Seeing two-dimensionally in a three-dimensional world 

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." 

- Hamlet, William Shakespeare

On September 10th, 2025, Charlie Kirk--a prominent right-wing political activist--was shot and killed by 22-year-old Tyler Robinson.  The murder of Kirk happened during a public event at Utah Valley University, and graphic video of Kirk's death spread rapidly across the Internet.

On that same day, 16-year-old Desmond Holly launched an attack on Evergreen High School in Colorado, critically wounding two students.  Holly then killed himself.  

Two weeks prior to that, 23-year-old Robin Westman fired dozens of rounds into an all-school Mass at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis.  In two minutes of shooting, Westman killed two children, and wounded eighteen children and three adults, then committed suicide.  

These are just the latest three in a long series of mass shootings and acts of extreme violence in public places, typically--but not always--perpetrated by young men.  Whenever they occur, politicians and pundits are quick to cast the blame.  The rank and file then join in via social media, pointing the finger (often before anything is actually known about the shooter or their motivations).  Robin Westman, the Annunciation School shooter, identified as transgender and had changed their name from Robert but had not received any kind of gender-affirming medical treatment or hormone therapy.  As a result of that tidbit, right-wing pundits and politicians jumped to blame transgender people and "woke" ideology for the shooting.  When the Charlie Kirk murder occurred two weeks later, those same right-wing pundits and politicians once more immediately blamed "the radical left" and transgenderism, even before a suspect had been identified.  Meanwhile, some on the left postulated that the killer was perhaps a radical right-winger who felt that Kirk was not right-wing enough.

And so it goes, the left suspects the right, the right is certain it is the left.  Both sides are operating in a binary us vs. them framework.  When Tyler Robinson, the murderer of Charlie Kirk, was apprehended and identified, and it was learned that he was a white kid from a good Republican Morman home and was not transgender, the calls from the right to visit holy war upon Democrats became less strident (though at this point in time some are still holding out hope that Robinson's roommate is transgender so that scapegoat can still be used).  And, so far, nothing has come to light to indicate that Robinson was indoctrinated into neo-Nazism or some other far-right ideology.  Time will tell the fuller picture.  

But in the meantime, there are very clear indications (for those who have eyes to see) that Robinson was radicalized by the same zeitgeist as Holly and Westman and a number of other mass shooters who preceded them (including 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, and killed firefighter Corey Comperatore, and critically injured two others, in Butler Pennsylvania on July 13th, 2024).  But this dark and poison wellspring exists outside of the two-dimensional binary worldview of right vs. left, Democrat vs. Republican, MAGA vs. Woke, progressive vs. conservative, making it difficult to comprehend.  It is an ideology of nihilism.  So, in a sense, it is an ideology of no ideology.  Robin Westman, the Annunciation Catholic School shooter, made the following journal entry: "This is not a church or religion attack, that is not the message. The message is there is no message.”  As the character Alfred says of the Joker in the Batman film The Dark Knight, "Some men just want to watch the world burn."

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (an excellent, peer-reviewed, resource), "Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy."

This particular nihilism that we see manifesting with alarming frequency lives and spreads in a world that is completely invisible and alien to most of us.  It is a world situated in dark corners of the Internet, on Discord and Telegram servers, in computer gaming culture, in decentralized online groups with names like Order of Nine Angles, No Lives Matter, Atomwaffen, 764, the Terrorgram Collective, Tempel ov Blood, the True Crime Community, etc.  Communication in this world is rife with symbols and memes that are inscrutable to the uninitiated (I'm reminded of an old Star Trek episode called 'Darmok' in which Captain Picard finds himself marooned on a planet with a starship captain from a previously unknown race called the Tamarians who's language is made up entirely of references to Tamarian culture, mythology and history.  In order to survive, Picard must figure out what phrases like "Shaka, when the walls fell", "Temba, his arms wide" and "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" mean.  This is what came to my mind as law enforcement and news reporters struggled to decipher the meaning of phrases and symbols etched into Tyler Robinson's bullet casings, and suggested interpretations that were eventually shown to be misguided).

The FBI has recently coined a term: Nihilistic Violent Extremism (NVE).  They define it 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.”  Former FBI director Christopher Wray characterized NVE as “more about the violence than the ideology."  British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has warned that “Terrorism has changed” to incorporate “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.”  As disaffected young people become immersed in this dark cyberworld they are exposed to a buffet of cynicism, nihilism, extremism, graphic gore, misanthropism, sadism, rage, abuse, and hopelessness.  Human empathy becomes dulled.  

Marc-Andre Argentino, an academic expert on NVE, states, "Practitioners articulate a visceral disdain for humanity, morality, and meaning; their writings celebrate extinction, entropy, and the erasure of narrative coherence. Violence is framed as existential art: an aesthetic of ruin whose highest achievement is the visible unravelling of norms. Their ultimate objective is a civilizational vacuum in which all normative constraints—legal, moral, religious, and even ideological—have been liquidated. Collateral suffering is not a means to an end; it is the end."

A common feature of Nihilistic Violent Extremism is "accelerationism", a term that Wikipedia defines as "attempts to worsen existing conditions for a favorable outcome. [For example] Right-wing extremists such as neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists and white supremacists have used the term to refer to an acceleration of racial conflict through assassinations, murders and terrorist attacks as a means to violently achieve a white ethnostate."  Those indoctrinated into Nihilistic Violent Extremism, though not seeking to further a political agenda,  may choose to act out in ways that create public shock and chaos and lead to further destruction.  The perpetrator will then be remembered for his/her audacious deeds, which gives them a sense of immortality and meaningfulness.  Both Desmond Holly and Robin Westman idolized previous school shooters, studied their methods, wrote about them in their journals, and incorporated references to them into their own violent performative acts of terror.  

It remains to be seen if this is also the case with Tyler Robinson, but I suspect it will be.  It is likely that Robinson's plan to murder Charlie Kirk, a prominent national Republican figure, in such a public way, had more to do with getting himself into the lorebooks of his nihilistic online community, to join the pantheon of young people who have shocked the world with cruel violence going back to Columbine High School's Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.  Robinson not only caught the attention of the entire world with a single bullet, but his act also brought about a ripple effect of chaos and potential violence as the Right blamed the Left and the Left blamed the Right.  The next shooter may very well engage in obsessive hero worship of Tyler Robinson as they plan their own outrageous performance of meaningless violence.

I'm no expert in that world, that invisible and nearly incomprehensible dimension  (I highly recommend Marc-Andre Argentino, who is), I'm just a dilettante scratching the surface.  The FBI and U.S. Department of Justice are well aware of that culture of Nihilistic Violent Extremism, and what its access points are, and what the danger signs are that a young person is being pulled into its dark orbit.  But one wonders if highly politicized government bureaucracies, as the FBI and DOJ currently are, are going to convey this information to the public-at-large or instead mute this information so as not to interfere with the cynical (and politically useful) narratives of "us vs. them" put forth by the politicians and pundits.  And the news media, alas, tends to be too beholden to what makes quick and punchy headlines rather then providing us with in-depth and nuanced three-dimensional analysis.  The obvious lesson here is that the longer we retain our two-dimensional us vs. them worldview, the more likely we are to play into the hands of these nihilistic attempts to sow self-perpetuating violence and chaos.