Dark forces

On Sept. 3, former FBI agent Pat McMonigle sat at a Catholic Mass in Washington state with three of his four children. They were celebrating the start of their school year exactly a week after a shooter opened fire at a near-identical gathering in Minneapolis.

“It was very eerie,” McMonigle said. Everyone was on high alert. “The ushers at the back of the church are more on guard thinking about who’s entering,” he said. The previous week’s events had seared into their minds the worst-case scenario of what could happen.

Looking at the students sitting in pews around him, McMonigle’s heart broke. “These poor kids are just like sheep,” he thought.

Mass shootings are always senseless. But the one in Minneapolis, targeting students at Annunciation, a Catholic church and school, bore every hallmark of a new kind of crime now being tracked by the FBI: Nihilistic Violent Extremists, or NVEs. The label refers to the troubling trend of violent crimes carried out for no apparent reason except a glorification of chaos and depravity for its own sake.

Investigators sifted through hundreds of pages of scribblings from the Minneapolis perpetrator, a 23-year-old male who identified as transgender. The writings expressed hatred toward many ­different groups: black people, Mexican people, Christians, and Jews.

“In short, the shooter appeared to hate all of us,” acting U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Joe Thompson said at an Aug. 28 press conference. In other words, NVEs lash out against a world they believe is meaningless.

“There’s always been a subset of people that just want to watch the world burn,” said Seamus Hughes, a policy associate in counterterrorism at the University of Nebraska Omaha. Law enforcement used to call this the “Joker effect.” Only more recently, in April 2025, did the FBI start using the NVE label for this phenomenon.

The twisted ideology behind these attacks is difficult for rational people to make sense of, Hughes said. But it runs something like this: “We can hurt and kill and maim whoever we want because it doesn’t matter in the long run.”

NVE groups aren’t formally organized in the way foreign terrorist groups like ISIS are, Hughes said. They are loose webs held together in dark corners of the internet, particularly on platforms like Discord and Telegram. NVEs often have ties to satanist and neo-Nazi groups like 764 and the Order of Nine Angles (O9A) that target isolated and vulnerable children online and manipulate them into explicit acts, self-harm, or violence.

“Think of it like an online troll who decided to go very violent very quickly,” Hughes said. Researchers don’t yet have good metrics on the size and scope of this problem, he added. FBI Director Kash Patel said his agency currently has over 250 active NVE investigations across the United States. But this may only be the tip of the iceberg.

Because of the insidious nature of the threat, it’s nearly impossible for agents to predict when the next NVE might come out of the woodwork. But former FBI agent McMonigle said it helps to know the general profile for these predators.

They are usually loners with mental health issues and significant suicidality. Most of them are males between the ages of 15 and 25, and often, their names are already in the FBI ­database for one reason or another, McMonigle said.

They are also marked by a grudge against humanity. “That’s why their manifestos or whatever really make no sense,” McMonigle said. “It’s just kind of grievances with everybody. Everybody did them wrong.”

Mourners visit a growing memorial for the victims of the school shooting. Scott Olson / Getty Images

This issue is deeply personal for McMonigle. In 2022, he helped investigate a local Washington case in which a 13-year-old recorded his own suicide at the urging of an online groomer and 764 ringleader.

“Our victim here was a child,” McMonigle said. “And he had just fallen into the trap of being convinced that this person was a friend and then becoming more and more manipulated by the predator.”

The case was one of the first to bring attention to the issue, and after that, the FBI designated particular squads to tackle this growing online threat, McMonigle said. But he worried the same perpetrator would target others. “These guys are on the prowl,” he said. “They want a bigger and bigger kill.”

But fighting these online gangs is harder than busting more organized ­terrorist groups. And McMonigle said FBI agents often find themselves in the difficult position where they can’t do much about the threats until someone actually commits a crime.

In 2024, just before McMonigle left the FBI, he got a call to interview a teenager who made comments about wanting to be a school shooter. The boy was living in a state home and didn’t have any parents. He had recently gotten pulled out of school and was at risk for suicide.

“But, he hasn’t done anything yet other than talk, right?” McMonigle said. It isn’t possible to keep everyone fitting the profile of a potential shooter under 24-hour surveillance, he said. So, the agents could only give the teenager a stern talking to and hope for the best.

“All I could do was think about giving this kid a hug,” McMonigle said. He knew there were a lot of complicated layers behind the teenager’s dark threats and volatile emotional state.

It’s a situation underscoring one of the most difficult aspects of NVE cases. Often, the perpetrators targeting children were victims first. And many of them are still legally minors when they first start committing crimes against others.

Because of that, McMonigle said law enforcement has to strike the right balance of compassionate intervention beforehand and absolute deterrence and prosecution after a crime.

And it’s absolutely essential for parents and teachers to know the warning signs of online grooming and be on the lookout for them, McMonigle said. Sometimes predators will encourage children to scratch swastikas and other symbols into their skin.

Church leaders and school administrators need to find ways to make their facilities less vulnerable to attack, McMonigle added. Often, NVEs are just looking for a soft target and will strike elsewhere if an institution takes basic security measures.

After investigating the 764-related case in 2022, McMonigle wrestled with the depravity of what he’d encountered. “It was hard to see such senseless evil committed on a child who was just a victim,” he said. German police recently arrested one of the suspected 764 leaders and charged him with 123 counts, including involvement in McMonigle’s case. But that won’t bring back the group’s victims.

That case displayed the same depravity manifested in the Minneapolis attack. “When somebody mows down kids who are literally praying—that’s evil,” McMonigle said.

McMonigle feels compassion for today’s young people who are growing up in an increasingly dark world. They’re worried about a lot of things: AI, climate change, and foreign wars. And that makes them more vulnerable to the lure of NVE.

In some ways, McMonigle said, Christians have a target on their backs as this nihilistic ideology takes root. But faith also helps people understand the way evil operates in the world and offers hope: “That is the one kind of antidote we have to this in a faithless, really depressed world.”