“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

Post got removed in .world for not being a “news source” even though Klippenstein is definitely a very established independent journalist, so trying again here I guess.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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    10 days ago

    This sounds like a written confession or statement to the police, after he’s already in police custody. Not a “manifesto”, which is something justifying your actions to the public and done before carrying out whatever it is.

    I’m not buying any of this. Someone who went to so much trouble planning, executing, and getting away without a trace, isn’t going to go out in public with a bunch of incriminating items on their person. The NYPD probably just picked this tip out of the thousands they got, and are making things fit after the fact.

    • daltotron@lemmy.ml
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      10 days ago

      I really find it to be quite absurd that people are still thinking this isn’t the guy. This is probably the guy. My basis for that is basically just that the shooter had a 200 dollar peak design redditor backpack and a uniqlo packable jacket when he shot that guy, and those are both heavily techbro-coded fashion items. That’s on top of all the internet history of this specific guy pretty much indicating that he’s the guy. Back problems, leading to a several month long disappearance, after he turns 26, and is no longer on his parent’s healthcare plan.

      We can also look at it through the lens of just the assassination attempt itself. The news is saying they found either a 3d printed gun, or more commonly, a ghost gun (which I have not been able to find a consistent account of). In either case, that involves buying a mostly unregulated firearm upper, and then either finishing an “80%” pre-assembled lower with a drill press, or probably even a regular cordless drill, or just wholesale printing the entire lower of the gun yourself. Both of those, are also techbro-coded methods of obtaining a firearm. Compared to just buying a somewhat common firearm in a state where it’s pretty easy to get a gun a couple months before, and then shaving the serial numbers off the gun, or just getting a gun off the black market, or stealing one from someone, which all seem maybe easier than going the ghost gun route.

      In the video itself, we see him struggle to cycle the gun manually, due what is probably a combination of using subsonic ammunition, and his suppressor, which I’m assuming did not have a nielsen device, or, a booster. Those are devices that are meant to help browning-style tilting barrel designs cycle much more reliably. They also tend to cycle less reliably with heavier baffled suppressors compared to much lighter, quieter, disposable, and easier to produce wipe-based suppressors.

      His research and meticulously planned operation also consisted of shooting this guy in the back, in front of a camera, while this guy walked to his hotel. That’s a plan that has a high percentage chance of success, it’s the same way that you’d see many mob hits happen, but does it strike me as something which is particularly complicated or out of character for this guy, if he had a couple months to cook something up?

      Based on the entire description of that chain of events, that would probably indicate that this is a somebody that’s had some amount of preparation but wasn’t some kind of professional or overwhelming genius. It could be the case that they dug around online for thirty minutes, happened to find a guy that had both disappeared for a couple months, had medical problems, was a little bit more conspiratorial, or rather, had incoherent politics, and would be the kind of guy who would dress in a peak design backpack and in a uniqlo jacket, and was ALSO a guy which was exiting new york at that time via bus. They would then have to plant evidence on him, which cops are known to do, but that’s all, legitimately, entirely possible. Is it more likely than this being the guy, based on everything we’ve seen from the video?

      I would say no, probably not, this is probably the guy.

      • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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        10 days ago

        My basis for that is basically just that the shooter had a 200 dollar peak design redditor backpack and a uniqlo packable jacket when he shot that guy, and those are both heavily techbro-coded fashion items. That’s on top of all the internet history of this specific guy pretty much indicating that he’s the guy. Back problems, leading to a several month long disappearance, after he turns 26, and is no longer on his parent’s healthcare plan.

        The number of black-haired white guys who wear this clothing, are interested in tech, had health problems, and have been screwed over by insurance companies isn’t a small number. There’s probably thousands of them in any given US city.

        You are doing the thing where the media is all pointing at a single person, and trying to convict them based on non-material-evidence factors: clothing, blurry pictures, ideology, “motivation”, etc. None of those things link this person to the crime scene. If they showed you all the other tips and candidates they’ve gotten in the past week that fit the bill, I doubt you’d be so sure.

        • granolabar@kbin.melroy.org
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          10 days ago

          You are doing the thing where the media is all pointing at a single person, and trying to convict them based on non-material-evidence factors: clothing, blurry pictures, ideology, “motivation”, etc. None of those things link this person to the crime scene.

          Remember folks the state has to convince the jury and the public he pulled the triggered.

          They have provided nothing to link him to the scene of the crime besides fake news headlines.

          Trust me bro, he did it!

