Is Motiveless Political Violence Really on the Rise?

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 09, 2026

 

‘The message is there is no message.” Those were the words the 23-year-old Robin Westman penned in the manifesto he wrote ahead of the massacre he carried out last August at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, where he killed two young children and wounded 18 others.

 

Westman insisted that the violence he committed was “not a church or religion attack,” even though he’d shot up a church during services. His dubious assertion was a great help to the Washington Post’s Peter Whoriskey’s investigative report on the alleged rise of motiveless political violence defined by “the absence of a recognizable agenda.”

 

Whoriskey set out to chronicle the ongoing effort to popularize a new (or, perhaps, quite old) profile of violent fanaticism: nihilistic violent extremism (NVE). The phenomenon’s believers insist it belongs to its own subcategory within the rubric of “domestic violent extremism” — the FBI’s term of art for individuals or small groups that engage in violence to advance a political cause. For NVE perpetrators, some say, their cause is nothing at all.

 

“In their manifestos, these attackers declared their contempt for humanity and a desire to see the collapse of civilization,” Whoriskey wrote. Prosecutors and law enforcement officials see theirs 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.”

 

Within the DVE universe, NVEs are supposedly distinct from other, more established subgroups. They’re not quite anarchist violent extremists (AVE) or racially/ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVE), nor are they militia or sovereign citizen violent extremists (MVE and SCVE, respectively). They are unique and deserve their own place in the taxonomy of violent extremists.

 

Do they? A deeper dive into the subject Whoriskey sets out to explore suggests that calling the killers on whom he dwells NVEs overcomplicates the matter. In addition, creating a romantic ideological origin for a collection of malcontents with mental health problems is unlikely to dissuade their would-be imitators from following in their footsteps.

 

Whoriskey sets out first to establish what NVEs are not. They are not what the Post calls “special interest” killers, whose motives are supposedly inexplicable.

 

Whoriskey puts Shane Tamura in this category. In July 2025, a 27-year-old casino worker shot up a Midtown Manhattan office that he thought was linked to the National Football League (on which he wanted revenge for the headaches he experienced after playing the game as a child). In his addled state, Tamura shot and killed four before turning the gun on himself. One of his victims, Wesley LePatner, was an executive with Blackstone Group, and her murder was celebrated by a ghoulish cast of activists who praised what they saw as anti-capitalist violence.

 

Army Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger is another. Last July, he blew himself up inside a Tesla Cyber Truck outside Donald Trump’s Las Vegas hotel. It was as demented an act as Tamura’s, but the political valence was not hard for those who took inspiration from it to comprehend.

 

Even Luigi Mangione is considered one of these “special” cases. His motives for killing the 50-year-old father of two and United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan in December 2024 were equally mystifying. Once again, the disordered thinking that led Mangione to kill a complete stranger did not seem so elusive at the time. Far too many, including prominent members of Congress, saw a callous but recognizable logic in his attack on a symbol of an institution as wicked as America’s health insurance sector.

 

Indeed, Whoriskey seems inclined to throw not just Mangione but Charlie Kirk’s alleged murderer, Tyler Robinson, and Vance Boelter, the Minnesota man who killed Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband last June, into this category. “While the targets were varied, the alleged assailants all claimed to be committed to furthering a cause,” he wrote.

 

In fact, at the time of Kirk’s shooting, mainstream media outlets tried to contend that Robinson was one of those “nihilistic violent extremists” with no discernible motive. His “violence isn’t tied to a clear political ideology,” the so-called experts told the CBS Evening News.

 

As for Boelter, while his targets were certainly political and his associates described him as having conservative views, prosecutors have not alleged that he understood his acts of violence in pursuit of an agenda. Plenty of commentators have, though, and they steadfastly ignore the degree to which the prosecutors and journalists who have had access to him describe how he “rambled” through a delusional “fantasy” in which he was trained off the books by the U.S. military and “instructed” by Governor Tim Walz “to kill U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar so that Walz could run for the U.S. Senate.”

 

These are portraits of the delusional. That is not evidence of having no motive, even if the motive is indecipherable to those in command of their faculties. Of course, a mentally deranged killer can do as much damage and have as great an impact on history as a canny and rational political terrorist. But a true NVE in Whoriskey’s formulation is more clear-eyed than these killers.

 

“One of the first known uses of the nihilist label by federal prosecutors came in March in the case of Nikita Casap,” the author wrote. The 17-year-old “killed his parents to ‘obtain the financial means and autonomy necessary’ to kill President Donald Trump and overthrow the U.S. government.” It’s reasonable to assume that seeking the collapse of the U.S. government by selectively murdering its Republican elected officials would fit within the context of anarchist violent extremism.

