51 points

Trump Rally Gunman Was ‘Definitely Liberal,’ Conservatives Recall

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-44 points
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Nothing people love more than feeding their own narrative. The guy was clearly mentally unstable and in dire need of therapy. He could have been a communist or an ancap for all I care. This attack doesn’t reflect on anything other than the sad state of mental healthcare in this country.

edit: I guess being pro mental healthcare is an unpopular opinion on Lemmy.

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82 points

Yes, somehow when a conservative murders (or tries to murder) someone, they’re just a mentally ill lone wolf and this in no way reflects on their ideology, which coincidentally somehow manages to keep producing vastly more of these mentally ill lone wolves compared to others.

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27 points

So odd isn’t it?

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19 points

It’s almost like encouraging people to believe the nonsense you want them to believe enables them to believe any nonsense.

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-2 points

Lemmy has a real problem listening to what people say and instead injecting their own narrative, and this is a great example. Where in my post am I defending conservatism or making any kind of statement as to “which side” produces more crazies? Fact is the has been the only assassination attempt in many years, despite an insanely vitriolic political environment. That goes to show even the crazies are not coming out en masse to start shooting at politicians.

I mean there was hammer guy, we can probably count him too but even so it’s pretty clear these are mentally unstable individuals, not the average conservative as Lemmy would love you to believe.

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12 points

All conservatives are mentally unstable they are fearful reactionaries as proven by multiple studies.

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3 points

Sorry I forgot I was on Lemmy. I should have just joined the blind rage. All conservatives are inherently evil and need to be destroyed. Can I have some of my points back now?

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1 point

Got a link to those multiple studies that definitively conclude all conservatives are mentally unstable?

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29 points

remembered a mock debate where their teacher made students stand on one side of the classroom or another to signal their allegiance. “The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side,” Smith said. “That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”

Gonna do some armchair psychoanalyzing because that’s what everyone is going to be doing over the next couple days. He probably was a old fashioned Republican conservative, small government, guns rights etc. who was a loner. Whenever he tried to speak to his beliefs his classmates would always just respond with some dumb things trump said and he’d get frustrated and point to him as the reason no one took him seriously.

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26 points

It is pretty simple and something a lot of men suffer from. You end up being nice try to follow the rules. The problem is that when you follow the rules all the time, you end up having to compromise a lot. Unfortunately Western culture stereotype of men is that of a strong silent hero, who does not complain. So quite a few never talk about there problems. Mostly it is just suffering, if it becomes really bad it ends up with a suicide and this is really the worst case. Basically they end up thinking that they are losers anyway, of which everybody is ignoring their needs, because quite frankly they often do. So this is the way to do something “great”, a way to stick out, to become famous.

Obviously not just a male problem, but you just have to look at who statistically commits suicide and mass shootings, to see the problem.

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18 points

Yes, America doesn’t randomly have these shootings. We’re a sick society with deep fundamental problems. It’s some kind of dark alchemy of hopelessness, pressure/bullying, and celebrity culture. The darkness grows inside until it has to be inflicted somehow. Best case it’s a suicide. Worst case they decide to become famous before they go.

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6 points

Corollary to that, we wouldn’t even know how sick we were if some of us hadn’t gotten better.

That’s the state we are in right now. There’s a growing consciousness that we should hold ourselves to a higher standard as a society, and the parts of us that have profited immensely and grown used to the old way of doing things are resisting the change.

We’re like any person who is on the pathway to salvation, our old sinful selves are actively fighting against the renewing of our minds by the desire to be better.

It’s easy for the part of us that has gotten better to hate our old selves and the parts of us that remain stuck in our old ways, and it’s easy for our old selves to hate the work and effort it takes to change who We are.

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16 points

This is one aspect of what is commonly called “toxic masculinity”. It negatively affects the men that hold these harmful believes a lot.

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2 points

But a huge portion of this is also driven by a warped sense of what masculinity is to begin with, which is pushed largely by conservative culture. I was raised in a fairly progressive area and never felt isolated or like I was unable to show vulnerability. This is not a US problem as much as a conservative one.

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19 points

I’m still sad that this probably awkward boy got lured into that shit, shot at the crowd and got his head popped by a sniper. We wouldn’t know at what stage he could’ve been helped. He’s lost now. And there are many boys like him who can take a gun and spray whoever with it, who can be saved as are their possible victims. There should be something to help his peers or otherwise this chaotic violence would continue, not like in Trump’s case but like in regular shootings it somehow overshadowed.

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0 points
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Couple facts according to BBC early reports:

  • gunman was a registered republican
  • gunman donated $15 to the dems

FWIW. Ideology could be either way based on that info. People sometimes register for the opposing party as a tactic to vote in the primaries for the weaker candidate (less likely to win). Donating to dems could either mean allegiance to dems or it could just as well be a true conservative who hates Trump (because true conservatives tend to oppose Trump as well over Trump’s disregard for antitrust situations and his sloppy spending). A Trump-hating republican would also likely register as republican to vote against Trump in the primaries.

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The donation appears to have been done by the similarly named 69-year old Thomas Crooks, not gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks.

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8 points

gunman donated $15 to the dems

What I heard is that he donated to a Democrat-affiliated “get out the vote” group on the day Biden was inaugurated. It’s true that the donation was to “the dems,” but it sounds to me like the motivation could’ve been dissatisfaction with the voter turnout that resulted in Biden entering office. Maybe he just didn’t know that higher turnout tends to favor Democrats…

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5 points

Or he lost a bet.

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4 points

As the other commenter mentioned, there seems to be a 69yo similarly named man in a different Pennsylvania town that made that donation.

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1 point

The donation record has 20yo Crooks’ address, not 69yo Crooks’ address, so that’s not likely. I don’t know why $15 makes him a secret democrat, when there’s so much more evidence he’s deeply conservative. It shouldn’t be an issue.

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