There was a terrible mass shooting in Michigan — the killer drove a truck into a Mormon church, set it on fire, and killed four. What I mainly heard in the aftermath of the tragedy was that the killer hated Mormons, thought they were an anti-Christian cult, etc., etc., etc., and Fox News was practically drooling at being able to pin this event on a leftist god-hating atheist fanatic. That’s what we do, after all.
PRAY for the victims, and their families. THIS EPIDEMIC OF VIOLENCE IN OUR COUNTRY MUST END, IMMEDIATELY!
That hope that the bad guy was on the correct side of the political spectrum has been fading away as we learned more about the guy. He was a Marine who served in Iraq. He drove a pickup truck with two American flags flapping above the bed.
Sanford’s political beliefs were reportedly conservative, and he was seen wearing a T-shirt endorsing Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election bid in a photo shared on Facebook, according to the Daily Mail.
The suspected shooter’s T-shirt also featured a graphic reading “Make liberals cry again.”
A Google Street view of Sanford’s home taken in June showed a “Trump-Pence” sign affixed to a back fence, the Detroit Free Press reports.
Meanwhile, the motive for the attack is unclear, just as you might expect from a sneaky liberal commie.
Of course, the right will squawk about liberal terrorist until it becomes patently clear he was one of their own at which point they’ll go dark, muttering oaths about liberals, jews,and blood oaths, making threats about payback. Trump, naturally, will send troops to occupy other blue cities and dream of mass casualties. Congress will continue to do nothing.
Nowadays, every time a shooting happens, there’s a 100% chance that the shooter is a MAGA nut who’s 100% Christian fundie who’s all “God, guns, and freedumb” and 1000% Trump worshiper.
Just your usual Christian on “not the right kind of Christian” violence.
I guess this means that Trumpists come in all flavors. There’s the liberal hating kind, the Mexican hating kind, the Jew haters, the trans haters, and then there’s the Mormon hating kind. I’m sure there are more MAGA hatreds out there that I can’t even imagine. But, the one thing that seems to unite all MAGAts is hatred.
He once lived in Utah for a while.
He is on record as being a fundie xian who didn’t like Mormons, considering them to be non-xians and the antichrist.
You can already see how this shooting is disappearing from the Mainstream Media.
Since it was one of their own, the right wingnuts will just forget about this shooting. They will move on to War Ravaged Portland and how the brave National Guard troops, many of which actually live in Portland to begin with, are surviving the bars and coffee houses.
I’m surprised they haven’t hit on the sleeper agent angle: he was just a liberal mole infiltrating God’s MAGA army, pretending to be a conservative to do something horrible like this that would be blamed on Taco.
What do you think? Maybe I could get a job on Fox or even at the White House.
There is a good chance that this is revenge for the killing of Charlie Kirk in Utah.
mormonism is its own special flavor of crappy protestant religion, but the prejudice against mormons has always creeped my shit out more than the mormons themselves.
It’s a cult, and an exceedingly wealthy one at that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finances_of_the_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints
they practice social control that could be characterized as cult-like, but if we’re going to live in a world that tolerates any religions at all, i don’t see how they’re less worthy of tolerance than motherfuckin pentecostals. singling out a religion as being worse than others is how nu atheism ended up helping spread global fascism with islamophobia.
a cult is a small unpopular religion.
a religion is a large popular cult.
Robbo @11
It’s a cult if the founder is alive.
It’s a religion if the founder is dead…
John Morales @9
And that makes them different from all the other rich Christian denominations and churches how? They’re all cults, it’s just that some are more successful at fleecing the flock than others.
Good grief! It is a cult, and I did not compare it to any other “churches”.
I was not ‘singling out a religion’, I was addressing the specific religion at hand in Bébé’s comment.
I am saying they are filthy rich, and a cult. That’s it.
No comparisons were made.
So, when I get an attempted rhetorical question such as “And that makes them different from all the other rich Christian denominations and churches how?”, I am mostly bemused how much some people project.
@11 True…
Longevity is also important. They all started as cults. Scientology is still a cult. Mormons are working on the transition to non-cult.
raven: Yes, if it had been an Antifa/BLM/CPC/muslim person the political class would have ridden that hard. But otherwise this is a completely non-notable event. The US is on track for something like 450-500 mass shootings this year.
FWIW isn’t one of the key differences with Mormonism that its founder was recorded historically as a con man and dodgy with the whole south park story being based on reality with looking into & talking through hats and shit?
