FD #68 - Face of Leopard Party Leader Gnawed on before Party Convention
Factual Dispatch | 7.15.24 | TNaj
Instead of publishing the Midday Music on Saturday and Easy Like Sunday Morning for our paid subscribers yesterday, days were spent untangling the threads of conspiracy, stupidity, fact, fiction, and fiat perspective that passed for commentary. An ex-president, current presidential candidate, and Leopards Eating Faces Party Leader, had his face chewed on by a registered leopard. On the eve of the Leopards Eating Faces Party Convention, the government suffered its worst security breach since the attempted assassination of the California Cowboy Leopard. (My apologies for how badly I’m going to be torturing this metaphor. By the end of this Dispatch, PETA will try got get me canceled for waterboarding big cats. Get to the end for a remix of a UK Sadboy artist by the same last name as the shooter.)
For those unfamiliar with the metaphor, this meme came about in parallel with the ascendancy of Trump. As he broke away from his competitor set in the GOP, a particularly ugly strain of “Because Fuck You, That’s Why” emerged as the main tenor of comms from MAGAts and the emerging alt-right. As he hurt group after group, and sycophant after sycophant, a narrative emerged, of Leopards Eating the Faces of those who put them in power. Anyone paying attention during the Trump presidency could see the myriad of faces being eaten by Leopards.
To be clear, Trump isn’t the only leopard, there are thousands. From the Tree of Life shooter and various incels doing violence in the name of “Western Civilization,” to local law enforcement repeating his hateful rhetoric in places where they won’t be punished, it is a country of Leopards. Sometimes they hurt people outside of the Face Eating Party, but this weekend a baby Leopard bit the face of the God Emperor Leopard himself.
What do we know? The leopard, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was killed by counter-snipers at the rally. The 20 year old earned his associates degree in engineering science from the Community College of Allegheny County in Western PA in May 2024. His gun was purchased legally, by his father at a dealership that has been closed for over a year. He was able to sneak an AR-15 style rifle into the area, and get onto a rooftop ~400 yards from the speaking platform. He was stopped by a local officer and video shows that spectators had identified him, with further evidence counter-snipers were trained in his direction, but he was still able to put 8 shots into the stage before being stopped. Oddly, the only piece of traditional media that Mr. Crooks was in is a 2022 promotional video for Blackrock that was taken down immediately upon this news breaking. (Editor’s Note: Coincidences like this are why sleep is hard to come by.)
Trump wasn’t clipped by the bullet, but looks to have been hit by glass shrapnel, which tracks given that Crooks sucked at shooting so much that he was kicked off his school’s rifle team. Three others were hit, with a father and volunteer firefighter named Corey Comperatore dying from injuries sustained protecting his family.
Did Crooks give $15 to a “progressive” or democratic PAC? Well, kind of. He donated $15 to “the Progressive Turnout Project,” who confirmed he unsubscribed from their email list in 2023. an aggressive text/email group that sends most of the revenue back to “Mothership Strategies” its parent consultant. But they might have been too aggressive with Crooks, who was 17 at the time. He might not have known it was a scummy, push-notification-abusing farm PAC. He registered as Republican and voted as one in 2022.
So, is “left wing rhetoric” responsible for pushing a quiet kid over the edge? No, but Republicans are loudly pretending that’s the case. Let’s not kid ourselves about who has been calling for violence and who has been convicted of felonies.
It’s not Karma. It’s not “you reap what you sow.” It’s the natural consequence of violent rhetoric, stochastic terrorist language, and calls for violence pouring out of one party’s foaming mouth for a decade. As The Reframe reminds us:
In 2015 it was "lock her up." In 2016 it was "2nd amendment solutions." In 2017 it was telling cops "please don't be too nice." In 2018 it was "when the looting starts, the shooting starts." In 2019 it was "can't you just shoot them in the legs or something?" In 2020 it was "stand back and stand by." In 2021 it was an actual attempted overthrow of the government, along with the attempted assassination of the Vice President and Congress. In 2022 it was leading the crowd in laughing about the attempted assassination of Nancy Pelosi and the brutal attack on her husband by a deranged hammer-wielding maniac. In 2023 it was calling enemies "vermin" who were "poisoning the blood of the country," and promising "I am your retribution."
