Sep. 26, 2024: The Eric Adams Indictment

U.S. calls for cease-fire in Lebanon; Biden officials boast of plan to knife Israel after the election; Why was there no National Guard at Jan. 6?

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The Big Story

Note to readers: Today’s Big Story is a guest post from Seth Barron.

The indictment of New York City Mayor Eric Adams on federal fraud and bribery charges, unsealed Thursday evening, came as no surprise to even occasional City Hall observers. Never known for reticence or a retreating personality, Adams set the tone for his mayoralty from the moment of his inauguration by club-hopping into the wee hours of the morning and holding court at flashy Midtown eateries, where no one was ever seen to pick up a check. Early on he tried to give his brother a plum job as head of his security detail, which was blocked as a serious conflict of interest. But he did pass out numerous patronage positions to his many friends and allies from a long career deep in the notorious swamp of Brooklyn Democratic politics.

Adams’ flash and bonhomie were represented by his press team as just the recipe for New York’s post-Covid renewal. But his insouciance also served as a red cape for the attention of head-hunting federal prosecutors, who make their careers by taking down corrupt big-city politicians. The specifics of the indictment relate mostly to an episode from 2021 when Adams was Brooklyn borough president. Adams, who has a long relationship with certain Turkish interests, evidently weighed in to speed up the approval of a certificate of occupancy for the new Turkish consulate building to get it open in time for the U.N. General Assembly. The Department of Justice alleges that, in exchange for this favor, Adams received illegally structured campaign contributions from Turkish nationals, in addition to seating upgrades and luxe hotel accommodations on trips to Istanbul and other exotic locales.

Asked about these allegations in 2023, when the first reports of a federal investigation emerged, Adams freely admitted that he had asked the then commissioner of the New York City Fire Department to help his Turkish friends get their consulate ready for business. “I did reach out to the commissioner,” Adams said. “This is what elected officials, what we do. … You reach out to an agency and ask them to look into a matter. You don’t reach out to an agency to compel them to do anything because I had no authority to do so. I was the borough president.”

Adams’ candor on this matter is less naive than one might assume. Proving that an elected official accepted a bribe in exchange for doing something—a quid pro quo—is harder than you might think. The 2016 McDonnell decision by the Supreme Court unanimously determined that “official acts” cover a lot of ground and that tying an elected official’s actions to an alleged benefit demands a very high evidentiary bar. “No one knows what ‘honest-services fraud’ encompasses,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a related case. “And the Constitution’s promise of due process does not tolerate that kind of uncertainty in our laws—especially when criminal sanctions loom.”

New York City’s socialist left has despised Eric Adams from the start. A former NYPD captain, Adams—who spent his career on the force suing the department for supposed racism—has never embraced the Progressive “defund the police” movement. He has refused to close Rikers Island, and opposes the elimination of merit or the racial reorganization of the school system. He praised the “restraint” of officers who shot a knife-wielding man on a subway platform, also hitting three other people.

A measure of how loathed Eric Adams is can be seen in a call to “flood the streets” distributed by the radical pro-Hamas group Within Our Lifetime, which indefatigably stages protests against anyone or anything that can be remotely connected to Israel. “Zionist cop mayor Eric Adams must resign, as his crime is not just corruption,” the group demands. “He has overseen the police murder of 38 Black and Brown New Yorkers, embraced austerity, given material support to the zionist genocide in Palestine, and set the NYPD to crackdown on Palestinian protestors in the streets.”

It seems unlikely however, that a mere indictment on “paperwork” crimes will be enough to dislodge Eric Adams from office. In fact, he seems to have been revivified by the charges. At a rowdy press conference after the indictment was unsealed, Adams, surrounded by supporters, grinned broadly in the rain while protesters screamed at him through bullhorns. He insisted that he “looks forward to defending myself and defending the people of this city” and nodded as his surrogates cast him in quasi-biblical terms as a kind of Job-cum-Jesus figure, attacked by enemies who assail him from above for having stood up for New Yorkers.

