In a tragic act of violence, two people, a teenage student and a teacher, were gunned down on Monday, December 16, 2024, in yet another mass shooting, this time at a Christian school in Madison, Wisc. Among the casualties were six more people who sustained injuries. The shooter – a 15-year-old girl named Natalie Rupnow, who called herself Samantha – was pronounced dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Following the attack, a manifesto allegedly written by the shooter was leaked to the public. It was filled with countless instances of dehumanization and calls for violence, including public executions, hangings, and bombings. She refers to Black people and women using slurs, Indians as people “who wanted to blow up just for the fun of it,” and repeatedly referred to the rest of society as “scum” and “filth.” On a Twitter account, an image believed to be of the shooter making an “OK” hand sign, common among white supremacists, was posted just before the attack. On TikTok, the ADL reported that they were able to identify evidence of “white supremacist and antisemitic memes” that she shared on her account, which has since been suspended by TikTok, in addition to “Nazi images” and “racist statistics.”
The author displayed clear signs that she was in touch with extremists online and praised other mass shooters. These include mentions of the 2007 Jokela, Finland shooter, who killed eight people at a local school, the 2024 Eskisehir, Turkey, attacker, a neo-Nazi who stabbed five people outside of a mosque, and the 2018 Kerch Polytechnic College shooter in occupied Crimea, who killed 20 people and wounded 67 others with a shotgun.
The obscure nature of these foreign attackers and the content of the manifesto indicates that this 15-year-old shooter learned about them from involvement in discussion groups online. She referred to them as “saints,” a common term deployed by sympathizers of mass attackers among extremists. She also mentioned several American shooters as influences including the 1999 Columbine, Colo., school shooters, the white supremacist 2019 El Paso, Texas, Walmart shooter, and the 2019 Suzano, Brazil, school shooting and failed bombing by two attackers, one of whom was sympathetic to neo-Nazism.
In addition, the shooter also describes in her manifesto what appears to be a serious and tragic dissatisfaction with her private life at home and at school. She describes a hatred for her parents, her psychiatrist, and schoolmates, who allegedly bullied her. Regarding school life, she describes herself as a “a weirdo,” “a freak,” and “a quiet kid.” The majority of the document consists of these kinds of grievances and other vague gripes about society.
Online accounts from several platforms analyzed by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’s (GPAHE) show that the shooter included songs that previous attackers listened to in her own public playlist. There is an image of her wearing a shirt with the logo of the band KMFDM, which was also worn by the Columbine shooters at the time of their attack. On Tumbler, she created what can only be described as a shrine to these shooters.
While police investigations are still underway, the alleged manifesto points to a young, disturbed individual who was upset at her life situation and was vulnerable to radicalization from extremist communities. There are indications that she was influenced by or had a possible accomplice in the attack, a twenty-year-old from Carlsbad, Calif., who was issued a gun violence emergency protective order and detained by police shortly after the shooting. The young man allegedly communicated with Rupnow his desire to commit his own mass casualty event in Carlsbad.
The fact that the shooter in this case was female, which is rare for mass shooters in the United States, is further evidence of how susceptible young people are to online radicalization. In a 20-year review of active shooter incidents collected by the U.S. Department of Justice, only 13 of the 345 shooters sampled were female, while the data collected by the non-profit Violence Prevention Project shows 98 percent of mass shooters are male. Despite this, the case of Rupnow is another reminder of how vulnerable young people are to radicalization that can lead them to commit acts of mass violence.
Far-Right Reactions
In the aftermath of the shooting, extremist accounts directed misogynistic attacks at Rupnow, or jumped to the conclusion that she was “trans,” a common response from far-right extremists who regularly demonize women and the trans community.
Most of the misogynistic attacks came from Groyper circles online. Groypers are white supremacist followers of Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes. They tend to be very young and internet-savvy (see GPAHE’s previous reporting on the Groypers here). Australian neo-Nazi Joel Davis, a close associate of Fuentes, wrote that the shooter could not be considered to be a real terrorist being a “female school shooter,” who “only managed to kill two people,” and “was basically just yapping.”
Abroad, Groyper sympathizers such as Afonso Gonçalves and Alexander Gazur of the white supremacist Reconquista movement in Portugal used the incident to extol the “natural superiority of man,” because the 15-year-old shooter had not made the Google Drive link with her alleged manifesto open to the public (see GPAHE’s previous reporting of Reconquista, Gonçalves and Gazur here).
Others who hold bigoted views towards trans people were also eager to portray the shooter as such, despite there not being any evidence to back this up. This was the case of the Uncle Sam’s Proud Boys of New York, for example, who referred to the shooter using an anti-trans slur.
After the Madison Police Chief stated that they would not be releasing the age or gender of the shooter on the day of the shooting, Eric Spracklen of Project Veritas wrote: “Trans shooter incoming. Brace yourself.” The Danish conspiracist Anastasia Maia Loupis wrote that she was a “trans shooter,” and implied that the media was not covering the victims because of this fact. Philip Anderson, who participated in the January 6 Capitol insurrection and is now an advocate for pardoning the insurrectionists, said the following about the shooter: “The shooter is a trans leftist. The shooter is always a trans leftist. Democrats caused this to happen.”
