4d ago

Leaked Chats Show Alleged Kirk Killer 'Doesn't Fit Into Any Tidy Narrative'

www.commondreams.org Leaked Chats Show Alleged Kirk Killer 'Doesn't Fit Into Any Tidy Narrative' | Common Dreams

Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein challenged conflicting narratives circulating about Tyler Robinson by obtaining online chats and speaking with a childhood friend of the 22-year-old man accused of assassinating far-right activist Charlie Kirk.

179 comments

My initial impression of his writings hit me as either Groyper posing as a leftist, or just an accelerationist psychopath.
Either way, it doesn't change the fact that right-wing extremism makes up the majority of violence.
- 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.
  
  We might find out, but will anybody care?
  
  I saw some of the Discord on Ken Klippensteins website. Are there other links to it that show more conversation?
  
  channers like most people are hypocrites
  ‘she was a good one’
- 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.
- What exactly makes you say things like that? I'm genuinely curious what part of the discord conversations make people draw these conclusions.
  
  I'm referring more to the immediate aftermath of the event. I wasn't very clear when I said writings but rather writings on the casings and the immediate reaction of Fuentes.

this country isn’t ready for what the youngest online male zoomers are like lol. i’m a millennial but i’ve been here the whole time watching cultures come and go and the memelord nihilist has been growing since ‘04. there are many variations and they range from sad and pathetic yet ultimately harmless to sad and pathetic and goddamn dangerous. these people can have a mixture of politics and usually prefer whatever has the most public condemnation so they can align themselves with immorality as a point of pride which becomes their identity. fuck having your own beliefs, just follow whatever gets the most negative response from society.
- 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.
  
  I used to live in a house that was on a big circle, with all the back yards joining in the middle. None of the houses had fences, so it was just one huge field, with the occasional tree. If that had been my backyard as a kid in the 60s and 70s, that giant field of combined backyards would have been filled with kids every day. I would have known the names of every other kid, where they lived, and probably their parents, too.
  But when I lived there about 10 years ago, I seldom saw a single kid out there. In the 5 years I was there, I saw kids playing maybe 3 times.
  A couple years before we moved, one of the house on the circle sold to a family with kids. They put a giant fence up, and the kids played in their own backyard, with no contact with others.
  
  i hear ya. i'm not one to participate in generation wars but zoomers were given access to the worst parts of the internet left behind by millennials and younger gen xers and it is doing a number on them psychologically. i feel bad more than anything. our government didn't care and let these kids get ruined by their control of information through media and the internet.
- 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.
  
  i want to push back a little bit on this because while i believe some of us were joking there were tons who weren't and are ultimately responsible for the chronically online zoomers we see today. young gen xers and older millennials built the culture of the late 90s and early 00s internet that became the blueprint for the mid 10s to now. we had some of the worst racism and bullying imaginable on 4chan and it spread to the real world on occasion in horrifyingly cruel ways, like taunting parents of recently deceased kids and shit. we weren't all joksters, the cruelty started early and spread rapidly. we allowed the internet to be eroded by the destruction of anonymity and infiltration of corporate and political interests.

Shocking that a terminally online 22 year old doesn’t have a consistent ideology.
I saw a comment on instagram from someone saying Charlie Kirk had had some “powerful comments” in his videos. Checked the profile and there was a ton of pro-environment, anti-cop content. Most people don’t think super hard about their political ideology.
- Most people don’t think super hard about their political ideology.
  This is perhaps the most important insight one can have when it comes to entertaining the 'fun' discussions on christmas dinner. Both in constructing an argument and maintaining healthy relationships.
  People really cling to being a "good" person. And not thinking can serve as a shield to maintain this; at least within one's own self-image.
  
