Sep 16, 2025
Sep 15, 2025
The Coming Electro-State
in Jinhua, in China's Zhejiang province. (AFP: Yuan Xinyu)
Why China is becoming the world’s first electrostate
The superpower is dominating the global clean technology sector. It’s not all about climate change.
In April this year, China installed more solar power than Australia has in all its history. In one month.
This isn’t a story about Australia’s poor track record on solar; Australia is a global leader. Rather, this shows the astonishing rate at which China is embracing renewable technologies across every aspect of its society.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking this transformation is driven by a moral obligation to act on climate change.
China’s reasons for this are less about arresting rising temperatures than its desire to stop relying on imported fossil fuels and to fix the pollution caused by them.
The superpower has put its economic might and willpower behind renewable technologies, and by doing so, is accelerating the end of the fossil fuel era and bringing about the age of the electrostate.
“The whole modern industrial economy is built around fossil fuels. Now the whole world is moving away from that and that means that we are rebuilding our economy around emerging clean tech sectors,” said Muyi Yang, the lead China analyst at energy think tank Ember.
“Once the new direction is set, the momentum will become self-sustaining. It will make reversal impossible. I think China now has set its direction towards a clean energy future.
“Can you imagine that the Chinese government will say that, oh, we will go back to fossil car, not the electric cars? That won’t happen. That’s not possible … this momentum is becoming so strong.”
The beginning of the end of fossil fuels
It’s hard to communicate the scale of China’s clean technology rollout but it helps to look back to recent history to appreciate the transformation.
China became the world’s factory at the end of the 20th century, manufacturing cheap, low-quality products. This industrialisation modernised the country but also caused widespread environmental damage and drastic air pollution.
The factories were powered by fossil fuels, causing China’s emissions to skyrocket and it to become the largest polluter in the world.
Chart showing annual emissions for China, US, India, EU and Australia with adjustments for population. China is the largest emitter by a wide margin but its per capita emissions trail the US and Australia.
China overtook the United States for top place in 2006, but the US is still responsible for the most emissions historically, at one-quarter of all emissions.
Still, China’s pivot to renewables wasn’t just about addressing these rising emissions.
With polluted waterways and acrid city smog long ago becoming their own crises, China had to act. Part of that response, starting a decade ago, was a plan called Made in China 2025, which outlined how it would reshape its manufacturing capability to focus on high-tech products, including the ones needed to address climate change.
The authoritarian regime put the heft of the state behind clean technologies at a scale and pace difficult to imagine in most democracies.
It began to invest in all components for renewables, especially wind, solar, electric cars, and batteries that are used for both transport and energy storage. To do this, it used significant government-funded subsidies, said Ember’s Muyi Yang.
“We all understand that young sectors and technologies need some protection for them to grow. It’s like helping a baby to learn how to walk; initially, you need to support them.
“But I think the logic behind China’s policy support is always clear — this support is not meant to be pumped up indefinitely.”
When China rose to industrial dominance in the 1990s, it realised that it could maximise output by developing hubs where all parts of a supply chain for a product are built in the same region. The same approach was applied to renewables, meaning battery factories were established near car plants, as an example.
“It’s not about subsidies. It’s about sound planning, sustained commitment, and targeted support,” Yang said.
As the Made In China plan unfolded, more and more power was needed to fuel these energy-hungry factories and the lifestyles of the burgeoning middle class. To keep up, China built new coal-fired power stations, even as it was installing more wind and solar.
This “dissonance” between China’s booming renewables and coal has meant China is painted both as a climate hero and a villain.
It’s also meant that emissions kept rising.
Renewables boom
A decade after the Made in China plan began, the country’s clean energy transformation is staggering.
“It’s a really interesting policy because it’s a 10-year plan to become a world-leading clean tech manufacturer, which they’ve outright achieved,” said Caroline Wang, the China engagement lead at the think tank Climate Energy Finance. “They’ve made themselves indispensable in the new kind of global economy.”
China is home to half of the world’s solar, half of the world’s wind power and half of the world’s electric cars.
