Yeardley: Hey, Small Town Fam. It’s Yeardley. How are you guys? I’m so glad you’re here, because we have such an interesting episode for you today. It comes to us from a new guest named Matt Kriner.

Matt founded an organization called The Institute for Countering Digital Extremism. They work with law enforcement around the world, as well as the US Department of State and the Department of Justice to identify bad actors on the Internet.

If you’re thinking this sounds like a full full-time job, you would be right. Because the people Matt is looking at are not the disgruntled trolls who spend their days shit posting, as Matt calls it. These are the people who plan mass shootings, traffic minors, and form terror cells, to name just a few.

I remember when we were recording this episode, all four of us on the Small Town Dicks side were rendered speechless several times, which doesn’t happen very often, as you know. Because honestly, Matt’s job just seemed impossible. I mean, how do you separate the shit posting from the credible threats when the people who want to make a statement using violence, skulk around the shadows of the dark web, and change their Internet addresses like the rest of us change the channel on TV.

Matt admits that it is extremely difficult to stop somebody who wants to shoot up a school before they do it, because hate speech is not actually illegal and law enforcement is largely reactionary. But Matt and his team have made progress, and thanks to their work, new protocols and warning systems are being implemented every day.

Still, this episode will scare you to death. And if you have school age children, I suspect it will hit you even harder. But I promise, it’s a fascinating discussion and you’ll learn a ton. Here is Malicious Intent.

Yeardley: Hi, there. I’m Yeardley.

Dan: I’m Dan.

Dave: I’m Dave.

Paul: And I’m Paul.

Yeardley: And this is Small Town Dicks.

Dan: Dave and I are identical twins.

Dave: And retired detectives from Small Town, USA.

Paul: And I’m a veteran cold case investigator who helped catch the Golden State Killer using a revolutionary DNA tool.

Dan: Between the three of us, we’ve investigated thousands of crimes, from petty theft to sexual assault, child abuse to murder.

Dave: Each case we cover is told by the detective who investigated it, offering a rare personal account of how they solved the crime.

Paul: Names, places, and certain details have been changed to protect the privacy of victims and their families.

Dan: And although we’re aware that some of our listeners may be familiar with these cases, we ask you to please join us in continuing to protect the true identities of those involved-

Dave: -out of respect for what they’ve been through.

In Unison: Thank you.

Yeardley: Today On Small Town Dicks, my friends, I sang it to you. We have the usual suspects. We have Detective Dan.

Dan: Hey there.

Yeardley: Hey there. We have Detective Dave.

Dave: Hello, everyone.

Yeardley: Hello, Dav, as I like to call you. And we have the one and only Paul Holes.

Paul: Hey, hey, how’s it going?

Yeardley: Hey, hey. Oh, it’s so good. So happy to see you all. Small Town Fam, we are doing something a little different today, which is really great. So, I’m just going to introduce our guest and then let’s him explain his job. Today, we are pleased to welcome to the podcast Matt Kriner.

Matt: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Yeardley: Thanks for coming, Matt. I know a little bit about what you do, because I’ve read the secret squirrel notes before we sat down, but nobody else does. So, give us a CliffNotes version of your job and why you’re here.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. So, I am the executive director of The Institute for Countering Digital Extremism. It is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to identifying and disrupting the actors in our digital spaces, so on our social media websites and in our digital forums that are aiming to collapse our society, to engage in violence and terrorism within our society and the real public spaces that we all transit and occupy. And our job is to help law enforcement and tech companies identify those actors before they can do the nefarious things they intend to do.

Yeardley: Amazing. I know these people hide in plain sight, and there are so many people online, I can’t even begin to imagine how you do it.

Matt: It’s a complicated endeavor. It really is. It’s very challenging sometimes to pick out the noise from the authentic, credible threats that might be occurring, knowing who is just so called shitposting, or being an ironic teenager online versus someone who actually wants to hurt someone else and means it and is actually going to carry it through, instead of when the door gets knocked on by a law enforcement officer, the agent of the FBI, saying, “Hi, we saw these posts and someone reported you. Would you like to explain this?” They say, “No, no, it was all just a joke. I’m not actually serious. This is just a part of my online subculture or my Discord channel where we all just joke around.”

So, our job is to help those individuals that have to go to that door, actually understand who they’re dealing with before they get there, help the tech companies empower those officers before they arrive, so that when they do knock on that door, they can say, “You know, I hear you, but I don’t believe you. And here’s the evidence to [Yeardley laughs] prove otherwise, and let’s go downtown and have a chat.”

Dan: That’s what we’re fighting here. Keyboard commandos.

Yeardley: Yeah.

Matt: Keyboard commandos, those that like to use the power of anonymity and other forms of obfuscation to pretend that they’re not actually doing something bad. Yeah.

Dave: What’s the definition of digital extremism?

Matt: Our definition of extremism means that someone’s attempting to apply violence to their action. It’s not just a disagreement that goes to extraordinary measures of name calling, or denigration, or even hate speech. In that matter, it’s very much tied to, “I’m going to make sure you pay for what I think you are or what I think you did to me.”

Dave: Got it.

Paul: Matt, now this sounds like you’re dealing with probably some pretty high-level criminal actors in the digital space. Does this also extend into what I think the layperson would just call cyberbullying?

Matt: It can. It often starts there, especially in our younger audiences that are exposed to a lot of this content, whether it’s ideologically driven content like say a Nazi forum or even an ISIS forum or something along those lines. They can begin in a space of cyberbullying or cyber harassment, cyber stalking even. Sometimes even just fraudulent scams and other forms of extortion that can draw them in.

Oftentimes it starts in even more benign spaces like video game spaces, where they’re being identified and recruited in order to join these networks. And next thing they know, they’re a diehard, they’re a believer, and they’re starting to engage in some of the same actions that you or I would consider criminal behavior or a predicate for criminal behavior, and suddenly they’re getting a knock on the door and their parents are going, “What in the world is happening?” So, this is really the ecosystem we’re talking about.

Yeardley: Interesting. So, with that in mind, Matt, you actually have a case for us today that you participated in that you helped identify and get into the headspace of this suspect. So, tell us about that. Tell us how this case came to you.

Matt: Yeah. So, part of our work is identifying emerging incidents, as they first hit the news media reporting or we get an alert from a wire agency or something along those lines that says something dangerous has occurred in society or maybe there’s reports of shots fired at say, a school or at a local Walmart. Our little antenna goes up and we say, “Aha, this is a moment we might want to pay attention to,” especially as we get this sort of cascading effect in society of late, where people follow on the last attack at a location that often generates the next attacker to do the same. So, we’re often looking for patterns, and we see patterns in these notifications.

And so, in January 2025, we get one such notification. A local media report goes out, actually, to one of my coworkers who lives in Tennessee, and they get this notification on their phone that says, “A local school is on lockdown.” And so, it was a student that perpetrated the attack. It was an individual named Solomon Henderson, we later found out. But we don’t see the name for a few hours. This is not something that comes out right away.

Dave: What did Solomon Henderson do? What’s he accused of?

