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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.
The world where money is thrown at a long of things that don’t take hold. Analogizing to plants misses the point entirely. Building organizations is not like growing a plant where you just need fertile soil and water. Many attempts at building organizations fail despite have moneyed interests backing them.
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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.
This is nonsense. All it takes for a Reddit/Twitter/etc. account to not be found by people on the internet is for it to have a unique username, that doesn't indicate a lack of interest in politics. Furthermore even if he didn't have social media account most people are lurkers and that wouldn't prevent him picking up political ideas from the internet any more than it prevented him picking up the internet memes. Even in the fairly unlikely event that he picked up stuff like "Bella ciao" from people he knew in real life that would most likely imply a general interest in politics rather than your highly specific hypothetical of politics as purely an extension of interpersonal relationships.
If you shot someone would randoms on the internet reading your real name realize you were "Soteriologian"? Would they be able to find it even if they found out the Steam username of your romantic partner?
I think one reason you are receiving a negative response is that your posts are dripping with contempt towards the mainstream speculation yet it's evident you've put minimal careful thought into your own speculation. It comes across as motivated by a sort of contrarian elitism where you don't want to be one of those people so you have to come up with some highly specific scenario which you think is sufficiently different from what they believe. (And engaging in such obvious motivated reasoning also makes some people assume your motive is sympathy for the shooter.) In just the prior post you somehow misread rDrama enough to think it was his Reddit account rather than his partner's and declared LoveForLandlords a subreddit for mocking the working class and LGBT with the implication that this reflects on his politics (ironic since the actual user was transgender). Having had this revealed you move on without comment and leap from "not finding social media accounts" to "those accounts don't exist" to "he didn't care about politics".
Such a specific scenario is much less likely to begin with than the broader "motivated by left-wing ideology" and the latter also seems to be supported by the evidence. Whatever their flaws the Twitter partisans you're contemptuous towards seem to have a better grasp of the situation than you. I think you would have had a much less negative reception if you had posted without the unwarranted confidence and contempt, something like "Now that we know the identity of his romantic partner, what do people think the chances are his feelings towards Charlie Kirk are downstream of that instead of broader ideological sentiment?" and then laid out your scenario. People still wouldn't have agreed with it because it's a pretty specific and unlikely seeming scenario and the casings point towards broader "anti-fascist" sentiment, but you wouldn't have irritated people as much.
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Your asinine fanfiction is getting exactly the reception it deserves. Just flounce away in a huff already, I don't get the impression that anyone will care.
Be less antagonistic.
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Please don't try to drive off the few counter-contrarians we have left here.
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I’ve gotten several good responses.
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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.
Richard Paul Pavlick was prepared to take out JFK in 1960, by loading his car with dynamite and ramming it into Kennedy's. He backed out after seeing Kennedy with his wife and children.
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Yes, it should be expected that, even people who not only fantasize about the deed, but also prepare and get to the place, only about 1 in 10-20 actually follow with the plan.
See one of most famous assassinations of history. Out of six volunteers, working as a team, dedicated to their cause and willing to sacrifice their lives, when the time came, five just did nothing at all.
(one of them changed his mind later and changed the course of history, but this is another tale)
Well done! I think your analysis is good—even with team pressure, many still chicken out, so the solo chickening rate is almost certainly higher than that rate.
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I have no idea.
Even if such would-be shooters exist, the idea this Robinson is one seems to be justified by absolutely nothing, except the fanfic you wrote.
I advise you not to play on prediction markets, and to consult someone you trust before making large financial decisions like signing a mortgage.
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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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