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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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There has been another attempted assassination of Donald Trump, this time at a rally at the Trump International golf course. The shooter, armed with an AK-74, fled after a brief exchange of gunfire with the Secret Service. Donald Trump is unharmed, and there appear to be no casualties.

Morbid question: If a presidential candidate is killed (or dies) prior to the election, who stands in his place?

Edit: or her place? (I write this only for grammatical balance)

I answered this a few months ago, so here's the copy/paste of that comment. Since that time the GOP has updated the rules on the link I provided, but the rule appears to be the same:

Per the rules of the Dems and the GOP it appears that the Democrats will have a meeting of the national committee, and the new nominee will be selected by a majority vote of the committee, one person, one vote. The Republicans will do the same, but members representing each state will receive the same amount of votes their state had during the convention. The replacement will be selected by a majority vote.

In neither case is it a rule that the Vice Presidential nominee will automatically assume the Presidential nomination.

The rules that govern balloting aren't at all uniform. I suppose you could have a gentleman's understanding that electors would just vote for the replacement even if the ballot could not be altered. But then the electors might expose themselves to liability under faithless elector laws. Some states don't merely punish faithless electors, they automatically cancel their votes and replace them with an alternate.

Yeah, this is a surprisingly complicated question because each state has different laws and it's never really been tested before. The parties can of course "nominate" whoever they want, but in most states the ballots have already been "locked in" and won't change. For example, RFK is going to stay on the ballot in some states, but not others, even though he dropped out and wants to be removed. Doubly complicated because, like you mentioned, you're not technically voting for the candidate themselves, but for electors pledge to them.

I think in practice it would just go to the vice president, because that's kind of their main job. But I would expect to see a lawsuit with some bickering over vague, archaic rules, and maybe get the Supreme Court involved like they did in Bush v Gore. Because, apparently, the Supreme Court is really the Supreme source of all authority in this ridiculous country.

To be fair, the entire point of the supreme court is to adjudicate edge cases like this. They are a lot closer to their intended purpose when they're making up rules to get a faithful procedural outcome than when they're the last word on popular moral debates that ought to be negotiated by Congress.

JD Vance would be the presumptive insert, unless one of his kids wants the job, but I don't think there are firm rules should the GOP decide it wanted otherwise.

We saw the same thing with DNC for Joe's political death. They weren't required to pick Kamala, but they did, largely because doing otherwise would be inconvenient.

Consider that the GOP would have additional pressure towards a Trump legacy pick because they would face the risk of appearing to be involved in the assassination.

It looks like this guy served in the Ukrainian military.

What should I, an American citizen, make of that? A presidential candidate is trying to end their war, and one of their soldiers shows up here to try and kill him?

What in the hell?

The establishment lied wildly about Vietnam. The lies about Iraq were next level inventing WMD in Iraq. They lied about Jessica Lynch, abu ghraib, the UN weapons inspectors and long list of other things.

In Afghanistan they claimed that the 120 000 000 000 dollars wasted on the Afghan national army created an army of 300 000. After a decade of claiming this they changed the narrative in a week admitting that they had basically fabricated this military. Unfortunately, they hadn't fabricated all the spent money.

The Ukraine war has to be the war in modern history with the least investigative journalism. There is basically only narrative and press releases from think tanks being published in the media. In 2003 Bagdhad Bob was interviewed on American TV. In this war, nobody would ever dream of bringing a Russian general on TV for an interview.

It is going to be interesting to see the reaction when the lies start falling apart and the true believers find out their war was roughly as fake all the previous ones.

Baghdad Bob was a meme, not a general or a person who would have been interviewed due to his particular importance.

Sergey Lavrov, for instance, has been interviewed by Western media countless times.

In this war, nobody would ever dream of bringing a Russian general on TV for an interview.

Uhhh

(Oops, looks like I can't tell one Slav from another. Never mind)

Well tbf the distinction between Ukrainian and Russian ethnicity is also a media fabrication and Syrskyi was born in Russia and his family all lives in Russia.

It appears the Ukrainians would disagree strongly with you on that.

Besides, I don’t see how the morality of the war is any different even if they are the same ethnicity. Would Colombia be justified in invading Venezuela?

