What Happens if Trump is Assassinated?

Via Althouse, Scott Adams predicts an (or another) attempt on Trump's life. It makes perfect sense, he says:

It would be easy to blame the protesters for taking things too far. But all they are doing is responding to hate speech from the next Hitler. Shouldn’t someone be fighting hard to stop Hitler? We can’t blame people for wanting fewer Hitlers....

Fast-forward to today and we see the media priming the public to try to kill Trump, or at least create some photogenic mayhem at a public event. Again, no one is sitting in a room plotting Trump’s death, but – let’s be honest – at least half of the media believes Trump is the next Hitler, and a Hitler assassination would be morally justified. Also great for ratings. The media would not be charged with any crime for triggering some nut to act. There would be no smoking gun. No guilt. No repercussions. Just better ratings and bonuses all around.

In the 2D world of reason, no one in the media consciously wants a candidate for president to be injured, and no one is consciously acting in a way that would make it happen. But in the 3D world of persuasion, society has decided to lance the wart that is Trump. Collectively – the media, the public, and the other candidates – are creating a situation that is deeply dangerous for Trump.

Adams cites a British author who did security for Farage, who describes the effects this will have on Trump's campaign.

I said that the Chicago disruption tactics would become standard against disfavored (i.e. conservative or Republican) candidates if they worked. I wonder if instead we'll just proceed directly to killing Republican candidates? They're not always as aggravating as Trump's rhetoric can make him, but they're always portrayed as deeply evil.

UPDATE: BLM says they are totally going to "shut down" the Republican Convention if they can. You can be sure that there will be plenty of police clashes with activists no matter who the frontrunner is, setting up the narrative for the fall. The Republican nominee will be portrayed as a deeply racist hater inheritor of Trumpist violence, by the very people engaged in trying to "shut down" opposing speech.

By the end of it all, America may decide it's ready for the "law and order" candidate. Right now, today, everybody is horrified by Trump. Three more months of this, and people may be wondering who is strong enough to put a stop to it.

Yeah, That's What I Figured

Headline: "Trump orders arrest of violent protesters. Wants 'law and order' for the United States."

UPDATE: The Obama administration's immigration efforts are setting Trump up for success.

Sturgill Simpson on NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts

Grim introduced Mr. Simpson the other day and I enjoyed his sound. NPR has a neat little program called Tiny Desk Concerts where musicians play a few songs live in the NPR offices. I've enjoyed several of these concerts now.

The 30% Solution

The Speed Metal band Metallica used to say, "Kill 'em all." But in a scholarly treatment of the world's worst wars, from ancient Athens to the Thirty Years war and from Napoleon to the Confederacy, Spengler says that's not necessary. Killing just 30% of the military-aged male population appears to do the trick.

Rather bloody mathematics, that, but his citations are chiefly to solid academic works. I wonder if he hasn't identified something universal in the inflection point. If so, I wonder why that universal would hold in such different times and cultures.

UPDATE: Thinking about this more overnight, I notice the omission of two examples of war of attrition that I'd have expected to see: the Vietnam War, and the Russian war in Afghanistan. Figures for Vietnam are controversial, but the high-end numbers don't support anything like a 30% loss of military aged males: the population of Vietnam actually grew rapidly during the war, from 28 to 45 million. I'll estimate military-aged as roughly 1/3rd of any population, with males being roughly 1/2, so 1/16th is the very rough estimate for military-aged males in a population. The highest number of estimated Vietnamese killed is 3.1 million; 1/6th of 28 million is 4.7 million. But in fact the population will have added nearly an additional 5 million military-aged males during the 20 years of the war, with those deaths being spread out over the whole course of the war and not all happening at once.

Thus I estimate deaths would have needed to be twice what they were and then some to attain the 30%, and that's if the highest estimates of dead are accurate. If the lower estimates are accurate instead, then more than six times as many deaths would have been necessary to attain the figure Spengler describes.

For Afghanistan, the total population is thought to have been around 16 million in 1981-2. 1/6th of that is 2.7 million. The 9 year Soviet war killed -- again, taking the highest estimate -- 1.6 million. So once again, in spite of Soviet brutality, they never approached the figure Spengler describes.

So these two possible counter-examples, in which industrial powers attempted to use attrition as a strategy, both fail to disprove his argument.

National Review: Die, White Working Class

Kevin Williamson, who has often been cited here and who is certainly a good writer capable of clear and clever thought, thinks America's white working class is vicious and worthless, and we'd be better off if they died out.

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog—you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that...

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. The white American under-class is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.

