It's Trump's Fault!

Whether the "Seditious Six" casmpaign to convince military members to refuse "illegal" orders from Trump is actually a CIA operation is up in the air, but it's separate from the recent allegations that the shootings of two National Guard members in Washington last Wednesday are "Trump's fault". The most respectable version of this line can be found at Real Clear Politics in a piece from The Atlantic, A Terrible and Avoidable Tragedy in D.C.:

The troops, deployed in an effort to reduce crime, are untrained in law enforcement; their days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform. Commanders, in a memo that was included in litigation challenging the high-visibility mission in D.C., argued that this could put them in danger. The Justice Department countered that the risk was merely “speculative.” It wasn’t. There are costs to performatively deploying members of the military—one of which is the risk of endangering them.

Let's parse this out. The argument is that the National Guard troops in Washington have been deployed "performatively", which implies that this is somehow unrelated to their actual function, which is otherwise unspecified (Hurricane relief? Border control? Overseas opeerations?) I did a web search on "performative" and got several definitions that I think reflect what the writer means by using the word in this context:

• done or expressed insincerely or inauthentically, typically with the intention of impressing others or improving one's own image
• a pejorative for people that publicly act out in a way to show their goodness and virtue but do not actually do the real work
• done or expressed for the sake of appearance, esp. to impress others or to improve one's own image.

The writer stresses this by asserting the troops' "days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform". That two members should be shot by an aggrieved illegal is just the natural consequence of such a feckless deployment.

But in the wake of the Martin Luther King assassination, there were riots in Washington:

As the violence and property destruction continued, President Lyndon B. Johnson called in U.S. troops to quell the disturbance and District of Columbia Mayor Walter E. Washington declared a 5:30 p.m. curfew. About 6,000 troops were mobilized in the District by dusk on April 5, including units from the Army and the Marine Corps as well as the D.C. National Guard.

. . . More than 13,000 soldiers patrolled Washington, DC, during this tumultuous period—the first time federal troops were sent into the capital since the Army dispersed the Bonus Marchers in 1932. The Marines remained stationed at the Capitol until April 12, eventually using barracks on Capitol Hill to rest.

This was, in fact, a "performative deployment". Thousands of National Guard troops were deployed to Los Angeles in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots. As in every such case, they were untrained in law enforcement. Their job wasn't to collar criminals; their job was simply to be the face of authority, to be present on the streets as a deterrent to disorder. All such deployments are "performative". The police are always the ones who actually collar criminals.

I asked Chrome AI mode, "Is it legitimate for military power to be deliberately performative?" It answered,

Yes, military power is considered to be deliberately performative to a significant extent. Actions, from training to actual operations, are often designed not just for their immediate physical effects, but also to signal strength, intent, and resolve to both domestic and international audiences.

Even in the gospels, there's reference to the performative value of the military (Luke 14:31-32):

Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down and decide whether with ten thousand troops he can successfully oppose another king advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops?

And if not, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.

But we come to the next question, the risk that troops on such a deployment are endangered. The fact is that there's a certain amount of unavoidable risk that comes just from being in the military. For instance,

Four Louisiana National Guardsmen from the 1st Assault Helicopter Battalion, 244th Aviation Regiment who died in a training accident, March 10, have been identified.

. . . The Louisiana Army National Guard was participating in a routine night-time training exercise with the Marine 2nd Special Operations Battalion. The Black Hawk carrying the four aircrew and seven Marines crashed into the Santa Rosa Sound in Navarre, Florida, March 10.

The two National Guard members were shot while in the line of duty during their deployment to Washington, D.C., while on what were said to be "high visibility patrols" near the Farragut West metro station; i.e., under legal orders to conduct legitimate performative operations. But the Atlantic writer concludes,

We are not at war now. But Trump’s use of the National Guard suggests that he thinks we are not at peace either. The National Guard is stranded somewhere on this battlefield of partisan politics. They are not ready for this arena, and we should never have asked them to be.

What's war got to do with it? The National Guard is routinely deployed for disaster relief, riot control, and many other functions outside wartime. Deployments are both inconvenient and risky, but members have signed up for them, and they're paid to be available. But aLso, the National Guard, especially within Washington, can be and has been deployed for purposes that have been hard to distinguish from politics, such as dispersing the 1932 Bonus Army encampment or contributing to the air of crisis that sorrounded the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act during that year's Martin Luther King riots.

There can be no question that Trump's deployment of the National Guard, especially to Washington, DC, was within the scope of his authority. In addition, he was elected to office in an atmosphere of uncertainty about the extent and nature of two related issues, illegal migration and urban crime. Are we "not at peace" over these issues? The National Guard members were apparently targeted by an aggrieved illegal migrant acting as a partisan combatant in something that's hard not to characterize as this same quasi-war, while on an anti-crime deployment. If anything, it's sharpened the the impression we have of the nature of this conflict.

