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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   42885 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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Tyler Robinson, Kirk shooter, has been caught after a family friend turned him in

The markings on the bullets described by authorities indicate that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, was steeped in online culture and included references to the Antifa , or the anti-fascist, movement. A fired shell casing was inscribed with “notices bulges OwO what’s this?” - a reference to a “copypasta” - a piece of text that is repeated over and over again, often to troll people online.

Authorities say one unfired casing had the words “Hey fascist, catch!” and three down arrows - a common symbol used to represent the anti-fascist movement. A second casing had the lyrics to a song “Bella Ciao” inscribed on it. The song honours WWII-era partisans of the Italian resistance who fought Nazi Germany.

The third unfired casing was inscribed with the words “If you read this, you are gay lmao” - again an apparent reference to online trolling humour.

Parents, keep your kids away from Discord. Will be interesting to see if this guy is a true believer or just ragebaiting.

A fired shell casing was inscribed with “notices bulges OwO what’s this?"

Don't cite the Deep Magic at me, witch. I was there when it was written.

Ahh, furry antifa. Just like one of my Bluesky feeds.

The argument I’m seeing from the left that he was actually a Groyper and all the antifascist slogans were ironic has an amusing resemblance to Holocaust denial. By this I mean the old “It didn’t happen but if it did happen it would’ve been a good thing.” As in, “He wasn’t killed by a leftist but we leftists think killing him is a good thing.” Which is what makes it seem so absurd, if your ideology leads you to support his assassination, is it really so surprising someone sharing your ideology did it?

The argument I’m seeing from the left that he was actually a Groyper and all the antifascist slogans were ironic has an amusing resemblance to Holocaust denial.

Meanwhile, the argument I'm seeing on Tumblr is that he's just some innocent guy the FBI are framing for some reason. Like the post simply asking: "Does anyone actually believe it was Tyler Robinson?" and so on.

Then, there was Kotaku founder, Polygon cofounder, and journalist for Variety and Rolling Stone Brian Crecente's "argument"

Oof, Charlie Kirk’s boys should have used the same team that faked Trump’s shooting. This is what happens when you try to save money on your false flag operations.

In addition to being a general Antifa thing Bella Ciao was used by the guy who attacked an ICE facility in 2019, as pointed out by Andy Ngo. So it's possible he took some inspiration from that, though it could just be generally popular enough in those circles that both referenced it.

The latter is are lyrics from the World War II-era Italian resistance song that has been adopted by Antifa as an unofficial anthem. It is frequently sung at their rallies and the song’s titled featured on their signs and slogans. In 2019, Washington state Antifa gunman Willem van Spronsen closed his manifesto with “Bella ciao” before attacking an ICE facility in Tacoma with a rifle and incendiary devices. He was shot dead while trying to ignite a propane tank close to the building and has since been glorified by Antifa as a hero and martyr.

In addition to being a general Antifa thing Bella Ciao was used by the guy who attacked an ICE facility in 2019, as pointed out by Andy Ngo. So it's possible he took some inspiration from that, though it could just be generally popular enough in those circles that both referenced it.

The actual reference for the song is the Netflix series Money Heist (by which I mean: yes it comes from the Itallian partisans, but literally none of these people would know that, were it not for the series). It was wildly popular in Europe, and is about as apolitical as you can get when writing a story about breaking into the European Central Bank. I think some of the iconography might have adapted by some activists, and if I had to guess the side, it would be left, but I'm not sure on that.

It's one of the most popular political songs of all time. I like Casa de Papel, but come on.

Maybe as a case of big fish small pond? I guearantee you most people never heard of it, and to the extent they did the chart I linked below speaks for itself.

I've known of it for a long time (and actually learned how to sing it in Italian, a language I don't speak) in my tankie/left-anarchist college days. It's significance would be very well known, way before the show, by leftie academic types I would think. But outside of them, I've also heard it sung in friends and family gathering, in random music shows, for decades, and I'm not italian. It's a very well known song in general. Maybe younger people have had more chances of being exposed to it through Casa de Papel, but it's been floating around in general culture for a long time.

