RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/16/we-need-to-talk-about-the-violent-hatred-for-donald-trump/

The BBC says the latest suspected attempt on the life of Donald Trump is proof that ‘political violence’ is the ‘new norm’ in America. It’s half right. There does seem to be a ‘new normal’ over there, but it’s not some abstract thing called ‘political violence’. It’s not some broad-strokes brutish contempt for all rulers of society. It’s more targeted than that. It has one politician in particular in its crosshairs. If there’s a new normal in America, it would appear to be a new normal of an increasingly militant culture of grievance against the 45th President of the United States, now aspiring to be the 47th: Donald Trump.

There’s a palpable reluctance in the MSM today to discuss the Trump-specific nature of recent acts of political terror. Many would rather wring their hands over ‘gun culture’. ‘The secret service didn’t fail Trump on Sunday’, says MSNBC of the latest suspected assassination attempt: ‘America’s gun culture did.’ Commentators agonise over the fact that the alleged would-be assassin involved in yesterday’s fracas was in possession of an AK-47. That’s the crazy thing, they say. Others focus on the poison of ‘polarisation’. The Beeb says it’s a mix of a ‘coarsened’ national discourse and an ‘epidemic of gun violence’ that has made attacks like yesterday’s ‘inevitable’.

Of course, questions can be asked about the easy availability of lethal weapons in the US. Even supporters of the Second Amendment feel iffy that fruitloops can purchase Soviet-invented assault rifles and rock up to a Florida golf course with one in the car. And public life is increasingly frazzled at the moment. Politics feels like a screaming match between opposing poles stone deaf to one another’s concerns. And yet, today’s focus on ‘gun culture’ and ‘polarisation’ feels like a displacement activity: a focus on the method of the violence (guns) and the backdrop to the violence (polarisation) in an effort to avoid looking into the eye of the violence: the strange, swirling contempt for Trump.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-violence-is-not-symmetrical/

Political media are constantly on the lookout for right-wing violence, to the exclusion of the menace on the left.

The city of Springfield, Ohio, is besieged. Bomb threats and shooting scares have disrupted municipal events and closed schools for days on end. The disorder has been attributed to the addled Americans who pay overly close attention to the Trump campaign’s rhetoric, which has recently been focused on promoting the claim that Haitian migrants are absconding with local pets and eating them.

This outbreak of menace fits within a rubric the mainstream press can intuitively process. Donald Trump’s supporters are forever “inspired to violence.” They are uniquely susceptible to suggestion, both from the Republican presidential nominee and his acolytes. The MAGA faithful are quick to threaten, harass, and intimidate Trump’s critics and pursuers. As a Reuters analysis published last year asserts, America is “embroiled in the most sustained spate of political violence” since the 1960s. But while some primarily nonviolent criminality can be attributed to left-wing activists, the “attacks on people — from beatings to killings — were perpetrated mostly by suspects acting in service of right-wing political beliefs and ideology.”

The second attempt on Donald Trump’s life, which took place on Sunday afternoon, is just the latest event to call this ponderous assumption into question. The alleged would-be assassin appears to be in some important ways similar to the gunman who shot off a portion of Trump’s ear and killed Corey Comperatore in Butler, Pa., in July. His efforts to advocate on behalf of Ukraine’s cause — going so far as to try to join the fight against Russia’s invaders (he failed) — suggest a desire to make himself a part of a mission grander than himself. While the July 13 shooter’s motives have not yet been firmly established, reports indicating that he considered any target of opportunity, including Joe Biden, suggest that he, too, sought out notoriety. Unlike Trump’s assailant in Pennsylvania, however, the would-be assailant in Florida left a paper trail suggesting that he was a highly impressionable figure radicalized in the support of progressive causes.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-harris-admin-launches-investigation-of-rfk-jr-for-whale-incident-30-years-ago/

Kamala claimed that if Trump wins, he’ll weaponize the government against his political opponents. That’s the most obvious case of projection since the Kinsey report. The Biden-Harris administration uses every part of the government to run investigations of its political opponents on the most implausible of pretexts.

Like trying to put Trump on trial over a law created to stop the KKK from wearing masks on highways.

Or an investigation of RFK Jr over something that happened decades ago.

In 2012, Kick Kennedy, RFK Jr’s daughter, told a story to Town and Country Magazine about something her dad had supposedly done when she was six years old.

