We Need to Punish Incompetence

No more FUPAs in the Secret Service

It’s time for society to draw a hard line.

Ever since Covid we’ve grown far too accommodating of ineptitude in every sphere of life. We all enjoy it when lower standards are applied to us, and as a compromise have come to accept significantly lower standards being imposed on everyone else.

At scale this has rendered every sector of society ridiculously inefficient and wasteful, and is ultimately responsible for the much-discussed “Crisis of Competence.”

Until yesterday this malaise had been absorbed by the spectacular abundance of modern America, which made it easy to dismiss the aggrieved as entitled “Karens.” But the attempt on President Trump’s life simply changed the equation.

It came far closer to succeeding than any of us thought possible in the 21st century, and needs to serve as a wake-up call to everyone in America that results fucking matter.

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The next steps are clear.

First Biden must fire everyone directly involved in overseeing this mess. It is simply unacceptable that a rooftop so close to President Trump was unsecured during a major event, and multiple careers need to end for this.

I mean, can you even fathom something like that happening in any of the last four administrations? Trump and Obama and Bush and Clinton all had thousands of fanatical enemies who hated their guts and absolutely wanted them gone, but everyone also knew it had become impossible to take down a President. The security state had simply grown too powerful, and we all had the vague notion that even joking about such a thing would result in a stern knock on the door.

Yesterday that myth was shattered, and that’s incredibly dangerous for the country at large. Because if a greasy incel with an AR-15 can nick a President, do you feel good about your chances as a Congressman or even a Senator? The security apparatus seems ridiculously fragile and incompetent right now, and you can bet this country’s enemies are all watching with a raised brow.

For very basic national security reasons we cannot let that stand, but when people aren’t fired for basic fuckups this is the culture that always results. And as Trump pointed out in their debate last month, Biden doesn’t fire people.

No more of that malarkey. In addition to everyone directly involved, President Biden must immediately terminate Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, the PepsiCo alumna now infamous for her goal of 30% female recruits by 2030.

Cheatle must be publicly humiliated for the anti-meritocratic culture she’s sought to create in America’s most important security body, and we need to make sure this fiasco is attached to her name specifically for the rest of her days. In a just world this creature would be permanently denied employment after something like this.

It’s honestly worth looking into whether her conduct as Secret Service Director constitutes gross misconduct, given that her ideologically biased approach to leadership demonstrably created a huge national security breach. Nobody denies that a successful assassination would have produced tremendous social unrest, if not a full-fledged Civil War. So why should Cheatle get to walk because of a turned head?

During his next administration President Trump should instruct his Attorney General to look into Cheatle’s situation and appoint a special prosecutor if necessary.

And he also needs to fire all female Secret Service agents.