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So best I can tell security at the recent dinner was somehow even worse than at the campaign event that nearly cost Trump his life. This sounds incredibly stupid but mainstream media reports of the security indicate it is so. And this is in a...storied location no less.
This is also not a situation where things have been calm for a while, we are at war and several attempts have been made, and people have died (ex: Kirk).
Some of this is probably due to security theater elements - security was never good, so it remains not good. You'd think we could make a bit of a change though?
Are all of our institutions really so rotten?
And perhaps more importantly - how many times can we get lucky and how will our civic norms survive when that luck runs out?
I think it’s more than security is hard. The President interfaces with a lot of people at a lot of events at a lot of locations. He and others have extensive staff and support. These events all have many service industry workers.
As you is increase security the inconvenience eventually becomes unacceptable. This is one of the many reasons that not murdering the president or calling for his murder is an important norm.
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Another thought: if the Secret Service failed, it was a failure of the Trump administration. The Secret Service is very much under control of the executive. If Trump wanted to be guarded exclusively by members of MAGA militias, he could certainly arrange for them to be hired. He made much bigger personnel changes happen in the USG, in fact.
I concede that this mostly rebuts the "they are incompetent" claim. If your claim is that they are highly and visibly competent, but also conspiring to get the president they are sworn to protect killed on their watch, it would not be reasonable to blame the administration for their failure to anticipate this treason.
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Yes, you are technically at war, and yes, Kirk was killed, but the way you phrase it implies that these things are connected. Kirk was a victim of violence inspired by the culture war, but the culture war has not killed very many people for all the mind space it claims.
And yes, you are fighting a war against Iran, and Iran would probably jump at the chance to assassinate a US president, but this seems to be a problem of your own making.
You can still rely on the US military. They are world class at killing elderly theocratic leaders, kidnapping foreign rulers, fighting naval battles against suspected drug smugglers, and neutralizing girl schools.
Seriously, in the grand scheme of things, the Secret Service is pretty far down on the list of relevant government institutions. Even if they failed to stop a president getting killed once per dozen years, this would not result in a lack of qualified people willing to do the job.
More broadly, Trump is synonymous with dismantling or perverting institutions or replacing them with his own cheap temu knockoffs:
So in conclusion, Trump is the one who you would vote for if you found that US institutions are beyond saving (probably because they are woke) and should be dismantled. Sadly, his replacements are what you would expect from some banana republic. For all of Harvard's many faults, Trump University is not an adequate substitute. The Peace Nobel has not been without troubles, but does anyone seriously expect that the FIFA peace price will earn a similar prestige? Likewise the Security Council -- mostly a club of big countries with nukes who will only vote for resolutions which do not touch the interests of any of their client states, but who on occasion have aided in conflict resolution. Trump's pay-to-play Board of Peace will die with him.
Quite frankly, the only reason why I do not want Trump to replace the Secret Service with the TRUMP ELITE PRAETORIAN PRESIDENTIAL GUARD is because it would enable them to further his cause by getting shot by some dumb liberal, which would be his most effective move now. But I cling to some faint hope that he decides to take health advice from RFK Jr and croaks of measles or brain worms or whatever retro diseases are en vogue among anti-vaxxers.
But tell us how you really feel.
It's funny, I actually agree with you on a handful of these things and I voted for the guy.
But your aesthetic revulsion to Trumpism (kid rock, "macho" military, RFK Jr=Gargamel, "disrespecting our allies") marks you as a class enemy. The way you talk about those things just drips with disdain, you sound like you think half of our country should probably be disenfranchised.
Your indignation that our hallowed and immaculate institutions are being profaned (Harvard, SCOTUS, NATO, UN security council, justice system) is also rich. I'm sure you'd be glad if we went back to 2010, when Harvard was unassailable, our activist judicial system was too sacrosanct to criticize, and NATO was supported by the right as an expression of America's military might. Back when the rubes didn't even know what was being done to them. Things were easier then, eh?
Your attitude is a large part of why Trump is able to retain power despite being an arrogant, distateful, reactive bully with no strategy. I would rather have what we have now than go back to 2010 because I don't want people like you, people who have contempt for me and who gaslight me when I point out the ideological project that pervades our institutions (see Neutral vs Conservative), to have power over me anymore.
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There's a reason that Congress keeps passing bills like the Patriot Act. Identifying bad actors using mass surveillance is so much more effective than physical security, which can almost always be bypassed with sufficient effort. The effort involved in studying that security is generally enough of a signature to get you caught. And then you don't have the danger and chaos of an actual confrontation, you just quietly roll up the perpetrators the day before.
The reason this guy got close is apparently because he didn't do any planning, just walked in with some weapons. That's also the reason his attempt failed. But if he had done prep work, i.e. scoping out the location, he would almost certainly have been identified.
That's my take at least, I'm not an expert on the topic.
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This guy was a caltech grad and he couldn't come up with a better plan than "run past a security checkpoint and hope there aren't more guards"? He didn't even get onto the floor of the ballroom itself. What happened to good old fashioned ANFO?
Thankfully the people interested in doing this kind of stuff are generally idiots but that doesn't save us from sufficiently motivated state actors should that become relevant.
I've clocked at least one smart person engaged in domestic terrorism in the U.S. in an intelligent way, and I suspect there are more they just don't get noticed, caught, or publicly emphasized. I'm sure the TLAs are aware, however.
After 9/11 airport security was significantly tightened, train security was not. 13 year old me was utterly confused why we weren't facing dozens of train derailments a day because it seemed so easy, destructive, and effective.
Turned out the terrorists aren't interested in those things, they just want flashy. Trains arent flashy so apparently they are safe. Old: Security through obscurity. New: Security through boring.
Used to happen in British Palestine (Israel) I believe. The Stern Gang loved that sort of thing.
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You wot mate?
No, there just aren't that many competent people who want to commit terrorism against the US or other western nations. You could do a straight rerun of 9/11 even today, if you got together a bunch of reasonably competent people.
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Timothy McVeigh happened. The feds have been tracking fertilizer purchases nationwide since the Oklahoma City bombings for suspicious purchases, and I believe there are also trace amounts of other chemicals added to the fertilizers now so they can more easily track it to the source of purchase etc.
The New Orleans shooter managed to cook up some homemade RDX, though he forgot that it requires a detonator. Bizarre display of semicompetence from an Army vet.
