Nearly 48 hours after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, investigators are struck by the lack of leads they’re finding about Thomas Matthew Crooks’ mindset and possible motives for his attack.
  • Sickos [they/them, it/its]
    ·
    2 个月前

    Have they considered that sometimes guns just do that, and maybe the dude was trying to stop the gun the entire time?

    • kristina [she/her]
      ·
      2 个月前

      Wrestling the gun trying to get it from climbing up to a roof

      • fox [comrade/them]
        ·
        2 个月前

        That cop fled the roof because he needed to grab his tactical holy water out of the trunk

    • Storm [she/her]
      ·
      2 个月前

      Guns don't kill people unless they're possessed by evil spirits.

  • joaomarrom [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    2 个月前

    it's crazy, this has to be the only 20-year-old who's online enough to have Demolition Ranch merch and yet have no social media pages

    • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      2 个月前

      He might be so online that he had his account scrubbing bots running the night before to purge himself from the internet. We might never know.

      • mayo_cider [he/him]
        ·
        2 个月前

        Even with scrubbing the accounts there would be signs of scrubbing them and a shit ton of cached or otherwise not actually deleted data

      • newacctidk [none/use name]
        ·
        2 个月前

        My theory (only partly joking) is that he was hired to miss Trump but was such a bad shot that he missed his designated off target. Like those theories about Oswald being there to removedKennedy into empowering the security state only he misses

  • Juiceyb [any]
    ·
    2 个月前

    It's like I told a chud yesterday, the problem with being conspiratorial is that all of those stories you keep telling yourself fall flat. What obviously happened is that the Secret Service was incompetent as shit because this detail was picked by the Donald or someone close to him. It's not like the Secret Service has a clean history with their agents to begin with. In a way it's DEI for white people as he chose his own people for the "loyalty" rather than anything else.

    • MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]
      ·
      2 个月前

      There was a guy on the radio the other day who had been part of Bush's protective detail and talked about how the SS usually did 'close protection' meaning the guys around Trump and the stage and extended threat like the snipers we saw who would be aiming much further out. He said that the close-to-middle-distance that the shooter was in was usually designated to local police to secure.

      If that's the case, then it's even more unsurprising that the cops half-arsed it and reacted way too late.

      • Adkml [he/him]
        ·
        2 个月前

        Not to defend cops but they have a solid argument of "thanks to the gun laws in PA he didn't do anything illegal until he pulled the trigger"

        • TankieTanuki [he/him]
          ·
          2 个月前

          I can't admire the president's visage through this rifle scope? I'm sorry, I thought this was AMERICA!

          • Adkml [he/him]
            ·
            2 个月前

            Crawling around on barn roofs with an ar-15 is basically the national pass time of that particularly blighted part of the country.

              • Adkml [he/him]
                ·
                2 个月前

                It's like the Mythbusters episode where they tested climbing ducts with magnets and there was a shot of Adam standing there as you heard bang bang bang from the ducts and he was like "I think somebody is trying to break into my building" except that the cops weren't smart enough to figure that out.

      • marxisthayaca [he/him,they/them]
        ·
        2 个月前

        If that's the case, then it's even more unsurprising that the cops half-arsed it and reacted way too late.

        Are you?

        Show

    • Chronicon [they/them]
      ·
      2 个月前

      >all we found is that, in 2019, he made $26 dollars trading on robinhood

      data-laughing

  • Mokey [none/use name]
    ·
    2 个月前

    Watching chuds spread misinformation on him is so frustrating

    He was an antifa liberal??? Are you sure? He's not an idiot gun nut redneck from the middle of nowhere?

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]
    ·
    2 个月前

    They're just saying that to lull the co-conspirators into a false sense of relief.

    Any day now the FBI will, completely unrelated, arrest a climate activist or something. I dunno. Whatever it is they do besides post on Reddit.

      • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]
        ·
        2 个月前

        Every time I remember that kid who harvested clocks or whatever it was until he built his own nuclear reactor my brain immediately thinks of all those entrapment plots they pulled after 9/11.

        Like damn, Feds, maybe check in on the white boys a little more often.

