WILLIAM OTIS: Q: Why can’t we just turn down the heat? A: Because the people who turned it up have nothing else to run on.

Jonathan Turley has a good take on it in his piece here, titled, “The attempted assassination of Trump is not nearly as surprising as it should be.” Turley notes that the Left’s screeching has included:

…claims that Trump was set to kill democracy, unleash “death squads” and make homosexuals and reporters “disappear.”

President Biden has stoked this rage rhetoric. In 2022, Biden held his controversial speech before Independence Hall where he denounced Trump supporters as enemies of the people. Biden recently referenced the speech and has embraced the claims that this could be our last democratic election….

While most people reject the hyperbolic claims, others take them as true. They believe that homosexuals are going to be “disappeared” as claimed on ABC’s “The View” or that the Trump “death squads” are now green lighted by a conservative Supreme Court, as claimed by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow….

I guess this was the reason that Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative Supreme Court Justice, himself needed to be “disappeared” — an actual murder attempt by a pro-abortion zealot that, oddly, we seem to be hearing zero about just now.

As soon as Trump was elected, unhinged rage became the norm as with Kathy Griffin featuring herself holding the bloody severed head of Trump.

Just recently, another celebrity, actress Lea DeLaria, begged Biden to “blow [Trump] up” after the recent presidential immunity decision. DeLaria explained that “this is a **** war. This is a war now, and we are fighting for our **** country. And these a**holes are going to take it away. They’re going to take it away.”

These are the people — they and their buddies one office down the hall at MSNBC or CNN or the WaPo — who are setting new world records for sanctimony in telling the rest of us to turn down the heat.

And it’s not all that new a development — like today’s Trump haters, Harry Truman also apparently had received special temporal dispensation from Mike Godwin to violate his law and go full Springtime for Hitler on Thomas Dewey, the liberal Republican governor of New York — because “Liberty!” was suddenly on the ballot if the big government Democrat didn’t win his election bid:

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Secret Service Director Allegedly Didn’t Want to Put Snipers on a Sloped Roof.

“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,” she said. “And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.”

Talk about a genuine Mission: Impossible!

UPDATE: It speaks volumes about how far the credibility of our institutions has fallen in recent years that this question would even be asked:

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

A JOE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF CANNOT STAND! Or: Dispatches From The Intersection Of “The Rent Is Too Damn High!” Guy And The Trunalimunumaprzure! Guy:

Joe Biden announces that he’s going to ban rent increases of more than $55 nationwide. I think he means 5%, which he also can’t do, but he legit can’t read his teleprompter. Elder abuse: pic.twitter.com/7wvKmEWE9U

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) July 16, 2024

Duane Patterson suggests that there may be a third option at play here: “Where does the $55 dollar number come from? It most certainly was not on the teleprompter, so what neuron fired in Biden’s head to cause him to say it? Is Joe Biden a closet Sammy Hagar fan?”

THE CRITICAL DRINKER ON BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXEL F: A Nostalgia Trip 30 Years In The Making (Video).

WHEN YOU’RE A LEFTIST WHO’S LOST BOB COSTAS…: ‘We can no longer indulge his delusions:’ Legendary announcer Bob Costas says Biden’s cognitive decline was obvious.

BLUEANON:  “Staged Theatrics to Win Idiots’ Vote:” Virginia Professor Declares Trump Shooting Was Faked.

University of Virginia Assistant Professor Sethunya Mokoko took a break from teaching students to get the word out this week that the entire assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump was a staged event for suckers. Mokoko explained that it was just a ploy to get the votes of “idiots.” He, however, is available to offer sage-like clarity that the Secret Service, local police, and the Trump campaign conspired to fake the assassination, kill a bystander, and seriously wound others to get the sucker vote. He is not alone in this theory while others on the left are simply bemoaning that Thomas Matthew Crooks missed.

In his tweet, Mokoko said that security ”ignored [Crooks] because trump & secrete service staged theatrics to win idiots’ vote.”

So let me get the conspiracy down. The Secret Service allowed a kid who flunked out of the high school shooting club as a bad shot to fire multiple rounds at the former president from a sloped roof at 130 yards in the hope that he would only wing him?