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I am approximately a security denier. I think almost all security is pretty much just theater when it comes to ability to preempt planned attacks. I was at the Boston Marathon last week and the security around it is so obviously just exactly and specifically targeted at the horrible bombing that happened; perhaps that exact, specific thing would be prevented with the new security, but it would obviously do almost nothing to prevent the other angles of attack that a determined individual would present. The obsession with clear bags and a finish-line adjacent perimeter is very silly when considering the whole host of threats that could exist. Really, all you can do for any of these things is have some armed and trained guys hanging around to handle observed threats in the moment, to react to what they're seeing in front of them. Everything else is just hardening against previously observed attacks to make people feel like they're safe now.
The good news is that this actually most works anyway because there just aren't very many determined attackers. The bad news is that it sometimes fails because there isn't a great way to stop the President from getting shot or a big public event from turning into a mass casualty event. How do our civic norms survive? If things go well, the same way they always have, which is to say that about one out of ten Presidents is assassinated and another chunk get shot, and things just keep ticking.
The thing is assassination almost never accomplishes anything, because the problems people care about are systemic and not caused by any one person. Part of the reason the supervillain archetype is such a prominent theme in fiction is because it gives you a world where you just need to kill the bad guy and everything magically gets fixed.
Here in the real world, you shoot the UHC CEO and nothing changes, because it turns out UHC CEO is a role, not a person.
The UHC CEO is a role, but Donald Trump is not. Most presidents probably aren't, and Donald Trump definitely isn't.
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I think that if Trump had been assassinated in Butler it would have been "successful" insofar as it would have influenced the upcoming election. the GOP convention was scheduled to begin the following week, and while it probably would have gone forward as an opportunity to eulogize Trump, it wouldn't have actually selected a nominee. While there was some controversy over Biden's passing the baton to Harris, it was nothing compared to the all-out war that would have happened in the Republican Party if their nominee had been killed on the eve of the convention. J.D. Vance, Nikki Haley, and Ron DeSantis all had claims to the nomination that were equal parts credible and ludicrous. Haley had won the second most primary votes, but those all came from people specifically voting against Trump. DeSantis probably would have been the nominee if Trump hadn't run, but he got even fewer votes in the primary than Haley, had a frosty relationship with Trump, and there's no way of proving what would have happened besides taking the word of Ron and other people who want him to be the nominee. J.D. Vance was the named heir apparent, but that wasn't public at the time, and anyone claiming that he was Trump's pick would just be accused of being self-serving, similar to people fighting over a will based on "what dad really wanted". And that leaves out opportunists who would throw their hat into the ring as "compromise candidates", and people who would throw their hat into the ring as full on Trump stans who would claim that none of the candidates represent the true MAGA spirit.
I guess, but I think the aesthetic difference is disproportionate to how this would have played out in practice.
In terms of policy, how is Trump any different than Bush 2.0, proceeding along the expected trajectory? You get more wars, a bunch of hot air about immigration but nothing actually happens, a bunch of pork, and... this is exactly what you'd get no matter which Republican won. The only difference with Trump is you get this chaotic, hog-in-the-China-shop, WWE Smackdown aesthetic, rather than the typical Bain Capital, business-suit psychopath aesthetic. But the policy is the same.
"If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it." -Mark Twain
Bush didn't go out of his way to alienate every other US ally than Israel. That's a pretty major policy difference.
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Ask USAID. Ask the Ayatollah Khameni (either one). Immigration changes actually did happen. So did tariffs. So did a rooting out of DEI in government; it wasn't complete but it happened.
Heritage Foundation, not Trump. Any Republican would have done this.
That would be more wars in the Middle East for the donors, which Trump explicitly ran against. At least the typical Republican would have done the Captain America PR campaign correctly and made the war popular for 1-2 years instead of making it unpopular from the outset (Pew shows 44% strongly disapprove vs only 18% strongly approve, and the economic consequences haven't even hit yet)
Ruled unconstitutional (by 2 of his own 3 justices lol). Lutnick made bank off of the confusion, though. Hard to imagine that wasn't the plan.
No, not a chance.
He just did them another way.
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It's a similar thing that happens with the war on drugs over time. You can lock up or kill a few drug traffickers and lower supply, but demand stays the same so the price increases and pulls in more drug traffickers looking for bigger payouts. You can interrupt this process over and over and over again, but you will never win as long as people want drugs. Now interrupting can be a way to get some demand lower. Forcing people off their addictions will lead to at least a few kicking their habits and driving it underground can help prevent addictions from starting.
It's not useless and there's a reason why drug legalization doesn't solve the issue either, and if anything makes it worse. But that's important, either. The war on drugs method also fails, just not as extreme because ultimately the only thing that will truly stop drugs is for people to not want drugs.
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I feel like a marathon is generally the most impractical thing to protect possible. '40KM stretch of open road that's otherwise open to the public the rest of the year and has a plethora of reasons for randoms to be clustering around doing random things'
Yep. As tragic as the events of 2013 were, I think the correct security reaction would have basically been, "yeah, well, what are ya gonna do". Among major marathons, Boston also has the additional complications of starting in a small, rural town with narrow roadways that bunch everything up further. You can take the symbolic action of being fastidious about finish line security, but Patriots' Day is just not really amenable to creating a genuinely secure event.
What really annoys me is that every other race decided that these are just actually good security protocols in general, so you can't drop your backpack at the finish line without it being treated as a security hazard. Guys, no one is trying to attack our 5K fun run and if they were this bag drop rule would not move the needle. But once something is standard practice, you're done for.
And to make matters worse, since the runners end up quite spread out, it’s not like you can just move security with the leaders. You need to secure miles of area at once.
We really are lucky that “mass murder” isn’t on more people’s bucket list, and should do what we can to keep it that.
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I think Israel is an interesting example. They have had a constant stream of terrorism and attackers for a while now. The systems that can be hardened to prevent attackers have been hardened, but holes remain. It does seem like specific targets and locations can be secured. But that the general public and general public areas cannot be protected (or at least not at a tolerable cost of money and hassle).
The hardest thing about good security is just maintaining the defensive mindset, because good security is often a hassle to those it is meant to protect.
Israel's response to Palestinian terrorism was mostly to harden the outer perimeter by ending the use of Palestinian day-labour.
