Travis Ikeguchi's journey to murder
Watching radicalisation in real time: how conservative culture wars and fringe conspiracy theories led to the killing of a California storekeeper.
This is a Twitter thread I wrote today. Pasting it here from Threadreader, so apologies for any format glitches.
Read on TwitterOn Friday, a California storekeeper, Laura Ann Carlton, was shot dead for flying a Pride flag. The killer has been named as Travis Ikeguchi. The son of a Florida state trooper, he was a Christian fascist radicalised online...
amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/a…
amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/a…
He was a prolific re/tweeter: I just looked through 3 months of his output. As well as Christian fundamentalism and a tsunami of homophobia + transphobia, there’s a wide range of conspiracy theories, linking mainstream conservative anti-LGBT culture wars with fascist terror…
At the heart of his cosmology is a set of hate figures he identified as the globalist elite or the Illuminati — Gates, Soros, Schwab, Fauci, the World Economic Forum. These are shared obsessions with QAnon, anti-vaxxers and those who follow the “Great Reset” conspiracy theory.
Many of the influencers Ikeguchi amplified – such as Dinesh D’Souza, Jordan Peterson, or Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe – are major entrepreneurs of hate selling to the mainstream American conservative base. A lot of these accounts get reposted by Elon Musk for example.
One example: The UK’s Daily Telegraph published a completely fake story about a kid who identified as a cat, taken up by US right-wing influencers such as Peterson, thus helping to radicalise this guy who shot someone for flying a Pride flag. bylinetimes.com/2023/06/20/fak…
We’ve also got anti-migrant fake news from Britain First’s Paul Golding, and Kanye West’s comments helping to normalise antisemitism on Twitter.
Conspiracy theory always leads to antisemitism. Whether you hate Zionists or Communists or both, you can blame Jews. Antisemitism often binds disparate ideological elements together, making a coherent package where you wouldn’t expect one, an explanation for every setback.
This is exactly it. When bigotries intersect they multiply, and a cosmology based on absolute demons calls for radical action.
Unsurprisingly, Ikeguchi supported Russia and opposed US support for Ukraine. Russia has completely captured this conspiracist scene.
For example, Ukraine is often identified as “Nazi” (a trope which comes from Russian media).
This post (claiming Ukrainian Nazis harvest kids for adrenochrome labs for pedophile elites) combines several QAnon, anti-globalist and anti-vaxx themes with demonisation of Ukraine.
This post (claiming Ukrainian Nazis harvest kids for adrenochrome labs for pedophile elites) combines several QAnon, anti-globalist and anti-vaxx themes with demonisation of Ukraine.
There’s also a lot of intense anti-Zionist content, sometimes from Israel-focused influencers and sometimes from right-wing sites (such as TruNews) that on this issue at first glance look left-wing. (Anti-Zionism isn’t itself antisemitic, but it can be a vector for antisemitism.)
(Ikeguchi thought Zionists control Hollywood, work for Satan to create a new world order… and are the reason he couldn’t get laid.)
(Although feminism also shared the blame for him being an involuntary celibate, of course.)
Ukraine and Israel are two of the topics where we can see some convergence between the far right + a fringe part of the left. Lots of his content wouldn’t look out of place on some “anti-imperialist” timelines: a Cornel West supporter praising Assange, RFK promoting antiwar[.]com
Final point: social media companies need to take responsibility for this. Musk’s site (then still called Twitter) judged that Ikeguchi’s bigoted threats were legitimate and not hate speech.
In conclusion, while we can laugh at someone who believes insane conspiracy theories (he thought Michelle Obama is secretly male) these theories – and the grifters mainstreaming them – are ultimately deadly.
In memory of Laura Ann Carleton, we need to resist this poison.
In memory of Laura Ann Carleton, we need to resist this poison.
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