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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37978 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Trump shot during rally.

The biggest news. The biggest! It literally just happened. I don't know what to say. Commentary beggars one's belief. I apologize for the brevity of this post, but the implications of it are mind-boggling. Political violence has escalated (perhaps, degenerated) into new levels of unforeseen disaster. What do you Americans think?

I'm mostly indifferent to Trump, but he really displayed protagonist level of charisma and plot armor here. Bullets miss, but slightly graze him for effect, he gets his wits together to both duck after the first shot and strike a pose at the right moment.
I like our scriptwriter.

My inclination to be polite to the people spreading histrionic conspiracies about how he's a "threat to democracy" has fallen to zero with this incident. I don't think I have it in me to say much more than, "fucking stop it, you're going to cause a literal civil war with your antics".

"fucking stop it, you're going to cause a literal civil war with your antics"

It is remarkable to read stuff from the early 1800s discussing how an American civil war over slavery was just inevitable--a matter of time.

It is depressing to feel like that's where we are today, that it may still be decades away but that a civil war between "reds" and "blues" has become inevitable. I would like to believe there is time to de-escalate, but I'm not sure there is a clear way--the bifurcation of American culture has gotten to the point where one side or the other simply must go away if the country is to survive at all. Time and demographics could accomplish that naturally and gradually, but if not, then a civil war is what will do it. But demands for political orthodoxy (on either side) seem to be getting louder, not quieter.

The young adult population in 30 years will be incredibly red if trends continue, so I doubt that. If there's going to be a red blue civil war it'll be soon because the blue tribe won't fight a war they're unable to win.

Is this actually true? Seems like there are some small indica that the next generation might be a bit redder than the younguns but by and large the young adult population doesn't seem to be trending incredibly red. I'd be fascinated to read a take otherwise.

(I've 100% seen the "only the reds are having kids" take but it doesn't seem clear that that actually results in red kids.)

young adult population doesn't seem to be trending incredibly red

The main two confounders here are that 1) the young adult population is less white than their elders and 2) the red/blue fertility gap had probably existed prior to that, but it only really opened up with the great recession.

Currently, the AA fertility rate is converging with the blues and hispanics are trending away from the dems. Thus we can expect 1) to be less of a factor going forwards. And the great recession happening 16 years ago, we can expect under 2) that if the fertility gap effects future generations then the trend would accelerate going forwards. And there are indications of political identity becoming more hereditary in the white population over time.

I would say that the growing gender divide on politics is more important than generational shifts. It doesn’t matter much if Gen Y is 50/50 red and blue if Gen Y males skew 80/20 red. Of course young women can fly a drone or shoot a gun in principle, but young men are both more suited to combat and more amenable to it.

This is an interesting point.

Right-wingers have been doing this cope for decades. Does anybody remember "Generation Zyklon"?

Well, realistically it will take at least a lifetime. Fertility rates between blues and reds weren't all that different until the 90s, but since then they've kept increasing. Blues are well below replacement. They're dependent on converting red children. Can they do this? Yes. Indefinitely? Probably not. They're picking the low hanging fruit right now, but it's like a parasite breeding resiliance in the host. Eventually, it will become harder and harder to convert red children, because they will increasingly be descended from a cultural and genetic lineage that is resistant to that conversion. The easiest converts are currently being sterilized, and so there won't be so many easy converts around in the future.

Will this all happen? I dunno. Perhaps the only way I can see modern blues achieving a sustainable fertility rate is pure technology--growing babies in artificial wombs.

Well, this time there's actually some evidence (for example, the notable drop in support among the younger generation for gay marriage since 2018) but I'm not sure that translates over to "incredibly red." However doglatine's point re: the gender divide is well taken.

What’s the big actual object level disagreement between the reds and the blues here? In the 1800s the country was divided over slavery. Now it really seems like a bunch of tiny object level issues plus a big aesthetic one, and nobody is going to have a civil war over aesthetics.

What’s the big actual object level disagreement between the reds and the blues here?

The proper way to live and the ordering of society.

(More practically, most Americans are way too comfortable (and in many cases, literally too fat) for anything like an actual civil war. Something like the Troubles is more likely, though even that I find doubtful, if for no other reason than the most dedicated Reds and Blues live in different places)

The troubles came about in large part because of incomplete state control due to marginalization of the Catholic population. We don't have that, and not only because Catholics are just normies and not an identifiable tribe.

The red tribe isn't welcome in the higher academy, but generally considers itself to be treated fairly by the police and mostly in the labor market. The red tribe mostly has a higher standard of living than the blue tribe at the same point at the socioeconomic ladder(granted there are proportionately more red tribers at a lower spot on the socioeconomic ladder- but the red tribe mostly understands full well that the blues kick their lowest performing members out of good standing and the reds don't. You basically need a college degree to be a full member of the blue tribe and you just need to 'want to work' to be accepted in the red tribe). These are not the conditions that result in actual or perceived marginalization which pares back state control, even if we leave out who the cops are.

As a general principle, if enough people consider the "aesthetics" important, it is becomes a cause, which is important for recruitment. Causes attract the real object-level issues, and object-level questions (economic or otherwise) may attach themselves to aesthetic causes. Or find themselves attached; sometimes the aesthetics may take the driver's seat.

I agree chances of classical civil war is quite low. There is still possibility of other forms of super-unfun-bad-times, though. (The Troubles. Italian years of lead.)

Takers versus Makers, and ethnic conflict. The blues are really more like the browns and yellows.

Certainly by the time the civil war goes got, it will be an ethnic conflict between all the foreigners imported in the last half century against those already present.

Who are the "takers"? Both tribes would contend that their own are valuable hard workers and the other side are parasites taking more value than they contribute.

The takers are public sector unions, HR and DEI, management and bureaucracy in general.

Would they? They talk a lot about being the ones to "equitably distribute" value to people according to their needs, not producing it. Like I worked in the nonprofit sector for years, nobody ever talked proudly about creating value.

Working in academia, the predominant perspective is closer to saying that everything of value is produced by the blue tribe anyway, so they should have the right to choose how the surplus is redistributed as well.

Yes, that's the sort of thing, but in our case nobody even thought about where all the grant money came from. It was just "our due"

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I don't see any indication that this is the case, however. Even though I'm sure that we've ended up importing more gang members than I feel comfortable with, overall violence and law-abidingness among immigrants is still way at least a good chunk lower than for born-Americans. I just don't see the ingredients right now or for the next two decades in place for this kind of large-scale ethnic violence to happen.

And speaking as someone who lived in Miami for a while... man, the United States cultural assimilation process is fucking fast, it's insane. At least for most immigrants. I saw kids who spent all of 4 years in country and they already were hardly distinguishable on their own from kids who grew up in the same city the whole time and actively despised and avoided speaking Spanish (which was a shame, in my opinion).

Even though I'm sure that we've ended up importing more gang members than I feel comfortable with, overall violence and law-abidingness among immigrants is still way at least a good chunk lower than for born-Americans.

There is no way at all this is true if you control for race. Certain segments of our population commit a ton of violent crime. Most do not.

Which ones are the Makers, though? Quick googling shows there's no clear mapping of donor and recipient states to their political affiliation.

Quick googling shows there's no clear mapping of donor and recipient states to their political affiliation.

This is partly because of things like counting retirees and government contractors the same as welfare recipients.

Retirees are welfare recipients.

Depends on your perspective. If you NPV their fica payments and benefits, maybe it’s just a small tax refund.

And significant black, Hispanic, and Native American populations in otherwise red states like the deep south, the Dakotas, Alaska, etc.

If something like a second American Civil War were to take place, my layman's estimation says it would almost certainly start in the next ten years if it happens at all. I could be wrong as tensions could yo-yo for longer than I, personally, might find sustainable but the population can accept.

As far as time to walk it all back goes, well. I think the American population has balkanized both further and for longer than most might admit or realize. The fractures within the major factions might prove to be the new political faultlines of whatever comes next, something like the death of the Whigs and subsequent rebirth of the Republican Party after the Civil War.

I am loosely of the opinion that we've already passed the maximum likelihood of civil war in this generation. If anything, the Culture War as a broader battle seems to be calming down, although this particular incident perhaps points the opposite direction. Both sides seem to have reached a point of being too tired of apocalyptic rhetoric to be energized by their own positive attributes: last I checked, both candidates have higher unfavorable polling numbers than favorable numbers.

More broadly, I'm coming around to a personal hypothesis that the introduction of the Internet as a social medium is starting to have run its course. We had a good couple decades where it was almost the exclusive domain of the young and well-educated, decaying September by September as normies have gradually settled the digital frontier. For a while, the discourse was Blue (with a strong helping of Techno-Libertarian) because the population was more generally. And as that faded, left-partisans were able to evaporatively cool dissent (cancel culture) in the space to maintain the partisan atmosphere. But evaporative cooling only works so far: at some point it cools to the point where people start noticing that the emperor has no clothes: I think we saw the peak of this in 2016, where the strongest efforts of blue partisans weren't able to completely ban online red-tribe rallying points. The Internet can no longer be maintained as a partisan territory for either side.

And I think that's generally still true. The forced-to-be-online interactions of 2020 seem to have had major effects: renewed efforts to ban red-tribe online spaces and such, but forcing everyone online doesn't really change that evaporative cooling is played out. Instead, it seems like the period of rapid social (and possibly also economic) change that the Internet has wrought seems to be coming to a close.

It's not the best-supported hypothesis, but it seems plausible enough for me.

I actually heard a radio segment on NPR of all places talking about how in marketing, companies are going back to politically neutral-leaning stances. Partly, according to them, because people are getting economically pinched and some of the worst woke stuff is in some sense an economic luxury, and also because a lot of the performative stuff plays just as bad with some big audiences as it does well with others. So, the general trend is: back to traditional marketing, you won't see as many of the Pepsi police-line ads anymore.

So yeah, I really don't think that we're going more nuclear. I'm always struck by most interviews by reporters - you get a few nutjobs that reporters sometimes seek out on purpose, but by and large people are just incredibly normal and down-to-earth more often than you'd think, and also on the individual level, more heterodox as well. The only caveat is if we manage to find ourselves in a war again -- wars have special social forces that can be very problematic.

I've seen in some places it has been discussed that the deep state was going to assassinate Biden so a better candidate could replace him. Maybe the deep state patsy got confused and shot the wrong guy.

What bothers me a little bit about the 'deep state' discourse is that the conclusions seem to be so rarely consistent. Like, you could maybe convince me that there's some deep state in a loose organizational/institutional sense, but it's far from clear to me what exactly they would want even if so, and people throwing around the terms don't seem to have a consistent story either.

It's a goofy concept for how slippery its use is. The term contains everything from "bureaucratic inertia" to "the illuminati conspiracy to control the world."

I think the steelman of the "deep state" concept would be the Iron Law of Institutions as applied to the Executive Branch. The people in the deep state would be primarily concerned with expanding the power and authority of the Executive Branch (regardless of the wishes of any particular president), and any threats to that would be resisted (typically not violently, because typically violence is not necessary).

Good reply, thanks. But even in that case, I don't think it's at all clear that either Biden or Trump would be "better" with that criteria? Like, people in the general public are politically divided despite wanting the expansion of the power and authority of the United States, so I don't really get how a simple law like that would have consistent interpretation either.

There was a poster here who promoted the scenario of Trump being the target of an assassination attempt and was widely criticized by many here. Have any of the people who done that willing to say mea culpa and accept that they were wrong?

There is a connection between the rhetoric promoted by various figures and media towards Trump, and it being more likely to lead to unhinged people to consider assassinating him. And also a connection between taking that threat seriously and try to suppress people and media of such rhetoric and condemn this, with acknowledging the problem and the risks it represents.

Taking seriously the genuine problem of anti right wing and anti trump extremism, it something that should have happened previously. But it becomes obvious now that there needs to be stronger condemnation and a serious desire and attempt to suppress this extremism.

I argued that using assassination risk to predict a VP was silly. I don’t think that’s changed.

It might have been me.

Wasn't it a registered republican that took the shot? There is a chance they wanted someone even further right.

  • -12

The man who took the shot was an MKUltra wind-up toy, who was 11 years old when Trump declared he was running for President and grew up in a media environment promoting total and absolute hatred of the man.

Oh here we go. The kid was a school shooter to a T. Shooting at trump for notoriety and disaffection rather than a school. Registered repub as well. Is trump a crisis actor?

You were mocking people for even talking about a potential Trump assassination about 2 months ago.

https://www.themotte.org/post/995/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/210703?context=8#context

Can't really believe you're inputting in good faith.

Yeah turns out it was a disaffected republican registered loser white kid, more like a school shooter than an assassination attempt. Unless you think school shooting victims have all been assassinated rather than murdered to take out some impotent rage at the world. Dude didn't even have a scope...pathetic and sad stuff from the SS and this kid. I'm glad he miffed it. But it wasn't a political assassination. There were fucking command snipers in the building he crawled up. Sad stuff.

Maybe dig into all the people who said this guy would be a left wing nut instead of a school shooter right wing dude obsessed with a youtube right gun channel, to the point of buying merch. I can almost feel themott's boogaloo contingent being massively disappointed.

I can see you went through your "enemies list" and looked to see if they thought there wouldn't be an attempt on trump so you could try to shame them. It only shames the accelerationist right wing as this was done by one of your own.

more like a school shooter than an assassination attempt. Unless you think school shooting victims have all been assassinated rather than murdered to take out some impotent rage at the world.

That is not the difference between murder and assassination. What matters is the profile of the target and the anticipated outcomes. Assassination attempts to accomplish something by targeting high-profile people.

Schoolchildren can't get assassinated, because they don't have the profile.

But it wasn't a political assassination.

It boggles the mind how you could say this, seriously. Of course it was a political assassination, the target was a politician. If it were a businessman, or inventor, or general, then maybe it would be an economic or military assassination, but it was Donald Fucking Trump, the highest profile politician in the world.

Schoolchildren can't get assassinated, because they don't have the profile.

Unless your whole world at that point is limited to schoolchildren; their importance simply expands to fill the void that should have been filled by other things. Same dynamic in workplace violence too, I suspect.

You're getting bogged down in semantics. You know what my point is, that this was a school shooter style kid who shot at trump instead of a classroom of kids, for the same reasons.

"They were definitely the type, and they did, make threats to shoot up our school," he said.

Although he and other classmates suspected Crooks himself was behind a threat, he said he had no firm proof. But after the threat came in, the future would-be >assassin didn't return to school for a few days.

Kid just needed to be better looking or not a weirdo and get laid. C’est la vie

I can see you went through your "enemies list" and looked to see if they thought there wouldn't be an attempt on trump so you could try to shame them. It only shames the accelerationist right wing as this was done by one of your own.

Nah, I just went through the responses to the comment @Recursive_Enlightenment directly linked up above and noticed there were some people expressing clear opinions about the likelihood of someone trying to off Trump and wanted to see how this updated any priors.

I also saw yours there, and its just ironical that your position is such that you can attack people for speculating that someone might take a shot at Trump, AND dismiss the event when someone takes a shot at Trump.

For what it is also worth, my comment was specifically pointing out that it would likely be some irrational actor with no real agenda:

unless the outcome you want is literally "X politician is dead" then no rational person would carry out such an assassination in hopes of achieving their end goals.

So my position isn't shifting much from the revelations thus far.

Even now it isn't clear if this guy wanted any other outcome than a dead Trump, so I'm not going to speculate further.

Considering @Recursive_Enlightenment's comment was regarding a conservative politician implying that the shooter would be a politically motivated leftist (hence picking an even more unpalatable VP to replace trump) As so many here often say, my thoughts on the matter were 'directionally correct', and so were yours, school shooter vibes, not deep state stochastic terrorist political assassin. Even a dead trump might have been ancillary to his true aim of acting out, suicide by cop, showing his anger at his own impotence, making a mark etc...

If we're not here for idle speculation on every topic under the sun, then what are we here for?

There's a chance, but it's definitely not clear. He also supposedly donated to ActBlue. So his registration could have been for tactical voting purposes, given that Pennsylvania is a closed primary state.

If you truly hated Trump and lived in Pennsylvania you registered as a Republican so you could vote against him in the primary. You had to register as a Republican to vote in the primary.

I don't think acceptance of being wrong on any particular subject matters. Centrist philosophy dictates that nothing ever happens. Be that the invasion of Ukraine or assassination attempts on world leaders. If anything does happen it's a 'Black Swan' event that no one could have predicted. Then it moves into the past and we chalk it up to things that happened in the past but could never happen now because reasons.

A more cynical reactionary philosophy would say: Things like this have been happening and will continue to happen as things move away from the abnormal spikes of human flourishing that European people afforded themselves, that centrists have grown up with, and towards a more balanced representation of humanity. Which happens to be ill equipped to deal with scarcity and large populations of terminal 'have nots'. Something that Europeans, through millennia of suffering, managed to break away from for a few short decades.

There's no individual instance of 'aha' that can change a centrist mind. They can always cope back to the vestiges of their top 5% lives. Maintain that the world is propelled forwards by the actions of normal, rational and well meaning people and that because of that no forecast of doom can ever be accurate.

To that extent there's no counter argument. It's long been a meme that a frog in a pot won't jump out if you bring it to a boil slowly. It's just really annoying to sit in the water listening to your fellow frog talk about how the water isn't that hot yet.

I think I could be roughly described as a centrist, but I don't think I'd ever characterize my view as "nothing ever happens". I'm a Taiwan war doomer, after all (in that I think that a war with China over Taiwan is at least fairly likely in the next ~8 years, as well thinking as if we fight one, we will more likely than not lose the war). I do think history is a great guide, but it's always at least a little tricky to identify macro/largescale trends in real time, rather than with hindsight. However with a US-focused lens, I view the system as robust and generally speaking having handled things like mass immigration just fine historically. And even civil war, and world war, and crazy economic depression. So yeah, of course I set the threshold for "doom" pretty high, and think I have good reason for doing so.

Like, I thought and honestly still think that assassinations of presidents are not very likely and not worth worrying about at least in a general political sense. Most of the danger of extremist political positions comes from when they interfere with regular governance, a la Freedom Caucus or The Squad (though how extremist you think those are is I guess debatable... maybe MTG/Pressley? Or maybe we open it beyond Congress?) I also tend to view virtually all major political movements as rooted in some sort of general but legitimate grievance, even if I think that the logic leading to their actions is, well, illogical. In much the same was as I view pop music as inherently "good" in a kind of revealed-preference kind of way, perhaps.

With that said, I will still say that I'm a little bit of a leaner on the "great man" school of history. I have a friend who is on the extreme "larger forces" side of things, who talks about stuff like how Steve Jobs didn't do much for Apple and Elon Musk didn't do much for any of his companies, it was all the workers/company/larger forces and I think that's total crap. I do think that individual, idiosyncratic decisions as well as individual politicians do in fact influence history to a good degree. That's just a fact, but it's harder to predict, so I usually decline to do so where possible and instead acknowledge that there's always going to be some sort of error bar from that. In other words, "psychohistory" a la Foundation series in bunk.

