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I just assume that if the deep state actually set up a shooting to assassinate Trump, they would probably succeed at killing him. It's hard for me to believe that they would manage to get a shooter within fairly easy range of him, yet the shooter would miss. The lone wolf theory seems way more plausible to me. In any case, if the deep state has had 10 years in which to kill Trump and they haven't done it, then they are fairly irrelevant as a political force, which is part of my original point.
As for the progressive status quo, I don't know where you are getting that from. I disagree with progressives on a range of issues, including HBD, policing, and the economic consequences of socialism. The average progressive would certainly not classify me as a fellow progressive if exposed to my unfiltered political ideas.
If Trump didn't turn his head at the exact second he did, he'd be dead now. Call it luck, call it coincidence, call it providence, it wasn't incompetence that saved Trump that day. You can, if you are naive or lying, claim incompetence put him in that position, which is exactly why pretending to be retarded has been such an integral strategy for the deep state. And it is also why the lead 'counter sniper' in Trump's SS detail was two years into his career, wasn't on counter sniper detail, and forgot his radio. And why that chubby cutie was playing hot potato with her gun. And why they blamed the local police. And every other insane detail from that fiasco.
As for the progressive status quo, it's because you keep buying into this ridiculous hysteria despite a decade of fake news declaring every saucy tweet Trump fires off the end of America and democracy. And never mind that the people we supposedly put in charge of promoting America and democracy abroad were primarily lining their own pockets but also helping fund groups that literally fucking hate America and democracy. And you don't mind it, because the media, which you inexplicably still trust, tells you it's just defunding trans operas and aids cures and you probably can't fix it anyway. You have to recognise by now that you are being manipulated. I mean how can you read the motte, read posts by people like @WhiningCoil and @jeroboam and me and not realise that "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law." is a blatant appeal to red tribe values, in the same category as 'The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time' and '1776 WILL COMMENCE AGAIN'?
Edit: edited out a cheap shot
This is astoundingly stupid. No theory of a hyper powerful deep state can explain why a deep state that wanted to assassinate someone couldn’t do so.
It's just YET ANOTHER amazing coincidence that negatively affects Trump huh? It's a good thing people don't have agency or we'd have to wonder about the motives of the people involved in these coincidences. We might ask why, the very first time anyone attempted to kill Trump, the first guy to give it a shot is the world's most opsec responsible teen with no social media presence they can find except some small things suggesting NO MOTIVE! Well that's unfortunate Mr Trump, so sorry you attract lunatics! How did such a green assassin even get to take off the shot though? Because he was up against agents just as green! As a tangent, did you know the ss had been maliciously complying with Trump throughout the campaign? They repeatedly refused to provide him with proper security, and the Butler rally was no different - they forgot to bring enough comms, so they had zero contact with local police. Of course, that doesn't really matter since members of the public were telling them about Crooks and THEY JUST FUCKING IGNORED THEM.
Like I said, you can call it all coincidental incompetence, but I would dispute which of us is being astoundingly stupid if you did. I don't mean they are hyper powerful, I mean that some key players, particularly in leadership, are compromised. After all, I'm told Trump was so hateable a third of the country would be happy with him dead, surely that includes some senior staff at the secret service. So they meet the minimum requirements for service, and mysterious coincidences just keep interrupting the work flow, no one is to blame for the lack of radios, no one is to blame for the counter snipers not being put on counter sniper detail, and so on and so on.
Nope. Three times is enemy action.
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You know what, since I've been summoned...
You know how virtually the only thing the FBI ever did (prior to persecuting their political opponents) was textbook entrapment? Talk some neuro divergent weirdo in their mom's basement into joining ISIS or committing a McVeigh style attack, sell them some fake (or real) materials to do it, and then immediately arrest them? Take a few victory laps proudly in public about how they caught another "terrorist" and they're doing such a good job keeping America safe. Then depending on whether they caught a white guy or a brown guy, one party or the other would grumble. And libertarians. Always the libertarians.
Isn't it weird how as often as the FBI does this, we've never heard about them accidentally letting someone they radicalized slip between the cracks and actually commit an atrocity? I mean, you'd have to assume it's happened at least once. Everyone fucks up eventually. Maybe it was Bob's last day and the hand off of his casework was just sloppy. And if I were the FBI, and that happened on my watch, I'd bury that shit as hard as I possibly could.
