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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27155 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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Steven Crowder has leaked portions of the Nashville shooter's "manifesto": https://nitter.cz/scrowder/status/1721545965402726734

I put manifesto in scare quotes because the leaked portions seem to more part of a "schizo mass shooting planning diary" as opposed to "schizo essay on motivations for the shooting." That said, the leaked pages do reveal some insight into the shooter's motivation. The biggest surprise to me is that it doesn't really mention being discriminated against for being trans. Instead it focuses on the shooter's perceived perpetrators being rich privileged white kids with daddy's money. Basically the lyrics to The Dead Kennedys's song Holiday in Cambodia if they were written by a mass shooter. Also semi-surprising to me is their repeated use of the word "faggot" as an insult. I wouldn't have been surprised to see this in a mtf trans shooter's diary, but it's a bit surprising to see from ftm trans. Maybe some sort of performative masculinity?

In any case, the documents appear to be genuine though they haven't been 100% confirmed. Currently there's a lot of hubbub over whether or not they were appropriate to leak in the first place, but I see very little questioning of their authenticity. What are your thoughts?

Initial impressions- this is just schizo rambling combined with adolescent angst the shooter is too old for(wasn’t she like 23?), so why suppress it? I don’t see an explanation beyond trying to bolster the ‘white privilege’ narrative and cover for genuinely anti white people in the progressive midst. Not that I think these are the majority, mind- I think most progressives, like most conservatives, simply don’t think very much about the implications of their beliefs, if nothing else- but providing cover for them shows at least some degree of acknowledgement and unwillingness to oppose anti-white sentiment, like we saw with the Sarah Jeong case.

Is it legit? I've seen some later comments that this isn't the real thing but a fake or troll.

As to "faggot", yeah. Funny how a lot of progressive-aligned online types immediately reach for that as an insult when arguing with others.

Apparently it's been verified as legit.

The National Desk has verified the authenticity of the leaked images through its Nashville affiliate, FOX 17 News.

Why suppress this? I can understand suppressing such writings generally, but AFAIK this is the first time such a thing has actually been kept under wraps for any length of time.

I doubt anyone would be inspired by it, and it's certainly not going to spark a movement or any kind of adoration for the shooter like we saw with Elliott Rodger.

Maybe Crowder isn't printing a genius rhetorical flourish, but I really doubt it given the kind of thinking on display.

Possibly because (1) the parents of the dead wanted it suppressed and (2) it doesn't do the transgender movement any favours (I'm wondering if Hale is getting the 'No True Scotsman' treatment because even NBC news is deadnaming and ABC is misgendering with references not to "Aiden" and "he" but "Audrey" and "she").

This person killed young children, so can't be defended on grounds of "they were bullied into it by the victims!" and can't be presented as a victim themselves (unlike the usual narrative around transgender people), and the 'manifesto' reads more like the stereotypical 'incel rant'. So if presented as a transgender he/him man, it looks bad. But if it's a crazy Christian gun-clutching family who drove their daughter nuts, well - that's different, isn't it?

In general we shouldn’t publicize mass shootings because the biggest cause of mass shootings is social contagion.

I am going to assume everything in the manifesto is the white hate I expected. It’s useful to publicize this for political gain but it’s also likely to lead to more mass shootings. It would be better not publicize the crazies.

Out of all the publicly released shooter manifestos, this document is so inane and thoughtless, so silly on its face (were it not backed up by devastating horrific actions) that I’d think it less likely to compel imitation than a well-written thesis on fallen glory or overwhelming oppression.

…However, a small part of me fears that this document was suppressed precisely because the suppressors believe such speech is all it would take to turn loose a flood of school shooters — either because they’re out of touch and don’t understand that such speech can be found in every corner of the Internet, or because they themselves felt a compelling need to go out and shoot them some crackers too after reading it.

Why suppress this? I can understand suppressing such writings generally, but AFAIK this is the first time such a thing has actually been kept under wraps for any length of time.

The manifesto directly makes reference to the kind of white privilege rhetoric the president of the US has spoken about and endorsed as a reason for the shooting. By the left's own standards, this would implicate Joe Biden as a stochastic terrorist.

