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Comment by oooyay | Hacker News Reader

The original HN thread is littered with people calling to kill all liberals and talking about taking specific people's heads.

The reporting that followed that post suggests the shooter donated $15 to Act Blue when he was 17 and registered as a Republican at 18. All of this within the context that this young man is from a very rural town in Pennsylvania that Trump easily won. The whole situation is just odd.

The best thing for everyone to do is to do nothing, because nothing good comes from this point. No point in making things worse.

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This is the right take. There’s a lot here we don’t know and tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance. We have none of the nuance right now. But I fear that even when we do, nobody will care. Because isn’t that kind of the current state of affairs on pretty much every issue?

There were a couple of green accounts spamming comments like that, taking them seriously as part of the normal HN community is disingenuous, as this sort of incident is bound to attract trolls looking to stir the pot.

A couple? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40957344 make sure you can view all the dead comments.

Not taking people's alt accounts that are also spamming this and other Trump related posts seriously is dangerous at best. There's a pattern here that's not hard to see.

The point isn't how many there were. The point is that they were a bunch of newly-created troll accounts and aren't actually members of the HN community at all.

I see 4 accounts making direct death threats, all 4 are green. You're choosing to intentionally assume the worst case about them being people's alts. The most dangerous thing here is your desire to prop up the narrative that a meaningful portion of this community were proposing to respond to this attack with political violence.

The contradiction is easily explained by him registering as a republican to vote in R. primaries (against Trump and for downballot candidates likely to lose against presumptive democratic opponents): https://newhampshirebulletin.com/briefs/ahead-of-primary-nea...

But I wouldn't be surprised if he was just some lone nut who fell down some conspiracy rabbit hole, or if some history of drug abuse and psychiatric problems is unearthed.

Right, and a conservative that doesn't want Trump is still a conservative.

It's just as easy to surmise that this is a conservative who would rather have anyone but Trump. What I dislike is that immediately there was a reaction to kill liberals. Anecdotally, I have group text messages with my friends from the military and the theme was similar to what it was on HN last night.

Hence, people should probably hold their horses.

Conservatives don't typically donate to ActBlue

ActRed went almost exclusively to Trump. My point was it's equally possible that he's just a conservative never Trumper, of which there are many thanks to the great work of the Lincoln Project. Trump's new VP was one of them, calling him "America's Hitler" at the time.

> ActRed went almost exclusively to Trump

"ActRed" isn't a thing, and the shooter didn't donate to "ActRed".

> it's equally possible that he's just a conservative never Trumper

Of course it's possible, but it's more common for someone to register as the other party to vote against them in the primary than it is to donate money to a PAC of the other party.

https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-donald-tru... https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-crossover-voting-gop-prim... https://www.reddit.com/r/SaltLakeCity/comments/o2yiyq/should...

> the great work of the Lincoln Project

No.

It was called WinRed, not ActRed. ActBlue and WinRed were the DNC and RNCs respective PACs.

The Lincoln Project was incredible, especially once you take events like January 6th in context. The kind of Republicans that made The Lincoln Project and investigated the actors behind January 6th are what our political system needs more of.

Yeah some real standup guys: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/02/17/linc...

> A study conducted after the 2020 election found that the group’s effect on the election’s outcome was trivial to non-existent — not surprising given its penchant for spending money on ads that aired in electorally irrelevant places such as Washington, D.C. or which circulated almost exclusively in liberal cable news and social media venues, and thus had no purpose other than to enable its consultants to take large commissions from the ad spending. They were producing ads solely for liberals, with the overriding intent not of defeating Trump but inflating their net worth. And it worked: until they were no longer needed.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-lincoln-project-facing-...

Sounds like their grift worked on you.

[citation needed]

You can use Algolia search just as well as I can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40957344

The rest is well documented in the news.

There are four censored comments in that thread that cannot be read along with a few benign downvoted comments. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that at least someone behaved poorly, but this is HN -- the thread is not littered.

lol ok, you and these other folks are amazing.

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