Assassination and the American Presidency | The Crumbling Edifice of Conventional Deterrence, and more

Third, taking into account the possibility that one or both candidates could find themselves in a shooter’s crosshairs in the next 109 days, both campaigns should review and revise campaign plans—and make substantial adjustments to limit risks. These should include moving to more defensible venues, limiting direct access to candidates, and other alterations that both candidates will resist.  Those attending events at which the candidates are present should also be more tolerant of more intrusive and time-consuming security measures required.

A Week of Conspiracies and Calls for War  (Wired)
Right after former president Donald Trump was shot at his campaign rally in Pennsylvania, conspiracy theories exploded online. Today on WIRED Politics Lab, we discuss the subsequent calls for violence and civil war, and the way that militias are recruiting off of the incident. Plus, we report from the Republican National Convention on the reaction to Trump’s vice presidential nominee, Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio.

Fortnite Has a Political Violence Problem  (Vittoria Elliott, Wired)
In the hours after former US president Donald Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, a new Fortnite game appeared: Donald Trump vs Assassin. The game was quickly removed, but several other games that include antisemitism and political violence remained on the gaming platform, according to a new report from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) shared exclusively with WIRED.
The games identified by the GPAHE were built using Fortnite Creative’s “Islands” feature, which allows users to design their own maps, or gameplay areas. One of them replicated the Jasenovac concentration camp in what is now Croatia where tens of thousands of Jews, Romani, and Serbs were murdered during World War II. In the game, users were able to play as members of the Ustaša, a Croatian nationalist group that was influenced by fascism and Nazism. This map was labeled as “education” content.
When WIRED brought the GPAHE’s findings to the attention of Epic Games, which owns Fortnite, Alan Cooper, a spokesperson for the company, said that the Jasenovac game was one of two games removed for violating the platform’s policies. Cooper told WIRED that the company had “actioned” a third game highlighted in the organization’s research.

Alleged ‘Maniac Murder Cult’ Leader Indicted Over Plot to Kill Jews  (Ali Winston, Wired)
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn on Tuesday unsealed a sweeping felony indictment against the 20-year-old they say is the head of a violent Eastern European skinhead gang implicated in a number of assaults and attacks abroad, some of them fatal. The gang, known as Maniac Murder Cult or MKY, is connected to the com/764 pedophilia network, with at least one killing in Romania directly connected to MKY.
Michail Chkhikvishvili, otherwise known as “Commander Butcher,” “Michael,” and “Mishka,” was arrested on an Interpol warrant on July 6 in Chișinău, Moldova, for allegedly conspiring to solicit attacks on homeless people, Jews, and other racial minorities in New York City, distributing explosives-making instructions, and making violent threats in online conversations with an undercover FBI employee. One plot prosecutors say he concocted with the undercover fed involved poisoning Jewish children by handing out tainted candy while dressed as Santa Claus on New Year’s Eve 2023.
Chkhikvishvili remains in custody in Moldova—which has previously collaborated with the US on the extradition of noncitizens—and has yet to be extradited to the United States and make his first appearance in court. He has not been assigned an attorney. If convicted, he faces a potential sentence of decades in an American prison.

The Crumbling Edifice of Conventional Deterrence  (Lawrence J. Korb and Stephen Cimbala, National Interest)
Current and aspiring nuclear great powers (the United States, Russia, and China), together with other comparatively small nuclear weapons states (either declared or widely acknowledged as such), are investing in expensive and expansive modernization of their nuclear arsenals. This pattern of growing commitment to larger and costlier nuclear weapons deployments is predicated on the assumption that nuclear weapons are a necessary and sufficient deterrent to a major war, including nuclear war. But that assumption is now under widespread challenge.
What we are seeing is a growing willingness of state and non-state actors to engage in large-scale conventional and unconventional warfare, even against the interests of nuclear powers. It turns out that, without the capability to deter or win conventional wars or unconventional attacks against vital interests, a state’s nuclear arsenal is, effectively, a one-dimensional success story sitting atop a glue factory of military insufficiency.
Dissenters of the preceding view might argue that nuclear weapons serve to deter a nuclear attack against the state and its vital interests and nuclear blackmail by one state against another or its allies. This concept is of little consolation to practical heads of state and military planners. A deliberate nuclear strike “out of the blue” by one nuclear power against another, not preceded by a conventional war, is one of the least likely paths to nuclear war. More likely is the expansion of a conventional war into a decision by one side to engage in nuclear first use. 
The side that is winning the conventional war is less likely to engage in nuclear first use or first strike than the losing side. Resorting to nuclear first use would probably be a decision to rescue a losing position in a conventional war. Still, against a nuclear-armed opponent, nuclear second use in retaliation could not be ruled out—indeed, it would almost certainly be expected. Thus, a power that decided on a first-use nuclear policy has wittingly opened the door to a process of escalation over which further control requires a two-sided tacit agreement not to climb the ladder any higher.