EXTREMISMAntioch, Tenn., Shooter Inspired by Broad Extremist Beliefs and Previous Mass Killers
On January 22, 2025, a 17-year-old student opened fire inside the cafeteria at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee. The shooter subscribed to broad accelerationist beliefs, which hold that society is irrevocably broken and must be destroyed to be rebuilt.
On January 22, 2025, a 17-year-old student opened fire inside the cafeteria at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee. The shooter killed one student and injured another before taking his own life.
Preliminary research by the ADL Center on Extremism (COE) found the shooter, who was Black, was fueled by violent misanthropic views, anti-Black hate and hateful extremist beliefs including inceldom and antisemitism. He subscribed to broad accelerationist beliefs, which hold that society is irrevocably broken and must be destroyed to be rebuilt, and lauded numerous past school shooters and mass killers, including the 15-year-old girl who shot and killed two people during a school shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, in December 2024.
The Antioch shooter, who self-identified as a “mentalcel” ( someone who identifies as an involuntary celibate (incel) on the basis of an intellectual or learning disability), posted and reshared incel content and frequented incel forms where users of color are often told they are incels because they are not white, leading to intensifying self-loathing and internalized racism.
The fact that the Antioch shooter appears to have been active in multiple obscure and extreme online spaces highlights a troubling trend: young people are increasingly finding interconnected online networks that are shaping violence and extremism fueling real-world tragedies. The Antioch shooter had a particular fixation on the Abundant Life (Madison, Wisconsin) shooter, referencing her in his Discord screenname and sharing multiple posts lauding her in recent weeks. He also showed interest in the Turkey mosque attacker, who created a private Telegram chat that the Abundant Life shooter had joined to discuss his attack. COE analysts found that the Abundant Life shooter was following two accounts believed to belong to the Antioch shooter on X (formerly Twitter) at the time of her attack, underscoring the growing influence of these cross-platform networks in fueling real-world violence.
A sprawling manifesto believed to have been written by the Antioch shooter is filled with expressions of anti-Black racism and antisemitism, including calls for the death of or violence against Jews and the Nazi phrase “Final Solution to the Jewish question.” The manifesto opens with “THE WEST HAS FALLEN, THE WEST HAS FALLEN, BILLIONS MUST DIE, BILLIONS MUST DIE, ACCELERATE, ACCELERATE, ACCELERATE,” all phrases which are commonly found and used in white supremacist accelerationist spaces.
