ID Bulletin: Ian H. Langille, of Chapman ME

[This is my contribution to the ID of Ian Henry Langille, a/k/a “Nordic Maine,” a collaboration with the Stumptown Research Collective. This version of what Stumptown eventually titled “Sam Winslow & the Vexing Vexillologist” has a little more in the way of Langille’s buffoonery and local fash history, cut from the fuller version for length. Other edits to content were suggested by Stumptown, and welcomed! Read the full ID here!]

It’s April 2023, and I’m having a hard time giving a damn about the incessant poster of a manchild I would later learn was born Ian Langille of Chapman ME.

At this early point the guy has two Telegram channels, one standard Nordic-Maine-Groyper channel (since deactivated but replaced) and one “uncensored” in flavor, both registered circa mid-January 2023. I can’t tell the difference. Both of them are largely white supremacist propaganda regurgitation channels. Buried in the cross-posts are his own occasional additions, largely involving Langille’s collection of gross white nationalist and neo-Nazi org merchandise, his (lack of) graphic design prowess, and his stickering efforts in Aroostook County.

His personal stickers are the New England Independence pine tree symbol inside the Waffen-SS shield. They also contain the URL to his personal Telegram channel. The URL is, if I recall, occasionally misspelled somehow. There’s also this image, which I originally thought was an admission that he doesn’t know how a hat is supposed to sit on a head.

Me asking “where’s the lower bound of the frame?” now would prove to be incredibly funny 18 months later. At this time, though, I believe the simple carelessness in this shit composition is emblematic of the man boy: his graphic designs, his information security, his typing style, any amount of effort he puts into something, all of him whiffing of half-ass.

Sometimes his photos include half of his face. It’s usually not the same half from photo to photo, which would be great if I had the urge to spend a week in Presque Isle, the city in Maine to which I managed to geo-locate most of his personal stickerings, asking who this loser was.

Other times the photos include his collection of neo-Nazi flags and patches and shirts. He’s a neo-Nazi merch guy, all day, every day. It’s a bit of a blessing; at least he’s not spending his money on guns, optics, and ammunition.

A review of his channels indicates that he’s seeking lonely neo-Nazis in his area, though. During late January 2023, Langille made a series of posts featuring his stickering efforts in and around Presque Isle. The slaptags were largely Will2Rise and Active Club products, but also included Langille’s personal stickers (this time with the Telegram URL spelled right). Under the photos in the Telegram posts was this text: “if your a nationalist in Aroostook county contact @pinetreemaine to crew up.” He makes two posts like this over two days. In the 28-and-a-half hour window between these two posts, Langille posts 32 separate times. Most are, again, cross-posts of other neo-Nazi and white nationalist content. Some are his own. They’re all shit. I file this “posting more than once an hour if sleep doesn’t exist” piece of information away for later.

The Telegram channels Langille recirculates, it occurs to me, are a grab-bag of different groups, some with conflicting ideologies or actual conflict between them. The simultaneous boosting of Patriot Front and the Nationalist Social Club, especially, twig my radar.

See, there’s this history between the New-England-local Patriot Front guys and NSC-131. I’ve spoken about it at great length in the past. The story started with Tommy Rousseau demoting and then eventually expelling Chris Hood from Patriot Front in 2019 for, among other things, forming the splinter group inside his local chapter that would eventually become NSC-131. From there it escalated into NSC-131 members submitting applications to join PF, setting up fake vetting interviews, and violently jumping anyone who showed up to run said interviews. I think this burst of Nazi-on-Nazi violence was spurred by convicted oxycodone dealer and delightfully departed Leo Cullinan joining NSC-131? There are indications Cullinan tried joining PF before he joined NSC; no way a hypothetical probationary membership lived through Brian Harwood or someone discovering his drug history. But yeah, there is video that suggests Cullinan tried to run-down CT-local PF loser Alex Beilman during one of NSC’s jumpings. It was more focused violence than NSC-131 ever visited on the leftists they targeted as their enemies. Rousseau and Hood hate each other, there’s so much bad blood there.

There’s no way anyone with active lines of communication to either of these orgs is going to get away with boosting both, no way that one of them is not going to YELL at this boy to cool his shit, to pick a side. I begin to suspect that Langille has no idea which direction is up. I file this piece of inference away, right next to the bit about Langille’s posting frequency.

At one point, I decide to reach out to Langille myself. Armed with a fresh Telegram sock, I expressed interest in getting more familiar with the NordicMaine posting lifestyle. Langille is immediately, gratingly hostile.