Mokoko previously taught at Clemson University, Gold West College, Long Beach City College and University of California, Long Beach, according to his Linkedin page.

His faculty bio states that Mokoko teaches “Race, Rhetoric, and Social Justice” and “Writing about Culture and Society.” His focus is “teaching students to appreciate and value social justice rhetorics across media; to become rhetorically listening writers, readers, and viewers; and to understand how global rhetorics shape and define agency and identification.”

He is not alone. Within minutes of the assassination attempt, the staging theory was going viral and has been picked up by many on the left. For example, actress Amanda Seales took to social media to claim that Trump used fake stage blood and sound effects to stage his assassination attempt.

The New York Times at least assumes the assassination is real. But how on earth can we presume to know the shooter’s motives?

Earlier from Steve: Republicans Pounce: Our Awful News Media Is Worse Than You Can Imagine.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: ‘Unifier In Chief’ Biden Admits Mistake In Calling for ‘Bullseye’ on Trump—Then Says He Never Used Inflammatory Rhetoric.

Biden’s defiant remarks were a far cry from the call for national unity the octogenarian leader issued in a rare Oval Office address on Sunday. “We must not go down this road in America. The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated,” Biden said. “It’s time to cool it down.” His comments in the wake of Saturday’s shooting prompted mainstream outlets such as Politico to call Biden the nation’s “unifier in chief.”

In his interview with Holt, however, Biden embraced such “heated” rhetoric. In addition to his assertion that Trump is a “threat to democracy,” Biden veered off into a diatribe about the “viciousness” of rural Trump supporters after Holt asked him whether Saturday’s assassination attempt will alter the trajectory of the presidential election.

“I’ve never seen circumstances where you ride through certain rural areas of the country, and people have signs they’re standing—big Trump signs with a middle—sign that says ‘F Biden’ and a little kid standing there putting up his middle finger,” Biden said. “I mean, that’s the kind of stuff that’s just inflammatory and a kind of viciousness. It’s a very different thing to say, ‘Look, I really disagree with Trump’s—the way he takes care of taxes.’”

Related: ‘Hitler Pig.’

As former President DONALD TRUMP’s trial opened Monday in New York City, NYT’s MAGGIE HABERMAN posted an update from the courtroom: “Trump appears to be sleeping. His head keeps dropping down and his mouth goes slack.”

The post, which immediately went viral on X and was almost instantly the talk of cable news panels, shot around Biden world in emails and text messages between White House, campaign aides and other Democrats close to the administration.

“Hitler Pig sleepy,” one individual said on one thread as a caption to Haberman’s post.

You read that right: “Hitler Pig.”

That moniker, four people in Biden’s orbit told West Wing Playbook, is one that aides to and allies of the president — generally younger, more digitally native individuals, not senior staffers, one person clarified — frequently use to describe Trump.

—The Politico, April 17th.

This morning, Biden senior advisor TJ Ducklo wasn’t happy about how his boss’s latest interaction with a party operative with a Chyron turned out:

This despite Holt doing all he can to cover for Biden’s gaffes:

Thing is that Lester Holt actively tried to help Biden throughout that interview and it still did not come off great.

Ex: When Biden called the Secret Service Director a him, Holt corrected it to “her” in the follow up instead of asking if he even knew who the Director was… pic.twitter.com/sefyyuRC5b

— AG (@AGHamilton29) July 16, 2024

Veteran journalism professor Jeff Jarvis apparently doesn’t think we’re worthy of grandpa’s wisdom:

Related: Biden Snaps at Lester Holt for Supposedly Not Covering the ‘Lies’ Trump Told at the Debate. No one is falling for the BUT TRUMP diversion. Anyone with a brain cell knows the media loves to fact check Trump.

SEN. ROBERT MENENDEZ (D-NJ) FOUND GUILTY ON CORRUPTION CHARGES.

UPDATE: “Biden Condemns Menendez For Taking Bribes In Gold Rather Than Fungible Assets Laundered By 20 Different Shell Companies,” America’s Newspaper of Record reports.

HOW MITT ROMNEY SOLD ME ON J.D. VANCE:

If you need any more convincing about J.D. Vance, I point you to a September 2023 article from The Atlantic written by Mitt Romney’s biographer, McKay Coppins.

