Editor’s note: In this week’s The Rabbit Hole, we examined nearly two dozen federal prosecutions across the country, focusing on an online group with real-world consequences. Since 2021, the group 764 and its adherents have built an online apparatus that targets children and, in some cases, grooms them into future violent perpetrators for the organization. Our reporting sought to understand 764’s targets, patterns and methods that are emerging while reviewing prosecutions nationwide. One note, we tend to shy away from trigger warnings in our stories, but in this instance, we feel compelled to alert you that this is not an easy Sunday afternoon read. - Seamus
There are groups who seek to destroy the government, and then there are groups who want to destroy humanity itself.
A decade ago, in the wake of the Unite the Right white supremacist rally turned bloody clash in Charlottesville, Virginia, marked a shift in how the public and federal law enforcement understood the relationship between social media platforms and domestic extremism. Terror cells such as the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division and the accelerationist group Terrorgram, whose members had participated in the rally, coordinated their efforts over Telegram, Discord, and WhatsApp to perpetrate acts of violence that would, in their view, descend the U.S. into a collapse and then a racially purer rebirth.
The FBI would later classify their arrests in federal court filings as racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism, as part of law enforcement’s work to dismantle the domestic extremist groups. Federal prosecutors and law enforcement would prove largely successful in their efforts toward those groups. Today, Atomwaffen is a shell of its former self, and Terrorgram’s leaders sit in federal detention.
An emerging extremist threat comes from a similar online world but may pose even graver consequences, particularly to society’s most vulnerable. The terror cell, known as 764, doesn’t have an ideology. Its members don’t have a coherent political, racial, religious, or other worldview that influences their activities. The FBI describes the cell as nihilistic violent extremism, another of its classifications for domestic extremism that had a 490% increase in arrests last year alone. Nor does 764’s membership reflect a shared racial, socioeconomic, national, educational, sexual, or any other kind of background. Its common denominator is cruelty. 764 terrorizes children. And the group’s perpetrators and the number of its victims are growing, with FBI offices opening dozens of new cases every month.
This story is based on hundreds of pages of federal court filings (including a number that were later sealed), interviews with authorities familiar with investigations into 764, and newly released academic research on the organization.
“It is as serious a threat as you can imagine,” said James Donnelly, the Justice Department’s domestic terrorism coordinator, during an academic panel last month. “[And] they’re trying to metastasize the evil.”
On Nov. 6, 2025, law enforcement arrested a 20-year-old alleged 764 member in a Baltimore, Maryland, suburb.
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