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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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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?

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.

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.

PS: Ok now that all the sappy stuff is done, what the hell is the Secret Service doing? Sorry, gonna rant a bit here and drop the formal tone.

Like, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo.

What I got (who knows, maybe they’re pranking me!) is nothing.

No damn security.

Not in transport.

Not in the hotel.

Not in the event.

Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance.

I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat.

The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.

Like, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again.

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.