But as Romney surveyed the crop of Republicans running for Senate in 2022, it was clear that more Hawleys were on their way. Perhaps most disconcerting was J. D. Vance, the Republican candidate in Ohio. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” Romney told me. They’d first met years earlier, after he read Vance’s best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Romney was so impressed with the book that he hosted the author at his annual Park City summit in 2018. Vance, who grew up in a poor, dysfunctional family in Appalachia and went on to graduate from Yale Law School, had seemed bright and thoughtful, with interesting ideas about how Republicans could court the white working class without indulging in toxic Trumpism. Then, in 2021, Vance decided he wanted to run for Senate, and re­invented his entire persona overnight. Suddenly, he was railing against the “childless left” and denouncing Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a “fake holiday” and accusing Joe Biden of manufacturing the opioid crisis “to punish people who didn’t vote for him.” The speed of the MAGA makeover was jarring.

“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” said Mitt Romney.

Is there any better endorsement than that?

I don’t think Romney realizes how his genteel response to the endless pummeling he received courtesy of Obama, his vice president, and his operatives with bylines led directly to the Trump era. As did his continuing Stockholm Syndrome after the ordeal. In December Romney was quoted by NBC as saying he doesn’t rule out voting for Biden, and that Trump has ‘authoritarian’ interests.

Flashback to 2012: Biden: Romney’s approach to financial regulation will ‘put y’all back in chains.’

COMCAST’S “PROGRESSIVE” NEWS CHANNEL IS HAVING A NORMAL ONE THIS WEEK: Scarborough Threatens to Quit Morning Joe after MSNBC Cancels Episode in Wake of Trump Assassination Attempt.

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough did not react kindly to the network removing his show from the air Monday following the assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump.

Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski, his wife, addressed the situation Tuesday and accused MSNBC of lying to them about replacing the show with breaking news coverage of the fallout from the Trump assassination attempt. If MSNBC does that again, Scarborough said, he will leave the show and they can find a new host.

“We were told, in no uncertain terms on Sunday evening that there was going to be one news feed across all NBC news channels yesterday,” Scarborough said. “That did not happen.”

“We were very surprised. We were very disappointed. And if we had known that there wasn’t going to be the one news feed, from NBC news across all NBC news channels. Willie, we obviously would have been in yesterday morning,” Scarborough added, speaking to guest Willie Geist.

When Brzezinski tried to shift the conversation after they addressed the situation, Scarborough cut her off and threatened to quit the network if executives cancel the program on false grounds, pointing out that the network did not cancel all commentary on Monday in favor of straight breaking-news coverage.

“Let me just say, next time we’re told there’s going to be a news feed replacing us, we will be in our chairs,” Scarborough warned. “The news feed will be us, or they can get somebody else to host the show.”

But Joe and Mika are from the only ones at MSNBC to be lashing out in the wake their “Party That Called Trump ‘Hitler’ For 8 Years Shocked As Someone Tries To Assassinate Him,” as the Babylon Bee put it yesterday. Or as David Strom writes at Hot Air: MSDNC Clowns Are Almost Fun to Watch They Are So Ridiculous.

PAULA BOLYARD: Watch: Trump Brings the House Down With Arrival at RNC.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE:

"Is it acceptable that you have still not heard, at least publicly, from the Secret Service Director?"

BIDEN: "Oh, I've heard from him."

The Director of Secret Service is a woman. pic.twitter.com/pkO5VnkddN

— Bobby LaValley (@Bobby_LaVallley) July 16, 2024

MARK JUDGE: Outfoxed? Martha MacCallum Grilled Me For An Hour about Brett Kavanaugh.

Many of MacCallum’s questions were tough, but the Fox people listened to my points, and aired them. I told them about Blasey For referring to me in her letter to Senator Feinstein as “Mark G. Judge.” Mark G. Judge is an old journalism byline of mine—no one calls me that. It indicates they were doing opposition research on me. There was the fact that, according to The New York Times, Blasey Ford has a friend who spent all summer doing oppo research once. There was the fact that Blasey Ford’s dates of when the alleged assault took place kept changing—they were trying to link me with Kavanaugh, and when the dates didn’t work they simply changed them. The entire thing was a hit. This is why one of Blasey Ford’s oldest friends, an FBI veteran who is called “Tori” in Ford’s book, cut off all contact with Ford. Tori doesn’t want to jeopardize her FBI reputation by promoting criminal activity. Getting the picture?

