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I thought the Minnesota guys' politics/general motivations turned out to be pretty weird and unclear?
The sheer obscurity of the Minnesotans plus the weirdness of the shooter's autobiography/having met them occasionally on all accounts create a different picture than trying to blast a Trump or w/e.
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I'm talking about the first clause, not the second -- mental health issues are kind of par for the course with multiple murderers, no?
I'm saying that it's not clear at all where this guy sits on the political spectrum and he has mental health issues. Even if he's a left winger!
You misunderstand me. RWers never, ever own their violent extremists, no matter how blatant it is (I mean, seriously, the guy was going down a hit list of democratic legislators). The blame is always shifted onto mental health. This despite how much time the far right spend fantasizing about violence (shit, the most common far-right response I've seen to Kirk's murder is "this is our Reichstag fire, time to break out the jackboots")
I found this remark from Ben Dreyfuss illustrative:
Except when it's a right-wing extremist, instead of MyLittleCommunistPony saying 'good', it's, like, Mike Lee, and right-wing commentators invent cope about how the guy was really mentally ill and we can't really know what was in his heart.
The guy also had a bunch of "no kings" anti-trump fliers -- as mentioned, rounding him off to "right wing extremist" doesn't even match up with the (normally left-wing slanted) article you linked in wikipedia. Which is kind of rough on your whole premise, mental health issues aside.
You may have bubble issues -- the most common response I've seen anywhere is more like "I'm praying for his family".
Which do you think is more likely: that this guy who was specifically targeting Democrats was also carrying fliers for a normie resist-lib protest because after he finished up murdering his way through the MN state legislature he was going to pass out some literature? Or that this guy with a history of right-wing views (pro-life, anti-trans, evangelical, etc...) was trying to throw people off the scent?
Boelter was not just an unhinged guy (he is also an unhinged guy, but that's just table stakes) who intended to pull the trigger and see what happened. Even if he didn't expect to get away with it, he clearly planned to.
What I'd consider most likely is that his views don't map cleanly to either of the Democrat nor Republican parties. (many such cases!)
The anti-abortion theory for his motive seems strongest, although I have some concerns -- but running with that for now -- does being anti-abortion in itself make one a right winger? It's certainly possible that he thinks Trump is fascist as well, which is more of a left-wing thing and would explain the fliers.
Is an anti-abortion pro-trans socialist left, or right wing? What if he also hates Israel? Or what if he's pro-choice, but loves the 2A and hates commies?
The disconnect here is coming from your apparent need to assign coherent political beliefs to this guy moreso than however the broad right/left is responding to these events. (which seems very different regardless of the political valence of the shooters; I certainly don't recall anybody at all, left or right, celebrating the Minnesota murderer)
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Yes the unhinged guy was deliberately gathering the literature of opposing parties in order to confuse potential biographers. AFAIK the main thing anybody associated was pro-Life, but not being on board with idpol doesn't necessarily inform the whole political thing.
His justification was that God Emperor Tim Walz called him and told him to take lives in his honor.
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For the duration of the tweet. Tomorrow they'll be back to explaining how Charlie Kirk rhetoric justifies violence.
I was actually thinking earlier how it's the left-wing version of the "thoughts and prayers" ritual.
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My dude, the guy said Tim Walz told him to do it. I was obsessed with that case, but the guy does seem to actually just be untethered to objective reality, like Jared Loughtner. FWIW, I think Mangione is in this category as well.
Relatedly, can you show a single right-winger who approved of Gendron? I feel confident predicting that an overwhelming supermajority of rightwingers support giving him the chair.
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That's exactly what the wikipedia article says. But Boelter tracks to right wing and has said he was right wing 20 years ago.
It just reads, to me, like Skibboleth giving up and getting mired in the same guesswork where everything is made up and the points don't matter that he's decrying which undermines the point just a bit.
How, specifically?
I followed this at the time, and my prediction was that it didn't look like a crazy person (obvious premeditation, use of tactics, use of a mask, etc), and seemed more likely to be a right-winger than a left-winger, given the available evidence. But then more evidence came out, and what it showed was that this guy had been fairly apolitical but mental-health-wise marginal, and that recently he had gone cuckoo-bananas based on his public pronouncements, in a way that did not map to the red-blue split.
I was, from the start, prepared to believe that he was motivated by right-wing ideology, and I maintain that the prior for any murder of politicians should be that the act is political. But in this case, he genuinely seemed to believe that (IIRC) he'd figured out how to end world hunger by outlawing food waste at the federal level, and thought the politicians who weren't listening to him were on the side of Big Hunger. That is not right-wing ideology. That is actual craziness.
from the wiki:
He's also a white guy that was wearing a cowboy hat in CCTV footage.
These all track right wing to me. There's a ton of confounders to this, yeah, which is why even his affiliation was muddy. But in situations like these affiliation is being used as an assumed motivation most of the time. I don't think that's true but I was just trying to meet Skibboleth halfway to try to maintain decorum since the post was mostly just pure seething.
All of those are indeed weak evidence that he was Red-aligned, which was why at the time I bet he was actually Red-aligned. But then I actually read what he'd been writing and posting shortly before the attack, and what some of his colleagues reported of his actions, and that gave much, much stronger evidence that he was in fact just insane.
They caught him alive, IIRC, they have all his devices and all his possessions. If someone can point to any actual evidence that his attacks were motivated by anything resembling red-tribe political ideology, I will be happy to count him as a Red-aligned ideological killer.
You tell me how this sounds like a Red Tribe grievance.
@Skibboleth is flaming out because he is a die-hard partisan whose goal is to pretend to be reasonable, and his side is having a very bad week. We actually discussed the Waltz shooting at some length at the time, including considerable speculation about motives. The shooting happened in the middle of the night and IIRC by the next afternoon they caught the guy and had established that he was legitimately crazy, so the conversation died out. The arguments he is presenting above are specious, but he puffs up big, neglects the detail and shouts in outrage, so mostly people don't notice.
What we are seeing now is legitimately way, way worse than the Minnesota shootings. We have video of people in the crowd jumping and screaming for joy within seconds of the bullet's impact. the entire left-wing internet is either openly celebrating his murder or feigning smug disinterest.
Didn't you just say that your side will not accept a crazy guy with a gun explanation?
Why are your enemies required to be so much more rational and forgiving than you are?
This is A) not true, and B) "murder and suspected jaywalking".
I think at this point the issue is more the general response to the shooting than a question of who actually pulled the trigger. A pile of tweets with half a million likes is sufficiently indicative of the death of civil norms
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I am not going to accept a "shooters are usually crazy people, he was probably just a crazy person" explanation until I see concrete evidence that he is actually crazy. None has been presented. I am doubtful that any will be forthcoming, but stand to be corrected.
I think it's pretty true, but welcome additional precision. What portion of the left-wing internet is some degree of happy that he's dead, in your view and experience?
I disagree. Blues do not appear to me to have a consensus that Reds being murdered is something to be concerned about. I find that lack of consensus concerning in its own right.
Ok well that's fine, my misunderstanding, although I don't know why you felt the need to specify that.
What is 'some degree of happy'? Like 0.00001% happy? Ambivalent feelings can come up when a person one does not like dies. That is not celebrating or approving someone's death. It seems this is all preparing the prosecution of your opponents for the crime of 'not being sad enough' and 'being quiet, evilly' ('feigning smug disinterest').
But to answer your question, I see nothing but condemnation from party leaders and influential people. What you're seeing is the screenshotting of some fringe nobodies for engagement.
Yeah but those fringe nobodies are getting hundreds of thousands of likes on their posts.
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