A Ridiculous Story of Extremism
Neo-Nazis, Salafi Jihadism, and the Death Cult of a Counterfeit Masculinity
I’ve chosen not to name the men responsible for these acts of mass violence, following the recommendations of No Notoriety, Don’t Name Them, and The Violence Project. Research shows that many actors of mass violence—especially since 2015—are motivated by a desire for fame or notoriety. Naming them can provoke that goal, inspire copycat violence, and cause further harm. Survivors, victims’ families, journalists, and researchers have called on the media to take a principled stand: report the facts without giving these individuals the attention they often seek. My focus is on the systems that give rise to violence, not on providing a platform to those who commit it.
Recommendations from Don’t Name Them, Don’t Show Them - Open Letter
Don’t name the perpetrator.
Don’t use photos or likenesses of the perpetrator.
Stop using the names, photos, or likenesses of past perpetrators.
Report everything else about these crimes in as much detail as desired.
On May 19, 2017, an 18-year-old American white male walked into a Tampa smoke shop with a semiautomatic pistol, took hostages, and shouted about American imperialism in the Middle East. After releasing the hostages and surrendering to police, he led them to the apartment he shared with his roommates—two other American white males, ages 22 and 18—whom he had shot and killed. All three, along with a fourth roommate—a 21-year-old American white male Florida National Guardsman—were members of Atomwaffen Division (AH-tom-vah-fen / Atomic Weapons Division), an accelerationist, neo-Nazi terrorist group.
The perpetrator claimed he murdered his roommates after they mocked his recent conversion to Salafi Islam, calling himself a "Salafist National Socialist." He expressed opposition to what he described as "degenerate Western culture" and voiced support for both white nationalism and global Salafi jihadism.
Police searched the garage of the apartment and discovered a cache of ammonium nitrate, nitromethane, HMTD (a volatile explosive), homemade detonators, radioactive materials, and, in the Florida Guardsman’s room, a framed photo of the Oklahoma City bomber. Authorities later confirmed that the group had been planning terrorist attacks targeting synagogues and possibly nuclear facilities.
“I prevented the deaths of a lot of people,” the perpetrator said. When asked why his roommates were planning such attacks, he responded, “Because they want to build a Fourth Reich.”
The FBI issued an arrest warrant for the Guardsman on explosives charges and circulated a bulletin warning that he might be preparing to carry out a terrorist attack. He was later arrested in Monroe County alongside another Atomwaffen member. Their vehicle contained assault rifles, body armor, and over 1,000 rounds of ammunition—acquired after the killings. He initially claimed the explosives were for model rocketry, but an FBI bomb technician testified they were powerful enough to destroy a commercial airliner. Prosecutors alleged that he had intended to use the explosives to target civilians, nuclear facilities, and synagogues.
The Guardsman pleaded guilty to explosives charges and was sentenced to five years in federal prison. While incarcerated, he continued to share bomb-making instructions and incite followers, declaring, “The sword has been drawn. There is no turning back.” On another occasion, he stated to the court, “I don’t care how long you put me in jail, Your Honor… as soon as I get out, I will go right back to fight for my White Race and my America!”
He was released on August 23, 2021. Less than two years later, in 2023, he was arrested again—this time for plotting to destroy Baltimore’s power grid alongside a co-conspirator, with the stated goal to “completely destroy this city.” In 2025, he was found guilty of conspiracy to damage an energy facility and now faces up to 20 years in federal prison.
Despite Atomwaffen Division being one of the most dangerous domestic terrorist organizations between 2017 and 2020, it has never been introduced into public dialogue or mainstream consciousness. In contrast, Republican leaders and right-wing media have relentlessly spotlighted transnational groups like MS-13, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Tren de Aragua to justify harsh immigration policies, stoke xenophobic and racist bigotry, and wage literal war. This case highlights how white supremacist violence is minimized or ignored in elite-led discourse, manufacturing consent within a deeply white supremacist culture. It also reveals the deep crisis of alienated young men across all communities, whose unhealed rage is too often propagandized and funneled into reactionary chauvinistic movements. It is a systemic issue rooted in white supremacy and patriarchy that manifests in violence through this toxic way of expressing masculinity.
