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Notes -
What are the odds?
In the chaos of the Charlie Kirk shooting, a lot of people forgot about the weirdness of the multiple arrests. Immediately after the shooting, George Zinn reacted in a very unusual way. He insisted that he was the shooter and police arrested him, allowing the real shooter to get away.
Was he an accomplice? No, it doesn't look that way. There's no evidence that he knew the shooter ahead of time.
So that leads to the first, "what are the odds?" Online, we saw leftists explode into cheers of support for Kirk's killer and suggestions for the next victim. But we are told that this represents a small fraction of the left, only the most politically deranged. But a random person in the crowd didn't just cheer on Kirk's death, he was willing to risk arrest, possibly death (if you claim to have a gun during an active shooting, you can't really be surprised if you wind up shot.)
BBC says there were about 3,000 people at Utah Valley University when he was shot. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yev470d59o. At least 1 of those people were very clearly supportive of the assassination. 0.03% isn't that bad, I suppose. There were also several people on a balcony cheering (I saw this on video, I don't have any desire to find that video again for hopefully obvious reasons so if you don't trust me on this that's fine.)
So let's say .03% willing to take extreme lengths in support of political violence, .3% immediately visibly excited by political violence. As a percentage that's low. It's a really, low, comforting percentage. Except when you see it happen in real life. Then it's not so comforting.
Every time you go out in a large enough crowd, there is a high chance that at least one person is kind of crazy. The kind of person willing to take the fall for someone else's crime. This is not comforting at all.
Another set of odds
What brought this on was a press release Andy Ngo shared from the county sheriff's office. Not only was Zinn a political extremist, he was also in possession of Child Pornography (real children, ages 5-12.) He also distributed this material to others.
Now, you might think such a person would have a strong incentive to avoid being picked up by the police and have his phone searched, but Mr. Zinn did not seem to have much hesitation.
Apropos of nothing, I'd like to talk about a tangent that I picked up on in Patel's Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing today. He was directly asked by Senator Kennedy if there was the possibility that the shooter wasn't working alone. Patel said there were a number of individuals currently being investigated and interrogated by the Feds.
I'm pretty much caught up on the trans partner and their chat logs, but it seems like the FBI is doing a deeper dive into some of the other connections. Perhaps other users in the Discord channel of interest?
Does anyone else have anything on accomplices? Does the idea of the trans partner knowing nothing about the shooting seem a little suspect? I know the partner is apparently an AnCap follower of Jordan Peterson and immediately cooperated with the police, but the text logs seem a little off. Particularly when combined with an 'IT WAS ME!' note left by the shooter under his keyboard for his partner to find.
Edit: Additional links
I seem to recall that in at least one of the alleged Discord group[s?], someone thought the photo looked like him and they joked about it. That implies that at least that group more broadly wasn't aware. I presume it's possible a Discord friend helped him on a more individual basis, but nothing other than maybe the questioner really required any help. In fact, he literally used a drop spot for the rifle, so I'd assume an actual accomplice would have been ready to grab it - actually would have been smart, or even worked, since no cameras covered the area and the other person would have looked different, though transportation would still be risky. Kirk's last questioner was interviewed and seemed innocent to me, despite affiliation with a group that usually hounds Kirk with gotchas allegedly he wasn't doing so on that particular day, though I supposed given the context and timing it's possible (OTOH, it's a right-wing AMA, of course guns are going to come up and probably trans issues too at some point no matter who has the mic).
The texts suggest that he really thought there was a good chance he'd get away with it. He was maybe loosely correct, but criminals of all types often forget that they have more human connections, even when loners, than you might think. Plus witnesses are everywhere in a manhunt, and he seems to literally not have planned for cameras (I mean come on dude, there are ALWAYS cameras somewhere, and an accomplice probably would have said as much). The grandpa recognized the rifle, and at least three people that we know of instantly thought it looked like him based on the pictures only.
The lone caveat then is I don't think we were told exactly how he got back home to Washington county - one report I believe mentioned a vehicle, but it wasn't clear if they actually matched its location to anywhere relevant that day, or found out where he parked, etc. I suppose someone could have driven him?
The dolt had his damned phone in his pocket, these days the devices are semi-online and ping the towers even when you think they are turned off. This level of incompetence blows out of the water any theories of isreal involvement(as alleged on our favorite internet watering holes) or grander strategy plan in my view.
If you turn them "off", they do shut down the radio and don't ping anything. Unless they've been infected by certain sorts of malware. (And if you happen a target of an investigation, there is special firmware that shuts down everything but the radio that can be loaded onto your phone by a co-operative carrier, which is to say any carrier whose CEO doesn't want to go to pound-me-in-the-ass Federal Prison)
So if you're a nobody with a clean phone, you're PROBABLY ok if you turn it "off". But it'd be dumb to bet on it.
newer iPhones have their bluetooth running when they are 'off' (i think this runs for up to 1 day?) in order to network with nearby iPhones to support the find-my-phone feature. https://www.wired.com/story/apple-find-my-cryptography-bluetooth/
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