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.
Planted chats. Full of boomer speak. It’s not even chatgpt. Just.traight boomer speak.
Good, fuck using fancy LLMs to generate text, just write the fucking words yourself!
People want a good weapon they can use to hurt others. But the store only has a human shaped tool. How can we swing that at others?
Please, I just need a “he was a groyper.” The guy behind me wants a “he was trans.”
The more ergonomic the concept the better. Don’t tell me it’s complex or untidy. What’s the point of being trained by the media? I have all these patterns… just fit the guy into one already.
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…
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.
What are you trying to say?
Do you actually believe that 22 year olds talk like this? They’ve been trying to push a narrative since the bullet was fucking fired.
They want to make this into a martyrdom. They are going to force the story to match.
I can believe 22 year olds talk like this, by these newer accounts he seemed very normal, likeable and intelligent.
But I also think there is a concerted effort to twist the narrative every which way, to emphasize the more extreme elements and mischaracterize the mundane elements as extreme. I don’t think we will know what happened for sure, for a long time.
To me, the evaluation that he was sort of apolitical is the most baffling explanation. That he was closeted bi and in a relationship with a trans or transitioning woman carries a lot of baggage when viewed by right wing hate movements who control vast parts of the government and media. But to me and probably you, this is just sort of normal for his generation. Based on that, even if he was a groyper, we won’t know until we hear it from him, which we won’t until after the trial. The right is too invested in hushing that part up, as I think you’re alluding to.
But I don’t think we are to the point of total show trials and completely fabricated evidence at the level of a court document, which itself would have to be backed by verifiable evidence. I have no doubt that facts were being massaged to fit the rights narrative, but it appears the roommate was rightfully horrified by Robinson’s actions and cooperated with police, by all verifiable accounts.
I think we need to be very careful with how we perceive news as its coming in. I’m fortunate to have many people and orgs in my life where I can have detailed, deep, probing discussions about current events, because without those people I would be a stark raving lunatic right now. The conspiracy mindset seeps into every bit of my thinking, because we know there are actual conspiracies happening! We just don’t know the specific content or subject of them which leads to wild speculation.
There is a period in the news cycle that I call “fog of war” where you literally can’t see what is actually happening. Its usually better for ourselves and others if we reserve final judgement for when the facts are mostly all in.
They literally claimed that the “TRNS” marking on the bullet from the manufacturer was “trans ideology.”
Do we have any evidence that they were romantically involved with the “transgender roommate” or that that person was trans at all? I thought he was living with his family?
We are at the point where they are just making shit up. We know for a fact that they hired people to go through the Epstein files and remove Trump’s name. They used photoshopped pictures to claim Kilmer Garcia was a gang member. They slaughtered 11 people on a boat with no evidence that they were drug smugglers.
It is time to be fucking conspiratorial. We have a president who openly wants to be a dictator. We have an entire right wing grifter sphere that claims every single mass shooter is trans, as it fucking happens.
Stop giving charity to Patel and this administration.
Ken Klippenstein verified some of these details in his interviews and research https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/exclusive-leaked-messages-from-charlie
You do realize that just believing the opposite of what your enemy says is not engaging in factual analysis right? Our enemies can, and do, twist their narratives in many ways in order to obscure facts by encouraging tribalist, campist justification in their enemies (us.)
I don’t see any messages in that post that confirm the dialogue I posted.
The federal conclusion will inevitably be that he was a so-called nihilist violent extremist (NVE)
That is a lot of confidence in the administration to let law enforcement do its job properly and not politicize the findings.
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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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.
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.
Guy went to college for one semester of virtual classes, and that was enough to radicalize him!? I want whatever you are smoking.
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.
AKA, just like everyone else.
I’m a little annoyed with how quickly everyone here latched onto the Groyper narrative and parroted it as established fact. Seems unhelpful to run with a story before any evidence came out.
I have a lot of hate in my inbox for telling people that latching onto the groyper narrative was the equivalent of the right claiming the shooter is trans. They sure are quiet lately.
You dumbasses out there just want distance from someone you don’t want representing you.
BE INTELLECTUALLY HONEST YOU FUCKING CHILDREN.
We don’t win by being as deluded as the WWE spectacle chuds who don’t think and just want sides and teams and fighting for territory.
shit, i was hoping this shooter was leftist. i was hoping he was the first sign that the left was willing to do more than just shout while they walk around with signs.
Username checks out. Say hi to your FBI agent, mine says “sup.”
if you’re not on a list by now, you’re not doing it right.
We’re starting to see Democrats react to things the same way MAGAs do. It may not be pretty, but the Michelle Obama Doctrine of “When they go low, we go high,” led directly to the successful rise, and revival, of MAGA, so getting a little ugly has been needed for a long time.
I’m sad that the supposedly better side is spreading missinformation and propaganda just like that.
Specially because it’s pushing a propaganda about “If your parents are X you are X”. Which is really harmful for all the people not following the same ideology as their parents.
