This is bothering me as well. I’ve seen video of him allegedly jumping off the building and running away, plus multiple images of him in the stairwell. No rifle. And yet, he supposedly hid it in the woods, wrapped in a towel. That makes absolutely no sense. It’s not like he had time to disassemble it and I have a hard time believing it was hidden under his clothes, especially while making what looks to be about a 10-15 ft tall leap from the building.
I’m afraid this is shaping to what I see with many recent killers, parents that were fanatical of guns and with a gross denial that their “precious” had mental issues and never should had been trained on how to shoot properly or had access to guns for that matter.
All’s I can figure is maybe he hid the gun down his pant leg? There’s footage of him on his way to the campus, and it seems he has a strange limp.
But yeh, as for his escape, it looks like he was full-on running.
Doesn’t he toss something off the roof before jumping down?
Eta: no, I see the rifle wrapped in a towel in his hand as he jumps down.
Ah, fair enough. I had seen that video but hadn’t noticed him carrying anything. Thanks for sharing that. It does appear that he is carrying something that could potentially have a gun inside.
Yeah, thanks for the clarification.
We have an opportunity for the anti-trumpers to adopt Bella Ciao as their anti fascist theme song. Imagine thousands of protesters singing Bella Ciao. Beats milling around carrying signs and it would get Trumps attention.
From the people who brought you "Umbrella Man…
Reading the lyrics, one of the first lines of the song refers to a partizan ‘waking up and discover that the invaders are coming’…
I think that is why it is not well known or sung by many lefties in the US nowadays, that theme would be more in tune with the neo-fascists of today in the US.
That sounds like a horrifically stupid idea. We should not lionize or rally behind political murderers. What the actual fuck?
So the one thing we know with absolute certainty is that they do NOT have the suspect in custody.
Apparently, they actually DO have the guy, according to the NYT and the local police. White guy from a Republican Utah family, who apparently wore a Trump costume at a Halloween party.
So – white kid with a police officer father in Utah. That doesn’t guarantee he’s conservative, but it’s certainly not a template for someone raised on “liberal propaganda” or whatever they’d want to pin on him. White cis dude. They were so eager for it to be a blue haired antifa trans person and it might turn out like Trump’s assassin to be another pissed off radicalized 4chan kid.
That’s probably the least immediately harmful outcome as it doesn’t fit the narrative and doesn’t support justification for revenge killing. And it’s kind of funny that the fucking right is so radicalized that even the people who go after right wing figures are still on the right.
I may be wrong, maybe he was a big online liberal activist or something, we don’t know yet. But I suspect that if he were, Trump and the entire right wing echosphere would be screaming about it, and the fact that they’re not probably means they’re going to bury the motivations of the shooter while still somehow using Charlie Kirk as a rallying cry even though it was one of their own.
All of the “moments of silence” honoring the dude are insane, by the way. The dude was basically an internet version of Rush Limbaugh, an asshole propagandist whose only contribution to the world was making people shittier. And they want to lionize him like he’s some kind of hero and this was a massive loss. I saw a headline that the European parliament refused to have a moment of silence for him. Why in the fuck would the US even push for that insanity? Fuck him. People can condemn political violence without acting like a piece of shit was a national hero and this is a great tragedy.
I believe the Fascists banned it as Communist then the Liberal government banned it as Fascist. Being a protest song, the group in power gives it a label. During the 50s the Italian MDAP pilots while in the US loved to sing it as a marching song because it was banned back home.
I think the ideal motivation for him to have in terms of doing the least harm/most good would be if he were a qanon kid that was pissed off about how the whole MAGA world decided that raping kids is good. They spent 10 years talking about how there was this secret cabal of democrats that were sex trafficking children, getting themselves all worked up in a frenzy, always seeing secret messages about how behind the scene Trump was ending all the satanic child molesting and any day now he would make the big announcement and the trap would be sprung and they’d all be caught. They spent years in a state of radicalized anger and hatred about this issue.
And then 2025 rolls around, and Trump is like oh hey there never were any Epstein files and I have nothing to do with it and it’s all cool and THEY SHOULD FUCKING BE LIVID. They just spent the last 10 years making half of their identity the idea that Trump was a secret superhero that was saving all of these raped children, and then it comes out that HE is actually the rapist that they pretended everyone else was. They should be up in fucking arms about this.
Charlie Kirk went from making conspiracy theories about Epstein when Biden was president to “oh I believe whatever the president says” this year, and it would completely make sense for all of those nutjobs to feel massively betrayed.
But then he went to college, and was radicalized by “the liberals”
(I’m not saying this happened, but it is a possibility. I’ve seen pretty conservative kids reject their upbringing in their early adult life)
The problem with so many of the hackneyed expressions is that they are hackneyed expressions.
To wit:
“The cruelty is the point.”
It should never lose its meaning. It should never become hackneyed.
It’s right up there with “every accusation is actually a confession.”
Also…
I remember watching footage of the trials at Nuremberg. No remorse until the very end. No acceptance of responsibility. No contrition. None. Zero. “I was following orders” was about the most any of them would say. History isn’t kind to demagogues*.
What dismays and amazes me is that there’s never any shortage of receptive audiences for these monsters. And the audiences always have a very similar demographic: a bit lost, uneducated, not particularly intelligent.
–
*A leader who obtains power by means of impassioned appeals to the emotions and prejudices of the populace.
Weird, isn’t it, how once you wind up a bunch of poorly educated, heavily armed, parentally consanguine idiots it’s hard to unwind them when you need a little compassion for your crimes?
You exhibit a lack of remorse.
Kirk was about as remarkable as a Kardashian. He was only relevant inside the cult.