Still, MacCallum battled me. Most notably, she said I wasn’t saying that Brett was innocent. I tried to point out her faulty logic: if someone makes something up about you and you have no recollection of it, people can just assume you are guilty. You can put anybody anywhere. There’s no need for proof or due process. Then, as we were filming “b-roll” outside the house, I tried to prove my point. “You know, Martha,” I said as we walked side by side, “when we were inside and away from the cameras you touched me in an inappropriate way.” It was completely untrue, and judging by her reaction she wasn’t taking it seriously—she knew the point I was making, her face kind of went blank. “So how do you feel?” I said. If I could make that kind of charge and be believed, I argued, we’d be living in East Germany.

Exit quote: “She thinks it’s a he-said/she-said, when it was a planned and purely evil bombing by the left.”

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Here’s Why Hollywood Is Addicted to Sequels, Prequels and Reboots.

It doesn’t get more Hollywood than “Fly Me to the Moon.”

The Apple production stars Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum in a rom-com tied to the ’60s space race and the moon landing “hoax.”

Big stars! A big budget (reportedly $100 million)? A sweet summer schedule release and the perfect counter-programming to kiddie hits (“Inside Out 2”) and horror frights (“Longlegs”).

And … thud.

“Fly Me to the Moon” snared a tepid $10 million in its opening weekend. It’ll need a supermodel’s legs to avoid losing a bundle following its theatrical run.

What happened?

The film had almost zero buzz up until its release date. That never helps. Summer audiences weren’t wooed by the comely stars or the ’60s-era setting.

And we’re still addicted to sequels, prequels and reboots.

Hopefully the film will make back some of its production costs when it goes to streaming, including Apple’s own Apple TV+ app. But 13 years after Lynda Obst wrote Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business, her look at Hollywood’s obsession with sequel-itis still looks correct, alas:

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Trump shooter was ‘spotted on roof 26 minutes before assassination attempt’ as pressure mounts on how Secret Service allowed gunman to open fire at rally.

Related: Mystery Around Trump Shooter Deepens.

Two days after Thomas Matthew Crooks committed one of the most shocking acts of political violence in half a century, both investigators and people in his western Pennsylvania community are no closer to understanding why he did it.

The FBI has analyzed Crooks’s cellphone and has found nothing that explains why he climbed onto a roof and shot at former President Trump, grazing his ear, law-enforcement officials said. Crooks’s parents have spoken to law enforcement, but they also seemed to have little insight, telling authorities he didn’t appear to have any strong political leanings and had few, if any, friends.

The attempted assassination looked likely to drive the country to new levels of partisan distrust, but the initial mixed picture of the bespectacled young gunman of a quiet loner who wasn’t politically outspoken has instead left most of the American public scratching its head.

* * * * * * * *

Crooks appears to have acted alone, investigators said, and they were turning to his computer and other devices in hopes of finding any clues about his ideology.

More: Claire Lehmann on Courage and Cowardice in Pennsylvania:

The last attempted assassination of a US president provides a lesson. Forty-four years ago, a man named John Hinckley Jr. followed US President Jimmy Carter across multiple states, stalking him from Washington, D.C., to Columbus, and then Dayton, Ohio. Hinckley came within 20 feet of President Carter but decided at the last minute not to shoot him. That fate would await the next president, Ronald Reagan, outside the Washington Hilton hotel in an assassination attempt that left three Secret Service agents with gunshot wounds, and the President with serious injuries.

Surprisingly, this assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan lacked a clear political motivation. Hinckley was driven not by ideology, but by a delusional desire to impress actress Jodie Foster. A note he wrote prior to the shooting provides insight into his morbid fantasy:

Over the past seven months I’ve left you dozens of poems, letters and love messages in the faint hope that you could develop an interest in me. Although we talked on the phone a couple of times I never had the nerve to simply approach you and introduce myself. … The reason I’m going ahead with this attempt now is because I cannot wait any longer to impress you.

