PS: Adam, that's a good point about her "going out with a bang". Shooting innocents, even if she ACTUALLY HAD a real beef against people who might in some way deserve it, makes no sense though.

I've often wondered why some of the White guys (in Steve Sailer parlance, the ones who are not planning on coming home from their shooting) don't pick on the RIGHT PEOPLE. It's not like there aren't a lot of them. I know, I don't want to sound like those tweeters about the Healthcare CEO, just saying, if you're someone who wants to go out with a bang, that bang ought to do some good for the world - if at all possible.

I liked your Drumpf glass ceiling meme. That reminds me of an Irish bar/restaurant in Destin, Florida, in which there are a mass of dollar bills hanging from the ceiling over the entire space. One of the regulars told us there were something like a million of them. They are hanging the long way and are packed together.

I wonder what the statutes are in Florida regarding non-prosecutable theft? Thanks a lot, Ron DeSantis!!

PS: Mr Hail, thanks for the explanation of the problems with nailing down any solid record of a modern on-line-world individual's state of mind now. Even this blog site could be doctored after the fact, with dates* changed etc., but the anti-social media has so many twists and turns, that I don't FOLLOW (get it?) any of it.

I read all your comments here, but let me just respond to your question. I didn't leave the tab open, so it's probably be another 10 minutes, but let me go from memory. I can't recall the exact jobs mentioned, but Jeff Rupnow didn't have a career, per se. He had a number of varied jobs, nothing very white collar, as I recall. Unfortunately, that is the state of things, where odd fairly-short-term jobs and gig jobs seem to be all many guys can do. Is this instability of the Dad - of course, he wasn't her at-home Dad all the time (I think they got married 3 times - the same couple!) - another factor.

OTOH, I am acquainted (I can't say "friends" really, though he's a good guy) with someone with 3 kids in an intact family who does a lot of this. He's hardworking though, with some contract involving furniture returns, an AirBnB (I think he had more than one for a while), and then now he's got a "real" job again, using one of the skills he learned in his own business.

The main thing was, and the thing I was frustrated trying to determine, is that Jeff Rupnow was NOT involved in Psychology or any of that. I don't know about his wife, cause, searching sucks now!

I read your new post on your site. I'll give a reference shortly and I think I have a couple of comments in mind already.


* Such as our post coming yesterday about the state of race relations and the NY Subway over a half-century on this, the day of my daughter's ... wait, the day Bernie Goetz shot a few unruly "teens".

PS: Good evening, Mr. Hail!

Many thanks for the answers to my questions and the updates.
I found a couple more links that help paint a more complete picture...

https://x.com/SubxNews/status/1868929897520828899
https://archive.ph/JJT6L

I agree with you that the PanicFest era, lockdownism and other disruptions as well as the techno-informational, socially-deteriorated landscape and highly ephemeral digital culture floating by on screens did this girl no favors. Something pushed this kid over the edge. Being from a broken home, in therapy, often bullied and feeling like an outcast is something experienced by many who will never resort to such a senseless act of violence.

What is the extra thing?

We may never know. I suspect that psychiatric drugs could be a factor, among other things.

https://pathwaystofamilywellness.org/childrens-health-wellness/still-at-large-are-psychiatric-drugs-the-hidden-culprit-in-mass-shootings.html

And perhaps the media attention lavished on crimes of this nature encourages people like Miss Rupnow to do what they do. As she said in her own muddled, incoherent way...

𝐼 𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑜𝑛 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑜𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑚𝑦𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑓 𝑎𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑒 𝑎𝑔𝑜 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑚𝑎𝑦𝑏𝑒 𝑖𝑡𝑠 𝑏𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑒𝑣𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑟𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛 𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑝𝑖𝑑 𝑏𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑠𝑢𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑑𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ ℎ𝑜𝑝𝑒𝑓𝑢𝑙𝑙𝑦 𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑐ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑝𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑡.

Why have a boring old suicide when you can go out with a bang?

It is tragic that two innocent people lost their lives and others had their lives irreversibly affected by such a pointless act of evil. Yet another symptom of a broken society.(?)

