In 1979 16 yo Brenda Spencer opened fire at an elementary school across the street from her house in 1979, killing two. When asked why said “I don’t like Mondays” which inspired the Boomtown Rats song of same title. She didn’t get radicalized on the internet because there was no internet then. And was a nihilist mass murderer just like the El Paso and Dayton murderers.
“The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload
And nobody’s gonna go to school today
She’s going to make them stay at homeAll the playing’s stopped in the playground now
She wants to play with her toys a while
And school’s out early and soon we’ll be learning
And the lesson today is how to die.”
Seems to me the El Paso murderer saw himself as soldier carrying out a mission (like Timothy McVeigh) and was overtly and blatantly racist and white supremacist. By contrast the Dayton murderer was seriously twisted, his social media was confused leftie antifa and he was in a sickening misogynist band – and since he killed his sister – at least part of it was personal.
The big question though is how recruiting happens. Neither side wants garbage Lost Boys like these two who are unstable and unpredictable. But the saner ones do get recruited and we never hear about them. But pretty clearly they found support online for the derangement in their heads.
David Hines on Twitter found an unsettling similarity between the two. Read the whole thread. Here are a few excerpts.
“Per the manifesto, the El Paso perp was a white nationalist (w/ a side of environmentalism/ecofascism). The Dayton perp’s social media and people who knew him describe him as a Hard Lefty. He was a socialist, and an acquaintance from the music scene described him as antifascist.
So, assholes alike in deed, but different in philosophy and outlook.
Except they were both interested in accelerationism.
So, what’s accelerationism? The dumb version tl;dr is that everything’s going crazy faster and the only way out is through, so increasing the level of chaos will lead to a breakthrough (and, if you’re a political fanatic, bring about the world you personally want to live in).”
Accelerationism is a lot like bonkers Marxists wanting massive repression because then Glorious Workers Uprising. Which of course is completely nihilistic and uncaring about the masses they pretend to support because it means many will be tortured and killed first before the supposed uprising (which might take years to happen, if it happens at all.)
PS Brenda Spencer is still in prison.