“In the month of April alone, 45.2GW of solar was added, more than Australia’s total cumulative solar power capacity,” Caroline Wang said.
“China’s renewable capacity has exponentially increased and that has also contributed to the drop in coal, in coal use and emissions. There is now a structural kind of decline of coal.”
That’s already having an impact on emissions.
Recent analysis from Carbon Brief found the country’s emissions dropped in the first quarter of 2025 by 1.6 per cent. China produces 30 per cent of the world’s emissions, making this a critical milestone for climate action.
With its unmatched economies of scale, this dramatic acceleration has also brought down the cost of electrification across the world and made China the world leader in clean technologies. Chinese-made electric cars are becoming more dominant on Australian roads — something that’s already happened for the solar panels and batteries installed across Australian homes.
“China has successfully helped the rest of the world lower the bar for them to embark on the transition. This makes it easier for many other countries to jump on board,” Ember’s Muyi Yang said.
“The transition has to be affordable, otherwise it will be extremely difficult for many developing countries.”
China’s clean energy exports in 2024 alone have already shaved 1 per cent off global emissions outside of China, according to Carbon Brief, and will continue to do so for the next 30 years.
Caroline Wang points out that this green era has also brought major economic benefits.
“It drove 10 per cent of their GDP last year — just the one industry, clean energy. It’s overtaken real estate, and that says a lot because real estate was the driving force of their economy until a few years ago. But now it’s been overtaken by clean energy,” she said.
Energy security as an electrostate
China’s renewables expansion is also striking because it could not be more different to the direction of another world superpower, the United States, under the leadership of President Donald Trump.
Casting aside the climate damage it will wreak, the US is in a position to return to its “drill, baby, drill” roots because the country produces more than enough fossil fuels to cover its own needs.
That’s not the case for China. One of the key reasons it has pivoted to electrification is to get away from its dependence on imported fossil fuels.
“I think there’s some deep strategic thinking … it’s not only about the environmental obligation or international commitment, and it can also not be fully explained by economic benefit in terms of jobs and investment,” Yang said.
“Energy is a basic input for economic activities. Energy security is critical because it’s critical for supporting a functioning economy.”
“China sees the old, the conventional fossil fuel growth model as not sustainable. And it is becoming increasingly unable to sustain long-term prosperity.”
When the world’s economies became hooked on fossil fuels, they became dependent on the countries that could supply them, and the price of fossil fuels increasingly dictated global markets.
“This dates back to issues in the 1970s with the [oil] crisis,” said Jorrit Gosens, a fellow at the Centre for Climate and Energy Policy at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the ANU.
“That’s really when people start to think about energy security, especially when we talk about China.
“China typically is described as very rich in coal, but very poor in natural gas and oil.”
Electrification is changing that, and China — the world’s biggest oil importer — is already weaning itself off with electric cars.
“If you go to Beijing today, you can honestly stand at intersections with four lanes going every way and it’ll be quiet as a mouse. The noisiest thing coming past will be a creaky bicycle,” Dr Gosens remarked.
Last year, crude oil imports to China fell for the first time in two decades, with the exception of the recent pandemic. China is now expected to hit peak oil in 2027, according to the International Energy Agency.
This is already having an impact on projections for global oil production, as China had driven two-thirds of the growth in oil demand in the decade to 2023.
The end of the petrostate?
The 20th century was dominated by countries rich in fossil fuels, and many of the world’s conflicts fought over access, power and exploitation of them.
Done right, electrification could change that too, as most countries will be producing their own electricity.
“Even if you have pretty poor-quality natural resources, you can still squeeze quite a bit of electricity out of a solar panel. It’s really changing the geopolitics,” the ANU’s Dr Gosens said.
“Renewable energy is the most secure form of energy that there is because you just eliminate the need for imports.
“But also the cost of it, right? It’s a stable cost. You lock it in as soon as you build it. You know what the price of your electricity is going to be. You get insulated from both those risks if you have more renewable energy.”
For Australia, one of the world’s largest exporters of coal and gas, there is plenty to take from this, with China’s furious electrification paving the way for the rest of the world to follow.
