The right has spent the last four years depending on and delighting off of the anxiety displayed very publicly by their opponents. We have to assess the current threat with a rational and measured baseline. https://twitter.com/breenewsome/status/1325979103208624128

Most of the worst case “what-ifs” never happened while a whole lot of really bad things that people weren’t paying attention to did happen. Don’t lose sight.

I shouted through the whole summer of 2017 for people to pay attention to Unite the Right and very few listened while people were droning on about the 25th Amendment, Russia, and nuclear codes. Meanwhile, the neo-Nazi threat grew.

Threat modeling must be done in relation to reality. This is fundamental.

In particular, when threat modeling, it is *never* productive to fixate on worst case scenarios for which there is no remedy, no mitigation, or no avoidance measure

It’s not useful to be like, “omg, he fired Esper to replace him with someone who will open fire on protesters!”

It’s not that that’s out of the realm of possibility. It’s clearly not. It’s that there’s very little we can *do* about it.