Political Violence and the Reality Distortion Field

There have been 47 episodes of mass violence on school campuses this year. The 47th took place at a Denver-area high school, 26 years after the Denver-area high school shooting in Columbine, where three people were shot on Wednesday, two of them students. The 46th school shooting of the year had just one victim. Charlie Kirk, the conservative campus activist and podcaster, was shot in the neck during a question-and-answer session at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. He died shortly thereafter. The question he was being asked, right at that moment, was about the number of mass shootings in America.

I abhor political violence, as I do all violence. It is simply not an answer to political disagreement. When an assailant dressed like a police officer shot Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman and murdered former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman in their own homes, it was tragic. When Kirk was killed by a long-range rifle during a public gathering, it was tragic. (When those two students are shot in Colorado, it’s also tragic, even as we’ve spent decades in this country pretending to ourselves that there’s nothing we can do about it.)

Political violence puts all of us who participate in politics, and indeed the very act of participating in politics, at risk. I am speaking at a public event next week and I am fully aware of the world we live in. And I shouldn’t have to think twice about my own vulnerability, nor should any conservative.

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My view of this is not very controversial or provocative. It has been shared by every Democratic political leader who has made a statement about this, at least the hundreds that I’ve seen. But what I say in this moment, or what any of those leaders say, doesn’t really matter when there’s an open struggle, in these moments of confusion, to redefine reality.

“The Democrat party is a domestic terrorist organization,” said Sean Davis, a conservative activist who was merely echoing the words of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller just a couple of weeks ago. “Every post on Bluesky is celebrating the assassination,” said writer Tim Urban. “The Left is the party of murder,” said incipient trillionaire Elon Musk on his personal microblogging site, X.

This effort to amp up your political side in times of extreme emotion, to not just condemn the individual act but to slander all your political opposition at once, is the kind of thing you see in societies in open civil warfare. The only time we’ve seen it in America was in the prelude to open civil warfare. The consensus about the pointlessness of political violence, if you scratch the surface, almost surely still exists. But an infinite scroll that pounds ideas into people’s heads, and dares them to take action, perverts that consensus.

America has often been on the brink of deciding that it is intolerable to live among one another. There have been secession threats for as long as there has been a country. In recent years, it has been dealt with through a kind of whispered segregation, where we ideologically sort ourselves among ideological lines. But we cannot divorce ourselves entirely. We come together in the noisy black hole of our social media feeds, where we read the heaviest users tell lies about each other and perform what can only be described as perpetual incitement. And that definitely feels like what happens right before societies break, and turn on each other.

I had the sad occasion to discuss political violence a year ago, when our current president was also shot at, turning his head at the most opportune moment to survive the attack. What I said then remains true: This is not a singularly violent moment in our history, we are a deeply violent country, and no political party or ideology holds an absolute monopoly on the manifestation of that violence. Eleven of the last 12 presidents have seen at least some sort of plot on their lives. We have been here before and in greater numbers, as the names Kennedy and King will surely reveal. It’s part of the background noise of living in this country.

Telling people that political speech causes such violence is nothing but a demand to criminalize dissent. I refuse to do so. Yet something does feel different in America—not the fact of violence but its aftermath. For the majority of my life in and around politics, the finger-pointing, the blaming of entire political movements for lone acts, has been growing. Mass shootings are instant contestable events, battles for power over a moral high ground that given the sheer numbers none of us frankly deserve to sit atop.

This predictable, execrable back-and-forth is what will cause the country to snap if anything does, not the usual paroxysms of violence that we’ve all regrettably become inured to. If political violence is seen as opportunity, a chance to reinforce an image of the political opposition as extremists and proper subjects for hatred and even revenge, that will change the country, irrevocably, and for the worst.

You cannot reasonably experience this president and deny his role in this coarsening of American politics. But it’s bigger than that; it’s part of the way politics is mediating through distortion fields and lies. Feeding a culture of vengeance and normalizing it as part of politics cheapens everything this country has stood and fought for. I fear we’re no longer stable enough, no longer secure enough as a country, to handle it.