Matt: So, Solomon’s accused of entering the school with a firearm and discharging that firearm within the cafeteria of that school, killing one student, injuring another. And then, before anything else could happen, he shoots himself fatally. And immediately, we go into alert, because a lot of actors that we evaluate have connections to threats against schools, whether they’re shooting threats or they’re bombing threats. And so, our antennas go up, and we start to look into it.

We do a couple of things right off the bat. The first thing we’ll do is we pull up every news source we could possibly get our hands on and say, “Okay, who’s got what in the early minutes of this incident?” Oftentimes, that’s full of noise or absolutely nothing at all, and so we’re in the dark with the rest of the society going, “Hey, what is this?”

We also have a large network of sources that we have built over the years that allow us to understand when the ecosystems we persistently watch online are saying, “Hey, that was one of ours. One of our guys just did something.”

Yeardley: You’re referring to a group of people who already might not have the best intentions.

Matt: Correct. We’re talking about the–

Yeardley: The bad actors.

Matt: -the bad actors that have their own forums and channels on Telegram, or Discord, or direct messages on X, or Instagram. Those are the places we’re talking about. And they’re telling one another, “Hey, I think one of our guys, one of our bad guys did a thing.”

So, we get these little indications across the Internet that say, “That’s where we should focus our attention.” And so, what we’ll do is we’ll take those little signals, as we call them, and we’ll zoom in, and we’ll start to assess how credible is this, what’s the source, does this actually track to a meme, is this actually real them saying, this was one of our guys, or is this just someone doing a bit, a joke that they’ve done hundreds of times before.

Yeardley: Is your team, your organization monitoring those channels, the Discords and the Telegrams, and just on a day-to-day basis kind of thing?

Matt: We are. So, we sit in these spaces and we watch and we wait, because we know eventually someone will make an attribution or a claim to these attacks.

Yeardley: Matt, are these people spaces pretty easy to get into as an outsider, or is there some insider vetting process that they put you through before you can get access to these chat rooms?

Matt: Most of the time, they’re surprisingly accessible. You would think that these spaces talking about intention to carry out violence, or glorifying mass shooters, or glorifying school shootings are actually difficult to get into. But the reality is, no, they want recruits. They want people to find them. They want to have an audience. We’re not going in as ourselves. Obviously, we’re assuming a persona and that is all digital. But oftentimes, we are able to just sit in their space, and watch, and listen while they actively talk about doing violent activity offline.

So, January 22nd, 2025, like I said, we get a notice. My coworker does. It says, “School’s on lockdown.” So, we pull up all of our different sources in these different communities online, and we started evaluating. We say, “Okay, which ones seem to have the most relevant information coming out of these chat rooms at the time?” What we start to see emerge is this claim that there’s a manifesto. So, we dig in. We say, “All right, what is this manifesto? Is it real? Is it legitimate?”

We apply years of experience of evaluating manifestos and understanding what the motivations of these shooters are when they write them. The first thing we see when we get this manifesto is a symbol on the front with an epithet, the N word, tied to cell or incel. So, it’s a combination of these two words. We see this meme over top of the symbol. The symbol is a hate symbol. It’s a Sonnenrad, as it’s called. It’s used very popularly by neo fascists, neo-Nazis, individuals that very much hate Jewish individuals or black individuals, anybody that’s not White.

The first thing that goes through our mind is, “Okay, we’re dealing with a neo Nazi. We’re dealing with somebody who has intentions to collapse the US government through terroristic actions, but they’ve chosen a school. This is strange, but we’ll it out and see where this goes.”

And as we dig in, what we notice, is that the individual’s manifesto is extraordinarily chaotic. It doesn’t match much of what we’ve expected from many of these actors in the past. In fact, if anything, it shows numerous different influences, numerous different ideologies at play, and more memes than anything else. It’s less coherent than you would expect, though. It is a teenager that’s perpetrated the attack, so we can understand that to some degree being chaotic. But as we really dig in, it just does not look like what we would expect at all.

Yeardley: How many pages was Solomon’s manifesto?

Matt: So, when placed into a PDF, it ends up– And mind you, there are a number of images that they’re included in different sizes. It’s a poorly formatted document, but it’s right at 51 pages.

Yeardley: Good God. So, even though you don’t know right out of the gate who or how old the suspect is, for our edification, how old does Solomon end up being?

Matt: We come to find out that Solomon Henderson was a 17-year-old black male. And immediately upon us learning this, this throws us into a loop. This is outside of what we’re seeing in the manifesto. We’re seeing neo-Nazi content. We’re seeing content that’s ideologically aligned with hardcore white supremacy. We’re seeing things that are indicative of someone who might actually be older than 17 years old.

It wouldn’t be the first time we had seen an older perpetrator come back onto a campus and perpetrate a school shooting. Instead, it turns out this was a student at the school, which fits another model. It fits the Columbine model where we see students come back out of a grievance to take it out on those that are in their class or else others in the school, such as teachers.

Again, what we really start to see when we dig into this and the media reports come out, is that this student is very much on the radar of law enforcement. Four times he was visited by local police between 2021 and 2024. Multiple firearms were taken from the home during those visits. And yet, what we end up seeing in the end is he still perpetrates an attack.

Yeardley: Why was law enforcement summoned to Solomon’s house? What sent them there?

Matt: It looks like it was reports between family and friends to local law enforcement about the situation in the home. It’s a little unclear ultimately what drove those visits. It appears it had more to do with anonymous tips related to either his conduct or to the firearms in his possession.

Dave: So, we used to get these cases where a child, a kid at a high school or junior high makes some either very specific threats, includes the use of a certain type of weapon. A lot of times, it’s a gun, or they say something to a classmate and it’s overheard. So, you get these reports to the office or to the school resource officer, and then they start doing follow up.

So, to address the seriousness of those types of threats, the police, it’s like a hurry up, get on top of this, get out there and talk to kiddo. We were given a little bit extended detainment powers, so we could detain a child, do the investigation, make sure that the child doesn’t have access to firearms that there’s nothing to this threat, that it was just kids talking shit.

So, there are pieces where you get anonymous report like this, and all of a sudden, everything starts moving very quickly, and the police end up going out doing visits they call Child Welfare, you know, ask the parents, “Can we search your house?” He says, “He has guns. Let’s go to his room and check his room for guns.” So, it’s pretty common. This happens all over the US every day.

Yeardley: I didn’t know that.

[Break 1]

So, Solomon’s been on law enforcement’s radar for several years, and now here he is at school causing a lockdown.

Matt: Right. What we do know, is that as he progressed in his Internet experience as a young adolescent, he found himself embedded deeply and very richly within what’s called the true crime community’s mass shooter fandom. And to unpack that a bit, we’re not talking about what we’re doing here. We’re talking about crimes and understanding the various elements of those. We’re talking about individuals who have perverted this that have turned it into something deeply unsettling and disturbing.

They turn these individuals, like the Columbine perpetrators, into idols, into martyrs for a movement that they think is occurring behind the scenes. And so, what we see with Solomon is there’s a significant amount of influence from these mass shooters, different types of mass shooters, not just school shooters, but mass shooters across the world, particularly two individuals that had seemingly an outsized influence on Solomon’s own pathway to violence.

