The gunman behind this week’s school shooting in Colorado was “radicalized by an extremist network,” authorities in Jefferson County said Thursday.
The statement from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office didn’t get into details about how a white 16-year-old named Desmond Holly was radicalized before he shot and wounded two students at Evergreen High School and then later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
But local media outlets have looked over social media accounts that appear to be Holly’s that suggest he showed interest in Nazism, holocaust denial, white supremacy and previous school shootings, including the 1999 massacre in nearby Columbine.
According to the Denver Post:
In one photo posted on TikTok five days ago, Desmond appears to be wearing a black T-shirt with the word “Wrath” written in red across the chest — similar to what one of the attackers wore in the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, also in Jefferson County. The same post also includes an image of the 15-year-old who killed two people and injured six more at a Madison, Wisconsin, school in December.
The Post continued:
The accounts also include references to Holocaust denial, and the name of one of the accounts appeared to end with a reference to a prominent white supremacist slogan. That account reposted several videos showing school shooting scenes from movies, as well as another video that appeared to show the two Columbine shooters taking target shots at bowling pins. Other videos the account reposted were explicitly antisemitic or depicted people in Nazi uniforms. The Colorado Sun also conducted a review of social media accounts apparently connected to the shooter and reached similar conclusions about the factors that seem to have radicalized the shooter. (Neither MSNBC nor NBC News have independently reviewed the accounts or their links to Holly.) After a school shooting in Minneapolis last month, Fox News host Trey Gowdy drew MAGA fury for endorsing some gun safety measures and making the data-backed claim that the overwhelming majority of school shootings in the U.S. have been conducted by “a young White male.” Wednesday’s school shooting in Denver played out at the same time as the fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk one state over at Utah Valley University. As of Friday, the motive in that shooting remains unclear, but coupled with the arrest of a suspect — another young white male — recent conversations about the threat of radicalization of white youth in the U.S., particularly of young men, feel newly urgent.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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