This kind of thing is the predictable endgame of the dehumanising white-hating rhetoric like privilege theory that a lot of us have been warning about for years.

People are going to run amok; when they do so they're going to pick up whatever's floating around in their society. Centuries ago, it might've been motivated and couched in religious or supernatural terms; in other times and places, it might be due to real or imagined grievances against other individuals or groups.

What I've read of Elliott Rodger's writings makes me go "I completely understand why you couldn't get a girlfriend". He's genuinely hurt about it, but he's also genuinely an entitled, whiny, pain in the ass. Not alone does he expect girls to fall at his feet in adoration simply because he's a handsome gentleman, he's nasty to those he considers his social inferiors (parts about turning up with his family at red carpet events where he writes abusively about the staff simply doing their jobs; just because your dad is currently an important director doesn't mean you have any clout or importance of your own).

Part of that was probably the usual adolescent turmoil, but again were I a sixteen or seventeen year old girl at that time I wouldn't have wanted to go out with a perpetually scowling guy who thought the sun shone out of his own backside and who would probably not been concerned with my feelings or wants.

You seem to assume he was walking broadcasting this sentiment 24/7. In long relationship, a woman would likely gain knowledge about his attitudes (but many people successfully hide parts of their personality for long time) but this doesn't explain short-term failures. The text is written after years on unsuccessful attempts, so maybe he was different when he started trying pursuing relationships.

Ah yes they must have sensed it. It’s the old vaginatron morality detector versus women like assholes theory. I will say that nastyness towards social inferiors is not disqualifying men as sexual partners. I think both sides overrate morality as a factor in sexual success.

It took me some time to understand your joke. Then, I tried uncensored gpt-3 and chatGPT explain it, to see how far could they, and results are poor.

I'm not a woman but what I read of his manifesto made it abundantly clear why he had no success with women or men. This isn't some kind of secret vagina-based loser-detection system - his attitudes and beliefs were obvious from his writing and videos alone, and you don't even need to be a woman to find someone like that creepy and off-putting. His incredibly poor social skills were absolutely a massive turn-off to women, but it isn't like men particularly enjoy the company of bitter, resentful and entitled narcissists either. There's no moral condemnation here at all - women (though maybe not consciously) are looking at a man with terrible social skills and correctly deducing that he'd be awful to spend extended periods of time with, and furthermore, that his children would also likely be creepy weirdos who have great difficulty reproducing. I agree that morality isn't really a huge factor in sexual success - but it wasn't the Supreme Gentleman's moral failings that prevented him from getting laid (hell, just look at how many marriage proposals convicted murderers get). It was the fact that he was an off-putting loser with terrible social skills that prevented him from getting any action.

I think both sides overrate morality as a factor in sexual success.

Maybe Mr. Rogers was an asshole. However, he also sucked at being an asshole. Before the murders, he had managed to engage in some low-level assholery, spraying orange juice at passing couples and trying to throw someone off a balcony before being beaten and thrown off himself. He was unable to recruit allies and was a less effective asshole than your local drunken brawler.

It's not about morality, it's about the fact that being pissy and whiny is hugely unsexy.

Look, you read anything by Rodgers, and it's a constant torrent of "Waaah! I'm rich, I'm handsome, I'm well-bred, I'm desirable, why doesn't anyone want to go out with me? Waaaah! Also fuck those low-class serfs who only exist to cater to the whims of their natural superiors like me, and why can my sister get a boyfriend and I can't get anyone? And why are my friends all going off with girls instead of hanging round with me? I DESERVE HOT CHICKS BECAUSE I'M THAT GREAT!"

You can feel sorry for him feeling isolated and frustrated, and want to give him a good kick up the backside for being so self-involved. His family do seem to have tried to help him, but he was too stuck in his own spiral of "it's not fair, it's not right, I should get what I want because I'm so great" and not willing to look at "maybe being unpleasant to be around has something to do with why people don't want to be around me?"

Of course he was extremely unpleasant generally, but I felt you were kinda reducing it to: he wasn’t showing the girls proper consideration, therefore he couldn’t get laid, as if that was the true measure and cause of all things.

