Should Morons Rooting For Trump’s Assassination Be Punished Or Canceled?
I’ve spent the morning wrestling with this interesting little conundrum current events have necessitated. Namely, there is the matter of Darcy Waldron Pinckney, a cashier at Home Depot in Auburn, Alabama (or is it Auburn, Maine? I don’t know and I’m not sure it’s important) who thought it was a good idea to post on Facebook that it’s “To bad they weren’t a better shooter!!” about Donald Trump’s wannabe assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks.
So as you can see, after Libs of TikTok spread Pinckney’s atrocious Facebook post on X, someone went to the Home Depot where she works, spotted her at a checkout counter and verbally blew her up on video.
That went pretty viral. Meanwhile, Libs of TikTok hit up Home Depot about what Pinckney had said, and this happened…
So now there is consternation on the Right about whether it’s a good thing to destroy the lives of the cretins who openly expressed support for Trump’s assassination.
And there are two schools of thought going on this. Here’s one from syndicated columnist David Harsanyi…
And the other side is our buddy, Townhall.com columnist and author Kurt Schlichter…
Before I weigh in on this, let me take a diversion so you can understand why I’m coming to the conclusion I do.
Because the more which comes out about what happened Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, the more obvious it is that something badly, badly wrong is afoot.
The two questions I’ve been asking from the point when the circumstances of the attempted assassination which took the life of a fine man named Corey Comperatore and missed taking Donald Trump’s life by an inch or two are these:
1. How did that kid get on that roof less than 150 yards away with a clear line of sight from where Trump was speaking?
2. How did Crooks know that such a prime location from which to snipe at the former president would be available? After all, any reasonably intelligent would-be assassin had to have figured the American Glass Research building would be occupied by law enforcement or other security personnel and therefore it would have been suicide to try to access it with a long rifle.
But now I have other questions. Like for example, it sounds a bit like Crooks was firing with a suppressed rifle. He was shooting an AR-15 or something like it, and those generally make a lot of noise. One reason you buy an AR-15 for home protection is just that; it’s scary-looking and it’s noisy, so if you have to use it you might not actually need to hit your target to scare them away. Was he shooting suppressed? If so, how did he get a suppressor? Those are difficult to get.
Supposedly Crooks’ father was the owner of the weapon. Perhaps Old Man Crooks had a suppressor. That should be easy enough to ascertain based on whether he had an ATF stamp for one.
But if not, a 20-year-old kid isn’t likely to be able to get a suppressor on his own. So how did he get one?
As I’m saying, these are questions. Perhaps there are satisfactory answers out there. We’ve heard nothing of the sort so far; in fact, everything coming out about this case looks worse and worse.
And it goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway, that had Trump’s head been turned a different way, he would be dead right now and America would be facing something almost unthinkable.
In this environment, an assassinated Donald Trump would almost certainly have led to civil unrest and perhaps even the fall of our constitutional system.
And I have my suspicions that none of it would be accidental.
Four years ago, I wrote a column at The American Spectator discussing an old video featuring Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB defector and an expert on information warfare. Bezmenov outlined the communist strategy for taking down a free nation, and it had four stages.
Those were demoralization, destabilization, crisis and normalization.
The first two stages are clearly underway. Bezmenov said the process of demoralization would be accomplished by corrupting the educational and cultural institutions of a nation, infiltrating them with Marxist revolutionaries who would replace the founding ideals of the country with a radical mindset – and in doing so raise generations of children who lack an understanding of the three pillars of a Western free society, which are Christianity, nationalism or patriotism, and charity or community.
Those were the three things cultural Marxist thought leader Antonio Gramsci identified as the obstacles to generating the proletarian revolution the communists all thought would come when World War I broke out. Gramsci said you couldn’t create a communist England or France or Germany because those cultures were too strong, and he posited that it would take a “march through the institutions” to get there. The Frankfurt School picked up on Gramsci’s work, built it out into things like critical theory, intersectionalism, radical feminism, transgenderism, repressive tolerance (which you know as cancel culture) and the rest of the post-modern horrors infecting our society and culture.
So we’ve been demoralized, and the four years of Joe Biden’s presidency have seen us destabilized.
Inflation has blown up to the point where the average American is dead broke and in increasing debt. Buying a house is far beyond the financial capabilities of the average Joe in America, and even used cars are so expensive that people are just fixing their current old beater the best they can. The average vehicle on America’s roads right now is something like 13 years old, an all-time high. We’re on the verge of losing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, which will be an abject disaster for our economy. We’re $37 trillion in debt, which is a nation-killing number. It’s a matter of time before we lose a war; the war in Ukraine is all but lost unless we attempt to intervene with troops on the ground, and that could very well result in losing a lot larger war than is already going, and if and when China moves on Taiwan we will either allow it without a fight or we will lose that fight to a larger and more muscular naval power.
