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At the end of 2024 and beginning of 2025 we have seen at least three school shootings in the United States paying homage to both previous school shooters and extreme right perpetrators. The common denominator in the cases seems to be a dark corner of the internet revolving around violent gore content and appreciation for all kinds of violent perpetrators — including school shooters and extreme right lone actors. In this blogpost the potential consequence of the merger is explored.
The shootings
The first of the three incidents took place in December 2024 at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. The perpetrator, a 15-year-old girl, fatally shot a fellow student and a teacher before taking her own life. In the aftermath of the attack, an alleged manifesto attributed to her began circulating online. (Authorities have yet to verify its authenticity). The second school shooting was committed at Antioch High School, Nashville, Tennessee in January 2025 by a 17-year-old student at the school. After killing a student and injuring another, he too committed suicide. Beforehand, he had uploaded a manifesto for the public to read. The third school shooting took place on August 27 in Minneapolis. The perpetrator, a 23-year-old individual, killed two children and injured 17 others, both children and adults, before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. After the attack, a video was released on YouTube. The video, which is believed to be made by the perpetrator beforehand, shows a hand flipping through a notebook. The text and drawings function as what Julia Kupper and J. Reid Meloy have coined a targeted violence manifesto (2021) – “A written or spoken communication intended to justify an act of violence against a specific target by articulating self-identified grievances…”.
School shooter admiration and the Extreme Right
Even though these three cases are new and the information limited, it seems evident that at least the two first cases can be traced directly to the WatchPeopleDie-webpage (WPD). The WPD forum is dedicated to violent content including “murders, torture, rape, executions, beheadings, suicides, dismemberments, accidents and animal killings”. While the WPD-connection is not documented yet regarding the Minneapolis school shooting, there is a considerable overlap in intertextual references indicating, that the perpetrator should be considered a part of the same violent gore online environment.
Unsurprisingly, extreme right content, like livestreams from mass shootings, have found its way to the webpage. The subcultures surrounding school shooter admiration and the extreme right share key traits that make favourable conditions for a merger. Both exhibit a fascination with violence and invest significant effort in commemorating past perpetrators. Within the school shooter milieu, the Columbine massacre remains a central reference point—each of the recent cases cited the event, and images have surfaced online showing the Abundant Life Christian School shooter wearing a ‘KMFDM’ t-shirt identical to one worn by one of the Columbine attackers. Research indicates that fame is a motivational factor for many school shooters who hope to achieve the same notoriety as their predecessors. Within the extreme right a similar culture can be identified. In extreme right ‘saints culture’ perpetrators are ‘elevated’ as ‘saints’ and ‘glorification of violence’ is combined with ‘religious-like veneration of terrorists’.
While earlier cases have shown intersections between school shooter culture and extreme right ideologies, recent developments suggest a deepening and more systematic convergence between the two. In recent years, one of the most central discussions within counter extremism has been increased hybridization. Especially former FBI director Christopher Wray’s testimony from 2020 concerning “salad bar” ideology seems to be a reoccurring reference point in the debate. It is sensible to consider the overlap between extreme right saints culture and school shootings as an example of hybridization. In that context, it is not unreasonable to view the WPD-forum as a variation of what Petersen and Johansen have described as a ‘hybridized prefatory extremism’ (HYPE) - space; an online space that enables individuals to participate in the creation of ‘hybrid forms of extremism’ that has the potential to ‘evolve into violent extremism’.
Why is this particularly worrisome?
There are several reasons why the apparent ‘fusion’ of the two milieus is alarming. Firstly, the convergence of school shooters with extreme right saints culture further complicates an already ambiguous threat landscape. While all three school shooting cases are inspired by the extreme right, they all deviate from the “expected” white male extreme right perpetrator: the first being female, the second being black, and the third identifying as transgender. This complicates and broadens the demographic profile of the potential perpetrators further and makes the task of thwarting the attacks even more complex.
Secondly, combining the two extremist milieus makes it possible for the perpetrators to combine different grievances in the justification for their attacks. It seems likely that an increasing combination of ‘grievances’ could lower the threshold for committing an attack. In general, school shooters are motivated by personal grievance (such as family issues and bullying) and extreme right perpetrators by a perceived racial injustice against white people. Allowing a would-be-perpetrator to combine personal and political grievances could offer more ways to justify attacks; in all three cases under discussion here a mixture of personal grievance and ideology is presented (if nothing else, personal grievance is combined with a variation of nihilism and/or accelerationism).
Thirdly, the overlap makes it possible for would-be-perpetrators to learn from perpetrators from the other extremist milieu — thereby widening the repertoire of models and strategies for executing an attack. Such lessons may concern the logistics of committing an attack, and strategies to maximize fame which is a key motivation for many of the perpetrators. For example, the perpetrator behind the Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minneapolis wrote the names of both extreme right perpetrators and school shooters with a white substance on the weaponry. Each mentioning functions as a sign that can motivate members of the respective extremist milieus to celebrate the attack — and as a logical endpoint; emulate it. This strategy for situating the violent act as a continuation of former attacks is normally associated with the extreme right attacks in Christchurch (2019) and Buffalo (2022). Now the strategy has been transferred to school shootings.
Conclusion
Perpetrators inspired by both extreme right ideology and school shooters can be identified in cases prior to the three cases discussed here. An example of this is the Sandy Hook school shooting (2012) where the perpetrator was “inspired by” the Norwegian extreme right perpetrator behind the attacks on Utøya and the governmental quarter in 2011. However, the three new attacks imply the growth of a matured online milieu where the normally separate forms of extremism can interact. This development adds to an already complicated threat landscape and makes it possible for would-be perpetrators to draw inspiration from a wider range of past perpetrators.
