By June 2025, Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were murdered by Vance Boelter, a registered Republican and Trump loyalist. Boelter then tried to kill Senator John Hoffman, leaving him and his wife seriously wounded.
And most recently, right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk was shot by Tyler Robinson, a young man from a staunch Republican Mormon family. Robinson has no formal party ties but has reportedly adopted the ideology of far-right extremist Nick Fuentes.
So how many attackers from this list are associated with the Democratic Party, progressives, or mainstream leftist groups? The answer: none. The only individual who could be described as Left-leaning is Quintez Brown.
Guess they’ll avoid solving their problem and keep getting bullets to the face. Boo hoo.
I wonder what faction will win the American Night of Long Knives.
China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
I keep thinking about this. It’s not far off in the playbook.
It’s too soon to say Robinson supported the right. His family did but he did not seem to share those ideas anymore. And someone shall not be judged on his family‘s belief. Frankly judging too fast is not helping the debate.
The stats are anyway already hard to deny. So adding Robinson and his unclear leanings to the balance actually weakens your argument.
Cute, but when the POTUS immediately calls the assassination an action by “the radical left”, there’s not much room to have an earnest argument.
No, let’s first research this for a year and then explain how this was wrong. People will understand that.
I saw a great article examining his possible motives on NPR. They pointed out the likihood that, as much as everyone is trying to point fingers, his was probably not a political killing in the way we’re imagining it.
For those who study political and extremist violence, the substance of the messages on the bullet casings is far less revealing than the simple fact that the shooter made the inscriptions at all. They say this act, combined with information revealed through other news reports and contained within the charging document in Utah, indicate that the suspect was thinking deliberately about how he would ultimately be situated within the universe of mass shooters and high-profile killers in the U.S.
“What he was doing here with this act was very performative,” said Senters. “He was performing ‘Internet culture’ — and specifically mass shooting culture in general — with the etchings on the shell casings being memes, with the joking about having a manifesto. It’s all very performative in that regard.”
The whole thing is worth a read, but I found the closing bit rather chilling:
“If you look at how long we’ve been talking about the Charlie Kirk shooting, there is perhaps a worrisome thought that can form that, oh, if someone is looking to sort of make their name in this online shooter space, then maybe a targeted political shooting is now a better way to do that than a mass shooting,” he said, “because we’ve become so sort of like inculcated to the tragedy of mass shootings that [they take] up space and the mass discourse for a handful of days before we all move on to the next thing.”
I don’t see that as chilling, more like reassuring.
Fewer school shootings would be a blessing but I don’t know if the political chaos from high profile murders would be much better. *Might just end up with more of both too.
I doubt an increase in political shootings would mean a decrease in school shootings. I suspect the shooters involved are from two very different circles.
Whether he “supported the right” at the moment he killed Kirk is really besides the point.
He was raised, in a deep red area in a deep red state, in a right-wing, MAGA environment his whole life. That’s all he knew from the time he was born. He came from a pro gun / hunter family, deeply entrenched in that culture from what he said in his texts and how he felt responsible for his grandfather’s bolt action rifle.
He was stewed in it, forged by it his whole life and those are the values and morality that formed him.
That’s like saying everyone in Utah is a Mormon, or everyone raised in the church is a Christian. Strict ideological upbringings often backfire.
Ok? A lifetime of indoctrination and propaganda in a MAGA family and community certainly did “backfire”. If by backfire you meant growing up in that environment was supposed to create some kind and gentle altar boy.
Another white male shooter and we are worried about political leanings when they often don’t matter. A society where we tolerate losing thousands of children to gun deaths and tens of thousands of adults every year. We are not allowed to say the quite part out loud. We can’t fix these problems because of this.
