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~So in America's one-party state the Leader of the Opposition is now the prisoner of his "security detail":
After allowing Trump to be shot in the head, the Biden-Harris Secret Service is now directly interfering in the election by dictating his rally and campaign schedule. https://t.co/vHdyEQKlxk
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) September 26, 2024
Why would a presidential candidate wish to campaign in Wisconsin? Because it's one of half-a-dozen states that matter in the US "election" and at Shenanigan Central the fun is already underway:
"1% of voters in the bluest county in a swing state got duplicate ballots
But don't worry our political opponents caught us so we had to tell you all
You can trust us that this won't happen anywhere else" pic.twitter.com/Cp4MYD6pXS
— Shaun Maguire (@shaunmmaguire) September 26, 2024
GOP "concerns"? Yeah, that'll have to do it - in the absence of the Secret Service's willingness to permit the Republican candidate to do any of the once traditional barnstorming.
Oh, and just to add to the gaiety, as in 2016, the Deep State is blaming it all on foreigners:
These remarks on the Secret Service from @MarkSteynOnline are particularly sobering given this report. https://t.co/NrFPmMh7hc
— Hillsdale College (@Hillsdale) September 25, 2024
So it would be unsafe to allow the opposition leader to campaign given threats against him by the fellows we gave pallets of greenbacks to.
My initial reaction to the first Trump assassin was that, even in the garbage Government of the United States, it was not possible for the world's most lavishly funded protection service to be this totally crap:
What's the old line? When seconds count, the police are minutes away? Not at a Secret Service event: even when the police are on site in massive overwhelming numbers, they're still minutes away. Here are fifty-two seconds of members of the public yelling that 'he's on the roof'...
The Secret Service have spent the summer as the enablers of wannabe assassins. Everything we've learned these last two months confirms as much, starting with only the most obvious post-Butler revelation: that even when the shooter started firing at Trump the crack agents with the reflector shades and dangling telephone cords did nothing until a village constable got off the first shot at the killer, and thereby forced the SS into joining fire a little earlier than they might have wished, if only to establish their post-fiasco cover story. And then the Director of the Secret Service, testifying under oath to Congress, claimed credit for the local lad's shot.
Why does Trump still have these guys in the house?
Oh, that's right: because, if he ordered them to leave, they'd shoot him in the back for trying to escape.
Even so, the Secret Service's job is not to determine what they will allow a presidential candidate to do - whether it's enjoying a weekend golf game or deciding how he wishes to campaign in the election. Even if one is willing to believe that in Butler, Pennsylvania the SS were merely feckless and dysfunctional, it is outrageous that so many bigshot Republicans are willing to reward the agency and let them make US elections - the worst in the civilised world - even lousier. And face it, as a practical matter, Trump would have a better chance of staying alive till November if the feds were to outsource his protection to these game Ugandan urchins:
🇺🇬🇺🇸 Ungandan children recreate the shooting of Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/oeGiB7zwbj
— HOT SPOT (@HotSpotHotSpot) July 17, 2024
As I had cause to tell my Hillsdale College audience just last week, I've had the cheerless experience in this election season of watching everything done to "niche Canadians" and the like over a decade ago now being directly applied to the opposition's presidential candidate. Way back when, my friend and compatriot Laura Rosen Cohen coined a most relevant and prescient expression. Here's me in January 2015:
Queen's University in Belfast has canceled a symposium on Charlie Hebdo:
'An award-winning novelist has said he is ashamed of his native city because of the decision by Queen's University Belfast to cancel an academic conference on the Charlie Hebdo massacre for security reasons.'
Yeah, right. As Laura Rosen Cohen likes to say, 'security' is the new 'shut up'. A couple more years of this and we'll all be so 'secure' no one will say a word.
Which is what's happening. Here we are ten years later with the ruling party cancelling the campaign events of its only opposition on "security grounds".
More from Tucker and me in 2017:
Look at all the wimp lingo from the authorities there: Nobody we disagree with can come to Berkeley because "we do not have a protectable venue". Seven years on, Berkeley still has no "protectable venue"; all that's changed is that the ruling party, having incentivised the assassination of its political opposition, can now find no "protectable venue" for the only other presidential candidate.
To be fair, the Berkeley bozo claimed to have found an "appropriate protectable venue" that would be available for one afternoon only some weeks later. Likewise, I'm sure even the Secret Service could find Trump an "appropriate protectable venue" for an election rally ...maybe around late November ...early February: yeah, that'll work.
So America still has free speech; it's just that, while the speech is free, there's a security cost: as I put it to Tucker, you could stage Hello Dolly Meets Godzilla on Ice for the cost of bringing Charles Murray to campus for a twenty-minute address.
Now the regime has taken it to the next level: America still has free elections; it's just that, while the election is free, the cost of an "appropriate protectable venue" for all the campaigning is increasingly prohibitive.
I was one of the first to say Trump would win in 2016, and also one of the first to predict what would happen to him after 2020. Me on November 6th, Election Day Plus Three:
Trump should just say 'Screw you, I'm done, I'm outta here', and he should get out. And he should do that before January 20th when he can use Air Force One, because it's my view that, after the Biden regime takes power, as in many coup situations, they will want to have the previous leader arrested. I'm being perfectly serious here. It is the intention of the Democrat Party to put Trump in gaol.
Well, they did arrest him, and try him, and convict him, and only the sentencing remains. They will not permit him to return to power - one way or the other: The Deep State is signalling that Trump's future is: a) prison; or b) death. The Secret Service can keep letting would-be killers get ever closer, but, if that fails to work, then they will simply use their security failures as justification to deny the opposite candidate the right to campaign.
Remember last time? The heads of 4,739 US "intelligence" agencies putting their names to a confident statement that Hunter's laptop was a Russian fake? Democrats win because they're serious, and Republicans aren't. Where are the GOP bigshots denouncing the Secret Service interfering in US elections?
Where are the bigshot Republicans pledging that, as soon as they're elected, the SS and other rogue agencies such as the FBI will be scrapped and replaced by something new and non- (or at least less) corrupt?
What is the point of an opposition party content to be the ruling junta's prison bitch?
~I thank you for all your supportive comments these last grisly months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead, and I look forward to your company at Mark Steyn on the Town tomorrow.