Indeed, there is a plausible argument to be made that Adams incurred the wrath of the Biden White House when he demanded federal action to stop the inflow of migrants, who were guaranteed shelter and food by the city’s perverse “Right to Shelter” consent decree. And as we have seen in the case of another brash New Yorker who challenged the powers that be over the question of the porous border, the federal government is more than willing to use its prosecutorial authority to challenge its political rivals.

— Seth Barron

And read Liel Leibovitz on the Adams indictments in Tablet here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-york-jews-eric-adams-democratic-party-lawfare 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Katherine Dee on the world of mass shooter fan culture

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The Rest

→On Wednesday evening, the United States and nine other countries (plus the European Union) released the following proposal for an “immediate 21 day ceasefire across the Lebanon-Israel border”:

The statement is farcical and not really worth parsing in full, other than to note, as we did yesterday, that the U.S. position here is explicitly the Iranian-Hezbollah position—notably, that Israel cannot settle the Lebanon issue via unilateral action, but only as part of comprehensive diplomatic settlement that includes a cease-fire in Gaza. 

We’ve seen some anger on social media about the statement’s false equivalence between Israel and Hezbollah—and, indeed, its failure to even mention Hezbollah—but this is again entirely consistent with what we’ve been arguing at The Scroll for close to a year now, and at Tablet for even longer. Namely, that the United States under the Obama Democratic Party considers “Lebanon” (i.e., Hezbollah) an American protectorate. “Lebanon,” in Obamanese, means “Hezbollah.” “Lebanon” is a legal fiction allowing U.S. diplomats and investors to legally transact business with the terror group that runs the place. It’s less a country than a mob-owned pizzeria with rockets. So of course the statement doesn’t mention Hezbollah—that would be redundant.

We’d also draw attention to the proposed time limit. As Tablet’s Lee Smith notes on X, “Stalling Israel for 3 weeks leaves 2 weeks before U.S. election. A Harris victory means Hezbollah, Iran and all [its] proxies [are] under U.S. protection for 4-8 years.” Israel would do well to ignore it. 

→For now, at least, both Israel and Hezbollah do seem to be ignoring the statement. On Thursday, Israel announced that it had killed the chief of Hezbollah’s aerial forces in a precision strike on the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh, while Hezbollah launched at least 150 rockets into Israel at last count. Arriving in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters on Thursday that Israel will “keep striking Hezbollah until we accomplish all of our goals.” A member of his entourage clarified that Israel “won’t go to a cease-fire now.” 

→For a preview of what happens in the event of a Harris victory, we can turn to a Wednesday report from Jacob Magid in The Times of Israel about the steps that a lame-duck Biden administration could take to “preserve a two-state solution” after November, according to “a current and a former senior U.S. official.” You should read the whole thing to understand the brazenness of their plans but here’s a list of highlights:

• Sanctioning sitting Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich under the Biden executive order “targeting individuals and entities destabilizing the West Bank”

• An “intensification of the sanctions” on Israeli NGOs such as Amana and Nahala, which are active in the West Bank

• Reopening a consulate for the Palestinian Territories in Jerusalem

• “Leveraging” U.S. aid by threatening to remove a clause in the Memorandum of Understanding allowing Israel to spend up to 25% of U.S. military aid on weapons made in Israel

• Authorizing a top cabinet member to deliver a speech laying out a “realistic” framework for a two-state solution

The officials acknowledged that if Trump wins, many of these actions would be immediately rolled back, but argued that Biden could go through with them anyway, since they would “set a precedent that would give other Western countries the legitimacy to follow suit.” If Harris wins, the sources said, the list of actions would be longer, since she is “unlikely to reverse them” and will be “shielded from any political backlash … due to [the moves] being seen as part of her predecessor’s legacy.” 

Read it here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-officials-weighing-steps-biden-could-take-to-preserve-two-states-after-election/ 

→Quote of the Day:

No. No support. When it comes to Lebanon, the U.S. military has no involvement in Israel’s operations. 

