“Mass shootings will always be a part of mass violence in the U.S., but the drone element is coming"

The UFC’s event at the White House was the perfect target for a terror attack: America’s elites, clustered around a small octagon in the open air for hours. A chaotic, packed city center. Plenty of cops and soldiers, to be sure, but then again, there are few defenses for a fast, deadly drone. As I sat through the event last weekend, I half expected something to go wrong. We seemed like sitting ducks, in a country that has amped itself up for political violence at every turn.

Earlier this week, the FBI claimed that they had foiled just such a plot. On Tuesday, the Justice Department charged five individuals with various offenses connected to a planned attack on the UFC’s event. Secret Service agents said the plot could still be ongoing, and that more suspects could still be at large even though the event has ended — but FBI Director Kash Patel jumped ahead to announce it without their knowledge. 

The government alleges that at least five men planned to attack the UFC White House event with a combination of explosive drones and rifles, setting up shooting positions in downtown Washington, D.C. ,to pick off fleeing civilians. Whether the suspects were actually capable of such a feat is unclear. But the political moment that pushed them to such an extreme fantasy of violence is all too real, according to one extremism expert, and the next plot to use drones and bombs on a political target may be much less clumsy. 

“Mass shootings will always be a part of mass violence in the U.S., but the drone element is coming,” Joshua Fisher-Birch, a researcher at the Counter Extremism Project, tells Rolling Stone. Fisher-Birch specializes in monitoring and analyzing the online posts of extremists, analyzing trends and predicting where violence may come from next. 

The Justice Department’s filing notes that one of the group’s key members was a 19-year-old named Tycen Proper, who had amassed weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Proper and “more serious” members of the group moved their communications to an encrypted messaging app, where they discussed an attack with explosive-laden drones and setting up sniper positions near the event. According to ESPN, Proper was hospitalized on June 10, days before the event, after his mother called police out of concern for him. Other alleged members of the group, including Californians Bryan Roa and Michael Thomas, were arrested after the DOJ executed search warrants at their homes on June 13. Fox News reported that one alleged member, Abraham Alvarez, was a foreign national who was a beneficiary of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. 

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The biggest question still hanging over the investigation is what, exactly, motivated the group of men to take action — or at least attempt to. Some of the most illuminating details in the case come from an interview investigators conducted with Proper’s mother, who initially turned her son in because she was worried about him. According to court papers, Proper’s mother said he had “expressed ultra-religious and antigovernment sentiments, specifically citing grievances about government corruption, the handling of the Epstein files, data centers taking up all the water in communities, and other government actions.”

Other evidence, however, points to even darker motives. According to The Washington Post, investigators were also informed by family members that Proper had made antisemitic comments online. Proper’s co-conspirators had also shared similar sentiments, trading in popular conspiracies about Jewish influence over the American government, and in some cases praising Adolf Hitler. 

Right-wing, anti-government sentiment comes in many different factions and flavors. Fisher-Birch says that from what he can see, the UFC plot did not bear all of the hallmarks of an “accellerationist” plot, or one planned by forces seeking a total collapse of the American government and society. 

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“The ideology itself is a little bit hazy at this point,” Fisher-Birch says. “I’m sort of seeing a mix of narratives.” 

Antisemitism, Fisher-Birch says, appears to be one of the unifying factors in the current plot’s participants. Trump’s war with Iran has super-charged anti-Israel sentiment in the United States, further galvanizing extremist movements and conspiracy theorists who have long sought to link broad antisemitic views to the United States’ political relationship with Israel. 

“A lot of this is built on decades of conspiracy theories related to what’s seen as taking away sovereignty from the American people,” Fisher-Birch says. 

These extremists aren’t directly connected to any mainstream political movement, but for those on the rightward end of the spectrum, Trump’s presidency has been a polarizing era.

“There is this aspect of betrayal because people have said, ‘We thought Donald Trump was going to stand up for white men in this country and he hasn’t _ he’s sold us out to the jews,’” Fisher-Birch says. “The term they may use is ‘Zion Don.’”

Still, Fisher-Birch says, “If the Democrats were in power they’d be using some of these same narratives, it would just be slightly different terminology.” 

The failed plot, in other words, is a significant data point in what could be a disastrous trend in American politics. Social polarization and a confluence of conspiracy theories relating to many intersecting aspects of American life — antisemitism, foreign policy, data centers, economics, immigration — provide a myriad of opportunities for domestic terrorists to recruit and motivate followers. The choice of armament, as well, is significant: the U.S. has yet to suffer a major domestic terror incident involving small consumer drones, but it’s almost certainly in our future. The Guardian reported last year that more and more domestic extremist groups were looking into using drones for prospective attacks. 

“Extremist groups who want to commit acts of violence are always going to look for tools that they can use to increase their lethality,” Fisher-Birch says. “Can you just imagine the headlines that an attack using drones would get?”

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And while the UFC plot may not be connected to explicit accelerationist sentiment, Fisher-Birch says that accelerationist philosophies are here to stay — even beyond the end of the Trump administration, as they tend to recruit best during periods of liberal government. 

The plot against the UFC’s White House event may have been foiled, but the conditions that led to it remain in place.