But nobody here is buying it. His friends and family were all maga and they all said he was a good kid meeting he was maga too.

All of the memes he shared were right-wing memes and that Trump costume was a reference to Nick Fuentes' memes.

Facts don't care about your feelings. The right wing encourages violence and when you encourage violence it's random and can pop off anytime at anyone.

The left wing figured that out ages ago and figured out that violence is useless if you want to do anything worthwhile so we stopped.

Violence is explicitly the domain of the right wing. This makes sense because effective violence requires command structures and the right wing is obsessed with command structures.

Your side prefers taking orders

Extremist right-wing men and women wanted to kill Muslims and dipshit liberals reacted to that by defending Islam accidentally because it's difficult for a lot of people distinguish between Muslims and Islam.

On the other hand the same extremists depend Islam when it comes to religious apologetics.

Doesn't matter what the religion is and nobody will ever attack the religion on the merits of the religion because as soon as start handing out to do that it's going to get used against your religion too.

So we don't attack the truth claims of Islam rather we focus on its use in the promotion of violence. We also conveniently forget the Christianity did the exact same thing for thousands of years before we stopped letting Christians do that.

Sure you can. It's pretty easy actually. You just use common signal tracking tools to find where it's coming from and kill anyone you find.

Once you give your country over to religious lunatics who are willing and able and happy to use violence anything becomes possible.

It would be nice if America had figured that out last year. Sometime before November.

Means graphics from 2012 with a handful of new lighting effects and sub 60 FPS on $4,000 worth of hardware...

I mean Jesus Randy just use UE 4 and call it a day. We didn't need realistic sunlight in borderlands.

Why would I pay somebody to work fewer hours if I don't have to?

Plus anyone who is still working 996 is going to be super pissed off at anyone working three days a week.

Americans do engage in class warfare only it's just the lower classes to do it and they only fight each other.

I don't see us getting over the deep cultural conditioning that tells you the moment you see somebody happier than you that you're supposed to get angry at that person for being happy instead of upset at the system keeping you miserable.

Of people who aren't experts complaining about experts doing their thing. You know damn well us nerds would have a fit if somebody went off on one of our little interests.

The data is consistent. That's what matters. You use data to make predictions. If the data is off but off at a consistent and predictable amount then you can predict that and take action accordingly.

This thing where everybody thinks they can just will their preferred universe into existence and ignore reality is something dictators and fascists have been pushing for pretty much forever.

It doesn't work. Sooner or later reality always wins in the end and reality has a well-known liberal bias.

He was killed by maga. The kid wasn't attacked by Charlie Kirk. The kid was radicalized by right wingers in right-wing spaces. The memes of the kids shared are pipeline memes. Their little bits of nastiness that look apolitical but are designed to lure disaffected young men into right-wing extremism.

It's part of a cult called gryoper and for the sake of your own mental stability I recommend you don't look that up.

What we have with Charlie Kirk is something called stochastic terrorism. It's terrorism created by throwing out a constant stream of undirected incitement to violence.

You never actually call for violence with stochastic terrorism you just constantly hint at it.

There is usually a Target but because you never directly go after the target what can and in the case of Charlie Kirk did happen is that when one of the mentally ill people you are trying to trigger into terrorism pops off that person can go after anyone.

The right wing normally would let this go once they figure it out that the kid wasn't a minority they could attack but they are hoping to trigger more stochastic terrorism so they can do a crackdown and maybe install Trump as president for Life after suspending elections.

The problem the right wing is having is the centrists and left wing just won't do violence. It's just not in us anymore if it ever was.

So what they are doing is trying to get their own side to commit random acts of violence because we won't.

For anyone who doesn't have hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars to buy security that is of course incredibly dangerous because by covering this shooter so much they are encouraging copycats and those copycats are likely to go after right wing personalities because that's where the attention is. But these people get paid a lot of money to create violence so they're willing to take the risk.

The Republican party has consistently cut enforcement on elite ultra rich people but made it a point to make sure there was still enforcement for regular slobs like you and me.

It's like the old saying goes, fascism requires an in group that the law protects but does not bind and in out group that the law binds but does not protect.

Lots of people who are in the out group seem to be under the mistaken impression that they are in the in group

They have basically gutted the SEC and virtually all regulation enforcement.

Remember it doesn't matter if something is a crime if there's nobody enforcing the law.

Instead of going after a scam artists JD Vance and Donald Trump are now openly attacking left wing organizations full force of the Department of justice. Their words not mine.

Under those circumstances scam artists know they can get away with all sorts of crap.

If you have elderly relatives get ready to have them moving in with you after they have their retirement stolen from them.

Now idiots who don't know any better can lose money even faster!

Venture capitalists can afford to lose lots and lots of money and make it all back on one big hit. Small retail investors can't do that.

Furthermore small retail investors generally aren't sophisticated enough to tell the difference between scam artists and actual businesses. Hell we just had a run of Chinese scam artists covered by the greatest rap channel on YouTube. One of them managed to pump their value up 60,000% before cashing out with everybody's money.

Once again this is a chesterton's fence moment. Don't take down the fence if you don't know why it was put up.

