El extremismo nihilista en línea impulsa violencia real (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: A massive car bomb rocked several blocks in Palm Springs, California. The target was a fertility clinic. Because it helps create life, the FBI says a young American suicide bomber wanted to destroy it last year, motivated by a dark online ideology to end all life. With the debris now gone, fertility clinic owner Dr. Marha Abdullah still struggles to understand why.

[00:00:34] Speaker 2: It just doesn't even make sense. I've never heard of a bombing targeting an IVF center that creates life. Dr.

[00:00:41] Speaker 1: Abdullah's clinic is just one of the many real-world casualties listed in government intelligence reports obtained exclusively by CNN that warn of the dire threat of nihilistic, violent extremists. These are people living online, driven not by political ideology, but a shared hatred of society at large. The unclassified documents describe in graphic detail how this subculture is spreading over the web, obsessed with gore and violence, encouraging rape and hate. The impact has been felt in real incidents around the globe. A school shooting in Nashville. At least four attacks abroad. Even a plot to assassinate the U.S. president. And the documents warn it is expanding, heightening the threat of mass casualty attacks in the U.S. While some of the extremists target the public, others focus on hurting individual children. Hearings on Capitol Hill have shown how these groups brainwash children into mutilating themselves. Experts testify they even kill pets on camera.

[00:01:47] Speaker 3: The imagery, the videos, the chats that we are seeing and reading are the most graphic that I have ever seen in my 20-year history.

[00:01:54] Speaker 4: They don't give a shit about the kids. They're expendable soldiers. Was your daughter a soldier in this? She definitely was involved and was love-bombed and then groomed and then extorted.

[00:02:15] Speaker 1: Penelope was Jason Sokoloski's daughter.

[00:02:19] Speaker 4: Her and I did everything together.

[00:02:21] Speaker 1: I love you, Daddy.

[00:02:24] Speaker 4: We had the parental apps. I was looking at her messaging. I was looking at what she was presenting to the world.

[00:02:30] Speaker 1: What Jason didn't see is what was happening to Penelope in chat rooms. Nihilistic extremists have circulated how-to guides to target depressed or mentally ill children. The groups often convince children to share nude or embarrassing photos and then use those as blackmail. Start by social engineering the girl into trusting you, one guide reads. Then groom her into producing blood content. The person targeting Penelope convinced her to self-mutilate.

[00:03:00] Speaker 4: I saw up her arm and I saw cuts. And then I lifted the sleeve and there was cuts all the way up her arm, which I'd never dealt with. I had no information on. I noticed that she had culprit written on her leg. That's when I opened up her phone and found messaging between her and culprit, her groomer. And in that messaging is when he asks her to cut for him.

[00:03:24] Speaker 1: Penelope's abuser was a member of something called 764, a group within the larger nihilistic violent extremist movement. The FBI has opened hundreds of cases, charging dozens of members of the group and as many offshoots for similar abuse. At the time, Jason and authorities didn't understand what was happening to Penelope.

[00:03:45] Speaker 4: I brought this up several times to several doctors. I said, she has these names carved into her body. How come nobody here is talking about this? How come none of it, nobody's able to give me any insight onto this or anything?

[00:03:59] Speaker 1: So society at large didn't know the signs.

[00:04:03] Speaker 4: No, they'd never seen this before. So they had to fit it into categories that they were familiar with.

[00:04:08] Speaker 1: The government reports say the alarming threat now is that this violence is no longer just online. Some of it has moved off chat rooms and into city streets, like in Palm Springs. The bomber who targeted the fertility clinic posted an audio message on the web before he died in the blast.

[00:04:28] Speaker 4: I'm angry that I exist. I'm pro non-existence is what I am.

[00:04:32] Speaker 2: It seemed like something that you see on TV.

[00:04:35] Speaker 1: Is this proof that online ideology has real world impact?

[00:04:41] Speaker 2: It can lead to violence of this magnitude.

[00:04:44] Speaker 1: The records CNN obtained show there have been other threats. Three Bulgarian women detained at an airport discussed organizing bombing attacks in U.S. cities with a teenaged American suspected of ties to the movement. Yet law enforcement has struggled to blunt the threat. The FBI says it has information gaps on how extremists use technology to mask their identities and coordinate online, with the Department of Homeland Security urging local help from educators, emergency room personnel and veterinarians. Jason says his daughter's abuser has not been caught. And Penelope, she died by suicide last February.

[00:05:26] Speaker 4: This massive reservoir that I have access to at any time. It's always there. It'll always be there. We have a new thing happening in our society that we don't understand. And we're plowing forward while our children are getting decimated. We're going to be so far behind if we don't start wrapping our head around this as a society. Our governments, our institutions, our health care, our police forces, our teachers.