The Islamic Center San Diego shooting on May 18, 2026, was another tragic addition to the death toll of American white supremacy, as two teens murdered three people in a planned attack before taking their own lives. In their meme-laden final words, typed out in a two-part manifesto they left online, the killers overtly aligned themselves with white nationalist attackers of the past.
What drew less attention were the signals demonstrating an affinity for multiple online communities that attract people at the margins of digital society.
The manifesto contained numerous references, both well-known and obscure, to online culture. Among these shout outs were references to the sites they intended to host their manifesto after their deaths: “Sharty, 8Kun, [and] Zarty.”
Sites like these, small imageboards and forums used by individuals too toxic to exist on mainstream platforms, have disproportionately impacted modern culture, influencing slang, online discourse, and in darker moments, feeding conspiracy theories that have had deadly results. While breaking through and gaining attention on mainstream social and news media remains the ultimate goal for far-right extremist movements, an increasing number of smaller communities are inspiring and radicalizing the next generation of extremists, including those who go on to commit violent actions.
The Fringe Front
The internet has long been home to far-right extremist and neo-Nazi websites and forums. The infamous neo-Nazi forum, Stormfront, began as an online message board in 1995. Once considered the largest online meeting place for the American white supremacist movement, the rise of social media created new tools for networking and community building that were quickly capitalized on by the far right.
Despite the recent trend of major social media companies like Meta and X scaling back moderation, it can still be difficult for some of the most extreme voices to secure a foothold on mainstream social media platforms. It has also never been easier to set up small online communities on low-moderation platforms like Telegram or start a small forum or website. This has led to the development of niche social ecosystems across the internet. Among radicalized and far-right users, these online meeting places mask their hatred through coded language and referential humor that obscures meaning while keeping outsiders who are unable to decipher the conversation in the dark.
Here are some of the sites and communities that have become increasingly significant:
Soyjak Party
Soyjak Party (SAVF), often referred to as “the Sharty” by its users, is an imageboard ostensibly dedicated to the sharing of “soyjak” characters. Soyjaks are typically crudely drawn characters meant to be “humorous depictions of effeminate males called soyboys that were initially derived from the Wojak meme,” according to a wiki site associated with the genre.
Wojak was initially a meme character developed on the internet forum 4chan, a much older and more influential imageboard. However, Soyjak Party is dedicated to repeatedly updating the lore around the characters.
Much like other imageboards, Soyjak Party is rife with calls for violence against LGBTQ+ people, racist and hateful beliefs, and support for violent action against people of color by its anonymous user base. It is also home to the Soyjak Attacker Video Fandom (SAVF), a network of users interacting on major public social media networks such as X (formerly known as Twitter), TikTok, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, YouTube, Telegram, Discord, Steam, Roblox, and Minecraft, and smaller niche platforms such as the main Soyjak Party forum and the harassment-focused web forum Kiwi Farms.
Like many of the subcultures that exist on these sites, SAVF is a network of individuals rather than an organized group. Nonetheless, members coalesce to create fan art, video edits, emulate mass attacker outfits, and interact with other fans.
Solomon Henderson, the perpetrator of a shooting at Nashville’s Antioch High School, repeatedly referenced Soyjak Party in a journal he kept in the lead-up to the attack. Researchers identified Henderson as a member of this community. Other attackers with connections to the SAVF include Arda Küçükyetim, a neo-Nazi who livestreamed a knife attack on an open-air tea café in the Turkish city of Eskisehir.
Soyzellig Party
An image from the landing page of the Soyzellig Party imageboard. The MyMy character (center-right) is shown colored all white, with a Nazi sonnenrad symbol behind it. (Source: Soyzellig Party)
Soyzellig Party, nicknamed the Zarty, is an outgrowth of the Soyjak fandom while also incorporating the Dutch animated series Ongezellig, which has garnered a following among some members of the extremely far right online.
The site was created largely out of necessity, as posts about Ongezellig came to dominate Soyjak Party. One of the show’s characters develops an intense interest in Dutch patriotism and nationalism, even changing her appearance to appear more like a person from the region.
The show Ongezellig has no affiliation with the site. The show has a diverse fan base and is increasingly well-known across the internet among various subcultures and content creators. Many fans of the show have no affiliation with the far right. However, the community built around the Soyzellig Party imageboard is extremist and the site is characteristically filled with hate speech, neo-Nazi propaganda, and violent images.
The Ongezellig series and Soyzellig Party were referenced in the manifesto left behind by the perpetrators of the attack on the Islamic center in San Diego.