That was former Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh’s response to being asked Wednesday if the United States was “supporting Israel’s operation in Lebanon, including with intelligence support,” per a Reuters report. As we indicated in yesterday’s Big Story, the United States also appears to be withholding weapons: In a Wednesday letter to Biden, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) wrote that they have “reason to believe” the White House is currently delaying deliveries of MK-84 bombs, Apache helicopters, and Caterpillar D9 tractors (used to clear IEDs) to Israel. Which, again, makes perfect sense. As Michael Doran observed in Tablet in June, the primary purpose of the administration’s policy of withholding arms is to restrain Israel from independent action against Hezbollah and Iran—not preventing civilian deaths in Gaza. 

→Transcripts released last Friday by the House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight, meanwhile, indicate that top Pentagon officials ignored Trump’s requests for a National Guard presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 over “optics” concerns. Gen. Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified that Trump told him on Jan. 3 to “make sure you have sufficient National Guard or soldiers to make sure it’s a safe event.” Milley relayed the directive to then Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, who reassured Milley that “we’ve got it covered.” Trump separately told Miller directly on Jan. 5 they would need “10,000 troops” at the Capitol to keep it safe. But Miller testified that he refused to comply for fear that Trump would “invoke the Insurrection Act to politicize the military in anti-democratic manner,” citing a Washington Post op-ed from 10 former secretaries of defense warning against such a possibility. That same day, Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy sent a memo to the commander of the D.C. National Guard prohibiting them from deploying to the Capitol without an explicit order from him. 

On the day of the riot itself, U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund testified that he made an urgent request to McCarthy’s office to deploy the National Guard but was told by a spokesperson, “I don’t like the optics of National Guard standing in a line with the Capitol in the background.” Miller finally provided McCarthy with verbal approval to deploy the National Guard at 3:04 p.m., but McCarthy’s order was not communicated to the National Guard until 5:08 p.m., two hours later. The commander of the D.C. National Guard testified that he attempted to call McCarthy three times between 2:30 p.m. and 5:00 p.m., but that the phone went straight to voicemail.

In addition to suggesting a disturbing willingness of military leaders to disobey their civilian superiors in the chain of command—Miller said that while he did not consider Trump’s request for 10,000 troops an “order,” there was “no way” he would have obeyed the order anyway—these transcripts help make some sense of Nancy Pelosi’s remarks on Jan. 6 that she took “responsibility” for the security failures at the Capitol, which Trump has consistently cited since it was revealed in an HBO documentary published this June. Pelosi was recorded by her daughter saying the following to her chief of staff, Terri McCullough, while being evacuated from the Capitol on the day of the riot:

Pelosi: We have responsibility, Terri. We did not have any accountability for what was going on there, and we should have. This is ridiculous. You’re going to ask me in the middle of the thing, when they’ve already breached the inaugural stuff, Should we call the Capitol Police? I mean, the National Guard? Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?

McCullough: They thought they had sufficient—

Pelosi: It’s not a question of … they don’t know. They clearly didn’t know, and I take responsibility for not just having them prepare for more. 

As for the “optics” concerns, the National Guard ended up deploying 20,000 troops to Washington D.C., and erecting a ring of security fencing around the Capitol to protect lawmakers from lingering insurrectionists in the wake of the riot. The last of those troops were not recalled until May 2021.

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TODAY IN TABLET:

The Jews Should Stand With Eric Adams, by Liel Leibovitz

Jewish New Yorkers have an obligation to stand up against a corrupt Democratic Party lawfare campaign that is targeting the mayor who stood up for us

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Adam Lanza Fan Art

My foray into the online world of true crime fandom, where people treat school shooters and serial killers not as criminals but like characters from their favorite movies or novels

By Katherine Dee

One day, sometime in 2022, I received a message request on Twitter.

i think you’d like this, the message read. Attached was a screenshot of a sketch of Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who took the lives of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in 2012. Twenty of those people were children.