Anyway... I'm pretty sleepy (1:54am here) and my thoughts are not easily translating to the written word. So I will leave you with this...

https://i.ibb.co/T2VqPP1/Drumph-Shatters-the-Debt-Ceiling.jpg

I hope you have a great evening, Mr. Hail.
And thanks again. ☮️

PS

Adam Smith says: "Without knowing more about her situation I would suggest that the schools she attended are at least partly responsible for her radicalization. That so many depressed and suicidal kids decide to shoot up their school speaks volumes about how horrible these institutions are."

The specific school, maybe not. Reports say shooter Samantha Rupnow only transferred into Abundant Life (a private Christian school) with the start of her 9th-grade year in August 2024.

Though the school is K-12, the shooter had not attended it up to 8th grade. She had been a student for about 3.5 months as of the day of the shooting.

One question is, Why did her parents -- or one of her parents? Mother? -- desire her be transferred into a Christian school for high school?

Where had she been for her 7th- and 8th-grade years? As know that one-third of her 4th-grade year and substantial amounts of 5th and 6th grades were lost, cancelled or majorly disrupted with the promotion of isolation and fear and Panic, by the the evils of "Lockdownism."

PS

Moderator wrote: "I'd thought there was something about the parents being in this occupation (Psychologist), but not the Dad, at least. It took me WAY too long to simply find out his occupation, and I never got to the Mom's yet."

What is the father's occupation?

PS

Little, if any, of the worst parts of school-shooter Samantha's "personal philosophy" seems likely much acquired from peers around Madison, Wisconsin. That the radical-feminist invective attributed to her was via a "Discord" account and not through the words of a friend or the like, may be a key to understanding the whole thing.

She was hooked into online communities, many of which reinforced many of the tenets of Wokeness and held undermine her mental stability and "radicalize" her.

She picked and chose from various aesthetics not uncommon for a teenager to pass through. But small communities of hardcore activists that promote Wokeness-adjacent ideologies are now at their highest-reach ever.

Samantha Rupnow is a useful reminder of the symbiotic relationship between digital-culture and the promotion of potentially dangerous sub-identities or beliefs. This began to be true with the early-Internet already by the late 1990s. At the time, and even holding true for most of the 2000s, the phenomenon got much pushback and scorn from "mainstream society." (The Internet in its early years was, in an important sense, unpopular.) Back then, spending x hours "online" a day was considered a sign of mental illness; today, x hours would be considered normal.

Today, weird-fringe ideologies like politicized Transgenderism are mainstream (and the very concepts of "online" and "offline" are nearly lost). It's also telling, therefore, that millions readily believed an early rumor that the Wisconsin shooter Samantha Rupnow was Transgender, a false allegation based on nothing but someone's conjecture but which spread rapidly because it fit the pattern that people now expect. She was not Transgender, but she may have been radicalized in a very-similar way to the way hardcore-activist Transgenderists are.

PS

Mr. Anon says: "Her personal philosophy was incoherent, as would be expected for a messed-up 15 year old: a radical, man-hating feminist, who embraces Nazi-aesthetic and mostly seemed to target females. Huh? She was apparently obsessed with death and suicide."

Having just turned age 15, she of course didn't have any coherent philosophy in the way many adult-males (can) have. She'll have been a reflection of energies she absorbed from the outside.

Males who are interested in ideas traditionally do not take seriously the "prattle" of women, certainly not in the realm of the political or other big-ideas fields. Nor even (usually) in academia. Women tend not to come up with ideas or consider them in any depth or with logical-rigor applied; they are aware that logical-rigor and rational-thinking filters exist out there, but they cannot escape using an emotional-filter.

In practice, the political for many women (and this also applies to many men) means the repeating of slogans, slogans often shown to be self-serving, and 'ideas' they may not even CARE about. Even ideas they spend much time around and which they might start arguments over, often they're just using them as props, or inflatable toys to float around on and seek attention. They can get highly worked up (or "radicalized") by certain ideas but not in the way a rational-minded male can.

(With apologies to the ladies out there among the PS-reading masses. It's "not all women," needless to say, but it is the cognitively-feminine norm. Some men are also on the cognitively-feminine side. It's about emotion-driven "feminization" as a process or idea, not some reason to bash individual women.)

