Trump Shooting Engineered to Foment Civil War?

In order to justify a crackdown… (Theories, theories everywhere…)

Some people are sure they know what happened on Saturday, but as far as I can tell, all we have are theories. Indeed, as I noted in Notes yesterday, all we might ever have are theories:

Just like with JFK, we have a lot of data points, but no one (other than those directly involved) can know for sure who was really behind these events, and why they did what they did.

Do you trust any investigation of this assassination attempt done by any federal alphabet agency? Do you trust that they will tell the truth? I certainly don’t.

How about the media? Please.

We may be talking about this decades from now and still not know for sure. In fact, I do not see any reason to believe that we can know for sure, given all the layers of untrustworthy sources sitting atop this thing.

I know plenty of people have already formulated a view, however. Even though we cannot know all the whos and whys for sure, it is human nature

a) to want to have clear explanations for events, and

b) to formulate explanations based on one’s worldview.

This event thus serves to reveal ideological and philosophical predispositions as much as anything else.

• Ocham’s Razor lovers, for example, are likely to argue for (what they claim to be) the simplest explanation: that the shooter was a lone wolf. People with a high normalcy bias will have a similar reaction.

• Some among the “conspiracy” community will take the opposite route and insist that the shooter had to have been MKUltra’d into doing this.

• Hanlon’s Razor fanboys will insist that there was no conspiracy—that the Secret Service’s failures were due to incompetence alone. (Hanlon’s Razor argues that we must never attribute to malice what can adequately be chalked up to stupidity.)

• Trump supporters are more likely to believe that this was an attempt to kill him, to get him out of the presidential race.

• Many on the left will favor theories about how this was actually engineered by Trump’s people—a narrow miss, followed by defiant strength, to make him a hero and hand him the election.

• Mass-formation normie types will insist that whatever the authorities and officials tell us is the real explanation is the real explanation.

• I am even noticing that many of the wonderfully iconoclastic people here on Substack tend either to lean a little bit more toward fear of the left or fear of the right—and thus to favor theories that reflect that fear.

So what happens when I cast this same lens back at myself?

In one sense, I suppose I am an exception—or, at least I am in a much smaller camp—in that I probably will never settle on a single explanation that I am absolutely sure is the real explanation.

In another sense, however, I am just like everyone else, insofar as my personal predispositions cause me to suspect some things more than others. So let’s look at those predispositions.

First…

I do not trust the state. Government is a criminal racket. Even the best-designed systems inevitably devolve into criminal rackets. So I don’t trust much that is said or done by any agent or agency of any government.

Second…

I do not trust the state no matter whose hands it is in, but when it comes to the left-right paradigm, I trust the left far, far less.

Leftism is the worst mass ideology ever to ooze forth from the twisted mind of man. It is devious, dangerous, and deadly. Every single time it reaches its fullest bloom, it produces nothing but failure, oppression, and rivers of blood.

Leftists managed to slaughter and starve 150 million people in a single century, and to oppress many millions more in soul-crushing totalitarian mega-states. Leftism really is a “boot stamping on a human face forever.” Denial of that is denial of history.

Of course, non-leftist states have perpetrated their own slaughters—from ancient conquerors to modern colonialism to every other form of barbarism. I oppose them all. But right here, right now, for the last hundred-plus years, leftism is far and away the biggest threat.

The right, properly defined, refers to Anglophone-style conservatives, (non-left) libertarians, and (non-left) anarchists. All of these ideologies share a core classical-liberal provenance in common. As such, they are not generally seeking power for its own sake. They have few objectives. Mostly, they just want to be left alone.

Yes, I know that conservatives have more of a busybody streak than their libertarian cousins. But none of that comes anywhere close to the “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” ethos to which every leftist is constantly straining (whether they recognize it consciously or not).

Third…

I have very little normalcy bias. I do not assume that things will remain as they are. I do assume that it is only a matter of time before really big, messed-up things happen. (This attitude actually served me well during covid. Yes, the situation was upsetting and even carried some psychological impact, but the lack of surprise made it easier for me to bear.) Thus, I have no difficulty imagining that any one particular event might be the spark of something big.

Fourth…

I am not a “conspiracy theorist,” but I am also not not a conspiracy theorist. I am willing to entertain just about any possibility. I am not tyrannized or constrained by Ocham’s Razor or Hanlon’s Razor (I definitely do not believe that either of those is always correct).¹

Fifth…

I am also about as far from mass-formation as you can get. I am generally anti-authority, and I am far less likely to trust mass narratives than most people.

And finally…

I am more comfortable than most with the fact that there are a lot of things for which there is no dispositive answer. I am willing to look at a question and consider a range of possible answers without actually setting on one.