Oleksandr Syrskyi

Is a Ukrainian general

This one is not Russian. What's your point?

The biggest lie of all was that Ukraine could give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for protection by the West. They fell for the gun control argument. Keep your guns.

They didn't have nuclear weapons, the USSR had weapons that were stored there. It's like if Turkey left NATO and refused to give back the nukes the US keeps there. They wouldn't have the codes to actually use them and would have to reverse engineer new bombs.

Anyone that gives up their WMD's gets punished (see Libya, Iraq etc). Think of the incentives that sends to states like Syria, Iran and North Korea.

The most frustrating part of having a even a barely decent understanding of history is having to constantly deal with people claiming that this time it's different and we must upend all norms to deal with a novel evil which is always made up to be unprecedented.

Don't you worry, they'll sweep this under the rug like all the other ones and continue basking in incompetence like nothing happened.

Even if Putin annexed all of Ukraine you'd find some people to spin this as a win because it unites Europe or something. Western elites are immune from accountability.

The most frustrating part of having a even a barely decent understanding of history is having to constantly deal with people claiming that this time it's different and we must upend all norms to deal with a novel evil which is always made up to be unprecedented.

Amusingly, having watched various sides discussing the Ukraine Conflict for so long, this applies to so many perspective and positions on it that I'd have no idea what position on the conflict this is supposed to be without checking someone's past posting history.

Is the 'this time it's different' mean to refer to the people who are aghast at a war which is the third continuation war of a decade? The credulity given to claims of nuclear thresholds at odds with decades of practice and saber-rattling? The multi-year sustainment of imminent collapse narratives? Are the novel threats justifying upending norms supposed to refer to the Russian imperalists, the Ukrainian nazis, the dreaded American/Western influence? And this is without the issues that come from barely decent understandings of history often also routinely carrying about deliberate misunderstandings that make it into pop history.

It almost certainly wasn't intended to be as omnidirectional as it was, but I thank you none the less.

It's intended at Western elites, but I'll stand by it omnidirectionaly.

I hate how unserious it all is.

What would a “serious” attitude look like to you? In other words, what would you expect of western elites instead?

Which is why I thank you.

(Which was what I meant to write instead of 'think you', so embarrassment on me.)

I mean things like that only work until they don’t. The sheer incompetence of the western elites is on display. The entire plan, as far as I can tell is “Ukraine is the good guy here. We arm them to the teeth, let them do whatever they want, and hope they win before something bad happens.” It’s not working, and worse, we’re putting ourselves in an extremely weak position by doing so, and for little strategic gain. Ukraine doesn’t have much beyond farmland. It’s not Taiwan with a big chip manufacturer base. And we’re depleting weapons and risking nuclear exchange to save Kansas.

How is it not working? They’re losing some land here and there, but otherwise appear to be attritioning the Russians pretty well.

Besides, I thought we were only sending over surplus reserve equipment. Is there any indication that US military readiness has been meaningfully reduced due to this aid?

Calling it now, there will be a terror attack on US soil by Ukrainian aligned elements bitter about the US abandoning them by 2034 (40% chance). (Not counting this one)

Mostly justified, quite frankly, unless they pick civilian non-elite target.

So far Ukrainian and Ukrainian inspired terrorism has: attempted to assassinate a US presidential nominee, attempted and nearly assassinated a European Prime Minister, blown up a major piece of German infrastructure causing serious damage to their economy.

From a strategic point of view they've been more successful than any recent anti western terrorist group other than al-qaeda via 9/11. Since ISIS never really got close to people in power or major infrastructure. They've also managed to get more free military gear from the west than al-qaeda.

The perverse incentives globalism and empire creates makes for some bizarre politics.

edit: oh they also keep a 180k person list of enemies of the state with personal info of Ukrainian enemies which includes westerners like Elon Musk, Viktor Orban, Roger Waters, Roy Jones Jr, and Berlusconi.

oh they also keep a 180k person list of enemies of the state with personal info of Ukrainian enemies which includes westerners like Elon Musk

The man who's absolutely critical to their war effort through Starlink and could trivially sabotage all of it?

Quite an outrageous claim.

