Trump Rally Gunman Was ‘Definitely Conservative,’ Classmate Recalls
“It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate.”
A lot of conservatives think trrmp is a traitor, too.
I mean, they should. The evidence provides.
But they usually think he betrayed the extremes of their bigotries rather than the country and general decency.
The Republican party has always been on the wrong side of social politics
I mean, in 1865 they were pretty OK.
Yea, he's definitely a nominal 'pub, but can't be conservative since he changes his political will constantly.
Twermp is liberally fascist.
Any strategy that will allow him to wield authoritarian power is worthy of pursuit for him.
The shooter was supposedly a fan of history, a history buff. Let's assume the meme about men thinking about the Roman empire was true. The guy might've been a fan of democracy, looked at the fate of the Roman republic, saw the writing on the wall, and decided that he wanted to prevent that, and also make history in some way too.
That's good news for the coming election. But I still fear he won't ever be punished for his numerous crimes, the biggest yet to come, the pedo rape connections from the Epstein papers.
He's half a billion in the hole and is a historically convicted felon, he's definitely facing consequences. Also, his own zealots are shooting at him.
I want to see what happens with the election from fraud scheme.
My largest concern is the supreme Court granting the President actual immunity.
I keep hearing about some pedophile case with Twermp here, but I don't know what everybody is talking about, did something new come out?
They also said he was a terrible shot.
I'm not even kidding. He tried out for the school shooting club and they asked him not to come back because they considered his poor shooting and gun handling dangerous.
school shooting club
Maybe they should name it something else...
No, I think that's an accurate description
LMFAO! I had a feeling he was conservative. It don't know about a terrible shot, he got damn close but if his school had a shooting club he was probably still better than someone untrained but could still be bad enough not to make the team. Like when I got cut from golf, a no cut sport, half way through the first day
He's a bad shot because anyone with any bit of training or even youtube experience knows to aim center mass. More chance of hitting. I picked up shooting for sport in 2017 and can hit center mass with iron sites at the distance this kid was. With my cheapo scope, I can hit out to 300 yards.
He tried lolz x-gamer headshot and failed miserably.
Imagine if his motivation was to prove he had great aim and that they did him wrong. Maybe he just wanted to become the most well known sniper-assassin in the modern world. Maybe that's the reason he didn't use scope, he wanted his memory to be that of the rifle maverick. I wonder what went through his head after he realised he missed. I mean, other than a bullet.
Maybe he was aiming at a suspiciously Antifa-looking person in the crowd and missed?
"Those damn Antifas and their damn anti-fascist ways."
I need the sauce cause that's hilarious if it's true.
Oh that makes it even funnier holy shit
Yeah, I was discussing this with a friend. It's been 15 years since I fired an assault rifle, but 100 meters with iron sights was pretty easy.
He must either be an awful shot, or his sights must've been screwed up.
The first shot was pretty good, almost headshot at 100m+ is not bad at all with an iron sight, moving target and in "not firing range" condition. If he tried a headshot on purpose thats pretty good, not the smartest decision but still good accuracy.
“It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate.”
Trump is the Republican candidate, but anyone young enough to actually believes in conservative talking points would not see him as a conservative candidate and would see him as a threat to the party.
That is true of some conservatives, which is obvious due to trumps continued popularity.
Some conservatives see trump as a bad conservative. Many see him as a good or even the best conservative.
Who's to say he didn't just want to die and take someone important out with him. In the mental state he was in at the time, he may not have even cared about politics.
I was thinking there's no proof he didn't do this to impress Jodie Foster. We may never completely understand
He did it... for Johnny. This is like that movie Citizen Kane where you later find out Rosemary was a sled, but we'll never find out who Johnny is, cause, like, he's dead.
Context It's quite prescient because he did indeed catch the bullet right in the ear.
He left a note saying it was to impress Taylor swift according to fox News proving is was a psyop
Hopefully he wrote something down somewhere that gives us an idea to his motivation, but you're absolutely right. We may never know. From the little bit that has come out about the shooter, it sure seems likely to be a typical case of a young man feeling isolated and angry at society. I'm certainly not convinced that politics had anything to do with it at this point.
Spain supported the colonies in the American Revolution. They were at war with Britain in Europe at the time and they provided money and supplies to the colonies as well as attacking several British positions along the Mississippi River and ramping up the European War. The Fourth of July holiday doesn't even mark a battle, it marks the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the war had been being fought for over a year at that point.