For better or worse, that is who I am. And so all of that contributes to any theories I might be more predisposed to consider. And the one on my mind right now relates back to an article I wrote in May: Is Trump Hate Desensitizing People to a Final Solution Against MAGAs?

The piece must’ve struck a chord, because it remains my biggest to date here on Substack. (Goodness knows the experiences that led to the theory I expound therein struck a chord with me when they happened.)

The article is actually not long at all, but the TL;DR is this:

The last eight years of fomenting unprecedented levels of hate against a single domestic public figure (for shorthand: Trump Derangement Syndrome) had a deeper purpose. For the architects, the real goal is to get the average person to hate Trump’s supporters. And the purpose of that is to desensitize them to whatever the state might do to Trump supporters in any kind of future crackdown.

If this theory is correct, then J6 was a major tactical event in this overall strategy. As soon as you look two inches past the official narrative, it is clear that the January 6th, 2020, “insurrection” was engineered. The event, and the narrative they created around it, gave them an excuse to label their political enemies as a threat not to Biden or the Democrats, but to “democracy”itself. To America. To mom and apple pie. It gave them an excuse to label everyone to the right of Michael Bloomberg as a “domestic terrorist.”

At the same time, after having clearly stolen the 2020 election, they created the narrative that questioning elections is crazy—itself an act bordering on treason. They even tried to press the notion that it was Team Trump that had cheated.

So let’s look at the assassination attempt against Trump in that light.

Within five minutes of the news breaking, people were already opining that this event has won him the election (by turning him into a martyr). In a conventional analysis, and with unrigged elections, that is more than plausible. I do not think he lost in 2020, and I do not think there is any chance he will lose in 2024, even before this assassination attempt.

But things are not conventional, and American elections are not unrigged.

So what if this event, plus all the rest of the facts on the ground, show him clearly winning…but then, at the last minute, he loses anyway? How do Trump’s supporters react?

I am not what you would describe as a “Trump supporter”—and I am not even a fan of “democracy” itself, as you all know—but I would be disgusted beyond belief. So imagine how Trump’s supporters would feel.

Maybe the left pulls a switcheroo and uses shady tactics to install another candidate at the last minute. Or maybe it’s Biden, and he simply once again gets a sudden influx of a statistically impossible number of votes at 2:00 AM, counted in rooms closed to Republican observers. What Trump supporter would accept that? Even Republicans who do not support Trump will smell a rat.

Even many of us who have largely left the red-blue paradigm will not accept that. Because it will be obvious banana-republic garbage.

So, in the shortest terms possible…

Could the assassination attempt be one more in a series of carefully curated events designed to foment civil war? Even just a few little post-election “insurrections” could be spun into a larger narrative, and that narrative used to justify…

Justify what? Crackdowns? More suspension of habeas corpus, as was done with the J6ers? A situation of rapid flux, allowing a sudden lurch in the direction of social credit scores, CBDC, or more surveillance than we already have?

I really don’t know. But it’s at least on my mind.

I recognize that events are moving quickly and evidence keeps coming in. I know that some truly damning piece of information may arrive—one that gives most of us a strong reason to favor a particular explanation.

But I also know that things are rarely as they appear, and that no matter what evidence arrives, we cannot be absolutely sure about all the whos and whys of any situation involving governments and people with power.

So for now, I am just keeping all the various possibilities in mind, including the theory I posit above.

All of that said…

I must point out that the only reason why these sorts of things happen is because there is power at stake. The power to control others. The power to acquire resources from them. Without the lure of that power, most of this madness disappears overnight.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

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Update:

I just got an email blast from an old colleague suggesting that their next move may be to set up a patsy “conservative” or MAGA person to do the same to Biden. And this attempt would not miss, serving the dual purpose of solving their senile-candidate problem and justifying whatever crackdowns they might like to impose. Just more grist for the mill…

1. There have been several event-clusters in the last few years that statistically could not have been the result of random chance: The sudden increase in destruction of food-processing facilities and major train derailments, all within a few weeks; the triple- and quadruple-digit percent increases in disease incidence right after the release of the covid vaccines; the unprecedented rise in heart attacks killing young people; etc.

Logic suggests that something that cannot be the result of random chance isn’t the result of random chance, but plenty of your perma-skeptic types cited Ocham’s (and Hanlon’s) Razor anyway, as if those tropes are dispositive of such questions.

Quite a few people portray themselves as dispassionate, rational empiricists, but then refuse to accept evidence even when it is right there—because it’s not about empiricism for them, really, but rather natural skepticism, normalcy bias, and fear of the unknown. Such people would deny Bigfoot exists even if he came up and kissed them on the nose.

And then on the other side of that coin are people who love the idea of unknown things and will believe anything.

(Full disclosure: if we draw a continuum to reflect this range, I would be to the whimsical side, but only by a small amount :-)