I think about that sort of thing a lot with the Trump shooter in Butler PA. Except minus the part about him accidentally slipping between the cracks after being radicalized. It would be remarkable with all the declassification and all the regime enemies in charge of intelligence if we ever find out. But given that google searches for "Bleach bit", "lawyers", "wipe hard drive" and "offshore bank" are exploding in DC, I suspect they have their tracks well covered. You know... were that the case.
I've personally thought the Las Vegas shooting was caused exactly by this, but I confess I have no evidence beyond twisted Occam's Razor and the overbearing presence of federal law enforcement in the aftermath.
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McVeigh described himself as the person whose fingers were slipped through originally to his attorneys. Of course, just one version of the narrative.
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1991 World Trade Center bombing. Draw Mohammed Day attack, stopped only by an off duty municipal cop who knew nothing about the FBI involvement. But yeah, probably there's been quite a few others they buried.
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About the assassination attempt: look, it's just clear to me that there is nothing necessarily surprising or conspiratorial about the Secret Service fucking up after successfully protecting one of the most hated figures in US history, who also constantly does outdoor rallies, for 10 years. It would be surprising if they didn't eventually fuck up.
As for your second paragraph, I think that you profoundly misunderstand where I am coming from. I have spent years regularly arguing against people who engage in anti-Trump hysteria. As recently as a few months ago, I was telling lib friends that their horror of Trump was overblown and misguided. I'm not some kind of crypto leftist who is here to convince people to hate Trump, for fuck's sake. I am telling you the truth, which is that until recently I thought Trump was part good and part bad but I felt he would be effectively contained by checks and balances, but I am now worried because I am beginning to see the checks and balances waver. You may agree with me, you may disagree with me, but the reality is that I am not making a bad faith argument. I am literally just telling you about the evolution of my political thought. A few months ago I really thought that Trump's second term would be a nothingburger, both because Trump's first term was a nothingburger and because I assumed that libs and leftists would put up more resistance than they actually are.
The idea that I "inexplicably trust" the media is absurd to me. I have spent years criticizing the media to anyone who will listen. If you assume that I am some slavish devotee of the media, you are just plain wrong. I hate and distrust the mainstream media, but that doesn't mean that I have to like Trumpism.
What are two examples of actually illegal behavior that you think the checks and balances are wavering on?
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"Eventually"?
Where are all the other assassination attempts that they caught? If some guy showing up with a rifle at all those rallies were some sort of regular occurrence, and this one retarded dude lucked out and slipped through, what you say would make sense -- but this is not the case.
They have one job, and the first chance they had to do it, they fucked it up. OR -- they've been doing their job OK, then one day they didn't.
I do not believe you.
There was the second attempt two months later where the Secret Service caught that guy on the golf course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Donald_Trump_in_Florida
And this list of other stories I don't remember even hearing half of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_incidents_involving_Donald_Trump
11 incidents in 9 years.
Mostly unarmed crazy people with no ability to do actual harm -- you can't brush this off as 'oh bad luck, bound to happen eventually what with so much public speaking and so many attempts on his life' when the very first guy who came to a speech with a gun was able to get multiple shots in the near vicinity of Trump's brainstem.
They didn't eventually fuck up -- they fucked up on the first try.
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I agree with you on the assassination attempt side: along with the various procedural faults and failures to analyze or punish the source of those procedural faults, the post-incident review has not gone well.
On the other...
June 8, 2023:
October 11th, 2024:
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Huh this is a puzzle to untangle. If you have looked into the Butler shooting and not trusted the media and you aren't a crypto leftist or unable to speak English, then claiming the secret service successfully protected Trump is truly comical. And hey, the FBI successfully saved Gretchen Whitmer yeah? What a success!
Moving on, I was indeed beginning to suspect you were a crypto leftist. Turning that tweet into the incipient rise of fascism is that fucking crazy in my view. But my original image of you is as someone on the outskirts of the pmc class who sees centrism as a useful heuristic for navigating reality. Which is to say that you at the very least tolerate the progressive status quo, you just want it to be less intrusive. I view the progressive status quo as the civilisational equivalent of dating a girl with borderline personality disorder.
I can see how this is unfair to you, but you have to understand I've already lived through half a decade of monthly 'boy I was all on board the maga train at first but this latest tweet is terrifying' posts and tweets. Beyond that I really think you should wait until Trump has at least one disaster under his belt before you start worrying. On reflection though I was imprecise with my language, instead of saying that you trust the media, what I should have said is that you don't distrust the media. And if you think you do, you don't do it enough. Until your first instinct when you read or hear anything on the news or reddit or Facebook or X etc is to call bullshit, you don't distrust the media enough.
