On Saturday afternoon, the Michigan State Police became aware of a chilling message posted to a Russian “confessions” website.
“On October 4th, I’m going to the University of Michigan and blow every single woman I see with an AR-15,” the message began. “There is a violent pro-male revolution coming and you people better get ready for it.”
The would-be shooter said that he (I’m assuming it was a he) was inspired in part by incel idol Elliot Rodger — though he misspelled his name — and by the incel who carried out the recent shooting in Plymouth, England which left 5 innocent people dead, including a three year-old girl. “I watch (sic) Plymouth happen and I had a smile on my face,” he wrote. “It was the first time I smiled in years.”
Here’s a screenshot of the message, which has been removed from the site. (I upped the contrast to make it more readable.)
Luckily — for us if not for him — the would-be shooter was so derelict in his internet security that authorities were able to locate him in the real world almost immediately.
Not so luckily for us, the FBI dismissed the threat as an empty one, and there’s no indication he was arrested.
According to the University of Michigan police in a press release,
The University of Michigan Police Department, with the assistance of the FBI, has identified an out-of-state residence from which the threat was posted. FBI agents interviewed a resident of the home, who they assessed to be responsible for the message.
Based on the investigation, there is nothing to indicate imminent harm to our community.
In another press release, they insisted that
[T]here is no current nor pending threat to the community from the individual responsible for the post. During the interview, agents assessed the individual had neither the means nor the opportunity to carry out the threat.
And the threat itself wasn’t enough for an arrest? Apparently not.
According to FindLaw,
Federal law prohibits transmitting “any threat to injure the person of another” and penalizes such threats with five years in prison. But not all threats are created equally, and the Supreme Court has determined that only “true threats” can be punished. This generally means that the threat must be credible and specific enough that a reasonable person would be threatened.
I guess they decided it wasn’t a “true threat” because, I don’t know, he didn’t come to the door carrying an AR-15 and a map of the University of Michigan campus.
Let’s just hope he never has the means and the opportunity to carry out a similar threat in the future.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
It’s just as likely that it’s because he was either
A. White, or B. Wasn’t going to menace anyone rich or powerful enough to be missed.
It’s always a good idea to remember who the police really serve in situations like these.
Incels: Why can’t I get laid? Why don’t women like me?
Also Incels: You OWE ME SEX. Fuck me or I will fucking kill you, you BITCH! I will shoot every one of you filthy WHORES!
Incels Again: Society hates me because I’m ugly/dorky/into geeky things.
Also Incels: Elliot Rodger killed all those filthy SKANKS. He is a saint.
Great. Just another way they don’t take violence against women seriously.
I hope the University takes it a little more seriously.
I mean, he might not shoot straight and accidentally take out some men too. Rich straight white ones, even.
I thought homicidal ideation required an involuntary psychiatric hold. These are people who need to be kept under observation
If someone “jokes” about something like this, clearly the intent is there. He is a threat to women and should at least be place on a psych hold until they can assess the threat level. The fact that he holds these views should be warning enough for anyone who gives a damn.
It’s not like he was threatening real people- only women. And when has an incel ever followed up and carried carried out a mass murder?
This is the US. There’s always means and opportunity to carry out a mass shooting because you can obtain guns at the drop of a hat.
Right. It was the first time you had smiled in years — because women won’t give you the time of day. Or access to their genitals. So women deserve to die. I feel you.
It’s not anti-female. It’s pro-male. Got it.
If I know anything at all about people, it’s that every one of us loves being lumped in with “you people.”
And if I know anything else about people, it’s that women would never take your words to heart. They wouldn’t get guns and sign up for the firing range.
And now you’ve had a visit from the FBI. That must have been exciting!
Listening to the results of the trail of against the police officer, Wayne Couzens, who kidnapped, raped, and murdered Sarah Sarah Everard. Today the news came out the officer Couzens belonged to a police WhatsApp group where he and his male colleagues exchanged extreme and violent pornography along with comments about their female colleagues.
