Securing the Sanctuary-Christian Warrior Training

Keith Graves

Join Christian Warrior Training for practical insights and training resources on church security. Our articles and videos empower church security teams to better protect their congregations and communities. www.christianwarriortraining.com

  1. ISIS Issues New Call to Attack Churches: Roll Call Intel Briefing for the Week

    4d ago

    ISIS Issues New Call to Attack Churches: Roll Call Intel Briefing for the Week

    Producing intel like this each week is time consuming and costly. If this material helps you, please consider upgrading your subscription if you can afford it. This week’s Roll Call Bulletin keeps the alert level at Orange and focuses on ISIS calls for attacks on churches, drone threats against soft targets, Iran-linked threats against synagogues, improvised incendiary devices at gatherings, and ISIS recruitment of Gen Z through gaming and social media. The training focus is trusted insiders, with a hard look at supervision, child safety, accountability, background checks, restroom sweeps, and making sure no one is ever alone with a child. ✅ ISIS-linked networks are calling for attacks on churches✅ FBI warns drones could be used against soft targets and crowds✅ Iran-linked networks remain a serious threat to synagogues✅ Improvised fire and explosive devices remain a concern at gatherings✅ ISIS is targeting young people through gaming and social media✅ Training topic: trusted insiders, supervision, accountability, and child safety This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.christianwarriortraining.com/subscribe

    12 min
  2. A Police Officer Shot the Wrong Man in Montreal. Your Church Team Could Do the Same.

    Jun 23

    A Police Officer Shot the Wrong Man in Montreal. Your Church Team Could Do the Same.

    If these videos help you, please consider upgrading your subscription to help us keep CWT up and running. Today a police officer in Montreal shot and killed an innocent man during an active shooter call, and church security people are already lining up to criticize her. I am going live to say what most of them do not want to hear: a lot of you would have done the exact same thing. I will break down what happened, why that officer fired on the wrong man, and how the same selection and training failures are sitting on church security teams right now. We will end in the Word on the one thing that keeps you from killing the wrong person. What we will cover * What happened in Montreal this morning, and what the official statements are careful not to say * Why that officer shot the wrong man, from thirty years of reading footage like this * The hard reason this keeps happening: wrong people in the role, never trained * Why owning a gun is not the same as being ready to use it * The church security people criticizing this officer who would get the same result * What you are really doing when you fill a slot instead of building a protector * “I would rather be shot than shoot the wrong person,” and why discernment is built, not issued * Hebrews 5:14, and how trained discernment is the difference between saving a life and taking the wrong one Copyright © 2026 Keith Graves. All rights reserved. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.christianwarriortraining.com/subscribe

    36 min
  3. Roll Call Briefing: ISIS Targets FIFA While Drone Attack Plans Surface in America

    Jun 19

    Roll Call Briefing: ISIS Targets FIFA While Drone Attack Plans Surface in America

    This is not possible without paid subscriptions. Please consider upgrading your subscription only if you can. This week’s Christian Warrior Training Roll Call Briefing is a lighter week overall, but there are still several items church safety teams need to understand before Sunday. We cover the continued HIGH, Orange threat level, a foiled drone and gunman plot tied to public events in Washington, D.C., fresh ISIS messaging around FIFA World Cup activity, suspicious activity reports from churches, and practical training on barred or unwanted persons on church property. ✅ Threat level remains HIGH, Orange, with continued concern through major summer events ✅ Foiled drone and gunman plot targeting public gatherings in Washington, D.C. ✅ ISIS messaging calling for attacks connected to FIFA and World Cup related activity ✅ Weaponized drone concerns moving from foreign battlefields toward domestic soft targets ✅ Las Vegas churches shared suspicious activity reports involving the same scouting subject ✅ Louisiana church reported a visitor photographing and filming church property ✅ Massachusetts youth leader received antisemitic hate mail addressed to him by name ✅ Nashville church security guard assaulted by a previously barred subject ✅ Illinois church discovered a hidden phone used to spy on a woman changing ✅ Virginia church anniversary tent collapse shows why safety teams must prepare for weather and medical emergencies ✅ Training focus: managing barred, unwanted, and trespassed subjects at church This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.christianwarriortraining.com/subscribe