I didn't get the impression that @FarNearEverywhere was arguing that all incels are assholes. I think almost everyone on this board would agree that there are plenty of pleasant, well-meaning people who are lonely and romantically/sexually frustrated through no fault of their own, purely as a result of being unattractive or socially awkward.

But Elliot Rodger was a grumpy dickhead, long before he committed his murder spree. Perhaps being a grumpy dickhead wasn't the only or primary reason that he was lonely and romantically frustrated, but I'd be very surprised if it helped.

If I had to generally say what most (straight) dudes I know who have no troubles with constantly getting women have in common, it would probably be that they are funny guys who are generally fun to hang out even if you're a (straight) guy yourself. Rodger, by no account, was one. You can of course be a dick towards some people, like the staff, and still be gregarious with your friends, but Rodger just seems like a boiling cauldron of loathing towards everyone.

Most people aren't perfect at code switching between "want to abuse janitor" and "want to impress chick" personality. Also, not all social inferiors are socially inferior in the same way. I've heard of guys being popular because they mogged on some guy in their social group or fended off a bum, not so much for yelling at a girl behind the counter in McDonalds.

In short, when angry guys in the manosphere observe that women don't like them even though they like other assholes just fine, they often fail to observe that they're not the correct sort of asshole.

Sometimes, often, they genuinely aren't assholes though. It's just that their way of not being assholes is not attractive. And that's okay. It's not women's responsibility, anyone's responsibility, to reward kind unassuming people with sex. But from a just world theory standpoint you can’t say that, so the demonizing and counter-demonizing follows.

Yeah, but also when they do try to be assholes their way of being assholes isn't attractive either.

There's also something to be said for not mistaking "kind" for "refraining from being unkind because you'd be bad at it".

I do not blame women from assuming the worst of those guys, really, because I've seen enough to believe that women do really have to deal, or in best case to expect to deal, with a whole lot of repulsive men.

They generally don’t go out, be assholes, and then come back saying that being an asshole doesn’t work. They just stew in the belief that they would be successful if they were assholes. And I have to defend their view again a bit here.

To be successful, they’d have to play the social game, which is essentially zero sum. So they’d have to step on a few toes, clip a few wings on their way to the social middle. Very social, inherently high status people can get to and maintain their righteous place in the social hierarchy with minimal breakage, but that’s not in the cards for the bitter rejects we’re talking about here. They’d have to crudely beat up on some other losers and social inferiors just to get to the social center.

That's just how the game is played, you have to say 'me first' a little.

i think giving any kind of attention to the shooters increases the probability of future shootings. i think there is very strong evidence that a similar thing happens with suicides. i'm not sure how big of an impact it is or if its worth the trade off to suppress such things but in a free society it is difficult to suppress such things.

but in a free society it is difficult to suppress such things

Well, that and mass shootings have political benefits to the side the media is on.
Which is why the ones that aren't the demographics they want to tar and feather get dropped relatively quickly compared to the "white men" ones.

Seeing that it reads as a diary moreso than a manifesto had me, for a moment, believing in the possibility that trans women are indeed real women and this is the evidence. Then I realized it was a FTM.

Biology is inescapable.

But then again, mass shootings take balls so there might be something honorary in it for her.

But then again, mass shootings take balls so there might be something honorary in it for her.

First mass shooter, or school shooter, I ever heard of was the girl who inspired The Boomtown Rats' I Don't Like Mondays:

The Cleveland Elementary School shooting was a school shooting that took place on January 29, 1979, at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, United States. The principal and a custodian were killed; eight children and police officer Robert Robb were injured. A 16-year-old girl, Brenda Spencer, who lived in a house across the street from the school, was convicted of the shootings. Charged as an adult, she pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon, resulting in her being sentenced to life in prison with a chance of parole after 25 years. As of 2023, she is still in prison.

A reporter reached Spencer by phone while she was still in the house after the shooting, and asked her why she committed the crime. She reportedly answered: "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day", which inspired Bob Geldof and Johnnie Fingers to write the Boomtown Rats song "I Don't Like Mondays".