Maybe younger people have had more chances of being exposed to it through Casa de Papel, but it's been floating around in general culture for a long time.

We're living in a time when cultural references in political discourse (what's left of it) consist of Star Wars, Harry Potter and Marvel movies. "Leftie academic types" were a core of my friend group, and none of them has hard the song in their life, before the show came out. The kinds of behavior you describe as the source of your knowledge of the song is so rare, I wouldn't be surprised if half your fiends had "von" in their last name.

I, as someone who grew up so interested in WWII that my 10th birthday present was a copy of Jane's Fighting Ships, have never heard of it

You're probably right but I simply refuse to believe Joan Baez has less cultural footprint than Alex Pina.

If one moves about in European (and presumably American) far left circles, even peripherally (ie. Discords and stuff), it is pretty much guaranteed that they will know Bella Ciao and its Italian partisan context.

Yeah, though it's almost certainly due to the TV show. Thanks for confirming alignment, though. It made sense, but I couldn't be sure there wasn't some Guy Fawkesaesque valance flip.

"If you're reading this you're gay" has pre-Internet roots.

I didn’t express this online, so I guess it's not documented, but I did warn some people on the right that they should be careful running too far with the reporting on the writing on the casing. The Annunciation Catholic Church shooter, Robin (Robert) Westman, had a little something for everyone. The problems of instantaneous, constant news consumption are hardly unheard of, and I fall to it all the time. Now that Tyler Robinson has been captured, the culture warriors are combing over his life, and while I think many would acknowledge the problems with Reddit, I still use it as a barometer. If it’s popular on Reddit, it represents a non-negligible minority. With bots and AI, at some point that might need to change. As I maybe should have posted a warning for the right about a rush to speculate before Tyler Robinson was apprehended, maybe the left should hold up? It took some archive shots [1] [2] /r/all. The current top post is titled:

Charlie Kirk’s Killer Tyler Robinson Raised in a Republican Household and It’s Bad News for the MAGA Media Machine.

Another post with 50k net upvotes has:

Ain’t No way in HELL that boy was raise “far left”.

Like… what? I don’t think Tyler Robinson being raised in a conservative family would surprise people. Isn’t the mantra been that schools and colleges are indoctrinating kids (I’m not claiming this happened in this case) one of THE big culture war talking points? It’s just a really odd thing to plant a flag on, to me.

Something seems to be going on with young men and social media, radicalized into violence with incoherent beliefs, deeply immersed into meme culture. The same day as Charlie Kirk's death, the Evergreen shooting was done by a radicalized boy immersed and radicalized online (apparently by a neonazi group).

There are whole online communities like 764 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/764_(organization) and O9A that target young loner males and try to radicalize them into violence. They're international groups operated by crime rings and antisocial psychopaths. And their attitudes are this exact type of brain poisoned "irony" rotten youth that we keep seeing pop up recently. There is no message, there is no idea, there is no politics. There is chaos, accelerationism, edge.

Perhaps the answer is as Joey Mannarino put it

If the person who killed Charlie Kirk was a [insert group here], there can be no mercy for that species any longer. We've already tolerated far too much form [sic] those creatures

Maybe we've tolerated too much from young men, maybe they need to be detained

The [insert group here], whose people keep committing mass shootings, need to be brought in and detained until we can figure out what the hell is going on.

I don't think that would be good, but it seems like there's increasing calls to detain all members of a group that a violent person might belong to. Hopefully we don't start locking up all young men for the actions of a few, but it looks like we might be heading that way with this logic.

Have you actually seen anything specifying "neonazi"? Everything I saw in the news had just a generic statement about "an extremist group" and "still unclear about the motive".

Yes.

The accounts also include references to Holocaust denial, and the name of one of the accounts appeared to end with a reference to a prominent white supremacist slogan. That account reposted several videos showing school shooting scenes from movies, as well as another video that appeared to show the two Columbine shooters taking target shots at bowling pins. Other videos the account reposted were explicitly antisemitic or depicted people in Nazi uniforms.

https://www.denverpost.com/2025/09/11/evergreen-high-school-shooting-colorado-updates/

He also had stuff like this

Holly had also liked a comment telling him to acquire a white supremacist sonnenrad patch like Tarrant and Gendron wore, replying that he had made some and sharing a photo of patches featuring a Totenkopf and sonnenrad. Both are Nazi-era symbols used today as hate symbols.

