The FBI identified the shooter, who is dead, as Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. A motive was not clear.
The FBI identified the shooter, who is dead, as Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. A motive was not clear.
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Bethel Park is a predominantly white, relatively well-to-do city in the southern reaches of greater Pittsburgh. The site of the rally, Butler, is about an hour’s drive north of Pittsburgh.
Pennsylvania voter records listed a Thomas Matthew Crooks with the same address and birth date as a registered Republican, though it was not clear from the records when that was put in place.
Feel like I'm gonna be posting this a lot today. Pennsylvania uses a closed party primary voting system. If you're a liberal voting in the primaries, it made the most sense to register Republican in Pennsylvania to vote for someone like Nikki Haley if you despise Trump. Don't want to say this is what happened, just that we shouldn't jump to false flag conspiracy conclusions right now.
I remember canvassing for Bernie back in 2016 and I knocked on a few doors of people who said “oh sorry, I switched to Republican to try to block Trump”. This is completely anecdotal evidence but it does happen. It’s rare though.
Edit: did a touch of cyber stalking… dad is a registered libertarian, mom is a democrat
He was registered back in 2021. Not sure this has much bearing on the 2024 primaries. He could have been a right leaning person who didn't like Trump. Those people exist. Basically, most libertarians.
This is important to know, but at the same time, the majority of registered members in both parties in Pennsylvania voted for the front-runner, and given his youth (20), the primary was his first election involving presidential candidates.
We need to wait until the facts about him come out. Very little is currently known beyond the party registration and the YouTube gun channel.
This is the right answer. It is entirely possible and feasible to register as a party you don't agree with for strategic reasons such as voting in primaries for important state offices etc. Millions of people do this across various states.
And just because he was registered as Republican, doesn't mean he was necessarily a Trump supporter. After all, those Lincoln Project guys had to come from somewhere.
I guarantee you that MAGA people will claim that he registered as a Republican as part of a big conspiracy that involves Biden personally sending him to kill Trump (which they won't realize is arguably acceptable unless he is impeached and removed from office according to SCOTUS).
Even that is speculative, from many different commenters. There’s belief that that donation was from someone else with the same name. Take it as you will, but we need to speak less as ‘fact’ right now when the water is this muddy.
disillusioned youth, no prospects, small hope in progressive cause (probably Bernie), gets screwed by the party, gets further disillusioned, sees TFG, thinks it's good to have an outsider to show these establishment politicians what's what, registers republican, gets easily reeled in to the far right pipeline, becomes interested in Q stuff, gets obsessed with pedophilia and Epstein, sees recent Epstein revelations about TFG, ends up where too many people end up in the US: full of anger and hate with easy access to guns.
Honestly that is an extremely common path. Mussolini took that route. He was a socialist that was pissed about the lack of progress so he went far right in the other direction.
So, this is 100% speculative rambling at this point, but as a gut feeling on my part that can be proven wrong: I get the feeling it might have been someone from a Republican family, possibly shitty family psychology-wise, registered as Republican for his families sake but got f'd up by the pressure within his personal relationships and the state of the world, who radicalised himself on the internet.