The deadly sniper attack on a Dallas ICE facility this morning seemed straightforward, with “ANTI-ICE” engraved on unused bullets recovered from the scene, per the FBI. But after interviewing several of the alleged shooter’s former friends, the picture isn’t so clear.

Within minutes of the shooting, FBI Director Kash Patel posted on X: “While the investigation is ongoing, an initial review of the evidence shows an idealogical [sic] motive behind this attack (see photo below).”

President Trump responded to the shooting by blaming the “radical left,” vowing to sign another executive order to “dismantle” what he called “Domestic Terrorism Networks.” (This comes at the heels of another executive order he signed this week designating Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization,” as I previously reported.

Vice President J.D. Vance, meanwhile, says “we know that this person was politically motivated,” pointing both to the inscriptions and “some evidence we have that’s not yet public.”

On the off-chance the shooting wasn’t what it looked like, I reached out to people who knew the gunman, 29-year-old Joshua Jahn. Three who knew him since at least middle school agreed to speak to me on the condition that I not name them, corroborating their friendship with photos and other records. Their accounts paint the picture of someone with a vaguely libertarian bent who despised both major parties and politicians generally (including Trump) but who didn’t engage with politics beyond that. He preferred edgy humor, video games and the message board 4chan, all of which he became increasingly steeped in as he withdrew from social life as well as their own friendships several years ago, they said.

None of his former friends believed that the “ANTI-ICE” inscription could possibly be sincere, feeling such a serious political statement was anathema to who Jahn was. His humor was deeply ironic, often offensive and aggressive to the point of alienation.

“He was most certainly an edgelord, an irony guy,” one friend said. (Edgelord is online-speak for someone who likes to espouse edgy, nihilistic views). Asked about the inscription on the bullet, the friend said: “Josh was an edgelord who wanted someone to get blamed. I think he tried his best to write something goofy … to rile people up.”

Another friend showed me a Facebook post describing how Jahn had flooded his friends’ comment sections with rape jokes — “playful shock humor,” the friend said.

Jahn’s profile on the gaming platform Steam showed the vast amounts of time he spent playing video games, particularly shooters: more than 6,000 hours on Rust, 3,000 on Team Fortress 2, and 1,000 on Left 4 Dead 2. (He even found time to play three and a half hours in the past two weeks, the account shows.)

Among the dozen or so usernames he used was one reading “#Impeachment.” When I asked if this wasn’t a clear reference to anti-Trump politics, his friends recoiled at the idea that he would express opposition to Trump so sincerely and straightforwardly. Instead they saw it as part of his broader ironic persona, poking fun at anti-Trump “resistance” types.

That said, one friend recalled that when Trump first came to power, Jahn “was not a fan” — though he had contempt for mainstream politicians in general. His friends say he had more of a libertarian bent, with one recalling an interest in the libertarian figure Ron Paul.

Still, the friend who recounted Jahn’s dislike of Trump insisted that there was at least a kernel of seriousness to the username.

“If it was ironic, it’s that half irony — where you’re half-kidding, half-serious, just in case,” he said.

“He was never really into politics, especially not politicians,” said another friend, who had known Jahn since age 8. “He was into politics only in the 4chan sense — contrarian, provocative, boundary-pushing for laughs, not conviction.”

4chan, the anonymous message board where provocation and irony are the coin of the realm, was apparently one of Jahn’s favorite haunts. His abrasive humor is where his friends’ opinions on him diverge the most, with some describing it as amusing but others as grating — especially as his online persona bled into real life.

“I mostly stopped talking to him when he took his 4chan/irony stuff into daily interactions,” one friend told me. “He was becoming unbearable … once he dropped out of college he had no obligation to be social and none of us reached out due to his edgelord behavior.”

I wasn’t able to find anyone with insight into Jahn’s more recent views, something that his friends said was unsurprising given his withdrawal from social life over the past few years.

“If you’re having trouble finding people besides immediate family who knew him, that’s part of the story,” one friend said. “Every mutual friend drifted away over that kind of edgelord behavior.”

A fledging version of Jahn’s humor appears in the following YouTube video (since removed) from when he was a highschooler, a tongue-in-cheek parody of tech advice videos:

“Hello there, Facebook user. Are you tired of scrolling through your Facebook feed mindlessly? Well, there’s a solution. You can unlike all your crappy pages.”

The following audio recording of Jahn bombing at stand-up comedy was shared with me. It drew a comparison by one friend to the 2019 Joker film starring Joaquin Phoenix as an off-putting loner who also tried and failed at comedy. The film culminates in a scene in which the Joker gets his revenge on the entertainment world by gunning down the host of a popular late night TV show.

“The audio from his attempted stand-up routine where he bombs now resonates uncannily with Joker,” the friend said.

Ironically Jahn’s contempt for Trump and the major political parties has bestowed them with one of the most intensely partisan news cycles in recent memory. In this sense, the joke is on him — and all of us, too.

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— Edited by William M. Arkin