hanlon's razor: unpacking plotlines on butler

malice or incompetence?

you all know that i love a good tinfoil tale as much as the next gato, but we also need to be a bit careful around them as they can be descents into miscalibration and nothing runs downhill in such situations faster than the real thoroughbreds. the very pattern recognition abilities that allow for intense and far reaching analysis can go awry on fog or war and randomness and start seeing linkages and intentions in mere coincidence and selective data use. this is especially potent around preconception and post facto analysis. the day before an event, you had 10,000 items to look at. the day after, it’s obvious which 4 you should have focused on. but this is not the same as “should have known, look it was obvious, it was right there!”

plots are harder than they look to orchestrate and much harder to obscure. people and institutions keep secrets badly, especially juicy ones.

the base case of “grand plots and schemes” is a dangerous (and seductive) null hypothesis.

this brings us to hanlon’s razor:

never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

obviously ideas are swirling about “how could this have happened” around the trump assassination attempt. how did some goofus with seemingly no meaningful training get 125m from the stage with a rifle and sit atop the most obvious roof vantage in the whole setup while not being noticed?

are these people really that stupid? the answer, unfortunately, is yes, perhaps they are. none of what follows disproves any plot (this is basically impossible as you cannot prove a negative) but it does provide what to my mind is a reasonable and plausible theory of what happened. it is, like everyhting at this point, speculative, but it’s my best current working theory and it seems to hang together. as someone who has spend a fair bit of time analyzing such “fog of war” incomplete information scenarios and trying to be right about them, i thought it was worth sharing.

first some background on how this works.

this is a great thread from a former SS agent and yet another example of how social media outperforms conventional media. where is this is any newspaper? it isn’t.

so, you have a sort of “donut” of zone coverage out past the close in and maybe to 500-700 yards. crooks somehow slid into the middle of that. it was local enforcement. they are on different (and unlinked) coms channels. it’s not a good setup and one full of holes around handoffs. anyone who has ever played zone coverage will be immediately seeing the problem. such coverage only works as well as the handoffs at the zone lines.

and this one looks like a mess.

this is the sort of issue you’re working with.

and so, when you get something like THIS

everyone wants to start howling about this:

but what is the answer is something altogether more stupid like this? (which looks like a credible claim from a guy who has been right quite a bit on this topic):

it turns out that the building that crooks wound up on top of was the staging area for a bunch of local LEO’s.

“The building — the AGR International Inc. factory in Butler, Pennsylvania — was being used by local police as a “watch post” for snipers to scan for threats as the former president spoke onstage only 130 yards away, according to sources.

Cops were inside, but not on the roof during the shooting, sources said.”

source NY post

“A variety of local police agencies were tasked with securing the area outside of the Butler Farm Show grounds where Trump spoke — with the Secret Service representative Anthony Gugliemi pointing out that local agencies were responsible for the area where the shooter opened fire.

Law enforcement sources said the building was swept by cops before the event and that the local sniper team used the large manufacturing site as a staging and lookout post — but did not climb on the roof for the event — possibly over concerns that it would interfere with the Secret Service snipers.”

so stop and think about how this all fits together.

crooks is on a roof that is supposed to have local LEO SWAT/snipers on it but doesn’t, perhaps because they were goldbricking inside or perhaps because they assumed they were not supposed to be on the roof.

anyone who sees him there will assume that’s what he is. some SS counter sniper calls it in to his overwatch and they check the plan/schematic and say “it’s a friendly, that’s a local LEO post.”

these people don’t know each other, have not worked together, and their coms seem surprisingly limited. so they stare right at him thinking he’s blue team not red team.

playing effective zone coverage with players you’ve never taken the field with before is a tough ask.

this looks like a pure charlie foxtrot along a zone handoff boundary because people are not where they were supposed to be.

and there was a a lot of slipshod work.

“Nobody contacted me. Nobody. Nobody called me, nobody stopped here,” said Valerie Fennell, whose property abuts both the farm grounds and the AGR factory.”

have we answered every question? no, you never can. but this seems like a pretty plausible scenario to me and does not require any great leaps, exotic beliefs, or ascription to plots. claiming that there was a big hit on that involved the secret service, local cops, and who knows who else and that anyone would ever assume that could be kept secret is a big mental ask. secrets like that are never kept unless everyone involved winds up dead. it stretches credulity that shadowy actors would plot that way for an issue of this magnitude.

and it’s not like the secret service is all that it once was. currently leadership there came from pepsi. she was never a LEO or military. her primary focus seems to be DEI and making sure the SS is 30% women by 2030. there have been lapses and attrition galore and it’s not like people were not jumping the white house wall and making it to the front door unchallenged already. this superspy myth of hyper competent SS maybe be playing a role here.

is the secret service the next boeing? an agency no longer fit for purpose due to misguided priorities?

we caught ze/zem red handed!

so, anyway, that’s some grist for the mill. i’m not sure we really have enough to make a truly high confidence assessment here yet. it’s less than clear if we ever will. i’m sure the current game of CYA is reaching legendary proportions.

but i’m still on team hanlon here. “incompetence” looks like a strong call as explanator and have yet to see a better theory that looks like it beats this as a null hypothesis.

(i’m sure this will set off a comments section for the ages. have at it, just be respectful.)