to cause harm to bees.

He was “a little goofy,” a former friend, Tyler Whitt, recalled. “But bro goofy.”

But that lovable persona hid a more sinister core. When he was behind his computer screen, Allison used the handle BTC, short for BanThisChannel, he told ProPublica and FRONTLINE. On the social media and messaging platform Telegram, authorities say, Allison was a key figure in a network of white supremacist and neo-Nazi chat groups and channels known as Terrorgram.

There, Allison held court, promoting himself as “the most infamous and prolific propagandist of our time.”

Hyperbole aside, BTC was infamous. Extremism researchers in the U.S. and in Europe studied his posts but did not know who he was. Leftist activists sought to expose him. And law enforcement authorities tried to identify and jail him.

Last September, he was finally arrested.

Prosecutors allege that Allison was one of the leaders in the Terrorgram Collective, a secretive group that produced propaganda and instructions for terrorists, and disseminated that information through the Terrorgram ecosystem.

They say Allison used the Telegram platform to solicit “attacks on government infrastructure, such as government buildings and energy facilities,” to encourage the assassination of “‘high-value targets’ — like politicians and government officials” with a “hit list,” and to help produce and distribute a Terrorgram Collective publication that featured instructions for making “Napalm, thermite, chlorine gas, pipe bombs, and dirty bombs.”

Authorities also contend in court filings that Allison had fantasies about committing gruesome violence and sexual assault, and that he may have been planning to act on them.

Allison has pleaded not guilty.

For about five years, the Terrorgram network operated largely unchallenged on Telegram, which has nearly one billion users. The Dubai-based company did little to prevent influencers like Allison from circulating their propaganda and encouraging isolated young men to kill, a ProPublica and FRONTLINE investigation found.

The news organizations obtained a trove of now-deleted Telegram chats and channel logs and used them to trace Allison’s activity and influence in the Terrorgram network.

Telegram has declined repeated requests to make its executives available for interviews but said in a statement, “When the Terrorgram name first surfaced years ago, we began removing groups and channels that used variations on the Terrorgram name. Calls for violence from any group are not tolerated on our platform.”

In the annals of white supremacist content online, Allison’s work stood out. “It was some of the most inflammatory propaganda that I had seen,” said Jennefer Harper, a researcher who has amassed a large archive of neo-Nazi materials from Telegram. Allison was also prolific. “This propaganda was being posted 24/7! The account wasn’t taking a break, it was like, ‘Don’t you have anything else to do in your life?’”

He specialized in what he called documentaries, and over more than five years, he said, he made and posted around 120 videos. There were images of riots, burning cities and Black people brutalizing white people. There was GoPro footage of massacres filmed by white killers as they murdered people of color.

Allison and the other Terrorgram leaders found a receptive audience for their propaganda. Some of their fans got off their phones and took action: scoping out high-profile targets and even killing people. ProPublica and FRONTLINE used the chat logs, court records and other sources to connect 35 criminal cases to the Terrorgram network. Each case involved an individual who posted in Terrorgram chats, followed Terrorgram accounts or was a member of an organized group whose leaders participated in the Terrorgram community.

Prosecutors have linked Allison and his co-defendant, Dallas Humber, to a trio of mass shootings that killed a total of six people and wounded a dozen others, and to a stabbing incident that injured five, according to the indictment and a subsequent brief.

In early 2024, Allison’s work caught the attention of a young man from New Jersey named Andrew Takhistov.

Takhistov was in a Terrorgram group chat in which someone had posted several Allison videos, including a 51-second clip showing how to disable overhead electrical lines, according to court records. In another post, Takhistov indicated that he’d seen one of Allison’s most infamous propaganda videos.

By that summer, Takhistov, then 18, was planning his own infrastructure attacks, scheming to disable two electrical substations in New Jersey using the technique featured in Allison’s video, according to prosecutors. In court records, they say Takhistov was a fan of one of the Terrorgram Collective’s terrorism how-to guides, which Allison allegedly helped produce.

On Sept. 9, 2024, the Biden administration’s Justice Department announced the arrests and indictments of Allison and Humber, his alleged co-conspirator.

“Today’s arrests are a warning that committing hate-fueled crimes in the darkest corners of the internet will not hide you, and soliciting terrorist attacks from behind a screen will not protect you,” declared then-Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement. “The United States Department of Justice will find you, and we will hold you accountable.”

Allison and Humber were each charged with 15 felony counts, including soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.

Arrested in Boise, Allison was extradited to California, where Humber is also facing trial. They both pleaded not guilty.