“Even if we have these climate wars here still … we can bicker about how quickly we should transition away from fossil fuels domestically [but] the rest of the world is ultimately going to decide how much they’ll be buying of our coal, gas and iron ore,” Dr Gosens said.
“I think that’s the biggest risk — that we fail to prepare for something and that these changes will be much quicker than we currently anticipate.”
For Climate Energy Finance’s Caroline Wang, it’s in Australia’s interest to be clear-eyed about what’s happening in China.
“I think a gap in Australia and other Western countries is knowledge and understanding. China is a complex country … it’s got good and bad. For the energy transition space, which is full of complexity, there’s a real need, for our strategic national interests, for Australia to understand what is happening in China.”
Finding hope in national self-interest and security might seem strange, but for Wang, China’s transformation makes her more optimistic about the climate crisis.
“This is the world’s largest emitter, the largest population. If they’ve managed to do it in quite a short time — a decade — it’s a kind of achievement that we haven’t seen any other country achieve. And so it’s very inspiring. Seeing that on the ground gave me hope for other countries, including Australia … there are lessons there to be learned.”
Today's Charlie Thing
Suspect Tyler Robinson allegedly inscribed messages on bullet casings that reference video games and internet culture—but they hardly point toward a coherent ideology.
On Friday morning, Tyler Robinson—the suspected killer of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk—was taken into custody after a two-day manhunt. (According to an affidavit obtained by People, he’s likely to face charges, including aggravated murder.) At a public briefing, FBI director Kash Patel and Utah governor Spencer Cox revealed that the shooter’s bullet casings were allegedly inscribed with bizarre messages: One read “Notices bulges OwO what’s this?” Unfired cartridges in the magazine allegedly read “Hey fascist! Catch!,”followed by five arrow symbols: one up, one right, and three down. Two others read “Oh Bella ciao Bella ciao Bella ciao ciao ciao” and “If you read this, you are gay lmao.” Photographs of the ammunition have not yet been made public, and it’s possible that there are minor discrepancies in punctuation—but none that would make these phrases appear any less nonsensical. That is, unless you have a passing familiarity with gamer and internet-forum culture.
The “OwO” casing, for instance, appears to be referencing a popular meme making fun of furry culture, a niche lifestyle in which people create alter egos styled after anthropomorphic animals. The combination of arrows found on another matches the combination of buttons players use to call in a bomb strike in the video game Helldivers 2, a Starship Troopers–style parody of a fascist interstellar empire. The Italian words are the lyrics to “Bella Ciao,” an antifascist Italian folk song that was prominently featured in the Netflix series Money Heist. And that last phrase appears to be little more than a joke meant to antagonize or troll the reader.
As of yet, little is known about Robinson’s alleged motivations or ideology. But the few details surrounding the 22-year old point toward a troubling trend: young shooter suspects who communicate primarily via obtuse memes and digitally inflected irony.
All sorts of young adults are familiar with the culture of video games, Twitch streamers, and YouTube, speaking a language completely foreign to those who do not spend as much time online. Is that language inherently sinister? No more than, say “Skibidi Toilet,” a series of crude animated shorts about toilets from which talking heads emerge. (There’s a movie in the works.) None of the phrases Robinson allegedly wrote are known code words for anything nefarious; they signal little beyond a connection to a contextless internet, where memes take on a life of their own and are used by the benign and malignant alike.
Some memes, however, aren’t so neutral. The young men who admired, and still admire, Charlie Kirk tend to be extremely online—which doesn’t necessarily mean that they all share exactly the same ideology. Internecine conflict between conservative factions is common, both on social media and at events for young conservatives. The most notable of these are the “Groyper Wars” of 2019. “Groypers” are fans of white nationalist agitator Nick Fuentes who like to hide their racism behind ironic jokes; when Kirk began making an effort to mainstream his ultra-right-wing Turning Point USA movement, Fuentes instructed them to publicly troll Kirk.
