Cool Zone Media.
Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Last Friday, I teamed up with Lance from the Canadian based politics show The Serfs to talk about the tragic events of last week in tumblr Ridge, British Columbia. On Tuesday, February tenth, an eighteen year old named Jesse Van Rutzler killed her mother and stepbrother in their home, then took two guns and went to tumblr Ridge Secondary School, where she killed five students, one teacher, and finally herself. Two other kids
were critically injured with gunshot wounds but have survived. The shooter did attend tumblr Ridge Secondary School years ago, but dropped out for the past three to five years. It's kind of unclear. Jesse identified as a transgender girl. Tumblr Ridge is a very small town with just twenty four hundred residents in northeastern British Columbia. This was the worst
school shooting in Canada since nineteen eighty nine. The sequence of events during this incident were very similar to the Lelouche shooting in Canada ten years ago, where the gunman killed two family members at home before going to a school.
During our conversation, Lance and I discussed the spread of misinformation, how the online writers tried to weaponize the deaths of these people for their own political agenda, and how the shooters online activity shows a growing fascination with mass shootings this past year. Here's that conversation.
I'm sure everyone knows that right now in canada's a nation in mourning. And I also did probably want to start this out by reading the names of the deceased, because it's one of the things that the families have
been asking for. And so the victims from the I'merridge Secondary School shooting are Abel Wanza who was twelve, Ezekiel Schofield who was thirteen, Kylie Smith who was twelve, Soybnoit who was twelve, Takaria Lampert who was twelve, Shanda have Iguanda Duran who's thirty nine, Emitt Jacobs who was eleven, and Jennifer Jacobs who was thirty nine years old. So I guess I'll start with Garrison. How have you been processing and or tracking the story since it happened.
Yeah, pretty horrifying incident that happened last Tuesday.
Very soon after it.
Happened, there was like right wing narratives trying to use the deaths of these children and family members for their own political agenda. And I started tracking that pretty soon, and then also trying to like verify as much information I about the actual circumstances of the shooting and who the shooter was, you know, around that same time. Things
have gotten pretty clear now a few days later. But I mean, it's been a nightmare to sort through all this stuff, especially all of like the political opportunism being done by a variety of right wing influencers and you know, quote unquote news agencies.
Yeah, I was doing the same thing. Like right after the event happened. I noticed that there was a lot of for people who don't know, right wing online operatives like the plub Reporter and Juno News and cat Canada and these are all very popular right wing social media accounts on Twitter in Canada or at least based in Canada for their origins, but then they usually get retweeted, quote tweeted and amplified eventually by the far right in
the US, which has a very corrosive effect. And I think but like by the time we're talking about this right now, I saw that like Donald Trump Junior, the son of the Presidents of the United States is doing an entire I assume blowed out of his mind rumble special on the shooting, just uniquely going after trans people the entire time, Like for a small little town of what like just over twenty four hundred people, that it has to be beyond like a shell shock to first
have to go through something that's horrifying and then deal with the international right wing apparatus.
Yeah, and they're going through the motions right like this is not the first time, it won't be the last time that they try to do something like this. It's not getting as much traction, I think as it used to do. There's a lot of other stuff happening in the States around the time, Like news was breaking in the States about the shooting that happened. It was Wednesday during Pam Bondi's Epstein hearing, So there's been a lot
of other stuff happening. So I don't think they've gotten as much like concentrated attention on this as some of the online right has wanted to or you know, like the Matt Walsh types lips of tech talk that sort of thing. But they're definitely giving it a go. It's gross, right, it's gross to use the deaths of all these people.
Yeah, absolutely, not to mention the way the entire thing's been framed is abhorrent. I mean, obviously, you know, we're speaking from a perspective where we don't want to vilify an entire group based on one, like, you know, horrifying monster's actions kind of thing, right, because that doesn't happen in the other direction for SIS people. And that's what
you got to be quick to point out. But I feel like the Matt Walshes and the limbs of TikTok have and it's a horrifying thing to say, but like they're perfect narrative, right, It's kind of like a twisted way something that're actually quite pleased about. It almost seems likely.
Yeah, they make a lot of money off this, Yes, yeah, exactly. They brought it off of human suffering and they try to spread as much of it as possible.
The first aspect I was trying to look at the story from was what it was, really, what are the
families themselves asking for? What does the you know, town need long terms of support that kind of stuff, And you move on from that, and then immediately it was well, now there's just an overwhelming, very apparent right wing mechanism gearing up, and it's going to be kind of devastating for a country like Canada that doesn't really have maybe or isn't as used to having the eyes of the world from the transphobic turf side of the internet.
Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about Jennifer Strang, the mother of the shooter, despite being a self described conservative libertarian and Jesse's mother, publicly supported her transition, made posts in supported trans people. In July twenty twenty four, she shared a LGBTQ Pride graphic reading good people don't spend their time harassing marginalized communities and wrote quote as a conservative leaning libertarian who lives in the North and
loves living in a small town. I really hope the hate I see online is just bored old people and not true hatred. Do better and educate yourself before spewing bullshit online makes you look dumb, evolve. I normally don't say anything. I normally don't go on shitbook to see the keyboard warriors, and I know I can't control or shield my kids from everything, but please, for the love of fuck, can you get your shit together, so we don't have to bring our kids up in a world
full of hatred. Do you have any idea how many kids are killing themselves over this kind of hate? Please stop the bullshit quote. So, pretty soon after this shooting, based on an early active shooter report describing the shooter as a quote unquote female in address with brown hair, online right wing accounts started trying to identify who this possible shooter was by looking at trans people in the
area of Tumblr Ridge. They misidentified one person who is a relative of this shooter, but put out photographs of them claiming that she was the shooter. This person is now having to like lock down all of their accounts and is scared to go outside to do the horrific wave of harassment they're facing.
