The whistling wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard before. It spun out of the high grass around us like hypersonic insects — or fizzing bottle rockets. I don’t recall hearing the crack of gunfire across the verdant background hum of the South Mississippi wetlands. My brain seized upon this mysterious sizzling sound.
Three or four bullets likely ripped the air around us before someone — finally — interpreted the noise for me. “Shots! Shots!” or “They’re shooting!” I don’t remember what exactly. I do remember someone screaming “Get down!” and seeing my older sister collapsed on top of my daughter at the bottom of the boat. Both, thankfully, unharmed.
I recall the tour guide blaring the boat’s horn. And the silence that followed. Only the chug of the engine was audible as we maneuvered around a stand of brush and met the accidental assailant perched on his boat, hands on his knees. We screamed after him as the captain radioed in the incident (what kind of asshole shoots into the grass without a thought as to what or who may be on the other side?!). That’s when the shooter bent over and picked up the weapon and wordlessly laid it across his lap. An admission — and a warning.
I like to think I would recognize that sound again in the future and move more quickly. Time may tell. This story surfaced in my memory slowly over the days I spent thoughtfully not commenting on social media about the attempt on Donald Trump’s life — where, apparently it bears repeating, actual bullets killed actual people and at least a fragment of which grazed Trump’s actual ear.
While someone did once try to forklift Trump to death, as far as I can tell Trump’s first time under fire involved a reclusive Republican gun lover who popped eight shots out of an AR-style rifle in Butler, PA, two days before the Republican National Convention. Trump’s reaction—and the flood of critiques about misplaced shoes, his slow crouch, and defiant posturing—filled up my social media threads for days with a range of ill-formed conspiracy claims. I knew firsthand that being shot at can be a confounding and even time-warping experience. So honestly, nothing Trump did on stage surprised me that day. His bluster, too, in that mayhem was pure Trump.
To be sure, Trump boosters, including some elected members of Congress, reflexively blamed President Biden and Democrats for raising the political blood pressure for the sin of correctly diagnosing the MAGA movement’s threat to democracy. But those challenging the reality of the shooting hammered on the conspiracy button without the benefit of a theory. They were “just asking questions” by pointing back to Donald’s history of showmanship, including, his antics in the world of professional wrestling. Too many responses just read: “Fake.”
Like many of you, I’m exhausted by the years of contending with the lies, fabrications, and unfounded claims pouring out of the QAnon-captured Republican Party and the daily distortions of Trump. More than any state actor (Russia included) this domestic deluge of disinformation is a reality we’ve been forced to organize against. Thankfully, by and large, I’ve been able to rely on my online network of anti-authoritarian fact checkers, a mashup of progressive Democrats, independents, socialists, greens, and anarchists, for holding a more-or-less unified line in defense of facts and rational discourse. We disagree, and often, about policy particulars, but not typically the nature of science and our shared reality.
This collective fact-keeping is understood as part of our greater obligation to keep one another safe in chaotic times when lies about migrants, trans people, racial justice, climate change, and public health have become daily fare among the third of Americans dedicated to establishing rule by a strict ideological hierarchy known as Christian nationalism.
Suddenly, however, even my social networks were going off the rails.
President Biden’s baton pass to Kamala Harris recaptured the narrative to some extent and sparked a surge of new energy and something like hope for a future. But so recently many on the Left were beginning to feel Trump 2.0 was inevitable. In that haze of anxiety I watched as the nature of the posts in my feeds shifted.
In the weeks before the shooting, for example, I saw a growing number of Facebook friends posting memes teasing a Trump assassination. A few revived images of Robert De Niro, a vocal Trump critic, but recast in his violent Taxi Driver role, a film that inspired President Reagan’s shooter John Hinckley, Jr. Another more straight forward meme featured President Biden, emboldened by the recent Supreme Court ruling providing his office wide immunity from criminal prosecution, calling in a hit on President Trump. A journalism professor who would later post a swarm of conspiracy claims around Trump’s shooting shared this Biden meme while editorializing bluntly: "This is where I'm at."
The anxiety over a possible Trump reboot inspired Choose Democracy, an ad hoc effort that assembled originally in 2020 to help people organize against the possibility of a right-wing coup in the U.S., to create a Choose Your Own Adventure tool. It is designed to map out individual options in difficult circumstances while offering real talk about the unintended consequences of some of those choices, including flight.
On a Convergence broadcast about their project last month CD’s Daniel Hunter said:
“It doesn’t work out for us if the entire Left decides to abandon itself and go to Canada. That doesn’t work out politically for us.”
Neither does it work out for us if our movement folds into the mirror maze of conspiracy thought. While claims of an emerging fact-averse “BlueAnon” as a sort of Left equivalent of QAnon are overblown, neither are they nothing. For those who reject violence rooted in systemic racist oppression, and who seek to diffuse it at the roots, wading into the land of unknowable conspiracy would be a misstep.
Research suggests that conspiracy thinking slows “normative” political involvement. This includes canvassing, phonebanking, and voting. While these aspects of political organizing are by no means the entirety of what is required (and I tend to think of them as the least we can do), each must be quickly ramped up if we are to avoid fascist capture of the nation this election cycle.
On a recent teach-in organized by Women’s March Network, the political strategist Rinku Sen summarized the problem with conspiracy thinking: it makes us not believe anything and therefore not do anything.
In the weeks since Trump’s shooting and the rise of conspiracy complaints, I noted a decline of posts decrying Project 2025, an exhaustive compendium of decades of neofascist policy ambitions elucidated by teams of former Trump aides intended to help steer his return to power. Google backed up my hunch. Searches on Google for “Project 2025” rose from an abyss of remarkable non-interest as recently as June 2024 to a surge of searches through early and mid July that crested in the days around the shooting. After the shooting those searches trailed off precipitously.
