A 16-year-old boy rang the wrong doorbell. A 20-year-old woman turned into the wrong driveway. Teenage cheerleaders stopped outside a supermarket, and one of them got into the wrong car.

In all three cases, banal and seemingly harmless occurrences culminated in horrific gun violence. Ralph Yarl was shot in the head. Kaylin Gillis was shot dead. Payton Washington and a friend were injured.

“But in the last five or six years or so, I feel like we’ve lost touch,” he said. “I’ve gotten older and gained my own political views, and he’s become staunchly right-wing, further down the right-wing rabbit hole as far as doing the election-denying conspiracy stuff and COVID conspiracies and disinformation, fully buying into the Fox News, OAN kind of line. I feel like it’s really further radicalized him in a lot of ways.”

Ludwig said his grandfather had been immersed in “a 24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia.”

“And then the NRA pushing the ‘stand your ground’ stuff and that you have to defend your home,” he said. “When I heard what happened, I was appalled and shocked that it transpired, but I didn’t disbelieve that it was true. The second I heard it, I was like, ‘Yeah, I could see him doing that.’”

Does he consider his grandfather a racist?

“I believe that there have been some positions that he’s held that have been bigoted or sort of disparaging,” Ludwig said. “But it’s stock Fox News, conservative American stuff. It’s ‘anybody who gets an abortion is a murderer.’ And ‘fatherless Black families are the reason why crime exists in this country.’ It’s stuff everybody’s heard at the Thanksgiving table every year.”