| | | Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Subscribe here | | Political violence in America has (mostly) been a subject for history class — seen only in black-and-white photos and scratchy newsreel footage. Not since the 1960s and early '70s have we seen a summer like 2025. Now, as then, we are caught in a crisis of our own making. But it isn't a crisis of political antagonism or ideological dispute. It's a crisis of meaning. A crisis of self-worth. The result of our failure to build and sustain an inclusive society of opportunity for all. We are arguing over a brush fire (which party is more to blame) as the forest burns. The nation cries out for leaders, but what we have instead are violence entrepreneurs. | Opportunists | Where others see challenges or threats, entrepreneurs see opportunity. At their best, politicians harness the energy unleashed in moments of crisis to implement new solutions: After the Soviets launched Sputnik, the U.S. invested in science and education to put a man on the moon. At their worst, politicians exploit tragedies to advance their own careers and consolidate power. When Saudi terrorists brought down the twin towers, the Bush administration used it as a pretext for domestic spying, torture, and the invasion of Iraq, a country with no connection to the 9/11 attacks — and, as it turned out, no weapons of mass destruction. | History takes time to sort itself out, but so far, our response to this crisis looks more like Wag the Dog than The Right Stuff. Charlie Kirk's killer hadn't even been charged before JD Vance promoted himself from vice president to podcast guest host, taking over Kirk's show and pledging to crack down on "radical-left lunatics." Among the first targets, he suggested, should be such nefarious organizations as the Ford Foundation and the Nation magazine. Trump adviser Stephen Miller blamed a "vast domestic terror movement" for Kirk's death. | Josh Hawley turned the gaslighting into a strobe light: "We've had three assassinations, or assassination attempts, of major political figures in the last 18 months. All the targets are one persuasion, and all the shooters are one persuasion." Persuasion is vague, but short of "human" your guess is as good as mine as to what it encompasses: a centrist Democratic governor (Josh Shapiro), a progressive Democratic state representative (Melissa Hortman), a Christian Nationalist podcaster (Kirk), and President Trump. And why could Hawley only count to three? | No leading Democrat has made any sort of equivalent assignment of blame or call for retribution, but they've been equally sclerotic. Condemning "violence" alone is just the sort of milquetoast response we've come to expect from the party of Schumer. | | Victims | Hawley was right about one thing: The "shooters" have all been of one "persuasion." Only it's not political. The commonalities appear to be invisible in plain sight. They are angry men, mostly young and nearly all of them white, suffering from an array of financial, medical, and personal setbacks. They're largely isolated from their families and physical communities. They're unemployed or intermittently working; they're not members of any sports teams, hobbyist clubs, or political organizations. These nominally "political" criminals held only shallow political views, defined by memes and enemies, not policies or ideologies. | Cody Balmer, charged with attempting to murder the governor of Pennsylvania, was recently divorced, about to lose his house to the bank, and fresh off a suicide attempt. | Tyler Robinson, Kirk's alleged murderer, was described by neighbors as spending all day in his apartment playing loud music and video games. He inscribed his bullet casings with memes and gaming references, artifacts of his nihilist, irony-soaked online life. | David DePape, who nearly killed Nancy Pelosi's husband in a botched effort to kidnap the former speaker, was estranged from his family, living in a rented garage. | Patrick White, who shot hundreds of rounds at the CDC, killing an Atlanta police officer, blamed the Covid vaccine for his deteriorating mental health. | Thomas Crooks's motive for shooting Donald Trump remains a mystery, but the entirety of his political engagement was donating $15 to a progressive voter registration group when he was 17, then registering to vote as a Republican the next year. | Vance Boelter, indicted for the murder of Hortman, was an outspoken opponent of abortion, and appeared to be targeting pro-choice politicians, but was otherwise not notably political. | Luigi Mangione, alleged killer of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was a prolific online writer about technology and history, but evidenced little interest in electoral politics or issues — except for his personal vendetta against the health insurance industry. | These men aren't resorting to violence after losing at the ballot