The words-to-the-wise caveats about "talking to women about politics" all apply, and even moreso, to teenage girls. Naturally. For those adult-males who think talking to women about politics is a pursuit worth the time and that might pay dividends in some form, it probably helps as a corrective, in most cases, to think of a given adult women as having the political consciousness of a teenage girl and proceed accordingly.

PS

Mr. Anon writes that the school-shooter girl Samantha Rupnow "seemed to target females."

It may have been random; the fact that of the eight people shot, the two deaths were women could easily be random (two 'heads' on two coin flips).

She may not have been calm and collected enough to do anything but shoot at targets of opportunity. It could be that as soon as someone saw the gun and a sense of panic began, she took some shots and that was it.

The shooter Samantha Rupnow must not even have known the (White-female) teacher who wound up dead. The woman was not regularly employed by the school. She was there as a substitute for the day, although seems to have previously (years earlier) worked as a regular salaried teacher at the same school. The odds would seem to be that Samantha Rupnow saw the woman that day for the first time (the shooter only transferred to the school, as a ninth-grader, starting with the new school year in late-August 2024). She chose the school, perhaps, because it was the center of her life, but in fact she seems to have intended victims to be random.

Or maybe she did target this specific substitute teacher for some reason I cannot even fathom. But more likely seems to me that the adult teacher may have been the clearest, most-visible target; by instinct, Samantha Rupnow would've perceived the adult as the biggest single threat, being an adult amid children. If this version of events is right, it's ironic that that kind of self-preservation instinct would still "kick in" with a girl fully intending to kill herself within mere minutes (as she proceeded to do).

Shooting this cheerful White woman, age 43, and the others, was unheroic, arbitrary, evil.

The deceased substitute teacher's name, published widely: Erin Michelle West, born September 1982. From the obituary, as published:

"Erin graduated from Harrison High School in 2000 and went on to graduate from Kennesaw State University in 2005. She married Jack West on May 21, 2005, in Powder Springs, Ga. Erin worked as a teacher for Abundant Life Christian School for four years. She was a member of Doxa Church in Madison, Wis. // Erin enjoyed family camping trips, attending school sporting events, serving at Doxa Church, and spending time with her daughters and the rest of her family... Erin is survived by her husband, Jack; three daughters..." (end quote from the obituary) (the funeral is to be held at her church today, December 23, 2024).

Samantha Rupnow may have recognized a 'type' in the substitute teacher whom she shot: a White family-woman, an active Christian, the mother of three daughters; she may have known none of those things but suspected all from immediate first-impression clues, plus her presence at a Christian school. If the "sneak peek manifesto" (the one that she hates men and non-feminist women) is accurate, the fifteen-year-old shooter hated this type of woman and, even seeing her on first sight may have been glad to point the gun in the woman's direction.

PS

Re: Adam Smith's comments on the "manifesto" and what was in it: overlapping digital trails, digital-native identity and its discontents

The girl had two main social-media accounts, @PostalBrained on X, and @BrainedOut on Discord, nd elsewhere used the handle "crossixir." The Discord and X accounts are linked. One of them posted same-day footage of herself leading right up to the shooting. The material in both the "manifestos" are linked to these accounts.

She published a link to a Google Document on her X account, but it was set to private-mode at the time of her death. She forgot to set it to public-mode. So the material depends on the word of her anonymous eboyfriend that someone got in contact with. Already, all of this is resting on multiple layers of sand.

What is more certain is that her Discord (@BrainedOut) published a "sneak peek," which contained the "women are the only hope for this wretched world" material. This radical-feminist rant began began circulating soon after the shootings, after one of her known followers (not some new person) published it on X.

It's hard to verify with certainty in the way we could verify the Ted Kaczynski manifesto in the 1990s. There is a lot more uncertainty now with virtually everything. Discord long since deleted the girl's account, all the original material on X is now inaccessible or in private mode, and the Google-Doc on private-mode (in the excitement she forgot to make it public-access).

There are probably lots more digitally-induced sources of uncertainty here. If the girl was influenced by Wokeness to the degree that the "sneak peek" manifesto (about wishing to shoot males and non-feminist women) indicates, the saturation of digital streams of digital info onto her life is likely key. It destabilized her an already-unstable mind.

