Over the weekend, a 40-year-old ex-Marine named Thomas Jacob Sanford slammed his pickup truck into a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan. Then he opened fire during service and set the building ablaze with gasoline.
4 worshippers killed
8 more wounded, including children
Congregants suffered both gunshot wounds and smoke inhalation
Investigators later found improvised explosive devices at the scene. Sanford was killed in a shootout with police just minutes into the attack. Officials have said he “hated Mormons,” but the motive remains officially unconfirmed. The FBI dispatched 100 agents to investigate, treating it as a major domestic terror incident.
Violence Beyond the Church
This wasn’t an isolated weekend of bloodshed.
In Dallas, Joshua Jahn opened fire from a rooftop at an ICE detention facility, killing one detainee and critically injuring two more before dying by suicide. Notes recovered showed anti-ICE sentiment, but the FBI is still investigating his motives.
The same week, multiple HBCUs reported bomb threats, forcing evacuations and heightening fears among Black students already targeted by racist violence.
Across the country, violence against Black people and the unhoused continues to rise, often without national headlines.
And to put this in scale: the U.S. is averaging more than one mass shooting per day. The weekend of the Michigan attack alone saw six different mass shootings, killing at least nine people and injuring dozens.
The Scapegoat Shuffle
So where’s the government’s focus? Not on the shooters. Not on the rising threats.
Instead, it’s on antifa.
National Guard deployments to Portland—without protests even happening
Surveillance of protest slogans as “terroristic activity”
Lists of “anti-fascists” compiled from people daring to criticize the government
Imagine being treated as a terrorist simply for saying, “We don’t like fascism.”
Gaslit into Submission
This is gaslighting at scale. We’re told that the left is the violent one, when all the left has ever asked for is:
Healthcare
A social safety net
Taxes used to help us, not just to kill Brown people
Meanwhile, the actual violence—churches in flames, immigrants shot, Black colleges threatened—goes on, largely unchecked.
If the government thinks its critics are “anti-fascists,” what does that make the government?
