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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34135 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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While we're discussing this: any news on motives? I'm amazed that no one has doxxed the guy on Reddit/chan/whatever by now, no friends have come forward.

The FBI has found a social media account featuring antisemitic and anti-immigration comments that investigators believe to be associated with the gunman who tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump, a senior bureau official said Tuesday.

FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate told members of Congress that the account could be linked to the shooter, Thomas Crooks, but he cautioned that officials are still working to verify the account's authenticity.

"There were over 700 comments posted; some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature," Abbate told a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees.

Abbate said the account dates to the 2019-2020 time period, when Crooks would have been 15 or 16 years old. It could provide a glimpse into Crooks' thinking, which has proven elusive as the FBI said the shooter generally had few social contacts and little social media presence. It wasn't clear from Abbate's comment what social media account it was on.

That would've been before the Gab posts.

As for his general internet use

In a statement to Fox News Digital, a Discord spokesperson said an account that appears to be linked to Thomas Matthew Crooks was identified and removed in accordance with the company's "off-platform behavior policy."

"It was rarely utilized, has not been used in months, and we have found no evidence that it was used to plan this incident, promote violence, or discuss his political views," the spokesperson said. "Discord strongly condemns violence of any kind, including political violence, and we will continue to coordinate closely with law enforcement."

It’s definitely odd given his age. You would expect at least some internet profiles somewhere to have popped up by now.

Based on all of the public information, my speculation is that he was simply a classic school shooter type (wanting attention, to remind society of his existence) that decided to target a politician instead.

That's my current theory too based on at least the fact he also made at least some Biden searches too, but it's complicated by the fact that it's at least possible that he was actually self-aware that he had a decent chance of being caught (despite his remote bomb distraction idea to get away after the shooting) and thus would have watched his own searches and online activity at least in the near term lead-up accordingly. My degree of confidence is still quite low however.

that decided to target a politician instead.

Unironically, even though this incident was bungled pretty badly, national politicians are much harder targets than elementary schools, and I'd much prefer suicide-by-countersniper to a bunch of dead kids. This does assume that those counter snipers are willing and actually manage to shoot first, though. And maybe that's asking too much.

Agree that we’d be way better off as a society if these psychopaths decided to target politicians or shady businessmen or something.

I've read somewhere he had a Gab account he used to troll people with (of all things), but I couldn't confirm this to any certainty.

The angle where he got rejected from the shooting team is the closest I've seen to a coherent motive, i.e.: "I'll show them.", but I may be biased by the irony of him missing such an easy target.

Thing is, even with historical perspective, would be regicides surprisingly often lack coherent motives. Especially those that act alone. So while it is certain that law enforcement now suppresses political manifestoes and the like, it's still quite possible he's just a random nut who got lucky.

The posts Andrew Torba shared don't seem particularly charged. I have no idea if that's a selection of his posts or all of them, but those aren't the comments of deranged 20 year old leftist shouting online. Without further context those read pretty close to the median internet argument. We can go read far less reasoned comments on reddit all day. For all we know those comments are evidence he liked to pass time as a devil's advocate. This forum has seen a few.

If Torba provided that selection to demonstrate Crooks as frothing leftist I don't buy the framing. Which makes his actions more puzzling. He probably wasn't a committed online ideologue, so why do what he did? More evidence towards CIA LSD mind control device from beyond the Ice Wall.

If Torba provided that selection to demonstrate Crooks as frothing leftist I don't buy the framing.

He did not. He provided it to rebut the FBIs claims that Crooks was a frothing rightist.

Yeah, specifically the pattern of events was that Paul Abbate, the FBI deputy director, testified to the Judiciary Committee that:

Something just very recently uncovered that I want to share is a social media account, which is believed to be associated with the shooter in the 2019-2020 time frame. There were over 700 comments posted from this account. Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect anti-semitic and anti-immigration themes, to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature. While the investigation team is still working to verify this account, to determine if it did in fact belong to the shooter, we believe it important to share and not it today, particularly given the general absence of other information to date from social media and other sources of information that reflect on the shooter's potential motive and mindset. [emphasis added]

The interesting bit from Torba is not so much that the content of the linked social media account is particularly extremist, but that the EDR less than a week before thought the account was specifically "associated with" the shooter. Allegedly, neither account has been confirmed as the attempted assassins, nor to my knowledge has the FBI said that the Gab account has since been found not to be the shooter's (or proven to be that of an associate of the shooter).

But it makes it quite hard to argue that the federal investigation representative in charge of this wasn't lying before Congress in order to present a more politically useful scenario.

According to Andrew Torba of Gab he posted on Gab arguing in favor of Biden/Democrats on various issues such as migration and mandates.

https://caldronpool.com/fbi-forced-to-backtrack-gab-account-suggests-trump-shooter-was-biden-supporter/

And here is Elon Musk responding to it: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1818340245139554333

The FBI claims he had another social media account with over 700 posts including the anti-semitic and anti-immigrant stuff. There's no independent confirmation or refutation of that one, so you can believe it or not.

I've seen a lot of "confirming" he was a groyper, but I generally disbelieve that anything so convenient can happen to the worst people in the world.

Did you mean groyper?

No.

Internecine elite warfare between the lizard people who rule us and the fish people who do their dirty deeds

Stay woke, friend

I always knew there was something fishy about this whole story…

Thanks. Not a word I use frequently.

The stakes are such that anything but hard evidence for his motives is suspect.

We may never actually know.

At least this isn't as conspicuously glowing as the Las Vegas shooting.

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