While it’s true that Trump and his network have supercharged conspiracy thinking to drive the engines of their movement, theirs is an apocalyptic vision that requires — win or lose — mass violence. As winners, the MAGA contingent are prepared, for instance, to embark on an unprecedented mass deportation agenda likely to target as many as 20 million U.S. residents. Trump has promised to activate the full power of the federal government in service of this mass deportation, including calling in the powers of the DEA, ATF, FBI, and DHS, as well as demanding all the powers of local law enforcement. At this speed and scale promised, an explosion of concentration camps is all but certain, leading to, according to Scientific American writes, “predictably brutal results.”
Project 2025’s radically pro fossil fuels agenda promises brutality of another sort, including breaking faith with every international environmental treaty and imploding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Recent research suggests Trump 2.0 would result in an additional 4B tons of US emissions by 2030 — enough to tank global climate efforts and erase five years of gains from renewables. Failure to reign in climate emissions soon means a ballooning of global climate refugees, both inside the U.S. and without, and further collapsing of the planet’s life-support system.
An electoral loss, on the other hand, will not only be vigorously challenged in the courts (an effort that is already underway, as the Washington Post reports), but is likely to draw on lessons learned from the January 6, 2021, storming of the United States Capitol building. Many of the evangelical set flocking to touring mashups of political and religious revival services run by disgraced former U.S. General Michael Flynn—who brought psychological operations he helped refine in the Middle East into service of the MAGA movement while calling for a coup — have been conditioned to welcome mass violence as God’s own cleaning service. You know, divinely ordained genocides like Old Testament days. Amen?
Political violence is already at its highest point in the U.S. since the 1970s. The difference is that today it is directed at people more than property and most of the deadly outbursts are coming from the political Right rather than the Left. Yes, including Trump’s shooter. In the midst of this violence, it’s tempting to want to match brutality with brutality, especially when one side is developing pogroms to eliminate entire groups of our families, friends, and neighbors (which, essentially, is what the waves of anti-trans legislation equate to, as well as the promises of mass deportations). The problem is that the imagined promise of political violence — this idea that taking Trump out will magically unwind the MAGA movement — is a fabrication.
More typically these sorts of actions work to the advantage of would-be autocrats and dictators and their movements.
In a reflection on right-wing violence and the imperative of an effective response, political scientist Timothy Snyder cites cases across the “inter-war” period of the 20th Century to show how fascist martyrs are made and used to facilitate purges.
This is critical wisdom my now-former Facebook journo professor friend missed. While I messaged this prolific poster for an interview to help me understand better his willingness to both play up pro-assassination memes and then discount the facts of the shooting itself, he spat back a defensive: “Are you threatening me?” before unfriending and blocking me. My email to his work address bounced back.
Clearly, he was unaware that some of Trump’s closest supporters have also publicly pined for the elimination of their leader. Their hoped-for result was somewhat different. They expressed hope that assassination may usher in the eliminationist violence they so deeply crave.
Trump’s belligerence has been immensely useful in bringing nativist and Christofascist forces working to defend fossil fuel’s billionaires into alignment and back to the cusp of power (again). But this cycle’s Trump is today a disposable vehicle. MAGA may be welded to Trump, but arguably more as an idea, not as a person. The forces behind Project 2025 that carry Trump aloft today, those who wish to obliterate all trace of social services and facilitate the rise of a new Christian nationalist feudalism, have a growing roster of replacement options, including J.D. Vance, who holds an even more oppressive vision for the country than even Trump’s cult of personality has allowed.
If Trump haters wrongly imagine the death of Trump could bring an end to Trumpism, some true believers look toward their leader’s death and see a whirlwind of carnage by which they imagine achieving their eliminationist goals in fast forward action.
Here’s Ivan Raiklin, who calls himself Trump’s “secretary of retribution,” speaking with Alex Jones of InfoWars about how Trump’s followers would respond to the assassination of Trump utilizing a “deep state target list” developed by Raiklin:
Raiklin: “Immediately, [Trump supporters] will respond in kind. And they know who you are, because we’ve created the list.”
Jones: “If they kill [Trump] that’s a best-case scenario—from a sick level. From a sick-level medium: Oh, please kill him. But it’s so good after that.”
Raiklin: “Oh it’s going to be the best cleansing and the fastest cleansing that we’ve ever seen in my lifetime.”
These may be obnoxious blowhards, but they understand the power of martyrdom and how political violence can be used to unleash the pent-up fury carefully packaged over many years within the MAGA movement.
It was for this reason I held my tongue and stayed off my keyboard after the shooting, understanding that so much that was to follow would depend on the identity of the shooter.
As the good folks at Political Research Associates reminded us after the shooting and before Trump would model his new square ear gauze to more distracting cries of fakery:
What the moment calls for is vigilance — “vigilance against inevitable disinformation, potential retaliatory violence, and rising government repression of peaceful protest and dissent.”
Repressive government responses are to be expected in these situations. The overpolicing and murder outside the RNC is, perhaps, one underappreciated outflow of this truth.
But as the PRA further wrote the day after Trump’s shooting:
“Violence and fear must not be allowed to deter the people from the fullest exercise of their rights and their agency in determining how they will govern and be governed.”Creating and carrying forward that vision of just governance while keeping our communities safe demands we keep our focus and hold and promote actual facts concerning what’s at stake. These facts exist.
Lift them up.
This article originally appeared in Deceleration.
Deceleration is a nonprofit online journal producing original news and analysis responding to our shared ecological, political and cultural crises.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter| Or sign up for our RSS Feed
