By any measure, the 17-year-old’s plans were outrageous. According to federal authorities, he allegedly murdered his parents to “obtain the financial means and autonomy necessary” to spark a second American revolution and “save the white race.” And he wanted to assassinate President Donald Trump in order to “Accelerate the Collapse.” Driven in part by white supremacist ideology, the would-be revolutionary communicated with counterparts abroad who encouraged him to commit the attacks. The teenager, Nikita Casap from Waukesha, Wisconsin, was arrested in Kansas in March after living with his parents’ decaying corpses for weeks. Authorities uncovered evidence of his affiliation with the Order of the Nine Angles, described by one scholar as “a radical fusion of occultism, accelerationism, and national socialist ideas.”
In court documents, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) deployed a new term of art to describe Casap: “Nihilistic Violent Extremist.” It was only the second time such language had been used, indicating a potential sea change in how federal agencies conceptualize and investigate domestic terrorism cases.
The FBI describes NVEs as “individuals who engage in criminal conduct within the United States and abroad, in furtherance of political, social, or 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 government’s use of the term was first reported by journalist Ken Klippenstein on a Substack site “dedicated to explaining what the national security state is actually up to.” Klippenstein claimed: “The brand new term was invented to replace the Biden administration’s focus on anti-government and ‘anti-authority’ extremism adopted after January 6. It also has the side benefit of appearing to be non-partisan, shifting the attention away from MAGA and white supremacism while pretending not to be focusing on anti-Trump activism.”
However, such criticism is overstated – even though Trump has repeatedly overlooked or even encouraged racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVE). The terminology was likely years in the making. As noted court watchers Seamus Hughes and Peter Beck wrote, “A preliminary review of federal cases by NCITE at the University of Nebraska Omaha found more than two dozen arrests in the last few years that would squarely fall into the new Bureau classification of Nihilistic Violent Extremism.”
Terrorism scholars have long warned of the “imperfect terminology and challenges to clear categorization” of such incidents. As early as April 2021, FBI director Christopher Wray testified about counterterrorism cases that were “more about the violence than the ideology.” The would-be assassin who targeted then former President Trump last July seems to have been part of this same trend. As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote in the aftermath of the shooting in Butler, PA, it “appears to be a story less about fanatical partisanship than about the crisis of lonely and disconnected young men being radicalized into pure nihilism.”
Indeed, nihilism has formed a key element of many online extremist movements for years now. Aside from Casap’s connections to the Order of the Nine Angles, a British-origin satanic network, governments are also growing increasingly concerned about 764, an esoteric movement that combines Satanic neo-Nazism with child sexual abuse glorification and encouragement of self-harm, up to and including suicide. “Victims are turned into abusers and recruiters who do unto others what was done to them,” Marc-André Argentino, Barrett G, and M.B. Tyler explain in their analysis of the 764 movement. Many online chatrooms have long been characterized by a “free-wheeling violent nihilism.”
Meanwhile, in Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has led a national debate about the changing nature of terrorism in the wake of the July 2024 stabbings of several young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport. The perpetrator was seemingly inspired only by his lust for violence. “The blunt truth here is that this case is a sign. Britain now faces a new threat,” Starmer warned. “Terrorism has changed.” Like Casap, the attacker, also 17, similarly emerged from a new generation of digital extremists characterized in Starmer’s words as “loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety, sometimes inspired by traditional terrorist groups, but fixated on that extreme violence, seemingly for its own sake.” Britain’s primary prevention infrastructure, Prevent, itself added a new category of cases in 2020 known as “Vulnerability present but no ideology or CT risk,” an outgrowth of an earlier category dubbed “mixed, unstable, and unclear.” In the year leading up to March 2024, that category constituted a plurality of cases.
Terrorism scholar Simon Purdue identified the growing role of nihilism in mass shootings as early as July 2022, responding to that summer’s mass shooting at a Highland Park, IL, Fourth of July parade. Purdue warned that a nihilist bent made a would-be killer far more dangerous. “Ideological nihilism, by its very nature, seeks to erode and ultimately remove the self-preservation instinct that acts as the last bulwark preventing many extremists from committing acts of mass violence,” Purdue wrote. “When extremists, or indeed anybody with a fascination with violence feels like they have nothing to live for, they are significantly more likely to commit an attack.”
