Israel Keyes in Full Detail: Politics of a Serial Killer

Israel Keyes had a Disqus account where he gave his opinion on a wide variety of matters. After establishing some foundation, we will mostly present them without comment, as we try very hard to be apolitical. We do have a provocative question to ask:

Do you have the politics of a serial killer?

It is relatively easy to establish that this was definitely Keyes; Keyes told the FBI that he used Izit as an account name in his interviews. User Izit also says he's in Alaska, and the account was made the year before Keyes was arrested. His last post was made in May 2011; Keyes was arrested in March 2012.

User Izit also shares personal details that match Keyes life along with his opinions:

This comment suggests that he may have been interested in the very notoriety he told the FBI that he didn’t want, suggesting potential Machiavellianism at play in his interrogations. Was his deal with the FBI an attempt to ensure his fame?

According to True Crime Bullshit, their researchers uncovered this account when they searched Keyes known email addresses in various data breaches, uncovering usernames and accounts he used. A simpler method to find accounts like this is to perform a Google search.

If you type “@Izit” into Google and hit enter, the Disqus account is both the second and the final search result on the third page. If you type “Izit” “Disqus” into Google and hit enter, it comes up as the first three results.

We’ve run similar searches across multiple sites, turning up very little aside from the Disqus account, although we did find an abandoned, unused Reddit account dating to 2009.

The comments from Keyes share certain themes, among them, the abysmal spelling and grammar you can see above. According to Keyes, he was often drunk when he would argue online, which may explain some of this. His homeschooling may also be a factor.

Some of these themes overlap and as a result, some may appear twice; they have been organized for the purposes of relevance and narrative flow.

Keyes on Gaza and Israel:

Keyes on Iraq:

Keyes on religion:

Keyes on Americans and American media [Note that Al Jazeera is a state media outlet owned by the government of Qatar]:

Keyes on Gun Control and Foreign Policy:

Keyes on hypocrisy, morality, and wealth disparity:

It is interesting, if somewhat typical to his type, to consider that Keyes was putting up this veneer even as he was killing people in cold blood. Even more interesting when you consider that, for all intents and purposes, these posts were anonymous.

Keyes is not unique in his political pontifications; many other serial killers have been politically active, too. While he doesn't appear to be directly affiliated with a political party, Keyes comes across as something of a liberal, but serial killers as a whole cross the entire political spectrum.

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Ted Bundy considered working in foreign affairs, hoping to improve trade relations with China, and ended up working for the Republican party of Washington state. Katharine Ramsland, a professor of forensic psychology at DeSales University, told Salon in 2022 that Bundy wanted a diplomatic position in government.

She referenced the book "Violent Mind: The 1976 Psychological Assessment of Ted Bundy" by Dr. Al Carlisle, the prison psychologist who evaluated Bundy after he was accused of attempted kidnapping.

Carlisle said that "importance, prestige and wealth were his primary goals," according to Ramsland. Although he didn’t end up working in foreign affairs to improving trade relations with China, Bundy worked for a variety of local Republican candidates in Washington State.

This gave him an opportunity to manage a grassroots campaign to convince New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to seek the presidency in 1968. Bundy even attended the Republican National Convention that year as a Rockefeller delegate.

He then worked as a driver, bodyguard, and personal assistant for Arthur Fletcher, a lieutenant governor candidate who was the first African American to seek state office in Washington (as well as the Western US in general).

Fletcher ended up serving in the Nixon administration as Assistant Secretary of Labor, going on to serve in the Ford, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush administrations, too. Fletcher died in 2005, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in honor of his service in the Army in World War II.

After working for Fletcher, Bundy joined Republican Daniel J. Evans’ re-election campaign for Governor of Washington state. When Evans won, Bundy was able to get himself hired as an assistant to Ross Davis, then Chairman of the Washington State Republican Party.

Bundy had helped the party secure victory using a method that mirrored his crimes: he infiltrated the campaign of Evans’ opponent by pretending to be a college student. Davis described Bundy as "smart, aggressive… and a believer in the system."

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While Bundy was a moderate Republican, John Wayne Gacy was a Democrat. Not only was he a Democrat, but he managed to ingratiate himself within the party to the point where he secured a photo opportunity with First Lady Rosalynn Carter.

This incident in 1975 was widely considered an embarrassment to the Secret Service due to Gacy’s criminal history. He was first convicted for a sex crime on November 7, 1968, when he pled guilty to one count of sodomy. He also faced several charges after being released, although none of them stuck. Gacy's parole ended on October 18, 1971.

Serial killers belief systems do not extend into bonafide opinion. While it's popular to imagine that these types of people are born monsters, the nature of pathological personality disturbance is built on formative traumas.

This precludes having sincere and earnest beliefs held "in good faith," in the absence of fraud or deception. In many cases, the fraud is committed on themselves first. They believe they’re sincere.

Keyes may have been liberal-ish in a reactionary response to parents extreme conservative-ism; it's widely believed that Gacy was a liberal Democrat for similar reasons.

