James and Mike discuss the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the media response to it, and the backlash from the right wing cancel culture. They also discuss a variety of other topics related to the incident, including: 1. What does it mean for the future of free speech? 2. What role does the media play in the effort to delegitimize Trump? 3. Why are we so angry about it? 4. Why do we care? 5. Is it really so bad? 6. Why does it matter? 7. How should we react? 8. How do we feel about the reaction from the media and cancel culture? 9. What should we think about the response to the attempt at assassination? 10. How can we move forward from this? 11. What are our reactions?
00:00:00.000We already have laws in place regarding calls to violence. Most Western societies do. I mean, if we want to take the you can't shout fire in a crowded theater kind of thing, like calls to violence or calls to panic or whatever it is are classified under a special, I suppose, subheading of free speech.
00:00:21.020So in this case, however, I think what perhaps people would say is that, well, they're not actually calling for violence. They are lamenting the lack of a violent actions.
00:00:35.380Trump has been painted as the next Hitler, basically, like somehow he's going to end democracy if he's getting elected. He's going to be it's going to be a dictatorship like he had his chance for four years to end democracy, but he didn't take it.
00:00:51.020You don't have to like him, but either he's incompetent at ending democracy because he couldn't do it in four years and he needs another four years.
00:00:58.520So people are going to vote him in so he can end democracy from now on, like for good now.
00:01:03.960If people truly believe what has been said about him, they feel like it's somewhat morally justified, like if it's preventing a greater evil, if it's framed to be a similar, if the risk, if the threat level is just as high.
00:01:18.360And I think if you measure it based on that and not by actions, people can believe that quite easily.
00:01:23.360And welcome back to the Critical Compass.
00:01:44.660And today we're going to talk about the attempted assassination on Donald Trump and the results of that, both from the media and also the right wing cancel culture that we've seen pop up in response to some of the events that have unfolded.
00:02:01.300Mike, you've got a few a few notes already lined up and that you want to share.
00:02:07.920Yeah, well, yeah, I wanted to kind of do this episode on what we're seeing, sort of an interesting development of this, what I guess is being called right wing counter right wing cancel culture, because cancel culture is something we normally associate with leftist politics, at least, you know, in the last half dozen years.
00:02:30.080But it's sort of been absent from the right because it's been the right has somewhat been unified in its response of the right and libertarians and just generally people who are, you know, present themselves as being against cancel culture and against kind of woke ideology that that generates that.
00:02:50.660But what we're seeing now, but what we're seeing now in the wake of the attempt at assassination is a really interesting divide, and it's brought up some, I think it's brought up some emotions that have been kind of sitting pretty heavy in a lot of people.
00:03:06.880I've got a few tweets just kind of lined up.
00:03:09.760I don't know all these people, I know a couple of them, but it's an interesting, there's sort of a loud, maybe it's a loud minority saying, hey, you know what, this has been something that the left has been doing to us for years.
00:03:27.440Anytime we step out of whatever they've determined, you know, the Overton window is for any given topic, they've been slamming us with, you know, getting us fired from jobs and, you know, you know, getting our social media accounts pulled and stuff.
00:03:40.180So I don't feel any remorse for the people who are getting fired for saying that they wish the shooter didn't miss.
00:03:47.020And then there's a couple what I would, and we were talking about this off the recording, and I would say that, like, my inherent kind of response to that is agreement.
00:03:59.360I kind of, a primal part of me sort of agrees with that, like, you know, that it's the just desserts.
00:04:05.120But then there's a couple writers, and Dave Smith will end on a clip from his Part of the Problem podcast, that kind of are, I feel are probably a little bit more measured and a little bit more of a mature response.
00:04:21.140But anyway, let me, let's pull the first one up here.
00:04:32.600Quote, OMG, y'all went after a grandma and got her fired from Home Depot.
00:04:38.440Y'all made us watch our grandmas die scared alone and in the hospital, so get effed.
00:04:44.640It's very resentful slash you deserve, you deserve this kind of attitude.