The depth of institutional misogyny within the police globally, is no secret. We may as well still be living in the 1970s (Life on Mars–the UK version). It doesn’t surprise me that an incel publishing online threats would not be taken seriously. Not one bit.
Sarah Everard was stopped by officer Couzens who said he was arresting her for breaking Covid curfew (she wasn’t).
After Couzens received a full life sentence, an announcement was made by the Metropolitan Police that “women needed to become more saavy”.
I went to the police a couple years ago to report a stalker. They took my statement and then informed me that there is nothing they can do about him hanging around outside my house or approaching me in public UNTIL he actually hurts or rapes me.
@PATRICIA HALL:
The messaging from the police has been ridiculous and appalling, but the situation is so bad that I can’t figure out what they could plausibly say. “Our institution is systemically broken, and nobody should trust us” would be a start, but where do they go from there?
@ moggie
This is a rather unreassuring bit from the judge’s sentencing remarks:
There’s only one place to go from there: Disband.
OT: I’m worried about the virus again. Though my region has had very little transmission through the peak of the fourth wave, now, when it seems to be declining in the rest of Ontario, we’ve just had 6 new cases in this county on each of the last 3 days. 18 in total. I don’t see how that can be unless there’s an outbreak in some specific place, probably a school that was prematurely reopened.
I need to do a supply run again soon, too, so I will have no choice but to risk exposure. It would be nice if there was some clue somewhere as to where, exactly, this outbreak is. If it’s in the next town over, or further away still, I’m probably safe. If it’s right here, not so much. Especially since 18 cases in three days is likely either the tip of the proverbial iceberg, with God knows how many undiagnosed presymptomatic people wandering around (those 18 were probably exposed 5 days to a week ago; if the outbreak is continuing, and there are six more people being infected daily, then there are another 30 of them out there somewhere perhaps nearby, and 12 of those have likely become contagious, and if it’s escalating, those numbers might be closer to 300 than 30), or else the result of an undiagnosed superspreader, who would have to be either a schoolchild, or else working in a job where they come into contact with new people every day to be infecting 6 new people a day for three days running, and that job could well be “grocery store cashier I’ll be a couple of feet away from sometime in the next couple of days, and who will be touching packages I’ll then be bringing home” …
@Alan, and some of his other (former) colleagues commonly called him “the rapist”. Though to be precise, I don’t know whether they also were supportive (perhaps they regarded him as a good cop who did a little light raping on the side).
I’m in the “burn it all down” camp right now.
@ moggie
Yeah, that was apparently in his days as a nuclear protection officer. I think it was the women who said that, so presumably they meant it as a ‘missing step’ type warning.
But I guess this issue is pertinent to the subject of the post above. Taking indicators seriously.
Like Peter Sutcliffe’s work nickname was ‘The Ripper’!!!
Emergency: Someone is blocking my access to Facebook. The culprit has done something to prevent devices I own from performing DNS queries for Facebook domains. The failure is selective: if I query Facebook, the DNS server acts like it is down, but if I query google or some other domain, the DNS server acts normal. So, the DNS server is not actually down; it is “playing dead” when it sees a query it doesn’t like. If it were functioning correctly, it would return Facebook’s IP address (or “NXDOMAIN” in a counterfactual world where Facebook actually didn’t exist) and if it were legitimately down it wouldn’t work no matter what domain was queried.
So, someone is engaging in a bit of censorship. I thought it might be Bell Canada or some such entity, but when I tried bypassing their DNS and using Google’s 8.8.8.8 I got the exact same behavior — including selectively pretending to be down depending on what was in the query, rather than just being actually down, or else up, independently of the content of the query.
Implication being, my adversary is sniffing traffic. It pretty much has to be Bell Canada, then, intercepting and modifying DNS queries (or the responses to them) regardless of what DNS server is being used. That’s a rather serious breach of norms, and probably the of law (net neutrality violation).
