this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2025
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What I said was that he didn't appear to have much identifiable political motivation for the shooting, which is largely supported by that article. The person I was replying to asked if he was MAGA, which it does not appear he was. I mean, I suppose you could assume that every registered Republican at this point must be MAGA, but I feel like the fact that this guy took a shot at Trump kind of calls that assumption into question.
Basically I don't think "he was a registered republican!" says anything more about his motivation than "he donated to a progressive get-out-the-vote program in 2021!" which was a big talking point on the right-wing news at the time. People are complicated and he wasn't disinterested in politics, but it seems like the main reason he tried to kill Trump is that he wanted there to be more political assassination attempts in general and decided to be the change he wanted to see in the world.
All Republicans are facists. Maybe it wasn’t true at one time but in my lifetime it has been the case and they’ve gotten so extreme that democrats are what republicans were in the 80s
Are you saying that you think being fascist was his motivation for shooting at Trump?
I think it’s a violent ideology that promotes and glorifies violence. Do you disagree?
What I think is that to learn someone has attempted a deadly attack, then learn that their voter registration is with a particular party, and conclude that this tells you everything you could possibly need to know about the motivation of the attack is bizarrely reductive. I asked if you thought fascism was the motivation for the attempted Trump shooter's actions because your previous reply had shifted the conversation to fascism and I was trying to understand what you perceived as its relevance to the conversation. I was not, in any way, attempting to defend fascism, and I'm kinda troubled to have given anyone that impression.
In any case I think this conversation is getting unproductive. I'm sorry I got you riled.
I’m not riled but I don’t agree with you. I do think your inferences of emotion based on nothing are weird and reflect poorly on you.