In the Minneapoli shot, an increasingly familiar model of violent extremism: NPR

One day after an attacker killed two children and injured 18 other children and adults in a Catholic church in Minnesota, the The FBI said The attack was motivated by a “hateful ideology”. But the online materials presumed to belong to the shooter paint a more complex image, say several analysts of extremism.

Instead, they say that the emerging profile seems to line up with an increasing tendency of school fire committed by young people who house a misanthropic vision of the world, who worship the authors of mass violence and who seek notoriety within communities that share this obsession.

“There does not seem to be a coherent ideological reason behind this attack,” said Amy Cooter, deputy director of the Institute for the fight against digital extremism. “It really seems that it is much more about violence for violence.”

Cooter and other analysts painted through videos that were downloaded at the time of the attack to a YouTube account that would belong to Robin Westman, the 23 -year -old shooter. We present handwritten journals, totaling more than 200 pages. It is phonetically in English, but written in Cyrillic Letters. Another video shows a letter addressed to family and friends, in English, then turns to a range of weapons arranged on a flat surface. They included a rifle, a hunting rifle, a handgun, a revolver, several magazines, a smoked bomb and a tactical belt.

“I think the most important thing is what the shooter wrote about the slide of this handgun:” There is no message “,” said Cody Zoschak, a main framework of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “There is an intrinsically non -ideological indication.”

Toxic stew of extremist influences

In his article on social networks, the director of the FBI, Kash Patel, said that the agency found in the writings of Westman and other “anti-Catholic and anti-religious” documents, “hatred and violence against the Jewish people” and “an explicit call for violence against President Trump”. But Cooter and Zoschak note that it is only the sampling of the animus that Westman posted against a wide range of targets. They say that to select a few, it is to ignore the wider image that emerges from the evidence they have seen: that Westman was obsessed with mass murder, especially children, for any reason – and not – at all.

“We have found markers both political opinions on the right and the left here,” said Cooter. “There are a few mentions of manifest racism, obvious anti -Semitism, but they are mixed with many references to many other things.”

For example, the interior cover of a notebook has a sticker of a flag of pride with a rifle bunk to him and words “defend equality”. In addition, the handle associated with the YouTube account includes the numbers “1312”, a digital code commonly used for the anti-political slogan “Acab”. On a firearm, the words “Kill Trump Now” are written in white ink.

But there are also many references to extremist movements on the right. Among the scribbles on arms are the mentions of Waco, a confrontation in Texas between the federal government and a religious group which ended with the death of dozens of people, including children. The weavers are also referenced in the weavers, the family at the center of the 1992 Ruby Ridge confrontation in Idaho. These two events have long hosted the extreme right antling and the feelings of the militia.

The materials are filled with reminders to the killers of white neonazi and violent supremacists. It seems particularly influential, it seems, a mass shooting in 2019 in New Zealand, where a violent white supremacist and Islamophobic killed 51 people in two mosques. But also, in the notebook, the names of several pirates of the September 11 are listed with other mass killers that Westman apparently came.

“We have a lot of random references that are really part of this type of swirling mass of violent references that we see in these spaces, which go to the point that it is not ideological,” said Zoschak.

Despite the inconsistency of ideological and political references and dispersed invocations of cultural memes throughout videos and writings, Zoschak and Cooter say that they reflect an increasingly familiar profile of a school shooter. Westman’s obsession for mass killers echoes other recent school shooters, who have shared an affinity for the “real crime community”, where participants are obsessed with mass killers in online forums. In this case, the extended references to the previous murderers extend over the world and even mention the authors in 1966.

Other references suggest an awareness of certain cultural markers within violent nihilist extremist spaces, where individuals recommend violence in order to accelerate societal collapse. There are also elements of “culture of saints”, a subculture that worships terrorists from the far right and boasts those who kill a large number of victims.

“Thus, all these things, both alone and in combination, show us that Westman was really aware of some of these cultural scripts,” said Cooter.

A complex mental health image

Minneapolis authorities said they knew no mental health treatment ordered by the state for the attacker. But in the video showing a letter written to “Family and Friends”, the alleged shooter qualifies as “seriously depressed” and “suicidal for years”. They also write: “I’m not doing well. I’m not right.” Analysts of extremism warn against the acceptance of these declarations as a fact.

“We must recognize the limits of counting only on the projection chosen by this online individual,” said Zoschak. “What we have at our disposal right now is the material that the shooter has chosen to make us at our disposal.”

Zoschak said it was impossible to assess from videos if the attacker really suffered from mental illness. But he noted that in certain subcultures of the real community of crime, there is an idealized “aesthetic” of mental misfortune that many individuals strive to transmit.

“There are two factors that we consider here. One: within the true community of crime, a desire to imitate and adopt the aesthetics of the ancient mass killers, several of which have displayed these sick mental characteristics,” said Zoschak. “Simultaneously, within the real crime community, there is a large population of people who claim to be and suffer very well from a disassocative identity disorder.”

The writings are aggravated by random whispers and statements in the videos and discordant juxtapositions of the video sequences. For example, after having shown a letter to dear beings who urges them to “pray for the victims and their families”, a video then goes through a slow promenade of the fatal equipment which was probably prepared for the attack. This included a magazine on which is scribbled, “for children”.

Zoschak and Cooter both noted that the superposition of these effects felt aesthetically similar to the digital imprint of an individual who opened fire during a parade of July 4 in Highland Park, Illinois, in 2022, killing seven people.

“I think it’s just a little too early to say it with certainty, but something that many people do not understand when they see individuals like that in the news, it is that these self-autonomous expressions that seem chaotic or unstable or simply sick are sometimes intentionally designed to give this perspective,” said Cooter.

The letter they wrote to his loved ones. Unlike some recent school shootings, where the writings of the attackers highlighted the grievances against the parents, this letter attributes to their parents to raise them in a loving and united household. He apologizes to family and friends for the “storm of chaos” that they were about to bring into their lives.

“This is where we are starting to see an extremely complex image,” said Zoschak.

So far, the authorities have said they thought the attack is attributed to Westman. But Cooter said that the ecosystem that Westman seems to have released is very designed by bad online actors who cultivate, in vulnerable people, the desire to commit violence.

“The way the equipment in newspapers and in YouTube videos really draws so strongly in many different spaces is very difficult to find completely organically organically active,” she said. “So he has the impression that there are probably certain people or at least certain online communities that facilitate this process in the background.”