The FBI “Foiled” an Incredibly Incompetent Right-Wing Christian Terror Attack on Trump’s UFC Event

Here’s how you know, right off the bat, that the perpetrators of the FBI-foiled terror attack upon Trump’s absurdly massive birthday party/UFC Freedom 250 event on the White House lawn this past Sunday, must have been an inconvenient demographic for conservative media to report on: Days later, Trump himself hasn’t talked about the planned attack one iota.

Just take a moment to acknowledge how ridiculous that is, for a man who lives to be aggrieved and play the victim online. Five men have been arrested, and more arrests may follow (if Kash Patel’s tweets didn’t ruin every investigation), for the planning of a “mass casualty event” that would supposedly have involved explosive flying drones, teams of snipers, a water-borne escape and the involvement of potentially dozens of conspirators … and Trump hasn’t bothered to say a single thing about this threat to his life via his perpetual soapbox on Truth Social. In fact, when asked about the “foiled” plot while at the G7 summit in France, Trump simply claimed “I haven’t heard about it.” So yeah–for future reference, when one of these types of events happens, and Trump responds in this way, the likelihood that the attackers were of a right-wing persuasion quickly approaches 100%.

And sure enough, the attack planners appear to be the most cartoonishly incompetent group of hardcore, far-right-wing Christian nationalists and delusional accelerationists that the FBI has ever managed to intercept … thanks entirely to the parents of one of the 19-year-old conspirators, who called the cops on their own kid because he was amassing a supply of weapons and apparently kept fantasizing aloud about how he and his online friends were going to carry out terrorist attacks. Despite the gloating (and of course dangerously rushed) Twitter postings of FBI director and whiskey appreciator Kash Patel, this is yet another embarrassing aspect of the story for the administration: The FBI would have been 100% in the dark about this entire series of supposedly planned attacks if not directly tipped off by the parents of a would-be 19-year-old shooter, who then immediately ratted out all of his co-conspirators after first being hospitalized with “homicidal ideations” and then arrested. As ever, the FBI finds itself fortunate that the majority of the criminals it tracks are almost indescribably stupid.

FBI broke up a plot to violently attack the UFC/WH fight extravaganza. This is pretty interesting, though:

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— Greg Sargent (@gregsargent.bsky.social) 1:45 PM · Jun 16, 2026

The fact that a 19-year-old, using his “graduation money” was apparently expected to be one of the main financiers of this “operation” gives a hint as to the actual resources and competence of the group we’re dealing with. Multiple outlets have reported that members of the group largely met and assembled on TikTok, calling themselves the “Vanguard of the Old” or “Vanguard of the Old Republic.” The mother of the arrested 19-year-old, Ohio’s Tycen C. Proper, described the group as styling themselves as ex-military and hyper-Christian in aesthetic and philosophy–as the criminal complaint against the five arrested people unsealed on Tuesday put it, “They expressed ultra-religious and antigovernment sentiments, specifically citing grievances about government corruption, the handling of the Epstein files, data centers taking up all the water in communities, and other government actions.” They also reportedly believed that the US needed to be “destroyed and rebuilt” by egging on the collapse of society, so the U.S. could return to the grand old days of yore. Said communications were uncovered by the Secret Service and FBI in a combined investigation after the mother of Tycen Proper first contacted local police on June 10.

Not that you would know any of this information, reading about the case in MAGA-friendly publications. Check the most recent Fox News reporting on the subject, and not only will the phrase “Vanguard of the Old” not appear, but Fox also chooses not to mention the group’s own stated Christian background, religious iconography or any material from the criminal complaint that would imply their extremely clear right-wing status. Isn’t it weird how that works? In Fox’s defense, its piece does include this incredible sentence: “According to court documents, Thomas told FBI agents he believed the U.S. government is controlled by a secret elite protected by the president that sacrifices and consumes infants.”

“The “ultra-religious” guerrillas espoused “anti-government” or anti-Israel views and had initially started plotting in a TikTok group called “Vanguard of the Old” in March 2026 before moving conversations to a private Signal group called “Hunters.”” nypost.com/2026/06/16/u…

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— Sami Eerola (@eerolasami.bsky.social) 4:57 AM · Jun 17, 2026

And that’s a shame for the Fox audience, as it’s causing them to miss the absolute lunacy and impressively delusional details of the attack that the group was supposedly planning. Personally, I’m not the least convinced that the “Vanguard of the Old” members would actually have even physically made it to D.C. if nothing had been discovered, considering their seeming total lack of disposable income, a lack of concrete plans only a few days out from the UFC event, and a clear preference for fantasizing about military insurgent action rather than actually doing any of it. These dudes would have been defeated by needing to present a credit card for a motel room booking. The FBI effectively uncovered a nest of anarchistic Christian LARPers here, with ideas and plans that could not possibly be more clearly derived from movies and videogames than from reality. Prepare to cringe at some of these highlights:

— According to the charging documents, the actual plan to attack the UFC event would have involved somehow launching explosive-laden drones (that the group seemingly had failed to obtain or produce) over the UFC arena and detonating them as a distraction, in an attempt to force members of the audience to previously determined “evacuation points,” where snipers would open fire on them. Beyond the fact that these men obviously would have had ZERO idea of the actual evacuation plans for their “high-value targets,” and would never in a million years be able to identify those people in the course of a panicked stampede, it is peak action movie brain to think that the best use of explosive drones would be as a “distraction,” rather than using them to say, attack your targets. Talk about your pointlessly overcomplicated plans.