The timestamp was 3:00 a.m.

When I didn't respond, the user, whose account name was just a string of letters and numbers, clarified that it wasn't their art. They weren't much of an artist. Maybe I had seen the picture before, they speculated. They weren’t trying to steal it. They had seen it on Tumblr earlier that day and it reminded them of me.

They kept messaging me, a stream of consciousness:

do you think adam would read your blog adam was on tumblr have you seen it you should write more about him tbh

A link to a Reddit thread titled “Adam Lanza’s Tumblr?” A video edit of Adam Lanza playing Dance Dance Revolution.

lol i can imagine you being into DDR was DDR big when you were younger you’re adam’s age

A YouTube link to a song, “PISTOL IN MY POCKET."

you kind of fell off

i used to read your stuff

now you just tweet

tweet

tweet

tweet …

nobody responds to you

And then, finally:

do you like andrew blaze?

Around 7:00 a.m. that day, I accepted their message request, and asked, “Why do you think I’d like that picture?”

The user deleted their account three days later. They never responded to my question.

Earlier that year, I had reported on Adam Lanza's YouTube channel a series of despairing monologues against a black background about his feelings of isolation and disgust with culture. Notably, Lanza’s ire wasn’t directed at “degeneracy,” or “the modern world,” now familiar refrains from angst-ridden young men on social media, but rather culture itself.

Lanza positioned himself against those he called “culturists,” a term he used to describe people who uncritically accept culture as a construct. He eventually turned against values altogether, calling himself a “eulavist,” riffing off of the fringe philosophy "efilism,” an outgrowth of antinatalism that argues that it would be better if life—any life—did not exist.

My interest in reporting on these videos was simple: There was more to the story than we had gotten from mainstream reporters, none of whom had—in the decade since Sandy Hook—explored Lanza’s digital footprint. It seemed obvious to me that his YouTube videos might offer clues about the motivation behind one of the most heinous crimes ever committed in American history. The investigation culminated in a podcast, and finally, an essay about what I saw as a pervasive nihilism among all Americans, not just perpetrators of mass casualty events.

I receive dozens of “crazy” messages a week about my writing and from all sorts of people. Many of them are from people who feel seen by my work, in more and less troubling ways. Many of them are also deliberate attempts to provoke me. They want to scare me, either for laughs, or as punishment. How dare I intrude? How dare I observe them? Whether I'm actually doing so or not, my reputation is that I watch people.

Not too long ago, a 20-something fan of a popular far-right internet personality saw me in a space on X and requested to speak.

“You just lurk around!” he screamed, his voice cracking, like a toddler shouting, “I hate you!”

Many of the senders are angry teenagers or young adults, upset with me because they think I am trying to empathize with them when they’ve deliberately put walls up to keep people like me out. Normies. They believe I'm claiming to speak for them, or that I have "special" insight. And whether they’re a part of a subculture I’ve written about or not, their message to me is that I don’t get it and I never will.

These messages, as pointed or alarming as they can sometimes be, rarely upset me. This is the nature of the type of writing I do. In some ways, to be an internet culture reporter is an invitation for these types of “shit tests.”

But for some reason, the person who messaged me about Lanza—the sketch—sticks with me. I wonder, though, if the stranger saw my attempt at sober journalism as fan art and not proper reporting. If my amateurish style—if my own lack of carefulness—made it seem less like an attempt at a serious investigation, and more like I was cryptically telegraphing that I was one of them. I wonder if I did something wrong.

Whenever I think about it, I stop being about to think about anything else. It gives me the kind of anxiety that only seems possible in the face of physical danger—but not because I thought the sender was dangerous. It makes me anxious because I think I made a mistake. I wonder if I minimized something horrible in my reporting, and it keeps me up at night. I wonder if there is a good reason not to explore the minds of monsters like Adam Lanza. What keeps me up at night is the fear that I didn’t make it clear—enough, or even worse, at all—how much my heart breaks for the victims and their families. That my compassion was with them and only them. If I owed them something more.

