Deeper into the Abyss

Every act of political violence opens up the prospect of the collapse of civil order. And the mainstream media doesn't care.

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Sunday night’s attempt on Donald Trump’s life — the second in two months — did not feature the same horrifying sense of immediacy or degree of drama witnessed at the Butler, Pennsylvania rally on July 13. And that’s because this time the attack was mercifully preempted.

Regardless, it is absolutely insane that there have been two Trump assassination attempts within the past sixty days. Two. And yes, this was indeed a second assassination attempt, regardless of what congenital morons like Dash Dobrofsky, whom I detest with the burning intensity of a thousand suns, would have you believe.

The would-be assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh, hid in the bushes along the perimeter of the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach for around 12 hours with a scoped SKS rifle,¹ a GoPro camera, and backpacks with ceramic plates. I think it’s safe to say this spaz wasn’t there to take pictures, especially considering that he was in the process of aiming the rifle at Trump through a cyclone fence approximately 300 meters away when a Secret Service agent spotted him and engaged, whereupon Routh fled on foot.

A distinction must be drawn between the two assassination attempts: whereas Matthew Thomas Crooks remains a rather enigmatic figure thanks in large part to a minimal internet footprint, the mainstream media’s willful incuriosity, and a distinct mumness from our noble and totally nonpartisan FBI warriors, Ryan Wesley Routh left a paper trail confirming that he was not only a highly impressionable figure radicalized in the support of progressive causes, but a Biden/Harris supporter who only ever donated to Democrats and often repeated the same OMG-Trump-is-an-existential-threat-who-will-end-Our-Democracy™-and-be-a-dictator-and-probably-start-WWIII-and-enslave-minorites-and-imprison-Rachel-Maddow-even-though-he-was-already-president-for-four-years-and-that-wasn’t-the-case rhetoric that the media class has been screaming from the rooftops over the past decade.

In other words, this second assassination attempt on Trump is an excellent example of the “stochastic terrorism” concept endorsed by the Left.

Harken back to 2022, when Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer. We were informed that, if the victim of an attack had at any point been “demonized” by a political party, then that political party was responsible for what follows. Indeed, no less reliable source than The Washington Post itself assigned three writers to explain to America why the assault on Paul Pelosi was directly tied to a series of anti-Nancy political commercials that ran twelve years earlier. “For many Democrats,” the piece concluded, “the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband represents the all-but-inevitable conclusion of Republicans’ increasingly violent and threatening rhetoric toward their political opponent.”

Think of all the other times that Democrats have used even the most tentative, implausible links to blame the Right for violent behavior. The guy who tried to murder Gabby Giffords in 2011 was a paranoid schizophrenic whose “political motivation” was his odd ideas about grammar, but Democrats condemned Republicans for inciting him. The 2016 Pulse nightclub shooter was a follower of the Islamic State, but his attack was blamed on conservative homophobia. The dude who shot up an Asian business in 2021 was a massage parlor customer wracked with guilt about his sex addiction, but the Left pinned it on Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. And so on and so forth.

Surely, then, based off the fact that Ryan Wesley Routh often repeated verbatim the language of civilizational catastrophe used by the liberal establishment and mainstream media whenever discussing the 45th president, it’s reasonable to conclude that Routh was at least encouraged to take matters into his own hands…right? Am I wrong in thinking that if you call someone an existential threat to democracy enough times, vigilantism is a natural result? That obsessively telling the American public a certain politician is Hitler 2.0² will eventually result in violence, since equating somebody to that degree of evil means almost anything is justified to stop them?³

Because it is simply impossible to overstate how pervasive, how ubiquitous, such messaging has become. Most of us are now desensitized to the Trump-as-existential-threat framing,⁴ but it is inarguable that Democrats and the Left more broadly, in conjunction with their media handmaidens, have fostered an increasingly militant culture of grievance against Donald Trump by whipping up a psychotic level of animus for both him and his supporters. This is the very definition of hysteria:

The video montage below consists of clips taken from just a single hour of MSNBC coverage a few months ago:

Notably, Ryan Wesley Routh self-published a book in which he called for Trump to be assassinated for being too friendly with Putin. Here’s a 2024 clip of Joy Reid telling her audience that Donald Trump has been groomed to be a Russian agent since 1977:

The point is, seeing as the Left always preaches about how the ineluctable prerequisite to political violence is “extreme rhetoric,” and seeing as this is now the second time someone has tried to murder Trump, and seeing as it’s fairly obvious Routh was influenced by the wildly alarmist propaganda pushed by Democrats and mainstream media bullshit artists pretty much 24/7, perhaps these sectarian parrots might at least tacitly acknowledge that prudence is warranted going forward and it’s in the best interest of the country to “lower the temperature.”

