By many accounts, Hilliard, a leafy suburb west of downtown Columbus, is a midwestern success story: its progressive school district gives a vacation day for all students to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr – the first inOhioto do so – and its homes are highly sought-after by a growing number of diverse families where locals enjoy shopping at the oldest Asian grocery in the state.
But it is also where Christopher Brenner Cook, a convicted terrorist, grew up. In April 2023, Cook and two others weresentencedfor conspiring to attack America’s electrical grid, and he was given a 92-month prison term.
Cook, who was 21 at the time of his sentencing for conspiring to blow up electricity stations, was previously a devout white supremacist who tried to recruit people to the neo-Nazi cause. He focused specifically on children in an effort to avoid detection by law enforcement.
More than 3,780 miles away in Derbyshire, England, 14-year-old Rhianan Rudd encountered Cook on WhatsApp and Discord, the online chat app. As of September 2020, theBBCnoted she had been in contact with Cook “for some time”. By early 2021, Rudd – who was autistic and had a history of self-harm – was spending up to 15 hours a day speaking to Cook online.
Cook had been grooming, sexually abusing and radicalizing Rudd. The last time she had contact with Cook, he told her he loved her, andshe felta “gaping hole” and “very sad for a long time”.
In May 2022, aged 16, Rhianan killed herself.
Asprominent supportersand members of the current administration such as Elon Musk and Steve Bannon have taken toNazi-style salutesin front of large audiences, the tentacles of a resurgent American white supremacism are stretching around the globe, often with deadly consequences.
Members of Americanwhite supremacist groups, including Patriot Front and the California-based Rise Above Movement (RAM), have traveled across Europe to take part in public marches and distribute propaganda while the Base, a group of American neo-Nazis,reportedly has Russian links.
A founding member of RAM wasextradited from Romaniain August 2023 to the US on charges of inciting violence. A Slovakian teenager who killed two people outside a bar popular with members of Bratislava’s LGBTQI community in October 2022 wasradicalizedin part by California- and Idaho-based leaders of the so-called “Terrorgram Collective”; those individualslast September were chargedby the Department of Justice for soliciting hate crimes and other offences.
But not all of America’s far right’s global endeavors are confined to the dark corners of the internet or violent extremists. Trump’s closest allies have also courted a resurgent far-right across Europe where such parties are gaining mainstream support and power.
Bannon, whose War Room podcast has more than 15,000 reviews on Apple Podcasts, has traveled toFrance, Hungary, Germany and elsewhere tomeet with and advisefar-right political leaders. Musk, who has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories on X, was criticized for appearing onlineat a campaign eventfor Germany’s far-rightAfD partyin January.
“The ideas that used to be fringe are much more mainstream,” says Christian Picciolini, a former white supremacist leader and author ofWhite American Youth: My Descent into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement and other books.
“This isn’t just my opinion; it’s the opinion of white supremacists. They love that the president has their back.”
For decades, Ohio was a national political bellwether that reflected America’s wider socioeconomic milieu. Its three large cities – Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland – provided a solid backbone of support for progressive politics.
In the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama won more votes in Ohio than any Democrat in history, repeating the feat four years later when he was elected to a second term in the White House. Until 2011, Democratic party governors were not uncommon.
However, in recent years, Ohio has seen a marked shift to the right.
The perpetrator of the 2017Charlottesville car attackthat killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer and the founder of the Daily Stormer, an influential neo-Nazi website, are both from Ohio. The plot to kill the Democratic Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer was formulated in Dublin, the same well-to-do Columbus suburb where Cook spent part of his childhood.
Eighty-three Ohioanswere chargedfor their part in the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol that was prompted by President Trump. After Delaware, West Virginia and Pennsylvania – all states geographically closer to the capital – Ohio had the highest per capita number of arrested rioters. The same year, Columbus experienced a higher per capita incidence of hate crimes than all but three other US cities.
In 2023, aNazi homeschooling effortwith more than 3,000 online subscribers run by residents of Upper Sandusky in the state’s north-west was unearthed. Ohio’s department of education found that no law had been broken.
Ku Klux Klan white supremacist flyers and marches by neo-Nazis are also now happening with growing frequency inplaces such as Springfield, Ohio, fafter Trump’s false claims in September that immigrants there were eating pets.
Neo-Nazi publicity efforts in Cincinnati, Columbus and elsewhere in Ohio – a defined effort, experts say, to desensitize communities to their imagery and normalize their presence – are on the rise.
At the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, politics has been overrun by far-right Republicans. Increasingly, Ohio Republicans have voiced extremist views or passed laws that disproportionately affect minorities and immigrants – groups regularly targeted by white supremacists.
“The far right has long been working to engage in local and state politics. They recognize that change is more likely when like-minded persons are designing policy and making decisions,” said Laura Dugan, a professor of human security and sociology at Ohio State University.
“We have no mechanism to stop this radicalization when it is being reflected in the statehouse.”