Among plenty of other explicitly neo Nazi posts and comments.

Two law enforcement sources tell CBS News, the BBC's US partner, Tyler Robinson's father relayed his son's confession to a clergy member - the family friend we heard about earlier.

That clergy member took the tip to the US Marshals Service, and then Robinson was detained.

Is this allowed from a religious standpoint? Beyond that, would the shooter have gotten away with it if not for yapping to his dad, or his dad yapping to a clergy member?

The seal of confession isn't a universal feature across all Christian denominations.

It's not an actual, literal Confession. His dad recognised him from the FBI photos and got him to admit it.

But then the dad allegedly tells a member of the clergy who then notifies the authorities, according to the article.

Even if we assume that the clergy member in question is a Catholic priest, the seal of confession only applies to things said during the sacrament. If you go up to a priest after mass and say "I just murdered someone", he could report you as that wasn't said during the sacrament of reconciliation.

That's got nothing to do with religion, though. I think it's more the unfortunate word choice of "confession" (which can refer to the sealed sacrament, or just any generic declaration to anyone) in the context of a clergyman.

I'm not fully aware of the nuance here. So the context of when and where matters? You can't just call and 'confess' over the phone?

I mean, you might be able to perform the sacrament over the phone in extenuating circumstances, but I'm not up on my teleCatholicism. It is (in Catholicism) a sacrament (like Marriage or Baptism or Last Rites), and it's generally done in a little box called a confessional. The priest sits in one part, and is screened so they cannot see the person in the other part... although in Catholic School, we sometimes did it with the priest in a chair just turned away so they can't see. The petitioner confesses their sins, and the priest can then assign them penance to perform and absolve them of their sins in God's eyes. If the sin involved harming another, the penance usually involves making amends somehow.

In this situation, the "seal of the confessional" is that the priest will not - under any circumstances - divulge what has been confessed to them. If it's, say, confessing to a murder? The priest may assign "turn yourself in" as penance, but cannot act outside the confessional to try to get the fellow arrested.

There may be extenuating circumstances for cases of ongoing/near future harm that can be prevented, but I don't think so. I think the "seal" really is that absolute. It's... something I really, truly respect an awful lot as a concept.

This is only Catholics, mind you. If a Protestant tries to say they went to their pastor and said something under the seal of the confessional, that's just an ordinary gentleman's agreement. And yes, it's only in these specific circumstances, as part of the Sacrament. If you just roll up to your local Catholic church and say, "Hey, Padre, just letting you know I stole a bunch of stuff", he can absolutely dial the police, no problemo.

You know not to do this, I've warned you before about low effort top level posts. 1 day ban while the discussion shakes out.

Once again, the rules of this site are extremely tiresome at times. I know you're sick of reading this same complaint, and I'm sorry for that. But this news was going to get posted here one way or another, and forcing people to jump through hoops to talk about current events while they're happening right now is bad. /r/moderatepolitics relaxes its topic ban about transgenders when a relevant court case with immediate political consequences comes around (Skrmetti was the last time, I think), and this website, too, needs to chill out during tumultuous times like this. He did not damage the quality of the discussion or the mission of the website. This was a bad ban.

Gatekeeping is good. Encouraging low effort stream-of-internet posting will be the death of this place.

This debate shakes out the same way every time. Amadan was willing to write the objections, so I'll not repeat them all.

I'll add that I see being slow on responding to news as a feature rather than a bug of the policy.

This is not a news website it's a discussion website, and it's a place for thinking. I'd prefer allowing people to digest the news elsewhere and then post here if they want to actually discuss a particular thing.

The poster earned a ban because I have explicitly told them in the past to not do this. I'm not in favor of unlimited "warnings" that have no teeth.

Once again, the rules of this site are extremely tiresome at times.

