Of Leadership and Courage

35 thoughts on “Of Leadership and Courage”

1. “What if the motive is Incel-related and Trump wasn’t a target because of his politics, but because of his status and success with women”

   Or, more plausibly, what if the shooter thought his neighbor’s dog was telling him Trump was a space lizard? Seriously, WTF?

2. Doesn’t seem that implausible to me. Envy is a terrible thing, and it causes people to do terrible things.

   Although the considerable age difference does seem to make it less likely in this case.

3. Something in Claire’s post at Quillette and my comment:

   Claire: “our modern, civilised societies ostensibly prioritise qualities like compassion, integrity, and empathy”….

   My comment: much of the ’empathy’ that is projected in order to gain power is either fake, highly-selective, or both. I”ll note the loud expressions of empathy for people in Gaza by those who have no empathy at all for murdered and raped Israelis.

   And the projection of empathy can be a way to achieve brute power: note Obama’s remark ‘turns out I’m really good at killing people,” or something like that.

   Also: Empathy by itself, even when well-intentioned and well-directed, is often of limited value without some of those other characteristics. Empathy for victims of the Nazis was a lot more effective when coupled with strong determination and moral/physical courage, which might come down to knife or bayonet fighting. If you were in an airline flight that was in trouble, would you prefer your flight crew and ATC to be bathing in empathy for the lives lost and family suffering that might be about to happen, or would you prefer them to be strictly task-focused?

4. Musk linked the Stepfanie Tyler and it has now reached 43 million views.

5. Well that was an interesting article by Lehmann.

   Personally while I found that iconic Trump pose with his presence of mind riveting what was just as impressive was the seemingly normal way he conducted himself the next day During points of immediate danger, one’s brain can snap into a reflex mode that only after the fact with reflection becomes terrifying… literally the shakes. Everyone gets that moment of revelation, only some master it. Given that it was a miracle he survived I’m impressed with how he’s handling himself

   As far as Lehmann…. I guess that’s her thumb-sucker addition to the analysis flooding the zone since Saturday. Of course no one is quite sure what why that guy decided to go out on a one-way death ride hoping to take Trump with him. Her speculation says more about her than some guy we know little about, placing some precooked narrative on another’s action. The feminization of society and a Freudian lens. I saw an interview of a former schoolmate that said he was bullied a lot.

   I have been noticing over the past day or two the slow coalescing of a counter-narrative by the Left regarding the near-assassination and their role in stochastic terrorism Part of it is just what Lehmann describes, an angry, troubled loner confused and looking for a place in the world. Part of it will also center on the “AR-15” and gun control narrative as well… talk about Freudian.

   The reason Lehmann strikes a nerve is that I hear a bit of this out in the social world. Part of the reason for Jordan Peterson’s fame is that he addresses young men regarding their role as the masculine within a nihilistic and feminine society, but in a way that forces those men to take responsibility for their actions and not offer excuses or play victim. That’s probably why he is despised by many of the people I meet.

   Since Lehmann is offering explanations, how about we apply Occam’s Razor and even if I grant her all of her Freudian analysis given that he chose as his target the very man all the of the establishment decried as the equivalent of Hitler, he probably thought he doing not only himself but the world some good. I’ll call that a clear political motive, in fact given her faulty reasoning I will say that motive is both necessary and sufficient for explanation as to why he was on that rooftop.

6. Btw…

   That contrast and compare between Stafanie Tyler and I/O is probably a pretty good framework to view how the next few months will play out (at least publicly), were you enthralled by what Trump did or horrified by it and how others responded to it?

   Alot of politics and what we like and don’t, depends on intuition which contrary to what I/P seems to think actually is as valid as reason in low-information, complex environments. That’s why symbols and images work so well in politics.

7. Mike: “The feminization of society and a Freudian lens.”

   Back in the bad old days when men attended to the little stuff (business & politics) and women took care of the important stuff (delivering the next generation of responsible citizens), we were told that the world would be a better place if only women had more power. Well, think about the rabid female leaders in Europe pushing the world towards wider war. Think about the debased nature of female-dominated politics & media in the US. It might be unfair to say that today’s predominance of women in politics & business has made the world a worse place — but it certainly has not made the world a better place.

8. In contrast to those two women who had a favorable gut reaction to Trump’s “Fight” after being shot, there is a CNN reporter who had a distinctly different reaction.CNN’s Response to Donald Trump Shooting Sparks Fury

   CNN’s Jamie Gangel attacks Trump for saying “Fight! Fight! Fight!” after someone tried to murder him.

