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When the Luigi news first broke, it wasn't clear why he even did what he did. Luigi didn't seem to have much of any passion for politics or even any discernible political affinity, and yet... clearly his action was political and extreme.
To recap for anyone who didn't read the psychoanalysis I never wrote, what actually happened--you'll pardon my pretense in mind-reading--is that Luigi had a bad experience with health insurance that led him to personally believe that the Health Insurance Bad narrative was vindicated. He had a spinal injury which caused him chronic pain, had The System tell him "nope, there's no cure for this, we won't help you." He researched the issue for himself, concluded "um, yes, there absolutely is", told them, was explicitly denied coverage because "it won't work", then somehow got the treatment without his insurance, and it totally worked and he felt great with all the chronic pain gone. This experience led him to conclude that yes, The System is indeed following bullshit financial incentives that have nothing to do with patient welfare, and thus The System is in need of a good burning.
So, to our latest incident: Tyler Robinson. Like Luigi, he's from a fairly high-tier background, has excellent test scores, has little discernible affiliation or concern for politics at all, and yet, like Luigi, he seems to have committed one of the most extreme political acts one can do. What's going on?
Well, if you listen to Twitter (never, ever listen to Twitter), what happened is some evil Antifa activist group Radicalized (TM) The Shooter using Internet Technologies like Reddit and Discord. Or maybe it wasn't Antifa, it was actually the University System -- in this particular case, the radical leftist institution of Utah State, which he attended for, uh, one semester in 2021. Look, feelings don't care about your facts, sweetie, the point is Leftists indoctrinated him and we need to crucify all leftists so they stop indoctrinating us.
Ahem.
Alright, so what really happened? The thing that puzzled me at first--my thoughts polluted by the above nonsense--was why Charlie Kirk? Surely there are better targets. Like... well, ok, I'm not going to put myself on a list by naming names, but I'm sure you can think of them. Kirk was basically just Bill O'Reilly for zoomers. He's not really a thinker or anything, just some rhetorician funded by establishment right-wing money to publish zingers on TikTok. Why would he be the target of choice?
Well, as we learned today, Tyler may have had some, uh, lapses in his Mormon Orthodoxy. Nothing big like drinking coffee or anything; just having a roommate that was trans. If you've seen the photos, the roommate isn't exactly attractive, like a Furby, and he seems to just sit at home playing video games all day. Moreover, far from the Twitter narrative, he seems to be fully cooperating with the investigation and doesn't appear to be any sort of mastermind or ideological zealot at all.
When the news about the roommate/boyfriend broke, I joked in our group chat "imagine your boyfren blasting a public figure for badmouthing your cute lil bussy. now that's true love". But the more I thought about it, this explanation made a lot more sense than any of the narrative silliness from Twitter. Unlike Fuentes or Trump or the Mormon Church or most other right-wing figures, Charlie Kirk uniquely comes across as scornful and mocking, especially with respect to this particular issue of trans people. (If you've never watched Kirk before his death, you may not understand this properly, as obviously only the clips that make him look like a saint are shown now). Of course, I'm sure the Mormon Church and Fuentes wouldn't condone trans stuff, but they'd have the standard tradcon view of being sincere and gracious and wishing you'd see the light. Trump and Vance probably don't care at all, with Trump being a NYC billionaire and Vance being a rat-adjacent. But Kirk goes out of his way to be an ass here, to pander to low-class right-wing bigotry.
Not convinced? Okay, notice when the shot happened: Tyler specifically waited for Kirk to badmouth transpeople before firing his shot. In fact, I'll go so far as to speculate that if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all. The audience member at the mic presumably tries to make a point that transpeople are not statistically prone to violence by starting with the question "Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?", and instead of replying "I don't know", Kirk replies with the deflective and maximally-inflammatory "Too many." The shot came a few seconds later, but I think this was when the shooter decided to aim carefully and fire. Kirk demonstrated he had no interest in discussing actual numbers that might fail to make transpeople look bad, he just wanted to play rhetorical judo and try to find his dunk.
Now, make no mistake, I'm not contending any of this was remotely justified, or that Kirk was right or wrong, or whatever. My contention is the shooter perceived Kirk as someone interested in making transpeople look as bad as possible, regardless of whether that was even justified by data or not, and that infuriated him, because his Furby little roommate was not like that. It's not merely a disagreement about trans stuff, it's "You are full of shit, and you are touching the apple of my eye." And, well, love can drive a man to mad decisions - a tale as old as time itself.
So that's my explanation of what actually happened. It has nothing to do with being "radicalized at university" or being in some antifa group or whatever.
Of course, nobody cares what actually happened. We want our culture war, and by golly if this will fuel it, pour it on the dumpster fire!
Eh, if your assessment is correct, I'd say it's probably a mix of everything. There's levels in between from being raised in a conservative mormon family to shooting a right wing political influencer because he's good at ragebait. Grows up conservative, finally moves out from family home, attends university and gets exposed to liberal ideas, perhaps gets some liberal leaning friends/roommates, has tiktok algorithm change to political slop, successfully gets ragebaited by the slop clips --> "omg charlie kirk is licherally killing my innocent trans boyfriend-roommate-friend with his words" --> takes matters into his own hands.