00:04:51.000Yeah, like, it's sort of, yeah, you can see here that there's a, there's an implication that, you know, one is,
00:05:01.080one is more of a serious, one is, like, actually a cancellation and the other was, was not justified.
00:05:08.600She followed, this was from, uh, 11 a.m. a few days ago.
00:05:14.340Then she followed it up with this one.
00:05:16.640Uh, if you've ever watched a rabid liberal salivating over the thought of kicking your family out of the grocery store while you try to buy milk maskless,
00:05:23.060uh, not exactly sure how you have one single F left in your field of F's upon the spinning rock we call Earth to have sympathy for them
00:05:32.280because they think assassination is how to deal with differing opinions.
00:05:36.600So, I, beyond the fact that I love how that sentence is crafted, um, it's, uh, I don't know, what do you, what do you think of her point here?
00:05:48.300It's, it is tricky because anything that calls for, like, we, we do make exceptions with free speech with, like, calls to violence or calling for somebody's head.
00:06:05.280Um, it, it gets tricky when it's, like, is that the way to actually deal with these?
00:06:13.000Is pushing for somebody to get fired is, like, the mob mentality, is that the healthy way to approach that?
00:06:22.600Or is that just us playing by the same rules as the leftist kind of cancel culture played for however many years?
00:06:32.540So, are, what principles are we going to fall back onto and how much of this mob mentality is, is healthy?
00:06:41.000Yeah, yeah, and that's, that's a good point you raise with, um, we, we already have laws in place regarding calls to violence.
00:06:51.880I mean, if, if we want to take, I suppose we can probably take American, um, you know, the, the, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the U.S. here
00:06:59.460because this is centered on, you know, around U.S. commentators and it was a U.S. event.
00:07:04.300They specifically have, uh, you know, you know, that, uh, I don't know what the, the term for it is, but, you know, like the, you can't shout fire in a, in a crowded theater kind of thing.
00:07:14.880Like, calls to violence or calls to panic or whatever it is, um, are classified under a special, uh, I suppose, subheading of, of free speech.
00:07:24.940So, in this case, however, I think what perhaps people would say is that, well, they're not actually calling for violence.
00:07:34.580They are, uh, lamenting the lack of a violent action.
00:07:38.920So, is that, is this the same thing or is there any difference there in your estimation?
00:07:44.500Uh, it's a little bit different, but it's, it's very tasteless.
00:07:52.380Um, you do sometimes find this on, even, I've seen some notable, like, Canadian commenters or people mentioning, well, if certain Canadian politicians broke these laws and those laws are treason, that should result in whatever corporal punishment and or end in a noose.
00:08:14.340So, I've seen these things be mentioned where if you take it at face value, like, oh, is that, is that calling for direct action or is that saying, is there more nuance behind that?
00:08:26.280And people don't really operate in nuance when there's only a certain number of characters when you can blast out to the internet.
00:08:31.920So, um, my, my issue with anything like that is like, the worst interpretation is always going to be taken if you, if you're pushing that line.
00:08:44.840Uh, so that gets difficult to find where that line is.
00:08:49.060I personally wouldn't say, say that, but I don't think it's, it's crim, like, it doesn't fit that line of criminality, but I don't think the mob should call for somebody to be fired over those comments.
00:09:08.660But there's nothing stopping an employer being like, well, this makes you a disgusting human and we don't want to associate, but how much of that is just the employer and how much of that is the mob?
00:09:20.100That's where I would maybe make a distinction of like the mob mentality of advocating for somebody's livelihood to be removed from like that.
00:09:33.120That's different than somebody being affected by their own actions under their employer, just observing what they said.
00:09:46.200I think we, we saw a lot of this during COVID where, uh, you know, we had people being, um, you know, people being let go from their jobs for, you know, esposing certain viewpoints about, you know, vaccines or whatever the case may be, all the associated, uh, contentious issues that came up around that vaccine passports, things like that.
00:10:07.460And maybe, you know, we're almost 10 minutes into this and we should probably reference.