  "not thinking"
  It's not so much that, as Wrong Thinking. As humans, we are supposed to employ Critical Thinking, but it isn't instinctual, we have to learn it. Just as importantly, we have to hone our Critical Thinking Skills, and use them constantly. That's how humans are supposed to think.
  But if your education didn't include solid Critical Thinking Skills training, then you have a major hole in your ability to process society. That intellectual vacuum wants to be filled by something. Some people don't fill it with anything, and they bounce around making one stupid decision after another. Others fall under the spell of propaganda, which Critical Thinking Skills are particularly successful at resisting, and become radicalized in some way, such as MAGA, or ISIS.
  Conservatives have been historically hostile at Critical Thinking Skills curriculum in schools. The Texas Republican Party even once put it in their official platform, explicitly stating that they oppose the teaching Critical Thinking Skills. Imagine creating an official policy that states that they oppose the teaching of PROPER, EFFECTIVE THINKING?
  The MAGAs are literally creating a system to deliberately make their constituents more stupid, and vulnerable to manipulation. It's hard to imagine anything more diabolical than that.

Taking politics (mostly) out of it -
Luigi allegedly killed because he saw injustice and had empathy for other people, wanted to show the evils of health insurance companies.
This kid imo allegedly killed because he loved someone CK was spouting hateful narratives about. His empathy for this person he loved, and people like them who are just normal people living life, made it easy for him to turn to guns when he wanted this person gone for eternity.
People with empathy are snapping.
- People with empathy are snapping.
  This line hits hard. I hate this fucking timeline.
  
  This is what the MAGAs don't understand since MAGA requires, and trains, people to be Sociopaths.
  An empathetic person will avoid violence for as long as possible, but when the forces against them become too great, and they snap, their empathy morphs into Protection Mode, and anyone who has people in their life that they protect, knows how dangerous Protection Mode can be.
  I've been identifying my personal Red Lines, and one of the biggest is certain people in my life who are members of vulnerable demographics that MAGAs particularly despise. If anything were to happen to those people, I would become very dangerous. My empathy for them could easily be twisted into revenge against MAGA.
  
  This is my personal conclusion about this situation because in my personal life people with empathy are drowning right now. It’s hard to live life these days if you give a single fuck about anything real, any real injustices or struggles people are living.
- Didn’t CK say empathy was a bad thing?
  
  The ultra Christians now say empathy is a sin.
  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/sin-empathy-christian-trump-vance-b2812330.html
  
  Yes he did. The whole MAGA movement believes empathy is 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...
  
  Yes, that’s why I took the politics out of it. Empathy can make you hate people enough to kill them if you see them hurting people you love. I think it’s been proven his house mate / partner is a trans person and they were romantically involved.
  CK was sitting, sharing the hateful transphobic ideals he had the actual second he was murdered. Looking into this guy, he wasn’t a MAGA and he wasn’t a leftist. He wasn’t extreme politically and that’s precisely the medias / MAGAs problem : he was just a seemingly average dude who snapped because of the hatred and torment he witnessed from CK.
  It’s only this political imo because he killed DT’s pet pig and they’re of course going to use that as FUD. I think the truth is probably that he would have killed CK regardless of who CK aligned with politically.

Here's my tidy narrative: he was raised in MAGA family, was poorly educated and had a lot of exposure to extremists positions but little exposure to critical thinking. When he finally was exposed to different ideology at college he wasn't able to process is correctly and reacted violently, as he was taught to do by his conservative upbringing.
- 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 ...
  
  A narrative is a story, whether fictional or not.
- Guy went to college for one semester of virtual classes, and that was enough to radicalize him!? I want whatever you are smoking.
  
  I think you didn't go even for one semester because if you did, you would understand what I wrote.

You mean...they're not transgender?! Who'd thunk it?!
Just mark one up against the stupid "a lot" response Kirk made when asked how many transgender shooters are out there.
- Allegedly dating a trans person tho
  
  Allegedly, we know little so far.
  
  Which apparently still fits with a subset of the groyper movement.
- Nothing confirmed as of yet

I'm a little annoyed with how quickly everyone here latched onto the Groyper narrative and parroted it as established fact. Seems unhelpful to run with a story before any evidence came out.
- I think it's just common sense. When the fascists start spewing "he's super leftist and trans" propaganda you don't respond with "wait, we have to wait for more facts". You respond with your own propaganda. Being nice and following rules will not help you stop fascism. The groyper narrative might have actually prevented retaliation and saved lives.
  
  Yeah it helped muddy the water and basically kept it liquid and nuclear till the actual facts could assert themselves. Even if the right still thinks he's an Uber leftist what matters is that folks who don't know may not believe that.
  