Tough.

I know you're sick of reading this same complaint, and I'm sorry for that.

Yes we are, and no you're not.

But this news was going to get posted here one way or another,

Yes. There are good and acceptable ways to post it that require a minimal amount of effort, and there are bad and unacceptable ways to post it because someone wants to be First!!!

and forcing people to jump through hoops to talk about current events while they're happening right now is bad.

No, it is not.

We've explained why the rule exists. We've explained why you can't do what you want to do. You can accept this or not.

You are truly not who I thought you were. Where is the kindness? Why is this so antagonistic? Why are you so hostile to me? This isn't even what I want to do, dude, I've never gotten warned for this offense or anything, I just feel pretty sad for some guy getting an actual ban for something so easy to do. You are incredibly uncharitable, and that's sad. Everything is incredibly sad right now.

Everything is incredibly sad right now.

Yes, it is. You know what? I was probably more hostile than I needed to be, and I'm sorry for that. We've been getting a lot of shit thrown at us lately and the threads this week have been terrible. But I should still have tried to write that in a less antagonistic manner. I apologize.

That said- the point stands. Our rule against posting hot takes on breaking news is not because we're trying to make people jump through unreasonable hoops or prevent people from talking about breaking news. It's because we want to see effortposts, not people trying to emulate Twitter with who can get the fastest zinger out there. It really is not unreasonable to ask you, if you want to talk about the latest breaking news, to put a few minutes thought into what you want to say about it and not just copy-paste a link and an excerpt, which looks very much like someone who is just eager to have the first top-level thread on the subject.

I really appreciate the apology, no joke. I've had such extreme emotions lately, I've tried so hard to get people to understand, I've left so many communities today... I thought I was going to be writing a long response to your reply proving my genuineness and self-doxxing myself even more with a tear-drenched keyboard.

I understand that it would be very damaging to relax every rule in the face of such emotional appeals. But I do think it might make sense to make a separate thread about this. Can I create a separate thread about this?

Sure, but if you want to start a thread about mod policies, it would be better to put it in the Small Questions thread than the CW thread.

I misinterpreted your endorsement to mean that I could make a separate thread discussing Charlie Kirk specifically. I did not notice that you thought I was talking about moderator policies until now. If you don't want that thread, then I will delete it and just post it as a top level comment here.

More comments

Writing a five (5) (五) sentence paragraph with your own original analysis is not a "hoop".

@urquan wrote a very detailed post within hours of the original shooting. It's not an insurmountable barrier. You just have to, you know, do it.

To be fair, much of the text of that post was pulled from a draft for something I had written before the shooting happened and fit well. I have a digital notebook full of unpublished effortpost drafts that I never posted, usually because I felt that it wasn't a good idea to post or the original idea got away from me and felt like something that needed a longer exposition or just became too broad for the context. Sometimes I pull something out of there if it's relevant to something I want to post.

It's not an insurmountable barrier for someone who's smart and posts here a lot. But those people can't provide coverage of everything here. From the way I see it, @yunyun333 is being punished because he posted in the wrong arbitrary thread, instead of the nonexistent megathread that should have been created (no seriously, why is there not a megathread about this? this is the exact use case for a separate thread), and some leniency should have been applied even if he posted in the wrong place, a gentle redirecting to the right place (which doesn't exist), because of how deeply hurtful this event was and continues to be.

Frankly, I don't want people posting here who aren't smart. The stringent moderation has helped us cultivate a high-quality community. If people are getting filtered by the rules, then that's a feature, not a bug.

But those people can't provide coverage of everything here.

Quality over quantity. If something is genuinely newsworthy, then someone will write a sufficiently effortful post about it eventually (where, again, sufficiently effortful typically means 4-5 sentences). There's no rush.

"OwO notices bulge what's this" is a gay 4chan joke, nothing to do with trans, it's more femboy-coded if anything but first of all anonymous imageboard coded. I'll spare the inane details because the truly funny thing here is that 4chan "investigation" pinning this on some random weird transgender went viral, and that was fueled in large part by initial reports of "trans" messages on casings. This can be spun into "radical far right killer 4chan tried to pin the blame on trans", and to an extent it will be. This is such a disaster.