  • HexbearGPT [comrade/them]
    ·
    2 个月前

    perhaps he was planning on trying to get away with afterwards and so erased everything so he could disappear easier?

    come Feds, at least make up a motive. say he was mad about buying a donald trump steak and it tasted bad. something.

    • Justice@lemmygrad.ml
      ·
      2 个月前

      I honestly feel like based on dude's... skull... and being a 20yo registered republican, they probably went to his house and his room was just a window into absolute madness induced by 16 hours a day gooning, posting about Jewish conspiracies on 4chan, and growing up in conservative-ass "no future" bumfuck western PA (alternatively known as Eastern Ohio or Northern Kentucky). The FBI was like "yeah, so... who wants to make the fake dono? Take care of that, say "motive unknown" and we can move on."

      In seriousness though, I feel like if we learned all this guy's browsing habits, especially over the last year or so, it would be so fucking bleak that you just gotta go "any reason he may have tried to articulate is irrelevant. The reason was the same as any school shooter. Hopelessness and despair turned into nihilism and a chance at being remembered for anything at all."

      • SoyViking [he/him]
        ·
        2 个月前

        the-pigs searching his room, finding it plastered with punisher skull/bald eagle/anti-woke/gun-crazy crap: "Nothing to see here, everything looks perfectly normal"

        • Adkml [he/him]
          ·
          2 个月前

          It's like that lady who said she wasn't involved in politics while being front and center at a Trump rally.

          I think we are underappreciating how many dipshits in this country don't consider their beliefs politicial because "it's what I think so it's the normal position, all the other positions are the political ones"

          Like in video games how there's two races, white and political. I think there really are a lot of mouth breathing chuds out there who that is unironically their entire worldview.

          • Darth_Reagan [they/them, comrade/them]
            ·
            2 个月前

            The wife of the chud who got shot said she was non-political as well, despite refusing to take a phone call from the sitting president to honor her husband's memory

            • Adkml [he/him]
              ·
              2 个月前

              Yea that's who I was talking about in her statement she said she doesn't get involved in politics then a sentence later said she was voting for Trump.

          • JayTwo [any]
            ·
            2 个月前

            So many people, libs especially, fail to understand that the colloquial meaning of "political" especially to reactionaries, doesn't mean involving politics, it means involving heterodox politics.
            Kneeling at a football game during the Anthem is "political" yet having players stand for the Anthem, which is recent and part of a military recruitment campaign (not joking) somehow isn't.
            I live in a liberal enclave inside a larger red area and I've found that "no politics allowed" never actually means that, it just means toe the line or GTFOH, which can be initially confusing being that there's two very different clashing ideologies common in the area, separated by some very fuzzy boundaries, both of which I disagree with.

            • Adkml [he/him]
              ·
              2 个月前

              Yea noticed the same thing. "No politics" means chuds are allowed to say gay people are pedophiles and should be rounded up but also means you can't call them a dumbshit bigot for saying that, that would be political.

      • Voidance [none/use name]
        ·
        2 个月前

        Don’t those guys pretty much always have some kind of manifesto though? It seems strange to give your life over to a political act, and then make sure no-one knows what your politics are

        • FunkyStuff [he/him]
          ·
          2 个月前

          I have a theory that he meant to make Trump a martyr and rile up the right in some way, Helter Skelter kind of thing, in which case it would make sense not to explain what he's doing.

          • BountifulEggnog [she/her]
            ·
            2 个月前

            It would have been really funny to read a right winger pretend to be a dem shooter in their manifesto though.

        • nohaybanda [he/him]
          ·
          2 个月前

          Wasn’t yamagami like, “I don’t like the guy, his weirdo cultists friends fucked up my mom”

          • Formerlyfarman [none/use name]
            ·
            2 个月前

            That's actually a really clear and well articulated motive. "He stole my money so I killed him." Is as reasonable as it gets.

