As I saw the footage of the Trump Assassination Attempt, I had three immediate thoughts. First, ‘he’s just won the election’. Second, ‘wow, that image is so cool, instantly iconic, even more than the mug shot’. Third, ‘this is the regime’s off-ramp to dial-down the heat and flip the script from collision course to unity’.[i] Since basically everyone had the first two reactions, here I will outline the third, especially given that it has received substantial and sustained pushback from people who have an emotional investment in and perhaps even financial incentive for the collision course narrative. Collision course is essentially the view of Tim Pool, which despite the fact he is frequently mocked for his dramatic cries of an impending civil war, is shared by many people, including many of you. In this narrative, the left is too far gone, cannot be controlled, hates the country, and at every turn will escalate and fight rather than moderate for the sake of social cohesion. This is a worldview embodied by Charles Haywood, but it is shared very widely, especially by those who feed at the trough of slop on nothing but a steady diet of Libs of Tiktok and End Wokeness clips. Let us call this part of social media The Slop. I recommend you filter out these big slop accounts, who frequently distort what is happening, share old clips as if they had just happened, and focus your gaze on small outliers much as the media would focus on white-on-black crime. These accounts are good propagandists, but they are doing politics, not value-free observation and analysis.
‘The left is out of control’ is something like a foundational belief for many of these people. I have never shared this view, not least because I have never believed ‘the left’ to be in control. Regime apparatchiks tend to be people who can sniff the wind, not ideologues, this is how David Lammy can go from a screeching woke SJW calling Trump a KKK-fascist in 2018 to the British Foreign Secretary denouncing political violence and sucking up to Trump while pretending to be a conservative in 2024. It is how many well-known leftists who suffered from extraordinary Trump Derangement Syndrome five or six years ago, have now suddenly declared that he is alright after all, that he ‘feels human’ that they ‘don’t feel negative towards him’, as one ‘Queer coder’ put it. I am frequently amazed by the number of people who have read their James Burnham but forgot to read Machiavelli himself. With the help of hundreds of people, to whom I am grateful, I have carefully tracked the regime toning down the most overt and aggressive woke rhetoric, which peaked in 2020, and backing down or changing course on many of the pledges declared during that period including a total dismantling of DEI architecture. Such evidence, which is overwhelming, is frequently denied or ignored by propagandists, who have a monomaniacal need to stick to the old script even in the face of new facts. I have tracked billionaires pulling funding from universities, switching horses from Biden to Trump, moderating the tone of their coverage, especially on CNN (which saw a change at the elite, leadership level), and signalling for many months not only that they expect a second Trump presidency but also that they are totally fine with that prospect. This trend, which has been developing for at least two years, massively accelerated after the events in Israel on 7th October 2023. This all happened in broad daylight and was unsubtle, even if Libs of Tiktok never told you about it. Again, people are unwilling and unable to process these new facts, to adapt their ideas to this new reality, and to adjust their conclusions based on them. Their analysis remains static and lacking in any form of dynamism, incapable of responding to events. They wish, essentially, to live in the moment of 2018 forever. They will not be able to do so. I have also tracked MAGA becoming increasingly diverse, pro-black, pro-gay and so on, achieving in actu what DEI only promised in theory. Again, while people at best laugh at this or at worst claim I am engaging in some sort of anti-Americanism, it is nonetheless, objectively, what has happened. MAGA America will not be the 2025 Project, it will be the Rufo Reich, more liberal, more democratic, more diverse than ever before but wrapped in the American flag not the rainbow one, in MAGA hats rather than pussyhats.
In the aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt, there was a swift effort by The Slop to claim that the media was playing it down, mostly because they ran immediate headlines which avoided using the word ‘assassination’. This was then spread together with screenshots of the offending headlines, and quickly spun out into a mythos, which was rapidly cemented in a video a by Paul Joseph Watson watched by hundreds of thousands of people. It was a feat of impressive real-time mythmaking. In realty, every single media outlet called it an assassination attempt, but journalists could not call it that until it was confirmed by the FBI which took about four hours. The Slop has also fixated on lunatic voices on the left who have been lamenting the fact that the shooter missed Trump; in this regard few have been more deranged than the well-known cuckold Destiny, but The Slop wished to present this as the dominant reaction. Again, this is basically a lie. The coverage across legacy media from CNN to MSNBC to BBC has been respectful, moderate, and measured with regime anchors such as Jake Tapper adopting that hushed sombre and ‘serious’ tone that journalists often affect when they wish to convey gravity. The narrative The Slop wishes to paint is that the regime is upset that the shooter missed. In reality, every world leader in the GAE immediately condemned the violence and wished Trump a speedy recovery. These leaders included Joe Biden himself, who later rang Trump, Barack Obama, Sir Keir Starmer, who also later rang Trump, Justin Trudeau and virtually every other high-profile leftist leader of note. Dozens of celebrities and billionaires declared their support for Trump, including a few rappers and black sportspeople, but perhaps most significantly, billionaires Bill Ackman and Elon Musk. The firmware update sent by the ruling elite was immediately picked up by their underlings in the non-ruling elite, with Brian Stelter, at one time the Lord High Priest of Trump Derangement Syndrome, saying that, actually, Americans are not divided over politics after all. I find it fascinating that people who so frequently accuse their opponents of being NPCs that replace one set of instructions with another can manage to miss a firmware update of this obviousness as it is happening. This is wilful blindness akin to doomsday cultists the day after the world did not end, every step away from the crazy will be ignored or explained away, because these people are committed to a narrative, regardless of how events unfold.