If that’s a bit heavy-handed, Ryan Broderick just published a newsletter in which he says basically the same:
It seems like the shooting was particularly hard for America’s various radical centrists and columnists, who spent the weekend moaning online about how the country has entered a new, darker era. As if a neo-Nazi didn’t drive a car through a crowd of people in Charlottesville in 2017. As if Trump supporters didn’t break down the doors of the Capitol Building in 2021, armed with guns, zip ties, and plans of taking lawmakers hostage and executing them on the front lawn. As if Nancy Pelosi’s husband wasn’t attacked with a hammer in his own home by a far-right conspiracy theorist in 2022.
The MSM is going with the same “isolated incident” and “troubled loner” nonsense they trot out after every mass shooting. All while the fire rises. The National Conservatism Conference was held in DC two weeks ago, and this is the rhetoric they’re spewing out in the open now:
With stakes such as these, we cannot falter. We cannot hesitate. We must act. This is a no fail mission. We have no choice. We have no option but victory. And may the sword of St. Michael defend us. I don’t know about you, but I will come home with my shield or on it. We are not the Christians who will be fed to the lions. We are the Christians who put on the full armor of god to march into battle against Satan and all his works…
We don’t negotiate with globalist neo-Marxists. We don’t negotiate with the political version of an auto-immune disease. In a word, ladies and gentlemen—taken from the title of my book—we don’t negotiate with un-humans. Because that’s the stakes of this battle: humanity versus un-humanity. Populist nationalists versus atheist Marxist globalists. Strength, beauty, and genius versus weakness, ugliness, and stupidity. Civilization versus barbarism. Crime and chaos versus law and order…
Law and order is the only thing that makes freedom possible. We come to restore law and order, not to knock it down. We do that because we understand that when civilization ends, the result would not be some anarcho-capitalist Ayn Randian utopia where the residents of Galt’s Gulch emerge and lead us into a perfect society of the self. No. Government collapse would produce a despotism because it always does. Where the Hank Reardens and the Dagny Taggarts and the John Galts of the world will end up as anonymous bones at the bottom of freshly dug mass graves, once the shock troops of the regime un-humans find them.
The violence has gotten old. We average a mass shooting a day now, and we’re on track to break 500 mass shootings this year.
We’re all just shocked it happened at a Trump rally, caused by a Republican, and the shooter was missed by multiple layers of law enforcement & intelligence. Instead of clutching pearls and pretending the rhetoric on “both sides” needs to cool down, we need to stop pretending this is ok. No one at the Secret Service was fired for January 6th, which makes their failures over the weekend even more infuriating. A senior House Democrat said: “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.” Which, is throwing in the towel while the game is still being played, with one side actively cheating.
Meta lifted all restrictions on Trump’s accounts, across all of their platforms. Groypers, a Gen Z white nationalist group, is creating spoofed accounts, pretending to be Crooks online, so they can post antifa/leftist memes to trick people into thinking he was a leftist. What are Liberals Doing? The Democratic Party is showing its belly, killing attack ads, softening their criticism, and somehow assuming they were responsible for a Republican with a legally owned firearm, shooting at a Republican candidate for president, at a Republican rally in a Republican stronghold district. Why? What is gained hoping Lucy won’t pull the football out from under Charlie Brown again?
The Right has been playing dirty for my entire adult life, but they haven’t won the game. The ball is still in motion, we aren’t a fascist corporatocracy yet. Project 2025 is being dissected, Trump’s violent rhetoric isn’t appealing to all or even most Republicans (as Mr. Crooks sadly proves). We need to point out the corrosiveness of this rhetoric, not pretend that disappointing friends are the same as deadly enemies. Mr. Crooks is a kid who lived through mass shooter drills, and was voting. The chickens come home to roost on both sides of the political aisle, it just hasn’t been tragically obvious to centrist beltway insiders until this weekend.
Thanks for reading this! It’s depressing but I’m a man of my word. For making it this far, here’s that UK Sadboy remix of sirens by someone named William Crooks.
It’s not over yet,
tn