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As our politics has become ever more polarized over the past four years—drawing comparisons to the violent political and social conflicts of the 1960s—up till now we’ve been able to reassure ourselves that “at least the assassinations haven’t started.” Well, strike that. With a burst of bullets passing millimeters from former President Donald Trump’s skull, we seem to find ourselves back in the world of 1968, when Palestinian radical Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy for his support of Israel. …
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… Although America is no stranger to political assassination attempts, this is the first major one of the social media era—a volatile combination indeed. Within minutes of the story breaking, X was rife with rumors and theories. …
Although at the time I write this we know the shooting was real and who did it (Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pa.), but we have no idea why. We are tempted, of course, to connect the dots immediately to the media’s intemperate rhetoric—if Trump is Hitler, someone’s going to try to play Bonhoeffer. But a glance at the history of U.S. political assassinations muddies the picture. Nearly all were the result of mentally deranged individuals acting alone for idiosyncratic motives …
All of this suggests that, in our desperate search for answers, we’re likely to be sorely disappointed. But that doesn’t stop us from rushing forward into the haze of uncertainty and trying to make sense of it all. …
If it is true, as many have alleged, that our politics is descending into an existential war, we had better learn to beware of the fog of war. … Ironically, those who seem most eager to rebrand our politics as warfare (on both the right and left) seem those most blind to the constraints of the fog of war and most brazenly confident in the grand narratives they spin. …
… The more we distrust all sources, the more feverishly we gulp down whatever information we can find, hoping that sheer quantity can somehow compensate for the lack of quality. As we digest the flood of conflicting information and speculation about Saturday night’s tragedy over the coming weeks, we will be sorely tempted to filter out inconvenient facts and latch onto those that confirm our biases. Best of all will be those bits of information that fuel our anger and give us more reason to distrust and hate our “enemies.” …
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(Excerpt from WORLD. Photo Credit: Marjan Grabowski on Unsplash)