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Daily Bread for 1.29.25: The Connection Between Two Murderous Extremists

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 41. Sunrise is 7:12 and sunset is 5:04, for 9 hours, 52 minutes of daytime. The moon is new with 0.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1845, “The Raven” is published in The Evening Mirror in New York, the first publication with the name of the author, Edgar Allan Poe.


Madison and Nashville killers visited the same online networks:

Moments before 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow opened fire inside her Madison, Wisconsin, school, killing two people and herself last month, a social media account believed to be hers posted a photograph on X showing someone sitting in a bathroom stall and flashing a hand gesture that has become a symbol for white supremacy. 

As news about the shooting broke, another X user responded: “Livestream it.” 

Extremism researchers now believe that second account belonged to 17-year-old Solomon Henderson, who police say walked into his high school cafeteria in Nashville, Tennessee, on Wednesday and fired 10 shots, killing one classmate and then himself. Archives of another X account linked to him show that he posted a similar photo to Rupnow’s in his final moments. 

While there isn’t any evidence that Rupnow and Henderson plotted their attacks together, extremism researchers who have tracked their social media activity told Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica that the two teenagers were active in the same online networks that glorify mass shooters, even crossing paths. Across various social media platforms, the networks trade hateful memes alongside terrorist literature, exchange tips on how to effectively commit attacks and encourage one another to carry out their own.

See Phoebe Petrovic, Madison and Nashville school shooters appear to have crossed paths in online extremist communities (‘A month after a student opened fire at Abundant Life Christian School, another killed a classmate at Antioch High School. Both were active in an internet subculture that glorifies mass shooters and encourages young people to commit attacks themselves’), Wisconsin Watch, January 24, 2025.


Lightning strikes British Airways plane at a Brazil airport:

Video shot by an eyewitness shows the moment lightning strikes a plane’s tail while parked at a gate in Sao Paulo’s International Guarulhos Airport on Jan. 24. (Eyewitness Bernhard Warr said the aircraft was moved away to undergo safety checks after the incident, and that it departed almost six hours after it was scheduled to fly, following repairs of minor damage.)
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