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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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This is too dank to believe, and I don't believe it, but it is what my Twitter feed wants me to believe, and I'm sharing it on that basis.

The combination of the messages on the cartridges is best explained by Robinson being deep into gamer culture

  • The sequence of arrows is a reference to Helldivers 2
  • "Ciao Bella" can be a number of things, but one of them is a HoI4 meme.
  • "If you read this you are gay" is general chan culture
  • "Notices, bulges what's this" is an online furry culture meme which has also spread into general chan culture

Where does this end up? If Robinson was deep into HoI4 online culture, his browser history will be full of both Wehraboo and Antifa material. And if he got into the chans or the other online cesspools where large number of gamers hang out, then they are going to find all the bad stuff. So the people who want to believe that he was a leftist will find enough evidence to believe that, the people who want to believe he was a groyper will find enough evidence to believe that, and the people (like me) who want to believe that he was just a Thomas Crooks-style very online loser who shot a politician because in the current year it is more memetically badass than shooting up a school will find enough evidence to believe that. So the assassination will become a super-scissor. And, to add insult to injury, a wholesome hobby that I and many other Motteposters enjoy a lot (namely Paradox grand strategy gaming) will become tied in the mind of normies to political violence.

I understood a few of those words.

But seriously, could you give a little background/context/de-abbreviation for the elderly among us?

HoI4 is Heart of Iron 4, the Paradox Interactive grand strategy game set during the period immediately before and during WW2.

Wehraboo is a term of abuse for people who get overly enthusiastic about playing as the Nazis in wargames - it originated in tabletop wargaming culture. There are a lot of Wehraboos in HoI4 fandom, and if you want to run a HoI4 discussion board you kind of have to tolerate them, hence the fandom is considered problematic by lefties.

Antifa is a international network of orgainsed violent far-left groups. The name stands for "Anti-fascist action" and they mostly like to engage in street brawls with European soccer hooligans (organised soccer hooliganism is tied to far-right politics). They are insignificant in the US. The term is also used more loosely as a general term for violent lefties who enjoy brawling with right-wing thugs.

The chans are a set of online forums, of which the original and greatest was 4chan, with a reception for lax moderation, crass language, porn-ridden image-sharing sections, and tolerating far-right politics which more respectable online fora don't. Gamergate is widely seen as the first sign of young very online people fighting back against PC/establishment-left control of the discourse, and mostly came out of 4chan. All the chans have dedicated subforums for discussing video games.

I don't know about the history of the term Groyper but it is showing up a lot in my Twitter feed. It refers to very online right-wing antisemites.

You needed to start before that, even. It took me a bit to piece together that Robinson is the Kirk shooter, and that the cartridges thing is about the claim of him having written things on his bullet casings not having been proven to be fake news (as was intermittently claimed) after all.