BONUS: The new age of terror

On Wednesday, June 27th there was a shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic school, killing two kids and injuring a dozen more people. The shooter took her own life, and left behind two YouTube videos and a manifesto that were dogwhistles for both The Order of Nine Angles (O9A) and 764, the latter of which we've previously covered on the show. Ryan & Grant talk about both of these networks and how the mainstream news and the internet have responded. Want to hear the rest of the conversation? For the month of September, we're offering 90% off the Panic World Patreon. Use code PANICYEAR at checkout to pay just fifty cents to get ad-free and extended episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our Discord. Sign up at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:27Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, let me get my local going, one sec. It's been a while since I've done this. Hope I remember how.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're feeling refreshed? You're feeling, you're feeling?

• 0:40Ryan Broderick?

  Great. Uh, went on a road trip across America. It was really lovely. Uh, my big revelation is that people from Pennsylvania are psychos and they want to kill you.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true.

• 0:51Ryan Broderick?

  On the road. They don't, don't value their life or yours. Yeah, other, yeah. Uh, great, great vacation. Feeling very refreshed.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  So you're ready to talk about the worst shit ever?

• 1:20Ryan Broderick?

  I'm, I'm, I'm fascinated to talk about this because when we did the episode,

• 1:29Ryan Broderick?

  it was something I did not, it was something I was actively ignoring. I had put it in my like, I'm not going to deal with this pile. And now I have sort of gotten a better sense of how it fits into the grander scheme of things.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  All right, well, let me,

• 1:43Speaker 02

  let's set it up so people actually know what we're talking about. I'm Grant Irving. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. Joining me, host of the show, a guy who's really happy to be back from vacation, Ryan Broderick. Uh, this is the longest we've gone without seeing each other, uh, since we've been doing this. It's-

• 2:02Ryan Broderick?

  I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed not having to do this show or talk to you for several weeks. It was great.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  I wasn't going through withdrawals at all. Uh-

• 2:11Ryan Broderick?

  You were. You would, you found many reasons to message me, Mr. Grant, actually.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  We have things to talk about. I'm just gonna cut this. We can, we can, we can debate this tonight. Uh.

• 2:24Ryan Broderick?

  That sounds like we live together. We're seeing each other for drinks afterwards. That's what's happening.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:29Ryan Broderick?

  Not in some sort of fucked up Burt and Ernie situation.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  I mean, once we start the compound, and you too, listener, can become part of the compound.

• 2:39Ryan Broderick?

  This is a thing that you have brought up before, and I want no part of it.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Has it? Jesus Christ. All right. Lock it in. So we think we figured at some point we would have to do a follow up to our 764 episode. Uh, but unfortunately, that happened sooner than later. On Wednesday, June 27th, there was a shooting at a Catholic school, killing an eight-year-old and a 10-year-old, and injuring over a dozen more people. The shooter, Robin Westman, was 23 years old and took their own life.

• 3:11Ryan Broderick?

  So just before we get any further into this, typically, I wouldn't name the shooter. Uh, but we're gonna be talking about, you know, the shooter's background and what larger network of extremists they're connected to. Also, there's a lot of discourse, a lot of confusion around the gender identity of the shooter. For the simplicity's sake, we're gonna use what law enforcement is using and what was on the shooter's license, which is she/her pronouns. They go by Robin Westman. There is a lot of chatter online about whether or not Westman was a detransitioner,

• 3:51Ryan Broderick?

  and it's gonna be part of sort of the larger conversation we're having today. But just for simplicity's sake, we're gonna be using she/her.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Good, good, good to note. Before we get into Robin and everything about this specifically, do you have a process as a journalist when you're seeing that there's a mass casualty event? Has it changed over the years? What, like, what do you do when you see that this is coming up?

• 4:17Ryan Broderick?

  It's definitely changed over the years. My first week. On a real news desk was Sandy Hook. I was a community moderator, working in a different part of the newsroom, and it was all hands on deck. Back in those days, I didn't have a work laptop, so I'd actually drag my iMac over to the news desk and sit underneath the TV screen. And my job for many years was quickly digging through the internet for leads. Whether that may be the identity of the shooter, the shooter's manifesto, or what you would call OSINT, Open Source Investigation. So I was doing a lot of that work. I thankfully don't do a lot of that work anymore.

• 5:01Ryan Broderick?

