NBC’s Ben Collins Says Highland Park Suspect Crimo Was ‘Trump Fan’ But Don’t Blame Trump: ‘This Is Not Tied to One Guy’
NBC News correspondent Ben Collins told the Morning Joe Crew that despite being a “Trump fan,” Highland Park mass shooting suspect Robert Crimo III is part of a deeper subculture that goes beyond politics.
Collins covers disinformation, extremism and the internet for NBC News, and was a guest on Tuesday morning’s edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe to give his insights into Crimo — the suspect who was apprehended in the mass shooting at the Highland Park 4th of July parade.
He spent several minutes telling host Willie Geist and the other MJ regulars about Crimo’s disturbing online activities, and described in detail the online subculture that he says Crimo was trying to fit in with.
And toward the end of his segment, Collins took pains to point out that while “a lot of people want to point out that this guy was a Donald Trump fan,” the former president is not to blame for Crimo’s actions:
And also, I want to say, like, you can’t drill this down to one specific traditional political subculture. I know a lot of people want to point out that this guy was a Donald Trump fan. He had, there were pictures of him draped in a Trump flag or, you know, at a Donald Trump, outside of a Donald Trump motorcade. This guy, this is part of a much larger, deeper subculture that Donald Trump is in the past of, like this guy who grew up as a child, if Donald Trump was his president, he is trying to advance the accelerationism well past Donald Trump.
This guy is part of a new wave of terror, and that’s something that we have to get our brains around right now. This is not, this is not tied to one guy. This is tied to a much larger cell of people who think they’re loners, who are really acting in concert to express their disaffection with the world by murdering a bunch of people. We have to stop that. I don’t know how to stop that. The one thing that you can stop it at the very end is the gun parts. But we have to at least, you know, try to start to learn how people are getting to this point.
Watch above via Morning Joe.