Suicides are relatively common, but mass shootings by suicidal girls are almost unknown. So some extra thing must be involved. That need for some extra thing is what led many to assume the girl Samantha Rupnow was Trans, which by all accounts was not the case. What is the extra thing? That's the question to answer. It's not good enough to say she hated her parents, hated her school, or was bullied, because many millions of such girls -- even those with diagnosed mental-illness -- have passed before the stream of time to whom those descriptors apply and who committed to mass-shootings. The sneak-peek version of the manifesto gives an answer, which may or may not be the final answer but also ought not be ignored.

If Samantha Rupnow was "indoctrinated into Wokeness," as the sneak-peek version of her manifesto she published on Discord would suggest, it wasn't likely through somebody indoctrinating her in person, but through the many digital tentacles, in much the same way that the Panic was successfully disseminated in 2020. This kind of culture is almost all the girl knew in her teenage and immediate-preteenage years. Recall that she only turned 10 in November 2019, just before the Panic. The life she's known was heavily influenced by the post-2020 developments and techno-informational, socially-deteriorated landscape, with effects that those of who are full adults can only imagine.

------

This is the original X post the school-shooter Samantha Rupnow sent out before the shooting with the link to the Google-Doc purporting to be her manifesto:

https://x.com/Postalbrained/status/1868700248954249241

The @Postalbrained account is now locked but you can see a long series of replies from people, many of the taunting her that she accidentally left the GoogleDoc on private mode.

Later, a journalist named Anna Slatz (@Slatzism), a Canadian with no local connection with the shooter, claims to have "made contact with the boyfriend of the Wisconsin shooter." and published a six-page, less-political manifesto as supplied by whoever that long-distance boyfriend is.

All people along the way here are connected by Internet wires and magic-like instant-communication and not real-life. As for Anna Slatz, she may also too close to her material to be fully trusted. Her wiki entry that describes her as "a radical feminist" and "a "gender-critical activist (TERF) and co-founder and editor of the gender-critical website Reduxx." If Samantha Rupnow was totally non-political, how does this obscure radical-feminist 'TERF' journalist Anna Slatz get involved?

Direct corroboration of most of all this being impossible, we generally have to rely on what others reposted. Anna Slatz (@Slatzism)'s version of the manifesto, through the unnamed e-boyfriend, has gotten more attention than the radical-feminist material that the shooter Samantha Rupnow posted on her own Discord account, in part probably because Discord is more closed-access and Twitter/X is more open-access and has, for more than ten years, been a place those working in journalism at any level are obsessed with.

One lesson in this tangled knot is how everything on the Internet, sooner or later (and sometimes very soon) is subject to uncertainty. The sands of the digital-hourglass bury any particular thing. You never really know what's true and what's not; there is a far-weaker information authority than had been true even just fifteen years ago at the time of the shooter's birth. Nothing's "set in stone," or printed an unchanging page. Much is being revised in real-time, or is subject to doubt for any real of other reasons (why do we trust the eboyfriend's version of the "manifesto"?). The information commons is now a dark place.

Here was an early compilation of information of the muddled and overlapping digital-trails:

https://ngo.locals.com/post/6470000/exclusive-madison-wisc-christian-school-mass-shooter-identified

_____________

(quote from Andy Ngo) "Rupnow's online friends identified the X account, which purported to belong to the shooter, soon after news broke of the shooting. The account's last post is of an "okay" hand symbol in the school's first-floor bathroom minutes before the shooting.

A purported "sneak peek" of her manifesto was posted on her Discord account, where she discussed a desire to kill in a rant inspired by fringe extremist online culture. A screenshot was posted on X by a person who was her Discord friend. The account also posted a mirror selfie photo of Rupnow. Journalist Anna Slatz posted the entire purported final draft of Rupnow's manifesto on X, in which Rupnow allegedly wrote about her admiration of mass killers and her family's dysfunction." (end quote from Andy Ngo)

________________

The Discord account known to belong to Samantha Rupnow posted the radical-feminist material, calling it a "sneak peek," and a longtime known follower reposted it to X. In other words, from what we know, the shooter's Discord account did publish the material that I quoted in the Unz comment. It's possible it was a "first draft," and that she decided to remove the most politically flagrant material later. This is a girl who's around her fifteenth birthday. Few, if any, of those who had such thoughts in past generations would have had their most-inner thoughts broadcast to the world like this.