Experts maintain that Tren de Aragua in no way poses a national security issue for Washington, as Donald Trump claims. The Republican tycoon has seized on the myth to exaggerate the threat of Tren de Aragua and justify the policy of mass deportations he has undertaken since returning to the White House. Trump has compared the gang to the Sinaloa Cartel and even ISIS. It has provided one of the excuses he has used to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, which allows for the accelerated expulsion of immigrants, a mechanism used during World War II to imprison Japanese, Italians, and Germans in internment camps. And he has paid Nayib Bukele $20,000 for each of the 238 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, the maximum-security prison built by the Salvadoran president. There is not a single known case of a prisoner having left that jail, where there is no natural light or exercise yard, only a hallway with cells on either side. “Fusing a hardline approach to a criminal group of disputable clout with an excessively broad understanding of who its members might be, the Trump administration has in effect sought a pretext for speeding up mass summary deportations,” notes a report by the International Crisis Group, an international organization focused on conflict resolution.
In my work, I've worked across a range of spaces, including prisons, hate group recovery, cult recovery, and hospice care. I've worked with individuals entangled in various forms of violence and coercive control, including people involved in gang structures, extremist ideologies, domestic abuse, trafficking networks, cultic environments, and acts of mass or serial violence. Though their contexts and actions all vary, a common thread in nearly all of these cases is that the individuals were overwhelmingly young men between the ages of 15 and 35, often shaped by a traumatic past, social isolation, and rigid patriarchal conditioning. I chose to examine this particularly disturbing case because it brings into focus several urgent dynamics we must confront in the United States as activists today: the narratives that minimize white supremacist violence, the vulnerability of alienated young men to destructive belief systems, and the systemic failures that allow these crises to fester. These dynamics are marked by rising authoritarianism, conspiracism, blatant con artistry, and fascism, making consideration, accountability, and collective opposition more pressing than ever.
I want to emphasize that we must hold these young men accountable for the harm they've caused our global human community and our human siblings, sisters, and brothers. At the same time, they undoubtedly have the right to healing, to pursue forgiveness, and peace of mind. As clinicians and activists, we can assist them in the work to hold space for their actions, potential traumas, and engage in meaningful, healthy transformation, meaning making, and hopefully, counterreactionary insights.
We must make the attempt to reach those who have fallen into reactionary chauvinist spaces and movements whenever possible. Still, we must do so in an engaged manner, with clarity, caution, and a grounded knowledge of the real and continuous danger they pose. When push comes to shove, we must know which side we're on—because these individuals have proven themselves to be, quite literally, dangerous. As these conflicts intensify, and they already have, we must hold strong to our intercommunicated humanity and address the deeper traumas of alienation, disconnection, and despair that are imposed upon all of us by billionaires, monopoly capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.
The Scapegoat Framing
This case illustrates how American white supremacist violence is routinely downplayed to individual actors or "lone wolves" in billionaire-run US media and political discourse, despite clearly articulated ideological motives and persistent threats to public safety. In contrast, acts of violence committed by Black and Indigenous people of color are amplified and generalized, used to justify increased surveillance, militarized policing, and authoritarian policies.
On June 12, 2016, an American-born Afghan Muslim killed 49 people and injured 58 others at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The attack was immediately labeled "radical Islamic terrorism," fueling widespread Islamophobia, boosting support for Donald Trump's proposed Muslim ban, and intensifying calls for increased surveillance of Muslim communities. Some Republican politicians feigned concern for the LGBTQ community, even as they enacted a sweeping series of laws banning gender-affirming care for minors, criminalizing certain forms of drag performance, and banning LGBTQ-related materials in schools.
The perpetrator was a US citizen with a personal history of domestic violence, controlling behavior, and psychological instability. The FBI had previously investigated the shooter in 2013 and 2014 for inflammatory statements made to coworkers, including claims of family ties to extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. No evidence was found to substantiate these claims. During the Pulse shooting, the perpetrator pledged allegiance to ISIS, an enemy of both al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. The incoherent and contradictory nature of his ideological identity emerged more rooted in personal grievance and instability than in a coherent political doctrine, patterns observed in many lone-actor mass shooters and a reality neglected in dominant narratives.
Less than a month after the Pulse nightclub shooting, on July 7, 2016, a Black American Army reservist opened fire during a protest in Dallas against police violence. He killed five police officers and wounded nine others before being killed by law enforcement using a bomb delivered via a remote-controlled robot, marking the first known lethal use of such a tactic by US police. Investigators confirmed that the perpetrator acted alone and had no affiliation with Black Lives Matter.
Nevertheless, Republican-aligned media outlets and political figures quickly seized on the incident, framing the attack as representative of the broader racial justice movement. The shooter's social media activity revealed some engagement with antisemitic groups, including the New Black Panther Party, Nation of Islam, and the Black Riders Liberation Party, all of which are designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center due to their violent rhetoric.
