I’ve been disturbed for the last day by all the unfounded speculation that Charlie Kirk’s killer was a far left fanatic, gay or trans, and that this was a hate crime against conservatives, which I had to recognize as a possibility. That was the constant drum beat from social media (and Donald Trump, and Nancy Mace, and all sorts of irrational people) at any rate, but suddenly, since late this afternoon, the drums have stopped pounding. The shooter has been caught. His personal history revealed. Suddenly, it has become apparent that he is a weird gamer from a right wing family who had criticized Kirk for not being conservative enough…and he may be a follower of Nick Fuentes and a groyper. The Serfs summarize what we know so far.
Oops. Don’t expect an apology, though, the right wing version of the story wasn’t based on facts or evidence, so facts won’t change their mind.
A civil war between right-wingers and far-right-wingers sure would be a terrible thing. Terrible terrible terrible.
I would tentatively lean this way, but it’s early still and way easy to assume too much as a counterpoint to the right wing narrative that took off with zero evidence. The groyper thing is intriguing though. I was not aware of the Groyper wars until today. IF (emphasis added) this was a result of someone acting on internecine right wing strife for Kirk being too moderate, that’s a bit of a mindfuck.
The right wing nutters seem to be backpedalling a bit but what was that adage attributed to Twain? — “ A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on”. The damage has been done.
And given how people have been saying how callous the Left is on Kirk’s murder we have…:
A civil war between right-wingers and far-right-wingers sure would be a terrible thing. Terrible terrible terrible.
I agree. And as Beginyahu would say, “I wish great success to both sides!”
There was this which on its face would make you think he was in lockstep with family ideology:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/charlie-kirk-suspects-grandma-says-family-is-all-maga/
But the Politifact link says he was not party affiliated and was inactive. Kirk obviously irked him for some reason.
There’s that photo of him kneeling in a costume that resembles a frog meme that is another face value thing that might lean one toward the alt-right explanation. Dunno.
It was a near certainty, as far as I could tell, that the shooter would be a young white man on the far reaches of the far right, most likely one still living with his parents. They’re the ones with the unbounded time to spend in the ugliest parts of the internet, the unfounded grievances, the easy access to weapons, the ability to move around unnoticed and unremarked upon, and the time to plan and execute such a thing. I would have been shocked if it had been anyone but the sort of person it turned out to be.
So, I guess we can expect the orange shit stain and the right to apologize soon, admitting they were wrong to be so quick to blame?
Groyper internet weirdo was my initial instinct on this one.
I don’t think the media will be able to cover this well (even if they were inclined to) because of just how incomprehensibly weird these niche online right-wing communities are. Layer upon layer of irony, Schrodinger Nazis, obscure references to media, memes, and videogames and even more confusing things remixed from of media, memes, and videogames.
For my elder millennial brethren and sistren: think of the absurd nonsense media we consumed during the early days of online flash video/games. Imagine if somehow the Badger Badger Badger Mushroom video got remixed by some nazi and then turned into a meme used exclusively by teenage edgelords to signal “I am/think you are a Nazi, are you?” to others of their ilk. Now imagine someone trying to shoot a minor politician with a bullet whose casing was etched with the words “f*cking mushroom” and a picture of a cartoon badger. How the hell would CNN explain that to an audience of half-asleep seniors?
How the hell can you explain the Com, TCC, 764, Order of Nine Angles…. I tried to explain just O9A to my wife a few months ago, and she just began making the universal British “wanker” gesture and told me it was too complicated and stupid for her to bother thinking about. And yet O9A inspired a serving US solder to make serious efforts to try to set his active-duty military unit up for ambush by the enemy. These things are absurd and complicated and disgustingly self-indulgent and self-referential. I despair. How the heck could the FBI even begin to infiltrate these…. communities? groups? discord channels and loosely affiliated individuals? There isn’t even really a name for the kinds of things that spawn people like this. No middle-aged, reasonably intelligent government intelligence worker is going to be able to consume the vast amount of extremist brain-rot you need to absorb to fit into these cultures, never-mind be able to figure out which members of them are likely to actually go on and do some violence.
See Molly Conger’s excellent podcast “Weird Little Guys”, and specifically her episodes on “terrorgram” for a good novice intro to this… phenomenon? I don’t have a good name for what this is.
I think the next phase of the right-wing response to this will be to pretend that there was no element of political extremism to the shooting at all and that the shooter was tragically mentally ill and we should all stop trying to politicize an issue that has nothing at all to do with gun access or extremist political radicalization. And also RFKJ is going to try to ban videogames.
Got to admit that I’m also not surprised and am quite relieved as well. Phew.
They had a very nasty backlash planned and were pretty much already foaming at the mouth ready to lash out with if the assassin had been leftwing at all esp Antifa or trans.
Got to admit that I’m also not surprised and am quite relieved as well. Phew.
They had a very nasty backlash planned and were pretty much already foaming at the mouth ready to lash out with if the assassin had been leftwing at all esp Antifa or trans.
Anyone think this willmake them mor ecautious and expect themn to now apologise to jumping to conclsuions and being so willing to demonise others without facts?
Anyone think Mormon culture and gun culture will now be targeted for inspecttion and suspicion and action?
Will Kirk still be a convenient “marytr” now the killer wasn’t who they hoped he was?
Or will his martyrdom now fade with inconvenience ofbeleif sof person who caused his death?
Will they get back to talking about the Epstein files being released? Will they start joining the dots on Global Overheating and the ever worse and more regular “natural”disasters we’re all experiencing?
Do these questions all have sadly too obvs answers? (Mostly.)
StevoR @ #10 — I certainly don’t expect anything like that. They’ll probably fall back to some combo of “let justice take its course” and crickets.
They are still going to try to do the backlash. Even if it becomes widely understood that the shooter was an “extreme conservative gamer” who shot Charlie Kirk because Kirk was not conservative enough, they are going to use this as ‘evidence’ that ‘the left’ is evil. Expect some highly distorted statistics in a few months that ‘prove’ that ‘left-wing violence’ is ‘the true threat to America!’. Followed by the FBI and Justice Department publicly committing to ‘going to war against this threat’. A number of organizations that have never advocated violence will be labored ‘terrorist groups’ (and maybe even revealed to be ‘narco-terrorists!’). Several prominent ‘leftists’ will be arrested. (And maybe even charged with ‘complicity in the murder of Charlie Kirk’.)
