https://www.newsweek.com/anti-elite-drones-ufc-white-house-terrorism-12084846

Anti-Elite, Pro-Drone: This Is a New Age for Terrorism

The UFC event at the White House for President Trump’s 80th birthday, marking America’s 250th year, went off without incident.

We now know how different that evening might have been due to an alleged plot that illustrates the dark anti-elite future of American terrorism.

Days prior, on June 10, the FBI learned of the threat not from a wiretap but from a suspect’s own mother, who called Knox County, Ohio, police, alarmed by her son’s gun purchases and the online group he’d joined.

Deputies found detailed attack plans on his phone.

Tycen Proper is one of five men charged—from Ohio, Missouri, Nebraska and California—in what the Justice Department calls a plot to kill officials and others at UFC Freedom 250.

FBI investigators and their law-enforcement partners traced the alleged network through a TikTok group and an encrypted Signal chat that authorities say had roughly two dozen participants.

The alleged plan, drawn from the affidavits, was choreographed. Explosive drones would be detonated near the White House to spark a stampede, the crowd funneled toward waiting snipers, and then a second wave.

Daniel Eskridge allegedly said they needed “5 teams of 3.” The alleged ringleader, Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez of Omaha, alias “Shepherd,” planned and directed it, according to the FBI assessment.

And here the easy story falls apart.
What the Plotters Believed

The first reports from unnamed officials in the media said the goal was to hit “capitalist elites,” “billionaires” and politicians funded by the pro-Israel group AIPAC, a list that read unmistakably leftist.

But the unsealed charges tell a stranger tale.

The alleged plotters believed America was “headed in the wrong direction” and “needed to be torn down so that it could be rebuilt.” Some insisted people tied to Jeffrey Epstein “should not govern the country.”

Proper’s mother described a group that “expressed ultrareligious and antigovernment sentiment,” using religion, she feared, to manipulate her son. Proper said the attack was meant to “jump-start” a revolution.

This was clearly not a threat emerging from the left. Proper’s family reported antisemitic statements and praise for Adolf Hitler.

The grievances were a collage. Anti-capitalist, anti-government, ultrareligious, fixated on the Epstein files and water-hungry data centers. But the through-line, in the charges’ framing, was “anti-government.”

It was the militant tradition of accelerationism, pushing society toward collapse so something new can rise.

This is a sentiment that has lived mostly on the far right, but not only there.

What the case reveals is the next phase of American terrorism.

A convergence of anti-elite grievance, encrypted coordination, symbolic targeting and cheap battlefield technology, drawn from across the ideological map.
The Symbolism of the Target

UFC Freedom 250 wasn’t just a sporting event near to power. It was power itself, staged.

Trump’s brand, combat-sport masculinity, billionaires, military patriotism—all compressed onto the most photographed lawn in America.

The charges describe the intended targets as “high value targets”: U.S. officials, members of Congress, even prominent business executives.

Court filings in a failed suit to block the event described a $60 million production and seven-plus federal agencies.

The FBI and DHS had already flagged the fights as “attractive symbolic targets,” no credible threat then identified.

The target is symbolic infrastructure—where power performs itself.
Drones Are Changing the Threat

This is where the plot stops looking like a one-off.

CISA warns that drones can slip past fences, gates and guards, surveil and disrupt critical infrastructure. And the tactic belongs to no single ideology.

In 2024, prosecutors charged Skyler Philippi—motivated, DOJ said, by white supremacist ideology—for trying to hit Nashville’s power grid with an explosive drone. He pleaded guilty in September 2025 to attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. Same weapon, very different hands.

The drone is now a terrorist accelerant. It lets a few people achieve effects that once demanded training, numbers or access.

And it is within reach of almost anyone.

Commercial, off-the-shelf quadcopters of the sort the Islamic State, Hamas and the Houthis have turned into bomb-droppers cost a few hundred dollars and can be ordered from sites like Amazon.

In Ukraine, cheap quadcopters have destroyed Russian tanks, closing the gap between state air power and what a few people can fly.

“$1300 gets us the drones and the charges,” Thomas allegedly wrote in the UFC Freedom 250 plot.

The barrier to entry? A TikTok group and a few thousand dollars.
The Bridge Ideology

Terrorism is increasingly organizing around a bridge ideology of anti-elite grievance.

It can run left, right, conspiratorial, anti-capitalist, anti-Israel, anti-government, or simply nihilistic.

The UFC plot is the proof; one cell that fused most of it at once.

Experts who study radicalization describe that incoherence.

The two teenagers who killed three at a San Diego mosque in May—steeped in accelerationism, neo-Nazism and incel rage—fit what American University’s Cynthia Miller-Idriss, assessing that case, called a “choose-your-own-adventure” path to a coherent-seeming rationale for violence.

And the pattern runs both ways.

On the anticorporate left, Luigi Mangione, accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024, was charged under New York law with murder as an act of terrorism—counts a judge later dismissed, though other state and federal charges still stand.

A 2025 wave of arson and gunfire at Tesla dealerships was branded “domestic terrorism” by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, though no one was charged under a label that isn’t a standalone federal crime.

On the right, the June 2025 assassination of Minnesota Democrat Melissa Hortman and her husband was carried out by a man with a hit list of Democrats and abortion providers; he pleaded guilty this month.

Different ideologies, the same anti-elite instinct.
Don’t Overread One Plot

We must be wary of a sweeping theory built on one thwarted plot. Name a bridge ideology and it can absorb almost anyone, until it explains everything, and so nothing.

Just Security, dissecting the data most cited for a surge in political violence, argues that loose definitions and a few incidents get stretched into trends they can’t bear—doubly so for a thesis resting on a single conspiracy.

And calling the plot neither left nor right can flatten an awkward fact: Accelerationism, the through-line here, has lived mostly on the militant far right.

The scale still tilts to the familiar.

Even as CSIS found 2025 the first year in three decades that left-wing incidents outnumbered far-right ones, it stressed such violence stays far less lethal: 13 people killed since 2016, versus 112 in right-wing attacks and 82 jihadist.

The accelerationist current that drove the San Diego killers has a body count; a thwarted plot, for now, does not.

The bodies stay concentrated among the far right and jihadists, and one disrupted plot does not define an era.

There’s also the question of what to call it. The FBI built the case and the DOJ categorized it as domestic terrorism.

But the charges themselves are conspiracy, attempted murder of a federal officer and firearms counts—there is no standalone federal domestic-terrorism charge.

The defendants are presumed innocent, and the picture may shift as more arrests follow.
The New Script

Concede all of that, and the plot still exposes the emerging template.

Pick a grievance—capitalism, the state, the pro-Israel lobby, whichever elite is the villain of the moment. Choose a spectacle, not just a target, and read it as proof of corruption.

Coordinate in an encrypted chat. Borrow cheap, low-tech battlefield tools. Aim for panic, symbolism and virality as much as casualties.

That is the new script, and its menace is how few people it takes to follow.

The danger is to America has swapped it is that grievance-fueled terrorism has gone modular.

Any ideology can plug into the same anti-elite outrage and the same cheap hardware.

Terrorism no longer needs an army—or even a coherent cause—to think like one.