And that’s Juraj Krajčík, who perpetrated a shooting at an LGBTQ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2022. In the same year, another individual, Payton Gendron, perpetrated a mass shooting at a grocery store, the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York. Both of these individuals, including a third individual, Brenton Tarrant, who perpetrated the terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, which killed 51 people. It was very much a white supremacy motivated incident.

All three of these Individuals, but particularly Krajčík and Gendron really heavily influenced Solomon’s pathway. And he cites them in this manifesto that’s just chaotic and all over the place. But those moments are very salient. What we see is that those moments really start to dominate Solomon’s rationale for violence. And then, we see that influence of the school attackers community online justifying his choice of school.

But as we really dig, what starts to emerge is another story. There’s another layer to his associations. And that’s this association with something that’s now called 764. It’s a very disturbing network of individuals that predominantly engage in sexual extortion of other minors. It’s minors typically extorting other minors. And what we see is this space also has this connection to neo fascist or white supremacist accelerationism or white supremacist terrorism, and the accelerationism is specifically something that is unusual as we look at the profile of Solomon.

And just to explain, accelerationism is the notion that through violence you can hasten the collapse of Western society, that if you do certain types of violence at certain times against certain targets, it will create a positive feedback cycle within society and society won’t be able to recover and will collapse faster than it would otherwise.

So, if you think about why a school might be targeted, it’s very vulnerable. The future of our country is in this location. These children will be highly traumatized. It gets a lot of media attention. Now, we start to see a pattern emerge. We start to see why Solomon may have been stitching together these, what seems like, incoherent elements into one manifesto.

And as we dig further, we start to see him reference figures, aliases I’m not going to mention, because it gives them a little bit of boost when they hear their names in these spaces, but we see certain aliases that are well known extorters in the 764 ecosystem online. And that puts up another antenna for us. We say, “Okay, this is strange.” This is the first time we’re starting now to see that ecosystem that’s predominantly for sexual extortion online through social media platforms, spitting out a school shooter.

And as we go, we start to see that some of Solomon’s social media activity is showing us other signs of connections to this ecosystem. He’s sharing propaganda items from some of these terrorist networks online and these other spaces. He’s referencing them. He’s name dropping them. He’s doing it in very oblique ways. He’s cloaking in an irony in shitposting. But as we dig and as we apply that knowledge we’ve built in this space, we start to see that he’s an accelerationist, he’s a terrorist that wanted to perpetrate a school shooting in order to collapse Western society, not because he wanted to punish some other students at his school.

Yeardley: Oh, I see.

Paul: So, you’ve got at least the way I understand how Matt has laid out Solomon’s philosophy. Even though he’s a black male, he’s part of this neo fascist or neo-Nazi type white supremacist group, he’s got adoration for select mass shooters across the world, but he’s also tied into the 764, the sexual exploitation of minors online.

Solomon has a life philosophy and is going to act out in a criminal and a violent manner because of this life philosophy. This is what I call a missionary offender. Solomon has a mission, right? Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, he had a philosophy, a manifesto. Anytime I’ve seen somebody write down their life philosophy, I go, “There’s a pathology there.” They just feel compelled to express these thoughts.

Yeardley: And so, Matt, your job here is mostly reactive, because you can’t get law enforcement involved until the person making the threats has actually committed a crime. So, describe the process of tracking Solomon, or really any attacker that you’re investigating.

Matt: Really, the best way to describe what we’re doing is we’re digging through their digital legacy, the carcass of their online experience. Usually, what we’ll have within the first, I would say six to eight hours, is a fairly reasonable understanding of the profile of the person. Young person, old person, veteran, maybe not veteran, unstable, history of law enforcement. Maybe they’re someone that’s done other acts of violence, and this is more criminal, pedestrian activity in some respects, or maybe they’re completely out of nowhere. They’ve never been on the radar. They’ve always been considered an average person that just kept quiet to themselves. We hear that quite a lot in the responses to these.

But within the first 24 hours, I would say we almost always have a full picture of who we’re dealing with. By 24 hours on, we’ve usually assembled a half dozen or social media profiles. Very few of us have limited social media. Many of us have multiple personalities that we’ll have in different platforms and engage in those pretty robustly. Some individuals, they’re pretty clean about it. Their hygiene is very good before they go into attack. Those are actually the ones we get the most concerned about. The minimal presence after the fact. Those are ones we find to be actually the worst of the worst offenders in this way.

Solomon, on the other hand, was actually quite robust. We identified something along the lines of a dozen social media accounts for him, sometimes multiple for the same platform, as if he were trying on different hats online to show who and what he was. But the main view that we get of him across all of those is a deeply disturbed and frustrated young individual, someone that is showing the world that they have needs that aren’t being met, and someone that is clearly leaking their desires to be violent or to engage in a violent ecosystem.

Paul: So, Matt, did Solomon ever explicitly post that he was going to go into a school and shoot kids, or is it more inferred through his postings that was his ideology?

Matt: We don’t see a direct statement of intent in that regard. No. The communities he’s a part of actually aren’t typically associated with school shootings. This is actually part of the new script that he becomes. He’s contributing to a new script similar to the way that the Columbine perpetrators created a new script of violence within society. Solomon’s helping create a new one by coming out of these spaces and doing an attack at a school versus say a Walmart or a church or synagogue.

Yeardley: Matt, Solomon’s script, as you called it, was new. What’s new about it? Because I feel like obviously, we’ve seen multiple school shooters. We’ve seen if they’re male, sometimes there is the incel factor, there’s white supremacy even though interestingly Solomon was black.

Matt: Yeah, it’s all of those things. Yeah. So, believe it or not, his racial identity is less relevant than one might think. The ideology, mixing white supremacy aspects as a black individual can be very contradictory, but it’s not as atypical as we might expect it to be. There’s actually large number of instances of individuals doing this throughout the history of violent extremism all around the world frankly.

What’s unusual about Solomon specifically in the way that he mixes his racial identity into the white supremacist memes and ideology he brings to bear, is that he does it in a self-denigrating way. He almost rejects his own racial identity in a lot of his manifesto and seems to extract his own sense of self into a larger pan personality that exists across numerous different people before him, inserting his own sense of self into that of the attackers he had started to idolize.

It’s very common to find that people that fixate on violence start to push themselves into those that they’re using as a model, this is not unusual. But what’s strange here is his age, his contradictory notion as a black individual using White supremacy, but then also referencing things like accelerationism and using so extensively the manifestos of accelerationist terrorists such as Krajčík, Gendron, and Tarrant, and then targeting a school.

This is the first time we had seen an individual that comes out of that ecosystem that targets a school. Typically, they target houses of worship, because at the end of the day, their primary enemy, the perceived enemy of accelerationists, specifically the white supremacist ones, were non-white individuals. And they also include Jewish individuals in that category. So, people who are Jewish, people who are Muslim, or people who are black or Hispanic. So, not seeing that as his primary target choice was actually highly unusual here.

