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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13178 thread views

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?

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.

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.

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.

More seriously, the fact that the perpetrator was stopped arguably shows that security measures were perfectly adequate.

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.

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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