Saturday’s murder of a Trump supporter and father of several, the serious wounding of at least two more, and the miraculously slight injury to candidate Trump, was shocking.
But it was far from unexpected.
First things first: Thomas Crooks was the one who pulled the trigger, killed Corey Comperatore, and tried his damnedest to kill former President Trump. On him alone lies the immediate responsibility.
But creating the atmosphere in which a 20 year old would consider blazing away at a crowd that included a Presidential candidate?
That’s been a team effort.
Society’s been building up to this – and, I think, worse – for a while now. I’ve been predicting it for a decade and a half.
I’m far from the only one.
Of DNA And Psychiatry: This is what America does to dictators.
This is what we did to Nazis.
We’ve brought a lot of them down in our time:
Our cultural memory involves a lot of fighting against actual tyranny – indeed, it’s an inextricable part of our country’s DNA:
And so last Monday, a week ago, when the once-presigious New Republic ran this as their cover…:
…and supported it with this…:
We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.
Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, “He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.” We unreservedly choose the latter course.
I’m not saying the New Republic intended to inflame some nutbar to take a literal shot a Trump (and, let’s not forget, a crowd of his supporters, murdering one and leaving two more in the hospital). But if they were, it’d be hard to know what they’d do differently.
It’s nothing new:
Untermensch: Of course, it’s not just Trump – although he’s been the focus of most of Big Left’s efforts over the past 8-9 years.
The left’s noise machine has moved someone to put literal crosshairs on Republicans – but the rhetorical iron sights were in play long ago.
POTATUS? As recently as the day before the assassination attempt, this was the President (or at least his loathsome social media tweep):
He covered last week’s boogieman of the week.
It’s been a running theme of his entire presidency; here’s his entire “Independence Hall” speech in which, surrounded by fascist re-framings of totems of American democracy, he said that half the population – “MAGA Republicans” – wanted to “end democracy”.
I’m loathe to use phrases like “declaration of (fill in adjective) war” lightly. But it’s too corrosive a narrative to just call “collctive slander”. The President actively tried to stoke irrational fear in half ot the population, of the other half of the population, for purposes of inflaming passions to turn people out for a mid-term election the Democrats expected to lose.
But it’s about way, way more than just elections.
Bad History: Big Left – the collective institutions that support the larger leftist drive for power, the media, academia, big leftybusiness, the non-profit/industrial complex, the public employee unions – have been actively working to demonize, marginalize and dehumanize their opposition as a matter of “etermal campaign” policy for a solid decade and a half.
Remember Obama’s DHS Secretary Napolitano memoing America’s law enforcement agencies to expect a wave of conservative terror that would (as re-parroted by the late, unlamented and loathsome “Dog Gone”) dwarf the war on terror that’d been going on in the Middle East for seven years at the time? Or the risible notion that White Supremacy was becoming popular again (notwithstanding the fact groups like the Klan have been shrinking by abour an order of magnitude every generaion)?
What was that but collective slander to create a boogieman to sic the droogs on.
Sic them to commmit violence? Oh, heavens no.
But who can control everyone?
- A nutcase (with progressive roots) attacked the House Congressional baseball team, nearly killing Steve Scalise
- A neighbor with impeccable Democrat credentais assaulted Senator Rand Paul, breaking his rib
- A would-be assassin came cross-country to attempt to kill SCOTUS justice Kavanaugh to try to forestall the overturing of Roef
- Many of the acts of senseless violence I documented for many years sprang, I believe, from the backdrop of inreasoning panicky hatred the left has spent the past 15 years promoting.
- Locally? Let’s not forget the fact that Major Jacob “Humiliiating Mompants” Frey told the Minneapolis Police not to worry to hard about protecting people coming to see Donald Trump at Target Center in 2016 – and didn’t bother intervening in a wave of assaults on the street.
- Also, the March 4 2017 attack by “Anti”-Fa on a group of Republicans in the rotunda the the State Capitol, injuring several in the immediate aftermath of the Trump inauguration.
In the latter two episodes, official actions can be seen as positive incentives to commit violence against Trump, his supporters and conservative dissenter is general.
So the alarming wonder isn’t that some cretin tried to murder Trump (and succeeded in murdering one of his supporters). And it’s not just lil’ ol’ me noticing this.
