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Friday, September 19, 2025

Ken Klippenstein: Accused shooter's "politics" is not what government and media say. I obtained ... Discord chats I've decided to publish (the legacy news media, as usual, refuses), along with new information I've learned about Robinson from the people who knew him best. read more


Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Lukium: First, you brand your opponents as wicked, malicious, soulless. You tell the public they're "radicalized people," "terrorists," a "wicked ideology." You convince your followers that the very existence of the opposition is a mortal threat to family, to faith, to civilization itself. And there is only one final stop on that train. Dehumanization always has the same destination: extermination. read more


Monday, September 15, 2025

A.R. Moxon: Whose deaths get to be deemed unacceptable in supremacist America, and whose are deemed necessary? And who does the deeming? read more


White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller vowed Friday that he and President Donald Trump would use this week's assassination of Charlie Kirk to "dismantle" the organized left using state power. read more


Sunday, September 14, 2025

Chris Hedges: Martyrs are used by messianic movements to sanctify violence. To show any mercy or understanding toward the enemy is to betray the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.


Comments

It's almost as if the entire theme of that expansion is... anti-fascist. Like Helldivers. Up Right Down Down Down.
#3 | Posted by sitzkrieg

Food for thought:

"The gut reaction is to assume that, oh, if he's etching 'Bella Ciao' on a shell casing, he must be anti-fascist, he must sort of have these anti-fascist tendencies," said Michael Senters, a Ph.D. candidate at Virginia Tech's ASPECT program, who focuses on the translation of online culture into real world politics. "But with so many things online, he could have come across Bella Ciao in any number of other instances."

Senters says that the song has been featured in a number of gaming-related contexts, including the video game Far Cry 6, the soundtrack for the game Hearts of Iron IV and a version has even appeared on a Spotify playlist for a far-right group that has, in the past, had tension with Kirk. But Senters and other researchers say they have seen no evidence, so far, tying Robinson to that group.

Similarly, Senters and others say the casing engraved with "Hey Fascist! Catch!" and arrows, is rooted in video game culture, and not indicative of any political or ideological background. The arrows, Chandler said, refer to a code sequence that players of the game Helldivers 2 can use to call down a 500-kg bomb. He said that code sequence has, itself, become a meme.

"The reason it's kind of a popular meme in the Helldivers 2 community is it is very, very easy to accidentally kill your friends in that game, and it's one of the real funny ways to do it," Chandler said. "Like, 'Oh, no, I got hit and I dropped the little beacon that I was supposed to throw. And now there's a half ton bomb dropping on us. Sorry, guys.'"

Chandler said that the earlier part of that shell casing's engraving, "Hey Fascist! Catch!" is a meme within the Helldivers 2 community talking about shooting robots. He said his assessment is that this, paired with the arrow sequence meme, render any possible political angle to the message "inconclusive."


www.npr.org

Suspected Charlie Kirk shooter Tyler Robinson used Trump's name as a pseudonym on Valve Corp.'s Steam video-game platform, a fact that's become part of a profile US law enforcement is building on the alleged assailant

Wow, that site sounds like a cesspool hate and violence:

Senator Urges Valve to Address Extremist, Hateful' Content on Steam
Updated November 17, 2024

Sen. Mark Warner says lax enforcement of rules by social media platforms leads to toxic social environments that elevate harassment and abuse.'

Senator Mark Warner has urged leadership at Valve to respond to allegations that 1.8 million pieces of extremist or hateful content have been identified on gaming platform Steam.

In a recent report, the ADL's Center on Extremism (COE) claims to have identified 1.5 million unique users and over 73,000 groups who used at least one piece of potentially extremist or hateful content.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization founded to combat antisemitism and other forms of discrimination, claims it included more than 458 million profiles, 152 million profile and group avatar images, and 610 million comments in its dataset.

Pepe the Frog and swastikas are allegedly the most common extremist symbols spreading on the platform, accounting for 54.6% and 9.1% of the detected symbols, respectively.

The ADL claims it also identified 15,000 public accounts using symbols from ISIS, Hezbollah, and Hamas in their profile pics. The group also claims to have identified "hundreds of accounts" using images of terrorist attackers like Anders Breivik, who killed 69 people in an attack on a summer camp in Norway in 2011.

The organization also highlighted cases of users posting extremism-linked content on Steam before committing attacks of real-life violence, such as an 18-year-old white supremacist who attacked a cafe in Turkey in August. In addition, it found 18,352 groups that had potentially extremist or hateful keywords on their group profiles, such as "shekel" and "white power."

www.pcmag.com

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