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  Riccio sought out angry, adrift youth because they were the most likely to buy into his celebration of Hitler in a country where Nazis are usually shorthand for evil. But there was likely a secondary reason he was seeking out “broken toys.” In one scene in the documentary, Riccio prays to Odin to protect his youth, but in recent years, several former WAR house residents came forward to report multiple cases of sexual abuse.

  Ronnie Painter, then a fifteen-year-old alcoholic addicted to painkillers when he met Riccio, told authorities he fled to WAR house to get away from his mother's physically abusive boyfriend, but his escape was short-lived. Painter said that Riccio had sexually exploited him at least four times while he lived under his roof. “I'd get extremely drunk and ride off in the car with him; then he'd perform oral sex on me.”3 His brother, Lonnie, told a similar story.

  This is not to suggest that all recruiters for white supremacy—or other types of extremism—are sexual predators. But it does serve to highlight how much the two groups share in common in terms of targeting and recruitment techniques. Both look for young people in need of love and attention. Both know that it's much easier to groom a child who has a missing or abusive parent. Both frequent places like playgrounds, parks, malls, arcades, and sports fields. Undeterred by the allegations against him, Riccio himself says he continues to look for disaffected youth to join his white supremacist movement at “shopping malls, concerts, and swimming holes.”4 As repugnant as the neo-Nazi ideology embraced by the teenagers was, they were also victims.

  Do the activities at a neo-Nazi compound in the 1990s have anything in common with the possible radicalization of Micah Johnson, Muhammad Abdulazeez, and Dylann Roof? On the surface, perhaps not much is similar. Roof and Abdulazeez both abused alcohol and drugs, but none of the three were runaways, belonged to any extremist social groups, had shaved heads or any other telltale extremist appearance. However, digging a little deeper reveals fraying inhibitions and growing destabilization.

  Inspired by his high school Junior ROTC experience, Johnson had been excited to serve his country when he shipped off to Afghanistan with his engineering unit in 2013. He had a bunch of friends in his unit, including a girl he'd had a crush on since high school. They weren't a couple, but she and Johnson had been close for years. She bought his mom, Delphine, presents on her birthday and Christmas, and had spent the night at the Johnson household several times.

  In Afghanistan, though, things fell apart in short order. From the beginning, Johnson was traumatized by the daily explosion of mortar shells. Then Johnson's crush got involved with an officer, and he angrily confronted her. Soon afterward, Johnson was caught in possession of a pair of her underwear that he'd stolen from the laundry. A search of his room found illegal weapons.

  As a result, Johnson's army-issued gun was taken away, and he was put under twenty-four-hour escort before being discharged and sent home. Johnson's military lawyer suggested the punishment was unusually harsh—normally soldiers would be sent to counseling for such a first-time offense—but for whatever reasons, his plea fell on deaf ears.

  His mother said Johnson wasn't the same after he returned. He had spent every Sunday in church as a child; now he claimed he'd lost faith in God. He continued to play basketball at the neighborhood school, but his friends would later say he didn't joke around like he used to. What's more, what had long been his future goal—a career in the army—was over and done with.

  In short, Johnson came back to Dallas physically intact, but his pre-Afghanistan understanding of the world was being pelted by destabilizers on all sides. He was smart but overwhelmed by his grievances against the army and his former girlfriend. He had some degree of PTSD, a result of the constant shelling of his base in Afghanistan. By 2016, he was known to be angered by perceived police harassment of him as well as the highly publicized shootings of African American men around the country. Somewhere between Bagram Air Base and the night he killed six cops, Johnson's inhibitors completely gave out.

  Muhammad Abdulazeez's once golden life was also collapsing as the clock ran down to his shooting spree. Following the loss of his job at a nuclear power plant, the intelligent, successful Abdulazeez seems to have suffered an existential crisis. His heavy drinking worried his parents. Because their health insurance refused to pay for an inpatient abuse program, they sent him to live in Jordan with his straight-laced businessman uncle for a few months. When he returned, however, he started using drugs and drinking again.