A serious fear that I have is that this shooter is going to get some very persuasive visits from Connected People who will offer him various forms of clemency if he just gets up in court and announces that he did the shooting because he’s a recent convert to Transcommunism who was radicalized by some Libs on TikTok and that he had personal orders from (List of Democratic politicians) to shoot Kirk, and now he’s seen the error of his ways and refound Jesus and converted back to Maga.
You can’t appease a fascist, terrorist, bully, or predator.
If they had the idea to go after leftists, liberals, and democrats, they were going to do it regardless of how polite or not people were about a hatemonger’s death.
Remember that quote from a while back, something like “the revolution will be bloodless, if the left lets it happen” – they were already planning horrible things. A lot like the abuser’s “look what you made me do”
I’m getting a bit tired of all the tone-trolling, and white-washing the hate-mongering bigot’s past actions, and mostly, I’m glad there is one lest fascist, and a prominent one at that.
How many trans people, queer people, immigrants, women, not white-enough people, etc., have been bullied, harassed, fired, evicted, assaulted, and outright murdered because these assholes are out there spreading bigoted propaganda on a daily basis and riling up their base and egging them on to violence?
lochaber:
“How many trans people, queer people, immigrants, women, not white-enough people, etc., have been bullied, harassed, fired, evicted, assaulted, and outright murdered because these assholes are out there spreading bigoted propaganda on a daily basis and riling up their base and egging them on to violence?”
You do not know. I do not know.
I do know one right-wing activist was just shot dead, though.
“I’m getting a bit tired of all the tone-trolling, and white-washing the hate-mongering bigot’s past actions, and mostly, I’m glad there is one lest [sic] fascist, and a prominent one at that.”
Weary, that’s you.
“You can’t appease a fascist, terrorist, bully, or predator.”
I get it. You are not to be appeased.
#16, Not cool. You know perfectly well that objecting to fascism is not evidence that one is a fascist. If you want to comment on the problems with hyperbole, that’s fine. But accusing someone of being a fascist because they are saying that fascists are dangerous? Not cool at all.
“But accusing someone of being a fascist because they are saying that fascists are dangerous? ”
No. The accusation is about appeasement and all the tone-trolling, and white-washing the hate-mongering bigot’s past actions.
See, lochaber is not to be appeased about their lack of sympathy for their gladness about this murder.
Instead, lochaber is glad because these assholes are out there spreading bigoted propaganda on a daily basis and riling up their base and egging them on to violence.
There is nothing wrong with my reading comprehension, or with my apprehension of intent.
—
“If you want to comment on the problems with hyperbole, that’s fine.”
Heh. Nice concession.
“Not cool at all.”
Warm and fuzzy, that’s me.
#18. Still not cool. Claiming that you were talking about appeasement is just handwaving – and you know it.
I know what I wrote, I know you’re having a stab at me.
No.
But sure. Go on.
Attempt to support your claim “But accusing someone of being a fascist because they are saying that fascists are dangerous?”.
Go on.
Remember, I have it on good authority (as you see it) that “If you want to comment on the problems with hyperbole, that’s fine.”
I am calling out hyperbole.
Go on.
Will Kirk still be a convenient “marytr” now the killer wasn’t who they hoped he was?
Beginyahu is now blaming Islamist radicals and their “ultra-progressive allies” in the US. So I guess now they’re gonna start going after both liberals and Muslims…
@profpedant,
You will find your experience of this blog vastly improved if you simply ignore that person’s excreta. As a user of Boing Boing before they got shit, in a fit of nostalgia I created a tampermonkey script to disemvowel their posts so I am not momentarily distracted by the uncanny resemblance that some of their posts have to a worthwhile conversation. If you want a copy of it, I’d be happy to post it here (it’s very short) and you can easily remove their ability to derail interesting conversations.
I didn’t spend much time on the script, AI created it for me with some tuning, helping me reduce the amount of time I think about their bullshit, which is the only way that AI has actually improved my life that I’m aware of. Thanks, free version of Gemini.
Actually, here is the script for anyone who is as tired of that particular troll as I am:
https://pastebin.com/EVAasHGs
You’ll need Tampermonkey or a similar user script manager for your browser. These are amazing tools and I’ve only recently begun to play with them, so it’s worth looking into the ways they can improve your web experience. Currently the only thing mine is doing is removing John Morales from my Pharyngula browsing, and forcing Reddit to default to Old mode. But I’m sure I’ll find other uses for it.
@21. Raging Bee : “Beginyahu is now blaming Islamist radicals and their “ultra-progressive allies” in the US. So I guess now they’re gonna start going after both liberals and Muslims…”
So the killer being a fmor eextreme Fuentes fan Repug MAGA Mormon is somehow the fault of liberals and Muslims and WHAT THE FUCK?!
^ Fix : the killer being an even more extreme reichwing Fuentes fan nazi
Ye non-existent gawds.
They really just.. fucks sake.
#22/23 – I have no idea whatsoever how to use that. It does sound useful though.
#20, Nope. I’m telling you that your behavior is not socially acceptable – but apparently you both know that and delight in it. You are acting like you have no interest in honest reality-based dialog. I have no interest in engaging with you and your dishonest nonsense.
Yo, maybe Trump could have Kirk buried under that fancy ballroom he was bragging about?
If not there, maybe Kirk could be buried next to Ivana?
@ 10
LOL. StevoR, has that ever stopped you before? No.
Nazi enough?
@Profpedant:
Install a browser extension called Tampermonkey, this basically lets you add your own javascript to websites you visit and modify how they behave on your browser. You can google how to install it on your specific browser, I think Tampermonkey works on all the major ones. Then when it’s installed open its interface and select “create a new script” copy and paste the text from my pastebin link into it. It should only apply to this website, and as configured will simply edit all posts by John Morales (original username, yorikoid) to remove all vowels. Personally, I find that this takes his posts which generally are a bunch of bullshit that superficially resembles actual dialog, and edits them into a pile of nearly-decipherable gabble that more accurately reflects their actual content. It’s easier for me not to get distracted if his excreta isn’t readable, but leaving it present allows me to see when he’s derailing conversations with real people – like today. If you’d prefer, it would be trivial to edit the code to simply remove his posts altogether.
You can add additional users to the code if you edit it, but you have to find out what their original username was on this blog, which I can show you how to do. Personally, I realized some time ago that engaging with that troll was simply a time and attention suck and they aren’t a person who is capable of meaningful conversation – so I have simply not engaged with, read, or interacted with them since. It’s made this blog vastly better to participate with, I suggest it to people whenever I see them getting distracted by that person’s pointless trolling.
