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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   29189 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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This one is Kamala's to lose.

The biggest sign was how quickly the Trump assassination story died down. The second Biden stepped down, he overwhelmed the media cycle and wiped the slate clean on both sides. Ofc, getting the support of everyone other than the crazies really helps. Every institution (left and right) is aligned on putting her in power. Look at Trump's new twitter, it has fully morphed into the caricature that Hillary claimed it was in 2016. (https://x.com/realDonaldTrump).

Kamala has picked a golden retriever of a VP candidate and has managed to be in public life for decades without expressing a substantial opinion. This is useful. It allows a vibes based campaign to flourish. If you have said nothing, they can't attack you. One big scandal from Kamala or Tim can potentially turn the tides, but so far she's been doing well.

Trump camp seems clueless too. Kamala is happy to fight in the dirt with Trump, because she too can have a full debate without saying anything substantial. So much energy was expended painting Hillary, Biden and Obama as evil, that Trump doesn't have much novel angles of attack. On top of that, JD Vance is clearly a terrible VP candidate (as much as us Rationalist types might agree with him). Kamala has avoided the obvious landmines too. She has steered clear of supporting Palestine and immediately stopped talking about the new capital-gains-tax before it could turn scandalous. She was a harsh prosecutor, so the crime angle doesn't work. Kamala has lucked into a pretty defensible position, because she is an uninspiring candidate for democratic primaries. But, her track record is pretty centrist for the generals.

All that being said, the electoral college is surely going to make this one a lot closer than it actually is. (ofc a lot can change between now and nov)

Kamala has no potential positive external events, and many negative ones.

The economy is the biggest one. Unemployment can't really go down in a way that matters to voters, wages can't really go up without driving up inflation and interest rates, the stock market is doing fine but no one cares. She can't get good news, only bad news. A recession would doom her.

And on foreign policy, Kamala is in a terrible position, because once again the Biden team is by Blob standards doing a good job. The stalemates in Israel and Ukraine are the best results the mainstream can get. Any side "winning" would be horrible for her. Any ceasefire is going to taste like ash to 2/3 of people.

And she's constantly at the mercy of various ongoing crises allowed to fester in America. An illegal immigrant could rape a sufficiently photogenic blonde. Some teenager who thinks they're trans could beat up a girl in a locker room. Some particularly bad wave of fentanyl overdose deaths could run through the country. Letting these things fester puts you at the mercy of the eye of sauron.

Kamala could lose an election of the economy goes to shit, if Russia wins the war or if illegal immigrants suddenly decide to start raping pretty women.

Yeah, you're right. They could derail the campaign....but that would derail any campaign. If anything, hoping for freak events shows that Kamala holds the cards right now.

A lot can happen between sept-nov, but it is still only 3 months.

The difference is that nothing positive can break for Kamala.

Zooming back to our last normal, non Trump campaign, Obama and Romney both had hopes and fears from unemployment numbers, or overseas entanglements, or scandals and controversies. Obama could have been sunk by bad numbers or buoyed by positive ones, and Romney vice versa. By comparison, Don has nothing to lose and Kamala has nothing to gain.

The difference is that nothing positive can break for Kamala.

What if Biden is declared unfit in early October and a new wave of enthusiasm for the First Woman President gives her a 5% boost to carry her through the election a week or two after she assumes office?

That didn't happen in Veep, and that show is unfortunately a crystal ball for US political developments now.

...I guess? But I don't see that happening. If anything, Biden resigning might remove some first woman president energy since at that point it already happened.

If that was going to be beneficial it already would have happened.

An illegal immigrant could rape a sufficiently photogenic blonde.

There is no one so photogenic the media couldn't ignore.

Yea the media smothers all the migrant rape and murder stories pretty hard. The only migrant murder/rape stories that make it out is if it was mass captured on social media and impossible to ignore, like the muslims attacking random white people at the pub in the UK. Without public eyeballs the media just repeatedly confirms coulters law over and over again.

Illegal immigrant rapes Taylor Swift. The dankest timeline.

With her resources & body guards, my immediate suspicion would be that it was Taylor doing the raping.

She has private security.

I’m not suggesting it is likely to happen and hope it doesn’t. But I’m just saying that would break out

Alright... Taylor Swift rapes illegal immigrant.

How terrible, can you imagine the backlash for peaceful members of the Swift family.

I think that's actually the only plausible way that such sex could even occur, given many people's stated beliefs about rape via power differential.

