In a massive blow to federal prosecutors, a Brisbane jury has acquitted a 17-year-old kid who was facing a lifetime in maximum security for allegedly plotting to blow up opposition leader Peter Dutton and a massive Labor Day parade. The trial was a wild ride through the absolute depths of modern internet brainrot, culminating in a defense strategy that basically argued the kid was too busy playing video games and shitposting to actually carry out a terrorist attack. And guess what? It worked.

Let’s look at the facts of the case, which read like a standard Tuesday on 4chan. Back in July 2024, the kid—then just 15 years old—decided to roll through the Brisbane suburbs on his kick scooter to buy nails, metal pipes, and household chemicals. His search history was equally chaotic: he was looking up "where is Peter Dutton located" because he apparently hated the Liberal Party’s nuclear power policy. When his friend asked, "Who are you trying to kill?" the kid casually replied, "Members of the Liberal party."

But wait, it gets better. The prosecution tried to paint this kid as a highly dangerous eco-terrorist mastermind who wanted to bring down industrial civilization. In reality, the evidence showed his brain was thoroughly fried by pop culture and video games. He was obsessively texting his friends about the ending of Fight Club—where a bunch of skyscrapers get blown up—and writing in his diary about his "autistic interest in bombs" that he just couldn't seem to shake. He was also deeply obsessed with the fictional Van der Linde outlaw gang from the video game Red Dead Redemption 2.

To make matters worse for the state's case, the kid’s diary was a complete mess of wildly contradictory extremist ideologies. He was apparently reading stuff from the Oklahoma City bomber and the Christchurch shooter at the same time, showing no actual coherent political alignment. Defense barrister Laura Reece did an absolute masterclass in court, convincing the jury that her client was just a "troubled kid" dealing with his parents’ divorce who fell down the dark corners of the internet.

Reece successfully argued that when the teen talked about bombing a Labor Day parade with 20,000 people, he was just making an "edgy joke" to his friend. The jury bought it, deliberating for two days before coming back with a unanimous "not guilty" verdict. The kid's family absolutely lost it in the courtroom, gasping and crying tears of joy as the state's terror case crumbled into dust.