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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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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.