Maybe a better question is this: What do you consider "doom"? Of course you can deliberately define a paradigm where there's no falsifiability, but that doesn't mean that it exists.

I consider doom to be anything that causes a reproductive collapse or any sort of negative large scale genetic bottleneck.

On that front your comment illustrates very well why I have a big problem with centrism and centrists. You trace back the steps of modern human history, drawing confidence from that which has brought us to a point of a self induced dysgenic bottleneck.

I can't look at modern Western societies and think: This has gone great! In fact, considering the technological advancements that have been made, I have a hard time imagining things going worse short of a more immediate mass extinction event like a nuclear war or pandemic. The amount of desperately needed first world genetic material that will be lost every single day in the coming decades will never be replaced. All in the service of an ontology built up as reasonable and moderate by its adherents.

To make a long story short: if the path you took led you to doom, it doesn't matter how scenic it was, it was the wrong path.

I can't look at modern Western societies and think: This has gone great! In fact, considering the technological advancements that have been made, I have a hard time imagining things going worse short of a more immediate mass extinction event like a nuclear war or pandemic.

This is just a gross failure of imagination. Would you trade places with any contemporary non westerner, or any premodern?

The worst things you can say about the modern West is that 1. we are so fabulously rich that basic living necessities are essentially free and so we plow all of our surplus into zero sum positional goods. 2. We demand such a high quality of life that we continually push our institutions to eliminate the n-th signma risk of living past the point of diminishing returns.

About half the word is either white or East Asian. There is plenty of "high quality" genetic stock of that's what you care about.

lost every single day in the coming decades will never be replaced.

This genetic stock wasn't present at the start of the universe. It was created out of nothing by selection effects. Equivalently high quality genetic pools can be created if they are adaptive

No, I would not want to trade places with the people who had to suffer for millennia to get to the place the west is today. Which is why I really don't like it when we squander those hard fought gains via man made genetic bottlenecks.

You seem to be, as centrists are want to do, ignoring the contention being made and the problems being pointed out and instead framing yourself as a defender of western civilization. The problem I have with that framing, outside of it being a dishonest rhetorical cope, should be obvious. I am not against the flourishing of European people. I like the modern comforts I have. I like the low risk high reward society afforded to me via technological advancement and high trust.

The reason I have a problem with centrism is because I don't want to lose all this good and I very much implied this in my previous post.

The worst things you can say about the modern West is that

It causes a genetic bottleneck that kills itself off. You need something self aware that offsets the problems caused by all the technological advancement. There are historical figures and movements that understood this, and centrists love to sneer at them. Going so far as to cast the doom of the western people in a salvageable light rather than admit they're wrong.

About half the word is either white or East Asian. There is plenty of "high quality" genetic stock of that's what you care about.

Most places on earth have people with many great qualities. East Asia, maybe, in particular. However, I don't want to live in China, Korea or Japan. I want to live where I live now and I want my future descendants to be afforded the same luxury. I am very much not in favor of introducing the sort of status and award obsessed 'Asian' into my immediate environment. It leads to the same toxic study and work culture on display in those countries and I very much prefer mine over theirs.

This genetic stock wasn't present at the start of the universe. It was created out of nothing by selection effects. Equivalently high quality genetic pools can be created if they are adaptive

I very much don't want a repeat of the horrible history of the European man. To suggest this makes you more radical and unhinged than anything I heard of outside of maybe Mao's alleged boasting of Chinas suitability to survive in the chance of a total nuclear war. "What if they killed 300 million of us? We would still have many people left.".

There are historical figures and movements that understood this, and centrists love to sneer at them. Going so far as to cast the doom of the western people in a salvageable light rather than admit they're wrong.

You’re being coy here, but in other comments you’ve been more explicit that you think we should look to the National Socialists for a model. Now, I’m happy to point out the things the Third Reich got right, and their interest in eugenics is probably the best argument for not totally discarding their legacy.

That being said, the legitimacy of their eugenic project is severely compromised by the fact that arguably the central thrust of it was rounding up massive numbers of Jews - a very high-quality population with a proven track record of great achievements, both in Germany and beyond - and causing their deaths via either negligence or outright murder, depending on which sources you believe.

This is compounded by the fact that they clearly expressed a desire to take military actions which they readily expected to lead to the deaths of some substantial number of white Slavs, another population who, while at that time not quite on par with the Germanic peoples due to a bunch of factors we can debate, were clearly at worst a near-peer brother civilization to the rest of Europe. Even casting the Reich’s foreign policy in the best light by presenting it as a noble war against Bolshevism, you’re still left questioning just how much destruction they were willing to visit upon the populations of Eastern Europe in order to achieve such an aim.

All of this to say, you might want to attempt a bit more empathy regarding the specific reasons why intelligent people who share your basic goals and values might still think that the fascists were and are a terrible and counterproductive model for the achievements of those goals and the furtherance of those values. One can believe that eugenics is a fundamentally good and important project while being reasonably squeamish about the specific actions historically taken in the interest of that project, as well as reasonably suspicious of some of the ulterior motives held by the most visible and historically-impactful proponents of the project.

Most places on earth have people with many great qualities. East Asia, maybe, in particular. However, I don't want to live in China, Korea or Japan. I want to live where I live now and I want my future descendants to be afforded the same luxury. I am very much not in favor of introducing the sort of status and award obsessed 'Asian' into my immediate environment. It leads to the same toxic study and work culture on display in those countries and I very much prefer mine over theirs.

What about a synthesis of both cultures, which incorporates the best aspects of both and seeks to sand off the worst and most obsolete aspects of each culture? I would argue that modern Japan and Korea are already a sort of prototype version of this: Western military occupation and cultural-political influence has, since the 1940s and 50s, already been moving those countries in a more Westernized direction; however, they’ve married those Western influences to the core Eastern aspects of their society, producing something that is in a great many ways superior to both extremes. It really is a best-of-both-worlds situation. Now, I agree that this process is incomplete, and that some parts of those cultures still need ironing out; I agree that the work/study culture is too extreme. That being said, there are many ways I would like to see Western cultures become more like Asian ones.

I think that a long-term melding of West and East is unequivocally the best outcome for not only both cultural spheres, but for humanity as a whole. Perhaps influenced overmuch by the black-and-white thinking of the National Socialists, you seem to be trapped in an either/or framing, in which one culture’s norms must be jealously guarded against influence by another. I think that’s the wrong approach. The ubermensch in my mind is a hapa race of diligent, creative, orderly but passionate, aristocratic in spirit without allowing status obsession to crowd out virtue, maintaining the capacity for violence while still holding it at arm’s length. For that to happen, some Asians are going to have to show up in Western societies and be able to do their thing; ditto for whites in Asian societies. Unlike you, I do not perceive this as an invasion by those who will wreck something precious about my society. (Note that I have said unabashedly that there are many groups whom I perceive as dangerous invaders; I just don’t see East Asians as one of them.)

Sometimes saying less is better as it steers the conversation away from irrelevant tangents and arguments. But here we are.

I don't view the holocaust as a strike against National Socialism any more than I view Asian American concentration camps during WW2 as a roadblock in the way of hapa ubermench supremacy. I find the association and repeat regurgitation of those kind of arguments incredibly stupid. It almost pushes me to a point where I no longer believe dialog on a policy level is possible since most people seem completely incapable of not talking about the holocaust. To top it all of, people feel very emboldened to make stuff up about the Third Reich. It's a bad guy that no one except a bad guy will defend. So you can make simple untrue statements that feel true due to emotional association with pop media whilst being completely devoid of any historical context.

On that end I am almost pushed to abandon any political thought and just start talking about the holocaust and how it's a ridiculous fairytale. The numbers really don't matter. 600 or 6 million, it's an animating myth for a victimary narrative. It's a black person speaking out against white supremacy since slavery used to be a thing. It really doesn't matter how many slaves there were, what color, who dunnit first or whatever else. Anyone can see how idiotic all of that is until its their own victimary narrative. Then people act out the exact same pathology without blinking an eye.

As for the EuroAsian synthesis, I don't see how there will be a synthesis, only a temporary transition period. Even assuming no outsider immigration, which is happening in all countries mentioned, Europe is taking in East Asians whilst China is not. The trickle of DNA goes one way. So it's just a matter of time before the European stops being hapa and just becomes Han.

I mean, I can imagine a world where every Asian and every European is married to one another with hapa children. But taking your vision without reservation and as valid in full, you will have to go much further than National Socialism to find any mechanism to turn that vision into reality. On that end, I take very little solace in the thought considering where things are today in the real world.

All of this to say, you might want to attempt a bit more empathy regarding the specific reasons why intelligent people who share your basic goals and values might still think that the fascists were and are a terrible and counterproductive model for the achievements of those goals and the furtherance of those values. One can believe that eugenics is a fundamentally good and important project while being reasonably squeamish about the specific actions historically taken in the interest of that project, as well as reasonably suspicious of some of the ulterior motives held by the most visible and historically-impactful proponents of the project.

I don't know what a fascist is and I don't know what 1940's Germany at war has to do with any of National Socialist policies I like. I really wish the intelligent people could engage with the topic of group bias and western policy flaws without defaulting to the holocaust but so far, they just don't. It's hard for me to empathize with them when they all display the same lack of reason and skepticism. Going through the same pathological motions every single time.

I'm not a smart guy. But I have a decent memory and cognitive dissonance hits me like a truck. So how can I still be here after a decade of making the same argument to all the smartest people I know? Did a swastika fall on my head when I was a toddler? Am I just retarded? Where is the light?

I mean, I certainly did not see it after the Oct 7 attack, where intelligent posters started nonchalantly floating ideas of genociding their enemy and such like it was just another day in the office. It certainly felt like a change from much of the dispassionate commentary on other conflicts. Almost like every single thing I say about group bias and pathology is correct and that being governed by people who don't ingroup me is very bad and leads to sub par outcomes for me? Nay, perhaps I should just listen to my elders and recognize why a slow death is the smart thing because the holocaust. Maybe I can entertain myself with ideas of EuroAsian paradise whilst housing prices inexplicably rise for the 240th month in a row. Almost as if immigrant paradise, promised by similar people, did not come to pass either. No really, all snark aside, can the smart people give me anything tangible as an alternative to a dysgenic society funneling into a massive genetic bottleneck?

Why is that genetic material so desperately needed? Just because first world populations shrink doesn’t mean there’s not going to be plenty of first worlders still.

The obvious need is for the advancement and maintenance of first world societies. You need first world people to stave of stagnation, deterioration and corruption.

On a social level the proportions that make up a population are very important if you care about first world living standards. This is why populations like Iceland can create a better living environment than populations in various eastern European countries despite the total number of high trust, high IQ people being higher in eastern Europe.

It has to pay off to be high trust. Otherwise the people predisposed to trusting will learn to do the opposite. This creates a drastic division within a society where people, most often the smartest who are very capable of forming collectives of trust, close themselves off from wider society because engaging with it fairly is not worth it since it has too many trust breakers.

This effectively makes nepotism and corruption a winning move, which is obviously awful for anyone who idealizes any modern conception of a first world society.

This creates a drastic division within a society where people, most often the smartest who are very capable of forming collectives of trust, close themselves off from wider society because engaging with it fairly is not worth it since it has too many trust breakers.

Interesting. Are there documented examples of this happening in real life?

Also, why is high IQ and not, say, high pro-social values so important for establishing trust?

Seems more like a big failure on the part of the secret service than anything else.

Political assassination attempts don’t swing votes in favor of the candidate who was almost killed. During the Brexit campaign a prominent Labour MP was assassinated, which was the first assassination of a British politician in a very long time, and I remember everyone saying that “surely” this would swing the vote to Remain, and Leave still won comfortably by the margin the more generous polls were showing, the effect was zero.

I think the imagery after the fact (ie Trump yelling wait and holding up a defiant fist) is what swings the election. Not just iconic imagery but the image of a guy demonstrating strength. Compare that to Biden…

It's pretty much the two extremes as far as the appearance of strength of the two candidates.

It depends on how he carries himself afterwards. If he limits public appearances or speaks behind bullet proof glass it doesn't exactly demonstrate strength. If he over politicizes it and tries to blame Biden, it won't sit well with some people.

He can’t directly go after Biden. But his surrogates sure will.

We're all probably overreacting in terms of the electoral implications.

But it's a problem that Biden can't afford right now, with everyone questioning whether he has the juice to even make it to November.

We're all probably overreacting in terms of the electoral implications.

It gives Trump Pennsylvania, assuming nothing else dramatic happens between now and the election. Plenty could still happen. And honestly, when I heard about the assassination attempt I checked to see if Biden had died, but the timeline isn't quite that dank.

Why would Pennsylvania have a bigger impact than other states?

Pennsylvania is a swing state with the most delegates. If you're asking why the shooting would have a bigger impact in PA... because it happened there. Even in the internet age, proximity matters.

Butler is just so far from Philly suburbs it might as well be a different state. More Philadelphians go to NYC, DC every year than go to Pittsburgh. Northwest pa was already Trump country.

Yet votes in western PA count towards the state wide totals

Marginal voters exist and they swing every election. Independents are a large and growing percentage of the population.

It also changes the new cycle likely giving Biden a lifeline to stay in which is probably bad for Dems.

I'm not sure it changes things that much on that front. The GOP convention was set to begin tomorrow anyway, which would have sucked all the media coverage away from Biden.

Maybe. You could imagine court intrigue still occurring. Also killed any more stories over the last 24 hours and tomorrow.

The aspect is a replacement may be less keen to run if they believe Trump is in a better spot again killing the “replace Biden momentum” albeit for a different reason.

If anything, I think this is going to leave a lasting overshadow over a lot of Trump's court proceedings.

Eh, Trump's VP pick was going to be the main news cycle of the week regardless.

But that assumes he’d pick the VP Monday. Again there could be a few more days.

Agree. And whether or not is affects electoral outcomes, the conventional wisdom is that it does. That may give alternative candidates pause.

Nate Silver makes a good point that when you’re behind, you want to increase variance. Other candidates are likely to lose to trump too, but the chance of them catching fire with voters is higher than Biden.

A better comparison would be Bolsonaro in 2018, who was IIRC behind in polls but cinched a Victory after the assassination attempt.

Hard to say in his case, it wasn’t an immediate boost (he was at around 26% before and immediately after) but he rose to the low 30s several weeks later and then won a higher percentage in the actual election. It also happened only a few days after Lula was barred, so there were a bunch of other factors in play as well that arguably explained why Bolsonaro rapidly increased in support in through late Sept and early October.

Brazil is not really embedded in the Western media sphere/memetic pond, though. I'd be more inclined to compare with Fico, where the media barely even mustered disapproval, and instead the reaction was all "he kind of had it coming" and "what if this makes more people support his pro-Putin agenda". The subsequent EU election did not really go in his favour, either

Fico's assassination didn't happen during a national election campaign. You could argue that it happened close to European elections cycle, at least, but the European elections have their own logic due to low voting rates and aren't treated as a "real" election nearly to the same degree as national elections are.

Jo wasn't a candidate, nor was she the candidate. she was a supporter of a larger movement. No one knew who she was before she died, she didn't have a diehard group of loyalists who believe that the state itself was trying to take down their messiah. If this doesn't move the needle then it is because the centre american politics has been long drained of undecideds.

I agree that the situations are far from identical, but I think it’s illustrative of the fact that predictions that political violence helps the injured or killed party’s team seem largely unfounded.

The real political effect of assassinations is so subject to context and specifics that it's hard to say. Culture is also relevant - in Japan, assassination of politicians rarely results in a martyr effect - if anything, public opinion often ends up turning in favour of the cause of the assassin.

(I suspect that if anything, the supposed martyrdom effect is just a cultural strategy to discourage assassination. When politicians rally behind an assassination victim, they're contributing to a political norm that protects their own behinds.)

the supposed martyrdom effect is just a cultural strategy to discourage assassination. When politicians rally behind an assassination victim, they're contributing to a political norm that protects their own behinds.

Agreed. It's a fairly good norm to have. Not just for the politicians avoiding the guillotine.

At some level the average American understands, or believes, that assassinations on important people threaten their comfortable way of life. In addition to that, Americans have a common association with assassinations in history. Lincoln, JFK, the average American is taught about these figures and recalls them in the context of their assassinations. On top of the taboo Americans see assassinations as Big Historical Tragedy. That elicits sympathy and dredges up deep associations found within their educational programming.

I don't think the effect is such that a bunch of D primary voters will swing to Trump. Among undecideds or swing voters, however, if this event is still at the forefront of voter consciousness come November it will have an effect. As an anecdote, a very blue couple I was with yesterday shared the news. This couple had canvassed for Biden in 2020 as I recall. They are less politically engaged this go around, but still very blue. They believed it meant the election was lost. That was one of their first reactions.

Perhaps if Biden was in a stronger position they would have reacted differently. A lot can happen, as we've seen, but this felt like a nail in the coffin to them. This is a barb in the side of avid partisans and accelerationists. Of the, actual real people, group I was with there was one "wouldn't have been so bad if he missed" flippant comment. Which Blue Couple did not appreciate and shamed him for, despite all the the vitriol Blue Wife has directed towards the former president over the years.

There are people who want Trump to win but don't want to vote for him because he's a bad person. I think it's pretty common amongst conservative blue tribers. I count myself in this group.

Watching the footage from yesterday made me like Trump a lot more. Say what you will about the guy, he showed enormous courage.

Yesterday will flip some votes at the margin which will matter in a close race.

This absolutely. Assassination attempts cut through media noise and penetrate straight to the most difficult to reach but also critical vote, the (actually real) undecided and swing voters, who often don't tune in until late and put heavy emphasis on "vibes". So this event is double critical hit, in that swing voters actually heard something so soon, and also the vibes were heavily good for Trump.

Of the, actual real people, group I was with there was one "wouldn't have been so bad if he missed" flippant comment. Which Blue Couple did not appreciate and shamed him for, despite all the the vitriol Blue Wife has directed towards the former president over the years.

I think at least part of that depends on the social groups you're running within. I got this (cw: ffxiv spoilers) linked in my social groups, followed by someone I gave computer build advice not twelve hours before joking about 'the hero we didn't know we needed'.

It's not universal among the left, but neither is it just the Kathy Griffins and Keith Olbermanns, either.

A matyr needs to have his base rally in a time of disunity. The japanese provide the ur-counterexample, where Japanese Socialist Party Chairman Inejiro Asanuma was assassinated and the party lost its forward momentum, falling into infighting before disintegrating completely. Matyrs work to hyperenergize a passive but unified base, they don't work for converting or unifying.

Given that Trumps base is MAGA and anyone who thinks Dems are going too far, I see this as an energizing moment. Fun fun fun.

