Stephen Paddock didn’t have a lot of friends. Those who knew him, though, all agreed that he had a thing about guns and the Second Amendment and a deep fear that the government would attempt to take them away.
They just didn’t expect him to commit, on October 1, 2017, the worst mass shooting in American history.
Like most men of his generation—Paddock attended high school and college in California in the 1970s—Paddock was drawn into the world of conspiracy theories not through the Internet or social media, but from the alternative media ecosystem that emerged in the 1990s associated with the “Patriot” militia movement. These earlier conspiracists’ main media then was the radio, including a variety of guerrilla broadcasts on underground networks, as well as mailings and email exchanges as the chief forms of communication.
Guns were the essence of the militia movement—most of its participants had multiple weapons and considerable stockpiles of ammunition. They showed them off to each other, and gun shows, which attracted a significant contingent of paranoid and suspicious people, were often where the militias themselves organized. Timothy McVeigh, the Patriot militiaman who killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in April 1995 with a large truck bomb, made a living for years traveling to gun shows and selling wares there. He would hand out copies of the white-supremacist race-war tract, The Turner Diaries, to people who bought guns out of the back of his car from him.1
It was this deep paranoia about the government confiscating their guns—set off by Bill Clinton’s ill-fated ban on assault weapons passed in 1994—that was the meat and potatoes of what Patriot militiamen talked about, organized around, and prepared for. This fear in turn launched the career of the greatest megastar of the conspiracy-theory universe, Alex Jones.2
Many of the people who were radicalized by conspiracy theories in the 1990s never lost their conviction that there was a nefarious New World Order plot to enslave mankind. Among them was Stephen Paddock.3
When Adam Le Fevre, an Australian man who was in a relationship with the sister of Paddock’s girlfriend, visited Paddock’s suburban Las Vegas home in 2013, he was given a tour of the place, including the gun room.4
“Steve said ‘bedroom . . . sitting room . . . and gun room . . .’ Aah, gun room?” Le Fevre later told an interviewer.
The two of them got into a discussion about guns, and when Le Fevre expressed some skepticism about the need for Second Amendment protection of gun ownership, Paddock became emphatic.
“I raised that question with Steve and it’s something that he came back at me with an incredible degree of vigor,” Le Fevre recalled. “He was very strict and very firm on the fact that it’s a right. It’s the freedom of every American to participate, to own a gun and use it . . . when need be.”
What most of his friends didn’t know about Steve Paddock was that his father was one of the longest sought names on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, having escaped prison in Texas in 1969 and remaining uncaught until 1977. Though he had little contact with his father for most of his life (the old man died of a heart attack in 1998), they shared a set of personality traits: both men were described as highly intelligent, arrogant, and egotistical.5
People who knew Paddock in high school said that he was “a real brain” and “extremely smart,” but also self-absorbed and narcissistic.6 After getting a degree in business administration at Cal Northridge in 1977, he went to work as a postal carrier, then at the Internal Revenue Service, where he was an agent until 1984.
Family members later told reporters that part of his motivation for being a federal employee involved his desire to avoid paying taxes, which he loathed deeply: he “worked for the IRS in order to learn how to hide his income,” his brother said.7
Multiple people, including a real estate broker with whom Paddock had dealings, described how he hated the government and hated paying taxes to it, even moving property ownership from California to Nevada in order to avoid them.8 This did not change over the years: Adam Le Fevre described to another correspondent how Paddock was “animated about the government and the tax system” and “outspoken about the inadequacies and waste of the government.”9
Though his behavior is consistent with a follower, it’s unclear whether Paddock participated in the radical anti-tax movement of the 1970s and 1980s. This movement was affiliated with the conspiracist far right of the time, and many of its tenets and participants were foundational in establishing the Patriot militia movement of the ’90s. Although it’s likely he was exposed to the ideology, there is no evidence Paddock joined any of the anti-tax organizations of that period.
Telling people that he had figured out how to play gambling odds in a way that could sustain an income, Paddock quit work in 1984 and lived off his considerable real estate investments and gambling winnings. He began leading a more leisurely lifestyle, taking overseas cruise ship tours, settling into communities in Texas, California, and Florida before moving to the Las Vegas exurb of Mesquite in 2015.
Something went wrong with his finances in September 2015, according to Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, who told reporters later that Paddock—who was profiled by experts as a narcissist obsessed with being part of the Las Vegas elite—lost “a significant amount” of money in his investments that month.10
He also began collecting guns and became increasingly paranoid about them. (Apparently he was also a fan of Donald Trump: “He was happy with Trump because the stock market was doing well,” Lombardo noted.) Between October 2016 and the same month a year later, he purchased fifty-five weapons, most of them rifles, to complement what was already an arsenal of twenty-nine guns. Paddock also had a girlfriend, but in mid-September 2017, he sent her to her home country of the Philippines on a family visit—a surprise trip he sprang on her. When she arrived, he wired her $100,000 to buy a home there.11
At one point, he began scouting locations for what he had in mind. He visited several hotels overlooking popular music festivals, including what would have been the venue for the Lollapalooza rock music festival in Chicago.12
Back in Las Vegas, however, he had apparently taken up with a prostitute who later spoke on condition of anonymity. She told investigators she “would spend hours drinking and gambling in Las Vegas” with a “paranoid” and “obsessive” Paddock. “Mikaela,” as the twenty-seven-year-old escort named herself, said Paddock would “often rant about conspiracy theories including how 9/11 was orchestrated by the U.S. government.”13
Late in September, another witness told police she saw a man resembling Stephen Paddock with another white male at a Vegas restaurant three days before the shooting.14 Both of them were ranting back and forth about the 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge and the 1993 Waco siege, both important martyrdom dates for Patriot militiamen (McVeigh later told authorities the Oklahoma bombing was revenge for those two events).