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Randy Kraft, on the other hand, was both. In some ways this makes Kraft more like Keyes, who clearly never fully escaped the extreme conservative environment of his youth; both men had connections to Oregon, as well.

Kraft started out as a conservative Republican with political ambitions of his own. He wanted to become a Senator. In 1964 he campaigned for Senator Barry Goldwater, who is now probably best known for being name checked by Bob Dylan in the song “I Shall Be Free No. 10”.

Kraft was also an outspoken supporter of the Vietnam War and even attended pro-war demonstrations… until he became a liberal Democrat, working as a Party organizer for New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

That was about a year after he was arrested for lewd conduct when he propositioned an undercover police officer for gay sex. While Gacy the Democrat justified his pathological compulsions by describing his victims as "worthless little queers and punks," and insisted that he himself was not a homosexual, Kraft, the conservative turned Democrat, was open about his sexuality.

He even came out to his family. Although they reportedly eventually accepted him as gay, in a letter he wrote to a friend Kraft said that his father flew "into a rage," when he first came out, while his mother “disapproved” but was more understanding.

Kraft's family ultimately accepted his sexuality, and he remained in contact with his parents and siblings, although his siblings said that he distanced himself from his family after coming out.

The Air Force was less accepting, and Kraft committed his first known sexual assault less than a year after being discharged for being gay (officially, a medical discharge). He committed his first known murder the year after the sexual assault.

It may be tempting to read into their politics and sexuality to look for motivations regarding their pathology, but there’s no clear and immediate connection.

While Kraft and Gacy were apparently gay, there’s no evidence to suggest that Bundy or Keyes were, and the political opinions of all of these broken men crossed the full gamut of mainstream American political thought.

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James “Michael Bear” Carson and Susan “Suzan Bear” Carson née Barnes are not as well known as Bundy, Gacy, Keyes, or Kraft, and they were also not in the mainstream of American political thought.

Their fringe beliefs make the pathology at play in these kinds of crimes somewhat more clear; their mask of sanity was less consistent than Bundy, Gacy, Keyes, or Kraft.

It’s also more readily obvious how their political leanings were self serving, although in all of these cases, it's likely that their beliefs served some function to shield their narcissistic core from the actions they undertook criminally.

Most cold blooded killers still want to think of themselves as being “good people;” as in the saying, “no one is the villain in their own mind.”

According to other workers on the marijuana farm where they worked in California, the Carson’s were anarchists who believed in revolution to overthrow the government on behalf of their radical agenda.

They were part of the counterculture of the late 70s and were also heavily involved in drugs and mysticism. James told his daughter from a previous marriage, Jennifer "Jenn" Carson, that God had given them their new names. Jennifer Carson has been interviewed for several podcasts.

In 1980, the Bear family moved to what was the epicenter of the hippy counterculture of the 60s: The Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. Things in the Haight-Ashbury were just right until March 1981, when they murdered their room mate, 23-year-old aspiring actress Karen Barnes (no relation to Suzan).

Karen was found dead in their shared apartment. She had been stabbed thirteen times and her skull had been crushed before they wrapped her in a blanket and hid her body in the basement. They later confessed to killing Karen; Suzan had apparently decided Karen was a witch.

After running away, first to Colorado and then to the marijuana farm, Michael shot and killed Clark Stephens in May 1982. Clark was another worker on the farm and the two had some kind of dispute. They attempted to dispose of the body by burning it and burying what was left under chicken fertilizer in the woods.

They ran away again but this time when authorities searched through the belongings they had abandoned, detectives found something which made the fugitives a higher priority for law enforcement: a disturbing manifesto in which they called for the assassination of then-President Ronald Reagan.

In November 1982, Michael was picked up by police in Los Angeles for hitchhiking. As the result of police error, he was let go. He left evidence behind, though, like the firearm that he left in a police cruiser.

The following January, the Bear family were hitchhiking near Bakersfield when 30-year-old Jon Charles Hellyar stopped to pick them up. Suzan reportedly decided that, like Karen Barnes, Hellyar was a witch and had to be killed.

An argument broke out between Hellyar and the couple somewhere on Route 101 in Sonoma County. A physical confrontation followed, resulting in the car coming to a complete stop and everyone exiting the vehicle.

The fight escalated, and Suzan stabbed Hellyar while he and Michael struggled over a gun outside of the vehicle. Michael shot Hellyar to death in view of passing motorists, one of whom called the police.

A high-speed chase ensued as the Carsons attempted to flee in Hellyar's car, which subsequently crashed. According to Richard D. Reynolds, who wrote a book about the case titled Cry For War, the anarchist couple were suspects in nearly a dozen other deaths across both America and Europe.

In a five-hour interview with KGO-TV and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as homicide investigators, the pair claimed they were pacifists and vegetarian yoga practitioners who converted to a form of Islam, describing themselves as "vegetarian Moslem warriors."

Their crimes emerged from a sacred mission: to exterminate "witches," leading to their nickname, "the San Francisco Witch Killers."

They said that they killed Barnes because they believed she had falsely converted to their religion and was "draining [Suzan] of her health and yogic powers."