WatchPeopleDie
A longstanding pillar of the gore-centred internet community, WatchPeopleDie (WPD) is a resource for accessing footage of extreme violence, graphic injuries, and brutal deaths. The site is highly stylized, much more than other prominent gore forums, and offers easily customizable profile pages and a social “points” system that encourages submissions and postings similar to those on mainstream forums like Reddit. These points are based on social interaction and other users’ interactions with original posts.
Only one in a constellation of online gore sites, WPD has played a significant role in the radicalization of individuals who have gone on to commit violent actions. These include Henderson, as well as Natalie Rupnow, the 15-year-old perpetrator of the Abundant Life Christian School attack in December 2024. Desmond Holly, who in September 2025 injured one student and then took his own life at the Evergreen High School in Evergreen, Colorado, also had an account. Far from the only perpetrators of violence present on the site, when connections to WPD are identified after an attack it is often to the delight of the site’s users.
Kiwi Farms
A forum rather than an imageboard, Kiwi Farms is the creation of Joshua Moon, better known online as “Null.” A former administrator of the imageboard 8kun started what was then called CWCki. The site was initially made up of internet trolls focused on one online content creator who had been the subject of online attention and harassment for their bizarre and erratic behaviour.
It grew to be a community dedicated to finding and sharing information about online content creators they refer to as “lolcows” (individuals who can be used repeatedly for “lolz” or laughs online). Long threads about individuals, their online activities, and personal lives are created and sustained by community members. These individuals often become the target of offline harassment, threats, doxing, and more.
While Moon denies that the site played a role, Kiwi Farms has been connected to the suicide of three individuals who were allegedly driven over the edge by targeted harassment.
Kiwi Farms became known to most of the public after the killing of 51 people at a Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque and Islamic center in 2019 by a white supremacist. The site refused to take down footage of the attack, despite legal threats from the Government of New Zealand—the video is banned in the country.
Fash Front
FashFront is a neo-Nazi web forum dedicated to serving as a digital home for militant accelerationism. This is a violent far-right ideology rooted in the idea that societal collapse is not only inevitable, but desirable and necessary for building a fascist ethnostate.
Followers of militant accelerationism believe that the process of collapse can be sped up, or accelerated, through acts of violence that increase existing social divisions. Some of the individuals lionized by the forum’s users include mass murderers such as Anders Behring Breivik, a white supremacist who killed 77 people in a 2011 attack in Oslo, Norway, or Brenton Tarrant, an Australian-born shooter who killed 51 people in attacks on two New Zealand mosques in 2019. Both are venerated as having struck out against a system they believe is systematically replacing people of European descent with people of color, known as the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.
Far-Right Themes Pervade Popular Culture
There has been a cyclical nature to fringe online spaces, particularly forums and imageboards, where users ostracized from one community space relocate to another. Some of the most prominent extremist communities grew as direct responses to other sites showing them the door. 4chan, perhaps one of the most enduring and best-known imageboards, has hosted links to livestreams of mass-casualty attacks and manifestos, and served as an incubator for many toxic and racist online communities. The initial userbase of 4chan came from refugees of the site Something Awful, a still-active internet humor website.
Forums similar to Kiwi Farms have also become a popular tool of extremists for networking and communication. Members of the 764 Network, a child-extortion group associated with the broader Com network, frequently start small forums to communicate with each other and alleged victims.
Other times, small websites are used to host doxes of individuals from rival groups, or serve as rosters, indicating different groups’ official membership.
A website roster of the Com group “Scare.” Screen names appearing on a roster indicate official membership.
These sites are often transitory, appearing online and quickly being taken down by the owner or the hosting service.
While most people will never visit an imageboard or small web forum like those profiled here, these communities have had a disproportionate impact on popular culture.
Many of the “new” slang terms now pervasive in the speech of especially the young on social media owe their origins to these small and often toxic online communities. The best known is likely “take the red pill,” a reference to the 1999 movie “The Matrix,” where the main character is offered two pills, the red one of which allows him to escape an artificial world used to control humanity.
Online, it emerged among “pick-up artist” forums and writing, which came to represent rejecting society’s conceptions of dating, for a realistic, darker set of rules related to animalistic human competition. Similarly, terms like “Looksmaxxing,” describe a process by which men engage in different actions and habits intended to improve their sexual appeal. Another example is the “blackpill,” a term describing a state of hopelessness or nihilism about the world, which is now a popular term in the “manosphere,” a “loose network of communities that claim to address men’s struggles,” including dating and fitness, but often put the blame on, and subsequently promote misogyny towards women.
Despite the popularity of the manosphere, many terms and concepts, like the “red pill” and “looksmaxxing,” were initially popularized within the “incel” or “involuntarily celibate” movement. In extreme cases, incels advocate for rape and other forms of violence against women, and have been involved in several acts of targeted hate against women, including murder.