America is not a stable power in any interpretation of the world. Everybody is waiting for the crisis to come.
And had that bullet been an inch or two to the right, we would have such a crisis. We would almost certainly be in full-scale civil unrest as Donald Trump’s supporters would have seen his assassination as a coup d’etat. Violent reprisals would have been inevitable.
You know this to be true. Everybody does. That’s the reason almost none of the talking heads on TV will even dare to mention the potential consequences of a Trump assassination.
But as Bezmenov noted, what comes after the crisis stage is normalization. Someone has to take control when the crisis comes, and that someone is, in his formulation, the new Marxist overlord.
Who’s been preparing this all along.
So you have your assassinated presidential candidate, who is leading the decrepit and non compos mentis Joe Biden whom the Democrats are desperate to get rid of in all the polls, and following that assassination you have civil unrest like we haven’t seen in this country in a long time. Worse even than the George Floyd riots, because at this point you have traditional Americans participating rather than huddling in the suburbs as the Left burns down the cities they control.
Oh, and do we know who’s been coming into the country over the last three-plus years? How many military-age men from all over the world, with no vetting at all? And what would they be capable of amid widespread civil unrest following Trump’s assassination?
And what happens then? Well, you got a taste of that following what happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They’ve been rounding up people ever since. Legitimate civil unrest that Trump voters are participating in, complete with some potshots being taken at Democrat officials (by who knows who), and not just at the Capitol but all over the country?
You know in circumstances like that you get the crackdown. You get some sort of martial law. And you get the end of America as we know it.
I’ve written five novels. What I know is that you get a climax, especially in a story of large scope, when you have several subplots which you tie together. That bullet very nearly tied up a lot of subplots in our national story in a very horrific way.
So those are the stakes. That brings me to the Darcy Waldron Pinckneys of the world.
Essentially, this woman – and a lot of other idiots like her – was cheering on our national apocalypse. Everything I just described above, she was advocating in public when she posted that stupid mini-rant on social media.
And she isn’t alone.
Now, did this moronic woman think all of that through before she went there? Of course not. And that’s why Harsanyi is advocating mercy.
Pinckney got fired at Home Depot for a pretty simple reason, which is that Home Depot is a conservative company founded by a bunch of guys who are mostly Republicans, and Home Depot caters to a clientele mostly made up of suburban Republican homeowners. Home Depot has no desire to be, and cannot be, the store where all the employees want to see Trump assassinated.
So it’s zero surprise they terminated Darcy Pinckney with extreme prejudice. She’s horrid for business, and if people are going to show up at that store and video themselves berating her that’s a catastrophe for the ages for Home Depot. Of course she had to go.
But is it wrong for Libs of TikTok and the other conservative social media folks to out these people and target them for personal destruction?
I don’t like it. It’s nasty. It’s right that conservatives want to be better than that.
But I’ll allow it anyway, and here’s why.
Raise a kid, train a dog, whatever, the one baseline mode of behavior modification is fear of negative feedback. You want to explain to your charge what their behavior needs to be and get buy-in through intellectual persuasion. Or even bribe them into compliance. But if the “carrot” methods don’t work, you can’t just give up and accept the bad behavior. So punishment is your last resort.
And the Left, from Biden all the way down to the Darcy Pinckneys of the world, has become worse and worse behaved as a result of a distinct lack of consequences to their actions over the past, say, decade and a half. They popularized cancel culture in the first place and weaponized it on traditional Americans. They’ve destroyed our civil compact with atrocious behavior. Go and eat at a restaurant and find yourself accosted by climate nuts or Black Lives Matter protesters. Go to an art museum and see the paintings defaced by anti-oil imbeciles. Try to drive on the roads and Antifa wackos are purposefully blocking traffic. No public landmark is safe, no conservative speaker can give a talk on a college campus.
Again and again we see the breakdown. Again and again, we wonder when anybody will suffer the consequences for this behavior.
And now they’re cheering for, as I’ve outlined, a civil war and the end of the American experiment. That’s how far this has gone.
It has to stop. If nasty methods must be used to make it stop, then so be it.
So yes. Put this woman out of a job. Hopefully she can find another one. Maybe Target is hiring; they seem pretty lefty-friendly. And maybe she’ll learn the valuable lesson she should have been taught at home or at school growing up.
Either way there must be consequences. We have to be yanked from the brink at this point, or else we’ll find out what’s on the other side of the brink.
And I can assure you that’s much, much worse than some cashiers at Home Depot or teachers at public schools, or bass players in Jack Black’s band, getting canceled.
