While Republicans in Congress have played down the risk of extremists in the military, experts who follow the issue say they’re not surprised to see extremist beliefs and leaks of classified information coincide. https://t.co/4RNyG30TlT pic.twitter.com/92WQmdI4Ca
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) April 27, 2023
You, peeing and pooping your pants: we have no way of identifying insider threats and our military has no extremism problem
Me, a genius: Have the FBI take the 19 year-old I just saw wearing a three-piece suit and fedora I just saw in the PX in for questioning.
— Affable Himbo Critical Russ Theory (@RPG_volley) April 27, 2023
“I want a list of the top 50 customers at the sword and knife kiosk, and I want you to cross-reference that with troops who have straight-faced asked their PSG if they could carry all seven magazines on their thigh in a drop-leg pouch.”
[touches earpiece] …he’s wearing his uniform… to his girlfriend’s prom… she’s a SOPHOMORE?? Okay wake up a federal judge, there’s no time to lose.
“Lieutenant, please unlock your phone… open the ‘Photos’ app… uh-huh, just like that. Now what I’d like you to do for me is type ‘Pepe the Frog’ into the search box-yep, thought so.”…
Does the troop have life size anime pillow as well as a poorly grown mustache
— Xris🫡 (@AlsoBadgerCult) April 27, 2023
Everyone with a bored ape avatar.
— The Ghost of Henry Hunt knows to bring extra ammo! (@dabigz732) April 27, 2023
Hire more boring women for sensitive positions and fewer fucking weird hyper-online manchildren with something asinine to prove to their moronic peers. https://t.co/pVVN0BYAO5
— cai (@AnneNotation) April 27, 2023
It’s embarrassing that I’m confident many of my weird internet friends could do a MUCH better job of conducting background checks than “official US government intelligence analysts” https://t.co/TWDctO3b2W
— Faine Greenwood (@faineg) April 27, 2023
I used to be wary of saying this, as maybe I was missing something, but it’s been a while and you know what, I’ve made up my mind: internet OSINT dweebs and furries are much better at this than the USG.
at some point the USG is going to have to suck it up, stop relying primarily on innocent Mormon lads as staff, and recognize that modern threats tend to look like horrible little white boys who say horrible things on the internet
The other irony is that the people today who are legitimately great at ferreting out threatening people on the Internet are the exact people who both couldn’t pass a current background check and have absolutely zero desire to do so
I cannot even wrap my brain around how you could be a compensated professional intelligence analyst in 2023 who is this stunningly naive, but the evidence that they are indeed this bad at their jobs is…everywhere
It really feels like background checks today are intentionally oriented in such a way that they select for malignant little assholes with the life experience of a newborn kitten
“Oh, he’s safe because he was a literal child a year ago and doesn’t have any suspect bank accounts or known contacts with individuals in Syria. No, there’s no need to check his social media.”
I mean come on
We appear to not have updated our priors on background checks since 2003 and it’s quickly moving from “embarrassing” to “dangerous travesty”
I am still mad as hell over how a bunch of us online dorks watched January 6th planning happen out in the open in real time and even tried to report it to officials…
…who ignored the warnings and then tried to claim no one could have seen it coming.
I have lots of these blinking-red Jan 6th warnings saved, and I know others have even more pic.twitter.com/xtf49f0puj
— Faine Greenwood (@faineg) April 27, 2023
— Faine Greenwood (@faineg) April 27, 2023
The big thing is that his stepdad retired from the same office. Having people vouch for you is very important. When I got my clearance they called every reference I gave them including neighbors from a decade ago. But parents aren’t a great ref. They are biased.
— starkmojo (@starkmojo) April 27, 2023
Hot take: if you have more than a million people with clearance, you cannot expect deep dives during the background investigation. https://t.co/INlK2tDVlL
— vocational politics appreciation account (@Convolutedname) April 27, 2023
"And no one knows how to identify me" https://t.co/dSglEMxhp3 pic.twitter.com/xXcOfo62Rw
— Mike Black (@MikeBlack114) April 27, 2023
JoyceH
OMG you guys! It’s Take Your Child To Work Day and look at the darling little Secret Service agents!
https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1651756871890378753
Spanky
This Faine Greenwood person is an idiot and demonstrates zero comprehension of the distinction between the military and civilian processes. Why does he/she get so much BJ real estate?
The military side really needs to clean house and tighten up its clearance process.
And that’s all I’m going to say about that, because saying more would go against my promise.
SpaceUnit
You can’t presume a guy is a potentially violent fascist terrorist just because he claims over and over and over online to be a potentially violent fascist terrorist. And collects assault weapons. Get real.
Cameron
It looks like the US military attracts at least a few pretzel-brained young nazis. This isn’t exactly new, though – Michael Flynn was a general and a national security advisor. He may not be a nazi (or a putinist), but he’s nuttier than a squirrel hotel.
eclare
@JoyceH: Love the fake earpieces and shades!
Mike S
I remember when Rice proclaimed that no one could have predicted that people would fly planes into buildings 6 years after Tom Clancy wrote a #1 best selling Jack Ryan book about a pilot crashing his jet into a joint session of congress.
