# Nihilistic Violent Extremism **Nihilistic violent extremism (NVE)** is a U.S. federal law-enforcement category for violence driven primarily by hatred of society as a whole, not by a coherent political program. It first appeared in federal court filings in early 2025; Al Jazeera dates its introduction to a **Wisconsin filing in March 2025**. The working definition describes people who commit crimes in furtherance of political, social or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos. In **September 2025**, [[FBI]] Director [[Kash Patel]] told the Senate that a large share of the Bureau's roughly 1,700 domestic-terrorism investigations involved NVE. The category is used for the 764 sextortion-and-violence network and related online communities (No Lives Matter, Maniac Murder Cult), as well as for some school and mass shooters. **Contested.** Counterterrorism researcher Jacob Ware and the ADL's Oren Segal have both warned that the label can become a blanket term that obscures ideological drivers, **especially white supremacy**. The stake is in the counting: an attacker who copied a Terrorgram script can be filed as "nihilist" rather than white-nationalist. See [[Blackpill Accelerationism]] for the convergence where this matters most, and [[Domestic Terrorism Framing]] for the vault's wider tracking of how domestic-terrorism labels get assigned. ## See Also - [[Blackpill Accelerationism]] - [[Accelerationism (White Nationalist)]] - [[Stochastic Terrorism]] - [[Domestic Terrorism Framing]] - [[FBI]]