Ignoring the cause makes us less safe!
| DEAN OBEIDALLAH SEP 14, 2025 |
16 year old gunman Desmond Holly
We are still learning all the details in connection with the killer of Charlie Kirk. Although a few facts are undisputed, namely that the killer was a young white guy who came from a pro-MAGA family, lived in a very Republican area of red state and spent large chunks of time in the online community. To be blunt, though we need more facts to understand his full motivation for this horrific murder.
However, on the very same day Kirk was killed, there was another dreadful shooting by a young white guy. That took place when 16 year-old Desmond Holly entered his high school in Evergreen, Colorado, where he began shooting at students with a revolver—wounding two before taking his own life.
We know from authorities that the gunman was “radicalized by some extremist network.” That is where the two cases greatly diverge. In the case of Kirk’s killer, Utah’s GOP Governor claimed the killer was “indoctrinated with leftist ideology,” despite not showing us even one social media post, photo or any credible objective evidence to back that up. Instead, he cited one conversation a family member had with the shooter about not liking Kirk’s views.
Is there a chance the governor had been shown something more to back up his assertion? Sure, but we are now three days from the arrest of the Kirk shooter and not the police, media nor MAGA activists have been able to present credible evidence that would in any one back the claim the gunman was motivated by some “leftist ideology.”
But in the case of the Colorado shooter, when police said the gunman was “radicalized by some extremist network,” they knew his online activity was a celebration of Neo-Nazi and white supremacist views but they refused to tell the public at the time. We know that because of the public reporting and reviews by extremist experts that has followed the shooting which detailed a tsunami of such evidence.
For starters, Holly’s Tik Tok account included “14w” in the username—which as experts note is a reference to the “14 words,” a popular white supremacist slogan.” Those “14 words” are, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Per the Southern Poverty Law Center, “this is the best-known slogan of the U.S. white supremacist movement” and was coined by David Lane–a member of the white power terrorist group The Order who killed Jewish radio host Alan Berg.
It gets worse from there. Holly posted himself wearing a skull mask that included the words “AL NOOR,” the name of the New Zealand mosque that self-described white supremacist Brenton Tarrant attacked in 2019, killing 51 Muslims people worshipping. It also included a reference to the “14 words” and “TJD,” which experts say is shorthand for “Total Jew Death.”
Holly also a posted a video of himself wearing a tactical helmet and a gas mask with background music featuring a Serbian folk song that Tarrant played while livestreaming the 2019 Christchurch Mosque shooting.
In addition, the 16-year-old Holly had shown off his homemade Nazi symbols online. For examples, he liked a comment online telling him to acquire a white supremacist/Nazi insignia patch like Tarrant wore during his mass killing of brown people. Holly responded by sharing the ones he had made—which were the Nazi skull and cross bones and another Nazi image. And as The Denver Post reported, other videos Holly’s account reposted “were explicitly antisemitic or depicted people in Nazi uniforms.”
And Holly–like other mass shooters on the right–had come to glorify people who had slaughtered others and streamed it in the past like Tarrant. On his previous account—as experts noted–his profile photo featured a picture of Payton Gendron being arrested. Gendron was the then 18-year-old self-avowed white supremacist who in 2022 travelled to Buffalo, New York to kill Black people. And he did just that, killing ten Black people. Gendron in his manifesto had repeatedly cited the “great replacement” theory that white people are intentionally being replaced by people of color—a view that is now a staple on the right and was openly embraced by Charlie Kirk.
There is one more very disturbing part of Holly’s online activity highlighted by experts. That was Holly’s active presence on ‘WatchPeopleDie” — an online forum where users post and interact with extremely graphic and violent content such as videos depicting murder, rape, beheadings, etc. This is the third example in less than a year of a teenager who was active on this platform, who become radicalized and then committed a school shooting or murder.
When you see all this, you have to ask why would the police say he was radicalized by some “extremist movement” without telling the media what it was?! Clearly, Holly was radicalized by white supremacist and Neo-Nazi ideology which was then married to a glorification of violence. But the police refused to reveal this. Instead, it took others days to uncover these facts—which was long after the media coverage of the story had faded.
But we can’t ignore it. Holly was a young white male who was marinating in a stew of hate and a glorification of violence of those who came before him and engaged in racist acts of mass murder. That took him to the doorstep of violence–which he crossed on Wednesday when he set out on his shooting spree.
The media should be covering the Holly story in far more detail. We need people from parents to friends to better understand the signs of online radicalization. The hope being of course they can intervene to stop the person from carrying out another attack.
But as is often the case when we see white supremacist violence, corporate media executives are uncomfortable to cover in that framing for fear of angering right-wing viewers and Donald Trump. However, by doing that they are not only engaging in journalistic malpractice—they are making us less safe as a nation.