So despite it being perceived as male-dominated or even male-only, sisters have been doing it for themselves too.

God, how I loathe that song. Has Bob Geldof written anything good?

Ah now, Rat Trap is good to sing along to when you're at that perfect age of teenage angst 😁

Well, the hand writing certainly looks like it was written by a boy…

If I see a guy using !!! in any context, I'm going to rip off his pants to see if he has any balls underneath them.

As for the handwriting, it looks pretty gender neutral to me, but I am a doctor, so maybe I have brain damage from reading notes left by consultants who should have retired after their cerebral palsy got this bad..

On a side note, I occasionally visit /r/GoodNotes, a sub for discussion regarding said note taking software which I rely on heavily myself, even if I'm using the obsolete 5 after the 6th version moved to an abominable subscription service. It's 80% women shilling Etsy sticker packs of ridiculous ornamentation and others posting "aesthetic" notes showing off their handwriting or typography. I am forced to retreat in confusion, given that my use case is purely agglomeration and annotating the terabytes of medical notes I need for yet more exams.

If I see a guy using !!! in any context, I'm going to rip off his pants to see if he has any balls underneath them.

I have to admit I have written notes with !!! to indicate important developments or other critical issues…

You're a pigeon, in your case a cloaca is entirely normal haha

Literally this: https://br.ifunny.co/picture/matty-mashhhuu-professor-ok-for-the-first-day-i-m-LjLCPKxF8

?

Sorry, I meant to link to this: https://br.ifunny.co/picture/matty-mashhhuu-professor-ok-for-the-first-day-i-m-LjLCPKxF8

To me, the handwriting looks practically indistinguishable from how the archetypal basic white girl would take lecture notes.

That link lands on a removed commment under a photo of Lady Gaga wearing an orrery as a hat.

Ugh for fuck's sake, thanks for letting me know.

Weirdly enough exactly the same thing happened the other week: https://www.themotte.org/post/728/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/152420?context=8#context

And that is represented by Lady gaga wearing an orrery or by some redditor saying nice hat?

Sorry, it was pointing to the wrong link for some reason. I meant to link this: https://br.ifunny.co/picture/matty-mashhhuu-professor-ok-for-the-first-day-i-m-LjLCPKxF8

Weirdly enough exactly the same thing happened the other week: https://www.themotte.org/post/728/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/152420?context=8#context

I remember, because I was just as baffled then.

The word "home" is encircled by a love heart. I've never even met a gay man who'd do something like that.

That's not what I'm referring to. I'm talking about how the letters are formed and how consistent they are. Look at the note where she's calling her targets faggots. It's all over the place. The letter formation isn't consistent from one word to the next, let alone inside words that have multiple of the same letter. The letters that stick up or go below the line are often smushed to the point of looking like a completely different letter.

None of this makes it completely illegible. You can still tell what letters they are based on context. But that doesn't mean it's neat. Girl handwriting is almost always clean and consistent. Their neatest handwriting gets close to looking like a font.

This is a girls' handwriting if I've ever seen one. How bad can you be at recognizing gendered writing not to see this.

Have we considered ‘uh, she was mentally ill’? I believe inconsistent handwriting is literally a symptom of schizophrenia; it’s certainly a stereotype.

There's also some probably-subclinical things that might make someone's handwriting mediocre or average instead of excellent. Hypermobility is one of them, and trans people are disproportionately hypermobile. Same for autism and the sensory bullshit and weirdness that goes with that. Including, say, mild dyspraxia or clumsiness.

TL;DR trans, a bit more likely to be loose-jointed and a bit clumsy.

I agree a lot of women have very neat penmanship, but I wouldn't say neatness is synonymous with femininity. The handwriting in Hale's manifesto/diary/whatever looks broadly similar to this, and both look distinctly feminine to me, even though the latter example is far from consistent (although certainly neater than Hale's penmanship). It's hard to pinpoint exactly what makes penmanship look "feminine", but for me it's something to do with the broadness and roundedness of the characters: the lowercase As are much larger and rounder than I would write mine. It's referred to here as "bubble" handwriting which I think is an apt description. I think men, regardless of whether their penmanship is neat or messy, generally have a preference for narrower and straighter characters.