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I'd agree that a decent chunk of security is theater, but probably not all of it. That theater (at least potentially) can make its watchers take better precautions: air travel is, in part, safer not due to "air marshalls" (have we been paying them to just, like, fly around for decades now?) but because passengers know that active resistance to hijackings is the right behavior. Having to take off your shoes (they ended that, finally) is at least partly a reminder of that.
The theater also allows for fairly straightforward laundering of parallel construction, although most of the issues seem to be lone wolves and I haven't heard as many accounts of foiled plots as I might expect.
None of this is to imply that these measures are efficient in doing so (not the biggest fan of the TSA or anything), but I do think it'd be remiss to ignore the theater aspect of security theater as theater, not as direct security.
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Any motivated and competent attacker can find holes, heck even just little children can spot them often like how a would be plane bomber could just blow up the TSA lines instead. But almost all crime is either a way to make money somehow, or personal issues. Even school shootings have that element, you pretty much always see that the perp went to that school they shot up. They're not selecting schools at random or because of some idealogy, they're holding a violent grudge against their life.
People who kill outside of those two reasons are rare, and also typically incompetent in some meaningful way. Selection effect, you gotta have your brain broken in some way after all to think killing a person, even someone like Trump, is going to solve your problems.
Even the "smarter" would be assassins are morons, like Luigi or Tyler Robinson who get caught because of video and pictures of them. Guess what would have let them get off free then? A decent disguise! You don't even have to dress up too complex, just a little bit of shapewear to alter how your body looks, a wig and like idk a fake scar with a darker foundation for changing skin tone slightly. Color contacts, imagine in court when your lawyer is arguing that you literally have a different eye color than the perp on camera. Women draw on eyebrows so maybe you can even have different looking facial hair if it's that good. Put on a face mask, especially a few years ago but still I see people like that from time to time and think nothing of them I just assume they're a little sick. All you need is for your friends and family to not immediately recognize you when pictures get released, and plausible deniability that it is you in courts. You might be able to force the cops to drop the case just because they can't make parallel construction work without revealing all the illegal methods you can't plan for as well. The feds have dropped charges against terrorists before for that reason. Make it hard to match up video to reality. But they're all stupid and barely even try.
They're incompetent, so dumb that most get stopped before they even make an attempt because their stupid plans get discovered by them bragging to their friends about it or posting online, or in one case literally live streaming himself as he scoped out Obama's home.
Its amazing and frightening how long serial criminals can get away with crimes by:
On the tamer side, graffiti artists can literally sign their names while defacing property and expect to get away with it.
AIUI graffiti artists are mostly doing graffiti in places where it is intentionally tolerated, and tend to get arrested quite fast if they do this stuff in nice exurbs.
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Absolutely. The same person who has the competency, drive, and intelligence to think through new angles of attack and succeed are also successful at finding better uses for their life.
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I have seen the conspiracy theory on leftwing subreddits that this was staged to bolster Trump's popularity. If looked at through the lens of it being performative, lax security kind of makes sense. They needed the "assassin" to get close enough that it felt dangerous to viewers.
It is also an argument for the ballroom. If private venues cannot be trusted with security, then you naturally have to make your own. Only for the sake of safety for your guests of course.
More seriously, the fact that the perpetrator was stopped arguably shows that security measures were perfectly adequate.
There's a "steelman"/less implausible version of the theory that keeps being invoked around terrorism events/public security incidents, which suggests that law enforcement knew in advance and made a deliberate choice to not apprehend/stop the attacker(s) as early as they could. This could serve to reap the PR boons from being targeted (greater support for authoritarian measures and some forms of collective reprisals against groups the attacker is associated with) while ideally still limiting the actual effects of the attack by stopping the attacker in the nick of time. Here, the theories seem to rest on some remark to the effect of "let's wait and see what happens" that Trump supposedly made when first being notified about the presence of a shooter.
Political brainrot notwithstanding, I've never been so convinced that the general pattern being suggested is altogether so implausible that it can't possibly have been true for any of the cases where it's commonly cited (1970s Italy's strategy of tension? 9/11? Oct 7th?). If it works out, the benefits to the goverment targeted are clearly great. One of the main objections is the potential costs if the whole scheme is revealed, but between the Snowden revelations and the realities of the tribalised information space I think the entire "shady conspiracies can't actually exist because someone would just leak it" argument complex is pretty discredited. Of course, there's another objection in that sometimes the "stop the attacker in the nick of time" plan would fail and/or the attack itself is more impactful than the conspirators bargained for. This one is harder to get a grasp of, because it would require an accurate model of how reckless or conversely loss-averse conspiratorial authorities can be, but to build that model we would need to ascertain the truth of alleged past situations which we can't because of our tribalised information space.
Another angle is that it simply makes prosecution and conviction much easier. If you arrest a guy with a shotgun on his way to DC, you'll have a hard time proving he was going there to shoot the president. If you let him post his manifesto and rush into the venue, brandishing the same shotgun and screaming, "Die, Trump, die", it's an open-and-shut case.
It's an open-and-shut case, until a DC jury pool declines to convict, but we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.
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In a certain trivial way you're obviously right, but I increasingly fear that the primary reason it works that way is that this has more to do with the low quality of people trying, as opposed to saying anything about the security.
Very much agreed. When was the last time someone sane enough to have comprehensible political motives that make sense tried to assassinate a US President? I think it was the turn-of-the-century anarchists.
Vladimir Arutyunian? The motive seems comprehensible, even if GWB appears to have been a secondary target and there's nothing to indicate that he was insane, as such.
I would also consider Lee Oswald to go to this category, if we go by the formal story. He was not completely sane, but there was enough there to allow for Oswald to attempt to assassinate an US president as an expression of his communist ideology.
Arutyunian counts by the criteria I gave, even if GWB wasn't the actual target. His motives for trying to kill Saakashvili make perfect sense.
I think Oswald is marginal. He seems more of a nihilist who picked up communism as an expression his nihilism while living in the US, and then abandoned it as an expression of his nihilism while living in the USSR. And of course "was Oswald a communist or a nihilist" is something I can't find accurate information about with ordinary effort because it touches on Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.
While my primary source here is Case Closed, my understanding is that Oswald never abandoned communism. He was disappointed with the Soviet system in practice, but it just made him flirt with Trotskyism (though without full commitment) after moving back to US.
