politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
Of course they have to identify the shooter with his First, middle, and last name, as is tradition… and it was a 20 yr old registered Republican? Wonder what the story on that will be?
I have a few ideas about that ranging from the boring to insane conspiracy bullshit.
A decent amount of people, myself included, have chosen to register as republican despite not really aligning themselves with the party. PA is a closed primary state so if you want a vote in the primaries you basically have to choose R or D, I personally went Republican on my registration because in general I can live with whoever the Democrats put up, they may not be my first, third, or 20th choice of candidate, but on the Republican side there are mostly only bad choices, and I'd rather try to head off the worst of them before they make it to the general election. In other cases it might just be down to a coin flip.
A lot of PA is pretty damn red, in some cases you may not have many or even any Democrat candidates in your local elections, and the ones you do have don't really have a snowballs chance in hell, so you might as well try to work with what you got on the Republican side.
Or maybe even you just registered as a Republican because that's what your parents told you to do when you got your driver's license and never bothered to change it. Maybe you just kind of figured that's what everyone did, or maybe you've had a change of heart since registering.
There are still some never-trump type Republicans out there, some of them even have their heads screwed on mostly correctly. Someone who sees trump as damaging to their party, or maybe even democracy while holding other Republican values may want him and his ilk taken out.
Again, some Republicans do have their heads screwed on mostly right, and maybe they feel very strongly about one of the many things Trump will obviously make worse.
Starting with the conspiracy bullshit - someone wanted to make trump a martyr to galvanize the Republican base. Maybe they only intended to wound him, maybe they did want to kill him. Maybe it's a publicity stunt orchestrated by Trump himself or other high ranking Republicans, maybe it's a lone actor who decided that it would really get Republicans motivated.
They know Trump is overall pretty incompetent, and felt he has already served the role he was needed for and wanted him out of the picture so that someone just as evil but actually good at his job could step into his shoes.
Even more radical Republicans who think that trump doesn't go far enough in advancing their race war, or christofascist, or whatever insane bullshit they want to bring about.
Putin is sick of his shit, or some other foreign actor helped bring this about.
Just plain ol' mental illness and trying to understand the motivation here isn't going to get you very far because it's not based on anything approaching logic.
I'm actually in the first camp as well, I'd rather have some amount of control over who the opposition is, and I like to keep tabs on what kind of rhetoric/propaganda the other side is pushing on their base. It looks like the shooter may have been in this camp as well, based on the reporting I've seen. A BBC story notes he was a registered Republican, but that he had made a donation to a liberal political group, ActBlue, in 2021. So I think it's probably going to be pinned on Democrats trying to be the violent ones, even though it has literally been Trump & co stirring up shit for years and basically guaranteeing that something like this would happen.
I reg'd as R as a 20-something, but have only voted R once (2000 election), just never bothered to change my registration once I realized voting R was a bad choice.
I heard on the news that he donated to ActBlue™ so that definitely tells some of the story.
$15... when he was 17.
And I think they just have a donation from someone with his common first and last name. No middle name, no birth date. The only confirmed info says he's a registered Republican.
This doesn't even matter. Guns are the issue.
Sounds more and more like he was a libertarian who didn't like Trump. Doesn't fit so cleanly into the media narrative, but there's definitely a lot of folks who fit that description politically in the US. Right leaning in a lot of ways but don't like authoritarianism. That part of the electorate also tends to own the most firearms, and there are no shortage of them in PA.