Humber, visited in jail by a ProPublica and FRONTLINE reporter, said she would not talk to journalists. Her lawyer declined to comment.

Allison, against the advice of his own lawyer, granted two interviews. Looking pale and gaunt and dressed in jailhouse orange, Allison proudly acknowledged being BTC but denied he was a terrorist or that he had incited others to violence.

He called the indictment “bullshit,” claimed to be a video “artist” and indicated that he intended to fight the case on First Amendment grounds.

Allison said the alleged hit list of targets for assassination was merely a doxing list, a response to efforts by anti-fascist groups “to dox me” and anyone who claimed “to be pro-white.” He insisted he didn’t hate anyone.

His lawyers, in a bail motion, said the indictment was misleading. They argued that there was no evidence that Allison was a leader of a transnational terrorist organization. He was, they wrote, just a participant in chats that “‘are mostly a chaotic mix of hyperbole and posts without any recognized leader.”

After Allison’s arrest, an FBI agent made his way to rural Perry, Missouri, to see Matthew’s father, John Allison, who lives in the basement of a rambling and drafty decommissioned church he’s renovating.

“Matthew was a perfect child,” John Allison remembers saying before closing the door on the agent. The father said the agent seemed interested only in incriminating information, so he refused to cooperate.

The first of four children, Matthew had sandy blond hair and blue eyes. Early on, he showed musical promise. Like Mozart in the movie “Amadeus,” John Allison recalls, Matthew could play the piano upside down.

The boy wasn’t raised to hate, his father told ProPublica and FRONTLINE in an interview.

But from the time he was 10 years old, the younger Allison took an interest in gruesome violence, prosecutors say. Matthew’s brother told federal agents that the boy enjoyed watching “graphic violent material,” including videos and images of “beheadings,” according to a prosecution brief. His legal team declined to comment on the allegation.

After high school in Perris, California, Matthew got an offer to attend a local college. He decided instead to follow his best friend to Idaho.

Allison’s lawyers said in a court filing that he spent 17 of the last 19 years in Boise, a relatively liberal city in a state that has become a haven for antigovernment and white supremacist activists.

He worked a variety of low-wage service jobs and did a lot of couch surfing, his friends say.

In 2013, Allison got a job working the night shift at a downtown coffee shop and bakery. His boss and co-worker remember him as quiet, polite and professional. He was in a long-term romance with a male co-worker and seemed very much in love.

“I always thought it was a very cohesive relationship,” said Tyler Armstrong, who worked at the bakery with both men. “They were together all the time. We’d all get together, smoke weed and just hang out.”

In Boise’s electronic dance music scene, Allison found a welcoming, inclusive community. He hosted parties where he would DJ, playing progressive house music.

He lived in a Spartan apartment. He didn’t have a car, or even a driver’s license. He told friends he wanted to stay under the radar.

Over the years, he lived in several upscale buildings, including The Fowler, a midrise that boasts a well-appointed fitness center and stunning views of the downtown.

While some acquaintances wondered how he afforded the rent on low-wage service jobs, four friends say that Allison had an illicit side hustle. As Tyler Whitt, one of his friends, put it, “He was an excellent plug” — a drug dealer.

Allison sold cocaine packaged in signature blue-tinted vials, according to Whitt and three other people who purchased drugs from him. Allison denied that he sold cocaine in an interview with FRONTLINE and ProPublica, and he has not been charged with any drug-related offenses.

In 2018, unbeknownst to his dance party friends, Allison was trying to break through on social media as an anonymous conservative influencer.

His early videos on YouTube under the Ban This Channel handle served up standard conservative fare. He peppered the videos with Tucker Carlson clips and used titles such as “The Russian Collusion Lie” and “Lies About Trump Exposed.” Most of the videos landed without notice.

Allison kept cranking out videos. They got more racist, homophobic and antisemitic. Eventually, after he posted the Nazi Party anthem, YouTube banished him from the platform.

His tilt to extremism came amid trouble in his personal life. Allison and his long-term boyfriend broke up, leaving him angry and depressed, according to Armstrong. And his younger brother in Nevada was imprisoned on drug charges, court records show.

In 2020, Allison abruptly left Idaho. He quit his job as a laborer for a flooring company, citing a family emergency. For a time, he lived in Nevada, taking care of his brother’s children.

Allison also lived with his father and stepmother in Utah for nearly six months, but he spent most of the time holed up in his room on his computer, his father said.

“That was a hard day,” Matthew Allison said after one 10-plus-hour session. His father stared at him, baffled.

Allison asked his father to help him start a website to host his content, which included videos he’d made from old Nazi propaganda footage, John Allison said.

