thanks for posting this, many people here seem to be hellbent on projecting onto the shooter whatever their preferred identity for him would be.
all i really care to know about him is that he’s a good shot.
I’m pretty sure I know his type and my guess is he “did it for the lulz”
Ok so suppose this is some seemingly normalish apolitical gamer kid that was foolishly taught to solve problems with guns. Kirk was blanket targetting people he cared about and took action to do something about it.
This is the MO of some guy who’s like neighbors are like threatening their wife. Its not a good solution but if the cops won’t help folks being threatened its what people do.
The same day a right wing trump gooner killed a bunch of kids in colorado. Its crazy that the media is all lockstep in whitewashing charlie kirk like this to explicitly go after people fully unrelated to the shootings.
It’s not crazy; they’re capitulating to keep their jobs, and probably their lives.
I’m just still mad Charlie Kirk is getting this much attention and the conservatives haven’t bat an eye to the children shot. I’m still mad the conservatives are the ones always advocating for guns and now that the conservatives have been attacked with a gun they say the left are the dangerous ones, even when the left are the ones who have been saying for years now the guns are out of hand.
This is coming from someone raised in a white conservative christian mom and dad household. They were always hoping for the end of the world or some sort of zombie apocalypse just so they could fully disconnect from the rest of the world and use their guns. When the left was pushing for better gun laws I always heard my parents outraged and saying “they will have to pry my guns out of my cold dead hands” - it’s no wonder I’m a leftist as an adult now. P.S. my parents were also fully on board that the sandy hook shooting was fake and it was all “fake actors” that’s all they think when it’s innocent children getting shot. But when it’s Charlie Kirk then they’re mad and it’s all the lefts fault.
I feel validated in an opinion I have had for ages : that in all the talk about 2nd Amendment rights Americans do guns are nothing but a security blanket they clutch to make them feel like Democracy will be saved or be maintained as long as they clutch their emotional support weapon. They will watch rights be stripped from them, their neighbours carted off in wagons and none of them will shoot even if they have the weapon on their person while this is happening. They will protest, they will write and verbalize their dissent and they will appeal to authority and band together democratically but the ownership of the weapons themselves are useless. Realistically if someone from the government comes for them they will likely go quietly because no one is coming to save them. At that point it’s basically over. The system is too big to fight.
The real resistance is in numbers not armaments. It doesn’t matter what you are wielding if you have solidarity and organization and the bravery to misbehave. Resistance can be in attacking the gears that make things run by not doing your job or doing it poorly. Refusing to comply in a multitude of ways like sending things to the wrong place or making ‘mistakes’ that cost time and effort to fix. A government can only force compliance so much and at the end of the day runs on good faith. Guns are a distraction to jingle in your face so you stay isolated. Building walls between you and other humans with dreams you will defend your own little fort against the tides of tyranny.
Its also the guns are only there to like shoot homeless people and kids apparently?
This is why Kirk was such a nutjob. He admitted the guns are just to kill kids but said it was worth it because insecure adults could still have their snuggy boomboom.
Conservative Americans and their love of guns isn’t really a Christian thing, it’s a cultural phenomenon that goes back to the American Revolution and earlier. Scots-Irish descended Americans have long had a culture based around gun ownership, militias, and xenophobia that may be traced back to England’s many invasions of Scotland and Ireland over the centuries since the Norman conquest of England.
Taking politics (mostly) out of it -
Luigi allegedly killed because he saw injustice and had empathy for other people, wanted to show the evils of health insurance companies.
This kid imo allegedly killed because he loved someone CK was spouting hateful narratives about. His empathy for this person he loved, and people like them who are just normal people living life, made it easy for him to turn to guns when he wanted this person gone for eternity.
People with empathy are snapping.
People with empathy are snapping.
This line hits hard. I hate this fucking timeline.
This is what the MAGAs don’t understand since MAGA requires, and trains, people to be Sociopaths.
An empathetic person will avoid violence for as long as possible, but when the forces against them become too great, and they snap, their empathy morphs into Protection Mode, and anyone who has people in their life that they protect, knows how dangerous Protection Mode can be.
I’ve been identifying my personal Red Lines, and one of the biggest is certain people in my life who are members of vulnerable demographics that MAGAs particularly despise. If anything were to happen to those people, I would become very dangerous. My empathy for them could easily be twisted into revenge against MAGA.
anyone who has people in their life that they protect, knows how dangerous Protection Mode can be.
And if you don’t, just ask a mama lion protecting her cubs…
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This is my personal conclusion about this situation because in my personal life people with empathy are drowning right now. It’s hard to live life these days if you give a single fuck about anything real, any real injustices or struggles people are living.