He's a good enough writer that I assume he didn't misspeak.

I don't share his economic theories. I do think immigration had a major effect on destroying America's working class, and I think the free-trade policies he champions did too. Bracket that, though: we'll agree to disagree on the question.

The welfare dependency he cites is a major part of the problem. America's welfare state, set up precisely to help the poorest Americans, has been deeply destructive to their lives and culture. It should be dismantled.

However, I am surprised that he doesn't see the effect of both welfare and over-regulation on the traditional economies of these regions. What did they ever produce? Small farms. You weren't going to get rich running a family farm, but you could sell the milk you got from your cow each day, and cheese, and a few crops. You were going to have to work hard (the absence of which he says is the root of the moral rot he describes). You'd need to keep the family together, somehow, to get that work done. Presumably no one would do it if they could sit back and collect a check from D.C., and the checks get bigger if the family falls apart. Subsidize anything and you get more of it.

But now not only is there the check, there's a huge set of rules and regulations that ban you from collecting and selling your cow's milk without expensive technological investments. You'd need to hire a lawyer to make sure your farm wasn't violating rules nine ways to Sunday.

The black market in drugs flourishes in part because, if everything you know how to do for money is illegal, you might as well do the most profitable one of the crimes.

The problems he cites of course generalize to all of America's working poor, but if you wrote the same column about the urban poor you'd be fired as a racist. (John Derbyshire's equally honest treatment of urban black culture in America is how he got shown the door). I won't call for that, because I value honesty. It's good to speak your mind plainly. Being offensive is sometimes helpful to breaking a deadlock on a big problem. The solution to America's poverty problem is not that the poor communities should 'die out,' however.

The solution is dismantling the existing transfer-payment welfare system and also the vast set of food production regulations that make farming the business of corporations instead of small family farms. In their place, we will need to set up CCC-style systems to teach people how to do the things that the current generation no longer knows how to do because their grandparents had to give it up.

We can structure our regulations to make it more likely that small family farms succeed, and we can make work-based systems like this the only welfare game going. Do that, and you'll have a healthier working poor. They'll still be poor. But they will have decent lives.

Along the way, we'll also get a better kind of food. Small farmers doing grass-fed, grass-finished beef or free-range chickens is something people want anyway: it's just too expensive to be marketable. Increase the supply vastly, however, and the price will come down. Doing so will ultimately be much cheaper than the transfer-payment systems we have now, and give us several goods we would be glad to have.

Pressing Charges

From a Trump rally in Kansas City (not the one in Wichita Valerie cited):

“I hope they get put into, I hope these guys get thrown into jail. They’ll never do it again. It’ll destroy their record. They’ll have to explain to mom and dad why they have a police record, and why they can’t get a job. And you know what? I’m going to start pressing charges against these people. And then we won’t have a problem.

“And I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to ruin somebody’s life. They’re probably good kids, you know. They’re probably good kids. I don’t what to ruin people’s lives. But the only way we’re going to stop this craziness is if we press charges. Because then their lives are going to be ruined. They’re going to know their lives are going to be ruined. So I’ll just tell you folks from now on, if you do anything, we’re pressing charges, okay?”

Trump is really good at playing the crowd. He's talking the right way now -- not 'Hey, I'll pay your legal fees if you beat up a protester.' American Presidents don't invite brown shirts to engage in violence against protesters. They use official police forces.

If he can make that shift, he will be poised to run as the law-and-order candidate in the fall. It will be difficult for Clinton or Sanders to take the same tone, because the BLM movement has their number. They can't afford to stand up to this kind of anti-free-speech, lawless disruption.

You'll Get Some On You

Indiana U is hosting an interdisciplinary conference in Psychoanalysis and Analytic Philosophy. I can't think of anything worse for Analytic Philosophy, although frankly that faction of the field deserves what it courts.

A History Lesson on Hillary Clinton

Oddly enough, Clinton enjoys her strongest support among older Democrats, the ones who were around and ought to remember all this. The younger Democrats, who didn't have the opportunity to see the constant crime and deceit, are the ones who have her figured out. That's an interesting irony.

UPDATE: Salon magazine hits the Clintons hard from the left.

UPDATE: Also, this progressive blogger who remembers the history unkindly.

The Anti-Klan Rally Will Be Held At The Klan Rally

I haven't seen a uniformed member of the Ku Klux Klan anywhere in Georgia since I was a boy. However, on April 23rd there is going to be a Klan rally at Stone Mountain (which has the dubious distinction of being the place where the Klan was reborn in 1915 after its successful suppression by Federal Marshals teamed up with Beford Forrest and other former-Confederate luminaries). I know this because there is going to be an anti-Klan rally at the Klan rally, and the group organizing it is soliciting attendance.