A Facebook photo in which Robinson appears to reference a Groyper meme has led to early speculation that Kirk’s killing may have been an outgrowth of these intra-far-right skirmishes. But another feature of the modern far-right is an embrace of the post-truth huckster. In these circles, it’s always possible that someone is playing a character—or will claim to be doing so, muddying the waters so no one can accuse them of having a sincere belief beyond the desire to rile up their targets. For people like this, the whole world is a forum board, where lewd public comments and real-world violence are becoming increasingly interchangeable. (Consider the messages left behind by the deceased shooter of Annunciation Catholic School, which were full of references to both other shooters and innocuous memes.)
In every respect, the circumstances surrounding Kirk’s murder are alarming for those with the understandable impulse to make some kind of sense out of terrifying events. It is true that real-life violence is the end result of our cultural coarsening. It is also important to remember that Robinson’s generation is entering public life with frames of reference that are totally foreign to its elders, regardless of individual ideology. We cannot properly comprehend the harm of bad actors or the concerns of the innocent until we have taken the time to learn their language—and sometimes, even then we won’t understand.
Parenting In A Black Pill World
I've learned more than I've wanted to about the dark web, and how easy it is for people - especially teenagers and young adults - to get sucked down the Way-Too-Fuckin'-Right rabbit hole.
Today's Keith
You can't kill your way out of your problems.
Authoritarians have never - and will never - understand this. They try to dictate generic, one-size-fits-all solutions, and when it becomes clear that not everybody will comply - and in fact, many are simply unable to comply - they always go for some version of The Final Solution. Always.
The Jobs Thing
Unemployment
+ Inflation
Long-term unemployment at post-pandemic high, straining workers and economy
More Americans are experiencing joblessness for six months or more, a sign of labor market’s weakness ahead of the Federal Reserve’s highly anticipated meeting this week.
More Americans are facing stretches of unemployment of six months or more, a worrisome sign for the U.S. economy.
More than 1 in 4 workers without jobs have been unemployed for at least half a year, new data shows. That number is a post-pandemic high and a level typically only seen during periods of economic turmoil.
Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.
In all, more than 1.9 million Americans had been unemployed “long term” in August, meaning they have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, a critical cliff when it comes to finding a job. That’s nearly double the 1 million people who were in a similar position in early 2023.
“We have a low-hire, low-fire environment — and that stagnancy means there aren’t a lot of new positions for people to move into,” said Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at the jobs site Indeed. “The probability of becoming unemployed has not gone up that much, but if you become unemployed, it’s much harder to find a job.”
Six months of unemployment often signals a turning point in a person’s job search, according to economists. They’ve likely run out of unemployment insurance benefits and severance payments by then, leaving them on shakier financial ground. People who have been unemployed for more than six months are also more likely to become discouraged and stop looking for work altogether.
The data shows how broadly the job market has cooled ahead of the Federal Reserve’s highly-anticipated meeting this week, when policymakers are expected to lower interest rates for the first time this year. Two months of weaker-than-expected jobs numbers, including widespread revisions, have led policymakers to voice concerns that the labor market could continue deteriorating.
Since 1950, the long-term unemployment rate has exceeded 25 percent in only a few other instances and always after a recession: for one month, June 1983, after an inflation-fueled recession; for an eight-year stretch following the Great Recession in 2009; and for about a year and half during the coronavirus pandemic.
The pickup in months-long unemployment coincides with broader cooling in the labor market. Although the overall unemployment rate, 4.3 percent, is near longtime lows, many employers have frozen hiring as they wait to see how new tariffs and other economic policies will affect business. Layoffs are rising, too, with weekly claims for unemployment insurance reaching the highest level since October 2021.
For the unemployed, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find new work — now an average six months, a month longer than before the pandemic, according to Labor Department data. And for the first time in four years, there are more unemployed people in the United States than there are job openings.
“I have 15-plus years in IT, I thought I should be able to step into any job,” said Steve Beal, 47, who has been unemployed since March 2024, when he was laid off from a six-figure job at Best Buy’s corporate office in Minnesota. “But so far I’ve applied to at least 300 jobs and it’s all rejections. Even with referrals, networking, résumé services, I haven’t gotten anywhere.”
