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Comment by yepitwas | Hacker News Reader

The very first reports of the engravings to break, supposedly from FBI sources, just said they had “pro trans” messages.

> The meaning and implications of these engravings is the subject of intense debate, and not at all an objective matter at the moment.

I agree. We can take away some things (like “very online” and some suggestions of certain connections to spheres or activities, like the Helldivers 2 reference) but there’s little more than rather mixed suggestions that could go multiple ways, as far as political affiliation and motivation that we can read from them, so far.

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> The very first reports of the engravings to break, supposedly from FBI sources, just said they had “pro trans” messages.

Not the FBI, and the story is much more complex than that: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/09/12/charlie-kirk-bullets-...

Ah, thanks for the link. I saw several headlines about it when that “news” dropped, but only followed one, and it claimed an FBI source. It may have been even worse than the others, and downstream from them, so to speak.

This is a frequent challenge when following breaking news.

I similarly delayed accepting Charlie Kirk had actually died because the only source I could find was President Trump (and news sources reporting Charlie Kirk's death that, ultimately, seemed to be using President Trump as a source).

Since President Trump is an extremely-well-documented liar, this was not a reliable source. It can be hard to figure out the source for news like this, since news outlets are not in the habit of doing well-disciplined source citation or summarizing sources to make it easy to identify them (in contrast to, say, a research publication).

Yeah at the time (and I’ve yet to see this contradicted?) it seemed like Trump broke the news on that one, which is certainly an unusual way for that to happen, which also made it more reasonable to put that on the “maybe, but let’s see” pile.

(I did believe it, but only because I’d watched the close-view video and regarded survival as all but impossible… without that I’d have “grain of salt”ed it, too)

I also find it very interesting that Netanyahu's post about Charlie Kirk happened at the same time as Trump's. How would he know before the rest of the world such that he could post at the exact same time as Trump?

You have timestamped links for this, of course? This is the first I've heard anyone even claim that Netanyahu said anything about it, and as you can probably see I've been very active in the discussion.

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