THEY WERE LEFT-WING BEFORE THEY WERE RIGHT-WING. WHEN THEY WENT RIGHT-WING, THEY TURNED VIOLENT.

Kimbrady Carriker killed five strangers in Philadelphia on July 3. To Marjorie Taylor Greene and others on the right, the salient fact in this story is that Carriker was regarded as a male but appeared to be wearing women's clothing in photos posted on social media.

I'm less interested in that aspect of Carriker's life than I am in the fact that Carriker has been identified as both a leftist and a rightist. The New York Post tells us:

[Carriker] regularly posts about supporting Black Lives Matter, including supporting workers who protested in the Strike For Black Lives in July 2020....

In May 2020, Carriker also posted a video to his Facebook of a burning Philadelphia police car that had been daubed with grafitti including “ACAB” — an acronym for “All coppers are b—–ds” — and captioned it: “I was there; where were you? #we matter.”

On the other hand, Heavy.com reports:

On Facebook, Carriker shared videos of guns and expressed concern that President Biden was going to take away gun rights....

Multiple posts on the page dealt with concern that people’s guns will be taken away by government.... He also shared a post about supporting President Trump....

Carriker sometimes wrote about political issues, and he shared memes negative to President Biden....

Carriker shared a video of Biden and wrote, “This y’all president. We said 2A defends our rights. Now it’s god save the queen while he attempts to take our arms.” He also shared a video headlined, “Biden turns red coat, in latest gun grabbing speech,” and wrote, “I told you he wanted your rights. GOD SAVE THE QUEEN SAYS BIDEN.”

Carriker also shared a post from President Trump’s Patriot Army that reads, “Who supports President Trump in 2024?”

He shared a photo of a sweatshirt that read, “I lubricate my AR-15 with liberal tears.” He shared a YouTube video of Tucker Carlson that said he humiliated Eric Swalwell, a Democratic U.S. congressman from California.

Carriker reminds me of another unstable person who was in the news a few months ago: Paul DePape, who beat Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul, with a hammer after a break-in. Right-wingers said that DePape was obviously a lefty:

Lidia Curanaj, a talk-show host, tweeted, “Reportedly Paul Pelosi attacker is David Depape—a Castro supporting nudist transient from Berkeley CA (he’s on the far LEFT literally and figuratively).” Sebastian Gorka tweeted out a photo of the Woolsey Street home with the caption, “Here is the hippie commune Pelosi’s pro-hemp nudist attacker lived in. It is festooned with LGBTQ flags, BLM signs and other Leftist propaganda.”

DePape had been on the hippie/lefty end of the spectrum. But by the time of his attack on Pelosi, he'd moved far to the right:

... those who knew him for years ... paint a portrait of a man who began to “deteriorate” over the last year and a half, as he spent a great deal of time alone, absorbing extremist views online and shifting his political views from supporting former President Obama years ago to believing in the false “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory...

In a personal blog on which DePape began posting in August, he included essays titled “Manipulation of History,” “Holohoax” and “It’s OK to be white.” ... He posted videos about conspiracies involving COVID-19 vaccines and the war in Ukraine being a ploy for Jewish people to buy land....

In an Aug. 23 entry titled “Q,” DePape wrote: “Either Q is Trump himself or Q is the deep state moles within Trumps inner circle.”

Another post referenced Pizzagate, a bogus conspiracy theory that posited that children were trapped in a sexual abuse ring in a Washington, D.C., pizzeria run by Hillary Clinton and a chief aide.

Eventually, DePape explained his reasons for the attack:

A jailhouse interview with David DePape ... provides insight into his apparently troubled mind. In an 18-minute clip of the interview ... DePape told detectives he broke into Pelosi’s San Francisco home to hold her hostage and make her admit to a series of “lies” she’d told about Donald Trump. “If she told the truth, I would let her go scot-free,” DePape said. “If she fucking lied, I was going to break her calves.” The supposed lies “originate[d] with Hillary” he said, as he ranted about Pelosi, the Democratic Party’s “crime spree” and the supposedly stolen 2020 election.

Carriker and DePape embraced ideas identified with the left -- but then they discovered the right, which is much better at inducing and sustaining rage, and also more inclined to portray violence as justifiable. Right-wingers talk about "the violent left", but it was when DePape and Carriker had become immersed in right-wing ideas that they turned to extreme violence. Whatever DePape and Carriker were in the past, they were steeped in a right-wing culture of violence when they shed blood.