Some years ago, the governor of somewhere rural and northern and cold in the winter recently drove out a long ways, hours and hours, to a cult’s compound with the intent of bringing them to justice. It’s not known very well what the cult was doing to attract his ire but it didn’t seem important at the time. What made this news newsworthy though is that the governor did it completely alone, without telling anyone, and he livestreamed the whole thing. He had a GoPro strapped to a helmet. People were arguing on Twitter over whether or not he was inspired by the Christchurch shooter and you really couldn’t get that out of your head the whole time. Somewhere between the Christchurch shooter and Bud Dwyer since obviously he didn’t come back. He died about 6 or 7 rooms and honestly I don’t know how many kills in. People made a hobby of counting the bodies, but it was pretty tough to see. The governor was really good at it, though. Ruthless, coordinated, efficient. His body seemed perfectly in tune with a sort of economics of motion the first time I watched it. The second time I could start to see where he was scared and that made me a little bit sick. When he died you could kinda hear him choke a little. It wasn’t dramatic. He rushes a room and there’s a ton of gunfire. The camera is shaky. It’s not like a movie at all. Then he just kinda doubles over and the gunfire stops. There’s like 5 minutes of screaming from some room somewhere. Then someone (it was never figured out who) picks up the camera and turns it off.
It was a huge compound, multiple houses arranged around a central courtyard, way out there in the sticks. It was a warm day in spring and the governor’s shirt sleeves were pulled up. His arms had thin but dark black hair on them and his hands were large and meaty but handled the gun with such delicacy. People had counted how many bullets he’d fired again and again. Lectures were given to chatrooms about his gear choices. Which gun it was. The brand of the magazines, the shape of the head of the bullets. People would dress up as him for a bit afterwards on LARP forums, right down to the store-brand button-down shirt. It was as tasteless as it sounds. There was a lot of discussion, in the early days, about his movements peeking certain corners or clearing certain rooms. He just shot without warning at adults and ignored children. People recreated the commune in a bunch of different video games. The family that ran the place asked people not to as they mourned the three members who were dead and eight more wounded. Like I said, people claimed various other numbers but those were the ones you saw on TV and on the family’s website. Someone cleared it in counter strike in about three and a half minutes.
The mainstream news coverage turned to the motive. There was a lot of dirt on both ends as the police and the various 3 letter agencies went through stuff. Maybe it was tax stuff, or bribery. It’s hard to remember. The family was pretty obviously a new religious thing. Rumors circulated about that. That they were into “reality shifting” and that one of their kids was kinda big on tiktok. I can’t remember if that was true or not. There was a big wave of mockery about tulpamancy again. One of the kids, a teenager who ran away, turned out to probably post a lot on reddit. The harassment meant they never spoke up about it either way. It was pretty banal. When the court proceedings started to come out, the internet had lost interest. Everyone involved seemed to be deceased so there wasn’t any pressure for the legal system to move quickly. The governor’s family didn’t seem to know anything about it, his wife stayed out of the public eye so long people debated over whether or not she’d died. Some QAnon forum claimed she had a body double when she did turn up again. I never read the court documents aside from a brief. There was a really big thread going over them building a case for the governor being a programmed-to-kill MKUltra case. People said it was really well researched and that they were convinced by it. I bookmarked it somewhere. When I went back to read it the forum had moved to reddit and promptly died.
There were some questions over who uploaded the video, and why. The chief culprit was the person who picked up the camera but given the cult’s response, that felt off. The guy was only missing for like a day and a half, supposedly when the actual cops showed up his body was barely cold. The cult members had covered him with a blanket and gone to stay in a hotel. We know because some rage streamer from kiwifarms was in the area and figured out the room’s door number and somehow lock code. He actually opened the door a little in his video. Then there’s a lot of screaming. He backed off and tried to apologize and then the video ends when he has to talk to a cop. He never got charged until a few years later.
He never posted. The governor. His Twitter feed was about as dull as you could make it, every tweet was the work of a 20 something intern hired to bang out formulaic summaries of half-read bills and happy holidays messages. It wasn’t even clear that he was religious but Wikipedia said he was a Lutheran so it became trendy to rip on Lutherans for a while, or else exhort them as defenders of Christendom against the incursions of new age demons. There was a memorial for him on a roadside. It wasn’t really a surprise that he was an ex-cop. Someone on a 4chan clone said they worked under his department and that he was an annoying, pencil-pushing bureaucrat. Someone else eulogized to the contrary. There were arguments over whether or not he was a fascist or something but no one ever did figure it out. He was a republican and committed to oil interests but seemed otherwise pretty centrist. Culture war stuff was just as big back then but he kept it out of his mouth. It just wasn’t worth it. He was an old-school fiscal conservative type. Described himself as a libertarian once. About the only thing anyone said about him was that he listed Mitt Romney of all people as one of his big inspirations. Romney never commented.
It all faded into the background. It wasn’t clear what any of that was supposed to be a metaphor for. People kept trying to make meaning out of it for years. They still do, in the backends of odd forums and conspiracy chats. He would’ve been in his 60s by now, his term finished a long time ago. Wikipedia says the case is still ongoing. The article is really short. People kept vandalizing it with speculation so it’s locked now. Pundits spilled a lot of ink about the uniquely damaged psychology of the conspiracy theorists but it was always dubious as to whether or not they actually spoke to them. There were probably more articles about that than the governor, or about the people he shot. It was like watching a body left out too long in the warm wet of early western spring, watching it decay into mush and then grow whatever other horrid, inhuman lush might thrive out there, a thick layer of pungent green algae, wildflowers, and flies. Like nature amusing itself playing the simplest of its designs over and over and over. Like the unrecognizable casualties of a housecat. Mere accidents of play.
