The Boy Who Cried Assassination: When Political Violence Stops Shocking Us
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Last weekend, a man tried to assassinate the president and members of his cabinet at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. He made it a floor above where the event was being held before he was stopped. And the response, from people across the political spectrum, was mostly a shrug.
That should bother us. Not because every news event needs to spark a national meltdown, but because the kind of shrug we're all doing right now is exactly the shrug that authoritarian regimes are built on.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf, But With Assassination Attempts
We are getting desensitized to political violence in real time. An NPR poll last October found that 30% of Americans, split pretty evenly between Republicans and Democrats, believe political violence may be necessary to fix the country's problems. Thirty percent. That's one in three of your neighbors.
So when something like the White House attempt happens, the reaction online isn't horror. It's:
- Convenient timing for a ballroom expansion.
- How did this guy even get in? Must be a plant.
- Wait, is this real? Didn't this already happen?
And honestly? I caught myself doing it too. The guy didn't make it into the room. He was a floor away. It felt like a non-story before the day was over. That's the problem.
What Simone Weil Knew About Violence
The French philosopher Simone Weil, who lived through World War II and watched fascism rise in real time, wrote an essay on the Iliad that gets quoted a lot but applied not nearly enough. Her argument: violence dehumanizes everyone it touches. Not just the victim. The person wielding it gets dehumanized too.
"Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to the victims. The second it crushes; the first it intoxicates."
The victim gets crushed. The oppressor gets drunk on it. And the spectator, the one watching from a phone screen on the couch, gets pulled into the same cycle. You don't have to pull a trigger to be morally injured by violence. You just have to keep watching it, scrolling past it, refreshing for more of it.
There's a James Baldwin short story called Going to Meet the Man that we won't summarize in full here (it is genuinely one of the more disturbing things ever written) but the premise is this: a Southern sheriff can only feel alive when he's remembering the lynching his parents took him to as a child. The violence doesn't just stay in the past. It feeds him. It becomes who he is.
That's what spectator violence does. It feeds something in us we shouldn't be feeding.
"Flood the Zone": Why You're So Tired
There's a phrase Steve Bannon coined back in 2018 that explains a lot of what's happening right now: flood the zone. The strategy is simple: overwhelm the media, the opposition, and the public with so many extreme moves at once that nobody can respond to any of them properly. Truth gets buried not because it's hidden, but because there's so much noise around it that finding it stops feeling worth the effort.
Hannah Arendt, who also lived through the rise of fascism and wrote about it, argued that this is the actual goal of authoritarianism. Not to make you believe a particular lie. Believing a lie still leaves truth somewhat intact. The deeper goal is to "unravel the very idea of truth itself," so that people end up believing everything and nothing at the same time.
When that happens, you don't need to persuade people anymore. You just need to exhaust them. And let's be honest. We are exhausted.
We're tired of fact-checking. We're tired of asking "wait, is that real?" We're tired of waking up to another executive order, another absurd post, another contradiction, another spectacle. The president posts an AI image of himself as Jesus while people are calling on the Defense Department to be investigated for bombing a girls' school in Iran. Both happen around the same time. Neither gets a full news cycle. By the next day or so we've moved on to the next three things. That's the strategy working.
Joseph Goebbels Said the Quiet Part Out Loud
Two quotes. Tell us if they sound familiar:
"It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas in disguise."
"The most brilliant propaganda technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly — it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."
Both of those are from Joseph Goebbels. The Nazi propaganda minister. The 2020 election was stolen. Immigrants are eating the pets. The press is the enemy of the people. Repeat it enough and reality starts to bend.
The defense against this is not clever rebuttals. The defense is critical thinking, actual, sustained, learned critical thinking. Which is exactly why education systems are being gutted right now. You don't have to convince a country full of critical thinkers of much of anything. You just have to make sure the next generation doesn't learn how to do it in the first place.
What Habits of the Soul Have to Do With It
The medieval theologians had a phrase for what we're describing. They called it habits of the soul. The idea was that what you do today shapes who you become tomorrow. You don't drift into being a more compassionate person. You don't drift into being a more cruel one either. You practice your way there, one small choice at a time.
Lillia Ellis put it like this in her piece for Christian Century:
"When we build up our collective capacity for anger, suspicion, and hatred, we ought not be surprised when compassion and reason wither away."
The fruits of the spirit don't just show up. You have to feed them. Same with everything else.
So when we shrug at an assassination attempt, when we click on the manifesto, scroll the comments, share the conspiracy theory, and move on without flinching, we're not just being lazy citizens. We're shaping ourselves into the kind of people who don't flinch. And eventually, we won't. That should scare us a lot more than it does.
So What Do We Do?
Honestly? Smaller things than you'd think.
Pay attention. Read the graffiti. Look at the bumper stickers. Talk to the Uber driver. Ask the tour guide what's going on with the protest down the street. The world is constantly telling you what's happening if you're willing to look at something other than your phone.
Read the people who saw this coming the first time. Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can't Happen Here in 1935 because he could see exactly what was happening in Germany and could imagine it happening here. Hannah Arendt. Simone Weil. James Baldwin. Lillian Smith. They handed us the blueprint. We just have to open it.
Vote. Matthew voted this week. Did you?
Refuse the exhaustion. That part is the hardest. The whole point of the flood is to make you stop caring. The most defiant thing you can do right now is just keep caring, about what's true, about your neighbors, about the people getting hurt overseas because of policies most Americans can't be bothered to read about.
And love the people who are hard to love. Jesus said it, in the parts of the Sermon on the Mount that nobody puts on a coffee mug: if you love only those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that.