It baffles me how, with Charlottesville, the El Paso attack, the attack on black churches, and other attacks, that it never seems to occur to white supremacists or other politically-minded killers that attacking a certain group of people (Hispanics, blacks, etc.) will only backfire and generate exactly the opposite of the desired effect.
Why don’t they dress up as leftists and shoot up a Trump rally if they’re trying to bolster the Trump cause? Or specifically target white people?
Some pro-Trump and pro-Nazi attacks were false flags by leftists. Jussie Smollett for one. But I’ve heard some spray paintings of swastikas, etc were false flags.
Also historically domestic terrorism against marginalized groups hasn’t led to any public backlash. All it did was achieve its goal of terrorizing the out groups into staying out of the political, social and economic system.
Also the Russians supported both the left and the right. They supported both black lives matter and white nationalist groups to sow divisions.
A.) Most mass shooters die or get caught relatively soon. False flag operations don’t tend to hold up very well when you have the dead guy, what with their long history of being an Illinois Nazi and having boasted at the bar last week that he was going to start a race war by murdering random white folks.
B.) Most mass shooters aren’t even remotely rational. If they were, they generally wouldn’t be shooting masses. They’re probably a couple steps down from a Unabomber-type in the mental stability department and HE was a nutcase. If you’re the kind of guy to start spraying bullets at a county fair, you’re probably not the guy to come up with some clever plan. Which, let’s face it, would never be that clever because false flag operations initiated by individuals( as opposed to, perhaps, a well-funded government )are pretty likely going to fail. It’s not really that easy to pull off clever crimes these days.
You did say something in the other thread along the lines of “It’s like they WANT gun control” – you have hit it, I think: on top of Tamerlane’s quite accurate IMO evaluations about mass shooters not being the hottest load in the magazine, those who fancy themselves white supremacist subversives *want *there to be a backlash. They *want * to provoke an overreaction, either counterviolence or a true rights-violating crackdown *on them *so they can cry out “time to rise against tyranny” (let’s face it, crying that “tyranny” is having to subsidize a welfare program quickly begins to sound like whingeing and does little to motivate anyone normal to pick up a gun). It does them little good to have a mainstream center-right establishment put leftist extremists down, they don’t want the mainstream center-right establishment to exist, either they want a wackadoodle ultraright establishment or at the very least a chance to go in a blaze of self-deluded glory trying.
But that’s only taking into account your smarter politically inclined WhiteSup. With most shooters it seems it’s just wacko city, who cares about consequences, not thinking farther ahead of how the hell is he supposed to bring forth the race war after he runs out of ammo or gets cornered.
One thing I’ve observed about some of these fellows: they seem convinced that if it were allowed to become a true no-holds-barred battle royale of all on all, *they *would of course be the natural winners because everyone who is not like them has to be weak and cowardly (on top of inferior physically and mentally) and it is only a System whose rules hobble the strong and superior for the benefit of the weak and inferior, that causes them to be utter hopeless losers. So they seek to prove themselves like the punk bitches they are by going after “soft targets” where they’ll have all the advantage to inflict maximum mayhem.
Because they are morons. Why do Muslim terrorists target who they target? Do they think anything is going to get better for anyone? They just bring upon a reign of bombing that never ends, and doesn’t improve life for anyone.
Terrorists, regardless of color, are morons.
More likely they think that way just because that’s what always happens in the movies. The “good guys” always win, (no matter how outgunned they are), and these fellows, of course, think they’re the “good guys.” Fundamentally, they’re trying to live out TV and movie fantasies.
The recent mass shootings aren’t to further a cause; they are an end in themselves.
The shooters are angry and rageful first. They pick the targets out later.
At least once in their life, they force people to treat them as if they were important. As if the hate that forms the basis of their emotional life was worthy of attention. The rhetoric is mostly just an excuse.
Hitler was enraged because he couldn’t get into art school and Germany lost WWI. The only difference between him and the latest shooters is he had the Luftwaffe instead of an AK-47.
Regards,
Shodan
Occam’s razor suggests that if they say they hate brown people, then most likely their priority is killing brown people.
We could go a little further and say that indirectly helping the white power/pro-Trump movement might eventually cause more killing, but these psychos either aren’t into the long game, or in their hearts they aren’t sure if it isn’t a doomed cause.
We could go even further and consider the outcomes of shooting up a Trump rally. Shooter most likely gets shot immediately (or, worse, for shooter, possibly beaten and stomped to death). Bad for shooter. Alternately, shooter knows it would be a circular firing squad with “good guys” shooting each other. Bad look for the movement.