The stalemates in Israel and Ukraine are the best results the mainstream can get. Any side "winning" would be horrible for her.

Am I missing something? A Ukraine win sounds like something she could brag about, though obviously it's not about to happen before the election concludes.

And she's constantly at the mercy of various ongoing crises allowed to fester in America. An illegal immigrant could rape a sufficiently photogenic blonde. Some teenager who thinks they're trans could beat up a girl in a locker room. Some particularly bad wave of fentanyl overdose deaths could run through the country. Letting these things fester puts you at the mercy of the eye of sauron.

All of these can be swept under the rug by the media until she wins. You need something that breaks containment. A recession would probably be the worst that can happen to her.

A Ukraine win would be a disaster for Kamala politically, as the Nazi-auxiliaries start launching reprisals against collaborators, which for a sufficiently large Ukrainian win would include most of the population of Crimea. Winning would not be a liberation, it would be a conquest. Closer to a shorter term Nagorno-Karabakh than de Gaulle rolling into Paris.

As for media containment, I just don't believe in it anymore. It doesn't exist.

https://sectv.com/lehigh-valley/channel-lineup/

If you live in PA (the keystone swing state) and you get CNN, you also get Fox News NewsMax and OANN. Twitter is somewhere between open to and pushing right wing stories.

Who is doing the containment, the newspapers no one reads?

For all the efforts of the NYT and Slate, for some godforsaken reason I know where Loudon Virginia is, and more about Hunter Biden than I ever wanted to know. When a story gets momentum, it goes. People still do really believe and care about things.

I mean, the UGCC convincing Ukraine to suspend freedom of religion isn’t on Fox News.

The kind of Ukraine win you are talking about probably leads to nuclear weapons being used. Which is bad.

There is no world where Ukraine wins decisively. Both sides are tired and maintaining stalemates.

With the impending Russian winter, it is too late to start a fresh invasion. There isn't enough time to establish control of newly captured outpost and establish supply chains before the country freezes over.

I agree with this. I was responding to a comment from the the other poster about Ukraine conquering Crimea.

Exactly.

So Kamala can't have Ukraine lose, and she can't have Ukraine win. She can't have Israel lose, and she can't have Israel win (although that's more or less categorically impossible anyway). Only bad news from abroad.

For all the efforts of the NYT and Slate, for some godforsaken reason I know where Loudon Virginia is, and more about Hunter Biden than I ever wanted to know. When a story gets momentum, it goes.

I don't think you're exactly a typical normie.

If you live in PA (the keystone swing state) and you get CNN, you also get Fox News NewsMax and OANN. Twitter is somewhere between open to and pushing right wing stories.

This might have (and did) work back in 2016, people were a bit more open mided back then. Nowadays any news coming from the outgroup is immediately dismissed.

People still do really believe and care about things.

I sure hope you're right.

Kamala has picked a golden retriever of a VP candidate

Stolen valor.

JD Vance is clearly a terrible VP candidate

Outside the media distortion field he's an extremely capable speaker.

This kind of political analysis basically assumes that the mainstream media frame is the only frame. It isn't. Most voters reject it.

can you show me examples of JD Vance being an effective speaker? I'm not doubting you but I want to see this.

extremely capable speaker

Being an intelligent & articulate speaker does not mean you're a capable speaker.

Obama is considered a generational speaker not because of the contents of his speech. It is because he can spontaneously create 'Russell Crowe Gladiator' tier moments around him, week in and week out. I used to do a lot of stage performances & skit comedy when I was younger. Obama is the greatest performer I've seen on TV. You should slow his videos down and study him. His suits, posture, micro adjustments, voice cracks, his wife, his kids.....everything is perfectly done. If you put a obsessive director in a room and asked him to micro-adjust a public speaking movie scene to platonic perfection, you'd get Obama on any random weekday. And no, this isn't me retroactively fawning over Obama's traits. Because the textbooks were written long before him. This came out years before Obama. If you saw it today, you'd think writer lazily wrote a 'what if Obama had aids' script. But in fact, Obama has modeled himself after the archetypical black inspiration that Hollywood had been doing for decades. (see any Denzel, Morgan Freeman role). Putting on that performance matters big time in popularity contests.

Public speaking is diction, content and performance. JD Vance is bad at this specific type of performative public speaking. And it's the most important one for winning presidential elections.

