“Haha! The FBI says there’s no evidence that Taylor Robinson was a member of any group! That means the killing of Charlie Kirk was non-political!”
So here’s an incomplete list of politically or socially-with-plenty-of-politics-motivated spree killers, terrorists and assassins who *weren’t affiliated with any group*:

• John Wilkes Booth
• Charles Guiteau
• Leon Czolgosz
• Lee Harvey Oswald
• Luigi Mangione
• Richard Reid
• Elias Rodriguez
• Nidal Hasan
• Ted “Unibomber” Kaczinski
• Ryan Routh
• Dylan Root
• Vance Boelter
• Payton Gendron
• Anibal Hernandez-Santana
• Every rioter at the Capitol on January 6
• Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik,
• Thomas Crooks
• Mauricio Garcia
• Micah Xavier Johnson
• Ryan Palmeter
• Robert “Robin” Westman
• Anderson Lee Aldrich
• Audrey “Aiden Williams” Hale
• Omar Mateen

And, let’s be honest, Timothy McVeigh, who *had* been part of a group, of which he and Terry Nichols were pretty much the two remaining members.
The problem is, it’s a big country with a lot of people with mental health issues, and when you spend enough time and effort telling unstable people that “speech is violence” and that some inscrutable murky sinister evil force is going to “erase” you/destroy democracy/steal your future/commit “genocide”/are “Nazis” or “fascists” – people against whom we fought a life or death war two generations ago – eventually someone’s going to connect the dots and start shooting people.

And if you ARE part of a group whose goal is to destabilize society, having people who *aren’t* in your group do the dirty work is a feature, not a bug.

So don’t believe the hype.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, September 22nd, 2025 at 6:59 am and is filed under Big Left, History And Its Making, Lefty "Alt"-Media, Media, Media Bias. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.