Secret Service Director Resigns | The Pentagon Wants to Spend $141 Billion on a Doomsday Machine | American Fury, and more

As I wrote in “The New Anarchy,” the April 2023 cover story for this magazine, political violence is seen as more acceptable today than it was a decade ago by nearly every measure. Political conversation borrows the rhetoric of war. People build their identity not around shared values but around a hatred of their foes. A 2023 UC Davis survey found that “a small but concerning segment of the population considers violence, including lethal violence, to be usually or always justified to advance political objectives.” More Americans bring weapons to protests than they did in previous years. A growing number of elected officials face harassment and death threats, which has prompted many capable leaders to drop out of politics entirely.
Officials at the highest levels of the military and in the White House told me repeatedly that they believed the United States would see an increase in violent attacks as the 2024 presidential election drew near. Other experts talked about pronounced danger in places where extremist groups had already emerged, where gun culture is thriving, and where hard-core partisans bump up against one another, especially in politically consequential states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. Clearly, they were right in their warning. They further predicted that the current wave of violence would take a generation or longer to crest.
These are poisonous days in our nation. It is reasonable to worry that the attempt on Trump’s life represents not the end of a cycle of violence, but an escalation in an era that has already seen a congresswoman shot in a supermarket parking lot, a congressman shot while playing baseball, and the U.S. Capitol stormed by insurrectionists. Some degree of cynicism is understandable. But too many Americans are allowing political exhaustion and despair to justify their own abstention from self-governance. Too many believe that screaming into the void, or clicking the “Like” button, amounts to political involvement.

How the Trump Rally Gunman Had an Edge Over the Countersnipers  (Leanne Abraham, et al., New York Times)
The would-be assassin who opened fire at Donald J. Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13 was able to get a clear shot at the former president, as countersniper teams nearby failed to see him in time to thwart the shooting.
The New York Times used drone photography to build a 3-D model and recreate the lines of sight for both the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, and three teams of countersnipers — two federal and one local. The analysis shows that Mr. Crooks, 20, who appears to have flown a drone to survey the site the morning of the rally, exploited one of the few blind spots within a rifle’s range of Mr. Trump, raising questions about serious lapses in security planning for the event.
At a contentious hearing on Capitol Hill on Monday, Kimberly A. Cheatle, the Secret Service director, offered few specifics to lawmakers’ repeated questions about sightlines and security breakdowns.

The Pentagon Wants to Spend $141 Billion on a Doomsday Machine  (Matthew Gault, Wired)
If you’re one of the millions of Americans who live within range of its 450 intercontinental ballistic missile silos, the Pentagon has written you off as an acceptable casualty. The silos are scattered across North Dakota, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska in a zone of sacrifice—what lawmakers and military planners have long called the “nuclear sponge.”
Despite real concerns over cost overruns, human lives, and the general uselessness of ICBMs, the Pentagon is barreling forward with a plan to modernize those silos and their missiles. Right now the Department of Defense thinks it’ll cost $141 billion. Independent research puts the number at closer to $315 billion.
All of that is money the Pentagon plans to use to build a doomsday machine—a weapon that, were it ever used, would mean the end of human civilization. Such a weapon, most experts agree, is pointless.

Seeking Answers, Lawmakers from Both Parties Ask Secret Service Chief to Quit  (Luke Broadwater, David A. Fahrenthold, Hamed Aleaziz and Campbell Robertson, New York Times)
The Secret Service director, Kimberly A. Cheatle, faced bipartisan calls for her resignation on Monday, after a disastrous hourslong congressional hearing in which she declined to answer basic questions about the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump.
Ms. Cheatle declined to say how many agents were protecting Mr. Trump when a gunman shot at him at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13, or who decided to leave a nearby rooftop out of the event’s security perimeter. Nor would she tell members of the House Oversight Committee why Secret Service agents were not aware until the last seconds that people in the crowd had seen a gunman on that roof.
At times, Ms. Cheatle seemed less informed than the lawmakers quizzing her. When Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, asked for a detailed timeline of events, Ms. Cheatle said she did not have one.
“I have a timeline that does not have specifics,” she said, eliciting laughter from the room.

By the hearing’s end, many of the committee’s Democrats — usually defensive of their party’s appointees — had also swung sharply against Ms. Cheatle.

FBI Says Two Former WKU Students Were Terrorists  (Beth Warren, Courier Journal)
Two former Western Kentucky University students became ISIS terrorist recruits and trained in Syria while attending the Bowling Green school, according to court records.
One of the then-students issued a warning in an email to WKU in June 2015 after he left the U.S. saying, in part: “In sha Allah [God willing] when we conquer the U.S. I will look for you.” This was disclosed in the federal court case of the students’ associate, Mirsad Hariz Adem Ramic, filed in the Western District of Kentucky. The Courier Journal reported Ramic’s arrest and sentencing last month and has learned new details of the case through a review of court filings.
The university shared the emails with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Louisville field office.
The other student apparently died in 2015 during a conflict in Iraq and was referred to as a martyr by the other two, according to a criminal complaint filed by an FBI agent against Ramic, who lived in Bowling Green. Ramic did not attend WKU but was in regular communication with the two students.