Greetings from Read Max HQ! In this week’s issue, an interview with elections analyst “Ettingermentum” on the politics and personality of alleged Charlie Kirk shooter Tyler Robinson.

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In the days following the assassination of right-wing media personality Charlie Kirk, a familiar ritual played out in the press and on social media: What Weird Internet Shit Was The Shooter On? Speculation about the motives, ideological commitments, partisan voting record, fetishes, Steam inventory, etc. of any given shooter is a time-honored tradition in American culture, and particularly around politically fraught killings like Kirk’s, but it is also an increasingly complex pastime, as the various tendencies of Fucked-Up Message-Board Politics (“Groyper,” “O9A,” “efilist,” “Nihilistic Violent Extremist,” etc.) multiply and disseminate. What makes it more complex still is the rise of shooters who are not on any Weird Internet Political Shit at all: Alleged United HealthCare assassin Luigi Mangione, for example, who as I’ve previously written, seemed to have been “pretty normal,” with an unremarkable and relatively decipherable online trail across Facebook, Twitter, and GoodReads.

When news emerged last that investigators had found bullets inscribed with memes and video-game references, many people around my age (i.e., Millennials and older) assumed that the Kirk shooter belonged to the former category of Fucked-Up Online Politics shooter. But some younger writers--chief among them the politics commentators ettingermentum and Liv Agar--immediately pegged him as much closer to the latter: Not a Groyper but “Reddit” shooter. And despite the vehement objections of people who were very much hoping this was an intra-right assassination--and the confusion of the even large group of people who didn’t even realize there was a distinction between “Groypers” and “Reddit”--the evidence shown in the Utah state indictment handed down this week would seem to confirm they were right. Based on texts between accused shooter Tyler Robinson and his partner, his motivation was to put an end to Charlie Kirk’s “hate,” and also he thought it was really funny to write memes on the bullets.

Earlier this week I spoke with Ettingermentum over the phone for a piece that was later killed. To help explain the relevant distinctions and taxonomies to my own audience of Millennials and Gen Xers, I’m reproducing an edited version of our conversation here with his permission. You can follow both ettingermentum and Liv Agar on Substack and Twitter.

Previously on Read Max

What Type of Guy is the alleged UHC shooter? Max Read · December 10, 2024 Read full story

The age of radical message-board utilitarian terrorism Max Read · May 22 Read full story

An interview with Ettingermentum

Read Max: Let me start with how you pegged early on that this guy was not a Groyper.¹ I mean, stipulating that we still don't fully know everything about everything, but it seems pretty clear, based on the indictment, that this guy had a different thing going on, which is what you’d been saying from the beginning. Why did you key in on this guy's particular online identity?

Ettingermentum: Well, I'm 23 years old. That's why. That was the reason. I lived through the same kind of cultural, memetic era that he did, and the moment that I heard about the bullet casings, I instantly recognized what kind of person this was, because I knew them. I went to school with these kinds of kids. I was also active playing video games like everybody else my age when I was in middle school and high school, and I just instantly recognized the humor. It brought me immediately back to middle school and high school.

It's kind of funny and a little embarrassing for the guy. Beyond all the other shit he has to be embarrassed about is the fact that all of his classmates remembered him as a “Reddit kid,”² with this kind of corny internet humor. Not really confident enough to make his own jokes. I mean, I could describe it a thousand different ways. He's like--people know these guys as band kids, because they always happen to be in marching bands and stuff.

Read Max: Okay. Right. I'm 39, “band kids” is familiar to me. That's a long-standing type.

Ettingermentum: So this is the latest evolution of band kids. Kind of cloying, desperate for approval, really liable to get into unfunny in-jokes, furry references. "Hey fascist, catch this"--an epic video game reference.³ I don't know if you could use the word "epic" in [redacted publication], but that's really the best word to describe this. He's trying to be epic. He's trying to be cool. He's trying to put these little references to video games and online in-jokes and stuff. And it's not funny. I know this isn't the relevant thing here, but I was just immediately struck by how unfunny it was. It's just making these stupid references to these stupid memes that were old a decade ago.