00:10:11.300There was, uh, all this is referring to, I believe, uh, one particular elderly woman who worked at a home Depot in the U S who, who posted, you know, something of a very similar sentiment to what lots of people were saying about how, you know, they wish that, uh, the shooter didn't miss.
00:10:28.600Um, we'll get into a little bit more detail about that later with, um, with Lauren Southern's tweet.
00:10:33.660But, uh, yeah, I was going to say there's, there's kind of a, kind of a distinction to be made.
00:10:41.380I think between, uh, like what you say about if an employer wants to distance themselves from somebody based on the things that they said and whether or not they're doing that out of, uh, you know, the, the values that that company claims to, uh, promote.
00:11:00.440Or if they're doing it just to avoid, uh, you know, public backlash, you know, against their, against the company name.
00:11:08.820So is there any sort of, do you, do you distinguish there at all?
00:11:14.500Do you think that there's any sort of, um, I don't know if there's enough pressure from the company without the mob mentality, because ultimately the only reason the company's caring is because there's enough of a online backlash.
00:11:30.440And people are like, let it be sending emails or like, there's that activism component, which is exactly what the left did on all these issues.
00:11:41.360So in the case where it's not criminal, it's, I think you should be able to call it out.
00:11:46.160And they're like, this is like, this is not cool.
00:11:50.480Like this is hypocritical look compared to what people have been fired for or what, what has been said on the right, which has had consequences that the left mobbed over and, um, pursued, pursued employers to, to damage.
00:12:07.660So I think, I think if left to their own devices, a company would only do that if it, if it like really affected their image and they don't want to be associated.
00:12:22.200So if the right doesn't mob together and call for that, I don't think some of these people will be fired.
00:12:31.100It also depends on the position because, uh, Home Depot employee, that's somebody who said like, that's a little bit better than the case you had in BC here in Canada.
00:12:41.800Like the, was it a professor who was basically say the same thing that the, there's upset that, well, the bullet didn't miss.
00:12:52.100And in that case, a public profile and a, well, now you're, now we're getting in the case of like, well, how much should a practitioner or, or is somebody's social media an extension of their professional identity?
00:13:05.380And, or, um, as a professor, are they, is that how interwoven is that to their, like to their identity with that particular school or their tenureship?
00:13:16.860Or so in that case, I can see that not reflecting the values of a university.
00:13:22.980Um, so what are your thoughts on that?
00:13:27.320Well, yeah, I, I, I don't, I don't think I disagree with that either.
00:13:30.580I just, it's kind of one of those things where it's like, if we, if we, you know, took this exact situation and we just subtracted like 50 years, 40 years, even you would have, um, you know, there, there would be a situation where there was probably a very similar level of discourse happening around any sort of event like this, that an employer or a, uh, you know, an institution would, would, you would never have, like, they would never know.
00:13:55.820They would never have any cause to know that, you know, what people talk about in their own homes, but because we, we, you know, of the age we live in, you put the stuff online and, you know, there becomes a viral kind of movement around it.
00:14:07.240And before you know it, it's, you know, it's a, it's a very, even though, yes, you're, you're, you're posting it publicly, but most of these people, especially elderly people, you could probably assume, believe that what their public posts are mostly just circulated around their friends or followers that they,
00:14:24.340they're a small group of people that they have online. And then before you know it, it becomes an, an international scandal. You know, you just, the, just the technology didn't exist for such things, you know, until very recently.
00:14:35.980The amplifications there. So it's like, you, you think you're just sending a message to a small group, but if something goes viral, it gets amplified outside of your circle.
00:14:44.880And now it has unlimited reach in a way. So it can get very loud, very quickly for somebody who does not think that it'll be seen by that many people, which maybe they would have worded it differently if they knew that it was, it was going to be passed around.
00:15:01.520Um, I, so the rhetoric, I'm not surprised though. Um, because if you, if you look at the, everything that's been said up to this point through the media and through the institutions, and even with the, the convictions and the, like the court cases going on,
00:15:26.940Trump has been painted as a, the next Hitler, basically like that. Somehow he's going to end democracy. If he's getting elected, he's going to be, it's going to be a dictatorship. Like he had his chance for four years to end democracy, but he didn't take it. Um, you don't have to like him, but either he's incompetent at ending democracy. Cause he couldn't do it in four years.