  The news cycle has changed a lot, like there's, like garbage day is not a 24/7 newsroom, so we're not really doing that kind of stuff. But my Twitter in particular is definitely still set up for that kind of work. So it lit up really fast during this shooting. Which has kind of led to this episode, which, you know, watching the internet digest this, pull this apart, and how different the conversations have been online versus how they've been in major news organizations and in law enforcement sources has been fascinating, to say the least.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we will, that's where we'll be going for the second half of the episode, but let's just lay out the basics first. The shooter attacked a Catholic school. She left behind two YouTube videos and a manifesto. And I think I mentioned at the top, but she also took her own life too. So like, the plan was in place for the clues to be left to be left behind, to be despoiled. Can you talk to us about her YouTube page and how it's been interpreted?

• 6:14Ryan Broderick?

  Well, the the major thing here is the connection to O9A, or the Order of Nine Angels, a neo-Nazi, quote-unquote, satanic extremist group, you know, tangentially connected to the larger com network, which is what we we did an episode about earlier this year. And I've gone down the rabbit hole a bit on this. And it seems like what they're, what a lot of users are finding out is like the stuff that Wesman wrote on the gun, on the bullet car, the bullet cartridges, like, dog whistles the Order of Nine Angels.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:00Ryan Broderick?

  That that seems to be the big thing here, which has led everyone to think, there's that, and then there's an identical selfie, effectively like, I think we talked about in the episode, but like a selfie you would take for submission to to the game. That that's what people are kind of latching on to here and saying this might be connected to the com network.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Might be connected, and we, whether that is ever able to be totally confirmed or not, we do see all of this, from what we've been able to glean, we do see all of the same inspiration points and fixations. So, Marc Andre Argentino, who we refer to and we spoke to for the 764 episode, you know, went through the the the manifesto and and inside there it said, "I indulge in every school shooting video I can find. My interest in school shooting started in 7th grade. I remember one day talking to, redacted name, my crush, and another kid. I asked him if there was a school shooting, what would they do?" So...

• 8:05Speaker 02

  This sort of valorization of spree shooters, this sort of fixation had gone uninterrupted for a very long time, which is exactly, you know, what we saw from the people who we directly know were connected to com. There is a period of fascination that like led into discord, so led into groups, so led into actual action. So this looks to be like a similar process.

• 8:33Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. In terms of like, what specifically was on the YouTube channel, it was a 20 minute video of what seems to be Westman silently turning the pages of a manifesto. And the manifesto, like most spree shooter, most extremist manifestos is nonsense. It is racist. It is anti-trans. It is pro-trans. It is pro-communist. It is anti-communist. It is, it is totally incoherent, which is not abnormal for something like this. I've, I've read a few of them over the years and all of them are mind conf level nuts.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. And along with all the pages on how good it's going to feel to be like come one of, one of these heroes, there was also on page 261 through 270, I want someone to stop me, but they won't, no one sees it. So like contradicting both in motive and what they want and in, in target. On, on one of the guns, it said, uh, let me get it directly.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  There is no message, which I think is, is the heart of it.

• 9:43Ryan Broderick?

  This, this sort of actually should lead us to like the next section here to talk about, which is like, is this nihilism? Because I saw this in a lot of the comments and I got a few messages from listeners after our episode on the com network about whether or not this is nihilism. Which I think is a fair point. For simplicity's sake, that's what I was sort of calling it.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  And it's also what they call it internally.

• 10:07Ryan Broderick?

  It is. I think a more accurate way to describe it is accelerationist violence.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:12Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's nihilistic in the sense that they don't really care what that accelerationist violence accomplishes other than chaos and misery.

• 10:22Ryan Broderick?

  For now.

• 10:24Ryan Broderick?

  Because as, as we have seen with this shooting is like, there are pockets of these, you know, young people who are completely radicalized by the internet and radicalized in ways that don't make any sense, other than that they're angry and they want to hurt people. But there are

• 10:42Ryan Broderick?

  like more coherent extremist cells on the periphery of this network that do have larger political goals in mind. That is, that is, I think where things get kind of confusing.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:54Ryan Broderick?