The Pipe Bomber? Never Mind!

When I last looked at the January 6 pipe bomber two weeks ago, I noted that there were two competing stories coming out of one FBI. The best-publicized was that the individual in loose-fitting clothes, hoodie, and mask was a literally moonlighting female Capitol Police officer whom we'll call Ms C, who planted the bombs while wandering around Capitol Hill for an hour on the evening of January 5.

The other story was that it wasn't Ms C, or maybe not even the figure wandering around in the videos at all. Instead, the bombs may have been planted shortly before they were discovered on January 6 by someone completely different. The main problem with this version is that on one hand, we have to discount the figure wandering around the previous evening, and on the other, we have to identify someone else planting the bombs the following morning. We must assume hundreds of man-hours have already been expended searching the relevant video footage for this without result.

But beyond that, this story has been strange from the start. Blaze Media is Glenn Beck's outfit. Beck, a converted Mormon, has always been just a dollar-store Rush Limbaugh, and Blaze Media has never been known for breaking big new stories. New investigative stories typically come from reporters like Catherine Herridge, John Solomon, or Susan Crabtree. The Blaze Media story comes from Steve Baker and Joseph Hanneman, who simply don't have that record.

The second problem is that Baker and Hanneman claim they identified Ms C via "gait analysis", but this doesn't hold water. It implies that some sort of massive AI program reviewed millions of videos of ordinary people walking, compared them to the video on the FBI site of the wandering figure, and lo and behold, it spat out the name of Ms C. I don't think so. I think someone from somewhere in the deep state contacted Baker and Hanneman, said you might want to look at Ms C, and at best, they took a "gait analysis" app and ran it against the FBI video vs one of Ms C walking, and they said doggone it, it's Ms C!

That is, if they did anything like that at all. There's so much hinky about this story that I don't feel compelled to accept any of this. A CBS story from this past Tuesday seems much closer to the circumstances I've surmised:

Multiple sources said that a unit overseen by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard drafted a memo identifying the woman and describing allegations that she had placed the explosive devices outside Democratic and Republican party offices. The memo was written after ODNI was made aware of allegations from an outside source, an ODNI spokesperson said.

ODNI officials said the agency received a tip from a person affiliated with a media organization about potential criminal wrongdoing by an individual believed to be working at an intelligence agency and set about documenting it in a memo.

A copy of the unfinished memo was given to senior staff at the security officer's workplace, sources said.

. . . A short time after the unfinished memo began to circulate, the conservative news outlet, Blaze News, published details similar to those in the draft, including the woman's full name.

But the same CBS News story says that after her employer followed up with Ms C, she

cleared her name by providing an alibi: video of her playing with her puppies at the time the devices were placed, sources told CBS News. The FBI has now ruled her out as a suspect in the 2021 plot, according to three sources — but only after her name circulated on social platforms and a conservative news site.

This seems a little too cut and dried as well. I tend to think there's too much of an effort to wrap up any inconvenient questions and proclaim there's nothing more to see. Sundance at Conservative Treehouse, while more of a conspiracy theorist than I am, makes a convincing case for some sort of deep state agenda here:

However, the CBS narrative doesn’t focus on The Blaze or the reporting of Steve Baker, instead the media hit shifts responsibility to Tulsi Gabbard who is operating outside her intelligence oversight lane and conducting independent investigations which includes information from “outside sources.”

. . . Having followed the operations of these embed “intel officials” the motive for this operation against the office of the DNI is clear. You, me, all of us can see with clear non-pretending eyes, the intent of this op was to change the way Tulsi Gabbard is receiving information and to block the delivery of external sunlight.

There’s no better way for the “Seven Ways from Sunday” domestic group to operate than to seed false information (“whistleblower”) to their target (ODNI). Then work to externalize it (Steve Baker), emphasize it (Glenn Beck), build drama toward it, so that eventually it can then be cited as an example to ensure no further assistance is ever accepted. Isolate – Ridicule – Marginalize.

. . . Notice the script, the emphasis, the narrative as it is performed. All of it is entirely transparent.

But other pieces of the story as they've trickled out still strike me as strangely incongruous and oddly coincidental. Take the Washington Metro fare card that was somehow traced to the pipe bombing -- as I discussed here two weeks ago, the version we're given is that the FBI, maybe the same people who found the wandering figure in the hoodie and mask, or maybe not, combed the video from the prior day and identified someone else, someone completely different, who was wandering around the same area and taking photos of things with numbers on them, dumpsters and such.

