What to do about a dictator. I was in New Jersey with my family when I got the first text. My sister sent her kids to the other room to play, out of earshot of the television, and we watched the mainstream channels with my mom and dad while I scrolled X for updates. Donald Trump was shot. When he got up, and we saw the blood, my mom cried. Americans were furious, frightened, confused. It’s been fifty years since a presidential candidate has come so close to being killed, and among folks less obsessively plugged into the news (“sane, well-adjusted humans” we typically call these people) there was a general sense of disbelief. How could something like this happen? But how could it not? Our political climate is total cancer. An attack like this was probably inevitable. I’m just grateful we escaped the darker timeline — by about an inch.

Now, how do we stop this from happening again?

Since the attempted assassination, many of the pundits and donors who most prolifically contributed to our nuclear waste dump politics have retreated to “both sides” hand waving, with no clear enunciation of what led to this tragedy, or how we might avoid such tragedies in the future. For the most part, this is probably just indicative of a natural human allergy to accountability. But the media’s budding focus on “conspiracy theories,” and the targeting of platforms that tolerate them, strikes me as something a little more alarming than merely obnoxious.

In the first place, conspiracy theories signal freedom. People think, and have always thought, all kinds of crazy shit, which means any discourse without a healthy representation of unhinged speculation is probably operating in service of standing power. But, this week, conspiracy theories are also being made a kind of discourse fall guy: don’t look at the calmly stated beliefs of most left-wing pundits that implicitly justify violence, look at the crazy BlueAnon cat lady who thinks the former president staged his own assassination for the epic photo op. More to the point, look at the Big Tech Baddies who allow this woman to speak. It wasn’t a surprise to me when, as the weekend’s news unraveled, Elon Musk revealed he’d recently been targeted by two attempts on his life. Given the constant, hysterical coverage of the industry, which blames any leader who refuses to collude with the state for the rise of fascism, I expect further attempts of this kind — not because of BlueAnon Becky, but because of our allegedly sane propagandists.

Much as the capital riot in January 2021 followed six months of de facto legalized rioting across the country, Trump’s blood — on his face, his hands, the stage — followed years of rhetoric that essentially guaranteed an attempt on his life. In this, while much has been made of problematic “violent language,” I don’t think words like “bloodbath” really move the dial. Reid Hoffman’s apparent wish the president was martyred strikes me as a particularly grizzly example of this kind of speech, and was certainly more pointed than Biden’s innocuous “bullseye.” But is it fair to say Reid is responsible for a shooting because he said something stupid in the heat of the moment after Peter Thiel embarrassed him at the Really Really Rich Person Conference? No. We should however probably take a look at the actual things men like Hoffman — normal, sane, tax paying Democrats — say they believe, which have largely been shaped by our press.

The normalization of hysterical language concerning Trump’s “failed coup” (this didn’t happen), the rise of fascism in our country (this isn’t happening), and the impending dissolution of the American government (this is extremely not going to happen) has elevated the importance of the next election to previously unthinkable heights, and become a kind of gravity for the mentally unwell. Now, Trump attracts the crazies too. Let’s not be stupid about this. A little bit of whack ball shit is table stakes in politics, and especially politics online. But I do hope the “democracy dies in darkness” contingent will sit with the following questions, even if only for these few days following the attempted assassination of their most hated enemy: if you believe Trump is truly a new Hitler, agent of mass murder in the tens of millions, and an intended dictator who plans not only to dissolve democracy, but to jail or kill the people you love, isn’t violence against him easily justified? If not, why? You perhaps believe the vote is sacred. Is a democratic referendum on democracy legitimate? What about the vote that led to Hitler? On further reflection, if you don’t really believe Trump constitutes a threat so extreme, why have you said he does? Why have you sat by quietly while your friends and colleagues have said he does?

I guess what I’m getting at here is just the obvious absurdity of a pundit or a politician wishing thoughts and prayers to “literally Hitler.” Clearly, there’s something deeply broken in this logic, and there’s no healthy path forward for our country until we tease it out.

The Sunday morning platitudes against political violence from CNN, NBC, and the New York Times, while nice, have ultimately fallen flat. This is because, for years, all of these outlets have argued Trump is a threat to our lives. Either they were lying last week, or they’re lying today. The former position is something we can work with, provided the rhetoric ends. The latter position is far more insane. Which is it? What exactly are we dealing with here? The answer isn’t clear, and our chance of reading some soul searching essay on the question in the mainstream press is, unfortunately, apparently close to zero.

“Shooting conspiracies trend on X as Musk endorses Trump,” wrote the Verge on Saturday, while Trump was in the hospital. A day later, the Washington Post updated the official canon more directly: first, in a piece on Elon and the bad boy “billionaires” more generally, then in a comprehensive guide on how to protect yourself from misinformation, and finally in a piece specifically targeting the BlueAnon cat lady phenomena on social media. All together, the paper’s position could not be more clear. Conspiracy theories about the attempted assassination of Trump, not the discourse that led us here, constitute our most pressing danger.