It also helps that Trump lived. There won’t be disunity.

Even if it did push people towards Trump, it's too early.

It might slow all of the Project 2025/"end of democracy" talk. Which was what Biden was selling.

Man the plot armour on Trump is insane. If the shooter had aimed just a few arcseconds away we'd have a dead Trump right now.

Photo of the/a bullet literally midair

It would be probably be the worst national crisis since 911 . It would not have as serious economic consequences of covid or 911 but it would be bad in ways that are hard to know because they would be unprecedented

Not quite unprecedented. Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed on the campaign trail just after winning a huge tranche of votes that likely would have given him the nomination. Also, I don't quite remember if he was the favorite to win, but given how the actual election between Kennedy's replacement Humphries was razor-close on election day and rated a toss-up against Nixon, his chances were good as I think most people thought Kennedy would be a much stronger candidate. So at least in that sense we've been through this before.

In practical terms however, yes, would be an absolute massive shockwave.

Trump turned his head likely just as the shooter popped his shot. It'd have clipped the back of his skull and if it was an XM15 the traumatic impact would blow apart his brain. Insanely lucky.

Can't trust Gen Z to do anything right.

Which candidate would the Republicans have pushed if Trump was killed?

Haley or Rubio.

Haley is hated by maga base. It would’ve been seen as an establishment plot. No way she would’ve been the nominee.

Given the current leadership of the RNC I think it would go to Don Jr if he wanted it, which I think he probably would.

There's no way career politicians with actual experience running campaigns would allow it to go to Don Jr. without a fight. Haley has pledged delegates who would see there chance. Whoever the VP pick was would argue that he gets Trump's delegates. Desantis would see his chance and argue he was more popular than either of them. On the other hand, if the RNC pushes one of the above three it will be harder for the other two to argue against them. There still might be a power struggle, but it wouldn't be as public.

Haley might try and fail, but Desantis I imagine has more political sense than do that; going against a popular figure like Trump (and by association his family) damages a Republican's brand. Jeb is a joke and a non-entity now. Rubio had to go into hiding for years to recover. The Cheney name is dirty now. Haley might have destroyed her political future. Desantis probably gave up on the primary just in time not to damage himself for 2028.

I think too inexperienced to take the convention, but I could see him cutting a deal for the VP slot.

Is he any less experienced (politically) than Trump was when he ran for the first time?

agree. when has experience ever been a major deciding factor? Palin anyone?

Politically he's probably more experienced, but in terms of executive experience, it's all been working for his father.

Do you think so? He is inexperienced. That said the memetic force would be very strong to push him through.

The only way it wouldn’t be Don Jr is if Don Jr (and the rest of the family) endorsed whoever it ultimately ended up being, since without the family the Republican candidate would probably lose due to infighting, people voting RFK Jr because of ‘crony’ RINOs taking over Trump’s legacy etc. Don Jr seems to have political connections and if they run someone else he’s finished, because in 8 years a) a Democrat would probably win again anyway and b) the Trump family would be largely forgotten, especially without the patriarch.

JD Vance is buddies with Don Jr, is quite possibly the VP nominee, and has the requisite style and experience. I would have bet on him if this had been successful.

It could be Vance, but I think if it was Vance there would be a lot of competition from within the party. If it was Don Jr I think there would be mostly deference outside the moderate business con wing, and even there I think they’d eventually accept it.

Don Jr vs Jared Kushner. That'll be the best.

Jared is happy with the Arabs giving him money, and I can see President Don Jr continuing to let him and Ivanka be in charge of Middle East policy (and thus profit from it). I don’t think either Jared or Ivanka will succeed Trump politically.

Kushner is too pro Israel and is on the nose.

Nothing about Kushner’s behavior over the last few years suggests he wants to be president. I think he might agree to Ivanka running, but she doesn’t want it either.

Pence? Haley? DeSantis? Donald Jr?

DeSantis seems like the obvious choice. He was in second place for most of the primary, and there isn't much time left to build up name recognition. He's also basically Trump lite. I think he could easily coast to victory on the outrage over the murder of a Presidential candidate.

And he was the second choice for many Trump voters. But who knows.

I, for one, think that everyone who talks about how this means a surefire Trump win is seriously underestimating our media institutions' skills at narrative management.

I mean, beyond the people claiming this was a false flag — our Reichstag fire, even — there seems to me to be an increasing prevalence of "frontlash" arguments: that this means it has only become more important than ever to keep Trump out of the White House, to protect the many innocent people who will be hurt by Trump (and his violent, bigoted supporters) when he lashes out violently in Putin-esque vengeance against anyone and everyone he happens to perceive as an enemy the moment he retakes power.

Edit: I also find quite rich the narrative that this indicates Trump is a threat to himself, because it was "his rhetoric and manipulation of people's emotions in a dangerous way" that caused this, and that if the shooter was left-wing, then he only did it because of "crazy right wingers killing their imagined enemies" thanks to Trump causes people on the left "who have been told they are an enemy" to feel like they have no choice but to "attack their enemy in kind."

I don't really see who it galvanizes to back Trump. The hollowing out of the middle means that I don't think that there's a huge bed of people who are gonna be additional votes for him as a result.

That's not what "hollowing out of the middle" means. It's usually used to describe how there are allegedly fewer political moderate, cross-aisle people elected to Congress than in previous times, and the reasons for that go beyond simply "there are fewer moderate voters". At least since 1994, and with a party lens, there's not much difference over time in the middle group among the actual voters. If anything, the "lean" group has increased, reflecting a general dissatisfaction with politics rather than an actual extinction of non-partisans. In other words, concerns about swing voters disappearing and everyone being too opinionated is conflating at least two different phenomena.

It could galvanize closet Trump supporters with some degree of social cachet to speak out now in favor of Trump. See eg Musk, Ackman. While anyone following those two closely weren’t surprised by the endorsement, the timing is suggestive of my point.

Also, while Trump shouldn’t directly make this point, his surrogates need to hit “Biden n has been lying about him and calling him a wannabe dictator—Biden has some responsibility.”

I feel like there's a certain energy of 'oh this is our Jan 6 that the media will have to blow out of proportion' to some of the Pro-Trump responses to this and I very much doubt that the media will fan the flames in the same way as they did Jan 6.

this means it has only become more important than ever to keep Trump out of the White House, to protect the many innocent people who will be hurt by Trump (and his violent, bigoted supporters)

Maybe you added that last bit as a joke, but I think the incongruousness of panicking about violence from the candidate who just came almost literally within a hair's breadth of being brained by (presumably) a Biden supporter would not be lost on most viewers who are not already extremists.

The shooter appears to be a registered republican

This is false.

Someone at his residence registered republican.

He did give money to actblue.

Are we sure the act blue donation isn't a different guy? Sources please

The zip code matched, which is not especially likely, as people were only posting that there was one other Thomas Crooks in the Pittsburgh area.

I thought they knew he was Republican from voter records?

Someone at his residence was registered... Not evidence he was. Unless new info had been discovered.

What evidence did you have? After searching reddit, I found this.

He was registered as a republican. That doesn't actually tell you who he voted for; there's no way to look that up.

Right, my point was merely that it was attached to his name, not his address, if I understood rightly.

The very special sort of Republican who donates to ActBlue.

A registered republican who donates to democrats, yes.

Likely so that he could vote in the republican primary.

Party registration means essentially nothing at this point. I change my party affiliation almost every election season.

This was almost certainly why, Pennsylvanian has closed primaries

Maybe you added that last bit as a joke,

Nope. I've been looking at responses like the comments at this Reddit thread. Bits like:

What upsets me is his rage that he projects... where if you disagree then you are literally labeled by him explicitly as a treasonous enemy of America, which itself is so unamerican and dangerous to the country.

He has made this country more dangerous and fractured by the day ever since he started his political rhetoric way back against Obama.

He creates the situation that makes politics dangerous in America, whether it is crazy right wingers killing their imagined enemies or bringing out crazy left wingers who have been told they are an enemy so they feel like they have to attack their enemy in kind.

and:

Amazing, the Republicans, who have developed a list of 350 political opponents that they believe should be incarcerated and/or put to death, and assert they have the right to be violent to achieve their goals of overthrowing our government, have the nerve to complain of political violence tonight. 😡

and:

I wonder if this will be my generations Reichstag fire. Now more than ever he needs to be kept out of the White House so he can’t take his anger out on opponents

and:

The right is already blaming democrats. Marjorie Trailer Park Greene is blaming democrats and the media.

She’s linking criticism of Trump to instigating this attack.

If Trump wins and it looks like he will, he will definitely try to go after all media that doesn’t praise him. He will do exactly what putin does.

and:

Trump will say Biden tried to kill him and if he doesn’t, Fox News will to try to win the election. These people are horrible.

and:

America the democracy is done. Nobody who isnt a white Christian will be safe

and:

I hope Biden’s team really tightens up their security. There are enough crazies in MAGA to believe he’s behind this and retaliate.

That's the whole "frontlash" idea — the real issue is all the innocent people who will be hurt by the likely "backlash". To quote a 2016 tweet from the late Norm Macdonald satirizing this view (in the context of Islamic terror attacks):

What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?

The problem, says this narrative, isn't that someone tried to kill Trump, it's all the horrible things he and Republicans are going to do to innocent people when they lash out blindly in retaliation.

Edit: add on this bit of sarcasm:

Okay, so who’s gonna talk them down from making a dictatorship? We all know that republicans are totally reasonable and don’t justify mass shootings at all, or claim climate change isn’t real, or try to involve religion in school, or try to discriminate, or control people’s bodies.

Yeah, we should just let them go on. It’s not like I want to live on a planet that isn’t on fire.

I’m sure that the people who downvote me aren’t complete bigots who want their Glorious Leader in power. I’m sure they respect women and minorities and think that the corporations SHOULD have massive power over their livelihood. I’m sure that most of America isn’t diseased by the republicans and want to completely overthrow democracy. I’m sure they don’t ignore the most obvious points about how republicans are making the world a worse place. Because they’re nice and friendly and totally don’t want to resurrect the Nazi Regime

This is just boo outgroup stuff. If a rightist made an attempt on Biden’s life there would tons of conservative forums and even users here making essentially the same comments inverted, about how woke and the left had divided America and fractured society racially and politically and this was the unfortunate consequence.

Would there? How can you make that assertion?

Talking of its inevitability would squeak in at a solid 1% of all comments, with 69% being "feds" and the last 30% being "that retard tried to kill a corpse."

If I were speculating here, I'd wonder about the increase in probability of an assassination attempt on any D politician other than Biden. It's gone up, but maybe not much--had 7/13 been a historically bad day, I would think it inevitable.

If a rightist made an attempt on Biden’s life there would tons of conservative forums and even users here making essentially the same comments inverted

You are making this up.

"The left actually did this. Well, the right didn't actually do this, but I'm sure they would do it if they had the chance!" is not very good reasoning.

We're not certain the shooter was from "the left". He was a registered republican for two years but had also given a small amount ($15) to a progressive Democratic group. There's still a lot of ambiguity in play and I wouldn't be too surprised if he turned out to be a right wing accelerationist.

I'm guessing progressive who registered Republican to vote in the primary.

Possibilities on the registration bit include:

  • He voluntarily registered Republican like mom and dad when he was living in their home, then his politics shifted
  • Mom or dad filled out the registration form for him
  • He registered Republican so that he could strategically vote for the "worse" candidate in the Republican races
  • He was truly a Republican then and truly a Republican yesterday when taking shots on the presumed nominee

It'll be funny if it turns out to be he was a disgruntled Haley supporter.

Grover Norquist rises from the grave!

I’m saying that on occasions where reactionary political violence in the US has been discussed on this board, many civilized posters have argued that it’s inevitable because the left have broken the social contract and have been steamrolling the right and that there might be no alternative. I mean, are you really disputing this? It’s not a great leap of a hypothetical really.

You are currently discussing an example of what strongly appears to be the Left breaking the social contract in a way that makes "reactionary" political violence inevitable. They whipped themselves into a frenzy over Trump, and now someone has actually tried to kill him, and for many on the left there is no actual way to walk it back, nor ability to recognize the realities of their position. All they know how to do is double-down, which makes further incidents inevitable, which in turn makes reciprocity from the Reds inevitable.

The Left actually rioted nation-wide. They actually have used national security assets to persecute their political rivals. They actually have inflicted lawless violence on Reds in particular and on the nation generally. They actually have made two serious attempts at assassinations of Republican leadership. They actually have prosecuted Reds for lawful self-defense. They actually have attempted to jail political opponents. They actually ignore all of the numerous violations they actually commit on a regular basis, and paper it over with fictions about Nazis and the Handmaid's Tale.

There is only so long this pattern can continue before it breaks things none of us will be able to fix. Today was just another step closer to the brink.

Here is an excellent article on the Russian revolution:

https://www.theconundrumcluster.com/p/you-should-really-read-this-introduction

Before the bloody civil war there was a lot of incompetence and appeasement. People to the right of other figures, refusing to use power, abdicating their duties and giving power to people to their left and letting them get away with crimes. Then came the violence.

A very rough summary of this: You had the Tsar giving power to a liberal relative Grand Duke Michael, who gave power to the Constituent Assembly (which imprisoned Tsar Nicolas)and the monarchy disintegrated to provisional assembly to lead the country during the elections lead by to Kerensky who followed a "no enemies to the left" dogma while the Bolsheviks were rising. Lenin ended up removed from prison. Both The Grand Duke and Tsar were murdered and Kerensky ended up in exile.

If they actually suppressed the radicals with force, and didn't give them more power the civil war would had been averted or less severe.

Point being, refusal to try to shut down leftist radicals and being afraid more of doing so than them makes future conflict larger, inevitable, and also their future atrocities. Putting and keeping people like Lenin in prison is more important than violent fantasies. It is only a failure to keep law and order and suppress such elements that lead to the Russian civil war and then the red terror.

Rather than lamenting future violence, you ought to be critical of the current right refusing to use power to suppress leftist extremists. I do agree with most of what you say of how the left breaks norms. I also don't want to see things breaking down in the ways the Russian revolution, civil war did.

But the right also breaks norms by complicity and not stopping them. For example, how about actual strong reprisals like trying to shut down left wing media with unhinged hateful rhetoric towards right wingers? Such as advocating to limit their reach by reprisals from their specific state We know the republican party is willing to do plenty of authoritarian moves, by looking them doing so when it comes to the Israel issue.

Although stopping criminals does include a component of physical violence, which is part of any duties of any police force, there are ways to exercise power, (and you are a moderator who have some power of your own however limited), that is different than just physically hurting people.

For example treating antifa as a criminal organization and then arresting their members, and have them subject to prosecution could be one of the possible ideas to suppress leftist extremism, targeting one of the worst of the worst groups most characteristic of it and it would qualify as qualitatively different than just physically harming in a purity spiral people identified as a different political tribe.

Another example, would be to try to debar antifa lawyers.

I see suppression of leftist/liberal radicalism and anti-right wing radicalism as preventive of current and future escalating violence, and the refusal to act as ensurer of things escalating...

Leftists hold Jan 6 like it was dooms forthcoming. Jan 6th attacked the govt, and didn't burn DC.

Did anyone actually get prosecuted for BLM riots? Are bippers and shoplifters actually arrested? Did Raz Simone actually get arrested for distributing guns that got black boys killed? Dems seem intent on fumbling the bag whenever its their protected classes who inconveniently express their criminal intent, while hushing up every instance where an accepted target is attacked by their pets.

Dems are surprisingly adroit at bending the machinery of govt to protect themselves. They are just afraid that the right will take this machine built by the left and turn it back on them.

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Now would be a good time to not fumble the bag. God I hope American rightists are smarter than Israelis.

Seems like if you guys were going to do anything about it you'd have started by now. After 2020 they know they can do anything to you and you can't or won't stop them.

It's way too late to talk tough now. If Robert Evans and all the other antifa leadership had been found decaying under a bridge in September '20, maybe they'd actually be scared to fuck with you.

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Err.. She's positing a counterfactual, that's not "making this up", anymore than if I say that if I went and punched you, you might punch me back.

She's positing the counterfacual of "if a rightist made an attempt on Biden's life". but she's making things up when she then decides how conservatives would behave in response. The behavior of conservatives isn't a premise of the counterfactual, it's an assumption about what conservatives are like in the real world.

You cannot have a counterfactual without assumptions. I happen to think, given observed behavior on both sides of the political spectrum, that there would an absolutely non-negligible number of people on the Right doing the things she spoke about.

You're welcome to disagree, but it's impossible to talk about things that didn't happen without said assumptions. Criticize those, as you're doing now.

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I think they will attempt this sure. I don't think they'll be successful. They can't arbitrate reality to the extent required against events like this and biden's performance to facilitate a Democrat win. Something else could possibly happen between now and the election, but as it stands, I'd say the prediction markets are fairly accurate.

Media sources are identifying the deceased gunman as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks. Seems to not have had an internet presence. Strange. +1 for nominative determinism though.

Seems that Crooks may have been prematurely fingered.

There’s some DR Twitter speculation that the real culprit is Pittsburgh-based antifa street brawler Maxwell Yearick, who certainly does uncannily resemble the supposed photos of the shooter, but I’m gonna wait and see how things shake out before endorsing any of this speculation.

  1. That's a troll , @jewgazing on twitter There's also a photo going around of a guy in a gun youtuber t-shirt, supposedly of the shooter.

  2. people misidentify Crooks as the Yearick antifa guy. But the antifa guy is way too old.

  3. in a "simulation is totally fucking with us" cleanest shots of Crooks are from a Blackrock advert shot at his school.

Crooks has an ear that perfectly matches the shape of the dead guy's ear, and is young enough to match the corpse photo.

Couple odd details: crooks wears glasses, but shooter has no glasses.

  1. it looks like the secret service were observing and aiming at the guy before he took the shots. At least it seems so from the video.

They were on the roof of a maybe 1.5 story tall shed, the shooter was on what looks like a garage or story unit.

  1. extended video of the shooting by NTD. So the timeline is, first three aimed shots, Trump ducks, then 5-6 rapid shots (didn't count), one of which hits hydraulics on a backhoe? behind Trump which starts spraying oil. Muted shot at the end, probably from a sniper rifle that headshot the assassin.

Cca 5 seconds from the first shot by the assassin, to the final muted shot. Hard to say whether 4) is true because I feel had they had him in his sights, he'd have been killed 1-2 seconds after firing or presumably, before even firing.

it looks like the secret service were observing and aiming at the guy before he took the shots. At least it seems so from the video.

I wonder if they were just unsure. I don’t envy them, it would be a big scandal if they executed some random guy watching from a nearby roof.

Or a police officer

There's no way all the sniper teams wouldn't be on the same radio channel imo.