  I don't disagree that having a counter during the initial heat of things was necessary. I'm just saying it bothers me that the delivery wasn't "here's some good lines of questioning and the conclusions they lead to" and was instead to saturate the front page with absolute certainty. That just feels disingenuous now, and made it more difficult to come across new verified information, which is really just a disservice to everyone.
  Edit: its been like what... 36 hours since the messages got released and the Groyper narrative fell apart. Lemmites are STILL screaming that he had Republican parents, STILL pointing at the voter registration that snopes debunked, STILL trying to draw weak parallels to Fuentes' content. We need to engage with reality here, counter propoganda doesn't work if it's obviously grasping at straws.
  
  The groyper narrative might have actually prevented retaliation and saved lives.
  I seriously doubt it, you are doing what most users of these platforms do, which is not looking at the right-wing sites and forums and seeing what their narratives looked like. (Hint: it was very focused and only wavered in the details and it's STILL solid as fuck because they have strict controls over narratives.)
  The only segment of their side who both knew what a groyper was and heard the rumor are not threats to anyone, they're as chronically online as anyone here and not part of any real movement or action.
  
  When I was in politics I have a friend that used to say: "The best way to win is not to act like them".
  I still live by that phrase. I don't want ro become then thing I want to destroy.
  Maybe it is just me. I cannot stand lies. I left political activism mostly because I saw people on my same group lying "for the cause". And I cannot be dishonest or stand dishonesty, no matter the cause.
- I’ll leave this here for others like me who apparently are really out of the loop
  Groypers, sometimes called the Groyper Army, are a group of alt-right, white nationalist, and Christian nationalist 41 activists led by Nick Fuentes. Groypers are a loosely defined group of Fuentes's followers and fans. They are named after a cartoon amphibian named "Groyper", a variant of the Internet meme Pepe the Frog.
- I'm sad that the supposedly better side is spreading missinformation and propaganda just like that.
  Specially because it's pushing a propaganda about "If your parents are X you are X". Which is really harmful for all the people not following the same ideology as their parents.
- We're starting to see Democrats react to things the same way MAGAs do. It may not be pretty, but the Michelle Obama Doctrine of "When they go low, we go high," led directly to the successful rise, and revival, of MAGA, so getting a little ugly has been needed for a long time.
  
  Michelle Obama Doctrine of “When they go low, we go high,” led directly to the successful rise, and revival, of MAGA,
  Do you mind expanding on this.
- I have a lot of hate in my inbox for telling people that latching onto the groyper narrative was the equivalent of the right claiming the shooter is trans. They sure are quiet lately.
  You dumbasses out there just want distance from someone you don't want representing you.
  BE INTELLECTUALLY HONEST YOU FUCKING CHILDREN.
  We don't win by being as deluded as the WWE spectacle chuds who don't think and just want sides and teams and fighting for territory.
  
  shit, i was hoping this shooter was leftist. i was hoping he was the first sign that the left was willing to do more than just shout while they walk around with signs.
- I can see the argument in favor of putting out literally any other story once bigoted lies start swirling. A narrative of any kind sticks better and provokes a feeling of uncertainty rather than just asking for it.
  Especially to sub-literate animals who understand tone but not actual words. Like Americans.
- They just needed it to be the right so bad that they went with whatever they could find.

You thought that right- and left-wing extremists are the problem, turns out the center-extremists are /s
- 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?
- That is who seems to be most into 'propaganda of the deed' these days. They don't really have anything else.
- These radical centrists are messed up in the brain, left and right can agree to that at least. (We're all fucked!)
- I consider myself a centrist radical
- Turns out all extremists are

How crazy would it be if we found out he did it for love?
- …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.
  
  Gonna be terribly ironic when Trump uses this to take rights away from trans people, but it would have happened anyway.
- 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!

Did they just learn about nuance and that practically nothing in life is strictly black and white?
- 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.
  
  Precisely. They're a thought-filter. They want to weed out the ones who can prove them wrong and only address the ones who're aligned with their set of beliefs.
  
  they want affirmation and assurances that thier beliefs are correct, if not they will find sources that will confirm thier biases. oh and they need to be constantly reminded of it, to convince them of thier koolaid drinking.
- did they just learn about nuance
  No. You'd be able to tell by how on fire they were.
- Apparently because it's always black... at least according to them
- I hope someone has, because lemmy certainly hasn't.

