NEVER ASSUME MALICE FOR WHAT CAN BE EXPLAINED BY INCOMPETENCE, BUT AT SOME POINT THE TWO ARE INDISTINGUISHABLE:

Here’s the official story so far: a random 20 year old acting completely alone walked within 150 yards of a presidential campaign rally with a rifle, climbed onto a rooftop in full view of Secret Service snipers, set up his shot and fired without anyone intervening and with no…

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) July 15, 2024

Secret Service had snipers INSIDE the building the assassin used. They took pictures of him. They watched him pull out a range finder to get his exact distance to Trump. They radioed the Secret Service command post about the assassin.

They all knew he was there.

Who gave the… https://t.co/4Exs0xm3Y1

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 16, 2024

Employee safety is the top priority for a job where you have to *checks notes* be willing to take a bullet for someone else.

— Clay (@MoodyBlueshirt) July 16, 2024

Related:

Notice he doesn’t have any short fat middle aged woman guarding him. https://t.co/hOdmc79Ffk

— EducatëdHillbilly™ (@RobProvince) July 15, 2024

SAD BUT TRUE: Democrats Have No Problem With Political Violence, They’re the Reason it Exists.

Related:

Your timely reminder that between 1865 and 1901, three presidents were assassinated, all Republicans. Three of the first six elected GOP presidents were murdered, by Democrats, anarchist leftists, and sexual weirdos. JFK, the lone Dem, was shot and killed by a Communist.

— Michael Walsh (@TheAmanuensis) July 4, 2024

Also: Just a Reminder: The Left Is Getting More Shrill and Violent.

Flashback: Democrats are threatening to remove security funding for Supreme Court.

Milwaukee approved every RNC protest request—without vetting or checking identities. And they gave protest groups no limits on the number of people allowed. @nypost's @amysikma: https://t.co/BwokKoGkKd

— Kelly Jane Torrance (@KJTorrance) July 12, 2024

NEVER FORGET: these are the nine U.S. Congress members that sponsored HR 8081, the bill aimed to revoke President Donald Trump's Secret Service protection if Joe Biden’s lawfare campaign was successful in obtaining a felony conviction by Soros D.A. Alvin Bragg. pic.twitter.com/CO9bbYcFXL

— Dapper Detective (@Dapper_Det) July 14, 2024

Here’s 2 and a half minutes straight of Democrats explicitly calling for political violence.

Has Biden ever denounced this?

They have blood on their hands. pic.twitter.com/mbGYXTWAN7

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 14, 2024

Your daughter Christine tweeted that the lunatic who assaulted my husband and broke six of his ribs was “right” to attack him — on the same day Rand was literally gasping to breathe from his injuries. https://t.co/tbPEVKscsM

— Kelley Paul (@KelleyAshbyPaul) July 14, 2024

Democrats very much enjoy an atmosphere of violence and intimidation.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Will space-based solar power ever make sense? Years of talk have now moved to design studies and hardware in space.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: What would it take to turn Mars into another Earth?

YOU KNOW HOW WE KNOW IT WASN’T FAKED? NASA events commemorate 55th anniversary of Apollo 11 moon landing.

Because if it had been, they’d have faked another big accomplishment since.

AS GOD AND ROBERT HEINLEIN FORESAW: Newly discovered moon cave could house future lunar explorers, researchers say.

LOSS OF TRUST HAS A PRICE: Global childhood vaccination rates still below prepandemic levels.

FLASHBACK: A RARE MOMENT OF HONESTY.

Chuck Schumer in January, 2017: “You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, so even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman [like Trump], he’s being really dumb to do this.” pic.twitter.com/0movJPfioD

— Dan O'Donnell (@DanODonnellShow) August 9, 2022

MAKE THEM PAY: Northwestern faces subpoena threat after antisemitism advisory board ends: House leader says university isn’t cooperating with investigation.

HIGHER EDUCATION SPREADS MISINFORMATION AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES: UVA professor claims Trump shooting was ‘staged’ and a tactic to win votes from ‘idiots.’

