Last week, a 23-year-old opened fire outside a church at a Minneapolis Catholic school, killing two children and injuring 19 other people before dying by suicide. Just a few hours later, the shooter’s YouTube videos began to circulate online. In one, the shooter shows off an arsenal of weapons and ammunition laid out on a bed. The killer laughs and offers a stream-of-consciousness monologue. “I didn’t ask for life,” they say, the camera focused on the shooter’s vape. “You didn’t ask for death.”
The video generated a lot of attention, in large part due to the images and phrases that the shooter had inscribed on guns and magazine cases: racial slurs, random expletives, and the names of at least 13 other killers. There were references to Waco and Ruby Ridge as well as BlackRock and ExxonMobil. One of the guns says Release the files! An ammo magazine is scrawled with kill Donald Trump; another says I’m the woker, baby, why so queerious. There are multiple references to memes: Popular phrases like skibidi appear, as does “Lenny Face”—( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)—and an extremely niche allusion to a web comic from 2008. Taken together, the messages are incoherent. This is irony-poisoned nihilism, tactical gear as shitposting—the only cause this person seems to have is to troll the viewer.
And it worked. The video was picked apart by people looking for some hints as to the shooter’s motivation or politics. Some right-wing influencers and MAGA-friendly news outlets seized on the killer’s gender identity, insinuating that the shooting had something to do with them being trans. Others fixated on the message about killing Trump and suggested the killer was a deranged liberal. Some left-leaning commentators seized upon the anti-Semitic scrawlings and racial slurs and said the killer was clearly a neo-Nazi.
But the rush to make sense of the shooting based on these messages and symbols is misguided. As incoherent, unhinged, or even cringey as the Minneapolis shooter’s videos might seem, they are part of a familiar template of terroristic behavior—one that continues to spread in online communities dedicated to mass shootings and other forms of brutality. In these morbid spaces, killers are viewed as martyrs, and they’re dubbed “saints.” Really, they’re influencers.
These disaffected communities live on social networks, message boards, and private Discords. They are populated by trolls, gore addicts, and, of course, aspiring shooters, who study, debate, and praise mass-shooting tactics and manifestos. Frequently, these groups adopt the aesthetics of neo-Nazis and white supremacists—sometimes because they are earnestly neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and sometimes because it’s the look and language that they’re cribbing from elsewhere. It’s always blurry, but it usually amounts to the same thing. In an article published by this magazine last year, Dave Cullen, author of the book Columbine, summed it all up: “As you read this, a distraught, lonely kid somewhere is contemplating an attack—and the one community they trust is screaming, Do it!”
Authorities have not released information as to whether the Minneapolis shooter was active in these online communities. Still, the shooter did appear to be participating in what could only be described as a fandom: One of their guns contains a direct reference to the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting.
To understand the dynamics at play here, I spoke at length with Alex Newhouse, a researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies online extremism. He told me that the “proximate goal of these attacks is to entrench the shooter in the broader legacy of violence and propel the legacy further.” The idea, in other words, is to motivate someone else to become a shooter—by creating a public manifesto, leaving a trail of digital evidence, and even livestreaming attacks in some cases. “The more frequently the template shows up, the more likely it will repeat,” Newhouse said. “It’s not ideological in the sense that we tend to think about it. There may be anti-Semitic or fascistic elements therein, but the real incentive is the self-reinforcing legacy of these shooters.”
For that reason, Newhouse calls these groups “mass-shooter-creation machines.”
There are many different networks of terror online, all with a constellation of differing ideologies, though many of them overlap. There is the Terrorgram Collective, whose leaders were last year indicted by the Department of Justice “for soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials, and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.” Another group is known as the True Crime Community, or TCC, which is a collection of users that grew in part out of the “Columbiners” community—these are fans of mass shooters and serial killers.
Sometimes, these groups overlap with other violent networks, including those that traffic child pornography and target and exploit vulnerable minors into cutting or otherwise hurting themselves. As the extremism researchers Jean Slater and Ry Terran wrote earlier this year, these groups, as well as right-wing youth subcultures, have blended together into a diffuse, “hybrid threat network.” What this means is that users from all these fringe subcultures—people from Terrorgram, mass-murder fan groups, people looking to groom children, trolls—are interacting across public social networks and private chat communities. These individuals may not all share the same interests, yet they are fellow travelers on many of the worst spaces on the internet. Slater and Terran call this loose network the “Soyjak Attacker Video Fandom,” named in part after a message board started by 4chan users. This network, they write, “is best understood as a fandom or subculture; it has no official membership or leaders. The fandom goes beyond simply admiring mass attackers, and is truly an active and participatory subculture.”