So university may have been a stepping stone, the algo did most of the heavy lifting and some mental deviations made him unable to handle the slop.
I think this is a reasonable assessment.
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We have two instances of the trans-identifying carrying out mass shootings against Christian schoolchildren. Saying "one is too many" is smug; two is too many, two is pattern. The idea has been seeded, people are considering it. It will not be allowed to keep happening.
There is something intriguing from civilization's standpoint, how there aren't examples of men murdering their ex-wives and judges in instances where those men have been prohibited from interfering in hormonal treatments their child is receiving. I wonder if it's that there's something inherent to the men, both in what led them to pairing with the mothers of their children, and to their children undergoing such hormonal therapies. Meaning, that there are plenty of men who would kill their ex-wives and/or judges in those situations, but such men never find themselves in those situations.
The segue here is Tyler Robinson, it's loosely relevant for Luigi Mangione, and then relevant again for the past two trans-identifying school shooters, and for any other perpetrators of that sort of random violence. I think it must be concluded that radical rhetoric cannot bend a healthy mind to violence, I think if it could, we would have seen it far more often, left and right, and we haven't. That it takes an already unhealthy mind with a preexisting murderous disposition to move to violence. This does not absolve, it reinforces the culpability on that rhetoric, because it takes such people and gives them a target, a target who often throws gasoline on the fire of politics.
I recall someone wondering about something like this with people who would have been serial killers instead carrying out mass shootings. So maybe it is worth contemplating that Tyler Robinson maybe wasn't twisted out of normalcy by the internet but rather by some event, perhaps some trauma in his life, and that he would have murdered someone else, or multiple people, or tried to, if not Charlie Kirk. But equally, that a murderer chose Charlie Kirk because of leftist rhetoric.
I'm only aware of one such case (the very recent one); could you name them both, please? I remember multiple cases where it was suspected the shooter was trans-identifying but it turned out to be bad early intel.
The Annunciation shooting in Minneapolis last month and the Covenant School shooting in Nashville in 2023.
Ah, I'd mentally filed away the latter as an unrelated case because it was an FTM and most of the concern is about MTFs.
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I think part of this ties into the contagiousness of mental pathologies. Scott discusses how in countries that have never heard of depression, nobody has depression. Before Columbine, nobody had ever heard of a school shooting, so nobody did school shootings (and even today, outside America, nobody does them).
This is basically Calvinism if you squint at it, which is basically self-selection when you scrub away all the fluff. People tune into signals that fit their cognitive state, and tune out signals that do not. People who like math naturally tune into math channels. People who have an urge to violence naturally seek out a signal to justify why committing violence is akshually okay.
I don't think this is quite what happened to either Luigi or Tyler, though. Especially in Luigi's case, in which I'm a bit more confident in my analysis, I think it's clear his own personal experience with The System convinced him that yes, the system really is full of shit and angered him to violence. I don't think it was tuning into any sort of external rhetorical signal at all. The underlying impetus is actually justice, although obviously external observers do not perceive it this way. When you see something that doesn't work because people are stupid or misguided or confused or lazy, none of that really motivates you to violence; but when you see something not working because you outright believe someone is lying to benefit themselves, well... I do think that arouses an urge to violence in any sensible man.
Charles Whitman shot and killed 15 people (and injured 31 others) at the University of Texas in 1966. Surprisingly, it was not the only notable school shooting that year. I think part of the reason Columbine sticks out for us as being "the first of its kind" is because there is video footage of them murdering their classmates.
Of note - Whitman had a significant organic brain injury (a tumor) in a location that could feasibly cause violent impulses.
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I know people have harped on this already, but being that the Westside Elementary Massacre happened in the school district next to mine before Columbine, and family and friends were there at the time, I feel the need to contradict the point. How much people get away with terroristic threats always feels similar to all the people getting away with larceny to me, because immediately after Westside, we got authority figures drilling home that terroristic threats would no longer be tolerated, period.
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This is, of course, plainly false. Here’s a list of school shootings in Europe, another list from Canada, and one from Brazil. Russia alone has had a number of notable school shootings, including the Kerch Polytechnic shooting and the Kazan school shooting/bombing.
And moreover mass casualty attacks are a known problem with a long history in Asia, with 'running amok' or Chinese mass-hacking attacks.
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And moreover, Columbine wasn't the first school shooting.
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It isn't, though. Just look at the content of those lists instead of Googling for gotchas and pasting them. Most of the incidents are just accidents or personal beefs that happened to take place at a school.
The "bring a gun to school to shoot as many people as possible" thing was rare pre-Columbine, precisely because it did not exist in the popular memeplex.
Just to emphasise that school shootings were very much a "thing" prior to Columbine and not limited to the US:
There were plenty I omitted because of low body counts, and the majority in that article took place post-Columbine (it's plausible that some, but far from all, were copycat massacres directly inspired by Columbine itself). I found your claim that "nobody" commits school shootings outside of the US particularly galling in light of the Dunblane massacre, easily one of the most notorious British crimes of the twentieth century (ranking up there with Rosemary & Fred West, Ian Brady & Myra Hindley, and the Yorkshire Ripper) and which was the direct impetus for sweeping gun legislation.