— One of the members devised some fiendishly complex code names for some of their high-priority targets, including “1” for Trump, “2” for Vice President JD Vance, and “N” for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu … who was not actually present. Ah, and they also devised the following code name for Elon Musk as well: “Musk.” Send in the cryptographers, we’re going to need all the help we can get in deciphering this.

— The planners allegedly believed that the attack would “jumpstart” a revolution in the U.S. and that active military would join them in some sort of unknown coup. They also–and I can’t stress enough how much I love this–“planned to escape using the Potomac River to an alleged safe house.” Beyond the incomprehensible delusion possessed by these men in thinking that they could ever have left the immediate area of the White House alive, it is objectively hilarious to imagine them reaching the Potomac, donning their ghillie suits and fording their way into the river in a brilliant, Tom Clancy-style escape op. We are clearly dealing with top strategic minds, here.

— Associates of the group believed they had the capability to build, from scratch, “drones that could subvert standard remote jamming from law enforcement.”

— They seemed to have a real dearth of actual weapons available to them, as the 19-year-old Proper was expected to buy new guns for the event, and was meant to pick up another member of the group on his way to DC from Ohio, who was “trying to procure a firearm.” Other members possessed guns, but it sure as hell sounds as if they were only pretending to have any idea what to do with them: One, California’s Bryan Roa, said in an intercepted message that they were preparing for “gorilla-style warfare.” Oh god, the Harambe squad has finally come for revenge!

To this end, it certainly sounds like the Vanguard of the Old members had achieved almost nothing in actually progressing toward the major operation they were supposedly planning. Local police were tipped off by the concerned parents only four days before the UFC event, and yet the charging documents are full of references to planned operations that had absolutely not actually occurred, such as a plot to rob a military ammunition plant in Parsons, Kansas, to obtain weaponry for the UFC Freedom 250 attack. When was this supposed to go down? The day before you’re kicking off a revolution? Cutting it a little close, are we? Nor were any of the conspirators seemingly arrested in Washington D.C., meaning none of them had bothered to travel there–perhaps not surprising, given that this would require spending money that none of them seemed to have. The court documents even mention an attempt at crowdfunding within the group “to raise $1,300 to purchase the drones and explosive charges intended for the operation.” I’m pretty sure that if they collectively couldn’t afford that, the prospect of finding a place to stay in D.C. would have represented an insurmountable cash-flow problem.

BREAKING on MS NOW: Secret Service officials are angry that Kash Patel prematurely announced the details of an ongoing FBI investigation into a plot to attack the UFC fight at the White House, according to three people familiar with the incident.

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1.bsky.social) 2:00 PM · Jun 16, 2026

What we have here is a pack of idiots, plain and simple. We’re talking about delusional LARPers, or perhaps “boogaloo boys” who love playing with military terminology, lingo and tough-sounding rhetoric, but who have absolutely no capacity whatsoever to turn their fantasies into anything approximating reality. Their plans are peppered with inane strategies for attack, plainly impossible plans for escape, and even cringy fantasies about breaking each other out of prison or excavating secret bunkers under their homes, where they most likely would all have died in cave-ins or from radon poisoning. Of course, none of this stopped the FBI from giving itself a hearty slap on the back for … picking up a 19-year-old turned in by his parents who immediately confessed and implicated all of his conspirators. That’s assuming this wasn’t all concocted by Kash’s FBI, of course, something that is impossible to fully dismiss.

So yeah, way to go, Kash Patel–except for the part where you revealed the investigation via tweet while “there are still suspects at large” according to the Secret Service, you really did a bang-up job.

That said, you probably won’t be hearing Patel, Trump or the FBI mentioning any of this ever again, now that the undeniably far-right status of the Vanguard of the Old members is filtering into public view. Which is, again, a shame–plots that are THIS boneheaded and fun to dissect don’t exactly come around every day. I know that I, for one, will think of it and laugh when I next drive over the Potomac, imagining the LARP squad swimming for freedom after taking out mystery targets like “1” and “Musk.” It truly is a fortunate thing for Kash Patel that the only criminals dumber than his boss are apparently the right-wing criminals who want to take him down.