Also, the guy wasn't even dressed like a cop and tbh, anyone aiming a gun at a guy protected by counter-snipers is fair game and asking for a bullet. You just don't do this.

Coupled with the rooftop being unsecured and the counter-snipers apparently watching the sniper beforehand, it does smell like a setup. We'll hear about it, if the SS detail truly got 'do not shoot' orders from their bosses, that's gonna leak.

look at the picture. There wasn't even any other place than the assassin's rooftop where they could be looking. Since WW2, snipers hiding in trees are a lost art. Wehrmacht in France was pretty fond of that but I haven't heard of that since.

That's not what I'm saying. The secret service was there in limited capacity and relied on local law enforcement for much of the security (but not sniper teams), miscommunication regularly happens, especially when different departments are trying to cooperate.

We're talking about a split second decision here not watching the guy for a couple of minutes and deciding not to shoot until he shoots.

They can't possibly be as amateurish as not be clear on just precisely how many riflemen are doing security. Having to waste time in a crisis figuring out who's who -that'd be totally nonsensical in a crisis.

From what I've seen in a twitter thread by a guy who says he was SS, the counter-snipers are always just the secret service, local LE does perimeter security and is responsible for, among other things, people staying off rooftops with a view of the stage etc.

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crooks wears glasses, but shooter has no glasses

Did the gun have a scope? If his prescription is mild he wouldn't need the glasses with a scope.

Or he could have been wearing contacts.

Haven't seen a good picture of the gun yet.

About the only thing that's clear that it was a semi-auto with a low recoil, so probably a .223, and he wasn't completely bad at shooting.

That video isn't of Matthew crooks though, but a troll?

Entirely plausible! All I’m saying is that until I see some real reporting corroborated by multiple sources, I’m going to avoid accepting any claims at face value.

EDIT: I’m now seeing multiple outlets reporting that the FBI themselves have named Crooks, so I now assume that identification is correct.

Not sure about the name (nypost seems to be the terminal source for it, and they previously, for example, confidently reported he was Chinese), but a photo that's being widely circulated along with it is apparently just some random guy on twitter who was just fucking around.

Not 100% sure about this photo either for that matter, which at the moment is the only known(/suspected?) photo of the shooter alive. I saw it emerge on 4chan with no attribution or explanation then 10 minutes later just be everywhere without question. It certainly seems consistent with the ~2 other currently-known photos of the assassin dead, but when and where is it supposed to be from? Like was it taken by someone at the rally today before he was on the roof?

Yet: it was not nearly as crazy an information environment today as I would have expected. After 8 years of reality-fracturing hysteria, someone finally actually tried to assassinate Donald Trump. By shooting at his head, with a rifle, in public. And they hit him! They shot off the top of his fucking ear! We came 2 centimeters from Donald Trump's head exploding on national TV today. And the worst fracture of consensus material reality we've got so far is some relatively mild mistaken identity with no political valence?

Is that a demo ranch t-shirt? https://www.bunkerbranding.com/collections/demolition-ranch-shirts/products/demolitia-t-shirt?variant=6807591190573

Looks like the flag matches up and I see a bit of an EM on the front. That would quickly pivot things to gun control.

Yup, I see it too.

For the uninitiated, "Demo Ranch" is a gun-tuber youtube channel that... well, probably the best description would be low-budget gun-centric DIY Mythbusters. I'd classify them as moderate Red Tribe, certainly on the family-friendly end of the spectrum. No idea what their community looks like, no idea if it's actually their shirt, and no idea why an attempted assassin aiming at Trump would be wearing it.

There is another angle from before the shooting circulating which definitely confirms it https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1812333459127578870 The blue shirt photo is fake, some 4chan troll, but that grey shirt matches with the photos of the deceased shooter and shows the logo clearly.

Yeah demo really keeps his channel clean of politics given it's focus and the audience. Though he collabs with Brandon Herrera who recently ran for congress and lost his primary and is very pro Trump / populist right.

The nypost now reports that he was a registered republican as well, and it wasn't a super recent registration either, in 2021, the same month he turned 18.

Either this is a very long running attempt at creating a republican persona to falseflag with or he was republican and still shot trump for some reason.

Or maybe it's two different people or something.

The details are all over the place. He was registered as a republican since 2021, had donated 15$ to the Biden campaign in 2021, was wearing a t-shirt of one of the biggest gun youtube channels, was using an AR with basic iron sights...

Combine that with all the scrutiny the secret service is getting for the delayed reaction and lax security and if there is no manifesto there will be as many conspiracies about this as JFK.

Or, alternatively, isn't this classic "regular-ish person with heterodox-ish views does something radical"? I don't see why seeing someone incompetent do something leads to the conclusion that really there must have been someone competent behind the scenes. Seeing how many incompetent people in my daily life exist...

Wasn't the donation in January 2021?

oops typo, fixed.

Hilariously 4chan also found out he starred in a commercial for a big globalist / left wing investment company https://youtube.com/watch?v=hjmLqoGRqNo

invest in tin foil

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I looked it up, and Pennsylvania has a closed primary. If he were an anti-Trump centrist, or even a Democrat, it would be sensible for him to have registered as a Republican in order to tactically vote against Trumpy candidates in the primaries. It's not like you have to vote along with your party registration in the general.

But it also seems most likely to me this was indeed a Republican. The motivation isn't particularly clear at this stage, maybe there'll be a manifesto. But I doubt we'll be allowed to read it.

I can't imagine one getting ready to assassinate a former President and not considering the symbolism of one's attire. I'm curious to know whether this shirt was bought especially for this ocassion or whether it was something pulled out of the back the closet because it just happened to be an inconspicuous gray.

The optics of attire are a slippery slope for mainstream media to assign providence. If the attire of a criminal is proof of intent then every keffiyeh, sagger pant or blm hoodie is grounds for discrimination.

What I'm trying to say is: fucking do it. Open discrimination against redcaps means open discrimination against the DSA and I know who will lose any confrontation.

I admire your confidence that the DSA won't just be declared a protected class.

I feel really bad for the other guy that Twitter thought for sure was the shooter.

This is my hometown. I do not have any big thoughts right now. But it is an interesting town with history. For a rust belt town there are people from Butler that went on to bigger things.

One of the founders of Silicon Valley came from Butler. One of the founders of the PE industry a partner at the Carlyle group came from Butler.

Historically Butler is a steel town and manufactured the jeep back in the day. Everyone I know with any ability moved away a long time ago.

And now it looks like Butler will be in the history books as an important place in American history.

Joe Montana….

He’s from the region not Butler.

It'll be interesting to see if the assassin was a local or (more likely) someone that came from out of town to have a crack at Trump during his last rally before the Republican convention.

Butler is prime maga territory.

It’s going to be prime territory for Trump to play up. Jay Last from the original traitorous 8 in SV and in pe Daniel D’aneillo came from Butler.

For a 15k person town there are some hitters who grew up there.

Well, it's certainly on the map now.

Don't get why people assuming this is a positive Trump moment. Obviously gonna pivot to Gun Control chat & Trump's base already loves him

There was concerns and coverage when the famous "mugshot" was released a couple of months ago that it gave Trump streetcred in the "hood", with some circumstantial evidence that it did sway some.

There's a lot more people that are convinced by a simplistic appeal to strength and power than the people on a website like this one would like to imagine.

Betting/prediction markets look slightly up for Trump, like +6%-7% or so.

But yeah, lots of room for Democrats to play a reverse uno card upon the Republicans, along the lines of a LeopardAlmostAteYourFace or a NearHermanCainAward. Gun control would be an obvious pathway.

Especially if the shooter ends up being a white male, then the drum can be banged with regard to White Male Fragility and the supposed epidemic of white male shooters (despite… what FBI crime statistics may state). Regardless of his politics. All the better if he’s an explicit rightist, but even a centrist griller, a compass-scattered schizo, or a non-explicitly ardent, vocal progressive would do.

Betting/prediction markets look slightly up for Trump, like +6%-7% or so.

I just don't really see which extra votes this is getting for them. Biden's probably the biggest beneficiary directly as he's moved out of the media focus now.

I just don't really see which extra votes this is getting for them.

People who were disengaged deciding to vote. Also, this gave Elon the cover to officially endorse Trump, so that's probably going to help sway some grey tribe members in the tech sector

And Ackman in the finance sector.

I mean he looks tough. He looks like a fighter. He looks like a leader in every way Biden can’t— calm, strong, and in command of the situation.

Black shootings don't happen ever and all black deaths are at the hands of police or a racist state that leaves them without opportunities so of course they have no choice but to shoot themselves. To posit otherwise is showing your bigotry and proof of why we must implement reparations to counter Project 2025.

  • -14

Crappy, low effort comments dripping with sarcasm and failing to speak plainly are not welcome here.

You were warned the last time you went on a shitty low effort posting spree to stop doing this.

Banned for 5 days.

Democrats / media playing that card would only sound convincing to the people they already convinced long ago, and it would be extremely off-putting to everyone else. They might not be able to help themselves but do it, as the alternative, doing the right thing (and the thing that wouldn't immediately disgust anyone who could be a swing voter) means giving Trump a couple of days at least of deferential, respectful coverage (in the case of the media) and unqualified wishes for a speedy recovery to Trump and complete unconditional condemnation of the assassin (for Democrat politicians).

Democrats / media playing that card would only sound convincing to the people they already convinced long ago, and it would be extremely off-putting to everyone else.

Prettymuch all Trump can do as well, though. Who does this really galvanize towards being pro-Trump? Trump's base loves him already

Cross pressured voters are real. There's people out there who don't like abortion bans but also don't like inflation, or people who don't want immigration but also don't like rich people getting tax cuts, etc, etc. You add another thing into the mix and sometimes it can make one of these people with mixed feelings flip.

Absolutely disgusting. The people peddling the more extremist rhetoric about Trump should be ashamed. On the bright side, perhaps those people will shut up for a while and we can regain some level of sanity for at least a little while.

As (nearly) always happens, I expect the actual outcome here to be the complete opposite of the shooter's goals and Trump just won the election by a landslide.

Most of the commentary I'm seeing elsewhere is of the "we came so close to a better world today" variety. (Quote, not paraphrase.)

Of course, I follow people who are fairly left of typical here. But the overlap between that and the more extreme rhetoric is significant enough.

It really doesn't look like the usual suspects understand that shutting up would be prudent. I think their social media instincts are very poorly calibrated for such extreme events.

Some highly liked reactions:

https://x.com/davidhogg111/status/1812320926240764072

If you keep talking about the assassination attempt don’t you dare tell the kids who survive school shootings and their families to “just get over it”
What happened today is unacceptable and what happens every day to kids who aren’t the president and don’t survive isn’t either.

https://x.com/GeorgeTakei/status/1812290878167281860

Politicians on the left are calling for unity and no violence. Politicians on the right are stoking things further.
Voters in the center: Join with those wishing to turn the temperature down, not crank it up. For all our sakes.

https://x.com/keithedwards/status/1812284437092307015

Paul Pelosi survived an assassination attempt, Trump mocked it.
Biden called Trump to make sure he's ok. That's the difference.

Reddit is linked below, you can get a load of what's happening there.

I am no Trump fan as you perhaps remember. He is graceless. But gracelessness is the default today, and it's very easy to stoop lower than a man who has just survived an assassination attempt – with these cringeworthy, mother hen attempts at narrative control.

With that said, apparently the Biden campaign itself was very quick to pull all of its ads attacking trump.

The lack of self-awareness in that george takei tweet is so galling I almost think it's a joke. You can't claim your tribe is calling for unity while in the same tweet stoking division.

Since I've seen his public statements Takei has always been utterly full of himself. (So was Sulu, so maybe he wasn't acting)

What happened today is unacceptable and what happens every day to kids who aren’t the president and don’t survive isn’t either.

Confusing. Does he think that kids are getting shot to death in schools every day?

I am guessing he means at home or in general

'don't survive' makes it hard to take that interpretation.

Technically by the rules used to track school shootings, they are. Any shooting within X-feet (300?) of a school, at any time of day or night regardless of if the school was in session.

Naturally this lumps in a lot of common urban shootings stemming from 2AM drug deals gone bad.

Does it also include bullets fired by police officers?

I believe so but haven't confirmed. Blip on the chart regardless.

Kids aren't usually shot in drug deals gone bad. I remain skeptical.

16-19 year olds are also "kids" if you look at the statistics, and also near the peak demo for gang shootings. It's procedural manipulation all the way down

This has always annoyed me. I know a few people even IRL who say with a straight face they are afraid to send their kids to school because of not just gun violence but mass shootings specifically. I'm incredulous. First because it remains rare enough that reacting to it, especially in an area as important as basic childhood education, is illogical. It's like developing agoraphobia from lightning strikes, as a lazy example. There are some fears that are unhelpful. Second, by legitimizing this fear, we actually propagate it. Kids are especially sensitive to these kinds of signals from adults, and may go on to develop real, illogical, and damaging fears and phobias based on their legitimization. Which is extra frustrating because some on the left seem at least aware of this on some level, because we are pretty sure that the way the media treats mass shootings is a self-fulfilling prophesy because of the increased number of copy-cat shooters.

According to the Washington Post there have been 413 school shootings since 1999.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/school-shootings-database/

I would expect that the Post would use the broadest feasible definition. I'm calling this one thoroughly deboonked - it's a regard on twitter, trying to rationalize a non-existent statistic is a waste of time.

No, the Washington Post is actually the most reasonable and conservative school shootings database. It's the one we always point to when the rest of the press use absurd numbers like "over 500 this year!!!"

Jesus Christ this is unpleasant.

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Below is the list of examples for "stochastic terrorism" on Wikipedia. Notice anything?

NPR was reporting that Trump allies have "already" given partisan remarks, saying that Democrats, who claim that democracy is under attack, are to blame for the rhetoric against Donald Trump. Browsing Reddit just now I read users coming up with conspiracy theories about this shooting for the purpose of discrediting them before they spread with any momentum.

I don't want the assassination attempt on Trump to be included in the article for stochastic terrorism. I just want those who are preemptively scoffing at the expected Republican outcry against this to examine their reactions to this shooting and try to have the same reaction when it happens to the Democrats. Or vice versa, or whatever. Be consistent or be quiet. Obviously, outright glee is being suppressed, for now, either by self-control or moderation policy. For that I'm grateful.

The 2009 murder of George Tiller has been described as an example of stochastic terrorism, as many conservative news opinion shows and talk radio shows repeatedly demonized him for his administration of post-viability abortions.[21][28][20]

In their 2017 book Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism, criminologist Mark S. Hamm and sociologist Ramón Spaaij describe ISIS,[1] Anwar al-Awlaki, and Alex Jones as guilty of stochastic terrorism.[19]: 157  In the 2010 Oakland freeway shootout, Byron Williams was said to be en route to offices of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Tides Foundation, planning to commit mass murder, "indirectly enabled by the conspiracy theories" of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones.[19] They also cite the 2012 shooting at the Family Research Council.[19]

The Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot in 2020 has been described as an example of stochastic terrorism.[2][6][1]

In the wake of escalating attacks on the LGBT community in the early 2020s, including bomb threats on children's hospitals and the Colorado Springs nightclub shooting, right-wing activists such as Matt Walsh and Chaiya Raichik of Libs of TikTok have been accused of stochastic terrorism.[29][30][31][32]

The May 2022 Buffalo shooting[11][33][34] and the August 2022 Cincinnati FBI field office attack have been cited as examples of stochastic terrorism.[35][36][37][38][39]

The perpetrator of the October 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi stated he was looking for Nancy Pelosi and hoping to intimidate other Democratic lawmakers, actions that have been described as stochastic terrorism.[6][4][40]

In June 2024, two racially motivated stabbing incidents happened in Oulu, Finland. The attacks were predated by years of hostile rhetoric from far-right politicians in Finland, most notably from the Finns Party.[41][42][43]

Did they include the Focus On The Family(?) shooting on that list? If not it would be fascinating to find the editor who removed it.

Anything more recent than, say, 5 years old AT LEAST has zero business being involved in any article on stochastic terrorism. Which is probably a legitimate thing, we know radical thought has at least some influence on mainstream thought such as the Overton Window idea -- but if we look to the world of finance, which actually does have to deal with a similar kind of problem paradigm, we can learn a few important lessons.

Namely, timescale matters. If your lifetime goal is to retire, then you shouldn't try and time the market. Keep your stocks in play, don't panic sell. Assuming your goal is lifetime political accuracy, rather than just winning a single election or maybe two, adjusting your priors about stochastic terror based on a a few events is very similar to panic selling at signs of a market slump. At the time and people scales we're working at, it's just too hard in my opinion to accurately judge an underlying distribution's makeup based on fundamentally very rare events on a short time scale without massively increasing false positive risk. This is doubly true since we don't have a good, consistent model for the underlying (stochastic part of the conversation) terror event generation function or frequency. The model for political assassination is sort of broad, I guess, maybe dating back to the era of personal firearms in general, but still so data-sparse I'd be skeptical of anyone claiming to understand the distribution too deeply.

And I'd bet if you chased some of the Wikipedia citations, most of the actual science involved would caution exactly the same.

I just want those who are preemptively scoffing at the expected Republican outcry against this to examine their reactions to this shooting and try to have the same reaction when it happens to the Democrats. Or vice versa, or whatever. Be consistent or be quiet.

And people in hell want ice water.
I want what you want, too, but I think there's little chance of this event turning down the temperature, or for most people to take this as a moment for self reflection. I think we are beyond that.

I think it's because calling someone a "Nazi" isn't expressing hostility or hate, but merely describing reality. It's the Nazi's own fault they were punched in the face because they should just stop being a Nazi; it's not the fault of the person who called them a Nazi.

That said, I think there is a good case for viewing stochastic terrorism as a mostly right-wing thing, because the extreme left does not gain its moral legitimacy from the moderate left, but rather the other way around.

What reality do you think the modern-day usage of 'Nazi' describes, beyond 'person I want you to be hostile to or hate'?

The historical Nazi referred to a specific brand of genocidal nihilistic cult of personality which pursued wars of conquest. That is not the reality being referred to by contemporary usages.

I read nomenym's comment as describing the POV of the typical antifa member; that there was an implicit "in the minds of people who advocate punching a nazi" attached to the end of their first sentence. Perhaps I'm wrong.

The Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot in 2020 has been described as an example of stochastic terrorism.

Not to detract from the larger point, but this is such a clear example of COINTELPRO, but for the right. Entirely fabricated by the FBI in the perfect opposite of stochastic terrorism.

Man who isn't President doesn't die. Is this what passes for Things Happening these days?

  • -68

I think there's some measure of trolling in spirit here, but maybe some real insight too, just hiding. I see the argument, history not changing, no matter how fine the margin, is still history not changing. Trump got a pic that's getting him 100 million votes (re. my now-Over @ 105), but how's that +15MM votes and ~+3 states won (I'd take the over on 42.5) going to change his presidency vs one where he wins by a lesser margin? If a conspirator comes forward and says the attempt was orchestrated through USSS, Trump would have historic mandate, but that's a discussively comical magnitude of "if", and ifs aren't happenings.

