Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:27 on 14 July 2024

You’re already starting to hear it: The assassination attempt just must be more than it seems on the surface, because no way could a random nobody do this to one of the most powerful and well-protected men on the planet.

There is exactly zero hard evidence behind this theory at the moment, yet many people are already buying into it, on no more “logic” than that presented above.

One of the key attributes of any hierarchical class society is that the lives of those higher up on the social pyramid are considered to be intrinsically more valuable than the lives of those lower down. Any time a higher-up harms a lower-down, the typical reaction ranges somewhere between rationalization (“well, what did you think would happen”) and outright celebration (“justice is served, he got what he deserved”). Any time a lower-down harms a higher-up, the typical reaction is shock, revulsion, and disbelief.

This despite the clearly evident fact that the individuals involved in all circumstances are mere humans, with the same general physiological characteristics. Trump is every bit as vulnerable to the effects of bullets as was his would-be assassin.

Likewise, the Secret Service is not run by supermen. It is run by fallible human beings, capable of making mistakes. Like most organizations with important missions, it has numerous procedures designed to minimize the chance of oversights being made in its work, but that’s all they can do: minimize the chance. They can’t eliminate it. It doesn’t matter how many contingencies their strategists think up, sometimes sh*t happens and a chance sequence of events occurs that causes unrectified errors to be made.

Authoritarians don’t like the fact that their authority relies mostly on organized brute force. It pisses the hell out of them when we anarchists say so. They want people to believe that their authority is natural and rightfully earned, not arbitrary and propped up by force. So they establish taboos against questioning their authority, and use their force-backed power to indoctrinate people into following those taboos, and to marginalize (at best) or harm (or even kill, at worst) those who refuse to adhere to the taboos.

Assuming that it simply “couldn’t” have happened the way currently it appears, that the Secret Service “couldn’t” neglect to properly secure a rooftop, and some random loser “couldn’t” almost prematurely end an ex-president’s life as a result, is assuming into existence, due to indoctrination into authoritarian values, attributes which humans do not in fact possess. It is the authoritarian mindset at work.

Note here that I am not saying that there definitively was not a deeper conspiracy, only that there is currently zero hard evidence of one, and that in the absence of such evidence, Occam’s razor applies. The simplest working theory, that a conspiracy for which there is zero evidence does not exist and that a random loser lucked out due to oversights by the Secret Service, should apply until and unless hard evidence to the contrary emerges.