00:15:52.280And he needs another four years. So people are going to vote him in so he can end democracy from now on, like for good now. Um, but if, if people truly believe what has been said about him, I, I think people's things like, well, if you have a chance to like time machine, you go back in time. Like, would you, would you, uh, put a pillow over the little, little baby Hitler's.
00:16:22.280Crib like the adult. Yeah. It's that same kind of scenario. They feel like it's somewhat morally justified. Like if it's a preventing a greater evil, if it's framed to be a similar degree of, uh, if the risk, if the threat level is just as high.
00:16:41.060And I think the threat level is only measured through your perceived number of mentions and like how vitriolic the messaging is behind it. So if you measure it based on that and not by actions, people can believe that quite easily.
00:16:55.700Yeah. Well, and I mean, um, Dave Smith, who we'll, we'll hear from a little bit here, had a, had a tweet right away, uh, after it happened where, you know, you, you know, the, the attempt happens and then you hear uniform messaging from the media of like, you know, uh, this is not, uh, you know, this is not how we do things in America.
00:17:16.740You know, we, we're a, we're a peaceful nation. We can't be resorting to violence, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And he's like, well, how are you going to like, exactly like you said, how are you going to be the, the media government apparatus that for the last eight years has been shouting from the rooftops about how, you know, Trump is a threat to democracy.
00:17:35.740He's in collusion with Russia. He's going to, uh, you know, turn the country into a dictatorship. He's, he's in some cases, as in the case of that, wasn't it there a time time magazine cover that had him like photoshopped next to Hitler and like talking about like you cannot do that.
00:17:53.520And at the same time act shocked and, and, and righteously indignant when someone goes, you know, you get into somebody's head and they go, Oh, well, you know, I'm, I'm going to be that hero. That's good. Uh, you know, stop this, the evil orange man. Right.
00:18:07.620Yeah. And, and it's one thing for that attempted assassination, regardless of everything that's that underpins that it's the people's response to it being, Oh, I wish the shot, I wish the wind was a little bit.
00:18:23.520different. So the shot would have landed like people. And you could see these, the people saying this are likely just the average person and likely kind individuals in normal respects, but like in this one case that feels morally justified because of the rhetoric, which is exactly a strange thing to like, well, it means it shows that the rhetoric is powerful.
00:18:51.520If the messages are said over and over and over again. And I do remember a time, maybe like it was within the first year of Donald getting elected.
00:19:02.920I remember how much I didn't like him. And then a couple of things came out. I'm like, well, he didn't actually say that. And they're hammering home on like the very fine people or some of these other common tropes where the media took him to task on something.
00:19:19.920He didn't actually say. And if you play the full clip, he gave context and he gave a very clear distinction. The media is like, well, why didn't he, why didn't he denounce the Nazis? And like, well, he literally did right after the clip you showed.
00:19:33.720If you played more than 20 seconds. So yeah, well, that happened recently too. If you remember, do you remember with, uh, when he was talking about, um, how he would, he would, um, bring back auto manufacturing to the U S instead of giving so much of it away to the Mexicans. Cause a lot of, maybe people don't know a lot of vehicle, North American vehicle manufacturing happens in Mexico.
00:19:56.720And it's been increasing over, you know, recent years. And the term that he used was, um, he said, it'll be a bloodbath if we don't do this. And what the media, this even on, um, I was really disappointed to see this because even on, um, Joe Rogan, when Jonathan Haidt was on and they, they played this clip and they played the edited version of the clip where he sort of, it sort of cut out a little bit more lead up to before he says the word bloodbath.
00:20:23.200They even played the proper clip afterwards. And even then Jonathan Haidt like did not accept that this was, you know, he, he thought that it was, Oh yeah, this, see, this is very dangerous rhetoric, but that's, that's only dangerous rhetoric. If you don't understand economics and you don't know the proper economic usage of the word bloodbath, which refers to a, uh, you know, I don't know the exact definition, but it refers to like a large disparity of like an economic loss and gain. You know, that's a, uh, it would be the, the American economy would
00:20:53.080suffer, suffer, suffer a bloodbath in comparison to the, what the gains that the Mexican economy is having because of the, the infrastructure that it has.
