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There has been yet another assassination attempt against President Donald Trump. A man was apprehended at Trump’s rally in Coachella California. The man was carrying multiple firearms, and a fake VIP pass to allow him to pass through into the central rally area where President Trump was speaking. The man was also carrying multiple passports showing various different names and identities. The man connected to the Ukrainian foreign legion who attempted to assassinate President Trump in Florida also had a similar collection of fake passports.
…but it is 100% worth discussing.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-14/la-me-no-assassination-trump-coachella
On one hand, the perpetrator is an outspoken Trump supporter, running an advocacy org to expose the Deep State.
On the other, he runs an advocacy org to expose the Deep State. I don’t think that selects for the most stable individuals.
On the gripping hand, the guy is taking fake IDs and fake weapons into a restricted area with his fake license plate. He’s lucky to be alive.
Trump and his lackeys have fed conspiracy theories for a full decade, which are now coming back to bite them in the ass.
It's a familiar story. The radicalization of Bangladesh and the Maldives are examples from the last two years. You can't give ammunition to the crazies and then be surprised when the crazies start shooting (figuratively and literally).
The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it. It personifies the incompetence inherent in all bureaucracy. It is as faceless as it is boring. However, Trump's rendition of the deep state is akin to a singular eldritch horror that seeks to destroy all that we hold dear. In this narrative, the deep state is held responsible for all of America's problems, and Trump is heralded as the savior.
Of course the crazies ate it up. And given Trump's recent behavior, of course they're turning against him.
It's a uniquely American problem. High trust is usually synonymous with the first world. High trust and civic sense drive efficiencies that help the first world stay ahead. First-world Europeans and East Asians do not have this deep-rooted suspicion towards authority. Even functioning third-world nations have sweeping rations and welfare (low quality as it may be) to help with survival. So, the citizenry retains a base level of goodwill towards institutions.
America, since its inception, may be the only first-world country that's remained low-trust. The Second Amendment and the union-of-states structure start things off with suspicion between smaller organizations and national organizations. As time went on, you got the Wild West, stranger danger, dilapidated inner cities, and more recently, drug addiction-driven homelessness. Can't trust anyone. Usually, this would be unstable. But America has so much money that it brute forces its inefficiencies away. The entire American debt and insurance industry is propped up as a band-aid solution for all the missing trust.
In such a zeitgeist, violent conspiracy nuts become a unique failure mode for American society. Somewhere along the way, these kinds of conspiracy nuts are beaten down into compliant citizens. But not here. The country feeds this distrust, through its scriptures and decentralization. Now the nuts are crazier than ever, they have guns, and they're pointing to the source of their distrust: national leaders. With the disempowerment of pacifying institutions such as mainstream media and traditional churches, the nuts continue spiraling. America is dry tinder, and Trump is a whole-ass blowtorch. For the sake of this nation, I hope he loses and quietly fucks off to Mar-a-Lago for good.
America has not been high trust in the modern era. We’re a Latin American country which is so wealthy it can brute force its way past most of the usual Latin American social ills, or at least mitigate them. We’re not a bigger wealthier first world country. This isn’t England or Japan in the new world. It’s Brazil with seven times the GDP per capita.
I think that's a direct restatement of what DirtyWaterHotDog said. Was that your intention, or were you trying to argue with him?
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