That's all very sympathetic until you get to the child porn and forcing kids to kill their pets and shit. Fuck that faggot. Too bad he didn't get a firing squad
none of this is any excuse for his actions ofc the shit he did was deplorable and went on to inspire others to follow in his footsteps
It seems you missed this part pretty obvious that you skimmed what I said if you came to the conclusion that I was being sympathetic, I show no sympathy towards degenerate losers who extort children, I just have an issue with people who push false narratives surrounding these individuals.
(I'm going to go on a long ass rant below about what I’ve personally witnessed from this community)
While I personally don't show any sympathy for these people or the sentences they receive (in most cases, they deserve their lengthy sentences in my opinion), I don’t like the narratives pushed around them. It’s important to understand why they do what they do and how they fall down this path. It’s a lot more complicated and less sensational than the “oh they’re just evil satanists” narrative pushed heavily by certain people and agencies. People aren’t “born this way”; they’re made. Brad had no interest in pedophilia or extortion/animal cruelty when I first met him. He lacked acceptance by his peers at school and lacked attention from his parents at home. He looked for acceptance and attention online in the editing community on Kik. When faced with rejection from that community, he looked for it elsewhere and found it within the Discord raiding community. The culture on Discord at the time, with CP spamming and extortion, was very prevalent, and he adapted that culture to fit in. The reality of the situation is that Brad was 13 years old and being influenced and egged on by people around him. He didn’t understand the effects and the seriousness of what he was doing; he just loved the attention it brought and he viewed it as something to laugh about with his friends and community. So that they would continue to like him, he wasn’t this mastermind psychopath trying to destroy society as the media tries to portray him. And like I said before, none of this takes away from what he did. The stuff he did is inexcusable, and he deserved to be punished for the lives he ruined and the crimes he committed. But if you actually care about preventing extortion and stopping people like Bradley from existing in the first place, you can’t ignore the facts, even if said facts paint a picture that’s hard to digest. Below, I’m going to lay out what I think the main causes leading people down this path are.
1. Bullying: 99% of the people you meet in this community have experienced bullying at some point in their lifetime. Intense and frequent bullying leads a lot of kids to have a more cold outlook on society and want to project the feelings of embarrassment they felt onto others. Brad, for example, was bullied heavily for his appearance/weight to the point where he didn’t want to go to school anymore. Bullying has always been and will always be a problem, no matter what country/culture you come from. In America, I personally believe that if the physical education system/health education system was more developed—for example, teaching young people proper hygiene, how to treat acne, and just generally take care of themselves by promoting healthy lifestyles and weight loss/exercise—than you’d see a lot less bullying when it comes to physical characteristics.
2. Isolation: Bullying typically leads to isolation. A lot of these extorters are high school dropouts or homeschoolers resulting from bullying at school, behavioral issues, or both. The lack of social interaction in their real life with people their age leads to poor social skills, which results in more bullying and the cycle continues. Also, the lack of social interaction in their day-to-day lives leads them to seek out interactions online, often spending excessive amounts of time online diving into niche communities where degenerate culture is more prevalent/accepted.
3. Attention/Acceptance: Most of these people, depressed, isolated, and humiliated, flock to the internet for attention. They find community and acceptance within degenerate sections of the internet typically because it’s filled with people who have similar experiences to them. They get snared up in the culture of these niche communities and do things for acceptance and attention that they typically wouldn’t find themselves doing. Often, they become the bullies themselves and get wrapped up in the raider/extortion culture. I personally think for most, the extortion doesn’t have any sexual motivation; most do it solely for attention and to build their “rep.” I think they end up enjoying the extortion, though, as they see it as a way to project the same humiliation and pain they’ve felt in their day-to-day lives onto others. It makes them feel powerful. This is the same reason they build these “evil” personas and groups; they like to portray themselves as evil/dangerous or part of something larger. The reality is these groups they start are extremely disorganized with no real goals or motives besides attention. They’ll adopt aesthetics or straight-up copy or “steal” other groups just to draw as much attention as possible. This is typically why you see these people using Nazi/Satanist aesthetics; it gets a rise out of people and maximizes the amount of attention they’ll receive.
4. Lack of Understanding: Most of the people participating in these activities don’t see it as a big deal or that serious (example being Brad). While some just simply don’t even take a second to consider their victims, or their anger outweighs their empathy, others have a lack of understanding of not only their own emotions but other’s emotions as well. As of recent, I think the FBI has done a good job making people realize how serious these crimes are, but for most, the reward (attention) outweighs the risk (jail). Also, the ones who have already been involved in these communities can’t go without the dopamine rush they get from the attention.
5. Mental Health Issues: A lot of the people I meet in this community exhibit very obvious traits of a plethora of different health/mental health conditions, mainly OCD, ADD, ADHD, autism, personality disorders, anger issues, etc. These factors often contribute to the isolation/bullying or lack of empathy/understanding of other’s emotions. The sad fact is mental health issues are seen as a joke in America and aren't taken seriously. Most of these people, had they been in therapy when they started exhibiting symptoms, most probably would have never gone down this path. But unfortunately, most people can’t afford therapy.
There are plenty of other causes and reasons as to why these people do what they do, and it’s a lot easier to ignore these societal issues that lead to people going down this path and just say “oh they’re just evil satanists that’s why they do it; anyone else who says otherwise supports them.” The mass shooting epidemic and extortion epidemic among young people are two sides of the same coin, caused by the same societal problems. The media deflects the blame of mass shootings onto violent media, blaming video games, movies, and music, and when it comes to extortion, they blame it on these sensationalist fantasies like white supremacy accelerationism and satanism while ignoring the actual issues. And this is my main issue with how these people are represented in the media: they portray them as weak, degenerate losers who crave attention. The whole fear-mongering schtick is getting old.