This is miles worse and we need to keep reminding people that Republicans stopped an investigation into extremists in law enforcement and the military.
eclare
@Cameron: One name: Timothy McVeigh.
Gin & Tonic
@Spanky: I’m not going to dig into the thread to see if Faine Greenwood wrote this:
but it is 100% true. The OSINT people really proved something with the Teixeira case.
thruppence
The short lived X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen had an episode where the bad guys planned to fly a jetliner into the WTC. Probably not available anywhere
Peke Daddy
@Mike S:
“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”
Tony G
At a certain point, incompetence becomes “deliberately looking the other way”. Maybe we’re way past that point.
Tony G
@Peke Daddy: Yup. And the guy who chose to ignore that was re-elected three years later.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@thruppence: Its on YouTube (link)
Carlo Graziani
@Gin & Tonic: Well, the thing is, what is the false alarm rate?
OSInt folks like to congratulate themselves on their prescience, but it seems to me that there is a constant background of racist idiot chatter, and all of it gets flagged. But I see no evidence of a capability for discriminating empty talk from real threats, just ex-post-facto sack dances when a flagged threat goes from potential to real.
You undoubtedly know the old saying, ” Economists have predicted 9 of the last 5 recessions…”
Steve in the ATL
@Tony G: technically, to be re-elected you have to win your first election….
Carlo Graziani
I am surprised that the US Government hands out security clearances like party favors to any enlistee, and particularly that the military acts as if kids are appropriate stewards of national secrets.
The Armed Forces have a relatively rigorous promotion system for assessing who is ready for increased responsibility. Even limiting classified access to mid-level NCOs would bring in a maturity selection criterion that would make potential Texeiras far less likely. Junior officer rank would be even better.
SpaceUnit
@Carlo Graziani:
FWIW, I’m fine with racist idiot chatter getting flagged.
Assume it’s all a real threat.
Gwangung
@SpaceUnit: and we’d fine better indicators if the pros were allowed or are thinking of studying them, the heretofore unsuspected young white males
Gin & Tonic
@Carlo Graziani: I’ve commented before, that the OSINT people have more freedom to scour the dark corners of the Internet than the TLA people. Much more. This is a problem.
mrmoshpotato
@Steve in the ATL:
Yeah! The thieving bastards!
Dangerman
Yup.
Some wheat will get tossed out with the chaff but the costs of being wrong are too high (see McVeigh, Timothy).
SpaceUnit
@Dangerman:
And it’s sure as shit not gonna be good wheat.
Citizen Alan
@Tony G: That was literally the moment I lost faith in American democracy. Everything since then has been a desperate rear-guard action against encroaching fascism. And if both my parents had been deceased in 2004, I would be an expatriate today.
Jay
@Carlo Graziani:
Fanny is part of an Antifa OSINT collective that since 9/11 have tracked down and doxxed thousands of Nazi’s. As far as I am aware, they have had zero “false” positives, because they don’t really care about people cosplaying Nazi’s online, they care about people cosplaying Nazi’s through violent actions in the real world, and people who join and are vetted by groups that act in the real world.
NAFO tracked down Dumbass Girl, in their hunt for vatnicks and scammers, but they didn’t doxx her. They exposed her as a fake scammer in the Washington Gulf islands, exposed that she “may” have exposed National Secrets.
It was Bellingcat and the FTFNYT following up on what NAFO had exposed, that doxxed her, and exposed the Idiot Child.
Carlo Graziani
@Dangerman: The Federal Government literally does not have the resources to follow up every alleged threat that surfaces on some social network. If they tried, they’d be diverting resources that ought to be focused on real threats.
To be clear: I don’t think that the Feds are particularly good at finding the real threat signal in this idiot noise. But claims that OSInt does any better are absurd, and credulous.
Jay
@Gin & Tonic:
Hunting the dark corners of the web, is a brutal job requiring a certain mindset. I know people who had to stop because they recognized that they were being radicalized. Others who quit, or had to take long breaks for the sake of their mental health. Others who had to leave their countries for their own physical safety.
Jay
@Carlo Graziani:
Bellingcat has found more Ruzzian spies, illegals and assassins than the FBI in the past 10 years.
Alison Rose
File Under: Sentences that make me wish the sun would hurry up and swallow us whole already
piratedan
to be fair to Faith, there is a kernel of truth to what she claims, when it comes to the FBI having to outsource J6 participants to the public because they can’t/won’t/have the resources to do it themselves, when you hear of Faux News being on in every base we have… it does seem that we should have some of our analysts being able to check the obvious places where the disaffected hangout since it’s been established that white christofascists are an issue, but have yet to internalize that reality.
James E Powell
@Tony G:
Voters, man. They are really stupid sometimes.
guachi
full bird private
@unreservist
“If the Soldiers are exhibiting any DLI-student behaviors and aren’t actually at DLI, go ahead and schedule an interview.”
2:43 PM · Apr 27, 2023
The above tweet in response to this one https://twitter.com/RPG_volley/status/1651653195888730131
has me in tears. It’s probably only funny to people who have been to DLI, the military’s language school.
ArchTeryx
@Tony G: The Incumbent Effect is all too effective for all but the most completely out there candidates (like Trump) or even minor apostates like Poppa Bush.
