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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:
Another post with 50k net upvotes has:
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.
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