Ah, yes, for all you young people: there was a relentless effort to manufacture a consensus that Columbine was caused by Goth culture, industrial music, and videogames. The neo-Nazism was buried, and anyone who pointed to easy access to guns was denounced as a liberty-hating tyrant.
I'm 35 and had never known they were Neo-Nazis until right now That's how much they tried to bury it
OKC Bombing was another instance where the Neo-Nazi/white power connection was downplayed and dropped for "war vet went crazy" angle. Incidently, the OKC Bombing (and reading about it & the trial after in Bring the War Home) really showed why Garland was going to be a bad AG pick, as has happened.
I wasn’t so young and remember it. And I’m literally finding out about the neo Nazi shit right now.
I think there was definitely a neo-Nazi element. I think mental illness and access to guns played a much higher role.
Yes, those were also the days when right-wing extremist influencers stirred up their followings with warnings the liberals were going to form a police state and send them to detention centers. That's what their whole shtick was about. That's what they were purportedly fighting.
til...
“Trench coat mafia” was some real satanic panic type shit
I'm not American so it's none of my business, but there have been a lot of these mass shootings in the US, and not so many in the rest of the world, and there's one standout differentiating factor.
Bowling For Columbine (2002) was so transformative for a lot of kids growing up then because it was post-9/11 and suddenly you had the sense American society at large was obfuscating the truth.
they also actively organized it around the idea that the shooters were anti-Christian
Yeah and then Pureflix made a movie about one of the victims.
that shit was a straight up coverup
This brought back uncomfortable memories of how my then-classmate related so much to the shooters that she wrote a poem dedicated to them in our school magazine. We're not even American.
besides the obvious (guns), I think bullying is the understated root reason for the school shootings, conservatives naturally have no sympathy for the bullied kid and liberals tend to have equal sympathy for the bully who may also be a "victim" etc.
Not meant to minimize school bullying, which - as we all know - is in fact a real and desperately serious problem, but in this case, per the OP, that narrative seems to have been off course as, per the testimony of their acquaintances, the killers weren't subject to any particular harassment.
From my understanding a lot of people did think them at least slightly weird, but it now appears that that understates the case as to how off-kilter they actually were.
I remember the NRA (led by Helton at that time) having a rally in downtown Denver before any of the victims had been buried.
the evangelical church seized on the chance to make the victims into martyrs and pastors around the country preached to scared teens that they needed to be ready to die rather than renounce christ. they just took violence as a given rather than making any attempt to change it, being pro life and all
“They killed a teacher and 12 students. You know who else was a teacher with 12 students?” - a fav line of megachurch youth group leaders in the early 2000s
Wait, wat?
oh god the "she said yes" thing was so maddening
It's even more so because the girl credited with "saying yes" never said any such thing - in fact more complete evidence indicates she was essentially shot out of hand - while the girl who actually affirmed belief in God was, for some reason, allowed to live by Harris & Klebold...
...and therefore her story was obscured because she HADN'T become a martyr.
It wasn't neo-nazis it was one guy
In no sense was Columbine "one guy"
Were you there
Were you? Even if we ignore everything that built up to it, there were two guys. You are factually wrong on every possible level.
Were you?
No but there was only one guy in the news so I don't know where you pulling out the other guy from all you guys know how to do is create conspiracy theories
Assuming you're not trolling, I'm afraid you're wrong. This is the famous/infamous screenshot taken from CCTV footage of the cafeteria, only minutes before the massacre in the library upstairs. There are clearly two armed people in this picture.
There are also photos of the bodies of both Klebold and Harris lying in the school library after they'd committed suicide, but I won't repost them here due to their graphic nature. They're easily searchable online, though...
...but be careful to distinguish them from photos of two high school students who thought it'd be funny to dress up as the killers and pose playing dead for Halloween (they got suspended for their trouble).
Like… this is all in the historical record and this choad thinks *we’re* the ones doing conspiracy theories?
As the old saying goes, you can fix ignorant (not knowing things), but you can't fix stupid (not *wanting* to know things especially if they conflict with your dearly held beliefs).
JFC there were two guys in the news from the very beginning. I remember watching the whole thing play out in high school.
"they blame it on Marylin and the heroin where were the parents at?"
Deliberately done on Hitler's 110th Birthday, wasn't it?
Charlton Heston showed up a few days later with the NRA and was given a microphone and huge TV audience. It was disgusting.
Harris and Klebold modelled their attack on the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and 1996 Olympic Park bombing, but their crude bombs mostly didn't work or weren't set off.
They'll never acknowledge the nazism because then people would start to realize that there's no meaningful difference between even the most "moderate" conservative and straight up nazis. There's no alt-right, it's just the right.
I remember the goddamned RPG Maker ass game made for the Columbine murderers that supposedly was "trying to be neutral, not judgemental," and boy howdy, they very much didn't bother to hide the humanisation efforts and supposed mercy these shitheads showed to a friend. But hid their Nazism.
For almost two weeks I couldn't wear my KMFDM T-shirts out of shame
I still remember a girl getting sent home for wearing a black coat. Not a trenchcoat, mind. Something like a north face jacket. When she told the principal it was her only coat, he told her to buy a new one. The funniest part? Our school's team jackets were black, too.
"goth, industrial music and video game" sounds like my friend group
Eventually REALLY late into it they blamed their antidepressants. The antidepressants chabged their whole name because of it.
Eric Harris wrote in his journal about hijacking planes and crashing them into NYC.
If their bombs had worked, it WOULD have been 9/11, 2 years early.
