Brief Assassination Comment; Two Recommended Reads

Danny Davis today raised a point that I’ve been thinking about. It simply reinforces the fact that the security detail swapped in for Trump’s rally last Saturday was not truly professional. The whole video is worthwhile:

Secret Service Fail UPDATE

but here’s the very short portion that I focused on.

DD had been showing video of the layout of the venue, stressing that position occupied by the shooter was, for practical purposes, really the only viable position for an assassin. He moved on to show the reactions of the security personnel on the stage, and then:

Earlier in this video, when you saw the president first go down, you saw a couple of other guys who look like army guys--they're dressed in in full camo gear and helmets and all that. Notice what they're doing. You'll be able to see these guys moving around. Where are they looking? They're looking behind them. He keeps looking around behind him. He's not looking for any other threats. Those other buildings I showed you which are in line of sight to that place. Why is this guy continuing to look back at Trump? He moves over here, he's still, he's just looking at Trump. Who is looking further to make sure there are no more threats, and why are none of these people doing that?

I hadda laugh at that line, guys who look like army guys--they're dressed in in full camo gear and helmets and all that. For all the world that reminded me of the old Smothers Brothers version of The Streets of Laredo. If you get an outfit you can be an operator, too. Or, forty years a cowboy and never stepped in sh*t.

I don’t mean to be overly flippant about this. The point is that all of these people on the security detail show by their actions that this is not something they have seriously trained for. For situations like this every participant basically has one job and one job only—you don’t want people engaging in complicated reasoning processes as to what they should be doing. These guys had one job only—to be on high alert for any mid range threat. The should absolutely not have been looking anywhere except out to their practical range of vision for recognizing a threat.

Of course, bad as that is, the real question is not about the amateur security detail that was swapped in for this rally. The real question is the command center decision to put Trump on stage for the shooter. They had 30 minutes to think that decision through, with multiple inputs from the people who had scoped this guy out. This wasn’t a decision that would be one and done. They had all that time to come to the right conclusion—Trump doesn’t go on stage until we sort out the guy with the rifle.

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So, two recommended reads. Both are about Trump voters and their concerns. First, Charles Hugh Smith:

The Roots Of American Populism: Are Trump And Vance Populists?

Smith begins by attempting to arrive at a reasonable description of what “populism” actually is. To that purpose he appeals to Christopher Lasch’s analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics.

Emerson's distain for the vanities of luxury was equaled by his distain for parasitic financiers, a position born of Emerson's religious beliefs. As Lasch notes, "Emerson believes in the moral value of manual labor." In other words, honest labor--what Emerson referred to as a calling--had a spiritual component. Here is Lasch: Emerson "would gladly sacrifice some of the 'conveniences' of civilization to the moral culture conferred by farming or a craft."

In his essay Politics (1844), Emerson "argues that the prevailing social arrangements allow 'the rich to encroach upon the poor.'" In Lasch's summary, Emerson held that "Society needs self-respecting men and women,, not a perfect set of institutions." He quotes Emerson: "Society can never prosper... until every man does that which he is created to do."

Emerson also held that those seeking to get something for nothing--the essence of the parasitic financialization and speculation Emerson viewed as a mortal threat--would eventually face a reckoning akin to karma: "A 'third silent party', Emerson notes, attends 'all our bargains'--nemesis or fate."

I’ll skip over Smith’s description of the plight of those whose bubble was not inflated by the the financialization of the American economy—follow the link. Here are his concluding paragraphs:

Unsurprisingly, those who benefited the most from the ascendancy of parasitic finance and globalization approve most heartily of their own management of the nation's institutions and policies. The bottom 99% have a decidedly less favorable view of the nation's self-serving elites:

All of which brings us to the potential ascent of the Trump-Vance ticket to leadership. If populism means anything, it means restoring the value of work and especially manual labor of the real-world essential sort that ChatGPT, apps, bots and marketing cannot do, restoring the ladder of social mobility and gutting the forces that have laid waste to all those who didn't have the opportunity to buy stocks and real estate before they skyrocketed to unattainable heights: hyper-financialization and hyper-globalization.

Nemesis is running out of patience. Let us hope that whomever ascends to the leadership is a populist in the full sense of the word, channeling Emerson and his fellow critics of what we now call neoliberalism. What counts now isn't political labels; what counts now is promoting policies that reverse the 45-year hollowing out of the nation--morally, culturally and economically--that benefited the few at the expense of the many.

I hope this helps explain why I do posts like A New Wave In Education?

Next up:

Trump and the Fate of Western Civilization

Trump represents a movement. It is bigger than him, and it is bigger than MAGA.

In this article Edward Ring attempts to answer the question: “But what is it about Trump that has made him a target of relentless and unified defamation, or worse, from every established American institution for nearly a decade?” He begins his answer with this telling paragraph:

Trump represents a movement. It is bigger than him, and it is bigger than MAGA. Trump and MAGA have counterparts all over the world, especially in Europe. The people in these movements all share at least two common grievances: they don’t want their national cultures destroyed, and they don’t want their standard of living destroyed. And in every country where these movements have arisen, that is exactly what is happening, and it’s happening fast.

Trump provides a rallying point for what was heretofore a movement without a leader. Trump provides focus for that movement. And, of course, the focal point, the big issue in this election, is the opening of the borders. The question then becomes: Cui bono?

I believe that it would be fair to summarize Ring’s thesis in terms of what I’ve previously written. The point of open borders is to break the middle class, who are the only barrier to the Ruling Class’s total domination of all the wealth of the country and, ultimately, the globe. Breaking the social fabric of the country will break the middle class. In his descriptive passages Ring covers ground similar to that covered by Smith.

Ring tries to present a strategy in response to this. In doing so he also sounds a theme that I have sounded:

Although many leftist activists are naïve enough to think that Marxist redistribution is our solution, that’s not what they’re going to get. Nor is our solution to be found in neoliberal free trade, even though that would define the economic world view of many Never Trumpers, to the extent any of them have ever really thought about it. These two ideological polarities, in actual practice, are two sides of the same coin: they both facilitate the centralization of power and ownership. That’s the pragmatic ideology of the migrant-importing, climate crisis-mongering, stop the “far right” (at any cost) western elites who want to rule the world. For them, ideology is window dressing.

Yes, it’s the Will to Power. Demonism.