These comport with a third unconfirmed witness’s tale. This man—a former chef who was in the county lockup on a petty crime charge at the time of the mass shooting—told police he and Paddock had met at a Bass Pro Shop in Las Vegas two weeks before. The man offered to sell Paddock the schematics for making an auto sear: the kind of specialized mechanism that converts a rifle from semiautomatic to automatic, turning an AR-15 into a machine gun capable of mowing down crowds.
The chef described how Paddock would carry on about “antigovernment stuff” that included FEMA camps and Hurricane Katrina. “He asked me if I remembered Katrina,” he said. “That was just a dry run for law enforcement and military to start kickin’ down doors and . . . confiscating guns,” the man quoted Paddock as saying.15
If this account is accurate, it is probably not a coincidence that Paddock had been stocking guns throughout the year preceding October 1, 2017. The 2016 hurricane season had been the worst on record, and the 2017 season was anticipated to be even worse (as indeed it was).
“He was kind of fanatical about this stuff; I just figured he’s another Internet nut, you know, watching too much of it and believing too much of it,” said the man.
The deal fell apart, though, because Paddock wanted the man not just to sell him the plans, but to actually make the auto sears for him. He offered him $500. The man turned him down, saying: “I’m too old to spend the rest of my life in federal prison.” Paddock wasn’t interested in the schematics.
He did, however, try to explain his motivations to the chef: “Somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves.
“Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”16
________
Conspiracy theories are the one constant thread that runs through the backgrounds of every right-wing American domestic terrorist of the past half-century.
In 1984, the notorious neo-Nazi terrorist gang The Order went on a six-month criminal rampage in which they robbed banks and armored cars by the dozen, counterfeited money, and assassinated a radio talk-show host in Denver before being brought to ground by the FBI. They believed that white people were the victims of a nefarious Jewish cabal secretly running the government and the media, calling it ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government.17
Timothy McVeigh believed a “New World Order” cabal was plotting to deprive Americans of their guns and round them up into concentration camps and that federal raids on right-wing extremists at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and in Waco, Texas, were proof of that. He killed 168 people with a truck bomb outside the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.18
Eric Rudolph believed in a similar conspiracy theory, but with a decided religious twist in which abortion played a central role. Rudolph set off a backpack bomb at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, then pipe-bombed women’s health clinics and a gay bar before leading authorities on a three-year manhunt in the North Carolina woods.19
These are only the most notorious examples. Right-wing domestic terrorism in fact has been occurring at a steady but muted pace for most of the past three decades, embodied by armed standoffs and police officer shootings by so-called sovereign citizens (who believe in a convoluted but arcane and heavily document-oriented conspiracist version of government). Nearly all of these terrorists were recruited into their belief systems through relatively traditional means of recruitment—namely, exposure to printed material, underground radio broadcasts, and face-to-face interpersonal proselytization, sometimes in the context of an organization. Rudolph was raised within an extremist Christian Identity church. Many of the terrorists were originally radicalized as members of the conspiracist John Birch Society.
Anders Breivik, however, was a different breed of domestic terrorist. A new breed. He was the first real Internet age terrorist.
Although the ideology that fueled Breivik’s violence—eliminationist white supremacism—was what he had in common with those earlier terrorists, Breivik was very much a child of the Internet. He was mostly radicalized online. On the day he murdered seventy-seven people, he published online a fifteen-hundred-page manifesto, complete with video and multiple links, to the mostly American Islamophobes and white nationalists whose ideas he had absorbed.
Breivik grew up in the Norwegian capital of Oslo, a child of divorced parents who was raised by a mother who, according to one child psychologist who treated him as a child in the 1980s, “sexualized” him and berated him, telling him she wished he’d never been born.20 As a teenager he dabbled in hip-hop culture and became a street graffiti artist, which got him into trouble with the law.21 When he tried to join the Norwegian army, he was deemed “unfit for service” during the vetting process.22
In his early twenties, he would later claim, he embarked on a long-term plan to commit an act of terrorism.23 In 2002, at the age of twenty-three, he founded a computer programming business that eventually earned him several million kroner. He moved back in with his mother after suffering financial setbacks, though he still retained a large nest egg of two million kroner, which he used to proceed with his plan.
In 2009, Breivik bought a farm operation in rural Hedmark County that mainly grew fresh produce of various kinds.24 He moved to the farm, which had a small house on the acreage, in June 2011, and began buying lots of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Being a farmer gave him cover.
The neighbors thought there was something “off” about Breivik. One described him as a “city dweller who wore expensive shirts and who knew nothing about rural ways.” Still, there was nothing exceptional about him.
They didn’t know that over the past year he had been assembling a private arsenal of weapons, including a Ruger semiautomatic rifle, purchased legally. Breivik had traveled to Prague in 2010 in an attempt to purchase illegal guns but backed out when it became too hazardous. He also bought a Glock handgun.25
In the back of a large white van, he began assembling a classic McVeigh-style truck bomb: barrels of ammonium nitrate mixed with jet fuel, carefully stirred, and topped with detonators. It took him, he later said, a couple of weeks.