Even Bowling for Columbine didn't mention it! Instead you had Manson sitting there like a fucking dipshit going "I would let them talk"!
Caitlyn Doughty (ask a mortician ) has an excellent video debunking the myths of columbine.
The Idaho murders were clearly a plan of femicide, the media likes burying that aspect as well.
I wonder how many people know that it was an explicit effort on the part of one of sets of parents.
So...the people who objected to Harris and Klebold being memorialized along with their victims were right after all, though they might not have known exactly why they were right?
Watch Bowling For Columbine, I saw it in the theater.
Don't forget the black trenchcoats, too! (I suppose that could land in 'Goth culture'...)
It even happened on Hitler's birthday
Growing up, I always thought that was an Eerie Coincidence, rather than an explicit part of their plan. I wish it hadn't taken until my adulthood to draw a line from Columbine to the Oklahoma City bombing to the Klan, y'know? OKC and Columbine were explained to me as lone wolf things, as one-offs
i was just looking it up, came across this article: www.nytimes.com/2005/03/23/u...
Good find! But look! some of the experts quoted in this article seem to handwave away the white supremacy. This shooter, who was Native American, hung out on racial-purity messageboards and described himself as a nazi! How can the nazism be, per Viollis in the article, "a collateral issue"?
yeah, i was looking through a bunch of articles, splc did a more accurate framing i think www.splcenter.org/resources/re...
they kinda also did some "cya" in that writing
"It could have been the goth music, too!" I mean those little snippets from Pit magazine, short as they were, were gross and a little chilling! But yeah, excellent digging! I don't think this has changed my mind about the *consensus* view of school shooters, though; would you say it has for you?
what i've noticed, in many of the narratives (immediate aftermath vs deep dives later), be it highland park, colorado springs, pulse nightclub, initial diagnosis was "normal" family dynamics but afterwards revealed there were so much family dysfunction! guns in those dysfunctional systems is deadly
(highland park native, ahoy!) This kind of violence is so... (forgive me for using this word) "spectacular", that is to say so explosive, so intended to be witnessed as a media event, so outside the bounds of "ordinary" gun violence, that its causes can only ever be multi-factor.
But LORD ISN'T IT CURIOUS how family dysfunction, virulent misogyny, and white supremacy always seem to tag along somewhere in the mix
Also tied to the date of the David Koresh/Branch Davidians raid. I think the Columbine shooters had to target the 20th instead of the 19th due to the day of the week and getting explosives in place.
Yep
They brought out one of the parents of the killers to say what a good and misunderstood kid he was, I remember that. We were supposed to feel sorry for her.
naturally leading to banning trenchcoats, parodic goth-industrial music / videogames, substituting emotional channels and creation with nihilism in order to advance auth "for the children" powergrabs that return every decade to blame kids and artists for where authority fails society
“When a dude’s getting bullied and shoots up his school. And they blame it on Marilyn, and the heroin. Where were the parents at? And look where it’s at. Middle America, now it’s a tragedy.”
Came to quote this exactly! For all his absurdity, his social commentary can be so on point. (See, especially, Mosh).
the golden age of jack thompson, it was
I guess I don’t know the updated version. Will have to look it up.
So proven by the fact I've heard plenty about this and yet this is somehow the very first time I've ever heard they were neo-Nazis. Which kind of explains a lot.
Given that their original plan was to set off multiple bombs - which would have killed and/or injured dozens if not 100's of students & faculty/staff - & then shot as many of the survivors as they could, it escalates the whole thing to an attempted act of domestic political terrorism.
Can confirm; as a young adult, I stopped wearing a rather nice black trenchcoat because of the moral panic about the black clothes at Columbine
Another thing they want people to forget. Columbine had armed guards. Armed guards at school have almost never prevented a school shooting.
A family member said "Oh, that INTERNET!"
My friends in high school were profiled for wearing trench coats & combat boots, they took Quake off our shared gaming folder on the network, and forbade us from wearing all black & playing any video games that involved one person shooting another. My malicious compliance was to wear all navy blue.
Don't forget the trench coats. My school immediately banned wearing black trench coats. Regular trench coats were still ok, it was only the black ones that were a problem.
My school banned all trench coats!! Just outright!!
my school banned wearing all black
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbi...
One of the mother's wrote a very good and disturbing book. Can't think of the name of it at the moment. Horrifying to read as a parent.
They weren’t neo-Nazis. One was a full blown psychopath in the literal sense of the word, the other had social issues. The easy access to guns ultimately by itself is what caused it. It’s in the book “Columbine”
According to the SPLC, Harris and Klebold had been flirting pretty seriously with neo-Nazism, even if they weren't "formally" so: www.splcenter.org/resources/re...
David Cullen wrote the seminal book on this after researching it for nine years and he states clearly they weren’t. It’s as much as myth as the trench coat mafia or bullying which were not true either.
I know one thing. If it were up to me, I'd take away the guns. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op7a...
This is how fucked up this was, Marilyn Manson wrote an essay about how politicians can fuck off for weaponizing his music after Columbine
Back in the olden days, school shootings were supposedly evidence that religion needed to have a greater presence in government and society, especially in schools.
An acquaintance posted yesterday "We need God!" Somebody pointed out that the kids were praying to God, in a church, when they were shot.
100% correct. I still remember how pissed off I was by the stupidity of it all.
My buddy and I were in HS and wore trench coats because goth dorks and the administration asked us to not wear them any longer after columbine. I knew nothing of the nazi stuff but I did ask "If the killers wore nikes would you ban those, too?" and the principle was like "no that's absurd."