FRIENDS: J. D. Vance quickly figured it out!

TUESDAY, JULY 16, 2024

But also, the weekend friends:  The apparent assassination attempt took place at roughly 6:12 p.m. Eastern.

With two hours, Senator Vance had managed to figure it out! 

Everyone has always known that Vance is plenty smart. But, in this particular case, his clairvoyance—his skill at reading the flight of birds—went right off the charts:

FLAM (7/15/24): Sen. J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s newly named running mate, responded to the assassination attempt on the former president by calling out President Joe Biden.

On Saturday, July 13, Trump, 78, was injured after Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, fired shots at the former president in Butler, Pa., in what authorities have since confirmed was an "assassination attempt." 

"Today is not just some isolated incident," Vance, 39, wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) two hours after the incident. "The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination."

That's part of this report from People magazine. Even People had noticed!

In fact, the soothsaying solon had no way of knowing whether his accusation was accurate. Even now, three days later, no evidence has emerged concerning the motive, or the state of mind, of the 20-year-old assailant.

Full disclosure! A familiar old soundbite comes to mind when we consider what this latter-day Calchas did. It's a soundbite which ruled the 2000 White House campaign:

Willing to do and say anything.

Way back in 1999, that unflattering description was relentlessly applied—by mainstream and conservative journalists alike—to Candidate Al Gore. 

Al Gore is willing to do and say anything! As evidence, our journalists kept offering crazy claims Gore had supposedly made—crazy claims the journalists themselves had invented and had then placed in Gore's mouth.

Starting in March 1999, this pattern continued for twenty straight months. The candidate won the popular vote, but lost Florida by an eyelash.

The Crazy was already on the prowl back in 1999. By now, The Crazy has come, en masse, for what's left of the American nation, a fact which was all too apparent in the immediate aftermath of Saturday's assassination attempt.

All across the firmament, people like Vance hurled themselves forward, making claims they couldn't possibly justify, prove or support. "Conspiracy theories" were everywhere! On the front page of today's New York Times, Hsu et al. offer this:

The Gunshots Rang Out. Then the Conspiracy Theories Erupted Online.

Four minutes after the first report of a shooting at a rally for Donald J. Trump on Saturday, an anonymous account on X posted, “Joe Biden’s antifa shot President Trump.”

Within half an hour, another account on X with links to the QAnon conspiracy theory claimed without proof that the attack against Mr. Trump had most likely been ordered by the Central Intelligence Agency. Shortly after that, the far-right activist Laura Loomer posted on X about some recent remarks that President Biden made about Mr. Trump and then wrote, “They tried to kill Trump.” She did not provide evidence.

An hour later, with official details of the assassination attempt still scant, the narrative that President Biden and his allies had engineered the attack on Mr. Trump was being amplified by Republican lawmakers, Russian sympathizers and even a Brazilian political scion. By the time 24 hours had elapsed, posts about the unverified claim had been viewed and shared millions of times.

The idea that President Biden was behind the shooting of Mr. Trump was perhaps the most dominant conspiracy theory to emerge after the attack in Butler, Pa., on Saturday. The unproven conjecture surfaced almost instantly, hardened into a narrative and then catapulted between platforms large and small, even as information about the incident was limited. It was a striking example of the speed, scale and stickiness of rumors on social media, which often calcify into accepted truth far more efficiently than efforts to debunk or pleas for restraint. 

In fairness, Vance's tweet didn't exactly present "a conspiracy theory." That said, it was a fairly obvious sign that at least one member of the Senate was willing to do and say anything.

It's as we noted early this morning. The climate is changing before our eyes—but then again, so is the world!

We'll guess that our own Blue America may finally have earned its way out, a speculation and claim we plan to discuss over the next several weeks.

Our own Blue America may be on the way out—or possibly not, of course. But in the wake of Saturday's apparent assassination attempt, Red America spilled over with an endless array of insinuations and accusations, and with some religious fervor as well.

That brings us to the unusual conduct on Sunday's Fox & Friends Weekend.

Full disclosure! We have a soft spot for weekend friend Rachel Campos-Duffy, who we believe is a million percent sincere in the various things she says. 

As we mentioned a few days back, Will Cain is the most cautious and careful of the three weekend friends. Pete Hegseth—the famous "Trader Pete"—strikes us as a perfectly intelligent person who needs to become a bit less upset and perhaps a great deal more honest.

Campos-Duffy and Hegseth also seem to be quite religious. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that—until such time as there is.

This Sunday, the weekend friends were joined by Lawrence Jones and Ainsley Earhardt, two of the regular friends from the weekday Fox & Friends program. That made five friends in all.

Was something "wrong" with what the five friends did this Sunday? For ourselves, we wouldn't say that.

Instead, we'd go with this:

We think what happened on Sunday's show should be recorded for posterity. It strikes us as an example of the way the world is currently turning. 

Climate is changing, but so is the world—and it seems to us that we Blues have very much earned our way out. We seem to be on our way to an earlier world—to an earlier model of the way a society should function. That's part of what we thought we saw when we watched two hours of Sunday's program, and when we searched the records of the Internet Archive for two more hours after that.

All in all, we'd put it this way—Sunday's program was flatly sectarian. Campos-Duffy and Hegseth took part in the repetitive service, as did Earhardt and especially Jones. 

We're not sure if Cain joined in. We'll continue with our research.

There's nothing wrong with being religious. There's nothing wrong with being doctrinal.

In our view, there was something new and different about what the five friends did. What they did was new and different, but then too it was also quite old. We lost a lot of time today, but in the course of the rest of the week, we're going to show you (some of) what was said and done.

There's nothing wrong with being religious. There's nothing wrong with being doctrinal.

Was something wrong with what the friends did? We'd put it a slightly different way:

We self-impressed Blues may have earned our way out. Climate is changing before our eyes, but so is the rest of the world.

Tomorrow: You'll read it nowhere else