   Literally, she complains about what he did 5 seconds after he was shot

   “That’s not the message that we want to being sending right now. We want to tamp it down.”

   It takes all kinds.

9. At the Free Press, Why America’s Zoomers are Turning MAGA:
   https://www.thefp.com/p/why-americas-zoomers-are-turning

   …includes various figures liked by Gen-Z guys praising Trump’s reaction as “gangster.”

   Not sure an actual Gangster would have likely reacted in this way, but it’s interesting that praiseworthy courage and determination gets that moniker, and the moniker is viewed as favorable.

10. I’m not much concerned with what was going through the mind than is now scattered over about a half acre of Pennsylvania, let alone when or even if he’d ever been laid. The world we live in, unfortunately, is one where it needs to be assumed that there are any number of people and organizations that, given an opportunity, would have pulled that trigger.

    What I want to know is if the stupid incompetence exhibited by the Secret Service was confined to just Trump or if it’s the way that Biden’s detail works as well. There is absalutly no excuse for leaving a rooftop less than 150 yards from the podium, with a direct line of sight unoccupied let alone unobserved. Every person from the bottom to the top should have been out of a job by Sunday morning.

11. MCS: “Every [Secret Service] person from the bottom to the top should have been out of a job by Sunday morning.”

    Absolutely! Starting with the Pepsi girl, and going down at least to those fat chicks milling around the SUV — and everyone in between who made (or who went along with) bad decisions. And our always-creative prosecutors should look into how many of them could end up in jail. This is not for revenge — this is to spell out to their replacements in Letters of Fire that incompetence will not be tolerated, ever. They have one job to do — Do It Well!

    But we all know this will not happen. Instead, Pepsi girl may become Kamela’s VP and all the fat chicks will get promoted.

12. This was an op.

    The most charitable interpretation is that the Deep State arranged for incompetent security with a fond hope that some nutter would show up and solve their Trump problem for them. In that case I’d bet that security for many other Trump events was equally as bad, only no shooter bothered to turn up. Worse, perhaps this particular shooter was groomed by the Deep State with deliberate intent, only missing due to bad luck or the wind.

    I sense a pattern. “Lone gunman” kills inconvenient political figure or commits a massacre, thus giving the Deep State a more pliable politician an office they might not have achieved on the own or an excuse to implement a policy that otherwise would not have been politically viable.

    How many times does this have to happen before people stop accepting the oopsie theory of assassinations?

    Let me recap. We had the murder of John F. Kennedy, which led to decades of questions about what actually happened. We had the killing of his brother, the killing of Martin Luther King, a near miss with Ronald Reagan, and every “five eyes” country had mass murders which led to gun-bans everywhere except the United States.

    Something is quite fishy, in my view.

13. It is amazing the difference in reactions when an adrenal situation happens. Some just see what needs to be done and do it. Others just sit there paralyzed. We want leaders that see and react which Trump has shown us he can do.
    Yes later the adrenal shakes hit and all sorts of stuff goes through your mind especially the possibly bad stuff, but the key is seeing, evaluating quickly and reacting.

14. “I/O” is a pretentious sack of “cultured” gibberish. Were I on X, I’d respond: “primal animal instincts” exist for a reason, they help people survive.

15. “primal animal instinct” doesn’t have to be ideal to be better than dusty senile Longhouse politics!

16. Someone at Instapundit, where this post was just linked, remembered something Charles Schumer said: “You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, so even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman [like Trump], he’s being really dumb to do this.”

    Very relevant to the subject of courage. Most politicians would be like Schumer and either let that unacceptable situation go without comment, or choose to take advantage of it, rather than trying to challenge or change it. Trump has demonstrated courage that is not only physical, as important as that form of courage is.

17. David Foster
    …includes various figures liked by Gen-Z guys praising Trump’s reaction as “gangster.”

    Not sure an actual Gangster would have likely reacted in this way, but it’s interesting that praiseworthy courage and determination gets that moniker, and the moniker is viewed as favorable.

    Ah, teen slang… The year I taught 9th grade math, a student described me as “ghetto.” This was in a small city, mostly Hispanic and white, and about 2% black. One class I taught consisted of 9th graders taking 11th grade math, so it was a decent high school. I found out that “ghetto” was intended as a compliment, to indicate that I was a sharp dresser. Well, I did wear a tie every day…

18. What if the motive is Incel-related and Trump wasn’t a target because of his politics, but because of his status and success with women

    Doubtful. Incel violence is generally directed towards women, not men. See Elliot Rodgers.

