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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   42409 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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and some people who knew him said he was an outspoken conservative

What people? From what I've read, he functionally didn't have any friends and barely interacted with anyone outside coursework.

As mystery continues surrounding the possible motivations of the 20-year-old Pennsylvania man accused of trying to kill Donald Trump at a campaign rally, a former classmate of his came forward to describe him as “definitely conservative” when they were in school together.

“It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate,” Max R Smith told the Philadelphia Inquirer of the accused shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks.

[...]

Smith said he and Crooks took a sophomore US history course together at Bethel Park high school, located in a middle-class suburb eight miles (13km) south of Pittsburgh.

Smith told the Inquirer about a mock debate in which the history professor asked students to signal their support or opposition for government policy proposals.

“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.”

From a Guardian article.

Every single other person interviewed describes him as a weird loner who never expressed any personal details beyond a general anxiety about doing well in school. Do you really believe that this one memory from a random classmate of the weird loner standing on the side of the room with no other people is the dispositive proof of his sincere beliefs?

Proof? No. Enough evidence, when combined with his membership of the Republicans, to make the "most Westerners who want to shoot Donald Trump are SJWs" heuristic dubious? Yes.

As noted above, I wouldn't count Crooks toward either "side"'s tally. Just too many question marks. As also noted above, there are plenty of others whom I would count as "SJers trying to kill Trump".

Shacked up with a transsexual, wrote a bunch of leftist memes, and finally shot a right-wing public figure.

Sure, he happened to be signed up with the other party. But his actual active actions speak a much clearer language than that bit of buerocratic neglect (i.e., inaction, which comes easy).

Sure, he happened to be signed up with the other party.

Is he? The only specifics on this that I heard of was that he supposedly donated to the Trump campaign... except he didn't. Someone just found a guy in the donation record, with the same first and last name.

Last I heard the shooter was not signed up with any party.

Edit: although from the context it sounds like they're talking about the Trump shooter(s), not the Charlie Kirk one, I don't think either of them shacked up with a transsexual.

Ah, my bad. I just went off of the parent comment.

According to German news, the Charlie Kirk shooter was indeed shacked up with a transsexual, but YMMV on how trustworthy that tidbit is.

I was, indeed, talking about Thomas Crooks, the guy who shot Trump at a rally a year ago. We have a report of him being an outspoken conservative, and he registered as Republican in 2022, but a few months before that he'd donated a small amount to ActBlue, and he did, y'know, shoot Donald Trump, and AFAIK he didn't make any political posts on the 'Web to clear up what the hell's going on there, so I stick him in the "unknown" column rather than the "left-wing" or "right-wing" columns.

I think the Charlie Kirk murder screams Antifa, to the point that the only way it could be not Antifa would be if it were an outright false-flag trying to frame them - and even then, that's quite unlikely. But that wasn't the topic of discussion.

Are we good?

Yeah, absolutely. I didn't bother to read the comment chain properly, and so made a fool of myself.

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