The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - How Big a Threat is Nihilistic Violent Extremism?

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

In December 2024, a school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin left two people dead and raised urgent questions about a disturbing form of violence with no clear ideological motive. The attacker left behind a manifesto expressing hatred for society and admiration for mass killers - a case researchers now associate with nihilistic violent extremism, violence for its own sake. Producer Eric Bombicino examines what this emerging threat is, how it differs from traditional forms of extremism, and whether it's on the rise in Canada. He's joined by Amarnath Amarasingam, associate professor at Queen's University. Then, Barbara Perry, founding director of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism at Ontario Tech University, explains how authorities and researchers are trying to understand and counter this phenomenon.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When TVO first went on air in 1970, the idea that public television could have a positive impact on learning was visionary. From beloved kid shows that sparked the joy of learning, pioneering must-see favorites exploring society and culture and series that made navigating life on Ontario a little easier, TVO's commitment to lifelong learning has stood the test of time. Renew your support now and help preserve this legacy. Visit TVO.comme slash 2026 renewal to make your donation today. In December 2024, 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow went to her school in Madison, Wisconsin, an open fire in a study hall.

She killed a teacher and a student, injured six, then killed herself. So why did she do it? She left behind a manifesto, she called it war against humanity, and wrote that she hated people in society. She talked about her admiration for mass killers. She spent time online in communities that celebrated extreme violence for its own sake. This isn't the kind of extremism we're used to. She doesn't seem to have been motivated by a clear ideology or political belief.

That's why researchers have linked people like her to a new category. Nialistic, violent extremism. We look at how they're grappling with the phenomenon and whether extremism is on the rise in Canada. This is the rundown. So what is nihilistic violent extremism and what can we do to combat it? Producer Eric Bombinchino gets insight from Amarnath Amariss Singam, an associate professor at Queen's University, in part two of their conversation on extremism.

Okay, so I did want to talk about, I guess it's a new form of extremism, and I think everything we just talked about in terms of understanding extremism might just get punted off the table here. Nialistic violent extremism, what is that and why is it, I guess, so confounding for you? I mean, the problem is in the nihilism word, right?

where nihilism, at least philosophically, is a sense of meaninglessness, rootlessness, purposelessness, and a lot of extremist groups are the complete opposite of that, right? They want a white ethno state, or they want a caliphate, or whatever it is,

they're building something, they're building a utopian vision, whereas a lot of these guys, and they come out of, you know, the Gore communities online, they come out of the true crime community online. So what are those? So it's like there are online,

boards where people are getting a lot of their excitement from, I don't even want to say community, but a lot of what they're consuming is gore content. So people getting hit by cars and dogs getting killed and that sort of content. And they're sitting there consuming this content. And the true crime community is the same, like, you know, the serial killer worship and that sort of thing, right? They come out of school shooter worship also, like people people, the kind of attachment people have to the Columbine shooters from way back. So out of these communities is this new phenomenon called nihilistic violent extremism where they are bullying young children into kind of harming themselves on camera.

All of that stuff is happening. And so people don't know how to kind of explain it because it sounds like violent extremism, but there is no purpose to it. Right. And so that's where the trouble is. where that's where people are kind of struggling with is, is this just violence for violence's sake? The UK government calls it violence fixation.

In Canada, we call it non-nihialistic violent extremism. So it's just this kind of weird obsession and attachment and fixation to violence. But it's not like the race war in the far right. We're out of that violence and chaos, something beautiful and glorious arises. For them, the violence is the purpose. Is this like the jokerizing? of extremism?

Like, I'm trying, like, some people just want to see the world burn. So some people want to see the world burn is something that extremism researchers and policymakers and law enforcement don't know what to do with. Okay. Right? Because on the one hand, we're used to finding a manifesto or a flag or a book or something, you know, you read mind-con, something to, like, point us towards ideology and belief systems, whereas we just want to destroy everything.

doesn't make any sense. Yeah. But they're unimaginably violent, especially towards young people, very young people. We've seen cases as young as nine and ten and eleven. And so where to place that is difficult. And a lot of our prevention programs now across the country are seeing an uptick in these cases as part of their caseload.

