Discussion

trhway: Hegseth - Signal appNoem - habeas corpus definition she gave at the Congress hearingKennedy Jr - vaccines and the rest of his view on medicineNow Patel's unhackable FBI.I think the world has changed, and i really need to update my expectations of what is new normal. It is like in tech when paradigm change happens, and you're either go with the new paradigm or get obsolete.

ToucanLoucan: “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” ~Hannah Arendt

chao-: From the administration that brought us "We are currently clean on OPSEC", I can't claim surprise. Disappointment, but not surprise.Nor, however, can I take the statements of malicious actors at face value. They hacked a personal email address, but that does not mean "the FBI’s security was nothing more than a joke".

conductr: If Idiocracy was made today, I wonder how far in the future they’d place it. In 2006, they thought 500 years which seems optimistic now.

unparagoned: It’s all fine since he didn’t use it for official business right, right…

pnw: Based on the links in the articles, it's personal photographs and a resume from an old Gmail account. The resume dates from 2017.

noosphr: Imagine a world where gpg encryption was the norm instead of something that only works reliably in Emacs.

add-sub-mul-div: I don't think people appreciate enough how much it mattered that Trump was a celebrity buffoon/reality show personality for decades before "politics". Stupid people eat that up. Other Trumpy candidates have not been able to reproduce his success. Let's not assume this is the new normal.

justonceokay: Or more likely unofficial business

trhway: i'm from USSR, so pretty familiar with it. The issue here is whether it is a fluke, or the world is really going into new phase where totalitarianism and authoritarianism are going to become dominating state of affairs.

dogemaster2025: I don’t think people appreciate enough how much it mattered that Trump was the only candidate explicitly saying they were working to Make America Great Again, as opposed to foreign interests or illegals.

pwarner: Only the best people

k310: A great many experts in the military, medicine, disaster relief, and cybersecurity { the list goes on } were fired.It's almost as if the nation were weakened on purpose.Don't get mad, get Vlad. Or just prepare for the long-desired Rapture.[0] and which politicians seem to be working very hard to being about (the Apocalypse part, anyway)[0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/29/us/iran-israel-evangelicals-p...> Prophecy, not politics, may also shape America’s clash with IranSo, is prophecy OK in a pitch deck? Asking for a friend.

RobRivera: When do the Raptor puppets go on sale?

sv123: Clowns, all the way down.

epistasis: The people of the US were converted into functional Putin-subservient Russians for the last election, and the media environment is not getting better, and in fact seems to be getting much worse.However there is revolt amongst a good chunk of the fractured coalition that barely brought Trump into office.Trump's Epstein coverup and sheltering of Ghislaine Maxwell took off the shine with a large number of people. The ghastly behavior around the deaths of major figures takes off more. Exempting producers of the pesticide glyphosate has taken off most of the MAHA coalition. And then, of course the wars, when he promised not to launch any and accused his opponent of doing exactly what he's currently doing...It remains to be seen just how permanent this is, and whether the post-Trump US can be reattached to reality instead of reality TV, but I use hope.

ToucanLoucan: Unfortunately that leaves us with the Democrats who have shown time and again that they are unwilling or unable to confront this movement for what it is.I'm frankly far more concerned that the Republicans lose next election, and we get Democrats in power who then prioritize "getting back to normal" and once again utterly failing to hold accountable the utter BUFFET of mediocre wannabe dictators who brought us to the brink already.I also hope. But I'd be lying if I said I thought it was rational.

upheaval7276: I'm no fan of this administration, at all, but this seems like a big fat nothingburger. They hacked a personal gmail account, not a government account, not government infra. Why is this not a failing of Google instead of the government? And surely the hackers would have eagerly released anything damning, but nothing damning seems to exist. What am i missing here?

m_ke: just think of what could someone do if they got into your personal email account?

upheaval7276: yes, and...?

margalabargala: It's not a big deal, for the reasons you mentioned. But it's interesting to a lot of people, and therefore newsworthy.

upheaval7276: it's definitely newsworthy, no doubt there. but i see so many people in this thread pointing to this as somehow a failing of the fbi, which it's not. i'm all for calling out this administration for its many many failings, but this is not one of them, and calling this a failure of the administration just hurts the credibility of everyone pointing out real issues with this administration.

paxys: 2FA is too woke. Sounds like DEI.

ohyoutravel: Major public figure who is currently in a position of power in the USA. That’s bad news because it reveals sensitive details which may lead to their further compromise. Imagine you’re compromised by a corrupt administration with pics of CSAM or something already, now imagine a foreign actor also having compromised you. It’s a sticky situation.

upheaval7276: Yes, that's all true, all potential issues in theory. I'm still not seeing why this points to or supports the (valid) claim of incompetence in the FBI. That seems to be the angle most posters in this thread are taking, and it seems...misguided to me. Tilting at windmills. Let's call out the admin for their real failings, not nonsense like this. Getting your gmail account hacked does not reflect on you as a professional.

mikkupikku: Unfair to clowns, a noble profession.

xeonmc: Prefer the title “jesters”

bryanrasmussen: the sensible middle of the road between clowns on the left and the jokers on the right.

hmokiguess: Was he running openclaw on his unpenetrable system by any chance?

OhMeadhbh: Certainly the FBI and GMail having gaps in their operational information security isn't news.

Fricken: Authoritarianism is a spectrum and all states are on it. We all have brain slugs now, it was voluntary. We'll be going back to that old time religion, but with a new twist. With AI every man will, in a much more literal way, be able to have an ongoing private conversation with god. And you won't need money or the government anymore. God has a special plan for you and you follow it.

ohyoutravel: Leaking one’s credentials to sensitive personal repositories of information is a “real failing” lol, how could one think any differently? I would be mortified and immediately rectify the situation.

weaksauce: you don't think that it's relevant and concerning that the director of the FBI didn't take operational security seriously enough that his account got compromised? even if they didn't get anything incriminating (which maybe they did and are going to blackmail him later) that show a shocking lack of competency for someone in that kind of position.

upheaval7276: we don't even know how it was compromised. was his password "password", or did the hackers exploit a gmail/google vulnerability?

pkilgore: are you suggesting the former is not a demonstration of a shocking lack of competency?

bloppe: I read the headline and first thought was seriously, that's it? Surely this is one of the least concerning things about the administration

root_axis: Doesn't gmail opt people into 2fa automatically?

upheaval7276: I'm suggesting we don't know how the account was hacked, which is true. could be due to incompetence or not. i don't know, nor do you

OhMeadhbh: I recently read one of the best descriptions of why middle of the road, non wealthy voters went for Trump in the book "The King in Orange," a book about the "magickal" aspects of the 2016 campaign by John Michael Greer, the former (?) head of the Ancient Order of Druids in America.I expect cogent commentary about ritual magick by a Druid, but was a little surprised to find well laid out political commentary. I guess that was a failure of my imagination. Worth a read, even if you consider the topic bollocks. Greer sticks mostly to psychology and musings about using metaphor to engineer the mass imagination. Much less woo-woo than you might expect.I mention it in support of the previous poster's commentary about the Dems messaging being irrelevant to most Americans. Seemed to me middle America doesn't love Trump as much as they weren't able to hear Harris address any issues they were concerned about.I can recommend The King in Orange, What's the Matter with Kansas and Metaphors We Live By for more musings about such things.