So far Ukrainian and Ukrainian inspired terrorism has: attempted to assassinate a US presidential nominee, attempted and nearly assassinated a European Prime Minister, blown up a major piece of German infrastructure causing serious damage to their economy.

Also: lied about Russia shooting a missile into a Poland in a very obvious attempt to grow their war into WW3 by dragging NATO into it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_missile_explosion_in_Poland?useskin=vector

(It was a Ukrainian missile)

Also: lied about Russia shooting a missile into a Poland in a very obvious attempt to grow their war into WW3 by dragging NATO into it

Or, more likely, a very obvious attempt to avoid taking the blame themselves.

I thought he was just a NAFO guy, a hanger-on looking to help Ukraine but not actually associated with it officially, (though he was in an ad for Azov at Mariupol?) Definitely a sketchy person with these seeming Afghanistan-Ukraine connections. And all the other stuff he's been doing, running around with machineguns and punching rapists: https://x.com/718Tv/status/1835491672857137620

Does he really have any connections ? That's the thing. He's very sketchy but those pictures of him in a cheap suit looking lost in Kiev don't inspire confidence in me. He had websites where he was soliticing passports numbers and saying he could get these people visas.

He appears he wants to have connections, and people on X are making a big deal out of him following some CIA girlboss on there, but people are generally stupid and confirmation bias is king.

Personally I'm leaning towards the guy being basically a fantasist and not very competent.

The only thing he did right was apparently camp out for 12 hours on the golf course, expecting that Trump will go there to relax. Had he used the time to properly camouflage himself, he might have succeeded.

It seems that he fought in Ukraine, he wrote a book about it: https://www.newsweek.com/ryan-routh-donald-trump-encouraged-assassination-book-1954433

Nobody is leaping out to debunk this: https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1835552460481478829

I don't think he's CIA either, surely the CIA has more sophisticated tools than this guy? But he could definitely be a useful idiot for somebody.

Stop reposting this everywhere

fought in Ukraine

On this very thread, 2 days ago @bro linked: https://search.pullpush.io/?kind=submission&until=1726297200&q=%22ryan%20routh%22&size=100 which has the group he claims to have volunteered in disavowing his membership, 7 months ago...

I can't believe I'm saying this, but if there was ever a would be assassin that could be a CIA asset it sure wouldn't be hard to convince me this guy is

Why do you say that? He seems awfully incompetent at… everything

Bit late now but looks like I was wrong, Blumenthal says he fought in Ukraine and even wrote a schizo rant about it: https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1835552460481478829

I hope the CIA hires people who can write out a full gramatical sentence though, the competence crisis is really severe if this is the kind of people they get.

The obvious joke is that this is the CIA op whilst the previous one was the FBI one, and inter-service communication is as good as it usually is.

Does Trump have a dog for the ATF entry into this contest to shoot? Maybe we can work in the DHS somehow?

If ATF gets involved trying to kill Trump, they'll probably wing Harris. If she had a pet they'd get that, but they don't.

2 months ago:

Warning about Ryan Routh: he is not, and never has been, associated with the International Legion or the Ukrainian Armed Forces at all. He is not, & never has been, a legion recruiter. He is misrepresenting himself and lying to many people.

Though it does seems he was in Ukraine at some point

Wild claims on his twitter seem consistent with him being a high-agency crazy:

#pnhhaiti I have thousands of Afghan solders that wish to serve for the Haiti national police at cheap wages. 1000 with passports ready to fly.

I mean no offense here but some random “they them” with 700 followers and a rainbow flag in their name doesn’t seem like an official spokesthem for the Ukrainian military[1]. Here’s another equally uncredible person saying the opposite: https://x.com/raheemkassam/status/1835440928074736007

Also your first link had like 10 different redirects and popups and stuff. Here is just a direct link: https://x.com/v8mile/status/1804097069876916506

[1]: what I mean is that this person seems focused on some sort of gender crusade. An equivalent would be linking me to a page dedicated to the San Francisco 49ers football team, but that wants to talk authoritatively on Iranian nuclear policy.

Here's a couple other people who had anything to say about him before today (you have to manually click "Search" unfortunately), all on the /r/volunteersforukraine subreddit. As a cautious heuristic I'd consider any random person who had anything at all to say about him before today to be more credible than any random person who has anything at all to say about him after today.

