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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.
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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