And yeah, some of it is just, they just need social workers and counselors and therapy and talk things through, but there's no, there's no ideological anything there. Could it lead eventually to some sort of belief system, something you'd call an ideology, we're in like a transition phase? It could be a transition phase.

A few people have kind of argued that. What they do, what they do is they'll, you might find an ISIS video on their hard drive. You might find a neo-Nazi video on their hard drive. And people are like, how can two competing ideologies be a part of the same person's computer, the reason for that is because the only thing they care about in those two videos is the violence, right? They like the violence part of it.

They don't really care about the ideological part of it. So it could be a transition to something else, but we don't know what that's going to look like. But in the meantime, it's the trail of destruction that they're leaving behind. So folks are angry at the world. They need to get back at it. They need to do something. But nothing means anything. There's no hope.

Then I guess all you have is revenge. It does seem like revenge can be its own thing to motivate. I don't even know if this is revenge. Like for them, for them, it's just, uh, they're just doing it for the lulls.

They're just doing it for the kicks, right? They're just doing it because they can. Um, and the online landscape kind of allows for some of this behavior too. And, and, and,

and they're just doing it for, uh, for clout. Right. They're just doing it because they're part of this weird nefarious group and everyone's like biging each other up and seeing who can one up each other. Right. Uh,

it's like a, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a, right and and and and and young people tying it back to your liberalism question like is this the kind of

end point meaninglessness um also right is this is this is this kind of the the failure of modernity to provide these young people with something meaningful and purposeful that they're now reacting very bizarrely to this sense of norm like rootlessness yeah um maybe right and and so that that that that might be the end of it the end result of all of this also is like like we have nothing to live for. This is all crazy anyway. This is all chaos and nothing meaning, you know, there's no heaven and there's no hell.

And it's all, we're just all this and that. We're just all floating through space. And so why not cause as utmost destruction as humanly possible? So I don't know if this is related to nihilistic violent extremism, but you did mention this idea of being a main character. And I wanted to sort of pick up on that. Are there more and more angry young men now that want to be, they feel sidelined in their lives,

they want to be the main character on a hero's journey. And hero's journey is a thing, and it ends in catharsis and salvation. Yeah. I don't know if that it's part of nihilistic violence extremism, but I would say a lot of the other ideological groups, far right jihadist,

even conspiracy theories in particular, they're very good at turning you into a cosmic warrior main character. Right. And so, I mean, conspiracy theories do this a lot. where it's like you are now tasked because you've been, your eyes have been opened and you've been granted the truth about what's really going on in the world.

Everyone else is asleep. You now have a responsibility to wake up everybody to the true reality and get them on a path towards like liberating humanity. And so the golden age for a lot of these conspiracy theories isn't like a caliphate or white ethnostate, but it's when everyone kind of wakes up. Right. Everyone realizes, realizes that there's always been the shadowy elite controlling everything. They've never had that much agency. Everything's always been taken away from them or controlled for them.

And now we're kind of hip to it. Yeah. Right. And so, yeah, it does create the sense of very deep purpose to kind of help humanity along. So you mentioned that the caliphate is sort of the end goal for Islamist extremists, the ethno state for right-wing extremists. I remember quite a long time ago on the agenda, we had on a ex-Neo-Nazi and an ex-Islamist extremist, and they talked about why, why they joined. And it was identical. So does the ideology matter as much here, or is that almost secondary?

The ideology matters for, so when you say, like, I joined for identity, or I joined for group identity or community, the ideology comes in and says which community? Right? Because if it was just any community, then we can go join a poker league. Yeah. Habitat free manority. Or Habitat remarry humanity. But no, the community is quarantined in terms of who is the in-group and who is the out-group and ideology is important for telling you what that is. Right. Right. So you're a, not just a white person, but a proud, racialized white nationalist, or not just a Muslim, but someone who believes in a very conservative form of

Islam Sunni Muslim you know so it tells you what the tears are and you belong here that's what ideology does and so yes they're both going after purpose and belonging

and meaning but the ideology makes it very different kinds of meaning and very different communities so that's what the ideology does it does the explaining right because community could mean any community but that's not satisfying right right and so you're not part of a swim meet

to you're part of a group, right? That actually means something. I think you'd mentioned before that it's odd that a lot of people might see, or some people might see Joe Rogan as a neo-Nazi. And I'm curious in this whole conversation about extremism, and we've talked about the potential for more extremism, I kind of wanted to go the other way on that with, as we get more polarized, are you seeing it becoming easier for folks to have a disagreement with someone politically?

