Our Crisis Spiral
Since I woke up to the news on Thursday, I've had the entire newsletter for this week planned out. I was going to spend Sunday afternoon watching the Premier League and collecting various quotes from Charlie Kirk.
I planned to start with when he suggested that Black airline pilots are suspect and of questionable merit:
“If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.”
Then I was going to shift to his serial denigration of Martin Luther King's Jr. and the civil rights movement including his belief, stated on multiple occasions, that passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which led to the integration of public accommodations and banned race based employment discrimination was “a mistake.”
But as the days wore on and the media fracas around the assassination began to crystallize, I realized that I wanted to zoom out and take a wider lens. And for the record, I don’t have a dog in the unfolding fight between8 Chan Groypers (who the shooter is allegedly affiliated with), and Kirk’s Turning Point USA movement.
Instead, I want to use this time to frame the events in Utah in concert with wider trends in the country in general.
I've read many historians refer to what America is experiencing today as a crisis spiral. We are experiencing escalating political violence and assassinations at a rate unseen in the country in over fifty years. The type of violence that we are seeing is generally more commonplace in states transitioning from authoritarian regimes toward more democratic systems. If you need to envision someplace in particular, think about the Philippines in the 1980s or post-colonial Nigeria and their waves of coups, counter-coups, and assassinations.
In short, escalating political violence is a sign of weak and ineffective institutions.
A History of Violence
People show their biases when looking at a conflict by where they think the starting point is. Many Americans appear to believe that the political violence that occurred on Wednesday is a radical departure from American norms, but I would argue as an observer within and now from afar that it is part of a wave of violence that has plagued our politics.
An establishment Democrat might argue it began on January 6th. A leftist or anti-racist may cite Charlotteville and the murder of Heather Heyer at the Unite the Right rally. But from this author’s vantage point, it began with Dylan Roof's murder of nine Black parishioners in South Carolina in 2015. Roof, a neo-Nazi, committed the murders hoping to spark a race war.
Using that date as your start, you can catalog over a decade of political violence, including mass shootings that were perpetrated by twenty something year-old men who had been indoctrinated into far right and neo-Nazi ideology in the darkest corners of the internet. Below is a brief list, and for the sake of expediency I’m excluding the spate of mass shootings committed by incels, but they arguably belong here are well:
June 2015, Charleston Church Shooting, neo-Nazi Dylan Roof killed nine Black worshipers at an evening prayer service
June 2017, a gunman opened fire on members of Congress practicing for an upcoming charity baseball game, wounding Rep. Steve Scalise
August 2017, Heather Heyer was killed in a vehicle attack by a neo-Nazi in Charlottesville; two other people died in a police helicopter crash later that day
October 2018, a neo-Nazi gunman entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg killing eleven
May 2019, after over a year of street brawls between Proud Boys (and affiliated groups) versus Portland Antifascists a massive coordinated attack occurred at Cider Riot; this was followed by a vehicle attack that killed an anti-fascist protester later that year in October
October 2020, thirteen anti-government extremists were arrested for conspiring to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan
January 2021, an attempted coup at the US Capitol led to the death of five people
October 2022, an attacker broke into the home of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, beating her husband with a hammer
July 2024, a twenty-two year old sniper took aim at Donald Trump at a campaign rally in rural Pennsylvania, killing a bystander
December 2024, a neo-Nazi opened fire at Abundant Life Christian School in Wisconsin killing two people
January 2025, a seventeen year-old student and author of a fifty-one page neo-Nazi manifesto killed two people at Antioch High School near Nashville
April 2025, a thirty-eight year old man fire bombed the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania, targeting the Jewish governor of the state, Josh Shapiro
May 2025, two Israeli embassy staffers were killed in Washington DC
June 2025, two democratic legislators were attacked by a gunman posing as a police officer; State Representative Melissa Horman and her husband were killed
You likely noted some trends in that data about the purveyors of political violence in the US and the increasing regularity with which it is happening.
This is not normal.
Too many young men are being radicalized and finding extremist fellow travelers in online and algorithmic fever swamps.
It is a lie to say that we are in uncharted or unprecedented times. History is full of examples of societies navigating moments like this. To our detriment, we seem to believe we are somehow better, wiser, or more immune than those who came before us.
By this point, I am supposed to offer some uplifting conclusion or practical advice for the road ahead, but I don’t have any to give.
Never before has a society staked its future on algorithmic feeds and the outrage merchants they elevate. Meanwhile, our leaders show neither the restraint nor the forbearance this moment demands.
There are exits from this road. We just do not seem interested in taking them.
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback about the newsletter, I welcome it, and I really appreciate it when folks share the newsletter with their friends.