Killers without a cause: The rise in nihilistic violent extremism [View all]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/08/nihilistic-violence-emerges/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/GnAYI


Amid a wave of high-profile killings and political violence in the United States, investigators have been confounded regularly by the absence of a recognizable agenda.

The assailants in several cases — shootings, a bombing, a planned drone attack — resisted familiar labels and categories. They were not Democrat or Republican, or Islamist militant, or antifa or white supremacist.

They were something new. In their manifestos, these attackers declared their contempt for humanity and a desire to see the collapse of civilization. Law enforcement officers and federal prosecutors have begun to describe these attacks as a contemporary strain of nihilism, an online revival of the philosophical stance that arose in the 19th century to deny the existence of moral truths and meaning in the universe.

Recent assailants who have been tagged as nihilists include the following: A 15-year-old shooter in Madison, Wisconsin, who left behind a manifesto titled “War Against Humanity” in which she described the human race as “filth.” A 24-year-old man who plotted a drone attack to blow up the Nashville power grid was seeking to precipitate “the start of the end … for the interconnected or otherwise globalized world.” A self-described “anti-natalist,” 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus, blew himself up outside an in vitro fertilization clinic in May, having argued that humans should not be brought into existence without their consent.

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