Bonus from that search: here's a reddit account of his that nobody else seems to have found yet.

He was also in a NYT article in March 2023

The thing about western volunteers in Ukraine, which is a scene I've looked into before, is that anybody can just show up and do and claim whatever, it's all incredibly ad-hoc, and it massively disproportionately attracts high-agency crazy people.

I linked xcancel because it's currently a functioning way to read twitter without an account, it's a straightforward mirror of twitter. I've never encountered popups on it, though it has a single layer of bot check redirect thing that kicks in on new visits or every few hours of use.

Bonus from that search: here's a reddit account of his that nobody else seems to have found yet.

lmao, "TaiwanForiegnLegion?" So he wasn't just a (attempted) Ukraine volunteer, he also wanted to volunteer for Taiwan? And then he goes off on his own to shoot Trump?

Yeah. "attracts high-agency crazy people" indeed.

But hey, give him credit for "taking heroic responsibility" like a good rationalist. (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R4f4RdGBdZsPzyJYk/a-discussion-of-heroic-responsibility)

edit: he has a website too! https://taiwanforeignlegion.com/. And it's really crazy, just a giant block of text with no paragraphs.

If you had asked me beforehand which special interest would be most likely to produce radicals who try to kill Trump, I would not have guessed Ukraine. Trying to make sense of it in hindsight, maybe the fact that volunteers for Ukraine tend to be violence-oriented boosts their likelihood of committing violence.

Trump has been pretty vocal about ending the war. I’d go as far as saying it’s one of his main talking points.

Frankly I’m surprised there hasn’t been more of this.

Trump has been pretty vocal about ending the war. I’d go as far as saying it’s one of his main talking points.

If you ignore most of what he or his campaign says, I suppose. It certainly doesn't make his platform, or his campaign website, or most of his speeches, and when more distant campaign associates raise end-the-war proposals, they often come with caveats like 'and if Russia doesn't agree to what we think is reasonable, big increases in Ukraine aid.'

Trump has repeatedly said that, if elected, he will negotiate an end to the war before he even takes office.

Presumably what this means is telling Ukraine they get no more assistance until they agree to a truce.

More comments

Jesus Christ. I hope they find the guy soon.

AK-47, though. As far as I know, -74s are a lot less common in the U.S.

Edit: I just clicked a WaPo link for “more information” and it expanded one sentence into two. Apparently the only substance on that website was some sort of livestream statement by the FBI. That kind of webpage should be a crime.

AK-47

Gun nerds are saying SKS

SKS

The photos are not super clear, but it does appear to be a sporterized SKS with a scope and modified to take generic AK magazines. This kind of rifle is actually a sort of meme gun in the firearms enthusiast community, though not as much now as in the past.

Gun nerd time: there are actually very few AK-47s in the US and they tend to be collectors items that sell for obscene amounts of money for a few reasons. First, very few were actually made. The gun most people are referring to as an "AK-47" is usually an AKM or an AK-74, all of which belong to the AK family/pattern of rifle. Actual AK 47s were made in 3 generations in the early 50s, were expensive to make due to using block milling operations, and very few made it into the US before the '68 ban on imports. A trophy weapon brought back into the US before the '68 ban sold at auction last year for over $250k.

Before the fall of the USSR, there were very few imported AK pattern guns that had the legal modifications to make them semi-auto only and thus legal for import. Then after the USSR fell, we had the 90s assault weapon ban. You do see some monstrosities from this era around, but they are undesirable for collectors. Wide availability of US legal, semi auto only, AK pattern rifles only start after the expiration of the (absurd) 90s assault weapons ban. The ammo was also hard to find.

But the SKS has always been available as its only ever been a semi auto gun with an internal 10 round magazine, satisfying the legal requirements of even the most hostile states like California. They do look superficially similar to an AK pattern rifle (the mechanical action is different) though, so with some creativity and modifications you can dress one up in the costume of an AK well enough to continue to fool people who don't know much about fire arms right up to the present day.

edit - here's a photo of basic models of the two rifles, SKS on the left. https://i0.wp.com/coldboremiracle.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/JAW01066.jpg

Republican congressional baseball team shooter also had an SKS. Also failed to kill anyone.