    15 min
  4. Roll Call Briefing: Multiple Shootings at Churches-American 250 Intel

    Jun 13

    Roll Call Briefing: Multiple Shootings at Churches-American 250 Intel

    Paid subscribers make this possible. Please consider upgrading your subscription to help us protect all churches. Facebook | X | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn | Threads | TikTok This week’s Roll Call Briefing is out, and it’s a heavy one. Here’s what your team needs to know going into Sunday: 🔸 We’re holding at Condition ORANGE, and I’m extending it through the end of July. I explain why, including a federal bulletin that went to law enforcement but not to you. 🔸 A brand new ISIS media unit fixated on cathedrals, the Pope, and homegrown American attackers 🔸 ISIS formally renews its ultimatum against Christians in Africa 🔸 An ISIS supporter charged in New Jersey after discussing attacks on places of worship 🔸 Why your church’s World Cup watch party is a soft target 🔸 The 764 network: an extremist threat hunting the kids in your youth group 🔸 Five incidents this week, including two parish festivals hit on the same night and two threats stopped because somebody reported what they saw 🔸 Training focus: rammings don’t end when the vehicle stops The full briefing PDF is free for every church. Download it, print it, and run your team through it Sunday morning. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.christianwarriortraining.com/subscribe

    14 min

  5. Jun 9

    One Variable Decides if Your Congregation Lives or Dies During an Attack

    Compiling this data and presenting it to you is only possible through paid subscriptions. If this helped you, please consider upgrading your subscription. Facebook | X | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn | Threads | TikTok Every few months someone sends me a statistic about church shootings. Sometimes it is accurate. Often it is not. The numbers get recycled, sources get dropped, and security teams end up training against a threat picture that does not reflect reality. This database exists to fix that. Christian Warrior Training has compiled 30 verified active shooter and deadly force incidents at houses of worship in the United States from 1999 to 2026. Every entry is sourced. Every weapon caliber, service phase, casualty count, and motive category has been checked against primary reporting. Where data was not publicly confirmed, it is listed as unconfirmed rather than estimated. About This Database The primary scope of this database is Christian churches and Christian ministry facilities. It also includes LDS meetinghouses, Unitarian Universalist congregations, and Jewish synagogues. This is not a theological statement. It is a tactical one. The LDS Church and the UU Church are included because their members gather in similar ways, at similar times, for similar purposes to Christian congregations, and because attacks on their facilities follow the same patterns of pre-incident indicators, service phase vulnerabilities, and security responses documented throughout the rest of this database. Every tactical lesson from the Grand Blanc LDS attack applies directly to your Sunday morning service. The Knoxville UU attack teaches the same parking lot dispersal lessons as Burnette Chapel Nashville. Synagogues are included for the same reason, and because the Michigan worship-site cluster of 2025-2026 cannot be understood without Temple Israel. One additional observation worth making before we get into the data. Christian congregations account for 77% of the incidents in this database. That reflects both the volume of attacks and the sheer number of Christian churches in America. There are approximately 355,000 Christian congregations in the United States compared to roughly 3,700 synagogues. On a per-congregation basis, synagogues face a significantly higher rate of targeted attack. Both communities are under real threat with different threat profiles. What rarely gets discussed is the steady drumbeat of violence against Christian congregations that receives almost no national coverage. Pittsburgh gets weeks of headlines. Sutherland Springs fades in days. Burnette Chapel barely registers nationally at all. Your congregation is not less of a target because fewer people are talking about it. Finding 1: The Dominant Weapon Is the Handgun Handguns account for 57% of all incidents in this database, 17 of 30. The 9mm is the single most common caliber, followed by .45 ACP, .40 S&W, and .22-caliber pistols. Rifles account for 30% of incidents, 9 of 30, and produced the two highest casualty events in the database. Sutherland Springs in 2017, 26 killed and 22 wounded, was a Ruger AR-556 in 5.56mm with 15 thirty-round magazines. Tree of Life Pittsburgh in 2018, 11 killed and 6 wounded, the deadliest synagogue attack in American history, was an AR-15 style rifle combined with three handguns. When a rifle comes through your door, the body count potential is in a different category from a handgun. Shotguns appeared in 3 incidents. Both the Knoxville 2008 and White Settlement 2019 shotguns were 12-gauge, sawed-off, and concealed under clothing. The White Settlement attack is instructive and critical at the same time. Jack Wilson made an exceptional shot, six seconds, from over 45 feet, to stop Keith Kinnunen. That shot is worth studying. What is also worth studying is how Kinnunen got to the point of making that shot necessary. He entered the building in a wig and a long overcoat concealing a sawed-off shotgun. He was observed by the security team inside, who began tracking him. They did not stop him at the door. He reached the pew, stood up, and killed two deacons before Wilson responded. One man’s marksmanship does not redeem a perimeter