The Charleston shooter has been described as “a most American terrorist.”10 The description seems fitting—the shooter’s motive was “retaliation for perceived offenses” against the white race, and the shooter hoped above all that his attack would worsen racial tensions and incite a “race war.”11 The shooter chose Black congregants because killing a Black drug dealer would not have garnered the same attention, he said. In other words, his violence was a deliberate political act meant to be exemplary to others and to serve as a catalyst for revolution—or what terrorism scholars call “propaganda of the deed.”
After the Charleston shooting, President Obama said the target of the shootings, Mother Emanuel, was especially troubling not only because it was a place of worship with a rich, lengthy history but because it held “a sacred place in the history of Charleston and in the history of America.” Mother Emanuel is the oldest African Methodist Episcopal church in the Southern United States and was a sanctuary for some of the most influential figures in Black history, from Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King Jr. At trial, lead prosecutor Jay Richardson called the crime “a modern-day lynching.” Cornell William Brooks, NAACP national president in 2015, labeled it an “act of racial terrorism.”
Acts of terrorism are performances of power by people who typically have very little. The Charleston shooter absolutely incited terror, and by attacking such a sacred space, he did more than put on a display; he also deliberately tried to change the social order.12 By most measures, this is terrorism, and for a while the Department of Justice considered terrorism charges against the perpetrator. In the end, however, those charges never came—instead, out of thirty-three felony counts, twelve of them were considered hate crimes. The reason? No specific federal statute covers acts of terrorism inside the United States that are not connected to Al Qaeda, ISIS, or other officially designated global terrorist groups and their sympathizers. Even though “domestic terrorism” was defined in the Patriot Act of 2001, and even though, under federal law, anyone who provides so-called material support to a designated terrorist organization can be prosecuted, suspected domestic terrorists are investigated by the FBI’s Civil Rights Program under the rubric of hate crimes.13
U.S. intelligence agencies maintain databases of suspected terrorists and work hard to map connections among extremists. After a man plowed his car into a crowd of protesters during a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, killing one and injuring twenty-eight—and, more recently, after the riot at the U.S. Capitol in 2021, which killed five, including a police officer—America revisited the question of whether home-grown extremists should be labeled terrorists. Doing so would authorize the Department of Justice to redirect its vast resources at the domestic terrorism problem. The FBI would then have greater latitude in monitoring what the perpetrators did before they acted and in directing more investigative resources to follow up on any suspicious behavior.
Prosecuting hate-motivated mass shooters as terrorists would also send the message that the threat of extremism is just as serious when it is rooted in domestic issues as it is when based on international ideologies. The problem is these measures carry serious civil liberties concerns. Separating racism from potential domestic terrorism is not always easy, especially when even the most contemptible hate speech is protected by the U.S. Constitution. Social media platforms are overflowing with heated and hateful rhetoric, making it difficult to separate tense debates from actual threats, and many words and deeds posted online aren’t illegal in and of themselves, however sinister or prophetic they might appear to be in hindsight.
There’s also something the terrorist label misses. The designation doesn’t really explain anything—in fact, it just explains things away. It’s another variation on the “monster.” For a crime to be classified as terrorism, the Department of Homeland Security says, there has to be a “discernable political, ideological, or religious motivation.”14 However, even some of the most hardened extremists are neither learned scholars nor subject matter experts in politics, ideology, or religion. Their understanding of the causes said to motivate their actions is often very shallow, contradictory—convenient, even.15
This is because, like the Charleston shooter, their ideology often is sourced from the internet. In the internet age, even “lone wolves” are never truly alone, and it is ideology that helps them feel part of the pack. In fact, extremism is less an ideological movement and more a social one. It offers people with shared individual deficits a sense of collective identity and belonging that previously did not exist.
Research with online hate groups suggests that there are “high-intensity” posters, who post infrequent but powerful messages of hate; “high-frequency” posters, who post a lot but mostly just noise; and “high-duration” posters, who have posted hate online the longest and appear the most committed to the cause.16 Some clearly are more invested in hate than others, but what they all have in common is they are searching for something to make sense of their lives. Their ideologies have necessary companions in their lives’ trajectories, and it’s the quest for personal significance that leads them to ideologies that justify violence. No one living a happy and fulfilled life goes searching for answers in the darkest corners of the internet. And not everyone finds who or what lives there equally compelling. The internet helps facilitate violence for some and enhance it for others, but either way, we have to remember why people opt into extremism in the first place. As we’ve argued throughout this book, the story of mass shooters extends well beyond their online search histories.
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In a letter to us about the motive for his shooting, Perpetrator A, the restaurant shooter, wrote:
At the time of the shooting I’d have to say there was a good amount of hate, anger, and rage taking place. I have no memory of it, but descriptions of my words and actions tell me I was not a happy individual to say the least.
