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Notes -
Tyler Robinson, Kirk shooter, has been caught after a family friend turned him in
Parents, keep your kids away from Discord. Will be interesting to see if this guy is a true believer or just ragebaiting.
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.
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:
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.
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