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.
That’s one I had to stop my kid from watching because their gun safety is not non existent but is also not safe at all
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…
A lot of that is less the algorithm and more the creators.
I Did A Thing/Boy Boy are as (obnoxiously) tankie as it gets and they literally did a “let’s shoot some kids with a drone” video using herrera’s guns*. Which means that basically an entire chunk of maker youtube now has an actual palpable connection to herrera.
Everyone wants to blame the algorithm and… it is fucked. But the reality is that these youtubers (and twitch streamers and so forth) are all businesses first and most have zero problems collaborating with a known evil if it makes them money.
I suspect it is why people like Simone Giertz and Xyla Foxlin have basically stopped all collaborations with people who aren’t part of their “inner circles”.
*: Well worth looking up the “drama” around that. On Boy Boy, Aleks (?) tore into the gun fetishism and basically painted him as a kid with toys who got made if anyone even thought of taking them away while highlighting how fucked it is that some of herrera’s favorite guns are literally what drove Aleks and his family out of his home country. The response was herrera throwing a shitfit and insisting that anyone who enjoys shooting guns can’t be pro gun control and they are liars.
Wasnt Herrera part of a sons of the confederacy organization years ago? You really expect someone like that to be smart. Anyways I find it funny when dipshits throw a fit about pro guns folks being in favor of some amount of gun control. Like im in favor of a basic training course at government funded ranges for example. Nothing fancy just a course on firearm safety and cleaning viola heres the card letting you buy.
I genuinely hope this was manufactured drama. Because I can’t imagine ANYONE dumb enough to let a couple of infamously tankie youtubers (whose claim to fame was flying out to North Korea for a day trip and insisting it isn’t that bad…) do a school shooting weeks after Uvalde with actual child cardboard tagets using his guns and his range and then being surprised by the outcome.
Like, even Michael Reeves pulled out of that video. And that is a kid that EVERYONE is amazed hasn’t been cancelled for some stupid joke at this point.
Eh, thats not just bad tastes thats… something else. What is wrong with fucken tankies?
I disagree, though it seems to happen to everyone else. Right-wing content is vary rare for me even though I’m subbed to lots of gun channels.
It’s weird how on Youtube survivors of Sexual Assault are blacklisted for saying the words “Sexual Assault”, but PragerU goes “We should bring back slavery and kill the gays!” every five minutes and get pushed to the front of my feed despite the fact that I mostly look up gaming trivia, not Right Wing shilling, meaning the algo shouldn’t be recommending it to me.
The closest thing I can think of to a non-right-wing gun nut YouTuber is Adam Savage. If course, most of his gun nuttery is centered on movie props, not real firearms.
Or Paul Harrell or,
Massad Ayoub or,
Hickock45 or,
James Reeves or,
Honest Outlaw or,
Black Powder Maniac Shooter or,
MidwayUSA or,
Royal Armouries or,
Garand Thumb.
And those are only ones I’m subscribed to.
I bailed on his channel when he started making comments about the George Floyd protests in his videos. It was always pretty clear what his beliefs are from a religious and political standpoint, but up to then, he never brought it into his videos.
I think the channel is hilarious.
I also think the channel shows off WAY too much reckless, butthole puckering lack of safety. I’m actually surprised no one has gotten injured or killed.