I shouldn't even be surprised that (like vocal pitch or gait), this is a trait that transgender people are aware is gendered and go out of their way to train themselves into doing.

While I'd hum and haw a bit about "girls and boys have different writing styles", I can see why the transgender lobby is so desperate that "biology not real". The amount of determinism there about gender roles based on biology, that there really is rigidly a gender binary and two sexes, so that your real sex will show up in the tiniest ways does mean that if you genuinely feel you are the wrong sex (because by now 'sex' and 'gender' have become interchangeable terms and people seem to have ditched 'being transgender is only about the gender you express, not your biological sex' talk) then you have to insist on advanced biology in order to argue that no, this is not a disorder or mental illness, it's totally natural, look earthworms are hermaphrodite!

Your advanced biology link leads to a thread about Lady Gaga having a funny hat. It seems to happen every time someone shares an old.reddit link. The exact same thing happened to me this morning.

Well now that's odd.

It looks like a user-side problem with the Old Reddit Redirect extension:

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/164uqjg/why_do_ireddit_image_links_go_to_that_ancient/
https://old.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/15p1ctt/why_does_clicking_any_image_on_reddit_open_the/

https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect/issues/99

Developer says it's fixed but as suggested on the Github page I removed and reinstalled the already updated addon and still have the problem.

Uh, does it? I thought the only way it could have looked more feminine is if the Is were dotted with little hearts and the whole thing was in a Hello Kitty diary.

Most of it looks like chicken scratches. Would 100% earn “you’ll be a doctor someday” jokes. I’ve met very few women with handwriting that shit. For a guy it’s not the worst in the world, my hand writing is way worse, I’d say it’s just a bit below average for boy handwriting.

Or am I out of touch and all teenagers have garbage handwriting now?

I’ve met very few women with handwriting that shit.

Just an anecdotal aside, but my mom's handwriting has always been pretty terrible (and now that she's in her 60s, it's approaching illegibility).

Or am I out of touch and all teenagers have garbage handwriting now?

That's been my, admittedly limited, experience. For that matter, I think it was when I reached 5th grade (1992-1993) that they stopped teaching us handwriting in school and had us start submitting all reports (and generally anything not a "fill-in-the-blank" worksheet) as typed up on computer and printed out. With modern electronic communications, do they even do the "print out a physical copy on paper" step anymore?

Well most teenagers barely write anything anymore outside of sometimes at school, they type it.

Something about the clearly formed loops in letters looks very feminine to me. It's not the ultra neat penmanship you'd expect of a grade A student, but that's not who this was, this was a deeply mentally unwell girl who thought she was a boy. As far as tomboy writings go, it matches up well. The handwriting is inconsistent in places, I assume, because she was undergoing a continuous mental breakdown.

It all looks extremely legible and vaguely feminine to me. Perhaps my standards are far too low (re. legibility).

Agreed. It's nowhere near typical "good girl" handwriting (the valedictorian in my high school had handwriting that looked not just like a font, but like a cursive typewriter) but it's very legible and has some obviously feminine features (like the heart).

Also, it's not a manifesto, it's a diary or journal (or two), which strikes me as more feminine (this is obviously culturally mediated, diaries weren't always female coded, but they are now)

Look at the note where she's calling her targets faggots. The handwriting is all over the place. The letter formation isn't consistent from one word to the next, let alone inside words that have multiple of the same letter. The letters that stick up or go below the line are often smushed to the point of looking like a completely different letter.

It's legible enough to understand if you slow down a bit. You can still tell what's being said due to context. But in no way would I call it neat, especially for a girl. Girl handwriting can get almost font like. As I said, my handwriting is way worse, but I have appalling handwriting even for a guy. My handwriting is often not legible to anyone but myself unless I slow down to an impractical pace.

I only glanced at it, and I assume these entries, like many diary entries, weren't meant with a future audience in mind necessarily, but for the writer to essentially vomit thoughts onto the page. I've read many, many handwritten pages throughout my teaching career and I'd have thought girl looking at these. Not girlie girl, but female.

