By Doug Casey
July 25, 2024
International Man: On July 13, there was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
What's your take on what really happened?
Doug Casey: The official narrative is still crystallizing, as all the government employees and bureaucrats who were supposedly responsible for Trump's safety scurry about to ensure their careers aren't adversely affected. Now that Kim Cheatle, the security hen in charge of the Secret Service, has resigned to collect her fat pension as a public mea culpa, the Secret Service and FBI will conduct internal investigations. A few people may be reprimanded and placed on administrative paid leave for a couple of weeks. A question will be asked as to whether it was a lone nut or part of a broader conspiracy. The odds are 99 out of 100 they'll conclude the former, whether or not it's true. They definitely won't dare find there was any conspiracy within the Secret Service to take Trump out...
The only thing that I'm really sure of is that the Secret Service was ultra-incompetent in scores of separate and egregious ways. The Biden administration's DEI policies fatally compromised SS effectiveness, starting with a diversity hire as director and using two short fat chicks as frontline security for Trump. If you have bodyguards, especially for a big, tall man like Trump, you want big, tall, muscular guys.
Many more things will come out showing how poorly managed the Secret Service has become. For instance, I understand physical qualifications used to include the ability to run a mile and a half in under 12 minutes. That's been dropped to 20 minutes. To me, it seems certain that top Secret Service guys are going to leave. Serious professionals will find it too demoralizing to stick around as standards degrade and the ranks are filled with Wokesters.
I suspect this has already happened with the FBI. The corruption set in long ago with the CIA. And in different ways, with all of the 15 armed Praetorian agencies. I don't take any news or analysis they put forth at face value. This is a time for critical thinking, which, as we recently discussed, is the process of questioning the validity of everything and pursuing the answers that are given until you've arrived at a reasonable conclusion. Regrettably, most Americans accept whatever the government tells them as fact.
The other thing that's certain is that the blue and the red people really don't like each other and can't communicate. The Progressive blue people actively hate the red MAGA people. The red people have a much longer, slower fuse. But an event like this can solidify their feelings and they could wind up hating the blue people as much as the blue people already hate them.
My bottom line on the assassination attempt? There was definitely government and Deep State involvement. We're just lucky that they're incompetent.
International Man: If Trump had been killed, what do you think would have happened next?
Doug Casey: I'd say that the 30 to 40% of the country who are MAGAs would've gone wild. It's a semi-religious movement at this point, and they won't take losing their savior lying down.
If he'd been killed, it would've immanentized the Eschaton. Generally speaking, the public killing of a semi-religious figure is big trouble. You saw that with the riots that followed the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, even more so with the death of George Floyd in 2020. In an unstable country, even a worthless common criminal can be apotheosized and set off riots.
When things like this happen in stable times, the public can overlook them and go back to their lives. But when the tinder is dry like it is now, almost anything can set off a conflagration. And that's what I expect we're going to see.
In fact, if I put on my conspiracy theorist hat, I might say that there could be other assassination attempts on Trump and/or JD Vance. Or even Kamala. Getting rid of a highly undesirable candidate would solve all kinds of problems for the Democrats, and give them a much-needed hero while fabricating a perfect excuse to lock the country down as well as "solve" the gun problem. A narrative would be built about how everybody's life is at risk.
I've said before that the Democrat Party is controlled and largely populated by people with the philosophy and psychology of French Jacobins. They really want to overturn the basis of society, and some of them will see a series of assassinations just before an election as a good way to do it.
International Man: You wrote a fiction book, Assassin, which explores political assassinations.
What did you learn writing that book, and how does it relate to what is happening today?
Doug Casey: John Hunt and I looked at, among many other things, a unique way to organize a resistance movement in modern-day America. Is it even possible to overturn the country's entrenched rulers since "democracy" and elections are a sham? What is the morality of shooting candidates? Apart from that, is it even practical?
Guns are basically a 15th-Century technology. You might think any technology that ancient wouldn't be something to fear in today's high-tech world. It's reminiscent of Biden's comment a few years ago about how you need F-15s if you want to overthrow the US government, which, like much of what he says, makes no sense.
You might think that if people want to replace a repressive regime, they could form militias, the way the colonists did in 1776. But a repressive State will just center its force on any pockets of resistance. No matter how well-armed the individual citizens might be, they can't stand up to an organized army. The odds are always against the rebels.
But on the other hand, guns are quite useful for excising selected bad individuals. Anyway, that's one of the themes of Assassin. Political assassination has a long history in the US, and that's likely to remain true in future US elections.
International Man: The US election is approaching, but there's still plenty of time for surprises that could sway the election.
Do you have any predictions?
Doug Casey: It now looks like the Republicans will win, for lots of reasons. But the Republicans are known as the stupid party for good reason. Notwithstanding election rhetoric, they're completely without fixed principles. Their operating principles are "do what the Democrats would do, but slower and not as thoroughly". They love to moralize but don't have a moral center, which actually makes them quite despicable. Everybody hates a hypocrite.
The Democrats, on the other hand, do have principles-but they're all rotten.
Trump has my sympathy among the candidates because, although he has no moral or philosophical center, at least he's a cultural conservative. Unlike the Democrats, he doesn't want to overturn the nature of society. But since the Republicans are so dimwitted, even though Trump is riding a huge wave of sympathy for what happened and the admirable way he recovered from the incident, it's entirely possible they'll find some way to blow the election.
Meanwhile, the Democrats, the Jacobins, are desperate to retain control of the apparatus of the State and could find any number of ways to subvert the election. They'll use the millions of migrants. They'll make massive use of mail-in ballots. They'll take full advantage of the electronic voting machines. They undoubtedly have lots of dirty tricks and surprises planned we can't imagine. They'll use the full force of the leftist media, academic, and entertainment complexes to propagandize. And don't forget, the average American is now a leftist. They elected and re-elected Obama, among other things.
They could, God forbid, win. As Yogi Berra said, it ain't over till it's over.
International Man: How do you recommend people prepare for the coming chaos?
Doug Casey: The coming chaos will be something very much like a civil war, which is defined as a conflict where two opposing sides attempt to gain control of the same government. Using that definition, the conflict of 1861 to 1865 was not a civil war. It was simply a secession movement.
I think that Ray Dalio, the multi-billionaire, may have put his finger on the way this is going to evolve. Dalio has recently published lots of articles and a book discussing how things are likely to evolve. He's a rather dry writer, but let me summarize.
He sees countries generally going through six stages, the last one characterized by war, civil war, revolution, or the like. He feels we're at the very end of stage five and right at the cusp of stage six. I generally concur with his outlook-but lots of people today have a gloomy view on the shape of things to come; that's nothing new. What's important here is that Dalio speaks as someone who's worth $15 billion and is totally immersed in the current system at the Master of the Universe level.
What's likely to be the catalyst that sets things off? He (correctly, IMO) puts his finger on the bankruptcy of the government, presumably accompanied by the collapse of the debt-based banking system and hyperinflation of the dollar.
What does he suggest we do, now that we're looking at something like a civil war, with all the trimmings?
Dalio says you have three options. One: pick your side and fight. Two: keep your head down and hide. Three: flee. Everybody has to determine which alternative is best for them.
Trying to hide, especially in today's world, is not very effective. Your neighbors will ask, to paraphrase that infamous quote from Baby Bush some years ago, "Are you with us or against us?" Don't be sure that if you choose sides, you'll necessarily be with the "good guys."
You might consider following in the footsteps of Rhett Butler in "Gone with the Wind". Enough said.
Reprinted with permission from International Man.