This turns out to have been a childhood friend of Ms C's then-next-door neighbor, who'd dropped in from out of town, a real MAGA type whom the neighbor didn't trust, but whom he nevertheless lent his extra Metro card, the one he didn't use, to go down to Capitol Hill and wander around and take pictures of things with numbers on them for a book he was writing. Or something like that. Hey, doesn't everyone keep a second Metro card that they never use?

And this was all thoroughly investigated and ruled out as not suspicious. Or something like that. And the guy's then-next door neighbor, just out of the blue, was fingered five years later as maybe the person who was wandering around, completely independently of another guy who was tracked on video taking pictures of things with numbers on them, dropping backpacks with bombs under benches. All of this is completely random and coincidental, nothiong to see here. We're still searching for the suspect.

Except that while I don't normally wander around taking pictures of things like dumpsters with numbers on them, I do watch a lot of true crime shows on TV. One of the most common things you hear is seasoned detectives saying that in their line of work, there's no such thing as a coincidence. Except that when you're investigating two pipe bombs that coincidentally didn't explode on January 6, there are coincidences up the wazoo, but this is perfectly fine.

Another thing I hear pretty frequently is cold case detectives saying when you've got a cold case that ought to be solvable, but it doesn't quite seem to fall into place, you've simply got to go back to the beginning and look at everything one more time. It's hard to think this hasn't yet been done here.

They need to start with Ms C's videotape of her playing with her puppies, but that's just one of a great many things that don't quite fit.

Nervous Nellies

A headline in the normally pro-Trump New York Post: Michael Goodwin: Trump needs to hit the reset button if the GOP wants to win the 2026 midterms:

As he barrels toward the end of his first year back in the White House, the president is beset by slumping poll numbers and a pileup of problems, some of which are self-inflicted.

This is my first big puzzle, the "slumping poll numbers". These are the same polls that were wildly off just a few weeks ago, claiming the New Jersey governor's race was a tossup, and Republicans even had a chance in Virginia. But the outcome was dog bites man; blue states voted blue. Nobody's asking what happened to put expectations so far out of whack. But let's proceed:

Even a gaggle of normally obedient Republicans in Congress are growing restless, and his call for gerrymandering House district lines in red states to pad the GOP advantage in the midterms is in danger of producing the opposite outcome.

This comes after Trump's victory in the Schumer Shutdown on November 10, only a little over two weeks ago, in which Mark Halperin marveled over the Republicans' message discipline throughoput the 41-day standoff. This was not your grandfather's Republican Party. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Was there dissent among Republicans in the 2018 government shutdown?" It answered with specific examples, including:

Opposition to the Funding Bill: In the House, during a December 2018 vote on a spending bill that included $5 billion for the border wall, eight Republicans joined Democrats to vote against it. Some of these dissenting members were concerned about the potential for a shutdown or the general increase in spending.

Concerns over Executive Power: Later, in a separate vote in the Senate in September 2019 related to the use of military funds for the wall (following Trump's national emergency declaration to bypass Congress), eleven Republicans voted to block the president's move, expressing concern over the precedent it set for presidential power. This included Senators like Mitt Romney, Mike Lee, and Susan Collins.

Criticism of Strategy: Some rank-and-file Republican lawmakers were publicly critical of their own party's handling of the situation and the decision to force a shutdown, which became the longest in U.S. history. Some in the conservative Freedom Caucus also had internal disagreements about the timing and tactics of the shutdown fight.

"Normally obedient Republicans"? Since when? Here's another story from just this past Monday:

A senior House Republican reportedly warned that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) shocking resignation is just the beginning, and predicted that what happens next could cost the GOP the majority even before next year’s midterm elections.

“More explosive early resignations are coming,” the unnamed figure told Punchbowl News on Monday. “It’s a tinder box. Morale has never been lower. Mike Johnson will be stripped of his gavel and they will lose the majority before this term is out.”

But other stories don't nesessarily draw the same picture:

Speaker Mike Johnson has told the White House that most House Republicans have little interest in extending the Affordable Care Act's enhanced subsidies, sources familiar with the conversation told CBS News.

Johnson delivered the message in a phone call with senior administration officials as President Trump's advisers were drafting a plan to continue the subsidies for an additional two years. That plan that was initially expected to emerge this week.

The Wall Street Journal first reported Johnson's warning to the White House regarding the lack of GOP House support for the plan. Any White House health care plan would require overwhelming Republican support in the House to be enacted.