I admit that I’m not the best at putting my foot in a neo-Nazi sock and pretending to “be one of the goys.” Still, I think again to Chris Hood. For all the flaws, faults, and follies that Hood exemplifies, it can be said that Hood is a decently-skilled organizer on a social basis. I’ve spoken with him a handful of times, through socks and through voice calls. His attitude is not immediately repellent. He’s friendly. He’s even known to try convincing antifascists to jump ship to his side! It has worked exactly never, but still, the intention is notable. Moreover, I’m aware of a handful of people like Langille – you know, terminally online losers – in Hood’s orbit. Hood hates them! Keeps them around to shit on for getting nothing done.

I take these three pieces of information about Langille – his poster’s sickness, his apparent ignorance of local fascist history in contrast to his obsession with their aesthetics and merch, and his odious personality – and I write him off. I decide he’s beneath my immediate attention. In the fullness of time, he will get his, at my hands or someone else’s. At the moment, though, I had more pressing matters to which I needed to attend.

Then it is May 2023. My research buddy, who’d tipped me off to Langille in the first place, tells me that Langille has a new, third Telegram channel. The URL is clearly his – t.me/nordicmaine – and the name of the channel is “aroostook county active club.” There are three Telegram users in it, and one of them, the only one ever saying anything, is Langille. I am annoyed, distractedly so, at Langille trying to will himself into relevance.

I happen to be aware of a Rhode-Island-local bank robber turned Proud Boy who had moved up to Aroostook County in the last couple of years. I wonder briefly if NordicMaine – I don’t know him as Ian Langille yet – is somehow this Proud Boy, before I remember that I’ve seen both halves of Langille’s face, as well as all of that Proud Boy’s face in a single photo, a Proud Boy who would definitely be ashamed to let himself descend into whatever shape Langille was melting into. They can’t possibly be the same people. I still desperately want to keep Langille written off. There is no floor to how little I want to care, no ceiling to my contempt at the idea of devoting attention to him.

Then, it is barely the next day. Langille’s main channel gets boosted by the Proud-Boys-controlled Western Chauvinist Telegram. No, I say. No no no. You cannot make me. I don’t want this guy to be an up-and-comer. He is a low-hanging fruitcake. I, ever the fool, feel entitled to (and have been specifically called upon to write up) a better class of villain. Still, the urge to commit myself to duty rises up my back. A neo-Nazi is a neo-Nazi, especially one looking like he might make connections with my violence-enjoying locals. Even then, there’s a furious and dismissive arrogance in me that tells me this guy is worth exactly no one’s time.

Then, it is a month later: June 2023. Langille’s main channel gets boosted by the Bay State Active Club. Local to Massachusetts, this BSAC is just the local Patriot Front members: Mark Hayden and his younger brother, Sal Munafo, Harwood, man-who-is-decidedly-not-from-here Alex Beilman (I was even working on Beilman’s dossier that month, finally scoring a hat trick of me having better things to do than pay attention to Langille), future North Brookfield Town Selectman Vaughn Schlegel for like five minutes, etc. I am still in what strikes me now as a deep denial, my brain telling me that this sticker-kiddie’s upward movement can’t last. I tell my research buddy that Langille is “where infosec goes to die.” My research buddy replies that Langille has attached, I shit you not, what appears to be his own STREET ADDRESS SANS STREET NUMBER to the ACAC chat’s profile page in Telegram.

It’s with the following energy that I log into the Aroostook County North Registry of Deeds, having registered an account to research the unnamed Proud Boy mentioned above, to finally and grudgingly commit myself to identifying Langille:

(You may ask “who is this sour-faced clown woman?” and “is that theater she’s wildly gesticulating in covered in a fine layer of gore?” and I will respond “don’t ask questions” and “just go read Kill 6 Billion Demons.”)

I’m maybe two, three hours into cross-referencing homeowners on Langille’s supposed street in Chapman ME with potential social media accounts when my research buddy tells me another antifascist researcher more experienced than I already has Langille’s ID. I thank the cosmos. This braying Gooberwaffen jackass isn’t my problem anymore! Someone else is going to take care of it. I can move on, like I’ve finished reading a fun obituary for someone I didn’t like.