“#20, Nope. I’m telling you that your behavior is not socially acceptable”
No. You are telling me you imagine that my behavior is not socially acceptable.
You, of course, are socially acceptable.
“You are acting like you have no interest in honest reality-based dialog.”
Your accusations are vague, unsubstantiated, and speculative at best.
I note your severe lack of specificity.
That claim would be far more credible had not you interjected to a comment of mine to lochaber, and then proceeded to engage with me.
But I get you. You no longer have such an interest, kicking against the pricks is painful.
Yeah.
I was getting tired of the press cycle the last couple of days.
I was fully expecting the nauseating never-forget-9/11 melodrama that day, and somehow the fascists outdid themselves — their demands for contrition and All Lives Matter with a thinly-veiled bloodthirst were somehow even more nauseating than that.
@33, Beholder
It’s amazing how the discovery of the shooter’s identity has taken the wind out of their sales – there was an excellent meme showing Rep Nancy’s Mace’s Twitter going from “bring back the death penalty” to “pray that the shooter finds Jesus.”
They’re probably still going to do a bunch of the anti-left-wing shit they always wanted to, but at least they won’t be so sanctimonious about it.
StevoR: As we know, the Republican party have ardent supporters of Israel, many of whom are anti-Semites; and also some factions of more overt anti-Semites who hate Israel. Kirk was (mostly) in the former group, but Nick Fuentes and most of the groypers are in the latter. And it seems Kirk was killed by someone in the latter group who thought Kirk was too soft on Israel as well as too critical of Dear Leader. So I guess Beginyahu is blaming “anti-Semitism” for Kirk’s murder, and using it to whip up a pogrom against EVERYONE who ever criticized Israel. And of course we’re expected to forget that most actual anti-Semites are right-wing Republicans, not “ultra-progressive” critics of Beginyahu and Likud.
profpedant: To be honest, I’m not even sure what Morales is trying to say here; and part of me suspects he isn’t sure either. Some of his late-night comments sound a bit…how should I say it…drunk? If you’re not sure what he’s on about, best not to bother with him.
@35, Raging Bee
There are significant fault-lines on the right. They usually infight less than the left-wing, but they still have their divisions. Fuentes feuded with Kirk both because it was good marketing and also because Kirk represented a much-more-mainstream and less bigoted (though still very, very, bigoted) vision of politics than he was making his living selling. Fuentes was particularly incensed that Kirk wouldn’t engage in the kind of “name the jew” antisemitism that Fuentes marketed, and it was definitely one of his major talking points/criticisms of ‘mainstream’ American conservatives.
Fuentes also was in direct competition with Kirk for the same audience of suckers, so it’s understandable that he would be more vitriolic towards a fellow grifter (and a much more successful one) than he was with his other stated enemies. Maybe in this case one of his followers just took the public beef to be more serious than it actually was. It gives me great joy to imagine just how much Fuentes is shitting himself right now as he waits to see what the fallout of all this is.
[OT]
Raging Bee, I am rather bemused when people talk about me when here I am.
Like, here I am. I am reading what you write about me.
(Do you find it peculiar that I respond?)
‘Some of his late-night comments sound a bit…how should I say it…drunk?’
I’m in Qld, Oz. Right now, it’s 2.39 pm. Not the late night.
“If you’re not sure what he’s on about, best not to bother with him.”
Excellent advice. Shame profpedant didn’t do that.
You do know my comments are bespoke, no? Addressed to those to whom I address.
In this case, you. You.
I’m shocked — shocked, I say — to see bullies employing their firearms against anyone who isn’t them.
Uggh…the train is coming off the tracks…again?
Anyway hoping to forestall the inevitable derailment, this showed up in my feed, a cursory analysis by “Good Politic Guy” which gets into the ammo markings and other things without leaning too far into projecting an explicit ideology onto the assassin:
Don’t know much about the presenter except this explainer: https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Good_Politic_Guy
Kyle Kulinski and Krystal Ball adjacent. Seems more reserved than the former. Well manicured mustache! Nothing strikes me as sus.
He also highlights the callous response Trump made which I linked above and some weird Trump digression on Fox News.
I’m a tad more uncertain or hesitant than others here on a specific ideological attribution to the shooter.
Hopefully all my sentences are well constructed enough to escape the chopping blades of the cuisinart.
Frankly, I’m baffled. I would be appalled if someone on the left had done this, but I can’t understand how a MAGA type would even scrape up enough resentment and hate to get out of bed and do the same. What did Kirk do that was worth this? It couldn’t be more than a minor disagreement?
@pilgham, 40
MAGA is nothing but resentment. And as they see themselves in the ascendancy, the veil of unity is beginning to crack. You had a coalition composed of mutually incompatible kinds of bigots willing to set aside their differences under the idea that “It’ll be better when Trump is god-king”, but now that their side is in charge, people within it are starting to realize that their personal vision of right-wing fulfillment isn’t happening. Stephen Miller is getting his concentration camps for minorities, but Fuentes’ followers are upset that there aren’t enough Jews being sent there. People who adhere to the ‘free market’ religion are seeing that Trump’s economy is much closer to the Mussolini Fascist/Corporatist model than to their own preferred vision. This is the dog that caught the car, but in this case it’s a pack of dogs who all wanted to catch the car but had different ideas for what to do with it afterwards.
…and they were hoping their loyal dogs would POWER the car, not try to catch it…
[meta — hypocrisy irritates me; so]
BTW: “… so I have simply not engaged with, read, or interacted with them since.”
Him. Cis mono hetero male. Male. Made it more than explicit since fucking 2005 when I first commented here. Bloke.
And, um, you have talked about ‘them’ to other people in the fucking same room as he is, while you talk to them about them.
(To your credit, I suppose. I might see that as cringe, but hey. You are you)
snarkhuntr, have you noticed I actually talk about you to YOU? Not to my cringe clique?
Nah. Of course not.
Someone wrote on socmed today that Gamergate was the Rosetta Stone of explaining what is currently going on, and there is probably a lot of truth to that.
Happy for the Vance fascists to start shooting the Loomer fascists now, or vice versa, but with a career criminal as POTUS and a broken and corrupted media, there will be collateral damage for people on the left, it is inevitable.
Turns out Nazi Edgelord Charlie Kirk was killed by a 20-nothing wasteoid. His death had nothing to do with politics. It was about celebrity.
