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Lawfare Daily: “I’m angry that I exist”: Nihilistic Violent Extremism with Seamus Hughes and Jacob Ware

March 10, 2026·44 min·4 clips

FBI investigations into nihilistic extremism surged from 100 to 425 in just a year.

The Lawfare Daily podcast features counterterrorism researchers Seamus Hughes and Jacob Ware discussing nihilistic violent extremism, or NVE, a classification the FBI first used in court documents in March 2025. The term emerged in the prosecution of Nikita Kassop, who murdered his parents and planned to kill President Trump to start a race war. FBI Director Kash Patel initially referenced about 100 active NVE investigations; that number has since grown to 425 and is expected to reach 550 soon. Hughes notes this reflects both a genuine increase in nihilistic online activity and the new administration's hesitation to use the term domestic terrorism. The guests identify two main categories of NVE actors. The first is 764, an online network named after the zip code of one of its leaders, Bradley Cadenhead. 764 combines elements of white supremacy, satanism, and nihilism with systematic child sexual exploitation. Members identify vulnerable young people, often girls, and coerce them into acts of sexually explicit self-harm including suicide, for celebration within the group. The network operates on a hierarchical level-up system where committing increasingly severe acts earns advancement through Telegram channels and lore books. The second category is the true crime community, an online culture that celebrates past mass killers. Members study previous attackers' tactics and seek to beat their kill counts. Notable incidents linked to this movement include the December 2024 Abundant Life school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin; the January 2025 Antioch High School shooting in Nashville; the August 2025 Annunciation Catholic Church shooting in Minneapolis; and the September 2025 Evergreen High School shooting in Colorado. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue identified 16 attacks or plots since early 2024 inspired by this community, all targeting schools. Schools are targeted for multiple reasons: the attackers are school-age, school shootings generate maximum publicity, and many perpetrators are motivated by revenge against peers who bullied or excluded them. Hughes notes that manifestos often contain contradictory ideological statements, mixing far-left and far-right rhetoric specifically to trigger polarized online debate. The researchers describe NVE as both a new classification and a name for violence that has always existed but was previously dismissed as meaningless. Ware suggests that Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Sandy Hook might have been classified as NVE had the term existed at the time. A major challenge for law enforcement is that NVE cases span traditional bureaucratic silos. Counterterrorism teams trained to track ISIS or white supremacist symbols may not recognize markers from other extremist traditions. Additionally, investigators experienced in interviewing adult terrorism suspects are not trained to interview child victims of exploitation. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 2,000 reports involving 764 in the past year, with at least half coming from victims themselves reaching out as a last resort because no other support infrastructure exists. Several 764 leaders have been arrested, including Cadenhead. About 35 federal arrests have been made with 160 charges, mostly child exploitation offenses rather than terrorism charges. There is no federal domestic terrorism statute, so NVE functions primarily as an investigative and conceptual framework rather than a legal classification. Ware points to Australia's social media ban for people under 16 as a potentially significant intervention, noting that prevention must take priority over prosecution given that most violent NVE cases end in the perpetrator's suicide. The UK's Southport attack, where a 17-year-old murdered three young girls at a Taylor Swift dance class, illustrates the limits of even sophisticated counter-extremism frameworks when dealing with individuals driven by pure homicidal intent found online rather than coherent ideology.

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