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An attempted assassination at the White House correspondence dinner and the crisis of opec. We'll talk about it on the compact podcast. I'm joined by Ashley Frawley and Jeff Schulenberger. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. So we saw actual news at this correspondence dinner, sometimes called Nerd Prom, treated a little less lightly this past week after the attempted shooting of Donald Trump by a Caltech grad. So it's, you saw a lot of speculation immediately in the wake of the shooting about who this guy is and what his motives are. I mean, correct me if I, if I'm wrong, but seems to me that he's, you know, basically a kind of resistance liberal, kind of blue sky guy who was very anti Trump. He was, you know, worried about a lot of things that are in the air, including Trump's kind of complicity with pedophilia. Right. The, the Epstein myth, one of the, one of the beliefs informing him. So, you know, I, I don't know, is this a kind of example of extremism? Is it the extremism of the resistance? Lib center, what's going on here?
C (2:27)
Yeah, I think it is that. And I, I will claim a little bit of vindication because this was my constant refrain, or maybe not that constant, but it was a point I made a number of times going back to the first Trump term and into the early 2010, 2000s, when people were talking about radicalization online through misinformation and Internet rabbit holes and filter bubbles and all these sorts of discourses that emerged in that period. And my, I think, repeated phrase was that what's important about online spaces and online social life isn't what it makes you think, but how it makes you feel. And, you know, it's a kind of Marshall McLuhan way of thinking about this, that the content is less important than the kind of affective impact of the medium and the way it changes your relation to the world. And a point that I brought and, and, you know, the simple point I was making was that, you know, the claim was that this is a. A problem of a certain type of content being too widely distributed and kind of fed to delicate, impressionable minds that are going to then go and do violent things. And the point I made back then was that, I mean, first of all, if you think about acts of violence, this is another relatively constant refrain of mine. They're, they're still extremely rare in statistical terms. And so the thing that's often more interesting in my view, is not what views are supposedly motivating people to commit acts of violence, but what views are attracting the type of people who might then go on to commit acts of violence. In other words, the kind of people who are attracted to committing acts of violence. And you can see this if you look at the biographies of various people who have been involved in these kinds of extreme acts, whether mass shootings or, you know, sort of ideologically hooded mass shootings or assassinations. Is that often they, they're kind of ideological tourists. They, they sort of travel through different realms and kind of sample from them. They often don't have a particularly clear or coherent worldview. Instead, what attracts them are ideas that, you know, somehow account for and provide some framework for understanding their, their feelings of alienation, disaffection, you know, perhaps sense of victimization by society. And so, in other words, the type of people who are, again, a very small subset of human beings who are going to commit these kind of extreme acts. The question is what kind of ideas are they going to be attracted to in a given moment? So that's, in my view, a much better heuristic for thinking about the relationship between ideologies and these kinds of extremely rare but very dramatic actions. So the, the point I may. I made back then in the. The first Trump term was what's important here isn't that certain people are being radicalized into certain extreme, dangerous beliefs. It's rather that the, the tone and affect of the way that we are apprehending and communicating beliefs is, is changing due to the nature of our, our media environment. And the point I brought up back then was that you could find a lot of centrists who sounded like deranged conspiracy theorists. You know, perhaps the most, the most sort of prominent of these was Rachel Maddow, who clearly kind of came to inhabit the Persona that was associated earlier in the same decade with someone like Glenn Beck, who, you know, was, was sort of mocked and ridiculed on regularly on Jon Stewart's show as kind of this classic archetype. Of the conspiracy theorists. So very clearly certain people like Rachel Maddow, we could think of all kinds of figures in the first Trump term on the resistance lib end of things, who, who came to embody this conspiracy theory outlook. Another figure I thought was sort of interesting, who I wrote about a bit at the time, is this guy named Seth Abramson who became, you know, who was a creative writing professor who then became, I think he published two or three books about sort of Russiagate type stuff. And on some level with him, what was interesting was that he had sort of theorized the value of conspiratorial narratives before actually engaging them in, with them in any impactful way. And then he sort of started out as a Bernie Sanders, you know, sort of Bernie Sanders was cheated out of the election by the DNC. So he was a hardcore Bernie Bro in 2016. And various people I knew kind of in the pro Bernie left started sharing his stuff and I started reading it and thinking this guy is either either completely nuts or, you know, he's doing something sort of clever, but extremely deceptive here. And I, I do think on some level he, he was a kind of theoretician of, of resistance lib cons, you know, the resistance lib descent