It did not help there was quite direct election interference in Ohio by Bush himself. I saw the results on the ground since I was working with Election Protection at the time. We expected street action. Instead they just removed all the voting machines from urban areas and let it play out. Bush won Ohio and the election hours later.
Feathers
This is Not America – Pat Metheny and David Bowie
I had not heard about the stepdad. That was one of the points in The Falcon and the Snowman (movie and book, based on a true story)? The two friends sell secrets to the Soviets, one of them has access through a job at a defense contractor. His security check was basically that his dad was an FBI agent.
As to the problem of effectiveness, policing has much the same problem. The rate of crime solving has plummeted, largely due to the fact that we hire people to be beat cops and then expect some percentage of them to morph into detectives. The two skill sets are very different. It’s a big part of the reason we have close to zero prosecutions of local white level crime. It’s just completely outside the experience of detectives and our police forces in general.
And because I mentioned The Falcon and the Snowman, here’s the video of the theme song, This is Not America by Pat Metheny and David Bowie. Always loved it. Haven’t seen the film since it came out in the 80s, but I really liked it then. Probably time for a rewatch. Traitorously disgruntled young white men then and now.
Link at top. On phone, not going to try to move it.
ArchTeryx
There was much more to the story, such as the Republican county that suddenly declared a terrorist alert and kicked out all the vote count observers. When the alert was lifted, there suddenly were enough votes for W to win Ohio… more votes than were in the county, total.
Sadly this all was labeled a conspiracy theory and everyone moved on when Kerry refused to fight. I knew that it was time to at the least leave Ohio and I was not wrong.
West of the Rockies
@JoyceH:
Cute pic, followed by a Twitter cesspool of wingnut comments. Twitter is vile now.
trollhattan
Little Donny, reworking Lennon’s “Imagine.” I guess.
https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1651710557471358984?cxt=HHwWkIC-nYeAh-wtAAAA
eclare
@Feathers: Great song.
JWR
@Mike S:
6 years? Nah, too dated. Try everything contemporaneous laid out below (from The Center for American Progress):
And she just lied and lied and lied all the way to receiving all those cozy, “elder national security expert” gigs.
Geminid
A Politico article by Johnathan Martin describes what sounds like a spirit of fatalism among Republicans, regarding a Trump nomination. There are arguments against by Chris Christie and upstate New York Congressman Mike Lawler, but they are not confident. The pessimistic view:
From Politico, “Is Trump Inevitable? Some in the GOP are starting to wonder,” April 27, 2023.
Baud
@Geminid:
Is Trump Thanos?
prufrock
@Carlo Graziani: On Offutt AFB, inside the 1.4 billion (!) dollar STRATCOM headquarters building, is the Global Operations Center (GOC). It is an amphitheater that faces an IMAX sized screen, where the brass that controls the nuclear triad can see threat conditions. A Top Secret SCI clearance is insufficient to get you in this room, especially when things get dicey. There are pictures of this room on STRATCOM’s website.
What it doesn’t show is all of the support personnel that are required to run the massive infrastructure necessary to make the GOC function. For example, who manages the conferences over the vast phone network? The answer is junior enlisted, because phone operator is a junior enlisted billet. Those people need above TS/SCI clearances too, because you can’t tell the operator not to listen to a conference they’re supposed to be monitoring.
This applies to many of the support roles. Suggesting that they be removed is like suggesting that we should remove the bottom couple of floors from a skyscraper. The whole thing would collapse.
@Carlo Graziani:
Geminid
@Geminid: Some of this pessimism may come from a reappraisal of Ron DeSantis: not only is he trailing Trump in polling by a lot, but he looks like he also would be a,weak general election candidate, liable to be a drag on other Republican candidates just like Trump would be.
At least one of the Republicans Martin surveyed said the Dobbs decision would make for a poweful headwind generally against Republican candidates next year. Florida’s 6 week abortion ban provides a powerful line of attack against DeSantis.
Baud
@Geminid:
I don’t know. Bodily autonomy is great and all, but have you heard about Biden’s age?
Baud
@Baud:
Haha. And MSNBC is talking about age again.
ETA: holy crap, the Axios guy is a creep.
lowtechcyclist
@Steve in the ATL:
He did, the final vote was 5-4 in his favor.
Geminid
@Baud: I think that when Republican elites first sized up DeSantis, his age relative to Biden was a selling point. It still could be if he makes it to the general election. Right now though, it looks like it will take a strong candidate to dislodge Trump, and DeSantis doesn’t seem to have the right stuff.
And it would take a very strong candidate to overcome the dropoff in Republican voting by bitter enders among Trump’s base. So Republicans may be damned if they do nominate Trump, and damned if they don’t. There still might be a Republican path to victory if a major recession hits, but I’m not sure there is one otherwise.
lowtechcyclist
@Carlo Graziani:
Fixed.
Steeplejack
@Geminid:
Damn it, I never seem to bookmark links that I suddenly need later (and can’t find now). But . . . somebody on Twitter had a great niblet yesterday saying that the Republicans need a candidate to stand up to Trump who, like Moses, will never see the promised land himself. But none of them will step up to take that role.
Baud
@Geminid:
Republicans are just damned.