My research buddy, much more astute and persistent with the social media tracking than I, pops Langille back into my attention every now and then. At some point shortly after getting boosted by BSAC, they relate that the Active Club Telegram channel made fun of Langille for running ACAC as a “solo” Active Club. Langille shuttered ACAC’s Telegram chat not long after, having accomplished nothing.

After a few months, they also spot Langille in the Patriot Youth chats, Patriot Youth being a Patriot Front project to indoctrinate kids into white nationalism via Roblox. A not-insignificant number of my locals are involved. At another point, there’s a Gab account full of masked selfies and more merch photos. A couple of Langille’s new photos from somewhere include a pair of Hammershades, suggesting he’d developed a fondness for the Blood Tribe.

It’s April 2024, and I see Langille’s on Twitter, having registered some two months before me finding him. I hate him. Still, I bring this finding to my research buddy, whose response is exactly: “NOOOO”

Then it’s August 2024, and I get hailed by a researcher out of the Pacific Northwest. It concerns a useless man I had all but forgotten about. I finally learn his name for certain, if not how to pronounce it. Langille and members of his family had been on my list of suspects, but he hadn’t been the primary guy I’d been looking at for the handful of hours I’d spent looking at it. I get told a couple of fresh stories. They’re a laugh!

With his real name, we find his Reddit username; it is, I shit you not, /u/Ian_langille, and he’s a frequent poster in vexillology subreddits, posting about his various fascist flags. There’s one photo of Langille holding an America First PAC flag, while wearing a skull mask, that seems to have been taken by his mother.

A figure visible in a mirror behind Langille shares a resemblance with her, certainly, with hair and height in common. I don’t know how onboard she is with this, if she’s supportive or uncomfortable. I also don’t know if she understands the meaning of the skull mask he wore, or the vitriol the flag represented.

I feel vindicated in my dismissiveness of Langille, of his uselessness, his adhesion to his social media clients, his gadfly tendency to hover around anyone who will tolerate him for a moment, and how his obsession with displaying his merch prevents him from actually effecting any meaningful change in the world.

It’s September 2024, the time of me writing this, and I am reviewing Langille’s Telegram channels to build this historical account of a man who will die of natural causes, alone, stagnant, unloved, and having brought no joy to a world not tainted by his caustic, irony-poisoned hatreds. His “██████ █████ ████████████ uncensored” channel, which has been operating on Telegram for the better part of two years and has racked up thousands upon thousands of posts, only has 35 subscribers.

I find, among his posts, an attempt to brigade a June 2023 news story about a man who had started an LGBTQ+ hotline back in the 80s. It’s a touching piece about people finding each other during the HIV/AIDS epidemic and caring for one another. Langille got nothing done, of course. Taking umbrage over the man’s residency in Aroostook County, Langille said to his channel he wanted help to “ratio” the story. There is no visible ratio. If there was, there would probably be more views on the thing.

I also find that on July 4th of the previous year, not long after I was thanking the stars that this guy was someone else’s problem, Langille shared a post from “171 Action,” a handful of people who think they’re a neo-Nazi street crew out of Missouri, Illinois, and Eastern Kansas. Langille’s repost is of a “member” action in “Arstook, Maine” that clearly included some of Langille’s personal stickers. I sense a desperation to join a group, any group, no matter how geographically distant from him. To the best of my knowledge, this Telegram feed never shares any actions out of Maine again.

By October, 171 Action had rebranded as the “Bullion State Nationalists.” They posted, on Halloween, in bold font alongside some graffiti on a rock: “Quit being terminally online and go outside.” Langille reposted it to his personal Telegram, apparently without a drop of self-awareness. I chuckle, bitterly, in the present. BSN has since gone silent, abound with unconfirmed rumors of legal trouble, and their channel set to private.

He clearly, so badly, wants to be someone. I think he wants to be a badass, someone intimidating that the people he hates will fear, or someone who will motivate and inspire people who think like he does to violent and awful action. I think he has no idea how to do either of those things. He just buys shirts and patches and flags and stickers, and feeds money into a hate machine of which he wishes he could be a cog, a servo, a capacitor, some functional and integral part. He wears the shirts and sticks the patches to his backpack and hangs the flags and posts the stickers in public, taking photos all the while, and insists he is one of them. An addict insisting he is somehow indispensable to the pushers selling him his supply.

It’s likely, both from his own spinning wheels and from what indications of neo-Nazi opinion of him have come to my attention, that his pushers think he’s a joke. Not even a funny one. What is the Great Pagliacci without his act? Just a depressing clown in need of therapy.

