Open-source intelligence analysts reported that Crooks didn’t appear to use mainstream social media channels such as Facebook or Instagram and had an almost negligible internet footprint, which is highly unusual for a 20-year-old. Instead, analysts said that Crooks corresponded with friends and associates on a Discord server that they were now trying to access.
Discord servers are restricted ring-fenced sections of the internet. They are often used by gaming groups and communities as secure chat rooms but are also used by fringe organisations to push their ideologies and discuss wild conspiracy theories and plots.
I feel like it’s not that weird for a 20 year old not to have a Facebook and only use Discord.
He also played a violent new video game that has just recently been discovered, called "Fortnite," and described himself as having "skibidi rizz" but not being a "sussy baka." These slang terms are gang lingo used by only the most dangerous terrorists.
I'm 26 and my peers are mixed on using Facebook. Some still have it to message relatives, and that's about it. I cannot imagine many 20 year olds using it.
he was The One Never-Trump Republican democrats are always trying to convince
If the same thing happened to Biden I'm almost certain mainstream Republicans would be saying things like "this is the people standing up against the woke mob, God Bless Them!"
Facebook or Instagram and had an almost negligible internet footprint, which is highly unusual for a 20-year-old. Instead, analysts said that Crooks corresponded with friends and associates on a Discord server that they were now trying to access.
The kids aren't using facebook, and a lot of them also aren't using Instagram. A 20 year old man using primarily discord is the most normal thing.
"intelligence" ""analyst"" being paid 6 figures to be absolutely fucking stupid and useless
yeah i do backgrounds on people for work and if you're over 70, it's hard to find you and if you're under like 23 it's really difficult as well.
First it was the nefarious CCP using TikTok to indoctrinate the naive youth into not liking genocide.
Now it's the dangerous shady Discord servers allowing extremists (from both sides) to plot against Our Democracy™.
I would not be surprised to see some sort of police state crackdown on Discord and other non-public parts of the internet resulting from this.
Discord will have his data served up on a platter in no time. I don't see anything changing because they already cooperate with the state heavily.
Isn't 4chan basically supervised by Feds at this point? The NSA already have access to Facebook and Google so it goes without saying that Discord is next. They want to ban TikTok because they can't gain that level of access to their user data.
Why don't zoomers rediscover Usenet and IRC? Can't rely on corporate platforms at all.
I'm pretty sure I remember moot himself saying that he cooperated with law enforcement when they demanded IP adresses every time some 4channer broke the law.
It was from a court transcript somewhere, but you're absolutely correct in assuming 4chan is heavily monitored and participated in by law enforcers, government officials and far right recruiters.
I was thinking the same thing. It’s kind of the next logical step for platforms that have locked their users onto their sites. What good is a walled garden internet if you can’t link 100% of your users to real world consumers. Hello TSA internet.
The FBI says it has not yet identified a motive for the shooting
I suggest checking the last ~6-12 months of his 4chan history. Key word searches to try: "Trump Zionist" "Kushner" "Fuentes"
I suppose on the positive side, probably some of the clammiest, palest groypers in existence will be getting some door knocks in coming weeks and months.
On the extremely negative side, if the guy is 100% confirmed a groyper and his motive is anything in the realm of "Trump supports Israel" or whatever... ain't gonna be good for future anti-Zionist movements.
Not that the future was ever bright considering how they've reacted to peaceful sit-ins. But yeah, anything groyper related and against Israel (for explicitly antisemitic reasons) will be lumped with anti-imperialism/anti-genocide related resistance to Israel. Very convenient packaging to barrel right past the unavoidable truth of the peaceful nature thus far of anti-Zionist moments. Yes it's totally nonsensical, but if it aids Zionist narratives that both parties share, it's too tempting.
Apparently the shooter said the following in his twitter bio before it got scrubbed: "on a mission from God (cross emoji) to end Epstien's evil empire"
If you're telling the truth then I called it last night when I said the shooter was a disillusioned QAnon-Head mad at Trump. I mean it's easy to guess because they're the only ones who are armed and do adventurism.
lmao a lot of us joked about it it, I didn't think that'd actually be the case
Reality itself is unserious, it seems
Something similar was my first though when I read the news this morning. QAnon has fractured in some bizarre and spectacular ways since Jan 6th especially and there's any number of reasons some of those rabbit-holed spin-offs don't like Trump now
I wonder if the media is going to bury this story because of Epstein?
