Let's Drop the Conspiratorial Bullshit

Okay?

Some quick thoughts on Butler, PA…

Conspiratorialist nut jobs have gone apeshit left and right.

The right….

Nope, not “the radical left deep state.” There is no radical US deep state. No such thing exists. But if did exist it would not have failed to murder the target for crying out loud.

Republi-fascist VP candidate wannabe JD Vance says the shooting is the outcome of the Biden campaign’s demonization of Trump as an “an authoritarian fascist” who needs to be stopped by any and all means.

Well, Trump is an authoritarian fascist but no that’s not really how the Biden campaign describes him and the Biden campaign consistently denounces political violence in the imperial homeland. I’m no fan (to say the least) of the Biden campaign but ….come on, no.

It looks like the shooter was a registered Republican and a gun nut though there are reports he gave a small bit of money to a liberal get out the vote group in January 2021. So his motives and ideological identity are at this point ambiguous.

My early guess is that he was a lone wolf psychotic looking for Boogaloo-like chaos and acceleration towards mass bloodshed. But that’s just an early guess.

Reports I just saw said he was wearing a Demolition Ranch t-shirt. Demolition Ranch is a militant gun rights group. That’s worth checking out.

“The left”…

Yes, the event very much works for Trump. You betchya. It feeds his martyrdom narrative and it feeds his invincibility and Chosen One narratives. (From the New York Times today: 'After Mr. Trump thrilled the crowd with his fist pump and made it offstage on his own power, his arm draped over the shoulder of an agent, some in the crowd quickly saw political implications. “Trump was just elected today, folks,” one man shouted. “He is a martyr.” ' )

But no, it was not “staged” by the Trump movement/campaign. Exploited and arguably fueled by the Trump campaign, sure, but “staged”? No. Come on. People died. The shooter almost killed Trump. It was a serious assassination attempt.

What’s remotely surprising about this? The nation is saturated with guns including AR-15s and other miltiary style assault weapons (the shooter had an AR). It simmers with political violence. The right has been fueling that violence and cancerous weapons-spread with paranoid-style politics and gun worship for many years. The dark web grooms a chilling underworld of unhinged lunatics, generally hyper-alienated white male Incels into guns, killing, and death.

Neo-Weatherman Shit, Really?

All the liberal and left-identified people I see who have been digging the shooting sound unhinged and stupid to me The incident works for Trump on the whole, so why are you celebrating it? What, have some of you gone Narodnik/Red Brigades/SLA? Really? Revolution is not about revenge and killing and terrorism and lone wolf actions ffs, it’s about a mass movement to radically replace the reigning capitalist-imperialist system with revolutionary socialism. It’s about “the revolutionary re-constitution of society at large.” And it certainly isn’t about helping the fascist right sell their Dear Leader as a God-ordained martyr and messiah.

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Finally I am struck by the role of chance in history.. Somehat better aim and we might be in some kind of intense civil conflagration right now, with Trumpists with guns wreaking havoc coast to coast. We already kind of are in a sort of simmering latent civil war but wow, that was close to a real spark for some serious mass violence.