It sounds as though there's some sort of productive discussion under way, with some type of consensus emerging that will hold the line against increased spending. On balabnce, this has been a winning issue for Republicans whenever they've been consistent on it. But Goodwin contiinues,

According to Real Clear Politics, his average approval is a mere 43%, while his average disapproval is 54.8%, a spread of minus 11.8 points.

Most troubling, the numbers are far worse on his handling of the economy, which was the issue at the heart of his resounding 2024 victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in all the swing states.

Yet now Trump’s average approval on the economy is a mere 39.5%, against an average disapproval of 57.8%, creating a huge spread of minus 18.3.

Again, Real Clear Politics has yet to explain how its averages were so far off the actual results in the latest elections. Almost all the polls that make up its composites were wildly outside the margin of error, which I discussed in this post. But Goodwin advises,

The big picture suggests he needs a reset, and maybe a rest.

In any event, it’s time to tighten the focus and follow a more methodical approach so the most important things get sufficient presidential attention.

What puzzles me is that just in the past few weeks, Trump has scored a major victory in ending the Schumer Shutdown and securing the resignation of a high-profile "normally obedient Republican". The main focus of the anti-Trump resistance has been to resurrect the question of whether Trump is some sort of subversive, this time giving the military illegal orders. Hysterical allegations -- that he's a Russian asset, that he's a rapist, that he's a pedo, that he's trying to get revenge on his enemies, that he's giving the military illegal orders -- have historically failed to gain traction.

I keep saying it's a major miscalculation to underestimate the guy.

The Case Of Sen Kelly

BREAKING: The Department of War is reportedly considering recalling Sen. Mark Kelly (D) to active duty for possible court-martial after he urged U.S. troops to defy orders from Trump and Hegseth. pic.twitter.com/W8q2a3iMlL

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) November 24, 2025

The received opinion, via the Sacramento Bee, goes like this:

Truthful speech is protected by the First Amendment and should not be the basis for accusing people of sedition, let alone threatening the death penalty. This seems obvious, but on Thursday, Nov. 20, President Donald Trump responded to a video by six members of Congress by posting: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

What did the members of Congress do to deserve this threat of capital punishment? They posted a 90-second video on social media that spoke to members of the military and intelligence communities about their oath to the Constitution. The part of the video that drew Trump’s ire was this remark: “This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens. ... Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders. ... No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

So what is Trump doing here? As I've been saying, it's a mistake to jump to the conclusion that he's impulse-driven, unless we attribute considerable discernment to his impulses, which in recent weeks have given him clear victories over the Schumer Shutdown and Rep Taylor Greene. Let's refer once more to the business-school analysis of his negotiating style that I've used in a number of posts here:

My argument is that Trump’s coercive negotiation style is best understood through the prism of his four public roles: observer, performer, controller, and disrupter.

. . . [U]sing observation to facilitate a mutual gains approach is not what Donald Trump has in mind when he prepares for a negotiation. Speaking on a television talk show in 2009, he emphatically told the audience that one key to a successful negotiation is “to be able to size up your opponent”. . . . He prepares for a negotiation by learning as much as possible about the other side’s strengths and vulnerabilities.

As much as Trump watches others, he is aware of being watched: “life is a performance art,” he wrote [in] Think Like a Champion.

. . . Trump’s fighting style has received considerable attention: “That’s just my makeup,” he explained in The Art of the Deal. “I fight when I feel I’m getting screwed, even if it’s costly and difficult and highly risky”. “I love fighting … battles,” Trump said recently.

. . . Trump the disrupter is instinct‐driven. “Listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper”. He repeated this advice ten years later. “The chosen few,” he wrote, “can just go with their gut”. Trump the disrupter is also action‐oriented: “If you’re going to achieve anything, you have to take action”.

The congresspeople who posted the video urging military members not to follow "illegal" orders was tailor-made for Trump's strategy. He immediately jumped on it in his roles as performer and disrupter:

“It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand — We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET,” the president wrote in one Truth Social post Thursday morning (Nov 20), linking to an article about the video from the Washington Examiner.

“This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???” Trump wrote in another post.

In a third, he wrote: "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!"

But it's worth pointing out that Trump as observer had already been at work. The Democrat who had the most to lose in making the video was Sen Mark Kelly:

Because Kelly was a senior officer who retired from the Navy, he is required to remain available for recall to the military by law. The other five lawmakers, Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Reps. Jason Crow, Maggie Goodlander, Chris Deluzio and Chrissy Houlahan, are not eligible for recall to a military service.

