The White House Correspondents Dinner is Decadent and Depraved
By 
A few thoughts on a church day String.
It’s an extremely bad sign that, from what I can tell, something like the majority opinion among non-fascists right now is that last night’s incident was staged for publicity purposes by the Trump administration, or somebody in it.
My own view is that facially it’s highly implausible that this would be the case, given that this sort of false flag operation is difficult to organize and pull off without being exposed — the most famous “false flag” operation, the Reichstag fire, turned out not to be false flag after all, although it was widely believed to be so for a long time — but that nevertheless suspecting that it might be is not irrational or paranoid.
That conclusion in itself is a total epistemological disaster for our politics and culture. The fact that the Trump administration is a kind of ongoing media circus of endless exercises in kayfabe, to use the the very useful term from the world of professional wrestling, has made it reasonable to at least consider the non-trivial possibility that it has just staged a fake assassination attempt.
On one level, it ultimately doesn’t even matter whether that possibility is true or false: the mere fact that it is a reasonable thing to consider illustrates the depths to which we have sunk as a polity and a culture.
It’s worth pausing for a moment to consider how utterly disgusting it is that purported journalists showed up for last night’s circus in the first place. Quite irrespective of whether the assassination attempt was real or not, this whole event was the kind of media event that has made Trump who he is, which is a president of the United States who is trying very hard to destroy liberal democracy. Showing up for this kind of thing at all makes you a collaborator in that project. And claiming that it’s your job — that you were just following orders as it were — doesn’t make it any better.
For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and Support are the same.
Eichmann in Jerusalem
. . . The information from this story from the LA Times suggests that it’s highly improbable that this was anything other than the classic “alienated young man with a gun” scenario. When one considers the prevalence of both in 2026 America, that’s almost as disturbing as baroque theories about scripted reality.
Again the key points here are the increasing extent to which we are becoming a low-trust society, and how the collaborationist tendencies of the elite media help nurture that.