  So you can read a manifesto like Westman's and go, well, this is just total nonsense. They just wanted to hurt people. But then if you go down the rabbit hole and you start reading about something like the Order of Nine Angels or whatever, you can absolutely see what they want to turn society into. And I think in many ways, a lot of these shootings that are connected to the comm network should be seen as sort of maybe not dupes and maybe not like they're tricked, but they are clearly the foot soldiers for more coherent extremist politics.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and, and what's so insidious about this is you get somebody who needs desperate help and becomes fixated on this stuff at a young age. And whether or not they're directly groomed or connected or not, there's enough information online that they can copy and study what other people have done. And that furthers this sort of accelerationism. So whether, so whether or not Robin was directly in touch or just studying it and, and took the same.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Kind, you know, put the same kind of symbols on there and was directly in contact that that like it's good information to know, but regardless, that information is out there for them for her to be mimicking. Regardless.

• 12:16Ryan Broderick?

  Right. And, and I, I think this is actually a really important point here, which is that if you think of school shootings, but let's, let's blow that up a bit to just say like spree shootings in America. Cause they're not always in schools anymore. But if you think of them in terms of waves, the first wave, the first sort of initial incident would be Columbine. And you see some activity between Columbine and the 2010s and there, there, there, there is that. But then in the 2010s, you see the second wave, which I would largely categorize as incel based.

• 13:02Ryan Broderick?

  And that starts to give way a little bit to things like the mega bomber and more more expressly right wing, far right mass casualty violence. But I actually think we are now firmly in a third wave. Where it is kids largely young people who have grown up in a world where this has always existed and their relationship with it, I think is quite different. The way that they are talking about it, the way that they, the way they understand it seems to be different. There's a, there's a level of worship

• 13:44Ryan Broderick?

  that I did not see with the incel mass violence. I, I, I, there's a, there's more out there. There's more resources. You can read more. You can understand it. And like, and in the same way that, you know, Gen Z memes don't make a ton of sense to millennials. The way that their manifestos read, the way that they're networking with each other is quite different. And is based on a lot more references and remixes of previous mass casualty events. I know that I'm sort of talking about this in a really weird like media way, but I think we do have to sort of think of a mass casualty event as a media.

• 14:26Ryan Broderick?

  Type, it clearly is to these kids, to these young people.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:32Ryan Broderick?

  And they are, they are playing with it in the same way that you would play with a meme. I know that that is really callous to say, but that is what's happening.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  No, no, I think that gets it at exactly with like, that is how it's spreading and looking at these as, as isolated incidents as, as opposed to trends and, and memes is, is entirely right. Like, I, I think that brings us directly to, to this post, Ryan. Can you explain this tweet and these pictures? I think it really gets at this in like a really jarring way.

• 15:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, this, this is sort of what made me think of that, actually. So this is a post from an ex-user with the unfortunate username HoleDonor. But

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Probably funny in other contexts, yeah.

• 15:18Ryan Broderick?

  Probably, yeah, but so they write, "Someone that's not the FBI or the CIA, they're involved and love it." I'm not really sure about that one, but like, let's table that for now. "Needs to do a deep dive into 09A764, because I don't understand it, but there's definitely something insane happening." And it's three pictures. One is Westman, and the other two are two previous spree shooters. And all of them are taking a mirror selfie. And we had talked about this in the COM Network episode where there is a, effectively like a submission process for a lot of these incidents, whether it's something like doxing, or hacking, or shooting up a public space.

• 16:03Ryan Broderick?

  You, you want credit for it in the network, because you've been groomed and radicalized by these other users into doing something to impress them. That, that's, that's the psychology, the, the core psychology here. So it, it seems to be that at least three school shooters have

• 16:26Ryan Broderick?

  Iterated on each other. And in fact, the two other school shooters that we're talking about, Wisconsin school shooter Natalie Rupnow and Solomon Henderson, a 15 year old and a 17 year old, were in contact with each other, according to law enforcement. So there is some sort of networking happening here. And all three of these shooters have taken nearly identical mirror selfies.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:53Ryan Broderick?

  In my mind, that is clearly to be submitted to a Telegram channel like that. That's sort of what I see happening here. But it could also just be you take it and you know that they're going to find it like the people in the comm network and put it in in there for you after you're dead or whatever in jail. But there's clearly a process.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  It kind of reminds me of ISIS, I think it was ISIS, where it was like, we had people we were training, but now we're able to put enough information out online that lone wolves can act. And insidiously, this could work exactly the same way where like they can be in contact, they can be being provoked to like actually like push, as we talked about in our seven six four episode to push to actually like, commit a horrible act. But it can also just be like, you're not connected, or you're just a lurker, because all this is out there and you're able and you mimic the same things and it spreads either way. That's, that's the danger. And I think how widespread this is and the impact of

• 17:53Speaker 02

  it is where we want to go. But before we do, I think it's good for us to talk about how legacy media has been talking and the right has been talking. This was a perceived as a trans person attacking a Catholic school and like, there's obvious polemics about that. And like, I think another thing we talked about in the last episode was like, this is just so ripe for a moral panic that doesn't address the actual very real, very scary issue. And I worry that we're starting to see that's starting to come into, come into effect.

