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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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An unknown assassin has attempted to kill President Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner tonight. One person is dead. President Trump is unharmed. The disposition of the assassin is unknown.

Here's a clip. I think I hear shooting sounds at 0:40 and then they react a few seconds later. Dunno how close the shooter actually got, seems like they must've got him further away from Trump?

https://x.com/WomanDefiner/status/2048203588841750754

One can only imagine how toxic fake shooter narratives are going to be this time... I don't like Trump much but how hard is it to believe that people sincerely want to shoot him dead and will even sacrifice their lives to do so? Or that if the Trump campaign somehow faked their own assassination attempts that wouldn't immediately leak, like so much else that they do?

Edit: Apparently the assassin made the world's shittest-looking steam game too and people are shitposting in the reviews:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/945530/Bohrdom/

I'm a huge critic of the "small number of people did something bad so everyone tangentially related is responsible or guilty" sort of arguments, but I do at least appreciate that the conspiracy theories formed after bad events are logically consistent with that. After all if you do truly believe in the concept then you're forced to deny that anyone tangentially related to you could do bad or else you're admitting that you are bad.

So of course then people have to go with "This Trump shooting was staged" or "the people who beat up cops and planted bombs during Jan 6th were secret fed antifa" or whatever because it can't simply be "oh that guy was nuts, but I'm not that guy so it doesn't impact me or my beliefs". Not that false flag attempts don't exist at all, but the question really should be, so what?

What does it matter if the guy who shot a police station was actually a boogaloo boy false flagging instead of a BLM protestor? No one is accountable for his actions except for him. To me it didn't make BLM look bad beforehand and it didn't make right wing groups look bad afterwards just cause this individual sucks. I appreciate the consistency but it's still really stupid.

Trying to equivocate 'Trump intentionally got shot in the ear since he's a showman' with 'massive sprawling mess potentially had glowies involved' is a bit of a stretch

Sure ok, we can find plenty of others, how about the killing of the two Minnesota Dems just last year?

We have two options under the "people are responsible for what others in their groups do".

  1. Conservatives are responsible for those two deaths.

  2. It's a false flag and he was actually a liberal because one time he was on some large board for business owners where the governor signs off on it and therefore it's anti conservatives are responsible.

And we have one simple.thing under my belief of personal responsibility.

  1. That guy was nuts, he sucks. He's responsible for his own actions. Other people aren't responsible on either side for not knowing this random guy would go murder two politicians.

It's striking that I rarely ever see "People are responsible for what happens in their groups" come with "I take responsibility for what other people did in my groups". It's always either blatant self serving hypocrisy or conspiracy theories about how everyone in.their group doesn't count.

Random nutjob activity == massive organized protest influenced by a plethora of different groups and interests. Unless you're saying the Jan 6 bombs just came from some amateur arson enthusiast who had a tragic schedule clash

Unless you're saying the Jan 6 bombs just came from some amateur arson enthusiast who had a tragic schedule clash

We know who did it, he's just a guy who thought the 2020 election was stolen and someone needed to do something about it.

Mr Cole told agents, according to the filing, that someone needed to "speak up" for the people who "feel that, you know, something as important as voting in the federal election is being tampered with".

Like many politically violent people, he's also just a weirdo in his political views too and calls himself apolitical and disliking "both parties" cause violent people are often freaks with weird views.

Funny enough though the Trump admin's refusal to not treat individuals as individuals might bite them in the ass here and end up letting a bomber go, his defense team is arguing the overarching Jan 6th pardon applies to him too.