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Yeah, it depends on how accurately one can predict the skill and risk of assassinations. If you are confident you are not at risk of some professional or organized effort to kill you, then you can afford to spend less on security.
I might be totally wrong here, but I imagine that a lot of security lies in gathering intel beforehand, and adapting your efforts to the information you have.
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OK. I guess someone will have to go there. I’ll ask the question. Does this also have plausibly something to do with the presence of women and other DEI hires in the Secret Service?
I don't doubt that DEI contributes, but the most egregious thing I noticed (after looking into it after the Butler assassination attempt) is that the Secret Service budget for protection duties is $1.2 billion, which is an obscene amount of money for how little they do. They only provide full-time protection for roughly 40 people (I assume Trump and Vance and their families, Barack and Michelle Obama, George and Laura Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and some small number of others). Not sure how many people they provide temporary protection to outside of presidential election years but I doubt it's many.
Compare that $1.2 billion to the entire military budget of several countries: https://www.globalfirepower.com/defense-spending-budget.php
The Secret Service has a bigger budget than roughly 1/3 of the world's militaries, to provide protection to just 40 people. That they seem only moderately competent in the best cases (like this most recent attempt) and wildly incompetent in the worst (Butler etc.) and that they misused such a massive budget means thet the rot has been in the Secret Service for a very long time.
My suspicion is that the costs Presidential security imposes on third parties (road closures, airspace restrictions etc.) are significantly more than the Secret Service budget.
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Much as I'd love to blame it on that I don't think so. This wasn't individual agents being unfit or stupid, this was top down problems.
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It was intentionally weak so that Trump could justify building a Baalroom
But who's going to supply sacrificial children without Epstein?
P.Diddy ... time to bring DEI into child abuse.
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The convergence of memes is too strong for this not to be true.
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Idk, I hear all these people claiming all sorts of things about security and I don’t see whether it means anything. This influencer says security is blah blah blah, this influencer says that it’s actually yadda yadda, they know what exactly? Somebody I’ve never heard of before says something I have no ability to evaluate. Oh he’s an insider. Or pretending to be one. Must be serious.
I’m not sure what good security is supposed to look like. The guy with the gun got caught N layers before reaching the president. But actually it should have been N + 1 layers. Sure I guess. I can believe that. This says something important about society.
The number of people who really know what they’re talking about is probably at least three orders of magnitude smaller than what social media gives me access to.
I’m sure that some of those people are in the White House right now. And they’re making decisions. Maybe they’ll decide security was too lax and needs to be tightened. Maybe they’ll decide it was fine but we need some more theater. Maybe they’ll decide it doesn’t matter and we can take the headlines and build our ballroom and go. I don’t know. I guess I trust whatever Trump wants to do. He knows better than I do.
And it’s always possible that they keep security the same and something happens in the future, but not because anything is wrong with security but because it’s impossible to prevent everything. And it’s always possible we increase useless security theater and nothing happens because of sheer dumb luck and we say, wow, the security theater really worked. I admit I couldn’t tell the difference. I’m not sure most of these Washington “Insiders” can either.
I mean you have credible people making comments. Mark Halperin (who is usually very calm and measured) complaining is why I made this post.
Usually people with knowledge don't publicly comment because you don't want to create -ideas- but this time a lot of people were close by and in the splash zone and are pissed.
I'm willing to treat Mark Halperin as serious for the sake of argument and your reaction to him as same. But it's also possible he's wrong. There are hundreds of influencers with different takes. How am I supposed to know who actually has a piece of the truth? It's not like I actually know much about the difference between real security and security theater.
I mean that's not unfair. Mark is a serious person who has been to many, many of these types of events. On the other hand he's a journalist not a security expert, and security experts usually decline to aggressively comment on these types of events.
I'd say on the face of it it doesn't seem well secured, especially with some of the semi-public details (security started inside the building, movement was restricted to the presence of a generic hotel key sleeve, etc.).
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There are ways to solve the security problem, but yes in terms of risk management the question is 'at what cost?'
Are people willing to shut the hotel down for 24 hours to deny guest access to the lobby? Who is paying for that? Are you willing to put multiple people on every single ground floor entrance to the hotel and at every portal on the ground floor before, during and after the event? Who is paying for that?
Are you willing to inconvenience the rich and powerful with tools like turnstiles, metal detectors, x-rays, pat downs and biometric recording the week before to be checked on the night? Who is paying for that (and not just in currency)?
How about shutting down the entire city block, snipers on every rooftop and swapping the chefs and service staff out for Seal Team 6 for the night? Who... well no one would.
The short version is that Security is a game of Risk Management utilizing limited resources deployed against a thinking adversary. Its most basic philosophy is of Defense in Depth, or a series of layered interlocking defenses with the presumption that some of them maybe vulnerable to being breached by certain attack methods while others aren't.
Here the system worked. If you want guarantees that it will work perfectly and that any event will always proceed undisturbed even though attackers are willing to throw away their own lives in the attempt, then you need to pay a significant price for that. Including a lot of inconveniences to the legitimate attendees.
Most of the complaints about how far the attacker got are complete cope (including by the attacker). They have nothing else to clutch onto at yet another failed assassination.
Yeah, I haven't studied the situation carefully but it looks like the system worked exactly as planned and intended. The attempt in Pennsylvania was far more concerning. Admittedly, Trump was not president at that time, but even so it seems Trump was saved by blind luck.
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The perpetrator wrote a PS in his manifesto that he thought security was bad. So that's something I guess. I'm not sure if he's supposed to know what he's talking about either given that, you know, he failed almost instantly. But here it is.
Seems like the competency crisis is hitting everyone hard.
It is difficult to get past your internalized misogyny when the Secret Service is incorporating what looks like an elementary school teacher.
But on the flipside I've internalized so much progressive propaganda I can practically feel the Netflix script they will write about the lone stalwart woman warrior that fought the incompetence of her superiors and coworkers and singlehandedly kept Trump alive through an unprecedented amount of half baked attempts against his life.
Honestly, if they made her full Karen it might even be worth it. As her insistence that everyone follow the rules exactly keeps foiling the ploys of the motley crew of would be assassins that seemingly can't do anything right.
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For context, Allen made his reservation after the President announced he'd attend. Guy checks into the hotel before the event with his weapons, is surprised he's never once searched, and not obviously surveilled.
I get that. But were they supposed to? Is it normal to search every guest staying at a hotel if the president shows up the next day to give a speech?