that failed. The lesson from West Freeway is not to have a Jack Wilson on your team. It is to build a perimeter that stops Kinnunen before he reaches the pew. The rifle percentage is increasing. In 1999-2009, rifles were 2 of 13 incidents, about 15%. In 2020-2026, rifles are 4 of 10, 40%. The handgun remains the dominant platform, but any security team that is not training for a rifle threat is training for yesterday’s problem. Finding 2: Transition Moments Are When Your Guard Is Down 47% of incidents in this database struck during a transition moment. When you apply the full definition of what a transition is, that number tells the real story. A transition moment is any period of ritual shift, movement, or reduced collective attention within or around the service. It includes the obvious ones: post-service parking lot dispersal, the pre-service foyer, between services, post-service fellowship meals. It also includes moments most security teams do not think about as transitions because they happen inside the sanctuary while the service is technically underway. Communion distribution is a transition. When deacons move to the front, every eye follows the elements. The congregation is not watching the doors. Keith Kinnunen knew this. He rose from his pew at West Freeway the moment that window opened. The closing prayer of a Bible study is a transition. Dylann Roof sat with the Wednesday evening group at Emanuel AME for a full hour. He waited until they stood, closed their eyes, and bowed their heads. He chose that moment deliberately. A children’s musical is a transition in attention. Jim Adkisson entered Tennessee Valley UU during a performance of Annie Jr. with over 200 people in the sanctuary. Every eye was on the children on the stage. His first shot was mistaken for a sound effect. That is not a coincidence. That is a man who understood where the congregation’s attention would be. The pre-service foyer is a transition. Scott Roeder killed Dr. George Tiller at Reformation Lutheran in Wichita while Tiller was serving as a greeter before service began. The post-service luncheon at Geneva Presbyterian in Laguna Woods was a transition. The hallway at Lakewood Church between services was a transition. The parking lot of an LDS meetinghouse during a funeral in Salt Lake City was a transition. Thirteen of the 30 incidents in this database occurred at one of these windows. Your security posture should not track the order of service. It should be consistent from the moment the parking lot opens until the last car leaves, with specific attention on every moment your congregation is moving, gathering, or engaged in a ritual that directs their attention away from the doors. Finding 3: Anti-Religious Hate Is the Leading Motive Category Anti-religious hate is the largest single motive category at 33%, 10 of 30 incidents. This category is broader and more varied than the racial hate framing that dominates the national conversation, and it is worth understanding precisely because the threat profile is different from every other category in this database. Anti-religious hate attacks are directed at congregations because of who they are as a gathered community of faith. The specific form of that hatred varies. Larry Ashbrook at Wedgwood Baptist in 1999 hated Christians. Matthew Murray at New Life Church in 2007 hated Christianity, having grown up in a deeply religious household and turned that experience into contempt. Jim Adkisson at Knoxville UU in 2008 hated liberals and targeted that congregation for its beliefs. Dylann Roof at Charleston in 2015 was a racial hate crime targeting a historically Black congregation. Emanuel Samson at Burnette Chapel in 2017 targeted that congregation in racial revenge for Charleston. David Wenwei Chou at Laguna Woods in 2022 targeted a Taiwanese congregation. Thomas Sanford at Grand Blanc LDS in 2025 hated Latter-day Saints specifically. Robert Bowers at Pittsburgh in 2018 hated Jews. John Earnest at Poway in 2019 hated Jews. Ayman Ghazali at Temple Israel in 2026 targeted Jews. These are not the same motive. But they share a structure: the attacker selected the target because of its identity as a gathered community before God. That is what makes this category distinct from domestic violence, where the church is simply the location of someone the attacker knows, or mental health crisis, where the congregation itself may be secondary to the attacker’s internal state. For your security team, anti-religious hate attacks tend to be operationally deliberate. Roof sat with the group for an hour doing surveillance. Murray attacked two locations the same day. Sanford brought a vehicle, a rifle, and a gasoline accelerant. Ghazali loaded a truck with commercial fireworks and gasoline, sat in the parking lot for over two hours, and called his ex-wife before driving through the entrance. These are not impulsive acts. They are planned. The pre-incident window is longer, the observable indicators are different from a mental health crisis, and the operational preparation tends to be more sophisticated. A Word on Mental Health and Spiritual Warfare Mental health is the second-largest motive category at 27%, 8 of 30 incidents. The behavioral indicators that researchers and law enforcement label as mental health warning signs are real and observable. Withdrawal from normal life, escalating agitation, expressions of hopelessness or grievance, dramatic behavioral changes in the days or weeks before an attack. But if the Bible is true, and it is, then the clinical framework does not have the full picture. Scripture documents demonic activity that produces observable behavioral disturbance in people. Mark 5, Luke 8, Matthew 8. Paul writes about spiritual warfare as a present operating r