No one disputes that the Columbine massacre is the most infamous school shooting since the concept came into existence (in spite of its paltry body count, less than half of the Virginia Tech shooting), that it inspired numerous copycat crimes, or that it created a "script" for such massacres that many copycats have been following (consciously or unconsciously) to this day. But the concept of a school shooting did exist prior to Columbine. As to the question of their relative frequency within the US vs. without, they're so rare in absolute terms that the difference between the US and other industrialised regions is nowhere near as dramatic as the availability heuristic would have you believe. For example, there have only been two school shootings in the US so far this year, from a population of 330m, which gives us a per capita rate of 0.00061/100k. The total population of Europe is more than double the population of the US at 751 million. With exactly the same rate of school shootings in the US as in Europe, we would expect 5 school shootings to take place in Europe this year. Instead, there have been two school shootings with a combined body count of 21, along with a third in which one person was wounded but no one killed (and a fourth which Wikipedia classifies as a school shooting but really looks more like a political assassination which incidentally happened to take place at a school). Only counting the first two incidents, Europe's school shooting rate this year is 0.000266/100k; including the third, 0.000399/100k. Ergo, the US's school shooting rate is anywhere from 1.5 to 2.3 times more frequent than Europe's: a significant difference, but the idea that school shootings are some crazy phenomenon completely unique to the US and unheard of elsewhere is not borne out by the evidence.
I found this comment while trying to find another one via the search function. I just want to add that I did some reading out of curiosity and I think I have to nitpick a bit.
Eppstein (Germany, 1983; 6 killed incl. perpetrator) - committed by an adult
Sofia University (Bulgaria, 1974; 8 killed) - committed in a university dormitory, not a school
For these reasons I'd argue these weren't school shootings in the everyday sense of the word.
This seems like splitting hairs on two fronts. Some of the most infamous "canonical" school shootings were committed by adults: Sandy Hook, Parkland High, Uvalde, Columbine (Eric Harris turned 18 a week before the shooting; Dylan Klebold was 17). The category "school shooting" is generally taken to include shootings which take place at universities, hence why Virginia Tech is usually considered the bloodiest school shooting in American history. The idea that "school shootings" only refers to mass shootings committed by minors at primary or secondary (but not post-secondary) educational institutions seems like a stipulative definition that doesn't reflect common usage.
My assumption is that widespread cable TV coverage and peculiar interpretations of the ‘classic’ US school shootings of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s compelled normies to put these in a different mental bucket as a particular phenomenon different from spree killings or ‘mass shootings’ in general.
The common characteristics are:
• The horror of ‘kids killing kids’ (of course, many ghetto shootings technically fall into the same category, but again, normies generally ignore those altogether or at least put them in a different mental bucket), college students and recent graduates who are technically already adults also being “just kids” in this context
• If the killer happens to be an adult, he’s a young adult who attended the school in question and is motivated by vengeance; otherwise adult killers are largely uninteresting and thus fall into a different mental category
• The killer is not mentally ill in the technical sense of the word (which is another reason I argue the Bulgarian case does not count) but is driven crazy through addiction to violent FPS games and metal music, by a deep dive into various weird-ass online subcultures or due to sexual frustration
• The massacre is happening strictly on school premises, with the killer hunting his victims indoors like prey
• Neither the killer nor the victims are nonwhite criminal or criminal-adjacent ghetto-dwellers; this needs to be stressed because it’s a big aspect making the whole incident a case of incomprehensible horror
• The shooting is interpreted as a sad commentary on the decadence of modern society and kids these days just being all screwed up
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I did read the contents. There are many of the Columbine-style mass shootings nestled in there among the personal beefs. Again, do you acknowledge that things like Kerch Polytechnic, Kazan, and Izhevsk (just to name three from Russia alone) are Columbine-style school shootings?
How about the École Polytechnic shooting in Montreal, which happened before Columbine? Or the Dawson College shooting, also in Montreal? Or the La Loche shootings in Saskatchewan?
Bro, what are you even trying to say? Do you think Scott was actually saying there were literally 0 people in the continent of Africa with depression until whites brought the concept there? Obviously not. Obviously the contention is the prevalence skyrocketed once the concept became a "thing" in the collective mindscape.
Come on, man, what are we even doing here.
You made an over-broad claim, I countered it with actual evidence, and now you’re acting flabbergasted that I took your claim seriously enough to refute it, instead of treating it like the empty bluster it apparently was.
I said it directly adjacent to the Scott reference on depression in Africa. Come on man, stop conflating pedantry for insight. I don't care about gotchas; I care about understanding stuff.
If you want a zingers and gotchas, there's... well, Charlie Kirk's TikToks.
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I’m going to highlight what I think is interesting and valuable about this comment, which I see being totally lost in the outrage in other replies. Forgive me if this isn’t original, OP.
Mangione’s motive - and potentially this other shooter’s motive, too - was not the strategic implementation of political principle. It was extremely personal, and the personal elements are what actually drove the murder. This is similar to past assassinations, like the schizo in Minnesota who believed he was personally carrying out Walz’s will on Earth.
