In the first, a 22-year old man raised in a white Republican family and pickled in gaming culture shot Charlie Kirk. Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who admitted he prayed that the culprit would not be a member of his Mormon culture, claims Tyler Robinson has been radicalized by left culture, but thus far the only evidence he has presented is a claim that Tyler is in a relationship with his roommate, whom Cox describes as transitioning. Kash Patel’s latest Fox hit describes a message Robinson left that appears to reference Kirk’s hatred: “some hatred cannot be negotiated with.”
By emptywheel
An hour later and one state away, 16-year old Desmond Holly shot up Evergreen High School, putting two of his classmates in the hospital before taking his own life. The ADL describes that Holly had an account on an online gore site where he had celebrated far right shootings and seemed to speak in advance of his attack.
Holly had an account on the gore forum WatchPeopleDie, where he had commented on posts about shootings in Parkland (2018), Buffalo (2022) and at a Quebec City mosque (2017).
Holly appears to have joined the gore site on December 26, 2024, during the month window between the school shootings at Abundant Life Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, and Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee.
Holly is one of several mass attackers who have been active on the platform.
Groundbreaking research from ADL Center on Extremism in August 2025 revealed that Natalie Rupnow and Solomon Henderson, the perpetrators of the Madison and Nashville school shootings, also used the site. As an example, in August, a Moroccan teenager announced plans to livestream a mass stabbing and shared a manifesto on WatchPeopleDie, as well as X and 8kun.
Holly also collected tactical gear, adorned that gear with extremist symbols and posted content emulating former shooters such as Rupnow and the 1999 Columbine High School shooters. Like many attackers, Holly assembled his gear in a piecemeal fashion, drawing inspiration from the equipment used by previous mass shooters. For example, Holly posted a now-deleted TikTok video in which he modelled a tactical helmet and a gas mask; the post’s background music featured a Serbian folk song that Brenton Tarrant played while livestreaming the 2019 Christchurch Mosque shootings.
Underneath his post, Holly engaged with several comments in a manner that suggested he was close to committing his own attack. He liked one comment reading, “You got close to a full setup now man time to make a move 👍.” He also liked a comment reading, “Just need an gopro its gonan be cool an pov [sic],” and responded, “A GoPro, battery, ear protection, and maybe a patch.” Responding to another commenter, he wrote, “I’m planning on getting a camera instead.”
The Evergreen shooting, like the Annunciation school shooting — before which Robin Westman posted videos cheering school shooters in advance of her attack — was probably preventable.
In seemingly stream-of-consciousness videos that she posted, the assailant fixated on guns, violence and school shooters. She displayed her own cache of weapons, bullets and what appear to be explosive devices, scrawled with antisemitic and racist language and threats against President Trump.
Or these tragic shootings would have been preventable had not the FBI reassigned key personnel to patrol the streets of DC, had not DHS put Thomas Fugate in charge of downsizing the office that used to try to prevent such things.
In response to the Kirk shooting, Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller, projecting tactics that Charlie Kirk himself used (like doxing), used those tactics to claim that Democrats are part of a domestic terror movement that he promises to take out.
“It is a vast domestic terror movement,” said Miller, speaking of left-wing political organizations.
“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people,” he added. “It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
It’s easy to forget given how much damage Miller has done to this country, but in addition to Wormtongue or Deputy Chief of Staff, his primary title is Homeland Security Advisor.
His job is to keep Americans, all Americans — including the two kids killed and 21 people injured at Annunciation, the two kids injured at Evergreen, as well as his beloved political ally Charlie Kirk — safe. And yet his response to a wave of violence carried out by young people radicalized online is to try to address just one shooting, and to address it in the least effective way possible, by hunting down people who had nothing to do with the Kirk killing.
I get that Miller has chosen to stoke fascism rather than grieve. I get the danger to all of this.
But Miller’s screed did something else: it said that he doesn’t care about the 8 and 10 and 16 year olds who face radicalized people with guns in their schools, he won’t do the most obvious things to address those shootings.
And that, it seems, counsels an obvious response.
Stephen Miller has announced he will do nothing to address school shootings, generally. He will do nothing to address the radicalization happening in chat rooms, including chat rooms that would be freely accessible to law enforcement if they weren’t off terrorizing Latino grandmothers.
Stephen Miller has responded to the murder of someone he calls a friend not by doing the most common sense things to try to prevent further school shootings, all school shootings, but to do the exact opposite.
And every parent of children who attend schools should be furious about Miller’s abject refusal to do his job.