South Park – Joseph Smith dum dum dum dum dum.. & yeah.
When you look at what they claim to believe it is really silly and really without supporting evidence even for a religion – and then there’s their history of racism, the magic underpants and Kolob nonnsense. See :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolob & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_garment
so mcuh more
Foudner died but they ahve a (relatively short for a majorish religion / sect
^ Linked SouthPark video is 9 minutes long and whilst obvs satirical from what I gather pretty much a fair summary of the story and I’m with Stan at the end (7 mins 50 secs mark) when he notes “Wait, Mormons actually know this story and they still believe Joseph Smith was a prophet .. It proves that he did make it all up! Are you blind?!” Ablist language aside; um, yeah. WTF. Con man blatantly caught out lying and still religious founder and seen as prophet? Really?
So whilst all religions are false inventions of human minds, Mormonism does strike me as being more obviously false than others because we know that bit of history and, I guess, because of it’s known recorded relatively short history not being established so much further back in the past when credible written sources & reliable records were less common. After all, its hard to say for a certainty that Jesus existed at all let alone Moses, David, Noah, etc. but we do know for sure that Joseph Smith was, well, a liar who failed that test of credibility.
When other established religions have leaders / founders whose nature and honesty isn’t so clearly dodgy as fuck then in comparison Mormonism suffers by contrast..
Which, ofc does NOT mean Mormons should be discriminated against given they grow up indoctrinated with that shit but yeah.
The guy who shot up the church was very probably a right wing nutcase. And the killer of Melissa Hortman was certainly one.
However, given who the killer of Charlie Kirk has turned out to be and recent attacks on ICE I would not say that all US political killers are right wing nut jobs. There are plenty of violent nutjobs on both sides of the American political spectrum. So plenty of excuses for revenge on both sides. And you are only one 1/8 of the way through Trump’s presidency. Hope that I am a pessimist.
[meta]
“However, given who the killer of Charlie Kirk has turned out to be and recent attacks on ICE I would not say that all US political killers are right wing nut jobs.”
houseplant, you think are in possession of privileged information?
What we ‘know’ about Tyler Robinson is vague and mostly speculative, and mostly based on one or two most dubious sources — not from him.
That’s a presumption which way exceeds the available info. Still developing.
Not even gone to trial yet.
In short, your opinion is not info about political violence in the USA, other than about you.
—
BTW: https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/charts-and-maps
A Google Street view of Sanford’s home taken in June showed a “Trump-Pence” sign affixed to a back fence, the Detroit Free Press reports.
Well, there ya have it — he was a closet socialist getting revenge for how Trump treated Pence!
This tired old lie again.
You aren’t the least bit original or bright and it isn’t even a remotely believable lie.
The vast majority of political violence and terrorism in the USA is from right wing extremists.
There is no both sides here.
This is a well known fact that right wingnuts always lie about.
Here are the facts from reliable sources.
Right wing violence accounts for 75-80% of the lethal political violence.
Left wing violence is less than 5% of the fatalities.
@ raven
Really? You claim it’s the people who endorse widespread access to guns and punishment for nonconformity who are responsible for most gun violence?
Not those who favour gun control and value diversity?
I’m shocked. Shocked, I say.
(/snark)
It is late here but for the 3 people still following this thread:
Trump just posted an insulting AI slop video of Jeffries and Schumer.
It isn’t even good AI slop, badly done and not the least bit realistic.
This is bizarre and reprehensible, not what you expect for a competent adult.
Trump’s mind is gone. He is totally senile.
I’m now sure just about anything the US government does is someone else’s ideas and he is just a meat puppet.
This explains a lot.
Trump is ultra-rich, powerful, politically invulnerable, and sick and dying and he knows it. He just doesn’t care what he does or who he hurts any more. Some of his latest victims such as those boats in the Caribbean are being outright killed, murdered.
@ 18 StevoR
I love the logic here: A religion founded by a person known to exist and known to be dishonest, has less credibility than a religion founded by a hypothetical person not known to exist at all.
So if I said faeries exist because Nixon said so, that’s less credible than saying faeries exist because Hercules said so.
X-D
Dude. Seriously. Do you not understand it was implicit in your #9 that Mormonism was uniquely cultish, and that justified prejudice. If not, your comment was an utter non sequitur.