But the murder, which was to the killer personal, became public. And when it became public, the public used it for their own purposes. The personal element was consumed by the strategic implementation of other people’s political principles. Kirk’s death may (let’s accept OP’s premise) have been just the expression of a personal idea, intent, purpose, but that’s gone now. All that remains is politics.
Or, in the words of someone far wiser than I:
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As Brendan O'Neill pointed out, Robinson was 200 yards from Kirk. It's profoundly unlikely he was able to hear what Kirk was saying.
He did have his phone with him, and was even using it (why on earth an assassin would do that in the post-Snowden era is beyond me. Zoomers...). But yeah, if we assume for whatever reason he couldn't hear what was going on, this does render the timing of the shot insignificant, which would weaken my narrative.
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Political assassination is bad and I don't condone it, of course, but even in condemning the killer, as a Mottizen I appreciate the artistry involved in waiting for Kirk to resort to paltering before killing him. Un bacione, addio!
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This sounds like any old way a tribalist would perceive any polite disagreement. I could just as easily say your comment is a long-winded effort at shaming people for being against murder.
I mean, let me be clear, I think the assassination was a bad idea; and even if I weren't, I think there were far better targets if you wanted to throw your life away on that.
My comment is an attempt to explain why the shooter did what he did, not to justify why it was morally or strategically correct.
How many were in Utah? Proximity likely played a large role.
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The clips I've seen of Kirk have him doing exactly that - expressing compassion towards the trans person, but suggesting counseling over transitioning. Are there examples otherwise? I'm sure the grave dancers can provide you with plenty, assuming the exist.
But I'd like to take this opporunity to sketch out a story. Imagine you're a smart kid, smart enough to figure out that you're smarter than your parents, and you might even be right about that. Your family might be Republicans, but you swing leftward, because a cursory glance at the culture bombards you like Hiro-fucking-shima with the idea that this is what All The Smart People do.
Then you go to college, first step of being a Professional Smart Person Who Is Obviously Left and you bomb out in one semester. You spend a few years pickling in existential crisis, gripping harder and deeper onto things that let you externalize the sense of failure. Radicalized by the university? What is this, the 60s? Wake up grandpa, it's the Roaring 20's, and we can mainline weapons-grade radicalism 24/7 from the box that lives in our pocket, and Discord is full of leftists that make Bill Ayers look like Mr. Rogers, and the ideology is basically designed to foster an external locus of control and shift blame for personal failings.
You tell your family that you're going to be an electrician because that's something they'll find respectable enough to get off your back, and it's one of the more intellectual blue collar trades, so it offends your sensibilities less.
Eventually the identity crisis stabilizes, but it settles into a horrible valley. You conclude that you're cooked, that you'll never be a real intellectual, and eventually you're going to have to actually become a tradesman or deal with your family. But you still think you're smart - smart enough to see what could and should be done. And you're basically expendable, right? What's a human life worth, really? Maybe you quote Che's final words to yourself.
Why not trade that horrifyingly mediocre future to eliminate a major node of enemy coordination and memetic production? Why, it's practically the most valuable thing you could possibly do with yourself! And the target in question isn't 110% pro-affirmation for trans people, which is Doing A Genocide, so it's basically self-defense even!
Based on currently available info, my best guess is something vaguely along these lines. Bro failed out of college, had an identity crisis, latched onto extremist politics to cope, went full hicklib, and then suffered a tragic outbreak of agency.
Thank you for the good engagement!
I don't think this is what happened. The guy had what, a 34 on the ACT? That's a very high score. Like, Harvard-tier. If he bombed out, it certainly wasn't for lack of ability.
But yes, clearly something odd happened, because he did drop out. Maybe he just didn't get along with the people there. Whatever it was, some sort of internal crisis of the sort you describe makes more sense to me than the simplistic "he fell for a bunch of libtard indoctrination."
That story had elements of "there but for the grace of God..." I had a near-perfect SAT and it wasn't enough to help me when my spectacular test-taking started writing checks that my work ethic and discipline couldn't cash. The fact that he had such high ability is exactly why failing would cause a personal identity bluescreen.
My hypothesis is more that he needed some kind of answer for the crisis, and he already leaned pretty left (purportedly), so it was easier to slide down the slippery slope of that brand of radicalization. Abundance Dems don't have a thalamic answer to that crisis. Far-leftists do, i.e. "Of course you were hampered by the buzzwords we live under! Once we destroy The System, then your genius will have a chance to flourish!"
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I wanted to upvote this post, but you're making so many bad faith obfuscations and undue leaps in logic that, by the end, it barely reads as a coherent statement anymore - how you could possibly say "if Kirk had been gracious in his response, then Tyler may not have even shot at all" in regards to a clearly premeditated shooting is just beyond me. You actually mean to tell us the gunman brought a disassembled gun to the campus, painstakingly avoided cameras identifying his face on his way up to the roof, assembled the gun once there, scoped out Kirk, and then waited patiently just in case he would make a statement that concerned trans people, lest he pack up and go home peacefully? I'm quite certain you yourself don't actually believe that - because it's so obviously delusional. Furthermore, Kirk was very much NOT shot right after making a remark about trans people, he was killed just as he was hinting at how school shooting statistics are distorted by gang violence.