Question is, what recourse do I have? Short of the long, arduous, and likely expensive process of switching to a different ISP (which would probably mean days of no internet access at all, which in turn would be unacceptable). Is there somewhere I can complain to have them slapped down and forced to comply with net neutrality? Is there somewhere I can do so and get results in five minutes rather than after several weeks or months of administrative bureaucratic bumbling or even several years of a lawsuit wending its way through the courts followed by the inevitable appeals? Is there a technical circumvention I can use? If there’s a way to do DNS-over-encryption that should suffice to sneak the queries past anything malicious Bell is doing, given that Bell can’t start indiscriminately blocking all TLS traffic and still call itself an “ISP”. Tor browser should obviously work, except that it’s not designed with things like Facebook in mind (why would it be?), so it would look up the site successfully but not be able to render or use it properly in all likelihood. Also, I don’t have it on my new machine, and I’m not sure I’d be able to get it (an obvious thing for Bell to block in addition to Facebook is anything that might be used to circumvent the block, and the tor browser download site would be near the top of that list).
Also: I can hardly believe that this is happening. This is the sort of shit that authoritarian countries like Thailand or Iran like to pull. I had heard that yet another website blocking proposal was being pushed by vested interests in Canada, but not that it had gotten any serious traction, and there was nothing there about blocking major commercial sites. Most likely this is a unilateral action by Bell but why would they do it?
This just gets more and more bizarre. I did some research and there is an encrypted DNS option that can be used by some apps, including Firefox … and my copy is already using it, according to the tickboxes on its own settings screens. It should be sending queries encrypted to Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 … and yet queries to look up Facebook domains are nonetheless getting intercepted and blocked, selectively. I don’t see how that’s possible unless either Cloudflare is in on it or else the problem is actually local to my own machine, some sort of malware that intercepts and blocks access to certain websites by tampering with DNS queries before they are sent. The problem with that is:
On the other hand, I can apparently access Facebook via my mobile, using my home WiFi, which suggests that the problem is on my computer somewhere.
Restarts of the browser and the router did not fix it. It is looking like a reboot of the computer, at minimum, may be necessary. Which is damn annoying. If it needs malware removal, so much the worse — but I’d need to have some idea what precisely could be causing it. I doubt it could be any accidental cause. A hosts file edit shouldn’t affect Firefox DNS over HTTPS, should it? Not that I’ve edited it recently anyway. Nor should it cause nslookup or any other tool to claim that the DNS server is down, or cause intermittent timeouts; it would just cause a substitute result to be promptly returned, such as “127.0.0.1”. The site would appear to be down but after an apparently successful hostname lookup, which is not the symptom I’m seeing.
This whole thing is just bizarre. Everything seems to contradict everything else. Firefox says Cloudflare is the one screwing up, nslookup says Bell is, my phone says Bell isn’t, it’s not my router, it’s not anything that can’t see inside Firefox-originated encrypted HTTPS packets which seems to mean it’s either inside Firefox or at Cloudflare, but neither of those could cause command-line nslookup to fail …
What in the bloody hell is going on?
This reminds me of the treatment January 6 insurgents have been receiving. Same for the man who threatened the Democratic premises in Austin, Texas last week. None of them are receiving terrorism charges despite their actions being the very definition of terrorism.
It seems society is deeply committed to treating conservatives with kid gloves. Democrats will even go out of their way to ensure they receive preferential treatment. Unfortunately they are adding to the things Right wing terrorists can get away with and, in doing so, just legitimizing this type of violence that is becoming more and more common.
@Surplus
Facebook is down universally afaict.
@surplus I think a simpler solution is facebook is having server issues. I assume that the mobile and web versions of facebook are run separately, so just the web version being down seems realistic.
Off-topic, but it looks like Jordan Peterson has officially retired from the University of Toronto.
So the world is marginally better at the moment, but, sadly, Facebook is likely to be back online before long.
@Surplus
It’s not just you. Facebook is down. The most plausible theory I’ve heard is that somebody at Facebook panicked at a news story and tried to get rid of some embarrassing data, and accidentally blew ’em up real good.
Surplus to Requirements – EVERYONE’S facebook is down. It’s not just you.
#ACAB all the way down