Many true believers view “heretics” who agree with them about most things but disagree on a few key points to be worse than unbelievers who don’t agree with them about most things. This is true for both religions and political ideologies. So, I agree that Charlie Kirk’s murderer being another right-winger, even more extreme, is not that surprising. I also agree that the internal disputes within the right and far right are really heating up now that they are in power. The right is often better at ignoring internal differences before getting power than the left is, but internal hostilities come to the surface once power is achieved.
An example of who Charlie Kirk was:
https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-elderly-couple-springfield-ohio-1953321
Also:
https://x.com/charliekirk11/status/1832883283199471676
Guess who else took off on the Haitians eating pets thing:
Not good faith actors.
I’m not yet convinced the shooter was far right, rather than an unstable notoriety-hunter with an incoherent political ideology, if any at all.
#31 – Thank you…..but my level of ignorance about how browsers and webpages work is such that I haven’t the foggiest idea of even what terms to google. Disemvoweling the troll would be nice though.
#35 I concur. (Between his nastiness, his incoherence, and his minimal ability to express himself I am surprised that he hangs out here.)
My mother had A Talk with me about video games from what she heard. Time to return the favor and give her A Talk about latching onto 24 hour corporate media rumor mongering.
All those memes scratched onto the sides of Tyler Robinson’s bullet casings are Groyper memes.
Groypers are followers of Fuentes, who has been fighting a war on Kirk since 2019.
There is no doubt that Robinson is a far right wingnut.
There is a simple explanation and translation on Bluesky for anyone who wants to know more.
raven@52
I had read through this one yesterday:
https://bsky.app/profile/segfaultvicta.bsky.social/post/3lynns5iuu22f
…which helped pique my interest on this angle along with The Serfs video PZ posted, but I would not say I’m entirely sold on the idea. Food for thought though.
@48 KG
Thing is, all of MAGA is incoherent insane nonsense, so saying you are not sure he was far right on the basis of being incoherent is not exactly discounting anything. That being said, at least some sources are suggesting that he actually thought Kirk wasn’t racist, nazish, and/or “conservative enough”, and that was his reason for doing it. In other words, the sort of nutjob that, in WWII would have shot Hitler, not because he disagreed with Nazi policy, but because Hitler wasn’t killing Jews fast enough for his taste. This is, literally, once again, the hate filled, insane, right wing, eating itself.
Heck, if this was a game world, some people on our side would be going, “Nah, its racist to suggest and entire culture of people could be so insane that they will kill each other for not being chaotic evil enough. How would they possibly survive as a culture long enough to even be a threat to anyone else?” Yet, here we get the obvious example of how that works. For that matter, Trump himself is an obvious example of it – As long as everyone is going along with his madness, he is totally fine with them. The second they have an opinion he doesn’t like they are sidelined, accused of working for the enemy, etc., and they all scramble to kiss his ass, to save themselves. Give Trump a gun, or a sword, and laws that let him, like old kings, just summarily execute someone in the throne room, or have his guards do so, and where is the difference between this and an army of D&D V1 or V2 orcs?
More Republican fun.
Texas AG caught in scandal
.http://youtube.com/post/Ugkx1R6fX3QbBtsdN-lAKFLjrMiu8fW4kWZr
snarkhuntr #7
The mainstream media have been covering the Groyper Wars since at least 2019. I’ve read articles from NBC and and The Washington Post written in 2019 covering them in detail.
It doesn’t matter if the shooter was a groyper. The right will go into full conspiracy mode claiming he was a MK-Ultra mind-controlled sleeper agent or he was an innocent patriot who was set up to take the fall by the Deep State while their transgender Antifa/BLM communist assassin who really pulled the trigger is still on the loose,
After all, this is the same bunch who insists that the right-wing chud who murdered those Democratic politicians in MN is really a Marxist.
John, this is pretty tortured language here. I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with it. I’m just perplexed by it.
Does a lack of sympathy even require appeasement? The lack of sympathy wouldn’t even exist if the murder never happened.
So, paradoxically, the only way to appease this lack of sympathy would be to undue what caused it in the first place. In this case, that would be Kirk’s murder. That, of course, is impossible.
For what it’s worth, I have no sympathy for Kirk either. That said, I would like to live in a society where violence and murder, particularly that caused by firearms, didn’t exist at all.
“Does a lack of sympathy even require appeasement? The lack of sympathy wouldn’t even exist if the
murder never happened.”
I like to mirror terminology. See, I was responding to a comment that began thus: “You can’t appease a fascist, terrorist, bully, or predator.”
Specifically, and to be more overt, one cannot appease an ideologue, a True Believer.
You should be aware I am quite familiar with lochaber’s posting here, I’ve been around a long time.
It works both ways, despite the claims of incomprehension.
“For what it’s worth, I have no sympathy for Kirk either. That said, I would like to live in a society where violence and murder, particularly that caused by firearms, didn’t exist at all.”
Those two things are not in tension.
—
Far as Kirk goes, well… “Live by the sword, die by the sword”.
—
BTW, this being 7.33 am for me precludes my drunken ramblings from being late-night ones, as alleged by some clueless person. For the record.
The fascists don’t care about the truth. Current headlines at ABC News:
Utah Democrats receive threatening voice messages in wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing
Trump doubles down on blaming ‘radical left’ after vow to go after political violence
MAGA can only blame themselves for the increase in political violence. They are the people who stormed Congress. They are the people who spread nonsense about government conspiracies and the utter BS of the racist replacement ‘theory’. They are the people who screech and wail about their right to own lethal weapons and open carry. They are the people who voted for a convicted sex offender to occupy the White House.
We don’t know why this particular shooter decided to kill Kirk. Maybe Kirk would now have a different opinion about the unrestricted gun rights if he had survived? Alas, he was hoisted by his own petard.
@profpedant The Troll has a very long history of mistreating many different people here. I’m sorry to say that every one of the faults you point out have been pointed out many times and he is simply impervious to criticism. Except it makes him reply, like clockwork. Interminably predictable though it all is, I get it, it is also still irritating. An odious combo. My goto has become”Fuck off Morales, you are a disgrace to yourself and a stain on this community”.
I worked with a bunch of Mormons at a research center and they were the most cognitive dissonant people I ever encountered. One guy swore that his program didn’t work because there was a “bug in the compiler” because the compiler was “written by an atheist. Well, that was probably true! But I found the bug in his program and with no thanks whatsoever he moved on. Not surprised that the Mormon assassin had no moral compass. Never met a Mormon with one.
@29. the Trumnp enabling &, in reality Trump voting, bad faith troll :
Edited for clarity.