• 18:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, so the gender identity of the shooter is obviously a huge dimension to this. I believe it was the New York Post published a headline, Minneapolis school shooter Robin Westman confessed. Sorry, there's no way to do this gracefully. I'm reading the headline here for listeners. Minneapolis school shooter Robin Westman confessed he was tired of being trans. I wish I never brainwashed myself. Which a lot of users are pointing at as proof that Westman was a detransitioner. Which is a whole other

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:01Ryan Broderick?

  Pocket of stuff to talk about that we don't, we're not going to be touching today, really. There's a lot of questions about Westman's political leanings. She had written fuck Trump on her guns or whatever. But she also wrote a ton of like Holocaust denial stuff too. So like

• 19:24Speaker 02

  And immigrant stuff, talked about maybe shooting up a synagogue, like it's meant to be. This was a confused person who needed help. And they also, it's been known that these kinds of shooters do things to make it confusing. Because it's provides another level of fuckery for people where they were like they mess with whether or not there's a motive.

• 19:47Ryan Broderick?

  I read the stuff on her guns. I as just like baseline shitposting. I mean, one of them said, I'm the woker baby. Why so querious? Uh, which I mean, goes hard. Yeah, sure. Uh, it's but

• 20:06Speaker 02

  I didn't.

• 20:07Ryan Broderick?

  No, but like, like, all right, but this is, this is someone who's like terminally online.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:14Ryan Broderick?

  And there is no.

• 20:18Ryan Broderick?

  Point, there's no benefit to trying to read into that. In the same way that like, I would not spend time trying to decipher like what some like internet kitty on X was talking about really like it doesn't matter. Cause like they don't want it to matter.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:37Ryan Broderick?

  Um, a lot of the current way that like young people talk online is actually to break like communication, to break the algorithm.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  What's another example of that?

• 20:50Ryan Broderick?

  You can listen to any episode of Panic World from the last nine months. Uh, dear listener, if you want an example, no, I mean, uh, a lot of Gen Z slang is like kind of aping the style of like brain rot nonsense that they see online. And I think it's a little ironic now. And, and the confusion that she seems to be expressing about her gender identity and her politics and all the rest of it reeks of bucket of crabs discord server behavior like it like, it just stinks of someone who like has spent so much time in shitty little chat rooms with shitty little people like that, like that, everything about this just stinks of it to me.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  I, it's, it's not a victim of the algorithm, but like, I think you can look at this all as a, a victim of what we got into in the adolescence episode of like a lack of equipped adults, a lack of any sort of social safety net and like, uh, you know, the door shut and a, and a teenager's alone with a computer without any sort of anyone having any insight. Um, which is like, it's a much large, like what adolescence did a great job of showing was that it was a much larger societal failing and bafflement by adults who have no, no sense

• 22:17Speaker 02

  of like how to like even read the messages of like what is happening or like how to intervene.

• 22:23Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like, so this is a young adult who has clearly just been online a lot. And they are not someone watching like Ben Shapiro or Theo Von or something. They are someone who is making ironic terminally online shit poster jokes in Telegram channels and Discord servers and getting obsessed with like niche satanic neo-Nazi groups and stuff. And that is, that is not like a thing you can put on the, you can't blame big tech for that. That is, that is, that is, that is solely a breakdown of society that is like so large and existential that it's like hard to talk about.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  We can blame big tech a little bit.

• 23:06Ryan Broderick?

  Here's what I'll compare it to, actually. I think I've told this, this story before, or I've mentioned it before, but it is a story that has stuck with me for many years. And it was my first time ever being sent out to report on a larger feature. I had been following for months, similar to this, actually, I'd been following for months, references in tabloids to a dangerous app called Ask FM. And it was essentially like an anonymous app, you could, people could ask you questions and you could answer, but it was anonymous. And it was being connected to bullying and subsequent suicides. So I was waiting for one, sorry, this is like journalism talk, but like, I was waiting

• 23:50Ryan Broderick?

  for one to happen in America to do a larger look at like, how does this work? And lo and behold, what happens? It happens in Lakeland, Florida.

