The recent school shootings are a tip of an iceberg of a vast private-security industry, Filipinos recruited into foreign wars, expanding US military access and rising defense expenditure. These converging phenomena intersect through poverty and violence, corruption and weak institutions. THE Philippines has experienced an unprecedented wave of campus gun violence in Tacloban and Zamboanga, occurring within a span of just two months. These school shootings have shattered the idyllic self-image of a peaceful nation.Internationally, school violence has become increasingly linked to the Western online far-right through “764,” a faction of a decentralized, global extremist ecosystem known as “The COM”...