Online subcultures schools need to understand
Does the threat assessment team at your school district understand the difference between groypers, furries, incels, femcels, and the deeper message behind an ironic meme?
When a school district gets a tip that a student might be plotting violence, the first step is to decide if the threat is real or not. This means that school officials need to figure out any possible motives or ideology that would drive a student to commit a school shooting.
Scenario: A 17-year-old male, minority race student has twitter and TikTok handles that include “Groyper” and “88” in his usernames. His bio line describes being Catholic (his family is not religious), America First, and proudly anti-woke. In his photos, he is wearing t-shirts from online retailers (below). In old Halloween photos, last year the teen was dressed as a skeleton with a skull face mask. The prior year, he was a soldier wearing a black trench coat and WWII-style helmet. His family is affluent and when it was his turn to pick the vacation location last summer, they visited Christchurch, New Zealand.
He also has photos on social media with a male teen who is wearing women’s lingerie. This teen lives in a neighboring school district and his parents are immigrants. There are other photos where the second teen is dressed in a cat costume while locked inside a pet crate. Based on interviews with classmates, it appears the student who is being investigated is having an intimate relationship with the other male teen.
The student’s family is involved in shooting sports, hunting, and he is proficient with firearms. His mother has posted social media pictures of the student with a rifle that he received as a Christmas gift and there are multiple legally-owned firearms stored in the student’s home. None of the social media posts make a direct or indirect threat of violence. Other students who were interviewed say the 17-year-old has a Discord account but the servers he uses are encrypted and the groups are invite only.
What’s the student’s ideology based on this online activity?
88 is classic white nationalist and neo-nazi code for ‘hail hitler’ (H is the 8th letter). But why is a minority race student identifying as a white nationalist?
Is a WWII costume just a Halloween costume, or is the trench coat a symbol of Columbine and the WWII helmet is mimicking social media posts from other school shooters?
Was he wearing a skull mask to look like a skeleton or was this a symbol of being a groyper?
Groypers are super-far-right anti-LGBTQ so why is a student who labels himself as a groyper in a relationship with another male teen?
When he identifies as Catholic and an incel, why is he in an intimate relationship with a man?
Why is a teen describing himself as Catholic when his family is not religious?
When he identifies as America First and a groyper, why is he in a relationship with an immigrant?
When he is anti-woke, why is he with a male teen who is wearing women’s lingerie? (Also, does women’s underwear mean the other teen is transgender?)
Is the other teen part of a super-far-left furry sub-culture where there is no gender and people dress in animal costumes to either have sex, simulate sex without having sex, or just simulate being animals in non-sexual ways?
None of this seems to make any sense! All of these contradictions are part of the problem when school officials need to decide if this student is a threat. And the stakes of these assessments is extremely high because the last four high profile school shooters were all connected to groyper and TCC online communities.
Meme Culture is about Irony
In Groyper subculture, everything is an inside joke and meme. The appeal of being part of a subgroup is feeling like there is a unique identity that normies don’t understand.
But how would a groyper guy end up with a furry romantic partner?
A Groyper man who identifies as an incel or “trad online dissident” might end up in a relationship with someone cosplaying as a femcel. Unlike regular women, a femcel might be seen as “tradwife salvageable” with memes like “wife a femcel, save Western Civilization”. A femcel can be a woman who aligns with male incels, a celibate woman who is anti-male incel (symbol of female chaos without male dominance), or even an incel man dressed as a woman because a true incel could be so anti-woman that he becomes intimate with a man (cosplaying a normie woman).
In Groyper spaces, furries are mocked relentlessly as the absolute bottom of the social and moral hierarchy. In Groyper meme culture, calling someone a “furry” is shorthand for anything woke, queer, or far left. Dominating a furry as the patriarch in a real world relationship could be seen as the ultimate power move for a groyper.
The meme wars go both ways as furries mock the conversion of a groyper into one of them by showing even more affection and in-group prestige than the groyper would get from hanging out with the other wolves. (There is a bit of irony here that the school-based threat assessment process uses so much animal imagery—howlers vs. hunter, wolves and sheepdogs—in serious descriptions of student behaviors).
Even when these online cultures sit at opposite ends of the spectrum, they are very much the same. Both groypers and people cosplaying as femcels/furries share a deep resentment toward modern American society. They all feel alienated by the real world, accepted by an online subgroup, and powerful when they can shame the other group.
When being part of these online communities is all about projecting affiliation and representing a virtual identity, what looks like contradiction is actually part of the performance. This is serious stuff that is deeply unserious at the same time.
How do you assess this threat?
There are few giant clues that can’t be dismissed. First, if a student has this specific skull mask, that is a really bad sign.
Second, if a student has groyper in their social media handle, that’s another really bad sign…especially if they have photos of guns with the names of prior school shooters written on them.
Third, dressing up in a trench coat on Halloween is a way to express that he identifies as a school shooter while having plausible deniability and pulling one over on adults. This is just like a 15-year-old girl wearing a Columbine t-shirt to the shooting range with her dad before she committed a school shooting last year.
Fourth, wanting to visit the site of one of the most deadly mass shootings in world history is a huge red flag. But sometimes parents are oblivious to this like the parents of a 14-year-old kid in Wisconsin who took him to location of a prior school shooting. He wrote in his journal about how much energy he felt coming from the ground at the location of a school shooting. Just like the fictional scenario, this 14-year-old student’s father was Latino but the kids was very involved far-right groyper-adjacent rhetoric as he wrote online about his anger over Black people, Jews, the LGBT community, feminism, and diversity.
And the Antioch (Nashville, TN) school shooter was a black student who was part of JROTC while he identified as a groyper online and he wrote:
“I just couldn’t take anymore. I am a worthless subhuman, a living breathing disgrace. All my (in real life) friends outgrew me act like they didn’t f–king know me. Being me was so f–king humiliating. That’s why I spend all day dissociating.”
Fifth, if the student’s family isn’t religious and suddenly a teenager claims he is Catholic or wants to convert with a clear reason why, this is a sign of allegiance to the Groyper Army. To be a true groyper, someone has to be Catholic or convert to it.
Finally, even without direct or indirect threats made on social media, this scenario should be taken very seriously because other students said the teen was in private Discord groups. After sneaking a shotgun and pistol into Perry High in Iowa in January 2024, a student opened the Discord app in the school bathroom as he prepared to shoot his classmates. An account believed to be the shooter was part of a private group called “School Massacres Discussion.” During a ten-minute period, the account posted:
At the school and ready “for what’s to come.”
“I’m f------ nervous, I’m the bathroom gearing up.”
“There’s a n----- in the bathroom, I need him to leave so I can assemble my guns.”
How to Stop This Radicalization
The modern Groyper movement has repackaged white nationalism in a more polished, coded, and culturally savvy form by using memes, ironic messages, and livestreams (including livestreaming attacks) to attract younger recruits to an online Christian nationalist army under the guise of “America First” or “anti-woke” activism.
Read more: Meme culture, Groypers, school shooters, and ‘Anomie Extremism’
Allizandra Herberhold, LMSW, is a deradicalization coach and explains how online communities are grooming teens and young adults to commit real world violence.
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 weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.
Hey David, This was really instructive. Particularly for those of us who are no where near the internet sights that are referenced. Different subculture. Your editorial posts recently have been terrific.