Separate data this week showed that Americans’ confidence in their ability to find a new job is at a record low. A survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that people say there’s less than a 45 percent chance they could find a job in the next three months if they were to suddenly become unemployed, which is the lowest reading since the survey began in 2013.
Felicia Enriquez, a paralegal in Los Angeles, lost her job in July 2024. In the 14 months since, she’s applied to hundreds of openings without success. Local government jobs have dried up, and even temp agencies are coming up empty, she said.
Her unemployment benefits — $400 a week — ran out in February, and she’s six months behind on rent. So far Enriquez’s landlord has been understanding, but she said she worries about what will happen to her and her 16-year-old daughter when that good will runs out. Already, she’s relying on food stamps to buy groceries.
“It gets harder the longer it gets. That’s the vicious part,” the 47-year-old said. “At the beginning, when you lose your job you have money saved up, you get unemployment, things are okay. But when that runs out, then you really have to worry.”
Studies have found that workers who are unemployed long-term are less likely to find jobs than others. They’re also more likely to drop out of the workforce entirely. A 2014 study by economists at Princeton University found that nearly half of those unemployed for seven months or longer, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, ended up leaving the labor force.
“The longer people linger in unemployment, the more likely they are to lose their contacts and connections, and after an extended period of time, their skills can depreciate,” said Francine Blau, a labor economist and professor emeritus at Cornell University. “And there is the possibility that employers see [long-term unemployment] as a sign of a less desirable worker.”
Finding work has been especially tough for younger workers and recent college graduates, who are entering a job market with few entry-level openings. The share of unemployed workers who are new to the labor force remains elevated after hitting a 37-year high earlier this summer.
Nelson E. Caballero graduated in December with a degree in communications from Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia. He said he’s emailed his résumé and cover letter to every public relations firm in the Washington, D.C., area with entry-level openings but has gotten just three responses in nine months: All telling him they’re not hiring at the moment.
The 27-year-old is living with his parents and fretting about what comes next.
“I feel stuck,” Caballero said. “Moving out, buying a car, getting married — it all feels like a pipe dream right now. I don’t mind living with mom and dad, but they can’t keep supporting me forever.”
In Grantsville, Utah, Jessica Howard lost her job seven months ago at a health care technology company, after 17 years there. Since then, she’s spruced up her résumé several times and applied to nearly 400 jobs. But finding a new position feels impossible, she said, especially since she’s competing with many others laid off this year.
For now, Howard has temporarily put her mortgage on hold and is using savings to pay for food, gas and other necessities. But it’s been tough to keep sending out applications and preparing for interviews After months of trying.
“They say not to take it personally, but after a while the rejections really get to you,” she said. “It kills your confidence and you start to wonder: Do I really have these skills? Have I ever had these skills? It starts to break you down emotionally.”
+ Inflation
= Stagflation
There's a strong probability we're already in the kind of recession that played hell with an awful lot of Americans in the 70s.
It was a time of transition. We were trying to go from the glory days of post-WW2 expansion of the empire to actual globalization. It was also when we really began to find out that we had taught the world how to beat us at our own game, but we got all pissed off when they started to show they could do it.
Japan and Germany were building better cars and electronics, and making better and cheaper steel. France and Spain were turning out American-branded TVs and home appliances that were as good as any built here, and selling at a lower price.
Throw in a couple of nasty oil shocks, and we ended the decade in double-digit inflation, which gave the money-grubbers all the incentive, opportunity, and justification they needed to buy more congress critters and begin dismantling the middle class.
History doesn't repeat - but it sure as fuck rhymes. So here we go again.
Long-term unemployment at post-pandemic high, straining workers and economy
More Americans are experiencing joblessness for six months or more, a sign of labor market’s weakness ahead of the Federal Reserve’s highly anticipated meeting this week.
More Americans are facing stretches of unemployment of six months or more, a worrisome sign for the U.S. economy.
More than 1 in 4 workers without jobs have been unemployed for at least half a year, new data shows. That number is a post-pandemic high and a level typically only seen during periods of economic turmoil.
Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.
In all, more than 1.9 million Americans had been unemployed “long term” in August, meaning they have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, a critical cliff when it comes to finding a job. That’s nearly double the 1 million people who were in a similar position in early 2023.