This is what a "slow pivot" looks like. Kirk's killer didn't turn out to be the gay, trans, rainbow polar bear the news was hoping for and did their hardest to promote.
The obvious "tidy narrative" is that the son of two Trump supporters, living in an ultra conservative state just might be a conservative himself.

What about the tidy narrative of raised in a conservative home with early and easy access to guns?
There haven’t been many shooters that weren’t around right wingers and guns at home, wherever their supposed personal ideologies became.
- Also Mormon and Groyper

I’m just still mad Charlie Kirk is getting this much attention and the conservatives haven’t bat an eye to the children shot. I’m still mad the conservatives are the ones always advocating for guns and now that the conservatives have been attacked with a gun they say the left are the dangerous ones, even when the left are the ones who have been saying for years now the guns are out of hand.
This is coming from someone raised in a white conservative christian mom and dad household. They were always hoping for the end of the world or some sort of zombie apocalypse just so they could fully disconnect from the rest of the world and use their guns. When the left was pushing for better gun laws I always heard my parents outraged and saying “they will have to pry my guns out of my cold dead hands” - it’s no wonder I’m a leftist as an adult now. P.S. my parents were also fully on board that the sandy hook shooting was fake and it was all “fake actors” that’s all they think when it’s innocent children getting shot. But when it’s Charlie Kirk then they’re mad and it’s all the lefts fault.
- I feel validated in an opinion I have had for ages : that in all the talk about 2nd Amendment rights Americans do guns are nothing but a security blanket they clutch to make them feel like Democracy will be saved or be maintained as long as they clutch their emotional support weapon. They will watch rights be stripped from them, their neighbours carted off in wagons and none of them will shoot even if they have the weapon on their person while this is happening. They will protest, they will write and verbalize their dissent and they will appeal to authority and band together democratically but the ownership of the weapons themselves are useless. Realistically if someone from the government comes for them they will likely go quietly because no one is coming to save them. At that point it's basically over. The system is too big to fight.
  The real resistance is in numbers not armaments. It doesn't matter what you are wielding if you have solidarity and organization and the bravery to misbehave. Resistance can be in attacking the gears that make things run by not doing your job or doing it poorly. Refusing to comply in a multitude of ways like sending things to the wrong place or making 'mistakes' that cost time and effort to fix. A government can only force compliance so much and at the end of the day runs on good faith. Guns are a distraction to jingle in your face so you stay isolated. Building walls between you and other humans with dreams you will defend your own little fort against the tides of tyranny.
  
  Its also the guns are only there to like shoot homeless people and kids apparently?
  This is why Kirk was such a nutjob. He admitted the guns are just to kill kids but said it was worth it because insecure adults could still have their snuggy boomboom.
- Conservative Americans and their love of guns isn’t really a Christian thing, it’s a cultural phenomenon that goes back to the American Revolution and earlier. Scots-Irish descended Americans have long had a culture based around gun ownership, militias, and xenophobia that may be traced back to England’s many invasions of Scotland and Ireland over the centuries since the Norman conquest of England.

Of course he fits into a tidy narrative: whatever one the right wants. Clearly he's trans, trans-adjacent, trans-influenced, trans-atlanic who did a bad because the social contagion eroding the social fabric of western (read: cis straight white male-dominated christian) civilization. We knew these facts before Kirk's body hit the floor.
The rest of the "details" like, reality and evidence or whatever, doesn't really matter.
- He is whatever will make their base ignore further and deeper encroachments in to their, and everyone American's, rights.

thanks for posting this, many people here seem to be hellbent on projecting onto the shooter whatever their preferred identity for him would be.
all i really care to know about him is that he's a good shot.

Ok so suppose this is some seemingly normalish apolitical gamer kid that was foolishly taught to solve problems with guns. Kirk was blanket targetting people he cared about and took action to do something about it.
This is the MO of some guy who's like neighbors are like threatening their wife. Its not a good solution but if the cops won't help folks being threatened its what people do.
The same day a right wing trump gooner killed a bunch of kids in colorado. Its crazy that the media is all lockstep in whitewashing charlie kirk like this to explicitly go after people fully unrelated to the shootings.
- It’s not crazy; they’re capitulating to keep their jobs, and probably their lives.

