⚠️ When the Killer Wears a MAGA Shirt, Where’s the Outrage? Conservatives Go Silent when they Learn Church Shooter was One of their Own.

A Marine runs his patriotic pickup truck into a church, shoots and kills worshippers, then sets the church on fire. Conservative outrage is oddly quiet.

Sep 29, 2025

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We’ve seen it again and again: when the suspect is Muslim, Black, immigrant, or left-wing, the outrage machine roars within minutes. Headlines scream terrorism, pundits demand crackdowns, and politicians sprint to microphones with sweeping solutions.

When the suspect, on the other hand, is a white man in MAGA merch, the temperature mysteriously drops. The vocabulary softens. The story shifts toward lone wolves, snapped minds, “seemed like a nice guy.” Somehow the political movement he publicly embraced is treated as irrelevant.

Thomas Jacob Sanford, 40, an Iraq War Marine veteran, rammed his truck into a Mormon church in Grand Blanc Township, set it ablaze, and opened fire, killing at least four and wounding many more. Police called it “targeted violence”; the motive has not yet been released. Photos circulating from prior years show Sanford in a Trump 2020 camo shirt (“Make Liberals Cry Again”) and Trump signage at his home.

I’m not here to argue that every conservative is responsible for every conservative’s crime. I am here to point out a pattern: when atrocity is linked to Trump-world aesthetics, conservative leaders and media tend to minimize, de-politicize, or change the subject. We get platitudes about “ending the epidemic of violence,” but not the full-body condemnation they reserve for suspects they consider the other side.

That asymmetry matters. It teaches the public whose violence is political and whose is a fluke. It shapes resource allocation, policy responses, and whose communities are preemptively treated as threats.

What “quiet outrage” looks like

Speed & scope: When the perpetrator aligns with their movement, many conservative voices adopt delay (“too soon to talk politics”) and narrowing (“just one broken man”). When the perpetrator doesn’t, it’s instant ideology: entire communities are implicated.
Language: Compare “terrorist” and “extremist” to “troubled veteran,” “family man,” “neighbor who cleared snow.” These frames do not appear by accident.
Policy posture: You’ll hear calls for domestic terror designations when the suspect is a leftist. You’ll hear mental health and door locks when it isn’t.

Objection & Answer (A new section where I attack a likely response head on)

Objection: You’re politicizing a tragedy before the motive is known.
Answer: I’m naming a coverage pattern, not guessing motive. The facts already documented—targets, method, equipment, prior public signaling—would be interpreted one way if the suspect fit a different profile. They’re being interpreted another way now.
What the evidence shows: Labeling and outrage are not evenly applied. That imbalance dilutes prevention, erodes trust, and leaves some communities permanently in the crosshairs.

What leadership would look like (from anyone, any party)

Equal vocabulary for equal harm. If driving a truck into a church, lighting the church on fire, and shooting worshippers isn’t terrorizing, the word has no meaning.
Condemnation with teeth. Not only “violence is bad,” but specific denunciation of dehumanizing rhetoric, enemy talk, and fantasy-war branding that incubate targeted attacks.

What we should center—always

The congregation: the dead, the wounded, the trauma that will echo through a community of faith for years. The first responders who ran into fire. The families whose lives were split into before and after. A politics that cannot hold space for their grief unless it advances a narrative is not a politics worth defending.

If your outrage depends on who pulled the trigger, it isn’t outrage—it’s marketing.

I refuse that. I want the same fire when a killer wears a MAGA shirt that we hear when a killer has a Muslim name. I want the same policy seriousness no matter which team’s signs are in the yard.

What I’m asking of you, right now

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