In 2014, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger, now revered by incels online, murdered six and injured another 14 people in Isla Vista, California. His manifesto described a “deep-rooted loathing of women, fueled by an intense frustration over his virginity.” His video published on YouTube spoke of “retribution.”
Four years later, in 2018, Alek Minassian murdered eight women and two men after driving his van onto a busy sidewalk in Toronto, Canada. His act of mass murder, the deadliest in the city’s history, was inspired by the Isla Vista murderer.
From the Fringe to the Mainstream
Niche memes initially developed in the corners of the internet have broken through and been used by individuals closest to some of the most important political offices in the world.
When Trump ally and billionaire Elon Musk was interviewed by U.K. broadcaster Mishal Husain in May 2025 about his work cutting the budget of the U.S. government through the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—itself named after a meme involving a popular image of a dog—he lashed out, accusing the interviewer of being “trapped in the NPC dialogue tree of a traditional journalist.”
An “NPC” is short for non-playable character, a reference to computer-controlled characters in video games that cannot deviate from their pre-programmed dialogue and actions. Often depicted as a grey, expressionless Wojak, the term is used to pejoratively describe people who believe mainstream narratives around particular issues or lack the ability of introspection.
Similarly, the term “based” has permeated mainstream slang. Initially popularized by American rapper Brandon “Lil B” McCartney, he took parts of the term “basehead,” slang for users of crack cocaine, and repurposed the term to mean “being yourself. Not being scared of what people think about you. Not being afraid to do what you wanna do.” It came to be used by the far-right online community in the 2010s as a term of approval.
In 2014, during a controversy over female video-game reviewers known as Gamergate, conservative commentator Christina Hoff Sommers was referred to as “Based Mom” for pushing back against criticisms that video game culture is sexist.
Though the term became associated with the far right, it has become increasingly common in a variety of online spaces.
The phenomenon of far-right internet culture piercing into mainstream discourse is not restricted to English-language corners of the online world. One of the earliest imageboards, and inventor of the anonymous posting style that came to define sites like 4chan and 8kun, was the Japanese imageboard 2channel (2chan). Launched by founder Hiroyuki Nishimura in 1999, it quickly became one of the most popular online communities in Japan.
Users were not exclusively far-right, and 2chan became home to multiple online communities as its popularity exploded. It is from this anonymous ecosystem that the “netto uyoku,” Japan’s online far right, emerged as a cultural force. This community was decidedly anti-Korean and anti-Chinese, against all forms of immigration and anything viewed as alien and foreign to the nation. Despite shuttering under a controversy involving alleged drug trafficking, 2chan was an early incubator for online extremism.
In South Korea, the far-right imageboard “Ilbe” has repeatedly generated controversy, as a major retatil brand, television show, and a k-pop musical group have had to deny associations with the anti-democratic, anti-feminist, and anti-immigration website.
A major television channel, Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS), had to institute a policy banning its producers from sourcing from Ilbe, as numerous doctored images that circulate on the site made were included in news reports.
When the head of Starbucks Korea, Sohn Jeong-hyun, was fired in May 2026, for an advertising campaign that appeared to mock the democracy movement against the military government during the 1980s outraged Koreans began calling the company “Ilbe-bucks.” Starbucks promoted what they called the “Tank Day” campaign promoting a line of tumblers with the tagline, “Thwack it on the table.”
Many saw the date of the campaign and the tagline as references to how police explained the 1987 death of a protester who was beaten and tortured by police. After his death, authorities claimed he had a heart attack when police slammed their fists on the table. The promotion was scheduled to begin on the anniversary of the protests. This type of referential humor, mocking the democracy movement, is common on Ilbe.
Mainstream Amplification
Despite the apparent soft cultural power of some of the concepts of these fringe spaces, they have the most power when they can break through into mainstream social media.
These sites influence extremist subcultures, but the biggest changes come when the same voices find purchase on mainstream platforms. One of the world’s largest social media sites, X (formerly Twitter), has become a home for numerous white nationalist groups and individuals who openly espouse racism on the platform, including Elon Musk, the company’s current CEO.
The paranormal-focused boards of 4chan and 8kun are where QAnon originated. Although the first post by the individual later dubbed “Q” appeared on 4chan in October 2017, the conspiracy theory did not spread widely until it broke through on Facebook.
While the platform took steps to moderate against the conspiracy theory on Instagram and Facebook, the damage was done.
The language used in the manifesto of the two young perpetrators of the attack in San Diego indicates time immersed in online communities most people will never visit. Far from unique, across these imageboards, forums, and niche platforms, the next generation of potential attackers is already online in communities that are too obscure for mainstream attention and too influential to ignore.