Another post on July 22nd of the same year really encapsulates the experience of learning about Langille, just wraps up who he is with an uninspiring, matte gray bow. He posted photos of his backpack, adorned with his shitty racist patches, and some of his neo-Nazi flags, hung on trees, somewhere in a Maine forest. He was clearly the photographer. No one was helping him take photos, to allow him to pose with his flags or his patch-festooned backpack.

The last of this series of six photos is what I think must’ve been behind him as he staged his flags: an empty, open field under a sunny summer day. He was alone, in nature, sure, but in his ideology and drive to do something too. He could’ve been doing anything else, but instead he was putting his neo-Nazi flags in trees, taking photos of them like it meant something.

The caption he attached to this post was “Total aryan victory for maine”. Sure, buddy. Sure.

Stumptown eventually plugs the totenkopf, the one toward the top of my missive, into reverse image search. Turns out it wasn’t Langille’s composition at all. It was someone else’s propaganda design, for the long-dead IronMarch forums! What’s more, the lower bound of the frame was missing because he never bothered to re-add it after cropping off Iron March’s branding.

Turns out the whiff of half-ass becomes a full-blown stench when you get close enough.

At some point, we find Langille making a claim that his local city council had held a vote concerning him specifically, in an attempt to ban him from his propaganda activities in the county.

This is hogwash on its face. For one, municipalities don’t have county-level authority last I checked! For two I don’t think they would risk a 1st Amendment lawsuit. I still try to verify. I check the agendas and minutes of each meeting in a particular, rough timeframe, and I also thumb through the auto-generated transcripts of video recordings in search of terms likely to pop up if such a vote were held. I find no indication Langille isn’t belching as hard as he can, to gas up his own hot air balloon. The closest I can find is a proposed ordinance barring  unpermitted encampments outside of authorized camping grounds, and posting signs outlining said ordinance at various locations through the city. What members of the Presque Isle City Council I’ve tried to contact have, to this day, not responded to my request for comment.

There are also indications of Atomwaffen fandom, indicated by a new patch in his collection. For me, it’s worth a giggle! Does he know how the local Atomwaffen chapter ended, I wonder? With half of its membership murdered by one of the groups co-founders, another member doxxed, and the ID on the last chump (saved by being 19 at the time, almost damned by signing his DMs on the Iron March forums with his real name) just waiting to go out on a rainy day? With the murders leading the other co-founder into a long string of run-ins with law enforcement? It’s incredible how bad Langille’s taste in his fellow neo-Nazis is, on top of him being an idiot blowhard.

Toward the end of the month, Stumptown sends me another screenshot of Langille’s Twitter account. In a post featuring a shitty fashwave edit of one of Langille’s selfies, he states “leftists better get ready for another Greensboro.” He credits another Twitter user with making the photo edit; Stumptown explains to me that this user is a 14-year-old, part of a youth network of online neo-Nazis who idolize mass shooters.

The arrogance does not fall from my eyes, but there is a new clarity. Langille is incompetent, and no one with any sense in the sphere he wants to influence will have anything to do with him, but he still has potential to blunder or brute-force himself into a niche. That niche may be radicalizing other people younger and more stupid than he is, people on his wavelength. I feel a pang of guilt for the other local antifascist researcher, the one who already has Langille’s ID in hand. In my attempts to reach out and make them aware of activity swirling around Langille, to urge them, I learned they had taken a much-needed mental health break.​​ (If you’re reading this, friend, you deserve it, I love you, and I hope you’re okay.)

I think of Terrorgram. I think of gore fetishist Dallas Humber and failed influencer Matthew Allison, trying to build a legacy atop a pile of bodies murdered by other people in hatred that Humber and Allison themselves fostered and encouraged. I think of the vacuum that exists in that niche now, given that Humber and Allison both are facing down serious consequences for their acts. I think of a preposterously unlikely future of Langille indoctrinating young racist idiots into full-blown neo-Nazi ideology, convincing them to make attempts at mass casualty events, and trying to make his own pile of bodies upon which he could sit, smartphone in hand, unable to log off.

There is now a clock hanging over Ian Langille’s head. No one can see it, we don’t know how much time is on it, and we don’t know if it even really exists, but I can hear it. I know it’s ticking down to something tragic and potentially bloody. I must assume that there is no time. There is much work to be done, and it must be done soon.

Okay, Ian. I may be busy with other things, as always, but you’ve got our attention now. ∴

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