The surprise is that it took this long to bubble up to Trump.
The counter-gaslighting has already begun:
- “It was fake! They sounded like blanks!” (Tell it to the dead man)
- “It was just a piece of glass from the teleprompter!” (That’s very unconfirmed – and irrelevant, since any “piece of glass” would have been propelled by f*cking bullet aimed at Trump’s head)
- “The shooter was a registered Republican! (in an open primary state, who also donated to ActBlue. This one is in the process of falling apart).
But to me, for purposes of this piece, the worst is this:
That’s a lie – both in re Biden and in general.
This is the culmination (so far) of a fifteen year long arc of stoking hatred for political gain. Caling it otherwise is delusion at best, evil at worst.
For Want Of An Inch: But Trump survived.
And the imaging is much more redolent of Churchill…
…whom, let’s be honest, Big Left hates just as badly.
As per your remark, But to me, for purposes of this piece, the worst is this, I was reminded at Instapundit this morning of this:
It is impossible to understand the politics of the Left without grasping that it is all about deniable intimidation.
Thanks for that quote. I may have to find and preserve it.
It’s from a 2010 article by Richard Fernandez (Wretchard the Cat). You can “drill down” to that article starting here https://instapundit.com/660493/
There are several people on the left that should be investigated for pushing for something like this to happen to Trump:
Dan Goldman, New York Rep, Rick Wilson, one of sickos that formed the faux GOP group, the Lincoln Project, Nick Soros, who posted a picture of a car window with a bullet hole in it, next to a picture of $47.00, these clowns that wanted to remove Trump’s Secret Service protection
https://thedailybs.com/2024/07/14/house-dem-who-moved-to-revoke-trumps-secret-service-protection-silent-on-bill-after-assassination-attempt/?utm_campaign=james&utm_content=7-15-24%20Daily%20AM&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=Get%20response&utm_term=email
There is another black, female Democrat Rep, (I believe it was Stacy Plaskett from the USVI) back when the lies about the classified documents “found” at Mar a Largo, made the Freudian slip that “Trump should be shot..stopped.
I often wondered how the White House got Leni Riefenstahl to design the set for Biden’s Independence Hall speech.
I thought she died in 2003.
But then again, they are experts in reviving the living dead.
FBI says they believe the shooter acted alone but can’t confirm that because although they have his phone in the FBI lab, they can’t crack it.
What kind of phone is that? I want one.
No kidding, Bigman. Me too. Something isn’t adding up with identifying the shooter and maybe some of you can help me out. They said he didn’t have any ID and they were able to identify him by DNA. Very quickly I might add. How did law enforcement/government entities happen to have a DNA sample in their database to use for a match? The other thing is, if they didn’t know who he was, how and why were we able to learn so quickly that he was 20 years-old?
His age came out way before his name.
There is a difference between id’ing someone and verifying an identification. Without a wallet with a state issued id, the best one can do immediately is ask, “hey, does anyone recognize this guy?”
Hopefully a relative or acquaintance will step forward. That is typically enough in most cases, but with the world press looking on this was not a typical case.
Apparently, his father was contacted very early in the process, so they had a good idea who he was. All they had to do was verify it.
The only way to do this beyond a doubt is bio-metrics.
One might use facial recognition to match an image with a DL photo – but given that he was apparently shot in the face, this might not work. That leaves fingerprints and DNA. Given that he was not previously arrested, DNA is the only route.
A DNA match with a relative is good enough. The test can be done in hours – but you have to wonder about the logistics.
It is reasonable that his age came out before his name, the authorities had a good idea who he was – but again, verification is another matter and you don’t want to tell the whole world what you believe rather than what you know for sure.
I think having the rifle registered to his father gave them a big headstart in narrowing down who he might be.
Wait, you mean there is a national registry of firearms which the federal government was able to instantly access to track the owner? I thought that was illegal. And the FBI would never do anything illegal. Which brings up two points:
First, how come they never use it in ordinary gun crimes to figure out who provided the gun to the perp so they can charge him, or to return a stolen gun to its owner, and
Second, If that registry had been in existence in 1776, we would still be a British colony, which explains the popularity of ghost guns
OK, can’t crack the phone, I remember that Apple had a kerfuffle a while back about not wanting to provide a key to those codes. Maybe it’s an Iphone? But if Apple (whoever) won’t provide a key for this kind of thing…wow.