No joke, this is the kind of thing that would make me say that Presidents should just stay at the White House and basically never leave. If the policy was that the President will be there sometime in the upcoming week so everyone is subject to a search, I would regard this as an obvious 4th Amendment violation, but also just a generalized case for the President staying home rather than annoying thousands of people that are just trying to go about their lives.
It's Camp David where the secret service would prefer the President stayed. The White House is a small parcel surrounded by city; Camp David is 125 acres of government property.
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We are not at anything. You should not consensus build here...
Politics has increased in heat level with each side increasing the verbal hostility level because hate sells. Unfortunately that has societal ramifications. As the populace is increasingly unmoored from any sort of shared foundational narrative, inevitably tribal conflicts will re-arrise. Accelerationists got what they wanted. Hopefully they enjoy the next 20-50 years of bloody sectarian conflict pitting brother against brother.
We are at literally kinetic war with an adversary that spends a lot of time and money on assassinations and terrorism..........
I mean far be it for me to put words in your mouth, but that is really not how any of this comes across.
I guess bravo for maintaining the plausible deniability required, but this clearly contextually reads as about the left vs right divide, not the US vs Iran divide.
I don't think it is a significant leap to mention the importance of keeping our head of state safe while we are in a shooting war with a nation whose head of state we killed and that has espoused direct desire to kill our head of state.
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I assumed he meant with Iran.
We are at
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idk why, nothing in his comment is about Iran, its about another lefty taking a shot at the Big Don, and then a reference to Kirk in the same sentence. The clear delineation is a left vs right, that we(the right) are at war and the left is attacking us.
I agree with the unpresented perspective that this is another lefty taking a shot at the President because he's been immersed in a stew of leftist propaganda, but I did not read the OP as saying that, at all. The "we" seems obviously to be that state of the United States is at war since the broadly construed political right is plainly not on any sort of war footing.
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Yes.
Who is John Galt?
(Context: the question is the focus of the first chapter of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. It's meant to be asked with world-weary cynicism, with the undertone of "Why would you expect anything nowadays to not be rotten, falling apart, or incompetently handled?" Nobody in the setting even knows who John Galt is, and they still ask it.)
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Presidents have been assassinated several times before and it has been fine; but Trump is singular (derogatory).
It's hard to know what his , lets call them fans would do, or what they could do; but at least some of his haters have been listening to what he was saying and interpreting it literally, so who knows what THEY would do.
In brief: Yo maybe those were load bearing norms, maybe we shouldn't have started removing struts to save weight, maybe the civility and political correctness and all those cancelations on tumblr I'm told were happening to prevent some real ass Sullian cancelations in the street, type of thing.
Yeah. Because clearly tumblr was a long standing fence in the middle of nowhere that reformers wanted to tear down without understanding why tumblr cancellations were there in the first place.
You joke but that is a true fact. People confused getting yelled at with actually getting prescribed out of existence; they seem to think that nobody should be allowed to make them feel bad and the power of the state should be deployed to that effect.
Yes, I think this is a perfectly valid characterization of their actions.
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It's the other way around. Cancel culture was about a lot more than private citizens / liberals "making people feel bad". Among other incidents:
Chicago citizens were fired from their jobs for making the OK hand signal, because progressives hallucinated that this was a White Supremacist hand signal because of 4chan
Mass censorship campaigns on social media platforms which included government officials emailing i.e. twitter and asking for accounts to be throttled / banned. (In the case of the pandemic specifically, many of the things that would get one censored turned out to be true.)
Academics and university speakers protested for having opinions unacceptable to liberals: this created a really perverse political culture on universities which culminated in e.g. corporations imposing mass DEI policies in the wake of George Floyd because nobody could say out loud that it's illegal to not hire white people because of their race.
Google broke a wonderful search engine that materially contributed to the benefit of all humanity because sometimes when you search the news you can find things that liberals think aren't true.
The host of The Bachelor was fired because he posted comments in defense of a contestant who attended an event at a plantation. The Dr. Seuss company stopped printing several of his books because they contain language progressives now consider unacceptable. James Watson was canceled and dishonored to the point that he had to sell his Nobel because he believes that race and IQ are real.
Cancel culture was real and progressives would have prescribed people out of existence if they had the power to. They clearly tried to many times. Instead of letting them we created a parallel society where they can't do that, which is now mainstream. You are choosing to participate in a forum that abides by these norms, and not by the cancel culture norms progressives tried to ensconce.
To make a little joke, None of those things happened, and if they did happen they didn't happen like that, and if they did happen like that then it was good.
You are gonna need to source me the first claim, it doesn't seem to have happened according to google.
Mass censorship is when fact checked, got it. Crazy that I was actually there during that time and I would have paid money to get away from those types; it's the "I was Canceled!" from the front shelf in the bookstore meme in real life.
Got it, free speech is when you can say whatever you want and if people get mad about it they should restrict their tone and only complain in the free speech zone on designated protest days. The knife cuts both ways, if you get to say what you want as a public figure, the public gets to call you a fascist/marxist depending on which direction the yelling is coming from.
4 and 5: so, the government should step in and force corporations to do things that the public at the time didn't like? Is that your solution? What do you actually want to do about this? When the republicans get washed this year and then again in 2028, should the Dem congress get to kick down the door to twitter and install sensitivity cops on every corner?
Cancel culture was fake, it was conservatives getting a taste of their own bullshit for the first time after 600 years of being on top and instead of realizing "Hey, free speech is great actually" doubling down on "No, only we should be allowed to cancel, now lets gut every US anything that has trans in the title. Transgenic? Transnational? Transorbital? Sounds woke to me."
Fact checking is fine. However, like many other terms, this term got subverted to mean something that does not follow from its naive meaning. What "fact checking" is now is an industry that delivers plausible deniability to governmental and quasi-governmental bodies to exercise censorship by producing third-party "objective" opinions (always aligning with the Party's needs, miraculously) which are used to censor disfavored opinions for being "misinformation". This has very little to do with facts or checking them, about as much as Democratic People's Republic of Korea has to do with democracy. It's a censorship laundering. And the perpetrators did not hide and do not hide right now that the goal is to deny their political opponents the "platform" - i.e. the ability to express and publicize their political speech. The goal is not having better facts, it's having less opposition.