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
Bill Kristol asked when they’d actually left the basement in the first place.
And of course any of them who think that somehow Trumpism is going to pass and the GOP can return to where it was a decade ago, have absolutely no clue about their own party. Trumpism is only going to get more extreme, with or without Trump himself, and it owns their party.
eclare
@Steeplejack: Great simile!
Matt McIrvin
@SpaceUnit: If the threat turns out to consist of 40% of the population of the US, then what do you do? We can’t round a hundred million people up into camps.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: In the most recent head-to-heads I saw, it seemed like DeSantis (but usually not Trump) was back to beating Biden in the popular vote. But these head-to-heads are all being conducted by right-wing outfits like the Wall Street Journal. And the polls also show DeSantis as weak against Trump.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Red wave!
ETA: Hard to see the Republicans winning the popular vote, but who knows?
Gvg
@Carlo Graziani: Adam tried to address this partly. I don’t have the background to really understand but I think what he was getting at was that the military has to know where they all are in order to support each other and operate as a coherent force and not just a random mob. There is a lot of communication involved in that. a lot of planning so they don’t shoot each other constantly or that the supplies like bullets and food don’t run out. This depends on a lot of low level very young officers and coms people talking to each other and having access to a lot of classified information that is troop movements. Plus they can figure out a lot from that. If that information is kept too tight, the force is crippled. So our forces have always had to put a lot more trust in a lot more young kids just in the service than we really realized. And mostly it has worked out.
Maybe it’s not working quite right now because we have a home grown crackpot radical movement incubated in what used to be a ”respectable” subset of out population.
Suppose you are white non radical, not awash in nutty fruitcake theories. Just been living your life, raising kids, chasing promotions, whatever. It can be hard to believe in these guys. I sure don’t meet them in the office. The only evangelicals I knew were black ladies I have known for more than 20 years, and my cousin whom I avoid. She lives about 4 states away. I can see how this would be a blind spot for quite awhile, not for the professionals but for the normies. And that would be a problem for politicians who might know better but have to court voters. There are responsible ways to react, and corrupt ways. The Republican suppression was corrupt and captured.
Baud
@Gvg:
Good comment. Upvoted.
Geminid
@Steeplejack: The primaries are 10 months away, so someone who can wage a vigorous challenge to Trump may still emerge. Asa Hutchinson says he’ll try, but he’s not a strong enough candidate, I think.
Anyone taking on the role will probably foreclose a possible future nomination. That rules out Youngkin, Kemp and others who have hopes for 2028.
Republican elites may be adopting a strategy of damage control, trying to minimize the harm Trump does to down ballot candidates. Their House majority will probably be lost, but maybe they can prevent a blowout. And the Senate will still be in play.
Looking at this idealistically, a serious primary fight “for the soul of the Republican party” should be a good thing. Practically speaking, it may not help down-ballot candidates, and could even hurt them.
Tony Jay
@Geminid:
It still baffles me that all of these GOP establishment big-dongs who can see pretty clearly that Trump is going to doom their Party haven’t got together with The Money and The Propaganda to thrash out a pretty simple Primary message for the MAGOP faithful.
“Donald Trump promised YOU the world, but he failed YOU!”
They don’t have to drop Trumpism as such (because they can’t) but they have to decouple Trump from it by pounding him day and night with the facts about his failure to serve and protect the MAGOP base.
Don’t denounce the Jan 6th Insurrection, but tie its failure to Trump’s cowardice. Don’t denounce the insurrectionists, but tar Trump with his failure to use the power of the Presidency to pardon every last one of them. Don’t give an inch on Immigration extremism, but finger Trump as the reason The Wall wasn’t built. Don’t give a single one of his dwindling band of defenders a microphone and turn the Dolchstoßlegende up to 11.
That kind of character assassination is bread and butter (with a side helping of meat and potatoes) to the Propaganda organs of the Right, they could get it done pretty damned quickly and leave Trump stranded up at at his swamp motel as his faithful worshippers suddenly realise how badly the fat old fake betrayed their cause.
And yet they won’t do it. It’s great, but it’s puzzling.
Baud
MJ has been good on abortion for the last couple of weeks, after ignoring it for a long time.
brantl
@Steve in the ATL: He didn’t win the second one either, look up what happened in Ohio, it’s ridiculously obvious somebody did a bad job of cheating for Douche, in Ohio.
eclare
@Baud: Yes, it has been. Also about Ron v Disney. Rattner was on yesterday talking about that, with his charts, of course.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I don’t suppose these kinds of early hypotheticals mean much, but I do get the impression there are a bunch of money conservatives and centrists out there who see Biden as a disastrous, Jimmy-Carter-like failed President and are still desperately wishing for some “Generic Republican” other than Trump to run against him and beat him. But I don’t think the Republican base are going to let that happen.
Marmot
@Alison Rose: I hate that sentiment. It’s just demoralizing and serves no other purpose.
Geminid
@Tony Jay: Those are good messages, but I think Republican elites need a strong candidate to carry them, and they don’t have one that I can see. Brian Kemp could maybe pull it off, but if he wants to be President some day (and I think he does) he won’t run next year. Even if he won the nomination, the vindictive Trump and his followers would undermine him in the general election.
