An image of the shooter in the January 2025 school shooting at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee, wearing a shirt depicting a school shooter. (Instagram/Screenshot)
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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 forums 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.
The manifesto lists a string of “soft targets” including Jews, Muslims, immigrants and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Sections of the document were lifted directly from various extremist sources, including many quotes from the Christchurch Mosque shooter’s manifesto and from propaganda by the Terrorgram Collective. A portion of the manifesto is plagiarized from the 800-page manifesto written by Matthew Harris, a former UCLA lecturer who was arrested in 2022 after publishing a manifesto threatening violence against 35 individuals.
Much like the Madison school shooter, this shooter frequented online spaces that traffic in violent, racist and white supremacist themes masked as “humor.” He used “88”, a white supremacist numerical code for Heil Hitler, in two of his public screennames. His alleged manifesto, along with other online accounts believed to belong to the shooter, cited Soyjak Party, a far-right reactionary imageboard filled with crude racist and antisemitic humor, as inspiration for his actions.
Shortly after the attack was reported, users on the “Soyjak Party” forum claimed the shooter had been “groomed” into committing his attack through interactions with other users on the site. In response, users on the forum became fearful that their website would be shut down and attempted to hide their discussion about the attack.
Across various social media platforms, the shooter lauded a wide range of mass attackers including school shooters and extremist killers. For example, a Pinterest account shared in his alleged manifesto included images of killers ranging from the alleged United Healthcare CEO killer to the 2018 Parkland High School shooter to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers. The bio for the account was a quote taken from the Christchurch attacker’s manifesto. On TikTok, he reposted fan edits of the Abundant Life shooter and 2015 Mother Emanuel AME Church shooter.
There is also evidence that this shooter frequented online forums focused on violence and gore. And, though he ironically denies it in his manifesto, he also appears to have been versed in the subculture of Com or “The Community,” a loose network of Telegram and Discord channels that targets youth and engages in a range of criminal activities, including CSAM, sextortion, SIM swapping, swatting and doxing. This broad network—which has ideological ties to the Order of Nine Angles (O9A)—includes Tempel ov Blood (ToB) and 764, a global network of violent predators.
On Bluesky, the shooter’s username included a tongue-in-cheek reference to him being a “victim” of “MK Ultra,” a possible nod to Kierre Anthony Cutler, a leading member of 764 who pleaded guilty to federal child pornography in 2023 or a more obscure reference to a related song by “incelcore” artist “Negativexp.” The Antioch shooter also shared memes featuring the phrases “Liber of Love” and “333,” references to a publication from the Tempel ov Blood (ToB), as well as a meme about 764.
In another post on Bluesky, the shooter posted that he had been “groomed” by “Nitro” and another individual. “Nitro” was one of several users identified by COE as having been active in the Turkey mosque attacker’s Telegram chat, where he claimed to have created an X account that was used to spread the Turkey attacker’s manifesto. This same individual also circulated a hoax version of the Abundant Life shooter’s manifesto on X.
Based on screenshots circulating on social media, the Antioch shooter may have shared photos of one of his weapons online prior to his attack; it’s unclear if this weapon was used during the shooting. The images show that he scrawled various phrases on his weapon, mimicking prior mass killers such as the 2019 Christchurch and 2022 Buffalo shooters. This included references to the Abundant Life shooter and the 2022 Bratislava shooter, as well as “TND” and “TKD”-- shorthand for “Total [N-word] Death” and “Total Kike Death,” respectively.
The Antioch shooter seems to have attempted to livestream his attack on Kick, but the livestream cut out. Notably, the August 2024 Turkey mosque attacker—whom the Antioch shooter mentioned frequently in his writings—also streamed his attack on the platform. The butt of a gun is visible at the end of the Antioch shooter’s first stream, which was filmed from the POV of the shooter walking around the inside of the school. During the second livestream, which is audio only via a cellphone, law enforcement can be overheard speaking to witnesses at the scene for several minutes, until an officer picks up the phone and cuts the stream.