and label that person, see that person as an extremist, as a radical. Because I hear the word extremist thrown around a lot when it seems like people are just having a regular political debate. I mean, I think this is the natural consequence of increased chaos, which naturally leads to kind of finding your group, which tends to be very tribal. You tend to have a heightened sense of the in-group in times of chaos, who you need to protect. And this happens on the progressive side and on the conservative side where they believe that it's not just a minor disagreement on tax policy, but you are the epitome of evil. And your vision for what Canada or America is going to look like is fundamentally evil and bad. And I'm on the side of good.

Right. And so when everything is non-chaotic, I think you can have very easy political disagreements. but now so much of this conversation is elevated to a cosmic level where I think it's becoming harder to just have a conversation, at least on the political space, right? I think interpersonally things are good. Like I always see people having very vibrant debates and disagreements in the actual real world. It just doesn't happen on TV or social media.

Yeah. Right? And so I think there is a disconnect there sometimes between how people behave, in real life and how it looks like online. But I do think people are becoming a little bit more tribal and politics is becoming more tribal. It's become an us and them thing, not like, let's work together for the betterment of the country.

It's more like who has the right vision for the country and the other side needs to go away. That line has been drawn for every mundane issue from immigration town to masks. Right. And so it could be the most minutest issue and there will be lines drawn. which is not great for our politics, I think. And so figuring out a way to turn that temperature down is important. I just don't know how you do it with the online space and the information space the way that it is.

I mean, it's just good to remember that, and I think this is good for all journalists, Twitter is not real life. Twitter is not real life. Go ahead and talk to some real people. Sort of on that, and to finish, deradicalization. So once upon a time, 10 years ago, these 20-somethings were coming across this ideology

on very fringe message boards, right? I think if you smash cut forward to now, it's kind of everywhere. So what does de-radicalization look like now and have we gotten better at it? Is it just more difficult because this stuff is everywhere? I think, so at the height of ISIS days,

there was a big disagreement in the derad space about, do we just care about the violence or do we care about what they believe? Right? And so that divide existed between Canada, the U.S., the U.S., the U.K., and other countries, where the U.K.K. really went down the line of, we need to change what they think. Right. And so we need to make them moderate Muslims, right?

And whereas in Canada, we just said, we don't really care what you believe. We just want to make sure you're not, like, stockpiling fertilizer. Right. And we just want to make sure you're not blowing stuff up. Right. And so that dichotomy got transferred into. the far right and is now even more acute

now where a whole bunch of people believe all kinds of weird stuff and law enforcement policy people prevention types, intervention types don't have the resources to thought police everybody all we can really focus on is the violent part. Right. It doesn't matter

what you believe. Are you tipping over into some sort of violence, preparatory violence stage which we need to keep an eye on? And so that's what the prevention space looks like We never really had a prevention space even a couple decades ago. It was almost all law enforcement. Whereas now, if a 14-year-old draws a swastika on a notebook in Canada, which has happened,

they might get a visit from the police, but the police might refer them to one of the few prevention outfits and organizations. And instead of a law enforcement approach, it will be a counseling approach. It's early, too. And it's early. So that's what the prevention space looks like. It's the same organizations that are dealing with like the de-radicalization space. So a lot of the people who came back from Iraq and Syria, making sure those kids are back in school, that sort of thing is all done by the same kind of groups.

So there's a kind of robust intervention, prevention, rehabilitation space in Canada, which never existed before. And so they're also having this ideology conversation, which is when you're talking to a 16th, year old about who's, you know, draws a swastika on a notebook, what do you, do you kind of talk about the ideology first? Right. Or do you talk about their family and their education and their mental health and all these other things and then eventually maybe get to the ideology or maybe after all of that, the ideology will just work itself out. Right.

So in an interesting way, I think one of the, in the causal space, in the radicalization space, ideology is still quite important, but in the de-radicalization space, ideology is often dealt with like down the line. Yeah. Get to the root causes and the ideology might die. And the ideology might die or some, and what some of these intervention providers will say is like ideology is so important that you can't actually do it first before all the trust has been built.

