THE JACKAL AND GENERAL WALKER.

In April, 1963, former general Edwin Walker, whose superiors requested his resignation after he briefed troops under his command with unauthorized materials from the John Birch Society, and who was subsequently charged with insurrection for organizing a protest against Air Force veteran James Meredith enrolling at, and desegregating by so doing, the University of Mississippi, was working on his taxes when somebody shot at him.  One legend has it that he shifted his focus at just the right time: the reality is more prosaic.  The guy who took a shot at him didn't see the window sash divider through his telescopic sight, and the general suffered only minor injuries as the cladding shattered on the latching mechanism and the slug was deflected enough to flatten in the wallboard.  Had the general closed the shades after dark, which is elementary personal security, whether against real or imagined enemies or Peeping Toms or prowling cat-burglars, or for the aesthetic reason that interior light reflected off exterior windows back into the house is distracting, the guy who took the shot might have moped off unfulfilled.  The post that follows will take a long and winding road back to General Walker's door, with lots of free associations and digressions.

First, although we did not have the expression, "stochastic terrorism," sixty years ago, the concept was present.

Stochastic terrorism is defined by conflict and law enforcement experts as the demonization of a foe so that he, she, or they might become targets of violence.

Scientific American recently put it this way:

Dehumanizing and vilifying a person or group of people can provoke what scholars and law enforcement officials call stochastic terrorism, in which ideologically driven hate speech increases the likelihood that people will violently and unpredictably attack the targets of vicious claims. At its core, stochastic terrorism exploits one of our strongest and most complicated emotions: disgust.

In addition to disgust, fear and hatred can work, the point being to depict a person or set of people as a loathsome other undeserving of respect of acceptance, and a dangerous threat. Establishing such a framework boosts the odds that a lone individual or group will violently assault the deprecated.

It should come as no surprise, dear reader, that a man prone to endorsing positions of Brother John Birch and opposing integration would be anathema to all sorts of political actors, from the World Council of Churches or the American Civil Liberties Union to the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party.  Readers my age have probably surmised where some of this post is going, but the Jackal connection will require development.

That excerpt defining "stochastic terrorism" came from a David Corn essay in Mother Jones, in which he suggests that Trumpy rhetoric can whip up those unpredictable loners.  Tony Katz, a conservative radio talker in Indiana, throws that right back.

You called for a lone wolf for years.

You said that democracy was threatened by Trump. You called Trump a fascist. You called his supporters “Nazis.” You screamed manically about “Christian Nationalist” takeovers.

And most recently, President Biden said to put Trump “in the…

— Tony Katz (@tonykatz) July 14, 2024

What the Jackal, the guy who took a shot at General Walker, and the guy who would have been charged with taking a shot at former President Trump have in common is preparation.  The fictional Jackal was motivated by money.  His meticulous preparations to determine the time and place to take the shot were undone by one detail.

The guy who took a shot at the general was motivated by ideology.  His meticulous preparations, including scouting the house for sniping locations and identifying places to hide the rifle he had purchased after determining that taking the general out with a pistol wouldn't work.  

We might never know what motivated the guy who would have been charged had the Secret Service not taken him down first.  We know that he, too, made preparations.

Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old would-be assassin who opened fire on former President Donald Trump's Pennsylvania campaign rally Saturday, hid the weapon in advance, according to a Secret Service source.

It was not immediately clear where he hid it, however. By the time agents spotted him on the roof, he was already holding it.

"We went from golf range finder to AR-15, and now we have to fill in the gap," the source told Fox News.

The conspiracy-mongers, predictably, are exploiting the interagency communication troubles to suggest all sorts of scary things.  "Authorities have spent much of the week pointing fingers about who was responsible for securing the AGR building, from where Crooks opened fire."  It's worth applying Hanlon's Razor, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."  That post elaborates, and The Federalist's Ben Weingarten expands on the ways the stupidity might have compounded.

Our leading institutions are so corrupted and incompetent that the purported experts who run them cannot or will not execute their most basic functions.

