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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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What the hell is an orange Emily?

I can think of a pretty wide spread of possible contents for the manifesto. Would it reveal the shooter was…

  • just really pathetic?
  • wronged by the school?
  • wronged by some vague sense of society?
  • lashing out, but citing an agenda?
  • reasonably planning to advance that agenda?
  • acting under orders?

Those are arranged in rough order of drama. People were suggesting pretty extreme ones, but we ended up stopping at the first or second. Which, sure, the Culture War does nasty things to people. That’s just milquetoast compared to some of the theories. A few choice selections from this forum:

It will be very interesting to see if trans activists feel any pressure to tone down the violent rhetoric now that it has resulted in a bunch of dead kids.

The perfectly tuned manifesto might trigger toxoplasma. I can see "Desparate cry for help from trans youth* brutally abused by religious fanatics" to split the public on whether we should blame the shooter or transphobia more.

I’ll bet my eye teeth it’s a Psyop. I’ve found treating all mass shootings as “Fake and Gay until proven otherwise” is an optimal heuristic. It’s probably why no one knows whether this person is MtFtM or FtMtFtM or something in between. The Newspeak is “TRANS”* this allows the usual suspects to ask why the focus isn’t on the issue of transgenderism/mental illness while the other usual suspects squawk about guns. The new talking point will be the tacit sympathy for a school shooter who was most certainly the victim of transphobia in that Jesus school…

Compared to those, what we got is pretty tame!

What the hell is an orange Emily?

It's a /r/PoliticalCompassMemes/ thing... orange Emily is the Woke wojak, basically. She started on 4chan as Art Hoe Wojak. She's usually lib-left but sometimes mid-left or even auth-left (especially when wearing a peaked cap). Characteristically the feminist inverse/counterpart of the purple coomer wojack, who is the "bad lib-right" character. There is pretty consistent "full compass unity" against orange and purple, they are characters who almost never get to be "based" or featured as the heroes in agenda posts (but see a counterexample here). Orange Emily hates Nazis more than anyone else, but is sure that everyone who doesn't identify as a black genderfluid differently-abled Wiccan is a Nazi.

So, you know. An unrealistically excessive exaggeration of negative stereotypes. Except, apparently, for this one time when...

Would it reveal the shooter was…

I think the main thing your list omitted was "targeting Christians for being Christians," which the notebook (now I want to know what law enforcement or media figure first called it a "manifesto," because certainly everyone has been calling it that for a long time) seems to not explicitly confirm, while also not actually weakening the case for that idea.

Following the link to this forum's discussion was an interesting exercise; it seems to me that many, maybe most of the posts in that thread have proven basically correct. Very few of the posts address the notebook at all.

Compared to those, what we got is pretty tame!

True, but you quoted a user with 21 posts, who hasn't been here in almost a year, who got moderated in that thread for (among other things) denying without evidence that anyone died at Sandy Hook, which like... yeah. Reality is always going to be more tame than whatever someone like that cooks up.

Ah, I do recognize that one.

I originally had "targeted Christians qua Christians" in between "wronged by (Christian) school" and "wronged by society," but I tried too hard to streamline the list.

And, yeah, I included psyop guy as an upper bound. I won't say he's representative.