 

But “Casap considered himself an ‘accelerationist,’” Whoriskey continued. Sure, “many accelerationists also seem to overlap with hate groups and express hatred toward Jews, African Americans, and other minority groups.” That would indicate that some of these killers are racially motivated violent extremists, too. So maybe there does need to be a new category.

 

But the FBI makes allowances for the confused thinking that typifies killers of this sort. They call it “salad bar” terrorism — a condition in which those inclined toward violence create their own unique blend of violent philosophies that justify their preexisting predilections. The bloody acts of self-described “eco-fascist” terrorists and overpopulation enthusiasts who also subscribe to racially conscious conspiracy theories fit this bill. Again, federal law enforcement doesn’t seem to have the categorization problem Whoriskey alleges.

 

If Casap was the first of his kind, he wasn’t the most infamous. That ignominious designation belongs to Natalie Rupnow. In December 2024, the 15-year-old killed a teacher and a student and injured six more at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wis. In the hunt for a motive, investigators initially looked into Rupnow’s online footprint, where she showed an “interest in neo-Nazi ideology and neo-Nazi violence.” But, if she was “driven by antisemitic or white supremacist beliefs,” Whoriskey added, “the target of her attack — a predominantly White Christian School — didn’t fit that explanation.”

 

Rupnow and the killers that her shooting spree later inspired are, Whoriskey contends, members of the “true crime community.” That’s a euphemistic way of describing a website Rupnow and her imitators frequented, “Watch People Die,” which hosts precisely the kind of content you would imagine. Rupnow’s manifesto, which she called “War Against Humanity,” is more misanthropic than nihilistic.

 

Rupnow had a few murderous mimics, but it was Westman who was held out as the apotheosis of the supposedly nihilistic philosophy Whoriskey set out to typologize.

 

But Westman didn’t just imitate Rupnow. He scrawled messages on the bullets he used to kill children: “kill Donald Trump,” “Jew Gas,” “6 Million Wasn’t Enough,” and, sickeningly, “For the Children.” He borrowed that trick from Luigi Mangione, and Charlie Kirk’s killer, Tyler Robinson, would later duplicate it. Both Westman and Kirk’s shooter (and, for the record, Donald Trump’s enigmatic would-be assassin, Thomas Crooks) spent a significant amount of time marinating in online “furry” culture. Those perverse forums are adjacent to a highly political form of transgender activism, in which it is not even controversial to propose that the social contract that prevails in the United States is an active and imminent threat to trans life. This is all ideological, but it is not necessarily nihilistic.

 

Westman was tormented by his own mind, but the jumbled and incompatible beliefs to which he subscribed are more manic than they are suggestive of an ideological commitment to nihilistic politics. By contrast, Robinson endorsed “leftist ideology,” according to Utah Governor Spencer Cox, and he committed his deed because he “had enough of [Kirk’s] hatred.” As for Mangione, he assumed that his target selection would ensure that the “message becomes self-evident.” His would be the first of many “revolutionary acts” he hoped to catalyze.

 

This isn’t nihilism. There is a worldview that underwrites many of these otherwise inscrutable acts of violence. Much of it is anarchistic. Seeking to overturn or destabilize the existing order through violence fits within the AVE paradigm. And, while not exclusive to the American left, AVEs tend to gravitate toward the leftmost end of the political spectrum. There is plenty of evidence of racial hostility in the so-called nihilists, but federal law enforcement is not confounded by ideological inconsistency in the disoriented mind of a murderer.

 

It’s not clear that this new category is useful. There’s evidence that it muddies rather than clarifies the thinking that inspires would-be killers — CBS’s deployment of the term to suggest that Kirk’s killer had no motives at all speaks to that. More than just being of questionable value, this new category could be counterproductive if the goal is to discourage violence. Likening school shooters to romantic Russian nihilism is liable to convince the impressionable that they are part of a storied tradition — that they themselves might have crawled out of a Dostoyevsky novel. Practitioners of political violence often convince themselves they are the instruments of history. We shouldn’t give them license to indulge that delusion.

 

Our age is one defined by increasing incidences of high-profile political violence. All civic-minded Americans are duly troubled by that phenomenon. But we will not stop its advance if we languish in the category errors that obscure the motives for political violence, confusing and misdirecting us. We must be able to call domestic political terrorism by its proper name.