The first pinned post can be found here:
https://lemmy.world/post/17530961
That’s where all the engagement and comments can be found, and I’d encourage everyone to participate there.
The reason for THIS post is to direct everyone there.
I’m getting multiple reports that some people can’t see it for some reason. Could be Federation, could be they blocked the user who posted it.
Here’s hoping you all can see THIS one and move over to where everyone else is engaged.
Please please please can we stop the conspiracy theories from blowing up in this thread? Can we not act like them?
Conspiracy theories aside, I’d like to see people mocking the injury with little red ear clips, just like these assholes mocked John Kerry with purple heart band-aids:
Why?
Because they need to be mocked.
looks like shit
Nah, man. Why step down to their level?
Because “when they go low we go high” was a stupid strategy, and not only did it not work, but it paved the way for Trump to win.
Making rhetoric that connects with the idiots and bigots in America who are old enough to vote is, annoyingly, a required part of political campaigns here, especially if your intent is to peel any of those votes away from populist candidates. It’s just social engineering.
Yeah but the flyover states don’t matter.
Eyes on the prize.
Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia.
They’re not quite “flyover states”, but they’re less liberal than you might hope.
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
-Nietzsche
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory to think that the actor turned politician decided to act like he was getting shot for attention. He’s a reality show host that says shocking things. I don’t think it’s a far stretch to say he would fake an assassination attempt when it’s in every other movie in Hollywood. This is in his wheelhouse.
NYT photographer got the photo of the bullet, it seems that TMZ’s reporting that it was glass from the teleprompter is not correct:
https://x.com/spectatorindex/status/1812293722832318726
There very well could be bullets. One person died. However, I don’t think it’s a far stretch to say he would sacrifice someone to gain what he wants to gain.
He has been proven to manipulate with the Russians for the last election. Is it that big of a leap to think he would stage a dramatic scene for sympathy? Plus he walked away without any harm.
Plus he walked away without any harm.
Uh… I hate Trump and everything, but if someone made my ear BLEED, I wouldn’t exactly call it harmless.
He walked away when a “bullet” hit him. Any other bullet is a major injury or death. Relatively speaking it’s harmless. He needs to “get over it”. His own words.
Oh, I see what you’re doing now. You’re trying to turn his words against him. I can get behind that.
But to reiterate, anything that makes you bleed is not harmless.
We are witness to a truly baffling idiocy…
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Removed, civility.
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Oh my god dude this is exactly what right wing fuckwits are doing to make sure it was “definitely a radical gay woke leftist” wake the fuck up. You are indulging the exact same conspiratorial thinking and circular logic they do. You’ve decided what happened and are cobbling together “evidence” in the form of “it’s possible.”
Get off your computer for an hour and go take a walk or something. Wait for actual information.
No u
Removed, civility.
This is literally a conspiracy theory.
Uh huh. You are selling that he’s that important and that people care that much. I don’t buy it. Go forth with your blind eyes. Mine see a better truth ;)
You sound like a QAnon grifter.
How? I’m bitching about how someone else has control over my life? No. I just don’t believe some event is shaking out the way they wanted it to. It’s what half of America has been asking for. Including him.
You did not say it was just shaking out the way they want it to. You were coming up with conspiracy theories for how it happened. Stop playing dumb/innocent. We both know exactly what you’re doing and it is insulting that you think you can pretend it was anything else.
I am not coming up with it. It’s been said since it’s happened. Because he’s a grifter that no one trusts and it’s in his character to lie. Maybe try not being a douchebag and people will care if you are shot at and not think it’s another grift 🤷
So walk me through how that conversation goes in your head. Trump is just this side of senile, so he definitely couldn’t have come up with a convoluted plot involving his attempted assassination, so it 100% would have had to be a suggestion of someone else. So let’s walk through the conversation that must have happened for this to have been a fake assassination attempt.
“So Mr. Trump, I think that the best thing to do to ensure you’re going to win the next election is to have someone shoot very near you. Maybe the bullet will graze you, maybe it’ll hit the teleprompter and send shards of glass your way. But either way, it’ll be a very close thing, and you’ll suffer a minor injury along the way.”
Do you honestly think that Donald Trump, the guy who got out of the draft because of bone spurs, the guy who gets queasy at the sight of blood, the guy who has spent the last 2 months talking about how he’d cling to a battery to get electrocuted instead of taking his chances with a shark, would be ok with being shot at? Seriously?
Because if that’s what you think, you and I don’t occupy the same universe.
Be creative. Let’s say you are a decision maker in Trump’s orbit. You think now is a good time to do something big to fire up your base.
Do you tell trump and risk bad acting or do you set it up without his knowledge? I believe the injury is genuine but that doesn’t rule out the idea that the situation was set up to have a minimal chance of permanent injury to the candidate while giving him incredible PR and the chance to look strong.
I think that the idea that it was faked is so outlandish that it would require a good amount of evidence before the prospect could even be considered in serious conversation. There is zero evidence that it was faked. By far the most likely explanation is that someone who had a bone to pick with Donald Trump, and who was not particularly skilled at making shots 150 yards away climbed up onto a roof and grabbed the opportunity that lax security provided.
You start throwing in conspiracies about how it was an inside job, and everything becomes so much more complicated, logistics-wise. Complicated plots do happen, but to suggest that was the case here with zero evidence is laughable.
