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.

What exactly makes you say things like that? I'm genuinely curious what part of the discord conversations make people draw these conclusions.

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.

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"?

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.

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.

When the grillers grill back!

What makes a man turn neutral? A lust for gold? Power? Or was he just born with a heart full of neutrality?

Turns out all extremists are

These radical centrists are messed up in the brain, left and right can agree to that at least. (We're all fucked!)

That is who seems to be most into 'propaganda of the deed' these days. They don't really have anything else.

I consider myself a centrist radical

…to impress Jodie Foster.

That's honestly what I'm thinking it is. He was supposedly dating a trans person and Kirk is a real POS when it comes to that topic so I could imagine him loving his partner so much that he felt the need to kill someone he sees as making life more dangerous for them.

Listen, as someone who fell in love with a trans woman decades ago (my ex), it's more plausible than you'd think. I didn't go shoot up people since I wasn't raised right wing, but love does make you do crazy things!

The people who need to learn a lesson will never change their minds. The "Change My Mind" crowd are not there to have their mind changed, it's to try to change those who are weaker and not able to come up with conclusions on their own.

did they just learn about nuance

No. You'd be able to tell by how on fire they were.

I hope someone has, because lemmy certainly hasn't.

Apparently because it's always black... at least according to them

He is whatever will make their base ignore further and deeper encroachments in to their, and everyone American's, rights.

It’s not crazy; they’re capitulating to keep their jobs, and probably their lives.

And it was a professional hit. And it was done by Trump as a distraction. And to cause a race war. And to stop Kirk from spreading hate.

I'm not one to condemn people on grounds of ideological purity, but didn't helldivers pull some super-proprietary registration and telemetry bullshit?

People with empathy are snapping.

This line hits hard. I hate this fucking timeline.

Didn’t CK say empathy was a bad thing?

But this doesn't fit the other narrative that they have been talking about... which is him hating the guy for not being right enough or whatever you want to call it...

Also Mormon and Groyper

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 ...

Guy went to college for one semester of virtual classes, and that was enough to radicalize him!? I want whatever you are smoking.

Well, would you look at that:

'No evidence' found yet of ties between Charlie Kirk's shooting and left-wing groups, officials say - NBC News, Sept 20th 2025