Nihilistic Violent Extremism

The FBI now has a new category, Nihilistic Violent Extremism (NVE), that Dr. Gerard Gill describes “as being motivated by a hatred of society and a desire to see it destroyed … what sets NVEs apart is their lack of ideological substance beyond a broad anger and hatred directed outwards at the world.”

Thomas Crooks, Ryan Routh, and Tyler Robinson (and Luigi Mangione?) may be characterized as “unremarkable men who somehow became possessed-the word is used deliberately–with an idea to kill a man they had never met, even at the almost certain cost of long jail sentences.”

And from an AP article comes, “Bruce Hoffman, who studies terrorism at Georgetown University, noted that the FBI has created a new category, Nihilistic Violent Extremism, to track the increasing number of attacks that seem to have no clear political motivation.”

Well, a couple of points become salient as I read.

First is the thought that I’m not sure how “new and different” this is from previous expressions of complaint such as “Queers for Palestine” that seem to have not been thought through. What message has anybody got from Antifa besides, “Burn, Baby, Burn?” Investigations following the assassination of Charlie Kirk revealed a trans group in Salt Lake City professing the following principles:

1. The armed and militant protection of queer and trans communities, and all oppressed people.

2. The end of capitalist oppression and exploitation, and the creation of a socialist society.

3.  Trans liberation from the gender binary and biological essentialism.

4.  The end of commodification of housing by landlords and the recognition of housing as a human right.

5.  The abolition of prisons and police as they serve as nothing but tools of capitalist oppression.

6.   Dismantling the bourgeois non-profit industrial complex and replacing it with an organized revolutionary movement.

You cannot make real-world sense of them, but of course, that’s contemporary and I guess could be swept under the NVE rug.    

But by now we’ve seen generations of the disaffected who are sometimes given to violence in support of their calls to socialism, a socialism/communism they clearly don’t understand. If queried about how their utopian socialist society will work, they fail to describe the existing socialist dictatorships, or why they turn out that way.

So it’s hardly a new phenomenon that the sometimes violent, alienated people act out without a clear understanding, much less a real plan. And, of course, assassination doesn’t have a good record of producing the assailant’s desired social change.

Secondarily, while the writings I’ve seen seem to be promoting the idea that these acts of violence are without underpinnings to any real political stance, all four of those named above have certainly been perceived as leftists, even though the Left is not anxious to claim them. That blame game gets exercised every time there’s a non-Chicago gang mass shooting.