Perpetrator A’s shooting has long been considered a hate crime because, at the time, he was upset about President Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” position on gay people in the military, and when he opened fired in a crowded restaurant, he “made statements along the lines of ‘I’ll show you Clinton-loving faggots [for] letting gays in my military!’ ” he tells us. Perpetrator A admits, “I was not happy at all with President Clinton’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy (felt it made all of our military look bad in the eyes of the world),” and he is even on public record as saying, “I needed to voice my opinion on it. . . . I’m not going to apologize for my views that I hold against gays or homosexuals.” However, in a letter to us about this issue, he wrote:
I don’t think that I went in with the intention of singling out any group of people, be it black, white, male, female, gay or straight. I was just angry at the world, I guess, at the time. I was taking out my aggression on whoever was there. . . .
I didn’t “decide” to commit my crime. . . . I don’t believe I planned it at all. I had all of my military gear there at the house to include a bullet proof vest, Kevlar helmet, fatigues, boots, etc. I had all of that available and yet what was I wearing during my crime?—No shoes, tan Levi Docker shorts, a peach colored “Montego Bay” tank top and a blaze orange hunting vest full of shotgun shells. Common sense says I might have been just a little better prepared had I “planned” to go on a shooting rampage. I don’t know what I was thinking.
He added, “As far as I know, I had no ‘goal.’ ” And when asked how well informed he was on the object of his supposed hate, he joked, “You’d had to have beat me to read a book! The only books I remember reading were: ‘Where the red fern grows,’ [sic] one on reptiles, and an adult sex novel I found in a junk car.”
It is clear that whatever hateful ideas or ideology motivated Perpetrator A’s crime, they were ancillary to whatever struggles he was facing at the time. And it is these struggles that propel somebody to violent extremism in the first place, making them especially vulnerable to indoctrinati
on and exploitation, whether from famous politicians or anonymous extremists.
The Charleston shooter had many personal issues that made him susceptible to extremist propaganda. He grew up with parental discord. He was “angsty all the time” in elementary school, one of the shooter’s childhood friends—coincidently, his one and only Black friend—tells us over iced coffee at a bohemian café. He was “uncomfortable” around people and “didn’t fit in” even then, his friend says. “He was always gullible,” he adds, and “never really accomplished anything.” He was a “quiet fellow” who “flew under the radar,” the shooter’s elementary school principal confirms during a meeting at home, where he shared yearbook photographs of the shooter and stories of a once-thriving middle-class community that fell on hard times, a community where it was now not uncommon to “hear discouraging things about Black people” being uttered by white residents.
The shooter dropped out of high school after repeating ninth grade and then dropped out of an online alternative school before later earning his GED. He abused alcohol and drugs. He also had many obsessive-compulsive behaviors and was preoccupied with various somatic beliefs, some of which were delusional. He hated his “feminine” and “lopsided” appearance, for instance.17 And if his uncle Tyler is to be believed, he was questioning his sexuality in a family where that wasn’t acceptable.
Four months before the murders, the shooter anonymously posted an ad on Craigslist that he was seeking a companion to join him on a tour of historic Charleston. “Jews, queers, or [N-word]” need not apply, he wrote. The tone of the ad troubled a retired child psychologist, Dr. Thomas Hiers, who responded to the post and struck up a correspondence, hoping to help. In response to continued racist and anti-Semitic comments, Dr. Hiers even offered to pay the shooter to watch online TED Talks as a way of expanding his view of the world. The shooter politely declined. “I am in bed, so depressed I cannot get out of bed,” he wrote. “My life is wasted. I have no friends even though I am cool. I am going back to sleep.” Hiers didn’t give up. He tried to get the shooter to meet with one of his professional colleagues for lunch, but the shooter never replied.
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A seventeen-year-old boy accused of fatally stabbing a woman in February 2020 recently became the first person ever charged with carrying out an “incel” terrorist attack. The suspect had already been charged with murder when Toronto Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced the terrorism charges.
An incel is someone who is “involuntarily celibate.” Journalist Naama Kates, host of the The Incel Project, a podcast devoted to the personal stories of people who identify as incels, worries about labeling them as “terrorists” because even though some incels are violent, violence is not integral to their group identity.
Kates reached out after hearing James talk about incels on television and being pleasantly surprised by his opening acknowledgment that the incels who make national news for their acts of violence were the exception, not the rule. Over Zoom, we chatted for nearly two hours about Kates’s forays into incel life.
Kates explains that the term incel was originally created by a Canadian woman who in 1997 created a website for people struggling to find love, called Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project.18 It was a platform for men and women in similar situations to express feelings of loneliness and process their inability to find romantic or sexual partners. But over time, incel evolved into shorthand for online groups of men who blame feminism in general and women in particular for any and all grievances. The attitudes of men who visit the online message boards vary widely, but these men frequently vent anger against sexually prolific men (“Chads”) and women (“Stacys”). Like teenagers on the subject of sex, incels talk about doing harm to these people far more than they actually engage in violence, but all that talk dials up the expectation that “everyone is doing it,” which can mobilize some people to action.
Kates thinks incels are a by-product of a patriarchal culture obsessed with sex and body image. “Women are idealized and overly sexualized,” Kates says, something she experienced firsthand as a Hollywood actor. Social media have made matters worse. “Everyone’s their own mini-publicist now,” she jokes. People post only their best and most curated selves on Facebook and Instagram, thus creating a hyperreal image of life and beauty. Apps like Tinder, which invite people to “swipe right” to approve of someone based on only a few pictures, a short bio, and subjective or superficial dating criteria such as good looks. And internet pornography creates distorted expectations in the bedroom, which hinders healthy sexual development and lowers levels of sexual self-esteem.