The recall can also be for the purpose of court martial for violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to which Kelly continues to be subject as a retiree. Kelly issued a bombastic reply:

When I was 22 years old, I commissioned as an Ensign in the United States Navy and swore an oath to the Constitution. I upheld that oath through flight school, multiple deployments on the USS Midway, 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm, test pilot school, four space shuttle flights at NASA, and every day since I retired – which I did after my wife Gabby was shot in the head while serving her constituents.

In combat, I had a missile blow up next to my jet and flew through anti-aircraft fire to drop bombs on enemy targets. At NASA, I launched on a rocket, commanded the space shuttle, and was part of the recovery mission that brought home the bodies of my astronaut classmates who died on Columbia. I did all of this in service to this country that I love and has given me so much.

Sec Hegseth replied,

So “Captain” Kelly, not only did your sedition video intentionally undercut good order & discipline…but you can’t even display your uniform correctly.

Your medals are out of order & rows reversed. When/if you are recalled to active duty, it’ll start with a uniform inspection. https://t.co/rsSyrPcmbg

— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) November 25, 2025

Intriguingly, legacy media hasn't been giving the other Democrats an easy ride:

Slotkin faced questions during an interview Sunday on ABC's "This Week" about the recent reaction to a social media video she and five other Democratic lawmakers made encouraging service members to "refuse illegal orders."

"Do you believe President Trump has issued any illegal orders?" host Martha Raddatz asked.

"To my knowledge, I am not aware of things that are illegal, but certainly there are some legal gymnastics that are going on with these Caribbean strikes and everything related to Venezuela," Slotkin responded.

Elsewhere,

NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday asked [Sen Amy] Klobuchar what specific “illegal acts” the seditious Democrats were referring to in the viral video.

“I wonder, do you know what the specific, illegal acts are that your democratic colleagues were referring to there?” Kristen Welker asked Klobuchar.

Klobuchar could not answer Welker.

. . . “If their commander were to tell them, hey go out on the streets… and do this and that, that’s not following the order that is in law,” Klobuchar said.

The allegations against Kelly are beginning to push other Democrats over the edge. Arizona Sen Ruben Gallego posted a video while driving:

This is f*cking insane. We should all point out how f*cking insane this is. Hey, this is Ruben Gallego, I’m traveling through Arizona right now, and I just see the news that Department of Defense is starting investigation against my seat mate, Mark Kelly. this is f*cking insane. We should all point out how f*cking insane this is. And, you know, these guys are trying to say that they’re not acting like fascists, they’re not trying to give as much power to this president as a king, that they should stop acting like it.

Trump as observer, performer, controller, and disrupter has deliberately provoked a donnybrook, the sort of thing that by his own admission he loves. And although he made his initial allegations with characteristic hyperbole and bravado, there's substance behind them, as former CIA operations officer Bryan Dean Wright pointed out to Jesse Waters:

[I]f you watch the video again, one of the first things that [Sen Slotkin] and the others do is they establish credibility and authority. They talk about who they are, working for the CIA and working for the military. They then move into the next phase of the propaganda message, which is, there’s a crisis. They create a crisis for the listeners inside the FBI and the CIA and the military, and they say that there is a threat, not just abroad, like we might face with China or Russia or al-Qaeda, but inside of the country. The threat is here. Who’s that threat? Donald Trump.

It looks like there might be serious grounds for a court martial for Sen Kelly in this case. I keep saying over and over that it's a big mistake to underestimate Trump. And let's face it, he's enjoying himself doing this. No wonder he doesn't take a salary.

Cameras Are Everywhere. Deal With It.

A typical event in the On Patrol: Live TV show involves a cop pulling a driver over for suspected DUI. The cop walks up to the driver's window and requests that the driver step out. All of a sudden, the driver notices there's a guy with a big camera filming the scene and realizes what this could mean: their face will be on national TV with a show that leads its time slot in the 25-54 demographic, which is another way of saying that by the next day, their DUI arrest will be all over town.

"I don't want to be filmed!" the driver protests. "I demand that you stop filming!"

"It's just a documentary," the officer usually replies. "They're just filming a documentary."

The other night, a driver protested more than usual, which had no impact. "Anyone can film out in public," the officer continued. "They can film you, you can film us. That's the law." Which is another way of saying cameras are everywhere. Deal with it.

This seems to bother libertarians more than just about anyone else, which is puzzling, since libertarians generally favor the fewest possible restraints on individual conduct. They'll argue all day for your right to film police activity, but they'll resist to the end the right of the police to film you, for pretty much the same reason a driver doesn't want anyone filming him failing a field sobriety test in front of a national audience.

Back in the day, local newspapers regularly printed the police blotter with news like "Mr Silas Murray of Sparta Center was booked Tuesday night for DUI", but apparently this wasn't the same thing as having your picture published, or maybe people seeing you on national TV falling over during the one-leg-stand test. The easiest way to prevent this, of course, is simply prudent behavior like not drinking and driving.

