This political moment

Hey all, this is a bit out of the ordinary for us, but as the local anthropology-of-political-extremism geek, I wanted to share what I'm seeing about the Charlie Kirk shooting suspect from the researchers and journalists who study this stuff most closely. There's a LOT of speculation and misinformation flying around, and I want to do my part to boost the accurate information.

From the information we have so far, it doesn't seem like the shooter had a coherent political ideology.

He's not a classic groyper (right-wing fans of white nationalist Nick Fuentes who went to "war" with Charlie Kirk in 2019 over Kirk's refusal to publicly endorse certain explicitly antisemetic conspiracy theories.) There's evidence that he was interested in memes that were *similar* to groyper memes, but according to several researchers I know who study groypers, they were not *actually* groyper memes. He was certainly hanging around in groyper-adjascent corners of the internet, but it's too early to come to any conclusions. (As I'm writing this, big chunks of the internet and media ecosystem are missing the nuance here and I'm worried it might come back to bite us.)

He's also not a classic "Boogaloo Boy" (a loosely organized mostly-online movement that seeks to bring about a second civil war out of a nihilistic belief that they'll end up on top of the rubble. They were responsible for most of the worst property destruction during the George Floyd Uprisings of 2020. They are very hard to place on the left-right spectrum, they're mostly just deeply unhappy destructive assholes)

There's absolutely no evidence that he's trans. Early reports that there were "transgender ideology symbols" on the bullet casings were based on a misinterpretation of a "Helldivers 2" video game meme. We live in the dumbest timeline.

He seems to have been very deeply enmeshed in ironic meme culture, so it's going to be very difficult to sort out what he actually believes from what he wants us to think he believes. If I was going to hazard a guess, I'd say that he probably fell into one flavor or another of accelerationism.

Accelerationism is basically the belief that things need to fall apart before they can be rebuilt, and that therefore actively making society crumble faster will get us to their particular promised land faster. It's a tendency that can crop up in all sorts of movements when they feel like they're under threat. It's most common among white supremacists and anti-government conservatives, but it's also taught by some of the more abusive cults that prey on people in lefty spaces, as well as nominally apolitical religious or subcultural groups. It's a seductive belief, because it lets believers off the hook for trying to fix everything that's going wrong. But it's also a dangerous one, because it can be used to justify some incredibly messed up s--t.

Things absolutely do not have to get worse before they get better. All that has to happen for things to get better is for us to develop a shared vision of what "better" looks like and then work to make it real. Which is a huge task, I admit. But you know what will absolutely not help us get there? Widespread political violence, or significant disruptions to the availability of food, water, and electricity. This is real life, and it doesn't follow the narrative laws of a dystopian novel.

We can all just decide to step back from the brink and figure out how to live together again. And those branches of the future look a lot better a lot faster than the branches where everybody decides to live in a Walking Dead/Civil War crossover novel for no damn reason.

At the protest today, a guy got in my face and called me a demonic trans nazi who supported murdering children. He spent more than 20 minutes harrassing protest attendees and telling us we deserved to be murdered. All while I was literally holding a six-foot-long banner saying that we're on the same side.

And here's the thing: I still want that guy to have food, housing, healthcare, and joy in his life. I want the people who are lying to him to stop doing that, and I want him to get whatever he needs to heal. I am not his enemy just because he wants to be mine.

We don't have to do this. We don't have to fall apart. We can't control what the larger world around us does, but we can learn to bridge the divide here in our town. If there is one thing I've learned studying the history of political violence, it's that small communities can make a huge difference by actively knitting themselves together and refusing to turn on each other. Together, we survive.