Suck that some Republican barely-adult attempted to assassinate the Republican candidate for President.
It would be wrong if a Democrat did it, and it’s still wrong.
The outcome of this attempt was probably the worst possible outcome for Democrats.
His high school classmates say he was bullied relentlessly. So it’s possible that this was just a case of “insanity” instead of political violence. Just another situation where some kid with mental health problems is able to get hold of weapons and do some serious damage. This would actually help democrats since they strong on gun control.
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Same here. His backers could absolutely conceive of such a scenario.
Its definitely a low probability event, but its non-zero in Trump world.
I think it’s far more likely a deranged young man had easy access to a dangerous weapon and took a shot at the most controversial person in the country.
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One would hope, but the spin machine already is happening.
Biden said that Democrats need to put Trump in the crosshairs. Despite this being a normal colloquial phrase, this is proof that Biden was encouraging an assassination.
The kid donated $15 to the Democratic Party. This was actually a 69-year-old Democrat from Pennsylvania, but he had the same name, so this has become canon in MAGA lore.
All the Fox News programming is saying this was the Democrats’ fault. Even if it was a Republican shooting at the Republican candidate, it was either a plot involving the Secret Service and probably going all the way up to Biden, or at a minimum it was due to the Democrat’s violent rhetoric.
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Certainly that is the case in the short run. But once the dust settles, it’s quite likely that this was just some kid who played violent video games and wanted notoriety. If this turns out to be true, republicans will look like complete fools trying to make this out to be political violence primarily fueled by Biden’s messaging.
I’d like to think that would play out, but we’re living partially in a post-truth world. IMO, the perception is more important than reality. If reality should end up being embarrassing once the dust settles, it doesn’t matter much.
This is the world where Benghazigate and Obamagate are still canon events done by the evil Deep State. We have an open border and the pedophile Crime Lord Biden wants to turn your kids trans.
The moment it was revealed the kid was a registered Republican, I saw numerous comments online, “you know how Democrats faked being Republicans to vote in Republican primaries, clearly the guy knew if he registered Republican then it would look bad for Republicans.”
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…it will probably not receive much coverage on Fox News, OANN, Newsmax, and similar outlets.
I’m sure there are records that show whether he registered as a Republican when he first registered to vote, or whether he switched it recently.
Reality no longer mattered on January 20th, 2017. Trump blatantly lied about crowd sizes and right wing news did a dance for him.
The conclusion is the left wants Trump dead, which might be true if you go far enough out into the tail, but that won’t prevent anyone more than ~1 s.d. right of center from making claims that every democrats is working towards this goal.
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This entire discussion is sad. NO one has yet managed to bring up that the political discourse has been out of hand for a while and people viewing the other side as “evil” or “the enemy” is a real problem. Everyone reverting to referencing their talking points like automatons.
BTW: Sotomayor was not the target of a carjacking. Some idiot kid tried to carjack a car in her neighborhood and was too stupid to realize it was a Federal Marshal. The guy was part of her residential external security and, shocker, was being covered by another Marshal not far away. It did not end well for the carjacker.
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I love how everyone is trying to find political motivation in a 20 year old kid. I didn’t know shit about politics when I was 20. Nor did I even care.
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I don’t think he was politically motivated.
How he was “nudged” to behave in this way matters a great deal.
We have seen this in Europe when young people with MH problems are radicalised online.
They can be groomed by an outside party to do stuff like this.
I really don’t care about his politics. I do care about pushing back on the narrative that he was a secret Democrat or that Biden somehow planned this. I don’t think a 20-year-old being registered as a Republican means that he’s a deeply-lost QAnon MAGA fanatic. It’s my assumption he was mentally ill - I just don’t see how a stable person would attempt such a thing.
Altogether, it’s just a sad story of a kid who got radicalized (opinion: likely a terminally-online kid) and did a really stupid thing, killed a bystander, and was shot dead.
It’s too soon to discuss gun control. Just like how the aftermath of mass shootings is an inappropriate time.
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You mean someone took a pot shot at a dude who had been ratcheting up the talk on political violence since 2016 is surprising?
In the words of Donald J. Trump about school shootings “Just get over it.”
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54 cases of violent crimes that directly cite former President Trump’s words as motivation for the crime. This was back in 2020. A minority are crimes done in opposition to Trump’s words but still cite his words as motivation.
I agree that violent rhetoric is inappropriate. Biden should continue to avoid such speech. The fringes of the left who wish that Trump had been killed are inappropriate. I’m glad that the Democrats don’t have mass chants to jail political opponents or drag them in front of military tribunals for treason.
It would be foolish to ignore Trump’s support of groups like self-described neo-Nazis and other white supremacists like Whites Against Replacement (WAR), but Democrats shouldn’t call for death. Overwhelmingly they aren’t, but I saw it regarding the assassination attempt more commonly than I’d like in anonymous online discourse. I view it as a response to years of the same calls by the GOP, but responding the same way doesn’t make it right.
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I agree. I have deleted many posts before sending them out here. There was a lot of blame on Trumps talk about the election for the Jan 2021 events (mostly justified too imo). There has been a lot of talk from the media and Biden about how evil this man is and how it is a threat to democracy if he wins. It should be the same sort of blame but instead it is spun to still blame Trump and the republicans
I do not change my stance that Trump is a fundamental threat to American democracy.
I don’t like the man and I don’t like his other policies, but that hasn’t been changed by a kid shooting at Trump. I don’t want him or any supporter murdered.
However, from Biden’s side - and I don’t believe he has ever called Trump evil - we have this:
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/14/g-s1-10305/trump-assassination-attempt-biden-unity
“I want to speak to you tonight about the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics,” Biden said. “We’re neighbors or friends, coworkers, citizens. Most importantly, we are fellow Americans, we must stand together,” Biden said.
Biden drew a throughline from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to the assault former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband and intimidation of election officials: “We can’t allow this violence to be normalized,” Biden said. “I believe politics ought to be an arena for peaceful debate. Our politics must never be a literal battlefield,” he said. “We resolve our differences at the ballot box – not with bullets.”
I have never seen a statement such as below from Biden. I’m not going to vouch for every one of the manifold Democratic politicians, because I’m sure a handful can be dredged up saying inappropriate things.
(Edit: I found one case of Jill using “evil” at a campaign event, but not Joe, and only in one spontaneous remark.)
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The thought that I struggle with is how can a person effectively communicate the opinion that electing Trump would be the capstone of the current existential crisis that the US is going through in a society where attention spans barely last the length of a TikTok video, without that short-form messaging being taken to mean “he must be stopped by any means possible”.
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Ahhh, yes… the great system that produces our choice of Biden or Trump.
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