The "noble lover" angle you're trying to spin of course doesn't hold up to the evidence regarding the bullet casings being marked with discord memes and boilerplate far-left slogans - not a single mention of love or partnership, just sneering sarcasm and ideological self-righteousness, right down to the tired "bella ciao" song that self-styled antifascists have considered their own informal anthem since generations.
You're pretending like this is some weird mystery, when Charlie Kirk was one of the most visible and mainstreamed normie-facing avatars of the right-wing shift among young people/young men, and something of a herald of the inevitable backlash against the excesses of wokeness in campus life. He was an opportunist and a MAGA mouthpiece with little doctrine or taste-making of his own - he truly isn't a Bannon, nor a Yarvin, nor a Fuentes - but he was a famous and prolific Trump supporter for the past decade and had - at least based on MAGA propaganda - a close relationship to and influence on Trump himself (I personally doubt this heavily, but it's the way he styled himself and the way mainstream journalism covered him).
For a left-winger who truly, unironically believes that Trump is a capital F Fascist, Charlie Kirk becomes a Goebbels or Streicher-type, someone highly responsible for the rightward shift in society who furnishes a constant stream of rhetorical and mediatic ammo to be used against the opressed. Obviously he's a justified target if one thinks under those lines.
Also - Luigi wasn't apolitical in the slightest, his digital footprint shows a young man deeply invested in policy discussions and poli-sci/statecraft literature. He just, it would seem, happened to be more of an enlightened centrist wonk type than a clear blue tribe/red tribe partisan, which is indeed interesting and unexpected, but not apolitical.
Another commenter not even bothering to take 10 seconds to Google the context, which yes, as I've demonstrated multiple times now, explicitly does make this about comparison of rates of trans violence.
I will not engage with this epistemic sloppiness and dishonesty. This place used to be LessWrong and SSC. Now it's just fricken' Twitter transformed with a GPT politeness filter.
It is a mystery, because Fuentes is the obvious, obvious target if you're actually concerned about The Rise of Far Right Fascism. He's an actual thinker, he will not be immediately replaced if you knock him off the board, and he has a growing audience. Charlie Kirk is like Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck or any other of the zillion establishment mouthpieces for big moneyed interests. He'll just be immediately replaced the moment you get rid of him and nothing will change.
The entire point of my post is that an external, chessboard-style political analysis of "where would be the most efficient place to put my bullet?" does not explain what happened here, just as it does not explain what Luigi did. What does explain it is an internal psychological narrative where the shooter is responding to his own perceptions and experiences and rationalizing what is obviously a poor decision by external standards. How people here are so illiterate as to read this as "ARE YOU ENDORSING LE CHARGLIE KURK MURDER?" is beyond me. This was clearly a mistaken endeavor.
I think this is misstating the motives of left-wing radicalism. Like, yeah, they call the GOP racist. But that's basically a snarl word. They call right wingers antisemitic but that's also a snarl word, and it's not as if they have a revealed preference for actually caring. It's pretty easy to find antisemites they're pretty cool with.
What left-wing radicals are actually upset about is sexual conservatism. Trans, yes, but also abortion, LGBT, support for abstinence.
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Just spitballing here, but might it be that Kirk was simply a much softer target and more available to the shooter than Fuentes?
It just worked this time, it's not for lack of trying.
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I do think Kirk coming to him played a big part, yes. I think if the visit hadn’t been scheduled so close, it’s likely the shooter would have not attempted kill anyone.
Why? The simple fact that he could have killed Kirk earlier, but never bothered until he happened to show up nearby.
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Fuentes has nowhere near the scope of name recognition and credentials that Kirk did, and your refined analysis bears no relation to how a self-radicalized leftist distinguishes between a MAGA think tank guy and an actual Fascist, which is to say, not at all. You don't have a good theory of mind for the current generation of left-wingers, who aren't the theory-reading pedants of the last century, but more often than not are driven by an impulsive and anti-intellectual tendency to essentialise their entire political opposition into one monolithic force of evil. Kirk was literally speaking to a crowd of thousands - Fuentes sits alone in his room streaming. To someone who thinks virtually everyone even in proximity of Trump is just another tentacle of the Fascist Kraken, Kirk obviously is the more attractive target. (Besides the basic fact that Kirk's career and output is exponentially more public-facing than Fuentes', which makes his assassination an event one can plan and premeditate).
Why are you accusing me of lowering the bar and level of quality around here if you're just going to then engage in completely absurd straw-manning? I said nothing of the sort, so why are you including it in your answer to my comment? Why don't you address the less low-hanging fruit of my reply to your original statement, i.e. the obvious political content inscribed on the bullet casings? Don't you see how transparent this cherry-picked and histrionic reaction is to everyone reading it?
I really don't think you're in any position to look down on others engaging with your arguments politely and offering fair rebuttals, even if some are less strong than others. Your tone and defensiveness is clearly coming from an emotional place and takes us away from getting anywhere in this discussion, which is a loss.
Kirk is a college dropout. I’m not sure what you mean here.