That doesn't mean I'm right and you're wrong, it's just what I thought and still think. You have a point that some sections are far less legible.

Biology might be inescapable, but when you introduce testosterone into a system that may not have been designed to handle it, it's not that surprising that something like this happens a certain percentage of the time (no claims on what percentage).

But, like, testosterone is rough to deal with even for people who were introduced to it in the way nature intended.

The biggest surprise to me is that it doesn't really mention being discriminated against for being trans.

Steven Crowder released it, so a possibility is that there are 100 pages and he only released the 3 that indicate anti-white and anti-Christian bigotry. Of course all of this can be resolved by making the diaries public.

Also semi-surprising to me is their repeated use of the word "faggot" as an insult.

This makes me believe it's real. If someone forged this to make a trans shooter look bad, an anti-gay slur is the last thing they would think of. It's bizarre and seemingly out of place, which puts it in "schizo ramblings" territory.

It's bizarre and seemingly out of place, which puts it in "schizo ramblings" territory.

It also pattern matches to the FTMs I've known in real life, depending on the circumstances some of them practically used it as punctuation.

I think discussing any of these morons’ manifestos is counterproductive and in poor taste.

I'm not a huge fan of putting shooters (or other attention-seeking violent criminals) on blast, both for to avoid bad incentives and because of contagion risks. It's a good part of why I don't engage with the Unabomber fetishism here, even if there's some philosophically interesting points on the broader anarchoprim stuff. That said, I'm a pretty far outlier, and it had long gone from unusual to noteworthy how long it'd taken for these to be released or leaked, to the point where I was skeptical that they'd ever be released. The religious motivation seemed pretty obvious and just as obviously ignored, so I dunno what the point would have been.

There was a lot of speculation among more marginal left-wing spheres that the shooter was 'really' motivated by speculated physical abuse from the school (possibly sexual), and that was why a lot of the writings haven't been divulged yet; it's possible there's some details in other pages Crowder didn't publish, but what's present so far makes that look like a dud (and the refusal to publish them earlier a bad one, given how it let that speculation florish).

I wouldn't have been surprised to see this in a mtf trans shooter's diary, but it's a bit surprising to see from ftm trans. Maybe some sort of performative masculinity?

The f-word has a weird place inside internal LGBT discourse: there are major factions fighting over the extent the term can or should be reclaimed or turned against their enemies, where it's appropriate or inappropriate to use, and what it even means. This clearly isn't the reclamation side of things, and I'm not really familiar enough with the redirect side to speak on it in too much detail, but from the outside my impression is that it's less gendered and more about confrontation.

Also semi-surprising to me is their repeated use of the word "faggot" as an insult. I wouldn't have been surprised to see this in a mtf trans shooter's diary, but it's a bit surprising to see from ftm trans. Maybe some sort of performative masculinity?

Just 4chan shit, I think.

What are your thoughts?

Mainly that it's a perfect example of how "X% of political violence is right-wing" is pretty much always just a lie.

Some of them go right for whatever insult they feel like screaming, like this person who thinks they've been misgendered, tries misgendering of their own and when that doesn't work goes right for the screaming racial slurs.

Just 4chan shit, I think.

Sure, but 4chan is probably like 95% male and the female 5% are probably almost all ethots on the webcam board

What are your thoughts?

Sounds like 90% of Reddit TBH

More effort than this, please.

A number of DR figures were 100% certain that this manifesto was being intentionally concealed by The Powers That Be because it would reveal that the shooter hated Christians and committed the shooting as an act of trans rebellion against oppressive Christian conservatism. I am very interested to see if those same commentators will insist that they were basically correct, even though the manifesto as released does not seem to bear much resemblance to that at all.

Frankly, much like any other mass shooter, Audrey Hale appears to have been a garden-variety retarded angry kid, whose motivations were muddled, irrational, and incoherent. Hale was white, so the potshots at white people make no sense, and are merely expressions of untargeted contrarian edgelord rage. Honestly not that interesting, and doesn’t teach us anything of value about “what the trans movement wants to do to every conservative Christian” or “what the left wants to do to white people” or anything like that. Just the sad ranting of a useless retard.