This can be spun into "radical far right killer 4chan tried to pin the blame on trans", and to an extent it will be. This is such a disaster.

I would bet $50 that ~no-one will remember this aspect after three weeks.

This can be spun into "radical far right killer 4chan tried to pin the blame on trans", and to an extent it will be. This is such a disaster.

Visceral video clip of a father of 2 getting shot in the throat vs "something something 4chan", I'm not seeing it, and if you are, you must be smoking something. I'm taking bets.

What? How is that a "vs"? That was a national manhunt, the EU Parliament almost had a minute of silence for said father of 2. If the killer can be traced to 4chan, and with OwO shit he almost certainly will be, the blood in the visceral video is also on their hands. I am not proposing some far-fetched guilt by association here, this is imageboard slang, and people were getting ready to obliterate trans rights when it was suggested that casings have some "trans" stuff, why do you think another guilty group would suffer less ire?

Because imageboard slang is incomprehensible to normies, and they're not going to follow you along as you try to explain it to them, while they will immediately understand "leftist shot right-winger". Trying to redirect the ire at gamers is going to come off as utter desperation. Like I said, I'm taking bets.

Reading what you said, I agreed to the point that I would put down a (virtual) bet, but thinking some more, I've seen some crazy, crazy deflections and downplayings from people I thought were normies. I think certain leftists are extremely uncomfortable with the facts that are being put forward here, and they refuse to accept the framing of right wingers at all. In these circumstances, I could easily see many of them try to redirect in the fashion he means, similar in the ways that his image is tarnished - on this very site! - with out-of-context quotes in a mad attempt to make this seem more like a natural outcome of the line of work he was in, rather than the pure evil murder it was. Will anyone buy it? I'd argue probably a lot of people. The left was willing to swallow anything to ignore all the utterly insane activists calling for the police to be defunded during 2020.

The only way I can picture a 'next shoe dropping' big congealing shift happening among normie liberal masses is more based on who comes out with a strong take, more so than necessarily what the take is. It seems like it takes someone like Chappelle or Jon Stewart to successfully rein people in and to feel a bit ashamed for their previous zeal, or to give the go-ahead that their righteous feelings are directionally correct. I can't think of many others, but these figures are a step above the basic Colbert/Kimmel cultural level (who can come up with great rhetoric for any position but lack authenticity).

I could be wrong about this, but my recollection of the post-George Floyd time period was that it was pretty easy to be hesitant about Floyd as a victim for normies, for the first week. But then Chappelle went viral with his '8 minutes and 46 seconds' angle, and the gas pedal was just locked to the floor after that. And obviously on the flip side, the 'moderating gatekeeper' role is well established.

If nothing like that happens, then everyone is just kind of shooting from the hip, and blame/justifications are going to stay all over the place.

Doing a quick 4plebs search, the “notices bulge” phrase is heavily overrepresented in the Ukrainian war threads but seldom appears elsewhere (where “bulges” appear on the frontlines map). I haven’t seen this copypasta in the wild in a very long time, so I found it extremely odd that he would put it on his gun. It’s not exactly a pro-trans message, and nothing else indicates that transgenderism had a role here, and he doesn’t appear to have dysphoria. The spooks who engage in the Ukraine/Russia threads often don’t have a tasteful grasp of how to use copypastas or which have fallen out of fashion, so I wonder if he picked this up in his online participation in pro-Ukrainian / anti-Russian spaces. This would make sense given his other interests: an antifascist song, Helldivers, an anti-fascist message. I’m not implying that he was groomed by the Feds, but I would bet my money that he was in some online ecosystem where fascism was demonized and which Feds participated in.

Does anyone here recall seeing a “notices bulge” meme in the wild lately? Do modern trans people use it?

Does anyone here recall seeing a “notices bulge” meme in the wild lately? Do modern trans people use it?