Their justifications for the second and third killings were that Stephens had allegedly sexually assaulted Suzan, while Hellyar had allegedly accused her of being a "witch" before somehow sexually abusing her as he drove them down the road in his car.

They remain unrepentant for their crimes.

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Andrei Chikatilo was another radical; a Soviet era serial killer who sexually assaulted, murdered, and mutilated over 50 women between 1978 and 1990.

Chikatilo was born in the Ukraine in the immediate aftermath of the Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian Famine, which some historians consider an intentional genocide perpetrated by Stalin against Ukrainians and others consider an unintentional byproduct of collectivization.

Chikatilo claimed his family had to eat grass and leaves to survive, and said that he did not eat bread until the age of 12. Chikatilo was told by his mother that before he was born, his 4-year-old older brother had disappeared, eaten by starving neighbors.

Starting when Chikatilo was 4-years-old, in 1941, he witnessed the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine, which lasted until 1944, and which Chikatilo described as horrific. His father was conscripted and then taken prisoner. He and his mother shared a one room hut and a bed; he was routinely beaten and scolded for bed wetting.

In 1943, Chikatilo became an older brother when his mother gave birth to a baby girl she named Tatyana. Chikatilo's father was conscripted in 1941 and a prisoner of war in 1943; it is believed that a German soldier raped Chikatilo’s mother in front of him in the one room hut they shared.

They were later forced to watch their hut burn to the ground together. Suffice to say that Chikatilo had an unpleasant childhood marked by deprivation and suffering.

His experiences as an adult weren’t much different. He struggled with girls, a consequence of both his shyness and his struggles with impotence. He was subject to public ridicule for these struggles, although he did eventually manage to father a child.

In an interview not long before he was executed, Chikatilo said that, "Girls were going behind my back, whispering that I was impotent. I was so ashamed. I tried to hang myself. My mother and some young neighbors pulled me out of the noose. Well, I thought no one would want such a shamed man. So I had to run away from there, away from my homeland."

In school, Chikatilo was a model communist, even becoming chairman of the student Communist Party committee. He read all the communist literature he could get his hands on and organized street marches in support of the Communist party.

He had a variety of jobs, eventually serving in the Red Army, after which, in the early 1970s, he became a teacher. In May 1973, Chikatilo committed his first known sexual assault when he groped the breasts and genitals of a 15-year-old female student in a swimming pool, ejaculating as the girl struggled.

This mirrored an earlier experience he had in high school, when at 17, Chikatilo jumped wrestled an 11-year-old friend of his younger sister to the ground, ejaculating as the girl struggled.

Months later, Chikatilo sexually assaulted and beat another female student he trapped inside of his classroom. Fellow teachers also observed Chikatilo fondling himself in the presence of his students.

He was not disciplined for these incidents, but eventually was told to resign or be fired. He chose to resign, and promptly found another job as a teacher. He had several of these jobs before being forced to find work in other fields.

Chikatilo committed his first documented murder in 1978; luring a 9-year-old girl into an isolated hut. He attempted to rape her but failed to achieve an erection; when the girl began to struggle, he choked and stabbed her to death, reportedly ejaculating while stabbing the child.

This became an overall pattern to his criminal behavior; targeting children and teenagers, luring them to a secluded area, and killing them, usually with a knife. This was not exclusive, however; some of his victims were adults, and some were strangled or beaten to death. His victims ranged in age between 7 and 44.

Chikatilo's adult victims were often prostitutes; he would typically attempt to have sex with these victims, but his impotence would send him into a murderous rage, particularly if the woman mocked his inability to maintain an erection. It is believed he could achieve orgasm only when he killed a victim.

Many of the early victims had mutilated eye sockets; when asked about this, Chikatilo said that initially, he believed in an old Russian superstition that the image of a murderer is left in the eyes of the victim. In his later years, he became convinced this was an old wives tale, and would just slash at the eyes instead of gouging them out.

Chikatilo was not arrested until the Soviet Union had begun to collapse, and he was not brought to trial until after it collapsed. A psychiatrist concluded that he suffered from borderline personality disorder with sadistic features.

One particularly interesting fact about the Chikatilo case is that efforts by Soviet police to warn the public were hampered by the country’s political ideologues. His murders were not really happening because, of course, serial murder was impossible in a communist society where everyone was provided for. To steal a line from the Cowboy Bebop movie, Tengoku no Tobira (Heavens Gate), “Something that should not exist, can’t exist.”

Chikatilo's trial was the first major media event of post-Soviet Russia; with no more communist politicians to stifle the story because it undermined the state, Chikatilo became one of the first criminal reports in the newly privatized news media.

Chikatilo was uncooperative at trial, exposing himself to the court, singing anthems from the socialist movement, and declaring that the charges against him were bogus.

Of course, serial killers know no true ideology beyond their psychopathy; in primary psychopathy, they are victims of the false self that is their own grandiose self image. In secondary psychopathy, they have no real self at all, lacking internal stability of any kind.

In either case, they cling to whatever belief of convenience is near to them that projects the image they believe will affirm their need for admiration and validation and allow them to gain power, exploit people, and fulfill their narcissistic, psychotic compulsions to harm others.