It was in this environment that Cook grew up. He and his coconspirators “fanaticized” about “the opportunity for white leaders to take control of this country and its government,”according to his sentencing memorandum.
Eight months after Cook was charged with conspiring to give material support to terrorists, theColumbus Dispatch ran an op-edcalling out some Hilliard residents for spreading hate. Some have filed lawsuits against the local school district to force staff to stop wearing badges in support of LGBTQ communities.
“Nothing is happening in the schools, and I think it really needs to because young men especially are being influenced by this culture wars stuff and the manosphere,” said Picciolini.
“There really isn’t enough happening to counter that.”
Picciolini was recruited by the Chicago-area SkinHeads when he was 14 years old and spent eight years as a member of white nationalist groups. Since leaving the movement, he has been involved in founding or cofounding many deradicalizing programs and has criticized the lack of government support for them.
Picciolini said he had seen children as young as nine be recruited online.
“The reason that anybody joins these groups is not the extremist ideology. It’s [for] the sense of identity, community and purpose,” he said.
“For people who feel marginalized, they have a difficult time with what I call ‘potholes’ – trauma or challenges with mental health; a health issue; physical abuse. It pushes people to the fringes and to the internet. A lot of these kids are being targeted because of their ‘potholes.’”
For Rhianan Rudd, who struggled to make friends, the internet proved to be both a release and a trap.
Her deepening online relationship with Cook saw her further radicalized, prompting her to make verbal threats to blow up a synagogue and download information on bomb making, for which she was arrested in October 2020. That resulted in her being taken out ofPrevent, the deradicalization program her mother had signed her into the month before. Six months later, she became the youngest person ever charged with terrorism in the UK, charges which were dropped when investigators concluded she had been groomed and abused by Cook.
An officer for Preventreferred to Ruddas the “most vulnerable individual she’s ever met”, after the teen admitted that Cook had been radicalizing her. She told her social worker that she felt she had “two competing individuals in her head”.
Cook wasn’t the only American male with a white supremacist background in Rudd’s life.
Rudd’s mother, Emily Carter, had been in contact with Dax Mallaburn, a convicted felon and known member of the Aryan Brotherhood in Arizona, through a prison pen pal program. They began a romantic relationship that saw Mallaburn move to the UK and live with Rudd and her mother. Mallaburn isallegedto have sexually groomed Rudd, and information gathered by police found that Cook was in contact with Mallaburn, telling him to teach the child “the right way”.
The terrorism charges against Rudd were dropped in December 2021, but the damage had been done.
Just weeks before her death, she asked her mother for help contacting a neo-Nazi group in the US and attempted to travel to London to acquire a visa to travel to Texas.
“Her being groomed was huge and I saw Rhianan change,” Carter said at an inquest into Rudd’s death and the role antiterrorism and other agencies played. The inquest is ongoing until June.
While the internet may have facilitated Cook’s abuse of Rudd, law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have come in for criticism.
On two occasions in early 2020, Cook’s vehicle was stopped by law enforcement, in Ohio and Texas. Drugs, Nazi paraphernalia and weapons were found, and yet both times Cook was let go.
The FBI shared information withBritish intelligenceabout Cook’s activities and trafficking of Rudd five months before she took her own life, while several years before her death, anMI5 agent lamentedto a senior colleague that Rudd couldn’t be referred to an anti-extremism program while she was under a police investigation.
Although Cook’s sentencing memorandum recognized that his “singular” end goal was linked to “the propagation and fruition of white supremacist ideology”, he was not investigated for his exploitation of Rudd or faced potential charges related to her death.
Legal experts say there is nothing precluding Cook from being charged for crimes related to the death of Rudd in the future, so long as no relevant statute of limitations has been tolled and there is probable cause to support specific crimes under US law. He could also be extradited to the UK to face charges, although that would be an unprecedented move.
Cook’s sentencing memorandum suggests he has embarrassment and remorse for his terrorism-related actions, pleading guilty to the crimes he was charged with. But given the opportunity to discuss details of his relationship with Rudd, Cook is more circumspect.
When the Guardian sought to interview Cook through the federal correctional institute he is being held in South Carolina, he declined. In aninterview with Columbus Monthlypublished last year, he also declined to discuss his interactions with Rudd.
While Cook is set to be released well before his 30th birthday, there is little evidence to suggest that Ohio will have solved its problem of white supremacist extremism by then.
In November 2023, a 20-year-old man entered a Walmart store in Beavercreek, Ohio, and shot four people before turning the gun on himself. Police found Nazi flags and a “SS history book” at his home. The Anti-Defamation Leaguefoundthat Ohio was second only to Texas for the number of white supremacist incidents in 2023.
About a dozen neo-Nazis, some armed, unfurled flags and signsbearing extremist materialin February 2025 over a highway close to a historically African American community in Cincinnati. In response, there’s been silence from the White House.
“They love this administration,” said Picciolini of the extremists. “They love the environment they are in.”