According to family and acquaintances, he was grappling with emotional trauma, paranoia, and disillusionment following his military service in Afghanistan, a pattern frequently seen in lone-actors of mass violence.
Leonard Peltier
Indigenous American activist Leonard Peltier spent nearly 50 years in federal prison following a 1977 conviction for the murder of two FBI agents during a 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation amid intense political violence, FBI surveillance, and armed conflict targeting the American Indian Movement (AIM). His case has been met with widespread criticism, citing serious due process violations, FBI misconduct, coerced witness testimony, and the suppression of key exculpatory evidence.
FBI's ballistics expert, Cortland Cunningham, who testified at trial that shell casings found near the agents' vehicle matched Peltier's AR-15. However, a later Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed that Cunningham had originally stated those same casings could not be definitively linked to Peltier's rifle. In 2004, an independent forensic review confirmed that some of the casings did not match his weapon, casting doubt on one of the prosecution's central claims.
Peltier was extradited from Canada based on a fabricated affidavit from a woman, Myrtle Poor Bear, who later admitted she had never met him and had been coerced by FBI agents into signing false statements. Her attempts to recant and testify regarding the coercion were barred during the trial. No physical evidence conclusively tied Peltier to the fatal shots, and several major inconsistencies—such as the FBI's changing description of the suspect vehicle and the failure to test other weapons found at the scene—further undermined the case. Numerous appeals were denied over the decades. Nevertheless, the case drew international support from major human rights organizations and figures such as Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Rigoberta Menchú, and Amnesty International. In 2022, the United Nations Human Rights Council condemned Peltier's imprisonment as arbitrary and in violation of international law.
On January 19, 2025, President Joe Biden commuted Peltier's sentence to home confinement. Peltier was released the following month and returned to the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota to live with his family. Legal scholars, human rights advocates, and Indigenous leaders continue to view his conviction and decades-long imprisonment as one of the most enduring miscarriages of justice in modern history.
Performing Masculinity
The Tampa perpetrator's shift from neo-Nazi to self-proclaimed Salafi jihadist may appear contradictory, but the paradox disintegrates under scrutiny. Neither ideology, as embraced by alienated young men like him, is rooted in coherent theory or deep theology. Rather, they serve as demonstrative vessels for rage, identity confusion, and a desperate need for meaning and control. At 18 years old, this shift reflects not ideological conviction, but unresolved psychosocial issues, confusion, and a craving for meaning and power.
He had no history of devout religious practice and was, in fact, a committed atheist before his neo-Nazism. Like many recruits to jihadist movements, his understanding of Islam was superficial. This pattern is well-documented: culturally disconnected individuals and recent converts, not lifelong adherents, are disproportionately represented in extremist groups. Their attraction is not rooted in theological conviction, but rather in symbolic rebellion, personal grievance, and, often, profound ignorance.
Neo-Nazism operates similarly. Despite its elaborate mythos, it is ideologically incoherent. The Nazi notion of the "Aryan race" is a linguistic fiction twisted into a pseudoscientific racial hierarchy. The Nazi regime glorified Nordic traits while fearing Germans were too "impure," promoted "Nordicization" to fix this, and arbitrarily extended "Aryan" status to groups like the Japanese or Northern Italians while excluding actual Indo-Aryan peoples such as Iranians or Indians.
The logic of these systems does not draw in young men, but rather, the fantasy of clarity and power they offer amid chaos. Reactionary chauvinistic movements promise transformation through violence, identity through commitment, and a momentary feeling of power through domination. The ideology is secondary. What a surface-level reading appears to be a radical shift is, in truth, a collapse of meaning. And that collapse is precisely what these movements are built to exploit.
These movements prey on disoriented, traumatized, isolated, and angry young men, many failed by systems of care and community. Trying to make "sense" of this ideological switch misses the point. The real question is: what makes him—and so many others across diverse backgrounds and settings—vulnerable to any of them?
For working-class, poor, and marginalized men—especially men of color—life is often shaped by economic insecurity, systemic neglect, and fear of state violence. Shame, rage, and confusion accumulate, while healthy coping is discouraged or punished. In this void, reactionary spaces offer an illusion of strength, clarity, and belonging. The pull is both emotional and economic. For many young white men, the perceived loss of social status curdles into resentment, which can deepen white nationalist sentiments. For many poor Black and brown men, especially men in poverty, systemic racial violence, economic exploitation, and lateral harm within the community can make authoritarian forms of belonging feel like safety and build social status.