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We live in one of two worlds:
The Secret Service was genuinely trying to protect Trump and were so clownishly incompetent that people in the crowd were warning them about a guy with a gun going up onto the roof but still let him take his shots. Men With Guns are supposed to be their forte, this is the one thing they're not supposed to let happen. Why wasn't there a drone or something providing overwatch? How hard can it be?
The Secret Service/Deep State was trying to kill Trump and chose some MKUltra victim who wasn't a good shot, as opposed to something like a drone or a precision mortar strike which would at least be reasonable for them to heroically fail to intercept. Intercepting drones is hard.
Either way they don't come off as very capable.
The way I look at it, Trump is:
The Secret Service might be good, but they are not perfect. It's not surprising if they just genuinely slipped up after almost 10 years of protecting Trump.
I don’t see incompetence when the crowd is literally walking up to the SS and telling them they see a guy with a gun on a roof and they don’t do anything. It’s just not possible that a group of people trying to protect someone have multiple people report a man on a roof with a gun and just don’t do anything.
If you've ever tried to manage people in a large and complicated setting like a concert, a mass causality event and so on you know it's extremely hard to triage these sorts of things and get them to the right people. Even something as self-contained as running a single patient trauma or a two pilot aircraft can result in poor communication and distribution of information.
Consider how easy it would be to mentally write this off as "oh yeah that's one of the police sniper teams."
Now if you have one organization that should have a plan for how to handle "tips" like this and not fuck up like this it should be the secret service - but that's incompetence not malice.
The standard way to launder malice is by appointing incompetent underlings for the task.
Are doctors appointed to patients randomly?
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It's possible. The Secret Service are humans, not superpowered ninjas from a movie. They are good at what they do, but the reality is that there are probably like 30 million people in this country who would happily kill Trump if they could do it and get away with it. The Secret Service has managed to successfully protect Trump for 10 years, through hundreds of outdoor rallies and so on. They're not perfect, so it's rational that they eventually fucked up. One might argue that it's weird that the two assassination attempts that we know of that even came close both happened shortly before the election, but that can be explained by the fact that just before the election is precisely when random lone wolves would be most motivated to try to kill Trump.
It might seem weird that the Secret Service would not do anything in reaction to someone telling them they see a guy on the roof with a gun... but at the end of the day, it's a job for them. We all have bad days on the job when we're tired or whatever. Besides, if I my job was protecting Trump for years and having to stand around in all kinds of weather conditions listening to him ramble for hours, and someone told me that there was a reason to think Trump might be about to get shot, I can easily imagine even as an elite Secret Service operator being like "fuck who cares, I'm tired of all this shit".
I think you don't know much about the Secret Service. They are extremely dedicated to their jobs. While their reputation as elites has taken a (justifiable) hit lately, they go to great effort to recruit and train people whose job is literally to take a bullet for their charge if need be. And part of that job is, obviously, a full understanding that these people will be chosen by the political process, and it may be someone you personally don't like. This is why I find conspiracy theories about how the SS has been infiltrated by the Deep State and set up Trump to to be assassinated extremely unlikely. Incompetence and sloppiness is easier to believe than the SS not only turning into a treasonous conspiracy but deciding that letting an untrained mentally ill teen take a shot at someone. This is comic book villain plotting.
A Secret Service operator being like "fuck who cares, I'm tired of all this shit" would be someone who is having a breakdown of some kind and needs to be relieved of duty. It might have happened (they are human beings) but it would not be normal.
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Really? If you were a Secret Service agent and your job involved such trivial and predictable hardships as standing around outside a lot and listening to the President talk, then you'd get so bored that you'd just completely ignore reports of an assassin? If this were actually an accurate description of your own level of diligence and not motivated reasoning, then you would be literally and objectively unqualified to hold pretty much any job whatsoever.
Sorry if my first post comes off as a flame, but this is a frankly ludicrous comment and I don't know how else to express it. There are absolutely no circumstances under which a Secret Service agent ignoring reports of a rooftop sniper is even the least bit understandable or excusable. That isn't being "not a super ninja" but rather being completely and utterly derelict to a degree indistinguishable from treason.
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