“No, I’m not going to be a party to that,” he said he told his son.

Allison soon found another home for his content: Telegram.

Pete Simi, a sociology professor at Chapman University in Orange, California, has spent much of his career studying violent extremist groups and has closely tracked their migrations to Telegram.

It was sometime in 2021, during the pandemic, when Simi first became aware of BTC.

Simi had just been admitted to a private Telegram chat group.

The administrator of the chat hadn’t been willing to let Simi join until he provided proof of his whiteness. He’d thought his middle-aged skin might raise suspicion, so he’d shared a photo of his adult son’s forearm.

As soon as he entered the chat, someone shared a six-minute video called “Last Battle.” Simi downloaded a copy.

Simi had studied a lot of neo-Nazi propaganda — some of it crude and ineffective. But this video stood out, though the overall message was familiar: It told the story of a nation being destroyed by drag queens, immigrant invaders, Black criminals, interracial marriage and a “Jewish communist takeover.”

What was compelling about this video, Simi thought, was the way it blended violent imagery, ominous music and storytelling to impart a sense of fear and white victimhood. The only salvation, the video suggested, was for heterosexual white people to stand together and arm themselves.

“VOTING WILL NOT REMOVE THEM,” reads text on the screen. “THEY WANT YOU DEAD.”

“I would say ‘Last Battle’ would be one of the more effective videos I’ve seen,” Simi said.

Simi started teaching the video in class as an example of propaganda that would be compelling to many alienated young men.

Allison, as BTC, became a Terrorgram Collective leader in 2022 after a previous leader was arrested, according to prosecutors.

He allegedly distributed lengthy digital how-to guides for making explosives and attacking critical infrastructure, as well as audiobooks of murderers’ manifestos. Prosecutors say he helped create a hit list of perceived enemies — politicians, executives and academics — presented as red-and-black trading cards with assault weapon logos, which included headshots, addresses and photos of the targets’ homes.

One of his major contributions was the 24-minute movie “White Terror,” which he told ProPublica and FRONTLINE that he edited. It was an homage to 105 white men and women who committed acts of terrorism. Humber narrates the script in a remorseless monotone, describing the victims with slurs and praising the terrorists as “saints,” an honorific the Terrorgram influencers bestowed upon white supremacist murderers.

As Allison’s content became more extreme, Telegram started to take down his channels. Each time, the channel just popped back up with a slightly modified name. In December 2021, he bragged in a post that 50 of the channels he had started had been banned by Telegram.

Using data from the social media analysis platform Open Measures and other sources, ProPublica and FRONTLINE identified more than 20 channels in the Terrorgram ecosystem that were run by Allison.

The channels were “widely shared and promoted by other members of the Terrorgram scene,” said Pierre Vaux, a London-based researcher who has studied Terrorgram extensively. Vaux said that Allison also belonged to 120 chat groups and posted in them prolifically. “He’s a superspreader,” said Vaux.

In October 2022, a Slovakian teen who had spent years being indoctrinated on Telegram opened fire on an LGBTQ+ bar in the city of Bratislava, killing two people and wounding a third.

The shooter had been in direct contact with Terrorgram influencers, and according to U.S. prosecutors, sent his manifesto to Allison before the attack.

Another Telegram account Allison ran called BowlTurdsCoinInvesting shared the manifesto. In posts, Allison referred to the victims using a slur for gay people and called the manifesto “fucking amazing.”

Telegram shut the channel down.

But Allison quickly resurfaced — this time as BigTittyChica. He reposted an audiobook version of the Bratislava shooter’s manifesto.

Around this time, Humber sent Allison more news that she found encouraging. She had been communicating with a Terrorgram fan who was contemplating a school shooting targeting people of color, prosecutors said in court filings. About a month later, the user acted, killing four and wounding 11 at an elementary and middle school in Aracruz, Brazil.

Terrorgram consecrated another saint.

Allison’s legal team has suggested that the government may have misinterpreted the communications between Allison and the Slovakian killer. The evidence, they said, did “not show direct messages between Mr. Allison and the shooter but rather are messages that the shooter sent to Telegram group chats that were later forwarded between Mr. Allison’s purported two phones.”

While the real world and online lives of Allison might seem irreconcilable — a gay man who allegedly led a neo-Nazi terror group and advocated the murder of gays and lesbians — Simi, the Chapman University professor, has seen such cases before. It illustrates, he said, “the propensity that all of us have for leading contradictory lives. We have a great capacity for compartmentalizing as humans.”