But now the long-standing libertarian objection to red light cameras has morphed into a more general panic over automated license plate readers.

The Associated Press is shocked, shocked, to discover that Customs and Border Protection has expanded their surveillance network beyond the “100 miles inland from every border” as authorized in the Patriot Act.

Worse yet is their stunned research showing license plate readers (APLR’s) are being connected to various other public and private sector mechanisms to identify travel patterns of U.S. citizens and collate them to facial recognition software applications.

. . . [Conservative Treehouse] has been writing about this surveillance issue for well over a decade. The introduction of Palantir facial recognition, to the overall database of social media information and private identity information, now makes it very easy for the government to simply point a camera at your face and get every scintilla of information about us [sic].

Almost all of the privacy advocates have given up trying to resist the outcome. However, I am not one of them. All it will take is a small mistake in the AI development programming, and people will see quickly just how dangerous this is.

A story at KPBS San Diego suggests the general level of panic:

The nondescript black cameras are mounted near each entrance of the Las Americas Premium Outlets, capturing the license plate, make and model of every car that enters the mall parking lot.

“As soon as you come in, it's in the system,” said a former worker with Simon Property Group. The company is the largest owner of shopping malls in the country, including Las Americas, the sprawling complex next to the San Ysidro border crossing.

At first, he embraced the automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras from Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based surveillance technology company. The former employee believed the ALPR system would help address shoplifting and solve serious crimes that occasionally happened around the mall, like robberies and vehicle theft.

And then he realized the power — and scope — of the license plate surveillance system. Flock can help users analyze patterns of movement and potential associations between drivers. And Simon Property Group gave several law enforcement agencies open access to search and receive notifications from its ALPR system.

“If people knew more about it, I would say people will obviously be pissed off,” he said. “Nobody wants big brother watching you on every single little thing.”

During the George Floyd riots, our neighbor put up a big WE BELIEVE BLACK LIVES MATTER AND ALSO BLAH BLAH BLAH sign in their front yard. I very briefly cogitated somehow spiriting it away in the dead of night until I almost immediately realized that, dead of night or no, my action would be caught by a minimum of three cameras from three different points of view, with my face clearly recognizable, and I thought better of any such project. Thus did cameras reinforce ordinary prudence.

Soon enough, the neighbors put the house on the market, and the realtor spirited the sign away in furtherance of making the property saleable. On camera or not, this was perfectly fine. It began to strike me that in almost any conceivable situation, cameras tend to enforce appropriate community expectations. If you think your actions will be on camera, you think twice. The KPBS story continues,

The use of license plate reader technology has long been a flashpoint between law enforcement and privacy advocates.

In recent years, California has established certain guardrails for ALPR networks owned by police departments and other public entities, including restrictions on how the data can be shared. The systems are also subject to public records requests.

But those safeguards don’t apply to the many private businesses — including Home Depot, Lowe's, the Southwestern Yacht Club, Fashion Valley mall and homeowners associations — that give police access to their license plate readers.

These private systems effectively serve as a wide-ranging extension of law enforcement's surveillance apparatus — even though the private businesses are not subject to the same public scrutiny and transparency requirements.

Wait a moment. Why would an upscale retailer, a big-box store, or an HOA want to install license plate readers? Almost certainly to deter theft, vandalism, or other potential crime. Should any such occur, store security or the HOA would indeed share such information with the police, along with other security video they have irrespective of the ALPR. If the video isn't clear enough to get a plate number, the ALPR could certainly help. It's possible that retailers could make other potential use of the information for marketing or whatever, but certainly the primary use would be to deter crime.

But why would an ordinary solid citizen be worrying about whether where he drove could wind up in someone's data base? Is he really worried that a trip to Home Depot could be used against him? They've already got his receipt and the card he used to pay, and they've already got video of him in the checkout line. This would only be a problem if the cops were trying to trace the shovel he used to bury a body, not if he were picking up some spackle.

The real problem we see often enough is that some solid citizens drive to the wrong part of town for the wrong reasons. They get caught at this often enough anyhow, but this could make tracking them just that much easier. Or they go to motels over a long lunch for trysts, or they say they're going someplace for a business meeting and wind up someplace else with someone else. I suppose license plate readers make these people nervous, but they really ought to recognize that technology has already been way ahead of them for a very long time.

Cameras are everywhere. It isn't Big Brother, it mostly just reinforces ordinary prudence.

So, MTG Is Resigning -- Why?

Q: “Are you willing to forgive Congresswoman Taylor Greene?”