It's a really common furry/anti-furry thing, generally focused around M/M (or, more rarely, M/F) roleplay norms. By convention the person noticing the bulge is usually the femmy one. Given the demographics of the furry roleplay sphere some of the M/F stuff is probably trans people, but the specifics of the joke misalign enough to what most trans people are looking for that probably less than you'd expect. See this for a relatively sfw joke about it.

The alliance between Ukrainians cosplaying WWII Germans and American far left woke people is one of the most interesting coalitions in modern history. I don't think we should expect them to be completely up to date with the current memes in the related sphere.

Most of the American far left are willing to condemn Azov in the abstract and I'm sure Azov is willing to condemn them. Both Azov and the American far left are invested in the survival of Ukraine but neither are the most critical part.

Though even in America the "hard left" are against Ukraine, tankies and Communists hate Ukraine and love Russia. Even the DSA was less than supportive early in the war.

It's up there with the iconography of the Finnish Air Force.

The Eastern Front isn't well-depicted in the Western public consciousness, and it's got a lot of weird history from that perspective.

The three downward-pointing tilted arrows were the symbol of the German Iron Front which was, in fact, a republican and Social Democratic umbrella organization.

In addition to the Helldivers bit others mentioned, I'd note that nowadays the Three Arrows has been picked up (seeming without irony) by a number of far-left types.

That’s because the BBC is misreporting it. It wasn’t three down arrows, it was ⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️ , the button code for calling in one of the air strikes in Helldivers.

Is there a picture of this?

Do you mean from the crime scene or the video game?

The crime scene. I've seen this claim, but no proof, and I'm interested in it.

In this case, it seems like it was intended to be the Helldivers 2 stratagem code for calling in a 500kg bomb.

So I was holding this back until confirmation, but honestly, I don't know if I can blame anybody for believing this is a false flag. Not that I think it is, but come on, if you prompted a Hollywood writer to come up with a scene about "killing discourse / debate / free speech", would anyone come up with something better than "milquetoast political pundit, who likes to make appearances under the tagline 'change my mind' gets shot in the throat by a political opponent, during a Q&A at a university, as a member of the audience is making a comment on how peaceful the other side of the political spectrum is"?

Too symbolic. Too surreal. Simulation theory confirmed.

"Thirty-three to be precise."

Yeah, I'm thinking something fucky went down.

... if the shooter was pushed into this by feds who were trying to sell a particular image of a danger the country faces that only they are able to address, does that count as a "false flag"?

Yeah, I always hated these entrapment cases.

Or perhaps the things that people have been saying about the current cultural climate are just true.

Stop, I can only get so erect right all the fucking time

For al milquetoast speaker the media networks memorializing him are suspiciously avoiding showing clips of him saying anything.

They played a bunch of clips of him on the radio yesterday. Not his "gotcha" "dunking on libs" stuff but instead him compassionately talking to trans people and talking about the importance of faith. Stuff like that. There's so much content from him that it's easy to get a collection of kind and thoughtful sentiments.

I think the reason some media networks are not playing such clips is that for example he listened to a distressed young woman with gender confusion asking about how young of children should be given HRT and he advised her to seek counseling rather than take hormones. Thoughtfully and compassionately. That kind of talk ain't allowed on MSNBC.

What do you even lead with? Random dunk will get massive effortposts.

Bunch of other stuff is verboten to even begin arguing about like preferred treatment of gender dysphoria.

I saw someone posted a clip of his appearance on Newsome's podcast. It seemed relatable and they had a reasonable rapport. But I haven't heard the whole thing.

My colleague voiced the false flag theory a couple of hours ago. He jumped to the same conclusion after Crooks shot Trump.

The Trump would-be assassination was pretty surreal too, particularly the "Fight! Fight! Fight!" bit. I sometimes tell my wife how the news doesn't feel real to me, how it's like flipping through a comic book, but Trump is acting all the time like he is in a comic book.

If you want to understand Donald Trump, imagine your normie grandfather having a power fantasy about being the super-model banging billionaire who saves America with Common Sense and Not Being A Loser.

In this context, what does it mean for something to be a false flag ?