But I tend to go with Occam’s razor. I deeply disagree that these people are crazy or stupid. They operate lucidly and rationally under the ideology of hate; they just aren’t much interested in strategy. Brown people are their enemies. They want to hurt their enemies and don’t want to hurt their friends.
Yup. The folks perpetrating these mass shootings (for the most part) have a plan that ends with them going out in a blaze of glory, or simply becoming “important” for once in their lives.
All of the above, and also - think how it would hurt their cred. If you’re a Nazi white supremacist, and you decide to shoot up a Nazi rally in the guise of being a leftist, and thus get widespread sympathy for the Nazi cause … someone might believe you! You, personally, might go down in history as a leftist terrorist! How terrible would that be? Way more terrible than the fact that you just shot a dozen innocent people to death, I’m guessing, if you’re violent narcissistic terrorist scum.
Goes double for pro-Islamic terrorism. Would a pro-Islamic terrorist really be okay with walking into a mosque strapped to a bomb, to make people more sympathetic to Muslims? Not gonna happen.
I’m not sure I agree with this premise. I suspect the core Trump supporters will be energized by these attacks. These are people who support Trump even after his response to Charlottesville.
Because if you’re angry enough to go and shoot up a bunch of people, you want to shoot the people you are angry at, not the people on some nebulous ‘your side.’
If you’re a fascist, you want to shoot brown people, not other fascists.
If you’re a fundamentalist, you want to shoot liberals or secularists or women, not other fundamentalists.
If you’re ever angry at people, replace “shoot” with “punch,” and the sentiment will be familiar to you.
The notion that false flags are common and other conspiracy theories is that other people are fundamentally different from you - they have alien motives and Byzantine thought processes - but chances are, for most of us, other people are fundamentally similar. You may not have the insanity and rage to go on a mass shooting spree, but you probably recognize the idea of lashing out at whoever you’re angry at, not lashing out at whoever being victimized would make whoever you’re angry at look bad.
That’s not to say false flags don’t exist - look at Jussie Smollett and Ashley Todd, both of whom tried to cast themselves as a victim with their opponents as the brute. It just doesn’t happen nearly as often as people lashing out directly at the targets of their anger.
(TL;DR: Pretty much what HMS Irruncible said - good post, HMS Irruncible)
If you’re a Nazi and want to go out a martyr for the cause, you don’t do it by murdering a bunch of people in MAGA hats.
They’re already white supremacists b/c they’re unconfident simpletons who are easily led. At best they’re just cunning enough to get weapons and ammo and drive somewhere. These cowards lack the capacity to plan and carry out anything more detailed than ‘Show up to where there are many unarmed people who are different from me and aim while pulling the trigger.’
They’re not even practiced marksmen, they need trapped groups of people to get as many as they do; they can’t practice a false flag to the point it’s successful.
Smollett is a professional actor and even he got caught. False flags are practically impossible to pull off for smart people, much less these mental minis.
Occam’s razor should imply anyone who commits a mass shooting is crazy ;).
Look, there is a shit-ton of standard-issue racists out there, even a fair number of hard-line white supremacists. But even most of them don’t start mowing down folks indiscriminately, out of self-preservation if nothing else. It’s perfectly possible for a person to be a hateful waste of a human life and still not have it in them to be a murderer. Some mass shooters may come off as lucid( most really don’t IMHO ), but pretty much by definition they ALL have bugs crawling around inside their heads.
A situation which students of history will note is often found on both sides during wars between nations.
When we talk about examples of “false flags”, we seem to find situations where the person claims that they are the victims of a fictional enemy, which might be motivated by the same desire for self-importance that also motivates the spree killer. False flags don’t appear to apply to cases where a person victimizes other people - there, the violence is sincere. It’s instead when the person is eliciting sympathy that we sometimes find the attack wasn’t as it seemed.
As far as shooting up a Trump rally, they won’t let you near one with a weapon, much less several of them plus pockets full of ammo.
As far as being false flag exercises, they all are. At least if you believe certain parties (who I won’t name), but they always claim it before the shooter’s gun barrel has cooled.
That’s a good question. You’d think that sort of thing would be rife among the more terroristic sorts.
My guess is that they’re probably so wound up about their OWN ideas and why they’re important enough to do some kind of asinine violent thing about, that the idea of executing it and pinning it on the opposition never crosses their minds.
(just in passing, I was wondering yesterday evening on my commute why no Democrat has gone and changed his legal name to “Conservative Republican” and then stood for election under that name as a Democrat. Seems like instant name recognition and probably would confuse the hell out of lower information Republican voters)