I want to apologize, but I don't know to whom, where, or how.

***

Search “Adam Lanza,” “Andrew Blaze” (the online pseudonym of Randy Stair, perpetrator of the Weis Markets shooting), or “Eric Harris” (one of the Columbine shooters) on platforms like Tumblr, Instagram, or TikTok, and it’s unlikely that your first results will be true crime as it’s commonly understood. Instead, you’ll find a world of fan art and video edits.

This video of Randy Stair for instance, reads like a tribute video to a dear friend who has passed away. The creator has ripped one of Stair’s YouTube videos—Stair had a prolific YouTube presence—where he is reading an old diary entry. The video is set to “Cry,” by Cigarettes After Sex, a song that’s typically used on TikTok to denote bittersweet nostalgia.

“Middle school sucks!” Stair declares in his theater kid inflection.

The top comment, from a user named REB (itself a reference to Columbine shooter Eric Harris’ online handle), reads: “i miss her sm i really wish she just would have gotten help because if she did, she’d still be here doing amazing stuff rip Andrew i hope my sweet girl is in a better place.”

Though plausible, it’s unlikely that the REB who commented on TikTok was a friend of Stair’s or that the video creator knew him personally. The commenter doesn’t miss him so much as yearn for him, in the way we yearn for boy band heartthrobs or even fictional characters. It’s reminiscent of how Stair himself might have yearned for the world of Danny Phantom, the animated universe that inspired him but which he could never truly be a part of.

This intense yearning is common in fandom culture, often taking on an almost occult quality. Fans may try to channel fictional characters or real people in a mystical sense. Some practice “reality shifting,” performing meditation and visualization practices to “move timelines.” Others subscribe to “multiverse theory,” imagining that on another timeline, in another universe, they are united with their fixation.

You may have also noticed that REB refers to Stair as “she,” a reference to limited, but compelling, information that Stair was struggling with his identity as a transgender woman. In this writing of the story, people suggest that Stair may not have murdered his coworkers if he had transitioned. These types of posts and comments are typical of what’s known as the true crime community (TCC), also referred to as the true crime fandom—or, in an attempt to poke fun at themselves, the true cringe community.

Other posts are less mawkish and more irreverent: that surrealist internet humor we often ascribe to Zoomers but that is really more endemic to fandom, or perhaps just the internet itself. On my Tumblr dashboard earlier this week, I came across a post which compared various school shooters to animals from the toy collection Littlest Pet Shop (LPS). This type of playful art isn’t out of the ordinary in this fandom, or any other one. You may see fan art where school shooters are depicted in an anime, “chibi” style, decorated with hearts and glitter, or “slash” pics that imagine shooters in homosexual pairings with one another.

On Spotify and YouTube, you’ll find hundreds of playlists with titles like: “the shooting at my school,” “ACADEMY MANIACS!” “a.l.,” “zero hour,” and “columbine high 1999 x3.”

They’re meant to convey different things.

Some of them are “soundtracks” to text-based role plays, a sort of collaborative storytelling popular in fandom spaces. Others are designed to put you in the same headspace as a particular shooter, not during the shooting, but rather, what the playlist creator believes their emotional world might have been like. The songs tend to be a mix of the creator’s personal taste and the taste of whichever murderer they’re fixated on. You might find a mix of KMFDM (famously a favorite band of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold), Brenda Lee, Chappell Roan, and whatever song is trending on TikTok that month. Foster the People’s so-called school shooter anthem, “Pumped Up Kicks” almost always makes an appearance.

To put their behavior in the context of fandom, compare what I’ve described to the One Direction transformational works, a fandom term which means derivative content that significantly alters or reinterprets the original material, described by internet culture reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany, in her book Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It:

It sometimes takes the form of playful disrespect, and you can’t always understand it by taking it at face value. Its practice takes many forms, some of which could reasonably be described as mutilation, and from the outside, it might not even look like love at all. The One Direction fandom, as I experienced it on Tumblr in the early 2010s, was playfully vicious and much grosser than you might expect. The images I remember best were surrealist—sometimes creepy or disgusting.