    15 min

  6. May 26

    A Kill List Targeted Churches. Here’s How We Stopped It

    If this debrief helped you, please consider upgrading your subscription. Facebook | X | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn | Threads | TikTok A Kill List Targeted Churches. Here’s How We Stopped It. On July 10th, 2025, a 277 page email landed in hundreds of inboxes across the Treasure Valley of Idaho and across the country. It named police officers. It named judges. It named church members. It listed home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, children, and workplaces. Then, in plain English, it told people to “go hunt and kill.” My church was not named in the original document, but we became involved soon after. Friends of mine were named. People I do life with on Sundays were named. Churches in our area were named. The threat was real, and the response had to be immediate. What happened over the next 48 hours is the reason no one in this story was murdered. That did not happen because we got lucky. It happened because churches in our area had already built the relationships, the intelligence network, and the law enforcement connections needed to respond before the threat reached our doors. What Happened The couple behind the email was Jonathan and Jolene Harms of Boise, Idaho. They had previously been members of Table Rock Church in Boise and had been excommunicated. They were angry about it, and they believed they had a divine commission to bring judgment against the people who had removed them. On July 10th, they put that belief into a 277 page manifesto and emailed it to hundreds of people. The document named more than 20 victims by name, home address, phone number, and email address. It named their children. It named their workplaces. It named churches. The document specifically condemned several churches, including Table Rock Church in Boise, Bethlehem Baptist in Minneapolis, Faith Community Church in Boise, The Well Reformed Church, and Main Street Church in Boise. My church was not on that original list. That changed later when intelligence developed that Harms associates were being directed toward additional churches, including ours. By the time that happened, the system was already moving. The Police Response The Harms had already been on law enforcement’s radar before the July 10th email. Jonathan Harms had been placed on a brief mental hold in May, and two church leaders had already obtained civil protection orders against the couple. The July 10th email violated those orders directly. Boise Police Department moved quickly. On July 12th, two days after the email went out, Boise PD served arrest and search warrants at the Harms residence on East Highland Valley Drive. Officers knew the couple had weapons, so they staged the crisis negotiation team and the special operations group. Jonathan Harms came out of the house and complied. He was taken into custody without incident. Inside the home, officers recovered a substantial amount of firearms and ammunition. Jolene Harms was arrested separately by Garden City Police Department on a related telecommunication harassment charge after sending a message threatening a Boise police officer’s children. That should have ended the threat. It did not. Jolene was released on bond, and over the following weeks both Harmses kept going. They sent certified letters to victims in violation of protection orders. They continued posting the manifesto online. They added new threats. The escalation continued. In September, both were arrested again on expanded charges. Their bonds were set at $15 million each. As a retired police officer, I can tell you that a $15 million bond for a threat case is something I have never seen before. They later represented themselves at trial. After two weeks of proceedings, the jury deliberated for about five and a half hours. Jonathan Harms was convicted on 62 counts. Jolene Harms was convicted on 60 counts. The charges included first degree stalking and witness intimidation. Each now faces more than 200 years in prison. That is the public record side of the case. Now let me explain what happened on the church side. The Church Intelligence Group Within minutes of the July 10th email landing in inboxes, the document was in the hands of the Treasure Valley Church Security Intelligence Group. For the last several years, a number of churches in the Boise area have been meeting regularly to coordinate on security. We call it our intelligence group. The men who serve as intelligence officers at each church know each other. We have each other’s phone numbers. We have each other’s email addresses. We have a standing agreement. If a threat lands at your church, you push it out to the group. If a threat lands in the group, every church gets it. That is why the response moved so quickly. When the manifesto hit one church inbox, the intelligence officers did not have to figure out who to call. They already knew. Within minutes, every intelligence officer in the network had