When it comes to the Secret Service, its singular duty is to protect the life and limb of the subjects to whom it is detailed. On July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, it failed that mission in a spectacular fashion.

Unfathomably, the critical organ of the most powerful and sophisticated security apparatus in the history of mankind allowed a would-be assassin, whom we are told had little tactical capability and was operating alone, to assume an unobstructed and otherwise insecure position a stone’s throw from the former president and fire at him, piercing his ear with a bullet.

Well in advance of the tragic incident, the shooter’s parents called law enforcement fearful he was missing. One wonders why they were distressed over the grown man’s whereabouts. Around three hours before the shooting, reports suggest that authorities identified that the shooter possessed a rangefinder. An hour before the shooting, the Secret Service began tracking the shooter as a “person of interest.”

Counter-snipers at one point saw the shooter scanning for them to identify their position, with the Secret Service briefing lawmakers that the shooter was spotted with a rangefinder 40 minutes before the shooting. Twenty minutes before the assassination attempt and 10 minutes before Trump took the stage, Secret Service saw the shooter on the roof of the building from where he would fire. This was a building authorities reportedly occupied but did not secure.

Despite the threat, Donald Trump was permitted to go on stage. And immediately before the shooting, screaming civilians observed the shooter to be crawling into firing position on that roof.

That post gets even deeper into the conspiratorial weeds.

The questions Americans must ask are whether logically so many different failures could have culminated in the near assassination of Donald Trump and what weight we might give to circumstantial evidence suggesting something more sinister transpired.

Among that circumstantial evidence is that the loner shooter — a registered Republican, yet a small donor to leftists — who sought to kill Trump two days before the RNC, profiles as an archetypal patsy. Authorities claim they cannot find a motive for his shooting. The Gen Zer somehow lacks any digital footprint, but what has been leaked to the media indicates he had searched for Republican and Democrat-related content.

So, are we to believe he was an equal-opportunity assassin? And authorities presumed he acted alone even before having examined his devices and conducted relevant interviews. This seems odd.

From among the motivations for committing treason, I would lean toward ego, but only for lack of better evidence either for those encoded bank accounts (I doubt that any serious intelligence officer would hire that guy) or for any institutional affiliations suggesting conscience or ideology.

And then Mr Weingarten closes the circle by invoking the patsy.  If you have stayed with me this long, yes, it was Lee Oswald who took that shot at General Walker.  He left a manifesto and instructions to his wife should he have been arrested.  He located hides for the rifle both before and after the shooting, even carrying it on the bus, this being common in Dallas in those days, and apparently had some fun with the news accounts seeking a "getaway car."  And later he posed as the hunter of fascists.

Social media now makes it possible for a contemporary youngster, lacking socialization, to share his imagination more broadly.  It used to be more difficult to attract attention.

"Hunter of Fascists"

Marina Oswald photographs retrieved from John McAdams's Lee Oswald page.

Had there been social media in the day, these photographs might have come to light online as part of the police investigation of a shot fired into General Edwin Walker's house, rather than being discovered in November 1963, which was when the bullet recovered from that house proved to match the rifle you see in the pictures.

There's nothing new about a sufficiently motivated malcontent, one who is hardly a professional killer, being able to avoid the scrutiny of law enforcement and evade security at a home or at a public event.

The Oswald material is in Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History, with the general's forced retirement beginning at page 649 and the aftermath of the shooting at page 691.

We'll close this post noting the loss of former Butler County fire chief Corey Comperatore.

Corey Comperatore’s quick decision to use his body as a shield against the bullets flying toward his wife and daughter rang true to the close friends and neighbors who loved and respected the proud 50-year-old Trump supporter, noting that the Butler County resident was a “man of conviction.”

“He’s a literal hero. He shoved his family out of the way, and he got killed for them,” said Mike Morehouse, who lived next to Comperatore for the last eight years. “He’s a hero that I was happy to have as a neighbor.”

So it often is with our first responders.  R.I.P.