77-Year Sentence for Supposed Most Prolific Member of 764

Content Warning: Just About All of Them

Kyle Spitze got sentenced to 77 years this week, and if you’ve never heard of him before, congratulations on having a life. The 27-year-old from Friendsville, Tennessee, just picked up the longest federal sentence ever handed to what the DOJ classifies as a “nihilistic violent extremist,” for producing CSAM, helping distribute animal crushing videos, and possessing CSAM with intent to view it.

He pleaded guilty back in late 2024 and has been sitting around waiting for the number ever since, and now he’s got one. 77 years, plus lifetime supervised release, plus a permanent spot on every sex offender registry that’ll have him.

Prosecutors say Spitze claimed online to have groomed more than 2,600 victims across the US and overseas, using the moniker “Criminal” or “Crimhn,” and that two of those victims eventually took their own lives.

One of his victims, a 12-year-old, was coerced into cutting herself on video and then into killing a chicken and spelling his nickname with its guts, which he then posted as “awesome” content for his followers. This man must be an absolute riot at parties.

The network he belonged to is called 764, and it’s worth explaining what that actually is, because “extremist network” makes people picture something with a clubhouse and a membership card. It isn’t that.

Nobody runs 764. There’s no founder handing out orders, no initiation, and no dues. It started in 2021 when a 15-year-old in Texas named it after his own zip code, and since then it’s spread the way a meme spreads, not the way a gang spreads.

Kids adopt the brand, adopt the tactics, and start their own splinter groups under their own names, which is exactly what happened here. Spitze wasn’t just “in 764,” he was an administrator of a related offshoot called HarmNation, which functions as its own thing while still falling under the wider 764 umbrella.

Calling it a cult implies a leader. Calling it a gang implies territory and rules. What it actually is is a decentralized aesthetic that teenage boys keep reinventing because the previous generation of them got arrested, and that’s a scarier problem than a cult, not a smaller one.

Then there’s the third alias, “Criminaloli,” and the “loli” part deserves its own paragraph because most readers won’t know what it means. “Loli” comes from “Lolita,” and in the corners of the internet where this term gets used unironically, it refers to sexualized art or content depicting characters who are drawn to look like children, usually in anime or manga style.

The argument its consumers make is that it’s fictional, that no real child was harmed, and that lines on a page aren’t a person. Law enforcement and child safety researchers don’t buy that distinction, and neither do I.

People who seek out loli content are consistently found to overlap heavily with people who consume actual CSAM, because the appeal isn’t the medium; it’s the subject. Spitze slapping that word onto his own username wasn’t a coincidence or a joke. It was a signal to the community he was trying to impress.

Here’s a question I keep coming back to, though. Why isn’t the FBI shouting this sentencing from the rooftops? A 77-year sentence, the longest ever for this specific category of offender, should be a press tour. Instead, it got a press release and a news cycle that’ll be gone by Monday.

I have a theory, and it’s not a flattering one for anybody involved. Almost every name attached to 764 and its offshoots that’s made it into a headline has been a white male, usually young, usually isolated, and usually radicalized in the same online spaces that produced incel forums a decade ago.

There are women and girls scattered through these networks too, sometimes as victims turned recruiters, but the center of gravity is unmistakable. These aren’t a new species. They’re incels who figured out that instead of stewing about rejection, they could manufacture total control over someone weaker than them, and the culture around prosecuting that kind of extremism gets a lot quieter when the extremist looks like the guy next door instead of someone lawmakers can point at as foreign or ‘other.’

Spitze’s own life, for what it’s worth, was a disaster before any of this. In 2023, he provoked his mother’s boyfriend into shooting him, got hit in the ear, filmed the whole thing, and then watched it go viral after the boyfriend killed himself when police showed up.

Months later, he found his mother unconscious and covered in blood, and instead of calling 911, he filmed her and posted that too. His father, from the outside, apparently decided the correct response to his son facing federal charges was to contact one of the victims from jail on Spitze’s behalf and tell her to delete evidence, which earned the father his own conviction and a six-year sentence.

None of that excuses a single thing Spitze did to those kids. Trauma explains people; it doesn’t acquit them. But it’s worth sitting with the fact that this wasn’t a stable, well-adjusted person who woke up one day and decided to become a monster. It was a kid raised inside genuine chaos who grew up to manufacture chaos for other kids, and somewhere in that pipeline are a number of adults who failed to intervene long before the FBI had to.

Lawmakers, especially on the right, spend an enormous amount of political energy on migrants supposedly coming to hurt your children and trans people supposedly grooming them in bathrooms. Meanwhile, a decentralized network of actual American teenagers is actually grooming and torturing actual American teenagers at scale and barely gets a mention outside a DOJ press release.

The FBI itself says it has more than 450 open NVE cases now, nearly double what it had a year ago. That’s a genuine, growing, homegrown threat with a body count, and it doesn’t fit the narrative anybody in Congress wants to run ads about, so it doesn’t get the attention like the moral panics do.

The DOJ likes to frame Spitze and scum like him as ideologically motivated, part of an “accelerationist” project aimed at collapsing society. Accelerationism, in the extremist sense, is the belief that you should deliberately worsen chaos, violence, and instability in a society in order to hasten its collapse, on the theory that something better, in whatever twisted sense the believer means, will rise from the wreckage.

It’s a real ideology, and some of the people who use the 764 brand may genuinely believe some version of it. But I don’t buy that as Spitze’s actual motive, and I don’t think it’s the actual motive for most of these assclowns.

What they’re chasing is power, full stop. They’re virtual rapists who found a medium where they never have to leave a bedroom to violate someone. Unable to function in the actual world, they retreat into their mothers’ basements and cast a net across every social platform a lonely 12-year-old girl might be using. Then they reel her in and grind her down until she’s convinced there’s no version of her life where she gets free of him.

He’s 27 years old. Not 15, not 19. Twenty-seven, and was still doing this out of somebody’s basement.

Grow the fuck up and touch grass.

(Sources)