According to federal prosecutors, former U.S. Marine Matthew Belanger was arrested on June 10 in New York and charged with making false statements to a federal firearms licensee in order to make straw purchases of an assault rifle and handgun; he pleaded not guilty on Monday. Federal prosecutors also allege that Belanger belongs to a a far-right neo-Nazi group, “Rapekrieg,” and plotted plotted mass murder and sexual assault to “decrease the number of minority residents” in the United States.
In a July 14 court memo, federal prosecutors say that while a Marine, Belanger plotted far more serious crimes as part of the neo-Nazi group. The memo says Belanger trained with airsoft guns in the woods of Long Island as part of a plot to attack the “Zionist Order of Governments.” The memo also says Belanger was the subject of an FBI Joint Terrorism Taskforce investigation into allegedly plotting to “engage in widespread homicide and sexual assault.” Much of Belanger’s ideology and plotting, the memo says, is based around a desire to lessen the number of nonwhite Americans and to rape “white women to increase the production of white children.”
Belanger’s attorney, Leighton Lee, had argued that his client should be allowed home detention with an ankle monitor but the judge disagreed. Currently, Belanger is detained at a federal detention center in Honolulu. He has not been charged with crimes related to his alleged membership in Rapekrieg, but a federal judge sided with prosecutors who argued that Belanger should be held in pretrial detention, citing his extremist beliefs and calling his alleged plots “both a danger to the community and a risk of non-appearance.”