Pete Buttigieg is a similar type of speaker to Vance, but he adds narrative pacing to his conversations, allowing him to have little "gotcha!" wins and "damn brother!" retorts. Vance comes off.....academic. He is a 'bad' public speaker, and us nerdy types liking his speech style has very little impact on how the rest of the world perceives it.

I always thought Obama was a mediocre public speaker propped up by media hype and social consensus. My evidence for this is that now that he's out of office, nobody especially cares about the occasional speech he gives. Every few years the left falls in blind love with these wunderkids who all present the same front: Obama, Beto, Wendy Davis, Stacey Abrams, now Kamala. The men are skinny and roll their sleeves up, the women are spunky and loud. We go through this routine every few years, and the eventual result is always that, win or lose, this once-in-a-generation political superstar is revealed as another mediocrity who doesn't really know anything but runs great when the media is nice for them. I think subconsciously it's all aping after the JFK aesthetic.

Vance screwed up a conversation with normie minimum wage employees in a donut shop. He is bad at many types of public speaking, though he can write a decent essay.

Stolen valor

I find it hard to believe that the average voter - or indeed almost any voter not already all in for Trump - who cares about the distinction between serving at a rank and retiring at that rank, especially when it's the Minnesota National Guard. Complete inside baseball.

Outside the media distortion field he's an extremely capable speaker.

This kind of political analysis basically assumes that the mainstream media frame is the only frame. It isn't. Most voters reject it.

Well he simply is not popular at the moment.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/jd-vance/

I find it hard to believe that the average voter - or indeed almost any voter not already all in for Trump - who cares about the distinction between serving at a rank and retiring at that rank, especially when it's the Minnesota National Guard. Complete inside baseball.

He lied about serving in combat, or allowed his allies to lie on his behalf. You cannot systematically lie about your military service and then claim, when finally called out, that it doesn't really matter anyways. Then why lie?

Well he simply is not popular at the moment.

JD Vance propelled his unlikely political career on the basis of his memoirs, which were unusually popular and well-regarded. The man is very smart and a good public defender of Trump's ideas. I predict that these qualities will age well and any temporary unpopularity is the result of a concentrated media push.

It isn't. Most voters reject it.

I don't know about the latter, but it's definitely frustrating to have that frame pushed here by default, without anyone bothering to make an explicit argument for it.

That "frame" is basically the Harris campaign strategy. It's being pushed on all the media, social media, and through all the informal Democratic networks in all the institutions. It would be shocking if it didn't make it here.

The Motte is honestly the most fatalistic place I know. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe smart people read history and spend too much time contemplating the death of Western Civilization. The Republicans I know are in good spirits about the election. Trump is polling well, at or slightly above a tie, whene he was supposedly -10 this time 2020. He's been endorsed by Musk, Tulsi, and RFK, and is putting together a unity ticket of conservatives, moderates, and classical liberals. The assassination shocked a lot of powerful people into joining his team. RFK's people are organized and working with MAGA. Then I come here and it's all about how Kamala is too powerful, nothing Republicans can do is working, Trump is hated, Trump is doomed, etc. etc. etc. I really don't get it.

Most people here just hate Trump. 'The adults are back in charge' was the common phrase uttered when Biden was elected, which aged like sour milk. 'It's just a stutter', which also aged like sour milk, was the common reply when others pointed out Biden's declining mental capabilities.

For all the claims that this place is very much right-wing/alt-right coded, it's still very much a liberal-leaning bubble that tries to hide alot of it's biases behind a layer of claimed neutral observations.

They can put it to his name, but it's not Trump they hate. It's the cold reality of neoliberal consensus being shattered. If not for Trump, somebody else would be the face of history not ending, and they would hate him too for rallying the plebs against those that know better.

I know this because Europe has a lot of slightly different political microcosms and every single one has its own avatar of "populism" that the middle class ritualistically fears. In the UK "Trump" is called "Brexit".

I just wish this was the 40s and they actually had the balls to say that their rule is scientific and good and that you shouldn't oppose them because they'll bring wonders and solve your problems instead of protesting impotently that the plebs should know their place and shut up about the obvious shambles their betters are making of everything.

My kingdom for a competent elite, any competent elite.

Most people who post here are Grey Tribe and ensconced in heavily blue cities. Some are not American. They are not a good representation of the American electorate.