Actually yes. I may have a lot of typos in many comments but I do try to be cautious and avoid demonising groups of people and think carefully about my words -even if typing them ain’t my forte
That’s been how I comment here for a long time and not caused by Kirk’s murder but still.
You OTOH, troll consistently ignore reality and facts and lack caution ignoring the very clear warnings you’ve been given & refusing toanswer questions as you continue to harm the world by your words and actions. However well you type them.
StevoR @64
I like to think that deciphering your typos is keeping my ageing brain sharp.
Aussie ABC’s Planet America had a good discussion at the strat of their show a coupleof nights ago linked here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/02/infinite-thread-xxxvi/comment-page-6/#comment-2277476
Militant Agnostic @65
Future research may show reading StevoR replies staves off several sorts of cognitive decline or dementia. Gerontologists may eventually prescribe the Pharyngula comments section for their patients. In that case I may stop trying to catch my own typos before hitting send.
[meta]
Your goto is talking about me, not to me. Because you show yourself when you actually try to address me.
Coward, you are. Weak.
I have seen reports that Tyler Robinson’s Roommate was transgender (M to F). They are using a male name (Lance). Most sources are right wing.. The link is supposedly “Progressive”, but I am not sure about it.
Most sources refer to them* as his “partner” or “girlfriend”.
I am using they/them because I am not sure what they identify as.
I would take any reports that include anything about transgender people as attempts to deflect attention from the MAGA cult of toxic masculinity.
@65. Militant Agnostic & #67. Hemidactylus : Cheers! I do try to help!
@profpedant, others
You can find a simple tutorial for how to install Tampermonkey here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tyjJD65zws
Adding my custom script to disemvowel that troll has made this blog so much easier to engage with. The ability to add custom javascript to websites is like a superpower for your browser, there are lots of custom userscripts out there to make many different websites more friendly or usable.
What I found was that they generally trap unwary users with a reasonable-seeming post or two, then descend into a self-indulgent and circular series of arguments – usually disingenuous and/or dishonest. They enjoy wasting your time, so the best thing you can do is ignore them. What I discovered was that because I tend to read the comment before I see the writer, I would waste mental time reading and even sometimes beginning to reply to their nonsense. After disemvoweling their posts look something like:
Now when I see one of their comments I just pass over it seamlessly and move on. They have the right to spew their nonsense so long as our host suffers it, but none of us have an obligation to pay any attention to them. This is a nice tool to make ignoring it easier.
@7 snarkhuntr
I had a hard time explaining someone (a 50+ year old Normie) what a dogwhistle (especially nazi dogwhistle) is. Then I had to explain what a Normie is. And what meme is. We had four hour long discussion in fact.
It contained multiple “Okay, why would anyone do THAT?” questions.
So, the short version is…
Imagine a group if friends hanging online. They have their inside jokes. Let’s take Garfield for example. He is:famous for saying “I hate Mondays”. So the inside joke in that group is that instead of posting “I hate Mondays” they post a picture of Garfield.
But even that is is too obvious. For your online group of friends you don’t even need a picture of Garfield. Because everyone in the group knows that Garfield = “I hate Mondays” just posting G that is orange in color translates to “I hate Mondays”. That’s a meme. An inside joke that evolved.
Now, if you wore a t-shirt in public that had orange letter G printed in front, nobody who is not part of the group would understand what that is and what your t-shirt means. But people who are in on the joke would nod to you and say “Me too, mate. Me too.”.
That t-shirt is a dogwhistle. The same way only dogs can hear dogwhistles while humans can’t, only members of the group can “hear” that t-shirt. The person who can’t “hear it” is called Normie.
Now imagine that the online friend group is very racist. Or that they are literal neonazis. Just being in public with those ideas means getting punished. So they hide them in dog whistles.
Let’s say for example your hate group would like to put people in camps. So they start using the words “I would like to help THEM concentrate”. But even that is too obvious to normies so they shorten it to capital letter C. If a normie sees someone in public with a big red or black C on a t-shirt and ask about it you just say “It’s Black C. You know, Black Sea? It’s a pun.” And the answer would be “Very funny”.
But the member of hate group would say “Me too, dude. Me too.” and nod. Now that’s fascist dogwhistle.
[meta]
snarkhuntr:
I sense I am being spoken about. Mysterious senses, those!
(Might I be right? Not like I am reading the very same site, is it?)
Also, that you feel the need for actual blinkers is quite informative.
(Back in the day, I had many many people dogpiling directly on me, here.
Now, I get a few feebly loudly whispering at each other about me.
So it goes)
@74, jo1storm
That’s a decent explanation of dog-whistling, but I think it gets much harder to explain to normies the sheer depth of irony-poisoning that takes place with these people. Particularly the kinds of folks who get sucked into the nihilistic violent-chaos-for-the-lulz groups like 764 or TCC.
Understanding literally anything they say or do involves peeling an onion’s worth of layers of irony-unirony-irony, recycled memes, deliberately incomprehensible in-jokes and jargon. There’s no way that the mainstream media can (or even wants to) delve into this, it involves vast amounts of nuance and we now live in a media landscape where if you can’t explain something to a facebook-brained boomer in 12 seconds, it just doesn’t exist. Add to that, most of the US media is owned by billionaires or financial firms with a vested interest in blaming basically any problem on ‘the left’, and there is just never going to be good mainstream coverage of these issues.
For fucks sake, O9A literally got a serving US solder to actively try to sell out his own unit to Jihadi terrorists, and it barely got any media coverage.. It did get some play, but never grew any legs. No pundit cares to opine about it, the people you would normally expect to be frothing at the chance to talk about an ‘enemy within’ are silent. The media loves ‘brown guy bad’ stories, but they just don’t have the mental bandwidth to cover ‘middle-class young white guy poisons brain with nihilistic superstition and memes and tries to sacrifice entire military unit in an effort to ascend to a new state of metaphysical power.”
The kids aren’t okay….
it’s just sad that most of a comment thread can get completely derailed by one individual with a grudge.
I am refusing to interact with them, but often times the entire comment thread ends up veering into comments in response to them, or about them, and ending up completely devoid of any relevance to the post, or event most of the comments about the post.
@76
Thing is, they don’t really need to go in depth with it.
“It’s a sign of recognition for an online radical neo-nazi terrorist group which is symbol of something they find funny. People who are not ‘Bad Guy terrorists TM’ don’t find it funny. They find it terrifying and for a good reason. ”
Everything else is playing the enemy’s Game.
Now, whether the media would want to do it that way or not depends on the ownership structure.