I ain’t saying I believe this. I think it has a low but non zero plausibility level. It’s also not ‘faked’, my hypothetical is a real guy really shooting at trump but with the scenario manipulated to limit permanent damage or death of the candidate.
It’s more believable than a full faked assassination attempt with fake blood, given the proximity of bystanders and cameras.
I would think the smartest play would to be near him say 10 yards where it would “look” close enough. Actually take out the sacrifice. But then go down and act as hit with a blood pack or cut himself on the ear when he was on the ground. The graze is just an illusion. Kind of like the bullet catch trick if you are familiar with magic tricks.
There aren’t sufficient words to describe the lack of intelligence in this comment.
someone died, plus the shooter. At least one other attendee was injured.
Of course they have to identify the shooter with his First, middle, and last name, as is tradition… and it was a 20 yr old registered Republican? Wonder what the story on that will be?
I have a few ideas about that ranging from the boring to insane conspiracy bullshit.
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A decent amount of people, myself included, have chosen to register as republican despite not really aligning themselves with the party. PA is a closed primary state so if you want a vote in the primaries you basically have to choose R or D, I personally went Republican on my registration because in general I can live with whoever the Democrats put up, they may not be my first, third, or 20th choice of candidate, but on the Republican side there are mostly only bad choices, and I’d rather try to head off the worst of them before they make it to the general election. In other cases it might just be down to a coin flip.
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A lot of PA is pretty damn red, in some cases you may not have many or even any Democrat candidates in your local elections, and the ones you do have don’t really have a snowballs chance in hell, so you might as well try to work with what you got on the Republican side.
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Or maybe even you just registered as a Republican because that’s what your parents told you to do when you got your driver’s license and never bothered to change it. Maybe you just kind of figured that’s what everyone did, or maybe you’ve had a change of heart since registering.
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There are still some never-trump type Republicans out there, some of them even have their heads screwed on mostly correctly. Someone who sees trump as damaging to their party, or maybe even democracy while holding other Republican values may want him and his ilk taken out.
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Again, some Republicans do have their heads screwed on mostly right, and maybe they feel very strongly about one of the many things Trump will obviously make worse.
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Starting with the conspiracy bullshit - someone wanted to make trump a martyr to galvanize the Republican base. Maybe they only intended to wound him, maybe they did want to kill him. Maybe it’s a publicity stunt orchestrated by Trump himself or other high ranking Republicans, maybe it’s a lone actor who decided that it would really get Republicans motivated.
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They know Trump is overall pretty incompetent, and felt he has already served the role he was needed for and wanted him out of the picture so that someone just as evil but actually good at his job could step into his shoes.
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Even more radical Republicans who think that trump doesn’t go far enough in advancing their race war, or christofascist, or whatever insane bullshit they want to bring about.
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Putin is sick of his shit, or some other foreign actor helped bring this about.
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Just plain ol’ mental illness and trying to understand the motivation here isn’t going to get you very far because it’s not based on anything approaching logic.
I’m actually in the first camp as well, I’d rather have some amount of control over who the opposition is, and I like to keep tabs on what kind of rhetoric/propaganda the other side is pushing on their base. It looks like the shooter may have been in this camp as well, based on the reporting I’ve seen. A BBC story notes he was a registered Republican, but that he had made a donation to a liberal political group, ActBlue, in 2021. So I think it’s probably going to be pinned on Democrats trying to be the violent ones, even though it has literally been Trump & co stirring up shit for years and basically guaranteeing that something like this would happen.
I heard on the news that he donated to ActBlue™ so that definitely tells some of the story.
$15… when he was 17.
And I think they just have a donation from someone with his common first and last name. No middle name, no birth date. The only confirmed info says he’s a registered Republican.
This doesn’t even matter. Guns are the issue.
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Sounds more and more like he was a libertarian who didn’t like Trump. Doesn’t fit so cleanly into the media narrative, but there’s definitely a lot of folks who fit that description politically in the US. Right leaning in a lot of ways but don’t like authoritarianism. That part of the electorate also tends to own the most firearms, and there are no shortage of them in PA.
Whelp… Biden was insistent on running, now the Monkey’s Paw has answered. All the other plausible Dems who could have stepped in to replace Biden will be running for the hills, and being the Democratic nominee is gonna be the worst job in politics for the next four months. And at the end of the campaign he gets to be remembered by history as the loser in the worst landslide election since Reagan-Carter.
Also:
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Sonia Sotomayor’s decision not to retire during Biden’s term is looking like yet another D own goal. Very real prospects for a 7-2 Supreme Court.
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We’re going to be seeing an orgy of foreign governments jockeying to cultivate relations with Trump. Official US foreign policy is going to be dead in the water, and NATO and G7 will be leaderless, until next year.
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Trump is going to have an iron grip on the Republican party now, to an even greater extent than before. On various issues where other Republicans held positions contrary to Trump’s, they’re going to be brushed aside.
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For the above two reasons, Ukraine is pretty well fucked.
Fucking vote
Democrats aren’t just jumping ship over this bullshit. The actual voters, the people, not the talking heads, are pretty entrenched in Not Trump. Votes aren’t changing over this, and the Democrats know what’s at stake. At the end of the day there’s more blue than red and it was an L for Trump as soon as he said he was running.
And the end of the day I dont give a shit that he got shot. So did 50. Its not changing my vote. He’s been calling for violence and got some. I worry this will cause more political violence.
(40)
Maybe he means 50 Cent?
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