I think it’s just common sense. When the fascists start spewing “he’s super leftist and trans” propaganda you don’t respond with “wait, we have to wait for more facts”. You respond with your own propaganda. Being nice and following rules will not help you stop fascism. The groyper narrative might have actually prevented retaliation and saved lives.
The groyper narrative might have actually prevented retaliation and saved lives.
I seriously doubt it, you are doing what most users of these platforms do, which is not looking at the right-wing sites and forums and seeing what their narratives looked like. (Hint: it was very focused and only wavered in the details and it’s STILL solid as fuck because they have strict controls over narratives.)
The only segment of their side who both knew what a groyper was and heard the rumor are not threats to anyone, they’re as chronically online as anyone here and not part of any real movement or action.
Yeah, your not going to change narratives on right-wing sites but as I see it the administration did flinch when identity of the shooter was revealed. They went from “democrats are responsible for this murder” to “democrats are being mean to us online”. They are still threatening to go after left-wing organizations but because of online comments, not because of the murder. I think this moment of hesitation on their side was small yet important win and the groyper narrative helped here. Am I delusional? I could be.
When I was in politics I have a friend that used to say: “The best way to win is not to act like them”.
I still live by that phrase. I don’t want ro become then thing I want to destroy.
Personally, I would rather live in a democracy as a liar than die under fascism knowing that I always told the truth.
The thing is that when you build something using the enemy tactics you end up with the country the enemy wanted.
When you use fascist tactics you end up in a fascist state. If you don’t believe me ask me most revolutionary countries that did “everything possible” to build the workers paradise.
I don’t really think there’s a way to do bad things and end up with a good result.
I don’t really think there’s a way to do bad things and end up with a good result
Worked pretty well in WWII. when someone is as bad as the Nazis (and MAGA is every bit as bad as the Nazis), doing very bad things to them is the moral choice. You aren’t hurting bad people, you are protecting good people, using the appropriate level of force required. It’s a necessary use of violence to defend the good.
If we are at war give me a rifle and let’s go killing people.
If we are not at war we shouldn’t behave like that.
Anyway, the allies didn’t lie about the nazis. Or about the people killing the nazis.
I’m 100% serious that I’m more against lying about the killer than against the assassination per se.
Among other things, if the killed end up being left wing you are throwing a lot of shit about a a fellow leftist, calling him groyper, racist and everything. And he may be “one of us”. That’s a fucked up thing to do in the name of propaganda.
Propaganda is just marketing. In fact, the guy who coined the word propaganda was an expert in marketing and advertising.
MAGAs have the Conservative Propaganda Machine, which is a wonder to behold, and 100% responsible for their success. They are extremely organized and have been honing their skills for DECADES. The CPM recruits, indoctrinates, excuses, rallies, insults, spins, and much more. It is their nuclear weapon, and they deploy it all day, EVERY day.
The Dems have literally nothing to offer in response. Even their own representatives, like Schmuck Schumer, are far more interested in insider trading than governing. He just recycles the same stern letter/speech for each loss of our Constitutional rights. Look at how Trump broadcasts his success with everything, even if it hasn’t even happened. Contrast that with Biden, who had an extremely successful presidency, but the Dems didn’t think it would be polite to brag. So his presidency ended up being dominated by his piss poor performance in reigning in MAGA, which was well within his rights and responsibilities to CRUSH as a viable National Security Threat, and he will forever be remembered as one of the weakest presidents in history.
If the Dems are ever going to regain power, they need to get control of their messaging. Right now, it is literally non-existent. It needs to be coordinated, widespread, and LOUD.
They also need a progressive platform, but that’s a separate discussion.
I don’t disagree that having a counter during the initial heat of things was necessary. I’m just saying it bothers me that the delivery wasn’t “here’s some good lines of questioning and the conclusions they lead to” and was instead to saturate the front page with absolute certainty. That just feels disingenuous now, and made it more difficult to come across new verified information, which is really just a disservice to everyone.
Yeah it helped muddy the water and basically kept it liquid and nuclear till the actual facts could assert themselves. Even if the right still thinks he’s an Uber leftist what matters is that folks who don’t know may not believe that.
nuclear
😂
HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH IVE COME TO HATE AUTOCORRECT SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR AUTOCORRECT AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR AUTOCORRECT. HATE. HATE.
aight I’m done with the I have no mouth and I must scream meme.
Internal Screaming
I can see the argument in favor of putting out literally any other story once bigoted lies start swirling. A narrative of any kind sticks better and provokes a feeling of uncertainty rather than just asking for it.
Especially to sub-literate animals who understand tone but not actual words. Like Americans.
I’ll leave this here for others like me who apparently are really out of the loop
Groypers, sometimes called the Groyper Army, are a group of alt-right, white nationalist, and Christian nationalist 41 activists led by Nick Fuentes. Groypers are a loosely defined group of Fuentes’s followers and fans. They are named after a cartoon amphibian named “Groyper”, a variant of the Internet meme Pepe the Frog.
They just needed it to be the right so bad that they went with whatever they could find.
dickhead shoots dickhead. Easy!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
is that like “black-pilled”?
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.
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.
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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 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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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.
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.
We might find out, but will anybody care?