It also makes me think of the other, other "great historic" picture of Trump: on the DMZ with Un.

In a different timeline this might have been a picture historically comparable to those of Nixon with Mao, and with Deng. But as good as the pic is, Trump left office, Nork's back to belligerent insularity, nothing happened. I wonder if I caught some psychic headwinds, I've been playing Dishonored (no kill total ghost ofc) the last couple days, and as I was walking yesterday around noon I fell down a Wiki hole reading about Korea's tumultuous more-than-20th century. Assassinations, coups and cults. Korea marched on, it's a tech, cultural and athletic powerhouse. One of their recent presidents was impeached, tried, sentenced to prison in 2018 and pardoned and released in 2021. Is that a happening? I don't know, how much did Korea change? The first woman in East Asia to be popularly elected as head of state, ending in scandal and prison, and how many people outside of Korea know? Not many, doesn't seem like Korea even felt the bump. So was it really a non-happening?

I'm not being coy. If "happenings" require a moment where a country is on the fulcrum and a decisive action forces the lever, maybe they are rare. (I'll use "moment" from here forward because "happening" is too slangy.) Was JFK's assassination such a moment? If it was federal actors, could you really say their moment was killing a President? They had to get to that point. So was it the conspiracy? But that doesn't come ex nihilo, they had to know they could conspire, so was the moment when the federal government changed so actors within could foment ideas of killing an adversarial Executive? Well when did those conditions arise? FDR? Where did that tyranny originate? Was he a communist? For the sake of this point and this point alone assume he was. So when was the moment? His swearing-in? Or was it being shown it could work, so the October Revolution? But was that a moment, or was it the long consequence of the Communist Manifesto and Marx? Well what was the moment in Marx's life? And what precipitated that moment?

"Nothing ever happens" is interesting to me, but even not reduced as I've done, so saying yes, JFK's assassination was a moment, the October Revolution was a moment, it's interesting to me because it's still necessarily a very holistic reading of history. In that there is a sensibility; holistically, Obama's election wasn't a moment, so many moments preceded and produced the America of 2008 and he was in the right place at the right time. Trump likewise, so many decisions were made and moments happened before he ever ran, before he was the nominee and the victor. Holistically these are really the long outcomes of the thoughts and actions resultant from the psychic ebbs and flows of the masses and any particular moment, even a very loud one, might be nothing, and it's not until much later that we know. Yeah, right now we don't know. We can't know. I like the zen of "Nothing happens until it does." There might be wisdom in it, "Don't rush to history."

Tom Crooks rushed to history. He grazed Trump, killed a supporter, died after catching a bullet or several to the head, and nothing happened. Maybe.

I see the argument, history not changing, no matter how fine the margin, is still history not changing. Trump got a pic that's getting him 100 million votes (re. my now-Over @ 105), but how's that +15MM votes and ~+3 states won (I'd take the over on 42.5) going to change his presidency vs one where he wins by a lesser margin?

That's only part of the equation, though. The electoral consequences don't matter that much, but the ballot box isn't the only box in play here - Crooks used the cartridge box, and people notice that. It remains to be seen how that's going to play out in the dance of lawfare and lunatics, but it's not ideal.

To the extent that history is just a series of interesting photographs (or, I should say, a series of photographs that 105IQ historians think are interesting enough to command the attention of what they think average people are), sure, this is history. A hundred years from now, bored teenagers will read about it on the 22nd century equivalent of cracked.com. Because they certainly won't read about Trump's meagre achievements. The people of the future will write history, not us. And chances are, they'll value very different things to us. "Making history" is what - putting on a performance, a show, for the benefit of alien, unborn observers.

Former President running for a second term gets shot in the head and survives.

When former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated, it was front page news everywhere, and he hadn't held the office for years.

He was shot in the head, and lived.

I would say that in common conversation the similarly common phrase "grazed by a bullet" is equally as concise and far more accurate.

Sure, but in response to, "Man who isn't President doesn't die," a phrase that was as true today as it was yesterday as it will be tomorrow, how else can I respond except with technically correct maximalism?

The fact that anyone was shooting at him at all is news in its own right. The fact that but a twitch and a cross breeze his head would be pulp in Pennsylvania is another thing altogether.

Grazed by bullet at least admits he was shot at, but the Once and Future President was shot at by some CIA wind-up toy. That deserves something more.

Something like,

He was shot in the head, and lived.

I suppose the ear is the head, but it still seems misleading.

Eyes and ears and mouth and nose.

Head shoulders knees and toes.

Obviously yes. By far the leading candidate for president was almost shot through the head

What does it take to impress you compared to this wild news?

Things actually happening, not Things Almost Happening.

Oh, I'll add, I think the person in the crowd who actually died is news. One person dying is more important than DJT having his picture taken.

  • -23

This reasoning didn't work for Sideshow Bob either.

You don't get half a point for almost scoring, amirite?

Except in horseshoes.

(and hand grenades, as the saying goes)

A bullet went through his ear. Donald Trump was an inch away from being shot in the face on live tv.

Looking at pics of his ear I suspect it was glass or some other fragment. There's hardly any actual tissue damage.

  • -21

The teleprompters were intact after the shot. This theory doesn't hold, unless you have evidence for some other source of broken glass?

The flying bullet has been captured in a picture just before it hit trump.

The flying bullet has been captured in a picture just before it hit trump.

I think that photo captured the first shot, which missed Trump, just after it passed behind his head. Trump also said he heard a whizzing sound right before he was hit. It may have been his reaction to that first miss which saved him from a clean head shot on the second attempt.

Just after, actually, assuming it's the picture where the bullet is on the right side of the picture.

The glass fragment from a teleprompter is the stupidest cope I have ever seen. What angle of shot has glass flying PERPENDICULAR from the OTHER side. Trump faces the camera, a teleprompter is there, the shot comes from the right and everyone turns to the right. Please tell me what magic teleprompter in front of Trump can be shot so that the direction of shot comes from that other side.

Stop repeating the desperate cope of dangerhairs trying to downplay this. It was an assassination attempt, a bullet clipped his ear. This theory doesn't pass the smell test or reality test and anyone repeating it has their baseline credibility lowered in turn.

In the early hours it wasn't that crazy as it's not uncommon for some addresses to be made behind various glass screens, and the blood pattern made it look like it could have been a glass fragment, but since then as it's I think clear he wasn't meaningfully surrounded by such protection it's dumb to still repeat such if you've been updated or looked more closely. I think it's now clear the blood was actually from dripping down his face while on the ground rather than a spray from shrapnel.

The glass fragment from a teleprompter is the stupidest cope I have ever seen.

I've already encountered 'It's a false flag so Trump gets elected in a commie plot to bring the revolution' in the wild.

The glass fragment from a teleprompter is the stupidest cope I have ever seen.

Have you seen the 'Trump has friends in Hollywood, this was all faked via special effects to boost his popularity' takes yet?

I've seen 'its all AI', which is automatically false because there aren't photos of trump with a billion plastic bottles turned into rocketships by african kids yet.

There isn't much tissue damage because it missed

Trump posted to Truth claiming it was a bullet wound. Watching the video it seems the most likely explanation—reaching for his ear is the first thing he does, only gunfire can be heard over general din, and I don't see how glass could have reached him in the middle of the huge platform.

I want to thank The United States Secret Service, and all of Law Enforcement, for their rapid response on the shooting that just took place in Butler, Pennsylvania. Most importantly, I want to extend my condolences to the family of the person at the Rally who was killed, and also to the family of another person that was badly injured. It is incredible that such an act can take place in our Country. Nothing is known at this time about the shooter, who is now dead. I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear. I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin. Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening. GOD BLESS AMERICA!

Looks to me like a through-and-through with a small caliber round on the upper part of the right ear near his skull.

It looks like thetes damage to both the front and back of the top of his ear (swear I used to know the words for the bits...)

If it's a bullet wound, it's one for the history books.

Don't tell me about things that almost happened.

  • -36

Things that really happened include "culture war temperature just spiked". That's an update regarding P(Boogaloo) and the related P(WWIII).

How is it an update regarding P(WW3)? It’s very unlikely to have been a state actor, that’s not how they would approach this kind of thing.

Oh, I'm not suggesting a state actor had Trump shot. The issue's that, as I said, P(Boogaloo) and more generally P(chaos in USA) is related to P(WWIII), because the USA is load-bearing in the world order.

America goes up. Pax Americana can't be maintained while America is busy committing messy suicide. All over the world, people make their moves.

What a bizarre comment.

Saturday night comments are more likely to be drunk trolling. Totally not speaking from experience of course.

You're joking, right?

No. This is drama, not things happening.

The real joke is this stupid fucking discourse. Trump got a "cool" photo taken. That's news? Could give him a boost in the polls. That's not news, that's conventional wisdom, repeated. Republicans are already complaining about Biden's "bullseye" comment. Already, this non event is just more discourse fodder.

I honestly think there's nothing to discuss or learn here. Of course, it's also fun to say Nothing Ever Happens.

  • -46

You may be seriously underestimating. Only from the most literal-minded, nothing-unless-quantifiable perspective is this a non-event. A former president and current presidential contender came within inches of having his head blown apart on live television. (If he had been killed in such a macabre display, presumably that would have been "something happening" in your view?)

To be sure, what you suggest about how it will all become, and is already becoming "discourse fodder" is true. That doesn't take away from the historical nature of the event. Presumably you acknowledge there are a lot of unanswered questions?

Yes, if Trump had died, that would have mattered. Not in of itself, but because someone else would be the next President and presumably do things differently. But he didn't! He's not seriously hurt. He might get a cool scar out of it.

Assassination attempts aren't unusual. If anything the lack of serious attempts to kill DJT is unusual.

I don't think this event is historical. It will at best become a piece of trivia.

  • -24

We've found the one person on the planet who doesn't have an opinion on Donald Trump.

I do have an opinion on DJT and this assassination, but I don't want to share it - it's counter to consensus reality. You would probably just disparage it. And, like the ending of Game of Thrones, having an opinion on it doesn't make it important!

  • -23

I'd like to say that just because you have a contrary opinion does not make it more probable that it is true, and that a universal confused/derisive reaction to the shape of your non-pinion should probably incite some self-reflection on your own take on things.

Do you know what an opinion is?

You've been posting on and off about how unimportant this is for 3 hours and haven't been deterred by the uniformly disparaging responses you've been getting. Why not just share your opinion?

What else should I do? It's Sunday afternoon, I'm bored and slightly depressed. This is light entertainment and stimulation, like playing a video game. That's why you're here, that's why everyone's here. Why is it that people need to know, now, exactly who fired the shot? If you really wanted to know... Wait 72 hours and you'll find out. Instead people are scouring photographs and speculating online. Because it's entertainment! How many people went to CNN to get mad about them using the wrong words to describe this non event? Because the event and the reaction and the discourse are entertainment - they wanted to feel mad, not to get information.

Why share my opinion? I've opened on Trump before, it makes no difference. I'm just adding to a mountain of shit.

  • -20

Why share my opinion? I've opened on Trump before, it makes no difference. I'm just adding to a mountain of shit.

Well, stop it.

This place is literally for sharing opinions, and posting repeatedly "This is unimportant" and "I have an opinion but I won't discuss it" has now become obnoxious. If you have something to say, say it. If you don't, then go play video games.

Right, clearly this place is now for consensus building and pushing people to have the same opinion and agree. If you think it's wrong of me to think, say, that Trump is ugly, then fine, I'll fuck off, because you're not going to debate me into thinking otherwise. And quite frankly a mod should have better sense than to operate as an enforcer of public opinion.

My opinion on Trump is that opinions on Trump don't fucking matter. When I don't vote in the US, does it actually matter if I find him to be likable? My opinion is that this event doesn't matter, beyond the sad death of two people and perhaps the increase in security at Trump events in the future. Those are legitimate opinions to hold, you just don't like them because it goes against the consensus here.

  • -19
More comments

Surprise, surprise: Trump is a fat, ugly, crude slug of a man, crooked, has terrible policies even from the perspective of the Right.

Oh he's got an opinion all right. First (ex)president since Reagan wounded in an assassination attempt, but it's somehow a nothing-burger.

A very strange troll?

Crazily enough this morning's Coffee With Scott Adams featured him predicting both candidates are now at high risk of assassination attempts. He says by Democrats for both, we will have to wait and see.

Naziphobia is becoming a serious problem in our politics.

Your last warning and the tone of your posts below leads me to believe that you are not being serious, and you think you're being funny.

You're not. This is why we have a rule about speaking plainly and we ask you to avoid sarcasm.

Ironically testing how many people you can take in with Poe's Law shitposting is not the giggle-fest you think it is.

Stop it.

In which sense? Is it a problem like Islamophobia was said to be a problem, or is it a problem like satanic panics or "pizzagate" conspiracies are a problem?

In that everyone someone left of GW Bush disagrees with gets called a NAZI and as such they are propagandized into thinking normal humans are monsters about to walk them into a gas chamber.

Exactly. Wouldn't shock me if the shooter was atleast partially motivated by the whole Project 2025 buzzword that's been hammered lately, which isn't even Trump's personal position.

I think there's a good chance the shooter was a Naziphobe, and that's why he targeted Donald Trump and his supporters. I see a lot of Naziphobia these days. There are a lot of people who are very worried and scared about Nazis.

There are a lot of people who are very worried and scared about Nazis.

And what I'm asking is the reason why they shouldn't be. Is it because there aren't really any Nazis (the "Satanic panic" model), or that the Nazis are real but aren't really something to be scared of (the "Islamophobia" model)?

We should be scared of Nazis. They're bad people.

We shouldn't be scared of Nazis, because there's vanishingly few of them, and those few are older than Biden.

Sure all ten of them.

If we should be scared of Nazis, then why is "Naziphobia" a problem? Shouldn't we all be "Naziphobes"?

His odds of winning the election just got a lot better.

I want to agree with @johnfabian that (mainstream) Democrats are going to get less strident. There's no angle, no way to try blaming the victim here. Not without a much more radical brand.

God. I was just at the gun store this morning. If this was an AR--and it probably was--the market is going to pucker up again.

I want to agree with @johnfabian that (mainstream) Democrats are going to get less strident. There's no angle, no way to try blaming the victim here. Not without a much more radical brand.

Gun control yaddayaddayadda gun control. Can easily work on that angle and Trump can't really condemn either side.

Which would work if gun control was the only thing democrats have been harping on. The democrats have been screaming that trump is a threat to democracy and someone took up that call to arms. People aren't nearly as consistently stupid as we think, and this is an animating moment far above ANYTHING the dems have as a rallying cry. Someone tried to kill a presidential candidate who was running on hot culture war issues. There is zero chance a gun control pivot will stick to the wall.

Culture war is for the base, not the margins/swing voters. The current Dem angle seems to be “we’re taking this extremely seriously, it’s unacceptable, the secret service fucked up”. Then they may sprinkle some gun control into that over the next few days. That’s the best path they can take right now.

True, but the democratic base is what conservatives hate. The rhetoric is always against the far left antifa, with the Squad as the bogeyman of choice as opposed to competent normies like Mark Kelly or even Biden on his lucid days. The threat is that the democrats will be hostage to their far left hamas tranny commie blm base and will be helpless against the destruction of America. Bidens visible brain fogs make the threat of DEI Kamala putting his signature on some mandatory trans law more probabls e to people who hate that, and I will stand by my assessment that many more people hate trans and blm stuff than support them.

How pro-BLM/trans is Kamala? She seems more like a relatively centrist formerly ‘tough on crime’ 90s-style DA who was parachuted into the role because she’s technically a black and Asian woman and very loyal to Biden.

I don’t think Kamala’s personal views are substantially to the left of Biden’s, she’s certainly much closer to him than to ‘the squad’ or the DSA.

apologies, my usage of 'dei kamala' was to reflect the messaging percolating within the more frothy parts of sotto voce rightist discourse. kamala is a rather bog standard black-when-convenient public figure, more climber than activist. nevertheless the ememy for righties remains 'antifa blm hamas communists' and democrat pushback against forces are viewed as anemic.

Kamala is simply not articulate enough to play for the center.

Yeah for sure I agree with that analysis.

I wonder if this puts a damper on trying to replace Biden. Trump was already favored to win, and running against someone surviving an assassination attempt adds an even more uphill struggle.

Who is going to want to jump in? For most Democratic politicians in contention now, letting Biden run and lose, so they can run against a new contender in 28, has got to look like a better proposition personally than the nasty fight to replace Biden, then going against a hero bumped Trump.

I think it's great for Biden's candidacy in that the media's been distracted.

Checking out the front page of various news sites, it’s noteworthy that the headlines deny Trump the honor of being grazed by a bullet or having survived a clear assassination attempt.

  • NYT: “Trump safe after shooting at rally”; “One spectator is dead after chaos at event in Pennsylvania”

  • CNN: “Trump shooting being investigated as assassination attempt”;

  • MSNBC: “Trump safe after shots fired at Pennsylvania rally”

  • FoxNews: “Trump rally shooter was killed by secret service counter sniper team, source says”

  • Googling Trump and finding first headline: “Trump safe after being rushed off rally stage when shots fired; gunman and audience member dead”

What’s up with this? The headline is clearly, “Trump survives assassination attempt”, the vastly more important subject of the event. I would write, “Bullet pierces Trump’s ear in failed assassination attempt”, because this includes the important information of the bullet’s proximity. The clear, plainly visible assassination attempt is 100x more important than that a shooting merely transpired at an event in Pennsylvania. This is also the most attention-grabbing title, so the news has an incentive to report this way. The bias is boundless…

How about "Not So Fast: Donald Trump Was Hit By Glass from Shattered Teleprompter, Not a Bullet -- According to Sources"

Maybe I'm crazy, but in some of the photos it looks pretty clearly like a small caliber round went right through his ear.

Us retards in this message board are sources as well. Anonymous sources without attribution are no better than speculation. Woe unto any of you who cite me or anyone else here as a source for anything, and woe unto anyone who thinks saying 'SOURCE' is a magic credibility sustainer.

Avoid low effort sarcasm, it's neither as funny as you think it is nor adding anything to the discussion.

There are images of intact teleprompters taken after the Secret Service swarmed him

Oh thank goodness! I thought the shooter was aiming for Trump. Turns out the real target was the dead spectator and Trump's teleprompter just happened to be in the way. What a coincidence!

Frankly, that's how that article comes across to me. I know they're not saying that, but it kind of reads that way.

I ... take the position that some of this is simply responsible journalism, and the way things should normally be done. We don't need minute-by-minute hot takes from official news sources, and usually when they happen they say more about the reporter's biases and expectations than they do reality. Not that I'd expect this level of caution from the same outlets if Biden were nicked, but still. I semi-seriously applaud their journalistic restraint, and wish they'd apply it more often.