a copy. We worked the document together. We pulled out names. We pulled out addresses. We cross referenced the named victims with church membership rolls. We identified threat indicators inside the manifesto. Then we built an intelligence bulletin and pushed it to area church security teams immediately. The church security response happened independently of the police investigation, but it was informed by the same urgency: protect the people who had been named, assess whether our churches were exposed, and harden our defenses before anyone showed up. We were not interfering with law enforcement. We were not duplicating their job. We were doing the work churches need to do to protect their own people, assess the threat, identify who may be affected, and harden their defenses. The reason we were able to move that fast is simple. The relationships already existed. There was no learning curve in the middle of the crisis. The system was already running before the threat arrived. The Trespass Order The Harms going to jail did not end the threat. Jolene was out on bond. The manifesto was still circulating online. Their associates, whom they referred to as disciples, were still active. Then word came to my church through a reliable source that those associates were being directed to our services. We were not in the original manifesto. We had not done anything to the Harmses. But we were part of the intelligence group, and now we were on the list of places where bad things could happen. We did not wait. Our church secured a trespass order against Jolene Harms. The sheriff’s department delivered it, and she was barred from all church property. A few days later, Jolene called the church to ask why. She got a direct answer. We knew what was happening, and she was not welcome at our church. The phone call ended. No associates ever showed up. Whatever they had planned never came through our doors because we acted before they arrived. A trespass order does two things. The first is obvious. It legally bars a known threat from coming onto your property. If that person comes back, they can be arrested. Your team does not need to debate it at the door. You do not need to improvise. The law has already been put in motion. The second thing is less obvious, but it is just as important. A trespass order tells the threat actor and anyone working with them that your church is awake, organized, and willing to use the legal tools available to protect your congregation. Bad actors looking at a church as a soft target are looking for confusion. They are looking for hesitation. They are looking for a congregation that will not act. A trespass order sends a different message. Not here. Lessons for Your Church There are five practical lessons every church security team should take from this case. 1. Build a Regional Church Security Intelligence Group Before You Need One Do not wait until a manifesto lands in your inbox to figure out which churches near you have security teams. Find the churches in your area. Reach out to the men responsible for security. Start a meeting. Once a month is enough to begin. Talk about what you are seeing. Talk about people moving between churches who concern you. Talk about protocols. Talk about weak points. Build trust over time. When a real threat arrives, the call needs to go out immediately. That only happens if the relationships already exist. 2. Your Church Needs an Intelligence Officer The intelligence officer position at your church is not optional. This is not a volunteer who checks the news on Sunday morning. This needs to be a man assigned to the role, with the time and tools to do the job. His responsibilities should include monitoring open source threats, watching social media accounts of known persons of concern, maintaining a working relationship with local law enforcement, and pushing alerts to your team and to peer churches in your area. There is another piece to this. When another church’s intelligence officer calls you, answer the phone. Over the years, I have personally called churches that were named in threats to warn them, and those calls have gone unanswered. That is a failure on the receiving end. If you are the man at your church who would receive that kind of call, decide now that you will answer it. 3. Build Direct Relationships With Law Enforcement The reason we were able to get fast, candid communication from officers about the Harms case is that those relationships had been built long before July 10th. Take a patrol officer to coffee. Invite officers to your security team meetings. Walk them through your church layout. Give them your contact information and ask for theirs. Your first real conversation with local law enforcement should not happen during a crisis. 4. Ask Law Enforcement to Create a Church and Synagogue Liaison Position Every police department and sheriff’s office in this country should have an officer assigned as a liaison to churches and synagogues in their jurisdiction. This does not need to be complicated. It

