#magashooter

[rickmctumbleface]

[rickmctumbleface]

Same. I see lots of brown skin and hear lots of Spanish and Semitic accents along the main street of our town, but I'm way more afraid of the guy who cruises up and down in a pick up that has a big sticker with an outline of America that says "FUCK OFF, WE'RE FULL!". Based on bombs and bullets in the last couple weeks, I think I have good reason. Here's the stats of terrorist acts in the US for the last decade:

Right-wing extremists: 71%

Islamic extremists: 26%

Left-wing and other extremists: 3%

I don't like violent extremists of any stripe, so I'll be hanging out with the people who have the least. Peace, all.

[rickmctumbleface]

[rickmctumbleface]

That awkward moment when a 4th grader is more eloquent and statesmanlike than the president during a national tragedy.

[rickmctumbleface]

Did Trump send those bombs to his political opponents or murder those people in the Tree of Life synagogue? No, not directly. They were carried out by hateful others. The ultimate fault lies with them. 

BUT… Trump, using the bully pulpit of the Presidency, has consistently and blatantly incited and sanctioned violence against journalists, political opponents and fellow American citizens who criticize him. There are plenty of tweets and recordings of him at his 'rallies' to prove it. He deliberately stirs up anger and hatred to divide America and pit us against each other. No surprise that some will take his goading to its logical conclusion. 

Trump didn't send those bombs or kill those people personally, but he encouraged that behavior, which has been an abuse of his position and authority. As far as I'm concerned, Trump is the second most responsible person for those crimes after the perpetrators themselves.

[rickmctumbleface]

...and they say the trumpies can't be reasoned with. Surely, they learned their lesson after Pizzagate, right? I mean, we're not dealing with violent morons, are we?

[rickmctumbleface]

Silly libtards. Do you really think a few pipe bombs and shootings are going to dissuade people from supporting trump when all the sewerage that's been spilling from his toxic mouth these last few years has not? I think you overestimate them. A lot.

[moonwalkertrance]

The radicalization of an alleged domestic terrorist

Cesar Sayoc's social media accounts read like a blueprint for the radicalization of an alleged domestic terrorist.

For several years, bombing suspect Cesar Sayok tweeted conspiracies of every sort: PizzaGate, a plethora about George Soros, claims the Clintons murdered people, birtherism, chemtrails.

But his tweets got increasingly violent after Trump took office.

Cesar Sayoc's social media accounts read like a blueprint for the radicalization of an alleged domestic terrorist.

A CNN KFile analysis of thousands of tweets sent from Sayoc's accounts found the 56-year-old shared conspiracy theories, false news articles, and graphic memes for years. Some of his tweets appeared to be directly parroting President Trump. He tweeted about a wide array of baseless conspiracy theories, including "Pizzagate;" "chemtrails;" birtherism, and a number of posts regarding billionaire and liberal philanthropist George Soros. Sayoc occasionally seemed to copy the president's rhetoric. In February 2017, three days after the first time President Trump called the news media the "enemy of the people," Sayoc, in a tweet directed at Fox News' Chris Wallace wrote, "The Press is enemy." In April 2018, six months before he allegedly sent mail bombs to Soros, prominent Democrats and the offices of CNN, Sayoc moved from just tweeting about conspiracy theories to regularly threatening people. In all, CNN's analysis found, Sayoc tweeted more than 240 threats directed to at least 50 public officials, news organizations and media personalities. The threats, and Twitter's apparent inaction regarding them, raise new questions regarding social media and radicalization. Social media platforms like Twitter are "radicalization machines," Jonathon Morgan, the CEO of New Knowledge, told CNN. Morgan's company tracks online disinformation, and he has studied online radicalization for years.

In this instance, Twitter may well have provided Sayoc with the material that radicalized him, and then it stood idly by as that radicalization led to hundreds of threats. "Your Time is coming," "Your days are over," "your (sic) next," and "Hug your loved ones real close everytime U leave your home," were some of Sayoc's refrains. Sometimes he attached photos to his threats, including pictures of decapitated goats, photos of the homes and families of those he was threatening and a tarot card of a skeleton on horseback over the caption "death." He frequently suggested that the people he was tweeting at would vanish in the Everglades, not far from where he lived in Florida. Sayoc would repeatedly tweet about the subjects of his threats often sending the same threat a dozen times in a row. He tweeted 50 times about Parkland shooting survivors in 2018, including spreading the false conspiracy theories that shooting survivor David Hogg was a crisis actor working with Soros and that he wasn't in school at the time of the shooting, and also tweeted digitally altered pictures of Hogg in a Nazi uniform. Sayoc sent at least four threats to at Hogg. In May he tweeted pictures of Soros' home and with the address typed over the photo nine times in a row. The following month he posted pictures of Rep. Maxine Waters' home and wrote, "See you soon." Both were eventually mailed suspicious packages allegedly tied to Sayoc. That same month on May 18th, in response to a tweet from parody site The Onion, he tweeted a threat saying every media building needed to be set on fire. "More flipped garbage bye liberal left media everyone of their building needs to be eliminated torched.." Sayoc preceded to tweet four threats at the satirical outlet.