It's a fine rifle, SKS owners just aren't sending their best.

Rifle is fine?

Why you want rail for Kalashnikov? Is not good enough as procured from Izhevsk Mechanical Works? You think needs improvement? Then maybe you find job with army of Russia! You have drinks with Mikhail Kalashnikov, trade story of many weapons designed and details of school for engineering!

Or maybe you not do this. Probably is because you never design weapon in whole life. You look at fine Russian rifle, think it need crazy shit stick on all sides of weapon. You have disease of American capitalist, change thing that is fine for no reason except to look different from comrade. You put cheap flashlight of Chinese slave factory on one side, you put bad scope of American middle west on other side, you put front pistol grip on bottom so you are like American movie guy John Rambo. Maybe you put sex dildo on top to fuck yourself in asshole for making shameful travesty of rifle of Mikhail Kalashnikov, no?

Rifle is fine. You fuck it, it only get heavy and you still no hit largest side of barn. Go to firing range, practice with many magazine of cartridge. Then you not need dumb shit put on side of rifle.

(Mods plz no ban this isn't even the active thread anymore)

Thank you. This warms my heart.

I'm just delighted to see the classics are still appreciated.

I've shot an SKS a couple times. It is indeed a fine rifle. The stripper clips can be tricky if you are not used to them.

The SKS is the ultimate successor to the Winchester 94- all the same fundamental limitations, same form factor/overall size, same power of cartridge (.30-30 is far weaker than its case size would otherwise suggest).

The AK kind of fits that description too, but only in the sense that it technically has a Win 94 compatibility mode (the Saiga rifles being the best example) rather than having been designed solely with that mode in mind.

Yeah 7.62x39 is not at all a well designed round. They took the old 7.62x54R and shortened the case length until it was small enough. No design process or attempt to optimize for performance. You end up with a moderate sized round with low recoil and poor ballistic performance. They could have instead made a deadlier higher-velocity flatter-shooting round. But they didn't want to.

To leap to the defense of the SKS: it is light, not too long and low recoil. I have a Korean War M1 and that thing is heavy and the ammo is enormous in comparison. Keeping size and weight in mind, I'd want the SKS.

But strange these two would-be murderers didn't bring any modern magazine fed rifle.

More comments

There are very fine rifles on both sides

My initial reaction is: this is fucking insane.

Most people just shrugged as far as I can tell.

Not sure how I’m feeling about my country with the slide of the last decade and now this.

NBC's Lester Holt: "Today's apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail. Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants" in Springfield, Ohio, resulting in bomb threats.

This just hits so hard to me. I want Trump to win (even though he's a terrible person) because I want these people to lose so much.

It doesn't surprise me so much after the 'Trump falls on stage at rally' headlines a couple of months ago.

That was my initial reaction to the first attempt.

I was then horrified at the lack of interest and muted reactions on the left.

I then recognized the lack of interest as analogous to the lack of interest and muted reactions by republicans after a school shooting.

Both sides are disgusting.

Why are you making such a comparison?

Because both events involve guns being used in ways we don't want guns to be used?

School shootings aren't normally politically driven. Assassination attempts targeting politicians always are.

Which is precisely why assassinations are less horrifying?

The OP was discussing the reactions of Democrats (well, OK, technically not them specifically, but their side) and Republicans - that is, political parties. Why should their reactions be the same to politically motivated and not politically motivated events?

Careful selection of "politically driven" rather than "politically motivated." July 13th doesn't seem to have an agenda aligned with either of the political sides.

Another reason for the comparison: they both have the same direct solution.

That was my initial reaction to the first attempt.

I was then horrified at the lack of interest and muted reactions on the left.

I then recognized the lack of interest as analogous to the lack of interest and muted reactions by republicans after a school shooting.

what exactly am I supposed to do about either of those things? I'm not in the secret service and I'm not a cop. I'm just a regular guy. there's nothing I, personally, can do to stop these things.

Usually when people get worked up they mean "we as a society should change things to stop it." meaning, ban guns. Well, even if I agreed with that, I'm still just one voter, so I can't actually ban guns.

So what it really means is "I want you to spend all your time posting political memes on social media and being a nervous wreck." Well, been there and done that. It's a waste of time.

