Texas Man Indicted For Online Comments Advocating Shooting AZ Poll Workers And Killing Kids

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Frederick Francis Goltz

A Texas man accused of using the Patriots.win social media site in November to support killing the children as a political message and suggesting a mass shooting of poll workers in Arizona “might be the way to go” will remain in pretrial detention without bail after a federal magistrate cited the risk to the community.

Frederick Francis Goltz has been indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of interstate threatening communications. One count alleges the Lubbock resident used Patriots.win to post the name, address, and phone number of an Arizona poll worker along with a comment about the ease with which someone could have “got to” the poll worker’s children.

Goltz, 51, was taken into custody by FBI special agents on Dec. 20 in Texas after coming to the attention of the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center in mid-November via a tip that a user called “FreeSpeechMaster” made threatening comments on Patriots.win, a site which describes itself as a “right-wing news, memes, and discussion aggregator.”

The FBI also found the FreeSpeechMaster name was registered on the Gab social media platform with a display name of ShootThePope. It did not take long for investigators to identify the Internet Protocol (IP) address used to post the comments and then confirm Goltz, a Canadian citizen with legal permanent residency status in the U.S., as the subscriber.

According to court records, Goltz did not limit his interest in the death of children to only those of elections officials.

In July 2022, he commented online that “the only way to punish” a well-known American medical advisor was “to execute him and everyone that helped him. I’m even in favor of going after his children and great-grandchildren.”

A Nov. 5 comment read, “Time to start killing Canadian law enforcement AND their families. It’s important to get the families. This is what sends the message 100 years into the future.

But it was a Nov. 14 comment by FreeSpeechMaster about elections in Arizona and Nevada that pondered a mass shooting of election workers in certain “highly suspect precincts.” Then on Nov. 21, the same user wrote of the possibility of harm coming to the children of an unidentified Arizona poll worker. At the same time, the worker’s name, address, and phone number were posted in what is referred to as doxxing.

Two days later, FreeSpeechMaster turned his ire to an unnamed Maricopa County official married to an attorney. The comment questioned whether the couple “has kids.” When another user replied kids are off limits, Goltz allegedly asserted that children could –and should– be targeted.

“No, NOTHING is off limits. It’s people like you that are supposedly with us, who don’t have the stomach to do whatever it takes to get our country back. That’s why we lose. They’ve come after our kids in every way possible and you have some aversion to targeting theirs?” the comment reads.

Another online comment noted in the criminal complaint reads, “The children are the most important ones to get because it sends a message 100 years into the future that people will pay the price for ‘sins of the father.’ Dead children burn into the memories of people. Dead adults are forgotten much easier.”

If convicted, Goltz faces a federal prison term of five years for each count, although probation and a fine are possible.