  In the days leading up to the attack, Abdulazeez called in sick to work and spent most of his time writing depressing journal entries about how his life felt like a prison. He was also increasingly angered by the deaths of Muslims as a result of the ongoing US wars in the Middle East.

  Dylann Roof checked nearly all the boxes for destabilizers. He was stubborn in many ways, including his insistence that his mom give him the same bowl haircut for years. He spent hours in isolation. Much of what social time he had was spent drinking and doing drugs. Dylann had quit his job with his dad's landscaping business a few months before the shooting and had no career prospects. His parents were divorced, although he was in touch with both of them. He was intelligent but had dropped out of high school. He was also believed to carry a grievance after being rejected by a romantic interest in favor of an African American male. And, perhaps most importantly, he seemed to have no coherent plan for his life going forward.

  In all three cases, a significant number of inhibitors had either long been frayed or were weakening while destabilizers multiplied. The men's safety nets were less likely to keep them from falling into the orbit of extremist ideologies or theories.

  But, while those conditions may have explained the three men's individual psychological susceptibilities to extremism, it didn't explain from where they got their radical ideologies. America has always been full of disaffected youth. Plenty of kids come from unhappy homes, and feel put upon, lack direction, abuse alcohol, and act restless and rebellious. If this was the sum total of the formula for radicalization, “extremists” would pop up around every bend.

  At the WAR house, Riccio played the ever-present “charismatic leader” for his acolytes. Sometimes, he was the cool dad, dispensing endless cans of Hamm's beer. Other times, he was a fascist scout leader, teaching the boys how to shoot guns and leading his group in sieg-heiling.

  In one telling scene from the documentary, Riccio produces a swastika cake to honor Hitler's birthday.

  “Okay,” he says as he begins to slice, “everybody grab a napkin.”5

  “Thanks, Dad!” a teenage skinhead responds.

  But Johnson, Abdulazeez, and Roof never had nearly that kind of close personal contact with extremist ideas. So from where did the external radicalizing forces come?

  After he returned from Afghanistan, Johnson attended some Pan-African events at a Dallas bookstore and went to a Malcolm X film festival. People who remember meeting him described him as a polite young man. Perhaps more relevantly, Johnson also attended meetings of the New Black Panther Party, which is listed as a hate group by the SPLC and has been disowned by members of the original Black Panther Party that started in the 1960s. But that's it. Johnson had limited personal involvement with one or two extremist groups, and Abdulazeez and Roof are not known to have had any.

  Roof did, however, leave a clue about what could have radicalized him in lieu of real-world connections. In a lengthy manifesto he wrote before his attack on the church-goers in Charleston, Roof described searching Google for the terms “black on white crime,” a term he had picked up in online discussions during the national debate following George Zimmerman's 2012 shooting of African American teenager Trayvon Martin. The search brought Roof to the website of the Council of Concerned Citizens, a white supremacist group formerly known as the White Citizens Council. The site apparently sparked his interest in white supremacist ideologies. “I've never been the same since that day,”6 wrote Roof.

  Roof also claimed to have found ins
piration in popular culture. At another point in the manifesto, he (mis)quoted a neo-Nazi character in the movie American History X: “I see all this stuff going on and I don't see anyone doing anything about it. And it pisses me off.”7

  Johnson also spent time on Black Nationalist websites, like Black Riders Liberation Army. One site—the African American Defense League—explicitly called for violence against cops.

  Abdulazeez is also reported to have spent time in his bedroom watching videos by Anwar al-Awlaki—an American-Yemeni Imam often described as “the bin Laden of the internet.”8 Al-Awlaki's videos explicitly call for Muslims to kill Americans.

