Transcription
I knew the Sue Klebold video was divisive, and people would disagree. But a content creator made a video claiming I blatantly lied in my video. So here are my regrets, corrections, and responses to the criticism of the Sue Klebold video.
At 1 minute and 9 seconds, he says that nowhere in Sue's Ted Talk does she state that she couldn't have known that Dylan would turn out to be a school shooter. Sue doesn't say anywhere in her Ted Talk that she couldn't have known that Dylan would turn out to be a school shooter, nor that nobody could have known that Dylan would turn out to be a school shooter.
In 2017, we have the Ted Talk, and she ends the talk with this statement: "In the end, what I know comes down to this: the tragic fact is that even the most vigilant and responsible of us may not be able to help. But for love's sake, we must never stop trying to know the unknowable. Thank you."
This end quote comes after another segment where she talks about how she knows that her loss can't compare to what other families lost. Here's the full clip in its context so that you can see how the Ted Talk was presented: "I know that I will live with this tragedy, with these multiple tragedies, for the rest of my life. I know that in the minds of many, what I lost can't compare to what the other families lost. I know my struggle doesn't make theirs any easier. I know there are even some who think I don't have the right to any pain, but only to a life of permanent penance. In the end, what I know comes down to this."
So right before the end quote, she references fault, pain, and loss, and whether she should have the right to live without permanent penance. Sue then ends the talk with the quote I used in my video about how we should try to know the unknowable, the unknowable of course referencing Dylan's derangement. I don't think I used this quote out of context.
But in Morrie's video, he said it came directly after a segment about mental health, and he claims I took everything out of context. When Sue talks about the unknowable in a Ted Talk, she's wrapping up a talk on depression. She's saying that you don't always know how someone is feeling and how they're thinking. This is misleading because he's trying to make the audience think I took her conclusion out of context. I didn't.
In fact, Sue has been painfully consistent with her messaging. She blames herself for being ignorant and not knowing what was going on with Dylan, but at the same time, she says it's unknowable. Sue cannot say that she takes accountability for ignorance and also at the same time claim it is impossible to know. Both of these statements cannot be true at the same time. It's so damn clever what Sue does.
Here's a quote from an Oprah article that Morrie uses to both prove that Sue has taken accountability and that I am this big, big liar: "I long to talk talked to Dylan one last time and asked him what he'd been thinking. I spoke to him in my thoughts and prayed for understanding. I concluded that he must not have loved me because love would have prevented him from doing what he did. And though at moments I was angry with him, mostly I thought that I was the one who needed his forgiveness because I'd failed to see that he needed help."
So here, Sue seemingly takes accountability because she states that she needs Dylan's forgiveness because she failed to see that he needed help. And Sue later starts to waffle. She points out how no one saw that Dylan was depressed and that there were no signs. And even if there were signs, there might not be anything anyone could have done. This seemingly is the opposite of taking accountability. And this is the same playbook she uses in her Ted Talk. She seemingly takes accountability early on, but "the tragedy convinced me that I failed as a parent, and it's partially this sense of failure that brings me here today." And then, "for years after the tragedy, I comb through memories trying to figure out exactly where I failed as a parent, but there are no simple answers. I can't give you any solutions." "Is that even the most vigilant and responsible of us may not be able to help?" This isn't accountability.
And there are two kinds of people who listen to Sue. There are those of you who are being swindled, and then there's people like myself who are looking at the larger context. And in the same way that you can't say that I changed my behavior and took accountability, and I think it's really important to hold people accountable for mistakes, and in the same breath say, "Hop on board the toxic gossip train because what everyone is saying is lies, and I won't take responsibility for the rumors that are wrong."
If those quotes sounded familiar, it's because it's from Miranda Sings' infamous apology video where she does not take accountability. So if you wanted to make me look like a fool, you could scroll up in any article or rewind any clip I used in my video and declare that Sue did, in fact, apologize and take accountability. But she doesn't. She's very explicit. But the context and the overall messaging matters. Yes, you can cherry-pick segments where Sue technically feels bad or has regret or is sorry, but in the same way that Miranda never takes accountability, Sue's overall messaging is that she is not responsible for Dylan.
And this leads me to my biggest error in the video. When researching this topic, I wrote down interesting quotes and all sorts of information and attributed this quote to Sue: "She says things like this in her book: 'The ultimate message of this book is terrifying. You may not know your own children. And worse yet, your children may be unknowable to you. The stranger you fear may be your own son or daughter.'" While it was from her book, it was from The Forewarn, which was written by Solomon. And I will make that correction in the video, and I stand corrected.