I just told my mama that I’m upset with her for raising me with empathy. Now I’m always broke. She couldn’t teach me to care more about money than people, ugh.
Didn’t CK say empathy was a bad thing?
The ultra Christians now say empathy is a sin.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/sin-empathy-christian-trump-vance-b2812330.html
Their central religious figure is literally God’s empathy taking on a human form. He empathized with the human experience to the point of experiencing a human death.
Amazing how people can be so bad at understanding their own religion.
*Very specific right wing mostly non-denominational Christians are saying this. Most Christians will think that’s an insane claim to make as most denominations dont hold that view
Then they need to speak the fuck up about it instead of stuffing their fingers in their ears and pretending everything is all honky dory.
Yes he did. The whole MAGA movement believes empathy is a bad thing.
Technically speaking they aren’t wrong ; empathy is a bad thing for MAGA. One could say antithetical.
But this doesn’t fit the other narrative that they have been talking about… which is him hating the guy for not being right enough or whatever you want to call it…
Yes, that’s why I took the politics out of it. Empathy can make you hate people enough to kill them if you see them hurting people you love. I think it’s been proven his house mate / partner is a trans person and they were romantically involved.
CK was sitting, sharing the hateful transphobic ideals he had the actual second he was murdered. Looking into this guy, he wasn’t a MAGA and he wasn’t a leftist. He wasn’t extreme politically and that’s precisely the medias / MAGAs problem : he was just a seemingly average dude who snapped because of the hatred and torment he witnessed from CK.
It’s only this political imo because he killed DT’s pet pig and they’re of course going to use that as FUD. I think the truth is probably that he would have killed CK regardless of who CK aligned with politically.
This is what a “slow pivot” looks like. Kirk’s killer didn’t turn out to be the gay, trans, rainbow polar bear the news was hoping for and did their hardest to promote.
The obvious “tidy narrative” is that the son of two Trump supporters, living in an ultra conservative state just might be a conservative himself.
He was taking revenge for having been brainwashed and conned.
Who does?
Here’s my tidy narrative: he was raised in MAGA family, was poorly educated and had a lot of exposure to extremists positions but little exposure to critical thinking. When he finally was exposed to different ideology at college he wasn’t able to process is correctly and reacted violently, as he was taught to do by his conservative upbringing.
That’s not a narrative though. A narrative is when he is clearly on team A or team B for a handful of cherry picked reasons that reduce his psychology to a caricature.
Coming in here with this sensible straight talking shit… Why I oughta …
A narrative is a story, whether fictional or not.
Guy went to college for one semester of virtual classes, and that was enough to radicalize him!? I want whatever you are smoking.
I think you didn’t go even for one semester because if you did, you would understand what I wrote.
My initial impression of his writings hit me as either Groyper posing as a leftist, or just an accelerationist psychopath.
Either way, it doesn’t change the fact that right-wing extremism makes up the majority of violence.
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If that was his thinking, then he’s terrible at foreseeing the coming chess moves from the other side.
It was quite obvious the Trump administration was doing everything in their power to provoke something like this so they could then utilize it as their Reichstag Fire / October 7th incident to further strip civil liberties and consolidate power.
Best thing he could’ve done was just do a public protest about Epstein and rally people to vote for midterms. I fail to see how this made vulnerable group safer in any way in all reality.
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Stochastic vigilantism
And let’s just hope it keeps pointing at assholes
That’s the sad part, it already isn’t. Many assholes on the right truly think they’re fighting a righteous war. Nay, a biblical crusade against evil. And they’re harming far more good people, both directly and indirectly.
All guardrails and checks & balances have since been broken to prevent this very thing from playing out but now it all just boils down to who can push a louder message to the masses and distort their perception of reality.
I’m pretty lost for answers on how to crawl our way out of this. My only hope is the economy tanks so hard that it hits the working class in their wallets. That’s pretty much the only thing they care about.
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There are VERY few situations where committing premeditated murder would be considered clinically neurotypical. The term psychopath is used so loosely, but would fall under antisocial personality disorder, which he very well could be diagnosed as.