  Compared to living at the WAR house, spending time online seems pretty tame. Is it possible that clicking through websites and social media replaced the radicalizing function served by living and socializing with other extremists, hardcore shows, charismatic leadership, and cause-based group activities?

  As ugly as the swastika cake is—or the racist ideology and violent rhetoric that Johnson, Abdulazeez, and Roof found online—it is not illegal. In the United States, at least, all of those activities are protected by the Constitution. What's more, extremist ideas by themselves don't create criminal activity, much less violence.

  However, all the elements discussed thus far—inhibitors, destabilizers, and a range of external radicalizers—do propel a select few further and further into what is known as the cone of radicalization. As someone becomes more radicalized, they rise into an increasingly smaller and rarified space at the tip of the cone. These people may be more likely to cross over into violent behavior, although most don't. So, what separates those whose extremist ideology and rhetoric remain legal and those who go beyond the law?

  The story of Paul Jennings Hill suggests an answer. By 1994, the forty-year-old Hill had established himself as one of the most radical voices in the anti-abortion extremist movement. He had appeared on both Donahue and ABC's Nightline to defend killing abortion providers. He had put in his time locally as a regular protestor at a Pensacola, Florida, abortion clinic called the Ladies Center. In short, his activity was very extreme—and completely legal.

  Hill was, however, also increasingly frustrated. He had spent day after day, month after month, year after year picketing and protesting outside the Ladies Center. Yet no one was listening to him. No one seemed deterred by his warnings and pictures of aborted fetuses. People still walked in and out of the clinic, as they did elsewhere, every day to access abortion services.

  Worse, Hill was being ostracized by his colleagues for his radical views. In 1993, he was even excommunicated from the church where he had served as pastor for several years.9 The board members were all staunchly anti-abortion, but they couldn't support Hill's extreme stance.

  Hill's bitterness at the perceived ineffectualness of his actions is common to dedicated extremists. It's known as hitting the “Wall of Frustration.” As an extremist's desire for radical action crystallizes, he usually collides with a barrier created by some combination of forces—including society, laws, friends, family, teachers, or religious groups. As was the case with Hill, the radicalizing communities and groups themselves will sometimes resist such action, due to ideological conflicts, public ridicule, or concern about law enforcement attention. However it happens, the Wall of Frustration suppresses an extremist's desire to undertake dangerous, illegal action.

  This is the critical moment in the radicalizing process. At the Wall, they face a stark decision. Some will accede to the barrier, swallow their frustration, and continue legal activities. Others become disillusioned and drop out of the orbit of their cause or ideology altogether. But a very small fraction of those with the necessary motivation will push through.

  There are often additional, nonideological factors in extremists’ decisions to turn violent. They may plan attacks as a misguided attempt at revenge or to confirm a messianic vision of themselves. In other words, extremist ideologies do not themselves cause violence. They do, however, encourage an actor to focus what may otherwise be an incoherent sense of grievance on a specific target. They can create a narrative, supplying a sense of purpose and mission to the extremist's actions. Finally, ideology may help define the triggering incident that precedes the attack.

  The other factor in violent acts is more logistical: having the means to carry them out. But for people carrying out a mass shooting in the United States, this is not much of a barrier. Assault weapons are not only easy to procure, but so widespread that owning them isn't remarkable. It's these people, with the motivation to push through the Wall and means to carry out attacks, who are on the path toward violence.

  Paul Hill chose to push through. On the morning of June 29, 1994, he went to the abortion clinic to set up white crosses around the perimeter as he often did. A little while later, Dr. John Britton arrived at the Ladies Clinic and asked Hill to move his picket signs and white crosses so he and his bodyguard, James Barrett, could drive into the parking lot. Hill did as requested, then pulled out a 12-gauge shotgun and shot both men in the head before they could even exit their vehicle. As they bled to death, Hill put down his weapon and waited to be arrested.

  Assuming that Johnson, Abdulazeez, and Roof were in fact deeply radicalized before their attacks, did the final part of their journeys look anything like Hill's?