***

TCC is not simply an extension of the broader fandom around true crime; for example podcasts like Serial. The easiest way to understand the difference between TCC and traditional true crime is through their fan works, or the content produced by each respective fandom. In TCC, their fanwork is emotive, intimate, parasocial, and sometimes playful. Fans of true crime, on the other hand, tend more toward theory and information, even if they do sometimes use comedy, as is the case with the comedy-cum-true-crime podcasts Last Podcast on the Left and My Favorite Murder.

Primarily composed of preteens, teenagers, and adults in their early 20s, TCC fans treat school shooters and serial killers not as criminals but as characters from their favorite movies or novels. They aren’t just characters—they are characters these kids have a strong parasocial relationship with, whom they empathize with, whom they adore, whom they “miss” as though they are people they personally know.

TCC and the more mainstream true crime fandom do crossover because both are products of the 24-hour news cycle. They are the logical outcome in a world consumed by the ever-encroaching mediatization of everything. In both fandoms, crime is to be consumed, dissected, transformed, and remixed. But it’s only TCC that features the stickers, the glitter, the hearts, the stray references to K-pop, anime, Taylor Swift, and cartoons.

It is clear from the very beginning that TCC is a space for big, teenage feelings, and ultimately, teenage catharsis and looks like other more intimate, more adolescent, fandoms.

***

Tracing the origins of TCC is nearly impossible, as it’s constantly shape-shifting.

The labels and tags change; the community migrates away from platforms and back to them; they retreat to Discord servers and group chats, away from prying eyes like mine. There are periods of time when they are moderated out of existence. Unsurprisingly, they evade easy categorization, which means it’s sometimes tough to determine if they are breaking terms of service by glorifying murderers.

But are they? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Fans in TCC have fraught relationships with their fan objects, often simultaneously repulsed by and adoring them. The first time I saw the acronyms DNI, or “do not interact,” and DNC, or “do not condone,” was in TCC. These acronyms often serve as guideposts: They don’t endorse violence, even if they play with it in their posts. They DNC murder. If you are pro-violence: DNI.

There is a tension: a deep, unrelenting love for these figures while many members recognize that what they did was wrong. The greatest tension lies in the fact that, like the Star Wars fan who doesn’t acknowledge the prequels, many members of TCC seem to discard the endings of these shooters’ stories altogether.

Like most online communities that operate on the fringes of acceptability, TCC doesn’t like being seen. Certainly not by journalists and academics, who either pathologize their behavior or bring their spaces to the attention of “trolls, feds, and posers,” as one former TCC member described it. Or to the platforms themselves, who may be ban-happy. And since a significant part of the community are minors, they’re keen to keep their involvement hidden from their parents. Archival efforts are inconsistent, primarily undertaken by a handful of academics and reporters.

And so the full story of TCC may only be able to be told through an oral history.

People who chirped away on AOL chat rooms in the wake of Columbine; members of the famous Shocked Beyond Belief forum, of which Adam Lanza was a member; private subreddits; the first wave of #hybristophiles on Tumblr; members-only Discord servers and Telegram channels.

Their collective memory is the only place this history is housed.

As Judith Fathallah, in her book Killer Fandom: Fan Studies and the Celebrity Serial Killer, a comprehensive exploration of the part of this fandom specifically interested in serial killers, points out, “Fandom of serial killers is older than the term ‘serial killer,’ and has actually been one of the most publicly visible forms of fandom historically, from Victorian hawkers selling bottled dirt from murder-sites as souvenirs to media moralizing over the contemporary sexualization of Richard ‘The Night Stalker’ Ramirez or Ted Bundy.”

There’s well-documented and well-known historical precedent for this type of behavior. For as long as there’s been the concept of “crime,” there have been people who consume that crime as entertainment, and as a result, there have been fans.

