Draft:Salad bar extremism

Salad bar extremism (also referred to as the "salad bar of ideologies") is a term used to describe violent extremists who appear to draw on elements of multiple, and sometimes contradictory, ideologies rather than adhering to a single coherent belief system. The phrase is attributed to then-Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Christopher Wray, who in September 2020 told a US Senate committee that some violent extremists assemble ideologies "in some kind of mish-mash", taking "a little of this, a little of that".

The term belongs to a broader family of concepts, including "composite violent extremism", "ideological convergence", "fringe fluidity", and the UK Home Office category of "mixed, unclear and unstable" ideology, which counterterrorism agencies and researchers have used since the late 2010s to classify individuals whose motivations do not fit conventional ideological categories. Government statistics in the United Kingdom indicate that a substantial share of individuals referred to countering violent extremism programmes are now assigned to such mixed or unclear categories.

The validity and usefulness of the term are contested. Some researchers argue that it captures a genuine shift in radicalization driven by online ecosystems, the decline of hierarchical extremist organizations, and the growing role of conspiracy theories. Others contend that the metaphor conflates distinct processes, overstates the novelty of cross-ideological borrowing, and reflects declining ideological literacy among analysts rather than incoherence among extremists.

Origin

Wray used the phrase during a hearing of the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on 24 September 2020, describing individuals who "assemble together in some kind of mish-mash, a bunch of different ideologies", adding that it was "almost like a salad bar of ideologies, a little of this, a little of that". The remark was made in the context of FBI assessments that a growing share of domestic terrorism suspects, particularly lone actors radicalized online, could not be assigned to a single ideological category.

The phrase was subsequently adopted in policy commentary and research. A March 2021 brief by the Soufan Center argued that the 2021 terrorist threat landscape was fragmented across diverse ideological combinations, with connectors such as anomie, nihilism, misogyny, antisemitism, and accelerationism enabling individuals to move between belief systems. The brief cited cases such as Devon Arthurs, a neo-Nazi who converted to Salafism, and Nicholas Young, a police officer who supported the Islamic State while also expressing admiration for Nazism.

Related concepts

Wray's metaphor is one of several overlapping terms developed to describe ideologically hybrid extremism. In 2018, the UK Home Office introduced the category "mixed, unstable or unclear" (MUU) in official statistics for its Prevent counter-radicalization programme, covering referrals that combine disparate ideological components or lack a discernible ideology.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Madeleine Blackman proposed "fringe fluidity" to describe movement between extremist milieus, based on cases of individuals whose prior involvement in one form of extremism served as a pathway into another. Gartenstein-Ross and colleagues later developed the framework of "composite violent extremism" (CoVE), which distinguishes four types of ideologically composite attackers: ambiguous (expressing multiple prejudices and grievances without a coherent belief system), mixed (influenced by multiple ideologies at relatively equal levels), fused (oriented around a core ideology while expressing sentiments associated with others), and convergent (adherents of different ideologies cooperating on the basis of shared enemies). The authors presented CoVE explicitly as a more granular alternative to "salad bar" characterizations.

Other related terms include "ideological convergence", used to describe the blending of extremist ideologies across previously separate movements; "ideological hopping", the deliberate abandonment of one belief system for another; "fused extremism"; and "hybridization". A 2023 report by the George Washington University Program on Extremism identified two principal patterns of mixed-ideology extremism: overlap between far-right and Islamist milieus, based on an analysis of 5,467 memes and 3,524 videos, and a "conspiracy extremism" category lacking clear ideological foundations.

In 2023, the US National Counterterrorism Center, Department of Homeland Security, and FBI jointly distinguished between "ideology mixers", who embrace several ideologies simultaneously, and "ideology hoppers", who migrate between them over time.

Prevalence

Official statistics have been central to claims about the scale of the phenomenon. In England and Wales, the share of Prevent referrals recorded as "mixed, unstable or unclear" rose from 11% in 2016–17 to 51% in 2019–20. From 2021 to 2022, the Home Office stopped aggregating these referrals under the MUU heading and began reporting subcategories directly. In the year to March 2024, the largest single category of referrals, 2,489 of 6,921 (36%), was "vulnerability present but no ideology or counter terrorism risk", ahead of extreme right-wing concerns (19%), "conflicted" ideology (18%), and Islamist concerns (13%).

