The only thing I had to offer in the immediate aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt was Secret Service Failure - a recommendation to read Carol Leonig’s Zero Fail for deeper insight into the conditions at our executive protection agency. Thanks to Jeff Stein it’s become the top read article here.
The social media scrum was just hopeless without proper tooling and I haven’t had that since the spring of 2023, when Twitter’s academic API access died. If something is important enough, someone will write a book about it, as Carol did, or perhaps make a six minute video that fits into part of a long running series, as Peter Zeihan has done here.
Peter’s view is both broad and long. He sees everywhere at once, and he thinks in terms of twenty year generations rather than our two year Congressional election cycles. The way he sums up this round of restructuring is something he’s done before, and which I found very helpful. I think I first mentioned structural balance in Change Partners, which was about the global restructuring we’ve been seeing. The things Zeihan says in here make sense, but I missed them, which I credit to having been too close to the action for too long. Who could have imagined the GOP kicking out both national security hawks AND big business? In retrospect this is a perfect fit for what I’ve seen, but my head didn’t go there of its own accord.
As always, he’s worth a listen.