The Suspected Motive for the Maine Shooter: 'He Had Paranoid Beliefs'

So this pretty much means that any Trumpist or MAGA American could shoot up a bowling alley, right?

Courtesy of ECFR

Is it just me, or does the Maine shooter sound like Donald Trump? Or, pretty much any Trumpist out there who, despite all of the proof that the 2020 election was not stolen or fraudulent — except in the cases where Trumpists and Trump were fraudulent — cling to the notion that there is some great, complex conspiracy through which only their X-ray vision minds can see.

The loser whose name we shall not utter in Maine was found dead from a self-inflicted wound. My first reaction was, “What a coward!” If you are “brave” enough to gun down your neighbors with a weapon meant solely for an army, then you should have the guts to face the music — or at least the vengeance of the loved ones of those slaughtered neighbors. My second reaction was, why can’t Trump choose that way out? But that’s another story. 

Paranoia is the norm

I wrote last week about the lunacy pushed by right-wingers and the gun-obsessed. Guns don’t kill people; “mentally unstable people kill people.” While this is, of course, not wrong, it is nonetheless semantics. It’s like one partner complaining to the other about a pregnancy. It couldn’t have happened without both being involved. The same holds for guns and our gun violence public health epidemic. 

The right-wing of America is not just angry as hell — at what no one knows — but also afraid of everyone and everything. The paranoia is stoked by right-wing media, cultivated by Republican politicians, and then harvested during elections. What used to be an awkward low-crawl toward fascism is now a full sprint through American communities, which regrettably are beginning to look more like battlefields than the towns and villages that used to characterize our exceptionalism. 

Half of America is too far away from being the murderous loser who tore apart the community of Lewiston, Maine. Trumpists will undoubtedly say I am out of my mind for making such a comparison, but the imagined sense of victimhood among these predominantly white and Christian racists is palpable. 

There is nothing rational or sane about their insistence that Trump won the election in 2020. In the past, I used to think that Trump was just using the Big Lie as an excuse because he wasn’t adult enough to accept his loss. I now believe that he believes that he was cheated.

And regardless of all of the proof and debunked theories, 1/3, and maybe more, of our country believes Trump. Many of these loons, I fear, could be capable of such horrific acts of terror.