Joshua Cole
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A Texas man was arrested by the FBI on Friday, Sept. 19, a day after he posted comments on a Facebook thread threatening a mass shooting at the Abilene LGBTQ Pride Parade set for Saturday, May 20 in retaliation for the Sept. 10 murder of right-wing talk show host and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
Kirk was shot to death on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, in the middle of one of his “Prove Me Wrong” debate events. Right-wing have tried desperately to somehow tie the accused shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, to the LGBTQ+ community. Robinson is a white male from a Trump-supporting Mormon family who has been described as a follower of Nick Fuentes, another right-wing activist who feuded with Kirk. Prosecutors in the case have submitted as evidence texts between Robinson and his roommate, who has been described as transgender, that indicate the two had a romantic relationship. The supposedly-transgender roommate, however, had nothing to do with the shooting and has cooperated with police.
The fact that Kirk’s murder had no actual connection to the LGBTQ+ community, however, made little difference to 42-year-old Joshua Cole, who faces up to five years in prison if he is convicted on charges related to threatening to shoot up the fourth annual Abilene Pride parade on Sept. 20, according to the U.S. edition of Independent.
When someone posted on Facebook to complain about the Pride parade and festival “no guns” policy, Cole replied, “They don’t want anyone showing up and taking them out like they wanna do everyone else. Maybe we should protest lol.”
When another poster added a comment wishing “those they/thems a good parade,” Cole responded again: “Fk their parade I say we lock and load and pay them back for taking out Charlie Kirk. There’s only like 30 of em we can send a clear message to the rest of them. Come on bro lets go hunting fairies.”
Independent reports that Cole admitted he operates the Facebook account behind the threatening comments but claimed while he didn’t think the parade should be allowed, “he didn’t actually intend to gun down parade participants,” according to the FBI’s probable cause affidavit.
But FBI Special Agent Sam Venuti wrote in the affidavit that Cole’s “threats were not conditional. The threats were specific. The threats were also specific to a particular set of victims: people participating in the gay Pride parade.”
Cole was booked into the Taylor County Jail in Abilene on Sept. 19 then released on Sept. 24. The following day, according to CBS News, “the court concluded that Cole must be detained pending trial for reasons including his prior criminal history, that the weight of evidence against him is strong and that his release poses ‘serious danger to any person or the community.’”
CBS reports that Cole was arrested in 2019 for making terroristic threats. A search of Taylor County Bond Records that Joshua Wayne Cole was arrested in November 2012 on two separate charges of selling/distributing/displaying harmful material to a minor and in April 2014 on a charge of violation of occupational license requirements, as well as on the terroristic threat charge in April of 2019.
Cole’s city of residence in all four previous cases was listed as Anson, Texas, a town in Jones County that is part of the Abilene metropolitan area, according to Wikipedia.
— Tammye Nash