Outside the Beltway

Nihilistic Violent Extremism?

Some criminologists have identified a new trend.

James Joyner · Sunday, February 8, 2026 · 4 comments

In his report “Killers without a cause: The rise in nihilistic violent extremism,” veteran WaPo reporter Peter Whoriskey purports to identify an emerging trend.

Amid a wave of high-profile killings and political violence in the United States, investigators havebeen confounded regularly by the absence of a recognizable agenda.

The assailants in several cases — shootings, a bombing, a planned drone attack — resisted familiar labels and categories. They were not Democrat or Republican, or Islamist militant, or antifa or white supremacist.

They were something new. In their manifestos, these attackers declared their contempt for humanity and a desire to see the collapse of civilization. Law enforcement officers and federal prosecutors have begun to describe these attacks as a contemporary strain of nihilism, an online revival of the philosophical stance that arose in the 19th century to deny the existence of moral truths and meaning in the universe.

Recent assailants who have been tagged as nihilists include the following: A 15-year-old shooter in Madison, Wisconsin, who left behind a manifesto titled “War Against Humanity” in which she described the human race as “filth.” A 24-year-old man who plotted a drone attack to blow up the Nashville power grid was seeking to precipitate “the start of the end … for the interconnected or otherwise globalized world.” A self-described “anti-natalist,” 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus, blew himself up outside an in vitro fertilization clinic in May, having argued that humans should not be brought into existence without their consent.

“Basically it comes down to: I’m angry that I exist and that nobody got my consent to bring me here,” the clinic bomber said in a recording posted online. “There’s no way you can get consent to bring someone here, so don’t f—ing do it.”

By March, federal prosecutors had adopted the rubric, too, coining a new official term for a variety of this destruction: nihilistic violent extremism, which they defined as “criminal conduct … in furtherance of political, social, religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability.” The first known use of the term came in the prosecution of a Wisconsin teenager who murdered his parents in February 2025 as part of a plot to foment a civil war and assassinate public figures.

While the hatred of these attackers sometimes veered into racist views, what stood out to investigators was the broader desire to attack all of society.

Amid a wave of high-profile killings and political violence in the United States, investigators havebeen confounded regularly by the absence of a recognizable agenda.

The assailants in several cases — shootings, a bombing, a planned drone attack — resisted familiar labels and categories. They were not Democrat or Republican, or Islamist militant, or antifa or white supremacist.

They were something new. In their manifestos, these attackers declared their contempt for humanity and a desire to see the collapse of civilization. Law enforcement officers and federal prosecutors have begun to describe these attacks as a contemporary strain of nihilism, an online revival of the philosophical stance that arose in the 19th century to deny the existence of moral truths and meaning in the universe.

Recent assailants who have been tagged as nihilists include the following: A 15-year-old shooter in Madison, Wisconsin, who left behind a manifesto titled “War Against Humanity” in which she described the human race as “filth.” A 24-year-old man who plotted a drone attack to blow up the Nashville power grid was seeking to precipitate “the start of the end … for the interconnected or otherwise globalized world.” A self-described “anti-natalist,” 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus, blew himself up outside an in vitro fertilization clinic in May, having argued that humans should not be brought into existence without their consent.

“Basically it comes down to: I’m angry that I exist and that nobody got my consent to bring me here,” the clinic bomber said in a recording posted online. “There’s no way you can get consent to bring someone here, so don’t f—ing do it.”

By March, federal prosecutors had adopted the rubric, too, coining a new official term for a variety of this destruction: nihilistic violent extremism, which they defined as “criminal conduct … in furtherance of political, social, religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability.” The first known use of the term came in the prosecution of a Wisconsin teenager who murdered his parents in February 2025 as part of a plot to foment a civil war and assassinate public figures.

While the hatred of these attackers sometimes veered into racist views, what stood out to investigators was the broader desire to attack all of society.

This all seems rather vague. And, while three cases can indeed be the start of a trend, it’s far more likely that they’re one-offs that are only related when we’re looking for evidence of a trend.

But, no, it’s not just WaPo reporters and the Trump Justice Department seeing something here.

“We were seeing a set of cases in which the existing definitions did not apply,” said Cody Zoschak, a researcher with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and former New York Police Department counterterrorism analyst who also worked on counterterrorism policy at the State Department.

Over the past 18 months, the United States has experienced a wave of high-profile targeted violence, including school attacks, a handful of bombings, and the assassinations of a Minnesota state legislator, the head of UnitedHealthcare and conservative activist Charlie Kirk. While the targets were varied, the alleged assailants all claimed to be committed to furthering a cause.

But the high-profile cases, at least, seem to be explainable by ordinary political motivations and/or mental illness.

To better understand the phenomenon, The Washington Post analyzed incidents in which the perpetrator or perpetrators left written explanations of their motives, according to investigators.

That’s . . . a very limited and unrepresentative sample.

From a search of academic databases and news clips, 17 attacks fit the bill in the period from July 2024 — when the first assassination attempt was made on Donald Trump — to December 2025.

So, 17 attacks in a span of 17 months in a country with 330 million people and some 20,000 homicides a year?

Several of the attacks were “political” in the conventional sense, aimed at either Democrats or Republicans or motivated by anger at the Israel-Gaza war, particularly the treatment of Palestinians. But six of those assailants fit something like the nihilistic pattern, while three others were motivated by a narrowly focused grievance that had rarely popped up before.

