A prominent white supremacist who encourages acts of domestic terror and who once claimed to have influenced the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter is a 27-year-old restaurant worker in California, a new HuffPost investigation has confirmed.

For years, a man using the pseudonym Vic Mackey has been the leading voice in a confederation of neo-Nazis called the Bowl Patrol , a reference to white supremacist murderer Dylann Roofs bowl cut hairstyle.

In podcasts, videos and social media posts reviewed by HuffPost, Mackey has called on his followers including nearly 1,000 on Telegram to commit hate crimes, threatened activists and journalists with rape and violence and celebrated white nationalist massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand; El Paso, Texas; Poway, California, and elsewhere all while keeping his real identity secret.

Though its hard to know the exact number of people Mackey has influenced, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League see him as a leader in this network of extremists, some of whom have been arrested in connection with threats or plans of real-world violence in Roofs name .

Even as so many other white nationalists have been unmasked in recent years among them cops , soldiers and politicians Mackey has remained elusive. But in recent weeks, the Anonymous Comrades Collective , a group of anti-fascist researchers, has traced Mackeys online history and believes he is a man named Andrew Richard Casarez, a 27-year-old pizza delivery driver who lives in a Sacramento suburb.

HuffPost has also confirmed his identity via photos, videos and audio clips, and by speaking to people who have known Casarez over the years.

Casarez did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.

His unmasking comes at a time when there has been a growing threat of violent right-wing extremism in the United States. A recent report from the Center For Strategic and International Studies found that from 1994 to 2020, there were nearly 900 terrorist attacks and plots in the country, nearly 60% of which were carried out by right-wing extremists. In 2019, domestic extremists killed at least 42 people in the United States, making 2019 the sixth-deadliest year on record for domestic extremist-related killings since 1970, according to a February report put out by the ADL Center on Extremism.

With the white supremacist rhetoric of President Donald Trump and his Fox News bullhorn , the growing economic instability caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the heightened political tensions surrounding this years presidential election, violent extremism is expected to grow, according to CSIS.

Already, six alleged members of neo-Nazi group The Base were arrested in January after police discovered plans to foment violence at a Virginia gun rights rally and to target an anti-fascist couple in Georgia. And five suspected members including two alleged leaders of the violent neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division were arrested in February after being accused of targeting journalists by calling police to their homes and dropping off threatening fliers.

Earlier this year, the FBI elevated the threat of racist extremism to a national threat priority for the fiscal year 2020. FBI Director Christopher Wray told the House Judiciary Committee that the new distinction has put white supremacist violence on the same footing as ISIS and homegrown violent extremists.

Making Mass Shooters Into Saints

Dylann Roof stared blankly ahead during his first court appearance days after he gunned down nine Black parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, HuffPost reported from the courthouse at the time. Roof was flanked by two guards in a remote room with a video screen connecting him to the rest of the court. Roof stood silent as families of the victims were given the opportunity to speak.

Nadine Collier, daughter of victim Ethel Lance, said she forgave Roof. Alana Simmons, granddaughter of victim Daniel Simmons, reminded Roof he had failed.

Hate wont win, she told him. My grandfather and the other victims died at the hands of hate. Everyones plea for your soul is proof that they lived in love and their legacies live in love.

On the other side of the country, Andrew Casarez was developing an obsession with Roof. Then 22, Casarez was living at home with his parents after a stint in college. A couple of years before, he was on probation for a DUI, public records show. As the years went on, Casarez would become entrenched in his worship of a murderer, working to build a base of like-minded racists who shared his dangerous ideology.

On Discord, a chat app popular among gamers but also frequently co-opted by right-wing extremists, a group emerged called Bowl Patrol. Though the exact date the group formed is unclear, members were posting as early as 2017, before that years deadly Unite The Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, according to leaked chat logs obtained by independent media collective Unicorn Riot .

Many members called for lynchings and used racial slurs. Another member photoshopped an image of himself smiling while standing in front of a pile of dead bodies at a Nazi death camp during the Holocaust. And yet another, who described himself as the founder of the Bowl Patrol, described how the groups memes would help condition people to carry out mass shootings.

How are they gonna handle stomping a niglets head like a grape gusher if a meme is too much for them? he wrote in one post.

This members username was Vic Mackey, a name borrowed from the racist, corrupt cop character on the TV show The Shield. He fashioned himself the leader of the Bowl Patrol, giving himself the nickname Head Bowl in Charge, and transformed the group into a congregation for Dylann Roof worshippers.

Eventually, Discord shut down the Bowl Patrol group, but Mackey and the other group members found homes elsewhere online, including on Gab and Telegram.

Mackey and a few other members produced a podcast, too, called Bowlcast. In a December 2018 episode, less than two months after a white supremacist named Robert Bowers allegedly shot and killed 11 people inside the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Mackey described how the attack had totally reinvigorated him.

The night before that wonderful thing happened, before Saint Bowers went to synagogue, me and some other bowls on bowl patrol were talking with each other and saying Its a shame that there hasnt been a Saint Roof event, another take me to church event, and that were really due for another one, Mackey said.

Mackey claimed Bowers had followed him on Gab and that the two had interacted. He also boasted that Bowers had posted memes created by the Bowl Patrol group.

Robert Bowers is not going to be the last, not by far, hes not gonna be the last, Mackey said. There is going to be a million Bowers flowers blossoming.

In the year and a half since that episode, Mackey and Bowl Patrol members have canonized many more accused white nationalist mass shooters, often celebrating the lives of Saint Crusius , Saint Earnest and Saint Tarrant .

Vic Mackeys biggest contribution to the white power movement has been to normalize violence and glorify acts of terrorism, Cassie Miller, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told HuffPost recently.

Mackey and the Bowl Patrols emergence, Miller argued, exemplifies how American white nationalists have increasingly come to embrace accelerationism the idea that acts of violence are needed to hasten the collapse of society so that a fascist and whites-only state can be constructed in its place.

In 2017, Miller said, prominent voices of the so-called alt-right, emboldened by the election of Donald Trump, were seeking to gain actual political power. New white nationalist groups like Identity Evropa came to prominence with the express intent of infiltrating the GOP. Fascist figureheads like Richard Spencer organized a series of high-profile rallies to promote their abominable ideas to the masses.

But the Bowl Patrol largely saw these attempts at using mainstream political channels as futile. People like Mackey, Miller said, argued that there was no way white nationalists were going to vote themselves to an ethno-state.

Instead, the Bowl Patrol promoted violence.

In a November 2018 episode of Bowlcast, for example, Mackey implored his listeners to read a certain monosyllabic book, a reference to Siege by neo-Nazi James Mason , which explicitly advocates lone-wolf terror attacks as a way to begin a race war and promotes the extermination of all nonwhites.

Thanks to anti-fascist activism, deplatforming by social media platforms and crackdowns by law enforcement, groups like Identity Evropa have fallen largely into disarray since the Charlottesville rally. Mackey and the Bowl Patrol seem vindicated by their failures and have continued to preach crass accelerationist sermons in podcasts and to post genocidal memes to Gab and Telegram.

All the members of the Bowl Patrol are emboldened by the fact that people dont know who they are, Miller said.

Mackey, in particular, she added, uses anonymity to his favor. And if his name and face are out there, he cant do that anymore.

Unmasking Andrew Richard Casarez

As Vic Mackeys star rose in accelerationist circles, so too did the desire to uncover his real identity.

Last year, Unicorn Riot posted thousands of leaked Discord chats from the Bowl Patrol group. Then, on July 7, the Anonymous Comrades Collective published a blog post identifying Mackey as Andrew Richard Casarez, 27, of Orangevale, California.