Things Just Went to the Next Level
“I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin…. Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening…. [I was] shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear.” —Donald Trump, Truth Social, July 13, 2024
Well, it’s happened. Part of me is wondering what took so long.
After all, I predicted back in 2016 that eventually someone would take a shot at Trump. Now someone has … or was allowed to, because Secret Service did not act.
Lower the Volume?
There’s a sense we just entered a new world. The next level, one might call it. Since probably everybody reading this knows the basics (where the assassination attempt took place, who the shooter was, etc.), I’ll skip over them in order to discuss something I’m seeing in a lot of “legacy” media: we need to lower the volume! Turn down the temperature! Scale back the heated political rhetoric!
Who is “we”? This is coming from left-of-center publications like The Atlantic Monthly. That’s just the one I thought of first.
As if leftists haven’t been outrage factories from the get-go … all the way back to the first Trump campaign (2015-16). Joined by countless Hollywood types, left-leaning celebrities like Robert de Niro who said he’d like to punch Trump in the face, or Madonna who said she’d thought about blowing up the White House. Or Kathy Griffin who held up a mock bloodied severed head designed to look like Trump’s.
The incident ruined her career. Because the average American does not feel that way. The average American does not want to see Donald Trump beheaded, or shot … or to countenance an image of such. Or what this high school teacher conjured up:
Anyone who looks honestly at recent history and can get past the litany of controlled media lies will see that leftists not only lie more, they tend to be more hotheaded and violent than anyone on the right, or in the (increasingly rare) center.
The right has been more reactive than active. At least until Trump came along. Leftists lost their minds.
Back in 2017, Steve Scalise was shot at a sports event by a lunatic Bernie Sanders supporter.
That same year, Antifa and Black Lives Matter descended on the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Leftist-controlled corporate media, as I noted last week, has been lying about this event ever since.
In 2020, Black Lives Matter and Antifa did hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to major cities — far more than was done to the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The former were “mostly peaceful protests”; the latter, an “insurrection against democracy.” Antifa types cordoned off several city blocks in Seattle during that year, with the blessings of that city’s leftist government that feared to cross them.
When the leftist thugs are able to claim an area and authorities do nothing, you have anarchy.
Turn down the temperature?
Leftists continued in this vein as their man, the arguably senile Joe Biden became their anointed commander-in-chief. J.D. Vance’s recent tweet on X strikes me as a good place to begin: “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign has been that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Some have denounced Vance for that. I suppose they’d prefer we memory-hole the disquieting speech Biden made in 2022, blood-red background like a scene from V For Vendetta, in which he denounced Trump’s base as “enemies of the people.” He’s also said that if Trump wins in November this could be our last democratic election.
Not just the Bidenista campaign, but the entire center-left to hard-left online and offline ecospheres have promoted the idea that Trump is a “threat to democracy,” that he’s “authoritarian,” an incipient “autocrat” or “dictator,” a “protofascist” (or “fascist”), the “next Hitler.” The GOP, leftists state, is now a “cult” filled up with “neo-Nazis”; etc.
Sometimes the violent rhetoric goes beyond this, claiming that Trump would unleash “death squads” and “disappear” LGBTQ+, and that it would all be endorsed by the conservatives on the Supreme Court.
Now I’m all for turning down the temperature. But so-called progressives (i.e., leftists) are going to have to turn theirs down first, which means stopping the lies (which I listed last week) and ending their own violent rhetoric.
CNN, etc., Versus the Truth
According to federal law Trump, as a former president, is entitled to Secret Service protection for life. That creates a dilemma, because I don’t believe Trump can or should trust Secret Service, at least as presently constituted.
I spent much of Sunday gathering information. Here is my biggest takeaway: either we saw epic incompetence, or Secret Service has been compromised, meaning that this attempt really was what some are already calling an inside job.
What might help turn down the temperature is if — gasp on top of gasp! — anyone in “our” government or in corporate media would
TELL THE EFFING TRUTH FOR ONCE IN THEIR LIVES!!
Sorry about the language, but to say this crap is getting old does not even begin to cover it!
Consider CNN:
Fall? He was shot! A bullet missed his head by centimeters!
Here they sugarcoat it by calling it an “incident”:
Those are just two examples. MSNBC is just as bad:
Popping sounds? Gunshot-like sounds?
One wants to seize the shirt-collar of whoever writes headlines like this and shout, “You idiot! Those were gunshots, and they just missed killing a former president of the United States!”
Neither leftists nor globalists would mind seeing Trump killed, of course, and I found the crocodile tears coming from Joe Biden and others in the Asylum on the Potomac to be vaguely sickening when they weren’t simply insulting!
More cases of CNN’s continued dishonesty are documented here. Unlike CNN and MSNBC, Australia’s fiercely independent Sky News appears to be an organization you can trust.
Inside Job or No? Unanswered Questions About The Performance of the Secret Service on July 13.
The questions about this incident that need answers fall into two categories: those to do with the shooter himself, and those to do with why he wasn’t stopped before he could kill a man and wound three others.
Who was Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pa.? Going not just off media reports but from everything I’ve been able to turn up online, he’s not far from being a blank slate.
His political stance is confused. According to public records he was a registered Republican, but had made a $15 donation to a leftist group.
