These days, a lot is depending on a t-shirt.
After the assassination of conservative podcast host and activist Charlie Kirk, right-wingers have been quick to assume that any subsequent acts of political violence must surely be from the left side of the aisle – even though it appears that any political affiliation of his assassin remains unknown.
It’s a bizarre argument, since for decades in the U.S., most violent politically-motivated acts have been performed by right-wing people, as verified by a federal study that strangely disappeared from the government’s publicly available databases just days after the Kirk shooting.
More recently, a madman in Michigan shot several people attending a service at a Mormon church. After the shootings, he then attempted to burn down the entire structure before being killed by police officers.
Officials said four individuals attending a service were apparently killed by the gunman; eight more had been injured.
A Facebook post from 2019 contains a picture of Thomas Jacob Sanford, the man accused of performing those attacks. In the pic, he is wearing a shirt that supports Donald Trump for re-election. A Democratic lawmaker posted a cropped version of this photo on X (formerly Twitter), cutting out other, innocent people who were in the picture with him. This understandable change appears to have led to baseless accusations that the lawmaker edited in the Trump graphic to only make it appear as if Sanford was a Trump supporter.
But at least two news sources have independently proven that the pro-Trump graphic is an authentic part of the 2019 post. Therefore, Sanford was a Trump supporter as early as 2019.
The t-shirt – and the original photo – may currently provide the best proof of the apparent shooter’s political leanings.
Looking through the publicly available aspects of Sanford’s voting record offer no insight, since
Michigan voters don’t register their party affiliation. Thus the authenticity of the graphic on Sanford’s t-shirt in that photo has become a very important matter.
Agencie France Press (AFP) found that “the image of [Sanford] wearing a shirt backing Trump for re-election does appear to be authentic.”
“A reverse image search of the photo … leads to [a] higher quality version of the same image posted on September 13, 2019 to a Facebook page titled ‘Brantlee’s journey,’ ” declared AFP.
Local reports reveal that Brantlee is Sanford’s son. The Facebook page still provides a link for a GoFundMe page that had been used to raise needed funds for Brantlee’s medical bills; the fundraiser page has since been taken down. But a copy can still be seen via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which reveals that the fundraiser page was created on Sept. 20th, 2015.
And, while “there is no indication that the Facebook post has been edited or changed since 2019.” AFP points out that, “by contrast, searches for the image of Sanford in the plain shirt only surface [i.e. uncover] posts [made] after September 29, 2025.”
But a fact-checking website appears to have settled the matter.
“Some comments on this post discuss a theory that the Trump 2020 graphic was photo-shopped onto the shirt,” mentioned the fact-check website Lead Stories, “and suggest that hackers replaced the original with an edited one.”
Lead Stories had a quick, elegant retort to this odd claim.
“This is not possible,” the fact-check site declared.
“If the post had been edited, the record of the editing would be present in the ‘[View] edit history’ of the post,” which, Lead Stories reminds us, is found “in the ‘three dots’ menu in the upper right corner of the post.”
The news source then makes its most succinct point: “Because the post has never been edited, there is no edit history to display.”
And that, as they say, should prove that.
The FBI so far has only stated that it is looking into the shooting as an “act of targeted violence.” It has not yet provided to journalists any findings on Sanford’s motives or political affiliation.
Some right-wingers bizarrely insist that they only wish to be peaceful purveyors of ideas, and falsely claim that any violent politically-motivated activity must surely come from a largely-imagined “radical left.” We at the Spark find it odd that the nationalistic right seems to have quickly forgotten the violence of their failed coup, or the young conservative man who broke into Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s home and beat her elderly husband in the head with a hammer, or the many times in which right-wing people have used a vehicle to run over left-wing protesters in the hopes of maiming or killing them.
These obviously radical, psychotic actions – all performed by “bad apples” on their side of the aisle – have either been ignored or forgotten by the wild-eyed right. This proves that our modern Trump thumpers simply cannot tell the truth on the matter of politically-motivated violence in this country.
After all, if they can’t tell the truth about themselves – even to themselves – how can they possibly tell the truth about any one else?