There's something to be said about us growing older and more cynical, remembering all the shenanigans they managed to pull off with impunity, and going from outraged amazement to it's-all-so-tiresomed resignation, but personally I think Trump stands a decent chance of winning. The fatalism might set in later on, because the first question I want to ask is "so what?", after seeing how his first term went.

I imagine Napoleon and Alexander felt the same way: so many victories, success unimaginable, unparalleled, and yet, and yet, and yet. So much unrealized. It's really always been this way.

I don't imagine even a Mega Trump who accomplishes more than anyone can imagine can solve all the problems we need to solve. I don't imagine these problems can even be solved in my lifetime. But I imagine that a lot of good can be done anyways.

I find it hard to give Kamala much credit here beyond being able to thread the needle between acting like a harmless ingenue and projecting enough professional demeanor that there is no actual feeling of wrongness when imagining her as a president. Rather, I'm left impressed with the perfectly choreographed campaign that started with a big and somewhat crass push to caricature Trump and Vance as creepy (that TV ad someone here linked a while back). This was followed by an almost complete denial of media air to Trump, except to prominently describe them as "weird" and thereby subtly keep the memory of the initial blitz alive.

The media discipline in following this script was basically flawless and extended even to cultural vassals like DE, and seems to have been calibrated to tickle the same social receptors that enable people to rapidly catch on when a member of their peer group fucked up one time too many and there is an unspoken consensus to quietly cut them off. It must have taken a great amount of internal whipping to stop any and all outlets from defecting and farming TDS engagement by reporting on his shenanigans, but short of dying, killing someone, withdrawing or going to jail, he will probably not get rent-free headlines again.

What surprises me is how little self-respect the corporate media seem to have. The Harris campaign treats reporters with complete disdain. Harris refuses to answer even the most basic questions, let alone explain any substantive policy proposals. The DNC handed out hundreds of press credentials/passes not to actual reporters but to TikTok influencers. The DNC gave clueless celebrities the choicest access to insiders in a display reminiscent of a foreigner’s pre-planned trip to Beijing or Pyongyang. Reporters fawned over the cult of personality of an empty vessel for President. Do they have no shame? Do Comcast and Time Warner shareholders really care so little about journalism in favor of maximizing profit?

Glenn Greenwald, an actual journalist, covered these sentiments very well. I would refer you to his opinion pieces.

Kamala is happy to fight in the dirt with Trump, because she too can have a full debate without saying anything substantial.

Then why hasn't she done any interviews, answered any questions from the media, or agreed to more debates? She's terrified of being put on the spot. Remember, this is the woman who was so nervous about having dinner with a big doner that she had her staff put on a practice dinner for her.

Why is she gunning for debates with mics on, now? It’s clear her team think she can say nothing for an hour while interrupting Trump and looking ‘strong’.

Why is she gunning for debates with mics on, now? It’s clear her team think she can say nothing for an hour while interrupting Trump and looking ‘strong’.

Trump defeats himself when he can't stop talking, which is why his 2020 debate with Biden went so poorly for him due to his constant interruptions, but in the 2024 debate Biden had several uninterrupted moments of looking old and weak. A closed mic helps Trump even though/because it goes against's Trump's nature.

I think they keep changing rules and taunting Trump in the hope of avoiding the debates altogether. Trump is too weird to debate, he does odd things over and over, and reactions to them are unpredictable.

My theory is that she thinks that the longer Trump talks the weaker he looks. Trump talks in streams of consciousness that often wander completely off-topic. For someone like Kamala who has barely any record and Isn't that good of a speaker, why not let him ramble and try to jump on the weakest thing he said?

Don't know if it will work (he's called "Teflon Don" for a reason). But maybe she'll have better luck by not being a geriatric man with a history of gaffes.

My guess: goading trump into responding, then cutting him off with a haughty "a powerful Black woman is speaking" (gestures to cut his mic)

They are absolutely angling for an "I'm speaking" moment. Same thing with Biden's "will you be quiet" moment that received extensive and fawning media repetition.

The biggest sign was how quickly the Trump assassination story died down. The second Biden stepped down, he overwhelmed the media cycle and wiped the slate clean on both sides.

There's a lot of passive voice here! Media outlets consist of actual people that make decisions about things. When we say that the Trump assassination died down, what we mean is that the media doesn't really have much curiosity about the shooter or why he putatively went unnoticed. Likewise, when we say that Biden stepped down and everyone rallied around Kamala, what we mean is that the media stopped being curious about what exactly Nancy Pelosi meant by doing things the "easy way or the hard way" and why it was that no one really mentioned that Biden was plainly senile.