And then, really, when we dug into him, at the end of the day, the thing that was the most unusual was the supplanting of ideology. Again, he didn’t have a clear ideology, but replacing his ideology with memes. Memes became the thing that defined who and what Solomon Henderson was prior to his attack. They stood in for philosophical justification. That was what really stood out when we looked at him and said, “Why is this guy turning violent? Why did he choose to do this activity? Why did he choose to walk into a school and shoot other students?” And that’s what we found, is that memes and this ecosystem of highly nuanced and complicated contradictions online, that’s what drove him at the end of the day. That’s what made him unique.

Yeardley: Matt, can you define these phrases, meme culture and meme shooter? What are those?

Matt: Are you asking me to define meme, because we all might be here all day?

[laughter]

Typically, when we refer to a meme, we’re often referring to a static file of an image. That’s the most common format for a meme in this regard. More frustratingly, what I’ll actually tell you, is that a meme can be anything, any form of multimedia or any layered meaning to an item that is shared. Even a phrase can become a meme. So, what we often see in this space is individuals will compile elements of the Internet that they feel are representative of themselves. And in doing so, they actually themselves become the meme with those things attached to them.

So, for a mass shooter space that is a meme shooter, for instance, the manifesto becomes a part of the meme. The visual of their own aesthetics, what they dress in, how they present themselves, what references they make through aesthetic choices, such as wearing a skull mask, which is popular with fascist terrorist groups, wearing a particular type of hat, for instance, or even a balaclava, which might reference the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, which was a terrorist organization in Ireland for a long time. Any of those things can become their own mimetic reference. But altogether, when we say a meme shooter or a meme culture, what we’re talking about is those compiled elements that turn into a cohesive meme or a type of meme in the end.

Paul: And in Solomon’s mind, he must feel– even though he knows he’s going to be killing himself, he must feel that he is going to live on in perpetuity, if you will, just like these other school shooters that this group idolizes. In fact, Solomon is elevating himself to his idols. You know, I’m looking at it just from, “Well, why would he do this?” You’ve got the ideology, but Solomon has this personal gratification about what he is going to become in the eyes of the other individuals that adore these school shooters, which is just insane.

Yeardley: Paul, do you find that a similar kind of ideology of, “I’m going to be immortalized” in the serial predators that you’ve investigated?

Paul: With the serial predators, now, you’re dealing with the individual personality, and you’ll see somebody like a Dennis Rader who really wants to be seen as that serial killer, BTK, very opposite from Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State killer, who does not want that notoriety. But as an example, Bryan Kohberger, he at least showed some level of academic study of serial predators leading up to his crime.

I imagine, and I have no inside information on Kohberger and his psychology. I’m just looking at him from afar, going, in some ways, there may be an adoration of these other predators, just like Solomon has this adoration of these other school shooters.

Yeardley: Right. Matt, once we figure out who Solomon is, at least online, what’s the end game? Because if Solomon, as you just said, has created a new script for this kind of shooter, how do you anticipate the next person who’s going to create a new script? Do you know what I’m saying? Like, this just seems like an impossible is really what I’m getting at.

Matt: It can be challenging if you’re not a deeply, at your core, optimistic individual thinking that you can make a [Yeardley laughs] difference. Sleep can be hard some nights. I will be very honest with you. But I think the same way that when we’re faced with widespread criminal activity, we still get up and we put on the uniform individuals that serve in that capacity, and they go back to the job and they do it again. It’s the same approach. We know that lessons can be learned. And if we’re evaluating an actor who starts a new trend, then what we can identify is what are the elements of that trend that the individual is responsible for mitigating its spread, for identifying emerging signs of someone looking to do that type of violence in that same way. What do they look like?

What would that look like to say, a school resource officer? What would that look like to a parent? How would a parent know? No one wants to be that parent, that their kid is a school shooter. But the reality is, at this point, with the way the Internet enables that type of ecosystem radicalization, it’s possible. And so, what we are doing is we’re extracting little bits of information that we can pull into established knowledge sets, literature that surrounds dealing with serial killers or mass killers or interventions, all these different approaches. And we’re taking that and we’re handing it over to tech companies that can tweak the way that they’re systems work or the way that their teams engage with understanding their own risk vulnerabilities to these spaces.

Because at the end of the day, it’s people exploiting systems. This is what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about the tech companies creating these people that go out and do violence. That’s not really how it works. So, they can take this knowledge and they can turn it into an internal framework that says, “Okay, when we see sign 1, 2 and 3, we need to intervene. We need to be concerned. We need to elevate our protocol of how we intervene here or how we report it to law enforcement,” for instance. At the same time, we’ll go to law enforcement and we’ll say, “Hi, we’ve done case studies on 10 or 15 of these now, or we did a deep dive on Salomon. Here’s what we found.”

And what we’ve done in the past and what we did after Salomon was we will have those conversations at a very granular level, both if it’s the FBI, special agents that were in charge of those cases, or an AOR, Area of Responsibility, that might intersect with those types of cases. And then, we go beyond just the US, because it’s not just a US issue. The Internet exists all over the world simultaneously. It’s not like we can just say, “Oh, this is the American Internet, this is the British Internet.”

So, we talk to our partners abroad and we help them also level up and we just do the classic academic thing where we talk all day. But at the end of the day, we also make sure they have actionable insights that they can take away. And the next time they’re asked to go and have a door knock with a young individual that sounds frustrated and has made some questionable statements about a firearm, regardless of where they live, in the back of their mind they’re thinking, “Okay, what signs should I be looking for that might match the profile of what Solomon Henderson did? The ecosystem that he came out of, the references, the memes. Should I be looking for those in this case?”

And what we find is that the more we can extract that information and get to those individuals that are on the front lines, regardless if they’re in tech frontline or law enforcement frontline, the more likely we are to detect and disrupt one of these plots. What you won’t hear very often, but is very much true, is that the FBI and the Department of Justice have intervened on hundreds of these types of situations in the aftermath of Henderson. They’ve done granular investigation into the network that Henderson belonged to.

As I’m also an expert witness for the Department of Justice on these cases, and so I’ve had the privilege of seeing some of the evidence that they’ve accumulated, and what I can say very confidently is they take it very seriously. They’re very aware of what these threat actors look like and how they’re cooperating and working together. So, those little bits of information, the use of a certain meme at the top of the manifesto or recreating the Columbine attack that is informing their activities and they are all responding accordingly.

Yeardley: Fascinating.

Paul: Matt, this very much parallels Mindhunter. You know, where the FBI agents were studying the serial predators to figure out pre-offense behavior for predictive purposes to try to prevent future crime. But I also see there’s a massive post-defense public safety aspect that your organization is doing. Solomon goes, and he shoots a school, and then kills himself. Does he have an accomplice who’s ready to launch off somewhere else? And so, I imagine 24 hours after a shooting, that’s a critical timeframe to see, is there something else that is going to be touched off as a result of what Solomon or a similar type of person did?

Matt: Yeah. What we found in the past when we’ve evaluated these actors, when they belong to the script of violence that is meant to encourage others to take up the torch and conduct an attack in a similar way, that 24 hours is very key for us to identify which ecosystems respond most positively to the attack. Rarely do we see it occur within a 24-hour period afterwards, like you might see with a successive attack sequence out of a terrorist cell that’s a little bit more solidified as a hierarchical organization. We’ve seen those in the past.