I think it's healthy that more people are starting to realize you can read about these things in the news and then just... move on with our lives. The news media wants us to obsess over these things, but there's no good reason we should.

There's a difference between a lack of reaction from someone who doesn't react to other things, and a lack of reaction from someone who does. You are in the former category. The leftists who are being criticized here are in the latter. When people obsess over a lot of anti-Trump political causes, it's not an answer to say "what can they do about the assassination, obsess over it?"

(Of course the school shooting is a false equivalence. The school shooting is not done for political reasons, and failure to support gun bans isn't to failure to react.)

I mean, I think this is just par for the course. The entire system is starting to collapse and as such nearly catastrophic systems failures are normal. We’re used to crime, drugs, shitty roads school shooters, random spree shooters, and a dozen other things that would shock people if they visited from 1950 or before. I mean or swan song is so bad at this point that we had congressional hearings about UFOs and the reaction was fairly muted. At this point, Mr. Spock could land on the White House lawn and most people would have muted reactions. We’re used to things being completely messed up.

The entire system is starting to collapse and as such nearly catastrophic systems failures are normal.

You've had assassination attempts on Presidents and much worse violence than this before back in the 60's and 70s and it did not lead to the system collapsing. And the economy was worse then as well. Maybe it is different now, but it's certainly something the US has been through before.

Yeah, we had assassination attempts, but we didn’t have two nearly successful attempts on the same political figure within two months of each other. That’s pretty unusual. And especially as by the second time, the SS had intelligence and knew that there was an Iranian plot to get Trump. They still can’t get their act together.

Actually... Ford had two almost successful attempts against him 17 days apart in 1975. One missed, the other forgot to chamber a round. Both women, which is doubly unusual. And in the former case it wasn't even the Secret Service who pushed the gun away so it missed, a bystander had to intervene!

Its unusual, but its not unheard of. And Ford was President then, not just a candidate. Unfortunately high profile attempts can spawn further attempts and perfectly securing spaces like golf courses and rallies is hard.

I'd agree with this, but also note that two of the main things that has changed since the 60s and 70s is the nature of how we know of eachother in an information sense, and for Americans in particular a collapse in shared trust in systems.

On the information front, something that's changed for everyone is the rise of social media. For all the worries of disinformation or misinformation or foreign interference, one of the other negatives of it is that it truly does allow people to see and hear what others may think of them- and that it's often both vocal and vitriolic disapproval. In the 60s and 70s, when countries had only a handful of centralized media presenters at a national level of visibility, the centralized news would tend to be... maybe not consensus based, but rarely radicalized, and radical-fringe views would be more limited to local media that simply couldn't be conveyed across a country in real time. People who might have had heated political fights in person were functionally physically separated in the information sphere. With the rise of the internet and social media, people in political segment A can absolutely know the loathing/mockery/opposition/subversion of their fellow citizens in segment B, often aided by the highly public organized acts of meanness that comes with such partisanship. The toxicity or violent might have been worse in the 60's and 70's, but the information flow and prevalence was much 'better' (in the sense of being less immediate and pervasive). In the 70s, if you didn't want to be bothered by news and views from other parts of the country, you could change the channel- now you can't open up most social media platforms without an algorithmic push of some variation of a sneer club / outrage bait of how bad-stupid-evil your outgroup citizens are... or, if you dare to be heterodox and observe another tribe, how bad-stupid-evil your ingroup is.

Combine that with a collapse of trust in shared systems- from religious to governmental to even informational- and even if the individual behaviors are 'better' than in the 60's/70's, you're working from a worse position in terms of social coping mechanisms to deal with the issues that are there.

I know this is a typical argument from dissident righties that world is a failing state and everything is collapsing, but conservatively, the world is a better place for approximately 70% of the world's population. Even using a purely American perspective, the median American city is still wealthier and for instance, has less crime than broad swathes of the 70's and 80's. Yes, if you truly think the fact there are more non-white people and that non-straight people of all sorts are open about it is truly a disastrous thing, OK, but this happened to Gerald Ford in '76.

less crime than broad swathes of the 70's and 80's

I see what you did there . From the OP:

We’re used to crime, drugs, shitty roads school shooters, random spree shooters, and a dozen other things that would shock people if they visited from 1950 or before.

