People Who Aggressively Believe in Nothing

Over the past decade, there’s been a lot of talk about “ideological extremism” on both the left and right, and the government has often claimed that warped political beliefs are encouraging Americans to commit violent acts. However, under the new Trump administration, the government now seems prepared to go after people who don’t believe in anything at all.

Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein writes that the government has a new target in its war on extremism: nihilists—more specifically, Nihilist Violent Extremists, or NVEs. The government has reportedly come up with this designation as a kind of catchall for the culprits behind various violent incidents, and the term has shown up in several recent court cases.

Who is a true NVE? That’s a good question, and the answer is: anybody. Klippenstein aptly notes that the term has a conveniently loose definition that could be applied to all sorts of different groups that the government considers undesirable. He writes that the NVE term…

…has the beauty of being elastic enough to apply to individuals and groups who are the focus of the administration’s war on all kinds of Americans. Nihilism also avoids all of the rusty and problematic words of the past: subversive, dissident, insurrectionist, revolutionary, or even “anti-government” (the Biden term).

Klippenstein writes that the term was recently used in the legal proceedings of Nikita Casap, a teen from Wisconsin who was arrested in February and charged with murdering his parents. Law enforcement claims Casap also planned to assassinate President Trump to spur a civil war in the U.S. But, hypothetically, the NVE term could also potentially be applied to people like Luigi Mangione, the young man accused of assassinating a UnitedHealthcare CEO, or the gaggle of people of who have recently been arrested for vandalizing and firebombing Teslas, or the Zizians.

The road to this new low in law enforcement terminology has been long. While “ideological extremism” has always existed in the U.S., it became a political (and, eventually, policy) issue in the modern era during the Clinton years, when incidents like Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City bombing brought fears of the rightwing militia movement into the mainstream. During the Bush years, 9/11 spurred a war on Islamist extremism—both in the U.S. and all over the world. Then, during the Biden years, the specter of January 6th encouraged the government to declare a war on “domestic terrorism.”

In short, the government has always found reasons to justify its federal police powers, though few of them have ever been as sloppily constructed as the current government’s newest fearmongering buzzword.