With these, keep in mind what we’re talking about is young individuals, usually between 15 and 20. Their level of sophistication comes from playing too much Call of Duty or thinking they’ve learned everything they can from watching certain television shows or movies. What we often see is that the follow-on mobilization is a couple weeks. And often, especially with school shootings, it coincides with return from holidays. Makes sense, students go home, they spend too much time online, they get sucked back into this ecosystem. They’re not caught up in their studies and being involved in the after-school extracurriculars. So, they come back to school and boom, you get an attack. It is almost like clockwork. Beginning of school years is almost always the highest point in which we see these occur, especially after holidays as well.

[Break2]

Yeardley: Matt, I have a question about these meme related attacks. For instance, when Tyler Robinson murdered Charlie Kirk, he wrote memes on the bullets he used.

Matt: Yeah.

Yeardley: Given how quickly memes change on the Internet, I mean, basically every second-

Matt: Yeah. [laughs]

Yeardley: -how hard is it for you to track what’s trending in that space?

Matt: Since Kirk was killed, I have barely kept up. Like dead serious. It is really hard to keep up. Like more buttoned-up answer, memes are replacing ideology. Memes are becoming the way people communicate. It’s just another form of communication. So, when we’re looking at individuals in the recent years that have been perpetrating mass attacks or targeted violence attacks, the memes that they’re including are starting to fill the ideological space that is either incoherent, contradictory, or non-existent. And that is actually causing a lot of complications for law enforcement, because it means we’re having a hard time understanding motive. And lacking motive, you can’t bring certain criminal charges.

Dave: The challenge here is law enforcement is very reactive, law enforcement has some limited resources and there’s this little thing called The Constitution. I think some people get, maybe they don’t understand, like, there’s a lot of this push, like “That’s hate speech.” It’s not a crime.

Matt: Right.

Yeardley: Not a crime.

Dave: In the United States, you can say with very limited exceptions, you can say whatever you want. And so, you get these cases of like online threats. I’ve investigated plenty of those. You can’t get an arrest out of it, because that’s protected speech. Even though you don’t agree with it and I don’t agree with it, I can’t arrest you for it, because you have rights that you were born with. And so, some of these issues that land in Matt’s lap maybe aren’t actionable by law enforcement at all.

And I think that probably could drive a lot of frustration with the public where they’re like, “The police didn’t do about this.” And it’s like, “Well, I have some guardrails that I have to stay in between. I can’t even jump on top of the guardrail. I got to stay in the road.” And so, it’s a challenge to get these cases prosecuted. Especially at a local level, it can be very difficult. The feds have more resources. They can dig these things. They have access to Matt’s agency. Those are huge tools. But on the local scale, very difficult to dedicate a detective, “Hey, keep an eye on this.” It’s like, “I got 30 other cases, man.”

Yeardley: Yeah.

Dave: Did Solomon Henderson have any mental health diagnosis? Was he medicated? Was he medicated but not taking them? Give me some suspectology on Solomon Henderson.

Matt: I honestly don’t know.

Dave: Okay.

Matt: It’s a good question. As a minor that probably wasn’t released, to be honest with you. What we’ve seen over and over again, though, is that even individuals that were taking medications or went off medications, the patterns of behavior that mobilize them to violence are the same, irrespective of what their clinical diagnoses are or their medication cadences, we still see the exact same outcomes.

What we actually ascribe that to Is the group dynamics, the ability of someone else to influence and guide you towards that act of violence. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, regardless of how dysregulated one might be mentally, we still want another individual to have affinity for us. We still want someone to make us feel like we belong. And that can be exploited. It’s very powerful. And with these individuals, the space that Solomon comes out of that is their currency, exploiting that sense of wanting to belong.

Paul: Yeah, Matt. This desire to belong to a group, it’s bringing back a case that I was involved with. It was a double homicide. Horrible double homicide, father and son. This family was heavily involved in the renaissance fair type of role playing. As I was digging into that case, it became apparent that there’s a subculture, very peaceful people. But they–

I believe it was called society for creative anachronism, SCA, where they believed that this role playing was their real life and that the real life was their menial life. It’s just what you had to do in order to exist, almost like with what Solomon is, what I can perceive, is that this interaction he’s doing in the virtual space that is becoming his real life. It’s like the matrix in a way, right? [chuckles]

Matt: Exactly. Yes.

Paul: And so, now this group, as radical as their philosophy is, well, it’s accepting of him sharing that he belongs. And of course, their goals are criminal and violence versus what I was digging into, but I think it’s the same phenomena. There is just that psychology of wanting to belong with a like-minded set of individuals, whether it be in the real world or in the virtual space.

Matt: Yeah, I think the notion of individuals finding themselves living the digital world over top of their real life is very salient. It’s very accurate, especially for Henderson and for other perpetrators that we’ve seen in the past, I’d say five years or so now. In our field of counterterrorism research and analysis, we often talk about the distinction between online and offline.

At least, that was the case in the early days of the Internet, but what we’ve come to find is that there is no such distinction. These individuals exist so thoroughly in both worlds at once that they start to bleed over into the other. But more often than not, the online is superimposing and bleeding down into the real life, and so they lose sight of what real life is. We call those people sometimes terminally online, because they can’t seem to turn it off. They’re addicted to their phone and they’re constantly on different social media platforms posting.

This ecosystem has two factors here that really exacerbate that. One is there is a pull factor. The individuals in that space where you’re trying to find yourself belonging there, they’re going to pull you in with that. They’re going to make you feel like you have to be engaged at all times. And if you’re not, you’re out. You’re done. That’s it. Goodbye. You no longer have any currency here.

So, the push factor becomes internal. It becomes I have to be involved, I have to do more, I have to show them how serious I am about being a part of this space, because I cannot take losing the online friends that I have, because I’ve also lost a lot of my in-person support network. So, that sense of perceived future trauma is a huge, huge red flag for us. When we start to see people talk about that, that’s where we go, “Oh, goodness, this is dangerous.”

Yeardley: Matt, when you’re talking about this infrastructure of people who push these vulnerable kids into proving their loyalty to them online, it sounds like being in a gang.

Matt: Can be. Sometimes it can be very gang oriented or cult like– I think cults are a much more apt comparison here. There are often single figureheads who dominate the space, and their entire persona is viewed as this godlike figure or really elevated personality. But in other spaces, that hierarchy doesn’t exist at all, and it’s really very chaotic and almost anarchic in some ways, where there’s no rules and they will advertise their space as no rules.

And so, what you get is everybody’s sort of picking at each other and trying to tear one another down in order to rise to the top, or it’s all just about the memes. There’s no hierarchy needed, because why would you need hierarchy if you’re just sharing memes? And so, it really is just dependent on the individual community, because this is how the Internet works. The Internet is very diversified and strange in many ways.

Yeardley: So when a Discord server gets removed, do you then see these same upper-level individuals pop up in other online spaces and chat rooms?

Matt: All the time. We have a running tracker of numerous entities that we are fairly confident our ringleaders or recruiters, and we are consistently watching them create new accounts. We track them from platform to platform. We’re very carefully analyzing their behaviors, looking for hallmarks of giveaways and tells that can show us that is actually who we think it is. Because this time, they used a different alias. And so, maybe they have a particular favorite emoji that they put in their username. And so, we’ll look for those little signals and we’ll try to track that, but they can be very difficult at times.

