Trump Agencies Fight War on Nihilism
New documents shed light on a bizarre obsession
Since the FBI started using the phrase “nihilistic violent extremism” earlier this year to describe people who it characterizes as believing in nothing, the term and the acronym “NVE” have spread like a virus to the rest of the federal bureaucracy.
When I first reported on the new designation in April, I warned that the new term was a euphemism the Trump administration wanted to use to focus away from right wing extremism and white nationalist violence. Though Trump is fond of railing against “Antifa” and the “radical left” to the exclusion of any MAGA-related group, the FBI and the counter-terror hunters at home wanted to have a non-partisan sounding phrase for them to describe domestic threats, one that could apply to anyone from sexual predators to Luigi Mangione.
They came up with NVE, and by May, the FBI had reportedly opened 250 separate investigations into a single “nihilistic violent extremist” group. A new threat was born.
What I didn’t anticipate was how quickly other agencies would adopt the same language, even the State Department, which wants this “violent extremist” category to apply to foreign groups that it says might threaten Americans and even “public health,” whatever that means.
In fact, federal and state organizations, including a variety of military organizations, are now focusing on the supposed NVE threat. Much of this is taking place behind the scenes in internal documents. I only know about these records because the fine folks at transparency nonprofit Property of the People obtained them under the Freedom of Information Act and shared them with me. (Check out their other FOIA work here.)
First, there’s the Army Threat Integration Center, which in June issued an internal warning titled, "Nihilistic Violent Extremist Chat Group Would Likely Result in the Construction of a Viable Explosive Device.” Making reference to the Telegram chat app, where it says a guide had been posted on how to build a homemade grenade, the report notes that the Army had consulted with a chemist about the viability of the explosive.
What any of this has to do with nihilism isn’t clear, but the designation does allow organizations to categorize threats so that when some official asks how many reports have been written about the nihilist threat, or a statistic is needed, the report’s title contributes to the sense that the threat is real and Something Is Being Done. So there’s that!
The Army report also mentions the FBI’s creation of the “nihilistic violent extremist” threat category, defining it as “hatred of humanity or society,” though also stressing that NVEs can overlap with other groups like “incels” (involuntary celibates).
“FBI recently announced the creation of the NVE terrorist threat category. Hatred of humanity or society motivates individuals prescribing to NVE ideologies, who may also incorporate elements from other extremist belief systems such as white supremacy or involuntary celibacy (‘incel’). NVEs often frequents forums dedicated to the curation of gore material or the glorification of mass casualty attackers in the United States and abroad.”
That and other documents mentioning NVEs makes clear that the focus on nihilists isn’t just some fixation of FBI Director Kash Patel’s or other Bureau officials. The national security apparatus seems driven by the need to categorize threats, as though each one were carefully pinned on a taxonomist’s specimen board.
The term has spread to Congress as well. In testimony before the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee on June 10, Dr. Gina Ligon, Director of the University of Nebraska’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center, funded by the Department of Homeland Security, said that the rise of NVEs means we must “make sure that we are empowering intelligence and analysis to be able to do those kinds of assessments…” That is, the same kinds of assessments I’m reporting on here. It was the middle of budget season, after all.
Then there’s the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which in June put together its own internal assessment of the foreign nihilist threat. Warning of a “high threat” to Americans abroad, the State Department says:
Members of NVE networks very likely pose a high threat to U.S. persons and seek to target U.S. celebrities or events that draw crowds of Americans. The NVE threat consists of overlapping networks based in Europe, FVEY [Five Eye] countries [Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and US], and South America clustered across multiple social media and secure messaging applications.
State’s report lists several violent attacks carried out by what it labels NVEs which, though real, are pretty clearly motivated by social or political beliefs — the opposite of nihilism, a point I’ve made before. But none of the details matter to these agencies in their rush to push out reporting that affirms their new category and the sense of ubiquitous threats to society that demand unprecedented levels of policing.
Then in July, the Illinois Statewide Terrorism & Intelligence Center (STIC), a statewide “fusion center,” issued a frankly surreal internal assessment that sounded more like something out of a fantasy series than an intelligence report. Warning of things like “occult shrines” and internet “sewers,” the report details the tactics and indicators associated with NVE groups, which apparently include:
“Tempel ov Blood” [not a typo],
“Order of Nine Angels,”
“764,” and
“The Community.”
And in New York, the NYPD’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau put out a similar internal assessment, delving into even more obscure matters. There’s the Order of Nine Angels’ “Septenary Sigil” — something to watch out for, I guess — the "Heaven’s Gate cult, “Militant Accelerationism,” and “The Hard Reset.”
Oh, and some Wisconsin high schooler’s “plan to assassinate POTUS and overthrow the US government.” (Would it surprise you that he didn’t get very far with that?) Each of these seems to have some kind of political motivation behind them which, again, can hardly be categorized as nihilistic.
Do the intelligence and law enforcement agencies really need to delve into these bizarre subcultures? It’s hard to see how any of this is making us safer.
The NYPD report is dated June 8, just days before a 27-year-old Shane Tamura, armed with an automatic rifle strolled into an office building in Midtown Manhattan, killing four people. (Here too, officials cast the shooting as some random, nihilistic act, but there’s clearly more to it, as I’ve reported.) Perhaps if the national security state were focused on more serious things than pentagrams, this tragedy could have been prevented.
As the violent shootings in Manhattan, Montana, Georgia and elsewhere show, there is no end to the amount of real work that law enforcement agencies should be doing to make sure that guns don’t get into the wrong hands, or that local police have actual intelligence to deal with “common” criminals. It’s just that none of it is as sexy or satisfying (or indulgent of Donald Trump) as describing the threat to society of some devil worshipper with a Telegram inspired grenade.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
Tempel ov Blood
How do you NOT put an umlaut on one of those o's?
A "nihilistic extremist" sounds like someone who only reads Nietzsche while wearing black clothes in a black room under black light.
Oh great—the right has learned a new word! Hopefully they will include a definition with their propaganda. However, since so few people might know what it means, it becomes another buzzword whose meaning can be conveniently twisted into whatever useful definition they have need for as they have successfully used with “antisemitism, terrorist & even Hamas”. And to add to the irony, the Army Threat Integration Center would be more usefully employed in keeping track of their own, as we saw just today with the shooting at Fort Stewart of five soldiers.