@jo1storm,
The problem is: the media gets to pick which level of Irony they decide is the endpoint. “He posted trans memes vs he posted trans memes to mock them“. I work with some people who are basically politically uninterested, they just get the spillover through MSM or cultural osmosis. They’re definitely not getting a lot of education on nuance from those sources.
@lochaber, 77
That’s why I installed my disemvoweler. It’s a few minutes work and then you never read their posts again unless they get responded to by other people. It becomes trivial to ignore the troll. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
snarkhunter @76
As proof of your point, I had to click on your link to find out what O9A was (probably because i read it as zero 9 A) even though I knew there was a violent white supremacist call Order of the Nine Angles.
“it’s just sad that most of a comment thread can get completely derailed by one individual with a grudge.”
It’s just sad that a bunch of clueless egoistic sadsacks can derrail a thread because of a grudge towards an individual.
(FTFY)
So silly.
You could ignore it, you could elide it, but you choose to massage it.
It matters to you.
—
You know, I hardly feel ignored, despite the desperate protestations of those who dare not address me, but only each other.
(And I supposedly am the one who derails!)
—
“I am refusing to interact with them”
Talking about me to others who talk about me is surely refusing to interact with me.
Though I’ve made it as plain as could be I am here, in this thread, reading everything.
But sure. Carry on with the chihuahua yappings, with your blinders.
(heh)
@79
It’s called Rove’s Law on RationalWIki, named by Karl Rove who was infamous for doing it.
“Never say anything that you wouldn’t want reduced to a three-second sound bite on the news.”
Or, in longer quote
“If you can’t express a complex political issue without using a string of words that, reduced to a three-second byte, sounds unpatriotic or otherwise inapt, don’t express it at all.”
And what you said is problem in general with propaganda. That’s the main issue, that our media is mostly propaganda pieces because of who they are owned by.
Worse than that.
I have relatives and had friends in Utah and have spent a lot of time there.
It is one of my favorite places, all due to the spectacular natural beauty of the area. You could make the whole state into a national park and it would work.
The Mormons are just weird and they don’t want anything to do with Gentiles, their word for non-Mormons. It is their one good idea.
Over the years, all my friends have left Utah.
They liked Utah but just got tired of Mormon weirdness and always being a minority.
PZ would know more.
He lived there for a few years while doing a postdoc.
@69 Militant Agnostic
I spent an hour chasing this down tonight.
It is a fantasy lie made up by MAGAts.
I’m not mentioning names because this guy is very close to being murdered right now by MAGA cultists.
He isn’t transgender.
He isn’t a boyfriend or partner of the shooter Tyler Robinson.
He in fact, helped the FBI track down the shooter, Tyler Robinson.
The MAGAts are so desperate to make the killing of Charlie Kirk into something done by Trans and/or Leftists that they are lying and making up stories by the minute.
Tyler Robinson lived in a far right online fantasy world of Groypers, lost contact with reality, and killed Charlie Kirk for no reason that rational people would be able to understand.
The MAGAts are doing the same thing every day. Chemtrails, lethal vaccines, gangs of Trans assassins roaming the USA, demons, atheists, Muslims, white genocide, etc..
They’ve killed a lot of people already and they are going to kill a lot more.
@85,
“The MAGAts are so desperate to make the killing of Charlie Kirk into something done by Trans and/or Leftists that they are lying and making up stories by the minute.”
It has come to this. I have to agree with raven. And it’s quite farcical to watch them do it too, and for media outlets like Axios to fall into line.
The WSJ carelessly spread anti-trans misinformation
@74: Somehow, I (68yo) manage to grok most of this stuff, with perhaps no more than a few details explained. That would be because, since I discovered Usenet way back in 1990, I’ve spent far more time online than is entirely healthy for me. Never heard of O9A, but okay, just another entry on my mental list of Weird Little Groups of People Who Desperately Need An Intervention, along with Zizians etc, and their specific obsessions are almost irrelevant to the basic pathology.
@88,
Usenet and IRC is what I use to this day, while my wife complains that her Whatsapp group chat uploads her work pictures to some cloud without her consent. Don’t give content to fascist billionaires for free.
@7, Snarkhuntr:
Setting his own unit up for an ambush? It’s almost as if they no longer see any difference between a video game and real life. Hence the memetic comments on the shell casings.
I’m not even sure it’s correct to call this guy “far right”. He comes across as an unhinged extremely-online kid who’s off on some undiscovered fourth axis on the political alignment chart. The kind of dude who would be equally likely to vote for Sanders as Trump just because they weren’t “the establishment”. I haven’t looked too deeply into the Groyper allegations but, I mean, it feels just as likely that he’s a pure accelerationist with no coherent direction in mind.
#73 Thank you. The troll makes no sense and the only motivation I can discern is a desire to be obnoxious, insulting, and annoying. Look through the remarks in a typical thread – nearly all of the comments that could be construed as insulting are from the troll. It must be very very very weird inside the troll’s head.
Raven @85
Mano Singham has a great example – the whackaloon wife of Florida’s anti-vax surgeon general
Raven @85
So he is just a straight cis male roommate who got some messages from Tyler Robinson and showed them to the FBI.
The sight I linked to looked more than a little fishy – it had another article saying Tyler’s “Girlfriend” had posted on a trans “Grooming” site. The picture on that article looked like a different person wearing a medical mask.
I guess the shooter was just too whitebread Mormon so they had to “transify” the roommate.
I would not speculate on the killer’s ideology so soon after the arrest.
People’s opinions can change quickly when they are young, so pictures of him a few years ago dressed a groyper or being a Trump supporter in high school may or may not mean anything. CNN quotes a coworker who said that he wasn’t too fond of Trump and a neighbour who assumed that he was pro Trump. According to Dem state his room mate is trans, which does not suggest a right winger (but then again, not everyone likes their room mates).
Just give this some time.
I can’t say I’m extremely online, but I spend maybe way too much time “online” than is warranted. Does streaming movies or Youtube count?
I was kinda radicalized by PZ and Larry Moran (the balcony muppets) on usenet decades ago. I wish Moran was blogging more frequently.
Meta I might regret: I have mixed feelings toward Morales. There are times he’s on point making decent contributions. But he has quirks that have irked me too. I push back on him sometimes when he IMO crosses a line with me or others. We’ve gotten into it on occasion, but he’s hardly close to being as obnoxious a personality as I’ve seen over the years. I was on usenet. YMMV. I think he’s got long histories with people here that precede my entering the commentariat.
