The $15 donation was another guy with the same name. This guy was 17 at the time.Snopes sez: false https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-shooter-donation/
I just want to chime in and say thank you for editing your post after finding new information. If everyone in the world was like you, this place would suck a lot less.
Not only editing but leaving the old info so people don't get confused, that's awesome behaviour.
He has the same name as a guy who donated to ActBlue?! DEM
The FEC filing for the donation matches the shooters address: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-shooter-donation
Dem too.
/s
Please Ive heard this but I could never find a source for it.
It's hard to actually tell. There's a 69 year old Thomas Crooks in Pittsburgh who regularly donated to ACT BLUE.
ACT BLUE also does not accept donations from those under 18 due to legal liability issues.
On the other hand, the donation in question, on Jan 20 2021, had Thomas M Crooks' address. Or at least his zip code.
Huh. Well, I trust Snopes enough to retract that. For obvious reasons they don’t specify the address in question.
Oh, damn..
Everything to me just points to this being a very confused and disaffected kid who wanted to do something memorable with his life. I genuinely don't think there was much consideration beyond that. He was 20 years old, were your political beliefs as concrete and nuanced when you were that age as they are today?
I was 19 for 9/11. It solidified where I stood pretty well. I'd say 20 year olds today could easily be just as galvanized, especially with the way social media has changed things since then.
Hey we're the same age! I remember when 9/11 happened and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, that I didn't really know the main differences of news sources and fully understand how they leaned one way or another. I remember watching Fox News at the time, but didn't really realize that it was blatant propaganda. It wasn't until I started looking into other news sources and then looked into media biases that I started to realize just how fucked up Fox News is.
So I don't really expect most 19 or 20 year olds to really know what's trustworthy and what's not.
He's the prototypical American lone wolf shooter, it's not complicated
Everything to me just points to this being a very confused and disaffected kid who wanted to do something memorable with his life.
Used to be, a guy like this would simply shoot up a school. But now that he's shooting at our Dear Leader, its time to get serious about
gun controlmental healthviolent political rhetoricTankies.were your political beliefs as concrete and nuanced when you were that age as they are today
…yeah. To be fair, I'm 22, but I've been in the board of a local political party for over 3 years now. You could maybe make that argument for 16, but honestly, even then I was at political demonstrations.
Yes
Yep, this is it. Before, he was an awkward kid from a backward place with no friends and no prospects. Now, his name is forever associated with Donald Trump.
It IS weird though that he tried to shoot the Rep candidate and I can't really see why, yet. We will probably hear a lot of explanations for this and I'd be curious about yours.
So far I have heard rumours about a possible inside job/secret service involvement as an explanation, because they should have been aware of him. Might be, but I personally haven't seen anything too convincing to verify or falsify this.
Another one I could see is that he wanted to vote Republican but at some point realized that Trump sucks ass to put it mildly. So he tried to somehow push the Rep party to at least get back in touch with the idea of sanity by killing him?
Other than that... make Trump a martyr somehow? Have a plot to blame it on the Dems? Mental issues?
I feel like he was unwell, and trying to apply reason to his motives will be a fool's errand.
Just because someone is unwell doesn't mean that reason can't be applied to his motives. Most mental illnesses still follow some (twisted and perverse) logic
There are two explanations which I don't find ludicrous, if you assume the shooter to be far right:
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He was a Qanoner who bought the "we've gotta hunt the pedophiles" but didn't develop the cognitive dissonance to also think "but that doesn't mean Trump obviously".
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He was angry about Trump trying to distance himself from Project 2025 (even though that was merely rhetoric, but an angry and radical 20 years old may not understand that).
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There could be a million reasons. It seems morbid speculating.
This is quite a significant incident in the middle of an important election campaign. While some reasons for the attempt may seem insignificant (e.g., mental illness), others could turn out to be quite important moving forward (e.g., involvement of secret service, faked attempt by Trump's team etc.). Any evidence for or against any of these could have political implications and effects on the election results.
Suicide by cop.
There are three theories
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Trump had people hire him to pretend to assassinate him, and he went along with it thinking it'd boost Trump's ratings (Kinda dumb and conspiratorial)
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He wasn't aiming for Trump, but someone in the crowd, and Trump was hit by mistake (Given that he doesn't aim for center of mass, this makes sense)
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He wanted to kill Trump, fearing he wasn't Right Leaning enough (There are already people bashing Vance not for being racist, but for not being racist enough)
Also wasn't the payment to the Biden campaign found to actually be someone else with a similar name?
Also wasn't the payment to the Biden campaign found to actually be someone else with a similar name?
The donation was to ActBlue not Biden and the FEC filing was his name at the house he lived at. It's unlikely it was someone else unless he was named for his grandpa or something and he lived with them
You can view the FEC filings yourself by going to the FEC website and search his name and zip code in the individual contribution search.
I have another:
Ah, I didn't consider the other side of the spectrum that maybe Trump isn't fascist enough for him.
Another theory is that he might have thought it would accelerate the right leaning movement by killing or wounding Trump. It is also possible he liked the movement but not Trump.
Theories 1 and 2 don’t make any sense. Trump has too much of an ego for 1 and 2 would be weird. If you aren’t going after Trump, anyone else would be easier to shoot when not next to Trump.
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Trump is a fascist and some small portion of Republicans still don't support fascists.
some small portion of Republicans still don’t support fascists.
Lmmfao, if that were the case, they wouldn't still be republicans
Another one I could see is that he wanted to vote Republican but at some point realized that Trump sucks ass to put it mildly. So he tried to somehow push the Rep party to at least get back in touch with the idea of sanity by killing him?