Republicans have a numbers problem already, and the Georgia Senate runoffs showed how disaffected Trump voters can deny Republicans the margin of victory in battleground states.
When Warnock’s and Ossoff’s races went to runoffs, the conventional wisdom was that because historically the Republican vote dropoff was less than the Democratic, Loeffler and Perdue had the inside track. Democrats did a good job turning out for the runoffs, but Warnock and Ossoff were also assisted by angry Trump fans staying home to punish the “RINO” establishment that allowed Biden to claim victory in their state. That dynamic will only be worse, I think, if Trump is denied the nomination next year.
gene108
@Tony Jay:
Republican voters would (1) not believe claims Trump failed, and (2) would ostracize any Republican politician who bad mouthed Trump.
Republicans who voted to impeach Trump were censured by their state party. Rusty Bowers, the Republican Secretary of State in Arizona, who testified before the J6 committee that there wasn’t fraud in Arizona, in 2020, was censured.
Trump is the Republican Party. The chance to attack Trump for failure was years ago, and no Republican did.
Marmot
@Geminid: Maybe premature, but I think that’s the kind of pessimism I can get behind. Sure, the Repubs could pull it together to all get enthusiastic about TFG again, but it seems less likely.
Frankensteinbeck
@Carlo Graziani:
This. We’re not talking half of these threats being real, or a quarter, or a tenth. This shit is a constant among conservatives. Their elected representatives talk about armed rebellion on a regular basis. There are literally millions of Americans whose hobby is fantasizing about slaughtering liberals. Groups like the Proud Boys do it nonstop, go out in their combat gear, and then don’t actually do much but cosplay or get in fistfights with counter protestors if the odds are heavily in their favor. Hell, the tweets above are a great example. They built the gallows and attacked the Capitol, an unprecedentedly rare event, but all that shit about bringing supplies to occupy DC? Didn’t happen. They were just getting their sick jollies.
The failures of J6 were real. The security you get when a concert is nearby would have stopped the attack. But the problem of sorting a few kernels of wheat from a dump truck of chaff is also real.
Geminid
@Marmot: Even if Trump can consolidate support among Republicans, he still polls badly among Independents, and that’s one reason Republican strategists discount his chances in a general election. DeSantis seems to poll poorly among that group also, maybe for different reasons like his centering culture war battles, and his signing the “6 week” abortion ban.
RSA
You’re exactly right. From the Rolling Stone article:
To use this as an example, soldiers need to know about all security procedures, and sometimes there are vulnerabilities. They need to know when they’re moving, and it may not be hard to find out where. Some information is classified; some information when combined with other information becomes automatically classified at a higher level.
I think this means focusing on trustworthiness of soldiers. We should do a better job. I’m not convinced that civilian freelancers are a lot better than government investigators, though. There are a lot of things a non-government person can do that are strictly illegal or would require a court order for a government person to do. Imagine reading a news story: “Federal investigators are using false identities to infiltrate private social media groups.” I’m sure it happens, but not all the time affecting hundreds of thousands of people who have a security clearance.
Tony Jay
@gene108:
Those were outliers, though, weren’t they? A small minority of Republican pols rowing against the direction of travel and with the full force of wingnut propaganda working against them. I’m talking about The Money, The Propaganda and The Party all turning on Trump and dumping every single MAGOP failure of the last half decade straight in his lap.
How often and easily have the MAGOP Base done tire-spinning 180s on things they’ve absolutely, positively, definitely believed with all their hearts? I’m pretty sure they’d bail on Trump if he were turned into The Man Who Betrayed Us and they were offered a new standard bearer who combined Trump’s hateful bile with the fulsome backing of all the Righty propaganda outlets.
Shorter – The MAGOP Base know ‘someone’ failed them, and making that someone Trump would suit a LOT of different needs.
Tony Jay
@Geminid:
Absolutely. They’re in a bad place with very few options and only themselves to blame. But they simply have to snap the link between Donny Doll-Dick and their radicalised Base or he’s just going to keep on shafting them election after election until he’s dead, and even then, the fight for his ‘legacy’ will cost them even more.
Bottom line, if Trump gets the nomination they lose the Presidency and probably Congress, and they still have their Trump problem to deal with, only moreso. Turn on him now, really tear him apart and make him a wingnut Judas, and they might still lose all those elections, but at least they can blame those defeats on Trump’s inevitable hissy-fit sabotage and face the future having decisively kicked him (if not Trumpism itself) to the kerb.
gvg
@Tony Jay: You are talking about legitimizing the attempt to overthrow the government. You are saying they should blame him for its failure (at least partly true) but the implication is that it was OK to even try to do that. This would be building an even more radical GOP than already exists and you want the republican money men to do this? Most of them are NOT that radical, they are Romney or McCain or rich tax breaks to the end guys. You scare me, I don’t want this to happen. I think after January 6th, our law enforcement and AG would be more likely to charge them based on intent if they did something like that right out in the open.
I am pretty sure thats what kept Trump from doing more. He didn’t want that many fingerprints on TV. He actually did IMO go too far. Any further, and the arrests and charges would have come sooner. I am not sure there was a chance of success. Maybe, but his side were terrible planners.