Yeardley: It’s like whack a mole.

Matt: It can be.

Yeardley: Matt, what’s the end game with these people promoting this violence? Because their ideologies seem to be all over the place. So, I’m curious, what do they actually want?

Matt: It depends on which actor we’re talking about. I know that’s an unsatisfying answer in some respects, but it really is highly individualized. So, for some people, what we’ll see is they have that joker mentality. They just want to see the world burn. They probably would have done something shitty and something violent regardless of where they were in their life. Something would have happened. What we’re seeing is they’re starting to gravitate towards these meme cultures that are violent online and that fixate on offline violence as an expression of that fixation.

And overall, the trend lines are all pointing towards lacking ideology as a point of your activity. The violence is the message. Not necessarily nihilistic. There’s a lot of groups that call themselves nihilists. There’s this new designation from the FBI and the Department of Justice which helped them create the nihilistic violent extremism, which is basically trying to capture those 764 groups that are merging into this terroristic space.

So, they’re blending a bunch of different harm types into one cohesive strategy, but they don’t really have a long-term goal. They just want to see everything collapse. They very much just hate people. They call themselves misanthropes. And so, they’ve bucketed them into this practical definition of nihilistic bionic extremism. It works until you get it used for political purposes, where anything and everything– It can now be nihilistic if it doesn’t agree with the majority consensus, which is not helpful, because it actually dilutes the ability of the prosecutorial approach.

So, what we’re actually seeing trend wise, is that year over year, this need to put things into a left right framework is failing us. It’s not actually representative of what we’re dealing with. And so, what we’re seeing is cases of very complex motivations being boiled down to a easily digestible thing for either political purposes or for public consumption. And neither of those are actually helping us get to the core of what’s driving a lot of that, which is disaffection, fixation on violence, and communities online that have no breaks and no checks to what they consume and how they turn that around into society.

Yeardley: Terrifying.

[Break3]

Dave: Matt, we talk about manifestos and often you hear references to him on Twitter or the news broadcasts. Where do these manifestos get posted, and how do you find them?

Matt: So, we often find these manifestos in different social media spaces. Depending on the actor, they will choose the social media platform of their choice, usually one that they like the most or they think will get the most traction after the fact. It tends to change and rotate, because these platforms get wise to the fact that they’re being exploited by these actors. So, they’ll change the way that their protocols allow for documents or content to be posted. And they upload the previous manifestos into a system that can detect, as people post, say, “Okay. Nope, too close. That’s not allowed. It’s not perfect.” But they’ve changed quite a bit.

For Solomon, we found his actually through other people. And so, it came to us through word of mouth effectively. For other individuals, they’ve posted it to private Discord channels. For instance, the recent Annunciation School shooter posted theirs to YouTube on delay. So, they scheduled it to go up to time with the attack. What we’re seeing over time is actually the release of the manifesto is becoming a tactic in and of itself as a component of their legacy. The more sophisticated you can do it or the more meme value you can get out of it, the more likely it’ll carry and get people to read it.

Dave: Interesting. Matt, I worked a lot of child pornography, child sex abuse material cases. I have great experience with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and very familiar with their cyber tip structure. And so, I think about what the NCMEC is able to do with cyber tips and electronic service providers being required by law to actively basically clean up their servers and make sure that nothing criminal is on their servers and to report that to law enforcement, which they do very well.

I’m curious, this is a written word, if we’re talking manifestos, if we’re talking chat rooms, it is protected speech. I’m wondering if there’s anything on the horizon, like in the way of AI tools that are able to actively 24/7 patrol the Internet and be our little police dogs that are wandering around. I’m wondering if there’s anything on the horizon related to that, or is there a threshold at some point where a legislature says, “If you put these types of things in a written word, in a written communication online that that is now this crime and we can arrest you for it? It’s not a speech issue.” Do you hear any rumblings in your industry about any of those solutions?

Matt: Yeah, there’s been a lot of talk about how do we approach this from a regulatory or legislative perspective. I think the solution pathways forward have largely gravitated towards the BTAM or the Behavioral Threat Assessment Model approach, as opposed to limitations on speech or forcing a legislature to figure out what is and isn’t allowable speech, which is a quagmire that none of us really want to get into, quite frankly.

Dave: I agree. Yeah.

Matt: So, effectively, they’re cross functional teams that exist both in law enforcement and outside law enforcement that can help law enforcement individuals assess threats as they emerge. So, if Solomon had four incidents with local law enforcement, his case could have been referred to a BTAM unit that says, “Hey, what are we really dealing with here?” They’ll bring in their own analysts that have knowledge similar to my own or to my colleagues who will then inform what they’re doing, or they’ll bring a clinical psychology standpoint, or they’ll bring other necessary tools to the table and really assess this individual for what they’re doing versus what they’re saying. There’s a deeper evaluation of that person’s behavior.

That approach has been tied into more of that countering violent extremism approach where we know these individuals are fixating on violence and they’re showing us ideations of violent activity or even suicidal activity which can go hand in hand sometimes. They’re finding in New York State, for instance. This is actually much more successful. A statewide initiative after the top shooting in Buffalo, and that has been very successful. I think that is the future forward of looking at prevention models that are respectful of rights of both minors and of adults in their first amendment, and at the same time evaluates them for what they’re doing rather than what they’re saying.

Dave: That’s well said.

Yeardley: Yeah.

Dan: You bring up red flag laws that if you post something online or you make a threat online or some innuendo on hurting people, that someone can report you and then a judge could order law enforcement to go out and seize firearms from people.

What we’re talking about, it’s a first amendment issue that’s affecting the Second Amendment also. So, now, you’re dealing with both. People really dig their heels in on the Second Amendment. I think that our legislature and our lawmakers and the powers that be, if they are going to make laws like that, you have to really understand that law enforcement’s the one who’s going to have to pull that person out of their house regarding first and Second Amendment issues. And that’s not fun for us. And people who have strong Second Amendment beliefs don’t believe that anybody gets to monitor that my Second Amendment is a God given right and you cannot take that away from me. And that’s a real threat.

Law enforcement, when we go to eviction notices, those are very dangerous. So, think about just an eviction of– You’re going to be evicted from your house, and law enforcement shows up and law enforcement officers get shot a lot during evictions. Well, think about it, you’re going to go seize somebody’s firearms, knock on their door, and seize their firearms. That is a huge threat to law enforcement.

Yeardley: Right. I think for me, at the end of the day, what we haven’t actually addressed here is the issue of mental health. Listen, I am certainly not making excuses for Solomon or anybody else who commits these violent acts, but it seems fairly obvious that every one of these perpetrators is in deep distress. As a person whose experienced depression throughout my life, a lot of times people just don’t know what to do.

I’ve been lucky, right? I have been able to get help and I’ve figured out ways to do what I call Stay in my Life. But for somebody like Solomon, who obviously wasn’t able to do that, and then you’re faced with this mental health crisis, I think it’s something that we as a society and a culture, we’re not very good at and we don’t know how to wrap our hands around it.