In the United States, researchers at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) reported a 311% increase over a decade in young people radicalized without formal ties to designated extremist organizations, a population in which ideological commitments have been described as fragile and fuzzy.

Classification rates vary considerably between programmes and jurisdictions. While UK Channel referrals came to be dominated by mixed or unclear designations, a Toronto-based intervention programme classified fewer than 5% of its clients as "mixed issue". Researchers on both sides of the debate have noted that such variation may reflect differences in detection and classification practice rather than in the underlying population.

Attacks frequently discussed in connection with the concept include the 2014 Isla Vista killings, whose perpetrator's manifesto combined incel, racist, and conspiratorial beliefs; the Christchurch mosque shootings (2019); the Hanau shootings (2020); the 2023 Allen, Texas mall shooting, whose perpetrator expressed a combination of neo-Nazi, incel, and conspiratorial content; and the mobilization of QAnon adherents in the January 6 United States Capitol attack.

Debate

Support

Proponents argue that the pattern the metaphor describes is real and increasingly common, even if the label itself is informal. Gartenstein-Ross and colleagues describe composite extremism as "a radicalization pattern changing the face of terrorism", contending that practitioners lack the conceptual tools to understand attackers who defy neat categorization. Kyler Ong, writing in 2020, documented ideological convergence within the extreme right, and the Program on Extremism's 2023 report concluded that mixed and unclear ideology extremism constituted a significant and understudied share of contemporary online extremist content.

In a 2026 reply to critics, Stephane Baele argued that the metaphor "might actually help extremism research", locating hybrid extremism within broader societal shifts: the fragmentation of traditional ideologies under conditions of liquid modernity, a "violence-first" pattern in which attraction to mass violence precedes thin ideological justification, and surveillance pressures that push lone actors into online spaces offering many ideologies in close proximity. Baele held that contemporary cases differ so starkly from historical examples of cross-ideological cooperation that the two could not reasonably be treated as a single category, and that the digital ecosystem actively encourages ideological cross-pollination.

Criticism

In a 2026 article, John Horgan and Morgan Shayler argued that the term "does not help us understand contemporary violent extremism", describing it as imprecise, conceptually dubious, and prone to conflating distinct processes such as mixing ideologies and migrating between them. They noted that cross-ideological borrowing has long historical precedent, citing earlier research on ideological hybridization among jihadist groups and on tactical cooperation between militant Islamists and the far right, and proposed replacing the metaphor with a typology distinguishing mixing from migrating and convergent from divergent ideological combinations. They further argued that conspiracy thinking, rather than surface-level ideological diversity, may be the more analytically useful common denominator.

Arie Perliger has argued that the critique should extend further, attributing the growth of "mixed" and "unclear" classifications partly to declining ideological literacy among analysts, who "perceive fragments where a coherent worldview exists". He noted that apparently novel formations such as the Great Replacement and militant accelerationism have long ideological genealogies, and cautioned against over-reliance on perpetrator manifestos, which he characterized as performative, curated, and unrepresentative documents. An empirical study by Tess Hemmila and Perliger, using computational analysis of American violent far-right online discourse, found that groups retained distinct priorities, adversarial identities, and operational goals, concluding that it was "too early to assume hybridization across the far-right".

The philosopher Quassim Cassam has argued that the debate rests on a questionable assumption that extremism necessarily involves ideology at all. Citing the 2024 Southport attack, whose perpetrator was found by a public inquiry to have pursued no ideological cause despite a documented fixation on violence, Cassam proposed that some contemporary extremists are better understood as "violence-fixated individuals" or "value extremists" for whom violence is an end in itself, a category that taxonomies of ideological mixing cannot accommodate.

See also

• Lone wolf attack
• Online radicalization
• Radicalization
• Terrorism and social media