What does the immediate motive for the Minneapolis school shooting seem to be?
An extremist fandom subculture.
For those that don’t know, there is an online subculture that practices obsessive fandom of mass shooters. They call themselves TCC for “True Crime Community” (not the general sense of the term of people who watch or listen to true crime shows). Many have said the shooter’s videos and journals seem incoherent or contradictory because they are looking for an ideology, but that’s because it’s not about ideology in the classic sense. This subculture obsesses about school shooters and mass shooters, creates memes about them (the shooter’s guns and journals had tons of internet memes, including the Loss meme), they cosplay as school shooters (this is why there are kmfdm stickers and shirts in the shooter’s videos, and they talked about putting together a school shooter cosplay), and they encourage each other to imitate the shooters by doing one.
It’s of note that this subculture actually is more likely to produce shooters who are women or of other minority groups. This shooter referenced on her gun a girl who committed a school shooting that was a part of TCC. There have been other women and girls who have attempted or made plans to coming out of this space. And there was also a “Black white supremacist” who committed mass violence too from TCC.
It also appears that the shooter was exposed to or spent time around anti-trans detransitioner rhetoric. They were no longer identifying as a woman, and were talking about detransitioning because they can’t ever “actually” be a girl. If anything, this shows how anti-trans rhetoric and policies feed hopelessness and isolation, making individuals more vulnerable to radicalization.
All in all, this points to the desperate need to continue creating spaces that bring in and help young marginalized folks connect and feel like they have a life and a future. Isolation and hatred make them vulnerable and we can do something about that.
What I shared above is based upon reporting by cool zone media on the It Could Happen Here podcast, which is run by multiple journalists who have spent a decade reporting on mass shooters.
Apple Podcasts
Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #31
Podcast Episode · It Could Happen Here · 08/29/2025 · 1h 1m