"Trolley delayed by shark"

https://readcomic.me/comic/kurt-busiek-s-astro-city-1995/issue-tpb-part-1/58

Time for me to sign off and have a beer or two.

Yeah, I'm kind of ambivalent about this. I'd be interested to see some of the breaking headlines from these outlets during the January 6th insurrection, because that would probably be the best test case to see if they struck the same restraint.

I only have this example that I've kept because it was funny at the time.

https://imgur.com/a/9Kq4ive

Yeah, in fact their current headlines are less clear because it conflates what was clearly a targeted shooting with the kind of gun violence that sometimes happens around and nearby big events.

Babylon Bee headline satirizing the bias: “CNN: ‘Clumsy Trump Hits Head On Bullet’ ”

Videos of the incident and the shooter: https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/229040

Babylon Bee

Another banger: Trump Indicted For Inciting Assassination Attempt

Until Trump's statement a few minutes ago, it's possible that Trump's ear injury was caused by shrapnel from a near-miss, so there's a reason you might not want to explicitly say that Trump took a bullet. That said, I broadly agree that the obvious headline is "Trump survives assassination attempt", or at least (more conservatively) "Trump injured in apparent assassination attempt."

Since 1860 someone has attempted to assassinate a president/candidate every 5th term except Bush the Lesser. I wonder why it's this term so often through history.

Its worse than that, let the record show that three of the first six elected GOP presidents (Lincoln, Garfield , and McKinley) were killed by Democrats. Meanwhile the lone Democrat to be assinated (JFK) was shot and killed by (depending on who you ask) either an avowed communist, or deep-state opperatives aligned with Lyndon Johnson.

Let me bang my "Read more early American history" drum again.

It is absolutely braindead (to paraphrase @Hoffmeister25) to try to map 19th century politics onto the 21st century. The Republicans and Democrats of the 19th century were not the Republicans and Democrats of today. Republicans during and after the Civil War were the liberals of their time. John Wilkes Booth was a Democrat, but more importantly, he was an anti-Union secessionist who was outraged at Lincoln because Lincoln indicated that he was going to give blacks voting rights. Really, try arguing that makes Booth in any way like a modern Democrat or "woke."

I have less to say about Garfield and McKinley as I haven't gotten to their biographies yet, but the pattern held at least to the mid-20th century. Republicans more and more became the party of northern industrialists and urbanites, vs. Democrats as the party of Southern farmers and working class people, but the Republicans began as the remnants of the Whig Party, with a bit of Know-Nothingism mixed in, while the Democrats began more or less with Andrew Jackson - arguably with Thomas Jefferson, but Jackson really made them into the party they became. None of these people would map to what you are conceiving of as a Republican or a Democrat today.

The Republicans and Democrats of the 19th century were not the Republicans and Democrats of today.

While obviously true in that the Republicans and Democrats of the 19th century have all long since passed on, I dont think that proves as much as you and @Hoffmeister25 seem to think it does.

While the issues of the day change, i don't think people (as a general class) do. I read a lot of late 19th/early 20th century history and it seems to me that the core axioms and motivating ethoses of the respective parties of 1920 are readily recognizable in thier 2020 counterparts.

Really, try arguing that makes Booth in any way like a modern Democrat or "woke."

"Normie" Republicans like my parents do just that quite often, by way of DR3 arguments: 'the Democrats were the party of racism then, and they're the party of racism now; the only difference is that these days they want to keep blacks trapped on the welfare "plantation",' and suchlike.

It may not be a good argument, but in my experience it's a common one.

To be completely fair, early twentieth century republicans would be recognizable as plausibly republicans today, just not exactly mainstream ones. Specifically, they'd be recognizable as possibly Rockefeller republicans.

There's a real continuity between Roosevelt and, say, Susan Collins today.

Careful now, you are treading on dangerous ground.

The left wins because they are much more fervent than the right which pushes the tail end of the left into a level of fervent than causes terrorism. Antifa and assassinations are examples of this. I am not necessarily saying assassinations would work for the right but the right needs to become more radicalized in their beliefs and not just want to grill if they want to win.

Big if true.

Not the level of fervency—the idea that terrorism gets wins. That doesn’t seem credible. How does Antifa win more votes? Who the hell is going to switch away from Trump after this?

Radicalizing the right means more Charlottesvilles. More PR disasters.

The left wins by shutting down the right. It is almost impossible to have right wing demonstrations without riots. People are afraid to attend debates. Doxing makes it far more difficult to recruit to political organisations.

If the left won by “shutting down” the right, 2016 would have looked pretty different, no?

Nor has the post-2020 period looked particularly good for the left. There’s a distinct lack of policy victories coming off the most radical parts of the coalition.

No shortage of significant changes in social conditions, though.

Eh, assuming you’re talking about gender identity politics, I trace the current trends back ten years at least. The contemporary radical left would have been, what, Occupy Wall Street? It makes more sense to point to Obergefell, or to the decades of social activism which laid its groundwork.

If you’re referring to racial DEI, I suppose it’s at least related to the post-2020 violence. There’s a plausible chain where softball coverage of riots informed the public that race-conscious policy was fashionable. Except that gives all the agency to the media narrative, not the violent radicals.

If so, radicalizing the right would be an even worse idea, because softball coverage is not going to materialize.

It's unclear that these translate into wins for the left. Actual policy victories after antifa wrecked shit seem to be few and far between.

It's far easier to radicalize a man without a wife, a house and a daughter.

Guiteau had been a Democrat when you needed to be a Democrat to be an effective lawyer in Tammany Hall era New York, but he was a Republican (and, indeed, at least in his own head a Garfield campaign activist) at the time he shot Garfield.

Czolgosz was an anarchist, which strongly suggests he wasn't a Democrat given that anarchists hated all non-anarchist political movements including other left-wing ones.

So you are 1 for 3 on basic accuracy here.

I'm at least two for three on basic accuracy as you yourself have conceded that Guiteau was a Democrat. The only point of of contention is on whether radical anarchists code more "right" than "left". For my part i think radical anarchists code more left-wing/progressive than they do right-wing or conservative. Would you like to argue otherwise?

For my part i think radical anarchists code more left-wing/progressive than they do right-wing or conservative. Would you like to argue otherwise?

You didn't say that the three Republican Presidents were shot by leftists (which would also have been wrong, as neither Booth nor Guiteau was a leftist), you said that they were shot by Democrats. Leftist~=Democrat doesn't isn't even mostly true until the New Deal (the capital-P Progressives preferred to work as a faction in the Republican party) and isn't consistently true until the Reagan administration.

This response is totally braindead. Guiteau had been a Democrat at one point, but then switched to being a Republican, which is what he was when he assassinated Garfield.

As for your dissembling about Czolgosz, it’s clear that you’ve moved the goalposts immediately upon being corrected. Your explicit claim was “Democrats”, not “left-wingers.” You explicitly made a partisan claim - linking the phenomenon to specific political parties - and are now flailing to make it look like you were making an ideological claim.

(A claim which still doesn’t make sense, because the policy-position split between Democrats and Republicans during the era when both Garfield and McKinley were shot does not at all map onto modern ideas of “left” versus “right”. Was Garfield to the left or to the right of Winfield Scott Hancock, his Democrat opponent in the 1880 election? Who knows? The question doesn’t make sense.)

You accuse me of being "braindead" but...

For my part i think radical anarchists code more left-wing/progressive than they do right-wing or conservative. Would you like to argue otherwise?

In no sense does this address any of the criticisms I’ve leveled against your post. Nobody has argued that Leon Czolgosz, anarcho-communist, was not left-wing. The problem is that, again, your original post called him a “Democrat”. That’s what you said. Not whatever you’re now pretending you said instead.

I think it does and that you are taking refuge in pedantics to avoid the plain truth of my statement.

More comments

Charles Guiteau supported the Stalwart faction of the Republican party in the 1880 election. His big stated reason for assassinating Garfield is that he wasn’t given the political patronage job that the Republicans owed him for his pivotal role - giving a rambling speech in support of Garfield (a speech which had originally been written in support of Ulysses S. Grant before Garfield received the nomination) and then passing out pamphlet versions of the speech at the Republican Party convention - in getting Garfield elected. Like, nothing whatsoever about his motivation can be accurately summarized as “Democrat wanted to kill Republican president.”

See my reply to @MadMonzer

Bush’s assassin was just incompetent.

He assassinated the man's spirit and honor, far more significant than his mortal body

Obama's was worse, he wasn't even there.

Nice one, I don't remember this at all.

Reminds me of the top level post recently suggesting that the jan 6 bomber was CIA because how else could he plant an explosive undetected? Meanwhile a man does a drive by shooting of the white house and

the Secret Service believed that gunfire was not aimed at the White House, but rather was the result of a gang fight nearby.

It took them four days to even notice that the white house was hit and five days to arrest the guy.

The jan 6 bomber was literally a glowie-op.

Restating this is not much of an argument.

We don't know that. Could have been that. Could have been some partisan loon.

Oh we definitely do. There's videos of the "bomb" being planted. And them the next day a "plain clothes cop" mysteriously goes straight for where the backpack is and recovers it then hands it to some cops. The whole thing stinks to high heaven and they did use the aleged bombing attempt to throw the book at a whole bunch of people. Not to mention the explosive device LITERALLY being constructed exactly like an "example" bomb down to the stupid mechanical clock thing.

There was also an attempt with a grenade that failed because it was a dud from the Soviet era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Arutyunian

Occam's Razor, everyone. Incompetence is almost always twice as likely as conspiracy. We have actually had no less than five years of headlines about the Secret Service not meeting standards of professionalism, so it seems like a pretty easy, high-probability conclusion that they were lax in sweeping and monitoring barn and shed roofs around the area. Sounds like the guy shimmied onto one, and the cops took too long to triangulate him and respond, per the BBC interview.

Still it's crazy to think that history would be insanely different if for just a single inch or two. Even weirder to think that I was literally playing Hitman earlier today, feels surreal.

Based on photo and video, it looks like the shooter crawled onto this roof, about 400 feet or so away at a nearby food and beverage bottling company, allegedly outside the checked rally perimeter.

I was only able to capture a handful of grabs via archive.is from subdomains of their website before Cloudflare took it offline, the only other upload is back in 2013. Feds work relatively fast, it seems.

What exactly are the Feds taking offline here

Sorry, from whose website?

The food packaging company, lol. It's like if you worked at the Texas Schoolbook Depository, how weird would that be the next day

Security for the sitting president is insane. I remember being stuck on a freeway onramp for 15 minutes while they completely cleared the road for the presidential motorcade. This level of security is incredibly expensive and disruptive. It's very difficult to secure all sightlines to a public area.

After reflecting on this for an hour, I have collected my thoughts. Obviously this is bad. I don't think people are going to jump immediately to start making nail bombs, but Trump getting killed or dying under conspiracy-able circumstances were what I always feared as a tipping point to some kind of actual level of civil conflict in the US. The shooter has achieved maybe the second-worst possibility after killing Trump in trying to kill him and failing.

Idle culture war prediction: "stochastic terrorism" is quietly retired as a term. 95% of people who ever used that unironically have spent the last few months saying Trump is a fascist who is going to end democracy and everyone should be doing their best to make sure he doesn't win. I think it's sort of a shame because there clearly is a genuine phenomenon there that it touches on, just the nature of it makes it so prone to abuse I suppose it was inevitably going to become useless.

"stochastic terrorism"

On your broader points, yes. But on this, it is a good club to beat people with, so the club-wielders will experience perfectly targeted selective amnesia to keep using it.

Exactly. Rhetorical weapons like this were only ever created to be fired in one direction. MSM and Wikpedia editors will do everything they can to disallow an acknowledgment of 'both sides' for the term.

Idle culture war prediction: "stochastic terrorism" is quietly retired as a term. 95% of people who ever used that unironically have spent the last few months saying Trump is a fascist who is going to end democracy and everyone should be doing their best to make sure he doesn't win.

Or, per recounting by @stolen_brawnze above of NPR's reporting, one can place any attempts by people on the right to draw this connection squarely in the classic "Republicans pounce!" frame.

Edit: also add in comments like this one on Reddit, in keeping with Sailer's "frontlash" model.

And now I see Steve himself on X predicting such a frontlash.

Edit 2: Plus, among the many gems on Reddit — declaring this is a false flag by Trump to distract the public from his felony conviction/project 2025/the Epstein files/whatever; how it's oh-so-convenient that the shooter is dead; that this is just another example of how Trump "just attracts bad news", this is a symptom of "the rage he projects," that Trump "enabled this culture," and he's to blame for 'making politics dangerous in America'; that it's entirely understandable given that "people don't like pedophiles or rapists"; that if elected, Trump's going to use this as an excuse to silence the media 'exactly like Putin does'; how our priority must be stopping Trump from 'take his anger out on opponents'; how this is going to be our Reichstag Fire and we're about to become Nazi Germany 2.0; and so on, and so on, I'll specifically highlight this one in its (brief) entirety:

Amazing, the Republicans, who have developed a list of 350 political opponents that they believe should be incarcerated and/or put to death, and assert they have the right to be violent to achieve their goals of overthrowing our government, have the nerve to complain of political violence tonight. 😡

Edit 3: add in another proposed reason for it to be a "false flag" — so that Trump can drop out of the race without losing face:

He probably faked it so he can call off his campaign for being in fear for his life. Probably because we are coming too close to actually putting his criminal lying as in jail. I wouldn’t hold it past him for one second that he didn’t outright say to go ahead and shoot someone innocent to bring it all home.

I think "stochastic terrorism" might actually apply more to the right than the left. I think violent rhetoric from the moderate right will inspire more violent action from the extreme right, because the extreme right still looks to the moderate right for legitimacy. But the same is not true of the left. It's the moderate left that looks to the extreme left for legitimacy. The extreme left is the cutting edge, it sets the pace. This is related to Jordan Peterson's frequent observation that the moderate left can't seem to answer the question "When does the left go too far?" Fundamentally, the moderate left is utopian, and so it has no moral authority over the extreme left, while the moderate right's anti-utopianism is both a guard against the extreme left and extreme right.

because the extreme right still looks to the moderate right for legitimacy

In which universe do you live? That hasn't been my experience at all.

the moderate left can't seem to answer the question "When does the left go too far?"

As a 'reasonableist' leftist, I believe there are plenty of examples of the left, if not 'going too far' per se, at least noticing a real problem but pursuing the wrong methods of solving it.

They can be largely sorted into two major clusters: the hard-green de-growthist Gaians, and the wokists SJWs PJFTMWTIAATUftSSaPCYDs.

I think it’s possible that you are underestimating how utterly shameless these people are.

That's very possible. I think if a bystander wasn't killed there would be a decent chance 20ish% of the population would have settled on it being staged.

I wonder what this means for the Vice-Presidential race. Trump has an incentive to find some ultra-MAGA extremist now as his alternative form of security. Presumably this will be a real boost for his electoral campaign (especially that fist-pump photo), an assassination attempt did great things for Reagan. There might not be nearly as much need to skew to the centre.

I wonder if Vance being a veteran will help Trump feel better, or at least provide optics.

I saw someone on X suggest Erik Prince, of blackwater fame.

Honestly? Seems like an amazing choice. Cesare Borgia, eat your motherfucking heart out.

Does Trump think that way? Like long term game theory about picking a veep who makes libs fear what comes after just doesn't seem like him.

You see his performances, not his daily life. It follows that you have the impression of him he wishes you to have.

The man is an actor, a consummate performer. Even on the video of the shooting, you can see him grimace, then realize he’s being photographed/recorded and compose himself to raise a fist and shout “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

J.D.Vance stocks up.

In case someone takes this literally, manifold's had no change.

Edit: regarding who would be VP

Trump winning at 69% on Polymarket. Biden at 16%.

Online political gambling aficionados almost certainly disproportionately Trump supporters (disproportionately white, disproportionately libertarian/right-leaning, almost all men).

Yeah I happen to run a biggish book and the sheer enthusiasm to back Trump and non-Biden dem noms is pretty crazy.

Only if Trump thinks that his enemies think Vance is a true MAGA believer.

Right, the alternate view is that Vance is a Silicon Valley guy with an Indian wife, that he’s funded by a gay tech tycoon and that he had a Hollywood movie based on his memoir lol.

Trump raising his fist in the air and speaking to the crowd after being shot through the ear with a bullet is a genuinely legendary moment in American history, however you feel about him.

Man's political instincts are solid. Not as good as Jackson's response (to beat his attempted assassin with his walking stick) but way better than Reagan's or Kennedy's.

...Reagan was severely wounded and Kennedy was literally dead.

#thatsthejoke

It's very hard to tell on this forum.

“Stop exploding, you cowards!”

Well, it might be reasonable to give Kennedy a pass on his response.

I mean, he certainly isn’t able to do it.

Teddy Roosevelt is still the GOAT, IMO.

Hope we get some bull moose references from Trump in the coming days.

Teddy was the one I thought of but Jackson beating his would be assassin half to death with his cane is probably the best possible response.

That's great too. Teddy was actually shot, though, and I kinda prefer the dismissiveness of Teddy's reaction. "Pff, whatever, I have enough medical knowledge to know that this chest shot isn't fatal, so I'm going to deliver my speech now." On the other hand, he lost.

Interestingly, the New York Post describes the shooter as “a Chinese man.”

Not sure what to make of that, but that seems to me to be a strike against theories of “antifa” and “right-wing schizo”, although obviously more info is needed. (Do they mean “Chinese-American” or “a Chinese national?)

So does this qualify as a new correlation of Sailer's Law? K>W is white, W>K is Black, W=K is Chinese?

It would be very fitting for the Chinese to be the embodiment of perfect balance.

The Middle Killdom.

Post updated it to say 'white male'. Disappointing that we won't kick off 2025 with a declaration of war against China 'for trying to get at me'.

The only question now is leftist, psycho or deep state. My money is 50/40/10. I put no money on foreign assassin, but it'll be fucking wild if it is.

100% on psycho but

30% leftist

20% Muslim

20% Identifiably right wing

5% Christian extremist

25% total dingbat

I confess to forgetting about muslims. If its a palestinian (black haired man, so not a small chance its an arab) with a social media history of pro-palestinian leanings I will fucking laugh. I think an attempt will be made to make the shooter right wing regardless of leaning, like how Europe defines muslim antisemitism as right wing because islamism is a right wing ideology according to the authorities. In this case if the shooter at any point expressed concerns about state overreach he will be cast as right wing, if the fact that he held a gun without bursting into flames isn't enough for that label to be thrown.

If its MUSLIM, fully expect it to be entirely memory holed and for endless pro-islam marches to be made. Pulse nightclub is now cast as a right wing incel attack, and the Fort Hood and DC sniper attacks are also forgotten. Fuck even 911 is forgotten by leftists who find it irritating that America dared to strike back against brown terrorists.