Militarized and emotionally suppressed, many young men are funneled toward violence as a way to perform masculinity. Patriarchal systems teach that domination and detachment are virtues, entangling them in a model that weaponizes their pain.
Masculinity itself isn’t the problem—it’s the distorted version shaped by unchecked patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism. The goal isn’t to excuse violence, but to confront the system that produces it and continues to sacrifice our youth for a false sense of order.
So What Do We Do With This?
I've worked with dozens of individuals and hundreds more in group settings, mostly men, grappling with alienation, moral injury, perpetrator trauma, betrayal trauma, inherited and lateral violence, and the unstable weight of socialized abandonment. While this case may appear unique in its specifics, its psychological and social patterns are completely familiar.
I chose this case not because it's sensationalistic, but because it reflects dynamics I've seen again and again, in street gangs, militias, cults, and hate groups. The ideology may modify, but the structure remains the same: young men in despair, searching for power, identity, belonging, safety, and stability.
The common thread is nihilism, a response to the conditions created by capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. White supremacy offers a counterfeit hierarchy. Patriarchy offers a counterfeit order. Militant extremism offers a counterfeit identity and social group. And at the root of it all is a counterfeit masculinity, a dishonest masculinity that values domination over cooperation, control over community, and outrage over honesty. Consider that many mass shootings are not simply acts of violence, but are a histrionic form of suicide, manifestations of inner collapse projected outward, shaped by parallel logics of cult behavior and war.
And yes, to be clear, toxic femininity exists: in internalized misogyny, relational aggression, and passive-aggressive social manipulation. It causes harm, often to other women and marginalized people. But it is not what drives most murders, rapes, hate crimes, or terror plots. Toxic masculinity is.
A Jihadist Prevents a White Supremacist Attack
One way to frame this story: a Salafi jihadist killed two of his neo-Nazi roommates, exposed a third, and disrupted a white supremacist plot targeting synagogues and nuclear infrastructure. His actions were unjustifiable, but they almost certainly saved lives.
And yet, the neo-Nazi Guardsman behind the terror plot received just five years in prison. He remained in contact with followers on the outside, professed devotion to the "White Race" in court, and was still released early. Within 2 years, he was arrested again for plotting another bombing campaign. The law may be written in neutral terms, but it is enforced with racialized political bigotry.
Compare that to the 2002 case of a biracial Black American white supremacist who, along with his girlfriend, both members of white supremacist cults, plotted to bomb a museum to ignite a race war. He was sentenced to 21 years. That's four times the sentence of a man who attempted terrorism twice and has never shown remorse.
A 2023 Associated Press analysis found:
Average sentence for international terrorists (primarily Muslim or foreign-born): 11.2 years
Average sentence for domestic extremists (primarily white supremacists): 1.6 years
Dozens of Muslim men remain indefinitely detained at Guantánamo Bay. Many have never been charged with a crime, and many have endured torture and years of detention. Some have been cleared for release for over a decade, yet remain imprisoned, held without trial, isolated, and continuously dehumanized.
In El Salvador, the mega-prison CECOT, or the Terrorism Confinement Center, holds tens of thousands, including migrants, U.S. legal residents, and even U.S. citizens. Many were deported from the U.S. and imprisoned on arrival without evidence of criminal conduct or due process, based on superficial indicators like tattoos, clothing, or neighborhood or family affiliation. International human rights groups have documented extreme overcrowding, inadequate medical care, and other serious human rights abuses. This racialized transnational pattern of selective enforcement is nothing less than barbarism.
A Path Forward
To be clear, if a civil war ever comes, I already know where I stand. I stand firmly against fascism, white supremacy, misogyny, queerphobia, and authoritarian violence—always. When the line is drawn, I know exactly which side I'm on.
It is crucial to remember that reactionaries have weaponized the "battle of ideas" trope over the past decades. Do not fall for this line. We are currently not fighting any ideas. We are in a battle for human lives. We are not about shaming men. We are about helping each other, humans, become whole. We are confronting a public health crisis of unprocessed trauma, systemic abandonment, and access to weapons.
Authentic masculinity, healthy masculinity, is rooted in accountability, understanding, camaraderie, and strength through service, not domination. The overwhelming majority of catastrophic violence, from hate crimes to mass shootings to domestic abuse to gang violence to fascist repression, is committed by those entangled in the performance of a counterfeit masculinity. If we want to end the harm, we have to end this heinous lie.
Interesting analysis. How can these people be rehabilitated?