The interior warns against the radicalization of sexually deprived young people. Because of the faculty?

The Home Office has published its annual report on extremism. And for the first time in it he describes a new category of danger: a lonely young man who becomes radicalized alone at home with a computer.

“The potential risk is represented by individuals who deviate from traditional extremist stereotypes. These are very young people, often suffering from some form of social isolation, sexual deprivation or psychological disorders. Their connection to the extremist scene is loose, and a specific extremist ideology is only an additional component of their self-radicalization process,” the report reads.

Abroad, especially in the United States, several media-famous cases of mass murder fall into this category. However, there has been no talk of any such attack in the Czech Republic.

Do the cops mean the shooter from the philosophy faculty? Or is a Slovak detained by the police in the Czech Republic responsible for mentioning extremism in the report? Political scientist Jan Charvát evaluates the report of the Ministry of the Interior for Seznam Zprávy.

Why did this year’s report on extremism include a passage about young, socially isolated and sexually frustrated people being able to radicalize themselves for the first time?

I’m generally a bit skeptical of the whole report on extremism. It’s a residue of something that doesn’t work very well today. The Ministry of the Interior writes in the report that all the structures that they have long considered extremist do not actually work or do not exist. Today, it is much more about the issue of the anti-system, or the disinfo scene, and on the other hand, hate crime and hate speech. It would make sense to dig through the entire message and do it differently. And this (information about young people who become radicalized themselves, editor’s note) is one of those moments. They mix together the things they have in the police records, and on the other hand, the things that are heard in the media.

Is it a reaction to the shooting at the philosophy faculty in Prague?

I think it is a pure-blooded reaction to the shooting in Bratislava and partly to the shooting at the Faculty of Philosophy. We don’t have any information yet that the shooter from the philosophy faculty was radicalized in a political way, but we actually have almost no information at all about what he was thinking or not thinking. Then it’s very hard to talk about why he did it or what it actually means.

Does the Philosophy Faculty Shooter Fit the Extremism Report’s Description?

It is extremely problematic to say that the person was lonely or something to that effect because it may not be true. This is such an abbreviation that will be created as a derivative of what sounds in the media and what is the general idea about shooters of this kind. In general, lone wolf theories are problematic. In recent years, more and more academics have pointed out that the term lone wolf is not entirely correct. It is only correct in the sense that the attacker is one, but it is not true that the people are alone. In the vast majority of cases, those people are part of a wider structure. Very often online, but that structure is important to them, maybe even essential.

Is there any such scene, subculture, structure, or whatever we want to call it in the Czech Republic?

We don’t know anything about the fact that something like this specifically exists in our country. But watch out! The fact that it does not exist in our country does not play such a role today. Apparently, the shooter from Bratislava simply immersed himself in Telegram groups, today we have the collective term Terrorgram for this, where he communicated and where there is a completely international community of people who are fascinated and attracted by these things (attacks).

What does such an environment look like?

It’s not exactly a new thing, it got its start on the 4Chan and 8Chan forums. Terrorgram is simply their continuation. It is an anonymous, global network that anyone can join and that simply spreads things that cannot spread anywhere else. It started as black humor on 4Chan, but it gradually crystallized very quickly into support for terrorism, anti-Semitism and the most classic forms of neo-Nazism. Terrorgram is exactly the same, moreover it is mixed with jihadism, from which these people take quite a lot of external signs. However, I do not know that we have specifically Czech structures that would reflect this.

What exactly should we imagine under the term Terrorgram?

Terrorgram is a very loose network connecting far-right accelerationists. At the same time, three publications that these people put together come from that environment. There are several people behind each of them, together we will talk, for example, about the lower tens. But it stems from general debates on the Telegram social network, which are intertwined in various ways. They are anonymous and at the same time unmoderated debates in which the issue of the “great replacement” (a nationalist right-wing conspiracy theory about the displacement of the European population, editor’s note) is addressed, the decline of Western civilization and the acceleration of all these things by means of violence. It follows the same line from Breivik to the Christchurch shooting to the Bratislava shooting. It is a deep conviction that the situation is ripe for collapse, it just needs a push and it needs to be done.

However, there is one Czech clue: Slovak Pavol Beňadik, under the nickname Slovakbro, wrote a terrorist manual called Hard Reset. He studied in the Czech Republic and was also detained in the Czech Republic in 2023. In Slovakia, he was eventually sentenced to 6 years in prison…

It was also said that the shooter from the Bratislava club Tepláreň was directly inspired by him. The shooter from Bratislava primarily refers to the classic mix of extreme right-wing shooters from recent years and at the same time, which is interesting, returns to the turn of the 80s and 90s, works with the conspiracy theory of the ‘Zionist Occupation Government’, refers to The Order and groups that were important in the 90s but I thought were dead for 20 years. It’s fascinating that this guy has come back to it. There will certainly be individuals of this kind here, although I do not know of such a closed structure in our country. But that doesn’t really matter because online radicalization has absolutely no national boundaries.

In what languages ​​does such radicalization take place? English, or perhaps also Russian?

Primarily English. The shooter from Bratislava was a completely orthodox racist and neo-Nazi. His primary target is the Jews, with several anti-Jewish outbursts on every page of his statement. He then evaluated Russia itself rather negatively. In the case of the shooter from Charles University, we know nothing at all. We know he was supposed to leave a letter, but it never made it to the public. I did not see him, unlike the manifesto of the shooter from Bratislava.

Does the shooter from Bratislava match the description in the Czech report on extremism? Specifically: social isolation, sexual deprivation, psychological disorders.

I’m not entirely sure about that. I never had the police file with the person’s profile in my hand. I know his manifesto, but he doesn’t fully answer it. What the extremism report says is, in my view, a very problematic media shorthand that may or may not apply to the individual specific shooters involved. It corresponds to the profile of an Incel (Incel – involuntary celibate, Czech for “involuntary celibate”. A designation for a subculture that is united by sexual frustration, hatred of women, feelings of disappointment, racism and calls to violence, editor’s note), but I’m not quite that sure we could say that about the shooter from Bratislava, and we have absolutely no idea about the shooter from Prague.