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The video itself looks like a SNL parody of bad terrorist videos. His face covered in a balaclava, Driver speaks in a stilted fashion, his eyes darting repeatedly to the left as he tries to read the script he couldn’t be bothered memorizing. At one point, he’s even interrupted by a cat that wanders into the frame.

Aside from just the kicks of making fun of guys like this, Pipes had a couple of serious points to make. First, that terrorists are, almost by definition, not that bright. Second, that because they are blinded by hatred and ideological contempt, they tend to think we’re not that bright and so they routinely take foolish risks, assuming they won’t get caught. The upshot for Pipes is that because these guys are mostly clowns who are more likely to blow themselves up by accident than they are to actually cause mayhem and panic, we’re all a little bit safer.

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Aaron Driver is a particular species of stupid terrorist — a loner social radical who became Islamicized, not an adherent of Islam who became radicalized. He was the typical self-radicalized lone wolf — basically an alienated, disaffected young man who found community and meaning in a sort of pidgin Islamic jihad.

The unspoken corollary of the Pipes line is that what keeps us safe from terror is, to a large extent, simple luck. The problem is there are plenty of disaffected young men around, and a lot of them engage in more or less the same alienated rantings as Driver — praising Allah, railing against Canada and the West and making vague threats. But as Lorne Dawson, a Waterloo sociologist who had interviewed Driver pointed out to John Geddes for Maclean’s, there’s not much you can conclude based on what people are saying. Talk is cheap, we can’t monitor everyone, and sometimes your luck runs out.