Sure thing. The public figure does not get to use the government suppression apparatus to get me to stop saying those things though. And the public figures in the US did a lot of that recently. In fact, they had massive governmental and taxpayer-paid programs to get people to stop saying things that the government does not approve of saying.
The public figure also does not get to apply the laws differently depending on whether or not you say what the public figure wants. That's also what public figures had been doing a lot - like, saying "X is bad" and then some unknown people dressed in black show up and beat up X and destroy their business or set fire to a place where he was supposed to speak, and the public figure just shrugs and says "unfortunately, we do not know who those people are and have no way to find out, but if X says those things again, they have only themselves to blame for what happens".
It should not, but it had been doing it a lot lately. The corporations had been pressed, either overtly - by government contracting rules, EEOC regulations and such, or more covertly - like prioritizing corporations that actively play in ESG and DEI, into doing what the government likes.
They shouldn't, but they would like to, very much. In fact, in Europe they are openly demanding exactly this. In the US, some pesky and little known legal loopholes, like 1st Amendment, make this harder, thus they need to resort to indirect ways like ones described above. Not that they are too proud to strong-arm too - see all the angry letters the government sent to social media companies under Biden, and the following censorship fast-lanes that were implemented as a result of that. If they take power in 2028, there is absolutely no doubt they would try to do it again.
That is a lie. Cancel culture was real, and is still real in many places.
So was it fake, or was it righteous revenge? You can't claim both in the same sentence without having a red nose and a rainbow wig on.
And yes, the conservatives did a lot of censoring and cancelling themselves, when they were in power. That's bad. A lot of people said that it was bad at the time, and they were right. Now the left is doing it. It's still bad. Shame on the people that changed their opinion on freedom when it became their team that is in power and suppressing freedom. Shame on fair-weather freedom lovers.
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You can get arrested in Britain for "hate speech" and hundreds of people do every year and the position of mainstream liberals was that we should have laws just like that. Look, just admit you're in favor of cancel culture, that's a much more consistent position to hold. Just admit that you're fine with the government monitoring twitter so they can throttle accounts they don't like. You can't actually coherently claim that "mass censorship is when fact checked" so it's no big deal and then also claim to somehow be against it.
This is what actually happened. Dems on the Hill held hearings excoriating tech CEOs for not censoring more. Officials in the State Department had working relationships with social media companies to censor content they didn't like. The files were all released by Elon when he bought twitter. The case went up to SCOTUS and John Roberts ruled that it isn't illegal because the State Department has a 1st Amendment right to tell twitter to ban things.
You can be for it or against it. It's real and it happened.
See, you're not even against cancel culture, you're essentially arguing in favor of it. I don't actually need to provide a citation for every instance of cancel culture in the world: You are arguing on a forum that was created because reddit would no longer allow us to have these conversations on their platform. You are literally participating on a platform that exists as a consequence of the forces you deny exist. Your position is inherently ridiculous.
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Ah yes, the load bearing norms, the same ones Obama used in operation Chokepoint, the same ones the SPLC and the JDL have been using to strangle the discourse. You know if Elon didn't buy Twitter we would still be back in the age where rabid groups of feminists and dangerhair unperson people and get them fired for not eating the communion wafer with enough gusto.
Agree on all counts, But it takes two to tango, speak up if you think the right has been perfectly christ-like and has not escalated to destroyed any of their own load bearing norms.
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If Trump is assassinated nothing will happen. Rather, his successor — so JD in this timeline — gets extraordinary political capital to do all sorts of things. Crackdown on antifa, economic free hand, maybe an immigration bill. It all depends on the mix of JD’s temperament (stronger than most suppose) and the GOP’s temperament (weaker than you’re thinking).
But most of what a Trump successor could do is priced in. There would be an extraordinary moment followed by a return to politics as usual. That’s all.
Trump is not politics as usual. Trump is unusual. When he’s dead that tendency will go away. Whatever state he leaves us in is the trajectory we’re likely to follow for some time. An assassination would just give JD Vance a last gasp put some finishing touches on the hot iron shape before it cools into place.
There won’t be civil war. If there are riots they will fizzle out. If MAGA rises to the occasion it will be within the political process. If libs rise up they will playact as revolutionaries and then fizzle out into the political process. That’s all
I've never agreed with you more!
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I feel like with all four of those we kind of “got lucky” that nothing particularly important was happening at the time. Even with Lincoln, the Civil War was basically over when he died. We aren’t guaranteed that it will always be like that. If equally obscure President Rutherford Hayes had been shot instead of Garfield, we may very well have had a second civil war.
Despite the heat of 1876 Hayes was ultimately accepted because the memory of the Civil War was too near for everybody to go to war. I guess it’s an open question. But I would take the other side of that bet
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Be specific. What norms, dismantled by who and when?
One example: social media has dismantled social norms.
Even when phones and TV existed, people used to communicate face-to-face more often, especially to strangers. Privacy used to be expected. News used to be centralized.
How does this affect politics? Perhaps since people have less random face-to-face interactions, they have tighter echo chambers and less respect for those outside. Perhaps since we have dirt on everyone (no privacy), especially dirty politicians are seen no differently. Perhaps since social media promotes strong emotions (especially negative ones; weaker centralized moderation), emotive (especially negative) politicians benefit.
Unfortunately in practice, we can’t ban social media and revert to the past (although that doesn’t stop politicians from trying). I think we need more local groups, in-person events with encouragement to attend, trusted curators who present “unbiased” news (specifically biased towards positivity and important details such that the people receiving the news benefit from hearing it). Most of all, we need to explicitly teach people how to behave socially, how to spot those who deserve sympathy vs. who’d exploit you, how to think critically; and this teaching should be through experience (trial and error, positive and negative reinforcement…). Because I believe those lessons used to be taught implicitly by face-to-face interactions which (para)social media has replaced.
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The norms that politics was as usual, the system can be reformed, and we all play act like we are doin' shit while the technocrats get on with getting on, and that your messaging needed to be connected to reality to be effective.
As to who to blame: Newt Gingrich, IMO. He's the dude that realized that movement was more important than improvement; that he could make more hay out of breaking shit than maintaining shit; and that you could create the problem then sell the solution. With one hand you can sign NAFTA, with the other you can rail against mexicans taking your jerbs. With one hand you can wave china into the WTO while the other is in fist configuration, shaking away at those dirty chinks. It's been wildly effective since Reagan, and the democrats are too limp dicked and liberal to do anything about it.