On the morning of July 22, he packed everything into the back of the van, then drove the ninety miles or so to Oslo. Just before he left, he hit “Send” on his computer, publishing his video on YouTube and launching his manifesto onto the Internet. He sent it directly via email to more than a thousand people.
Titled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, it rambled on for fifteen hundred pages of evidence intended to “prove” various conspiracy theories, all of which established the need for a new “Christian” crusade in Europe to drive out the invading Muslims.26 It included a wealth of autobiographical information of often dubious value, though it does detail how he set out in 2002 with a nine-year plan, as well as how he trained for his attack on the youth camp by playing the video games Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and World of Warcraft.
The centerpiece of Breivik’s manifesto was a conspiracy theory: namely, that the nefarious forces of “cultural Marxism” were colluding to destroy Western white civilization and to replace white Europeans with a polyglot population of brown people. Citing a range of mostly American anti-Muslim ideologues—notably Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, both of whom he quotes multiple times—he propounds ad nauseam about the existential threat posed to traditional cultures by the influx of Muslim immigrants.
“Cultural Marxism” is a standout example of how conspiracy theories do the work of radical and often toxic political ideologies.27 The general outline of this conspiracy, according to the progenitors of the theory, is fairly simple: a group of Jewish academics, all Marxists with a base of operations at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main—known as the Frankfurt School—were responsible for concocting the ideas behind multiculturalism and “Critical Theory,” which they saw as a means for translating Marxist ideals into cultural values. During the 1930s, the story goes, they moved from Frankfurt to New York and Columbia University, and their influence became so profound that it now dominates both academia and modern popular culture.
Indeed, as they tell it, nearly all of the modern expressions of liberal democratic culture—feminism, the civil rights movement, the ’60s counterculture movement, the antiwar movement, rock and roll, and the gay rights movement—are eventually all products of the scheming of this cabal of Jewish elites.28
In reality, although the influence of the Frankfurt School is generally viewed by most political scientists to have had a considerable range within academia, especially regarding Critical Theory, this school of thought was directly in opposition to the theories promoted by “postmodernists,” who are frequently themselves identified by right-wing ideologues as leading examples of “cultural Marxism.”29 Nor were its members leaders of any kind of international conspiracy to destroy Western civilization. Contrary to the characterizations of the conspiracy theorists, most of the “cultural Marxists” of the Frankfurt School were sharply critical of the modern entertainment industry,30 which they saw not as a tool for their own ideology but as a kind of modern “opiate of the masses” that was antithetical to their values.31
Moreover, multiculturalism was not the product of Critical Theory but has much deeper roots in the study of anthropology, dating back to the turn of the twentieth century.32 It became ascendant as a worldview in the post–World War II years after it became apparent (especially as the events of the Holocaust became more widely understood) that white supremacy—the worldview it replaced—was not only inadequate but a direct source of wholesale evil. The people who are widely recognized as the founders of multiculturalism—particularly such anthropologists as Franz Boas and Margaret Mead—were not members of the Frankfurt School (though both were affiliated with Columbia), and their work had long preceded the war.
The idea of “cultural Marxism” as a plot to destroy the West originated with a handful of far-right thinkers in the 1990s.33 One of these was the conservative Jewish intellectual Paul Gottfried, who claimed in later years that he had identified with the right-wing bloc of the Frankfurt School and had first complained about cultural Marxism as an insider.34 Gottfried (who is also credited with having helped coin the phrase “alt-right”)35 engaged in a debate with paleo-conservative William S. Lind, an associate of far-right godfather Paul Weyrich and his Free Congress Foundation,36 questioning whether or not such thinkers could be properly labeled Marxists. Lind concluded that they could and should be (Gottfried disagreed).
In short order, Lind began developing a cottage industry around his “cultural Marxism” theory, promoting the idea on the Internet, in speeches, and in videos. “Cultural Marxism is a branch of western Marxism, different from the Marxism-Leninism of the old Soviet Union,” he wrote. “It is commonly known as ‘multiculturalism’ or, less formally, Political Correctness. From its beginning, the promoters of cultural Marxism have known they could be more effective if they concealed the Marxist nature of their work, hence the use of terms such as ‘multiculturalism.’”37
Eventually, Lind propounded on the topic at a Holocaust denial conference in 2003, where he explained to the audience pointedly: “These guys were all Jewish.”38
Weyrich, who had already promoted the idea of “cultural conservatism,” also heavily promoted the idea, presenting it as the subject of a speech he gave in 1998 to the Civitas Institute’s Conservative Leadership Conference: “Cultural Marxism is succeeding in its war against our culture. The question becomes, if we are unable to escape the cultural disintegration that is gripping society, then what hope can we have?”39
This became the cornerstone in Weyrich’s call for conservatives to join in a “culture war” against liberals, joining the ranks of such paleoconservatives as Patrick Buchanan, the former presidential candidate who in 1992 had originally issued a call for such a “culture war” at the Republican National Convention.40
Beginning in 2000, Buchanan picked up Lind and Weyrich’s idea and ran with it, incorporating his attacks on “cultural Marxism” in his writings, and began giving a number of interviews in which he laid all of the world’s ills at its feet. In his 2001 book The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, Buchanan described it as a “regime to punish dissent and to stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy. Its trademark is intolerance.”41
The book ascribes nearly superhuman powers to Critical Theory. “Using Critical Theory, for example, the cultural Marxist repeats and repeats the charge that the West is guilty of genocidal crimes against every civilization and culture it has encountered,” Buchanan averred. “Under Critical Theory, one repeats and repeats that Western societies are history’s greatest repositories of racism, sexism, nativism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, fascism and Nazism. Under Critical Theory, the crimes of the West flow from the character of the West, as shaped by Christianity. . . . Under the impact of Critical Theory, many of the sixties generation, the most privileged in history, convinced themselves that they were living in an intolerable hell.”