However, I think it's important to note that Sue's Ted Talk and other statements she's made, uh, throughout her media appearances agree with Solomon and his conclusion, almost eerily with the exact same verbiage and words. It's almost as if he's summarizing her book in the intro. Wait, that is exactly what he did. Okay, well, yes, I misattributed this quote, but this was a mistake. It's not the same thing as intentionally lying or deceiving.
At 1 minute and 31 seconds, Morrie says there was no way for Sue to know that Dylan would have turned out to be a school shooter, and yet Timmy just brushes over that as if that suggestion is silly, even though it's the truth. And this is just a straw man. I never claimed Sue could have known this. Uh, I made the case in the video that she was a bad parent.
And so this is where we come across another major contention. Some people think Sue and parents in general have zero accountability, and some believe they have 100% accountability. As where I'm at, I'm somewhere in the middle. In my video, I conclude that the police, the school, society, and Sue are to blame. My academic background is in sociology, so my bias is that we are a product of our environment, and I blame Sue for being a bad mom. I even explicitly make this point clear in the video that I don't think she was an evil villain who beat her son in a basement. Nobody is claiming that Sue beat Dylan in a basement dungeon. It's just that she was a bad mom, and I'd argue that she doesn't have anything to teach us, just a bad mom. Sue never takes accountability for being a bad mom, never. Her theory as to why Dylan was a deranged mass murderer is a secret hidden mental illness that nobody could have seen. I think Dylan was clearly messed up in the head, but she was also a bad mom. These two things can be true. And even if you side with Sue and you accept her theory as true, there's nothing for her to apologize about. She can't have accountability. She can't be responsible for the unknowable.
And I believe a good parent would have intervened more heavily in Dylan's life after he was caught hacking into computers with Eric and committing felonies at night with Eric more than a year before Columbine. And I pointed out how Dylan killed a girl whose parents had transferred her to Columbine after she was having behavioral problems. And I brought up the fact that Sue has a master's degree in education and worked at a psych hospital to make the point that Sue doesn't have an excuse to not be a good parent. Dylan's mother worked at a psychiatric hospital in the past and even had a master's degree in educational sciences. I don't think I'm holding her to this unrealistic high standard here. When your kid is a felon and in an adolescent diversion program so he doesn't have to go to jail and drop out of high school, you don't let him hang out with the kid who's consistently getting caught doing terrible things with him. When the parents of your child's best friend warn you of his behavior, you do anything and everything to prevent them from hanging out, but she didn't.
This is all true, but it's been pointed out that she was a teacher at a psych hospital. I never wanted to imply that she was a clinician. A master's in education isn't even the right credentials to be a clinician at a hospital anyway. But I think it's icing on the cake that not only was she a child educator, she worked with children with mental health problems. But I wish I had included in the video that she was a child educator explicitly. And in any case, it doesn't change anything. She didn't need to work at a psych hospital or have a master's degree in child education to be a good parent. I just think it's a slam dunk. In the same way that you don't need to be a doctor to know smoking is bad, but if you are a lung doctor or a pulmonologist, you really don't have any excuses.
Morrie twists my words and implies that I brought up her credentials to imply she should have been able to see Columbine coming, but that's not what I said, and it's just another example of a straw man argument. He's breaking down an argument that I never made.
Which brings me to another correction. In another part of my video, I was establishing how a troubled Sue's other son, Byron, was in Dylan's diversion paperwork for his felony. The counselor who met with the family stated that Byron was kicked out of the house. I quoted what the counselor wrote down from her meeting with the family. I wasn't trying to mislead anyone. And while Sue did sign the paperwork and was there at the time when the counselor met, I can't verify exactly what he said. No one can. However, I think what a diversion counselor writes has a lot of weight. I found out after the video went live that almost 20 years later, Sue denies kicking Byron out, and I wish I'd put those two facts together in a more transparent way. I don't believe Sue. Um, I think the counselor is more trustworthy, as she wrote the facts before Columbine, and there's little reason for the counselor to lie or make up the facts. Personally, I think this is evidence that Sue is not trustworthy in her accounts of the past.