“We have a low-hire, low-fire environment — and that stagnancy means there aren’t a lot of new positions for people to move into,” said Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at the jobs site Indeed. “The probability of becoming unemployed has not gone up that much, but if you become unemployed, it’s much harder to find a job.”
Six months of unemployment often signals a turning point in a person’s job search, according to economists. They’ve likely run out of unemployment insurance benefits and severance payments by then, leaving them on shakier financial ground. People who have been unemployed for more than six months are also more likely to become discouraged and stop looking for work altogether.
The data shows how broadly the job market has cooled ahead of the Federal Reserve’s highly-anticipated meeting this week, when policymakers are expected to lower interest rates for the first time this year. Two months of weaker-than-expected jobs numbers, including widespread revisions, have led policymakers to voice concerns that the labor market could continue deteriorating.
Since 1950, the long-term unemployment rate has exceeded 25 percent in only a few other instances and always after a recession: for one month, June 1983, after an inflation-fueled recession; for an eight-year stretch following the Great Recession in 2009; and for about a year and half during the coronavirus pandemic.
The pickup in months-long unemployment coincides with broader cooling in the labor market. Although the overall unemployment rate, 4.3 percent, is near longtime lows, many employers have frozen hiring as they wait to see how new tariffs and other economic policies will affect business. Layoffs are rising, too, with weekly claims for unemployment insurance reaching the highest level since October 2021.
For the unemployed, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find new work — now an average six months, a month longer than before the pandemic, according to Labor Department data. And for the first time in four years, there are more unemployed people in the United States than there are job openings.
“I have 15-plus years in IT, I thought I should be able to step into any job,” said Steve Beal, 47, who has been unemployed since March 2024, when he was laid off from a six-figure job at Best Buy’s corporate office in Minnesota. “But so far I’ve applied to at least 300 jobs and it’s all rejections. Even with referrals, networking, résumé services, I haven’t gotten anywhere.”
Separate data this week showed that Americans’ confidence in their ability to find a new job is at a record low. A survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that people say there’s less than a 45 percent chance they could find a job in the next three months if they were to suddenly become unemployed, which is the lowest reading since the survey began in 2013.
Felicia Enriquez, a paralegal in Los Angeles, lost her job in July 2024. In the 14 months since, she’s applied to hundreds of openings without success. Local government jobs have dried up, and even temp agencies are coming up empty, she said.
Her unemployment benefits — $400 a week — ran out in February, and she’s six months behind on rent. So far Enriquez’s landlord has been understanding, but she said she worries about what will happen to her and her 16-year-old daughter when that good will runs out. Already, she’s relying on food stamps to buy groceries.
“It gets harder the longer it gets. That’s the vicious part,” the 47-year-old said. “At the beginning, when you lose your job you have money saved up, you get unemployment, things are okay. But when that runs out, then you really have to worry.”
Studies have found that workers who are unemployed long-term are less likely to find jobs than others. They’re also more likely to drop out of the workforce entirely. A 2014 study by economists at Princeton University found that nearly half of those unemployed for seven months or longer, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, ended up leaving the labor force.
“The longer people linger in unemployment, the more likely they are to lose their contacts and connections, and after an extended period of time, their skills can depreciate,” said Francine Blau, a labor economist and professor emeritus at Cornell University. “And there is the possibility that employers see [long-term unemployment] as a sign of a less desirable worker.”
Finding work has been especially tough for younger workers and recent college graduates, who are entering a job market with few entry-level openings. The share of unemployed workers who are new to the labor force remains elevated after hitting a 37-year high earlier this summer.
Nelson E. Caballero graduated in December with a degree in communications from Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia. He said he’s emailed his résumé and cover letter to every public relations firm in the Washington, D.C., area with entry-level openings but has gotten just three responses in nine months: All telling him they’re not hiring at the moment.
The 27-year-old is living with his parents and fretting about what comes next.
“I feel stuck,” Caballero said. “Moving out, buying a car, getting married — it all feels like a pipe dream right now. I don’t mind living with mom and dad, but they can’t keep supporting me forever.”
