Evidence & sources

The receipts behind Search & Rescue. The narrative makes its argument cleanly; this is where the documented material, source provenance, claim boundaries, and review methodology live — so a skeptical reader can check the work.

How the pages are labeled

The Bradley case — provenance

The timeline is provenance-tiered so you can see what kind of evidence supports each event: ● record / multi-source, ○ self-report (what he told a psychologist), ◇ witness recollection. Ages are approximate; sources vary. It is drawn primarily from the Washington Post investigation into the founder of 764, which itself draws on court records and interviews.

Claim boundary: the bullying wording is deliberately precise — his mother reported that church peers began bullying him around six, and bullying continued at school. We do not claim church peers necessarily continued the bullying through middle school; the sourcing distinguishes the two.

764 — scale & sources

The FBI’s 2025 public warning (IC3, March 2025) cites a “sharp increase” in the activity of 764 and related violent online networks; a later FBI field-office bulletin describes investigations reaching all 56 field offices and hundreds of subjects nationwide. The founder was sentenced to eighty years; the network splintered into copycat offshoots and kept operating. Children remain the targets.

The distribution claim — a Field model

“Darkness has better distribution” is a Field model, not a Field record — our interpretation, offered as a working hypothesis rather than a documented finding to look up. The argument: negative, high-arousal, transgressive material is cheap, ambient, and always at hand, so it enjoys a structural distribution advantage. Weigh it as a mechanism. It is not a claim that darkness is spiritually stronger — light has the same network available to it.

Claim boundaries & what we are not saying

• 764 is presented as an extreme case that makes an ordinary mechanism visible — not as the typical outcome for a young person online.
• Bradley is one documented case, offered to show how formation can go wrong — not a claim that his path is universal or inevitable.
• We map the formation field — how communities shape people — not the whole of discipleship.
• The distribution claim is structural, not spiritual (see above).

How this was reviewed

Before publication the thesis was put through an adversarial review: an independent pass tasked with finding every weakness a careful skeptic would raise, with each factual claim checked against its source and each interpretive move tested against the strongest counter-case. Where the sources didn’t support a figure, we corrected or removed it (see Corrections & version, below). The goal is a thesis that survives scrutiny, not one that avoids it.

Sources

• Washington Post — investigation into the founder of 764 (Sept 9, 2024)
• FBI / IC3 public service announcement on violent online networks (March 6, 2025)
• FBI field-office bulletin on 764 / violent online networks — source for the field-office and subject-count figures

Corrections & version

These corrections are applied to both this web edition (the canonical Search & Rescue v1) and the downloadable deck.

• Softened the 764 figures to what the sources actually state (all 56 field offices; hundreds of subjects), replacing an earlier “250+ investigations, May 2025” figure not found in the cited PSA.
• Removed a “federal filing” provenance tag from the Bradley timeline — the founder’s case was prosecuted in Texas state court, so “federal” was inaccurate; the Washington Post investigation is the timeline’s multi-source anchor.

Spotted something to correct? We want to hear it — accuracy is the point.