Obviously Kirk has broader reach, but it has nothing to do with Kirk’s superiority; he has reach for the same reason Miley Cyrus did: he’s backed by big money. Fuentes is not backed by any mainstream organization. In fact, quite the opposite: they’ve gone to great lengths to outright suppress him, and have still failed.
I mean, this guy had a Harvard-tier ACT score. He shouldn’t be completely retarded. Then again, he performed a high-profile assassination while chatting with his friends on Discord, so maybe +2 SD doesn’t even render one out of the “meat comes from the supermarket”-tier zone for Zoomers. Honestly, if this is the case, you’re correct, I really have no theory of mind for people that retarded, and my psychoanalysis is better reduced to “guess it was a chimp-out, skibidi.” I mean come on, how does someone not know to not take their cell phone with them on this little excursion? Snowden was 10 years ago, and even without that, you’d still have cell blocks and SIM tracking.
Isn’t it just memes from a video game? I mean, yes, technically Helldivers 2 does have political content, but given the level of cognitive ability we’re dealing with here, I’m not going to do some Elden Ring-tier deep-dive into the game’s themes and symbolism to figure out what the shooter was trying to say. He’s just saying stupid zoomer nonsense.
This shows how out of touch your argument is. If someone took up palantir’s offer to skip college and that person kicked ass, I would say their credential (ie palantir’s stamp of approval) is a better credential compared to say Harvard.
Likewise, Charlie had the credential of running what seems to be an effective organization. The fact you only think in terms of degrees as credentials yet slam others for epistemological sloppiness…my god you cite LessWrong. Do you know about Big Yud?
You’re the one who brought up credentials. I’m the one who judges them by what I’ve heard them say (which, to be fair, is minimal; I don’t listen, I read). And by my judgment, Fuentes was more impressive.
I frankly don’t give a rat’s ass what moneyed interests think is impressive. They think Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow are great. I think these people are useless and ignore them.
Learn to read — I didn’t bring up credentials. I’m an interlocutor.
Also moneyed interest thinks Harvard is impressive. You seem to crave that? Finally, Kirk built something at scale whereas Fuentes has not. That is more impressive. Your standards are weak.
I noticed that after my comment, yes. My apologies.
Not really. I’m pretty dismissive of American universities in general. You have people like Peter Navarro or Eric Weinstein getting doctorates from Harvard. Not only do I think these people aren’t particular bright, I think they’re downright fraudulent.
In contrast, take someone like Grant of 3B1B. I’m sure he has credentials of some sort, but I don’t know or care what they are. I consider him very high human capital because of the quality of his work.
With big money behind you, everything is at scale. You can take almost anyone and make them a celebrity by throwing enough money at them.
Fuentes has centralized power actively opposing him, booting him off every major platform, and yet he still thrives.
I’m sorry but I don’t know what sort of epistemic model you come from where a plant given water and fertiliser in a climate-conditioned greenhouse is somehow more impressive to you than one tossed into the desert that manages to take root and grow anyway.
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No, as pointed out here.
https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/365897?context=8#context
I’m sorry but none of this strikes me as serious or meaningful except the fact that he specifically mentioned disliking Charlie Kirk to his family, which is in harmony with my thesis anyway.
Let me clarify what I mean by he doesn’t seem political: he doesn’t seem to have ever gone to any sort of political rally or activist event for any party, he hasn’t made any sort of public statements on social media accounts about this or that politician, etc. His voter registration is explicitly “No Party.” And perhaps most importantly, he didn’t leave a manifesto to tell us why he did what he did. Even Luigi half-assed a few paragraphs for us. Uncle Ted wrote us a proper epistle. I’m genuinely not trying to cover up for some pet left-wing beliefs of mine or something. I don’t live in Burgerstan, I honestly don’t care that much about your dumpster fire either way. I’m saying I think the shooter was basically non-political because I actually believe he was basically non-political. You’re free to disagree.
I simply do not see any evidence that he cared about politics at all beyond this one act. Which is why my analysis is what it is in my original post.
EDIT: for what it’s worth, the Dramatards have found evidence he was on LoveForLandlords (a popular rdrama psyop back in the day), which is an explicitly satirical subreddit of left-wing causes (mocking the working class and mocking LGBT)
As far as I know we don't know any of his social media accounts besides his Steam account and a blank FurAffinity account. A lot of people with strong political views don't attend rallies or protests, and we could easily not know if he had. So this is meaningless in judging whether he cared about politics and we're once again left with the fact he assassinated a political figure, the two political inscriptions on the casings, and the statement from his family.
No, that was his transgender romantic partner Lance Twiggs. While I do not browse LoveForLandlords I don't know of it "mocking LGBT" or even really mocking "workers", just commies who get mad about landlords online (and according to someone on rdrama it was taken over by the people being mocked at some point so maybe not even that). Twiggs also posted on /r/4tran and unsurprisingly seemed anti-Trump.
That’s kind of my point. Where’s his Reddit account ranting about the evils of capitalism? Where’s his #girlsforkamala posts on Instagram?
The entire internet is scouring for this stuff, and we’re simply not finding anything. We’re finding less on his politics over his entire life than you’d find about mine in the past 3 hours of my posts.
