Thread by @themaxburns

A Gen Z colleague described the "blackpill mindset" to me in a way I'd never heard before:

For younger kids today, especially men, there's a pressure to either "get rich at any cost" or "get famous at any cost." They use irony and crude memes to mask the deep anxiety they feel.

What stood out to this person was the "lol nothing matters" attitude Kirk's assassin tried so hard to project in his ironic bullet inscriptions, political-but-mostly-stupid meme Halloween costumes, and the gamer culture he was steeped in. His politics almost feel secondary.

We're seeing an uptick in "ironic" phrases written on bullet casings and manifestos that are peppered with Very Online references meant to be read and understood not by the media, but by these shooters' online peers. They want to be remembered as the people who "went for it."

It speaks to an alienation that younger Amercians (disproportionately men) try to heal not through therapy but through online game communities, Discord, and validating themselves online. Their goal isn't news coverage - it's to be cheered on their niche forums of choice.

It also speaks to a lack of hope about the future. It's hard to say if these people even have coherent left-right "ideologies" so much as an overriding sense that their lives are pretty much over before they begin unless they hit a crypto jackpot or something equally unlikely.

At the same time, they're stewing in a social media ecosystem where algorithms feed them a constant stream of rage-bait. And so they form parasocial hatreds. As the shooter's family said, he'd only become political recently, and seemed to fixate on Charlie Kirk's viral content.

What Gov. Cox said is broadly right -- social media is a cancer, and when coupled with the social alienation epidemic we're seeing in America, it's convincing people that reality is something less than real. If you're never going to be rich, why not try to be infamous?

The traditional venue for that was school shootings. But those have become so commonplace now that the shooters barely register in our media coverage. We're numb to it.

What gets headlines now? POLITICAL shootings. Even better if your message is confusing to the "normies"!

It isn't just the violence or the instant celebrity that makes it so appealing. It's using purposefully conflicting and often nonsensical messaging (like the meme slogans on the shooter's bullets) to confuse the media and create confusion and chaos. It's trolling with bullets.

I don't know the Kirk shooter's ideology, and I imagine we will learn more as the story develops. My point is the *pattern* of his behavior, his Very Online existence, his deep kinship with irony and nihilistic online culture, is shared by other recent shooters. Don't ignore it.

This is also why it's *critical* for media outlets to start hiring deeply Internet culture-literate reporters who can understand at a glance what these messages are, what they mean, and what they don't mean. That "trans ideology" turned out to be a video game reference.