You don't try to assassinate people for altruistic reasons, and I have no ancestors that killed Spaniards on the 4th of July.
It was a horrible incident and there is no room for violence in politics…
That said, I am relieved to know that the shooter is neither an immigrant nor a person of color, or a trans person. And not someone on the left. The violent backlash from the right would be unbearable/unthinkable otherwise.
But, rifles are an old way of doing things, and predict that there will be more political violence through the next years.
Buddy not funny. Extra judicially executing your political opponents is the kinda thing trump would pull and we can't endorse or even approve of it. The state of America today keeps reminding me of the fall of the roman Republic and a fascist dying ain't gonna fix the problem, it'll just let someone more cunningly capable of such things into the seat trumps trying to fill and then sh*ts gonna turn fast. What we needs is wide reaching, institutional reform. I just don't know whose gonna push for it.
Acing Trump is the path to guaranteed violence. People advocating against doing so aren’t just doing so from a moral and/or philosophical standpoint. WWI started with a politician being assassinated.
Edit:ok clowns, downvote the person saying killing a former president is a bad idea. Like several countries aren’t salivating at the idea of the US being embroiled in a civil war. Gee almost like one or more countries even have a vested interest in destabilising the US and have been accused of contributing to it. By all means though don’t let that stop you.
It won't matter though, they'll still blame the left and say it was a false flag etc. Biden even connected this to the Gaza campus protests.
And not one Republican or prominent journalist will point out that this is mostly due to the decade of rhetoric from the conservatives that political violence is the answer.
So…. Why then? Was he one of those rare conservatives that don’t like Trump? I think I’ve only ever met maybe one or two.
There is a growing movement within conservative groups that want Trump out of the way so a more competent politician can enact their crazy goals more effectively. Nick Fuentes is one example.
It is though any groups of people is not a monolith who perfectly toe the line with each other.
They usually don't talk about it because either they are lumped into trump supporters or attacked by the former for being a liberal pansy.
I've met the "I don't like Trump, but he's a Republican, so..." Variant.
That would be a big chuck of them. It seems many support him only because they fear retaliation from the anti-democratic red hats.
If he passed, how long before the red hat movement collapsed without him as its figurehead? How long before many conservatives started shifting/distancing themselves from his memory? I would guess not long at all.
Problem with American politics is there tens of millions of people on both sides of the party split who abhor the candidate they've voted for but that's the candidate that won the primaries. So their options are vote their party, or waste their vote not voting, voting third party or voting the opposition party.
A conservative that hasn't been brainwashed. You don't see that very often these days.
I imagine there are a bunch of conservatives who dislike trump, especially ones whose family members have been completely sucked into the cult.
I think, looking at what has been published on him, it's pretty clear as to why he shot Trump. For one, his personality lended itself to a hero complex. He was really nice, shy, intelligent, informed, and helpful. He clearly had respect for the Republican party, but given the info on his friend group, it was likely due to peer pressure. This is mostly made obvious by his political donation to the Progressive Turnout Project he made. A project that no conservative really should want to encourage.
In all likelihood, this guy saw the direction the States was headed in and realized there was no way to stop it from imploding without resorting to extreme political violence. I imagined he was upset with the fact that he wouldn't be able to do much through official channels in his life, so he made the ultimate sacrifice to will the change himself. That's why this guy's a hero in my books, not because he took a shot at Trump, but because he realized there's nothing any of us normies can do about the States' political situation through normal means, so he went above and beyond. He probably spent some time weighing the options as to whom to shoot, and realized Trump was the better pick.
Side note, he didn't make that donation. It would have been illegal as he was 17 at the time, and the donation came from a 60+ year old in Philadelphia with the name Thomas Crooks, not his town of Bethel Park.
Apparently that little bit of trivia doesn't actually apply to the story, and the shooter did make the donation.
That’s why this guy’s a hero in my books, not because he took a shot at Trump, but because he realized there’s nothing any of us normies can do about the States’ political situation through normal means, so he went above and beyond. He probably spent some time weighing the options as to whom to shoot, and realized Trump was the better pick.
I do wonder how much improvement there would be in the political situation in the US if Fox and the other channels spewing right-wing lies and fearmongering garbage went off the air?
this kind of speculation is pointless until more evidence is revealed.