In addition to Buchanan and the paleoconservatives, the theory was also quickly adopted by white nationalists who began promoting the theory assiduously. The most notable of these was the far-right publisher Roger Pearson, a retired anthropologist and prominent eugenicist.42 Besides numerous eugenicist and supremacist books and journals, he published a book in 2006 by Frank Ellis titled Marxism, Multiculturalism, and Free Speech that laid out the basics of the cultural Marxism theory and claims. Ellis, a former Leeds University professor, claimed that “political correctness” could be traced to Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong and that it was designed as an attack on the principles of free speech.
Other white nationalists, notably Jared Taylor of American Renaissance,43 academic Kevin MacDonald,44 and Peter Brimelow of VDare, likewise made discussion of “cultural Marxism” central to their arguments. Taylor railed against it and multiculturalism at a Council of Conservative Citizens convention in 1999. MacDonald discussed “cultural Marxism” at length in his book Culture of Critique and discusses it frequently in interviews and in his magazine, Occidental Observer.45 Brimelow mentioned the concept as early as 2003 and, all the way through 2017, was blaming it for the world’s ills, including the cancellation of a VDare conference.46
It also gained wide play among right-wing conspiracy theorists led by Alex Jones, who featured guest conspiracist Alan Watt on air during a 2010 show. Watt told Jones: “People really have lost a sense of dignity and self-respect and definitely a common culture. That was part of the deep massive Communist move for multiculturalism. It wasn’t to be nice to other cultures, it was to help you destroy your own cohesive majority.”47
“Get rid of all other cultures and replace it with a corporate Borg culture,” Jones surmised.
However, the concept also began moving into the mainstream of the conservative movement as early as 2008, mainly due to the contributions of Andrew Breitbart, the founder of the online news organization Breitbart News.
In his autobiography Righteous Indignation, Breitbart described his discovery, in about 2007, of “cultural Marxism” as his “awakening.” He told an interviewer in 2012, shortly before his death, that the concept was like “putting the medicine in the sherbet. . . . My one great epiphany, my one a-ha moment where I said, ‘I got it—I see what exactly happened in this country.’”48
Breitbart began holding forth at length in various venues about the evils of “cultural Marxism.” He appeared on Fox News and told Sean Hannity and his audience: “For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, America dealt with Communism, which was economic Marxism. And what America was susceptible to during that period of time was cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxism is political correctness, it’s multiculturalism, and it’s a war on Judeo-Christianity.”49
After Breitbart’s death in 2012, the news organization bearing his name continued its tradition of obsession with cultural Marxism; the subject remains a popular keyword among the website’s writers.
And, obviously, it had gained an ardent believer in Anders Breivik.
“We are sick and tired of feeling like strangers in our own lands, of being mugged, raped, stabbed, harassed and even killed by violent gangs of Muslim thugs, yet being accused of ‘racism and xenophobia,’” he wrote.
“As we all know, the root of Europe’s problems is the lack of cultural self-confidence (nationalism),” he continued. “Most people are still terrified of nationalistic political doctrines thinking that if we ever embrace these principles again, new ‘Hitler’s’ will suddenly pop up and initiate global Armageddon. . . . This irrational fear of nationalistic doctrines is preventing us from stopping our own national/cultural suicide as the Islamic colonization is increasing annually . . . You cannot defeat Islamization or halt/reverse the Islamic colonization of Western Europe without first removing the political doctrines manifested through multiculturalism/cultural Marxism.”50
His plan for doing so, according to the manifesto, entailed other true believers who also would participate in his “Christian Crusade.” The video he posted on YouTube contained a plenitude of images of medieval knights in armor along with references to the “new Crusade.” He claimed that other members of an organization called the “Knights Templar” were ready to spring into action with similar terrorist acts elsewhere—though none were ever named, and in truth none ever came to light.
Breivik saw himself as a white knight out to do his duty to save “his people.” No doubt that image was in his mind as he drove the little white van into Oslo the morning of July 22, 2011.
________
Anders Breivik, it later emerged, had had relatively few contacts with other white nationalist ideologues in real life, though he had exchanged emails with a number of others, particularly in the European scene. But the largest source of his inspiration, his manifesto made clear, was material he had found on the Internet.
This represented a marked shift. Conspiracy theories in the decades following the Red Scare of the 1950s, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, were often spread slowly through organizations ranging from the John Birch Society to the Ku Klux Klan. People were recruited into the belief systems usually through exposure to the group’s literature followed by face-to-face time in organizational meetings.
Some of the radical-right conspiracism of the 1990s was bolstered by the early stages of the Internet: white supremacist websites such as Stormfront began creating community spaces for like-minded bigots, and of course their main content involved a potpourri of conspiracist legends and theories. The email forwards of the 1990s—usually spurious, anonymous content alleging all kinds of nefarious behavior by godless liberals and their politicians—which were shared on listservs and among friends and family members, were especially effective in spreading conspiracy theories. And then there were radio shows, many of them “underground” broadcasts, but others reaching broad audiences like Alex Jones’s show out of Austin, Texas—shows that specialized in spinning dubious tales of New World Order conspiracies, which as time went on and Jones’s audience grew massive, in the 2000s, were renamed globalist plots.51
However, the arrival in the 2000s of a full-on digital culture changed the path of radicalization. Increasingly, people—young white men especially—were drawn to conspiracy theories in part because there was a deluge of them that began hitting the Internet in the latter part of the century’s first decade, thanks primarily to the arrival of YouTube as a major source of media consumption, especially for younger users. On YouTube, thanks to algorithms that encouraged people to find “engaging” content, which often translated into “outrageously nutty and afactual” in reality, the conspiracy theories spread like kudzu.
