O9A vs 764: How the Two Networks Differ and Where They Connect

Two Different Things

The Order of Nine Angles and the 764 network are routinely treated as a single phenomenon in the press coverage and in some of the academic treatment, and the conflation produces a false picture. The two networks operate in different decades, around different populations, with different doctrinal frameworks, through different recruitment infrastructures. They share material. They are not the same.

The Order of Nine Angles is the older formation. Its documentary record begins in the late 1970s in rural Shropshire, in the English-Welsh border region the order’s own writings call the Welsh Marches. The founder, writing under the pseudonym Anton Long, has been identified by external researchers as the British neo-Nazi David Myatt; the identity-evidence record is reviewed separately. The order built itself around a body of writing that synthesizes left-hand-path occultism with accelerationist neo-Nazi politics. Its organizational structure is decentralized: small cells called nexions, operating semi-autonomously, bound together by adherence to the corpus. Its target population, across most of its history, has been disaffected young men in the British and later American neo-Nazi orbit.

The 764 network is the younger formation. It originated around 2020 with Bradley Cadenhead, a then-fifteen-year-old in Stephenville, Texas, who built the original 764 Discord server around the production and distribution of child sexual abuse material and around the coercion of younger minors into acts of self-harm. The network grew rapidly through 2021 and 2022, drawing in adherents across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. The FBI classified 764 as a Tier One threat in 2023, the same designation it reserves for foreign terrorist organizations. The U.S. State Department designated 764 as a transnational terrorist organization in 2025. The Bradley Cadenhead profile and the 764 explainer treat the network in detail.

The forty-five years between the two formations are not incidental. O9A grew up in the British far-right print and zine culture of the 1980s and only entered the broader online accelerationist ecosystem in the late 2000s. 764 is a native of the post-2020 platform environment: Discord, Telegram, Wire, Session, and the encrypted messaging ecosystem that displaced the open forums in which the earlier accelerationist groups recruited.

Where the Doctrines Diverge

O9A’s doctrinal corpus is substantial and explicit. The order publishes, openly, a set of foundational texts (Naos, The Black Book of Satan, The Sinister Tradition, and a body of accumulated essays and ritual texts) that articulate a coherent if extreme position: that Western civilization is in terminal decline, that its replacement requires the production of new human types capable of acting outside conventional moral constraints, and that the production of such types proceeds through a structured initiatory curriculum in which acts of transgression function as developmental milestones. The political content is explicit. The occult content is explicit. The instructional framework is laid out in detail across multiple texts. A reader can identify what the order claims to believe and what it claims its members should do.

764’s doctrinal content is substantially thinner. The network operates without a foundational text comparable to Naos. Its rhetorical content draws heavily on O9A imagery and on broader accelerationist iconography, but the integration is loose. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s explainer on 764 has described the network’s relationship to O9A as primarily aesthetic and symbolic rather than fully doctrinal: 764 adopted the look and some of the language of O9A’s transgression framework without absorbing the initiatory structure that, in O9A proper, the transgressions are supposed to serve.

The functional difference is that O9A members, in the order’s own framing, are supposed to be working toward something: personal initiation, the production of a new self, the advancement of the broader sinister tradition. 764 members, in the network’s operational practice, are working through something: a pattern of coercion and CSAM production that the network treats as both end and means. The personal-development frame is largely absent. The accelerationist political frame is also largely absent. What remains is the harm itself, organized around the production of evidence of harm.

This is the difference that researchers including the Counter Extremism Project and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies have flagged as analytically significant. Treating 764 as simply a younger O9A obscures the operational pattern. 764 is recognizable in O9A’s terms only in part. The rest of it is its own thing.

Where the Operational Connection Runs

The connection that does run between the two networks runs through a single publishing operation. Joshua Caleb Sutter, the South Carolina figure who served as a paid FBI confidential informant from 2003 through at least 2021, founded the American O9A nexion Tempel ov Blood and operated Martinet Press as its publishing arm. The Sutter FBI informant investigation covers the financial and accountability dimensions of the case in detail. What matters for the O9A–764 connection is the catalog.

Martinet Press published, among other titles, the novel Iron Gates, attributed to Sutter and credited within Tempel ov Blood’s internal literature as a foundational text of the American sinister tradition. Iron Gates is a 312-page work of fiction that depicts, in graphic detail, scenarios involving child sexual abuse, human sacrifice, and torture carried out by O9A adherents in a post-civilizational setting. The book’s downstream circulation has been documented: it appeared in Atomwaffen Division’s Discord servers as required reading through the mid-2010s, and it appeared in 764-affiliated channels through the early 2020s. The text bridged the two networks not as an item of academic-occult interest but as an operational manual for the kinds of harm both networks treat as constitutive of their work.

The Tempel ov Blood material more broadly performed the same bridging function. Texts including Liber 333 and Bluebird, both produced through Sutter’s publishing operation, articulated a synthesis of O9A doctrine with American neo-Nazi political content and with explicit instructions on what the order calls insight roles: long-term infiltration of institutions including law enforcement and the military. The texts circulated through the same online infrastructure that subsequently incubated 764. The transmission was not curated by anyone with editorial responsibility for the doctrine. The texts were available; the texts were read; the texts shaped the rhetorical and operational practice of the readers.

The case against treating 764 as fully doctrinally O9A is that 764 absorbed the material without absorbing the surrounding initiatory framework. The case for treating the two networks as operationally connected is that the same publishing operation produced material that radicalized both. The relationship is not identity. The relationship is shared infrastructure.

What This Means for the Investigation

The analytical distinction matters because the policy responses differ. Proscribing O9A, which the UK government has declined to do despite cross-party pressure since 2020, would address the doctrinal source. Proscribing 764, which the U.S. State Department effectively did through the 2025 transnational-terrorist designation, addresses the operational network. Neither action substitutes for the other. The doctrine can continue to produce new operational expressions even after a particular network is dismantled. The networks can continue to absorb new doctrinal material even after a particular source is suppressed.

The Sutter case sits at the convergence point. As long as the FBI’s handling of the Sutter informant relationship, and the broader pattern of informants embedded in extremist networks while continuing to produce radicalizing material, remains unaddressed at the level of institutional accountability, the upstream pipeline that has fed both O9A and 764 remains structurally intact. The proscription of downstream networks proceeds; the production of the material those networks absorb continues.

That is the residue. Two networks, forty-five years apart, are sharing a publishing pipeline that the federal government paid to operate. The doctrinal differences are real. The downstream consequences accumulated through the same channel.

Sources

• Institute for Strategic Dialogue, “The Order of Nine Angles” explainer
• Counter Extremism Project, “Order of Nine Angles”
• Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “The Order of Nine Angles,” July 2023
• ADL, “764 backgrounder”
• Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET), “The Designation of 764 Network: Why Does it Matter?” 16 March 2026
• GNET, “764: The Intersection of Terrorism, Violent Extremism, and Child Sexual Exploitation,” 19 January 2024
• Ali Winston, “The FBI Paid a Violent Extremist Leader More Than $140,000,” WIRED, August 2024
• Hope Not Hate, “Government Misses Opportunity to Proscribe Order of Nine Angles,” 19 April 2021
• Middlebury Institute CTEC, “Dangerous Organizations and Bad Actors: Order of Nine Angles”