Police identified a man Monday who shot and killed a California business owner last week after he allegedly took issue with a Pride flag she had displayed at her clothing store in Lake Arrowhead, California. Sheriff’s officials told NBC News that the killing is being investigated as a possible hate crime.
Travis Ikeguchi, 27, was responsible for shooting Laura Ann Carleton, 66, to death after “yelling many homophobic slurs” about the store’s Pride flag Friday, San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus said at a news conference Monday.
It looks like this might be his gab profile.
Anti-LGBT, gun obsessed, railing against California, and what looks like a bunch of incel posts mixed in too.
It’s a profile filled to the brim with red flags, but destined to fly under the radar because it’s mixed in with a hundred thousand profiles just like it.
These people have zero grip on reality.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: today’s Trump supporter is tomorrow’s mass shooter.
It’s worse than that. They’re penguins on an ice floe. All the penguins want to get into the water; none of them want to get eaten by a leopard seal. They mill around until a penguin gets brave/hungry enough to jump in (or one gets pushed in), and the rest of them wait to see if he gets eaten. If it survives, all the rest of the penguins jump right in after them.
With fascists you have a bunch of folks nudging people toward (but carefully avoiding openly calling for) violence. They push right up to the line, inch by inch, as close as they possibly can without technically crossing it. They do it until someone trips over, and then they all watch to see if/how that person gets punished.
The absolute instant that law enforcement ever stops punishing these people in a meaningful way we are going to see some crazy shit. That crazy shit will suddenly become the new normal, and the fascists will start pushing a new, more extreme line.
I think there would be a lot more urgency around this if more regular people could hear how conservative gun owners talk to each other when they think no one else is around. There are a lot of real normal-seeming guys who have reached a casual acceptance that any day now it will be time to “do the things.” Which is a fun little euphemism for murdering anyone they feel isn’t conservative enough, white enough, or Christian enough. They haven’t affiliated themselves with a larger extremist group yet, but are none-the-less arming and training themselves toward the goal of joining right in when it’s finally time to “do the things.”
I like that analogy.
Nah they just live in their own twisted reality, reinforced by their other nutbag buddies online, and are vehemently intent on imposing said reality on everyone else. The scary thing is that if these muppets gain a majority, sanity flies out the window.
We saw what happened when the trumpy grumpies were in power. The only saving grace was their leader was an idiot.
We have to stay vigilant to keep the party of hate greed and power from ever gaining a foot hole again. Even at 40% they can still wreck havoc in the Senate. Always remember and always vote even in the local and mid terms.