Narrative Building: Secret Service Agent Throws Media Photographer to the Ground at Trump Event

The photographer says he moved "18 inches" outside the press pen, where the press is required to stay during Trump events, and the Secret Service agent grabbed him by the throat and threw him to the ground.

This happened. It's a fact.

However, while the media attempts to add it to its "violence at Trump rallies narrative," that's, as usual, a lie.

Secret Service agents aren't trained by Trump. Neither do they take their tactical orders from Trump.

Yes, this happened at a Trump rally -- but what the hell does it have to do with Trump?

The media likes doing this -- associating words with other words, even though they don't fit together logically. The brain, I think, works in the same way an internet's search algorithms work -- words said in proximity to other words become linked to those other words, and then the search algorithm begins searching for one word when the other word is searched for. Taking them for synonyms, essentially.

That is, search "Trump violence" and you'll get this Secret Service event -- even though this particular take-down can not be linked to Trump by anyone with a functioning brain cell or a lick of honesty in his body.

And the media plays this game, not linking things logically or honestly, but just forever mentioning one thing in rapid relation to another, until the public subconsciously believes one concept is chained, logically, to the other.

The subconscious is where all decision making and beliefs are actually made. The conscious mind just makes up little stories and rationalizations to explain one's beliefs "logically" to oneself.

I don't like Trump and think he'd be a bad president. I think he does in fact have a strong tendency towards brutish authoritarianism, and I think a lot of his supporters, in great error, think that this brutish authoritarianism is an excellent way to have their vengeance on a left that itself employs brutish authoritarianism as a tactic.

They're wrong on several scores. First, they assume wrongly these tactics won't be used against themselves when they become inconvenient to Trump; ask Michelle Fields and Breitbart about that assuption.

Also, Trump will almost certainly lose the election in a blow-out. Thus, any further legitimization of brutish authoritarianism does not create a permission structure for Trump to use such tactics, but instead creates it for the likely next president of the United States, Hillary Rodham -- who has been plotting herself for a great and wrathful vengeance on the Rightwing Conspiracy that's been scheming against her for all her adult life.

That said, all that can be true without having to take the dishonest step (and dishonesty chanted by a group with media power is a soft application of brutish authoritarianism) of claiming that a Secret Service agent's actions are somehow attributable to Trump.

I don't even know if, per Service training, what this guy did was wrong. I can tell you that it looks like an overreaction, but I have no Secret Service training and have no idea what their protocols are.

Eh, politics makes liars of us all, and especially the left, for whom politics is not a necessary evil, to be engaged with as necessary, but instead a Church providing all metaphysical meaning to the weak and stupid.

And for the right, it infects us during campaign season. I'm sure most of Trump's critics will start claiming that a "tone" and a "zeitgiest" created by Trump somehow inveighed itself so forcefully upon a trained professional Secret Service's mind he lost all sense and discipline and became a Trump-mad fascist robot.

Thinking should consist of slightly more than a mental keyword search for HashtagTrump and HashtagViolence.

By the Way: If the Secret Service agent was on edge, why blame Trump? Why not, maybe, blame the disruptors who were causing the disorder and tension?

It it possible the increasingly-confrontational tactics used by BLM and OWS might be maybe setting some "tone" here?

Nah -- they're left-wing and/or black, therefore, blameless as a definitional matter.

Oh, and on "tone," Heather MacDonald wants to talk about the left's tone and increasing embrace of violence as a teaching tool.

Let’s dip into the rhetoric of a garden-variety Black Lives Matter march that I observed last October on Fifth Avenue in New York City. It featured "F**k the Police," "Murderer Cops," and "Racism Is the Disease, Revolution Is the Cure" T-shirts, "Stop Police Terror" signs, and "Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Racist Cops Have Got to Go" chants.

And lete's not forget this:

posted by Ace at 03:29 PM

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