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Most of them
The rich and powerful
The last ~50 years
Edit: I wrote slightly more coherent version here
Then I got baited and wrote an even longer response here
So no specifics. Thanks.
I'm not that guy, just exercising my god given right to butt into random conversations with my thoughts
I did write a slightly more coherent response here
EDIT: I got baited and wrote an even long response here
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Man, that might be even more vague than the original framing.
In some ways yes, in others I actually find it quite accurate.
I've seen enough of the
"Republicans destroyed the norms"
"Erm actually, it was Democrats who started destroying the norms with X"
"Erm actually, the Dems who did X were simply responding to the Republican norm destroyal of Y"
And so on and so on. Lost in all the finger pointing litigation is the core truth that the norms have been fucking obliterated and our society is worse off overall.
Thus, I'd like step back and acknowledge that
the leadership/elite of the Republican and Democratic have way more in common with each other than they do with us
their en bloc interests very very clearly do not align with ours
the rich and powerful people of Western civilization have been absolutely strip mining this civilization in their relentless pursuit of accruing more power and money to themselves, regardless of the detrimental effects to the society that created that wealth in the first place.
I agree with your general framing but would expand point 1. to the managerial/laptop class more generally, and suggest that much of derangement and consternation surrounding the Aesthetics of Trump and MAGA is driven by status anxiety stemming from the appearance of the working class pushing their own interests.
To borrow a word from this forum's favorite (as measured by number of times I see his name) political philosopher, I think we can happily call them the "petit bourgeois". Although the laptop-class is a larger group than the original concept of the petit bourgeois so I am personally partial to the term "Professional Managerial Class" and even that is almost too narrow.
But the occupy a similar niche for sure.
100% agree but I'd go even further and say that much of the appeal of MAGA itself is also status anxiety. Its status anxiety all the way down! It's almost like people are really worried that things are being enshittified in every direction by a bunch of elites who no longer feel any obligation to their society...
The petit bourgeois (as defined by Marx) in modern society consists mostly of self-employed tradesmen and microbusiness owners. These are the most right-wing occupational group and largely define themselves in opposition to the PMC, which by stereotype consists of employees of large (public and private sector) organisations with large salaries.
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I don't think this is a good explanation. On really any level.
Have norms really eroded in the last 50 years? 50 years ago it was the 70s, this was a huge period of political and social unrest. Political violence was at least an order of magnitude more then. Very widespread protests on the Vietnam war. There were daily bombings by an entire mish mash of groups - the Weathermen, Puerto Ricans, black power type groups. What do you mean the norms have eroded in the last 50 years, they're way better than in the 70s! Especially on political violence!
And your 3 points are lazy. They don't really explain much.
Like on 1 - of course the leadership/elite of the parties have more in common with each other than with us. They work the same job! They talk to each other a lot! They live part time in the same city! Of course you have more in common with the people you work with than with 330 million people you have never met! How could it be any other way?
Your point 2 is also very vague, it is not clear at all. What en bloc interests are unaligned? How has that unalignment increased in the last 50 years? What are some examples? Like they have an interest to stay elected? And raise money? That's always been the case. What changed? What eroded?
Your point 3 - there have always been unscrupulous rich people. They have always been willing to obtain money and power at the expense of others. They've always been there, so how could a supposed erosion of norms be due to them? What has actually changed? There are much better and much more interesting explanations out there. Like if anything changed I would say it is the technology, particularly the internet, that is driving changes. The internet is what allowed the rise of social media, and online echo chambers, and doom scrolling algos, and mean nasty people having a voice. DJT is the twitter president. Technological changes allowed his rise, he could bypass the traditional media gatekeepers. Zuck can't build facebook in 1970 when there are no smartphones and no internet.
Sorry but its just a lazy explanation when there are much more interesting ones to chew on. "Rich people bad. Politicians bad." Ok but there are a lot of people, there are a lot of rich people, a lot of them will do bad things. This has always been the case. A lot of them did bad things in 1976. So what changed? You offer platitudes that aren't even true and don't make any sense.
I ass-pulled 50 years, I could have said 75 and I don't think it changes my point. 50 years = "directionally over the last century post WW2"
Clearly the answer to this is yes. Many norms across society have changed in 50 years. Some of these changes are good, some bad. The norms around political violence have clearly gotten better, so that is nice.
What I’m talking about is, on net, norms of: institutional restraint, civic obligation, elite shame, truthfulness, long-term stewardship, and basic seriousness about governing. Some norms have improved. Others, like these, have decayed badly.
It mattered when politicians felt they had to at least pretend to respect institutional boundaries. It mattered when business leaders felt they had to at least pretend they owed something back to the society that made them rich. It mattered when public lying carried more shame. It mattered when leaders were expected to speak like adults, not like engagement-optimized influencers.
Trump is the obvious example, although clearly not the whole argument. A president(al candidate) being caught on tape saying "grab em by the pussy" or lying constantly and blatantly, or saying any number of things that would have been politically fatal in an earlier media environment, and large parts of the country just shrugging, is obviously a norm shift.
Similarly, on a procedural side: I don't really want to get into a debate about American constitutionalism and procedural philosophy, but it is very clear the Trump2 admin is doing many things outside the bounds of previously thought to be accepted norms and processes. Maybe it's good they're bending/breaking these processes because they were shit, maybe it's bad, maybe the Dems did it first in some way, I don't really care here. The point is that it's happening, and the boundaries are constantly being pushed and tested.
Also fun stuff like Citizens United.
This is obvious to you, as it is obvious to me. However, I have seen enough partisan back-and-forth on this forum to know that many members either do not find this obvious, or choose to ignore it while trying to dunk on their opponents.
The perpetual "the Republicans ruined it" "no the Dems ruined it" is a stupid argument in my opinion. I don't care who ruined it, I want my government to work again. Us all fighting each other about who's fault it is serves the Democratic/Republican elite, who get to continue ruining everything as we fight over the Titanic's deck chair arrangement.
Red vs Blue arguments trap us inside a frame that benefits them and not us.
The incentives of the political, economic, and media elite are growing increasingly detached from the long-term health of the society they govern.
Sure, politicians always wanted to be elected, businesses have always wanted to make money/secure power to ensure they can continue to make money, media has always wanted eyeballs. None of those incentives are new. What changed is the strength of the counterweights.
