Events

September 18, 2025 Meeting

It was so great seeing so many familiar and new faces at the September meeting! It was apparent that many of us really needed a depolarizing conversation after the events of this week. I’m really happy that we could have this time to talk and to focus on the need to find common ground, when everyone seems to be doing the opposite right now.

I also wanted to include a few resources in an attempt to highlight some things about the politics of online gaming communities that defy any attempts to put a left/right spin on many of the acts of “lone wolf terrorism” that we have seen in recent years.

While everyone has been trying to blame political ideologies, this only serves the cause of divisiveness without providing any real understanding of what is causing the rise of violence in America. As someone who is familiar with the online communities that inspire many of the perpetrators of political violence, school shootings, and other heinous acts, their motivations rarely fit neatly into left/right political dichotomies. Rather than being rabid ideologues, most of these are troubled young men who feel a strong personal grievance against a single person or the world in general, and want to make a name for themselves by inflicting as much pain as they can on others. In many online forums like 4Chan, people will celebrate and encourage people to commit these acts, and many have been livestreamed to those sites while they happen. While we can’t blame violence on video games, many video game communities are cesspools of toxic nihilism that has little to do with politics as we understand it.

This Substack article looks at the Discord chats and video game meme culture that Tyler Robinson was part of. Of course, we don’t know what anonymous communities he may have participated in.

https://substack.com/@kenklippenstein/p-173772965

This video explains some of the terms and movements that are involved in these online communities, and how they use meme culture to promote what can be called “Blackpill Accelerationism” where disillusioned young men (often identifying as Incels) want to hasten the destruction of society. I’m not saying that this was definitely what influenced Robinson, but any online forum associated with the game Helldiver 2 is going to be full of this stuff.

Blackpill Aesthetics: A Crash Course in Meme Extremism

This study analyzes the psychological characteristics of “lone wolf terrorists” which most perpetrators of modern political violence would best be described as. They identify six psychological mechanisms that lead to acts of violence---personal grievance, political grievance,

slippery slope, risk and status seeking, and unfreezing.

Characteristics of Lone Wolf Violent Offenders

Individuals can resort to political violence as a result of personal grievance, such as perceived

mistreatment by the government of self or loved ones. Individuals may also be radicalized by

political grievance, a perceived mistreatment of people the individual identifies with but does not

know personally. Another mechanism of radicalisation is slippery slope, a gradual

desensitization to the idea and experience of violence through slow escalation of illegal and

violent acts. Paradoxically, love can move an individual to violence if a loved one - friend,

relative, or romantic partner - becomes part of a radical group and asks for help.

Risk and status seeking is perhaps especially common among young males for whom violence

may seem the best path to money and respect. Finally, unfreezing occurs when an individual

loses the everyday reassurance of relationships and routines: a parent dies, a romantic partner

leaves, a job lost, a major illness strikes, or the individual moves far from home. Unfreezing is a

personal crisis of disconnection that leaves an individual with less to lose and in search of new

directions.

These individual-level mechanisms of radicalisation, derived from the study of terrorism and

terrorists, are extended here to ask whether any of these can be identified in the histories of

school attackers and assassins.

I wanted to send these along because I think the best way to prevent these acts from further dividing us is to understand the complicated reasons that lead troubled young men to commit acts of violence. It’s more than just politics or mental illness, and the influence of these online communities is very hard to understand for those who don’t follow them. Political polarization is a factor, but trying to put Blackpill Accelerationism into a left/right framework is only going to lead us further from understanding why these events happen and how to prevent them in the future.

I hope that this can give you some context. Red or Blue, we can all agree that toxic online communities that glorify acts of violence and seek the collapse of society are a bad thing!

-Aaron Tyrrell
Blue Co-Chair East TN Alliance