Name: Inside a dark online subculture inspiring bombings and mass shootings
Uploaded: 2026-02-12T17:02:14.000Z
Duration: 6 min 7 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

A massive car bomb rocked several blocks in Palm Springs, California, blew out the glass.

Transition words & phrases

The target was a fertility clinic because it helps create life.

Participle clauses

The FBI says a young American suicide bomber wanted to destroy it last year, motivated by a dark online ideology to end all life.

The debris now gone from fertility clinic owner Dr. Marha Abdullah still struggles to understand why.

I've never heard of a bombing targeting IVF center that creates life.

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 US President.

And the documents warn it is expanding, heightening the threat of mass casualty attacks in the US 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.

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.

And was love bombed and then groomed and then extorted.

Penelope was Jason Sokolowski's daughter.

I was looking at what she was presenting to the world.

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 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.

And then I lifted the sleeve and there was cuts all the way up her arm, which I'd never dealt with.

I noticed that she had culprit written on her leg.

That, 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.

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.

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 nobody's able to give me any insight onto this or anything?

So society at large didn't know the signs?

No, they'd never seen this before, so they had to fit it into categories that they were familiar with.

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.

It seemed like something that you see on tv.

Is this proof that online ideology has real world impact?

It can lead to, you know, violence of this magnitude.

The records CNN obtained show there have been other threats.

Three Bulgarian women detained at an airport discussed organizing bombing attacks in US 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.

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.

This massive reservoir sadness that I. I have access to at any time.

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.