What is wild about that aspect of the story is I've seen accounts like the Blood reporter who popularized, you know, publishing that photo, but I think Rachel Gilmore is the one who also pointed out that there was the misuse of a photo in an actual CBC radio broadcast image thumbnail as well, which it is also kind of just shocking to hear because these are again innocent people who might have targets now put on their back because they're being directly identified as some kind of a mass shooter
or monster. And then in addition to that, like now, I'm wondering how much of this is going to be something that they're capable of containing, especially considering that it's been still proliferated. Like I saw an account called bricks News, which I assumed would be about bricks, you know, the economic lines between a number of different nations, and instead was publishing the false photo of again a completely innocent person and sad like I think at the time, seventeen
thousand likes, you know, hundreds of thousands of impressions. It's really dangerous.
I mean, yeah, I mean that's part of the intent here.
You know, places like Kubia Farms trailblaze a lot of this quote unquote early research, and the point is to cast as large of than as possible, to damage as many trans people as they can using horrific events like this.
The cruelty is part of the point, and you know, blame gets laid at a you know, a combination of trends enabled mental delusion SSRIs and hormones, saying that those things are causing the shooting well before we've any evidence to determine what types of medications someone could be on
who they actually are, or any possible motive. One kind of crude thing that I've seen a lot is right wing accounts like you know, end Wokeness, allegedly Jack Pisovic saying that you know, the shooter quote unquote gunned down thirty five kids to make it seem like, you know, massacre of such a such a large magnitude, right, The number of kids that that have been killed and other
other people as well, obviously is like horrific. Thirty five people were not shot in this shooting, though there was twenty five people with non gunshot related injuries as a result of the incident, and that is the number that that people are framing as being, you know, total number of people shot, which just isn't true. And then they
also very quickly start sharing you know, unsourced graphs. I'm sure you've seen stuff like this, right saying that you know, trans girls make up the highest demographic of mass shooters per capita. You see these things go all over the place.
By the world's richest men. He's sharing that a lot online right now.
Yeah, I mean and this is this has been a thing the past three years. Right, this is something they've been doing well before any any actual incident can be even used to create data. They've they've created fake graphs that show this, those factors that get people to you know, believe these sorts of things. Right, There is certainly a selection bias that determines which types of shootings gets like
a lot of media attention. And the other issue that I've talked about a lot in previous shootings is there's a lot of different definitions of a mass shooting, you know, mass shooting versus a mass killing, versus like a school shooting. Right, all these are different terms. Even the term school shooting can be used to refer to a variety of very different incidents revolving around gun violence.
Right.
There can be gang related violence at a school. There can be shots fired as an escalation of a physical fight, Students bringing guns to school and accidentally firing them, which happens more often than what you would think, like as someone who just brings a gun in their backpack, not intending to do a shoot, but it accidentally fires into school.
This happens multiple times a year.
There's you know, shootings there dormitories, right, those get counted as mass shootings at like you know, a college dormitory. It's in our personal violence. There's you know, neighborhood shooting set effect, but aren't targeting the school like drive by shootings or even something like the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which some people have categorized as a school shooting because was on a college campus. Right, But these are all
very different types of violence, right. These aren't like you know, intentional you know, mass shooting violence where someone who's trying to shoot as many people as possible and then usually killed themselves.
Right.
That's that's that's a different thing than a lot of these other other things that I mentioned, but they all get lumped under this one label of school shooting. And all these different you know, data collection criteria could produce
very different stats. And depending whether you're measuring your injuries versus deaths, you know, specific weapons like knives versus guns, and how many years are being sampled, or if there's connections to other violent activity, there could be very very different results and how you categorize you know, mass killings or mass shootings. The Mass Killing Database has six hundred and thirty one incidents in the United States since two thousand and six, of which about one to three gets
kind of unclear. One to three are done by people who have been reported as transgender, which is an underrepresented
ample size. The Violence Project has one transgender mass shooter in their database of about one hundred and ninety five mass shootings, and according to the Gun Violence Archive, which also measures gunshot injuries not just deaths, fewer than one in one thousand mass shooters over the past decade have been identified as transgender according to a Gallop poll for twenty twenty three, but two percent of gen Z identify as transgender, and if you also count like non binary people,
it brings it up to four percent. But you can have all those stats on hand, if that doesn't really do very much. Once you're arguing about statistics and like semantics of terms, when kids have died, you're kind of already starting to lose the emotional battle, right, Like I can say all of that, but like that's not actually going to be helpful, right, Like, fact checking doesn't work to dissuade disinformation, And when you're dealing with such an
emotionally charge incident like kids being murdered. Having to read off a paragraph like that just doesn't really help, right. Parents just want to know why this is happening and what can be un to stop it, And all they know is that, you know, since twenty twenty three, there has been a series of shootings done by young people who either attempted to or did transition genders. Right, That's what they know, and they want to know, you know, why this is happening and how to stop it.