Matt: Yeah.

Dan: I think any law enforcement in the country, we do not want people who are mentally ill and dangerous to have guns. We don’t. It’s just like our hands are tied. We are not in a good position to be able to go out and fix that problem. I think by and large, people have made police the default solution to these problems, and we’re not. We’re not equipped to do it.

Yeardley: You guys are the catch all, you know?

Dave: That is true. [Yeardley laughs] Lots of people have their opinions on what the police should or shouldn’t have done. Sometimes the police are like, “We couldn’t have done anything.

Yeardley: Right.

Dave: It’s out of my hands.”

Paul: Well, Matt, I also think with the compilation of these behaviors that the offenders are exhibiting pre-offense. Now, what I’m seeing, and maybe Yeardley, to your point about how from a mental health standpoint, who’s the arbitrator of that? Well, I’m hearing, okay, there’s predictive behaviors. There’s experts that could say, “This set of behaviors is predictive for future violence.”

I know out of my state, law enforcement had the ability to put a medical hold on somebody for mental evaluation. I’m sure that’s probably nationwide. And so, now, as opposed to, “Okay, I’m going to go seize the guns,” and we’ve got the Second Amendment issues, now it’s falling into more this mental health public safety arena. And now, you have experts that are evaluating that person, and then it would take steps from there as to, is there truly a real threat.

I know it doesn’t remove law enforcement out of it, but it puts the focus on the mental health of the individual, as well as at least for a period of time, you know that the public is safe, and then that person has drawn the attention up and beyond law enforcement is now going into a different level of societal entities in order to monitor what truly is happening with that particular person.

Matt: We should also point out that the vast majority of these perpetrators of mass violence in this nature, especially those that lean into the violent extremism or the terrorism, there are numerous points that they will– If you go back and forensically analyze what they did behaviorally, who they talked to, what they said to those people when you do your investigations, those things come out. When you look at media reporting, when they talk to friends and family or colleagues, and when you look at their social media, there are so many items that show little hints of asking for help. People are asking for help, right?

No one really hides depression. It is there. We often just ignore it. We often look at it as taboo, and we don’t really want to deal with it. People that are engaging in self-harm and eating disorders, those other two very high recruitment spaces for these types of perpetrators as well, those are often ignored as well. It’s too uncomfortable. People don’t want to deal with that. They don’t know how to necessarily deal with it.

We’re not trained. I don’t remember going through public school and being taught how to approach my friends about, “Hey, are you depressed? How can I help you?” That wasn’t really a part of our civics courses. But maybe you should be. I think that’s really what we find when we evaluate individuals like Solomon is they engage in leakage, which is the act of showing intention well before the actual act of violence itself. Those four visits to Solomon by law enforcement were a form of leakage. Those four visits are a form of touchpoint that could have off ramped him many different ways.

If we’re taking a firearm, what we’re saying is something is seriously wrong here. And to your points, this isn’t a law enforcement response challenge, right? They’ve done their job. Now, it goes to a larger picture. Well, whose job is it? What do we do with those people? And if we are going to disrupt this cycle of these individuals that are recruiting online, that are inspiring the next generation to become them, we have to figure out how to do that. And that’s the challenge is where are those little pieces of these really disturbing cases that we can extract to say that was the point when someone should have sat down and said, “Solomon, I hear that you’re having problems. Talk to me about it. What can I do to keep you from going further down that dark pathway.”

I’m confident that when we look carefully at someone like Solomon, we don’t see that very often. We often see the opposite. “You’re criminalizing my child, or I don’t want to deal with that. It’s too difficult, it’s too heavy. My son won’t be the school shooter.” I’ve seen that so many times in recent school shooter perpetrators denial even after their child is in custody or killed themselves. “I can’t believe my son did that. I can’t believe my daughter did that.”

[chuckles] I’m looking at their social media, I’m looking at what is in the media reporting, I’m looking at the criminal indictment after the fact and it’s clear as they. And that is the part that I think we have to really dig in collectively and say First Amendment, Second Amendment be damned sometimes maybe. Maybe we have to stop and say, “That’s not okay. We need to figure out how to walk that back a bit and get that person that help they need.”

Dave: Yeah. I’ve been out to a few of those houses at the end of a school day and talked to the parents, and they usually had the same reaction as, “My son would never do that.” The denial out there, it’s a real thing that people have to deal with is getting over whether or not they know their kids.

Matt: And to let the parents off the hook a bit, the challenge here is also getting a teenager to tell you every little terrible thing they’re up to, right?

Dave: Right.

Matt: What’s the easiest way to get a kid to do the opposite thing you want them to do? Well, ask them to do the thing you want them to do. [Yeardley chuckles] And so, saying, “Hey, any chance you’re hanging out on Columbiner forums?” [Yeardley laughs] “No, no, definitely not. I’ve never seen that. What’s that? Well, I’ve never heard of that.” These are the humps that we have to get over. I think it’s more clever questions about, “What’s the worst thing you saw recently online?” That empathetic approach. Get them to open up, show them that it’s not a taboo to have seen something, because it’s not. It’s reality.

Dave: Yeah.

Paul: You mentioned that oftentimes the age range that you are seeing these individuals, or is that 15- to 20-year-old age range, right? These are individuals that have never existed in this world without that online space.

Matt: They are natively online.

Paul: Exactly. That’s like my younger kids. They’ve always had that online persona, if you will, and those online friends.

Matt: Absolutely.

Dan: These online spaces that Solomon is hanging out in that he’s frequenting and that he really– I think his identity is tied to these online spaces. Attacking a high school, is that like– that got him clout in those spaces? Is the body count really the motivator here? It’s not high school students. It’s just body count.

Matt: It depends on which specific subspace we’re talking about in the reception to their attack, or those that are grooming such an individual, like Solomon. Some would prioritize the body count. And alongside of their grooming or radicalizing of the perpetrator, they will dehumanize the target, so that they can feel empowered to have a higher kill count.

Dave: Columbine.

Matt: Columbine style. Right. Exactly. In some of the spaces, it’s been gamified like a video game. They call it a leaderboard. Whoever has the most gets the highest part of the leaderboard.

Yeardley: Oh, that’s fucked up.

Matt: It’s very fucked up. The other side of it is, I think you get individuals who, they have their own fingerprints on this space. They have their own style that they will impart. Actually, that is one of the hallmarks that we will look for. Very much like a serial killer that inspires copycats, we will look for certain hallmarks.

What we’ve seen with these attackers, is that they will often be encouraged by their peers in these spaces to target their school for personal grievances. They will exacerbate, they will encourage that sense of personal grievance, so that the individual will be more likely to actually do it. They maybe will play up an incident of bullying, or racial profiling, or harassment, or something along those lines, and that will motivate and drive the individual to choose their school. Others carry their own baggage, and they don’t need to be goaded. They can just bring that along and apply it.

This is where the human factor comes in, is that there are so many different pathways, because we’re all individuals. We all have our own composition that drives us as individuals. That is a little bit more difficult to predict, which school, why. Some of the more recent attackers, though, have actually adopted Adam Lanza as their individual idol, the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook mass shooting. They’re actually choosing to target schools with the most children, specifically because they’re children. And so, the recent Annunciation shooting was actually one of those cases.