Right. Right. And so you have to spend a year building trust with this person and then talk about the ideological part because if you go in ideology first, the walls are going to go up and you're not going to have any secondary relationship, right? And so that, so it kind of works both ways. But we, what's new in Canada is we have this kind of infrastructure over the last little while to actually off ramp some of these kids. Right.

Before they go into the court system and the prison system. So there's that 14-year-old early prevention. But if you get a kid coming back, or 20-something coming back from Syria or someone steeped in the right-waying extremist space, who's a committed believer, if you get them into de-radicalization, does it work? Or is it kind of a coin flip? I wouldn't go as far as coin flip, but I also don't know what work means, right? In the sense of like, how do you know that there's, what does success look like in this space, right? It's very, it's very hard to know. So like I have a few former far right people who are acquaintances of mine who I would say

have left the movement, have denounced violence. but now in the online space still say a lot of pro-Trump stuff, anti-immigration stuff, racist stuff. And so for me, I'm like, oh, like, you're a former neo-Nazi, still saying racist stuff online. Are you de-radicalized? And so that's the challenge. It's like, how do you know that you're on the other side of it? He's not violent.

Is that enough? or do you want him to completely become like a liberal Democrat? Does he have to be an NDP support? What does success, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What does success look like? Yeah. And so where, so that's the challenge is, is how long are you going to track these people

and how long are you going to counsel these people? And before you're like, okay, he's denounce violence and that's enough because we have 100 other cases over here who are also urgent. And so that, that's the challenge. Is like, when does it end, right? Well, it also feels like, I mean, we talked about the need for meaning, purpose, community. These are massive structural things. So to get at that stuff feels like, it doesn't feel like something that could be done in a deradicalization program.

No. Yeah. No, I think broader structural changes need to happen because whatever this derad space is, they also go back into society after. They reintegrate into society. And so there has to be something there for them. And so there are, I mean, I know a few people who came out of prison in the 2000s, who one of the things we did was like help them write a resume. Yeah.

Show them what an iPhone was because they went to prison. There were no iPhones. They came out of prison and everyone was staring at these rectangular devices. They were like, what is happening, right? Right. And so reintegration sometimes is very mundane like that, but there has to be something there for them to feel integrated into. Family has to stay.

Family has to have not abandoned them. Friends have to have not abandoned them. Is there work? What does education look like? So it depends. Like there's been great success stories. And there's been others who are just kind of languishing. What's one thing you like to see change in this space when we're looking at the future of de-radicalization?

I would say consistent funding. Because right now there are a lot of these D-RATs, organizing. are like one funding cycle away, one election away from having it all taken away. And so there's no, some of them anyway don't have like layers of governmental funding. They have the federal government funding them. There's no provincial funding. There's no municipal funding. It's now integrated into the broader like health care environment.

So it's very flimsy. And so I would like to see that kind of supported more and made more permanent. But yeah, otherwise I think there's a lot. are doing a great job, most of them. Hey, man, thanks for spending all this time with me. It's always a joy to hang with you. Yeah, always good to chat. You can catch part one of Eric and Amranath's conversation

on our website at tbio.org or our YouTube channel at TVO today. Now, back in 2018, the Canadian government launched something called the national strategy on countering radicalization to violence. Eight years later, we look at what kinds of threats the country faces and whether our efforts to counter extremism are working. Barbara Perry is the founding director of the Center on Hate, Bias, and Extremism at Ontario Tech University. Barbara, great to have you on the program. How are you doing? I'm good. Thank you.

Barbara, let's start with how would you characterize the threat of violent extremism in Canada today? I think we're at a fairly high threat level. I mean, over the past decade or so, we've had, I think a total of five mass murders, mass homicides, resulting in 24 deaths that have been associated with some variant of right-wing extremism, whether it's anti-Muslim violence or anti-Indigenous violence or, in fact, anti-authority violence as well. And I think the threat continues because of the narratives that are associated with the active groups and active members now that do promote violence. against targeted communities, promote violence against the state. So I think I see that threat and I think even CIS has seen that threat. All right. I want to go back a decade.

