An African American posted a assassination attempt fallout rant at his Substack yesterday, which I think every American should read, so here it is, followed by my comment and ensuing discussion with another reader and the author.
There Are No Individuals Left In America
STEVE QJ
If you've been avoiding social media and newspapers for the past few days, if you've cut off all contact with humans and carrier pigeons, if you've stayed away from the oceans lest you stumble across a message in a bottle, there’s still no way you don't know that a guy called Thomas Matthew Crooks shot Donald Trump in the head last week.
If the bullet had flown an inch or two to the right, Trump’s final words would have been “Take a look what happened…”
But instead, dozens of "hurr, hurr, shame he missed" videos popped up on TikTok, photos of Trump’s defiant fist pump sent right-wing Twitter into bacchanalian raptures, and social media offered up the kind of balanced, measured analysis we all know and love:
“ANTIFA SCUM Thomas Matthew Crooks is the shooter who tried to assassinate Trump. He was a registered Democrat who voted for Clinton and Biden,” claimed one viral Facebook post, even though Crooks was a registered Republican and was just thirteen-years-old when Clinton ran for president.
“If we learned anything today, I hope it’s realizing [that] having a firearm means absolutely nothing if you don’t spend time at the range practising with it,” snarked political “influencer” Destiny, as part of a three-day tweet bender that included claiming that conservatives aren't worthy of respect as humans and mocking the firefighter who died shielding his daughter.
And my personal favourite:
F*ck every single one of you f*cking worthless Democrats. Every last one of you miserable f*cks has perpetuated this lie and created this false reality where you have convinced yourself Trump is Hitler. All based on lies…Now, we are going to f*cking destroy you.
And sure, you could point out that Trump gets compared to Hitler because he has an unfortunate habit of quoting and praising Hitler, you could ask whether Trump fans are the best-qualified to talk about perpetuating lies and false realities, you could quibble about whether “every last one” of the ~81 million people who voted Democrat in 2020 are responsible for the rhetoric of a few journalists and politicians.
But I think we can all agree that doubling down on this brainless tribalism is the best way to ensure nothing like this happens again.
In the 1999 cult classic Fight Club, Tyler Durden delivers a speech championing the kind of fierce, anti-consumerist individualism that sane people used to aspire to:
You are not your job, you are not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your f*cking khakis...
Sadly, times have changed.
In 2024, you are your skin colour, you are your gender, you are your sexuality and religious beliefs and the emoji in yourInstagram bio. And topically enough, you are whoever you voted for in the next election. So, anything anyone who shares those traits does can and will be held against you.
A woman in Trump's security detail looked flustered and out of place during the shooting, so all women “have no place in the Secret Service. At any level.”
Progressives like Destiny make crass, despicable statements about political opponents. So all Democrats “want Republicans dead.”
A white, heterosexual man tries to blow the former president's brains out, so all...uh, there's no broader pattern to be gleaned from that...
And all this because there are no individuals in America anymore. No white people who aren't racist, no black people who aren't criminals, no Trump supporters who aren't bigots or liberals who aren't “groomers.”
Everyone is cumulatively responsible for the worst actions of anybody who looks or thinks kinda, sorta like them. And aside from the flagrant stupidity of this worldview, how is anybody surprised that it leads to violence?
After all, Payton Gendron had no reason to kill Ruth Whitfield or Pearl Young or Hayward Patterson, but "blacks"? That's different! They're all trying to replace white people with Critical Race Theory.
Anderson Aldrich had nothing against Ashley Paugh or Derrick Rump or Raymond Vance, but the “2SLGBTQIA+ community”? They're forcing kids to dye their hair and change their pronouns.
Joseph Czuba didn't want to stab six-year-old Wadea al-Fayoume twenty-six times, but “All Muslims must die” because they're all terrorists.
It's hard to hate individuals. You can look them in the eye and shake their hands, you can persuade them (or be persuaded) with empathy and intelligence, you can relate to them, if nothing else, as fellow human beings.