From a superficial reading, the Post’s BlueAnon piece seemed to criticize the left, which many people found surprising given it was written by Taylor Lorenz, a prominent, left-wing writer. Some even considered the piece a kind of moderation from the Post, which previously ascribed the existence of conspiracy theories entirely to the political right. But the focus on conspiracy theories largely obfuscates the fact that nobody in the press is revisiting their position that Trump is trying to dissolve the government, or reflecting on what behavior broad belief in such an extreme position naturally encourages.

I understand the trepidation to self-reflect. After all, what else might introspection of this kind unearth? Who knows, once sufficiently primed for curiosity, one might even find herself inclined to grapple with the anti-democratic tendencies masked behind her democratic platitudes. I’ve let such hypocrisy go for years, mostly on account of, to some extent, everyone lives in political delusion. We humans love our little stories. But as of this weekend, with a cost for this delusion clearly now in blood, I’m done pretending there’s an equivalence here in terms of power, and the way that power has been wielded.

Throughout this election, one party has made repeated use of the state to turn a threat of violence on its enemies. We are told that party is the party of Trump. But Trump is not the president. Let’s talk about the team that’s actually in power.

It has been years since freedom of speech, something one might argue is a core requirement of working democracy, fell out of favor on the left. But the First Amendment feels almost trite to cry about in 2024. Friend, are you a Democracy Enjoyer? Great. Are you presently attempting to jail the frontrunner opposition candidate in the middle of an election? That should give you pause.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is currently trying to impeach and remove two supreme Court Justices from office, explicitly in response to a ruling she didn’t like — a ruling that made it more difficult for her to jail the opposition candidate. More concerning, her despicable attack on the nation’s balance of powers was not so great a leap from the position of her colleagues. Remember, seizing the courts by way of the unimaginable court packing nuclear option has become a mainstream left demand.

Standing in the shadow of attempted assassination, however, I think it’s most important we revisit a bit of recent policy from the defenders of our “democratic” state: just a few months ago, Congressman Bennie Thompson proposed legislation that would revoke Trump’s Secret Service protection, explicitly on grounds Trump should be punished following his felony convictions. The legislation was co-sponsored by four sitting Congressmen. Can it really be said these people wanted Trump to die? They’ll never explicitly admit it, but it’s worth asking if… oh, never mind. Saturday, one of Bennie’s staffers openly expressed her wish the shooter hadn’t missed. Hmm!

It’s interesting the New York Times understood the need to at least mention this final bit of psychopathy, only to follow with pearl clutching over Marjorie Taylor Green’s insistence Democrats wanted to kill Republicans. If even confined to the details in that single report, the fact that at least some Democrats want to kill Republicans appears to be literally true. Do all Democrats want this? Of course not. I am assuming only a very tiny fraction of Democrats are actively leveraging the powers of the state to kill Republicans. But some of them are, and we need the freedom to discuss these things — regardless of any other clown world story that also lives on the internet.

There is a price to freedom, and to truth, paid in the crazy shit we read online.

Social media, unmoderated, concludes in a chaos of all information: benign reporting of the day’s events, assholes bickering (me), unhinged memes (also me), official statements from the state, unofficial statements from the state framed as “news,” and pointed criticism of both. And this, I think — the primacy of the state narrative — is all we’re ever really debating in consideration of “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and the media’s much-loathed “conspiracy theory.” The question is not if people on the internet sometimes, or even frequently, lie. Pirate Wires can officially confirm: there are liars everywhere, in every direction. The question is what else are we only capable of discussing while wading through the clown world ephemera of our modern world?

Conspiracy theories, even when they’re wrong, almost always correctly signal the coordinates of power. An abundance of conspiracy theories, then, while not necessarily healthy, certainly indicates a healthy freedom to criticize power. There is probably a point at which any society does just need to find consensus, whether on some specific topic or reality more generally. At that imagined point, making space for conspiracies within the total chaos of our discourse might become untenable. Many of us are now asking if we’ve arrived at that point today. But we are not discussing, as the question is often framed, our access to some carefully measured truth vs. our exposure to insanity. We are discussing something much more abstract: what balance of information control (authoritarianism) vs. information chaos (anarchy) is best? There isn’t an answer here, there are only preferences. But keep in mind the state narrative is constantly riddled with lies, some by mistake (Covid, I think), some by omission (I will never forgive them for what they did to Ron Paul), and some on purpose (RussiaGate, Hunter Biden’s laptop). I prefer freedom.

Is Trump a fascist, or a Nazi? No. Is he trying to dissolve democracy, and put you all in camps? No. Is he trying to literally kill you? In my professional opinion: no. He was just shot, however, and I’m grateful that we’re free to talk about that shooting without the permission of people who can’t decide if he deserved it, or if they’re wishing for his speedy recovery.

-SOLANA