Yeah.
One of the things that I've tried to push up against, because you are getting a lot of Americans who are pushing that narrative right now, is to point out because I've seen people saying like this epidemic of transmass violence is a scorge and I think they're blending Canada in the US into one nation because I was like, just to be clear, this is the first mass shooting committed by a transperson in Canadian history ever.
And there's a lot of trans people in British Columbia.
Yeah, well across the country. I mean, it's one of those things for him like this, this this is not an epidemic of which like, oh my god, you have a high probability of being hurt by a transperson in your life. It couldn't be further from the truth, right, Like the stats are still overwhelmingly in the other direction. You're more likely to be the victim of physical or sexual violence if you're a transperson, then if you're this.
Person, Yeah, no, that is another problem here is Yeah, a lot of these you know, data collection tools aren't counting bolencing Canada.
These are all stuff based into states.
But for you know, the culture wars, it's not that hard to you know, move that border up five hundred miles to include things that are happening in Canada in a rhetorical sense, for you know your Matt Walsh's or end wokenesses, even you know your Fox News anchors, right, Yeah, this thing that people are talking about on the right
about this you know, epidemic of trans violence. What this is also done is created like a counter reaction from trans influencers to whenever something horrible happens like this, to blame these other groups like you know nine A or seven six four. Right, this has become something that's also now been very consistent. You know, there is a kernel
of truth in this. This is based on a real thing that has happened before, but the invocation of this has often, you know, expanded greatly beyond it's actual, Like do.
You explain it for people who are completely unfamiliar because I remember, like even a year ago, I had to started reading up I like, what is what is all this satanic cult for rituals with participation requirements of self harm and all this stuff?
Like Okay, yeah, you see a lot of people now when there's news coverage, you know a lot of trans people who have you know, accounts online, you know, talking about how quote unquote satanic Nazi pedophiles have groomed another vulnerable queer kid into doing a mass shooting. There's a viral tweet on semi viral tweet on Twitter right now that reads quote fuck anyone talking about trends and not to Adam Waffen. This includes the cops and the media like the CBC and BBC. So yeah, what are they
talking about here? You know, Adam Waffin Satanic Nazi pedophile cults. I said, you know nine A, seven, six four, right, These are originally you know Ninea is this older group, but as as contemporary internet lore, it is seen as this neo Nazi occultic organization that grooms people into sexual exploitation or into doing violence like mass shootings. Seven six four is a extortion ring that operated mainly on telegram and discord, which tried to get kids to do self harm,
produce blackmail kids. Yeah, they're active across a lot of places, but like the organizing hubs were on discord and telegram and they you know, attempted to get child sex abuse material out of these kids and then use that to blackmail them to get even more material than also encouraging self harm and acts of violence.
These have been real groups historically.
They are getting cracked down upon pretty heavily, at least in seven six four's case. Oh nine, it's not really a real group anymore, arguably, but it exists as like lore. And there has been no instances of a seven six
four affiliated people doing public acts of violence. So in this case, there's been people who have you know, trans people online or you know allies who have have said that this shooting is another one of these instances where these online groups of you know, Nazis and pedophiles have you know, groomed someone into doing violence, and they have
produced some evidence for this. There was a Twitter account that allegedly belonged to the shooter that had a profile picture of a son andrad on top of a trans flag, as well as.
The face of the christ Church shooter.
This account had posts glorifying white supremacist mass killers and promoting the idea of creating a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest. This was a Canada based account, but in reality, this was actually just another Nazis account who changed their user name to match that of the Tumblr Ridge shooter. And this was an attempt to troll people and just to spread disinformation. And this even fooled the ADL, whose
research standards have dropped dramatically the past three years. But a few days ago, the ADL put out an article where they credited posts made by this Twitter account to the Tumblr Ridge shooter and claimed that a quote unquote, preliminary investigation showed that the shooter had showed interest in white supremacy. But this was this was not their real account.
This was just someone who also is a fan of mass shootings like the shooter was, as we'll soon discuss, But this was someone who was just trying to troll other other you know, researchers on Twitter and see how far their disinformation can spread. This is the consequence of an organization like the ADL doing preliminary research based on Kiwi of arms posts and not actually verifying the information.
I mean, the fact that I think they're actively pursuing Hassan Piker more than Elon Musk is pretty much all I need to know in terms of work where they're prioritizing, you know, the search for racism.
Yeah, I can get into the actual like online footprint of the shooter, which we we do have a decent idea of.
Actually, well before you get to that, because I think that's what everyone is kind of interested in. I just want to wrap up that last part. So just to be clear, when you were mentioning those groups, you know, seven six four, et cetera, there is no actual history of the shooter having been into the Nazi the occults that kind of stuff.
Based on their presence, they have not been active in like specific seven six four communities or have showed interest in like you know, white supremacy, neo Nazism, or you know, the the occult pedophile Nazism of nine A. This is not observable in the online for print that they have left, which is which is not to say the online foot print they have left is you know, normal and good.
If anything, it does point towards, you know, significant factors that are causing kids to do shooting is like this, and we can trace it to a number of shootings that have happened. But the nine eight seven six four thing is more so like a meme at this point that people similarly deploy the same way that you know, the right deploys the know this epidemic of trans violence.
