[BryantD]

If the web page linked in another comment is authentic, the attacker was in a very bad mental state. I don’t think we can completely rule out previous contact, and the attacker was unhappy with his team members, but random chance also seems possible.

I lean towards authentic because a) the journal document is much too long to have been produced quickly, b) the text isn’t lifted from other sources, and c) the website was captured by archive.org in 2019. That last is most important since it’d be relatively trivial to train an AI to produce the kind of disassociated text we see there. Yay, 2022.

And just to get out in front of it: while there are all kinds of conspiracy theories and some racism in that document, I don’t see any ideological consistency and I don’t see accelerationist tendencies. I’m not a professional extremism researcher, mind you.

[beebmam]

Making Holocaust video games isn't exactly non-extremist.

[BryantD]

This one is fairly tasteless but it’s not clear to me whether or not it’s extremist. If the description said you were chasing Anne Frank down, that would be one thing. As is, it’s explicitly framed as pushing the limits of free speech which strikes me as a dumb kid thought exercise.

And it wasn’t important enough for him to list on the standalone games pages.

Now, Prophet Shooter is unambiguously anti-religious, so maybe there’s something there? And he’s got a Trump parody game. I’m not 100% sure here, just leaning against it. It’s also certainly true that sometimes extremism is the result of mental illness looking for some kind of framework to cling to.

[zozbot234]

Making an Anne Frank game while also praising "Adolf Hitler's bolstering of Nazi Germany in the 1930's" is pretty unambiguous, I'd say. Nothing that a random 8chan user couldn't have come up with "for the lulz" of course, but that website has also been associated with violent acts.

[BryantD]

Huh. That honestly struck me as irony, given that it’s in conjunction with his grandmother’s departure from Germany. But I do see your point.

Note that the dates may not be accurate; according to a quick bit of genealogical research, his grandmother Paula married his grandfather in Bavaria in 1955 < https://www.genealogy.com/ftm/b/i/s/Robert-S-Bishop/BOOK-000...>. Could also be that she left Germany and then returned for the wedding, of course.

Paula’s mother’s surname appears to have been Ketzler, which doesn’t tell us a ton about ethnic background. Not that it would tell us much about the attacker in any case, even if that was why she left Germany.

Edit: he had at least a bit of 4chan activity, as per his journal.

[tptacek]

This one is fairly tasteless but it’s not clear to me whether or not it’s extremist

Recalibrate. It's overt.

This person is gravely mentally ill, though.