Kick’s taste for the extreme was fed by her dad’s eccentric environmentalism. Exhibit A: When she was six, word got out that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Bobby — who likes to study animal skulls and skeletons — ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head, and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick recalls. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

Since Kick was supposedly born in 1988, this would have happened in 1994. Or 30 years ago. (RFK Jr describes it as being 20 years ago so maybe my math is off or his daughter’s age is.)

No one cared. Certainly no one launched investigations of RFK Jr.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-deadly-get-trump-climate-continues/

Just two months after the failed Trump assassination attempt of one Thomas Matthew Crooks, we witnessed on Sunday yet another foiled one by Ryan Wesley Routh—a would-be assassin and anti-Trump/radical pro-Ukraine War social media addict. Somehow he too once again got within relatively easy shooting range of ex-President Trump.

Is there a continued pattern here of lax Trump Secret Service protection, coupled with a general social media and televised climate that equates Trump with Hitler and lowers the bar of the assassination?

That is, are we sending unambiguous messages to would-be assassins that a) lots of Trump-hating people would welcome an assassination attempt and canonize the wannabe assailant; b) it would not be that difficult to pull an assassination off given security laxity and incompetence; and thus c) we will likely witness a series of such unhinged attempts?

On August 14, almost exactly two months ago, I predicted the following:

If Donald Trump all summer has been compared by his enemies to Hitler and his murderous Third Reich, and if a 20-year-old would-be assassin and murderer with ease took up a sniper’s position to kill Trump—without a notified Secret Service or other law enforcement attempting to abort the shooter’s attempted assassination—what signal does that send to other would-be assassins for the next 80 days of the 2024 campaign?

Is the message that if a 20-year-old amateur sniper can brazenly and visibly for nearly an hour breach all Secret Service security perimeters to shoot eight times at the president, hit him in the ear, kill one innocent bystander, and wound two others, then almost any future, more-experienced serious shooter could match or exceed the ability of that disturbed amateur to get close enough to Trump to fire more than eight shots at his head?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/15/us/politics/trump-shooting-golf-course.html?nl=from-the-times&regi_id=2636639&segment_id=177904

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it was investigating what appeared to be a second assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump.

Former President Donald J. Trump was playing golf on Sunday afternoon in Florida when a Secret Service agent spotted a man with a rifle standing by a chain-link fence on the perimeter of the course, law enforcement officials said.

The agents opened fire, and the man fled in a black Nissan but was eventually taken into custody, the officials said.

While Mr. Trump was safe and unharmed, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it was investigating the episode as an apparent attempted assassination, the second one against the former president in just over two months. Mr. Trump was wounded in a previous attempt during a July 13 rally in Butler, Pa.

The suspected gunman was identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, of Hawaii, according to a law enforcement official who was granted anonymity to describe an open investigation.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/13/who-is-running-america-right-now/

Who is currently in charge in America? It’s sobering to realise that this critical question was never asked in this week’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. After all, what question could be more important than who is running the country?

The nominal answer should be vice-president Harris’s boss, President Joe Biden. However, the Democratic Party powers-that-be have staged something of a palace coup, deeming Biden insufficiently compos mentis to be the party candidate in November’s election. At the same time, there is an unwillingness to address whether he is capable of leading the US right now.

When seen on the day after the Trump-Harris debate, Biden was wearing a Trump 2024 hat during a visit to a fire station in Pennsylvania to mark the anniversary of 9/11. Perhaps he was demonstrating a sense of humour or a nod to bipartisanship. Or quite possibly, this was another King-Lear-losing-his-faculties moment.

Over the past year, Biden’s cognitive decline has been apparent to most observers, even as it remained unmentioned by his supporters and the press – until the disastrous June debate with Trump. In February, the New York Times published a piece by a neuroscientist that assured us that ‘we’re thinking about Biden’s memory and age in the wrong way’. The message this tried to send was: ‘Don’t worry, it happens to everybody as they get older.’ Except, of course, this particular elderly man is in charge of the nuclear codes.

The evidence of Biden’s mental decline continues to mount up. Earlier this year, a special counsel found that he had retained classified government documents when he left the vice-presidency in 2017. But whereas Trump himself was charged with multiple felony accounts after he had done something similar – retaining dozens of classified files after he left office – Biden was exonerated in his particular documents case.