Your opinion isn't based on anything... The conversation around that single, small donation to a "Progressive" cause is developing. Last I heard, speculation was that it was a known very spammy PAC and it was asking some ambiguous, more centrist survey question and then you could donate. People will turn their backs to a mountain of evidence to focus on a Pebble on the ground behind them.
Now reasonable assumption is A) he was tricked into donating to a cause he would never knowingly support B) He meant to graze and wound, but not kill to try to make trump a martyr C) He actually wanted to kill trump to incite a civil war or race war and figured trump would be down to be the pin on the grenade because he was delusional D) he was straight up mentally ill and he wanted trump to go meet Jesus quickly to get a medal or some shit.
First: As conservatives love bible quotes: Hosea 8,7: "They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind." Boy, did Trump sow wind everywhere. And Thomas Crooks simply was the whirlwind this time.
Second: Each and every year, about 50,000 people in the US die from guns, and politics f-ing does not care. Because they love the money from arms manufaturers and votes from the gun nuts more than the mostly innocent people who die. But once the wrong asshole gets his ear nicked by a bullet, they suddenly fall over themselves condemning violence.
I prefer to quote the profit Weir, in Estimations:7, quote "If you plant ice, you're gonna harvest wind"
You're intentionally conflating suicides--which account for about 2/3 of gunshot deaths annually--and the violence that Trump has repeatedly called for. Both are concerning, but they're not the same, and should not be considered as such. "Simply" banning the tools of suicide does nothing to reduce the misery.
But gun prevalence increases suicide rates. People who would otherwise not commit suicide end up doing so because a quick and relatively easy way out is available. Should those guns not be so easily accessible, some percentage of those suicides wouldn't happen.
Those gun deaths are a problem regardless of whether they're suicide or homicide. And the gun lobby/Trump is perfectly happy with all that death as long as they get their sales/status quo/money. The deaths don't need to be the same for it to be relevant.
I wonder how many of your downvoters upvoted suicide nets without a thought toward improved working conditions and wages?
One good deed does not redeem the entire sect
Was it really a good deed though? Because by missing, he gave Trump a shit load of political ammunition.
Trump is going to take this crisis and abuse it for every vote it gets him, and it's gonna get him a lot.
My money is the kid saw the 2025 agenda and despite being a conservative leaning person was still appalled at the idea people would vote for a fascist again.
My guess is it was the Epstein document releases.
I mean, possibly you'd have to be living under a rock to not have seen all the images of Trump and Epstein together.
But the investigators say he “had no strongly held political beliefs”.
IOW he’s republican and they don’t want to broadcast it?
Not saying the guy wasn't, but I'm pretty sure my former classmates would recall me as very conservative, and I changed a lot.
From like 2-3 years ago? My friends from that long ago would not get that info wrong. Former classmates from almost 2 decades ago might get it wrong.
Guy was 20, so if we're talking high school senior classmates, that's only 2-3 years of growth.
I changed a ton just the first 2 years of college. I had a real shitty time in high school and didn't come out of my shell until I got into an environment where I wasn't getting fucked with every time attention was focused on me. I didn't stay in touch with anyone from high school but the times I ran into people from then they often commented on how different I was. I definitely became a lot less conservative after I got out of that environment where I felt like almost everyone was my enemy.
I don't know anything about this dude but that's what happened with me.
I'm not sure why Trump-scale neofeudalistic reformist would be called conservative.
Thats just reaganism though.
Yeah. That's why he tried to assassinate the conservative candidate, right? Trying to associate someone who was mentally broken enough to attempt murder to an entire political bloc is missing the entire point.
You do know that he could have been a conservative that didn't like trump, right? They do exist. I mean from the 34 felony charges, his links to Epstein, his talking about being a dictator for a day, calling to terminate the constitution a few years back on a truth social post, and his violent rhetoric, there's a lot of reason for people who identify as conservative (The shooter's father is libertarian and he very well may have also been libertarian but registered as a Republican in order to vote in the primary) to not like trump.
It wouldn't be the first time a conservative did something violent for political goals. It won't be the last.
Do you have any idea how many abortion clinics have been bombed/shot at by conservatives?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_plot
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/nancy-pelosi-husband-paul-attack/index.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tucson_shooting
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/what-nij-research-tells-us-about-domestic-terrorism