chat

most leftists live in cities. most reactionaries live in cities. most democrats live in cities. most republicans live in cities.

these are all facts, and none of them can be used to characterize the general politics of people who live in rural communities any more than demographic facts about LA can tell you about the value structure of a random guy in East Jerkwater, West Virginia. capitalists run all the political machines in the US, but they choose different brands and narratives to paper their projects, depending on the landscape.

if i had to lay odds, i would bet the shooter is a hard-to-parse configuration of mostly right wing politics from Salt Lake or Toole counties in Utah and works in the Salt Lake City, Utah Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) with a tenuous, primarily historic-kinship connection to hunting; a father, an uncle, etc that hunts.

my logic: i just described the most typical/average utahan. if there's a common characteristic profile to assassins/vigilantes/whathaveyou, it's their isolation from community and alienation from common social grouping. every recent-ish shooter i can think of had politics all over the place, kind of like the average, politically incoherent american, and pundits/analysts both tried to either claim them or reject them, with varying levels of success, based more on their targets and easy narratives more than what they actually believed. this guy could come out as a right wing, christian identitarian anti-semite and i guarantee, much of the press and the influencer sphere will say he's a leftist because he wrote some anti-cop stuff on reddit in 2020.

the actual critical ethnography of people who do shit like this and their value systems will come much later, if at all, by some weird PhD candidate and nobody will read their articles/dissertation. it makes it difficult, re: impossible, to predict their politics with any rigor.

i do like the idea of it being some activated ex-mossad cut-out as part of some 5d plan (Project Argus: Phase IV), but that's because i like high level geopolitical conspiracies. i try to stay on the side of being entertained by them more than entertaining them myself. maybe one day i'll get some red yarn, a red sharpee, and go crazy on a wall with cut out photos, maps, and newspaper headlines.