Internet brain rot

It’s very likely that Tyler Robinson, whatever his very probably completely confused and incoherent political beliefs might have been, was engaging in stochastic violence for the purposes of gaining internet fame, like so many other young men who have grown up on the internet. The fact that he confessed his crime strongly suggests this, given that a bumbling hollowed out FBI run by social media influencers as opposed to professionals might very well have never caught him if he hadn’t been able to resist advertising his achievement.

Shooting somebody famous, or shooting a whole lot of ordinary people all at once, in order to get famous yourself was a thing before the internet of course — Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman, and John Hinckley all fit the former model — but in the age of the internet these two distinct but related rounds to fame/infamy have become epidemic.

Almost all the deadliest mass shootings in US history are post-internet, and most are post-social media. Columbine doesn’t even make the top 15 any more. It’s gotten much harder to assassinate presidents, but celebrity murders have also become a thing, in an age where Andy Warhol’s famous quip about 15 minutes has taken on a very dark resonance.

I really wish people wouldn’t confuse this kind of thing with something that could even conceivably count as justifiable political action, no matter what the killer’s political beliefs might be. Stochastic violence born of narcissistic motives is an absolute gift to authoritarians in general and fascists in particular. It gives them a ready made excuse for even more widespread repression and censorship, as we’ve seen so clearly over the last couple of days. These murders, both of individual famous people and ordinary people who were just going about their day, often children going about their school day, are not ideological acts at all, except in the loosest sense in which nihilistic narcissistic rage can be thought of an ideology. They are the acts of young men, almost exclusively, who have had their brains rotted by the toxic stew that is the dark side of the internet.

What they have collectively created is a culture of fear and paranoia, both of which are being and will be exploited to the maximum extent by the authoritarians and fascists who currently control the federal government and that of many states, in order to pursue their authoritarian and fascist agendas.

At the core of all this are guns, both in terms of how easily they’re obtained and how completely they’re fetishized, by disturbed young men in particular, but by many other people as well. And our political and legal cultures seem completely incapable of doing anything meaningful about that.

. . . BTW I put our friend Pepe up there before I saw this:

If you look at the X thread from which this is embedded, there’s a lot of indications that the kid was a Groyper. That’s Nick Fuentes’s group, which had been openly feuding with Kirk.

. . . just for the heck of it:

. . . Commenter Enbast pointed out something which I think is almost certain to happen.

The mainstream media disgraced themselves completely with their reaction to Kirk’s murder, but now they have a brand new frame: Charlie Kirk, “mainstream Republican,” was murdered by a “far right extremist.” And the thing is, it will be true! Charlie Kirk was a “mainstream Republican” — which means an open racist, misogynist, transphobe etc. But he did criticize Trump about the Epstein files. Nick Fuentes — an almost literal Nazi who is even more slavishly devoted to Trump — is now the right wing core of the Republican party.