box. Few of them appear to have had much interest in politics at all, beyond their personal grievances. Several don't appear to have even voted. They certainly aren't the shock troops of a violent movement or the martyrs of a revolutionary cause. A dozen people picked at random would likely demonstrate more political engagement than these men, up until the moment they pulled the trigger. | They are evidence of a crisis that runs deeper than any political division. Now, dead or imprisoned, they are fodder for the wrong battle. Ironically, that these men weren't partisan actors means the debate over which side they were on is unresolvable — they were on neither side — and thus can go on forever, generating clicks and clout. Besides political campaigns, the near-term financial beneficiaries are politicians raising money, cable news channels pumping ratings and social media companies seeking ad impressions. | Rehabilitation | Only once we stop pretending this violence is politics by other means, and recognize it as the result of our broken politics, can we envision solutions. | Our accelerating cavalcade of bloodshed rests on three pillars: | First, the massive tech media platforms, which feed us a daily diet of misinformation and tribal distrust. Sex sells. But Big Tech — 40% of the S&P 500 — has found something even better: rage. Eisenhower rightly warned us about the military industrial complex. In the decades after he left office, weapons manufacturers, think tanks, and politicians — the violence entrepreneurs of their era — conspired to make foreign wars and proxy conflicts into billion-dollar businesses. Today, Meta dwarves Lockheed Martin. "Make Memes Not War" is the trillion-dollar strategy. | My argument is not that politics is unrelated to the violence. (Or that there isn't actual organized political violence, mostly from the far right, as has been well documented.) On the contrary, the ever more violent and inflammatory rhetoric and misinformation and the relentless demonization of every available scapegoat have left their marks all over the lives of the perpetrators. But demagoguery, dog whistles, and tribalism aren't new. The dangerous novelty of our time is the fusing of capitalism and technology to make rage, and violence, profitable. | We'd go a long way toward dismantling the rage machine if we exposed its makers to liability, as we do with every other corporation. Reforming Section 230, which insulates online platforms from the externalities of the conspiracy theories and Chinese misinformation schemes they peddle, would be a massive first step. Age-gating social media would be a good follow-up. | And online media is an accelerant to our problem. As I often say, (including in my next book), the fire it fuels is disconnected rage. Rarely has a cohort fallen further, faster than young men. Most angry young men find peace. Some grasp a gun instead. | | My friend Richard Reeves wrote a book, Of Boys and Men, that's replete with good ideas: recruit more male teachers, invest in vocational training, destigmatize mental health problems. We should raise the minimum wage and create tax breaks for people paying off student debt and saving for home ownership. Implement national service to get young people off their devices and into their communities. Use tax credits that unleash the private building sector and anti-Nimby laws, to help us build 8 million new homes in 10 years. Enforce retirement ages and term limits so older people make room for the rising generation. | The third leg of this stool is the most obvious, but also the most politicized. This post comes nine days after Kirk was killed. In those nine days, 1,125 other Americans died from gun violence. Fifty were children. Two more people have been shot and killed since you began reading this post. | | The U.K., where I've been living for the past three years, has much in common with the U.S. The problems are familiar: racial division, arguments over immigration, declining opportunity for young people. Yet one difference stands out. It will take more than a year for the U.K. to see as many gun deaths (per capita) as the U.S. experienced in the nine days since Kirk's murder. Private handguns are outlawed here, and hunting firearms are tightly controlled. | This isn't complicated: break Big Tech's immunity, invest in boys, rein in guns. The hard part isn't policy — it's courage. The violence entrepreneurs aren't selling solutions, they're selling rage. And business is booming. | Life is so rich, | | P.S. Check out our newest podcast: China Decode, co-hosted by Alice Han and James Kynge, with a new episode every Tuesday on the Prof G Pod feed. Listen to the inaugural episode here on Apple or Spotify, or subscribe on YouTube. | ____________sponsored content __________ |
|
| | ____________sponsored content ____________ |
|
| |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment