The suspect in the Florida State University shootings, who faces first degree murder charges for killing two and injuring five on Thursday, was a member of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, a fascist youth group around the Republican Party, and is a registered Republican voter in Florida. The 20-year-old suspect, Phoenix Ikner, is the stepson of Leon County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Jessica Ikner, who has been with the department for 18 years.
Tallahassee Police Chief Lawrence Revell said at a press conference, “This weapon was a weapon that the deputy previously used” and that “this was a handgun that that deputy used prior to them transitioning to a new handgun, and so it was her personal handgun.” McNeil said the Tallahassee Police were continuing their investigation into how that weapon was used and other weapons Phoenix Ikner might have had access to.
Ikner was a member of the LCSO’s Youth Advisory Council while he was still going to Lincoln High School, according to LCSO spokesperson Shonda Knight, and spent a lot of time around the sheriff’s office. She stated that “being the son of law enforcement, meant he was constantly exposed to firearm safety,” i.e., training in the use of firearms.
Leon County Sheriff Walter A. McNeil said in a press conference hours after the shooting that Ikner was “deeply embedded” in the law enforcement community and “has been steeped in the Leon County Sheriff’s Office family, engaged in a number of training programs, so it’s not a surprise to us that he had access to weapons.” He added that “this event is tragic in more ways than you people in the audience could ever [fathom] from a law enforcement perspective.” Ikner also received training from his stepmother.
A shotgun was also found at the scene but it is unclear if this weapon was used in the attack at Florida State.
Given this, and his stepmother’s access to firearms, it is obvious that this isn’t a crime that would have been prevented by the gun control measures advocated by the Democrats, since none of the proposals involve disarming the police.
Documents obtained by the Miami Herald show that Ikner had an unstable family life, including an instance in which his biological mother was arrested for attempting to kidnap him and take him to her native Norway. Ikner cited this “tragic event” in 2015 when he went to court to change his name from Christian Gunnar Eriksen. Notably, he appeared in his Navy Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps uniform. It isn’t known if Ikner was a member of ROTC at his university or not.
He was at the center of a custody battle since he was a toddler, with his father alleging his mother neglected and abused him. According to the Herald, hundreds of pages of court documents show Ikner grew up in Tallahassee and after 2015 primarily lived with his father, Christopher Ikner, and step-mother Jessica Ikner, whom his father had married in 2010.
Ikner was attending FSU majoring in political science at the time of the shooting. Pictures on the internet of Ikner in a MAGA hat have circulated widely.
According to USA Today, Ikner had a “history of espousing radical conspiracy theories, according to people who knew him.” It said that “news that Ikner was the suspected gunman horrified people who knew him, but they said they weren’t shocked given things he had said publicly.”
“I got into arguments with him in class over how gross the things he said were,” Lucas Luzietti, who was in a federal politics course with Ikner, stated to USA Today. His far-right conspiracy theories and hateful rhetoric included the lie that Joseph Biden stole the 2020 election, a lie used to justify Trump’s violent January 6, 2021 coup, that “Rosa Parks was in the wrong” and black people were ruining his neighborhood. Ikner was reported to have few friends.
Luzietti remembered thinking “this man should not have access to firearms” and said he was “sadly not surprised” that he carried out a shooting. Luzietti recalls Ikner boasting to the class that he had access to firearms.
Notably, the Instagram biography of the accused shooter was changed right before the shooting from a fairly innocuous description to the following disturbing Bible quote: “Jeremiah 51:20—’You are my war club, my weapon for battle; with you I shatter nations, with you I destroy kingdoms.’” This is the same quote used by “The Order,” a violent white supremacist terrorist organization that was part of the “Christian Identity Movement” as some on social media have pointed out.
“The Order,” also known as the Silent Brotherhood, was an openly neo-Nazi terrorist organization active between September 1983 and December 1984. It was implicated in a series of armed robberies, racketeering and the notorious 1984 murder of Jewish radio talk show host Alan Berg.
Their ideology was inspired by The Turner Diaries, both of which called for a race war which called for the extermination of communists, blacks, Jews and “race mixers” in order to form a racially pure society. It called for terrorist acts in order to facilitate this, including mass shootings and up to terrorist attacks with nuclear weapons. A number of mass murders have drawn their inspiration from The Turner Diaries, including the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, 1999 London nail bombings, the racist murder of James Byrd, Jr. in Texas and an estimated over 200 killings since its publication in 1978. A British MP was murdered by a man who purchased the book.
An article in the campus newspaper FSUNews quoted Ikner mocking protesters against Trump’s inauguration on January 20. In the article, viewable here, he said the protesters were “usually pretty entertaining, usually not for good reasons,” and that “I think it’s a little too late, he’s [Trump] already going to be inaugurated on Jan. 20 and there’s not really much you can do unless you outright revolt, and I don’t think anyone wants that.”
According to people who knew Ikner, he espoused bigoted and misogynistic views while attending student meetings at the Tallahassee State College’s Political Discourse Club, then known as the Political Roundtable. He was removed from the Roundtable for violating their “no Nazis” rule, espousing “white supremacist and far-right rhetoric.” Ikner reportedly went on diatribes about how he hated immigrants, LGBTQ people, minorities and the feminist movement (and women in general) according to student Andrea Miranda.
Miranda, 19, said that Ikner claimed “multiculturalism and communism are destroying America” and that he supported the neo-Nazi party in Germany, the AfD. She described him as “sort of like the MAGA ringleader in the group.”
Club president Riley Pusins, 20, recalled Ikner calling protesters against the Gaza genocide and police murder of George Floyd “dirty rats.” He also “joked” that white people are the superior race.
These sort of fascist politics are common to the police force, an arm of the capitalist state which exists to suppress the working class. It is riddled with fascists, a fact that even the government has been forced to admit. It’s very likely that Ikner was politically influenced by the police, as well as by the fascist environment that prevails in the Republican Party and groups like Turning Point USA.