PUSHBACK: A friend sends this from MIT. It’s the Pierce Laboratory, by where the protests were. If you can’t make out the photo on your device, it’s Israeli and American flags, and the words “Jews are Indigenous to Israel.”

THE ESTABLISHMENT HAS BEEN SCREWING WITH ELON, AND HE’S RETURNING THE FAVOR: Elon Musk Has Said He Is Committing Around $45 Million a Month to a New Pro-Trump Super PAC. “Formed in June, America PAC is focused on registering voters and persuading constituents to vote early and request mail-in ballots in swing states, according to one of the people. The coalition assessed that the Democrats have historically had very robust “get out the vote” campaigns and took note of the amounts of money that the Biden administration has dedicated to so-called on the ground efforts in swing states. America PAC will try to counter that.”

DEMENTIA MAKES SOME PEOPLE MEAN: That Was Quick: Biden Is Getting Nasty Again.

Also, it’s all he’s got.

Related: Biden Flails Trying to Defend “Bullseye” Remark About Trump.

HOW DARE HE RESIST AGGRESSION: Liberal Media Scream: Anger over blood-splattered ‘fight, fight, fight.’

DON SURBER: You know, for a guy shot in the face, Trump is having a good week. He made $763 million on Monday

THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF THOMAS CROOKS:

Had Saturday’s assassination attempt been carried out against President Joe Biden, we have no doubt we would have read about how the right’s dangerous rhetoric was behind it. We are old enough to remember more than a decade back when former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s use of crosshairs imagery to identify congressional districts—or, as the Atlantic’s James Fallows put it, “extreme, implicitly violent political rhetoric and imagery”—was fingered as an incitement for former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s (D., Ariz.) shooter. (He was, in fact, a deranged individual with no discernible motivation, political or otherwise.)

We could go on: The media fatuously attributed a Georgia spa shooting in 2021 to right-wing, anti-Asian hatred while the motivations of the left-wing lunatic who almost took out Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) and other Republican lawmakers on a baseball field in 2017 went studiously unexamined.

Plenty of poisonous rhetoric has been flying around on the left for the past decade. Biden is waging a campaign whose only argument, expressed with intermittent coherency, is that democracy is on the ballot. “We’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bull’s eye,” Biden told donors last week. Even in the 2022 midterms he was scaremongering in front of Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, telling voters that the race was about “democracy itself” and a Republican victory would “allow dark forces to thirst,” whatever that means. The New Republic and others compare former president Donald Trump to Hitler.

We don’t know whether those moronic and misguided talking points led Thomas Crooks to try to assassinate Trump, but there are a few things we do know.

More than a few.

THEY’RE ALWAYS HORRIFIED BY FREEDOM: Lefties Horrified Young White Men Can Buy 50 Rounds of Ammo Without Triggering a SWAT Raid.

JOHN LUCAS: Leadership Under Fire.

ANN ALTHOUSE ON THE VANCE PICK: “I’m happy with this choice. Aren’t you?”

“I’m glancing around elsewhere and keep seeing this theme: Vance used to criticize Trump. The old criticisms are repeated. But we’ve all heard criticisms of Trump, and here’s someone who knew and felt the criticisms, but he came around. And he’s going to be telling us, eloquently, how he came around.”

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DAVID FOSTER: Of Leadership And Courage.

UPDATE: A friend writes: “Trump’s reaction reminds me of what Shelby Foote said about Grant:”

“Grant the general had many qualities but he had a thing that’s very necessary for a great general. He had what they call ‘four o’clock in the morning courage.’ You could wake him up at four o’clock in the morning and tell him they had just turned his right flank and he would be as cool as a cucumber.”

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

BETTER PUT UP MY UMBRELLA: The Dangers of Orbital Debris.

I ALREADY SUPPORT HIM, YOU DON’T HAVE TO SELL ME.

NO ONE BELIEVES OUR SUFFERING: ‘Man Flu’ Could Actually Have a Real Explanation, Expert Says. “There are differences in immune responses between men and women that provide a plausible reason for worse symptoms in men.”