    15 min
  7. Roll Call/Intelligence Briefing for the Week of 22 May 2026

    May 22

    Roll Call/Intelligence Briefing for the Week of 22 May 2026

    Paid subscribers make this possible. Please consider upgrading your subscription to help us protect all churches. Facebook | X | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn | Threads | TikTok Don’t forget we have the SAR submission form above! Just click the button and fill out the info. Don’t forget to submit it to your local Regional Intelligence Center first, or the FBI tip line. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.christianwarriortraining.com/subscribe

    16 min

  8. May 22

    What the Mosque Attackers Believed: A Field Guide for Pastors, Youth Leaders, and Security Teams

    Paid subscribers make this possible. Please consider upgrading your subscription to help us protect all churches. Facebook | X | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn | Threads | TikTok Who Needs to Read This With You Last week’s incident review of the San Diego mosque attack was for your security team. This is the companion piece, and it is for your pastor, your youth ministry leader, your children’s ministry director, and the parent who is wondering what their fourteen-year-old has been doing on his phone for the last six months. The two attackers left behind a document of roughly forty pages laying out exactly what they believed, who they followed, where they learned it, and what they thought they were accomplishing. That document is the most useful thing on the table right now, because it is the same playbook radicalizing other young men inside the same online networks at this very moment. If you can recognize the ideology, the symbols, and the language, you can spot it earlier in the children around you and intervene before this walks into someone else’s parking lot. I am going to lay this out plainly, including the actual words these networks use. Some of those words are slurs and some are coded language a normal adult would never recognize. You need to see them, because your youth leader is going to hear them coming out of a teenager in your congregation, and right now most adults in the church world do not know what they are listening to. What They Actually Believed These attackers were not random and they were not aimless. They had a stated belief system and they wrote it down across roughly forty pages. The label that fits what is on the page is white supremacist accelerationism, with a heavy incel layer running underneath it. White supremacist accelerationism holds that the existing political and social order is too far gone to reform, that white people are being deliberately replaced through immigration, and that the only path forward is to provoke societal collapse and a race war through acts of violence. The older attacker writes in the document that he is “an Accelerationist” who believes “accelerating towards the destruction of our current political system and towards an all-out race war for the purpose of a societal collapse is the only real way forward.” The younger writes that “the only solution to the current state of the world is to accelerate towards the complete and utter collapse of society” and that he wants to “burn this earth down and rebuild it into a new and better society.” Both name the same canon of books they want followers to read: Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto, James Mason’s Siege, William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, and Hitler’s Mein Kampf. That is the modern white supremacist terrorist reading list, and it is openly traded in their networks. The incel layer is the misogynist subculture they fused with the racial ideology. The older attacker identifies with online incel networks dating back to 2022, venerates Elliot Rodger and what he calls “the Incel saints,” and writes a long section directly attacking women. The younger attacker writes a similar section. This fusion of white supremacist accelerationism with the incel subculture is the same pattern that drove the Buffalo grocery store attack and the Allen, Texas mall attack. The recruitment is happening on platforms your kids are already using, and the document is open about that. The Saint Culture This is the single most important concept for a youth pastor or parent to understand, because it is the cultural marker that tells you a young person has crossed from edgy internet humor into actual radicalization. These networks elevate past mass killers to “sainthood.” They literally use the word. They build shrines to them, write hymns about them, post their photos as memes, and rank them by body count. The older attacker’s document includes a list of roughly thirty so-called saints. The younger attacker’s section lists about twenty more. Both authors place the Christchurch mosque shooter at the top, calling themselves “Sons of Tarrant.” If a child in your youth group ever says the word “saint” alongside the name of a mass killer, that is the warning sign. If you see the name “Brenton Tarrant,” “Patrick Crusius,” “Payton Gendron,” “John Earnest,” “Dylann Roof,” “Elliot Rodger,” “Robert Bowers,” “Anders Breivik,” “Stephan Balliet,” or “Brandon Russell” appearing on a teenager’s phone, social media, or notebooks in a reverential way, you are looking at active radicalization. These are not edgy jokes. Inside these networks they are religious figures. The “Sons of Tarrant” framing the San Diego attackers used is itself an attempt to launch a new recruitment brand. Their goal, stated openly in the document, was to convince other young men to follow them. The document is a recruitment instrument as much as it is an explanation, and that is why it is being mirrored across these networks now. Where They Live Online The radicalization ecosystem for the San Diego attack and most attacks like it sits inside two platforms: Discord and Telegram. Both have voice chat, video chat, encrypted servers, and the ability to live-stream to small private groups in real time. The image below is a screenshot from the San Diego live-stream itself. ***VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED**** [IMAGE 1]: Screenshot from the live-stream on Discord. The interface shown is Discord’s mobile voice and video channel screen. One participant has the camera on, showing what appears to be the interior of the attack vehicle. A second participant is listening with their camera off, identified by an anonymous handle and a hooded-figure avatar. The green border around the active speaker tile is Discord’s standard speaking indicator. This is what radicalization looks like in 2026. It is not a hooded man in a basement reading books. It is a teenager on his phone in his bedroom, on a Discord voice channel with eight or ten other young men who go by anonymous handles, listening to music and trading propaganda edits while one of them eventually decides to act and the rest watch it happen live. Discord is the daily-driver platform. Voice channels, video, screen share, small-group chat. The networks operate as private servers that are nearly impossible for an outsider to access, recruit through smaller public servers, and graduate promising members into the inner servers. The San Diego attackers were streaming the attack itself to a Discord channel of fellow believers when they were stopped. Telegram is the propaganda and reading library. Encrypted broadcast channels with thousands of subscribers, archives of every manifesto, edited videos of past attacks set to music, PDFs of every banned book, and step-by-step ideological training. Counter-terrorism researchers refer to the network of these channels as “Terrorgram.” The older attacker writes that he found his radical reading material on Telegram. There are several other platforms in the ecosystem your youth leader should at least know by name: 4chan and its successor boards (Sharty, Soyjak.party, 8kun, EndChan), where memes and propaganda are workshopped before being pushed to Telegram and Discord; Roblox and Steam group chats, where teenagers are first approached; and various less-known video-game-adjacent chat networks where children as young as twelve are pulled in by older operators. The 764 network specifically operates across many of these platforms. If a young person you know is suddenly spending six to ten hours a day on Discord, has multiple accounts under anonymous handles, refuses to let any adult see their server list, and has a Telegram app they did not have a year ago, that is the ecosystem. Not all of those kids are radicalizing. The ones who are, are in it. The Symbols You Will See These are the visual markers a youth leader, parent, or security team member needs to recognize on a phone case, a hoodie, a notebook, a school binder, or a Discord profile picture. They are not subtle once you know them, but they look like meaningless internet art if you do not. [IMAGE 2]: The Sons of Tarrant cover from the San Diego manifesto, showing the Black Sun (Sonnenrad) symbol with dog tags featuring the Kolovrat at center. The Black Sun, also called the Sonnenrad. Twelve lightning-bolt-shaped rays arranged in a circle around a center. Originally an SS occult symbol installed in the floor at Wewelsburg Castle by Heinrich Himmler. It is now the single most-used white supremacist symbol on earth and was central to the Christchurch attacker’s iconography. The San Diego attackers used it as the centerpiece of both their group logo and their second manifesto cover. If you see this symbol anywhere, it is not a coincidence and it is not aesthetic. It means what it means. The Kolovrat. An eight-armed Slavic sun wheel that looks like four or eight swastikas linked in a circle. Used inside the dog-tag center of the Sons of Tarrant logo. Sometimes claimed as a “pre-Christian heritage” symbol but in modern use it is a coded white supremacist mark. The swastika, often hidden. Direct swastikas are common in these networks, but they also get embedded into other imagery to dodge platform moderation. In the San Diego manifesto, swastikas are placed inside the eye sockets of a skull mask on one of the cover images. Look for it in skull eyes, in geometric patterns, inside other symbols. The skull mask and Atomwaffen aesthetic. Balaclavas, skull-printed face coverings, all-black tactical kit, propaganda imagery built around faceless armed figures. This look comes from the Atomwaffen Division and its successor groups. It is the visual language of accelerationist terrorism. If a teenager is suddenly drawn to this aesthetic in his profile pictures, his clothing, or his art, that is a flag. [IMAGE 3]: The “MisanthropistCEL” manifesto cover, s

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