            • nohaybanda [he/him]
              ·
              2 个月前

              Yeah, but I don’t get the feeling that the dude saw his struggle and ultimate decision to assassinate Abe as political. Our analysis ties up what happened to him with American imperialism and the use of far right religious extremists to exert control over East Asia. His reading was “Fuck that guy”

      • kristina [she/her]
        ·
        2 个月前

        Donation to actblue was a different guy with same name

    • Adkml [he/him]
      ·
      2 个月前

      Either that or his motive was "he's really obviously a viscous pedophile, he's been close personal friends with espstein for decades" and all the movers and shakers agreed they don't wanna put that pretty reasonable explanation out

    • Pandantic@midwest.social
      ·
      2 个月前

      perhaps he was planning on trying to get away

      I think he was because he had improvised explosives in his car and at his house. No reason to make those unless you plan to be alive to use them.

      • emizeko [they/them]
        ·
        2 个月前

        didn't the cops say "bomb-making materials" which could easily be a lie about something mundane

        • Wertheimer [any]
          ·
          2 个月前

          Shoes and a larger-than-travel-size container of toothpaste

        • Pandantic@midwest.social
          ·
          2 个月前

          This is what I found. They don’t go into specifics tho.

          Police found explosives in Thomas Matthew Crooks' car after he shot at Donald Trump.

          https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/police-found-explosives-inside-the-car-of-suspected-trump-rally-shooter-thomas-matthew-crooks/ar-BB1pY0p9

          Edit: other sources saying bombs too, but AP says “bomb making materials” so idk

  • Hestia [comrade/them, she/her]
    ·
    2 个月前

    I keep thinking of that one joke about witnessing JFK's assassination and the guy saying "holy shit that was meant for me!"

    Except the target was Corey

  • kristina [she/her]
    ·
    2 个月前

    dude just thought itd be fun to play target practice with his ear

    • kristina [she/her]
      ·
      2 个月前

      or just decided being a school shooter was ridiculous and the way to get real notoriety is

    • WereHacker@lemmy.ml
      ·
      2 个月前

      The "lone gunman" always have the same motive, becoming an anti-hero instead of a looser. It doesn't really matter what went on in their sad little brains before the killing started. Usually it is some coked-up version of a fascist fairytale, but as said, they all have the same motive. Rewriting the story about their sad underdog lives. They are an homage to conservative rebellion against liberalism.

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
      ·
      2 个月前

      At first I was convinced he was going to be on the left and was registered to vote for the worst R in the primaries, but the more (or less) I learn about this person I'm starting to think he's one of the "old school" conservatives, who has conservative parents, and actually gives a fuck about conservativism, who just so happens to be a "quiet kid" with not much online presence.

      One of the actual conservatives and not today's fake, Republican version of conservative.

      It's kinda fucked in a way, leftists and centrist conservatives have almost no representation in government unless you consider most Democrats to be centrist conservatives but they why don't principled conservatives vote for them? All we have as far as representation are center left and far right...

      • Chronicon [they/them]
        ·
        2 个月前

        the "actual conservatives" would be fine with all the same atrocities that fascists want if it had the right coat of paint and civility over it so they could feel good about it. MAGA weirdos aren't fake conservatives, they're if anything more honest conservatives. Less liberal veneer than old school republicans sometimes had, but the substance? it's not that different

        Also to be clear, liberals are right wing under any meaningful definition

      • Dr. Jenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube
        ·
        2 个月前

        Nah I think he's your standard run-of-the-mill mass shooter. If Trump didn't happen to roll through his town he would have shot up a movie theater or school.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        2 个月前

        but they why don't principled conservatives vote for them?

        Because the team they supported was a religion to them

      • wild_dog [they/them]
        ·
        2 个月前

        It's kinda fucked in a way, leftists and centrist conservatives have almost no representation in government unless you consider most Democrats to be centrist conservatives but they why don't principled conservatives vote for them?

        They do, it's just that our entire political system has been running to the right for so long that "principled conservatives" are a small minority of the broader right wing movement now. Think about how Nikki Haley bombed in the primary this year, she would have done way better against Trump if this type of conservative made up a bigger chunk of the modern Republican base.

  • Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    2 个月前

    You're telling me this kid owns youtuber merch but does not have any online accounts?

    Bullshit.

    • Chronicon [they/them]
      ·
      2 个月前

      they said he has discord, and sure he probably has youtube, but that doesn't mean he posted about his adventurism plans on either