> A large number of California wildfires have been set by arsonists and arson is a key tactic used by ecoterrorist groups like ELF
This is misleading. Ecoterrorist groups do use arson, but they target cars and buildings, like car dealerships or chain stores, not forests.
If you're engaged in a fight against logging, burning down forests is likely not the first thing on your mind.
Immediately jumping to conclusions and then using that conclusion as a political weapon is part of the insanity. Everything that happens has to be qualified as either beneficial to your political position or detrimental to it, dictating how you respond to it. Everything has to be framed as the fault of your "evil" opponents or as a lie and fake news.
This is extremely detrimental to societal cohesion and to democratic political processes, and I wish people would stop before it's too late.
> Ecoterrorist groups do use arson, but they target cars and buildings, like car dealerships or chain stores, not forests.
False. If you know anything about forests you know that before “European colonizers” (not my preferred terminology tbh) wildfire was very common and a tool wielded by indigenous peoples to control overgrowth of the sort that is now common given “intrusion” of housing into forested land which is often a subject of the ecoterrorist’s disdain.
When a major serial arsonist is caught and he explains, “f** you f*** pigs!” a natural response is to pattern match to anarchist or ecoterrorist fringe groups and anti-authoritarian personality types. When the news censors or conspicuously avoids discussion of specific individuals and their motives, preferring an imo more beneficial focus on climate change (a very real and pressing threat) even more pattern matching occurs.
I’m not saying such speculation is useful or accurate, but I don’t think it’s insanity by any stretch.
Fair enough but given sparse coverage of the backgrounds of many serial arsonists (the ones that got caught, presumably most of them do not) behind recent California wildfires, people notice that for example, Alexandra Souverneva, was an Environmental Studies major and yoga instructor and speculate on her motive.
Much of that speculation is the direct result of the conspicuously sparse reporting about the backgrounds of these arsonists. There was Maynard, the college professor, there was Eric Michael Smith who may have simply been anti-authoritarian bedwetter type. I mean, it’s a huge list but the coverage, perhaps for noble reasons, focuses almost exclusively on climate change which if you understand the science and notice the vast number of arsonists that do get caught seems almost conspiratorial to those prone to conjecture.
this is an incredible leap in imagination. I'm constantly impressed by that kind of diversity in thought towards a common goal.
normally it's the other way round - diverse thought leads to many places, but in hating the big bad leftie boogeyman, certain people seem really great at joining the dots.
here's a hint: it's actually written in the stars! don't believe me? take a map of a deep sky survey, and draw dots! you'll find the message you're looking for.
The only indisputable fact about the Kirk assassin was that he had access to a bad ass rifle and knew how to use it. Like many shooters, he was a gun nut with psychological issues.
You claiming that he was "a leftist" is exactly the tribalism you complain about.
As much as i hate it this does prove the other commenters point. They guy was at the very least indisputably not right wing. Leftist? Maybe not too political of a take for me but he was no maganut at the time of the act.
The dude was dating a trans person. The level of cognitive dissonance on display is a wonder to behold. One of the memes was a ref to furry culture another 4chan. Like i said, lefty? Idk, i dont like grouping everyone like that. But maga? Not even.
You're going to have to post some evidence bud. I can't find anyone denying the engravings existed.
Nick Fuentes himself pleaded with his followers not to commit any more violence immediately after Kirk was assassinated: "I pray to God that nobody else is hurt as a result of this. I hope that it stops here. It should stop here. To all of my followers: if you take up arms, I disavow you."
> While speaking on his show Rumble, Fuentes, told his followers, known as “groypers,” that if they turn to violence in the wake of the killing of Charlie Kirk, he will “disavow” and “disown" them.
Hes saying that they shouldn't "turn to violence in the wake of the killing". Where does that imply that it was one of his followers? Its clearly saying "dont take revenge".
The BBC article:
> At the same time, a number of left-wing social media users have continued to claim that Robinson is a Trump supporter or member of a fringe, far-right group known as "groypers"
They explicitly provide no evidence that the shooter was far right, only mentioning that left-wing social media claims that he is far right -- the very source of the disinformation!
You are falling for straight disinformation, and its not particularly subtle. Its tribalism.
PS: lets be clear, it was disinformation not misinformation - the intent was to lie and deceive.
Sure, if you want to ignore the half of the equation of tribalism that you’re exhibiting. Labeling things as NOT one side is ALSO tribalism… like repeatedly trying to point out someone is a “leftist” because they share some ideologies with the left. You are just as much the problem you are attempting to point the finger with.
Not at all. The context of the thread was the twitter page where tons of people/bots were inaccurately labeling the guy as MAGA. Correcting that is not tribalism because it is truthful. That you see it as tribalism is projection.
You are literally doing what you're describing, man! Do you not see that you are also engulfed in tribalism?!
You grasp on to any little shred of factoid (who cares if true or not) to put anyone you don't like as "the other tribe".. "Oh he donated $1 to Biden! Fucking leftist!". "Oh a report says his mom said he's a leftist?! I fucking knew it!".
It's sad. It's even sadder if you can't see it in yourself.
These questions are almost always more complex and nuanced than simply left or right. I agree with you on the second part to a degree—insomuch as the modern media landscape pushes people to quickly label shooters and tends to disincentivize any sort of nuance—but might you be doing the same here?
