The Michael Fanone Show
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] He told a federal agent it was all a joke. Free speech. He said it on his own front porch, with the FBI standing right in front of him, and he kept saying it right up until the night they came back and put him in handcuffs. After twenty years in law enforcement, I can tell you “it’s just a joke” is the most predictable sentence in this entire business. I’ve heard it from people who genuinely meant nothing by it. I’ve also heard it from people who were one bad day away from doing something that leads the news for a week. The whole job is telling those two apart. So let me walk you through what the Bureau was actually looking at, because once you see it, the joke defense falls apart pretty f*****g quickly. Here’s the timeline. In October, the FBI got a tip about an Instagram account posting what they classify as RMVE — racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism. They traced it to a nineteen-year-old in Edgewater, Florida named Lucas Nevcherlian. Before I lay out the case, I want to be transparent. He’s pleaded not guilty, the case is still open, and he’s still presumed innocent in the eyes of the law. Everything here is in the public record and the police file. Draw your own conclusions. This was not one edgy post. The account was literally called Incel Revolution Soon. According to the file, in private messages he wrote that the sight of women filled him with rage. He wrote about getting a gun and going to a public area. He praised Elliot Rodger, the man who murdered six people in 2014 because women wouldn’t date him. He praised Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who killed seventy-seven people, most of them kids at a summer camp. He wrote that Breivik lit his fuse of hate too early — and that they all needed to light their fuses together, for one enormous explosion. Let me tell you what a cop is actually looking at in a pile like that. We’re not grading vocabulary. We’re not policing opinions. We’re looking for a few specific things. Is there real intent behind the words. Is there a target. Does the person have the means. And are they fixated on people who have already done it. This kid checked every box. He named a weapon. He named a place — a public area. And he named his heroes, and his heroes happen to be two of the worst mass murderers of the century. That’s not a teenager being provocative online. That’s a threat assessment lighting up like a switchboard. His father shows up partway through, and on one point the man isn’t wrong. You do have a First Amendment right. You can hate any group you want. You can say the ugliest, most repugnant thing about a religion or a race or a sex, and the government can’t lay a finger on you for the opinion itself. I’ll defend that line all day. But there’s a point where speech stops being an opinion and becomes a threat — and the moment you write that you’re going to get a gun and kill people in a public place, you’ve blown right past it. In Florida, a written threat to kill is a second-degree felony. Fifteen years. That’s not the FBI inventing a crime because they didn’t like his worldview. That’s a statute on the books. And watch how this nineteen-year-old — a legal adult — handled the one chance he was given. An agent is standing on his porch practically begging him to say it was stupid, that he got carried away, that he didn’t mean it. Instead he lectures federal agents about the Patriot Act and calls them terrorists. He wants everybody in that driveway to know the real victim here is him. A white guy who supposedly can’t catch a break. That grievance — that self-pity dressed up as persecution — is the engine. It’s the exact thing that takes a lonely, angry, chronically online kid and turns him into somebody the Bureau has to open a file on. His own friends couldn’t fully vouch for him, and that’s the detail that should stick with you. One of his buddies gets asked, point blank, do you think he’d actually act on this. “Truthfully, I don’t know.” That’s the answer. That’s the answer every single time — from the neighbor, the classmate, the guy in the group chat — after it’s already happened. He was quiet. He posted weird stuff. We figured he was joking. We’ve all read that news story a hundred times. The only reason we keep reading it is that somebody decided the jokes weren’t worth taking seriously until it was too late. I have sympathy for the parents in that driveway, I do. Nobody wants to believe their own kid is capable of this. But the mother’s line about how he never gets in trouble, and the father quietly moving the guns to his shop while the kid films it and laughs, tells you everything about the house this happened in. A young man with access to a Glock, a shotgun, and an AK, writing about shooting up a public area — and the adults around him had spent who knows how long treating it as nothing. Here’s the rare case where the system did its job. Somebody saw it and said something. The Bureau took the tip seriously. An agent knocked, assessed it, built the case, got a warrant signed by a judge, and made the arrest at night without a single person getting hurt. That’s threat assessment working exactly the way it’s designed to. The alternative to that knock on the door is the version of this story where I’m reading you a body count instead of a case number. So the next time somebody tells you this was just a kid, just a joke, just free speech — remember that every one of those words was technically true right up until the second it wasn’t. The whole job of the people who do this work is to act before you find out which kind of person you were dealing with. I did that job for decades, and I’ll tell you plainly: I’d rather knock on a hundred doors and be wrong ninety-nine times than miss the one. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!
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