The Long Pause Is Over

For more than half a century, America managed to do something remarkable: we avoided political assassination. From the bloody chaos of the 1960s — when bullets felled a president and his brother — we entered an uneasy, fragile calm. Three generations grew up believing that while our politics might be ugly, dangerous violence was mostly behind us.

Until now.

What happened wasn’t random. It wasn’t unforeseeable. And it sure as hell wasn’t without warning. This was not simply the act of one disturbed individual. This was the inevitable outcome of the political culture we have gleefully built, monetized, and exported to ourselves for the last two decades. We lit the fuse. We sold the fireworks. Now we pretend to be shocked at the explosion.

For years, we’ve allowed politics to stop being a debate about policy and turn into a battle of existential grievance. People no longer argue over healthcare or taxes — they argue over who is trying to destroy America. Who are the “real Americans” versus the traitors, the criminals, the child groomers, the globalists, the communists, the fascists, the deep state. The list depends on which network you watch.

The language has gotten more eliminationist with each passing cycle. “Lock her up.” “Enemies of the people.” “Stolen elections.” “They’re coming for your children.” Every time that rhetoric ratchets up, the line between political speech and implied violence gets thinner. And every time the line gets thinner, some unstable actor hears the not-so-subtle dog whistle as a call to arms.

This culture of grievance isn’t a bug, it’s the business model. Politicians, pundits, cable networks, and YouTubers have made entire careers out of keeping their audiences perpetually outraged and perpetually terrified. Rage drives ratings. Fear raises campaign donations. Manufactured panic turns into real violence — but the grifters never take responsibility. Why would they? The algorithm rewards them either way.

And while we’re assigning blame, let’s be brutally honest: one side of the American political spectrum has weaponized violent rhetoric as campaign strategy. They play footsie with militias. They wink at armed intimidation. They describe political opponents as subhuman, illegitimate, treasonous.

Donald Trump and his flying monkeys didn’t just light the match — they built the bonfire. Every election is rigged. Every critic is an enemy of the people. Every opponent is part of a criminal conspiracy. And when you tell millions of people for years that democracy itself has been stolen from them, someone will eventually pick up a gun.

But here’s the second ugly truth: while the MAGA cult set the fire, the Democratic Party watched it burn. For years, Democrats treated this rising threat like it was just another political disagreement — a messy but manageable dispute between two sides. They clung to procedural norms while one side shredded every one of them. They gave speeches while their opponents stockpiled weapons. They issued strongly worded letters while insurrectionists rehearsed for civil war.

Time after time, faced with authoritarian escalation, Democrats responded with caution, calculation, and a naive hope that the “system” would hold. They underestimated how deeply the rot had spread. They underestimated how easily institutions buckle when half the country no longer believes in them. And now they act stunned that the violence they refused to confront directly has finally arrived.

None of this was unpredictable. It was simply a matter of time. The country is saturated with guns. Security protocols work until they don’t. Lone actors require no elaborate conspiracy — just proximity, a weapon, and conviction that they’re serving some higher patriotic purpose.

For 56 years, nearly three generations, we beat the odds. We survived the boiling rage of our own divisions. But the streak is over now. And barring a wholesale shift in how we conduct ourselves politically, it won’t be the last time. We are entering the next phase — one where political assassination is no longer theoretical, but again part of our political reality.

We engineered this moment. We profited from it. We enabled it. We excused it. We watched it. And now we pretend to be surprised when the blood starts? Please.