I’m going to call that a non-political person, I’m sorry. The replies I’m getting just reek of wanting him to be Political so you can say he was radicalized by le evil leftists and start your Long March through their institutions. I don’t need to come here to get that analysis. It’s already all over Twitter. Just go play over there, that’s where your friends are.
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That's fine, though the fact that the ide he would have packed up and left, if Kirk hadn't mentioned trans people, does strike you as serious, shows your analytical skills aren't particulrly reliable in matters related to this case.
Hah, alright big-brain, let’s play:
Has there ever been a shooter who got cold feet at the last minute, decided not to pull the trigger, and went home quietly?
Come on, show me your epistemic prowess. Impress me.
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I think we're done here, lol -- are you serious?
In the context of political media figures, I mean. Obviously he's not a thinker compared to John Locke or something
But compared to any other political commentator of similar size in visual media? Absolutely. He is by far the most intelligent and most original thinker. He is not just spouting a list of talking points given to him by a sponsoring organization.
Name one single original idea that was developed by Nick Fuentes - I'm extremely curious. Every time I see an extrait of his streams, he's just ranting in a vaguely comedic tone about jews.
That’s not really what I meant. I mean his responses to content placed in front of him are much more intelligent and coherent than what you’d see from, say, Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens. He never falls for the egregious plebe stuff like “wow, could Ivermectin really help with cancer?” or “Is Macron’s wife a transsexual? 😱”
I realize this sounds like a painfully low bar but… I mean, that is in fact where the bar is. News commentators in visual media really are functionally retarded by our standards. All intelligent discourse takes place through textual media.
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Based on what? He shot a political figure, he wrote "Hey fascist! Catch!" and "Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao" on the bullet casings (the latter being a WW2 anti-fascist song often used by left-wing activists in general and antifa in particular, it also concluded the manifesto of the guy who attacked an ICE facility in 2019), and apparently he was telling his family about how Charlie Kirk was spreading hate. All of those seem pretty political to me, and conversely the evidence of him being apolitical is that...he didn't have a party registration? And that he also put some jokes on his bullet casings instead of making them all political slogans? Sometimes people engaging in political violence are just insane or have incoherent politics, but so far there's no evidence of that, his views seem pretty straightforward.
Well yeah, both of the political statements on the casings seem antifa associated. That doesn't mean he was radicalized by a specifically antifa group, "Charlie Kirk was a fascist and deserved death" is an opinion held more widely than that. Nor does it mean he was involved with any sort of formal political group rather than just browsing the internet. But it does seem likely he picked up his political opinions online, that's pretty much the default assumption nowadays, especially for someone writing internet memes on bullet casings and called a "Reddit kid" by a schoolmate. You're acting superior to those idiots on Twitter but "antifa views he picked up online" is better supported by the evidence than "little concern for politics" is.
He didn't seem apolitical to me, it's just that his public political affiliation was vaguely technocratic centrism. (A dumb version of technocratic centrism that didn't really understand the healthcare industry, but that's common enough.) He frequently commented on politics on Twitter, just not in a heavily partisan way. (Also I vaguely remember an account that in his personal life he he expressed pretty different and more extreme views?)
Note that he wrote a short manifesto which didn't mention this.
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Uh, weren’t Kirk’s last words about gun violence in the US, not trans people?
Also, how exactly do you think Robinson was able to hear what Kirk was saying from ~200m away? Even though Kirk had a mic and amplification, it didn’t look like there were speakers set up within earshot of Robinson’s vantage point. Are you suggesting that he was watching the livestream on his phone, just before picking up his rifle and assassinating Kirk?
Come on, do you guys even check before posting? I haven't hung around here much for years, but every reply I'm getting is like... multiple standard deviations below my expectations. This place is a hollow husk of its former self.
The questioner started with "Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?" to establish the first data point, then followed with "Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?" to establish the second. The questioner was obviously attempting to make a point about the rate of transpeople committing violence vs the overall expected rate.
He gave an interview where he goes over what he was trying to say and you are mostly correct.
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We're so sorry we fail to meet your expectations. But be less antagonistic.
Let me be clear: the permabanning of interesting, intelligent posters over petty rule violations was a bad decision and has steadily made the place worse. You absolutely need to rethink this policy, because it is sending a once-beautiful community into chronic decay.
I am serious about this. Do better, or find someone to replace you who can.
Blame the "interesting, intelligent" posters who got themselves permabanned because they just couldn't help making everyone else's experience worse. The rules aren't arbitrary or hard to follow.
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Thank you for your input.
Be less antagonistic.
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I think that's a valid clarification from "The shot came a few seconds later, but I think...". If you're going to place relevance on his last words, then it makes sense to pay attention to his last words, even if it's to dismiss them.
I think your theory makes as much sense as any other about the timing (e.g. about gun violence in general, or random because he was too far to hear), but the one extra answer should be addressed more explicitly than "a few seconds later" IMO.
The conversation is interrupted right in the middle. It's basically just "How many trans shooters?" "too many" "5" "How many regular shooters?" "with or without gang violence?" bang
Yup. It doesn't take much to clear up that you're talking about the last two sentences he said, instead of simply eliding the last one.
