TRIGGERnometry - July 16, 2024


Trump Assassination Attempt： Why I'm Not Surprised - Konstantin Kisin


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

190.82529

Word count

1,180

Sentence count

47

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Learn English with Donald Trump. President Trump was shot and killed at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday night, but what is the most logical explanation for this? Is it a political assassination? Or is it an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.040 The attempt on Trump's life is a wake-up call for all of us.
00:00:03.940 I attended a private conference last week where I was introduced as a man who has made a career
00:00:08.700 out of stating the self-evident. While some would see this description as a slight,
00:00:13.380 to me it is a source of tremendous satisfaction. In a society which has forced large swathes of
00:00:18.680 its citizenry to pretend that what they see with their own eyes must never be uttered out loud,
00:00:23.980 describing the obvious reality is a worthy thing to do. That being the case, what is the self-evident
00:00:29.280 truth of the last 48 hours? I woke up on Sunday morning to the news that President Trump had been
00:00:34.380 shot in an assassination attempt. My phone was bursting with notifications, a mixture of concern
00:00:39.820 and unprintable memes. Like many, I experienced a range of emotions, from shock to the relief that
00:00:45.360 the assassination failed, to concern for the future of an America in which this sort of thing can happen.
00:00:50.840 What occurred at the Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania had, and may still have, the
00:00:55.460 potential to be one of those singular moments in history which changes the world forever.
00:01:00.560 One need not reach for the overused example of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
00:01:05.400 which sparked the outbreak of World War I. Every significant revolution in modern history,
00:01:10.240 from the French, to the American, to the Russian, was a product of events that no one could have
00:01:14.840 predicted having the outcome they did. Likewise, the unanticipated and still not fully understood
00:01:19.800 consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the terrorist attacks on 9-11,
00:01:24.040 and the global financial crisis, continue to plague us to this day. Preoccupied with these
00:01:29.060 historical precedents, my busy mind took many hours to settle, and it was only when it did that
00:01:34.140 I realized the sad truth. There was one emotion I hadn't experienced. Surprise. Obviously, I don't
00:01:40.380 mean that I had prior knowledge of the attack, or that I was aware of some sort of conspiracy to murder
00:01:45.500 President Trump. I mean only that for some time now, we've lived in a society in which this sort of
00:01:50.560 thing could conceivably happen. To be clear, this video is not an attempt to blame the assassination
00:01:55.420 attempt on my favorite political complaint, as politicians and commentators of every stripe
00:02:00.760 have done over recent days. Republicans tried to present recent comments by President Biden,
00:02:05.520 in which he argued that enough time has been spent on debates about his mental acuity as the motivating
00:02:10.820 factor for the attack. Apparently, we're supposed to believe that Biden incited the shooting when he
00:02:16.260 said, we can't waste any more time being distracted. I have one job, and that's to beat Donald Trump,
00:02:21.900 before adding, it's time to put Trump in the bullseye. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose main
00:02:26.760 achievement is to demonstrate that a low IQ is no impediment to success in politics, went further,
00:02:32.220 tweeting that the Democrat Party just tried to murder Donald Trump. Many Democrats, on the other
00:02:37.340 hand, have for once abandoned their pretense of being the party of good people. YouTuber Destiny,
00:02:42.500 who you might remember from a recent debate on trigonometry, had a full mask-off moment when
00:02:47.360 he celebrated the death of Cori Comperatore, a man whose only crime was to be in the crowd.
00:02:53.400 Comperatore was killed when he dived on top of his daughter to protect her from the gunfire,
00:02:57.920 with the only thing he had, his body.
00:03:00.500 A person in the crowd cheering for and supporting a traitor caught astray?
00:03:04.060 I'm so sad, please, Destiny tweeted.
00:03:07.160 Mehdi Hassan, meanwhile, spent the last few days using the attack to score political points,
00:03:11.760 retweeting things like this to his one and a half million followers.
00:03:15.760 Naturally, all of this is abominable behavior in and of itself, and even more so when it
00:03:20.840 concerns an event in which a man died and several others were seriously injured.
00:03:25.100 But to focus on this would be to conceal a more fundamental and self-evident truth.
00:03:29.640 The way we talk about our political opponents is simply criminal.
00:03:32.920 In this instance, the right will justifiably paint the rhetoric, jokes and military metaphors
00:03:37.700 deployed by the left as the cause of the assassination attempt.
00:03:41.000 The left will deflect by citing Donald Trump's suggestion that the problem of Hillary Clinton 0.81
00:03:45.920 could be solved by the Second Amendment and his other irresponsible comments.
00:03:50.320 Both will be right because, as with most issues nowadays, whatever the case you want to make,
00:03:55.200 the evidence is all there.
00:03:56.640 The real question for someone who doesn't believe that jokes and metaphors make people
00:04:00.160 shoot politicians is, what is the context in which an attempt on the life of a presidential
00:04:04.900 candidate is not a surprise?
00:04:06.740 Like you, I know nothing about the would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks.
00:04:11.200 I heard someone on TV describe the 20-year-old as a nutjob.
00:04:14.820 Is that the most logical explanation, I thought to myself? 0.93
00:04:17.920 After all, in a political climate in which Trump has been described as Hitler, fascist, 0.71
00:04:22.700 Nazi, dictator and so on, would it really be crazy to assassinate him?
00:04:26.780 I know that you and I are emotionally well-regulated, sensible people who never took these allegations
00:04:32.180 seriously, whether we like Trump or not.
00:04:35.160 But not everyone out there is emotionally well-regulated, sensible or educated about history.
00:04:40.180 What if you were a 20-year-old man?
00:04:42.060 What if, like most 20-year-old men, you were seeking a mission worthy of your life?
00:04:46.240 What if you're emotionally dysregulated?
00:04:48.720 What if you lacked the judgment IQ or plain common sense to disbelieve the people on your screens
00:04:53.640 who kept screaming that he's a Nazi?
00:04:56.160 What if you actually thought Trump was Hitler?
00:04:58.760 In that situation, as a patriot and a dedicated citizen who wanted to go down in history,
00:05:03.900 would you not be duty-bound to grab a rifle, climb on a roof and pull the trigger?
00:05:08.200 After all, how would history remember a man who managed or even attempted to eliminate Hitler?
00:05:13.840 Do we not make movies about men like Colonel von Staffenberg who did just that?
00:05:17.600 To be clear, I make no claim as to the shooter's actual motivations.
00:05:22.060 I'm merely attempting to process the shock at my own lack of surprise at the assassination attempt itself.
00:05:27.860 The self-evident truth is that we have ceased to love our neighbor.
00:05:31.600 We may never know what the true reasons for the shooting of President Trump were,
00:05:35.420 but what we do know is that it is time for this type of politics to end.
00:05:39.780 Because if it doesn't, something else will.
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