But with the current administration Jesus fucking Christ it's open season. If you're a scam artist it's like shooting fish in a barrel. As long as you keep a few million around for a pardon and make sure you do your crimes in a red state so there's a governor to bribe on the top of the president you are probably okay.

Edward Snowden accomplished Jack and shit.

He didn't tell us anything anyone didn't already know. He just found some documents that confirmed things and we all just ignored them anyway.

Meanwhile the Democrats had been slowly chipping away at the government powers seized during the wake of 9/11 when guys like you were shitting bricks demanding protection from the big bad scary terrorists.

In the wake of 9/11 the Democrats could do basically fuck and all to prevent people panicking so much they handed away their liberties. A couple of them tried and immediately lost their seats and their political careers.

As things calmed down the Democrats began to run committee hearings and work towards eliminating all that surveillance crap.

And every time they started to get somewhere with it you start to freak out and they started to lose elections and they had the back off.

It's the difference between people representing you and people ruling you. The Democrats represent you. And that's for good and for bad. If you want them to do something balls to the walls incredibly stupid then they're going to let you do it. They will tell you the back off is best they can they will try to limit the damage you're going to do is best they can but they will still let you do it.

Basically when you as an American have a hold my beer moment the Democrats hold your beer instead of telling you to shut the fuck up and stop acting like an idiot Cletus.

They have tried in the past doing that and you still do to dumb shit you just do even more dumb shit because there's that Republican who not only will hold your beer but will tell you to do something even stupider and more dangerous and you'll do it.

The affordable Care act comes to mind but there is a whole slew of other less well-known laws.

They're also a ton of Labor protection laws the Democrats pushed through.

And without the free and open Internet created by section 230 of the CDA which the Democrats have consistently defended I wouldn't have the job that let me pay for my kids to go to college.

And of course there's the whole thing with the Republicans keep trying to crash the economy and would have made me and several of my friends homeless in the wake of the 2008 market crash if they could have.

And this is before we talk about all the clean Air stuff. Or the food safety stuff. Or the vaccine stuff. Or the fact that the Democrats are the ones who got money for working Americans during covid which kept our economy functional albeit barely. Or the fact that Joe Biden got us a soft landing instead of an economic depression. Or...

You really are just ignorant. I don't mean that as an insult I mean that is a statement of fact. You have been protected by people that you endlessly hate your entire life.

And threw it all despite your scorn they still work hard to protect you and your family. And no matter how much you hate them they won't stop.

Because of laws the Democrats passed that the Republicans fought tooth and nail against. So you can go fuck yourself when it comes to saying the Democrats did nothing.

You don't know anything about America or American history. I would accuse you of being a foreigner but I know fellow Americans don't have a fucking clue so who knows...

Go look up the contract with america. That was newt gingrich's name for the systematic process of derailing anything that would help you as an American and then using their control of media to blame the Democrat party for the Republicans did to you.

Over and over and over again the Republicans have fucked Americans in the ass and we bend over and take it. The way they keep getting this through the Democrats is by threatening to destroy the entire American economy by shutting down the government during budget negotiations.

Every single American is a hostage of the Republican party. And about 47% of us have Stockholm syndrome. A little bit of voter suppression and the Republicans can consistently win elections.

I mean for fuck sakes Missouri is 40% black but a deep red state. You don't need to have a PhD in political science to figure out what the fuck is going on there. And they still gerrymandered the districts to give the Republicans one more vote in the house because everyone knows they're about to get their asses kicked if they don't do something.

Trump literally said last year was the last election you were ever going to vote in and you still voted for trump. With all due respect and I do mean all due respect what the hell is wrong with you?

Trump wants to seize power and put himself in as a dictator so he's hoping for a nice scary violent event like an assassination against a republican US senator or something like it that would let him declare martial law and suspend elections. He is probably not going to get it but that's what he's after.

Economically the Republican party has nothing to offer voters and that has become exceedingly clear. The Republican party today favors high taxes on anyone who has less than 100 million cash in the bank and high prices to pay for all that using a national sales tax.

When your economic policies are that dumb and that destructive you need to keep everyone in a perpetual state of fear.

It's why Russia is doomed. Their birthright keeps going down because they treat people like shit but they can't get immigrants because they need intense xenophobia and racism in order to keep people willing to accept those terrible living conditions.

At this point I think the majority of Republican voters know all this but the closer they get to election and the more of the right wing propaganda they consume they just can't help themselves anymore. Their eyes glaze over their brains turn off and they vote Republican.

Hitler proved propaganda works.

Yeah if you go back into the early to mid-90s you will find Democrats doing this kind of tough on crime bullshit.

Similarly there's some of it right after 9/11 that the democrats got on board with.

In both cases the public was in the throes of a major moral panic and demanded it.

If the Democrats have a flaw it's that when the public wants something stupid they will give it to 'em.

But when the public calms the fuck down they will gradually start undoing the stupid shit the public demanded they do during the, always Republican stoked, panic.

The difference is the Republicans will do this kind of shit when the public doesn't want them to because Republicans don't give a rat's ass what you think or what you want.

Trump said it himself. You'll never have to vote again.