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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   24642 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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Interesting to compare him to the standard psycho political shooter profile of the last few years: smart, weird in an autistic-coded way (whether or not diagnosed), goes to a university of a tier well below his IQ level and doesn't do well there, fails to launch into a PMC career, no female girlfriend.

If he is mixed-race, he is politically Black and eligible for affirmative action on that basis, so the information to date is consistent with "this is a Thomas Crooks type smart autistic loser, except he was affirmative actioned into Caltech so he failed out of life later than Crooks did." His CV looks like a series of short stints at the kind of jobs that Caltech would love to affirmative action a black kid into, consistent with him failing out repeatedly and being given too many second chances.

Anyone want to make odds on him turning out to have a female girlfriend?

What are the odds he's a Mottizen? He's got all the relevant risk factors, even if the absolute risk is low.

could only have been a lurker, he doesn't have the posting style.

Zero. His social media is full of Abolish ICE and Trump is a Nazi slop. If he found his way here, he'd have flamed out faster than a vampire under the noon sun.

Yeah even the obstinate contrarian kinda-Left posters in here would still get Nazi labels from blue sky

Not me I would think, except insofar as some would object to me being here at all. But abstracting that fact away, I don't think so.

Shooter was supposedly active on BlueSky, and frequently replied to Will Stancil. No word yet if he was a supporter of the Stancilwaffen, or one of the people calling Herr Stancil a fascist.

Here's the alleged profile snapshot archived in late March. If that is his profile he seems a fairly average 'resist lib' type on Bluesky with a higher than average (though not unusual) interest in pro-Ukraine messaging for 2026. He recently reposted several Stancil posts without any commentary. Overall his account does not give the impression of someone especially radical when compared to the other million active users on that site.

That's two out of three Trump assassins who were oddly fixated on Ukraine.

Ideas?

That's two out of three Trump assassins who were oddly fixated on Ukraine.

The idea that Trump is Putin's puppet is the longest running and most heavily invested into psyop the left has been conducting about Trump. It literally started in 2015, now over a decade ago. That Trump is betraying Ukraine is just the modern iteration of that joint media-IC operation, so it is a manifestation of a lot of work.

If you radically oppose Trump to the point of assassination you probably support Ukraine is the simplest answer. Notable that this guy didn't mention Ukraine as a point of contention in his goodbye letter.

My recollection is the Golf Course guy was was a lifelong criminal and a middle-aged mess who basically went all-in on Ukraine. To such an extent he claimed he was a recruiter for the Foreign Legion which was (contemporaneously?) contested. Unless you subscribe to Ukrainian or CIA approved assassination attempt, in which case they chose him for these qualities. I don't find it at all implausible that a high stakes a major European War provides meaning for an individual such as Golf Course guy-- he'd been draping political identity over himself for well over a decade. Although, he also seems so obviously the type to be susceptible to spooky persuasion that I don't really blame the conspiracists, other than the fact that were Trump to find out we'd definitely hear about it.

For Cole, I don't find his interest as an odd fixation. Lots of people support Ukraine, including myself. Cole's old enough to have absorbed the Russia Collusion brain worms, and apparently politically isolated enough to indulge in them. Ezra Klein types were savvy enough to reconcile with and distance themselves from the Russia Collusion when the Time to Move On came. A 31 year old California blue-geek, along with the rest of Bluesky for that matter, don't have to reconcile anything. They go on living in perpetual 2017. It is not good.

goes to a university of a tier well below his IQ level

Uh, to be clear, you’re saying Caltech—home of such luminaries as Feynman and Gell-Mann—is beneath this guy? Pray tell, what is your estimate of this era-defining genius’s IQ, and of the IQ range befitting Caltech?

What I was trying to say is that he is the sort of person who, if white, would have ended up at a university below his IQ, but didn't because of affirmative action.

Ahh, OK. Based on the surrounding two traits listed in your post (“weird in an autistic-coded way”, “fails to launch into a PMC career”) which accurately describe this shooter, I thought you were also claiming that he went to a university worse than what his IQ would predict.

He did his bachelor’s at Caltech, but did his master’s at a [State] State University, [Name] [Landform], which was quite the downward mobility. Although… you can’t really go upward from Caltech.

He downgraded massively for his Masters after getting into Caltech for his undergrad which seems indicative of some sort of derailment

I think you misunderstood his post.

Interesting to compare him to the standard psycho political shooter profile of the last few years: smart, weird in an autistic-coded way (whether or not diagnosed), goes to a university of a tier well below his IQ level and doesn't do well there, fails to launch into a PMC career, no female girlfriend.

He didn't do most of that. He went to Caltech (top tier, perhaps even sui generis for IQ level), graduated, and had a job as a mechanical engineer in what seems to be a defense contractor (IJK Controls, now owned by General Atomics) associated with Caltech. After that, he went and got a second degree from a low-tier university, possibly in furtherance of his desire to make video games. These are significant differences. He only had the job for a year; I'd guess he didn't like it much.

After that, he went and got a second degree from a low-tier university, possibly in furtherance of his desire to make video games.

That is the second stupidest plan this guy had. You don't need degree to make video games.

Probably a question of whether he dropped out of the job to pursue the video games or whether he wasn't a great fit for the workforce and just decided to do the video games regardless.

Hard to say he wasn't a "great fit for the workforce" after one job. Defense work is its own kind of suck.

It's a job and he's a mechanical engineer so it's likely gonna be fairly dry stuff regardless

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