Idaho labor economist ran anonymous accounts promoting pro-Russian, far-right views

Standing alongside the rectangular glow of a PowerPoint presentation, Sam Wolkenhauer plays up a nerdy persona. In May 2025, he led a group of North Idaho realtors through a slide deck on labor market trends, slipping in self-deprecating references to the Lord of the Rings, actuarial statistics and spreadsheets. 

Wolkenhauer clicked to a chart on unemployment claims. 

“One of the first things you have to understand about economists,” he told the group, “is we’re very petty and we’re very, very fixated on the aesthetic quality of our graphs.”

Wolkenhauer, an economist and research analyst supervisor at the Idaho Department of Labor, has often served as the face of the state’s agency for worker welfare. He regularly delivers presentations to local civic groups, hosts webinars on workforce statistics and gives media interviews to regional news outlets. 

But online researchers recently identified Wolkenhauer as the anonymous poster behind large Substack and X.com accounts that drive thousands of dollars in subscriptions each month with pro-Russian commentary that often traffics in Nazi imagery and amplifies far-right organizations. 

Wolkenhauer’s Big Serge account on X, formerly known as Twitter, has more than 196,000 followers and his Big Serge Thought account on Substack ranks as the 20th most popular history newsletter on the site. He has used the accounts to post political and cultural opinions that attack Ukrainian perspectives as well as LGBTQ individuals and others. In one recent post, he called for mass executions in response to a UK grooming investigation.

“I am an Orthodox Christian with religious/familial affinity with the Russian people,” Wolkenhauer wrote on X in 2024, “and I hate America’s Atlanticist regime of gay race communism which loots the American people to propagate a great ugliness and spiritual sterility upon the world.”

The Big Serge account on X frequently employs Nazi imagery, praising Nazi fashion and insignias. Memes and AI images of Adolf Hitler were posted alongside recommendations for far-right publications that promote white supremacist ideologies, drawing additional engagement from overtly racist and antisemitic accounts. 

Time stamps and metadata indicate many of Wolkenhauer’s posts were published during regular working hours. 

When contacted by InvestigateWest in June, Wolkenhauer initially denied having any online accounts. Within hours, hundreds of posts started to disappear from his X account as he deleted old tweets from public view. After Wolkenhauer was shown evidence linking him to the accounts, he went public with his identity on June 26.

In a statement to InvestigateWest, Wolkenhauer described himself as a hobbyist historian who uses exaggerated posts to mock neo-Nazism, antisemitism and misogynistic ideologies. 

“I am very proud to have maintained a high quality of writing,” he wrote on Substack, “and a growing readership over multiple years.”

 “All state employees are expected to adhere to state laws and policies applicable to their employment,” Bureau Chief Darlene Carnopis wrote to InvestigateWest. “Evidence of misconduct is investigated in accordance with these policies.”

Wolkenhauer joined the Idaho Department of Labor right out of college in 2015 and spent several years as a regional economist, according to a 2021 interview with the Coeur d’Alene Press. He described his job as providing analysis and forecasting on labor markets, workforce demographics, and other economic issues. He recently received a promotion to a supervisor position this past spring. 

“Russian history is a special interest of mine,” he told the CDA Press. “I own well over 100 books on Russian history, which is probably a little absurd, but I enjoy it.”

Wolkenhauer later started his anonymous Big Serge accounts in 2022 as Russia launched its military invasion of Ukraine. He posted that his many years of reading on Russian history had proved a fortunate hobby for understanding the war.

“So, I created a Twitter account hoping to contribute to the discussion however I could,” he wrote on Substack, “as well as to capitalize on the current fascination with war [and] to talk about military history. People seem to like it, so I’ll try to keep doing it.”

Substack has certified the Big Serge account with a badge confirming it has more than 1,000 paid subscribers, with subscription rates of $5 a month, or $50 for an annual plan. Those rates suggest Wolkenhauer could be making at least $50,000 a year from his newsletter. 

Wolkenhauer did not respond to questions about his income from his online accounts other than to say the Russian government had no influence on his content or subscription revenue. 

As the Big Serge accounts grew, online investigators with TUA Research — an open source intelligence group that tracks Russian propaganda and publicly supports Ukraine — started piecing together clues to his identity. TUA Research eventually matched registration details from a Substack data leak to Wolkenhauer and provided its evidence to InvestigateWest for review. 

InvestigateWest found numerous posts accusing Ukrainian forces of war crimes and commiserating with Russian nationalist accounts that celebrated violence against Ukraine. Several Big Serge posts referred to Ukrainians with terms that are widely considered to be derogatory ethnic slurs. 

“Nobody wants to see kids get hurt,” he posted in 2022, “but these deaths are the fault of Ukrainian neo-Nazi cowards who retreat into cities and use children as human shields.”

“The sooner this gangster state is destroyed the better,” he posted later.