I see no reason for the money guys in general to do what you say. A specific money guy might for his own reasons and I suspect it wouldn’t work.
The main reason nobody can attack Trump seems to be that in order to win a fight you have to have somebody and they don’t. DeSantis is pretty much like Trump only weak and rigid. They need someone different and attractive in his own right. They haven’t got anyone. Republicans chased good ideas away about 20 years ago.
SteverinoCT
Two stories (about me, my favorite subject). On shore duty, my command had a link to a local elementary school for community outreach. One day a group of us went to do a meet-and-greet; I was assigned a 4th-grade class. Questions on this and that, and then a little girl stands up and asks, “How deep can a submarine go?” I reply, “In excess of 400 feet.” She then asks, “How fast can a submarine go?” I reply, “In excess of 20 knots,” and the whole class laughs. Her father was a sub skipper, and told her what to ask: and then told her what my answer would be. That’s confidence in your Sailors. (The max depth statement is more, now, but I’m not sure of the number).
The other story: I was in Puget Sound base on the payphone with my wife in CT (pre-cell, obviously) and said, “Not doing anything, just watching the Alaska getting underway. Oh, shit.” Not that big a secret, but even so…
FTR I had a TS clearance; you need a Secret just to *be* on a sub, due to necessary exposure to classified stuff just to get your work done. Hard to keep the helmsmen, lowest-ranking Sailors aboard, from hearing everything happening around them.
Geminid
@Tony Jay: Alternatively, Republicans can let Trump crash and burn next November, and not give Trumpers the excuse that he was stabbed in the back.
I think that’s the path Karl Rove and his peers will take; they’ll leave the job of discrediting Trump to Joe Biden and the Democrats, while trying to mitigate damage done to down ballot Republicans. Money not spent fighting Trump in the primaries can help Senate and House candidates.
Tony Jay
@gvg:
I’m saying, obviously not very clearly, that these people have absolutely zero integrity, zero honesty, and a major problem in that they backed a lazy, greedy conman all the way to a fascist insurrection against American democracy to try and overturn an election he lost. They’ve let Trump and Trump’s failures become their problem and they need to solve that problem in a way that keeps their political Party viable for elections to come.
So no, I’m not taking about legitimising the Jan 6th Insurrection. On the Right, that’s already been done. I’m talking about the people who fund, propagandise for and owe their careers to the GOP sidestepping the issue of treason and turning the Trump Problem inside out by wrapping all of the blame for all of his Administration’s failures (and I’m talking here about what the Base would consider failures) around Trump’s fat neck and drowning his popularity with them.
They’ve tried blaming it all on Woke, chai-latte sipping Liberal Elites at the heart of the Deep State and it lost them elections, they’ve tried ramping up the culture war bile, and it’s lost them elections. What they haven’t tried is blaming it all on the mendacious coward who was actually in charge when all the failures occurred and promising the wingnut base that the next guy will give them Trumpism without Trump’s failures.
Of course, they don’t seem to have anyone willing or able to fill that role, but that may be a result of the failure to isolate and hurt Trump. They’ve left him to exert his control in a way he’s comfortable with and all it’s got them is a Primary arena where everything is on Trump’s terms.
So, yeah, it’s an unpleasant subject revolving around unpleasant people, but what I’m saying is it’s surprising that the unpleasant people who – could – do it, aren’t doing it.
evodevo
@Frankensteinbeck:
As far as I can see, the actual and ongoing prosecution of the Jan6 choads has done more to discourage a second attempt at uprising than anything else. Nothing like real consequences, in the form of long jail sentences, to push the average choad back under the rock, railing on 4chan. Now if this were followed up by random highly publicized visits from your local Fibbies, to a select few of these guys, it would also be a help…
eversor
@RSA:
The issue is not young people being cleared it’s that a lot of these people should not be in the military to start with. I was cleared like crazy by 21 as were most people I knew and that was fine.
However we had white nationalists, Christian nationalists, Nazis, various people part of various ethnic gangs (the bad actors weren’t all white), people who were still dealing drugs, gamblers, people who ran out and bought stupidly expensive cars, women engaged in prostitution on base/ship/deployment, and a ton of other jackasss behavior all around.
Since they had not been convicted, often even arrested, for any of this it would not show up on an investigation. So everyone lied their asses off on their investigations and nobody saw nothing lest someone drop a dime on you.
Recruiters need to put X asses in uniform but after that they are off the hook if the person washes out. Most young people get up to all sorts of stupid and illegal stuff so a recruiter has no incentive to try and different between a person who was just being a dumb kid but really wants to do this and is going to turn things around vs someone who is a disaster waiting to happen.
Everyone in the service knows who the shitbags are and it’s always a matter of time before they lend up in deep shit. In my first command we had one person kicked out for running a gang club that brought down multiple people. One person for smuggling a gun onto a carrier after he got into a racial gang shootout a few blocks at base. One person for snooping porn on government computers. One person decided to move beyond his confederate flag and got a swastika tatoo. Then there was the constant stream of failling a piss test. We also had a few people get knocked up on ship to get kicked out rather than complete deployment.
