We’ve Just Gone to the Next Level

By Steven Yates

July 17, 2024

“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 personnel did not do their jobs.

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 those 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 and leftist publications 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 setting fire to the White House. Or Kathy Griffin who held up a mock bloodied severed head designed to look like Trump’s head.

This last incident ruined the minor-league actress’s 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.

Anyone who looks honestly at 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 Unite the Right rallygoers in Charlottesville. Leftist-controlled corporate media, as I noted last week, has been lying about this event ever since.

In 2020, these groups 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 protesters”; the latter, an “insurrection against democracy.” Antifa types cordoned off several city blocks in Seattle during that period, with the blessings of that city’s leftist government that feared to cross them. In leftist-controlled Portland, Ore., they burned police stations.

When leftist thugs are able to do these sorts of things and authorities do nothing, you have anarchy.

Turn down the temperature?

Leftists have only continued as their man, the clearly 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 remark. I suppose they’d prefer that we memory-hole the disquieting speech Biden made back in 2022, blood-red background like something out of the film V For Vendetta, in which he denounced Trump’s base of support 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 coming from the left has gone 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 before this happened) and ending their own violent rhetoric.

Lies: CNN introduced a headline reading Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally….

Falls? He was shot! A bullet missed his forehead by centimeters!

Another headline sugarcoats what happened: Trump injured in incident at Pennsylvania rally….

Incident? It was an assassination attempt!

These are just two examples. MSNBC was just as bad with Secret Service: Donald Trump safe after popping sounds heard at rally…. Trump safe after being rushed off Pennsylvania stage after gunshot-like sounds….

Are you kidding me?! Gunshot-like sounds?

One wants to seize the shirt-collar of whoever writes headlines like these and shout into their faces, “You idiots!! Those were gunshots, and they just missed killing a former president of the United States!!”

Neither leftists nor globalists would wind 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 has emerged as one of the small handful of media organizations you can trust.

Inside Job or No? Unanswered Questions About the Performance of the Secret Service on July 13.

The questions about this incident needing answers fall into two categories: those to do with the shooter himself, and those having to do with why he wasn’t stopped before he could kill a man and wound three others including Trump.

Who was Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pa.? Going not just off media reports but from everything I’ve been able to gather online, he’s not far from being a tabula rasa.

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. (He was a member of a local gun organization. Maybe, with practice, he got better.)

I sought an Antifa connection, based on what turned up Saturday night on one 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 associate degree in engineering 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 was he able to do it? No mystery here! Secret Service allowed him to do it, whether, as I said, through epic-level incompetence or deliberately.

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 them 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 we saw epic incompetence last Saturday, and not an inside job.

Recall Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice what can be explained through stupidity.”

Listen to this scathing critique by a bona-fide expert.

Then this.

The other possibility, of course, is that there was genuine malfeasance involved. Nothing said above rules that out absolutely.

Start with the fact that 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, 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 just requires 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 against Ronald Reagan back in 1981. Maybe we’ll have a chance to find out what really happened.

That’s if the inquest 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’ve said:

Tell the truth for a change! Especially about the role of the far left in promoting dysfunction in America, whether through Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) or through its consistently dishonest portrayals 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 the election, unless what happened last Saturday is only the beginning…

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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A slightly different version of this article is also available on Steven Yates’s Navigating the New Normal (Substack). Subscribe to Navigating the New Normal.

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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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Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

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