Breivik was one of the first young men to emerge from the spiral of radicalization that the Internet can uniquely weave into being, and just as he hoped, his 2011 rampage became a model and inspiration for other young white men who tried to follow in his footsteps. Like Breivik, the funnel into which they were drawn was the seductive downward spiral of conspiracy theories like “cultural Marxism” that lead vulnerable minds down the rabbit holes of white nationalism and similarly hateful ideologies, including outright fascism.
Many of those who followed this path of online radicalization were a good deal younger than Breivik, who was thirty-two at the time he embarked on his terrorism plot. The archetype that developed was in most regards more closely embodied in two men who were both in their early twenties at the time they exploded: Dylann Roof and Elliot Rodger.52
Roof in particular left a social media crumb trail that was at once cryptic and clear. From his Facebook page, you could see that the twenty-one-year-old South Carolina man liked to visit historical sites. This was not a healthy thing: they tended to be sites from the slave-trading era, like Sullivan’s Island, the largest slave disembarkation port in North America. He had black friends from school—despite dropping out after ninth grade—but he also hated black people generically.53
In his manifesto, he called black people “the group that is the biggest problem for Americans,” but like most white nationalists, he also blamed nefarious Jews for creating it:
Niggers are stupid and violent. At the same time they have the capacity to be very slick. Black people view everything through a racial lense. Thats what racial awareness is, its viewing everything that happens through a racial lense. They are always thinking about the fact that they are black. This is part of the reason they get offended so easily, and think that some thing are intended to be racist towards them, even when a White person wouldnt be thinking about race. The other reason is the Jewish agitation of the black race.54
Roof never joined any organizations, but in addition to spending inordinate amounts of time playing video games, taking Suboxone, and hanging out in Columbia with his friends, he also began hanging out on the chat boards at the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer—where “cultural Marxism” is conventional wisdom—as well as the old school website of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC).
It was at the latter site that, inspired by the case of Trayvon Martin, the young black Florida man who was gunned down by a white security guard, he began reading and absorbing the spurious statistics spewed there about black crime and particularly its effect on whites: Roof fully believed the CCC’s assertion that 80 percent of white homicides are committed by black people. After all, a Google search had told him so.55
A ne’er-do-well whose last job had been a brief stint as a landscaper, Roof decided he needed to rescue the white race from extermination. That was why, on June 17, 2015, he set out on his mission, another knight off to save the world, like Anders Breivik:
I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.
________
Elliot Rodger, like Breivik and Roof, saw himself in a similarly heroic light, and likewise wanted to do battle with the forces of “political correctness.” But his enemy was different: he hated women.56
Rodger was the well-to-do son of a Hollywood producer, and in most regards a good-looking young man. But he was deeply troubled. Smaller and slightly frail, he had always been something of a bully magnet in school and was known to spend his days alone: he later wrote that he “cried by myself every day.” At Crespi Carmelite High in Los Angeles, he fell asleep at a desk one day, and other students taped his head to it.
He expressed himself at Elliot Rodger’s Official Blog and on YouTube, where he mostly posted angst-ridden expressions of rejection and loneliness. At home, he received mental-health counseling and drug treatment by psychiatrists, although he never received a formal diagnosis of a mental illness.
Rodger also spent inordinate amounts of time online in chat rooms. The places he liked to dwell the most were some of the darkest corners of the Internet—in particular, among his fellow dwellers in the online “incel” culture.
“Incel” is short for “involuntary celibate,” and the young men who participate in this universe invariably loathe women and feminists and blame them for the men’s lack of receiving enough sex. Their solution: an “incel revolution” in which men take back the reins of society from women and put them back in their place with force. The revolution they envision is, of course, quite violent.57
After all, the problem in most respects is simple: these are men who for various reasons have difficulty sustaining a relationship long enough to have sex (often because they don’t understand that, unlike in the world of pornography, most women are uninterested in sex with relative strangers). Put crudely, they can’t get laid and blame women for that. In their view, it’s owed them.
As incels imagine things, the world is mostly comprised of “Chads”—sexually competitive males, guys who are chosen for their superiority—and “Stacys,” the sexually attractive and available women who get to do the choosing and who always choose Chads. Incels see themselves as noble-spirited rebels who stand outside that world.
Elliot Rodger was one of these young men. Posting at the misogynist site PUAHate (“The Forefront of the Anti-Pickup Artist Movement”: this sector of the misogynist world had repudiated sex altogether), Rodger mused on both feminism (“If we can’t solve our problems we must destroy our problems”) and race:
Today I drove through the area near my college and saw some things that were extremely rage-inducing.
I passed by this restaurant and I saw this black guy chilling with 4 hot white girls. He didn’t even look good.
Then later on in the day I was shopping at Trader Joe’s and saw an Indian guy with 2 above average White Girls!!!
