I’m doing a shorter post today outside my regular rotation and different from my regular style as I’ve been fascinated by the second assassination attempt on Donald Trump. News moves so quickly that you can either write about it quickly or the world moves on. Our news cycle depends on this.
I’ve noticed that some people have been commenting that the second shooter (Ryan Wesley Routh)’s X account was taken down shortly after the event happened. His Facebook account was already down by the time I looked, but I did actually read through his X posts right after I learned about the attempted assassination and immediately took down some brief notes. I’m just going to leave this all here without comment and just write down what I saw without comment or speculation. I do not have much but I will leave this here:
Routh was in Ukraine in May 2022. He wrote a joke tweet for some reason encouraging Angelina Jolie to come too.
He posted a lot of pro-Ukrainian sentiment, such as one tweet saying that what is happening in Ukraine is “worthy of World War III”
His account was only active beginning in 2020 and he had not posted recently in 2024
He posted several times about George Floyd/Black Lives Matter. The nature of the tweets was not really about him or African-Americans but he was using the movement as an argument for why there should be federal and not state oversight over the police
He followed the Department of Defense, several Taiwanese organizations, NAFO (the “North Atlantic Fella Organization,” a social media movement that Wikipedia says is dedicated to “countering Russian propaganda and disinformation about the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine”), and Anthony Blinken
He did not really post about anything non-political
Also, these are not tweets but may be of interest—he is associated with this website that is still up: https://taiwanforeignlegion.com/. The website attemps to recruit foreign, non-Taiwanese soldiers to come to Taiwan and protest for Taiwanese democracy. This page is still up and it asks questions in its recruitment form such as:
“Are you willing to be a human shield for Taiwan?”
“Do you have sniper training?”
“If your commander is bad, can you accept that?”
“Can you run a festival?”
“Do you know any bands?”
“Will you complain if food and housing is poor?”
Unfortunately that’s all I have but just wanted to share. I will post again on Saturday as usual.