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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor and Nuclear Physicist, Nuno Loureiro, was shot to death last night in his own home. Loureiro was reportedly Jewish and somewhat vocally pro-Israel. No suspect is in custody. I cannot help but think that this might be related to the shooting at Brown University last week. My knowledge of the geography of the northeast United States is limited, but I believe the two locations are at most a couple of hours apart. The shooting at Brown seems to have targeted the class of a professor of Israel-US relations.

I think we are are now approaching five left wing domestic terrorist attacks in as many months. When I suggested we were on the verge of slipping into another Days of Rage after the Israeli embassy attack, everyone here pooh-poohed the idea. But my concerns have only deepened since.

My knowledge of the geography of the northeast United States is limited, but I believe the two locations are at most a couple of hours apart.

The guy could have walked from Brown to MIT in the time between the two shootings.

I feel I was a bit flippant in my post on the subject in last week's thread. I didn't consider the possibility that the shooter could still be at large well into the week. We are seeing a new meta emerging in real time. If one has a getaway plan, it's possible to run from the law for several days, perhaps even stringing together multiple attacks in the process.

I started to see this with the Brian Thompson shooting last year, where in the immediate aftermath, people online were commenting about how the as-yet-unidentified shooter could escape by taking such-and-such bus route to a particular Canadian airport that has direct flights to the following non-extradition countries, etc.

There was a little of this with the Charlie Kirk shooting also, with the added spectacle of the FBI claiming not once but twice that they caught the guy, only to realize it was the wrong guy, during which time it seemed like the actual shooter could have easily gotten away if he had made any effort to do so.

I do worry that if people start to actually get away with murder in this way then it'll spell the end of what little privacy and civil liberties we still have. ("What are you doing, citizen, trying to ride the bus without your papers?")

Luigi didn't even need to go to Canada - he could have gone straight to LaGuardia and hopped on a plane (well, LGA is quickest with public transit or a cab from the shooting), but he didn't have a network abroad or a place to hide, and being a gringo with little money and a crippling back injury is not a pleasant life in the sort of countries peripheral enough to hide in. If he was healthy and had planned ahead, he could have spent the rest of his life off the grid in some distant surfer town (South America, if you're feeling ballsy, but the really secure move would be to fly Newark-Johannesburg and then get to Madagascar. Great place to disappear forever if you like surfing and don't ever want to go near cell service). I don't see many shooters other than him having the mental stability and executive function to pull that off, though. Tyler Robinson definitely couldn't have.

is he supposed to live the rest of his life off of cash pro-dropped in secure locations in Madagascar? Otherwise he'd get caught as soon as he tried to use an ATM, no?

If he'd put some advance work in with crypto and some basic mixing he'd probably have been fine to get a couple years worth of Madagascar living expenses together and largely untraceable.