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If the Discord is real, he seemed like a pretty normal guy. Apparently he was bisexual, and his girfriend might’ve been trans. According to the source at least. I don’t know any groypers, so I don’t know how they act, but I don’t think that they’re normally fine with that sort of thing. Somewhere else said that he claimes to have done it to silence the hate that Kirk spewed, which is a fair enough reason I guess. Lots of contradictory info. Maybe he was a groyper that woke up after meeting his girlfriend. Maybe he just did it for attention. Maybe he just snapped. I’m just hoping for the best, that he did it for a decent enough reason, not to start a race war. We might even find out, if he isn’t Epsteined.
channers like most people are hypocrites
‘she was a good one’
Sure. Just something to think about.
i called it 4chan speak just from the rumored bullet casings before it was announced he was a Fuentes fanboy, not sure what there is to think about
humans are really good at ignoring reality and doubling down with self hatred, how many gay republican politicians have made the news over the years now?
we really don’t need to invent trans support motivations
plenty of other examples of right wing political violence, just recently both the trump shooter and that lady rep and her dog
but surely it’ll be a dangerous drag queen perp next time
Because none of this stuff is actually trustworthy, because we can’t trust the government to do anything right or tell the truth. The bullet casings might be made up, I don’t think any real evidence of those were ever released. He’s probably conservative, and I think that everyone knows that. I’d just like more substantial evidence, which it doesn’t seem that we’re going to get, certainly not anytime soon. The text messages are obviously faked, so they’re obviously trying to construct the “evil leftist” narrative.
the early stuff likely was real
pretty sketch now for sure
We might find out, but will anybody care?
I saw some of the Discord on Ken Klippensteins website. Are there other links to it that show more conversation?
No, this is just from what he wrote. Apparently he got a publicly unavailable picture of the two of them as evidence, so it’s not impossible that it’s real. I think that too many of us might’ve been a bit too quick to hop on the groyper thing, just because he was online a ton. And someone named Tyler Robinson in the St. George area donated to Trump 5 years ago, when Robinson was 17.
Either way, it doesn’t change the fact that right-wing extremism makes up the majority of violence.
Even if it can be concluded that he acted out of left-wing motivations, his Conservative upbringing led him to react with a right-wing solution.
Had he been raised a Lefty, he would have been protesting, making phone calls, writing emails, and voting, not shooting.
What exactly makes you say things like that? I’m genuinely curious what part of the discord conversations make people draw these conclusions.
I’m referring more to the immediate aftermath of the event. I wasn’t very clear when I said writings but rather writings on the casings and the immediate reaction of Fuentes.
How a comment that spreads unsubstantiated rumours which this article specifically states as being so is at the top of this thread is beyond me.
Do confirm that you actually believe this is unsubstantiated:
Either way, it doesn’t change the fact that right-wing extremism makes up the majority of violence.
Now in fairness I’ll clarify that I am focusing on politically motivated violence.
Additionally, did you miss the past tense of the first point?
You admit to not being clear before, that’s whats wrong with your comment, don’t strawman me lmao. You refer to his writings, which in this context would obviously refer to the Discord conversations this article is about.
Hundreds of people saw you referring to his writings in your comment, yet only a handful will see this clarification it’s about the scribbles on the bullets. That is how unsubstantiated rumours spread.
this country isn’t ready for what the youngest online male zoomers are like lol. i’m a millennial but i’ve been here the whole time watching cultures come and go and the memelord nihilist has been growing since ‘04. there are many variations and they range from sad and pathetic yet ultimately harmless to sad and pathetic and goddamn dangerous. these people can have a mixture of politics and usually prefer whatever has the most public condemnation so they can align themselves with immorality as a point of pride which becomes their identity. fuck having your own beliefs, just follow whatever gets the most negative response from society.
It’s the way disempowerment interacts with tribalism and a saturated obviously polarized media environment.
This is only gonna get stupider. The cure is giving people agency over their lives, authorship over their world. Make the things they believe actually fucking matter.
Agreed - I really hate doing this “next generation bad” thing, but this really is a different situation than what we’ve seen before. The way the Internet creates a feedback loop of extremism around every single topic is terrifying, and people are completely missing the profound effects this is having on developing brains - priming them for radicalization while critical thought atrophies.
When we grew up we had a set of influences which grounded us in reality. Even if we found subversive places on the Internet, we still spent most of our time with our parents and teacher and coaches, etc. This is completely inverted now. Kids traverse the internet like a dog sniffing out idiotic ideas, and when they find the validation they seek, there’s seemingly no way to pull it out of them.
I used to live in a house that was on a big circle, with all the back yards joining in the middle. None of the houses had fences, so it was just one huge field, with the occasional tree. If that had been my backyard as a kid in the 60s and 70s, that giant field of combined backyards would have been filled with kids every day. I would have known the names of every other kid, where they lived, and probably their parents, too.
But when I lived there about 10 years ago, I seldom saw a single kid out there. In the 5 years I was there, I saw kids playing maybe 3 times.
