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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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has little discernible affiliation or concern for politics at all

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, 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.

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.

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.

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?)

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.

Note that he wrote a short manifesto which didn't mention this.