ICE Shooter Joshua Jahn Apparently Had Pretty Complicated Political Opinions

In the aftermath of a deadly sniper attack at an ICE facility in Dallas that left two people dead, including the shooter, there was an almost immediate rush to better understand the politics of the man behind the attack, Joshua Jahn. Because the shooting occurred at an ICE facility, many high-ranking Republican officials, including both the president and the vice president, suggested that Jahn was a "leftist" who hated ICE.

According to reporting from Ken Klippenstein, though, Jahn's politics seem to be at least a little more complicated than that. Here's what we know so far.

It's important to note first that there are still new developments being released in this case, so all the information we have is provisional and could be further complicated. Based on Klippenstein's reporting, though, it seems like the effort to paint Jahns as a leftist is not totally accurate. He spoke to three of Jahn's former friends.

"Their accounts paint the picture of someone with a vaguely libertarian bent who despised both major parties and politicians generally (including Trump) but who didn’t engage with politics beyond that," Klippenstein wrote.

They also suggested that he liked "edgy humor" and video games, and none of them believed that the "anti-ICE" message that was scrawled on one of his bullets could possibly be sincere.

“He was most certainly an edgelord, an irony guy," one of his friends said. “Josh was an edgelord who wanted someone to get blamed. I think he tried his best to write something goofy … to rile people up.”

Another friend showed Klippenstein a Facebook account that Jahn had used to flood the comments sections of posts with rape jokes, which his friend described as "playful shock humor."

“He was never really into politics, especially not politicians,” a childhood friend of Jahn said. “He was into politics only in the 4chan sense — contrarian, provocative, boundary-pushing for laughs, not conviction.”

All three friends apparently lost touch with Jahn to some extent, at least in part because he had become so intent on being ironic and provocative during their interactions.

“I mostly stopped talking to him when he took his 4chan/irony stuff into daily interactions,” one friend said. “He was becoming unbearable … once he dropped out of college, he had no obligation to be social, and none of us reached out due to his edgelord behavior.”

These friends don't have a firm sense of what might have motivated Jahn to commit this shooting, but they paint a picture of a shooter who was spending a lot of time online and was apathetic about politics more broadly.

Maybe he evolved over the years and became someone with more conventional political views. It also seems possible, though, that some in the Republican Party have chosen to simplify Jahn's motivations to fit their own narrative and aren't super worried about what the facts might actually reveal. There's still plenty of time to learn more about precisely why he decided to do what he did.