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Notes -
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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