I've been following all the news on him and he's clearly a trans groyper antifa gun enthusiast centrist who likes to play Helldivers II.
(/s)
- 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?
  
  IIRC, Sony is the publisher and wanted to require logging in through their service, but it wasn't ready at launch so it launched without that requirement and they tried to add it later.

People want a good weapon they can use to hurt others. But the store only has a human shaped tool. How can we swing that at others?
Please, I just need a "he was a groyper." The guy behind me wants a "he was trans."
The more ergonomic the concept the better. Don't tell me it's complex or untidy. What's the point of being trained by the media? I have all these patterns... just fit the guy into one already.

Planted chats. Full of boomer speak. It's not even chatgpt. Just straight boomer speak.
- Good, fuck using fancy LLMs to generate text, just write the fucking words yourself!

I'm pretty sure I know his type and my guess is he "did it for the lulz"

The federal conclusion will inevitably be that he was a so-called nihilist violent extremist (NVE)
That is a lot of confidence in the administration to let law enforcement do its job properly and not politicize the findings.

Does Helldiver's 2 have game chat? Discord seems tame so far.
- It does have a game chat. Hardly anyone uses it. Also I don't think he's that big on helldivers since he did ⬆️ ➡️ ⬇️ ⬇️ ⬇️, when he should have done ➡️ ➡️ ⬆️ or ➡️ ⬆️ ⬇️ ⬇️ ➡️
  
  "An Eagle never misses" though. Tough choice.
- Fuggin' turn it over, or let us fall through the grate. We're already burnt to a crisp.
- It's a 4 person co op game. There's a local chat for those you're in with, but that's it.

“I am still okay my love…”
Does anyone his age write like that?
- Honestly, this isn't far off how I texted at his age. I've seen a lot of skepticism of the texts, but I don't find them hard to believe from someone with his background, disposition, and test scores.
  
  Test scores? Damn people are really probing.
- Possibly, especially a lot of weird conservative kids who don’t fully understand how relationships work. But really it’s not a huge deal.

They will continue to try to turn the dude trans. Simple fact is that kirk didn't hate enough people and died for it. They once again are trying to cloud the truth and make up anything they can to promote their agenda of hate.

And I think that's what scares the right even more. He was "normal" by their standards. Not a loner, accepted by his family, hobbies, Christian background, went to trade school, solidly middle-class family, white, cis. If you've effed up the system so much that this "normal" guy can do something like this then that's scary. Que "are we the baddies" gif.
- He wasn't though? He was seriously deep into 4chan and meme culture. He wasn't "normal" except on the surface.
  
  That's why I use the quotation marks. Boomer conservatives don't understand that 4chan meme culture. They see a good ol' boy with a proper upbringing.
  
  I think meme culture is pretty mainstream at this point.

If you believe this shit, want to hear about my bridge in Brooklyn?
- What are you trying to say?
  
  Do you actually believe that 22 year olds talk like this? They’ve been trying to push a narrative since the bullet was fucking fired.
  They want to make this into a martyrdom. They are going to force the story to match.

AKA, just like everyone else.

None of us know anything for certain, but I sure get the sense that this kid is a patsy. I'm inclined to dismiss everything the authorities and the media are saying about him. It all sounds like incongruent nonsense. My fingers are crossed that we actually get to hear him speak before the powers that be murder him.
- The "text" messages seem really weird, like someone who is like 40+ tried writing like a much younger person...
  Everything seems to add up in just this perfectly awkward way...
  And this is my crazy ass thoughts: I'm not even sure the dude is real, or his family is, i have not seen an actual interview from these people who keep saying all these things... is it just a bunch of Ai bullshit? Part of a Cover up?
  
  100%, that text message chain is ridiculous. The entire official doesn't make any sense. Just seems like they are trying to pin the whole thing onto a 'lone shooter' and quickly move on. And then politicians are trying to capitalize on the death to push through whatever agenda they are already trying to push through, it's disgusting and embarrassing.
- Why would they have a patsy who doesn’t fit the narrative they want? That makes no sense
  
  I think what "they" want is confusion.

Who does?

He was taking revenge for having been brainwashed and conned.

dickhead shoots dickhead. Easy!

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