Morrie doesn't like an argument I made and then accuses me of lying. Uh, in the video, I brought up a quote from Dylan's, um, dad. He says, "People need to understand that this could have happened to them." And I brought up how people responded to, uh, the Klebolds, um, as liking, you know, the, um, tragedy to a natural disaster. And I said, "Tom is insinuating that school shooters are seemingly random." Personally, I don't believe that it's random. That's the whole point of my video. But the Klebolds do not believe that they created a monster. They believe Dylan was born with mental illness that caused him to do the things that he did. Sue even references dreams in her book where she sees wounds on Dylan and wishes she could have seen them, implying that he was born with this illness. You can pause here and read it for yourself if you don't believe me, but it's very consistent with her overall messaging that he hid everything. It was not visible to her. It was present at birth, not from the environment, out of their control. You may not like my argument, but it's, it's not lying.
Also, Morrie doesn't like the fact that I covered what people in the media were saying about Sue's book and articles. Uh, she was in. Okay, I don't think this is a dishonest thing to do. And I found it a bit ironic that at the end of Morrie's video, he went through the comments of my video. He even started arguing with what people said, as if the words were mine or had anything to do with my video. But this is what people have taken away from your video. Some people have even taken away the idea that she was doing it for money. "This woman is literally cashing in on her son's status as a mass murderer. That's all I need to know. The fact that not only did she refuse to take any any responsibility for what happened, but also made a profit off of it, is conclusive proof that she was a dreadful mother who helped to raise a psychopath. She belongs under the prison."
Not once in the video did I ever accuse Sue of profiting off the tragedy. So you're essentially holding me accountable for what some random person on the internet is saying. It's absolutely ridiculous. There's like 16,000 comments. I'm not responsible for all the crazy theories that people come up with. And even better, you lectured me about going to commentary about Sue's media appearances in your video a few minutes prior. You cited comments on articles instead of reading the article and negative reviews of Sue's articles rather than telling us what's actually in the article.
At 12:55, Morrie brings up the part of my video where Randy says Sue's overall book is a lie. "This is from the year 2020, and Randy specifically references Sue Klebold's book." In this passage, I read it, and I was really upset. "It was not the truth. It was not the truth. She makes light of the warnings that Judy gave her about Eric Harris. Judy told told her that he was dangerous and to keep him away from Dylan. Judy warned her very clearly as a friend. Sue ignored her. Sue was warned and chose to ignore it."
Morrie then brings up a video from 1999 with Judy, not Randy, by the way, more than 20 years ago, where she says this: "I think again, as we look back on this crime at the end of the year now, some people are still looking at the parents, still saying the parents should have done more. How could these kids have obtained these weapons, made these videos? The parents never would have found out. You still talk to Sue Klebold on a regular basis. What is she thinking about that?" "We talk quite openly about it. She has nothing to hide. Um, in the first place, a lot of those things didn't take place in the Cole house that I am aware of, and that she is aware of. Um, Sue wants the answers too. I'm asking kids, I'm trying to find out any clue we can get. Um, this part of Dylan's personality, I'm not getting anything. And and and we we want the answers. Um, Sue was not aware of this behavior in her child. I wouldn't be defending Sue, believe me. You have to remember that Dylan, that day, meant to kill both my children. I had a child in the cafeteria, and Dylan knew he was in the cafeteria. I would not be defending this mom if I thought that she knew. First off, it's the wrong person. I quoted Randy, and I quoted Randy in 2020. And in 1999, we didn't know as much as we know now. Judy isn't an authority on Columbine, and just because she disagrees with me doesn't mean I'm wrong."
And Timmy, in his video, suggests that Judy Brown knew how evil Eric was and that she had warned Sue. I read this direct quote from Randy Brown in his book. "Other people may disagree with Randy Brown, but this doesn't mean that I'm lying or being deceptive."
And then Timmy goes on to say this: "As we'll talk later, Randy reported Eric Harris to the police more than a year before Columbine, and he was the only one who publicly addressed the issue in advance." "You went to them and said, 'Here's a red flag, more than a red flag, here were three felonies that we had turned into them making and detonating pipe bombs and threatening my son's life, and they didn't pursue it. They didn't do their job.' I was utterly dumbfounded that they did nothing with the web pages. Eric was saying how he was going to blow people up. 'Hey, I'm making pipe bombs. I've got the designs for them on my website. Um, I'm going to kill these people. Here's why.' That's a level beyond making a joke. That's even more damning, right? Eric had the website where he wrote about how to make bombs and he made a hit list and spoken about how he was going to shoot up the school. That's truly evil. How could Sue have not known what was going to happen?" "This mom did not know, and this was a good nurturing mom and could not have known. I mean, let's accept the fact that she didn't know, but I think still a lot of people are saying, 'But she should have known.' Even if she didn't, you know, that is hard to believe. But I know what she knows, and I will tell you, I did not share the web pages with her in the beginning, and I've explained that that's quite complicated. Until after the tragedy did I share the web pages with her? When I shared the web pages with her, she said, 'Oh, my Eric is such an angry child.' She had never known that."
