(bit from the middle of the story)
The house that Jack built
By the time Discord was shuttering its attempt to engage with the moderators who police its own rules and content, Jack Teixeira was already sharing classified government secrets with friends.
Beginning in 2020, Teixeira and his friends had littered several private servers, including Thug Shaker Central, with racist and antisemitic posts, gore and imagery from terrorist attacks — all in apparent violation of Discord’s community guidelines. The server name itself was a reference to a racist meme taken from gay porn. Though his intentions weren’t always clear, in chats Teixeira discussed committing acts of violence, fantasizing about blowing up his school and rigging a vehicle from which to shoot people.
Members of Thug Shaker Central also shared memes riffing on the live stream footage of the Christchurch mass killing, which Tarrant had littered with far-right online references aimed at gaming communities.
A user on the server who went by the handle “Memenicer” said he would discuss “accelerationist rhetoric” and “racial ideology” with Teixeira, pushing to see how far the conversation would go. On the wall of Teixeira’s room hung the flag of Rhodesia, a racist minority-ruled former state in southern Africa that has become a totem among white nationalists.
After Teixeira’s arrest, FBI agents visited Memenicer, who spoke on the condition that he be identified by his online handle, carrying transcripts of chats the two had exchanged, he said.
“One was about a school shooting and then one was … about a mass shooting,” he said. More often the server was a stream of slurs: “the n-word over and over again.”
In Thug Shaker Central, Teixeira cultivated a cadre of younger users, who he wanted to be “prepared” for action against a government he worked for but claimed to distrust. Over time, the community became “more extreme,” according to Pucki, a user who created the initial server used by the group during pandemic lockdowns in 2020 and spoke on the condition that he be identified by his online handle.
Once he became administrator of the server, Teixeira expelled those he didn’t like, narrowing the pool of who could report him. Many of those who remained had spent time on 4chan’s firearms board and its notorious racism and sexism-filled /pol/ forum, Pucki said, bringing the toxic language and memes from those communities.
Teixeira’s political and social views increasingly infected the server, said members of Thug Shaker Central. “It became less about playing games and chatting and having fun, and it became about screaming racial slurs,” said Pucki.
There was at least one self described neo-Nazi on Thug Shaker Central: a teenager who went by the handle “Crow” and who said she dated Teixeira until early 2022. Crow said that at the time she was involved with more hardcore accelerationist
white supremacist groups that sought to inspire racial revolution, movements she says she has since left behind and disavows.
"Crow" met Teixeira online and the two spent hours together on Discord. (Frontline (PBS)/The Washington Post)
Crow spent time on Telegram, but she also pushed her views on Discord, including in Thug Shaker Central, where several members recalled her sharing links to other communities and posting racist material, including swastikas.
“I was trying to radicalize people at the time,” said Crow. “I was trying to get them to join … get them more violent.”
Crow claimed that a young man she attempted to radicalize later live-streamed the beating of a Black man in a Discord private message as she and another person watched. The Post was unable to confirm the existence of this video.
“The man was sitting against a wall and he was kicking him,” Crow said. She had little fear the video broadcast in a group chat would be picked up by the company. “They, as far as I know, can’t really look into those.”
Teixeira posted videos taken behind his mother and stepfather’s house, firing guns into the woods. Filmed from Teixeira’s perspective, the clips mimicked the aesthetic of first-person-shooter video games — the look of Tarrant’s live stream in Christchurch.
“That’s what I think of instantly,” said Mariana Olaizola, a policy adviser on technology and law at the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights who wrote a May report on extremism in gaming communities. “I’m not sure about other people, but the resemblance is very obvious, I would say.”
Another video Teixeira posted on the server showed him standing in camouflage fatigues at a gun range near his home. “Jews scam, n----rs rape, and I mag dump,” he says to the camera before firing the full magazine downrange.
Discord’s Redgrave confirmed that the video violated the company’s community guidelines. But like everything else that happened on Thug Shaker Central, no one at Discord saw it.
A member of the server where Jack Teixeira allegedly leaked hundreds of documents tells Post reporter Sam Oakford they bonded over sharing offensive videos. (Video: Frontline (PBS)/The Washington Post)
Hundreds of documents, fragments of metadata
The intelligence horde linked to Teixeira turned out to be larger than it first appeared, extending to hundreds of documents posted online, either as text or images, for more than a year.
Redgrave said there was little the company could do about the platform being used to share government secrets.
“Without knowing what is and is not classified and without having some way to essentially detect that proactively, we can’t say definitively where classified documents go,” said Redgrave. “That’s true of every single tech company, not just us.”
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