As an FBI agent for nearly 20 years, Pat McMonigle investigated national security crimes, was a hostage negotiator and Joint Terrorism Task Force coordinator, trained dozens of other special agents, and was deployed three times to war zones overseas. But it was his investigation of an online cult fueled by an insidious, unspeakably evil ideology that led to the end of his law enforcement career.
That ideology is called 764, an online neo-Nazi group grounded in a nihilism and a perverse form of social Darwinism which encourages vulnerable young kids to release sexually explicit material, hurt themselves, and even die by suicide. And it is that ideology that the shooter at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Robin Westman, appears to have subscribed to based on the killer’s writings and activity online.
Westman appears to have supported the Order of Nine Angles, a Satanic right-wing group with ties to 764, though authorities haven’t yet confirmed this connection.
The investigation by McMonigle began in 2022 and involved a 13-year-old who was manipulated and coerced into dying by suicide, and recording it, by an online groomer and leader of 764. McMonigle said over the course of the investigation, he was forced to watch videos of dozens of kids being coerced into physically harming themselves, including watching the video of the 13-year-old child’s suicide at least half a dozen times.
This summer the German police finally arrested one of the suspected leaders of 764, a 20-year-old man living in his parents’ home in Hamburg who went by “White Tiger.” He was charged with 123 counts, including the murder of the 13-year-old child at the center of McMonigle’s case.
McMonigle told me he felt an incredible sense of relief after the arrest, but he’s still left with irreparable scars. The horror of working on the case left him with debilitating PTSD, a battle he described earlier this year in The Free Press.
I called McMonigle in the aftermath of this week’s mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School to ask him about how and why nihilistic ideology is infecting young people around the world, how easily it can spread, and what we can do to fight it.
Below is an edited version of our conversation.
