“He was in a 4Chan bubble”: Inside the Highland Park shooting suspect’s social media diet
“This is Trump’s 4th of July gift to America,” tweeted entrepreneur and influencer John Anthony Castro after 21-year-old Robert “Bobby” Crimo III was identified as the suspect in the Fourth of July shootings that left seven dead and dozens injured in Highland Park, Illinois. Commentators had immediately begun exposing Crimo’s political and social media allegiances and pointing to them as a potential motivation behind the deadly shooting. According to Castro, Crimo “was a die-hard Trump supporter who released a QAnon-inspired song called ‘I Am the Storm.’”
Crimo, who goes by the stage name “Awake the Rapper,” posted numerous albums on Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music, including those with apparent references to the QAnon movement. The streaming giants have since raced to scrub his music from their platforms.
QAnon influencers were quick to distance themselves from Crimo. One called TruthHammer888 claimed that the suspect had “liked tons of CDC posts and the vaccines on his Twitter account. He was not one of us.” Experts who study QAnon and conspiracy theory movements said Crimo’s social media diet, while extreme, was distinct from the realm of QAnon. “Our attempts to make it make sense aren’t landing,” tweeted Mike Rothschild, an author who has written books on QAnon and grew up just a few miles away from Highland Park.
He told me that “the world Crimo lived in was pretty far off Q. He was in a 4chan bubble of ironic Nazi and anime memes, fascist-inspired music, and mass shooter ideation that basically consumes nothing but irony and sadness.” He explained that this nihilistic media diet exists on a different plane to QAnon which is “ultimately a hopeful movement that claims once the evildoers are done away with, we’ll live in a free and safe world.”