    “I experienced a sudden political transformation because I liked that after he got grazed by a bullet he stood up and pumped his fist” is just another way of saying “I prefer to base my politics on primal animal instinct,” which I’m pretty sure is a non-ideal way to do politics.

    Something tells me that this I/O individual would have been an enthusiastic participant in the Wannsee Conference.

19. “Trump with an opportunity to display the very qualities that have already made him a cult icon.”

    FU ahole

20. Mr. Weinberg nailed it at the top. Who cares about Claire Lehman’s (whoever she is) speculations on Crooks’ motives?

    Thank God that Trump was spared! The dramatics were fine, but we need an honest, sober electorate who can elect him, and a sober, competent administration that can begin the hard work of restoring the Republic.

21. This was an op

    Yeah that was my first thought Saturday.

    The question isn’t so much why that building was left unsecured or even the amazing coincidence of why a building that against all logic was left unsecured just happened to have had a sniper on it. Maybe it’s because I’m an ops guy, but my first question was why did the sniper feel comfortable enough in the expectation that he would be able beforehand, against all logic, to get in a firing position 150 yards from and overlooking the target and get multiple aimed shots off including 1 that missed by an inch?

    That’s a lot of variables to hit with no margin for error. It would take a great deal of planning, reconnaissance, and prior knowledge up to small details such as knowing say the the existence of a ledge upon which he could balance the rifle and so didn’t need to bring a bipod or that the ledge was of a certain height so that he could get observe the target over the ledge and still remain in a prone position.

    It doesn’t seem like this guy is a super-genius Day of the Jackal type that do that sort of planning. In fact given that there was no chance of this guy getting away my first thought was patsy, a dead-end when they identified his corpse and investigated.

    So knowing the stakes involved if this was a conspiracy, there should be little expectation of an honest and full investigation by either the NEP (to use SGM’s term) or government agencies (see “COVID-19, Lab Leak Theory) However there are other, pro-Trump outlets that could probably pursue this relying on relatively open sources.

    When was this event scheduled at this location? When did the campaign begin to consider the location? That should give a date of departure for inquiries. The guy apparently had a membership at a range. What were his range habits? When did he join? Did he often shoot an AR-15, especially from a prone position? Did his attendance change, less or more, after the date the event was scheduled (indicating he might have been training at another location?

    Pull the cell phone tower info for the areas surrounding both the fairgrounds and his home. Would take a bit of finance and manpower to acquire and comb the records, but did he ever visit the town of Butler? How many times before and after the event was scheduled?

    He had to have had a reasonable knowledge of the lay out of the building; not only the existence and height of the ledge but the location of a ladder to reach the roof and the roof’s layout. Simple Google-style satellite shot would provide some intel but not the depth perception needed to know that he would, say, have to stand up to clear an obstacle as he traversed the roof. To do that type of recon he would need to be physically on the roof… did the building have a security guard, CCTV that would deter him from doing so? Why would he feel confident that from that given location he could overlook the podium to get the shot?

    Of course as anybody who has watched movies would know or assumed that he was being watched by a sniper team…. unless he knew he wouldn’t

    There is other info that would be nice to have that probably wouldn’t get. The cell phone contents. What sort of scope he had, where and when he got it and the rifle. What specific type of ammo he was using

    I feel like a version of Lemony Snicket, an unusual series of lucky coincidences. Maybe it is, but I find it troubling that everyone wants to focus on the incompetence of the Secret Service rather than analyzing it from the shooter’s perspective.

22. Here is apost supporting David’s comment about Gen-Z Trump supporters.
    https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/07/15/young-voters-abandoning-democrats-n4930701

23. which I’m pretty sure is a non-ideal way to do politics.

    Wrong.

    What is the ideal way to do politics?
    My tribe right or wrong must win? Nope. But common.
    Abstract reason? Failed in practice. Just another form of self-deception.
    Richest candidate? Non-ideal, but reasonable.
    Successful general (or colonel)? Non-ideal, but reasonable.
    Most bribable, corrupt, or lustful (for the office)? Joke, right?

24. While our societal values have evolved to emphasise qualities such as diversity and inclusion,

    Evolved? We evolved to include transing children. Evolved to including Muslim rape gangs and White sexual slavery?

    Claire Lehman is inhuman.

25. ErisGuy….note the previous paragraph:

    “This brings us to a crucial point: while our modern, civilised societies OSTENSIBLY prioritise qualities like compassion, integrity, and empathy, and while we no longer reward brute force with status, our evolved psychology means that we remain sensitive to displays of male dominance, even when doing so conflicts with our professed values.”