And man, does this look like I'm being deceptive? And this is why a lot of you are so angry. Except I never made the argument that Sue knew about the website or the journals or any direct evidence that Dylan was going to shoot up Columbine. If you'll notice, Morrie can't clip anything from my video showing this, but he will lie and tell you that I made this argument in my video. This man is the king of straw man arguments. He makes up an emotional argument that I never made and then defeats it only to pat himself on the back.
But now Timmy has built a narrative why you think, well, Judy had warned Sue about Eric, and Judy knew how evil Eric was. Therefore, Judy must have warned Sue about all of the evil things that Eric was getting up to. Mr. Strawman, why don't you show me a clip where I have ever made this argument? You can't. But if someone hasn't seen my 45-minute video in 3 months, they might have fallen for your lie.
Here also, Sue wrote her book almost 20 years after Columbine. In 1999, when Judy is giving this statement, Sue hadn't even written the lies that Randy's referencing. Morrie should be ashamed of using this clip to discredit my statement, and much of what we know now wasn't available in 1999. Shortly after the tragedy, Judy thought Sue was a good mom. In 1999, but Sue denies being close to Judy or even knowing her that well. Sue talks about Judy in her book: "I looked up to see a figure coming up the driveway. It was Judy Brown, the mother of one of Dylan's childhood friends. Brooks alerted by the Littleton rumor mill that Dylan was involved in the events at the school, she had come to our house. I was startled to see her. Our boys had been good friends in first and second grades and then reunited in high school, but they hadn't been close, and I'd only seen Judy a few times in the years since elementary school. We checked added warmly a few weeks before at school event, but we'd never done anything together except when our boys were involved, and I wasn't sure I could manage any social niceties."
Judy comes across like she knows Sue well in 1999 in the TV interview, but almost 20 years later, Sue denies this fact in her book. People disagree. The facts are muddy, and I made a video giving my opinion on the situation, and showing that people disagree with me doesn't mean I'm lying.
At one point, Judy said, "But I know what she knows." First of all, that's impossible. Nobody knows everything Sue knows. And according to Sue's book, you'd have to retract Judy's clip as evidence because Sue refutes the fact that Judy was close to Sue. You are deliberately misquoting me. I never, ever claimed anyone told Sue that Dylan was going to shoot up the school.
At 17:19, you are going on and on about how Sue didn't know about the website. I never said Sue knew about the website. Again, my claim is that Sue is a bad mom. Uh, this is just a straw man argument again.
At 9 minutes and 15 seconds, you have qualms with my, um, statement that Randy is the first person to threat-assess a modern shooter. Uh, you say it's not true because Randy didn't really believe it would be a massacre, but Randy does believe Eric was going to shoot his son. This is all semantics in my opinion. Randy thought he was going to kill his son and other people on the hit list. Is that not a shooting at school? And Randy was so worried he went to the police over and over. He correctly threat-assessed Eric. Threat assessment is not a statement of absolute certainty in the same way that if someone says they might be suicidal or showing like subtle signs, we assess them and we get an idea of like how much help they might need, regardless of whether we think for sure that they really will do it or not. This is such a nothing burger of a qualm.
At 26 minutes and 23 seconds, you mention that Dylan couldn't hang out with Eric for a month after being grounded when they were caught with the break-in felony. You use this as evidence that Sue tried to separate Eric and Dylan and claim I am being dishonest for hiding this information. Being grounded from your friends is not the same thing as not being allowed to hang out with them. I bet Dylan couldn't hang out with anyone or do anything when he was grounded. It was about punishing him, not changing his environment fundamentally. You say that keeping Dylan from Eric was exactly what Sue was trying to do. This is patently false. They worked at the same pizza place, and they spent pretty much every single night together for a year leading up to Columbine. If she had the ability to ground him and keep him away for an entire month, she could have changed his environment for the entire year. An example of being grounded is not proof that she tried to separate Eric from Dylan, and even worse, it's not proof that I'm being deceptive or lying or withholding information. This is you're just grasping for straws here.
At 27 and 2 minutes, Morrie makes another straw man that Sue can't be held solely responsible. I've never said Sue was solely responsible. She was responsible for one thing: being a bad parent.