Incels tend to be young white men, but Kates stresses that they are not a monolithic group. Some are “LARPers” (live-action role players), pretending to be someone or something they are not in order to infiltrate the subculture. Others are “Edgelords,” the online equivalent of shock jocks, who, in an effort to appear cool or edgy, talk about offensive or taboo subjects to get a rise from other users. Still others are “number crunchers,” shy Silicon Valley types who use their STEM skills to quantify and analyze topics incels care about, such as Darwinian sexual selection and the “science” of physical attractiveness. Then there are those with the biggest profiles, the influencers and content creators, who post video confessions online that attract huge followings. Kates says that while many incels are quirky, with their own unique lexicon,19 and socially awkward, even fatalistic about life, most are perfectly benign.
The term incel is most synonymous, however, with the twenty-two-year-old who in 2014 shot and killed six people in Isla Vista, an area that is part of the University of California, Santa Barbara, campus. Kates explains that the Isla Vista shooter was not the first incel killer—that honor belongs to a twenty-five-year-old Canadian who murdered fourteen women and wounded ten others in a 1989 shooting in Montreal—but the Isla Vista shooter has become the “charismatic father of the movement.” As his rage spiraled out of control, he began to blame the “wicked hearts” of women for his years of pain and suffering. In his sprawling 141-page autobiography, he wrote that “women’s rejection of me was a declaration of war” and that he would “punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex.”
However, much like how the Charleston church shooter was radicalized online, these ideas were not his own. We spoke to two people who knew the Isla Vista shooter well but asked not to be named. Over a series of joint conversations, both in person and over the telephone, we learned that there was more to this person than meets the eye.
“There’s a different voice in the manifesto” that went viral, because by then “he had a plan,” one of our interviewees explains. In fact, our interviewees now consider the shooter’s autobiography to be his public “suicide note,” written with an audience in mind. They remember hearing that the shooter was writing the document. They first thought it was a positive thing, because it seemed to keep him engaged and occupied. They realize now that this was a mistake. “Being alone changes you. You start hearing this voice that you think is yours, but it’s not.”
Our interviewees told us about a boy who grew up in privilege, the son of a successful Hollywood producer and someone who was largely very happy until puberty. From that point on, “he couldn’t talk to girls. Other boys have charm, but he didn’t,” one of them says. “He tried so hard for so long,” they add, before channeling his perspective: “I have the clothes. The BMW. I am better than everyone else, but they [girls] don’t like me.” That was how he felt.
Then, suddenly, “there was a switch. He went from ‘I’m the loser’ to ‘They are the losers.’ ” But “these ideas didn’t just come from him.” It’s well documented that the shooter visited websites like Pick Up Artist Hate, which opposed the industry of teaching men the art of attracting women, and other misogynistic forums. One of our interviewees is clear: “We also need to talk about the toxic environment of those online forums. . . . I don’t want to make excuses for him, but he didn’t co
me up with all this stuff. He was encouraged. He was emboldened. And now he’s idolized.”
“Idolized” is a fitting description. Having already stabbed his two housemates and another man to death, the Isla Vista shooter filmed himself from behind the wheel of his black BMW coupe, bathed in golden hour lighting, and uploaded to YouTube his intent to exact “retribution” on a world he believed had deeply wronged him. The video went viral. In his autobiography, the shooter wrote, “Infamy is better than total obscurity.” Some incels now call the Isla Vista shooter their patron “saint” and share memes of him superimposed onto paintings of Christian icons. The 2015 Umpqua Community College shooter described the Isla Vista shooter as being among “people who stand with the gods.” The 2018 Parkland shooter, who killed seventeen people at a Florida high school, posted online that the Isla Vista shooter “will not be forgotten.”
But when he was still alive, the Isla Vista shooter was just another incel who frequented a number of misogynistic chat rooms and communicated with other incels online. More than a means to perform socially deviant roles collectively, the internet also offers a platform to do it anonymously. And this is important if you don’t want to be held accountable for your abhorrent, sexist views. “People were on his side. They understood him. It was the only place he felt accepted, after being ostracized his entire life,” one of our interviewees says. “They thought the exact same way as him,” they add, but the problem with that was the chat rooms and message boards became an echo chamber, and the shooter increasingly encountered only beliefs and opinions that coincided with his own, reinforcing his existing views. “There’s no responsibility on these sites. You just type words. Without consequence,” they say.
As his time online became less cathartic and more confirming, the Isla Vista shooter developed a form of “hostile attribution bias” that is common among mass shooters, meaning he began to infer hostile intent not just from obviously hostile actions but also from ambiguous ones. When he saw people dating or kissing in public, he began to assume they were doing it to spite him. Years before his crime, he threw coffee on a couple he was jealous of and on two girls for not smiling at him. He also got into a fight at a party.
The Violence Project Page 15