Seemingly irrational violence is not unique to Hinckley. In fact, it fits into a broader pattern identified by behavioural science. Psychologist Robert King, in a 2019 study on spree killers, wrote: “Males have been literally running amok—attacking innocent strangers en masse—across time and space.” In their study of spree killers, King and his colleague Nadia Butler analysed an archival search of 70 mass murderers, and found that they fell into two distinct groups. These groups were defined by age and stage of life. The younger killers, with an average age of 23, often had troubled pasts and mental health issues, and appeared to use violence as a way to obtain status, simply through infamy. By comparison, the older group, averaging 41 years old, were typically married with children and did not have a history of mental illness. They had recently experienced a significant loss in status, such as job loss or marital breakdown. Their primary motivation was jealousy.

* * * * * * * *

In the realm of political assassinations, we see a similar pattern of youth typically combined with mental illness or emotional disturbance. John Hinckley Jr. was 25 years old, with no job and no girlfriend, harbouring delusions of forming a relationship with Jodie Foster. Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated John F. Kennedy, was a 24-year-old with a history of violence, paranoia, and social rejection. Sirhan Sirhan was 24 when he killed Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, reportedly motivated by Kennedy’s support for Israel. John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, was just 26.

In an article for Quillette published last year, Robert King observed that “mass killings are, among many other things, a deliberately public, attention-seeking attempt to drive a wedge into the existing social order.” In 2024 America, what could be more attention-seeking than attempting to kill Donald Trump?

Read the whole thing.

NEO: Trump, fate and his convention speech. Plus a cameo from Edward Fox as a chilling presidential assassin in The Day of the Jackal.

DAVID HARSANYI ON THE RISE OF BLUEANON: How the Democrats Became a Party of Conspiracy Theorists.

Pennsylvania, the top political adviser to Democratic Party mega-donor Reid Hoffman — who had himself recently joked about Trump becoming a “martyr” — sent an email to journalists wondering why, “NOT ONE NEWSPAPER OR OPINION LEADER IN AMERICA IS WILLING TO OPENLY CONSIDER THE POSSIBILITY THAT TRUMP AND PUTIN STAGED THIS ON PURPOSE.”

Dmitri Mehlhorn implored reporters to consider the “possibility — which feels horrific and alien and absurd in America, but is quite common globally — … that this ‘shooting’ was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash.”

Indeed, it was horrific to see social media explode with claims that the assassination attempt was “staged” and “false flag.” These theories garnered millions of likes, retweets, and views. And plenty of people who should know better, academics and activists, participated.

Indeed, Mehlhorn’s boss, the founder of LinkedIn, isn’t some unhinged commenter on Reddit; he is worth $2.5 billion. He pledged $100 million to fund efforts to oppose President Trump in 2020 and was on the same path in 2024.

Perhaps Mehlhorn felt comfortable posing conspiratorial questions to reporters because they have been quite receptive in the past. Mehlhorn, for example, padded his plea to journalists with conspiratorial mainstays of the contemporary left — theorizing that the assassination staging was a “classic Russian tactic” and urging them to consider “how often Putin and his allies run this play.”

The Russian collusion conspiracy theory — hatched by Democrats — is the most successful and consequential in American history, conceived by a major political party and spread by establishment media. Earlier this year Nancy Pelosi was still on MSNBC claiming that Putin probably “had” something “financial” on Trump.

Fortunately, one brave leftwing journalist looks to get to the bottom of her own party’s love of conspiracy theories:

What could possibly go wrong?

GREAT MOMENTS IN INTERVIEW PREP: Watch: Joe Biden Is Asked About His Inciteful ‘Bullseye’ Trump Comment, His Answer Just Doesn’t Cut It.

🚨Joe Biden has no remorse for targeting President Trump. His calls for unity were never genuine:

Lester Holt: “You called President Trump ‘an existential threat’ and said it's time to put him “in the bullseye.’”

Biden: “I didn't say ‘crosshairs.’”

pic.twitter.com/Ly3cc5TYKt

— Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) July 15, 2024

This is a bit like Biden’s staff taking the Dark Brandon Internet meme seriously, and then sending the old man out in front of a background that looks like a Nuremburg Rally. Unless you’re a hyper-online political junky who has followed the DNC-MSM’s unceasing attacks on Sarah Palin in 2011, would you even know or care why Biden is splitting this hair?