This group is called "All Out ATL," apparently a local wing of a nationwide movement. They are, naturally, Bernie Sanders voters who speak blithely about revolution. They are better fit to keep company with the Klan than they realize, preferring direct action and street violence to suppress their political opponents and smooth the way for their agenda. They see themselves as in "solidarity" (of course) with the protesting groups that shut down the Trump rally in Chicago. The comparison would no doubt shock them, but in truth they are a lot alike. I imagine the one group has more grad students than the other, but they are both motivated by hate and a taste for suppressing their enemies with force.

The Klan is a despicable organization we ought to oppose. It is possible to do so without becoming like them.

Politics as the Jerry Springer Show

Possibly also an assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

UPDATE: Drudge linked this video of Ronald Reagan's response to lawbreaking protests. It's worth watching for the short clip of him reading the riot act to the college faculty.

Bring the crowd to its feet

This looks like good exercise.

I'm Looking At You, Ash Carter

As our Secretary of Defense celebrates his decision to force all combat positions open to women in the military, I would like to present a Marine Corps recruit currently in training at Parris Island (the Land that Time Forgot). I could tell you her name, as a friend of mine worked with her while she was in the USMC's JROTC. All I'm going to tell you is that she is a young woman of spirit and dedication, and that she is exactly what the USMC is looking for right now.

Marines in the audience will notice that her belt is out of order and needs to be cut. At this stage in her career, that error on her DIs and not on her. Being a country girl, I'm sure she can shoot a rifle well. She says she wants to be a Marine to make her parents proud, and to do something important with her life. Those are both honorable, laudable goals. I think the world of this young woman and wish her well.

All the same, take a close look at what we're doing.

And now for something completely different

The amazing thing is, he barely seems to be moving his hands:

The Shutdown in Chicago

It was carefully organized, of course, but (as I heard someone remark last night) that doesn't change the fact that any other candidate could have held a rally in Chicago without drawing this reaction. For now: if this is seen to have been effective at killing the Trump candidacy, it will become a regular playbook entry for these organizations. BLM has made disrupting political rallies a standard of its tactics already, though the scale of this was larger.

Ironically, that would end up having a fascist effect on American politics even though the people behind this claim to be motivated by a fear of fascism.

He Is Very Disappointed In Us

David Frum, writing in the Atlantic, says of the President:

He admits one major mistake: not making sufficient allowances for how unreasonable other people are.

Apparently he inherited lousy allies as well as an American population that is significantly less capable than he expected.

Brokerage and floor fights

Knowing nothing of brokered conventions, and having recently discovered I can't even figure out my own state's rules for allotting delegates to candidates, I found this article by Michael Barone interesting.  He predicts that the rules will permit the party to outmaneuver Trump almost no matter how the vote comes out, that Cruz will end up with the nomination, and that we'll know the answer by June.

She Was One of Us

Hannah Arendt:

[W]hat would have become of that, had she not come to these [American] shores — who knows? It was the experience of the Republic here which decisively shaped her political thinking, tempered as it was in the fires of European tyranny and catastrophe, and forever supported by her grounding in classical thought. America taught her a way beyond the hardened alternatives of left and right from which she had escaped; and the idea of the Republic, as the realistic chance for freedom, remained dear to her even in its darkening days.

She died in her error, as I hope to myself.

Apocalyptic Modified Blues

Friday Night AMV

For Saturday night. I remember when this song was popular.

Oh, and wait for it.

She Sure -Sounds- Like a Target

FOX News is reporting that the FBI has been questioning Clinton's IT dude in such a way as to try to tie together images of then-Secretary Clinton using her electronic devices with the email server's records. The claim is that they are trying to put together voids in the email record, so they can get some sense of just what she deleted as "personal" and never turned over to State.

They are, in other words, looking at her personally. They want to know exactly what she herself was doing, and how it ties into the records they are examining.

If that's not a "target" of the investigation, it's certainly a "subject" of the investigation in the technical terminology they use. The real point of her denials of being a "target" is that she wants to say something like this:

This is just a security review! Nobody is thinking of indicting me!

If they're looking at images of her and trying to tie them to events, though, they're looking at her personally. This was never just a security review, but it might have been targeted at finding a scapegoat among her chief aides. Now it sounds like they are doing the right thing, and targeting her personally for her manifest and constant violations of national security law.