Yeardley: That was the shooting in Minneapolis last summer.

Matt: Yeah. What we saw was that individual wrote extensively in their diary, very similar to Henderson, that they wanted to do it, because they wanted to see children dead at their feet. So, this is the difficulty of predicting that part for us, is that what we’re now having to do is take dozens and dozens and dozens of inspirations, because each time there’s a new one, it adds another pathway. So, we have somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple hundred individuals that could be plucked out of obscurity.

Not just in the United States, but all around the world, Russian mass shootings or stabbings, because it’s harder for them to get guns sometimes, those can be influences. And we’ve seen that creep in. And that’s the influence of the Internet. It brings the most obscure things into a very highly salient point for an individual. And how do you predict that? You don’t. [chuckles]

Dave: It’s like trying to predict a volcano eruption. It’s like, “Oh, there’s signs. There’s all kinds of signs. It’s any minute now,” and then you’re complacent because it doesn’t happen, and then, boom, it happens. You can’t predict it. There’s no way to assign a cop to be like, “Keep an eye on that guy.”

Matt: Right.

Dave: There’s about a million cops in America, and we got a lot of people. [Yeardley laughs] So, you think about, how do you devote those kind of resources?

Dan: My mind goes to Solomon attacked his own school. So, Solomon is very familiar with the grounds there. Like, it’s not a surprise that people target schools, because they’re soft targets. It just seems preventable to some degree, like, let’s put up some barriers here, right?

Matt: Your point about the schools being targeted is actually a really important one, because what we often see– And this gets to the point of how do we prevent these. The individuals that perpetrate these attacks, Solomon’s a perfect example. In their manifestos, more often than not, will have a diagram of the school or the target. If you’re fixating on a target, you’re probably going to diagram it and figure out what your tactical approach is and how to do it and either get away with it or go out in a place of glory, which is what the typical other pathway is here.

When you look at Solomon’s manifesto deep within the document, probably about halfway through it, we get what’s called a Q&A section, which is a memeified element of it where it’s not very serious. They don’t take it very seriously. They often put a bunch of references, they being attackers, that use this model of their manifesto. But in this case, we actually get a satellite image that he’s manipulated a bit of his school, showing particularly what he was planning to do and he talks about it. He talks about elements of the school and what gear he’s going to use and all these other things. Those are the little bits that can be intervened without hardening a facility. Those are the things that we should look for, and those are often the things, believe it or not, that other students are actually exposed to prior to an attack.

There are numerous reports of individuals that are reported to their SROs, because other students saw them diagramming and talking about school shootings or becoming fixated with it and having those items out where people could see. “Well, that’s weird. I should say something.” And they do, which is good. The question is, “What’s the next step? What happens once that report is made?” And that’s where it often breaks down, there’s not enough to go on for them to do anything more serious with that individual.

Yeardley: Matt, what about this case stands out for you?

Matt: Really, at the end of the day, Henderson represents the turning point. For us, it was the first opportunity that we had to look behind the veil of a network of actors that we were pretty confident were trying to get individuals to perpetrate school shooting, but we had yet to find the evidence. Unfortunately, we found the evidence in the worst possible way. It perpetrated an attack and left behind a large footprint that we were then forced to grapple with.

What we’ve seen since is a number of individuals in numerous spaces online, as well as additional school shooters that have referenced Henderson in their own manifestos, writing inscriptions on their firearms or in other formats, such as making referential posts online to him.

Entire subspaces of forums that we routinely monitor have martyred him, essentially. They’ve turned him into a figure larger than life. And that is having an outsized impact on the next generation of people that are being exposed. We’re talking, again, 15 to 20 years old. There’s always new 15-year-olds, there’s always new young teenagers coming into these spaces.

And unlike the white supremacy spaces that Solomon referenced, there aren’t as many hard boundaries ideologically that would prevent someone that is black, for instance, becoming a white supremacist icon, nowadays. Online especially. Things are blurring. Boundaries are falling down. People are being more willing to engage in contradictory notions. So, we’re seeing his legacy carry further than what we had seen with other school shooters in previous eras.

Yeardley: I say this all the time now. My Wednesday is never going to look like yours ever. No. [Yeardley and Matt laughs] I really do have the best job in the world doing Lisa Simpson. I don’t know how any of you do what you do. Thank you so much for joining us here today.

Matt: Of course.

Yeardley: That was fascinating.

Dave: It is fascinating.

Dan: That is the word for it. Fascinating work, and thank you.

Matt: Yeah.

Paul: I didn’t realize there was anybody out there doing this type of work. So, Matt, I think you’re feeling a very valuable public service.

Matt: Well, thank you all very much. We really appreciate the words of encouragement and support, especially these days when it’s harder and harder to do the work that we do. We support those that do it on the front lines as much as we thank those that do it behind a computer screen like us.

Dan: Matt, does your organization, do you guys work off federal grants? How do people support your–

Matt: Yeah.

Dan: -what you’re doing.

Matt: I laugh, because there are no more federal grants for the work we do, [Yeardley chuckles] believe it or not.

Dan: We got federal grants for everything else.

Matt: Not anymore. [chuckles]

Dan: That’s true.

Matt: As of February 2025, every single counterextremism and counterterrorism grant was done away with by the federal government.

Dan: Doged.

Matt: Yes. There was a compilation of programs that supported intervention and prevention work that a lot of the work and research that we’ve conducted informed, and those are no longer funded by the US government. The onus is now placed on state and local governments to do that. Many of them are facing budget shortfalls or the fallout from losing federal grants that actually paid for that. So, they’re finding different avenues.

So, at this point, we are a 501c3, a nonprofit organization. So, we are actively exploring philanthropic investment as well as donations, which is like swimming upstream at this point, because I think about every other 501 nonprofit is asking for the same thing these days. [Yeardley laughs] It’s a very challenging environment. But we are confident that the value of what we do is going to carry us through, and people will see that, and help support us.

Yeardley: Well, we certainly appreciate the work you’re doing, Matt. And Small Town Fam, if you want to donate to Matt’s organization, it’s called The Institute for Countering Digital Extremism. And you can support their work by going to counteringextremism.org. That’s counteringextremism.org. We’ll also include a link to their website in the show notes.

Matt, thank you so much for sitting down with us today.

Matt: Thank you for having me.

Yeardley: We really appreciate it. Keep up the extraordinary work, and please stay safe out there.

Small Town Dicks was created by detectives Dan and Dave. The podcast is produced by Jessica Halstead and me, Yeardley Smith.

Our senior editor is Sorin Begin, and our editor is Christina Bracamontes. Our associate producers are the Real Nick Smitty and Erin Gaynor. Logan Heftel is our production manager.

Our books are Cooked and Cats Wrangled by Ben Cornwell. And our social media maven is Monika Scott.

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The transcripts of this podcast are thanks to SpeechDocs. And they can be found on our website, smalltowndicks.com. Thank you, SpeechDocs, for this wonderful service.

Small Town Dicks is an Audio 99 production. Small Town Fam, thanks for listening. Nobody is better than you.

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