A couple years before we moved, one of the house on the circle sold to a family with kids. They put a giant fence up, and the kids played in their own backyard, with no contact with others.
i hear ya. i’m not one to participate in generation wars but zoomers were given access to the worst parts of the internet left behind by millennials and younger gen xers and it is doing a number on them psychologically. i feel bad more than anything. our government didn’t care and let these kids get ruined by their control of information through media and the internet.
as someone what has been online since '96…don’t these kids realize we were all joking? evidently not. They take it seriously when “back in my day” we would have ridiculed them for it. I mean I’m old enough to see the rise and fall of 4chan, it’s dead now but at it’s peak it was dumb troll comics and edgelord antics. Then all of sudden zoomers decided that our shitposts were things to model their lives around.
It’s like when I was a kid and we had convinced my friends little brother that if he held a battery on his tongue for long enough he could get mutant powers. like no dude, you’re not getting power and confidence, you just look like an idiot with a battery on his tongue.
i want to push back a little bit on this because while i believe some of us were joking there were tons who weren’t and are ultimately responsible for the chronically online zoomers we see today. young gen xers and older millennials built the culture of the late 90s and early 00s internet that became the blueprint for the mid 10s to now. we had some of the worst racism and bullying imaginable on 4chan and it spread to the real world on occasion in horrifyingly cruel ways, like taunting parents of recently deceased kids and shit. we weren’t all joksters, the cruelty started early and spread rapidly. we allowed the internet to be eroded by the destruction of anonymity and infiltration of corporate and political interests.
is that like “black-pilled”?
What about the tidy narrative of raised in a conservative home with early and easy access to guns?
There haven’t been many shooters that weren’t around right wingers and guns at home, wherever their supposed personal ideologies became.
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“I am still okay my love…”
Does anyone his age write like that?
Honestly, this isn’t far off how I texted at his age. I’ve seen a lot of skepticism of the texts, but I don’t find them hard to believe from someone with his background, disposition, and test scores.
Test scores? Damn people are really probing.
Possibly, especially a lot of weird conservative kids who don’t fully understand how relationships work. But really it’s not a huge deal.
Shocking that a terminally online 22 year old doesn’t have a consistent ideology.
I saw a comment on instagram from someone saying Charlie Kirk had had some “powerful comments” in his videos. Checked the profile and there was a ton of pro-environment, anti-cop content. Most people don’t think super hard about their political ideology.
Most people don’t think super hard about their political ideology.
This is perhaps the most important insight one can have when it comes to entertaining the ‘fun’ discussions on christmas dinner. Both in constructing an argument and maintaining healthy relationships.
People really cling to being a “good” person. And not thinking can serve as a shield to maintain this; at least within one’s own self-image.
“not thinking”
It’s not so much that, as Wrong Thinking. As humans, we are supposed to employ Critical Thinking, but it isn’t instinctual, we have to learn it. Just as importantly, we have to hone our Critical Thinking Skills, and use them constantly. That’s how humans are supposed to think.
But if your education didn’t include solid Critical Thinking Skills training, then you have a major hole in your ability to process society. That intellectual vacuum wants to be filled by something. Some people don’t fill it with anything, and they bounce around making one stupid decision after another. Others fall under the spell of propaganda, which Critical Thinking Skills are particularly successful at resisting, and become radicalized in some way, such as MAGA, or ISIS.
Conservatives have been historically hostile at Critical Thinking Skills curriculum in schools. The Texas Republican Party even once put it in their official platform, explicitly stating that they oppose the teaching Critical Thinking Skills. Imagine creating an official policy that states that they oppose the teaching of PROPER, EFFECTIVE THINKING?
The MAGAs are literally creating a system to deliberately make their constituents more stupid, and vulnerable to manipulation. It’s hard to imagine anything more diabolical than that.
Critical thinking is never instinctual, it is a mode that has to be consciously engaged and maintained and the moment we let it drop then bias and heuristics take over.
Maybe that’s more social conditioning than essential characteristic, but studies show that it is a universal condition regardless. People who have been trained the most in critical thinking are actually more likely to let heuristics take over their decision making. See Dan Kahneman’s work on behavioral economics.
Of course he fits into a tidy narrative: whatever one the right wants. Clearly he’s trans, trans-adjacent, trans-influenced, trans-atlanic who did a bad because the social contagion eroding the social fabric of western (read: cis straight white male-dominated christian) civilization. We knew these facts before Kirk’s body hit the floor.
The rest of the “details” like, reality and evidence or whatever, doesn’t really matter.
He is whatever will make their base ignore further and deeper encroachments in to their, and everyone American’s, rights.
