Internet brain rot and irony poisoning

The shooting at the ICE facility in Dallas is already part of the — almost completely fictional — canon of “left wing violence” in the right wing scream machine’s propaganda archive.

Journalist Ken Klippenstein has done some valuable spade work of the old-fashioned kind, digging into what might have inspired Joshua Jahn to fire a bunch of rounds from a sniper rifle into the facility, killing one migrant and critically wounding two others (no ICE personnel were injured).

I’ve seen a whole punch of paranoid reactions here at the usually not paranoid LGM about this incident, in which people are throwing out wildly implausible theories about how maybe an FBI agent hastily scrawled “ANTI-ICE” on the bullet that was found at the scene. I understand why people are thinking this way under the circumstances, but it’s far more likely that this again, as in the case of Charlie Kirk’s killer, is a Reichstag fire situation, but in a much more degraded 4chan kind of way. Historical refresher: the Reichstag fire was an extremely convenient incident for the Nazis, who exploited it to ratchet up political repression even further immediately after Hitler came to power. For a long time many people assumed the fire was a false flag, perpetrated by the Nazis themselves, but the consensus among historians today is that it wasn’t. The perpetrator, Marinus van der Lubbe was a lone wolf. He was not acting, as the Nazis claimed falsely at the time, as part of some larger left wing plot, but was rather someone who both hated the Nazis for ideological reasons — he was a communist — and was also an unhinged manic depressive pyromaniac

The very loose Reichstag fire analogy here is the killers in both these cases appear to be unhinged young men who were acting on their own for a confused mixture of psychopathological motivations. The analogy is loose in that, unlike Van der Lubbe, who actually was a member of a larger political movement, and appears to have had genuine political as well as pathological motivations for his actions, these young men were not really acting politically at all, except to the extent that the essentially nihilistic irony of the internet vortex in which they lived can be considered a kind of politics.

Klippenstein:

President Trump responded to the shooting by blaming the “radical left,” vowing to sign another executive order to “dismantle” what he called “Domestic Terrorism Networks.” (This comes at the heels of another executive order he signed this week designating Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization,” as I previously reported.

On the off-chance the shooting wasn’t what it looked like, I reached out to people who knew the gunman, 29-year-old Joshua Jahn. Three who knew him since at least middle school agreed to speak to me on the condition that I not name them, corroborating their friendship with photos and other records. Their accounts paint the picture of someone with a vaguely libertarian bent who despised both major parties and politicians generally (including Trump) but who didn’t engage with politics beyond that. He preferred edgy humor, video games and the message board 4chan, all of which he became increasingly steeped in as he withdrew from social life as well as their own friendships several years ago, they said.

None of his former friends believed that the “ANTI-ICE” inscription could possibly be sincere, feeling such a serious political statement was anathema to who Jahn was. His humor was deeply ironic, often offensive and aggressive to the point of alienation.

“He was most certainly an edgelord, an irony guy,” one friend said. (Edgelord is online-speak for someone who likes to espouse edgy, nihilistic views). Asked about the inscription on the bullet, the friend said: “Josh was an edgelord who wanted someone to get blamed. I think he tried his best to write something goofy … to rile people up.”

Another friend showed me a Facebook post describing how Jahn had flooded his friends’ comment sections with rape jokes — “playful shock humor,” the friend said.

Jahn appears to have spent what to me at least is a mind-boggling amount of time playing “shooter” video games:

Jahn’s profile on the gaming platform Steam showed the vast amounts of time he spent playing video games, particularly shooters: more than 6,000 hours on Rust, 3,000 on Team Fortress 2, and 1,000 on Left 4 Dead 2. (He even found time to play three and a half hours in the past two weeks, the account shows.) . . .

Among the dozen or so usernames he used was one reading “#Impeachment.” When I asked if this wasn’t a clear reference to anti-Trump politics, his friends recoiled at the idea that he would express opposition to Trump so sincerely and straightforwardly. Instead they saw it as part of his broader ironic persona, poking fun at anti-Trump “resistance” types.

That said, one friend recalled that when Trump first came to power, Jahn “was not a fan” — though he had contempt for mainstream politicians in general. His friends say he had more of a libertarian bent, with one recalling an interest in the libertarian figure Ron Paul.

Still, the friend who recounted Jahn’s dislike of Trump insisted that there was at least a kernel of seriousness to the username.

“If it was ironic, it’s that half irony — where you’re half-kidding, half-serious, just in case,” he said.

“He was never really into politics, especially not politicians,” said another friend, who had known Jahn since age 8. “He was into politics only in the 4chan sense — contrarian, provocative, boundary-pushing for laughs, not conviction.”

4chan, the anonymous message board where provocation and irony are the coin of the realm, was apparently one of Jahn’s favorite haunts. His abrasive humor is where his friends’ opinions on him diverge the most, with some describing it as amusing but others as grating — especially as his online persona bled into real life.

“I mostly stopped talking to him when he took his 4chan/irony stuff into daily interactions,” one friend told me. “He was becoming unbearable … once he dropped out of college he had no obligation to be social and none of us reached out due to his edgelord behavior.”

I wasn’t able to find anyone with insight into Jahn’s more recent views, something that his friends said was unsurprising given his withdrawal from social life over the past few years.

“If you’re having trouble finding people besides immediate family who knew him, that’s part of the story,” one friend said. “Every mutual friend drifted away over that kind of edgelord behavior.”

I don’t know anything about video games or video game culture, so I’m studiously trying to avoid an old man in the 1940s panicking about comic books reaction to this. And I suspect — but again I don’t know anything about these subcultures — that the problem here is not so much with shooter video games per se, but with internet brain rot more generally: with what happens to deeply alienated young, usually white, men, who spend their lives somewhere down the 4chan or equivalent rabbit hole, whether that rabbit hold is video games, or incel chat boards, or endless porn surfing, or even more overtly political fora of one kind or another.

What I don’t see any evidence of here is someone who has been politicized in any traditional sense at all, let alone someone who was a “leftist”. (Keep in mind that in the profoundly warped world of the right wing scream machine, Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer are “leftists.”).

Instead, what I see is someone who looks very much like what Charlie Kirk’s killer appeared to be, as I commented at the time 17 years two weeks ago:

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.

It’s vastly more probable that Jahn scrawling ANTI-ICE on one of his bullets was a bit of ironic copycatting of Tyler Robinson, in another pathetic and deranged bid for internet fame, rather than evidence of his apparently non-existent commitment to left wing politics, in even the very loosest sense of that term. or that the writing was some Trumpist false flag, produced on the spot by Them.

“They” are plenty bad enough as they are, before we succumb to paranoid hallucinations of fiendish MAGA plots everywhere. The paranoid hallucinations that are helping hurtle us down the road to authoritarianism are being churned out by spending 17 hours a day on 4chan etc., which is poisoning the minds of so many deeply unhinged and heavily armed young men.