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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!
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.
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.
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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