@25. Silentbob :
Nope. That’s not it. My logic is that we KNOW that Joseph Smith wasa con man who lied and was proven wrong whereas in contrast we do not know for a fact that Jesus or Moses deliberately lied because we don’t know for sure they existed at all.
It is possible that Christianity was founded on something other than deliberate lies and that something strange that happened in ancient Judea circa 1st C BCE led to Christianity (and before that Judaism) arising. They might NOT be based on pure lies unlike Mormonism where the founder clealy was caught lying and had his beliefs disproven by the story linked in #17.
We know Mormonism is false because we have enough informationabout its ori9gin to prove that.
We do NOT know enough about the origin of XNity to say for a fact that it orginated as lies.
X is known to be false. Y is NOT known to be false due to insufficent evidence.
PS. I note you have failed to respond to and answer my questiosn for you in #41 here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/09/25/some-good-news-2/#comment-2278771
Please do so.
^ We have enough evidence and certainty to say we know that X (Mormonism) is a lie. That it was created as a lie, a con, from the start by Joseph Smith lying.
We do NOT have enough evidence and certainty surrounding the orgin to know that Y (Xnity, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc) is a lie.
Which doesn’t mean Y might NOT be (a) lie(s) just that we cannot say for sure that Y is a lie because we lack sufficient certain knowledge of the origins of Y.
None of which means Y is true but we do have sufficient grounds to say as fact that X is false. (Where X = Mormonism.)
Is that logic clear now?
Any particular logical flaws in that that you see?
StevoR@28,
Exactly. Scientology is a parallel case: we know L. Ron Hubbard was a prolific fraudster, we know he opined before inventing “Dianetics” that the best way to get rich would be to start a religion. The weird thing is, he seems to have ended up at least partly believing in his own con! (See Russell Miller’s biography, Bare-Faced Messiah, available free online.) I wonder if Joseph Smith did too; if those around them believe, or appear to believe, the inventor of the con may not be immune to it.
@ ^ KG : Got that book in hardcover on my bookshelves! A classic. Yes, I think that was the case given at least Hubbard and probly Smith ahd only a vague grasp on reality to begin with anyhow. Of course it helped their con when they semed to believe in it so ..
@27
But, if you know literally anything about its history following that era, the reinterpretation of the OT, to try to fit the NT narrative, the outright theft in the OT of other neighboring religions, to turn it into the story of a “chosen people”, and the literal changes in meaning to certain words and phrases, over time, including ones like, “make a difference”, its not possible to conclude that, regardless of what events “started it”, the modern version is anything but a mess of incoherent, renegotiated, cults, with only vague correspondence with the original. So, yeah, still a flipping cult, run by people that rewrote, or at least reinterpreted, everything for their own purposes.
On, and on that, “make a difference”, thing, turns out that the modern version is from the 19th century. The original meaning, in the text, from the time it was written, would have been closer to, “mark the difference”, and was a reference to the behavior of the church goer, and how “they” differed from non-believers, by giving charitably. Ironic, given that this makes it a “display of piety, so that others would know you are a good Christian.” I guess its only doing this by praying in public which makes you a hypocrite. Any other act of false piety, to make sure everyone knows you are better than them at being godly, is totally OK…
But, yeah, its all a con, regardless of what may have started it, because every bit of it has been reworked, reinterpreted, renegotiated, and often outright made up, since then, to fit what ever the cult leaders want people to believe (especially the stuff that doesn’t appear in the Bible at all, and never did). Now… One can argue that its a rare case in which such cults can be, depending on denomination, “mostly benign”, but its still cults, all the way down.
Someone on Youtube said, the white people on Fox News et cetera did NOT say Christianity was under siege after the massacre in a black church 2015. Black Christians simply do not count.
20 John Morales
You say that “What we ‘know’ about Tyler Robinson is vague and mostly speculative, and mostly based on one or two most dubious sources — not from him”
But we know even less about the killer who attacked the Mormon church, and he is not going to be able to tell us about his motives and yet you don’t doubt that he is right wing ? He probably was, but we can say that Tyler Robinson was probably left wing on stronger evidence.
22 Raven
You cite a report that compares political violence since 2001. I was talking about what has happened more recently with the second election of Trump. There have been two attempts on Trump’s life, Charlie Kirk’s and Brian Thompson’s murders as well as three shooting attacks on ICE. So there has been a recent increase in leftist political violence. Yes, the right wing nutcases are as bad or worse, but this means that politics in the US has become more violent and cycles of reprisals could increase this.