        • daltotron@lemmy.ml
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          7 days ago

          I say all that in my comment, but, it’s not just that this guy is a techbro, there are some other factors that make it so he’s probably the guy. With those, I just think that it’s probably more likely that this is the guy, than that it isn’t. I don’t really see a need to theorize that this isn’t the guy based on how the guy in the video is some sort of crazy criminal mastermind, when he also hits up a starbucks right before, as well as a bunch of other evidence in the video itself that this is probably a somewhat average, if maybe uncommon, guy. i.e. it easily could just be a techbro.

          From what the news has told us, which is really all we have, this guy fits the bill pretty solidly. We’ll see with the dna, ballistics, and fingerprint, but we also know that’s historically not really conclusive evidence either. The best you could do is that this guy fits the specific timeline, which we’ve heard less about relative to everything else, though from what we have heard, he does seem to fit pretty well. This entire issue, the issue of being able to conclusively tell who’s done a crime at what time, that’s part of why the justice system needs reform, because it’s very likely that you could just get this all wrong. I can acknowledge that reality, and also acknowledge that, based on what is publicly available so far, this guy is probably the guy.

          I dunno, the idea that this random guy, who’s reading and posting shit about the unabomber’s manifesto on his goodreads, and happened to be passing through new york via hostel and then greyhound at this time, is just some random guy, I dunno. With modern social media, I think we really start to strain credibility that this isn’t the guy. You would have to have a very convenient fall guy for that to be the case. It probably would’ve been easier to just catch any random schizo techbro inside of new york and then throw a gun and prewritten manifesto at that guy, to be honest, if the nypd or fbi just wanted some random dude to bag and throw away to pretend like they’re capable. Like you said, you could find them by the thousands.

      • zante@slrpnk.net
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        10 days ago

        It’s really sad that this has attracted the nutcase community.

        Like the story somehow isn’t wild enough, people are hopping on some crazy narrative about his eyebrows.

        Very sad.

        • daltotron@lemmy.ml
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          10 days ago

          Yeah, it’s been really crazy. People have been trueanoning on this one just like people did with the trump shooting, even though that one was obviously also a pretty clear cut case. I think partially, it’s because people are wanting to be half-funny, and are basically just iterating on the joke of “oh, I saw him at bible study at the time! that couldn’t have been him!” and then sharing photo edits, right.

          I think part of it is that everyone has been trained by true crime and fiction to think of all of these events as though they’re living in a tom clancy book, or something. They’re enraptured by the spectacularization of this event, and of all of the past of history, enraptured by the transformation of this event into a spectacle, so they get the feeling that, oh, oooh, something’s off, but I just can’t tell what. It always has to be some sort of increasingly more dramatic escalation, until there’s some sort of release of tension, because that’s how things work in fiction. In fiction, a guy isn’t allowed to just pull off a hit on a random unprotected CEO, ride his bike to central park, leave a backpack full of monopoly cash because he’s kind of cracked, get on a bus, and then go to a shithole in pennsylvania and then get busted over a mcdonald’s hash brown. That shit doesn’t happen in fiction, so it’s not allowed to happen in real life.

          I think part of it is also some sort of idiot idea about, somehow, if they just question the narrative on this enough, it will cause the guy to be innocent, somehow just them being conspiratorial on social media will cause that if they cook on it hard enough.

          Most of all, though, I think it’s sort of this desire to have the guy who shot that CEO get away, or be a different guy because, in the mind of your average person, that guy is some agent 47 super CEO hitman, that’s going to liberate us brokies from our shitty healthcare problems, when obviously that’s kind of a delusional escapist fantasy.

          Basically, none of this is allowed to be actually real. This isn’t a real event, in the mind of your average person. This is a media event, it’s being treated like one. Much like that, you can cook up fanfictions, but it doesn’t change the base media product, and you have to know that you can’t do anything to affect the thing itself, it’s set in stone and it’s unchangeable and it’s totally ethereal and out of your grasp.

          That’s sort of partially why I think this isn’t going to change anything, and, though I think maybe a repeat might happen, I’m not holding my breath. Because while everyone can recognize the problem, everyone, in classic american style, wants some superman to come and save them, and is willing to do nothing, or put anything on the line, in order to really save themselves or others.

        • bstix@feddit.dk
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          10 days ago

          The conspiracy theorists fall for the same falacy that they accuse the media and cops of doing: That it’s only interesting because the victim was a CEO.