Good question and sadly I have no answer yet. However, it is a matter of time that most of us get answers.
I was seeing a ton of fake stuff posted trying to frame him as like antifa and such last night, so I will stand by waiting for more on that type of stuff before really forming opinions on it.
I was seeing a ton of fake stuff posted trying to frame him as like antifa and such last night
Same here and that made me very uneasy due to the readiness for violence that people with neonazi views have.
pretty clearly faked, check the Epstein reddit, top comments sleuthed out the fact it has 0 posts, photoshopped the shooter's face onto a different pic, etc
Could you share the post here? I checked this https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/new/ sub and it has nothing within these two days.
it was removed by mods https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/1e2x2c4/trump_shooter_was_on_a_quest_to_end_epsteins_evil/
Interesting! Here it is: @RedWizard@hexbear.net @Jenniferrr@hexbear.net
Btw, thanks for sharing Crispy!
*removed externally hosted image*
they changed their name on insta so I doubt it’s him. Also they use a picture that looks like a lookalike (protected twitter, guy in blue shirt)
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I saw this in a discord that I am currently in and I am currently asking for a screenshot to see if I can share it here. People are working hard to scrub data from this shooter.
I saw this in a discord that I am currently in and I am waiting for a screenshot to see if we can analyze it here.
I guess I'm out of the loop on this. It makes sense upon reading it however. So the theory is, based on your analysis, that because he was off mainstream social media, and associated with gun culture that he was likely on the neo-nazi pipeline.
This pipeline involving an antisemitic anti-zionist framework, that believes support for Israel is support for white genocide in effect. Is this a widely held view among groypers?
To the last part, yes, basically. They hate Israel because (this is me summing up a lot of disconnected "ideologies" from them):
-Israel is Jewish. -They hate Jews. -Zionist=Judaism.
Some of them, although all this stuff is very disjointed, believe that Trump is like a "Jewish puppet" (they will sometimes substitute Zionist with the intention of meaning Jewish. They do not distinguish a difference. All Jews are Zionists loyal to Israel to them. Classic antisemitic stuff). His son in law, Jared Kushner, was in charge of a lot of foreign policy stuff in the Middle East including the treaty that was meant to full solidify the alliance and support from the surrounding Arab countries like Saudi Arabia with Israel. This was interrupted by partly 1) Trump losing re-election but mostly 2) recent Palestinian resistance starting on Oct 7 last year. The groypers see this as Kushner, who is Jewish, manipulating Trump or Trump working in cooperation with "the Jews", however they want to frame it, to sell out America to the "the Jews" and "the Arabs." They see America as a place that should be only white people, which apparently now includes Hispanic whites and not just anglo/germanic whites (crazy developments are emerging in Nazi ideology), and has no Jews, they belong in Israel, which the US should have no role in supporting (or killing the Jews outright, again, depending on the relative insanity), no black people, brown skinned Hispanic, Latino, no indigenous, no Asians... you get get gist. Typical Nazi stuff.
But yeah the hangup with them specifically is Trump/US support of Israel and their deep racist hatred of Jews. It's basically like if the racist republicans were fully ideologically consistent in their racism... you get a groyper who wants absolutely nothing to do with Jews or anything even associated with Judaism.
Some of them do hesitantly, lightly support Trump btw. I believe Fuentes has been on record as supporting Trump as sort of a means to an end transitional figure. He said something like "we elect Trump twice and then we have no more elections" like he will form an actual empire, dissolve the republic, Rome style, and then the next person will be a "based anti-Jewish groyper." Or whatever.
Now I must go shower.
So groypers think of Trump like we think of Bernie. Except Trump won.
I understand the comparison there, but I gotta reject it based on the implied (or direct?) comparison between groypers, who explicitly want to do genocide, to "bernie bros" and further left who want crazy things like free healthcare for all, improved material conditions for the poor, ending or least heavily drawing down US imperialism, etc.
