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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   27860 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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Strange Rumblings in Columbia: Inauguration Day Weirdness

Some odd news and sights coming out of Washington in the last few days. First, the public Inauguration Day ceremony on the National Mall was cancelled. Ostensibly due to poor weather (the forecasted high temperature for Inauguration Day is 28F/-2C), although other Presidents have had public ceremonies in cooler temperatures. President Trump would be sworn in the Congressional chamber of the Capitol building in front of the full Congress, similar to a state of the Union address.

Then a day or two ago ago, that plan was cancelled, and the ceremony is being moved to the White House. It will be much smaller and most of Congress will not be there.

When Trump arrived in Virginia yesterday, all the cars in the motorcade had an odd feature. A three foot tall pole-like device attached to the roof, around 4 inches wide. It is apparently some kind of anti-drone countermeasure. There are rumors spreading that the first two ceremony types were canceled due to intelligence reports of a credible threat of drone attack.

Adding to the already odd protocol, it appears that Vice-President elect JD Vance will not even be present in Washington DC for the inauguration and will be sworn in at an undisclosed location somewhere else. This harks back to the years after 9/11 when Vice President Cheney would spend State of the Union addresses in an undisclosed bunker in case of a massive attack.

Meanwhile, there are still several thousand troops in Washington DC, who were brought in to safeguard the election certification process.

This all seems very odd. If this is in response to a foreign threat of some kind it seems like a very credible and serious one indeed. It is also of course sending bolts of static electricity through the creases of my tinfoil hat, but I have no idea how to interpret them. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts on this.

Then a day or two ago ago, that plan was cancelled, and the ceremony is being moved to the White House. It will be much smaller and most of Congress will not be there.

If you are repeating rumours, add qualifiers or weasel words. Such as "I have heard that..." or "Rumour has it that...". As time has shown, Vance and Trump were sworn in the Capitol building.

Adding to the already odd protocol, it appears that Vice-President elect JD Vance will not even be present in Washington DC for the inauguration and will be sworn in at an undisclosed location somewhere else.

What are the chances that he does what he joked about?

"Hopefully everyone is cool with me skipping the inauguration so I can go to the national title game"

(For those unfamiliar or uninterested, the college football team of his undergrad alma mater Ohio State is facing Notre Dame roughly 7 hours after the inauguration)

I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts on this.

As a conspiracy theorist, my belief is that this is Trump/his team discovering real, serious attempts on his life coming from within the government. The deep state likes to plan these things out in advance (to this date there is no non-conspiracy explanation for the January 6 pipe bomb affair), and suddenly shifting the location is going to throw a wrench into their plans.

My conspiracy theory: mossad told them that Iran was about to drone attack Trump. That plays on his sense of self importance and helps inception him into going to war with Iran later on.

The j6 pipe bombs could have been planted by a foreign adversary, couldn't they have?

That's still a conspiracy...

Who? Remember that whoever planted the pipe bombs had the ability to scramble and corrupt cellphone data after it was given to the FBI, and use magical powers to prevent the FBI from investigating further or getting the uncorrupted data from the telecom company by just asking them again. If you want to blame a foreign adversary, the US is completely owned and compromised.

https://cha.house.gov/2025/1/chairs-loudermilk-massie-release-january-6-2021-pipe-bomb-report

"The FBI’s Investigation into the Pipe Bomber: The FBI did not receive “corrupted data” from one of the major cell carriers in connection with its investigation into the pipe bomber. A former senior FBI official testified that the major cell carrier companies provided “corrupted” cell data to the FBI and suggested that that “corrupted” data may have contained the identity of the pipe bomber; however, in responses to letters from the Subcommittee, the major cell carriers confirmed that they did not provide corrupted data to the FBI and that the FBI never notified them of any issues with accessing the cellular data."

I'm not sure the corrupted cellphone data thing is as you're describing it.