It's hard for me to see how the Trump assassination attempt could have stayed in the news longer than it did. Two things that keep stories in the news are mystery, and continuing developments. There was no mystery as to the identity of the shooter, and the continuing developments were naturally limited. With a murder, there's an announcement, a police investigation, a suspect identified, an arrest, hearings, a trial, appeals, etc. With a missing persons case, like Natalee Holloway or the plane that disappeared, there's endless speculation on what may have happened, as well as updates from the continuing investigation. With this, there was nothing. The shooter was dead, and we didn't learn anything interesting about him other than that he lived a few blocks from where my grandparents lived (which was only of interest to people from the area). After a couple days we learned nothing interesting about the shooter, and nothing of note happened other than the announcement of the House investigation and some remarks by the various law enforcement agencies blaming each other (I probably heard more of this than most because local police talked to the news in Pittsburgh after the Secret Service threw them under the bus).

Now, it might still stay in the news if there's nothing more interesting to talk about, but two days later the GOP Convention started, kicked off by Trump's VP announcement, and that was inherently more interesting than an crime with no further developments. Then a week later Biden dropped out, and the Olympics started, and by that point it was hard to see what coverage they could have even run about the assassination without it being the kind of pointless drivel that causes people to reach for the remote.

There was no mystery as to the identity of the shooter

Officially, maybe, but speculation about Maxwell Yearick is still circulating on social media.

The shooter was dead

The patsy was dead, and what about the other shooters?

The patsy was dead, and what about the other shooters?

More effort than this, please.

This is illustrative of the complete lack of interest being shown by the media. We have many eyewitnesses saying multiple shooters. We have audio from all over with bullets sounding, and we can count them, and it doesn't match what the patsy allegedly did.

But if you don't know there were other shots, and don't know there were other shooters, because the media you choose has chosen to keep you uninformed of that fact, then what an I supposed to do? I can't choose for you.

Didn't it come out pretty quickly that local police returned fire, missed, and then the service ended the issue? That's multiple different guns right there.

The congress-dude who's independently investigating (see gattsuru's link) says that the local SWAT guy ran across the open field towards the action, engaged with his AR-15 and got one round off hitting the butt of the guy's rifle (ie. pretty near his face and a good shot all things considered) causing the shooter to pause his activities and possibly jamming the gun by fucking up the buffer tube -- pretty interesting stuff, and the fact that you or I (who are presumably more interested than average, given our current venue) didn't hear about it on the news is indeed kind of... weird.

I did hear that police (although I guess SWAT if we want to be specific) returned fire and missed, I didn't hear the specific character of the miss. This is probably best explained by a. the U.S. government does not want everyone spending a great deal of time thinking about how incompetent everything about this was. b. the media doesn't want anybody thinking about this as part of their Kamala vibes push.

The shooter was dead, and we didn't learn anything interesting about him other than that he lived a few blocks from where my grandparents lived (which was only of interest to people from the area).

There were repeated and conflicting reports about the shooter's social media (including the possibility that [the deputy FBI director in charge of the investigation mislead Congress on the matter), the shooter's body was cremated before the autopsy was released, we have no information about how the Secret Service fucked up so badly that they couldn't pick up a radio but the steady trickle of how badly they managed to fuck that up, that particular event was apparently the first(!?) post-Presidency Trump event with any countersniper presence from the Secret Service, and a whistleblower has come out claiming that the Secret Service headquarters "encouraged agents in charge of the trip not to request any additional security assets in its formal manpower request".

Oh, and I still like the 'bicameral, bipartisan' process that the Rowe claims to have, in an organization that doesn't have a 'cameral' to start with.

There's also the part where Congressional democrats had been trying to pass a bill to strip Trump of his Secret Service protection. But none of this matters. Nothing matters unless the Press wants it to matter.

When we say that the Trump assassination died down, what we mean is that the media doesn't really have much curiosity about the shooter or why he putatively went unnoticed.

There's this fascinating genre of Tweet/Post/Comment/Blog that I've seen among certain kinds of Rightists in the last month that goes something like "Why aren't we talking more about the Trump Assassination attempt? That was a really big deal guys!" But they don't seem to have anything to say about it to spark a discussion.