What rage-inducing sights did you guys see today? Don’t you just hate seeing these things when you go out? It just makes you want to quit life.58
Rodger’s mother was Chinese, but he saw himself as mostly passing for white. When an Asian male posted a query about whether a specific pair of shoes would help him “attract white women,” Rodger responded: “White girls are disgusted by you, silly little Asian.”
The Asian man replied by posting photos of himself with a white woman, which set Rodger off: “Full Asian men are disgustingly ugly and white girls would never go for you. You’re just butthurt that you were born as an asian piece of shit, so you lash out by linking these fake pictures. You even admit that you wish you were half white. You’ll never be half-white and you’ll never fulfill your dream of marrying a white woman. I suggest you jump off a bridge.”
Like many others in incel culture, he became a seething cauldron of frustration and anger toward women and feminists, though he often expressed vitriolic anger toward other men for outcompeting him. At other times he struck a genteel pose, naming himself “the supreme gentleman” and “the perfect guy.”
Because the world failed to recognize him, though, he wanted to burn it all down. At PUAHate, he posted:
One day incels will realize their true strength and numbers, and will overthrow this oppressive feminist system.
Start envisioning a world where WOMEN FEAR YOU.59
Rodger drove a nice a car, a black BMW. On the evening of May 23, 2014, he walked out of his apartment near the University of California, Santa Barbara, campus, got into it, and drove away, leaving three dead roommates behind. He drove to a Starbucks, got some coffee, and sat in the car, uploading material to the Internet from his laptop.
Specifically, it was a manifesto, titled “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger,” with a meandering explanation for the violence he was about to commit. He also uploaded a video to YouTube. It was titled “Retribution.”60
“On the day of retribution,” he told the world, “I am going to enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB and I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck up, blonde slut I see inside there.”
________
Alek Minassian always had issues, even before becoming enmeshed in incel culture. In high school in Toronto, he was placed in a special needs program, where he was known for making cat sounds and hugging himself. Sometimes he tried to bite people, though otherwise was quite “harmless.”61
In college, he studied software development and had an easier time fitting in as an adult, especially as he was able to cocoon himself in the more insular world of research technology. And that, seemingly, was when he was drawn into the world of incels.62
Minassian apparently fell into the culture while visiting the Internet message board 4chan, a popular website with massive traffic numbers built around an anything-goes approach to subject matter, including the open expression and promotion of white nationalist and other far-right beliefs.
The problem is that Minassian never could be identified with any previous comments or participation on incel threads, either at 4chan or Reddit (another popular incel gathering site) or websites specifically dedicated to the culture. Where and how he picked up the ideology is anyone’s guess.63
In late 2017, he joined the Canadian military but washed out after two months and sought a voluntary release. Minassian “wasn’t adapting to military life, including in matters of dress, deportment and group interactions in a military setting,” a senior military official commented, noting that “there were no red flags” suggesting concerns about violence.64
The only thing anyone really knows about him is that on April 23, 2018, he rented a large white Chevrolet Express van from a Ryder agency and drove it into the heart of downtown Toronto, into the trendy North York City Centre shopping district on Yonge Street. He apparently parked it long enough to post a message onto Facebook.
Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!
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Jeremy Christian had issues, too. But like Anders Breivik and Elliot Rodger, he never received an official diagnosis of mental illness. He was just, in the vernacular, “troubled.”65
Mostly he was in trouble with the law as a young man. When he was a fifteen-year-old heavy-metal fan and skateboarder, he was caught breaking into a Goodwill clothing donation box in downtown Portland, Oregon. The police released him to his parents and there were no legal penalties. The next year he dropped out of high school and got a job in a pizza parlor, where he worked for the next four years, picking up a GED along the way. He also picked up classes at Portland Community College.
Christian argued with his parents a lot. So, at eighteen, he moved out of the family home and rented a room from the mother of a friend while continuing to work at Pietro’s. Then, in 2002, at the age of twenty, it all went to hell when he decided to rob a convenience store.66
The attempt went sideways from the start, though Christian wore a ski mask. He threatened the clerk with a .38 revolver, then handcuffed him to a cigarette rack. Christian made his getaway with $1,000 and armfuls of cigarette cartons on a bike, and police caught him just a few blocks away, the ski mask sticking out of a pocket. He pulled out a gun, and the officer fired at him three times; one of the shots hit him in the right cheek. When they had him on the ground, he told the cops he wasn’t aiming at them. He had intended to shoot himself.67
Christian had no criminal record, but he wound up spending the next seven years in prison, in part because the charges included kidnapping for handcuffing the clerk.
When he got out in 2010, he apparently fell into the everyday life of being a homeless street itinerant in downtown Portland. He was known to trade comics outside Powell’s, the big local bookstore. He was also known for being loud and a little frightening.68
On his Facebook page, Christian began posting a variety of conspiracy theories. His politics swung wildly; he originally favored Bernie Sanders’s 2016 candidacy for the presidency, but after the primaries, he swung to Donald Trump (for a while, at least) because his loathing for Hillary Clinton was deep, visceral, and violent. After the election, he ranted: “Death to Hillary Rodham Clinton and all her supporters!!! To be carried out by Bernie Supporters who didn’t turn traitor and vote Hillary.”69
As spring 2017 wore on, his posts became more openly violent, deeply Islamophobic and racist, not to mention voicing a weird obsession with circumcision, which he connected to a nefarious Jewish conspiracy.
“I want a job in Norway cutting off the heads of people that Circumcize Babies. . . . Like if you agree!!!” he wrote.
