A Fan Of Charlie Kirk And Andrew Tate Killed Two Teenage Girls Last Week
He had been stalking one of them for months.
“I built a great following on TikTok, with 39,000 followers, that I have grown since 2020, and I want to thank each and every single one of you,” 17-year-old video game streamer Vincent Battiloro said in a video last Tuesday morning. “I love you all to absolute death. And regardless of what happens, if you don’t see me streaming for a little bit, you’ll understand why.”
The “why” would be because, the night before, Battiloro intentionally drove into best friends Maria Niotis and Isabella Salas, at 70 miles an hour in a 25 mile an hour zone, while they were riding their e-bikes in the small New Jersey town where they all lived.
The other “why” here would be because Battiloro had been stalking and harassing Niotis for at least three months by then. He’d frequently park outside her house and refuse to leave. He harassed her online, on the phone, and then bragged about it on his streaming channel. Bragged about how his uncle was the chief of police in a neighboring town, so nothing would ever happen to him. He made videos of himself ordering pizzas to her house, claiming it was revenge for her “making fun” of Charlie Kirk’s death.
“Hey, whenever Maria sees the pizza guy come, better think of Charlie Kirk for making fun of his fucking death. Stupid ass clown. Just remember that,” he said. “She made fun of Charlie Kirk’s death on TikTok on a repost. Maybe her mother should monitor her social media activity.”
Inside Edition — which, credit where it’s due, was one of the only national news outlets to mention the Charlie Kirk of it all — reported that Niotis had initially rejected Battiloro’s advances. Unfortunately, that’s a movie we’ve all seen before.
In the video, Battiloro is asked if he would ever go and watch the pizzas get delivered — to which he says, “I did that the last time, but the mother saw me pull up, in the car, and I got tracked and the police, you know, did what they did.”
Whatever it was, it clearly wasn’t enough.
Niotis’s family had, according to friends and neighbors, reported all of this to the police, who did nothing. It’s possible that this was due to his uncle being police chief in a neighboring town, or due to the fact that his father had been a cop as well, but it’s hardly unusual. Victims of stalking are regularly told that police can’t do anything until the stalker does something more serious than ordering a pizza to their house.
As we have noted many, many times, the Supreme Court has determined that the police do not have an obligation to protect anyone from harm, even if they have an actual order of protection. In the case linked in that last sentence, a woman had called the police to report that her estranged husband, whom she had an order of protection against, had just called her to tell her that he had taken their children to an amusement park. She called the police, who didn’t bother doing anything about it until he showed up at the police station several hours later, guns blazing and the dead bodies of his three daughters in the back of his truck. The Court determined police had done nothing wrong. So as much as I’d like to blame the lack of action on nepotism, it’s pretty much par for the course.
In his videos, Bartirollo claimed that Niotis had falsely accused him of sending her “child pornography” (given their ages, this could be a picture of himself or someone else their own age), and that he’d been barred from going to school as a result of this. It’s not clear if that is where this all started or if she was claiming that this was part of the harassment.
“I’m a nice kid. I’m 17 years old with a good family by my side, and these allegations have been ruining everything. It is a shame,” Battiloro said in the video he streamed the day after killing Maria Niotis and Isabella Salas. Even after literally ending two lives, he still saw himself as the victim. I wonder where he learned this behavior?
The Right has spent the better part of a month crying that the Left is inciting violence against them by calling people Nazis and fascists just because they express an admiration for Francisco Franco, a desire to give people Pinochet-style “helicopter rides,” or order military takeovers of cities they don’t like. Or even just for criticizing Kirk and others who hold such views, by being horrified by the things he said about women, LGBTQ+ people and people of color.
Since then, there’s been this double murder, courtesy of a white, conservative male. There was, on the same day Kirk was killed, a white supremacist school shooter in Colorado. There was Joshua Cole, who was arrested after threatening to shoot up an Abilene, Texas, pride event in order to “pay them back for taking out Charlie Kirk.”
Just this weekend, the house of a judge who criticized the Trump administration burned down. While it’s not known yet if it was arson or some other cause, South Carolina Circuit Court Judge Diane Goodstein had been receiving death threats for weeks after having blocked the state from giving voters’ data — including “names, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and Social Security numbers” — to the Department of Justice. Goodstein was not home at the time of the incident, but at least three family members were, and have been hospitalized with serious injuries.
And we all know what the statistics are from before that day.
You’ll notice that there has not been any hysteria from the Right about this incident, the way there was about Kirk or even about Iryna Zarutska, the 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee murdered on a train by a mentally ill person. This doesn’t make them feel unsafe. They’re not fretting about how kids can’t ride bikes in the suburbs without worrying that some angry white video game streamer will run them over. Maybe that’s because the part where he was angry at the girl over Charlie Kirk comments or his fondness for Andrew Tate somehow didn’t make it out of the local reporting in New Jersey. It wasn’t mentioned at all in the New York Post’s article on the attack, which is par for the course, but it wasn’t mentioned in the New York Times’ or CBS’s either.
It could be that.
Somehow, when it’s a straight conservative white guy who is not a part of any other subgroup they have a particular issue with, he’s just a lone wolf who was probably crazy, anyway. He’s an individual. He doesn’t represent the group, writ large. Anyone else commits a crime and it’s reflective of their entire gender, their sexuality, their race, their political orientation, and, if not that, of the liberal area in which they live.
And yet, even if “making fun” of Charlie Kirk’s death were only the impetus for that particular pizza delivery prank and not the murder, it’s not irrelevant that he was a fan. Kirk was an extreme sexist who did not believe women should have careers but rather that their only value was in submitting to their husbands and taking care of children. Battiloro also expressed admiration for Andrew Tate. We all know what Andrew Tate thinks of women.
Battiloro and young men like him are being conditioned by various influencers to alternately hate and resent women, to believe they are being victimized by women, to feel entitled to women, and to believe that women are their inferiors and must do as they say (as per God). When they are surrounded by a right-wing culture in which #RepealThe19th is a popular hashtag and influencers (even female ones) regularly make the argument that giving women the vote “ruined” the country? When they are told that empathy is a sin? What happens when a boy whose mind has been poisoned like that gets rejected? When he has some kind of other issue with a girl?
Well, unfortunately, sometimes it’s things like this.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
These putrid little fucking right wing boys are out of control. And the video game community and places like Discord and even Steam are breeding grounds for them. They steep and stew in it and are just vile and fucking dangerous.
I don't know what the solution is to this. But they are utterly convinced of their own righteousness and think "woke" is the problem. Here's an example:
"That's interesting but its woke doing all the murdering, destruction of public property and trolling\threatening people online. The right are not doing any of these things ...LOL
Woke is hate, woke is violence, woke is death, woke doesn't entertain people it divides them. Therefore it must be ripped from gaming and movies. There's no debate about this, the people have already decided, its just going to take some time because woke won't admit it lost the culture war."
THEY have lost the culture war and that's why they are acting out violently. The existence of "woke" decent people reminds them every minute of every day what pathetic, lowdown, dirty, vile, disgusting, repulsive BROKEN FUCKING WORMS they are!
From the linked article: "It’s unclear what, exactly, precipitated the feud."
No it isn't.