The inside story of how a pastor’s son started a neo-Nazi militia and got arrested by the FBI. Andrew Nary and Aiden Cuevas were spooked. They were listening to a podcast about an FBI informant and thought the setup sounded uncomfortably familiar: the day before, in an abandoned parking lot off Highway 72 in northern Alabama, Cuevas allegedly handed $1,000 in cash to a man claiming he could sell them firearms with obliterated serial numbers—a federal felony. The two met with the seller again the next day, asked a lot of questions, and a reassured Cuevas allegedly gave him another $500 for more firearms. Nary and Cuevas, two men in their early 20s with deep ties to the neo-Nazi movement, allegedly intended to use the weapons, in part, to “take out” a former associate of theirs who they suspected of being a government source. On the morning of January 20, 2026, Cuevas traveled across the state line, with Nary allegedly trailing him in a “shadow car” as a lookout, to a hotel in Tennessee to meet the seller to pick up the weapons. The seller was, in fact, an undercover officer, and Cuevas was immediately arrested. Nary was arrested an hour later after surveillance teams observed him returning to the house he shared with Cuevas. After running into the house and leaving again in his car, Nary was stopped by a task force officer. Both were charged with conspiracy to traffic in firearms and are being held, without bond, in separate detention centers. They have both entered pleas of not guilty. As a teenager, Nary founded Automata, a neo-Nazi organization that promoted paramilitary training and sought to create an ethnostate in North Carolina. At Nary’s detention hearing on January 23, Joint Terrorism Task Force Investigator Chris Hluzek testified that members of Automata had previously been arrested on charges of weapons trafficking and other violent offenses. According to filings, prosecutors have already produced roughly 20,000 pages of paper evidence, with some four terabytes of digital discovery expected. Automata was the first of many groups that Nary—the son of a revivalist preacher—would start or organize alongside in the Southeast.
via decoherence: The rise and fall of Automata
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