There's some Monday morning quarterbacking stuff with the Secret Service, but it doesn't really seem to be going anywhere interesting. The stochastic terrorism stuff never got any traction, with everything we know about the shooter making it feel like a reach, and there's not much appetite on the Right for "let's all cool down a little." It's not clear to me what advantage he's getting out of going in the little hamster aquarium they have him in now, I don't feel like he's any more likely to get shot tomorrow than he was yesterday.

I'm always kind of confused by this confusion about why the story died down, what else was there to talk about?

Anything to say?

!!!!

Ad data purchased by Heritage shows a person regularly visiting Crooks home was also regularly going to a restaurant next door to FBI in DC.

Whistleblowers from SS say they were told not to ask for more people because none would be given.

SS who killed Crooks were the second shooters at Crooks. First shot by local cops hit Crooks's rifle.

The SS sniper team did not take local police radios set for them for the event..

Plenty of oddities!

What does the first shot hitting the gun mean?

The current Official Story of the shooting is that:

  • A total of ten shots were fired.
  • "8 shots were fired by [the shooter] from his firing (and dying) position on the AGR rooftop."
  • "The 9th shot fired on J13 was from a Butler SWAT operator from the ground about 100 yards away from the AGR building... He stopped [the shooter] and importantly, I believe the shot damaged the buffer tube... This means that if his AR buffer tube was damaged, [the shooter]’ rifle wouldn’t fire after his 8th shot."
  • "The 10th (and, I believe, final) shot was fired from the southern counter-sniper team... entered somewhere around the left mouth area and exited the right ear area. Instant over. This entry-exit aligns with USSS southern counter-sniper team position."

That is, a rando on the ground managed faster and more accurate counter-sniper operations, possibly even disabling the shooter, than the actual federal counter-sniper team.

... Why do we expect significantly higher performance from federal than local sharpshooters? I would think that's a skill that caps fairly quickly.

Sharpshooting is a pretty serious skill, both in terms of developing and maintaining direct shooting ability, and also in terms of developing a broader set of situational awareness, learning to see things rather than patterns, and developing stamina.

More generally, counter-snipers are set up in what they've selected as an ideal position, generally shooting from prone position, and often are working with spotter assistance. The Butler SWAT individual had to sprint from a location with obscured view due to foliage, get a sight picture, and was almost certainly firing from a standing position (albeit possibly with support/cover).

It's 100 yards, which isn't some amazing world-defying feat, but it's one that I would normally expect a counter-sniper team to excel at in ways that most police officers (and most SWAT) don't really prioritize. ((Though obv this guy may well have been an outlier.))

It just seems that expecting talent to out within the context of one shot is poor evidence. I wouldn't expect it to stabilize until we've repeated the exercise at least five times, for the expected talent difference between class b and class a to be at all apparent.

..that SS absolutely fumbled it and even looks somewhat suspect because as the primary security on the they site failed to engage a guy in civilian clothing pointing a rifle at their subject ?

How long did the Uvalde shooting story last in the news? How long did Sandy Hook Elementary stay in the spotlight? Both cases involved controversy, to put it mildly. The incompetence of Uvalde PD rivals even the Secret Service's vaunted inability to pour water from a boot with instructions on the heel.

The 'stochastic terrorism' stuff is always a reach -- it's never a commentary on the perpetrator, but on the rhetoric of your outgroup. The Pulse nightclub shooting was blamed on homophobia until it became clear that it was a terrorist attack. Media bias means that the people in charge of news (90% leftists) likes to make a story about their outgroup, no matter how implausible the tie-in, but has no appetite for doing the same to stories about their ingroup. How long did it take after the Trump assassination attempt for Biden to double down on calling Trump a danger to democracy?

Let's say the roles were reversed -- let's imagine a world where today Kamala Harris dodges a literal bullet by half an inch on live TV, and the shooter turned out to have the internet posting history of Thomas Matthew Crooks. 1) How quickly would the attack be blamed on right-wing extremism, and how persistently would that blame 'stick' once more facts were in? 2) How long would the story remain on the 'front page' of media outlets? 3) How long would the story and its many many permutations (e.g., gun control, Secret Service incompetence) last in the news cycle? 4) How long would the story survive in the public consciousness, off of the front page but still in regular media references (e.g., whenever Trump says anything that could be interpreted as a call for violence?)

The answer feels almost self-evident. The only real question would be, by what margin would Kamala Harris win in November?

I'm always kind of confused by this confusion about why the story died down, what else was there to talk about?

