Meme culture, Groypers, school shooters, and ‘Anomie Extremism’
Why are teens posting frog memes, wearing nazi patches, and using codewords like "1488" or "TJD" before they commit a school shooting?
There’s a generational difference in understanding online rhetoric and as someone who was in middle school during Columbine, I’ve made the mistake of labeling recent teenage school shooters as just “neo-nazis” when they are actually part of a more complex hate-based online community—the Groyper Army.
The 1970-90s neo-Nazi movement was defined by visible aggression (e.g., skinheads, prison gangs, swastika tattoos, white power music, and overt calls for race war).
The modern Groyper movement has repackaged the same white nationalism in a more polished, coded, and culturally savvy form of militant racism by using memes, ironic messages, and livestreams (including livestreaming attacks) to attract younger recruits to an online Christian nationalist army (e.g., the Nicks, the Groypers) under the guise of “America First” or “anti-woke” activism.
The term “army” is exactly what this is because the group’s leader (white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes) has labeled their actions as the “Groyper War”. At this point, the war is not against the traditional targets of white nationalists (e.g., minorities, Jews) but rather an internal war between different conservative factions. Since 2019, the Groyper Army has been targeting mainstream conservative figures, especially Charlie Kirk and his organization Turning Point USA, when Groypers began disrupting Kirk’s “Culture War” college tour events.
The Groyper’s tactics are straight from online trolling that’s designed to flood comments with memes and offensive content. In real life, Groypers would show up to Kirk’s college campus Q&A sessions to ask provocative, leading, or extreme questions about immigration, Israel, and LGBT rights to expose Kirk as being ‘too moderate’ for true white nationalists. For example, at an Ohio State University event, 11 of 14 audience questions reportedly came from Groypers who forced Kirk to cancel the rest of the Q&A segments and the 2-hour event was over in less than 30 minutes. During campus events, these groups were also in an online streaming war as 4,000 people watched Fuentes commenting on the official TPUSA stream compared to only 400 watching the TPUSA’s stream itself.
When there are strongly held belief systems that sit under the same umbrella, but are incompatible with each other, this creates factions and conflicts between these subgroups. The political right in the United States right now has multiple sub-groups who are in direct competition and conflict with each other:
Classic Conservative: Pro-business, traditional family, small government, and Christian values (but accepting that others practice different religions).
Neocon: Pro-war, pro-globalism, low corporate taxes, and pro-business (especially the military and homeland security industrial complex).
Libertarian — Individual freedom above all, global isolationism, low/no taxes, and small/no government.
Tech Right — Pro-globalism, pro-immigration, low/no taxes, low/no regulation, and tech can solve all problems by replacing services traditionally provided by governments (privatization of government).
Evangelical Right — Narrow Christian-first politics focused on anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ, traditional family, and merger of Church-State with Christian focused public education and policy.
Culture War Right — Online warriors/trolls fighting wokeism, DEI, perceived liberal media influence, and liberal professors. Anti-free speech, anti-Civil Rights, anti-education, and pro-Christian values.
Groyper Right — Anti-democracy Christian nationalists who want to preserve the white majority, ban/expel immigrants, ban non-Christian religions, and have authoritarian-style rule with strict rules. They blend neo-nazi Holocaust celebration/denial with KKK-style violence against minorities.
What we need to understand about this conflict is that it isn’t between traditional mainstream politicians on the left and right. There is an online war between different factions trying to recruit teens to be their soldiers (both online and for real life violence like committing school shootings).
Groyper Appeal to Teens
The Groyper movement targets schools and young people on purpose because they believe the culture war will be won by defeating traditional institutions.
Public education is framed as Marxist and globalist. Teachers are labeled as “groomers”, DEI programs are mocked as “anti-white”, and standard school-based public health programs like sex ed (that have existed since the 1950s) are called brainwashing. Any schools, textbooks, or educators who embrace diversity and teach history or social theories become their enemies.
The Groyper strategy isn’t just memes and trolling, it’s using students and young adults to breakdown high schools and universities from the inside out. Teens who are Groypers don’t walk into school wearing a swastika armband (until the time when they open fire in the cafeteria). Instead, it’s subtle and layered in plausible deniability like:
Doodling of a Groyper frog or posting “1488” on Snapchat.
Posting memes wearing wrap-around style sunglasses (below).
Wearing a MASA hat (Make America Straight Again).
Chanting “America First” during a Pride or diversity event on campus.
Student group chats with racial slurs, Holocaust jokes, and videos of Nick Fuentes.