But you can't shake hands with an “identity,” you can't relate to a mortal enemy, it's impossible to persuade an ideology.
So if you disagree, what choice is there but to “f**king destroy” them?
In the hours after Crooks' assassination attempt, “Civil War 2” began trending on social media and Google, right-wing groups used right-wing message boards to call for right-wing violence, and none of them stopped to think about who exactly they'd be fighting.
Were they planning to interrogate their neighbours to see how they voted in 2020? Will they make their pastors and doctors pledge allegiance to Donald Trump? Surely, for reasons of self-preservation, they're not planning to round up every pimply Republican with bad hair and an underbite, so who exactly is the enemy?
Thomas Crooks wasn’t a soldier, he wasn't “the Left,” he was one guy in a country of over 330 million, who tried and failed to kill a former president.
And the only reason this simple, undeniable reality isn't enough for some people is that individualism is no longer entertaining enough. There has to be a secret agenda, a group to condemn, a “them” to our “us.”
But if there's anything to learn from Crooks, it's that this collectivising worldview isn’t sustainable.
Because, if you still can't see where these “jokes” and threats and brainless tribalism lead, well, take a look at what happened.
https://commentary.steveqj.com/p/there-are-no-individuals-left-in/comments#comment-62644683
Sloan Bashinsky
Sloan’s Newsletter
Steve OJ liked
I’m an individual who said a few times in 2016 that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton should be locked up in adjoining cells, and who said later that the Democrats ran the candidate Trump could beat, and they are responsible for what happened after that.
It looks to me this kid, now dead, who tried to kill Trump, didn’t care for Trump, and having learned of President Joe Biden’s remark to Democrat donors, that it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye, which has special meaning to gun owners, and having learned before that of Trump’s lawyer telling the U.S. Supreme Court that Trump would have immunity for ordering an execution of an opponent, if his order was an official presidential act, the now dead kid, feeling every bit as patriotic as Trump’s January 6 mob chanting Hang Mike Pence, took it upon himself to carry out Biden’s order as he understood it, since the U.S. Senate had given Trump a pass for the January 6 coup attempt, and I can imagine maybe half the people in America wish the dead kid had killed Trump, but they won’t say it, because they fear the blowback.
Peaceful Dave
Dave’s Substack
They are saying it.
I dread the thought that the time could come where political yard signs and bumper stickers become bullseyes on the owners of them. They are begging for it though.
Sloan Bashinsky
Sloan’s Newsletter
That’s why when I moved back to Alabama in 2018, instead of getting a designer license plate for my vehicle, I got a “God bless America” license plate, hoping that wouldn’t piss anyone off. I have nothing stuck on my car that says anything about me. I do shoot off my mouth plenty, though, on Facebook, blogs, and other online places, and in a podcast, and I know I’m painting bullseyes on me. If Trump loses the election in November, he and his army will not go quietly into the night like they did after he told them to stand down on January 6, and they stood down, proving he was in charge of them all along.
Peaceful Dave
Dave’s Substack
I just have a USMC license plate. Being a veteran has gotten me out of, or reduced tickets.
Sloan Bashinsky
Sloan’s Newsletter
I’n not a veteran, because a miracle save me from the Vietnam war draft. It took a while for me to begin to see why. For along time now, I have been in different wars, but the weapon is words spoken and written, or sometimes silence.
Trump had to get himself a new vice president, because he sent his Aryan mob to the capitol to, among other things, hang Mike Pence. Yes, Aryan. Look at the photos of that coup attempt. Look at Trump rallies. Look at photos of the rally where the kid tried to kill Trump. Dems are white people, Aryans. A picture’s worth a thousand words, res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself.