The charging document[0] said that his mother claimed "that over the last year or so, Robinson had become more political and had started to lean more to the left – becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented." There's also a text message he sent, which said "since trump got into office [my dad] has been pretty diehard maga." That's it. Acquaintances said "he wasn't too fond of Trump or Charlie [Kirk]," but we still haven't seen much that explains the specifics of why beyond the gay and trans rights angle. A former high school classmate said "[w]hen I knew him and his family, they were like diehard Trump" and that he was politically conservative and supported Trump "ahead of the 2020 election."[1]
As for what changed and why, we don't know. Did he stop supporting Trump because of gay and trans rights? Did he still believe in other conservative ideas? Simply labeling him as a leftist implies a cohesive ideology, but ideology is rarely so simple or straightforward even for normal people who don't decide to commit political assassinations.
Beyond that, a lot of even ideologically-motivated shooters have some awfully peculiar and non-cohesive ideologies. If the suspect agrees with 80% of a particular tribe's most common views, but that last 20% consists of some truly batshit ideas that have very little if any support, are they still a member of that tribe? Would that tribe even want them? Would they themselves want to be part of that tribe? Plenty of conservatives who believed fully in the movement's ideas broke with Trump in 2016 solely on the basis of his personal character.
They can also grab onto ideas from other tribes, to the point where investigators wind up crawling through something that's less a cohesive political ideology and more a smorgasbord of ideas they pinned together. I mean, hell, you've got to have a screw or two loose to think a political assassination is going to somehow lessen--let alone stop--anti-gay and/or anti-trans sentiment. Run that idea past pretty much any left-leaning politician, activist, or political junkie, and they'll tell you you're a moron, likely right before giving the FBI a call.
If you dont believe even his mother, theres tons of other evidence. The anti fascism messaging on his bullets. The text messages to his partner saying a Kirk was full of hate.
> I mean, hell, you've got to have a screw or two loose to think a political assassination is going to somehow lessen--let alone stop--anti-gay and/or anti-trans sentiment. Run that idea past pretty much any left-leaning politician, activist, or political junkie, and they'll tell you you're a moron, likely right before giving the FBI a call.
Straight cope and Im pretty sure I dont need to say why.
> If you dont believe even his mother, theres tons of other evidence. The anti fascism messaging on his bullets. The text messages to his partner saying a Kirk was full of hate.
Sigh. That's not what I claimed. I can accept his mother's limited statement from the charging document at face value, and still point out that we still know very little about his ideological leanings. Why did she consider him moving left? Was it just because of gay rights? Did his other views shift as well? Was the shooter's motivation more about the political side of things, or some misplaced idea that they were somehow protecting or helping their partner?
I have no clue, but I want answers to these questions if only because they can contribute to the effort of better understanding radicalization pathways and the process by which some random kid decided to commit an act of political violence.
We know that shooters rarely have cohesive, logical ideologies. The fact that a shooter decides to become a shooter in the first place is evidence that their personal ideology has shifted in some truly extreme ways that puts them--or should put them--outside the normal political discourse. Put another way, radicalization can take people to some truly unexpected places and it's entirely reasonable to want a nuanced view before jumping to affix labels because while labels can help us understand some things, they can also obscure other aspects and create entirely separate problems. Especially when those labels then get for partisan purposes and to undermine the political discourse.
As for the casings? We've got memes and video game references.[0] The most overtly political parts are "hey fascist, CATCH" with a video game code thrown in for good measure and an 19th century folksong that later became an anti-Mussolini resistance anthem. The others are memes. Do they all have meaning for the shooter? Obviously, since he went through the effort to engrave the casings. At the same time, their immaturity and oddness should be pointed out as well, as they undermine the idea that this was some sort of rational consequence of a cohesive political ideology.
> Straight cope and Im pretty sure I dont need to say why.
Perhaps you should re-read the sentence before trying to read something into it that wasn't present? My point was simple: even setting aside the ethical aspects of the question (simple answer: outside of baby Hitler hypotheticals, it's bad--and even with Baby Hitler, most people will acknowledge they're trying to leverage his future actions to make literal baby murder pencil out because they recognize that baby murder is a prima facie immoral act), political assassination is an insanely stupid means to shift public opinion and pretty much any politician, activist, or advisor--whether on the right or left--will tell you the same thing. Feel free to substitute right-leaning for left-leaning in my original comment if "left-leaning" made the sentence read as something I hadn't intended. I certainly didn't intend to suggest that somehow only left-leaning folks are capable of recognizing that political assassination is a very bad idea with tons of unintended consequences. Anyone with even a basic grasp on history is more than capable of knowing how dumb it is.
Hell, we've got literal case studies showing how political assassinations tend to blow up in everyone's face. The CIA has a list of coups and political assassinations that pretty much all resulted in serious blowback that undermined their intended outcomes--and often resulted in the very thing they wanted to prevent.
So, yeah, I think that if the shooter shopped the idea that murdering Charlie Kirk would somehow magically make things better for gay or trans people to gay and trans advocacy groups--or influential figures on the left more broadly--they'd almost unanimously tell him he's a moron and notify the FBI even if they thought Kirk was a pox on American political discourse. It's an insane proposition, and only in the mind of someone who has serious problems would it somehow make sense.
I also think that the reverse situation--where the shooter wanted to benefit some conservative constituency or ideology by murdering a liberal political activist and shopped the idea around conservative politicians and activists--would likely result in the same call to the FBI.
> Was the shooter's motivation more about the political side of things, or some misplaced idea that they were somehow protecting or helping their partner?
I respect the effort you are putting in, but you are answering a question that was not part of this thread: what was his motivation.
The question in this thread was somewhat simpler: was he on the left?
Because the context of this discussion was the twitter thread where people and bots were en masse assigning MAGA affiliation to killers, just like they did in the Charlie Kirk situation.
And the answer is unequivocal: Robinson was not MAGA or groyper, he was on the left.