I honestly doubt its a right wing gun nut. Any gun enthusiast will know that a .22 is a joke round and will go for .223, 30-06 or .308 for an assassination. Someone using a .22 seems just bafflingly incompetent.

As someone who doesn’t know about guns, what’s the difference? And why not the common 5.56 round?

.223 is just a cheaper generic version of 5.56. .223 is technically a lower pressure round than a 5.56 but they're interchangeable in any firearm chambered for them.

.22 is a small round not recommended for using to shoot at anything bigger than a squirrel. A sniper in particular should be using a deer cartridge like .308(the standard US military sniper round) or 30-06, both of which are substantially bigger and more powerful rounds than a .223 which is more powerful than .22.

Simplified version: 5.56 is .223, 5.56 uses the same bullet as .22 but throws it a lot faster. Speed makes aiming way easier, and just like in car accidents, speed kills.

And why not the common 5.56 round?

We don't know yet. Shooters of this type tend to be shockingly incompetent (generally because there are other things wrong with them)- and making aiming harder in a life-or-death situation and using a round that isn't sufficiently powerful is incompetence.

5.56 uses the same bullet as .22

I think you meant to say .223.

No, .22 and 5.56 use what is, functionally, the same projectile; the simplest explanation for 5.56 is just a .22 with anger issues.

Sure, the projectile for 5.56 needs to be pointier and covered in copper so it doesn't disintegrate due to spinning at ~300,000 RPM, but it's not meaningfully different in terms of weight (from "slightly heavier" at 55-62 grains to "exactly the same" at 40) and identical in terms of diameter.

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.223 is, essentially, 5.56. There's some variations between the two as .223 specifications were developed by civilians and 5.56 specifications were written by the military, but it's essentially the same round for most practical purposes, and most guns can fire most loadings of the two rounds interchangably.

.22 refers to .22 Long Rifle, an extremely weak round used for hunting rabbits and target shooting. The .22 LR has the same bore diameter as a .223/5.56, but has a significantly shorter and lighter bullet, and fires it at significantly lower velocity; 1000 feet per second, rather than the 3000 feet per second of the later. .22 LR would be an extremely poor choice for an attempted sniper assassination; it's plenty accurate at a hundred yards, but the low velocity means bullet drop, wind drift, and lethal effect are all greatly reduced. A perfectly-centered .22 shot to the head from a hundred yards has a so-so chance of killing the target. Anything less than perfectly centered and it's entirely possible the round would deflect off the skull or fail to penetrate into the brain.

By contrast, a perfectly-centered 5.56 to the head from a hundred yards is a modulo-certain instant kill, and has a decent chance of literally blowing their head apart from the hydraulic force of the impact.

.22 LR would be an extremely poor choice for an attempted sniper assassination

Reminds me how this is a plot point in Day of the Jackal, where the assassin deliberately picks explosive rounds to make up for it.

To add on to this, @mdurak, 5.56 is basically .223 described in international-standard (rather than American) terms, in order to aid military standardisation among NATO. .223 means "0.223 inches across the rifle barrel, in the rifling grooves" - imperial measurements and the American practice of measuring calibre across the grooves. 5.56 means "5.56 mm across the rifle barrel, not in the grooves" - metric measurements and the international practice of measuring calibre across the ungrooved parts of the barrel (the "lands"). (5.56 mm is, as you might expect, very slightly less than 0.223 inches.)

I honestly doubt its a right wing gun nut. Any gun enthusiast will know that a .22 is a joke round and will go for .223, 30-06 or .308 for an assassination. Someone using a .22 seems just bafflingly incompetent.

It was a .223, was it not?

If it was an AR platform, yes.

BTW Nobody shoots 30-06 anymore.

People who have 30-06 caliber rifles shoot 30-06. It's just that the two main choices in an AR platform rifle, unless you happen to be a gun nut, are .223 and .308.

Saw people here say .22, so I ran with that. Updated info points to AR style, so bushmaster XM15 is the most likely candidate just for availability. So, .223.

Also, boo on 30-06 not being fired anymore. Military doesn't, true, but home pressers usually load up .308 or 30-06. Admittedly I haven't been in the scene for years, but all the small town rednecks who pivoted away from walmart supplies during the 2020 ammo shortage swear by their old reliable hunting rugers.

Also, boo on 30-06 not being fired anymore.

.30-06 is obsoleted by .308 on the low end (and in most tactical/fighting rifles) and .300 Winchester Magnum on the high end (and in hunting rifles).

Modern gunmakers, when designing hunting rifles, build their receivers for the physically largest cartridge they'll offer first. .300 Win Mag is that cartridge, so if you buy that rifle in .30-06 you're taking a rifle that's already sized for a more powerful cartridge and, well, nerfing it. And when hunting, people generally welcome the extra power, since you only really want to take (and frequently, only get) one shot.

As for .308, there's no .30-06 Pmag, and why would a manufacturer reinvent the wheel when a different company has already designed it for them? And if you're designing a hunting rifle with its own custom magazine, the above point applies.

Don't worry, though. If it makes you feel any better, in the next 20 years all .30 caliber cartridges will be obsoleted by a hybrid-case high-pressure .308-sized round that delivers .300 Win Mag performance, and I don't believe any mass-market cartridge is going to bother going higher because .300 Win Mag is already at the upper limit of human recoil tolerance.

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Point of pedantry, but the AR platform covers just about every commercially available cartridge, from .17 rimfire to .50 BMG.

It was probably a .223/5.56mm, but the AR platform is extremely popular and absurdly diverse.

The first discussion I had brought Muslim front of mind, because I wasn't really upset by it and my friend said come on its a big deal, and I said hey Trump's had people assassinated turnabout is fair play. So like the first discussion I had was if it would be valid by the USAs own interpretation of international law for Iran to kill Trump.

Also not all right wingers are gun nuts.

I think if it was any variety of right wing or Christian we would have heard by now.

How? I don't even think there's a name yet

Eta: I should note that two different baptist friends have told me in recent weeks that based on biblical prophecy their bible study groups think Trump might be the antichrist. Just a weird thing that's going around I guess, I wasn't sure what to make of it.

I should note that two different baptist friends have told me in recent weeks that based on biblical prophecy their bible study groups think Trump might be the antichrist.

Interesting -- are the evangelical elements of the red tribe shifting against him?

I guess my response is, of course he's the antichrist, have you seen the guy talk about his relationship with the divine and how his most ardent supporters talk about him? But then again, I also think Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Henry VIII, Peter the Great, and of course the OG Nero are the antichrist, there are many of them. So that's not a particularly spectacular claim for me to make.

The actually-religious parts of the republican base are consistently the last people to line up behind Trump who will ultimately do so anyways.

Amusingly enough, it is true that Moscow "sits on many waters", and it was, at least under the USSR, "drunk with the blood of the saints".

I'm not really sure if it even means they aren't voting for him! Some prophetically inclined evangelicals seem to be interested in triggering the end times, what with Israel and red heifers and whatnot. Although my impression is that one is always choosing sides against the antichrist even if his coming it's inevitable and ultimately welcome.

I'm not really sure if it even means they aren't voting for him!

Reminds me of the Lizardman's Constant post.

"Well, on the one hand, Obama is the Anti-Christ. On the other, do I really want four years of Romney?"

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Revelation 13:3…

I am 90% on psycho, but only 60% on obviously psycho given what comes out. The guy is dead, so we won't have a prison psychiatrist's report. This is unfortunate, because the guy turning out to be unfit-to-plead level mentally ill like the guy who shot Reagan would defuse things a bit.

I just think people tend to weirdly equate "identifiable ideological point" with "rational" and that's silly. One can be a psycho for Islam or Mainstream Democratic politics or for the Dallas cowboys.

Interestingly, the New York Post describes the shooter as “a Chinese man.”

As of now, it is (emphasis added):

The gunman believed to have been behind the attempted assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump Saturday was shot and killed by Secret Service, sources told The Post.

The shooter, identified only as a white male, was in a sniper position located hundreds of yards away from Trump’s podium in Butler, Pa. as he spoke to a campaign crowd, sources said.

About 120 m or so, not hundreds of yards.

Really close.

NSFW, gore warning: picture of the shooter.

/images/17209263241078749.webp

Whats up with his cauliflower ear? Damage to the skull underneath?

down and left of his ear is what appears to be the rim of a catastrophic exit wound. Pretty sure that guy is missing a good portion of the lower-right quadrant of his skull.

He got domed by the secret service Counter Assault Team within seconds of opening up. They couldn't prevent the attack, but their reaction was incredible.

One of my first thoughts upon seeing this was "I wonder if this is real or AI generated", and that's a scary thought. I wonder if fake images of this event will soon be circulating.

Young man, scruffy unkempt hair, peach fuzz. Skinny-fat vibes. Certainly fits the antifa stereotype, but not much to go on. If this is real, then it's incredible it got out so soon.

If Shaggy decided to become an assassin instead of solving mysteries with his talking dog.

You need decent cognitive skills to draw blood on such a well-guarded target. The takes calling the shooter a retard are, well, retarded. We've seen what it looks like when mentally ill people try to assassinate Trump. It's pathetic.

A caution: "mentally ill" is a very broad term, much broader than "retarded". You can be plenty intelligent and planning-capable and also anxious or depressed. Not even all psychotics are as useless as Sandford; Kaczynski was probably mildly psychotic and he lasted almost two decades.

Reminder that a literal 65 IQ* retard shot 32 people inside 90 seconds, killing 20, in the Broad Arrow café & gift shop.

In the café itself:

From the first shot, all of these events took approximately fifteen seconds, during which Bryant fired seventeen shots, killed twelve people, and wounded ten more

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Bryant

Reading the article, it's possible that he wasn't nearly that stupid, of more 'average' intelligence yet mentally odd enough that he didn't care to learn to read or do well on any test. He may have killed his father and the heiress who was (presumably) sleeping with him.

Well we all know, hopefully, how first accounts during live news go. Crazy amounts of bullshit. But anyway, checking wiki to see if there's been any U.S President assassination attempts since Squeaky Fromme on Ford, there's been a surprising amount. I guess the media decided to not report these things. Though it's hard to tell how serious all the listed are.

But the point is, the examples of the lesser known recent assassination attempts sound very schizo. Random Chinese man wouldn't actually be out of the theme. I like this one:

Joe Biden: May 23, 2023: Sai Varshith Kandula, a 19-year-old man from St. Louis, drove a rented box truck into a barrier that separated the White House grounds from the public. Shortly thereafter he was taken into custody by the United States Park Police and was found to have a Nazi flag in his truck. Kandula expressed admiration for the Third Reich and stated his intentions were to "kill the president" and "seize power".[128]

My favorite is Ronald Gene Barbour in 1994. He was driving to commit suicide at a particular destination, but missed his exit and decided he might as well continue on the highway all the way to Washington DC and shoot Bill Clinton. As it happened, Clinton was overseas at the time, so Barbour gave up, went home, and wound up telling a friend (and the friend's tape recorder) all about it.

But anyway, checking wiki to see if there's been any U.S President assassination attempts since Squeaky Fromme on Ford

A rather famous one on Reagan, by a random schizo attempting to impress Jodie Foster (she wasn't impressed).

There's been a previous attempt on Trump (as candidate, in 2016), though it didn't get as far as shots being fired.

I think I've heard people say she kind of was impressed.

It'd be kind of funny if they raid his home just to find pictures of Jodie Foster plastered all over the walls. That might be the best possible outcome of all this.

Rooftop chinese would certainly BTFO my prediction.

Interviewee says he saw the guy on a roof and reported him: https://x.com/SharpFootball/status/1812265909727396107

I watched that and his disbelief that Secret Service didn't have those roofs covered. I'm assuming Trump has a much smaller SS detail than he would have had while he was president, right? I understand that former presidents and presidential campaigners get some degree of SS coverage, but is their detail really big enough to station agents on all of the roofs in a small town, like this guy seems to have expected?

https://apnews.com/article/trump-vp-vance-rubio-7c7ba6b99b5f38d2d840ed95b2fdc3e5

According to this (and the "all clear" in the video), they killed the shooter in seconds. I guess it could just be a really tight window between him popping up and opening fire?

Edit: here's a video with the guy's corpse in his shooting position.

But drones with cameras are cheap. Couldn't the Secret Service have easily had eyes on all the rooftops within sniper range?

There may be an issue with drones that, if you have several of your own drones flying around for security, it's much harder to spot an unauthorized drone that may be up to no good.

From some of the pics, it looks like some of the security detail was from local police, so maybe a core SS detail coordinates with local law enforcement for events like these, which means using teams that are not necessarily accustomed to the scope of sweep needed for events like this?

Suicide drones are a bigger threat than shooters, so public security officials prefer to lock down the airspace entirely, and current practices prefer clean air to ease identification of assets, using tethered drones for station keeping in fixed positions (so visual rotations, not patrols, and both are insufficient to cover a 1km radius without 9 or more teams). No Unmanned Traffic Management system exists yet, and these opt-in systems cannot handle uncooperative elements.

Interesting, thanks. Then shouldn't the Secret Service have placed fixed cameras on all the roofs in shooting range that they didn't plan to have men on?

Installing temporary cameras is actually super irritating and most agents on the ground prefer to walk and use their eyes instead of fiddling with cameras. An agent in an elevated position can just turn his head to scan a sector, then walk 8 meters and see another sector. Temporary cameras streaming to a command post have relatively low resolution for transmission ease, and can't move. You need to spam a shitload of cameras, and therefore spam a shitload of observers. A command post can only stuff so many bodies in it and comms overload is something to be guarded against.

Update: I saw the map of the shooting. I take back my above regarding observer spam. The entire site is practically empty with the firing position being literally the closest point to target with direct line of sight, and no clutter or surplus of alternative angles of attack. There is no excuse for this magnitude of failure. This isn't a rally at a factory or a town center with a shitload of positions to consider, its a fucking open field. An absolute failure by SS to secure this barest of bare minimums.

I'm not sure what I expected, but Chinese wasn't it.

Presumably they must have identified him by nationality or they'd just say Asian.

I'm not sure I'd call assassinations "unforeseen", the whole reason the secret service exists is because they are foreseen risks.

The prospect of a President or major party candidate being assassinated is in 2024, positively quotidian, to the point where the real story isn't even the assassination but that it might improve Trump's chances of being reelected. Not news but drama.

I've generally felt that the election is too early to call, because there's so much room for people on both sides to do very stupid things. I think now the idiot ball is in Trump's court, and it's his race to lose, if he or a follower picks it up.

Given that the shooter is dead, I predict an uptick in the popularity of the movie "Bob Roberts" and its associated conspiracy theory (fake assassination attempt, blamed on a plausible person of the opposition party). Thoughts?

Is the shooter dead?

Yes, an agent(?) said the shooter was dead before they left the stage. As far as I can tell, there still hasn't been official confirmation, but anonymous officials are repeating it.

EDIT: adding more

video link, just before the shots

6:50-6:58, 7:07 Shots fired

7:32 "he's down", "Shooter's down."

I'm curious if the agents shot the would-be-assassin with that last shot. It sounded the same as the rest, but I don't think gunshots are that distinct based on angle and caliber.

My guess would be the second-to-last shot is the Secret Service sniper shooting the would-be assassin, and the last shot after several seconds delay is them putting a very carefully-aimed second round into him to confirm the kill.

video link, just before the shots

The woman in the right corner at just after 9 minutes who transitions from shouting "USA! USA! USA!" to "FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!" is a perfect ecapsulation of the ugliness of the current American body politic.

That was the USs response to Pearl Harbor also. And 9/11.

The immediate aftermath of 9-11 in the US (and this is my memory, so take that fwiw) was one of self-sacrifice and attending the victims, as well as giving accolades to the first responders. Most attention was on the NYFD and NYPD (in the what seems like a bizarro world now, when Rudy Giuliani was seen as heroic). It was an interesting time, when a lot of people in the US showed their very best qualities. I can clearly remember the backlash from my good ol boy acquaintances to Bush's comments that the terrorists were "cowards."

Of course soon enough this all gave way to a more palpable desire for justice, revenge, etc. But that wasn't the first reaction.

The immediate aftermath of 9-11 in the US (and this is my memory, so take that fwiw) was one of self-sacrifice and attending the victims, as well as giving accolades to the first responders.

My personal, immediate reaction was "we're going to bomb the shit out of whoever did this."

My personal, immediate reaction was "we're going to bomb the shit out of whoever did this."

I remember my dad's first words in response to seeing the news: "Well, we're going to war with somebody now."

Or to put it another way, it was "common-sense country control".

(It was certainly as successful in the long term as everything else common sense demands we control.)

That seems like an appropriate response to a prospective assassin. It's not like the crowd is attacking the dignity and respect that he should have.

Pro work. Good job whoever downed him.

Yes - as well as one attendee

Really? I need to update my news feed. Who killed the shooter? I didn't see any law enforcement fire a weapon.

My understanding is that the secret service SOP is to have snipers on-site for public events like this one. I'd assume the snipers got him.

More information on the shooter.

Apparently the shooter was seen on a rooftop prior to being taken down.

Annd here it is.. (Edit: Dead guy on a rooftop with beer drinkers in foreground, taken with a camera with very good zoom.)

Makes sense. I was reading speculation about two shooters but one of those could have been a secret service sniper. Hopefully there is a lot more forthcoming video just from people with their phones out that will bring more clarity to what happened (assuming that footage is not immediately suppressed.)

I'm getting this in writing while things are hot. The amount of narrative control by Internet janitors, as of writing, is interesting. I'm ashamed of myself for firing up 4chan like old times, but the /tv/ board, which is the default unofficial shitposting general board, is mass deleting any word of this on the second. Some fatass is watching the live post queue with wide dilated pupils, sweat, and hair trigger. If I hadn't heard about this elsewhere by coincidence, I wouldn't have known it happened yet. On Reddit, the /r/news thread is locked. On /r/worldnews (supposedly non-USA news) I don't see any thread. On /r/neoliberal the major thread is labeled [restricted], whatever that means.

It's big news worth discussing yet... Seems like liberal anti-Trump jannies are freaking out and doing what they know best when confused and inflamed. Deleting/restrict everything until further marching orders are given and official consensus thought is reached from mothership.

Can't speak for /tv/ but most boards I browse tend to be moderately much more tightly for off-topic content now than they were 5 years ago. I find the mods over-zealous, but prefer it to every board degenerating into some different flavour of /b/.

What exactly, is worth saying about it, given that we don't really know what happened? Even if we did know what happened, what gems of insight are likely to come out of front page Reddit? That it's good for Trump? That it's really cool that he put his fist in the air? You might as well ask ChatGPT.

Hacker News is having every submission concerning the topic flagged and killed as well.

There's a megathread on /r/politics.