Jeepers creepers, this J.D. Vance guy Trump picked to be his vice president candidate compared Trump to Hitler in 2016, and said if he had to pick between Trump and Hillary Clinton, he would vote for Hillary. Imagine Trump winning in November. Imagine Trump dying of a heart attack after that. Imagine President J.D. Vance, who would have voted for Hilary in 2016, because he thought Trump was another Hitler. In fact, that is what Trump is. Look at the photos of his Aryan gatherings. What in the hell is Vance? He sold his soul to something Bible people think they know a lot about, but if they did, they would know a demon has take-up residence in Trump, and thus in them.
That demon is what compromised Turmp’ s Secret Service detail and local police and allowed the kid to get off his first shot, but the kid was rattled by the cop that got to the roof and maybe that’s why he missed shooting Trump in the head, or the demon nudged the kid or the bullet, and Trump thinks God saved him, and so does his army.
Steve QJ
"it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye, which has special meaning to gun owners"
I don't know, maybe I'm not gun-loving enough, but I find this ridiculous. First of all, from the context, it's painfully obvious what Biden meant. He was sick and tired of having his disastrous debate performance analyzed and being asked to withdraw, and wanted Democrats to focus on Trump's issues instead. If he'd said, "put Trump in the hot seat" he doesn't mean put him in the electric chair.
This feels exactly like the deliberate misrepresentations of Trump's "fine people on both sides" and "bloodbath" comments. If you don't think that Trump's "Fight like hell" was unequivocal incitement on January 6th I don't know how you can think this comment, that hardly anybody even heard before the assassination attempt, drove this kid to commit murder.
But second of all, imagine you're Biden, and you're secretly planning to assassinate Donald Trump. You've decided to use the crack assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old nerd who looks like he could be taken out by a stiff breeze. Your genius plan involves having your assassin wander aimlessly around the site, were he could have been arrested at any moment by the assembled police officers, you have absolutely no contingency plan if he misses, and you decide, on a private call to donors, to drop a little hint by talking about putting Trump "in the bullseye"??
Why not at least go a little further and say, "in the crosshairs"? Or give a sly wink as you say, "I think we should all lend Trump our EAR in the coming rally😉"
It's just so silly. If Biden, with the support of the Secret Service, had been leading a conspiracy to kill Trump, he'd be dead. He doesn't need to do it at a rally, where the image will be seared into the minds of millions of voters,q he can do it in when Trump is on the toilet. Or having a meal. Or God, literally anywhere at all.
Sloan Bashinsky
Sloan’s Newsletter
I know what Biden meant. He had put himself in a bullseye during the debate and thereafter he was being asked to step aside, and he said it to rich people he hoped would make large donations to his campaign, instead of call for him to step down. If you or I had said what Biden said, we should not have been surprised to receive a visit from the FBI. I figure about half of Americans wish that kid had killed Trump, and Joe Biden is one of them.
What I wonder is, how’d that kid get on that roof with a gun and people watching him do it and telling local police about it and pointing it out to Secret Service agents, and a Secret Service sniper had the kid in his scope and let him shoot? Why weren’t Secret Service on that roof to begin with?
I’m a lawyer, who clerked for a US District Judge that presided over every federal criminal prosecution in his court’s jurisdiction. The Secret Service’s behavior that day makes no sense.
If I were Trump, I would think the Secret Service was in on it, and I would hire private security to protect me henceforth.
I understand why Donald Trump, Jr. said and MAGAs say it was an execution (ordered by Biden). I laugh, because the 6 Republican Supreme Court justices as much as gave Biden permission to order Trump’s execution as an official act, over the January 6 failed coup.
From what I’ve read and seen in the news media, politics was that kid’s reason for being. He decided Trump needed to be killed, and he believed he was a patriot, and he knew what Biden had said, and he set out to kill Trump, and he knew the consequences.
But how’d he get away with it? Unless, the Secret Service wanted Trump dead. Or, something not of this world intervened and paved the way for the kid to get on that roof with the NRA’s favorite weapon of mass executions.
A demon ran what happened that day, because the demon wanted the result that happened, to increase Trump’s chance of winning November. I hope God has a different plan that keeps Biden and Trump out of the White House.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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