A born-2009 girl like Samantha Rupnow, having been raised entirely in a highly ephemeral culture of quasi-reality or parallel-reality floating by on screens, may have in part wanted her suicide and mass-killing spree to be an act declaring: "I exist," which up to then she had not felt with a sense of assurance. Her manifesto in Google-Docs being set to private. The great jumble of confusion about her "manifesto(s)" means she remained a victim of ephemeral digital culture even in death (along with the two people she killed and the others she wounded, possible shortening or greatly limiting/paralyzing one or more others lives). Hence my title here, "Digital-native identity and its discontents."

PS: Mr. Smith, I didn't insert the manifesto just because it was so idiotic, but I hope Mr. Hail can straighten out which are the true words out of this girl.

I was about to write something about psychologists, based on both that this girl had been in therapy - very likely meaning she'd be taking some drugs, the way they give them out to kids these days. I'd thought there was something about the parents being in this occupation, but not the Dad, at least. It took me WAY too long to simply find out his occupation, and I never got to the Mom's yet.

I may be confusing them with the Arabian mass-murderer in Germany. He was in that field. With the possible (no, it's hard to kid on here) exception of our Dieter Kief, I think that people in the psychology/psychiatry fields have more than their share of these kinds of problems.

It does seem like psychiatric drugs are involved in most of these child mass murders.

PS: Mr. Anon, I may or may not have seen that movie "The Bad Seed". It seems familiar to me, but 1950s B&W movies are not usually my thing. (I've seen a few classics, just because they were said to be classics.)

I do remember some horror flicks made in the late '70s, such as "It's Alive" with people/creatures just born bad. I suppose it's not cool to believe you get offspring that are simply born bad, because that's HBD. There's only tragic dirt, not tragic wombs or tragic sperm and tragic eggs.

Agreed about the childhood thing.

PS: Good afternoon, everyone,

I have a question for Mr. Hail. In this comment...
https://www.unz.com/isteve/150k/#comment-6907961

Mr. Hail writes...

The manifesto shows she was radicalized to believe in the Evil White-Male Eternal Enemy idea. A branch of the Wokeness tree. Quote, from the meat of the manifesto:

𝑤𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑛 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 ℎ𝑜𝑝𝑒 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑤𝑟𝑒𝑡𝑐ℎ𝑒𝑑 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑. 𝐵𝑢𝑡 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑛 𝑤𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑛 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑏𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑤𝑎𝑠ℎ𝑒𝑑 𝑏𝑦 𝑚𝑜𝑖𝑑𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑡𝑜𝑜 𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦𝑣𝑒 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑧𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑎𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ𝑦 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑜𝑛 𝑒𝑎𝑐ℎ 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟, 𝑎𝑙𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑠 𝑏𝑒𝑔𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑚𝑎𝑙𝑒 𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑣𝑎𝑙 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑣𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑑𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛. 𝐼𝑡𝑠 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑔𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔. 𝐼 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑧𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑡ℎ 𝑚𝑒𝑛 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑒𝑒𝑚𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒. 𝑟𝑎𝑑𝑓𝑒𝑚 ℎ𝑖𝑡𝑙𝑒𝑟 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑖𝑠 𝑓𝑢𝑐𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑣𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑛𝑜𝑤. 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑏𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑒𝑑 𝑜𝑟 𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑒𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑑. 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦𝑟𝑒 𝑎 𝑓**𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑠𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑔𝑒 𝑢𝑝𝑜𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑡ℎ. 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑡𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑒𝑥𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑓𝑜𝑖𝑑 𝑤ℎ𝑜 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑝𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑠𝑒 𝑓**𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑠. 𝐸𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑒 𝑚𝑎𝑙𝑒 𝑚𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑏𝑒 𝑤𝑖𝑝𝑒𝑑 𝑜𝑢𝑡, 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑖𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑙𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑙𝑦. 𝑂𝑛𝑙𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑤𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑛 𝑏𝑒 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑎 𝑛𝑒𝑤 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑. 𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑏𝑒 𝑎 𝑝𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑟, 𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑏𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑠𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑠𝑡 𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑝.