Yesterday – again to wails of disbelief, howling counter-signals, and hot-headed and angry denunciations – I said Biden would call for national unity and to dial down the heat, and that Trump would then mirror those statements to his own base calling for unity and a dialling down of the discourse. Then, as usual, people gasped as I was able to predict events in real time with the usual exclamations that I must be a wizard of some sort. Biden duly made a speech calling for national unity and to dial down the heat and Trump duly ‘truthed’ out ‘UNITY!’ with his wife, Melania, penning a letter calling for the same, and it being widely reported that he is changing his speech at the Republican convention to call for unity. How is it I can predict these moves and The Slop cannot? My underlying assumption is that America is a serious country which must course correct because it has to. Their underlying assumption is that America is a basket-case that is destined to come apart at the seams because of political polarisation. My underlying assumption is that the leaders of the regime are fundamentally non-ideological and will do what is necessary to maintain power. Their underling assumption is that the leaders of the regime are religious fanatics who cannot help themselves but follow the most crazy path possible. While it is true that many crazy things have happened, such as the Trump conviction and trials, I maintained that these were the result of a few rogue elements and that overall the regime did not want any of that to happen, and that, when all was said and done, Blueanon – now mainstreamed by the way – would be blue-balled as they always have been. Again, the wailing, the sighs, the counter-signals, the anger, but again fundamentally events followed the course I had predicted and the cases went nowhere. This is not magic, it is simply reading the news and parsing the media correctly. Many people who are addicted to The Slop do not ever consult the media directly, as I do, they have it curated and filleted for them by dishonest ‘influencers’. It is up to you, you can process what is happening as a mark, or you can do it as a smart fan reading Dave Meltzer (i.e. me) but be aware that you choose the former only to satisfy emotional needs and not to understand what is really happening.
If you are reading this publication in a year and the Dems have stolen another election, or America has descended into civil war, or seen widespread civil unrest following the mother of all chimp outs, I will say ‘okay, sorry, I was wrong, America really is a basket case and not a serious country and no sensible elites remain’. If the course that I predict is followed – that Trump will rule as Ronald Reagan, that he will be an oddly unifying figure, that he will do nothing radical whatsoever in power, that the regime will be cool with him – I do not expect any apologies, because I have learned over the past eight years that no one ever learns anything. This is the iron law of the online right, a group with whom I, as a sensible centrist, increasingly feel no affinity.
[i] I have decided that I hate links and pictures in articles and therefore will not be linking to or screenshotting anything today or here on out. My last article had too many links. I hate links.
While I think your theories are right, I think this whole article is very much Monday morning quarterbacking. If that bullet is an inch to the right, there would be no Trump movement for the regime to co-opt. And surely you're above saying they 'planned it' in any explicit sense, so it becomed just a matter of fortune, of destiny, in which case your theory landed the coin flip.
That being said, we are all emotional, nk doubt about that. I was driving through the heart of Trump country, twelve hour trip, seeing nothing but MAGA flags and posters along the way when I heard the news. I just white knuckled the steering wheel and muttered, "I thought we had more time" like Duke Leto. Emotions are very high here.
Excellent article, but the evidence is ambivalent.
Fact: a would-be assassin attempted to murder DJT.
Available inferences: (1) the country is spiraling out of control into a vortex of violence (admittedly somewhat histrionic but not unsupported); (2) power hungry elites know that violence does not play well with the public and will tone down the rhetoric in order to preserve the power of the regime, easily weathering another Trump administration.
It is hardly crazy to maintain position number (1) the way Haywood does. Time will tell which theory is most cogent.
If I had to bet my life, I would bet theory number (2).
If I had to confess my hopes, they’re for number (1), as there is nothing in the world I detest more than this regime.