they behave with impunity because of the security measures that surround them, because of what they represent to the american economic hegemony. all of that "hypothetical" tech you hear about the government supposedly having to watch over citizens, like drone surveillance, ai facial recognition and height/weight/frame/gait recognition, backdoors and digital surveillance, palantir crunching aggregated metadata to discern simple criticism from actual intent and identify threats, minority report-tier predictive analytics that find intersections of speech behavior and online habits that will acurrately predict violent or extremist behavior? the people that you're actually talking about, people above government in the west, are the ones who possess this technology. this is the stuff of the elite in the private sector, not public. say someone knows where elon musk or larry fink or bill gates is going to dinner on a given night and wants to shoot them in the head while they eat their lobster bisque. this person's intent has been known for months, their behavior anticipated, and their movements tracked long before they ever execute. there is no trial, no phone call, no due process. they are arrested on the drive to whatever eatery they have identified, black bagged, bound, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean off the back of a boat with no registration number. people who don't understand or believe that this sort of thing happens fail to recognize what people like the aforementioned mean to the american machine. our money doesn't mean anything. these people's wealth is not denominated in cash. they and their respective organizations are extended virtually limitless lines of credit by the banking system and the federal reserve because the system believes in their capacity to be productive and build things. if they were to be eliminated, that money (in the form of credit and a massive double digit percentage of gdp) would simply be erased from existence.
United States