“If you support the cutting of babies genitals in sick tribal rituals in America get off my page,” went another post. “I don’t care if you are friend of family.”
A law banning circumcision, he proposed another time, would “stop True Patriots from having to kill otherwise good doctors inside hospitals.”
“F-- You if you say my body my choice but support circumcision,” he declared.
Street artist Raymond Alexander, a sixty-eight-year-old black man, had known Christian for years from the streets. He told Oregonian reporter Allan Brettman that Christian had talked race with him, but “he didn’t ever use the master race issue on me.”70
“He went way back to Norway,” Alexander said, “to some secret society that if they find out about this document that’s never been exposed to the world then there’s going to be mass chaos throughout the world. . . . [H]e was tied up in mythology, tied up in Viking blood lines.”
That spring in the Portland area, a group of right-wing extremists who first organized as a kind of biker militia in nearby Vancouver, Washington, renamed themselves Patriot Prayer and began organizing pro-Trump street protests in Portland as a way of asserting their “free speech” rights—usually in the face of a militant far left/anarchist/black bloc contingent native to the city. Jeremy Christian was drawn to the conflict like a fly to garbage.
He showed up at one of Patriot Prayer’s first events in Portland on April 29, a kind of street march in which about thirty people carrying American and Gadsden flags—in addition to the large Trump banner carried by Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson—traveled along a busy thoroughfare in the city’s southeastern quadrant. A contingent of antifascists accompanied and taunted them, though no violence broke out.71
But Jeremy Christian got kicked out.
For most of the march he blended in with the other “Patriots”—a large American flag with the stars replaced by a “1776” logo draped over his back like a cape, a gray woolen ballcap reading “Wolverines” turned backward, shouting “Free speech! Free speech!” When they pulled up at a parking lot, though, Christian started getting into it verbally with some of the antifascists. He began yelling at one of them: “White nigger! You’re a white nigger! You are a white nigger!”72
At that point, another “Patriot” intervened. “Hey, no language! No language!” He told Christian using the “N word” was “not appropriate”: “Don’t do that!” Christian later told others in the parking that being called a “Nazi” was “a joke! I’m a nihilist!” he shouted. Then, he started using a Nazi salute.
An antifascist counterprotester dressed in a clown hat, juggling balls and telling jokes, approached Christian and joked with him briefly. His name was Micah David-Cole Fletcher, a twenty-one-year-old Portland State student, and they would meet again, fatefully, a few weeks later.73
Finally, a larger group of “Patriots” stepped up and told Christian he was being ejected from the march. He started talking gibberish to them, and they stopped him: “No! No! You’re giving the Nazi sign, you’re using the N word! So please go away! I won’t ask you again nicely.”
Christian turned around and shouted to the gathered crowd. “I’m the only motherfucking free speecher here! Who will defend free speech?” Police then escorted Christian away from the scene.
Nearly a month later, on a late evening Portland MAX commuter train, Christian boarded and promptly announced that he was a Nazi and was looking to recruit others to join him. He shouted that he hated Jews, Mexicans, Japanese, and anyone who wasn’t Christian.74
A black woman named Demetria Hester—the only person of color on the train—spoke up and told Christian he needed to keep it down.
“Fuck you Bitch!” he screamed at her, adding that she had neither the right to speak nor to be on the train.
“I built this country!” he shouted. “You don’t have a right to speak. You’re black. You don’t have a right to be here. All you Muslims, blacks, Jews, I will kill all of you.”
As the train pulled into Demetria Hester’s stop, she stood up to leave. Christian made clear he intended to get off and began shouting loudly at everyone on the train that he didn’t care if anyone wanted to call the police because he wasn’t scared.
“I will kill anyone who stands in my way because I have a right to do this,” he told them. He looked at Hester and seethed: “Bitch, you’re about to get it now.”
As she stepped off the train, Christian lunged at her with a Gatorade bottle and smacked her above the right eye with it just as she whipped out her can of mace and gave him a faceful. It knocked him down on the platform. She staggered away and awaited police, who finally arrived about twenty minutes later. Hester said the officers treated her as a likely suspect, even though witnesses pointed out Jeremy Christian—still washing pepper spray out of his eyes—standing feet away.
Christian wound up walking away from the scene and going home for the night. Police later blamed this on confusion regarding who the perpetrator was.75
The next day, he boarded another MAX train during rush hour. This time he had a knife.
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Buckey Wolfe and his brother James were raised in the same home in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood and attended the same local schools, but they ended up on very different paths. After they graduated high school, James joined the army and served overseas. Buckey joined the Washington State Militia and became devoted to conspiracy theories.76
Everyone kind of knew that Buckey had mental-illness problems, though. He had a jittery, paranoid personality and was on edge a lot. Eventually, in his early twenties, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and prescribed medication to cope with it.77
At the same time, he dove headfirst into the far right’s rabbit holes. In addition to joining a militia group, he also participated in the events and drinking games with a local chapter of the Proud Boys—the far-right, pro-Trump, street-brawling organization that had been involved in a number of ugly riots along the West Coast in 2017 and 2018.
Wolfe also started watching conspiracy videos on YouTube. Initially, his video “likes” were a typical teenage boy’s interests—lots of rock videos plus some fitness and personal motivation material. As he grew older, though, he was drawn into politics. Initially this came through “alt-lite” YouTubers, like Hunter Avallone, who specialize in making fun of “social justice warriors.” Then he started liking weird science conspiracy theories about “free energy” and “Tesla’s UFO,” before he eventually became a full-time Alex Jones/Infowars fan. He later told friends that he had “watched every episode” of Jones on his massive YouTube channel.78
After that, all of Wolfe’s video likes revolved around the far right, especially Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes and his cohorts, as well as Milo Yiannopoulos, Steven Crowder, and “Sargon of Akkad,” all figures in the so-called alt-lite. Unsurprisingly, he then began liking videos from openly white nationalist sites such as Red Ice.
