America has seen a spate of political assassination. What does it mean, and how should we respond?
You might have missed the headline, but there’s been another assassination attempt against President Trump. This time, a deranged 21-year-old man named Austin Martin tried to break into Mar-a-Lago with a shotgun and a gas canister. The Secret Service killed him.
The story would have dominated the headlines during any other period in American history, but in this instance, it seems to have passed through the discourse without much of a blip. Are we becoming desensitized to assassination culture, and if so, where does that leave us? What does the gradual normalization of conspiracy-driven violence mean for the future?
The evidence suggests that online radicalization was a major part of the alleged assassin’s spiral into violence. The would-be shooter seems to have been radicalized by Epstein conspiracy theories. According to messages obtained by TMZ, he had texted a friend saying, “I don’t know if you read up on the Epstein Files, but evil is real and unmistakable,” and “[t]he best people like you and I can do is use what little influence we have.”
Martin’s backstory reminded me of what we know about Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old who nearly succeeded in killing Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. In both cases, these were bookish young white men who had trouble fitting into the high school social order and who, if reporting is to be believed, graduated from high school as supporters of Trump. Then, for whatever reason, they had a psychological breakdown and ended up trying to assassinate the president.
The Cycle of Paranoia in American History
Paranoia and assassination have been a recurring, if unfortunate, feature of American politics. Conspiracy and counter-conspiracy are baked into our history, from the founding era to the Civil War to the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which saw the assassinations of figures like John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. While any one incident can be blamed on a particular lunatic, the waves of violent paranoia that we have seen in specific periods of our history—and that we appear to be seeing now—are indicators of broader social distress, public anxiety, and latent political frustration.
What is happening now? In my view, contemporary American society is afflicted by what the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called the “postmodern condition.” Digitization fragments reality and undermines a society’s meta-narrative, producing splintered counter-narratives. Walter Cronkite is displaced by infinite podcasts. Thomas Pynchon’s novels capture the feeling of this post-1960s paranoia, how it distorts human psychology in profound ways and how it undermines our ability to parse the real world.
Take David DePape, the lunatic who attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer. A few months ago, out of curiosity, I pulled his trial transcripts and spoke with people close to him. DePape was involved in fringe subcultures; he lived in Berkeley, made pornographic films, drifted from the fringe Left to the fringe Right, was marginally employed, and was deeply immersed in conspiracy podcasts.
The trial transcripts show he spent hours every day consuming right-wing conspiracy podcasts. DePape concluded that public schools were “pedophile molestation factories,” for which he blamed the queer theorist Gayle Rubin and the Democratic establishment. Would it be fair to say that DePape’s attack on Pelosi was the fault of the conspiracy podcasters? Of course not. But would it be fair to say that the information environment in which DePape was operating activated pre-existing mental illness and directed it toward a target? Yes.
How to Resist the Postmodern Condition
What can we do about all of this? We can’t eliminate the algorithm. Censorship won’t solve the problem. The only prescription, to my mind, is individual responsibility. We have a duty to steel ourselves intellectually and hold on to our perceptions of reality. This moment will burn out, as similar moments have in the past. Technology will further evolve, solving existing problems while creating new ones. In our current information moment, it really is caveat emptor. You “consume content” at your own risk.
In my view, the deepest kind of conservatism involves resisting the culture’s attempt to imprint its ideology and its paranoias on future generations. Children today are taught leftist counter-narratives without ever learning the foundational meta-narratives of Western civilization. They don’t read the Bible; they don’t learn about the American Founding or the glories of the frontier. Instead, whether through Oscar-nominated films or unending TikTok videos, they absorb a thin, post-1968 ideological framework—one that is ultimately anti-civilizational.
Resisting the postmodern condition begins in our own households. In my own family, one thing we’ve been doing is eliminating digital distractions during critical periods. I leave my phone in my truck overnight. After dinner, we have a “family reading hour” when everyone sits together and reads. Sometimes we read children’s books, and sometimes we take on more challenging texts.
The goal isn’t to shelter kids from the world but to equip them to face the world from a position of strength—rather than surrendering to whatever fantasies, trends, or conspiracies happen to be circulating online.