Yet somehow there's never a shortage of 'something else to talk about' in those other cases.

There's no appetite on the part of the victim(s) in this case to make the story about gun control. And the Dems lacked the guts to push it. No other angle really sticks.

Without gun control, we wouldn't talk much about school shootings either.

I have to put my cards on the table: I bought two ARs that Monday on fear of a fresh gun control push. More fool me, I guess.

If Kamala were shot at by a normie Dem they/them of color, the story would disappear almost before the shell casing landed; which would be the equivalent.

TINSTAPP

There Is No Such Thing As A Presidential Prospect

So many anointed ones have flamed out, from Aaron Burr to Adlai Stevenson to Mario Cuomo to Jon Huntsman to HRC. More than four years out, it just doesn't matter. There are fifty maybe presidents for every president.

If Kamala were shot at by a normie Dem they/them of color, the story would disappear almost before the shell casing landed;

The story would be picked up by every major news organization and not dropped for years, much how they responded when Gabbie Giffords was shot, but not when Steve Scalise was shot.

Giffords’ shooting was a huge deal. I don’t think it can be understated how pivotal that event changed American politics. In my opinion, Giffords was being prepared for a long career in the U.S. Senate, perhaps even to become President someday. The shooting changed the trajectory of the U.S. forever. The media was right to cover it so much, because the shooting effectively robbed the U.S. of a future President. In another timeline we might be debating a Trump vs. Giffords election right now.

I say this as someone who lived somewhat close by to the ‘Congress on Your Corner’ event where the shooting happened. It was 2011. Giffords had served in the House of Representatives for the prior four years, and in Arizona state politics for the prior decade. She started in politics at the age of 30, and was 40 years old at the time of the shooting. A Jew, she is related to celebrity stardom (Gwyneth Paltrow) and married a corn-fed, non-Jew military guy, the current junior Senator, Mark Kelly, a man with no political aspirations himself before the shooting happened in 2011. Giffords went to the correct private liberal arts colleges, was a Fulbright Scholar, ran her family’s business, and spearheaded economic development initiatives in Hispanic, rural Arizona. Check, check, check. This was a woman with ambition for higher office. She had never spoken at the DNC but she was young. She, too, could have her 2004 Obama moment. Until a schizophrenic loser tragically came out of the woodwork.

How many ‘Congress on Your Corner’ mass public campaign events do politicians hold nowadays? Basically none, I think. If you’re not an incumbent you still have to hold outreach events, but they happen in private establishments, often with guest lists and operational security to control access. Or you just cut the populist facade and hold dinners that charge $50,000 per plate to attend. The Giffords shooting also sparked the resurgence of the gun control movement. The shooting was the beginning move toward a greater political polarization, since the media blamed Sarah Palin and her ham-fisted Internet ad about putting elected Democrats ‘in the crosshairs’ for unseating them at re-election.

Were the shooting not to happen in 2011, or if Giffords’ career hadn’t effectively ended that day, I have no doubt that she would have been Senator instead of Mark Kelly. They wanted her, not her husband. But she’s part of the same Orwellian Inner Party apparatus, that’s why she got a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2022 as well as a speaking slot at the DNC this year in 2024, long after she’s become irrelevant. The DNC apparatus wanted her to become Senator, maybe even President. But it wasn’t meant to be.

It might have robbed the US of multiple future presidents.

Steve Scaline was the No. 2 House Republican, got shot with half a dozen other Republicans outside, and the media shrugged. Rand Paul got attacked by his neighbor not long after his presidential run, and he got laughed at by the media. Trump almost got his head blown off and the media is not even curioud about the investigation, after several news orgs have put a ban on the iconic photo of Trump pumping his fist. Meanwhile, I remember coverage of Giffords being so overwhelming that Sarah Palin was blamed for the shooting because she had a campaign ad that showed crosshairs.

I can't speak to Giffords' potential. I had never heard of her before the shooting. Maybe she was poised for great things. But there are hundreds of national politicians actively jockeying to become national names, and dozens at any moment who are close to actual power. I can't say with confidence that Giffords would have achieved special renown if not for the shooting. (I don't think it's meaningful that she got a Medal of Honor -- any sitting Congressman who gets shot and lives probably rightfully deserves one.)

Nah. I've never heard a peep from the Mainstream about the trans whatever that shot up that Xtian school. Giffords shooting launched a whole political career, but it's primarily been about, once again, gun control.

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