“Deep State”

When Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Representative, turned up at a congressional oversight hearing with the head of the Secret Service a week after Donald Trump was targeted by a sniper at a rally, she expected some answers.

What she got, she tells me when we meet in Manhattan, was obfuscation. Her resulting encounter with Kimberly Cheatle, then director of the Secret Service, so frustrated her that footage of it immediately went viral.

Republicans,

Take out your number 2 pencils and take notes.

Nancy Mace just showed every single one of you so far how to do your job.

Fire breathing dragon. 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/ZGj2MaOnmK

— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) July 22, 2024

It was essentially by pure luck that Donald Trump survived the attempt on his life earlier this month. It was certainly no thanks to the US Secret Service or its recently departed head, Kimberly Cheatle.

Inside job.

The since-resigned Secret Service director conceded before House lawmakers Monday that this month’s shooting of former President Donald Trump was the worst agency security failure since President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.

“On July 13th, we failed,” Kimberly Cheatle said.

But was the assassination attempt a failure because Trump survived? Or was it a failure because he was shot in the first place? It’s easy to blow off a government attempt to kill the former and potential future president as an episode of conspiratorial paranoia, but not so much when one is reminded of the extent to which Trump has remained the Washington regime’s Public Enemy No. 1 since 2015.

FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has historically focused more on “abortion-related violent extremism” than targeting pro-lifers under the unconstitutional Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.

“When it comes to FACE Act enforcement and abortion-related violent extremism, I think one of the things that gets lost — and I appreciate the opportunity to clarify — is that really, since the Dobbs decision, actually more of our abortion-related violent extremism investigations have focused on violence against pro-life facilities, as opposed to other way around,” Wray claimed.

What disaster science tells us about the Trump assassination attempt

It took only minutes for conspiracy theories to start flooding social media when news broke on July 13 that a sniper had almost assassinated former president Donald Trump. Some conservatives asked whether U.S. Secret Service agents assigned to the Butler, Pennsylvania, campaign rally were actually plotting Trump’s demise. Left-leaning partisans suspected the shooting was somehow faked to garner sympathy for the candidate. According to the media monitoring site NewsGuard, appearances of the words “inside job” and “staged” surged more than 3,000 percent on the X platform immediately after the shooting.

The failed assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, one of the worst security fiascoes in American history, reflects a core truth that fuels the MAGA movement and makes the case for reelecting its leader to the Oval Office: Our leading institutions are so corrupted and incompetent that the purported experts who run them cannot or will not execute their most basic functions.

When it comes to the Secret Service, its singular duty is to protect the life and limb of the subjects to whom it is detailed. On July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, it failed that mission in a spectacular fashion.

On Saturday, July 14, a 20-year-old local boy with virtually no online footprint or history of political radicalism brought a ladder and rifle to the Pennsylvania grounds where presidential candidate Donald Trump was about to speak to supporters. The would-be assassin stationed himself on a low, unsecured, slightly sloped rooftop with a direct line of sight to Trump, a mere 130 yards away, and got off a shot that came within a hair’s breadth of killing the likely next President. A Secret Service sniper then eliminated the threat (but only after he got off a total of eight shots, murdering one Trump supporter and critically wounding two others).

If Facebook, the company, had a personal Facebook profile, its “relationship status” with free speech would say, “It’s complicated.” The platform, however, has consistently courted election interference efforts.

MRC Free Speech America researchers compiled 39 times Facebook was caught interfering in U.S. elections since 2008. The platform’s record of election-interfering censorship began in 2012, reached a crescendo in 2020 and has begun fading somewhat in the early stages of the 2024 electoral cycle. All the while, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly made pro-free speech comments including during his famous 2019 speech at Georgetown University.