"Last week, a 23-year-old opened fire outside a church at a Minneapolis Catholic school, killing two children and injuring 19 other people before dying by suicide. Just a few hours later, the shooter's YouTube videos began to circulate online. In one, the shooter shows off an arsenal of weapons and ammunition laid out on a bed. The killer laughs and offers a stream-of-consciousness monologue. "I didn't ask for life," they say, the camera focused on the shooter's vape. "You didn't ask for death.""
"There were references to Waco and Ruby Ridge as well as BlackRock and ExxonMobil. One of the guns says Release the files! An ammo magazine is scrawled with kill Donald Trump; another says I'm the woker, baby, why so queerious. There are multiple references to memes: Popular phrases like skibidi appear, as does "Lenny Face"-( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)-and an extremely niche allusion to a web comic from 2008. Taken together, the messages are incoherent."
"And it worked. The video was picked apart by people looking for some hints as to the shooter's motivation or politics. Some right-wing influencers and MAGA-friendly news outlets seized on the killer's gender identity, insinuating that the shooting had something to do with them being trans. Others fixated on the message about killing Trump and suggested the killer was a deranged liberal. Some left-leaning commentators seized upon the anti-Semitic scrawlings and racial slurs and said the killer was clearly a neo-Nazi."
A 23-year-old shooter killed two children and injured 19 outside a Minneapolis Catholic school before dying by suicide. The shooter's YouTube videos show weapons and ammunition marked with slurs, expletives, names of killers, references to Waco and Ruby Ridge, corporate names, and meme culture. The inscriptions form a collage of incoherent, irony-poisoned nihilism that appears aimed at trolling viewers rather than advancing a coherent ideology. Observers across the political spectrum quickly seized on fragments to infer motive or politics, producing conflicting and unreliable narratives.
Read at The Atlantic
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