BIometrics seem to be available, as someone who’d seen a picture of the perp, deceased, said that the face was bloody but intact. And it’s a pretty big bullet that will destroy dental records–a colleague of my stepdad, a retired dentist, worked on identifying remains of victims from a crash in Indiana a while back. So if identifiable teeth can survive a plane crashing nose first into a corn field, I’m guessing they can deal with teeth that have been damaged by 5.56mm.
It is, but it isn’t.
Technically, the system could best be described as a “distributed/disjointed database”.
Hop 1) the secret service identifies the weapon and calls manufacturer, who does have a system of who they sold the gun to.
Hop 2) If the item is sold to a distributor, they call the distributor. If it was sold directly to a shop, they call the shop.
Hop 3) The gun shop is required to keep records, they check the records and voila.
Instead of an online registry taking milliseconds, it takes minutes.
But they do..
From the ATF website
Don’t get me wrong, in uncivil times, everyone should have a gun and nice supply of ammo – because when things turn to sh*t, every psycho and “mostly peaceful” protester/looter comes out of the woodwork.
The sad thing is that 1776 was just as much a civil war as it was a war of independence and many a patriot and tory was looted, raped and murdered by other patriots and tories who held slightly more or less radical of a position.
Good to have a gun in such times.
However, the days to grabbing your three-corner hat and rebelling against the gooberment are long gone.
Silicone Valley and Justin Trudeau etched out the contours of the next battlefield.
Ask yourself, how long will the revolution last when all of its lines of communication go dark and its foot soldiers are debanked? What happens when cash is no longer legal tender and the powers that be decide who and who is not allowed access to simple transactions?
Britain was talking about going cashless earlier this year, about the same time Nigel Farage was debanked.
The deep state lives in the cloud – not sure how one gets at it.
Greg, I invite you to consider the possibility that you are thinking Inside the box when you ought to be thinking Outside the box.
The Taliban didn’t debank Biden but they still forced him to surrender, using different tactics. I wonder whether those tactics could be used in our own country?
https://x.com/LauraLoomer/status/1812330872437436593
That is a photo of the ladder the shooter used to get on the roof. Look at it. 12 foot fiberglass ladder, costs a few hundred dollars, weighs about 65 pounds, unwieldy as hell. He snuck that into the area while carrying his gun and nobody noticed? What does he drive that he can haul that ladder,?
Oh, he didn’t bring it the day of, it was helpfully left standing there for him to find as he was strolling past looking for a good spot to shoot from? By whom,? When?
Or no. Maybe he set it up days earlier when he scouted the area but none of the security sweep team noticed a ladder as a potential security risk?
Massive incompetence or actual malice? 🤔
I could not think of two nations more far apart in terms of geography, economy, religion and social organization.
Take a single data point
Afghanistan 74% rural 26% urban
United States 17% rural 83% urban
Even though 74% of the afghan population is rural, 80% of the population is employed in agriculture. In the U.S. that is 2%.
So no, one cannot feed, clothe, arm and field a rural army in the U.S. and any effort to raise an insurrection would be instantly defunded.
One needs 21st century tactics for 21st century conflicts.
Greg, that’s an interesting analysis. Where can I learn more about these 21st Century tactics?
The FBI, aka the Modern version of the Gestapo, claims they can’t hack into the shooter’s phone, yet claim he acted alone. How do they know that?
Conversely, they hacked into hundreds of phones belonging to January 6 attendees and tracked Mike Lindell to the drive through of a Hardee’s restaurant in Mankato. They know that at least half of the population will believe this crap!
Also, remember all of the reports of three letter agencies deleted the stuff on their cell phones? Well, this is what’s happening with the shooter’s phone, to hide their complicity.
One of the narratives that the left and media (PTR) is trying to push is “Trump and conservatives’ violent rhetoric is to blame for Trump being shot.”
Which is one degree removed from the domestic abuser’s mantra: Look what you made me do.
Oh, Bill C, Trump’s skirt was too short.