Edit: the comments are an absolute shit show, but no surprise there.

The /news/ thread has been locked.

Ech, maybe I have low standards but comments are better quality than I expected.

See

I’m so tired of living in interesting times

and other primary comments. Conspiracy theories got down voted now

That's positively enlightening compared to what I was seeing at the top earlier. I expect the mods are in a flurry of excited activity deleting posts. (The ones I saw were bizarre conspiracy theory posts or "Sorry he got shot but fuckim" type posts.)

The false flag theories are incredible. Yeah, Trump planned to get shot in the ear with deadly rounds. What could go wrong?

A steady diet of tv shows highlighting the mythical capabilities of snipers and ultracompetent assassins has poisoned the threat environment. Hell the lionization of 'sniper' as a term has its own knock-on effects, positing threats as long range invisible single shot killers compared to actual successful assassination/shootings, which were close range pistols due to ease of proximity and access, or high volume indiscriminate fire.

Only people with no awareness of how threats work will dare posit farfetched deep state ultracompetent CIA black ops type of stuff straight out of Call Of Duty. A real CIA assassin would preload a bunch of drones with anfo to take off on an inertial guided vector to to a saturation bombing on a series of approaches, not waste a SAC asset.

Well, he knew this guy, William Tell...

Trump obviously believes in quantum immortality so knew he would survive from his viewpoint.

Even if it’s not true, believing in that seems needed as a psychological base to be an overman / man of destiny.

Yes, Douglas MacArthur was fantastically brave and on a podcast one of the reasons given was that he knew he was a man of destiny and so wouldn't be killed before victory.

If only Franz Ferdinand had been more cowardly.

Or, as Napoleon famously put it,

The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast.

Had this happen in a personal group chat as well and had to slap it down. I've had enough.

TDS continues to be one of the most insane and embarrassing diseases to contract that I've seen in my lifetime.

Seriously. I have handguns. I like shooting them. If challenged to make that shot into the ear but not the head I'd probably screw it up.

There's a 0% chance this is a false flag shot through the ear.

Edit: turns out it was with a rifle. I stand by my claim that a shot through the ear, but not the rest of the head, is completely implausible on purpose.

Agree not a false flag. I think some people cannot bring themselves to accepting that political violence is real and the dire implications had he succeeded.

What dire implications? We'd have TWO parties scrambling for a viable candidate, that's all.

"If you go against the establishment, they murder you." That's an implication that is dire in nature.

i dunno ? a prez candidate killed with head shot on live tv ? seems pretty dire to me. It would be way worse than just trying to find a new candidate, like had he died of a heart attack or something. True, the country quickly moved on from the JFK assassination, but would have been worse.

As you note, an actual President has already been killed on live TV. Trump's currently only a candidate. The country is perfectly capable of handling that sort of thing. Would it be bad? Yes. Dire? No. Assuming it's a psycho, anyway. If it was someone acting under the authority of the Democrats (or even less likely, a Republican rival), that would be pretty dire, moving the country towards a norm of political assassination. But it won't be. I suppose there's some slim chance it could be a foreign adversary, and that could be quite dire depending on which one. But most likely it's a psycho who is a little TOO serious about his politics, and that the country can handle.

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That would be absolute political chaos

There's also the issue of rule 4 "know your target, and what's behind it"

There’s video of a forklift getting hit in the hydraulics by the sniper: https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/229040

Forklift was holding up speakers for the rally.

I think the would-be assassin is beyond safety rules.

And to be less charitable, I'm going to guess this person didn't grow up in a culture of correct gun handling.

I think if you're pulling this sort of thing, collateral damage is going to be acceptable to you. That applies to both people trying to actually kill Trump and wild false-flag theories.

Unironically how I play the video game Hitman - get halfway there via sneaking, oh man they have a bunch of bodyguards, okay well I'm an assassin, might as well do assassin things.

Though I have no idea how this would happen IRL. I feel guilty about things like talking up my job to get someone to join me in my section at work as a coworker (I was not the boss) because we were short-staffed but paid better, but then she later ended up quitting because she hated it, and that's not even my fault. I can't even imagine killing someone.

Put yourself in a community where such language is common and expected and this is what happens. Rotherham found plenty of muslims eager to rape children in collaboration with their partners, just as poetry circles find plenty of people all wondering how to bring their poetry to the masses after the revolution. To find yourself in such a community is difficult but not impossible, and that is why group association is a parole breaking condition.

I think if you believe a politician is such a profound threat that you’re willing to kill him, you also think people who love him enough to show up to his rally are complicit.

Yeah, if you truly believe Trump is Hitler 2.0, then any collateral damage is just another dead Nazi

Yeah, that sounds like sniper work, not something that someone on the ground with a handgun could reliably pull off?

Maybe a better conspiracy theory would be that Trump had a blood packet in his hand, and clapped it to his head, or something like that. Maybe his guards would have to be in on it? Most likely his doctor would, unless they've got a way for Trump to shoot himself afterwards, but I expect that he'll be under close guard for a while. And whoever shot into the air, and whoever killed and framed the "shooter". So at least 4 people including Trump, and probably a few more.

Edit: Looks like the shooter was a sniper on the roof of a nearby building, and was picked off by Secret Service snipers almost immediately afterward. So it's unclear what was going on in the crowd.

I've seen people say he "bladed" himself with a razor to draw real blood.

But given there's a dead man on a roof with a rifle, it's going to take some pretty determined motivated reasoning to continue to call this fake.

Somebody get going archiving these absurd CNN headlines about “popping sounds.”

Here's one: https://x.com/BasedBeffJezos/status/1812261010168037696

Looks like they've been quickly changed to be more accurate as people go 'wtf are you smoking'.

This was one of the worst. I’m on mobile so wasnt able to add anything to my archives sadly.

I screenshotted it as soon as I saw it.

/images/17209146151058116.webp

I think Trump is now sure to win. From the audio I'm now also pretty sure there's a dead body somewhere and I'm intensely interested in who that corpse was before it made a very bad decision. What's the protocol for the media here? Avoid publicizing it to prevent copy cats? This is a very bad thing for our democracy.

I think Trump is now sure to win.

Why? After all, he could still end up in jail. Or a second assassin could get luckier despite the likely increased security to follow. Or we could get an October surprise. Or some last-minute tricks to get him off the ballot/votes disqualified (I remember one particularly wacky-yet-memorable proposal for a way to declare Trump an invalid candidate and votes for him null and void). Or he could get over 100 million votes… and the Democrat candidate be declared the winner with an "official vote count" of several million more, particularly concentrated in "battleground" states.

It's not over until it's over, and nothing's certain except death and taxes.

After all, he could still end up in jail.

I don't think that one would be enough anymore - not on its own.

If New York can put him in jail he can be Epsteined.

I mean, I think Epstein probably killed himself, but sure, it would definitely be possible to arrange for Trump to get murdered in prison (putting him in the general population would probably be enough right there). I just didn't count that as "on its own" - Trump being murdered was another item in the list I replied to.

As with the joke about Hell, the danger of putting Trump in genpop is he might take over.

True about a lot of famous and successful people, though, because they’re usually pretty charismatic and smart and can understand social hierarchies very well. Madoff was apparently very well liked in jail.

Yes -- I would assume the same about Bill Clinton, even more so. Probably any President, but Clinton and Trump more than most. Maybe not Gerald Ford.

At this stage Trump could literally set up an alternative government in exile in Moscow and the majority's of states would support him.

At this stage Trump could literally set up an alternative government in exile in Moscow

Except, how's he supposed to get from a jail cell to Moscow

and the majority's of states would support him.

Support him how? Beyond symbolic "moral support" and "not my president" rhetoric, I mean.

talking out my ass here:

trump posts bail, flees or escapes usa with the help of literally anyone, declares he is true president in exile just like guaido. alternative suite of electors submits trump as legit winner.

specific mechanics break down from this point on regarding how to actually govern, but theres enough hilarity to sustain bullshit for a decade from this point

trump posts bail

Bail is for pre-trial custody. He's already been convicted of multiple felonies, he just hasn't been sentenced yet. Once the judge gives him jail time, there's no "posting bail" to get out of it.

If he was ordered to be arrested by federal marshals while in Texas I can see Abbott going ‘fuck it’ and having relatively loyal rangers / cops / nat guard surround him so that federal agents can’t reach him.

At that point Biden would have to decide whether to send in the troops to pacify Texas and that seems unlikely, it would probably just lead to a standoff until the election.

Major internal operations require politically reliable troops, and it seems unlikely that the US military can put together a politically reliable field army in the months before the election. It's not a thing that the US military has experience in and it doesn't take that many to own-goal the mission.

Now a very long-term standoff between the state of Texas and the federal government probably goes badly for Texas(and not great for the federal government either), but a major state rebelling probably has at least a year of 'we do what we want' before having to face the music.

I don't think that one would be enough anymore - not on its own.

Well, my experience IRL is that there do indeed exist people (mostly elderly) who've already been put off of voting for him again because this time he's "a convicted felon," and thus I expect jailing him will move even more in that direction. Plus, it would definitely prevent any repeats of the debate disaster, wouldn't it?

Edit: I also saw this comment blaming the assassination attempt on the failure to have jailed him already:

I just want the Trump convicted by a jury of his peers and sentenced to prison for his crimes. Not saying what happened today was right, but this is the kind of thing that happens when people lose faith in justice.

(Emphasis added)

Yeah, I saw you say that before and you have a point.

I said that post-shooting it likely wouldn't be enough.

My current worry (personal estimate of the conjunction of most likely and most bad) is that some Trump supporter somewhere does something very stupid and very violent, and then Trump fails to condemn it strongly "enough", leading to a spiral of violence on both sides. I hope I'm just worrying too much. I had similar worries about Oct 7, but it didn't spiral into a regional nuclear war, but I don't think this current domestic scenario has an equivalent to Biden ordering 2 carrier strike groups into the neighborhood.

AP says two dead: the shooter and one attendee.

The CNN headline on my tablet: "Trump Speech Interrupted by Secret Service." You couldn't make this shit up.

/images/17209123358050816.webp

AP: Shooting Being Investigated as Assassination Attempt. Wow, I wouldn't have guessed.

It's not like the actual coverage is evasive. They're being really straightforward. Just a goofy title.

It's improved a great deal in the last two hours, true enough.

As someone on quipped; “If you hate these people, chances are you don’t hate them nearly enough.”

The story is an hour old, give it some time. Obviously CNN has a bias but they also don't want to fuck this up too bad.

You know they've got $$$ in their eyes knowing they can run on this for the next month.

You're not wrong, but the words "possibly" and "shooting" or something similar are meat and potatoes for clickable headlines. This just seems dubious. Plus fuck CNN for a thousand other reasons. I was at a place recently that for some reason had CNN running above the cashier counter. I don't think any Japanese person was paying attention as it was just the sound of talking heads in fast English for them and easily ignored. For me it was like a bombardment of progressive propaganda packaged so matter-of-factly that I literally couldn't stand there and listen to it. And I've voted Democrat in every election I've ever voted in. It's just mind-boggling how partisan they are.

So the media is censoring assassination attempts now.

No matter whose fault this is, it's going to be bad for the left. Yeah, they can claim "it was right-wing" even if it is, but you can't get more right-wing than Trump specifically because of a concerted effort by said media.

The problem if it's not a right-wing actor that did this, doubly so if it's a Dem brownshirt, is that leftists are only really permitted [insured] property damage and the occasional murder as the contained scope of their violence. That is incompatible with also being the faction of murderdeathkill (and being able to call it murderdeathkill).

In any case, one more turn on the escalation spiral. Guess I should buy some primers; I'm sure they're about to sell out again.

is that leftists are only really permitted [insured] property damage and the occasional murder as the contained scope of their violence.

Permitted by who? And why can't that change?

In any case, one more turn on the escalation spiral.

Doesn't an escalation spiral require two sides escalating? If the right doesn't escalate in response, is there a "spiral"?

the faction of murderdeathkill

What do you mean by this?

This sort of thing puts a pretty big dent in Scott’s (and Hanania’s) thesis that for all their faults, the mainstream media is the best place to find accurate factual knowledge about current events. An ex-President (and current candidate) came three inches away from assassination and CNN readers might come away with the impression that he was spooked by a little noise.

Isn't it likely this was from an air rifle? I assumed from the pictures and sound it actually hit him multiple times and scraped his face but didn't do worse damage.

Allegedly a .22LR.

Whoever tried to shoot him is a fucking idiot, that weapon requires superb shot placement.

Also, the photo of the shooting goes incredibly hard.

That's Time cover of the year material right there. And not the current era Time, but back in the good old days.

That is at least the third coolest reaction to an American presidential assassination attempt. It's probably still behind Teddy Roosevelt's "takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose" but I don't think it tops Andrew Jackson turning the tables on the assassin.

I can't believe Zucc is on Trump's protective detail.

Sounded like a small caliber handgun (9mm or smaller) to me, but it's really hard to tell anything from recorded audio (except that it's supersonic -- you hear the crack of the shockwave before the report). I think an air rifle probably wouldn't have been audible, or only barely so.

Here’s better sound. https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/229040

For comparison, a video of what incoming bullets sound like.

Thanks, this makes sense. I had thought the second sound was the sound of Trump getting hit. But now there are reports of bystanders dead so it seems awfully unlikely it was an air rifle.

Sounded rather supersonic to be an air rifle.

Nah, if it was a solitary 'pop' possibly, but the shooter mag dumped after the initial graze.

Currently debating with online gun nerds on what sort of weapon it was.

Three aimed shots, then mag dump. https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/229040

What're the thoughts of the gun nerds? Can you link the discussion?

What're the thoughts of the gun nerds?

My thoughts are "for fuck's sake, ammunition and reloading components are about to be sold out and/or scalped again, so if you want a gun or gun-related item it's probably best to buy what you want today before they raise their prices even further beyond the normal election year rush".

it's probably best to buy what you want today before they raise their prices even further beyond the normal election year rush

Is there a typical election year run on guns? Has that always been the case, or only in 2020? As I know nothing about guns, that's not something I ever knew, but even I considerd buying a hand gun in 2020 to prepare for if Trump won (because I was worried that the BLM riots that were already going nuts would soon reach my neighborhood and my home would be in danger if Trump won)

It's been that way since at least Obama's win in 08. The gun culture knows that a Democrat election win means further restrictions are likely, so they go shopping before the election to end-run the potential bans. It's been this way for more than a decade now, every election, and in particularly bad years the shortages are absolutely absurd.

Let's just say I've been waiting to stock up on a lifetime supply between crises for over a decade, and somehow there's always a war, gun ban, or election spiking prices. 5-10x higher than 2011, iirc.

Ah, it's a discord, but the initial reaction was some sort of air rifle. (I thought it was a .22). Mind you, it's only speculation. We'll get to know what happened real soon from the official news, I bet.

shooter mag dumped after

I think that was (multiple members of) security. The shooter's reported dead.

It will be interesting to hear the real report. Either they eliminated the threat in under four seconds or it took 20.

I eagerly await the report of the Blue Ribbon panel in 3-5 years to find out what really happened.

Interesting. That would be weird.

All the news sites seem to be hedging as well. “Possible shooting” “Trump rushes off stage after what sounds like gunshots”.

Why would they hedge like this. Anyone know?

You don't want to print "Donald Trump shot" unless you know that Donald Trump was in fact shot. The known facts are exactly what was printed. The reader can make the inference just as well as the editor.

Presumably media has policies in place for their low-level employees to only print the exact verifiable events (erring on cautiousness) when there's an important breaking story, and then updating later when all the decision makers have rushed in place. Companies are always gonna be a little slower than individual people that can basically watch events live when it comes to that.

I'd expect this happens for the same reason and opposite direction that Everyone Knew from day one that Sarah Palin inspired a spree shooter.

First of all, is he dead? That's the first ten things that matter. Given that he lives through the day and recovers from any injuries...

Speculation can immediately begin, whodunnit?

I am partial to deep state explanations, because I think Biden's collapse post debate and uncertainty of the Democrat nominee has forced someone's hand.

Of course the most likely is that we'll find out nothing of the sort.

We found out.

I'm thinking right wing schizo. Can't imagine the deep state would want to make a martyr of Trump (or in this case ensure his victory), but of course that's unfalsifiable anyway.

Not dead, from the video posted by the NY Post he appears to have been hit twice from an oblique angle, one round hitting his shoulder the other grazing his ear. Walked off the stage under his own power while waving to the crowd.

Edit: upon repeated viewing i think the woman wearing the red maga tank-top and cabela's hat behind trump probably got hit which would put the angle of the shot (and therefore the shooter) more to trump's front right.

That's correct, according to Xitter. There is an interview with a redheaded bearded man with a MAGA visor who says he saw the shooter and his rifle and alerted police minutes before the shooting, and tried to point him out to Secret Service for several minutes as well. The shooter was prone and crawling on a rooftop nearly 90 degrees to the right of Trump.

The interview you reference can be found in two parts here and here

Delays getting hustled off the stage to yell "fight - fight".

Maybe he'll be finally motivated to do something about the antifa and their solid connections to media and seeming impunity..

Maybe he'll be finally motivated to do something about the antifa and their solid connections to media and seeming impunity..

This implies an ability to "do something" about antifa. Like what, exactly?

Not dead. They clipped his ear though. 3 inches inches to the right and his head would have popped on live tv. Unreal. He seriously is a man of destiny.

Money shot (excuse the term):

/images/17209126824325557.webp

Not dead, looked like if it hit him it grazed his ear.

Why would this be deep state? I can’t see how this will do anything except make him a more sympathetic figure.

Not if they'd succeeded. But it was probably a random crazy, and my second choice would be a random crazy egged on by the FBI -- not in order to kill Trump, but because the FBI likes to do stuff like that (e.g. Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot, "draw Mohammed" shooter).

It seems way, way too incompetent. If it was deep state he'd have been given an 'ghost gun' AR-15 modified for full auto (classical boogeynman gun for ATF, and trained to use it.)

Wondering how he even got in there with a gun tho.

Wondering how he even got in there with a gun tho.

Unironically, deep state. The deceased shooter was a wind up toy and somebody on the inside influenced the security.

You know, the JFK playbook.

This TBH

Climbed a nearby building: https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/229040

And incompetent? Guy just drew blood from outside the Secret Service cordon. The wind is the only thing that saved President Trump.

There's 2 bystanders saying they tried to get police attention for minutes er: the guy on the roof.

People asking pointed question as in: how come the rooftop, an obvious and apparently best (closest) spot wasn't secured.

there's Alex Jones ranting this was definitely deep state trying to kill Trump. I'm not convinced yet, but his people have gone on record saying they asked to beef up his Secret Service protection, that was denied, the suspicous incompetence now)..

Are you suggesting that whoever shot him intended for him to live? I'm assuming the deep state wants him dead, but of course nobody knows anything.

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