Yesterday’s right wing terrorist attacks
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It seems fairly clear that yesterday’s terrorist attacks — and these kinds of mass shootings are a form of terrorism, both in intention and effect — were carried out by self-consciously right wing terrorists. One killer may well have been seeking some sort of twisted vengeance for the murder of Charlie Kirk, while the other was obsessed with the idea that he was being persecuted by the LGBTQ community.
The attack on a Mormon congregation in Michigan was carried out by this person:
Public records show that Sanford had no party affiliation. However, in one social media post, dated September 2019, Sanford is seen wearing a Trump 2020 T-shirt, which had the text, “Make Liberals Cry Again.” . . .
Records also show that Sanford lived in a house on the 4100 block of East Atherton Road in Burton, Michigan. A Google Maps image from June of 2025 shows a Trump sign outside of the suspect’s home. The sign has been reported on by multiple outlets, and has been fueling social media speculation about Sanford’s political beliefs. . . .
In a Facebook post dated May 12, 2021, Sanford’s wife, Tella Sanford shared a link, accompanied by the hashtags, “#bringtrumpback,” and “#whovotedforthis.” The linked content has been deleted.
The attack on the Mormon church is extremely suggestive in regard to Sanford’s possible motivation. Mormons are a tiny religious minority in Michigan — there are only about 45,000 in a state of ten million people, meaning that for example Muslims outnumber them six to one — so it seems wildly unlikely that the attack on a Mormon church in particular was random. Charlie Kirk’s apparent murderer was from a Mormon family, and if you dive into the right wing fever swamps you’ll find a by this point quite elaborate conspiracy theory about how the shooter was actually a patsy, and that Kirk wasn’t shot at all but killed by an exploding microphone, booby trapped by a fiendish coalition consisting of the leadership of the Mormon church, and the agents of a foreign nation. I’ll give you five guesses about which foreign nation, and the first four don’t count. (Hint: Mormons call them gentiles).
I would put the odds of Sanford having picked up some version of the Mormons murdered Charlie Kirk from the internet as “high,” which is probably, and by probably I mean certainly, why we aren’t hearing anything from Kash Patel and Pam Bondi about how this is all part of “Antifa’s” campaign of left-wing terrorism, although if the bullets end up etched with the messages Down With Donald Trump and/or Cis Vengeance I may have to change my mind.
Authorities have charged a suspect after a gunman opened fire from a boat at a waterfront restaurant in Southport, North Carolina, on Saturday night, killing three and wounding at least five others.
Nigel Max Edge, 40, faces three counts of first-degree murder . . .Armed with a short barrel AR rifle, equipped with a suppressor, folding stock and scope, Edge allegedly sprayed bullets indiscriminately into a crowd of unsuspecting patrons. Three people were killed and eight others were injured. . . In a lawsuit filed in April, Edge alleged that the U.S. government, police, and military were a part of a conspiracy linked to Jeffrey Epstein, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Abu Ghraib scandal. He alleged that he was human-trafficked, used as a drug mule, and tortured in Iraq as a “ghost detainee.”
In another lawsuit filed in May, Edge claimed that the Generations Church in Southport was behind a conspiracy that was masterminded by the LGBTQ community and white supremacists who were pedophiles to kill him because he’s heterosexual.
Back in January, Edge filed a similar suit against the Brunswick Medical Center, alleging that it was a conspiracy that was launched by “LGBTQ White Supremacists” who wanted to kill him because he survived their attack in Iraq.
The Michigan killer was also an Iraq veteran.
Both of these terrorist attacks, in other words, featured a middle-aged veteran who seems likely to have been suffering from post-combat PTSD, and who was radicalized into some version of the delusional ideation of the American right wing. The most important form of that delusion is that Donald Trump should be within ten thousand miles of the presidency of the United States, and in these two incidents we see some of the violent consequences of that particular delusion.