This has to become like a counter meme to say that every time a trans person does something bad, it's actually the fault of nine eight and seven six.
Four, right, because there has been incidences in the past that could point towards that.
Yeah, there could be there could be suggestions in the past, and certainly when seven six four was more active years ago, I mean a lot of the kids they were grooming for child sexual abuse material were a lot of queer kids, because those kids are uniquely vulnerable and are looking for community.
But I mean that is the majority of kids affected by seven six four are people who have been groomed into self harm or producing a child sexual beies material to circulate among like the organizers of these of these groups.
So it turns out that there isn't really a connection in those two directions, correct and putting out there, there's a counter push like I did the same thing with Charlie Kirk, right, Like I remember when the first image of the Charliekirk shooter being in the krouperhitba the frog style jumper. I was like, oh, this has to be a krouper, right, Like this immediately where my brain went because they do have a history of targeting that community.
So you know, you can understand why there's a pushback.
Yeah, And I think people feel like they understand ideological violence easier, like like violence caused by political ideology, and are uncomfortable with the increasing amount of horrific public violence that is seemingly linked to no political ideology. It's much more like like nihilistic and scattershot, and that's like uncomfortable. It's harder to understand like the causal forces producing that
rather than just saying, you know, oh, it's another Nazi. Right, that's easy and at this point sad like easy thing for people to understand because of you know, a very high number of neo Nazi mass shootings that happened in the past ten years, but it is not twenty seventeen anymore. And there's the circumstances that are inducing shootings like this have have changed.
Can you talk about that, because, like you said, it's a conversation that people don't want to have. Is it because we are uncomfortable with the conversation itself, or because there's not enough information available yet to truly understand what is leading these super online shooter slash nihilistic you know, deep in the memes style stuff.
Yeah, I think a mix of both.
It is both an emerging phenomenon so that people have to observe it for a certain amount of time to see the pattern. And then also it's it's uncomfortable and it sucks. It sucks to be in these places and like and like, look at all this stuff, right, Like I've been the past few days. I've been looking at you know, these horrible forum posts and reading about all kinds of like you know, bad stuff, and it sucks, and no one wants to do that. So I think it's a mix of factors. But uh, yeah, I do
want to talk about that. That's the kind of the I've kind of like two sections that get into that, the first one based on her actual online footprint, the second one on more like, you know, basic societal forces. I think is getting people to go so far to the social margins that pushes them to places like where the shooter hung out online. So in twenty twenty one, Jesse's mom shared a link to her kids YouTube channel where quote he posts about hunting, self reliance, guns and.
Stuff he likes to do.
Quote.
This YouTube account shared the user name as Jesse's Reddit account. The earliest posts from twenty nineteen were about like roadblocks gaming. Then in twenty twenty one, Jesse started posting about firearms and shared a photo of her Chinese SKS, which is kind of like an a case forty seven style gun, which she used for hunting. Around twenty twenty three, she started posting about quote unquote starting MTF transitions soon and
as well as her phobia of needles. The police say that she started transitioning before this, but the earliest indication we have from her online activity pusts this around twenty twenty three. On other posts on arsash trans asked for advice on girl's clothing what to expect from HRT and talked about body dysmorphia. Her very last gender related post
on Reddit still refers to herself as pre HRT. Jesse made a single post on r slash trans Guns in October twenty twenty three, sharing a video of her firing
a Desert Eagle handgun at a shooting range. At this point, surround like the end of twenty twenty three, almost all of her posts switch to being about psychedelic drug abuse, asking how to vape or smoke weed without leaving a smell in the house, being scammed by an online psychedelic seller in Canada, and asking if you can get high off drinking the urine from a drug addict, and asked on Reddit if it's safe to do five moo dmt alone.
After she returned from the quote unquote psych ward, she was admitted to a psychiatric facility after attempting to burn down her home with account of aerosol while on three grams of mushrooms. Jesse also said that she was diagnosed with ADHD, autism, major depressive disorder, and OCD, and was prescribed a mix of different SSRIs as well as an
antipsychotic for sleep. In one comment on one of her multiple Reddit posts asking about trying five meodmt after being arrested for arson, she wrote, quote, it is a wonder I'm still alive yet I am speaks volumes, But how much I've been trying to keep breathing when all my effort goes towards keeping alive quote. Her Reddit activity drops off in April twenty twenty four. This could mean that she just stop using Reddit around then, or that she has deleted a whole bunch of posts. She did scrub
some of her online activity prior to the shooting. Now, in the aftermath of the shooting, the police have said that they made multiple mental health related visits to the shooter's home the past two years, and had previously confiscated guns from the home, but the owner of the guns it's unclear who exactly successfully petitioned for their return, and Jesse did have a miner's firearms license, but that expired
in twenty twenty four. It's unclear if the guns that were confiscated with the same ones used in the shooting. Jesse has posted a number of different photos of guns, and we still don't know which exact ones were used. We just know that there was a long gun and
a handgun recovered. So though the shooters like Reddit activity ceases in early twenty twenty four, her online presence moved to darker corners of the Internet, which demonstrate a declining mental well being and a growing fascination with mass shootings. The past year, Jesse was active on an Internet forum called Watch People Die, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It's the website to host footage of refe gore.
Yeah, I was like, is that what it sounds like?