But I cannot find this quote in my copy of the (alleged) manifesto. The copy I have can be found here...

https://medium.com/@bandit_gabled/samantha-rupnow-manifesto-87472c2b78ef

or here...

https://channel2now.com/2024/12/16/article/news/crime/abundant-life-christian-school-shooter-natalie-rupnows-full-manifesto-revealed/

Is my copy incomplete? Do you have a different version, Mr. Hail? If you do, can you share it? (I would appreciate it very much if you could.)

With that out of the way, and assuming that the version of the manifesto that I have read was indeed written by Miss Rupnow, it seems that she was bullied pretty hard at school and neglected/abused by her parents. (Obviously, I have no way of knowing if Miss Rupnow was neglected or abused by her parents, but if this is her writing it certainly comes across as though she believed that she was.)

She mentions that her 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑝𝑖𝑠𝑡 𝑠𝑢𝑐𝑘𝑠, so that has me wondering what sort of SSRI's/anti-depressants/other drugs (amphetamines are often prescribed for children who have been labeled ADHD or some other such imaginary ailment) she may have been taking. Most school shooters are on a heavy pharmaceutical cocktail often involving SSRI's and/or adderall.

Who radicalized Samantha Rupnow?

Without knowing more about her situation I would suggest that the schools she attended are at least partly responsible for her radicalization. That so many depressed and suicidal kids decide to shoot up their school speaks volumes about how horrible these institutions are. The "government" schools are failing miserably at what should be their core purpose; to teach children how to read, write and do basic math. And the abusive environment found in the "government" schools is obviously harmful to some percentage of students. That some of them lash out violently is understandable.

So yeah...
Happy Sunday! ☮️

PS

One has to wonder what would influence a young girl to be the monster that this one became. What was it in her upbringing? Was it the enforced social isolation of the COVID lockdown regime? Maybe she's just a bad seed.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048977/

Her personal philosophy was incoherent, as would be expected for a messed-up 15 year old: a radical, man-hating feminist, who embraces Nazi-aesthetic and mostly seemed to target females. Huh? She was apparently obsessed with death and suicide.

It goes to show why the innocence of childhood should be preserved and cherished (and why society should be arranged in such a way as to make that possible) - so that they can believe that life can be good. Yes, life is often cruel and ugly, but it's a bad idea to expose children to that early: they may come to think that nothing else is possible.

PS: Happy Sunday, Robert! I take it that the band is the one advertised on the young lady's T-shirt? (It took me till just now to figure that out - sad!)

Now, if she had listened to some Led Zeppelin, say II, IV (Zosa), or especially the song "Houses of the Holy", she'd probably have understood a little more about the men's world or at least been so ramped up by the music that she could not possibly get in such a depressed state. Well, but then she'd have been wise to avoid "Dazed & Confused". Not only does the title fit with her eventual state, but their lyrics about women*... haha, surprised Maleinists 15 y/o boys have never shot up a school... oh, wait, there are no Maleinists.

I don't know Lords of Acid, but sex-positive sounds good and normal. Or... what if she had an ABBA, Go-Gos, Linda Rondstadt, maybe Olivia Newton-John T-shirt... but NO Joan Jett. I'd be fine with Pat Bean-eater though.**


* Going just by memory here... "... but some of them know.. the soul of a woman was created below... " Let loose with the guitar, Jimmy!

Hey, you probably can't blame that on those young British White men anyway - again, I'm not checking, but lots of their stuff came from old Blues numbers. Blame the 1930s era American Black! men - misogynistic crap, but with great beats, guitar riffs, and drumming, so, actually, quite brilliant.

** A friend from long ago called her that, but I liked her stuff, mainly because she and Tom Petty ("Refugee") were the 1st sounds I heard during the rise out from the pit of the Disco years. (In hindsight, they were short and sweet compared to 2 decades of (c)Rap.

PS:

I am somewhat disturbed to be able to say that I know (knew) that band --- KMFDM.

I was unwilling to spend more than thirty seconds on searching, but I see that they seem to still exist. I can't imagine that they are anything like what they were fourty years or so ago.

Now, if she had a 'Lords of Acid' (an all-female "sex-positive" industrial music group from the same time period) t-shirt on, that would be something else.