I have found this thread a helpful clearing house for info on recent events that have more people very online trying to reduce their uncertainty. So the derailment, which I’m now chiming in on, took up some space.
That is a new lie from the right wingnuts.
He isn’t Trans, isn’t Tyler’s boyfriend, and helped the FBI catch Tyler.
He is another right wing, Southern Utah, good Mormon young adult.
If you had read the thread, you would know this.
I gave it an hour last night and that was enough.
I checked some fact finding sources and it traced back to random right wing trolls.
It was an obvious lie from the MAGAts, a group that is all lies all the time.
@97
Raven,
both Dem state and CNN (quoting the Utah governor) have said that the killer’s room mate is trans. I am not sure that they are right, but it is too soon to dismiss the story. Just because random right wing trolls say the same does not mean that it is a lie.
Also, what do you consider a fact finding source ? Be careful of those who tell you what you want to believ.
The roommate is a cis-male white Mormon who gave the FBI some online chat records. He is currently being harassed and receiving death threats because various media outlets are straight up repeating right wing rumors.
I hope he sues for defamation.
Houseplant @98
Although I posted a link to Dem State, I had reservations about that site – it looks very fishy – see my post @94. The Governor of Utah is not trustworthy.
None of those are reliable sources.
Cox the Utah governor is a far right wingnut and typical Mormon. Which are almost synonymous.
Cox was by his own admission desperately hoping the killer was an outsider.
It was a typical young Mormon guy from Southern Utah.
Cox like all the GOP and you are grasping at straws now and lying.
You aren’t.
You are a troll.
The roommate in question is now being harassed by right wingnuts to the point where he is in serious danger of being murdered himself. Despite the fact that he gave the FBI important information that helped them capture the killer.
I won’t mention his name for that reason but he and his family have a lot of social media content on Facebook and TikTok.
If you look at him and his own content, there is zero evidence that he is Trans.
If you follow the lies back, they all end with MAGAt trolls.
Militant Agnostic@69,
The page your link points to has now been removed. As for Robinson’s motivation – and for that matter, his guilt – I’m going to wait until there is clearer information (or a revealing lack of it), before reaching any conclusions.
I’m not going to waste any more time on Houseplant the troll.
He needs to go back to Twitter, 4chan, or whatever trash can he crawled out of.
If you look at his roommate’s social media this is what you find.
I”m paraphrasing here because MAGAts are violent when you call them out for lies and hate.
Watched all the videos in (redacted name)’s TikTok. Nothing says he was transgender.
One of the things the MAGAts did was conflate Southern Utah Mormon guy with a Trans commenter on Reddit with a similar name.
They are actually two separate unrelated people.
“Family members of (name redacted) have confirmed that he and Charlie Kirk’s alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson, were roommates, not romantic partners.
I also read Governor Cox’s interviews.
He is a far right cuckoo Mormon and it is basically right wing Mormon hate and lies nonstop.
No surprise.
He also calls the actual killer a left winger, which we also know is just a lie.
Cox like anyone in the GOP never has a problem with lying.
If he doesn’t get killed first.
The amount of online hate and lies directed to this guy is incredible and very disturbing.
He is just a kid. Well, OK a young adult.
He did nothing wrong whatsoever.
He is sort of a hero for helping the FBI get the killer.
A lot of ugly rumors are spreading through the Mormon community and he and his family are going to be outcasts at best or forced to move from Zion or Deseret or whatever they call their homeland. Mormons are clannish and conformist and can be vicious to anyone who doesn’t fit in.
Yeah, he should be in a witness protection program by now.
And, when this is over, he needs to find a few good lawyers and start suing media outlets like the NYPost and Fox NoNews for running with made up, unverified stories and wrecking his life.
@101
Hi Raven,
Cox maybe a wingnut, but as a State Governor he is unlikely to tell such an easily disprovable lie as calling a cis-male white Mormon trans. Cox has also said the room mate is being incredibly cooperative with the authorities. I cannot prove that Cox is telling the truth, but an NPR station (not normally considered MAGA) is reporting his remarks without any skepticism.
https://www.wlrn.org/npr-breaking-news/2025-09-14/charlie-kirk-murder-suspect-set-to-face-aggravated-murder-charge-in-utah
I would wait a few days before making up your mind about the killer’s motives.
In related news, I got blessed by youtube algorhitm this morning.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WSqUBwlHld4&list=RDWSqUBwlHld4&start_radio=1&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5tD
The funny comment was on 10th of september.
There weren’t any satanists kidnapping and ritually sacrificing children back in the eighties, yet that did not stop a media frenzy over satanic panic.
I see no reason to believe the Governor of Utahs claim.
Inciting a trans-panic is the latest trend in the cult of MAGA.
Stop repeating their harmful lies.
Here is what the alleged Trans boyfriend just had to say on his Instagram account.
“Not Tyler Robinson’s bf/gf/it-ef, claimed for boredom, feel free to chat. Christian, right leaning.”
The photos on his Instagram account look like other photos elsewhere identified as him.
AFAICT, this is his real account.
Make of it what you will.
I’m not providing a link because he is already being persecuted for simply existing and knowing Tyler Robinson.
You can find it easily with Google.
He seems remarkably calm considering the amount of hate and lies pushed his way. By now, I would be looking up lawyers on Google and downloading news reports from the NYPost for their court case.
KG @102
ws
Happy to hear that – the site was kind of fishy
@90 Hemidactylus,
(Meta) – I wrote John off completely a good while ago. I realized that he is simply not engaging in conversations or debates, he is amusing himself by absorbing other people’s time and attention. He is not an honest participant, he does not (or will not/cannot) respond to any arguments or facts presented that might contradict his points and will twist and wriggle incessantly for as long as he feels he can keep holding your attention and wasting your time. As far as I’m concerned, he adds nothing whatsoever of value to any discussion he is a part of – which is why I decided to remove him from my experience of this board. The glimpses I get of his excreta in other people’s quotations from him have not suggested that his behaviour has changed.
@108, Raven
It seems from that quotation that the guy might be as much of an internet-poisoned edgelord as the suspect himself was. If he posted something that implied he was trans because he was ‘bored’, I am not inclined to think that he’s a raging leftist, but much more likely the same kind of nihilist that enjoys stirring whatever pots he can just to see the reactions. Being young, white and on-the-right, he might not realize what kinds of things can happen to someone who becomes the right-wing’s enemy of the moment. Look at that J6 guy who got fed-jacketed by his own movement – whatever he does now, this guy is always going to be seen as the ‘trans boyfriend who got charlie kirk killed’ for as long as their attention span holds.