And that's not the way that Groypers operate. I’m passingly familiar with Groyper culture. I know their jokes; I know the way that they talk. And he did not sound anything like that at all. They have their own little culture, more hard-edged and misanthropic. They're trying to scare people or do something esoteric and bizarre. They're not trying to make people laugh with these dumb internet-culture references.

I was sort of making that assumption myself. When I saw he was a younger white male from this Republican family, I was joking with my fiancée: "Oh, is he a Nikki Haley voter? Is he a Nick Fuentes guy?" We were having a debate over which it was more likely--and then I saw the bullet casings.

The thing that got me was "Notices bulges OwO what’s this?"--this stupid little furry joke.⁴ And it seems like he was a Furry. Liv [Agar] and I did our own research on this, and we found his Steam account,⁵ linked to a username that he used on his Venmo. He had a FurAffinity account.⁶ He had a sticker from a Furry porn game called “Furry Shades of Gay.”⁷

I joked that people needed Zoomer correspondents for this, because there are a lot of stories just from this guy's Steam inventory. Nobody's talked about this, but he has a StatTrak sniper rifle from Team Fortress 2 with 250 kills on it⁸--not an impressive number of kills, but the kind of thing you could start a whole moral panic about that could get TF2 banned.

I wouldn't say that he's a leftist. I wouldn't say he's a hardliner, somebody with discrete ideology. It seems like--I don't want to go into the specifics of my theories on it, but it seems like kind of a Dog Day Afternoon kind of situation.⁹

Read Max: Yeah, that's a reference that keeps coming up. In a weird way, it almost reminds me of Luigi Mangione--a guy who had a very normal, very identifiable type of life,¹⁰ and something snapped at some point that made him pick up a gun.

Ettingermentum: Yeah, exactly. Over one particular issue. And I've checked--his girlfriend, his roommate, has more of an online presence, and it's just not hardline leftism stuff. She posted some memes making fun of RFK Jr., and was part of a subreddit about how landlords suck. These people aren't tankies or anything.

I don't want to be too definitive about it, but nothing about it gave me the sense of a Groyper. And we know this because when people like O9A or 764¹¹ have done these kinds of shootings in the past, they’re very loud and proud. They put their weird bullshit all over stuff. There was a shooting in Minneapolis, and the person literally put O9A references all over their guns, or T.C.C. stuff.¹²

Read Max: Yeah.

Ettingermentum: So I post about this, and I say he's not a Groyper, he's just an annoying fucking Reddit person, and Liv posts a similar thing, and people get furious. People lose their minds in a way I did not expect or had ever seen before.

What was really mortifying about it for me is that it wasn't just people saying, "You're coming to conclusions too early." It was that people were grasping at the thinnest straws possible to say that this was definitively a Groyper. They said that him calling Kirk a fascist was right-wing because Nick Fuentes called Charlie Kirk a fascist offhandedly one time. That “Bella Ciao” was a right-wing song because there was a sped-up Nightcore version of it in a Groyper playlist with 300 followers that also had songs like "Goofy Goober Rock" in it.¹³ The thinnest fucking reeds available.

They took pictures of him dressing up--because this guy is an unfunny loser, he dressed up like the “Slav squat” meme in 2017 for Halloween, and his mom posted a picture of him saying he's dressed up as a guy from a meme.¹⁴ And because I was on the internet at this time, I know what that was referencing: How Slavic people online always took pictures of themselves squatting, wearing Adidas track suits.¹⁵ It was a meme.¹⁶ So this kid, because he's a fucking cornball, dressed up like the “Slav squat” guy, which is just further proof in my eyes that he was just some Reddit kid. But they find a Pepe the Frog doing the Slav squat¹⁷ and say it’s definitive proof he’s a Groyper.

People were calling me a 30-year-old fucking millennial who doesn't understand online culture, who themselves were 30-year-old millennials who were just talking completely out of their ass about this.