In 2024, Wolkenhauer reinforced a debunked antisemitic narrative against Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman who was lynched in 1915 after being wrongfully convicted of murdering a young girl. 

Wolkenhauer has also posted that “treating people as humans” is totally separate from LGBT issues and referred to transgender people with a transphobic slur. In other posts, he leans into other stereotypes.

“The obese black lady at the DMV and the divorced, childless white HR lady who channels her existential despair into bureaucratic terrorism,” he posted. “Two of the worst types of people, elevated to the highest levels of power.”

Nearly all of these posts disappeared in the days after InvestigateWest contacted Wolkenhauer, as X statistics show he deleted more than 5,000 posts from his feed. (Many of those posts disappeared during work hours.) He also removed emojis representing the Orthodox cross, American flag and Russian flag from his X display name. 

“You are correct that I scrubbed some tweets,” he told InvestigateWest. “My Twitter personality is quite sarcastic and I often use exaggerated sarcasm to mock ideas that I find ridiculous. … However, I understand that sarcasm may not translate to people that have not followed me and become acclimated to my style.”

Ross said he did not detect sarcasm or mockery in a recent post calling for the executions of “hundreds of thousands” and “violently resetting the ethnic makeup” of the United Kingdom. 

“I didn’t read that as a spoof,” he said. “I read it as taking the most extreme stance you possibly can and opening up negotiation in that sort of way, through a really hard-line position. … I see it more as part of that hysteria that’s been part of the far right since Gamergate [in 2014].”

Ross said Wolkenhauer had also built friendly relationships with several mainstay institutions and personalities of the far right. He has written an essay for Man’s World magazine, film reviews for “dissident right” magazine IM-1776 and repeatedly promoted Antelope Hill — publishers of Nazi and white nationalist materials. 

“I think a lot of it is about status,” he said. “The new right, which Antelope Hill is a part of, basically serves this purpose of opening up opportunities for … a kind of a movement-oriented prestige.”

Internationally, Wolkenhauer has also made guest appearances on the ultranationalist Russians With Attitude podcast and traded praise with right-wing bodybuilder Raw Egg Nationalist. 

While Wolkenhauer told InvestigateWest he had turned down requests to write for some right-wing outlets, he has still posted links to their feeds and called them “friends.” In other cases, he has piled on to their online mockery of Ukrainians or other targets. 

“A lot of it is a way of gaining notoriety,” Ross said. “The New Right … has done a lot to try to aestheticize fascism within the context of modern America. Being involved in that sort of milieu is a way of capturing an audience that has money and is willing to spend it on these pseudo-academic projects.”

Ross said online networks have created new financial incentives for extremism. While centrist U.S. political institutions used to help moderate extreme views, he said many right-wing organizations now reject that kind of policing as “punching right.” Some of the anonymous accounts Wolkenhauer fraternized with have weathered their own public identifications in recent years. 

“They’ve really kind of built up a culture of solidarity,” Ross said, “where being identified is almost ultimately like a sign that you’ve made it.”

The Idaho Department of Human Resources declined an interview request to discuss what kind of online activity could violate employment policies. The department’s own employee handbook states it follows the state policy on disclosing potential conflicts of interest and outside work. 

“Requests for approval to conduct outside employment must be in writing and approved by the Administrator,” the handbook states. 

The DHR handbook also emphasizes that employees can engage in political activities — on their own time. 

“Employees retain the right to otherwise participate fully in public affairs … in a manner which does not materially compromise the neutrality, efficiency or integrity in the employees’ official duties,” the handbook states. “Any employee wishing to participate in any political activities should do so outside normal business hours.”

InvestigateWest and TUA Research found time stamps and metadata showing numerous Big Serge posts to X and Substack went up during regular work hours. Wolkenhauer did not respond to questions asking him to explain or correct those time stamps. 

The DHR handbook also warns that employees cannot use state-owned devices or network access to conduct unauthorized business activities for financial gain, distribute offensive material or engage in political activity. 

“Employees disregarding these policies or improperly using DHR-owned technology or state-funded network resources, access, and rights are subject to disciplinary action up to and including dismissal,” the policy states. 

Wolkenhauer asserted multiple times that his posts were “personal opinions” separate from his professional role and duties. 

“Any posting was done on my private equipment,” he told InvestigateWest.

“I would ultimately characterize myself as a hobbyist military historian who has tried to apply a historian’s framework to current events, with a Twitter account that can at times be sarcastic and combative,” he added, “but you will find no endorsement of extremist view[s] or conspiracy theories in my writing.”

To his Substack readers, Wolkenhauer wrote that the public reckoning with his online accounts had clarified a diminished dedication to posting newsletters amid his other obligations. 

“[The] reality is that my heart has not been in it,” he wrote. “I wish to continue to publish here sporadically in the future, but for now I cannot commit to any sort of stable output.”

He has posted at least 20 new tweets, retweets or replies on X since then.