Even the more fannish expressions, the expressions that feel inextricably linked with both the rise of celebrity and the proliferation of television, aren’t particularly novel. Incels, who themselves sometimes have a fannish, half-ambivalent relationship with the 5-foot-9-inch college student who killed six people and injured 14 in a mass shooting in Isla Vista, California, Elliot Rodger, “ironically” referring to him as Saint Elliot, love to point out:

Women are so shallow, they’ll show interest in a murderer like Ted Bundy before a man under 6’0”.

However, this type of fan engagement seems different from that of the women who wanted to, and in some cases did, knowingly sleep with serial killers like Ted Bundy. Members of TCC aren’t united by their letter-writing efforts to prisoners any more than K-pop fans are united by their attempts to contact Korean pop idols. It happens, and it can happen in big, explosive ways, but it doesn’t define the community.

To them, these murderers are, as Ryan Broll describes in his 2018 paper, “Dark Fandoms: An Introduction and Case Study,” characters.

According to Fathallah, turning murderers into “characters,” as though in a work of fiction,is something that the media, to some extent, has already done. TCC just takes it a step further.

The members of TCC are a mixed bag of people who identify with them, people who want to be with them, who think they could have saved them or been saved by them, and people who feel some combination of both.

***

In some sense, it is true that Columbine, and the 25 years of media coverage that followed it, "created" school shootings. It gave the school shooting an aesthetic, a foundation, and its patron saints. In recent years, particularly following Sandy Hook, the press has tried to reverse this canonization. Reporters no longer publicize the names of shooters, placing a greater emphasis on the pain of the victims and their families.

It’s too late, though. The space for school shootings already exists in our collective imaginations.

The school shooter, just like the serial killer before it and increasingly the groomer or pedophile today, is an archetype. These archetypes serve as symbolic vessels for societal fears and anxieties.

“Goths don’t exist anymore,” I often see older millennials lament on social media. But they do: TCC members are contemporary Goths in a world defined by hypermedia consumption, the revolving door of "current things," and a forever "culture war," which has defined Gen Z's and Gen Alpha’s childhood and young adulthood as much as the "war on terror" defined mine.

The school shooter being an archetype doesn’t mean that its role in our lives is straightforward. It’s an archetype we have a deeply ambivalent relationship with.

On the one hand, TCC is a community that’s steeped in “edgelording,” or deliberately engaging in shocking or controversial behavior online to elicit strong reactions from others or to appear edgy and nonconformist. They reject socially sanctioned ideas of what it means to be cool, embracing what mainstream culture has maligned instead.

Some corners of the community borrow and adapt memes from the more explicitly white supremacist fringes of the online right. In self-described “toxic” TCC Discord servers, 12- and 13-year-old kids post racial slurs with reckless abandon. They share stories about how they talked about wanting to “gas the Jews” and “TND” ("total N-word death") at school and then snicker about the reactions from their classmates and teachers.

They embrace mental illness, but not in the carefully constructed, DEI-tinged language you see in Instagram advertisements for direct-to-consumer ketamine, with their calls for “self-care,” and “treating” oneself, or the “special snowflake” register that’s so often the butt of conservative jokes. Their mental illness makes them evil; bad; rotten to the core.

They’re racist and have borderline personality disorder and deserve nothing.

On the other hand, every now and then, someone will pop up and demand other server members respect their neopronouns, or their “headmates,” an entirely online word for one’s alternate personalities, as depicted in dissociative identity disorder. In a recent, and quite bizarre incident I witnessed, someone demanded that all Zionists be booted from a server otherwise devoted to role-playing young men famous for killing 6-year-olds.

This jarring juxtaposition of extreme offensiveness and demands for arbitrary notions of respect speaks to their immaturity. They are a product of their time and, viewed through the lens of teenage rebellion, the absurdity of their language makes sense. They are resisting the dominant culture while still deeply intertwined with it.

They are kids.

Read the rest of the essay here.