Assassination Book Club

I was at a book club at a pub in Cardiff, just after the Trump assassination attempt in July 2024. It wasn’t my book club, and I didn’t know I was taking part in it, but I accidentally got involved.

Johnny Vedmore

I hadn’t even read the book in question. I had taken a seat out the back of a local pub and was typing away as the table next to me began to fill with this group of youthful-looking readers ready to discuss a Salmond Rushdie book they’d been reading. I didn’t realise that was what they had planned, but I was soon drawn into the conversation they were having until I realised it was a book club, and I bowed out, only to return to typing.

They sat talking for an hour or so, discussing the ins and outs of what appeared to be a relatively stale read, and each of the book club members gave away a little of their true natures while commenting on the book. As I typed, I overheard the conversation they were having, and after the book club was over, the talk turned to politics.

I had gained an unfair advantage. By overhearing the book club meeting they were having, I was able to tell which side of the political spectrum these young upstarts were on. They were not aware of what I do, even though I had hinted that I worked somewhere within the political sphere, and that I was a commentator of sorts.

They began to discuss the events in America, along with the assassination attempt on Trump, and listening to them was fascinating. One of the girls--probably the most well-read of the group--said that she didn’t realise someone had died at the rally. It was around then that I piped up and explained that it was an off-duty firefighter who apparently shielded his children from the gunfire. The girl went on to say that if you took a look at the timeline of the guy who was shot on social media, you’d see that he was supporting violence. She said:

“Isn’t it ironic that he supported violence, and then he was at a violent rally, supporting a violent man, and then he got shot?”

What she was doing was excusing the ideological murder of those she considered to be the violent opposition. However, the main point that the group agreed on was that, if Trump were elected, he’d pull out of the Ukrainian conflict. They actually saw this as a negative consequence. Ending the violence, which would lead to World War III, made Trump the violent one, and all of the people at his rally were, in that weird and twisted sense, violent people, practising violence. Regardless, they were wrong, as I write this in October 2025, Trump has not pursued peace in Ukraine.

I was unable to understand the number of logical fallacies I’d have to embrace to believe that pursuing peace could be classified as violent intent. Nobody used any logic to prove their claims. Rather, it was a group of left-wingers in their early twenties, trying to work out between them a riddle as old as time. They were searching for a way to excuse the murder of an innocent person by unsanctioned assassination.

I’m not sure if any of the people involved realised how sick the conversation was. They were clearly hooked into the illusory modern political paradigm, painting the Democrats as heroes because they oppose Trump. It was an election year, and they all had a range of compliments for Biden and Harris, even though their electioneering by this point had been somewhere between embarrassing and dire. These veritable kids had taken the legacy media official narrative, and they turned it into lore. The side which was pushing and funding the war were the peaceful heroes, and the people being shot at a peaceful political rally were the violent ones. The clear moral inversion was undeniable.

I spoke to a few of them, I attempted to plant a seed here and there, but it was clear that these guys had drunk all the Kool-Aid. I didn’t try to instil any of them with a sense of objectivity. There was really no way these guys were going to wake up anytime soon. But it did serve another purpose. I got to see the introverted nature of the next generation. I got to see how they created a bizarre ethical framework and logical fallacies so their values would fit their murderous desires. I realised that the youth of today are as senseless as their counterparts were 50 years ago. We may believe that we’re more mentally evolved than our parents’ generation, but the same gap between us and reality exists now as it did then.

The most worrying aspect may have been that these were all university-educated medical students. All of them were working in the nearby hospital. They are the ones who look after your relatives, who care for the weak, who we trust implicitly to do the right thing when it counts the most.

Yet, some of them believed that violence was peace and peace was violence. That gave me pause for thought.

Source: Johnny Vedmore's Substack