The Trump shooter and Nihilism of Young Men have an opinion
How Militia Follows Trump’s Call for Reconciliation: After Two Injuries, One Died, Two More, One More
The militia movement has been a target of some groups that are trying to rebuild it from the ground up. According to Seddon, APIII and the Light Foot Militia, another decentralized paramilitary group with chapters nationwide, have been coordinating closely. Last month, a video circulated on TikTok and Facebook purporting to show a training meetup with APIII and Light Foot in an undisclosed location. A group of men and women dressed in fatigues stand together. Text over the video reads: “Now is the time to join a MF’in Militia, Not a Political Party,” and “We came into this world screaming covered in blood and will be leaving the same way. No retreat, no surrender.
Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, says that this type of rhetoric has been pretty commonplace in online spaces since 2020, especially since January 6. But she’s particularly concerned about the heightened rhetoric in tandem with aggressive recruitment efforts by militia groups, who historically have opportunistically pounced on moments of national chaos to encourage organizing and training. Paul believes that the confluence of militia activity and heightened rhetoric could prompt individuals who are vulnerable to online influence to act on their own. She believes militias emphasize organization over calls for violence as a sign that they are focused on long term goals and growth.
The death of one person and two others injured at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, as well as an attack on the former President, created a wave of incendiary rhetoric and calls for revenge.
Seddon goes on in the video to say that he’s looking at coordinating a meeting with other militias around Pennsylvania. This isn’t going to go away. They need to become strong, strong lions. “Start reaching out to individuals in your state that are trustworthy, that have the like-minded vision of local strong communities, to hold down the fort, just in case [of] war, or for when shit hits the fan.”
Militia and anti-government groups across the United States are using the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump as an opportunity to organize, recruit, and train.
An attack on President Donald Trump was an attack on people like us, people who were like minded Americanpatriot, according to the video posted to TikTok on Sunday. APIII is a decentralized militia network with chapters across the US. Everybody in the group needs to start being accountable for what they do to help grow the organization and build a network of like minded people in their area. They are coming for us.
The ex-president’s allies have rushed to blame those who tried to warn of the danger he poses to democracy after the vile, civically calamitous attempted assassination of him. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that Trump must be stopped at all costs because he is an authoritarian fascist. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Empowered by the righteous fury of victimhood, Trump’s movement wants to cast discussion of his autocratic record and vengeful threats as incitement, smothering the debate at the heart of the 2024 election in a cloying fug of sanctimony.
It would be easy to expound on Republican hypocrisy and list all the many, many times Trump has encouraged violence against his opponents. In this case, the debate about divisive political rhetoric is not just suffused with bad faith. It also seems to be irrelevant, because the more we learn about the shooter, the less it makes sense to analyze his actions in conventional ideological terms. Though details remain sparse, this appears to be a story less about fanatical partisanship than about the crisis of lonely and disconnected young men being radicalized into pure nihilism.
In the immediate wake of the attack — which killed rally-goer Corey Comperatore as he shielded his family — many understandably assumed that the perpetrator was a leftist like the man who shot Representative Steve Scalise and several others in 2017. But what we’ve learned since then, while not enough to draw firm conclusions, complicates the picture.
The would-be killer is a cipher, leaving little trail online. Ryan Grim reports that, back when he was 17, he donated$15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a group that’s been known to carpet bomb your inbox, deliver emails with splashy colors, and use every trick in the book to convince people to give small amounts. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, his classmates remember him as a right-leaning Republican when he was in high school. A student in a American history class tells The Inquirer that the majority of the class was liberal but Tom always stood his ground on the conservative side.
