UPDATE: We didn’t know much about this guy when I first saw the headline & posted the meme.
Now we do!
https://www.wlwt.com/amp/article/fbi-office-cincinnati-armed-suspect-shot-fire-clinton-county/40871234
Tl;dr — a political radical deep in the Right-Wingnutophere who was literally posting to Truth Social while being pursued in the chase that eventually ended in his death.
He should have just obeyed the law!
But anyway. It’s very sad to see this happening to Americans, but also, these guys are dangerous and so brainwashed that their actions are indistinguishable from insanity, unless accompanied by other markers like social media overuse that indicate the source of the disease.
I cruised by Gab last night, and what I saw there was even more disturbing than the toxic brew of election denial that I encountered on the platform when I was checking up on it off-and-on during the post-2020 election Presidential transition period.
Back then, the radical-Right had hope that somehow, someway, Trump was going to be inaugurated to a second term. Now, they don’t even have hope — just a sense of impending doom (their psychological well-being is totally bound up with Trump’s), and the round pegs of conspiracies that they’re trying to fit into the square hole of reality.
I also saw rampant anti-Semitism, suggestions that Hitler was right, taunts to liberals to “shoot it out like it’s 1775,” etc etc.
This won’t end well. Things will get worse on this front before they get better, but in the end, things will get better. Despite the taunts, there won’t be a “Civil War.” At worst, there will be more scattered lone-wolf attacks, similar to this guy. But this “movement,” if that’s what it is, lacks organization completely. And they won’t be capable of building one, because… well, because the FBI, and other law enforcement agencies. As this guy’s tweet (erm, “Truth”) intuited, the American state is more than capable of doling out violence against those who threaten it.
And they may hem and haw, but I do not see the GOP as an institution fully aligning itself with domestic terrorists.
