Slender Man; Let’s Go Brandon; the Christmas Parade. And the Highland Park Fourth of July mass murderer, Bobby Crimo III—seven killed just days past—who once attended a Trump rally dressed as Waldo of “Where’s Waldo?” fame, and who may or may not have been truly aware of “politics” as such at all. His online life rippled with right-wing hatreds, but he dedicated the panicked days before his crime to a sped-up aesthetic of images and ideologies crashing into one another, sometimes called “schizowave.” It is a vile term, a grotesque romanticization of mental illness; an awful metaphor for the
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