@ 82 John Morales
Still making friends and influencing people I see dude. Given up on the pretense that I’m your nemesis out to destroy you and everyone else loves you yet? Or are you going to write deranged fiction about everyone who recognizes you as the troll you are like you did about me?
Sorry, I just read this and then I’ll leave the resident troll alone (for now)
@ 43 Morales
Gender neutral language of course includes male gender, dickhead. How could it not? You’re like some misogynist fuckwit who complains that using “firefighter” instead of “fireman” “erases” men. No it doesn’t. If your masculinity is so fragile it withers when not explicity referenced – that’s your problem dude. Cope.
We don’t give a flying fuck what your gender is assclown and may or may not refer to it if we judge it relevant. Deal.
(I mean seriously, this fucknuckle thinks nothing of calling people names like fecalbubulum or some such shit and then pretends to be offended – not by being misgendered – by not having his alleged gender explicitly referenced?!
Fucking clown. Piss off.
P.S.
Morales – LEARN TO FUCKING BLOCKQUOTE. Prove to us you are not a troll (as you claim) by making the bare minimum necessary effort to make your comments readable to others.
[meta]
“Prove to us you are not a troll”
https://web.archive.org/web/20120411120429/http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/01/i_neglected_molly_again.php
https://web.archive.org/web/20120413031340/http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/molly.php
PZ thinks I’m sorta irritating, but he knows damn well I am not a troll.
I currently have committed to complying with a number of directives, one of which I am sorta breaching in spirit with this comment, but I do try. No having fun with commenters. No pure didactic pedantry. No hammering a point home. That sort of thing.
Anyway. I know he told two people to not talk to or about each other, and I know only one has hitherto complied.
—
BTW, houseplant is quite informative @105, and I cannot dispute the claims at hand.
It is a good comment, though not exactly lauded until just now.
I imagine that the reflexive antipathy I myself am accustomed to and to which I am inured is hardly a friendly thing to experience for newcomers. The mob is aroused!
@105. houseplant :
Er, do you also believe Florida Guv’nah Ron DeathSantis when he lies and blames pretty much everything in the world on “woke” too?
Just because De Guv says it does NOT mean it is true and that seems esp so in this case where the reichwing are so, so, so so VERY desperate to link Kirk’s murderer with the left and esp with trans people rather than the actual nazi Groyper who killed him.
This particular Mormon Utah Guv already has form on this and is already invested in a certain demographic being guilty when it ain’t.
So, NO. I do not find the lying Utah Guv’ who is emotionally and politically biased here a very credible source at all especially without him providing strong evidence.
Meta : John Morales can be really infuriating at times and I can understand why people might not want to interact with him but he isn’t a troll.
John Morales is a regular who often posts somethings of worth even if they coem from different perspectives and I don’t like or agree with the dog-piling on him here. Alo worth noting the many years long campaign of trolling and attacking him her e by Silentbob who useems utterly obsessed with him and unable to simply leave him be and ignore him.
There’s another commenter here – I’m sure yáll can guess who who is a Trump enabler, commenst in ba dfaith adds nothing or very little indeed and has used this blog to hutt the world with their commenters who I’d happily see go.
But PZ is the boss here of his own blog natch so a-n-y-how.
Via CW Daily on fb : https://www.facebook.com/cwdailynews
Holyshit these right-wing scumbags are blaming trans people again, unbelievable. They always find a way even after their killer turned out to be a white boy from a white religious rightwing family. It’s so sickening.
@105 houseplant
Given that you curent president lies approximately every time he makes a statement, it seems optimistic.to expect truth from a mere guvernor.
Silentbob @112: Ooh, a lecture on language around gender from the arsewipe who’s been persistently misgendering another commenter for years.
Yeah, John can be annoying. You, on the other hand, are scum. Fuck off.
The “shooter was a leftist with a trans partner” story still seems to have legs. The BBC is uncritically repeating Cox’s version: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gvrw2pgedo, and there was some guy from “The Bowler”(sp?) interviewed on the CBC this morning saying the same thing, with no pushback from the interviewer. Big Lie tactic? C’mon journos, do your fucking job!
@stevewatson:
The point is not whether it has legs or not, it is that it is being emphasized, highlighted and mentioned almost as often as the shooter. Hell, it even gets mentioned more often than most things relevant to the case: that shooter was raised with guns, from a religious rightwing family and so on.
Also, the source of all this information are the scumbag Republican officials, so I don’t trust them for now.
@SteveoR, 115
(meta) It has nothing to do with disagreeing with John. In fact, before I removed his vowels I often found that I generally agreed with at least some of what he said, at least in his posts before he is engaged with by other commenters. It has to do with the way he chooses to respond to any engagement he gets: he derails people and conversations, and seems to delight in getting people to respond to endless minutiae. He seems to enjoy this so much that he refuses to address anything said to him that does not drive the conversation towards his preferred goal of endless bickering over insignificant details. Pedantry and obsessive focus on trivia would not bother me in themselves, but in a thread long past where I went back and forth with him for uite a while, I realized that he’s also dishonest and argues in bad faith for the sake of it. So I ignore him now, this thread excepted, and the place is much nicer for it.
(unmeta)
I think that historians in the future (if such a profession is allowed to exist) may look at Trump as having been a lucky break for the States. Clearly the national mood of at least a substantial portion of the population, and especially the oligarch classes who own the media and tech companies is ready for fascism. They crave it, demand it, and they voted for Trump to get it. But Trump is not a fascist. He has only one guiding principle, “I should get what I want” and what he wants is everything. He has the mind and instincts of a badly behaved toddler. He seems to be completely uninterested in building a dynasty, he has no chosen successor and is not laying the groundwork for anyone to take over – because he cannot stand for anyone but himself to have any prominence. Everything must be Trump, and Trump only.
A competent fascist would be using the death of Kirk to create his preferred national mythos. He would have been their Horst Wessel, if not their Reichstag Fire. But Trump has no particular interest in that, and I think the constant repetition of any name but his is going to be really grating on his sensitive ego. That clip where a reporter asks him about Kirk and he literally gives the guy two words before he starts talking about the ‘beautiful’ ballroom he’s having built over the former Rose Garden is illustrative. I wouldn’t be surprised if he starts to lash out if people keep talking about some dead guy while he’s trying to be adored. Hopefully his Fillet o’Fish-ridden heart holds out until the next election cycle and not a moment beyond it. He will run – or at least try to – and his existence will prevent other fascist candidates from gaining mass support.