“But we know even less about the killer who attacked the Mormon church, and he is not going to be able to tell us about his motives and yet you don’t doubt that he is right wing ?”
What? I’ve written zero about what I believe.
I specifically quoted you (“However, given who the killer of Charlie Kirk has turned out to be and recent attacks on ICE I would not say that all US political killers are right wing nut jobs.”) and that is to what I referred.
Whatever made you imagine that I “don’t doubt that he is right wing ?”
Anyway. Since you engaged me again:
Your claims about ICE are not particularly relevant, especially since it’s been recently largely expanded and financed and it has engaged in behaviour that has been condemned on civil rights grounds.
You know, these days it’s quite possible to determine the level of staffing over time for ICE, and the number of assaults per time. Per capita is a much more appropriate metric than raw numbers, no?
(What do you know about Joshua Jahn?)
One of them by a right wingnut for obscure reasons of his own. The one in Pennsylvania.
“Crooks had been registered to vote since September 2021, when he turned 18.[3] He registered as a Republican,
Crooks’ activity on social networking services as including comments that “appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes” and “espouse political violence.”
You notice that the Trump regime never talks about his attempted killer. Because he was one of their own.
So what. It’s relevant, a good statistical sample.
You are moving the goal posts to a small slice of time so you can lie some more.
If we just looked at Sunday, we could say all lethal political violence was by your buddies, the right wingnuts.
That is cherry picking, an example of a logical fallacy.
There has also been a huge increase in right wingnut violence that you just ignored.
At least 16 people have died in ICE custody this year. That we know of. The actual number with all the people sent to hellholes like El Salvador prisons is probably much higher.
There are any number of videos on line of masked ICE thugs illegally assaulting US residents and citizens, including reporters.
ICE are just right wingnut thugs with a pension plan.
Oh, and why is this?
It might have something to do with the Trump/GOP election and their attacks on women, nonwhites, nonxians, Democrats, etc.. while they also attempt to destroy the US democracy.
It is all right wingnut spawned violence by the president on down.
I’m not wasting any more time on a low level troll that crawled out of his trashcan again.
@33 I seriously hope you are not including the “shooting at ice” in which they had flipping bullets that looked to be from a WWII magazine, with anti-ice written on them, in which the only victims where PRISONERS, as one of those… I don’t believe a damn thing the administration says about any of this crap at this point. Their whole goal seems to be making excuses to claim all crime is leftist, so that they, wait for it – can do something like telling the military that they are going to deploy them to murder, “American terrorists”, which they define so vaguely that they could just decide to have said military take over the next network who refuse to fire a comedian, and have the military shoot the comedian, as a “leftist terrorist”. Their “evidence” is a joke, when they even bother to give any, and we know damn well, from their own words, that they can, will, and are, rigging the DOJ, and anyone else whose leadership, and other members, have been replaced with Trump lap dogs, to just do what ever the F he orders, including lying their asses off about crimes, and what the supposed “evidence” is in them. And, yeah, the press is scared to all hell, and willingly going along with it, because they are all mega corporations, with financial incentives to play along with it, lest they lose licenses, and/or Trump derails their f-ing greedy attempts to gobble up even more companies, to make themselves even richer.
What is the saying, or one of the numerous variations – “It is difficult to tell the truth when your very job depends on reporting anything as though it is truth, especially lies.”
Hi Morales 34, Raven 35 and Kagehi 36,
You might want to read a recent article in the Atlantic. I don’t think that you can dismiss them as MAGAs.
Left-Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise
For the first time in more than 30 years, attacks by the far left outnumber those by the far right.
By Daniel Byman and Riley McCabe
Sure, houseplant. I took a look:
“In the past decade in the United States, 36 left-wing attacks have killed 13 people, whereas 152 right-wing attacks have killed 112.”
(https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/09/charlie-kirk-left-wing-terrorism/684323/)
By your own adduced source, “left-wing” attacks have quite a way to go to catch up.
A bit of jocularity (Aussie satirical show)
[BackBerner 13-06-2001 Part 11/13]
Correspondent for Goverment Reconciliation Dexter Pinion gives his views on the economic effects of Japanese fishing and his general distaste for Greenpeace’s concerns.
(heh. Took me a few episodes to get ‘Dexter Pinion’)