Tag Archives: politics

This Isn’t Just Political Mischief

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Nor is it merely divisiveness.

Jay Jones, Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Virginia Attorney General, has threatened a political opponent, Todd Gilbert, at the time the Republican Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, with murder, with implied threats against his wife and children, as well. This was as recently as August 2022. What he texted another delegate, a Republican:

Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, Hitler and Pol Pot. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head.

Here’s Jones’ full sequence:

From inflicting metaphorical violence on us average Americans with their government shutdown to threatening physical violence in the form of murder threats by a candidate for State Attorney General(!)—this is, mind you, against years of assaults like Bernie Sanders smearing Republicans as Nazis, followed shortly by a mass murder attempt against Republican Congressmen at a baseball practice; Chuck Schumer threatening by name two Supreme Court Justices, followed shortly by a murder attempt against one of them; Party politicians in drumbeat cadence calling Donald Trump Nazi, Hitlerian, a threat to democracy, followed shortly by two murder attempts—this is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s view of how to deal with their political opponents. If they don’t get their way, they will attack American citizens as a whole and seek to murder their political opponents.

And just to drive home Party’s point, Jones is refusing to withdraw his candidacy for State AG, and no one in Party is pushing him to withdraw. To a man and woman, Party politicians are downplaying Jones’ threats, pretending he was joking.

This is the Party that wants to seize control of our Congress in 2026 and seize the White House in 2028.

State Auspices

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Louisiana’s Republican Governor, Jeff Landry, has acknowledged that his State has a crime problem for all that the State has made laudable progress against crime (that’s how bad it had been). It would be good if Progressive-Democrat Governors had the same integrity, introspection, and insight for their States, but they are what they are.

Where I disagree with Landry, though, is this:

Louisiana GOP Governor Jeff Landry has asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deploy as many as 1,000 state National Guardsmen to help curb crime.

Landry doesn’t need SecDef to Federalize the National Guard to do this. He can call up his State’s 1,000 Guardsmen for the purpose himself. If he needs the Guard, he needs to stop injecting delays and get it done.

“We cannot normalize”

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ICE and CBP are patrolling downtown Chicago and arresting criminals along the way. DHS noted that (with accompanying images)

11 violent rioters were arrested last night in Chicago outside the ICE detention facility: these are two guns that were taken off rioters in Chicago right against the fence at our ICE detention facility. An investigation is underway into what appears to be some sort of explosive device found last night near the ICE Chicago detention facility.

Progressive-Democrat Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is dismayed, and he’s hyping the fact that ICE and CBP agents are armed in a dangerous city while they go about their intrinsically dangerous job of law enforcement. He said this, too:

We cannot normalize militarizing American cities and suburbs. Make sure you know your rights and stay alert.

Neither can we normalize violent lawlessness, even in Chicago. We do know our rights, we are staying alert, and so do—and are—those law enforcement personnel. Pritzker, though, would rather protect the criminals rampant in one of his State’s major cities than protect the residents of that city.

Part of the Problem

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The Department of Defense, first under the Biden administration, but continuing under the Trump administration, is having far too much trouble deploying “AI weapons,” even figuring out how to use those it has deployed. An illustration of this is this:

The Pentagon has also struggled to find software that can successfully control large numbers of drones, made by different companies, working in coordination to find and potentially strike a target—a key to making the Replicator vision work.

This isn’t so much a software commonality or interoperability problem as it is a problem with bureaucrats giving too much weight to the desires of contractors and their lobbyists, each of whom insist on their own proprietary software. What’s needed here isn’t more money (although sometimes that helps), it’s an operational officer, one fresh in from a combatant command that’s facing current conflicts, being put in charge of AI development and programs. This officer, independent of the lobbyists, needs to write a better requirements document, one that specifies the standards of commonality (not merely interoperability—this is software, not hardware) that each contractor and contractor wannabe must meet in order for their AI package to be considered.

Beyond that, this AI OIC must open his Requests for Proposals far beyond the major contractors and take in RFPs from small businesses and startups—that’s where the ideas and agility exist—then push the development and acquisition pace, eliminating the layers of bureaucrats’ reviews.

Finally, this AI OIC must be willing to spend money on mistakes and dead ends rather than demanding (near) perfection at one stage before moving on to the next.

That’s just the development side. The AI OIC also must have four or five teams of operational officers—again, fresh in from combatant commands—working on tactics and strategies that make use of the four or five leading AI weapons candidates to investigate best uses for integrating these weapons into a combatant command unit’s (at all levels) existing suite of weapons. That tactics and strategies development effort should also lead to adjustments in those units’ existing tactics and those commands’ existing strategies, even their existing suites of weapons.

There’re just too much bureaucracy and too little operational consideration in the currently extant DoD. SecDef is making progress on the bureaucracy qua bureaucracy, but he’s got a long way to go. It’s time for him to zero in on lethality.

A Mistake

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DHS, according to Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, is looking at so-called “ICE tracking apps,” which allow users to share locations of immigration enforcement activity in real time. Of course they should be looking at these.

However.

According to McLaughlin, while such apps might currently be legal, they are “being used by gangs, suspected terrorists, and others to evade law enforcement and even target officers.”
She said the Department of Justice might consider whether the apps and other tracking tools amount to obstruction of justice.

That’s looking at the wrong end of the apps. It’s certainly true that, as McLaughlin also says, there has been a 1,000% increase in assaults against ICE officers.

But the way to deal with that is not to go after the apps as obstructions of justice. The proper way to deal with that is to treat the use of the apps in particular ways as obstructions of justice, backtrack those uses to their users, and then to go after the users who actually obstruct justice or who interfere with law enforcement officers in the course of their actions.

The apps themselves are merely tools. They’re agnostic in themselves; it’s the users who are…not agnostic.

Moreover, targeting the apps over their misuse also would fuel the Left’s war on our 2nd Amendment, making it easier to target our weapons over their misuse.