TRUMP: “Forgive for what? I just disagreed with her philosophy … I think she's a nice person.”
pic.twitter.com/SWBYdjn4LV

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) November 22, 2025

It's worth linking yet again to the very insightful business-school analysis of Trump's negotiating strategy to get a clearer idea of what's going on regarding Marjorie Taylor Greene's resignation announcement.

Trump also uses generosity, particularly compliments, to enhance his leverage. “I know that no matter how tough somebody is, he or she will always remember support you’ve given or a favor you might have done in the past,” he wrote in one of his books.

From the X post above, we can see that Trump is being unexpectedly generous with Rep Greene, having called her a "traitor" only a few days earlier. Why? It looks like she's going to give him exactly what he wants, her resignation from Congress. Now he doesn't even need to primary her. As long as she goes through with it on January 5, he's copacetic.

Especially if she just goes away as a prominent figure in the supposed MAGA civil war, which it looks like she'll also do. So the first big takeaway here is that Trump has succeeded in giving her a structured choice.

If his counterparts do have options, he uses threats to denigrate the value of these alternatives, thus presenting them with a structured choice: either accept his offer (which, as performer, he promotes with his typical bravado), or face his unpredictable ire (disrupter). Accepting Trump’s offer often puts the other parties in his debt, and he can be expected to threaten retribution if they do not reciprocate (disrupter).

Looking at Rep Greene's career, I'm surprised at how little attention has been paid to her marriage, which ended after 27 years when her husband filed for divorce in 2022.

Marjorie Taylor Greene's husband has filed for divorce after 27 years of marriage to the Georgia representative, according to court records obtained by PEOPLE.

Perry Greene, who wed Marjorie in August of 1995, claimed his marriage with her was "irretrievably broken."

. . . The petition clarified that Perry and Marjorie "previously separated and remain in a bona fide state of separation."

The cause was apparently repeated infidelities on her part. She also faced attacks from Trump confidante Laura Loomer, who accused her of hiring illegal aliens in her family's construction business:

Why is @mtgreenee such a two faced, lying political prostitute?

I oppose H1Bs and illegal immigration, but it was Marjorie Traitor Greene who spent Christmas in 2024 defending H1Bs. It was MTG who said we need to give jobs to illegal Aliens so she can keep having the ability to hire illegal aliens to work at her construction company.

Now she’s pretending like we don’t have the receipts.

What Greene faced was the potential for more such attacks, giving her the structured choice of getting out of Trump's way or risking terminal damage to her reputation. Scott Pinsker offers some perspective on why Greene announced her resignation on a Friday night:

in a press release about bad news or an embarrassing situation, you don’t want to include any memorable quotes or snappy one-liners. Now’s not the time to write like Hemingway. Instead, you roll in the opposite direction and make everything as boring as possible.

That’s because you wanna kill the story. Therefore, boring is better.

Another tactic is the Friday evening news dump: When you’ve got something bad to announce, don’t do it Monday morning! That’s when news organizations can dedicate their resources to scrutinizing all the sordid, humiliating details. If you release it Monday morning, it’ll be on the menu for the rest of the week!

Do it on a Friday evening, when Americans are less likely to watch the news at all.

But the best time of all is the Friday before a big holiday weekend. During major holidays like Christmas, Independence Day, Memorial Day — and, of course, Thanksgiving — the American people are distracted. We’re focused on other things.

. . . And this brings us to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), one of the most media-savvy members of congress. From Fox News to CNN to The View, since assuming office on Jan. 3, 2021, the most dangerous place in D.C. is between Greene and a camera. From national TV interviews to on-set visits to Tucker Carlson’s podcast, she’s certainly not media-shy.

So why would she announce her resignation at 8:01 p.m. on the Friday before Thanksgiving?

If her goal was maximizing publicity, it would’ve been smarter to make her announcement on the Monday morning after Thanksgiving — not the Friday preceding it.

From her sketchy personal life to whether the family construction business exploits illegals to how her net worth rocketed to $22 million while she was in Congress, she was looking at nothing but downside if she continued to get crosswise with Trump. The sorts of things that could come out would be unpredictable but likely catastrophic, and they could start coming out any day. Pinsker continues,

I know there’s speculation that MTG might be setting up a run for president. Or maybe she’ll follow through with her threat of running for the Senate. After all, that’s what ambitious politicians tend to do: They always run for higher offices.

But I don’t think so. If those were her plans, she’d want more eyeballs — not fewer. This PR strategy doesn’t make any sense.

Unless she’s dropping out of politics for good.

I think she’s done. I don’t know if there’s any truth to AOC’s comments about MTG making millions on insider trading, but I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s some legal scandal, too.