The gammut of just dumb behavior was massive. But most of us knew that it was only a matter of time with so and so because it was obvious what was up but nothing could be done until they self immolated.
This is worse with cleared civilians where you aren’t living with each other so everyone does not know what everyone is doing, also you have more rights than a service member does.
The catch is that if you as a junior service member raise a stink about all the crap that minority of your command is up to you are in deep trouble or even danger. Even though the majority of you are on the up and up. Nothing can, or will be done, until the issue blows up. But it will be known to everyone you brought it up and then you are on the shit list of all the bad actors. For me I learned early on to stick with the good actors and just get up to normal jackass stuff and we all made it through no problems.
I have no idea how to fix this.
Tony Jay
@Geminid:
Except, he crashed and burnt in 2020. It hasn’t stopped him continuing to dominate the MAGOP, has it? Joe Biden and the Democrats can’t discredit Trump in the eyes of the MAGOP faithful, they’re not listening to them, and what they – do – hear will only tie them tighter to their rusty godling.
When he loses next year, Trump isn’t going to blame himself or the unpopularity of his policies. He’s going to blame the Deep State, the MSM and the weak-kneed GOP Establishment who obviously failed to give his movement the support they needed. And so the problem the GOP have in Trump will just get worse, more ingrained, and harder to remove, and it will keep on costing them elections until they do something about it.
I’m saying that, because of who and what they are, that ‘something’ isn’t going to be an honest accounting of their mistakes and a hard turn away from fascism, so all they’ve got left is shifting the blame onto the Failure in Chief. They have the means, the motive and the mendacity… so why haven’t they done it?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Teixiera a kid, so has no life, so it’s easy for him to pass a security check.
The real question is, Teixiera clearly can’t keep his mouth shut so he was quite likely ranting at his coworkers about his bullshit. Why didn’t they report him, or is The Insider Threat program only for civilians?
Steve in the ATL
@lowtechcyclist: @brantl: fair points!
Chief Oshkosh
@Frankensteinbeck: This take may be the wrong way around. Suppose that instead of trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, all of it was at least looked at closely. I suspect that within days of government-up-your-ass-with-a-flashlight (just asking questions, naturally!), the amount of rightwing bullshit online, including from our oh-so-sensitive military, would plummet. This could be done while still protecting first amendment rights – it’s a balance, but we’re clearly erring way too far on the side of avoiding even a hint of maybe looking at something that’s actually pretty clearly coming from a distinct, self-identifying group (no matter how large) that wants to overthrow the government AND kill half the populace.
Steve in the ATL
@Tony Jay:
damn, son—well said!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The party bigwigs are professional cowards, the big money people are LARPing as Sauron from LOTR and Right Wing media is over saturated and fighting for the same granpa crazy pants demographic in the midst of a massive advertisement down turn.
Matt McIrvin
@Tony Jay: It would require abandoning the message they all publicly bought into already, that Trump really won and the election was stolen from him by nefarious liberal forces. Can they back out now?
Geminid
@Tony Jay: Trump came close to winning in 2020. A less lazy President with a more efficient campaign could have won.
Next time, I think Trump will be thrashed, and Republicans will lose 20-40 House seats. Only his craziest supporters will pin their hopes on a 2028 run. The rest of the Republicans will know they have to move on from him.
Trump’s been a one-man show, and has no organization to carry on his legacy. I think some of his hard core supporters will simply drop out and never vote again, and that would probably to the benefit of the party long term.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: I think a lot of Republican politicians never publically embraced the stolen election idea, and some have pushed back against it.
Tony Jay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
So… chuck a few tens of millions at the professionals and let them work out the new season scripts with Angry Rupert’s people, let the yellowbellies keep their heads down while the BREAKING NEWS – NOBODY WILL SAY IT EXCEPT US – ZOMG – TRUMP LIED TO US ALL narrative runs its way through the system, tell the zombies 24/7 that the clever play is to let the Evil Liberals think they’ve won by dragging Trump through the courts, but really, you all want him punished for betraying you, don’t you? You do. DON’T YOU? Wait for the cognitive dissonance to kick in and see if the bet has paid off.
Hell, at least it would mean they don’t have to shlep down to Swamp Hotel to kiss the ring anymore.
@Matt McIrvin:
It would mean doing a hard about face and telling their viewers to forget absolutely everything they’ve been telling them for years in favour of this new reality with added extra anger and feelings of betrayal.
It’s a big ask, but I think they’ve got it in them. 8-)
@Geminid:
You could well be right. Probably are. It just baffles me that they haven’t gone with that option when there was space to Operation Valkyrie 2 – Electric Boogaloo.
You colonials and your politics of decorum. 8-)
Geminid
@Tony Jay: If Mitch McConnell and Karl Rove believed they could have gotten away with it, they would have poisoned Trump years ago.
Tony Jay
@Geminid:
They did. Unfortunately the intense heat used to coke his hamberders altered the chemical composition of the poison and rendered it useless.
Geminid
@Tony Jay: They need a different poison, maybe Novichock.
Melania: “Donald, why don’t you try on those nice silk underpants Karl Rove sent you?”
Ken
@Tony Jay: Now that you mention it, Trump does have some suspicious similarities with Rasputin….
