‘There is no message’: The search for ideological motives in the Minneapolis shooting

A day after an assailant killed two children and wounded 18 other children and adults at a Catholic church in Minnesota, the FBI said the attack was motivated by “hate-filled ideology.” But online materials presumed to belong to the shooter paint a more complex picture, say several extremism analysts.

Instead, they say the emerging profile appears to align with a growing trend of school shootings committed by young people who harbor a misanthropic view of the world, who revere perpetrators of mass violence and who seek notoriety within communities that share that obsession.

“There does not seem to be a coherent ideological motive behind this attack,” said Amy Cooter, deputy director at the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism. “It really seems to be much more about the violence for the sake of violence.”

Cooter and other analysts have been combing through videos that were uploaded around the time of the attack to a YouTube account believed to belong to Robin Westman, the 23-year-old shooter. One showcases handwritten journals totaling over 200 pages. It is phonetically in English but written in Cyrillic letters. Another video shows a letter addressed to family and friends, in English, and then turns to an array of weapons laid out on a flat surface. They included a rifle, a shotgun, a handgun, a revolver, multiple magazines, a smoke bomb and a tactical belt.

“I think the most important thing is what the shooter wrote on the slide of that handgun: ‘There is no message,'” said Cody Zoschak, a senior manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “There’s an inherently nonideological indication.”

A toxic stew of extremist influences

In his social media post, FBI Director Kash Patel said the agency found in Westman’s writings and other materials “anti-Catholic, anti-religious references,” “hatred and violence toward Jewish people” and “an explicit call for violence against President Trump.” But Cooter and Zoschak note that these are just a sampling of the animus that Westman displayed against a wide range of targets. They say that to select just a few is to ignore the larger picture that emerges from the evidence they’ve viewed: that Westman was obsessed with mass killing, particularly of children, for any — and no — reason at all.

“We have found markers of both right-wing and left-wing political views here,” said Cooter. “There are a few mentions of overt racism, of overt antisemitism, but they’re mixed in with a lot of references to many other things.”

For example, the inner cover of one notebook features a sticker of a pride flag with a rifle superimposed upon it and the words “Defend Equality.” Also, the handle associated with the YouTube account includes the numbers “1312,” a numerical code commonly used for the anti-police slogan “acab.” On one firearm, the words “Kill Trump Now” are written in white ink.

But there are also numerous references to extremist movements on the right. Among the scrawls on the weaponry are mentions of Waco, a standoff in Texas between the federal government and a religious group that ended in the deaths of dozens of people, including children. Also referenced in the materials are the Weavers, the family at the center of the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff in Idaho. Both of those events have long animated far-right antigovernment and militia sentiments.

The materials are filled with callbacks to neo-Nazi and violent white supremacist killers. Particularly influential, it seems, is a 2019 mass shooting in New Zealand, where a violent white supremacist and Islamophobe killed 51 people at two mosques. But also, in the notebook, the names of several 9/11 hijackers are listed along with other mass killers whom Westman apparently emulated.

“We have a lot of random references that are really just part of this kind of swirling mass of violent references that we see in these spaces, that go to the point that this is nonideological,” said Zoschak.

Despite the incoherence of the ideological and political references and the scattershot invocations of cultural memes throughout the videos and writings, Zoschak and Cooter say they reflect an increasingly familiar profile of a school shooter. Westman’s obsession with mass killers echoes other recent school shooters, who have shared an affinity for the “true crime community,” where participants obsess over mass killers in online forums. In this case, the extensive references to past murderers span the globe and even mention perpetrators from as early as 1966.

Other references suggest an awareness of certain cultural markers within nihilistic violent extremist spaces, where individuals advocate violence for the purpose of accelerating societal collapse. There are also elements of “Saints Culture,” a subculture that venerates far-right terrorists and extols those who kill high numbers of victims.

“So all of those things, both alone and in combination, show us that Westman was really aware of some of these cultural scripts,” said Cooter.

A complex mental health picture

Authorities in Minneapolis have said they are not aware of any state-ordered mental health treatment for the assailant. But in the video showing a letter written to “family and friends,” the presumed shooter calls themself “severely depressed” and “suicidal for years.” They also write, “I am not well. I am not right.” Extremism analysts caution against accepting these pronouncements as fact.

“We need to recognize the limitations of relying only on this individual’s chosen projection of themselves online,” said Zoschak. “What we have available to us right now is the material that the shooter chose to make available to us.”

Zoschak said it is impossible to assess from the videos whether the attacker truly suffered from a mental illness. But he noted that within certain true crime community subcultures, there is an idealized “aesthetic” of mental unwellness that many individuals strive to convey.

“There are two factors that we consider here. One: within the true crime community, a desire to imitate and adopt the aesthetics of past mass killers, several of whom … did very much display these mentally unwell characteristics,” said Zoschak. “Simultaneously, within the true crime community, there is a large population of individuals who claim to be and very well may be suffering from disassociative identity disorder.”

The writings are compounded by random muttering and utterances in the videos, as well as discordant juxtapositions of video sequences. For example, after showing a letter written to loved ones that urges them to “pray for the victims and their families,” one video then goes through a slow walk of the deadly equipment that was presumably being prepared for the attack. That included a magazine on which is scrawled “For the children.”

Zoschak and Cooter both noted that the layering of these effects feels aesthetically similar to the digital footprint of an individual who opened fire at a July 4 parade in Highland Park, Ill., in 2022, killing seven people.

“I think it’s just a little too early to say for sure, but something that a lot of people don’t understand when they see individuals like this in the news is that those self-expressions that seem chaotic or unstable or just plain unwell are sometimes intentionally crafted to give that perspective,” said Cooter.

Further complicating any speculation about the attacker’s mental condition is the letter the attacker wrote to loved ones. Unlike some recent school shootings, where the assailants’ writings highlighted grievances against parents, this letter credits the parents with raising them in a loving and supportive household. It apologizes to family and friends for the “storm of chaos” that the attacker was about to bring into their lives.

“This is where we start seeing an extremely complex picture,” said Zoschak.

So far, authorities have said they believe the attack is attributed to just Westman. But Cooter said the ecosystem that Westman appears to have come out of is highly engineered by bad actors online who cultivate, in vulnerable people, a desire to commit violence.

“The way the material in the journals and in the YouTube videos really draw so heavily across many different spaces is very difficult to come by completely organically from someone acting on their own,” she said. “So it feels like there are probably certain people or at least certain online communities that were facilitating this process in the background.”