In the Swirl of Rage and Paranoia
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.