It is okay, right, you know, like snuff like real gore is hosted there and shared, as well as a lot of you know, like edits of mass shooter footage of people filming themselves doing mass shootings that then circulates. This forum is way more of like a social orbit around this recent wave of mass shootings than seven six four is. And you know, there is there is some crossover.
You know, there is some seven six for people who are also you know, active on this form, people who used to be seven six four, because that group is also you know, not really what it used to be, but this form is its own thing rather than being linked to you know, explicit Nazi groups you know the occultic OH nine A or the child's exploitation rings six seven six four.
That the shooter is verifiable.
Online footprint suggests much more of a nexus of involvement
with what I've been calling the school shooter fandom. They call it TCC or the True crime community, And in the past two years we've seen an increase in shootings based on this, like Neo Columnbiner variety Right people doing copycats of other school shootings, the Abundant Life Christian School shooting and December twenty twenty four by Columbine cause player Natalie Simith Ruppnow, who the Right falsely labeled as trans. There was also the Catholic school shooting in August twenty
twenty five by Robin Westman, who did at one point attempt gender transition but later regretted it and originally planned to attack an LGBTQ music venue. Westman was similarly obsessed with mass killers and wrote the name of Repnow on one of their rifles. Last April, a twenty two year old man in Florida was arrested for threatening to commit
a mass shooting on discord. The FBI believes that he was in communication with Samantha Repnow prior to her shooting, and they both discussed with each other plans for their mass killing attacks. In September twenty twenty five, a sixteen year old named Desmond Holly shot two kids before killing
himself at Evergreen High School in Colorado. He also idolized Samantha Rupdown, replicated her selfies, and was active on the same forum Watch People Die that Repnow herself was active on, so Jesse was on this forum, but Jesse also displayed other traits similar of.
The TCC group.
Jesse created a mass shooting simulator game on Roadblocks, which was set in a mall where you, you know, act out a shooting and killing people in the mall. I'll talk a little bit about this this forum specifically now Right like this forum essentially exists to desensitize people to extremely violent content that glorifies mass killings. Jesse's very first comment on Watch People Die was on a compilation video of mass shooter footage, and she wrote, quote, I appreciate
this post. She also commented on another thread of mass shooting footage quote I love these first person perspective type videos when a shooter records his or her own actions. It's always heat.
Unquote.
The most worrying comment is something that you know, if police were aware of, should have should have been cause to prevent this from happening. Came about five months ago. In a thread on Watch People Die about the psychology of watching Gore, she wrote, quote, I find it addictive. It's hard not to watch violent content. I'm just drawn to it. I don't think much of it, though to say it doesn't affect me is likely naive. I'm sure maybe subconsciously it does. It just doesn't feel like a
big deal. I'm drawn to substances too. It's easy to get high and just to zone out into videos of this stuff. Does it impact my mental health, eh, mine's probably already fucked. I tried to stay away from watching this type of thing before because it really sucks me in and it's a massive useless time dump. But I
never really saw any benefit. I think the r words in the comment section are more bothersome mentally than the videos, so I try just not interact with dorks x D. And these types of sentiments are not like uncommon among people who regularly engage with this type of content.
I think it's an individual thing to ask you. But at this point it almost seems as if like the two biggest things that are often blame for mass shooting that I have to push up against and I have been doing to my whole life drugs and in the other case, hyper online radicalization. Right, the history that you're painting here kind of seems like someone who needed a variety of help.
I'll reiterate that in like a sec Okay, yeah, I mean, as I was reading this, this reminded me a little bit. There was a shooting a few years ago at a Fourth of July parade, the Highland Park mass shooting. The sort of like writing that Jesse did in his post, it reminds me of a bit of the writing done by this this this other mass shooter to talk about like getting like sucked into like like violent content or this like this like idea of like it like beckons
you further into the concept. It's like almost like hypnotic, very similar writing done by this other other shooter.
So one other post.
I'll reference that she made on this forum was a video of a father hanging himself in front of his children, and she claimed that her stepdad attempted the same thing trying to kill himself in front of her when you know, she was just a little kid, and she wrote, quote, I wish his bitch ass would have died on the noose. Then in they're probably better than beating your kids unquote.
So obviously, you know this person had like long standing issues that at certain points seemed like better, right, Like around twenty twenty one, they seemed to be doing better, right. They were they were making you know, YouTube content about about guns and hunting, and felt like they had some more of like a had more of a stable social outlet.
And then around twenty twenty three with you know.
This, this like abuse of psychedelic drugs leading to this mass shooter obsession. It's like a pretty a pretty clear picture of like a mental spiral. Two months before Jesse's own shooting, she did visit the Watch People Die profile for Samantha ruppn Now, and if we're not talking about like a causal factors, right, and especially like in reference to you know this, this this idea that you know parents have where you know they're there has been a
sequence of trans people doing shootings. You can argue about you know, the per capita percent rates or like stats again, but that doesn't go so far. But at a certain point, I mean, we have to all be comfortable, or maybe comfortable is the wrong worry, but we have to, like you know, realize that like as more people you know, transition right genders, is not this like immutable thing. As more people attempt transitioning, there's gonna be some trans people
who do bad things. This happens with every social group
of people. To borrow from sociologist Mark Worrel, who wrote about the social phenomenon of mass shootings, like destruction of others is the means towards another end, the desire for self destruction that the self was incapable of inflicting in isolation a lot of the mass shootings and with suicide or trying to get the police to kill you through through suicide, like like the public shootings like this have a very strong suicidal component, and some people might not
be able to do that themselves. They need to create a social context in which they feel like they can, and at least in terms of the States and to a smaller degree in Canada, like these shootings like exist as like this like cultural ritual, this like ritual of destruction of this self and destruction of the self can include the social apparatus that makes up the self. And for like a young person, that's what that's that's their family in school, the two things that were targeted in this shooting.