Paul in KY
@Feathers: I hope those two traitorous fucks are still in jail.
Paul in KY
@Steeplejack: That’s cause they are all craven. Just like the craven Nazi that tried to assasinate Hitler with that bomb. He had some complicated thing he setup so he could escape. Bomb gets accidently moved and Hitler survives. He should have just suicided, in hindsight.
Bill Arnold
@Mike S:
Roughly 1999, a co-worker brought a new Microsoft flight simulator game to the office and installed it on a regularly-wiped test machine. It had a 737 mode and the very first thing I did was take off, fly it to NYC, and hit one of the World Trade Center buildings at full throttle. (Was trying to fly between them but was not practiced with the 737; first flight.)
It was the obvious thing to do. Rice was trying to assert the indefensible.
PJ
@Bill Arnold: A guy crashed a plane into the lawn of the White House (he missed the building) during the Clinton Administration (on Sept. 12, 1994, no less). It was in the Washington Post. There was no way Condi Rice was not aware of that. She was just trying to cover her ass for her gross negligence.
PJ
@Geminid: Trump did not come close to winning in 2020. He lost by 7 million votes and over 70 electoral votes.
Bill Arnold
@Frankensteinbeck:
I’m confused. Are you suggesting that openly talking about killing high tens of millions of Americans should not be disqualifying for being being granted a security clearance?
I do not want such people residing in the USA, and certainly not in the US military or with a security clearance.
artem1s
@Geminid:
The fact that they think they can’t survive challenging Trump in 2024 is what rules them out as viable candidates for any future elections. Trump isn’t the problem – the GOP (and MSM) is addicted to his brand and voter suppression in order to win elections – that’s the problem. That’s not going away for at least a couple of decades. It’s not a problem for the Dems anymore because they have repeatedly shown they can crush someone who is running on his brand. And, since Hillary, the Dems have demonstrated they can overcome significant voter suppression too.
Geminid
@PJ: I thought Trump came close. The 7 million popular votes had no weight by themselves. My recollection is that Biden carried Pennsylvania by ~80,000 votes out of more than 6 million cast. He carried Wisconsin and Nevada by narrower margins, and his margins in Arizona and Georgia were even tighter.
You may not call that close, but I do.
Geminid
@artem1s: You say Youngkin and Kemp’s unwillingness to challenge Trump rules them out for any future election. Why would a governor not seeking the Presidential nomination while in the middle of his term rule him out?
PJ
@Geminid:
If he had needed only one of those states, I’d agree with you, but he needed like six of them, which meant his scheme to overturn the election was highly unlikely to succeed.
Bill Arnold
@PJ:
50 (IIRC) thousand votes in a few battleground states would have swung the 2020 election (electoral college) to Trump. It was even closer than the 2016 election, in that respect. About 80K (IIRC) votes in 2016 would have swung that election.
Paul in KY
@RSA: I hope Melzer is in Leavenworth doing a 25 year sentence.
Paul in KY
@Tony Jay: TFG would turn on a dime, if he perceived a positive result from doing that.
Paul in KY
@Tony Jay: I hope they don’t take your advice, Tony.
Geminid
@PJ: I am not talking about Trump’s attempt to overturn the election. That’s not the point. This election saw well over 130 million votes cast, and Biden’s margins in 5 states totaled under 160,000. That’s close in my book even if it’s not in yours.
Tony Jay
@Paul in KY:
They won’t. Not this cycle, anyway.
burritoboy
People wondering why the Republican Party can’t quit Trump….you’re still not understanding fascism (and it’s getting very late for you to still not understand). Fascists don’t care about politics as politics exists within the tradition of democratic republicanism. Fascism understands politics as the battlefield of the will to power – i.e. gaining absolute victory and absolute power through the leader’s will to power. Anything less is irrelevant within fascism. Democratic republicanism is about rational discourse around rational policy goals. Within democratic republicanism, moving a policy a tiny amount in the way you want it to go is what politics is all about. There’s no problem having a new or slightly different leadership within democratic republicanism, because the personal identity (or will to power) of the leadership – while of course important – is not what political parties in democratic republics do.
The two understandings don’t intersect – they are in absolute, fundamental contradiction to each other. The base of the Republican Party has been fascist-ized – that means that the only thing (quite literally) that matters is the victory of the leader. Lowering taxes slightly – or almost any concrete doable political goal – is irrelevant except insofar as it is one expression of the total victory. Fascist political parties ultimately rely on their followers – whether directly or vicariously – feeling that sense of elation of victory over their enemies. If they don’t generate that emotional feeling (note: it’s an emotion, and is not some rational sense of being satisfied with a policy achievement), the fascist party simply disappears.
Fascist parties thus can’t just select a new leader – selecting a new leader would mean that the fascist followers have been defeated in their own eyes. Defeat isn’t some temporary setback – since they are fascists, they expect their enemies to treat them as they would have treated their enemies (whether they’re explicit about it or not – they would largely destroy or at least violently suppress their enemies). Thus, defeat is apocalyptic, world-ending. That defeat will elicit most of the followers converting back into non-political people who are mostly passively waiting for the next leader to emerge. And that’s not a rational process or one that the “party leadership” has anything to do with.