The New Narrative™: The ICE Assassin Was Joking

hotair.com

The liberal cover-up of the ICE shooter's motives began almost immediately after the news broke. 

As expected, it took a bit for the talking points to go out, so there was the usual "throwing the brown fecal matter onto the wall" period where everything was on the table, first coalescing around the "white man" theme, proving that he was MAGA and anti-immigrant. Because all white men are MAGA fascists, of course. 

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When Kash Patel released a photo of the clip showing a bullet with the message "Anti-ICE," the next potential narrative popped up: the FBI was covering up for the MAGA shooter. 

That might work well for the hard-core lefties, but it isn't exactly tailor-made for the ordinary center-left voter.

So, what to do when yet another radical left-winger attacks a people whom the Democrats have painted a big fat red target on? 

Obvious: claim that the anti-ICE message was really an ironic joke. 

Yes, because people normally shoot up places and kill themselves as an elaborate joke. 

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Ken Klippenstein, a leftist reporter, picked up the baton and has been pushing this Narrative™ hard, and his large following is falling in line. 

Klippenstein was very enterprising--I'll give him that!--and found some Junior High and High School friends who have not seen Joshua Jahn in years, and they describe Jahn as an "Edgelord," which basically means somebody who adopts a dark, ironic, and destructive personality. A cynic X100, with a nasty edge. A nihilist, in short. 

On the off-chance the shooting wasn’t what it looked like, I reached out to people who knew the gunman, 29-year-old Joshua Jahn. Three who knew him since at least middle school agreed to speak to me on the condition that I not name them, corroborating their friendship with photos and other records. Their accounts paint the picture of someone with a vaguely libertarian bent who despised both major parties and politicians generally (including Trump) but who didn’t engage with politics beyond that. He preferred edgy humor, video games and the message board 4chan, all of which he became increasingly steeped in as he withdrew from social life as well as their own friendships several years ago, they said.

None of his former friends believed that the “ANTI-ICE” inscription could possibly be sincere, feeling such a serious political statement was anathema to who Jahn was. His humor was deeply ironic, often offensive and aggressive to the point of alienation.

“He was most certainly an edgelord, an irony guy,” one friend said. (Edgelord is online-speak for someone who likes to espouse edgy, nihilistic views). Asked about the inscription on the bullet, the friend said: “Josh was an edgelord who wanted someone to get blamed. I think he tried his best to write something goofy … to rile people up.”

Another friend showed me a Facebook post describing how Jahn had flooded his friends’ comment sections with rape jokes — “playful shock humor,” the friend said.

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 Yep, shooting up the place and turning the gun on yourself was a barrel of laughs, if you think about it. In a dark, ironic way it makes sense to take your own and others' lives to stick it to the man with a smirk. 

Jahn was 29, and to give you an idea of just how reliable Klippenstein's sources are, one of them is offering to talk to others in the media too. 

Basically, it comes down to "I knew him 10 years ago." Out of such sources, Ken Klippenstein weaves a story where a killer who tells you his motive didn't mean what he said. 

4chan, the anonymous message board where provocation and irony are the coin of the realm, was apparently one of Jahn’s favorite haunts. His abrasive humor is where his friends’ opinions on him diverge the most, with some describing it as amusing but others as grating — especially as his online persona bled into real life.

“I mostly stopped talking to him when he took his 4chan/irony stuff into daily interactions,” one friend told me. “He was becoming unbearable … once he dropped out of college he had no obligation to be social and none of us reached out due to his edgelord behavior.”

I wasn’t able to find anyone with insight into Jahn’s more recent views, something that his friends said was unsurprising given his withdrawal from social life over the past few years.

“If you’re having trouble finding people besides immediate family who knew him, that’s part of the story,” one friend said. “Every mutual friend drifted away over that kind of edgelord behavior.”

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So...nobody has much of an idea of what Jahn was like as an adult, but he was into dark, ironic humor 10 years ago. 

We can conclude that the anti-ICE message was a joke, you see. Because at 19, Jahn's sense of humor was really dark, and he spent a lot of time online in places like 4Chan, where dark humor is a thing. 

Bonus round: Klippenstein did the same thing with Kirk's assassin:

You have to hand it to people steeped in Critical Theory--they know how to strip words and ideas of their original meaning and use them as vessels for whatever ideas they want to push. 

I don't put a lot of stock in the analysis that stems from the fact that his mom is an anti-gun leftist activist and his sister is apparently a queer activist. Those facts prove little either--they may have indoctrinated him, but it would be just as likely that he would rebel against his family as Tyler Robinson did. 

Jahn spent many thousands of hours playing dystopian, violent video games, and while all Good™ people are supposed to preface mentions of such things as "of course this means nothing, but...," you have to wonder whether an obsession with murdering people with abandon online doesn't transfer to the real world in some people. 

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Such games may not MAKE you a murderous assassin, but for somebody unhinged, it probably doesn't help keep you stable. 

I'm pretty sure that the "he killed them to be ironic" meme will not stick for most people, although it serves to slice off a part of the center-left who worry generically about online culture. And that is good enough, because the real goal of these people is to confuse a Narrative™ that is inconvenient to them. To muddy the waters, because if they remain clear, the obvious answer we could all see is devastating. 

Democrats have been demonizing certain groups--people like Charlie Kirk and ICE officers--and their followers are shooting at those targets. 

That's a bad look, as they say.