Simi once interviewed a gay man who was also a member of Hammerskin Nation, a violent, hypermasculine Nazi skinhead gang whose members despise LGBTQ+ people. Ultimately, the cognitive dissonance became too great and the man quit the white supremacist movement.

There are other more recent examples. Taylor Ashley Parker-Dipeppe concealed his transgender identity from fellow members of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division, a violently homophobic group. His gender identity was revealed in court after he pleaded guilty in 2021 to conspiracy and stalking charges related to threats against journalists and activists.

Allison’s friends had no inkling that the man they partied with was celebrating the murder of gay people on Telegram. But one friend, Tyler Armstrong, recalled a troubling moment in 2020. He stumbled on a Snapchat post in which Allison repeated a white supremacist meme about high crime rates in the Black community.

When Armstrong asked how Allison, as a gay man, could demonize another vulnerable population, Allison replied, “Don’t get me started on the LGBTQ” community, according to Armstrong. Allison denied the exchange to FRONTLINE and ProPublica.

“Sup bro. do house parties exist anymore?”

It was February 2024, and Allison was texting a friend, trying to score DJ gigs. He’d been working a ton lately at a convenience store job he hated and only partying Saturday nights. “Anyone else tapped in to the scene who would know what’s up?” he asked. “I’m killing it djing and got all the gear.”

Meanwhile on Telegram, Allison was putting the final touches on a movie trilogy, which he said documented “one man’s process of radicalization every step of the way.”

In July, Allison filled out an online application for a part-time job at a popular downtown Boise breakfast spot just a short bike ride from his apartment.

“Hi there, my name’s Matt. I have relevant job experience in baking, making New York style bagels from scratch,” he wrote. “I’m a friendly, clean cut, sociable, reliable, and highly organized hard worker.”

He was hired and began working immediately.

That same month, federal agents arrested Takhistov, the New Jersey man who had watched Allison’s videos and read the Terrorgram Collective manual.

Prosecutors say Takhistov was working with another extremist to disable electrical power stations. What he didn’t know was that his co-conspirator was an undercover investigator. Takhistov was charged with soliciting another individual to destroy energy facilities. In building their case, investigators obtained his chat history, including more than 2,500 files.

Court records do not make it clear whether Takhistov has entered a plea. His attorney declined to comment.

The feds were getting closer. But if Allison was worried about the arrest of this young Terrorgram fan, he didn’t let on at work.

Over the next weeks at his new job, Allison was polite, professional and friendly. He told his father it was the best job he’d ever had.

On Friday, Sept. 6, armed federal agents confronted Allison as he prepared to bike to work.

He did not resist. And for two hours he spoke to investigators, waiving access to a lawyer. Allison admitted to making artwork for one Terrorgram production and to participating in a large number of Telegram channels with white supremacists, according to court records. He explained that he was just sharing “propaganda” and “documenting” his “understanding of the world.”

He repeatedly demanded: “What part of any of this was illegal?”

But investigators found more reasons for concern. In his backpack, agents found zip ties, duct tape, ammunition, a firearm, a knife, lockpicking equipment, two phones and a thumbdrive, court documents say.

In his apartment, they discovered an assault rifle, two laptops and a “go bag” with $1,500 cash, a black balaclava and the kind of skull mask favored by members of Atomwaffen Division, court records show.

Federal authorities also searched his storage unit, where they found disturbing handwritten letters titled “Commit Homicide” and “Post-Mortem Disembowelment” that contained graphic fantasies about murdering a baby and her mother, followed by the post-mortem rape and dissection of the woman’s body, according to the court filings. Prosecutors do not allege that he committed these crimes.

At a detention hearing, Allison’s defense claimed the writings were old song lyrics from his high school death metal band, Putrid Flesh.

In a motion for bail, Allison’s lawyers argued that he was not a threat to anyone and that his speech was protected under the First Amendment.

The judge denied Allison bail.

Late last year in Boise, the two Tylers who partied with Allison — Tyler Whitt and Tyler Armstrong — sat down to process the confounding double life of their former friend.

But first they watched “White Terror,” the BTC production that coldly celebrates terrorist killers with a mix of gruesome violence and dehumanizing language. Both men said the video left them in shock.

“That’s somebody who spent a lot of time thinking and giving in to all this hate in his heart,” Armstrong said. “And I’m like, Where does that come from?”

Whitt, who is gay, said he was still struggling to understand. “That’s got to be a totally broken person,” he said. “It was like hating everybody else is more important than loving one part of himself.”

But Whitt said he had no sympathy for his former friend and hopes Allison will spend the rest of his life in prison.

“I’m glad they got him.”