“I’m a proud Western chauvinist and I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world,” a Facebook post read, closing with the Proud Boys’ slogan: “Uhuru!!!”
A Facebook post from a Proud Boys member in March 2018 showing the twenty or so members of the Seattle chapter standing outside a local light-rail station making the mock-white-nationalist “OK” sign and holding up a “Trump 45” shirt featured a comment from Buckey Wolfe, who appears in it: “My face [is] covered by hands lol. Last night was awesome I had a great time!”
Finally, Wolfe reached the apotheosis of this journey when he became an ardent supporter of the “QAnon” conspiracy theories—a sort of meta-conspiracy theory involving Donald Trump, Robert Mueller, Hillary Clinton, and the same global pedophilia ring featured in Pizzagate. “It’s coming, and it’s gonna be good!” Wolfe commented on YouTube. “Y’alls are gonna get your just dues. I will be so happy, you have no idea.”79
While circulating in that world, Buckey also became enamored of David Icke’s theory positing that world leaders are in fact a species of lizard aliens from outer space who are able to disguise themselves.
In November 2018, he posted a rant: “If I start talking about the iluminati and you role your eyes at me you have been successfully indoctrinated. The ilimunati is VERY real, the CIA agrees with my asurtion, this is straight from the CIAs website!!! I erge you DO YOUR RESEARCH BEFORE YOU BLOW ME OFF!!!”
Two of his fellow Proud Boys chimed in to support him. One replied: “I didnt believe in Zionist till I watched a rabi speak about rothchilds being their Zionist leaders.”80
Wolfe’s family became concerned, especially after a long late December 2018 rant that he posted on Facebook about humans being replaced by alien lizards that ended with a plea not to ignore him. His brother James chimed in to try to calm him down. An aunt who lived in Ohio asked him if he was okay but said that she couldn’t understand what he was talking about. This aunt, who had lost a son the year before, added that she loved him.81
Buckey replied: “I know you don’t cus you’ve been taken, don’t think I didn’t notice when you got back from your cruise your eyes had changed!!!! You will be made in to dust lizard!!!!!”
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Brenton Tarrant had a perfectly unremarkable upbringing in the town of Grafton, Australia, located south of Brisbane and the Gold Coast in New South Wales.82 He worked for a few years as a personal trainer after graduating high school and then began traveling widely.83
Around 2016, at the age of twenty-six, he became obsessed with the long-simmering conflict between Serbs and Muslims in Kosovo after visiting the Balkans extensively.84 He began posting Balkan nationalist material, defending the Serbian military as “Christian Europeans attempting to remove these Islamic occupiers from Europe,” as he later put it in his manifesto. Investigators believe that he met far-right extremists in Europe on his travels and became deeply influenced by them.85
The manifesto explained that he “dramatically changed my views” between April and May 2017. He felt that a “series of events . . . revealed the truth of the Wests current situation.” He decided at that time that a “violent, revolutionary solution” was needed.86
The key event, he said, was the April 7, 2017, truck attack by an Islamist radical in downtown Stockholm that killed five people and injured another eleven. Tarrant said he was visiting Western Europe at the time, playing the tourist in France, Spain, Portugal, and other countries at the time of the attack. Among the dead was an eleven-year-old girl named Ebba Akerlund: “Young, innocent and dead Ebba,” he wrote.
At this point, he said, he began planning his own attack, initially from his home in Melbourne. Sometime in 2018 he moved to the town of Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island, just a five-hour drive down the eastern coast from Christchurch. It’s a quiet town, at one time a famed whaling station, now best known for its college campuses, with students accounting for about a fifth of the population.
Tarrant rented a place in the suburb of Andersons Bay. His neighbors said that he was quiet, polite, and reserved—indeed, they scarcely ever encountered him in person. No one had any idea he even had guns.87
Like Breivik, whom he celebrated in his manifesto, he was obsessed with “white genocide” and changes in ethnic demographics. “It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. If there is one thing I want you to remember from these writings, its that the birthrates must change,” Tarrant wrote. “Even if we were to deport all Non-Europeans from our lands tomorrow, the European people would still be spiraling into decay and eventual death.”
However, he claimed he was “not a direct member of any organization or group, though I have donated to many nationalist groups and have interacted with many more.”
He said “no group ordered my attack. I make the decision myself. Though I did contact the reborn Knights Templar for a blessing in support of the attack, which was given.”
Tarrant’s attitudes about the left were also clear.
To Antifa/Marxists/Communists
I do not want to convert you, I do not want to come to an understanding. Egalitarians and those that believe in heirachy will never come to terms. I don’t want you by my side or I don’t want share power.
I want you in my sights. I want your neck under my boot.
SEE YOU ON THE STREETS YOU ANTI-WHITE SCUM
He titled the manifesto “The Great Replacement,” and delivered it via email to thirty recipients at around noon Friday, March 15, 2019. He was in downtown Christchurch, a good two hours north of Dunedin, sitting in a car, and he had several guns with him: two semiautomatics, two shotguns, and a lever-action gun. He also had a GoPro camera strapped to his chest.