The unprecedented crime wave of 1967-94 (roughly) was the consequence of policies (the "Great Society" etc.) enacted by entrenched political forces that are still in a hegemonic position today.

Also, "70%"? Where does that figure come from? Who are the other 30%?

there are more non-white people and that non-straight people of all sorts are open about it

My I ask why you're spinning the whole issue like this? The OP didn't make any such references anywhere.

How did Great Society policies lead to high crime waves?

Mainly by enabling and normalizing single mother households i.e. fatherlessness, as far as I know. There was also a tendency of more lenient sentencing.

When I told my wife (checking phone in between commercials) she said “you’ve got to be kidding.” It seems less shocking but more “this is sad”

The loss of institutional prestige in the SS has some downstream effects. Most notably, every crackpot in the country now knows (whether true or not) that the service is not protecting Trump, or is wildly incompetent. I would expect political assassination attempts in general to rise for a while, as nobody is scared of the talent on display from that particular agency. The myth of the secret service terminators stopped more guns than the actual service ever did.

Now? The first marginally competent goon to rock up is gonna have a field day, but apparently today is not that day.

Cops at the press conference are saying the guy was spotted (or his gun barrel was spotted) by a secret service officer. Basically praising him.

Will a second assassination attempt give Trump a bump in the polls? The first one didn't. I'm curious to see how this plays out.

The problem for Trump is neither of these been have been obvious Democrat's. From what I can tell, Ford didn't get any huge approval bump from his two attempts from weirdos like Squeaky Fromme and even for Hinckley, the reason Reagan got sympathy is he dealt with it with good humor and sympathy for people like Brady who got killed.

From what's been revealed, this guy is a weirdo swing voter who voted for Trump in 2016, went to Bernie & Tulsi in 2020, is pro-Ukraine, but anti-vax, and is was trying for a Haley/Vivek ticket. That's not a political ideology you can stick on Democrat's.

Plus, there is the small matter that the moment voters outside of the 40-45% Republican hard limit listen to Trump, they like him less.

He literally had a biden-harris bumper sticker. This is just playing that smug little "you can't prove he's a Democrat because we literally refuse to report the evidence" game.

This guy is a huge Dem. He is all in on Ukraine and has lots of posts saying that Kamala should go visit the people who got shot at the Trump rally to one-up him.

It appears much more correct to say he was an anti-Trump republican.

A Republican who had a Biden/Harris bumper sticker. A Republican who is for infinity migration and into castration culture.

Nah. What made him a republican ?

Huge Dem's aren't Vivek fanboys. He's only a 'huge Dem' by the standards that anybody who isn't 100% for Trump a 'huge Dem.' He's like many, many people, a weirdo with ping-pong political opinions and obvious mental issues.

It seems like his political donations were pretty heavy act blue

If state media can memory hole that photo of Trump bleeding from his ear while fist pumping with an American flag in the background in only a week than this will be deleted from mainstream memory within 24 hours. Assuming it even makes it beyond local news coverage.

There's no hella epic based video, so this one won't even energize the base. Maybe if there's a manifesto or something

Press conference happening now: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2W1Yi_Np64U

some live thoughts:

  • They found the vehicle because an eyewitness got the plate of the shooter (how TF is there not a least 1 drone orbiting wherever Trump is literally at all times??)

  • Guy is in custody and alive

  • Witnessed ID'd the guy

  • In the bushes where the guy was was an AK with a scope, a gopro, and ceramic plates.

  • SS spotted the guy before Tump was actually near him and engaged him first.

how TF is there not a least 1 drone orbiting wherever Trump is literally at all times??

I would go mad if I had to listen to a drone buzzing above me 24x7. Trump, presumably, would too.

No reason to have a SS agent run down to the store and buy a DJI to buzz around at 100'. Just get a domestic MIC prototype and fly it higher.

Having any drones in the air makes it quite difficult to detect if a hostile drone is in the air I suppose.

...uhh..what?

You know where your drone is. Today you could even have its position updated live on their tracking devices.

This was the stated reason on the podcast I listened to, perhaps Cleared Hot, that featured an ex Secret Service agent discussing the first Trump assassination attempt.

Wow. Kudos to SS

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