Look, I can understand where this is coming from emotionally. But this isn’t simple skepticism. There were people saying “We got him dead to rights.” They're doing victory laps over this.

And it's not even like this got confined to just the internet. This has impacted public opinion. I don't know if you saw the YouGov poll, but more people think that the shooter was a Republican than a Democrat.¹⁸ This has actually broken through. There are people's parents texting their kids to ask them what a Groyper is. Heather Cox Richardson just flatly stated that he was far-right.¹⁹ Off of nothing!

Read Max: I wouldn't want to claim that what he's doing isn't political violence, but I think everybody's trying to put this in “Years of Lead”²⁰ terms and attach it to a movement, a group, a cadre, or some social phenomenon, when in fact it seems like the total opposite. He was a kind of guy that we all have encountered. A Reddit kid, a band kid. And there's an assumption because he was on Discord²¹ that he was some satanic whatever--

Ettingermentum: But no, he was in very normal Discords. What's remarkable about him is he's actually doing all the stuff that you would expect to be the kind of socially well-adjusted person who's going to create the great America of J.D. Vance's imagination. He was hanging out with people of all political backgrounds on his Discord, according to Ken Klippenstein's reporting.²² He had a trade school job as an electrician. He was an apprentice. He had a relationship. He had hobbies. He went outside. He was a hiker. He went hunting. He was involved in all these communities. There's no traditional story of some kind of super socially maladjusted freak like you can with Thomas Matthew Crooks.²³ Everyone reporters have talked to has said, “Yeah, he wasn't a popular kid, but everybody liked him.”²⁴ Everybody knows a person like that, and I hadn't thought about them in forever, which is why it just struck me so immediately as recognizable.

And I do wonder how many people my age were capable of recognizing this person but weren't part of the discussion about it, because there's not many people my age who have big platforms who can make those kinds of judgments.

Read Max: And there's the Millennial-to-Boomer understanding of what Discord is and how it functions in the lives of politically engaged young people, and then also the last 20 years or so of political assassination having mostly been either just straightforwardly insane people or school-shooter types.

Ettingermentum: A friend of mine, QuoProQuid on Twitter, had a really good point about how school shootings have become routine and not really as newsworthy as before. The type of person just seeking to make an impact on history, or get their name known, has migrated more towards going after public figures, because the security is lighter than at school. And as we saw with Trump and Luigi, they get a lot more coverage than a school shooting.

And especially with the right making such a big deal of it and the world coming to a halt for a full week at this point, if you're some nihilistic loser freak who wants to make some kind of point by killing someone, people in the public eye are a lot more enticing a target at this point than some classroom full of kids.

Read Max: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I think too, again, without wanting to lean too heavy on the Luigi Mangione-Tyler Robinson connections, there's a a way where if you are relatively depoliticized, if you have one single issue that is the issue you care about, and you have a particular kind of disposition--

Ettingermentum: If you're not part of a larger ideological struggle where you have to worry about things like optics or the greater good or a larger cause, these one issues can kind of take up the whole world in your mind, and it might become even more dangerous than being part of just an enlisted soldier in one side of the culture war.

1

“Groypers” is name adopted by the white-nationalist followers of live-streamer and right-wing activist Nick Fuentes--direct descendants of the more loosely organized trolls who made up the "alt right" that got so much attention during Trump's first term. Much of Groyper “activism,” such as it is, is targeted at slightly more mainstream conservatives like Kirk. “Groyper” refers to their frog-cartoon mascot, a variation of the "Pepe the Frog" that dominated online right-wing iconography in the 2010s:

2

voteinorout

A post shared by @voteinorout

4

“Notices bulges OwO what’s this?” is a longstanding meme parodying furry roleplay. The exact phrase was originally used in a 2015 cartoon that went viral on Tumblr. For more information read Know Your Meme.

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See here:

What Type of Guy is the alleged UHC shooter? Max Read · December 10, 2024 Read full story

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