• 23:59Ryan Broderick?

  It's a 13-year-old girl. She climbs to the top of a cement mixer in her local neighborhood and jumps off of it one morning. So I go down there and I go to a PTA meeting hosted by the local sheriff, who is exasperated and he's crying and he's telling parents that they need to unplug their routers so that the internet can't get their children. To which one parent said, well, they have cellular connection on their phone, so I don't know, you know, what are we supposed to do? And I met with some of her friends, I met with her sister and a local Burger King and we sat and we talked for a while.

• 24:38Ryan Broderick?

  And what came into picture for me was that there was a mean girl at the school who didn't like this other girl. And they were using the internet to bully her, but they were using not the internet to bully her. It was, the internet could have been removed entirely from the story. And there's a good chance it would have ended the exact same way. It was, it was a story that really changed the way I think about the internet because now I sort of divide, divide it into two groups. One is automated, the automated internet. And that's where you can say like, that is Mark Zuckerberg's creation. That is, that, that, that is the, the people on Instagram who are being told by an algorithm that to put onions on their feet to go to sleep.

• 25:21Ryan Broderick?

  Eating disorder content flooding somebody's. Well, that's, that's a weird one. And I don't bring that one up, that's a weird one. Because as we learned in our episode, that is pre-algorithmic. The other bucket that I put things in is people. And those are stories that would be almost exactly the same if the internet was never invented. And the problems that you get to, things like non-consensual sharing of sexual material, eating disorder content to a degree, stochastic violence and extremism, these things are amplified by the internet. But they existed before the internet. And they can exist without public platforms in a lot of ways.

• 26:07Ryan Broderick?

  And after COVID, a lot of what we call dark social, so messaging apps, email, the, the, the social networking that you don't see got better. Discord got really good, Telegram, WhatsApp, Snapchat in America. And those apps you can't track. Those apps are largely black boxes and there's no way to know really what's going on in there.

• 26:35Ryan Broderick?

  And so.

• 26:38Ryan Broderick?

  I look at the shooter's profile, the little we know now, and I think, okay, like, no, no person in society could have, could be expected to understand what was going on in their head, in their head. That, that, that's, that's the sort of depressing existential terror of this for me is like, this is just someone who was like poking around the internet.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  The failure happened a long time before, starting, you know, if we take them, if we take her at her

• 27:02Ryan Broderick?

  Way before.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  At start saying that I became obsessed with Columbine in seventh grade. Like, there was plenty of opportunity.

• 27:10Ryan Broderick?

  We created a society where Columbine happened.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:13Ryan Broderick?

  And like this is, and this is, this is, this is just another part of the domino.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  And, uh, And I, and I do think we should, um,

• 27:23Speaker 02

  mention, but not linger on that this was a person who had zero, uh, training seemingly before this, but then was, was in a period of 96 days able to arm themselves to the T and

• 27:38Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  And plot things and like, there's the failure emotionally, and then there's the failure practically that we have basically given up on addressing, making something like this. Like if somebody's like, suddenly buying a ton of guns in a short period of time. I mean, but like, we just skip over that part because we've all accepted that nothing will be done ever.

• 28:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. I mean, I don't even bring it up anymore.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Right. Exactly. And I, and I just wanted to at least mention the glaring thing, but like, what else is there to say? Thoughts and prayers. On the other side, uh, on, on the Patreon, we're going to get into how this connects to the man leading America into full ruins. Of course I'm talking about big balls. That's on the Patreon.

• 28:26Ryan Broderick?

  That's right. America's favorite teenager, big balls.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  For this month. The Patreon is only 50 cents, so us putting this behind the paywall is basically us giving it to you for free.

• 28:40Ryan Broderick?

  Go listen to all of our Patreon episodes, pay 50 cents, listen to all of them and unsubscribe if you want.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Please.

• 28:46Ryan Broderick?

  Anything other than complaining about it in YouTube comments, please.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Though if you, if you continue to give us $5.

• 28:52Ryan Broderick?

  You can complain all you want. You complain all you want.

• 28:54Speaker 02

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• 29:03Ryan Broderick?

  No, that rules. That's great.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  Patreon.com/panicworld and then just use the promo code PANICYEAR, all caps, PANICYEAR, all caps, at Patreon.com/panicworld. Only 50 cents for this a month. You can keep listening.

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