Of course, the U.S. is no stranger to non-ideological (or at least less-ideological) mass murderers. Dating back to at least the 1966 killings at the University of Texas at Austin, school shootings have been a regular occurrence. The shootings are so frequent that Generation Z (born roughly between 1997 and 2012) is colloquially known as the school shooting generation. Gun violence researchers speak of a “Columbine Effect” to describe aggrieved young men and boys who launch acts of self-proclaimed revenge against former classmates in a manner that mimics the two high school seniors who killed 12 students and 1 teacher, wounding nearly two dozen others, in the horrific 1999 mass shooting.
The rise of personal grievances as a primary motivator in ideological murders is not new. The incel movement, in which sexually frustrated young men crystallize their resentment into an ideological hatred of women, pioneered the fusing of the deeply personal and political into an outburst of violent fury. Incels traffic in explicit nihilism too, with the “Blackpill” concept providing an ideological veneer to cover their self-loathing and isolation. Many school shooters and incels display and act upon the same suicidality that also characterizes much nihilist activity. For instance, incels have adopted a phrase, “going ER,” to describe the phenomenon of taking one’s own life in a bloody murder-suicide plot against society, similar to the example set by incel Elliot Rodger.
Although nihilistic tendencies can infuse ideological extremists of all stripes, NVEs are differentiated from other categories by the absence of a broader political aim or platform. Instead, in leading scholar Marc-André Argentino’s assessment, the “animating principle [for NVEs] is destruction for its own sake.” Their acts are the result of a fusion of several emerging trends in the online ecosystem, including the rise of personal grievances, particularly among youth.
NVEs are best understood from the counterterrorism perspective as the latest metastasis in what Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Andrew Zammit, Emelie Chace-Donahue, and Madison Urban call “composite violent extremism.” Extremist ideologies are blurring, and young people with very salient personal grievances are increasingly turning to a “salad bar” of ideologies to explain their anger and hopelessness. Accordingly, nihilistic violent extremism might even be considered part of a fourth generation of online radicalization, in which the historical boundaries between non-ideological killers and terrorists (usually differentiated through their political motivations) continue to blur.
Therefore, the FBI’s new “nihilistic violent extremism” terminology fills a gap in our law enforcement and intelligence response—not least because different terminology across offices and jurisdictions complicates counterterrorism coordination. The new term will at least allow those working to undermine this movement to speak the same language. It remains to be seen if the NVE category will “replace” other classifications or merely complement them, offering law enforcement more breadth.
Despite these advantages, critics are right to be concerned that the term might be weaponized to redirect attention from the more pressing threat of RMVE terrorism. Abuse might come from the term’s broadness, which podcaster Garrison Davis aptly describes as its “depoliticized” character. Indeed, in announcing the arrest of two leaders of the 764 network on Apr. 30, the DOJ acknowledged that the “network’s accelerationist goals include social unrest and the downfall of the current world order, including the United States Government,” but failed to point out that the network largely aligns with neo-Nazi ideology. Precisely the same dynamic is at play in the Casap case, where the Department of Justice (DOJ) seemingly has decided to overlook Casap’s avowed white supremacy. Otherwise, his stated motivation to “save the white race” probably should have landed him in the RMVE category.
As a GAO report published in April pointed out, most recent government threat assessments “identify racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism as one of the most lethal domestic terrorism threats to the United States.” The Anti-Defamation League’s 2024 report on extremist activity in the United States found that last year was “the third year in a row that right-wing extremists have been connected to all identified extremist-related killings.” That trend was broken on New Year’s Day, when an ISIS sympathizer rammed his vehicle into a celebratory crowd in New Orleans.
In other words, although the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are right to identify and directly tackle the nihilist vein now infusing much online extremism, they cannot ignore the data showing that white supremacist and anti-government extremists have consistently posed the deadliest terrorist threat to the homeland.