  At one meeting of New Black Panther Party, Johnson was so insistent that the group stockpile more ammunition and guns that he was banned from future meetings. This could have been his Wall of Frustration. Afterward, he became convinced that nobody else was going to take action and began training for the Dallas attacks. His attack also came immediately following two widely publicized fatal police shootings of African American men, likely his immediate trigger for the specific day.

  Roof was also frustrated by small acts of resistance. His friend Joe Meek claimed he refused to take a photo of Roof burning the US flag. During a drug and alcohol binge a week before the shooting with Meek and Christon Scriven, Roof began talking about doing “something big” at the College of Charleston.10 He didn't describe the attack as racially motivated. Though they doubted Roof would carry out any kind of threat, Meek and Scriven broke into Roof's car and hid his gun. Unfortunately, Meek returned it after his girlfriend reminded him possessing a firearm violated his probation for a burglary.

  In his manifesto, Roof also appeared to have a sense of heroic messianism, writing, “No one [is] doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

  In the days leading up to his attack, Abdulazeez similarly painted himself as a lonely warrior without support from the rest of the world. He began making self-comparisons to the seventh-century companions of an Islamic prophet, who he believed had to commit jihad. As apparent proof of his commitment, Abdulazeez bought ammunition at Walmart on July 11, 2015, five days before the shooting. Hours before his attack on the military targets, Abdulazeez was having a religious and philosophical discussion with a friend via text in which he quoted an Islamic verse that read, “Whosoever shows enmity to a friend of mine, then I have declared war against him.”

  In short, each young man had his own personal problems. Each of their safety nets—constructed out of inhibitors and worn down by destabilizers—was at least somewhat frayed. Individually, they came into contact with violent, extremist rhetoric. Finally, their frustration with perceived inaction led them to seize upon a narrative of heroic, self-sacrificing violence—the ultimate contribution to their radical cause.

  If that journey explains the motivation behind those young men's killing sprees, then the difficulty of predicting who becomes a violent extremist helps to explain why they were able to fly under the radar. The combination of inhibitors, destabilizers, and external radicalizing forces is a general diagnostic tool, not a crystal ball. In hindsight, the model describes the three men's path to extremism fairly well, but their general profiles match those of tens of thousands of young
men, somewhat adrift and aggrieved.

  In fact, the known markers of extremism are so common that it is a huge challenge for law enforcement and intelligence analysts to target specific individuals for potential radicalization. In a 2016 article, the New York Times described prediction as a “murky science [that] seems to imply that nearly anyone is a potential terrorist.”11

  This isn't because intelligence analysts need to design a better tool. As Chip Berlet, a longtime chronicler of right-wing extremism, claims: “There is no recent social science evidence showing that people who join the Patriot movement (or any social movement on the right or left) are mentally ill, suffer from paranoid delusions, or are more or less uneducated, ignorant or stupid than people in a surrounding batch of zip codes. They tend to be just like their neighbors.”12 This statement seems to describe Johnson, Abdulazeez, and Roof quite well.

  One final clue to what motivated these murders came in the Southern Poverty Law Center's annual Year in Hate and Extremism reports.

  In 2016, the SPLC recorded the highest number of right-wing hate groups in the thirty years since they began keeping records, a spike that began in 2008. The Ku Klux Klan remained the single largest entity, representing 21 percent of all hate groups, but heavily armed, conspiracy-minded, and anti-government “Patriot” groups had also recently hit record highs. In 2008, there were 149 such groups; by 2015, there were 998, nearly a seven-fold increase.

  During this same time period, attacks by domestic Islamic extremists continued unabated. A year after Abdulazeez's attack, twenty-nine-year-old Omar Mateen, an American citizen who had pledged allegiance to ISIS, killed forty-nine people at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Five months later, Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik killed fourteen and wounded twenty-two in a mass shooting attack at an office holiday party held at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California.