Based on these notebooks, we're not looking at another Unabomber. "Retarded Angry Kid" seems correct. Extremist rhetoric sometimes trickles down to these types and has tragic results. Various shootings have been done by Alt-Right Retarded Angry Kids in recent years.

I believe the phrase they usually like to use is "stochastic terrorism". At least, they like to use it when it can be used against their enemies.

If you haven't read this article, I think you will enjoy it: https://drrollergator.substack.com/p/stochastic-terrorism-a-game-of-rhetorical

Hale was white, so the potshots at white people make no sense

Where have you been this past decade? There’s been a whole cohort of young white people raised to hate white culture and white people because of propaganda that depicts them as stained with the sins of oppression and racism. This is called “white privilege” discourse. The shooter specifies white privilege as one of her motivations for the shooting. The motivation is not muddled. She absorbed far left propaganda to hate her race and she lashed out violently as a result. She mentions white privileged, khakis, fancy schools and “Daddy’s money” because these are the ideological memes that she came in contact with.

Obviously I am intimately familiar with that discourse, but when you are talking about literally wanting to personally kill white people because they’re white, that is not something I believe we’ve ever witnessed a white terrorist or mass shooter do. (Plenty of non-white killers have done so, but not whites as far as I know.)

White progressives who claim to hate white people usually advocate a variety of policies and cultural changes that would adversely affect white people if enacted. These changes would lower whites’ quality of life, deny them opportunities, punish expressions of their culture, dispossess them of the wealth of their ancestors, etc. But believing that it would be a good thing if currently-living white people were violently killed is something that only an extremely tiny fringe of white individuals do. The vast majority of white progressives, deluded as they may be about other things, are perfectly able to recognize the blatant self-destructive insanity of believing “somebody ought to murder me for being white!”. For Hale to believe white people should be murdered, despite being white her/himself, is a pretty clear sign of a deeply distorted and incoherent mind.

This relates to something I've seen referred to as "generational loss of hypocrisy." The first "generation" who put out some bit of hyperbolic, extreme rhetoric may not really believe it, nor live by it. They might quietly carve out unprincipled exceptions for themselves in practice, or acknowledge the performativity of it all in private among themselves.

But if, when "in public," they keep preaching the message consistently, for long enough, then at least some of the next "generation" who absorb it will end up taking it seriously.

There's someone I've interacted with a bit online who, since at least a few years ago, repeatedly raised the issue of the extreme nature and implications of much of academic "decolonization" discourse, especially the bits about being "unconcerned with settler futurity." The common rejoinder to these was always that nobody actually takes any of that stuff literally, or would ever actually follow through to the terrible-yet-logical conclusions implied…

…and yet, now we are seeing that, no, quite a few people do indeed take all that seriously.

A cult leader may have been a conman who made it all up as a grift, but if the group manages to persist long enough after his death, it will probably end up made of true believers.

I see this as greasing the slope while complaining about the slippery slope fallacy. The slippery slope is, of course, a fallacious argument made against people wanting to push forward things like the whole "white privilege" discourse; the fallacy is in that moving away from the status quo to some position X doesn't necessarily imply that we'll go to 2X or 4X or 10X or whatever if given time. We're trying to nail the exact correct height to land at here, and it happens to be lower than where we are right now, and we will engineer society to nail that exact correct height, not an inch lower, and we don't deserve an iota of responsibility for the people who have decided that they want to push it lower the slope. Those are different people, not us.

But it turns out that the method we use to reach that precise lower place on the slope matters, and if that involves pouring grease on the slope so we can more easily go lower, then we don't get to claim innocence (we might be able to claim ignorance, although ignorance would be more damning, not less, in the context of engineering social norms) when people slide down the slope far beneath that precise spot we intended to nail, and in fact we are responsible for that phenomenon. I think this has clearly happened and is clearly happening with the "white privilege" discourse openly attacking things like empirical measurements and logic and discouraging criticism and scrutiny on the basis of "solidarity" and similar concepts.

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