By the time a parent sees a concerning Discord message or a teacher reports a student quoting from Fuentes' show, the radicalization has already begun. The danger isn’t just in what the student believes because the movement is designed to isolate teens from adults, normalizes hate, and rewards them with attention and recognition if they escalate to real world violence.
Likely Groyper connections to recent school shootings:
Evergreen High School (CO), September 2025:
16-year-old was part of the ‘WatchPeopleDie’ online group and he commented on posts about shootings in Parkland, Buffalo, and Quebec City mosque.
He expressed white nationalist and neo-nazi beliefs.
On the skull mask he wrote: “AL NOOR” the name of the New Zealand mosque Tarrant attacked; “14” reference to a white supremacist 14 words slogan combined with "88" to form "1488," a numerical code for "Heil Hitler" (since H is the 8th letter of the alphabet); Celtic cross in the white supremacist version which consists of a square cross interlocking with or surrounded by a circle; and “TJD” shorthand for Total Jew Death.
Annunciation Catholic School (MN), August 2025:
Phrases written on the weapons draw from meme culture including “suck on this,” “there is no message,” “release the list” (likely a reference to the Epstein list), and “skibidi” (Skibidi toilet meme).
Other messages on weapons are white nationalist and antisemitic including “kick a spic,” “Burn Israel,”“6 million wasn’t enough,” and “Extra Thicc! [sic] Jew Gas”
Direct reference to 2024 Abundant Life shooter on the weapon.
Antioch High School (TN), January 2025:
17-year-old shooter’s username on social media was a direct homage to the Madison, WI school shooter. Her last name was Rupnow and he combined that with '“groyper”.
He wrote messages on his gun including “TND” (total nig**r death) which is a common abbreviation posted online by white nationalist groups.
Before the shooting, he posted a photo replicating a popular Groyper meme with Pepe squatting in a, ADIDAS-brand tracksuit.
Abundant Life Christian School (WI), December 2024
15-year-old girl posted a range of white supremacist and antisemitic memes (including Nazi images and racist “statistics”) with a bio including the phrase “Totally normal day”. This is wording often used by racist or white supremacist users as a code for "TND," or "total n***** death."
She participated in a Telegram chat for the attack by Arda Küçükyetim, the Turkish neo-Nazi who stabbed five people outside a Turkish mosque on August 12, 2024.
Right before the school shooting started, she posted the “okay” hand gesture, which is used in some extremist circles as a way to troll viewers (same photo was posted by the Antioch High shooter a month later).
Mooresville High School (IN), February 2025
Trinity Shockley, 17, a current student planned ‘Parkland Part 2’ for more than a year.
Access to an AR-15 rifle and purchased a bulletproof vest online
Username on Discord was “Crazy Nikolaz” and and was part of school shooting groups including interacting with TCC usernames
Told a school counselor about “being in love with Nikolas Cruz”
Classmate reported plot 3 days before the attack
In 2022 (15-year-old at the time), she was struck by a drunk driver crossing the road to get to her school bus. She sustained serious injuries including a broken femur, skull fracture, and head trauma. The aftermath of the collision appears to have significantly changed the student’s behavior and personality. Her relatives said that she would go days without sleeping because of the pain.
New ‘Anomie Extremism’?
Groyper’s think that democracy is dead and American society has crumbled. In sociology, anomie is a social condition defined by an uprooting or breakdown of moral values and standards for people to follow. It’s commonly understood to mean normlessness (lack of purpose, despair, and disconnect in a state of societal breakdown).
This concept of anomie idea dates back to French sociologist Émile Durkheim and his book Suicide in 1897. It’s not a stretch to connect these concepts because school shootings are almost always violent public suicides (the Madison, Nashville, Minneapolis, and Denver school shooters who I referenced all committed suicide before police could stop their attack). Durkheim explained that society (and not individuals) is the cause of suicide because of rapid changes to the standards or values of societies, and this causes feelings of alienation and purposelessness.
If the individual isolates himself, it is because the ties uniting him with others are slackened or broken, because society is not sufficiently integrated at the points where he is in contact with it. These gaps between one and another individual consciousness, estranging them from each other, are authentic results of the weakening of the social fabric.
This is why we need to teach and learn social theories to understand these complex problems. Durkheim’s work from a century ago is the standard undergrad Sociology 101 content that’s being attacked by both the Culture Warriors of TPUSA and the Groyper Army as “woke ideology”. Teaching social theories like anomie is being banned by the mainstream political leaders—from the President, to state governors, to local schoolboards—across the country.
We must realize that social theories don’t create violence, they help us learn how to stop it.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.