In Grantsville, Utah, Jessica Howard lost her job seven months ago at a health care technology company, after 17 years there. Since then, she’s spruced up her résumé several times and applied to nearly 400 jobs. But finding a new position feels impossible, she said, especially since she’s competing with many others laid off this year.
For now, Howard has temporarily put her mortgage on hold and is using savings to pay for food, gas and other necessities. But it’s been tough to keep sending out applications and preparing for interviews After months of trying.
“They say not to take it personally, but after a while the rejections really get to you,” she said. “It kills your confidence and you start to wonder: Do I really have these skills? Have I ever had these skills? It starts to break you down emotionally.”
It's On Us
We're going to get ourselves outa of this. We'll get through it, and we'll come out the other side - changed, to be sure, but we'll have a chance to make those changes for the good.
Sep 14, 2025
Something About The Guns
Wow - you saw the news last week, right?
Two:
Which story?
One:
The shooting.
Two:
Which one?
One:
At the school.
Two:
Which one?
YOU ARE NINE KINDS
OF FUCKED UP, AMERICA
Colorado officials said Desmond Holly, 16, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot after injuring two students at Evergreen High School, had been "radicalized by an extremist network," but did not provide further details.
According to the ADL report, several school shooters in the past year, including Holly, had been active on the same website, which the organization says is known for hosting content backing white supremacist ideas as well as material portraying graphic violence against both people and animals. People can navigate to the website, WatchPeopleDie, and access a forum where they can watch real images of beheadings, shootings and other violence. The site started on Reddit, before being banned in March 2019.
"We're talking about thousands of people who are on these spaces," ADL Senior Vice President of Counter-Extremism and Intelligence, Oren Segal, told CBS News. "There's no friction to access— anybody can do it."
Beverly Kingston, the director of Colorado University's Center For The Study and Prevention of Violence, told CBS Colorado that school shooters often exhibit similarities in their behavior and have been known to pay tribute to other mass shooters. The website Holly used was also frequented, the ADL says, by other individuals who have carried out school shootings. They include 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, who shot and killed a student and a teacher at Abundant Life Christian school in Wisconsin last year, and Solomon Henderson, a 17-year-old who committed a shooting that killed one and wounded another at Antioch High School in Nashville in January.
Holly, who posted a photo of Rupnow on TikTok, appeared to have joined the site in December 2024, in the month between the Madison and Nashville shootings, according to the ADL.
"Many of these online spaces are glorifying these young, violent shooter types, where they're even referencing one another," Segal said.
Holly's most recent profile photo on TikTok was of Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in California in 2014 and had a history of engaging in and spewing misogynistic content online, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The 16-year-old posted a photo of himself holding a gun next to a box of ammunition on his X account two hours before the shooting. On social media, Holly showcased his collection of tactical gear, which featured extremist symbols. In a now-deleted TikTok post that contained references to a 2019 mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, he engaged with a comment encouraging him to "make a move," according to ADL.
CBS News reached out to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office to see whether the department's findings were consistent with those in the ADL report. A spokesperson said they cannot comment as the investigation remains open.
The domain of Watchpeopledie is registered by proxy, according to a search of the "whois" registration database – and hides the names of the owners. Cloudflare is used as the registrar for their main domain, Segal at the ADL said, and uses Cloudflare-owned IP addresses, which means that WPD is either hosted on Cloudflare or they are using their passthrough services.
Segal said Cloudflare allows it to remain … that it's basically a service provider not taking action and "allowing the hosting of the site."
A spokesperson for Cloudflare told CBS News that it is not the hosting provider for the website, adding that the company "typically does not host websites and doesn't have the capacity to remove content that is hosted by others."
Segal said that ADL shares their findings with law enforcement agencies across the country. He did not specify an agency or the specific report. Segal said understanding incidents perpetrated by people influenced by nihilistic online spaces as a broader trend rather than one-offs could be a step toward preventing violence.
"We need to see that there's a connection there, there's a through line," Segal said. "There's a common theme and a common thread, which are these online platforms."
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