I could see that happening. While I still dislike it, conservatism by itself is a valid ideology. Maybe he believed in the core principles of the party (small government, free market, christianity, etc.) and was sick of the main candidate being a lying fascist that is the spitting image of the biblical antichrist.
I've seen actblue ask for money for literally everything. Likely they were advertising for something conservative.
This is getting weirder and weirder.
Summary since I haven't seen it in the comments yet: they cracked his phone. There was some sort of high level briefing and some info got leaked:
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He either had or just googled some kind of depressive disorder (could potentially relate to motive if he was bipolar and having a manic episode or something).
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He had pictures saved of the schedules for both Trump and Biden's national convention appearances. So he could have been trying to go after both of them, potentially.
Usually after 18 is when most bipolar people have their first major episode. There's really no access to mental healthcare for someone like him. You're lucky if you can see a p-doc for ten minutes. Usually you'll see a primary care physician first and there's a good chance that they're going to prescribe you antidepressants, which is like throwing gas on the fire. It takes months or years of trying different medications to find a combo that works for you and that requires a support system of people who can tell how you're doing and you have to have a willingness to be miserable for an indefinate period of time. Certain meds will make you feel better for a month or two and then they'll gradually stop working. People get frustrated and stop taking medication because it makes them feel like shit. Dropping meds completely is the worst thing, it's like dumping a 100 lb backpack that you've been carrying for months. You feel like you can jump ten feet in the air, nobody can stop you.
He had pictures saved of the schedules for both Trump and Biden’s national convention appearances. So he could have been trying to go after both of them, potentially.
That's the kind of bipartisanship that I can support.
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Fash don't care about the truth. It's an ideology based entirely on lies.
His face kind of looks like Elizabeth Warren. She's a Democrat! Lol
Last I heard from the rumor mill is that he was right leaning but showed signs of disapproval of Trump specifically after he was elected the first time. Something about activism engagements related to stuff that was pretty opposite of whatever Trump wanted.
I dunno, I haven't fact checked anything, but I don't care to. Everyone is already picking his life apart (law enforcement and the public), which IMO, is pretty invasive.
If the LEOs wanted to know why he did what he did, I'm sure their sharpshooters could have found a way to not end his life in the process of stopping him. IDK, I'm not a sharpshooter either.
It's funny, I tend to fixate on shooting events when they happen and follow the news and dig into it. But I didn't even hear about this till days later.
My conspiracy is that this kid got groomed or extorted by stronger sovereign types to do this. Basically all politics use youth. Youth are the ones fucked over because adults want to get something. Business marketing to youth to make money etc... America's youth are puppets. Shit, it's the same reason why conservatives say colleges are indoctrinating people. It's the same dumb bullshit on all sides of pop politics... Market to and use the youth to advance your ideology while killing innocence of just "existing" and "being" so that one can feel some fake security and solidify their perception of reality.
If by using the youth you mean discussing very prevalent political items that they will absolutely need to deal with in a time where they are forming their perception of what reality is actually like… then yeah..
When else would be an appropriate time to discuss current standings, issues, and opinions than during the dawn of adulthood? We vote at 18 in the US… it’s absolutely acceptable to be talking about this stuff when teens are starting highschool. And of all the political sides, try as the republicans may, democratic/liberal policies are generally based on how things are affecting everyone from the richest of rich down to the smallest minority demographic.
Sure there’s crazies on both sides, but trying to find a Republican who’s open to different ideas and concerns is a lot harder than finding a dem. One is based on modernization and societal progress while the other just points to any problem and suggests regression and suppression. Pretty simple imo
One is based on modernization and societal progress while the other just points to any problem and suggests regression and suppression.
This is what they've indoctrinated you as a teenager to think, doesn't make it true though. The truth is both exist primarily, if not solely to maintain capitalism and the status quo.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/22/american-democracy-was-never-designed-to-be-democratic
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/06/no-capitalism-isnt-democratic
https://libcom.org/article/capitalist-democracy-illusion-choice
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/14/liberalism-and-fascism-partners-in-crime/
My conspiracy is that this kid got groomed or extorted by stronger sovereign types to do this.
I've been having similar thoughts. It seems much more likely to me that a trump fanboy could be convinced to take part in a convoluted plan to stage an assassination to create the hero/survivor/martyr/victim narrative for not much at all (but including the false promise that he would make it out alive, and maybe a free shot in to the crowd, as a treat), and that the christofascist police would look the other way (or just be their usual incompetent selves), than that one would not only get disillusioned to the point of wanting to kill him, but also being able to pull off something like this unnoticed (and we already know he was noticed).
Though the truth is that whatever really happened, if we ever find out, one thing's for sure - being a trump supporter he definitely was, to one degree or another, groomed by stronger sovereign types, there's a whole pipeline dedicated to it..
People underestimate the underground in terms of their play in politics. It's gotten to the point that our system is fully intertwined with illegal and corrupt lifestyles.
Pop politics is just giving false hope to a class of people that don't understand war and crime. The civil war has been here for awhile but people are too naive, even the cops and politicians, to understand. The deaths get passed off as accidents and suicides or blamed on mentally ill. It's part of the game to make someone go crazy and do shit like this. It's a common play. It's to the point I question mass shootings. Are these kids getting used by stronger people? I see a lot of "regular" people played out doing work for stronger people. They are to naive to know what's happening and how strong people around them can be. There's players in the game everywhere. From the low streets to the big business and people get so blinded by the false market virtuosity of politics. It's finished already. Shit our country would collapse if we took out the black market and dark money.