This is all meant to be impenetrable to outsiders, which is one reason for the confusion that follows shootings such as the one in Minneapolis. But the dynamics are familiar: There are in-jokes, lore, and, most importantly, real people trying to impress their perceived peers. For instance, in January, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and ProPublica reported that two teenagers who carried out separate shootings in Madison, Wisconsin (December 2024), and Nashville, Tennessee (January 2025), crossed paths online and frequented many of the same spaces dedicated to glorifying and discussing mass killings. The report notes that the Nashville killer praised the Madison shooter online as a “saintress” and boasted online that he “used to be mutuals with someone who is now a real school shooter ;-).”
Again, all of this confounds traditional attempts at sense making. “So much of the killers’ legacy is built upon the dependability of individual shooters being treated as puzzles to solve and people to understand,” Newhouse told me. “The reaction—by the media, by researchers, by politicians—to dig into these individuals and sort it into something we can wrap our heads around is very human, but it helps sustain this cycle.”
The problem is not that media coverage or attempts at explanation necessarily glorifies the shooter, but that it directs attention toward the shooter. That people might be falling for the Minneapolis shooter’s scribblings and raging at each other over potential motivations is likely thrilling to potential copycat killers—proof that the troll still works. We can link to the post still but summarize ourselves: As one extremism researcher posted last week, the goal of these attacks is to join the lineage of mass shooters and for the next killer to inscribe their name on a gun before an attack.
What is chilling about this still-novel brand of extremist violence is that it weaponizes one of the internet’s greatest gifts: the ability for small groups of like-minded people to find each other and build community.
To counter this dynamic, Newhouse thinks lawmakers, those in charge of news coverage, and even interested onlookers should redirect attention away from individual perpetrators. Instead, they should focus on how mass shootings are a social problem driven by networks and communities. Addressing the problem would mean tackling the loneliness and alienation that cause people to seek out or fall into these online spaces. It would require real changes to firearm access. It would mean finding ways to counter the degradation of real, physical communities that lead people to retreat to the digital world, and it would mean expecting tech companies such as the infamously permissive Telegram to take a more active role in halting the recruitment of children into dangerous groups. There are no politically easy or fast solutions.
But the situation is not hopeless. Near the end of our conversation, Newhouse offered an interesting comparison for the networked phenomenon of the modern, online mass shooter: ISIS. In 2015, Twitter began conducting mass-deletion campaigns of suspected ISIS accounts, significantly disrupting the group’s organizing and recruiting. When ISIS moved to more private networks, a group organized by Europol worked with nine technology platforms and service providers, including Telegram, to identify and suspend ISIS accounts and jihadist content. Eighty-nine countries and institutions, including the United States, have joined a “Global Coalition” to fight ISIS, which continues to monitor digital activity and financial transactions to combat the terror group. “There are signs throughout the last 20 years that you can disrupt well-resourced established networks to make them less prolific, but it requires an extreme amount of government and corporate coordination,” Newhouse said.
As for the media, in the aftermath of the Minneapolis shooting, I went back and reread Columbine. I was haunted by the passages that chronicled the mass media’s response to the shooting. In a rush to understand the tragedy and feed a hungry audience, their reporting helped spread rumors—that the killers were goths, that they targeted jocks and minorities, or that they were gay. Some of these mistruths portrayed the killers as outcasts and, crucially, victims. Others incorrectly stated that the killers had executed their plan to perfection. In reality, they botched their attack horribly. Their bombs never went off, and the pair died, according to Cullen, as “miserable failures.”
But more than 26 years later, these mischaracterizations endured, becoming foundational lore for young people who want to follow in the killers’ footsteps. The cycle that Columbine helped kick off has evolved into a subculture that is dark, unwieldy, and durable. Yes, it is an outgrowth of sick individuals, broken policy, and a nation brimming with firearms, but also of a culture that refuses to learn lessons from past tragedies. To break this nightmarish cycle, every bit of it has to change.
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