          If this has been any other shooting, they wouldn’t be theorizing about the “message” or reasoning in his manifest. Every fucking murderer has a message or believes in a reason to do what they do.

          Until the proven killer has confessed and stated an actual message, the whole thing is entirely made up by people who want to align the story to their own interest.

      • Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        I really find it to be quite absurd that people are still thinking this isn’t the guy

        This guy doesn’t know about jury nullification.

        • daltotron@lemmy.ml
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          The crazy part about jury nullification is that if I was someone who was wanting to engage in it I probably wouldn’t be posting my opinions about the case online in a public fashion because that could easily be used as something to dismiss me from the case. That’s like a step away from bringing it up to the judge in the courtroom. They’re probably already gonna select a bunch of random boomers who have no idea what’s going on to comprise the jury anyways, since they can just do that if they want to, in the same way that the jury can just decide someone’s guilty or not. So that whole conversation is kind of moot.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlM
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      10 days ago

      There does seem to be inconsistency between the shooter meticulously planning things out and then this guy conveniently popping up at a McDonalds with all the gear and confessing. Seems like the first thing you’d do would be to ditch the gun and the silencer. If the gun was 3d printed, he could’ve literally just melted it down. On the flip side, if he wanted to get caught then he didn’t have to do all this complex planning and could’ve just stayed at the scene and surrendered.

    • frostysauce@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      Very much agree on the fact this is no way a manifesto and shame on all the news outlets using such a clickbaity word.

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      10 days ago

      I had a similar vibe but can’t quite put my finger on it though.

      To the Feds,

      This intro just does not feel right, He sounds like fedi/reddit poster with that intro. I have not seen a lot of his social media post but he did not have that tone in his posts, at least not public ones.

      There people around fedi who I can see saying it though lol. As if he feds, searched online on how to sound like a plausible corpo hater. “parasite” is also a nice touch, I see that shit daily on here…

      Also, why the fuck would this man give two fucks to discuss the tool for the job. I was on the fence but I am not longer buying it is his work or if he even did it.

      In country with 330m people, there must have reviewed many fact patterns that could have fit like glove purely from mathematically probably. His disappearing is likely made him an easy target, now it is on him to account for his where abouts.

      • Batman@sopuli.xyz
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        10 days ago

        I dont want to get my hopes up. I think dude may just be tired and hurt, ready to be done.

        I’ve seen a lot of folks posting FBI setup but, what about a glory seeker? Someone who was like damn, I look like that dude, and got his shit together to go “be found”. Been plenty of copy cats and false confessions for all kinds of crazy crimes in the past.

        • granolabar@kbin.melroy.org
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          10 days ago

          That’s also viable theory.

          TBH I am just NOT buying how they are working OT clearly providing all evidence a stupid peasant would need to feel confidently wrong

          They have no proven even close Luigi did it.

          They need to do that. I can see an ideologically aligned person try to fuck with feds to keep the party goitngz which is much balls the original job.

          Either government has the burde of proof and then running a smear campaign is planting seed of doubts esp since these clowns have done this trick before

          We tracking their lies real time now

        • granolabar@kbin.melroy.org
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          10 days ago

          yeah but his public writings don’t have the anti cap terminology laced in it like here.

          there specific groups of people in various subs who use termnology like feds and parasite the was it was used although this shit is now main stream discourse. talk about taking the disucssion mainstream

          • nave@lemmy.ca
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            9 days ago

            I don’t think he’s “anti cap” he seems to have problems with certain industries (notice he mentions Alphabet and Walmart but doesn’t criticize them). Also this writing honestly seems very in character for him (see the goodreads review).

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      10 days ago

      I don’t know why it’s so hard to believe. Of course the weight of US law enforcement was focused on one murder because it was a CEO. He didn’t get away without a trace, pictures of his face were everywhere. His path was traced from Atlanta to Pennsylvania. Why is it so hard to believe that he had incriminating evidence on him? For all we know, he might be on his way to whack another CEO. Wasn’t his last known address in Hawaii? He might have just been passing through Pennsylvania and had all his travel stuff with him. Once he realized the manhunt was closing in, he might have felt the need to write the justification with the hopes that the average American would read it and see him as a hero.

      We still know so little about this whole situation. There’s just no reason to jump to conspiracy.

    • 31337@sh.itjust.works
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      10 days ago

      I think it’s real. Though, it is kinda suspicious they were able to respond so fast to a McDonald’s tip; could’ve been parallel construction.