The “special interest” attackers include Luigi Mangione, who is charged with gunning down a UnitedHealthcare chief executive in Manhattan in December 2024 because of his anger at the industry; Army Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger, who blew up his Tesla Cybertruck in front of a Las Vegas casino in January 2025, citing the loss of U.S. military lives in Afghanistan; and Shane Tamura, who attacked a Manhattan office building in July over the National Football League’s handling of concussions.

So now we’re down to six incidents over 17 months. And none of the three just described strike me as “deriv[ing] primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability.” They all seem to have had rather specific grievances.

Nihilists are different. In past decades, people holding solitary grievances against society may have struggled to act on them. But the internet has provided them easily accessible technical expertise and, despite their distaste for society, a sense of community. The IVF clinic bomber queried an AI application for information about the “detonation velocity” he could create with a certain type of chemical. The Nashville plotter seeking to sow chaos by blowing up the city’s power grid allegedly found information on YouTube about how to build a drone to carry explosives. They found places online to share their anger with the like-minded.

“There was a time when terrorist activity was organizational in nature. It was structured: bomb maker, recruiter, foot soldier, leader,” said Michael Jensen, the director of research for the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University. “The advent of the internet chipped away at that pretty quickly.”

Jensen added, “What is scary now is we don’t know where the next threat might be coming from.”

The Internet did not emerge in July 2024. I know that because this here blog has been around since January 2003.

It’s certainly true that various AI models make it easier than ever before to get information on how to do dangerous things. And that it’s easier to find like-minded whackos than ever before. But the Columbine High School shooting was in 1999, when the World Wide Web was in its relative infancy. Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995, back when AOL was still sending out floppy discs and people were accessing the Internet via 2400 baud modems that tied up their landline telephones. Granted, he had a little help, but he wasn’t part of a vast network.

The rest of the report is a deep dive into the individual cases. The most instructive is the Madison, Wisconsin shooter.

[She] had an account on an online forum that hosts images of people dying violently. Fans on such websites are classified by researchers as part of the “true crime community” — a nonideological online subculture where fascination with mass killers sometimes stretches into admiration. Among some fans, the instigators of the attacks are viewed as romantic loners, outcasts who turn to violence in revenge against society.

In her manifesto, [she] professed reverence for several mass killers, describing them in language that read like the musings of a teenage fan. Like others in this world, she referred to these killers as “saints” and venerated them for their seemingly meaningless acts of violence.

“I’ve looked into him since late 2021-2022, and i’ve just realized how much potential bombs have,” she wrote of an 18-year-old who in 2018 killed 20 and injured another 70 in a bomb and gun attack at his college in Crimea. “… Some of his fan girls are like, really strange though in my opinion, but aren’t like all fangirls?”

Of a Turkish 18-year-old who stabbed five people at a mosque and broadcast the attack on social media in 2024, she wrote, “An Ultimate Saint … A being of true nature … Someone I was inspired by, maybe I didn’t know him, but what stops me, what would have stopped him from doing what was right and now proven to be a true form of being and of simple hope.”

Elsewhere, she had posted a picture of herself wearing a T-shirt bearing the logo of KMFDM, the German industrial band favored by the two teenagers who carried out the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999.

“Search engines often give people a community of the like-minded — in things good and things bad,” said Barnes, the former Madison police chief.

Her manifesto, “War Against Humanity,” reflected her contempt for people.

“Humanity is filth and I don’t like filth nor want to live in it …” she wrote. “This situation and the situation of a lifetime is a get the f— out moment and don’t come back, I will never go back and nag my way through life. It’s not even my fault though, it’s everyone else’s, it has to be theirs and not mine.

“ … I hate how the population thinks, grows, and talks and how they make romance fake. If only some days we could do a public execution, that would be gladly needed. I wouldn’t mind throwing some stones at idiots or even watching from the far back when they get hanged.”

She was a “fangirl” of mass murderers and, apparently, some number of others found her tale inspirational. At least one of them, who exchanged romantic text messages with her, was foiled in a plot of unspecified plausibility to carry out seven mass shootings. A few months later, another fan shot up hi school and then killed himself.

But all of the cases are complicated. Many of them have a racist and/or antisemitic element. And all seemed to be narcissists seeking fame for their crimes.

One of the first known uses of the nihilist label by federal prosecutors came in March in the case of [the] Wisconsin 17-year-old who, according to federal court documents, killed his parents to “obtain the financial means and autonomy necessary” to kill President Donald Trump and overthrow the U.S. government.

Federal prosecutors filed excerpts from what they say is [his] manifesto, titled “Accelerate the Collapse,” linking him to nihilistic violent extremism.

“By getting rid of the president and perhaps the vice president, that is guaranteed to bring in some chaos,” according to the manifesto. “And not only that, but it will further bring into the public the idea that assassination and accelerating the collapse are possible things to do. … It is time that we lead the way to the System collapse.”

[He] considered himself an “accelerationist,” a label for those who believe that society is irreparable and that the only solution is its destruction, after which it can be rebuilt, according to court documents.

I’m persuadable that nihilistic violence is in actual movement. But it seems more like some mentally disturbed young people finding fuel through social media and adults trying to make sense of the senseless post hoc.