into conspiratorialism in the 2010s. So people can go back to Seth Abramson's work if they want to get a sense of this the way that I think some people quite. And I'd say Maddow, you know, canny operator, somebody who knew her audience and what they wanted. So I think that there are people who kind of intuited that this was the direction that, you know, mainstream kind of center left culture was going in, in the late 2000 and tens and build careers on catering to it. And, you know, so I, I think now at that time that was kind of a relatively novel phenomenon, but now it's really, you know, normalized, to use a kind of annoying term. And this guy is sort of a, you know, he, he's not a significant figure in this world, doesn't seem to have had any influence. He's just somebody who you know, picked up on his general vibes and mood. And again, because I think he's, he's one of these sort of underground men, these sort of alienated outsiders. I wrote last year about what I called the return of the assassin. And so the figure of the assassin in American history, at least particularly in the kind of mass media starting in the mass media age. I think if you go back to the Era of sort of explicit anarchist assassination as a political strategy, period. The McKinley assassination and things like that. That's somewhat different world because you actually have these, you know, relatively, these relatively organized groups of anarchists who are carrying out assassination as an explicitly understood strategy. So the figure of the assassin that emerges in the mass media era embodied in figures like Lee Harvey Oswald. What's interesting about Oswald is that he, you know, did, he tried to be a communist. And I think he's a good illustration of my, my previous thesis. He tried to be a communist. He defected to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union didn't really want him. They, they eventually kind of essentially got rid of him. He came back to the U.S. he hung out with all these, even though he still seemed to be a communist, he actually hung out with all these kind of right wing anti communist types. And he was just this fundamentally disaffected figure who couldn't quite find a place for himself in society. And so what his ideological commitments were, I'd say was, was secondary to that situation of, of being Dostoyevsky, an underground man. And so what's interesting about this guy, as with other kind of center left assassins who seem to be emerging, is that they are attracted to center left ideology because it is a, a perfect illustration or it's a perfect manifestation of the, it's become a perfect manifestation of the conspiratorial mindset. And the other thing that I'd say is important here is that it expresses the worldview of people who feel disempowered and feel shut out of power. Which is fascinating in a way because I think what, what it first manifested in the peak sort of Maddow era was a group that felt itself losing its grip on power and was, was terrified by that and had to create these narratives to account for that. Now I'd say in some sense it's, it's a group that can plausibly consider itself quite disempowered because it doesn't seem to even be able to control the narrative of the Democratic Party very well. You know, it's the, the sort of mainstream center left. I saw some things pointing out that apparently Cole Allen, the alleged, you know, attempted assassin, you know, was posting some things like dunking on pro Palestine activists. So apparently he was not, he was not a pro Palestine guy. And you know, I, I think this is relevant because he's somebody who, who's in a sense attracted to this world worldview of the centrist because it is an embattled worldview that sees itself as out of power, as disempowered, as losing control, as in some sense fundamentally alienated from the society that it belongs to. And so I think that's why, you know, again and again with. And you know, I think Alan, this guy, Ryan Routh, who was the other, another attempted assassin, Thomas Crooks, the Butler Pa Assassin we don't really know enough about. But he does seem to have been not, you know, he was certainly not a sort of figure who clearly embodied some kind of movement leftism. We don't really know. He seemed to have been a registered Republican, but also donated to Democrats. So you know, maybe he was a never Trump Republican, I don't really know. But if so, you know, if essentially he was a never Trump slash resist resistance lib Democrat, you know, that, that does kind of fit this broader profile of the, the scent, the sort of the radical centrist who is radicalized by his sense of disempowerment and is actually attracted to centrism in some sense because it has become this. Another of these kind of phantasmagoric ideologies of, of. Of the disempowered and the disinherited and those who feel like they have no place in society. So that's, that's sort of what I think is, is revealing about this. And it does seem to have become a pattern. And so again, I don't think this is because that ideology is radicalizing people into killing people or trying to kill people. It's in fact because that ideology has become attractive to people who feel fundamentally disempowered, disinherited and alienated because it, because it is a fulsome expression of that sensibility and that understanding of the world. So, you know, a decade ago, maybe some kind of, I don't know, anti Semitic great replacement type worldview would be the most obvious thing that would attract you if you were one of these types of people. But now even just sort of centrists, resistance lib ideology is, is so conspiratorial and so kind of fixated on its own dispossession and inability to influence the world that it can appeal to somebody who would go out and commit these sorts of acts.