Right, this this.
Network that makes up like my sense of self as a seventeen year old, eighteen year old, it's gonna be my family, which is you know, uh for Jesse, that's that's her mom. She's been separated from her father for for a while, as well as her stepbrother. And then
also this school that she used to used to go to. Right, That's that's the sort of that's the network that makes up your idea of this social And like I said before, like as the trans community grows, there's gonna be some overlap between anti social you know, mentally unwell individuals who act out a mass killing as a suit aside and disintegrated and socially underregulated people who try transitioning as a
way to ease tensions both internally and externally. And if anything, I think transitioning can often be maybe one of the healthiest ways to attempt to relieve some of these tensions. But like being trans is like a marginal position in society, right, And the people who commit school shootings and suicide through mass shootings are at like the very very extreme end of social dysregulation and like marginal isolation, and some people in those latter categories will also try transitioning as a
method of social regulation. And in Jesse's case, like considering all their posts about like mental health and drugs, never once is being trans cited as like a point of their distress, Like that's the thing that's causing them the distress is it is a method of relief, at least according to their own writing on Reddit, like the cause of the distress or all these are these other things, and like people can blame mass shootings or mass killings
on like any number of specific factors, right, such as access to weapons, whether that's knives, firearms, bullying, substance abuse, mental health and lacking mental health services and like mental health oversight. But like the common base factor across you know, most of those things is that there's like social disintegration
and deregulation happening. That that's like a failure to balance like egoism and altruism, right, a healthy individual sense of self as well as a place of belonging within a larger social group, like we need a mix of freedom and available structured paths for social life. Ritualistic outbursts of suicidal violence against society happen when these things are extremely unregulated and someone falls out of the social fabric. And like marginal classes like trans people can be particularly affected
by social disintegration and deregulation. And like it's important to note here, like this isn't caused by some like vague medical condition like gender dysphoria like that, that's that's not causing the violence, right prescribed estrogen, it's not a causal force. Inness we don't even know if Robin Westman or or Jesse was even on estrogen.
We don't know. But these things aren't aren't causal.
But you know, these are social positions that include, you know, these larger social factors that affect large populations. One of those populations can be trans people. There's a lot of social disintegration that affects the sist men currently, they do a lot of shootings, and yeah, the overwhelming majority. You
can also graft these things on class lines. Lots of people who go and do public shootings, either themselves or their families are suffering from economic instability or or people in like the middle class as well, which has this this this other problem in like Durkheim's med methodology of suicide, which I'm kind of pulling from a little bit here, it's like this thiss, this sense of like overregulation can
also produce in unhealthy balance. So it's either you know, very overregulating people, you know, like like Elon Musk has too much freedom, has too much too much like access to like money and possibilities, that he's then a very dysfunctional person. This can happen with some probably like you know, like middle class kids as well, that can produce violent outbursts. But a lot of the time it's you know, lower middle class or lower class conditions that can lead to violence.
And sometimes sometimes it does not go to the extreme of doing you know, a mass killing. It can often just result in like petty crime, which is do you arguably a more healthy method of regulation compared to something like a mass shooting, which is like you know, the most desperate, the most marginal, like active suicide that we could like envision as a society.
I just wanted to specifically say when it came to factors. You're you're distinctly not saying that video games where we're in any way responsible, and then I know you're not, but I just like I people should note that when you mentioned Roadblocks, people like I had I think my mom and someone else asked like, oh, well, what's the storyline for Roadblocks? And I was like, it's like asking what's the story for Minecraft? Right, I was like, yeah,
I was like, these these are world building. It's it's it's similar to seeing someone basically trying journal out their thoughts. Right. I think in that she was building these these mass shooting simulators, that wasn't her being influenced I say, by some kind of like template that Roblocks had. That was her showing, yeah, creating something to express something else.
Yeah, And and that sort of like like cause player replication very common among this you know, growing community of the true crime community, the school shooter fandom, which which attracts a lot of people in marginal populations, right, Like the fact that Samantha Rupp now is like one of the first like you know, assists female school shooters, like is notable here and like a lot of like the early like Columbine fandom on Tumblr was was young girls.
The fact that TCC is attracting like a wider net than just CIS males, I think is in interesting, but it points to these other social forces. I think condensing it down to being like a certain mixture of SSRIs and HRT is what's causing this, Like there's more psychedelics, No, true for that, yeah, or psycholyst right, I mean, like anything, these things can exist within a healthy equilibrium, right, Psychedelics can be a very healthy tool for people to deal with, like mortality.
Yeah, no, absolutely right.
You know, whether that's you know, MDMA, ketamine or like mushrooms, Like mushrooms are being used to treat people who have cancer, right, to help them get comfortable with the idea of their
own mortality. These things can exist within a healthy equilibrium of the social but they can also exist in an unhealthy non equilibrium, right, And I think the types of ways that Jesse was writing about psychedelics online, I think demonstrates a very unhealthy use of these drugs, especially as like you know, like a sixteen year old, right.