Based on this report, it seems like either

  1. There was no corrupted data and the FBI guy just said something completely erroneous out of incompetence.

  2. The cellphone companies are not aware of the corrupted data, but it's real.

  3. Some sort of miscommunication based on different definitions of the term "corrupted data" between the FBI and cell phone companies.

I can understand not wanting to doubt the sterling moral character of the US intelligence agencies, but this explanation is actually less realistic than the conspiracy approach. The FBI failing to follow a lead on a person who was potentially trying to blow up the president/vice president) because of a miscommunication with a telecom company is a level of incompetence that beggars belief. This is the sort of excuse that would get someone fired from their job at a supermarket or furniture store, and yet there was no corrective action for an investigation into someone attempting to blow up the president during the inauguration? Every single one of the points you raised could have been corrected within a few minutes by someone who actually wanted to investigate the situation, and yet nothing of the sort has happened - this is substantially less realistic than the idea that the FBI is malicious.

I think one of us has misunderstood the other. I'm saying what if there never was any corrupted data and the FBI guy was just talking out of his ass?

That's the original conspiracy theory claim - the FBI lying to cover up something else (most likely that the person planting the pipe bomb was working for intelligence).

Possibly relevant concurrent events: DJI (the Chinese drone company) lifts geofencing restrictions in the US: https://viewpoints.dji.com/blog/geo-system-update

It lifted its own geofencing and is pulling in restriction data from a FAA API to populate US specific geofences. DJI used to just utilize NOTAM universal warning zones as first point of contact, but various ATCs around the world kept putting in requests for temporary geofences for special events that DJI just ended up witb different APIs to submit. Not sure what the latest firmware is like, but I hear its made things massively easier for a country to issue geofencing restrictions without any users, even DJI, knowing why.

it could also be massive case of ass covering. 4 years ago security was screwed up during the certification process and there have been multiple attempts on Trumps life. you don't want to be the person in charge if something goes wrong unless you have checked every box.

And also weird that it took so many attempts on the life of Trump to get them to try at all.

I’ll be honest, I think this is mostly theater, either for domestic audiences “see, we actually don’t want anything to happen to him”, or foreign audiences “we know, don’t try it.” It seems weird to make all of this public if the goal is to prevent an assassination. They know where he’ll be and when, and it would seem odd that they situation is serious enough that they have to change venues twice yet not serious enough that they aren’t worried about making the venue public information. Serious enough that you need anti drone tech, but not serious enough that you might do something like unmarked cars that an agent couldn’t locate.

Might they be covering their asses with, not foreigners, not the public, but a possible Trump appointee?

Yeah that's my assumption, the only reassurance I get from this is in my belief that the deep state tried to kill Trump. Oh oh now you're going to be president we'll do our jobs properly, look at all these very serious things we are doing! We didn't put a bunch of counter-snipers in your protection and tell them they were on crowd control, we didn't put a twenty year old who was so green he forgot his flipping radio in charge of them, hell we actually brought enough radios for everyone, so we also won't be partnering with local law enforcement then cutting them out of comms and putting them in charge of buildings they can't see! Don't just fire the lot of us and salt the earth behind you, we are actually capable of doing what we were hired to do!

This all seems very odd. If this is in response to a foreign threat of some kind it seems like a very credible and serious one indeed. It is also of course sending bolts of static electricity through the creases of my tinfoil hat, but I have no idea how to interpret them. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts on this.

I just want you to applaud you for the beautiful prose of this paragraph.

Where are you finding this information? CBS is still reporting, in an article updated 25 minutes ago, that everything will take place in the Rotunda and that Vance will be present.

Katie Hopkins reporting.

the ceremony is being moved to the White House.

So I presume Capt. Michael Byrd of the US Capitol Police will not be there, packing heat. A sensible precaution.

Ostensibly due to poor weather (the forecasted high temperature for Inauguration Day is 28F/-2C), although other Presidents have had public ceremonies in cooler temperatures.