  • Someone else killed him. They got the wrong guy.
  • It's the right killer, but he was not working alone. He did this on direct instruction from a 3rd party.
  • The killer was working alone. But, was targeted to be radicalized without his awareness. Some malicious party that even he is unaware of is orchestrating his brainwashing.

According to the posters on /r/somethingiswrong2024 it was the Heritage Foundation who murdered him. That would be a false flag attack.

It means the flag the ship was sailing under was false.

So something like, he's not a tranny leftist, he's a rightist who wants to draw down wrath on tranny leftists.

(Tongue in cheek) Throwing this out there as a proposal: it's a double false flag, a lefty pretending to be a righty pretending to be a lefty. All the hints that he's a right-wing 4chan kid are so explicit that no one earnestly trying to cover his tracks would be so obvious.

The reality is he's an Isma'ili muslim shown visions of paradise while under the influence in a castle in Persia, and the entire rest of his life is a series of ruses designed to throw us off the scent. But we won't be fooled! We know the Safavid-Ottoman conflict has moved to NYC, where else can the Isma'ili menace be found than in Utah?

"Utah" is basically one letter away from "Ummah". The kabbalistic implications should be obvious.

In this context, what does it mean for something to be a false flag ?

"The Drumpf finally wants to declare himself the God Emperor, so he directed the CIA to engineer an assasination that will turn the nation's hearts and minds against his political opposition", or something.

a reference to a “copypasta”

Someone in the BBC is trying to shift the attention away from gay furries.

Goddamn furries!

After reading about the guy, I think it's just random brainrot written for lulz. While he's reported to be academically gifted, I can't otherwise pattern-match him to the usual hyperfixated yiff or trans autist type.

While he's reported to be academically gifted

Academically gifted zoomers are often some of the most brainrotted. It's a verbal IQ thing. I have dozens and dozens of those damn vines stuck in my head that replay randomly. "Look at all those chickens," (they were geese), "they were roommates", "freesh a voc a doo", etc.

Not a zoomer, but a good example of the type is gwern. He's obviously very intelligent, but I find it hard to read essays of his because they're so dense, and filled with javascript pop-up hyperlinks to various things that are connected to the core topic of the essay in his mind. I remember reading something by him and being astounded at the sheer number of hyperlinked references to unrelated anime phrases. I felt like I was getting a firehose of his mind rather than a focused essay. Smart people collect phrases, anecdotes, factoids, data points, and it's entirely conceivable for a smart person to get fixated on things that aren't useful, like internet memes.

Look man, don’t go all reasony to me when I’m just looking for a cheap excuse to shit on furries as is sacred interwebs tradition.

First the violent nutjobs took FLCL references, and now they're taking the concept of getting rawwed by a werewolf in tight jeans. Is nothing sacred.

First the violent nutjobs took FLCL references

Wait, when did this happen?

Dayton, Ohio 2019 spree shooter. Very heavily themed his online presence around Canti and Atomsk.

Huh. I think I remember that guy actually, but not the FLCL iconography. Thanks

Political assassinations existed before discord so I’m not sure why discord would get the blame here.

Discord is a stand in (though a solid one) for all the various pozzed environments people let their kids simmer in without even thinking twice about it.

I've seen gloating on twitter that this kid is a right winger (because his parents are right wing), that the kid is antifa (because of statements he made to family about Kirk's "hateful" rhetoric and the messages written on the weapon and bullets), that the kid is just a schizo edgelord (alternate explanation for the messages on the gun). I've seen people speculating that he has SSR-eyes, that he was radicalized by college, etc, etc.

Also apparently he tried to get his roommate to pick up the rifle he ditched, and communicated this via Discord?

Like I said elsewhere, deep in my heart I fear he could be, I donno, a Groyper or something. Not like I have any reason to actually think that, it would just be the worst of all possible worlds, and the depressive part of me thinks that makes it the most likely. The left would get to have it's day of celebration, nakedly cheering and clapping and celebrating a person not substantially different myself being gruesomely murdered in public, and then they'd get to plausibly wash their hands of all responsibility for it.