    Note the ‘ostensibly’. I don’t think there is any evidence that Claire approves of transing kids, Muslim rape, etc, quite the contrary. IMO she is one of the more thoughtful writers & publishers on the Internet, worth reading even when I don’t agree with her.

26. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit says: “A friend writes: “Trump’s reaction reminds me of what Shelby Foote said about Grant:”

    “Grant the general had many qualities but he had a thing that’s very necessary for a great general. He had what they call ‘four o’clock in the morning courage.’ You could wake him up at four o’clock in the morning and tell him they had just turned his right flank and he would be as cool as a cucumber.”

    Yes, quick reactions and context-switches are important, even in business…sometimes interrupts on top of interrupts, important to decide when to process them immediately vs when to inhibit them and stack them. Now think of national leadership: 3 am message that embassy is being overrun by terrorists, followed by report about China violating Taiwanese airspace, followed by report about unpleasant allegations by the domestic political opposition….

    I don’t think the qualities demonstrated by Trump are irrelevant to performance in such scenarios.

27. The incel motivation is silly and small. No, it’s bigger and more existential than that. I think the shooter had been bullied relentlessly and was seeking a way to become somebody, to rid the world of someone he’d been told was Very Bad, to do something that he thought would have significance and meaning.

    As for Stephanie’s reaction, I don’t think it was primal or primitive in any way. I felt the same jolt she did, and in my case it was not “big bad chieftain is strong, must follow.” Rather, it was, “Omy, this man who I had discounted as another narcissistic buffoon — albeit a less wrong one than the lefties — is actually showing moral courage and grace under fire. Who IS this guy? Have I been judging him all wrong all this time? Is Trump much more than I thought he was?”

    It was like catching a sudden glimpse of seriousness, dignity, and presidential leadership in someone you thought was kind of a clown show up to this point. THAT’s the shock. I/O got it all wrong and misread Stephanie on that one.

    The gangster thing is also true. I think gangsters as a whole are not exactly shining icons of moral courage, but they admire masculinity and strength, and Trump demonstrated courage in the face of fear and uncertainty — there was a kind of bravado and flair to his “fight! fight! fight” response that many men wish they had, especially with all the rap songs about it.

    So I think he touched a chord for a lot of people — it was undeniably a display of courage, and we’re so starved for courage in public life that it was almost shockingly heroic.

28. The event and the discussions reminded me of something in CS Lewis. The following quote probably won’t mean anything except to those who’ve read That Hideous Strength, but maybe it will to those that have read it.

    “Then I will go, Sir. But..but..am I a bear or a hedgehog?” Jane asks the Director, who responds:

    “More. But not less.”

29. That response from I/O is context switching, plus a bit of straw-manning.

    He frames what happened to Stepfanie as a sudden “political” transformation, when the rest of her tweet suggests a years-long evolution. Then he says what Trump did “is not how you do politics.”

    No, but it is how you do leadership. Americans want to hear about the issues, like tax and foreign policy, but policy wonks, the ones who actually do the politics, are not the ones who get elected. Those perceived as leaders get elected. What Stepfanie saw was Trump’s instinct for leadership, to tell the people he claims to see that he still sees them even when his life is threatened, to tell them he is all right and they should fight on.

    It’s perfectly logical that Stepfanie’s response to Trump’s leadership would convince her. She doesn’t expect him to “do politics” that way. She, and we, expect Trump to lead that way.

30. It might be unfair to say that today’s predominance of women in politics & business has made the world a worse place — but it certainly has not made the world a better place.

    Agreed. Even my wife agrees.

    Trump’s response to the near (very near) miss is revealing. He has skirted bankruptcy in business. The Lawfare being waged against him must be infuriating. Yet he keeps his cool.

    I saw Stepfanie’s post on X this morning and understand her. I hope more women react this way. The primal instinct survives for a reason. There is supposed to be an Arab saying, “When your life is being auctioned off, you bid what is asked.”

31. Two posts from today

    The World-Spirit on a Golf Cart

    And it seems that Trump, like Hegel’s Napoleon, has somehow become a concentrated symbol of these times – of a world-spirit of a global rebellion; of the end of one epoch and the birth of another; and that he is a figure with an historic role that must be fulfilled, for better or worse, come hell or high water. If so, it feels obvious in retrospect why we couldn’t have Ron DeSantis or whoever else (as I originally would have preferred) instead of the Great Orange One…”

    And…. Propositions About the Current Moment

    This is the Trump Era. This didn’t automatically mean he would win the election or succeed in office; he could end up like Napoleon. But my second thought, more privately held, was that God and the universe want Trump to be president again. It’s his destiny, and it will not be denied.