There used to be more pressure: social, institutional, geopolitical, and reputational. The elites had more pressure to justify their status by maintaining buy-in. Call it noblesse oblige, fear of communism, postwar civic nationalism, stronger unions, higher institutional trust, whatever. That system wasn't 100% fair or wonderful either. But there was at least pressure on elites to build public goods, maintain legitimacy, and make ordinary people feel like they had a stake in the system.
That pressure seems much weaker these days, does it even exist?
Now we get to enjoy things like: financialization, regulatory capture, monopolistic/oligopolistic concentration everywhere, cartoonish short-termism, asset inflation, institutional decay, and attention-economy slop. The pie is not being expanded in the way it could be. A lot of elite behavior now looks more like fighting over pie slices on a stagnating pie. We seem to be Moloch-maxxing a lot more these days.
Yes. Greed was not invented in 1976. My point is that the restraints around elite self-interest have borderline evaporated.
There have always been selfish rich people/corrupt politicians/those willing to trade the public good for personal advantage. But societies differ in how much they constrain that behavior, how much shame attaches to it, how much counter-power exists, and how much elites feel obligated to reinvest in the system that enabled their wealth.
Previously, the rich often felt some need to build public goods with their names on them. Libraries, universities, museums, civic institutions, hospitals, parks, whatever. Obviously there was ego and such involved, but the output was still often a durable public good.
Plus, I think they used to fear "the masses" a hell of a lot more than they do now. A big reason homeownership was pushed in the 1930s-??? (definitely not these days lol) was as a way to support/entrench/create buy-in to "the system" by making millions of households materially invested in private property, consumer credit, and rising asset values. To be clear, I think that this is a good thing. I want my government to be worried about my opinion towards the system, and to take action to make me like the system by having the system work for me. Do Americans feel like the system is working for them right now?
Now the dominant model feels blatantly extractive. Regulatory capture, monopoly/oligopoly power, tax avoidance, asset hoarding, platform rent-seeking, union avoidance, and political influence operations. The goal increasingly seems to be to take as much as possible out of the system while giving as little back as possible. All of this was happening in 1975 or 1950 too, but it seems a lot more successful and a lot more aggressive now.
Technology matters enormously. I agree. But I don’t think "the internet did it" is a full explanation either. The internet amplified incentives and trends that were already there.
TL;DR: Over the last ~X decades, the "elite" / "the institutions" have become increasingly optimized for extraction, self-preservation, and short-term advantage rather than long-term civilizational health. The informal norms that once partially restrained that behavior have weakened. We are worse off as a result. Parisian "no you're team is the one truly at fault" is useless at best, and actively against our own interests as citizens at worst.
This isn't a social norm, it's a political norm based on leftist assumptions. And not a common one in the past; it's most associated with Andrew Carnegie, though he based it on different assumptions. Further, Carnegie's beliefs did not cash out to "I should pay shitloads of taxes" (though he supported a high estate tax), but to "I, and other wealthy people, should use our wealth to directly help society".
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It doesn’t seem like the security was bad but I did see reporting done that the security level for the event was not proportionate to the number of high level leaders there (President and VP and a number of Cabinet members) and so the claim that security wasn’t of the appropriate quality is almost certainly true (and admittedly so, according to the government’s own rules and policies for this sort of thing). So it’s hard to judge the execution itself other than to say that there’s clearly a planning weakness that we can clearly see across all three assassination attempts.
My question becomes: how would a random teacher in California know that this specific event would have unusually-lax security?
How can you say unusually lax? It seems like the random teacher underestimated the amount of security there, considering the actual result.
Were they supposed to search every hotel guest? Can you imagine the kinds of accusations that would've come out of security searching a random teacher from California?
What's your point? Why ask a vague question?
Yes. They search every passenger in every airport, after all. You don't even need to go all the way and force the guests to take off their belt and shoes. "Please place your bag onto the belt, empty your pockets into the tray and walk through the metal detector." You can even have the bellhop take their bags away and scan them discreetly to show some class.
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I guess it does prove the need for a White House event room, because there is no way for the President to hold events in a public space to the level of security you are expecting. You couldn't have preveted the JFK assassaination with more security. The only robust solution is to not drive around Downtown Dallas in a convertable.
I got stuck behind the presidential motorcade in traffic once. The security presense was immense. They blocked-off every freeway entrance on the route for what felt like 15 minutes before the bulk of the motorcade passed by. I had about a half-second of direct line of sight at 60-80 feet on Cadillac One, and that was by pure chance with no advance planning at all.
Every rooftop and every window is a sightline. Every organization that has people in the hot zone is a potential infiltration route.
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Our civic norms under a diadochic presidency... will the mos maiorum actually deteriorate? The 60's were bad, but, I mean, we, you know, survived.
That is a good point, actually. Trump has always not given a fuck about how things are customarily done in DC, from Birtherism over election denial to tariffs based on little more than the hope that they would be too bothersome to revert. There was corruption in DC before, but it had an etiquette, like people going to the bathroom to relieve themselves. With Trump, it is all blatant, the equivalent of just taking a dump in the middle of Time Square.
So yes, getting shot as a sitting president in a world where that just does not happen any more would seem perfectly in character for him.
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How exactly was it worse? Did the moron ever have a chance of getting line of sight on the President?
I don’t understand what institutions you think are analogous to the Secret Service.
From what I can tell the Hotel was essentially allowed to go about its business and the security cordon was in the building close to the event. You could get very close to the event itself with a generic hotel keyboard. Minimal access control. Someone could easily have preplanted a surprise or walked close with one and rendered the primary security buffer irrelevant, and then had others follow.
People who have been to similar events before said that the security was rather lacking in comparison to other events.
I certainly have been to places that have been more aggressive in searching my bag or person multiple times further out.
I gotta say I've been hassled more at job sites for municipalities than this; and I've done more hassling as impromptu "Don't bring a fucking gun into the reception, you dingus" doorman than the dude got.
It's so bad I really, really want to believe in false flag theory because if it's real it's dumb enough to make me sad.
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My understanding is a) the Secret Service rot far predates Trump's first term, and b) the shooter was already inside the hotel, as a guest, and that was a bit of a blind spot. Obvious in hindsight, but still.
Making sure the guests at a 1000 person hotel aren't armed or smuggling in materials is obvious in foresight, not hindsight.
...at least I hope so.
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