At 30:21, he points out that he doesn't like it when I say things like, "I have a hard time believing." So Morrie doesn't like it when I state my personal bias, but he spends about 40 minutes accusing me of lying and saying that he has a hard time believing I wasn't being intentionally deceptive. You know, because fundamentally, he doesn't know what my intent was with some of these mistakes. He doesn't know if it was, you know, just an error, or when I was writing the script and I misquoted something. He doesn't know that. So he, he has to just kind of have, you know, stay his opinion that he doesn't believe me. There's nothing wrong with stating your opinions, but I don't know why you're you're getting on me about it if you're going to do the exact same thing in your video.
At 33 and A2 minutes, Morrie says Dylan only had two traffic tickets up until the diversion paperwork felony situation. This just isn't true. Dylan was suspended from school with Eric and some other friends for hacking into the computer system, stealing locker combinations, and trolling students at the school, leaving threatening letters and all sorts of stuff.
At around close to the 34 Minute Mark, Morrie is is getting frustrated with how I pointed out that, um, Sue changed, you know, gained access to have access, implying, you know, saying that, you know, she didn't want to imply something illicit. Eric didn't have access to the locker combinations. He hacked into the files and stole them illegally. Even Eric's dad writes "illegally obtained locker combinations" in Eric's diversion paperwork. In Sue's book, she flat out says he hacked the lockers. This just goes to show how in the diversion paperwork, she's being wishy-washy with her language.
At the 36 minute Mark, uh, Morrie is talking about my conclusion, and he doesn't like the fact that I, you know, blame multiple sources for fault. Um, but I don't let Sue do the same thing. The blame for Columbine isn't this mutually exclusive thing. Sue can be responsible for being a bad parent, and it can also be true that multiple other factors also went wrong as well. They aren't mutually exclusive. I said Columbine was unique for many reasons. One of the reasons was that there hasn't been a shooting with two people working together since Columbine, but in 2019, the STEM high school shooting involved two shooters, and they shot multiple students, killing one. When I was looking at the databases, I removed any shooting with only one death because, um, there are numerous gunfights at schools where someone dies, and there are hundreds of these. And I, I was wrong to do this because the STEM High School, uh, shooting, even though it wasn't technically a, a mass killing, it was a mass casualty incident where multiple students, um, were shot, and I stand corrected.
My video was divisive. I knew it would be. I'm basically pointing a finger at a mom and saying, "bad mom," and you're not supposed to do that, even to a mother of a horrific killer. And a lot of people were triggered. This is why I was actually pretty surprised the video did so well, but here we are. I have never in any of my videos on any of my channels intentionally misled the audience with false information. I'm not going to convince everyone that bad parenting can produce poor outcomes. Everyone has their perspective on this. Being a bad parent is sort of like not wearing a seatbelt. You might not get in a car accident, and everything will be fine, but you might find yourself halfway through a windshield.
I went out of my way to not accuse Sue of beating Dylan in a basement or ignoring signs of a plan to shoot up the school. My problem with Sue is that she was a bad parent, and having bad parents who didn't do a great job was essentially required for all of the pieces of the Columbine puzzle to fit together. As I said in my video, she doesn't have anything to teach us. We live in a world where parents always do the best they could have. I don't agree with that, though. I think Sue is a great example of a bad mom who was unlucky. She wasn't wearing a seatbelt when the vehicle crashed.
And if you noticed, I barely mentioned Dylan's dad and Eric's parents. Why? Because they didn't go on a media campaign. They settled their lawsuit with the families of the victims and moved on with life, which is what Sue should have done. And as for Morrie, I don't know why you had to make your video about me being deceptive and lying. You could have very easily just attempted to refute my logic and make a video showing how Sue is a victim in all of this, and I'm this mean guy for making my video. But to call me a liar is just not correct. You got so many things wrong in your video, and while it is your most successful video ever, just remember that if you double down and try to make a name for yourself by starting drama with other content creators, it will eventually come back around to you.
On my other channel, I called out other Escape from Tarkov gaming content creators for simping for the developer. I created a few enemies, and I realized it wasn't a smart move. I went out of my way and I invited them on my stream after I launched a mega viral video, "The Wiggle That Killed Tarkov," and I used my popularity at the time to heal wounds. I'm going to be fine. I'm confident that I have never and will never deceive people intentionally, and I have proven multiple times that I know how to make good content. I don't think you'll survive long on here if you're going to go this far out of your way to make someone look bad.