I’m sure there are many who would be happy to see Trump have his own William Henry Harrison moment.

I shudder to think what that would mean for Vance's actions, given that Harrison's successor, John Tyler, later became the only U. S. president to openly swear allegiance to a polity firing on U. S. troops....

That's a weird thing to worry about.

It could also be an over correction from the USSS. After two assassination attempts you can’t blame them.

After Jan. 6th and other incidents, no one taking any chances.

I just today learned of a subreddit called r/somethingiswrong2024, where the crowd of disappointed liberals have already spiralled to QAnon levels of theorizing how somehow the election will be annulled and Kamala will win, and naturally the irregulaties surrounding the swearing in have ended up throwing fuel to the fire by shovelful.

I think it’s perfectly predictable. When elections take on apocalyptic significance, it’s easy to convince people to believe in fraud when they don’t when.

I’ll be honest, politics is something that works best when people aren’t that interested. The people most likely to take it too seriously are the ones who know least about the issues and policies that they’re indirectly voting on. They’re watching it like wrestling fans, except that they believe that civilization itself hangs on the outcome.

The people most likely to take it too seriously are the ones who know least about the issues and policies that they’re indirectly voting on.

Parallel to this, the people most likely to engage in political activism are paradoxically the least likely to perform it effectively i.e. to successfully recruit new supporters to a political cause, as they tend to lack the necessary social skills etc. I remember this getting discussed multiple times on the old subreddit.

Note what the primary difference is between this and qanon, birthers, pizzagaters etc - media coverage.

Lots of people have reasons to kill DJT and a damn good amount of them are state actors or equivalent with the means to pull off sophisticated assassinations.

Ukraine, Iran, radical left groups, parts of USG afraid of retaliation, now even hardcore Zionists.

And that's the obvious ones, let's not count the parties that would lose from his economic policy enough to consider direct action. Or those accelerationists that know the chaos that the world would be plunged into if he was gunned down now.

I'm sure the Secret Service is tied into knots right now. But what this atmosphere of siege will mean politically, if anything, I don't know. Lots of people want to kill even a normal POTUS.

Uh, you kill Trump, you get president Vance(and while it’s an interesting legal question who technically assumes the presidency if you knock him off too, in practice the principle of party rule is too strong to be overcome, so it would be a Republican with a tough-as-nails reputation). I’m not sure the people who have an interest in averting a Trump presidency would find that preferable.

If Trump is somehow assassinated during his inaugural address, IMO that has a very good chance of kicking off a civil war.

Probably, yes. Particularly if the popular legitimacy answer(a hardline member of the same party succeeds) conflicts with the technical legal line of succession(which has never even gotten to Secretary of State).

A wave of terrorism, maybe. You need high-ranking officers to kick-off a proper civil war.

This is why there's a VPOTUS of course, but Vance may be more malleable to certain business and geopolitical interests without his boss, and the MAGA movement could dissolve without it's figurehead.

I agree it's unlikely to change that much, but if your back is against the wall and you can get a mulligan, you might want to take the risk.

Speaker of the House becomes president after Vance if both were taken out at once. If Vance gets assassinated a few days/weeks/months after Trump then it would just be whoever Vance's VP is

I'm sure the Secret Service is tied into knots right now. But what this atmosphere of siege will mean politically, if anything, I don't know.

I'm willing to predict "not much". Maybe public events will be smaller or more selective, but that doesn't matter much until 2026 anyway.

A pity that we're not making this public event "smaller" and "more selective" on the grounds that when your country is 36 trillion dollars in the hole, it's frankly obscene to be spending anything on a glorified public party. All that's needed for the inauguration is the President, the VP, and the Chief Justice to administer the oath, and maybe a BBC camera crew to show the rest of the world that the inauguration actually happened, plus the usual Secret Service security that'd be there anyway. Anything beyond that is frivolity.

How much of the budget is being footed by the taxpayer? Corporations, as we know, have pitched in millions for this particular party.

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