I mean they're going to gaslight everyone about their rhetoric the last 10 years anyways, and all the gruesome celebrating we just saw. But it's just easier for them if the assassin isn't even one of theirs.

Like I said elsewhere, deep in my heart I fear he could be, I donno, a Groyper or something. Not like I have any reason to actually think that, it would just be the worst of all possible worlds, and the depressive part of me thinks that makes it the most likely.

This is certainly an argument being made.

The explanations on the pictures all seem to boil down to "yeah this is a known Antifa/LGBT thing but Groypers also use it mockingly or ironically, therefore this guy must be a Groyper." This does not strike me as impossible, but it also pattern matches to motivated reasoning from someone hoping to dissociate their preferred movement from these events.

Robinson was apparently a very high-achieving high school graduate (picture of a 34 ACT score on his mom's social media) who dropped out of university after a single semester, then spent two or three years studying to become an electrician at a local trade school. That's a pretty by-the-book "disappointed genius/failure to launch" story. Whichever group ultimately radicalized him, it clearly wasn't a group of Free Speech absolutists.

But given that past is prologue, I am skeptical that these matters will ever be cleared up to the satisfaction of any committed doubters.

EDIT: This link may not stay fresh but it says:

In a phone interview on Friday, someone who said they were friends with Robinson in high school, who wanted to remain anonymous, said that the suspect was “pretty left on everything” and was “the only member of his family that was really leftist”.

“The rest of his family was very hard Republican,” the friend said.

Around sophomore year, the friend said, Robinson became more extreme in his political views and would “always just be ranting and arguing about them”.

It's a common enough pattern in young people from conservative households that it seems more likely, to me, than the "Groyper" story, but at this point there is still sufficient vagueness that people can (and will) believe what they want to believe.

Discord is memed as the alt right nazi pipeline but it is also where commies and socialists engineer kaiserreich worlds where communism crushes the british empire and leads to the paris commune ushering in a gay utopia. Many of these people would quite likely lurk or reveal their schizo preferences by going to the nazi side of discord which also overlaps with the nazifur and oh god I have to stop talking about this. My point is that the language is not necessarily indicative of a specific affiliation, but simply a general brainrot that exists regardless of underlying ideology.

Attempts to paint him as trans or groyper or furry seem to miss the forest for the trees: he killed a right wing polemicist that was viewed by the left as an existential threat to civilization, but also an accessible one. Tucker Carlson isnt going on campus jaunts, Trump has a security detail, Shapiro looks like literally every normie around. NPR actually featured an article about Kirk, with clear urgency about the threat. By contrast Fox also talks about how Hasan Piker "America deserved 9/11" is a threat who hates the USA too, but no one shot Hasan.

Things do happen and chuddha has failed his all-ins on nothing multiple times, but false flag accelerationism is where he keeps getting his bets paid off.

On X they post pictures from him as a kid with lots of guns and his conservative mormon family. The internet fried his brain but I can't say if in the antifa or far-right direction....

Not to cite horseshoe theory but if the guy's beliefs turn out to be a random mishmash of 4 alt-right and 6 anti-fascist dot points (3 of which are inevitably going to be interchangeable) is anybody shocked.

I'm personally going with gut feel that he's a chaser and has a trans girlfriend/maybe some other random sexual deviancy stuff.

Pornhub should submit IP logs of everyone who watches sissy hypno or BNWO porn. Might be a better precursor for mental illness than tweetscraping.

Why are we overthinking this? He wrote multiple explicitly antifascist slogans on the bullets. In every case of someone writing on bullets/guns that I know of, be it Tarrant or Mangione it has been an earnest (if meme-filled) expression of their beliefs.

So that in three years, when Presidential Candidate Vance is debating Presidential Candidate Newsom, and the topic of extremist violence comes up, the CNN moderator can "fact check" Vance when he tries to bring up Charlie Kirk's assassination that actually the motive of the shooter is unknown.

Because we've never seen a mormon kid from Utah turn against the faith. Never.

Honestly I'm curious if that guy on Twitter who got flagged for posting that something big might happen but was cleared as the shooter might have been in a discord with him or sometimg

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