Yet another new, darker era

Garbage Day Live in San Francisco was a blast! I want to thank the fabulous venue, Swedish American Hall, our wonderful guests Danielle Baskin, Casey Newton, Ward Sutton, and Shindigs, all the folks that helped me put the show together, including Jeff Atwood, and, of course, all of you who attended. I can’t wait to come back and do another one.

Before we get into today’s issue, though, which is a bit different than usual, here’s a word from our sponsors.

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A New, Darker Era That Is Darker Than The Previous New, Darker Era

On stage at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, former President Donald Trump was shot in the ear. The attack happened while I was on a plane back from the Garbage Day Live show in San Francisco and, as news broke, a man behind me told a flight attendant, “Trump’s been shot,” to which she sort of laughed and excitedly said, “really?!” She then waited a beat and said, “wait, sorry, that came out wrong. That’s scary.” Anyways, The Newsroom is always worth a rewatch.

There has been little found in the way of a clear political motive for the attack, but what we do know about the shooter is that he was a registered Republican. A former classmate told The Philadelphia Inquirer that he, “no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side.” He was also kicked off of his school’s rifle team for being a dangerously bad shot. Bomb making materials were found in his home and he used an automatic rifle to fire into the crowd from a nearby roof, before he was killed by Secret Service. He was not stopped by a local cop that approached him before he opened fire.

A decade and a half of millennial mass shooters have primed us for some kind of digital paper trail, but the 20-year-old shooter had no real public social media presence. He was using Discord, but the platform said in a statement that his account “was rarely utilized” and was not “used to plan this incident or discuss his political views.” The shooter also appeared as an extra in a 2022 promotional video for BlackRock, which has since been taken down.

The only real detail we have to go on, currently, is that the shooter carried out the attack while wearing a Demolition Ranch T-shirt. Demolition Ranch is a wildly popular YouTube channel about guns and gun culture — it’s also largely considered the most mainstream and least politically extreme of all the guntube channels. They shared a photo of the shooter on Facebook wearing their merch, writing, “what the hell?” (NSFW link.)

Filling in the information vacuum right now are dozens of conspiracy theories. On the left, the most popular is that the whole thing was staged to help Trump in the polls. In fact, the reaction on the left to the shooting was an almost immediate and unanimous assumption that it had just won Trump the election. This was largely due to the photo of him pumping his fist as he was rushed off stage because, even though the far left and the far right are not equivalent in any way, both groups do regularly underestimate the intelligence of voters and mistake good optics for real electoral power. It’s also worth pointing out that American history does not necessarily back up the idea that this was somehow good for Trump. Plus, let’s be honest, he was probably already going to win anyways.

There’s another theory floating around that the shooter carried out the attack due to a separate conspiracy theory that’s been circulating in the last few weeks that new information emerged about Trump’s alleged connections to Jeffrey Epstein. But there’s no evidence for this or the initial Epstein conspiracy either.

On the right, the biggest conspiracy theory is another version of the false flag idea, that the shooter was pretending to be a Republican to sow division within their ranks. As if the right needs outside bad actors to cause infighting. The shooter reportedly donated to the progressive PAC ActBlue in 2021, when he was 17 years old. He then registered as a Republican several months later and voted as a registered Republican in 2022. It’s not much to go on, which is why far-right users are exploring other kinds of disinformation and spin to process the attack.

Groypers, the Gen Z white nationalist group, are making fake accounts under the shooter’s name on Instagram, trying to make it look like he was an antifascist. And verified Musk fanboys on X tried to convince everyone that the shooter was an Italian football fan named Marco Violi, which they were claiming was an antifa member named Mark Violets.

But, curiously enough, the most popular narrative currently is that all of this was actually the Secret Service’s fault. Right-wing influencers have latched on to a clip of women agents at the rally, which they’re now sharing as proof that DEI initiatives are what caused the shooting. There are also users pretending to be the Secret Service on 4chan, claiming they weren’t allowed to stop the attack.

It seems like the shooting was particularly hard for America’s various radical centrists and columnists, who spent the weekend moaning online about how the country has entered a new, darker era. As if a neo-Nazi didn’t drive a car through a crowd of people in Charlottesville in 2017. As if Trump supporters didn’t break down the doors of the Capitol Building in 2021, armed with guns, zip ties, and plans of taking lawmakers hostage and executing them on the front lawn. As if Nancy Pelosi’s husband wasn’t attacked with a hammer in his own home by a far-right conspiracy theorist in 2022.