Naturally of course, Holt never punched back when Biden claimed he’s never used heated rhetoric when referring to Trump:

Biden falsely claims he has never engaged in inflammatory rhetoric against Trump

Here are some direct quotes from Biden attacking Trump:

3/22/18: ""If we were in high school, I'd take him [Trump] behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.'"

9/1/22: "Donald Trump and the MAGA… pic.twitter.com/FFJdFwGTZE

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) July 15, 2024

More examples at our sister-site Twitchy: ‘Bloodbath:’ President Joe Biden Tells NBC News He’s Not Engaged in Trump’s Sort of Rhetoric.

Oh, and speaking of inflammatory rhetoric:

HE REALLY SHOULDN’T HAVE WORN THAT SKIRT SO HIGH UP: Axios Founders Demand Trump Apologize For Being Shot During Assassination Attempt.

The co-founders of Axios are demanding former President Donald Trump take responsibility for an assassination attempt over the weekend when the Republican candidate had part of his ear blown off on live television.

In their “Behind the Curtain” column on Monday, Jim VandeHei and Michael Allen suggested Trump could leverage his political star power to “unify America” by practicing what the Axios founders characterized as “humility.”

“Imagine him telling the nation that he has been too rough, too loose, too combative with his language — and now realizes words can have consequences, and promises to tone it down and bring new voices into the White House if he wins,” VandeHei and Allen wrote. Trump, they said, “could show a different side of himself.”

“People who know Trump well say he’s a gracious host, inquisitive, loves music and social media,” they added. “This is the kind of moment when people give leaders a second look, a second change.”

Trump was shot in the ear at a Pennsylvania campaign rally on Saturday following a years-long campaign to smear the GOP candidate as a fascistic political figure on par with Adolf Hitler. Slow-motion videos of Trump delivering his stump speech show the former president was saved by a split-second tilt of his head, which caused the bullet to avoid piercing the back of his brain.

In accordance with the prophecy:

GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-AWARENESS: AOC Calls Trump a Fascist the Day After He Was Almost Assassinated.

Does AOC (or whoever writes her tweets in 2024) remember her barnstorming “New Socialist ‘It’ Girl” days of 2019 when she wanted to ban and regulate the entire US economy, her original chief of staff was photographed on multiple occasions wearing a T-shirt celebrating a Nazi collaborator, and she gave passionate shout outs to Evita Peron and the Black Panthers? Such was the stuff of legend before everything went pear-shaped the next year.

WE NEED A TOTAL AND COMPLETE SHUTDOWN OF FORBES UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE: Forbes removes column that asks if Trump surviving shooting will appeal to black voters.

A controversial Forbes column with a headline that questioned if former President Donald Trump surviving Saturday’s assassination attempt would draw more black voters was yanked from its website amid social media backlash.

The piece, “Will Surviving Gunfire Be Donald Trump’s Next Appeal To Black Voters,” by scholar and self-described DEI expert Shaun Harper was posted Sunday morning and quickly called out by critics on X.

The column described how black Americans face “inexcusably” high levels of gun violence, including in many urban centers, which Harper wrote Trump could address through legislation and financial investments in urban black communities.

The author mentioned Trump attempted to sway black voters after he was indicted on various criminal charges and his mugshot was taken in one of his cases last year.

“Hopefully, being shot doesn’t become a similarly problematic strategy to link Trump with an experience that far too many (not all) Black people have,” part of the column reads.

“Instead, using his powerful platform to advocate fixing this through public policy and significant financial investments into urban Black communities is the opportunity that awaits Trump once he recovers from the tragedy that occurred at his rally.”

But social media users were incensed by the column and its headline.

There’s a photo of Harper underneath this New York Post column wearing a “Joe & Kamala 2020” T-shirt, not surprisingly. The Daily Mail adds that he “claimed that the injured ex-president’s defiant raised fist might resonate with George Floyd protesters.”

Sometimes a power fist raised the moment after surviving an assassination attempt is merely a power fist raised the moment after surviving an assassination attempt.

Here’s a screenshot of the column’s headline and first two paragraphs from the Wayback Machine:

NEW CIVILITY WATCH:

Don’t be fooled folks.