Like it's well, it sounds like self medication. It sounds like unsupervised medication, and it also sounds like something that was most likely acting as an accelerant, right, Like, if you already have a host of other problems, if you are introducing a very large amount of incredibly powerful like you know, psychostimulants into you know what you're in ingestine every day, then it's going to have potentially very very dangerous outcomes. Yeah.
Again, these are largely correlating factor. It's not cause, not causal forces. Right. The causal forces is this like social disintegration and deregulation of which you know, abuse of psychedelics can do a lot of damage to your sense of self and your sense of self within like a larger
a larger community. And the fact that I think, like specifically, you know, the lacking mental health services, lacking like oversight of these things in terms like a palsy outlook like, these are things that we as a society should be putting more work into. If you actually want to start solving this problem, you can get into you know, larger, larger things about you know, like the alienation of like quote unquote late stage capitalism, which you know also can be a factor.
In another accelerant, right, Like, I think a lot of these are accelerants, right where every other thing that you've been listening, and then it seems to me like, you know, this compounded upon this, which compounded upon this and eventually led you know, someone to looking up more and more extreme content. Yeah.
Well, one thing that I do want to mention, which i've i've kind of seen seen discussed, is like that this term like radicalization saying that you know, she was like radicalized into this like violent content. This is more of like a like a semantic note. I'm not sure how useful like the term radicalization is in this case, if anything. I think she was like desensitized to horrific acts of violence through repeated viewing and was in within
communities that encouraged this sort of thing. I think that's the way that I'm framing it as opposed to, you know, radicalization makes makes you think of like politics and like ideology.
Right right or not Nazism or white supremacy or something like that, right, Yeah.
Yeah, And it's like it's not that they're getting like politically radical, it's that they're they're dropping out of the social fabric and desensitizing themselves to this concept of like you know, horrific like societally targeted violence.
I know now that, like obviously, the right wing is is decided that they're uniquely going to be attacking trans people. I'm not sure if you're aware of the shooter's father's statements that were just made recently. The father intentionally uses terms like I am the biological father, refers to her with him pronouns, says that he was allowed to raise her,
that she was taken from him. Part of me is also really fearful that this is going to be maybe the future of the Matt Walsh lips at TikTok circuit. Right here we have the case like the number one horror story that every right wing you know personality always talks about, right or that the myth that Elon Musk perpetuates, Yeah, exactly, that this is somehow negatively impacting their children.
No, yeah, that is a good thing to keep an eye on. I have not seen that.
In terms of, like, you know, your analysis, and I appreciate it, by the way a lot. I hadn't thought of it that in those terms, in terms of like disconnecting from the social fabric itself, Is there things that can be done? Is the recommendations beyond like obviously, you know late stage capitalism, mass alienation. I'm not solving that tomorrow.
Sure, so yeah, I mean I'm not sure if I'm gonna be able to solve that on a stream.
No, you have to. Isn't it called that could happen here? Let's let it happen.
I mean yeah, Like there's a lot of things that we can do, like even just like increasing like social services, right, like the like fund funding social services can be a thing, like what what can we do to strengthen the social fabric?
Right?
Give people available paths for their life.
You know, that's through you know, education, free college, make make life actually feel like you have a way to exist within a social matrix. Canada already has, you know, compared to the States fairly restrictive gun laws. There's are a factor, but there's even mass killings like this that happen you know in Europe where people find other means of enacting them besides guns.
Japan that sits swords and knives oftentimes.
Yeah right, yeah, so like these things have some like based social social aspects that are going to be the things that you're solving. Is is kind of more challenging rather than just you know, taking away guns, making drugs that are already illegal harder.
To get right.
These things aren't aren't going to actually eliminate this problem. But I mean, funding social services can be an aspect of this. Having more comprehensive mental health care, free healthcare check ins, you know, if that's a big thing in the States. Canada has that to some degree, but still there's obviously room for improvement. But I mean, now solving these larger social problems, like that's the question of the twenty first century.
Yeah, and I mean, you know, based on the story that you're telling and the research you did, it does really seem like this is one of those cases where this doesn't happen often, but when you see it get to that end state, this is pretty much right. The patterns become a lot more evident. The obsession with prior shootings, the mental health episodes, and now the combining that with you know, a very very prolific psychedelic drug use, and then here we are.
I mean, this person should not have had guns, right at a certain point, their guns were taken away, our guns and has taken away. If police knew about their activity on these forums, I'm sure this wouldn't have been returned.
So there's there's there's certain things like you know, parents being more aware of these sorts of like online spaces, the school shooter fandom, you know, picking up signs of you know, social isolation, how much how much time your kid is just spending alone on the internet and you
might not be knowing what they're doing. So solving that's you know hard because because the solution for a lot of a lot of you know states is just like increased surveillance on platforms like you know, discord age verification. But those types of you know, guardrails don't exist on a forum site like Watch People Die, right, you can you can have a very you know, safe regulated discord which just pushes people to you know, even more niche
even more dangerous parts of the Internet. You know, Watch People Die started as a Reddit page that was you know taken down like seven years ago. Now it's you know a far a far less regulated, you know thing that that kids are spending a decent amount of time on. But you know, being aware of, you know, the risks of this type of like social isolation, you know, is also also a star. Ideally we do not have a forum site, you know, dedicated to glorifying mass killings. But
banning a website is not so simple. It's easier to than done, you know, figuring out a way to take that down, right, I same problem with you know, like eight kun or like you know eight chan back in the day four and eventually keeping fire.
But this one seems blatant to the point of illegality, and I don't want to I know, you don't have time for me to start a topic.
But like, I mean, like eight quin's also illegal, right, they host a lot of illegal content there. Finding a way to take it down is still tricky. You know, a lot of websites host illegal stuff. Just because it's you know, illegal does does does not mean it's gonna it's going to be solved. Like the legal pathway there is is tricky.
But isn't the rule of something typically that if a lot of those companies that provide them with the necessary like d doos security, they're like through line seems to be as long as it's not illegal, right, Like if you're not running a child poor or sorry child sexual abuse material website, if you're not running like an assassination or cryptocurrency like excite, you're fine. Like but that just does in practice doesn't work.
I'm unsure of the current hosting situation of Watch People Die, but I wouldn't be surprised if they went through the same kind of loopholes by registering at like a certain foreign country with has that had that that's very loose guidelines, like you know, that was the thing with like ait Kun for a while. But yeah, I'm I'm actually unsure if the current the current like setup.
That Watch people that has.
Yeah, I've been talking about you know, TCC and this the school shooter fandom increasingly the past two years, and it's really tragic that it is something that i've that is you know, a pattern that is that is continuing, right, This is like the really the main the main force across these shootings, whether you're you know, assist girls, this boy, a trans girl, trans guy, whatever, whatever demographic you know, racial.
You know, there was the the Antioch school shooting in January twenty twenty five that was done by this like black ironic neo Nazi, similarly linked to TCC as well, like whatever the demographic is. The through line that we're seeing is this is this just like nihilistic obsession with like the act of school shooting and this like fandom that has developed around it.
Do you find the media picks up on that at all, Like you've done a lot of research into do they reach out to you? Like do they ever say.
Every every once in a while. But it takes them time. It took them about three years after like the peak of seven and six four to start reporting on seven six four, And now there's seven six four articles all the time, but it took them about three years to like kept up to it. I would not be surprised if in a year and a half we get tons of articles about TCC, but a lot of legacy media is very slow to this sort of thing. My own
Internet presence also exists kind of in the margins. My monitoring is in the margins, but those margins can have you know, very very u destabilizing social effects.
But it does take a while.
I mean, same thing with the FBI, right, it took them years to get on top of seven six four, even though people were like reporting this stuff in like twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, but before seven six four, even that organization there was previous iterations called the CVLT. But like you know that that that style of thing was was was a problem for years, and the FBI did not really get on it until much later, and the media then followed suit.
Right I do.
I just don't have trust in you know, the current current American law enforcement threat to really be on it right now.
You know, I can't.
I'm unsure of how that works in Canada at this point, but certainly, certainly I don't think Cash Hotel's FBI is going to be you know, on this one super super well, even though they been trying been trying to, you know, push some stuff like the nihilist Bilin extremist label, which does cover stuff like this.
But I know this is controversial, but in my opinion, it almost feels as if Cash matel is actively trying to push narratives that will benefit this entire story that we're talking about in the opposite direction, right Like if you're trying to push a narrative that Charlie Kirk's shooter and we're not going to change topics, but I'm just you know, bring this up because you mentioned cash Hotel, you're trying to push narrative that he was in fact
trans or inspired by trans ideology or inspired by furries or furry culture, et cetera. They've tried everything, and now now we're at the point where it's like the loosest of connections. It's like, well, there may have been a lover who is or is not may or may not be trends or non binary. We're not sure, but that's enough. We got it. Cash Hotel will push the story.
I mean, yeah, this is this administration comes out of the same kind of network of influencers who try to grossly use horrific events to their own ideological advantage, including too you know, attack groups of people that they find to be bad as.
Wow, because it turns out they're all pedophiles. They're all part of an elite group of insiders. And so let's start talking about the Epstein files for next time. My brain is I know, I'm just joking. I'm just joking. Where can everyone find you and your incredible work outside of listening to the amazing It Could Happen Here podcast? Yeah?
Well, I mean I I occasionally post about Yawi on on X the everything app at by shown in type I'm trying to post more about Yaowi on Blue Sky. There's just just not as much of it. But you know, maybe I should be the change I want to see?
Is it not friendly the environment?
It's more so that there's just not as many Yawi artists on Blue Sky. A lot of Yawi artists are shockingly Japanese, and this Japan has a very large presence on nextually everything app at least at the moment. I know some of their like AI image stuff is pushing, is pushing people to other platforms, but it's slow. But yeah, I'm on, I'm on, I'm on those two places. I also occasionally post photography at Instagram also by shown in type.
And I suppose if you enjoyed listening to me getting informed by the only information you heard here today, you should check out YouTube dot com slash at the Surf Times, where I post videos and this one too will be there.
Hey you can look at uh yeah, me in a black turtleneck talk about sad things.
There you go. If you enjoyed the audio version and you want to see the visual version of it, head on down to YouTube dot com slash at the Surf Times. Thank you so much for joining us today. Okay, I appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
It was it was a ton of fun. Well, Actually it was sad, but it was it was very informative.
Yeah, that's the that's the needle. I'd try to threat.
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