Leading the bad take competition, though, was The Spectator coming in second with their piece, “Today, we’re all MAGA,” just behind Forbes, which had to yank down a column titled, “Will Surviving Gunfire Be Donald Trump’s Next Appeal To Black Voters?” I’d also give an honorable mention to The New York Times, which published a piece headlined, “The Photographs That Made Trump an Incarnation of Defiance,” comparing photographer Doug Mills’ genuinely incredible photos of Trump at the rally to paintings from the French Revolution??? But liberal media across the board is reportedly softening their coverage of the Republican National Convention this week. The Daily Show isn’t airing anything with host Jon Stewart and MSNBC didn’t air Morning Joe today.

Thankfully, Democrats aren’t playing into any of this and are holding firm. Wait, sorry, that’s obviously not true. Biden campaign staffers have already gone belly up, telling Reuters that the attack has “changed everything.” They’re taking Trump-critical TV ads off the air, canceling a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, and Democratic leadership told Axios, "We've all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency." That’s the spirit!

But leadership on both sides of aisle, including Trump himself, have not said anything meaningful about the other victims of Saturday’s shooting. Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old volunteer firefighter, was killed shielding his family from the gunfire. Comperatore’s last post on X was a reply to forgotten right-wing novelty account Catturd about attending the rally. And two other audience members were injured, as well. One rallygoer who was standing behind Trump and was not injured, however, was Vincent Fusca, the QAnon celebrity that pretends to be JFK, Jr.

If there were any real “winners” of this weekend’s news cycle, it was bootleg T-shirt manufacturers, both in the US and in China, who had Mills’ fist pump photos on T-shirts literally minutes after they hit social media. Though, Chinese internet users are also roasting Trump because he now resembles Abao, a viral panda in China that is missing part of his right ear.

The shooting also gave Elon Musk a reason to finally admit he was planning on backing the Trump campaign all along. “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” he wrote on X. He’s also pushing the anti-women Secret Service narrative, writing, “Having a small person as body cover for a large man is like an undersized Speedo at the beach – doesn’t cover the subject.” I assume Grok wrote that one. Per Bloomberg, Musk has already donated “a sizable amount” to America PAC, a right-wing Super PAC.

Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro also offered support to Trump, writing, “See you at the inauguration.” Bolsonaro was stabbed while campaigning in 2018. And, similarly, rumors have swirled for years that it was an inside job that went too far. Here’s a good chart of how Bolsonaro’s stabbing did — or didn’t — affect his polling. He was already on the upswing, but it didn’t slow him down. Well, aside from all the time he’s spent since the attack in and out of the hospital dealing with gastrointestinal problems. (Also, he catches a new variant of COVID approximately every 90 days.)

Overall, I tend to agree with writer Jared Yates Sexton, that the attack was likely accelerationist in nature, or, at the very least, will have accelerationist consequences. Even if the shooting doesn’t help Trump directly at the polls, that doesn’t mean that Republicans aren’t out for blood now. They understand the stakes have changed and they’re armed with Project 2025 as their blueprint for what they know is their last real chance for a Trump-led dictatorship. Once he’s out of the picture, the party will split into a million factions. So I’m unclear why both mainstream media and Democratic leadership are finding it so hard right now to express what I think is a fairly basic point. Political violence is bad and a second Trump presidency means more of it.

But I actually think I agree with X user @crumbbutler more, who wrote, “I know this sounds insane now but everyone will totally forget about this in ten days.” In fact, I think it’s our only hope.

Three months out from the election — which is still, thankfully, a lot of time — everything is pointing to a Trump win. The only way it doesn’t go in that direction is if every assumption we have about modern politics is wrong. That polling is inaccurate. That cable news doesn’t actually matter. That televised debates don’t move the needle. That online misinformation and disinformation don’t impact, or reflect, how we vote. That there is simply so much chaos surrounding Trump that voters will cast their ballots for any candidate, no matter how old, to make it all go away. Which could be true. But I, personally, would feel better if there was literally any other plan in place for preventing the end of American democracy.

Some Stray Links

• “Glen Powell’s Charm Offensive Is Working”

• “Chum King Express”

• “Disney has a kid crisis”

P.S. here’s Zillow on the vape.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***