There are some indications, according to former classmates, that he was a bit of a loner, bullied in high school. That’s the closest we have to a red flag, since bullied kids get angry, repress their rage, and sometimes it eventually comes out violently.
He was seen as an intelligent kid, very good in math and science.
He seems to have had an interest in guns, but wasn’t a good enough shot to make the high school rifle team. (Maybe he got better with practice.)
I sought an Antifa connection, based on what turned up Saturday night on a Facebook forum when I searched under his name.
Nothing I’ve seen since confirms this.
Either he had a minimal social media presence, or his accounts were quickly scrubbed. I’ve heard nothing about a manifesto left somewhere.
None of which means that something won’t turn up in the near future.
His parenting seems to have been normal. Both his parents were licensed counselors.
He graduated on time from high school and earned an associates degree in engineer science from a local tech college. He had a job at a nursing facility.
No one he’d studied with, or worked with, had noticed anything unusual recently. Nothing, that is, to indicate that on Saturday, July 13, 2024, he would hop into his car with a rifle and explosives, drive the distance to Butler Co., climb onto a roof, and try to assassinate Donald Trump.
He had no record of previous brushes with authorities; he doesn’t appear to have been on any watch lists. Nothing about him attracted attention.
So why he did it remains, as of this writing, an unsolved mystery.
How he was able to do it? No mystery here! Secret Service allowed him to do it, whether, as I said, deliberately or through epic-level incompetence. Let’s take these in reverse order.
Start with Kimberly Cheatle, a Bidenista appointee (2022) to Secret Service’s directorship.
A Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) appointee?
Probably, given what we know of this administration. Although she’d been with Secret Service in the past, she’d left. She’d been working for PepsiCo when the Bidenistas tapped her for her present job. She was clearly preoccupied with increasing the number of women Secret Service agents. Some of the latter can be seen on the video from Saturday night … moving in circles not knowing what to do. Watch (especially 2:00 – 2:05). Reportedly some of these gals don’t know how to holster their weapons properly.
That in itself is a recipe for eventual disaster.
This is a drum I’ve been beating, to no avail, for 35 years now! When hiring personnel, you can prioritize merit, or you can prioritize group identity. You cannot prioritize both at once! The moment you prioritize the latter over the former, quality and competence erode and your organization is eventually dysfunctional.
Look at academia, which has prioritized group identity for over 35 years now!
So it’s certainly possible that what we saw last Saturday was epic incompetence, and not an inside job.
Recall Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice what can be explained through stupidity.”
Listen to this scathing examination by a bona-fide expert.
Then this.
The other possibility is that there was genuine malfeasance. Nothing said above rules that out.
Start with the fact that several people in the crowd spotted Crooks on the rooftop with a rifle before Secret Service did anything. Where they were stationed, they couldn’t possibly have not seen him (I am presuming the DIE mindset doesn’t entail blindness).
Around 40 seconds went by before the shooting itself. Secret Service personnel had plenty of time to get off a warning shot, which might have sent Crooks scampering away and prevented what followed, which was the murder of a man with a wife and daughter and the injury of at least two others in the crowd, besides Trump. There’s protocol to follow, though. No one in Secret Service is allowed to open fire on someone who hasn’t fired first without proper authorization.
No authorization came. Then shots rang out. Crooks was dead at the scene seconds later, but the damage was done.
One version of the inside job theory requires that Crooks have previous contact with the FBI, which, twenty years ago, gained an underground reputation for pulling unhappy or unstable individuals into its clutches, presenting them with illegal activities often involving explosives, effectively entrapping them and then arresting them, as evidence of the “terrorist threat” (foreign or domestic).
As I noted, though, no evidence of any such prior contact has turned up. At least not yet. If it does, you can rest assured, I will pay attention.
A different inside job theory requires no more than that there be at least one mole inside Secret Service, someone positioned in the organization to be able to give a stand-down order and know that it will be complied with, word going down and not going out.
Because the Secret Service answers to Homeland Security, which is part of the Deep State. The Deep State wants Trump gone.
Now that’s conspiratorial!
Secret Service is about to face its biggest inquest since the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan back in 1981. Maybe we’ll have a chance to find out what really happened.
That’s if the investigation is an honest one, and whatever results is dispensed transparently to John Q. Public. This is a mighty big if!
Restoring Trust After This Disaster.
Want to restore trust, media? It’s like I said above.
Tell the truth for a change! Especially about the role of the far left in promoting dysfunction in America, whether through Diversity-Inclusion-Equity or through its consistently dishonest portrayal of past and recent events!
Consider: as I noted last week: trust in institutions — especially corporate media institutions — is at an all time low. Repairing the damage corrupt outfits like CNN have done is going to take a while … possibly a long while.
Building back trust won’t happen overnight. There’s a lot to undo.
Some are saying that Trump just won this election … if nothing else, through the sheer resilience he displayed, raising a fist in the air after having been shot. This on top of the resilience he’s displayed for over a year now in the face of the four criminal lawfare suits against him (one of which has corporate media labeling him a convicted felon, no more questions allowed) as well as the civil lawfare suits.
He may have just won, unless what happened last Saturday is only the beginning..
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Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2012 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.
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