The Nothing People

Joe Zeigler

24 Mar 2026 — 6 min read

We built our defenses against people who believe too much.

The FBI has a new label for something that doesn’t have a flag, doesn’t have a manifesto worth reading, and doesn’t want anything you could negotiate over. They’re calling it nihilistic violent extremism. The name is clunky in the way government names always are, but the thing it describes is real, and it’s growing fast enough to scare the people whose job it is to not look scared.

I’ve spent decades watching institutions name threats. Usually the naming comes too late and fits too loosely. This time, I’m not sure it came too late. I think it might have arrived just in time to watch something metastasize.

Here’s what we’re talking about. In the last few years, federal investigators started noticing a pattern in attacks and disrupted plots that didn’t match the usual categories. The perpetrators weren’t white supremacists, weren’t jihadists, weren’t antigovernment militiamen, weren’t anything the playbook covered. Some of them scrawled neo-Nazi symbols on their weapons alongside satanic imagery and references to mass shooters from the other end of the spectrum. They picked from a buffet of hatreds with no plate and no appetite for any particular dish. FBI Director Christopher Wray called it a “salad bar of ideologies” in 2020. What they shared wasn’t a belief. It was a vacancy.

The numbers are ugly. FBI Director Kash Patel told the Senate in September 2025 that NVE cases had surged 300 percent in a single year. By December, the Bureau reported over 350 active investigations tied to the 764 network alone—a transnational group that started in the bedroom of a fifteen-year-old in Stephenville, Texas, in 2021 and grown into what the Department of Justice calls one of the most grotesque criminal enterprises it has ever seen. They target children. They coerce minors into producing sexual abuse material. They blackmail kids into carving aliases into their own skin. They encouraged a thirteen-year-old boy to kill himself on a livestream. He did.

If that sounds like plain sadism rather than extremism, you’re not wrong. That’s what makes the category so hard to hold. These actors don’t want to overthrow the government or install a caliphate or build a white ethnostate. They want collapse. One researcher described their logic as flooding the system with low-cost, high-chaos events so that authorities burn resources faster than the perpetrators burn effort. School shootings, swatting campaigns, animal cruelty posted for clout, sextortion—all of it serving the same purpose. Attention. The only thing that registers when you’ve decided nothing else is real.

Last August, a shooter opened fire on Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. Two children died. Seventeen more people were wounded. The attacker’s weapons were inscribed with references to mass shooters across the ideological spectrum, neo-Nazi phrases, and—etched into the chamber of a Glock—the words “There is no message.” Researchers found markers linking the shooter to 764 and related nihilistic subcultures online. In his own writings, the shooter described himself as severely depressed and suicidal. He wrote: “I am not well. I am not right.”

That sentence tells you more than a thousand-page intelligence assessment. These are not revolutionaries. They are people who have already died inside and decided to take the proof of it public.

What’s happening now isn’t philosophy. It’s damage wrapped in a reading list. Online spaces give isolated, broken young men language for their alienation and, worse, an audience that rewards the spectacle. Discord servers. Telegram channels. Gaming platforms where predators recruit kids the way cults used to recruit drifters at bus stations. The technology changed. The vulnerability didn’t.

There’s a legitimate concern about the label becoming a catch-all that catches nothing. Experts have warned—rightly—that calling everything nihilistic violent extremism lets investigators avoid naming the white supremacy or misogyny that often lurks underneath the chaos. Some of these attackers wear nihilism as a costume over very old hatreds. The Minneapolis shooter inscribed “Jew gas” on one of his weapons. That’s not nothing. That’s not the absence of ideology. That’s the presence of something ancient and specific dressed up in edgelord aesthetics.

But dismissing the category entirely would be a bigger mistake. Something genuinely new is happening. A generation of young men is being radicalized not toward a cause but toward the absence of one. They are being recruited into communities that treat cruelty as social currency and destruction as proof of authenticity. The guiding principle isn’t belief. It’s contempt. And contempt doesn’t need a manifesto.

Try talking to someone who doesn’t want anything. Try threatening consequences to someone who already expects to die and considers that the finale. Traditional counterterrorism—monitoring organizations, tracking money, mapping ideology—loses traction when the ideology is absence itself. We built our defenses against people who believe too much. We have almost nothing for people who believe in nothing.

This is not just a law enforcement problem, and anyone who tells you it is hasn’t been paying attention. When a country strips its institutions down to set pieces, when it turns community into content and politics into professional wrestling, it leaves a lot of young people standing in the wreckage looking for something solid. Some of them will pick up a hammer. Not to build. Because the sound of breaking things is the only honest sound left.

I’ve watched thirteen presidencies and built enough things to know what happens when the builders leave and the wreckers move in. What’s different now is that the wreckers aren’t even pretending to build something else. They’re not tearing down the old house to put up a new one. They’re setting fires because fire is the only thing that feels real to them.

Nihilistic violence isn’t a new ideology. It’s the sound a country makes when the last load-bearing wall gives out. The rage outlived whatever beliefs used to contain it, and now it walks around looking for targets. We spent the last decade gutting every institution that once gave people a reason to show up. We replaced them with feeds and algorithms and a political class that treats governance like a reality show. And now we’re shocked that some kids looked around, saw nothing worth preserving, and took us at our word.

If this landed, send it to one person who needs to read it.