00:20:59.840That was part of the definition as well. Like, and, um, I just see if, I don't know if I have the paper trail, but I believe Webster's or they updated their definition shortly after to like hide or diminish the other.
00:21:16.640Oh, the other definition. Yeah. Yeah. The other definition is a period of disastrous loss or reversal. And the example, they use a few mutual funds performed well in the general bloodbath of the stock market. So a completely reasonable term to use in the context.
00:21:33.560So there's also compilations of CNN and all the other media using that term and other politicians using that term. So it's like, well, again, this is the crux of the issue is like, if the underlying principle is like, well, we demand the same type of speech to be treated the same way.
00:21:54.320It doesn't matter who's saying it. And we want unbiased reporting and we want unbiased rules on either side. That's the underlying principle. So if somebody on CNN can say bloodbath or some democratic Senator can say bloodbath, and it doesn't have the same consequence, then like it should just be a level playing field that way.
00:22:17.880In the same thing of like, well, if we decide what is proper, like what is criminal speech and what is not, we should be applying rules equally across the board. So what these examples show is that we do not have a unbiased media apparatus that just tells events, just showcases events and lets people decide for themselves the meaning behind it.
00:22:43.220It is a narrative driven, it's a conclusion first apparatus. And we have example over example. And somebody doesn't have to like Trump at all. Like, there's plenty of things that I think you could do better, articulate better. And like, there's certainly better potential leaders, but I do feel like the media attacks on him are completely unfair.
00:23:13.220And it's very clear. And as long as they continue to be unfair, Trump's base will just double down. And that's the thing is like, it's bolstering him because it's proving him right. And it's actually giving him more credibility than he would have got otherwise to the people that see the, the attacks happen in real time.
00:23:35.460Now, I can't remember who said it years ago, but they were like, you know what, this would be, this tactic would be way more effective if they ever reported on any of his successes during his presidency, of which he had a number.
00:23:49.080You know, if they ever reported on any tiny success, then the criticisms, pardon me, the criticisms would ring much truer and would be, it would look much less forced and much less propagandistic, right?
00:24:03.700But they just, they don't get it. They, they, they can't do it. They can't like intellectually, emotionally, morally bring themselves to do it.
00:24:12.720And their credibility, credibility suffers for it.
00:24:15.720Well, and the one last little point on this, the fact that he's speaking up and standing up against these constant attacks is, I think, the reason why a lot of people will vote for him.
00:24:28.920Where a leftist, their perception is that, well, the people on the right, well, look at how many racists there are who just don't like immigrants or just don't like this.
00:24:40.580And they think it's the, a bunch of racists or hateful people found somebody just as racist and hateful as them.
00:24:47.880Therefore, that's why they're voting. They're not seeing this other side to it because they have, these leftists have complete trust in the media.
00:24:58.920Therefore, it doesn't even pop into their head that people would have a major issue and vote for somebody or support somebody who's standing up against the unbiased coverage.
00:25:12.240Yeah, it's a, it's a very simplistic way of, uh, analyzing politics, but that's a, that's a plague on both sides.
00:25:21.620Um, okay, I'm going to bring up our, uh, another tweet here from our, uh, uh, future friend of the channel as well.
00:25:28.820I love Josie, the, the redheaded libertarian, uh, often seen on, uh, Tim cast.
00:25:34.880Uh, she says, uh, the same people outraged over those getting fired from their jobs for celebrating the death of a firefighter
00:25:41.420and lamenting a failed assassination, wanted you fired from your job for being unvaccinated three years ago
00:25:46.880and also wanted your children taken away. So I'm fresh out of F's.
00:25:51.420I'm not making an effort to get anyone fired, but I'm also not going to cry about it.
00:25:55.000If a business no longer wants to associate with an employee who publicly and brazenly and without empathy,