And with groypers, they are so comically "evil" in their espoused beliefs that it is pretty easy to just go "oh, no. No no no. Fuck that entire group." And yeah yeah everyone is a product of their environment and material conditions, including those losers, but so were the Nazis. So I can simultaneously lament the fact they are lost to darkness, while also knowing their existence is a threat to the lives of a lot of people I care about and probably me too as a "traitor"
I just don't like making these comparisons because you end up with like "so Stalin was like Hitler, but with a different ideology?" Ok. Maybe. But what were their ideologies? One was pure evil and one was good.
I'm not saying that was your intent, but that's why I don't accept those comparisons. "Somethings are good and somethings are bad" logic applies.
I was just thinking of a groyper posting “Trump was the compromise” and wasn’t sure how to get the idea across
Rabidly pro-Ukraine?
Wanted to kickstart helterskelter?
Trump was too left for his tastes?
Trump was too right for this Romneyite?
Gamer just wanted to get a Wikipedia page?
Trump was too right for this Romneyite?
The militant Mormon uprising has begun. Salt Lake City will stand for 1000 years.
Gamer just wanted to get a Wikipedia page?
almost certainly this one, you miss 100% of the shots you...do take apparently
the "Chinese shooter" revealed to be...
white guy in demolition ranch merch
cool, thanks for that NYPost
"Redditors and Twitter users" just doesn't have the same ring to it, y'know?
That's just how you say "hack journalists who googled 'Thomas Matthew Crooks Facebook' for five minutes" when you've watched too much Mr. Robot.
I'm revising my guess at motivations to being more like a school shooter but against a cool target.
It's 100% gonna be Epstein/Save the Children/QAnon. There was a story (apparently fake, but only
-types say so) going around a few weeks ago about Trump being reinvestigated for Epstein behavior. I think it was only Pinocchio'd a few days ago, so I could definitely see the deboonking not having filtered into the Q space before this heroic moron bought a ticket to the cool zone.This is my take as well. If this were at all politically motivated, we would be reading his manifesto right now. Or at least his unhinged posts on 4chan/facebook. The fact that there are none of those things leads me to believe that this is just a guy who wanted to be epic. The target was irrelevant, if it was Genocide Joe on that stage he would have still taken the shot.
Crook’s father told CNN he was trying to find out “what the hell” was going on but that he would talk to law enforcement before speaking about his son.
Mr Carriker reposted the photo of members of the US security forces standing over Crooks’ dead body, wearing the grey Demolition Ranch t-shirt.
“What the hell?” he wrote underneath the photo.
Discord servers are restricted ring-fenced sections of the internet. They are often used by gaming groups and communities as secure chat rooms but are also used by fringe organisations to push their ideologies and discuss wild conspiracy theories and plots.
Fuck, they know about our discord where we push for a Protracted People's War in the United SStates of AmeriKKKa.
as secure chat rooms
Nobody is using a Discord server as a "secure" chat room. What is that even supposed to mean?
"The gunman's Discord server mod refused to send me an invite link. Their security is un-breachable."
The highest form of security: not letting lame people join your club.
I will simply not invite the CIA to my Marxist Leninist Maoist Guerilla server
Some people are just deeply unserious and think Discord is encrypted (it isn't).
its not secure but it is "private" enough for chatting/gaming with randoms (if your standards are low for data harvesting)
It's super cool how the US is so depoliticized that this guy is just some random 20 year old groyper who yelled "hold my beer" and thnere's no revolutionary cells or organized falandrists or anything.
depoliticized
Bluntened... as to make their teeth and guns less injurious....
On one side I am totally unsurprised, but on the other side I was hoping this was going to be the worlds first instance of a lib with a spine. I don't know why I got my hopes up
The Liberal Driller let's trouble come to him
Then he makes sure it troubles no one ever again
The Republican party is full of, and run by, crazies. Trying to find a coherent motive for this assassination attempt might not be possible.
Incoherence has never stopped them from finding scapegoats before, so why now?
where's the archive link