This is what unity looks like from Democrat politicians and many of their supporter’s. pic.twitter.com/RXz7KbQbGT

— Allen Lively (@AllenLivelyLOF) July 14, 2024

JIM TREACHER GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Maybe the Secret Service Isn’t a Vehicle for Female Empowerment.

This push for diversity is fine when the manager at your local Starbucks is hiring. I’m not so sure it’s such a great idea for, say, the United States Secret Service.

Here’s a slick promotional video the agency released last year:

Yaaaaaaaas kween! Girlbosses are getting it done! Struttin’ down a hallway in slo-mo. Liftin’ weights in slo-mo. Everything’s cooler in slo-mo.

“Being a part of history is probably the best part of this job.” Well, you’re definitely part of history now. How does it feel?

So that promo was great for public relations. The press loved it. Big win for the agency.

Fast-forward to July 13. Butler, Pennsylvania. What does this push for diversity look like in practice?

It looks like this:

I guess she’s protecting him from… ants? The Lollipop Guild? I don’t know.

The Secret Service inspired a bit more confidence when they were still beefy guys in khakis, blazers, argyle socks and Sperry Top-Siders:

Related: It Just Gets Worse —> Secret Service Detail Diverted From PA Trump Rally … to Jill Biden and WTAF.

WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON OVER AT MORNING JOE?

Folks, it is off the air today, for the first time in its history, and this is neither an accident nor a minor event in the media world. The flagship broadcast of America’s political establishment, Joe Biden’s “favorite show” — the one he possibly watches more religiously than he attends Mass — is missing in action on this most important Monday in recent living political times. (I imagine Joe Biden now lost, without his magnetic lodestone to center him, lacking any idea of what to say even to his chef today, and for the first time I genuinely fear for the nation.)

* * * * * * * *

And apparently, we must now all Beware of the Blob, for it cannot be trusted to be let loose on this Monday morning to explain how America ought to properly regard the attempted assassination of the former president of the United States. Could that possibly be because the attempt came after years of Morning Joe’s various guests spending their waking hours depicting that same man as an incubatory proto-Hitler? Here’s the funny thing: Honestly, I doubt it.

Read that again carefully: I do not think that was the reason at all. Because I don’t think shame motivated MSNBC at all. I instead wonder whether it was well-placed fear. Surely there are private communications — texts, emails, perhaps deeply unfortunate drunken half-punctuated rants CC’d to far more people than a sober person would send — that made today impossible. Why else would MSNBC do the utterly unprecedented, and simply axe its flagship brand-name show on one of the most consequential news days of the last decade? And if it was impossible for Mika and Joe to be up to the challenge of discussing events without the sort of rhetoric that would shame an entire nation, to say nothing of a network, then how on earth would it be any less so tomorrow? To quote one of RedState’s sharpest observers: “Pulling Morning Joe off the air is an admission.” “An admission of what?” remains the only question.

Related: Just NBC the utter lack of empathy when a Republican is shot:

I’m sure bullets “impacted” Scalise more. Strange framing from @kwelkernbc. To @SenSanders: “You, obviously, have been impacted by political violence yourself. In 2017 that horrible moment when Republican Congressman Steve Scalise was shot” by one of your supporters. #MTP pic.twitter.com/i2Cnah7XCx

— Brent Baker 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) July 14, 2024

Flashback: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History. And additional examples of leftist violence and eliminationist rhetoric at the link.

MICHAEL WALSH: Trump, Biden, and the Shame of the Corporate Media.

We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.

Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, “He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.” We unreservedly choose the latter course.

Unreservedly, TNR, and now you have to live with it. Remember when Sarah Palin ran an ad “targeting” vulnerable congressional seats and the Left lost its collective mind? But it’s okay when they do it — after all, their hearts and minds are in the right place. They live in a feminized fantasy world of violence and revenge, but one in which the consequences of their words and deeds never blow back on them. Let BLM burn down parts of major cities and their fascist goon squad, Antifa, assault real Americans with impunity — their intentions are pure! And if you disagree, they’ll kill you.

Read the whole thing. As Richard Fernandez once wrote: “It is impossible to understand the politics of the Left without grasping that it is all about deniable intimidation.”

UPDATE: TNR quickly attempts to memory hole its new cover: