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Notes -
Judging from the diary, it seems like ideology may have been part of the reason Audrey was so unhappy and mentally unwell. But it doesn’t look like she intended the attack to be propaganda of the deed for the cause, or to strike back at enemies of the revolution. To me it looks more like the typical mass-shooter motive for an aggressively postured suicide. Elliot Rodger seemed to have considered himself to be on a crusade of personal vengeance, but I don’t think he necessarily considered it a political act. Compare both of those to Ted Kaczynski, where although he was perhaps mentally ill, he had a pretty defined ideology he was acting under and specifically intended his attacks to advance that ideology.
This all seems correct to me, but what I'm wondering is about the nature of "radicalization" when the relevant ideology is ungrounded, emergent, deliberately obscurantist, etc. I think usually such ideologies just don't produce extremism, because it's hard to be a zealot for something so conceptually slippery. This particular case is exceptional in several respects, which might mean the best thing to do is chalk it up to noise in the system. But I don't feel sure of that. At minimum--I do not, at all, agree that these notebook pages contain, quote, "nothing interesting."
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