There were many reports at the time in the media of Canadians flying to Syria to fight for ISIS. How has violent extremism, if we look at from that point on, how has it evolved since here in Canada? Yeah, I think it's an interesting question. I mean, I started looking at, well, I started looking at white supremacy when I was working in Arizona in the 90s. But then in the Canadian context, started looking at the movement here, probably around 2011 or so, when really the focus was on Islamist-inspired extremism, very little attention being paid to the far-right. I wasn't even sure if there was a far-right threat at the time. So we launched the first study, and in fact, by the time we published in 2015, we were beginning to see quite a dramatic increase in the movement.

It took some years, I think, for policymakers, for stakeholders to recognize that. So it wasn't probably until 2018, 2019, that we started paying attention to it at the federal level. But during that period of time, the threat itself shifted quite dramatically from, you know, the threat of. And it really wasn't a domestic threat. It really was exactly what you're seeing. That is foreign fighters, folks going to fight wars or insurrections in other parts of the world. We really start to see that increase in the domestic threat associated with the far right. Again, probably around 2016, 2017 after the rise of Donald Trump, for example.

I want to throw in another year there, 2020. That's COVID for a lot of people who remember. Was that a turning point at all here in Canada when we look at violent extremism? Yeah, it really was. I think it was an accelerator. As I say, we're already starting to see an increase in right-wing extremism, anti-authority extremism in the Canadian context around 2018, 2019. And COVID, I think, really lit a fuse around obviously anti-statist sentiment and activity, but also anti-Semitism and anti-Asian sentiment. Both of those communities were held accountable through different conspiracy theories, for COVID. So they also became the targets of right-wing extremists in many respects and others on the street. And I think the convoys also played a role in that

in bringing people into the movement through their grievances, through their fears and anxieties in terms of real or potential job loss, in terms of what they saw as government overreach with respect to vaccinations and health restrictions. So people were brought into a movement that was in many respects orchestrated by folks, at least adjacent to, if not deeply embedded in far-right narratives. If I was Canadian enforcement right now, and I had a list of sort of who's on my radar, what are the groups? And are there fairly new groups?

Are there these groups that have been on this list for quite a while? There are some that are variants, if you will, of previously existing groups. some that we thought were underground. So Proud Boys, for example, were designated as terrorist entities and reemerged as Canada First. They are still active to some extent. But I think really what we're worried about now are what are referred to as active clubs. They're typically accelerationists or neo-Nazi collectives, if you will, that are informed by racism, by misogyny, by anti-feminist narratives. and they bring people into the movement through an emphasis on fitness, hence the name, active clubs.

So they bring people in through the name of fitness. They're typically all male groups, and so, I mean, I think the misogyny is embedded in them, and slowly integrate people into the ideologies. I think affiliated with them are a new group, Second Sons, which emerged in some respects out of Diagallon, which we saw during COVID days, led by Jeremy McKenzie. He then created Second Sons, which is a much more aggressive variant of that nationalist group, if you will. So that's sort of the shock troops or the feet on the ground.

Then we have a group called also related to McKenzie and related to Second Sons, the Dominion Society of Canada, which sort of is the political arm in many respects. So a registered not-for-profit organization that attempts to influence political policy and political narratives as well. So those are the sorts of groups that I think are really most visible right now. I mean, there are several others that are offshoots of those, but those are the ones I think that security services are looking at most closely. Well, you talk about security services just yesterday. CIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said that it's stepping up vigilance of potential extremist violence amid the U.S. Israeli war on Iran. What do you make of that? Yeah, I think that those sorts of geopolitical

events do influence the movement here, and it can go in multiple directions. I remember after the attack in Israel just a couple of years ago where you had some far right groups applauding both sides, both the attack on Israel, but also Israel's

attack on subsequent forays into Palestine. And we're going to see that as well. I mean, they're just going to use it as they're so good at leveraging and exploiting these kinds of crises to enhance their messages

and to broaden their reach to broaden their membership as well. So it's definitely going to have an impact here in terms of the movement, but also just individual actors acting on their anti-Semitism or acting on their anti-Muslim or anti-Arab sentiment. Barbara, we're going to leave it there. Really appreciate your insights. Thank you so much on this.

Okay, thanks for your time. I'm Jay-N. Thanks for spending some time with us on The Rundown. We want this show to reflect you and what you care about. So what should we cover, next. Let us know at tbo.org slash rundown feedback or drop a comment on YouTube. Until then, see you tomorrow.