Thomas Matthew Crooks, the suspectin Saturday’s shooting, was registered as a Republican voter, according to Pennsylvania records.
Already the republicans are dismissing his voter registration as meaningless. Here comes the “mental illness” angle.
Edit: apparently it’s not uncommon to register with the party you oppose in PA. This is going to be a fun ride.
Crooks was supposedly wearing a shirt for a YT channel “Demolition Ranch” being called a pro-gun channel by the news. Quick scan of their content seems to indicate that guns are toys to be played with and how much destruction you can do with them.
IIRC, DemoRanch uses (or at least used to) a portion of its income to run his Veterinarian clinic, but that is a few years old and it looks like he stepped back from the business in 2021? I fell off from most of YouTube before the pandemic, so I’m bummed but not surprised that he’s a Trump guy.
Basically every single gun nut youtube is inherently right wing. Any content creator who actually gives a shit about humanity would have made MASSIVE changes following… ANY school shooting.
The best you can hope for is channels like Forgotten Weapons where Ian actively refuses to “be political”. He still lets his biases show any time he talks about legislation but he also has very clearly mocked a lot of the “loophole” devices and mostly comes across as a rich jerk talking about engineering. Or (funny enough) Carl at InRange who is 100% in the “useful idiot” category but seems to have a good heart.
The YT algo also drives the content further right. I keep getting recommended Herrera’s channel, and if that’s the kind of stuff you’ve got to compete against for views, it’s just going to create a runaway phenomenon. If a tech literate, vaguely media literate leftist with a “mechanical porn” fetish can’t stop getting recommended Right-wing political gun garbage, then the average viewer doesn’t stand a chance…