    I have been involved in politics for quite a while, have always felt that conservatives were the true counter-culture. However Conservative, Inc, let alone the Republican Party, has exhausted itself and become irrelevant let alone the corruption of pride and place. Institutions such National Review and others prefer to be dead than rude as slide toward Hell.

    Trump is different. As a kid I remember reading David Stockman’s “The Triumph of Politics” and his echo of the “Let Reagan be Reagan” crowd. Well no one is going to get in the way of Trump being Trump. I don’t see some Napoleon rather to be the man is Godzilla coming to wreak vengeance. In relation to the crisis we face, he is the answer to Jim Malone’s :What are you prepared to do?” or to John Boyd’s “To you want to be or do you want to do” Hate it to tell the better dead than rude crowd that perhaps the times require maybe not a Napoleon but like in the westerns “a stranger comes to town”

    Accordingly, there has been a lot of criticism of Trump’s selection of Vance for VP. That criticism, usually from Conservative Inc., misses the point because they view it from their withered perspective that a VP somehow changes an election. Trump knows something different, that since he cannot run Vance becomes his 3rd term. Not only that, if he is unable to move his head out of the way the next time… it won’t be a Mike Pence who succeeds him. He plays to win

32. Watching that clip again and again of Trump getting his ear shot off, falling to the ground, and then rising up in defiance reminds me that his brain works at a different tempo than ours. On a conference call Sunday somebody remarked that image shows his ability to turn inside another’s “OODA Loop” , while we would still be processing the danger he’s already thinking the next step. I think that’s the right idea but I think it goes beyond that.

    My study group has taken up John Boyd’s “Patterns of Conflict.” Boyd is known for his development of the energy maneuverability theory, OODA loop; stuff that has gone into the F-16, kill chains. We have an F-16 pilot in our group, What Boyd is trying to do in “Patterns” is take it much further and outline universal principles for any form of conflict: military, political, bureaucratic

    We have in the group a former Marine Colonel, an acolyte of Boyd’s, who has explained the man’s theory as relying on tempo, imposing epistemology on your enemy, and not worrying about your flanks so much as making your enemy worry about his. On yesterday’s call he made the pitch that image should change people’s framework about Trump; he isn’t a politician, he’s a combatant and that he implicitly understands implicitly conflict as Boyd’s maneuver warfare theory of conflict. Now Trump understands that his brand of politics will be the same.

    Trump took it on the chin in his first term because he not only did he have few friends but he didn’t understand the rules of conflict in DC. He operated at a slower tempo and never knew what hit him. You get the idea this time around things will be different, that he’s learned a few lessons, and understands how to bring his strengths to bear in the DC swamp.

    If I was the DC establishment, I would pin that picture to the office wall and spend a lot of time looking at and trying to get inside that man’s head before he gets any further into yours.

33. There is other info that would be nice to have that probably wouldn’t get. The cell phone contents.

    Now the FBI is claiming there’s nothing interesting on the cell phone, which makes me certain they erased everything they found.

    The regime plainly wants this event to be forgotten ASAP.

34. David Foster, the paragraph you quoted is even more insulting: “we remain sensitive to displays of male dominance, even when doing so conflicts with our professed values.” What she called ‘male dominance’ is bravery and leadership.

    And, yeah, she wrote we have evolved to be diverse (encouraging pedophilia and trans) and inclusive (not prosecuting Moslem rape gangs). If that isn’t what “diverse & inclusive” means then why are “diversity and inclusion” cited to protect them.

    I disagree: We must devolve to reward male dominance demonstrations of bravery and leadership and to reject diversity and inclusion: criminal gangs must be imprisoned for life or executed; the entire trans establishment must be tried for their Mengelian crimes against humanity and executed as a warning to the next ten generations, “don’t mutilate children.” As if that should need to be said.

    It doesn’t matter if Lehman means something else by D&I—that’s what it means IRL.

35. Compare Trump to, oh, François Hollande.

    When terrorists (a suicide bomber as it later turned out) attacked Stade de France, President François Hollande was in the stadium watching France’s national soccer team take on Germany.

    He fled. No one bombed him. No one shot at him.

    He thought his person was so wonderful that he fled even though he is the executive and living embodiment of France even in his name. No display of defiance. No call for action. No bravery.

    He was a coward.

    Trump was not a coward.

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