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You’re the one claiming he had no discernible political motivations despite inscribing multiple antifascist slogans on his bullets and his family describing his fervent devotion to politics. You’re also the idiot claiming that a sniper would have packed up and left without taking a shot if he just avoided making any trans-related statement. Frankly these are just idiotic comments
Even if you're responding to someone being antagonistic, do not reply with personal attacks.
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Ok, so? The statement Kirk made immediately preceding his shooting still wasn't trans-related, if anything, it was a black-on-black crime dogwhistle.
I also find it somewhat rich to claim that Kirk saying there had been "too many" trans school shooters was "maximally-inflammatory" - I feel like "too many" would be a normal, even standard answer to literally any question relating to the amount of school shootings committed by whatever demographic group. You've been on the internet in the past 10 years, presumably - you should know what it sounds like when someone really wants to denigrate transgenderism and its acolytes, since it can get considerably more inflammatory than what Kirk said. He didn't even deny their "identity" or disagree with any of the fundamentals of trans ideology - just said too many of them had been school shooters.
To me it feels quite clear that he knows the commenter is going to make a probably-valid or at least not-off-the-cuff-easy-to-refute claim about transpeople not actually being statistically dangerous and is seeking to derail that any way he can. Which, yes, is epistemically dishonest (although par for the course for verbal debate, especially of the rhetorical judo style geared for TikTok clips he does).
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To be fair, I’m avoiding checking the source in this case due to the gruesome nature of it. I think in this situation folks can be excused a bit for not actually watching the clip.
I just took the questions from an article I found by Googling "Charlie Kirk last words." Took 5 seconds.
Touche.
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That's a long comment to say "Kirk was asking for it".
Also, we don't know the guy's motives yet, so all the speculation is just that.
Also also, I've seen it bruited about that Kirk's last words were in response to a question on gun violence, not trans issues, unless that's what you mean by "trans shooters".
I don't think Robinson would have gone there all tooled up, positioned himself on the roof, waited for Kirk to say something mean about the trans, then packed up and gone home if "Oh, okay, he didn't say anything". He was going to shoot no matter if Kirk had been saying "my favourite soda is Classic Coke".
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There is tons of evidence of premeditation and careful planning put into this. No post hoc justification for Charlie mentioning the issue for which he was apparently killed. Maybe the person heard it and timed it I guess, but this comes some two weeks after a similar belief system mass shooting in recent memory (and a third a few months ago). I agree that transgender rights are centered around the issue - but it’s become clear that there is some loose association between transgender supportive online groups and radical left politics. Doesn’t really matter how he talked about the issue either - the implication is that people against this issue are putting themselves in danger of future violence by speaking their minds.
This forum has a certain leaning to it - moving off reddit naturally attracts more dissident and people here lean relatively rightward (ignoring lineage of SSC first etc).
Reddit is the most mainstream network and can get towards radical politics, but it’s usually attention seeking and inauthentic (North Korea stans etc). X pretty similar.
Discord, 4chan, probably telegram - these are places where small groups of people are communicating radical ideas in a more personal forum. It’s what the classified info poster used as well. I think it’s more inviting to total ideological capture and feeling ‘rewarded’ by those you know for dedicating yourself to the cause.
The ‘terminally online’ behavior others are mentioning here has been a reoccurrence with people that have committed mass violence this year (don’t forget that there have been HISTORIC level of political violence over the last year). I would bet that there is a significant effort going into threat assessments and online surveillance into continued violence from online communities with radical trans acceptance politics, among other groups
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Isn't the limited data on MtF trans violence disproportionately high, inline with males who suffer from mental illness?
If this killing turns out to be "trans related," it wouldn't be coded as having been done by a trans person, obviously.
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Stop trying to justify murder. Kirk could be ungracious in talking about trans people. There is a trans problem (and indeed trans is an incoherent absurd belief). But even if you disagree, killing isn’t the way to do it.
I’m sure you’ll protest “but I’m not excusing the murder.” Yet you said you believe Kirk would be alive if he had been more gracious. Quoting for the full paragraph.
“Not convinced? Okay, notice when the shot happened: Tyler specifically waited for Kirk to badmouth transpeople before firing his shot. In fact, I'll go so far as to speculate that if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all.”
Yeah, right is the only response to this. "Darn it, I carved the mottoes into my ammo, I changed my clothes, I came all this way and the guy is just talking about who's gonna win the next Superbowl? Well that was a waste of my day!"
I can appreciate being on the edge of killing the guy and giving him one last chance to redeem himself (in the killer's mind). Or alternatively, putting an exclamation mark on something he thought was especially shitty.
I don't think it could be that fine-tuned, was he even able to hear what Kirk was saying from where he was on the roof? I think it was more "get in position, get ready, take the shot, get out". I don't think what Kirk was saying at that precise second mattered. Did it matter what Trump was saying when his assassination attempt happened?
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Could you point to … several of these instances?
Kirk is like the polite Ben Shapiro.
He got a boyfriend and radicalized himself online and took out the biggest target he had available.
Lack of mystery to me.
‘ look at me dad ‘ x100
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