Wishful thinking.

It’s been little more than three days since the “golf club incident,” as the obfuscating wordcels at NBC News call it, and the collective response on the Left has been so disgusting, and so irresponsible, that it’s almost fascinating.

Yes, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden both called Trump to express relief that the former president was unharmed,⁵ and both issued brief statements condemning the violence. But other than that, Democratic politicians, luminaries, influencers, and media mouthpieces have essentially upped the ante by blaming Trump for bringing the assassination attempts on himself; reiterating that yes, Trump is a threat to Our Democracy™; making light of what’s transpired; decrying Republicans and their “gun culture”; and retreating into self-soothing fictions.

Note that according to the Governor of Ohio, the “bomb threats” are originating “overseas.”

It’s clear that the mainstream media is intent on twisting reality in order to meet its most urgent ideological and political prerogative: preventing Trump from being re-elected.

The equivocations, the deflections, the displacement—it all comes down to power. All means are justified to prevent threats to Democratic rule, because only Democrats and their progressive agonistes are the responsible and right-thinking people. They simply don’t care how much they degrade and corrupt our political process as long as they get what they want. And right now, the last thing they want is voters believing that Trump is a victim or a near-martyr. As Colin Redemer puts it, “Assassination and attempted assassination confer unique moral authority. For many on the Left, the prospect of Trump entering the pantheon alongside Reagan, the Kennedys, Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln is too horrible to countenance.” The desperation to dampen his “aura” is hardly surprising.

The press knows full well that its hyperbolic bilge and propaganda-fueled catastrophism has led, at least in part, to two dreadful, almost murderous events, and that doubling down on such rhetorical fusillades will further establish a verbal atmosphere encouraging additional attempts on Trump’s life.

But that’s the desired effect.

And if you should have any doubt as to whether the media class’s operating animus toward Trump, its new business of rallying audiences to addictive disgust, and its insistence on prioritizing narrative over fact is having a horrible effect on our body politic, I invite you to scroll through the comments of this Washington Post article, as well as this one. Here are a handful:

I didn’t pick out the most insane comments I could find. These were the norm. I invite you to venture into the cesspool and see for yourself. But be forewarned: it’s no frolic in the psychic glade.

Think about this, though. These aren’t comments posted on social media, which incentivizes saying crazy things and engaging in empty pugilistic bombast to accrue a following that can be monetized; these are comments on a Washington Post article made by random anons. What does it say when the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” newspaper subscribers so glibly trade in vitriolic, BlueAnon bull?

The press plays a fundamental role in a well-functioning society as a sense-making tool that the public can use to orient itself. But the American media has largely been captured by Democratic activists and progressive zealots intent on advancing the Left’s revolutionary project. They ensnare people in a closed, homogenized information bubble filled with fodder for the sadomasochistic pleasures of outrage and vindication, being wronged and proven right, how-dare-you and I told-you-so. Such misinformed, synthetic outrage leads groundlings to come up with more and more egregious departures from reason as a way to signal their ideological purity and commitment to Progress™. Over time this has a radicalizing effect, fomenting an intolerant lust for crushing those who hold an alternative vision for society.

When the chasm between our worldviews, down to the most basic understanding of reality, widens to a certain point, political disagreement becomes lethal. Eventually, the civil peace bequeathed to us by centuries of Western civilization will give way to Third World anarchy.

We seem to be on a course toward disaster, but those at the helm have no desire to navigate away from the shoals.

1. SKS stands for “Samozaryadny karabin sistemy Simonova,” which translates to “self-loading carbine of the Simonov system” in Russian. Very curious as to why Routh chose this rifle.

2. “In most situations, comparing a political opponent to Adolf Hitler might seem like an extraordinary step,” wrote Politico in December 2023. “For Joe Biden’s campaign, it has become part of the routine of running against Donald Trump.”

3. I’m reminded of a David Hogg tweet from two years ago: “What do you do when the former president is the greatest threat to US national security?”

4. The Harris campaign is currently running multiple ads calling Trump “a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms,” a “dictator,” and is even noting pointedly that America “was founded” — by which, of course, she means it violently revolted — “in defiance of a King.” And just weeks after the first assassination attempt on Trump, Tim Walz said that the former president is a “threat to Democracy” and a “fascist” who will “put people's lives in danger.”

5. “We are relieved that the biggest threat to America since the civil war is safe.”