According to Chrome AI mode,

Marjorie Taylor Greene's estimated net worth increased from approximately $700,000 before she took office in January 2021 to around $22 million by early 2025. This increase in her estimated net worth largely stems from the appreciation of her assets, particularly her majority ownership in her family's construction business, Taylor Commercial, Inc., along with stock investments and book royalties, not directly from her congressional salary of $174,000 per year.

Certainly more questions could come out about this as well. As the business school analysis puts it, Trump prefers to negotiate with people who have no options. We see this carried out week after week in his second term.

Yet Again, It's A Major Mistake To Cubbyhole Trump

As Ludwig Wittgenstein would put it, the solution to the problem is seen in the disappearance of the problem. I was drawn to Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene's announcement of her resignation, in particular that she mentions Epstein prominently:

I never changed or went back on my campaign promises and only disagreed in a few areas like. . . demanding the release of the Epstein files.

Just last Sunday, she said the growing animosity between her and Donald Trump “has all come down to the Epstein files.”

“I have no idea what’s in the files. I can’t even guess,” Greene added. “But that is the question everyone is asking is why fight this so hard?”

Greene, a former close ally of Trump, has come under fire from the president in recent weeks over her push to release federal files related to Jeffrey Epstein files, a trove of documents presumably detailing the disgraced financier’s crimes, including who may have known about or been involved in those crimes.

It appears that by late last week, Trump had lost patience with Rep Greene, and the same day as she made the remarks quoted above, he endorsed the Epstein Files Transparency Act via a post on Truth Social, and following votes in both houses, he signed it into law on Wednesday. This brought to mind some homespun advice I heard many years ago, but I can't remember exactly where it came from: "Don't give them a wall to bounce their ball off of."

I asked Chrome AI mode, "What does 'Don't give them a wall to bounce their ball off of' mean?" It answered,

"Don't give them a wall to bounce their ball off of" is an idiomatic expression that means you should not give someone a reaction, an argument, or any material that they can use to continue a conflict, disagreement, or provocation.

It is a metaphorical way of saying:

. . . Starve them of attention: By not reacting, you deny them the satisfaction or fuel they are seeking.

The advice is often used in situations where someone is trying to bait you into an emotional response or a fight. By remaining calm, silent, or simply refusing to participate, you effectively end the interaction because the other person has no "surface" off which to bounce their ideas or accusations.

Greene's response, two days after Trump signed the bill, was to announce her resignation from Congress. I can only surmise that, given the angry and vengeful tone of her announcement, she had been utterly thwarted in a bid for attention that she'd expected to propel her into much higher levels of influence and prominence.

It has been unfair and wrong not only to me but especially to my family, but it's been wrong to my district as well. I have too much self-respect and dignity, I love my family way too much, and I do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the president that we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms and in turn be expected to defend the president against impeachment after he hatefully dumped tens of millions of dollars against me and tried to destroy me. It's all so absurd and completely unserious. I refuse to be a battered wife hoping it all goes away and gets better.

Boy, is she mad. But what's she so mad about? Didn't she just win and force Trump to do a 180 on the Epstein files? She ought to be doing a victory lap on the talk shows, maybe do an encore on The View. Apparently not. Somehow Trump just stole her thunder, stole her spotlight. I guess I'd be just as mad if I were she; he made her so mad, she ended her career. I guess the alternative would be to do what Elon Musk did after he tried to play the Epstein card: eat humble pie, admit his own miscalculation, and play by Trump's rules.

But the solution to Trump's Marjorie Taylor Greene problem is seen in the disappearance of the Marjorie Taylor Greene problem. Just like that!

The same thing seems to be happening with New York Mayor Mamdani.

Zohran Mamdani’s high-stakes White House meeting turned into a Freaky Friday lovefest – as President Trump lauded the socialist mayor-elect and predicted he’ll make New York City great again.

A sitting Trump, with Mamdani standing by his side behind the Resolute Desk, heaped praise on the democratic socialist, jovially touching his arm as he helped him dodge tough questions and unexpectedly predicted his mayoralty will be a success.

. . . Trump’s predicted civility exceeded expectations as he fielded some of the tough questions directed at Mamdani and praised his surprising election victory.

. . . The cordial summit arguably puts more pressure on Mamdani to deliver his sweeping promises to lower costs for New Yorkers – and elevates the socialist as a Democratic leader.

New York political insiders were equal parts dumbfounded and amused by how the faceoff played out, with one calling it a “kiss-ass fest.”

Trump basically just knows the homnespun truth, "Don't give them a wall to bounce their ball off of." The results can be astonishing.