AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Today, FBI Director Kash Patel posted on X that yesterday's mass shooting at a Minneapolis church was, quote, "an act of domestic terrorism motivated by a hate-filled ideology." Extremism analysts have been looking through extensive materials that the shooter is presumed to have shared on a YouTube account, and some of these experts say the videos do not paint a picture of any motive. NPR domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef joins us now. Hi, Odette.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: Hey, Ailsa.
CHANG: OK, I just want to start with what specifically FBI Director Patel cites as evidence that this attack was ideologically driven. He claims that - let's see - the shooter made, quote, "anti-Catholic, antireligious references," also expressed animus towards Jewish people and Israel and that the shooter called for violence against President Trump. Now, how does all of that line up with what you and analysts have found?
YOUSEF: So I need to preface this with some caveats. First of all, the FBI has access to far more information than I or any extremism researchers can access.
CHANG: Sure.
YOUSEF: Also, the main materials that we've been able to look at are writings presumed to belong to the shooter. That includes journals, which in this case have been phonetically written in English but with a Cyrillic script. So analysts are actually still working through to translate those full documents. That said, the picture that's emerging for researchers that I've spoken with is quite different from what the FBI is saying.
The FBI is highlighting what it is calling anti-Catholic messages as well as anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian messages. The materials I've seen include, for example, a picture of Jesus crucified that is mounted onto a shooting target. So perhaps anti-Christian but not specifically anti-Catholic. And more notably, you know, there is a stew of hatreds here. You know, there is antisemitism in there. There's also anti-Muslim references. But the bigger point is that to focus on any single one would be to cherry-pick. You know, instead, the overwhelming picture here is of somebody who was obsessed with mass shooters and a specific aesthetic of mass shooters but not an ideology. The goal was the violence itself and to achieve notoriety through it.
CHANG: Which seems to echo reporting that you have done on some other school shootings, right? Like, I'm thinking of the one at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, last December, also one at Antioch High School in Nashville in January, right?
YOUSEF: Yes. Yeah, and back near, you know, the beginning of the year, the FBI actually created a name for this category of violence called nihilistic violent extremism. Before that, the former head of the FBI sometimes used the phrase salad bar extremism, which kind of illustrates how the radicalization isn't rooted in any single ideology or goal, but it's...
CHANG: Yeah.
YOUSEF: ...Just picking and choosing from different sometimes contradictory ones. But there's another trend that analysts say may be at play here. And that is really about an aesthetic that dwells on mental illness, meaning these shooters are in online communities that venerate mass killers and where mental illness is something they want people to associate with them. Now, it's not possible to conclude from watching someone's, you know, curated selection of videos whether they are clinically mentally ill or not, but the aesthetic that this individual stitched together and presented is a familiar one.
CHANG: Interesting. Well, I also want to mention that there's been a lot of discussion among some conservatives and the media about how the shooter's gender identity may be relevant here. What do the researchers that you're talking to - what are they saying about that?
YOUSEF: So in a 2020 court order, it was noted that the shooter - born a male - identifies as a female. Now, the numbers simply don't bear out the idea that trans people are disproportionately responsible for mass shootings in the U.S. But the trans community in the U.S. is vulnerable, and that could potentially make them susceptible to online radicalization in ways others may not be.
CHANG: That is NPR's Odette Yousef. Thank you, Odette.
YOUSEF: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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