It has been 22 days since the last major government news story I have to address in my newsletter.1
It has been 0 days since the last major government news story I have to address in my newsletter.
Well, the government’s back on their bullshit and so am I, I guess. I really toyed with the idea of not addressing the events surrounding the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, but then I remembered that the whole point of this newsletter is discussing things like business, technology, the internet, our digital lives and how, at least in the US, those things are becoming more and more intertwined. It would be pretty hard to talk about what I wanted to talk about (Doritos and Frito-Lay and the price of greed) knowing that the story dominating many social feeds right now is this shooting? Attempted shooting? There were “shots fired,” but not like, AT anyone, so we’ll just call it The Really Stupid WHCD Event (TRSWHCDE, okay that’s a little long but whatever).
Speedy primer on what happened in case you’ve been actively avoiding it: On Saturday evening, a man breezed past security2 at the Washington DC Hilton, where the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was about to begin, and fired shots in the lobby somewhere before being tackled and arrested. The journalists and White House officials in the dinner heard the shots and had to duck and/or run for cover. Some people looked scared and some people didn’t look scared. Prior to all this happening, this man wrote a “manifesto” (it was basically an email) about how he was going to try to kill the WH Administration members one by one (except Kash Patel because…maybe they have a mutual love of…shots?) because he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”
Those are the quick facts. And, as it was happening, like clockwork, everyone rushed to judgment. Too many press outlets were releasing information like it was factual when it wasn’t3, and too many people online had Very Loud Opinions too early on. For some, it was about the “violence of the left,” (which always conveniently ignores violence in all other forms.) For some, it was a sudden change of heart around the President (???) and a show of solidarity and support for the administration. For some, it was (and I can’t actually understand the words I’m about to type here) a Very Good Justification for ~checks notes~ a ballroom?
And for plenty of people, it was a Very Obvious False Flag Operation.
Now, before I get into what I’m really hoping to impart here, I want to say that there are many, MANY good reasons for people to be suspicious of these events.
1) POTUS has proven, over many years, to be prone to creating distraction and attempting sleight of hand when faced with scandal or waning approval ratings, both of which are happening right now.
2) There has been a LOT of illegal or even just plain unethical4 shit that the administration (and the Trump family) has endeavored in BOTH of his terms.
3) Reactions during TRSWHCDE were mixed, as I said. Some people looked genuinely terrified, and some reacted in ways that others interpreted as “the calm of prior knowledge,” as I’ll call it.
4) The poetry of it all felt very, um, on the nose, as this particular Hilton was the site of Ronald Reagan’s attempted assassination almost 45 years ago to the day.
5) Finally, the response felt very exploitive: First, POTUS reportedly wanted to keep going with the event, because he was really stoked about his speech. Then, upon canceling the event, he took to a press conference to…shill his ballroom idea? Social media was just WALLPAPERED with right-wing influencers demanding this ballroom be built. It was one more opportunity to shame the left for violence, etc. etc.
(Okay can I just for a second? Can someone please explain to me how this is connected to a ballroom? Because every time I read it, every time I type it, I feel fucking crazy. Did everyone on the right pay up front for a lifetime of foxtrot and tango lessons and is very panicked about where they’re going to perform their final showcase? I feel like Alice meeting the Cheshire Cat for the first time, except hearing him talk doesn’t make me go on an adventure so much as it makes me want to put my head in an oven.)
I get why people were immediately skeptical of the situation. Shit, I’m not gonna pretend like I wasn’t: My FIRST reaction was that it seemed annoyingly convenient, with his ratings in the toilet, WHILE A MEMORIAL FOR VIRGINIA GIUFFRE IS TAKING PLACE, and the midterms are looking concerning for the GOP (or they WERE, before SCOTUS gutted the Voting Rights Act, days after I wrote this). I get it, especially with the way they IMMEDIATELY exploited all of it in their (their ballroom’s?) favor.
But here’s the unfortunate truth: They were going to exploit it literally no matter what.
In the most generous and unearned take possible, that’s what politicos do: They take events like these and they push an agenda (never thought it’d be such a Bridgerton-esque agenda, but here we are). In a less generous (and more honest) take, this administration is FULL of people whose idea of generosity is General Zaroff giving Rainsford a few more hours before he begins to hunt him.5 And at the helm is Donald Trump, a Very Classic Narcissist.6 An aging narcissist. He cares about two things: Attention and power.7 And he gets the latter from the former.
You would, of course, be forgiven for routinely forgetting this if you’ve never had to intimately deal with a narcissist before. For those of us who have had relationships with them or have them in our families, both terms of this administration have basically been an Ongoing Trauma Response. A narcissist doesn’t necessarily hate negative attention because it’s still ATTENTION, though they’d definitely prefer it to be positive. But even with negative attention, they will always find ways to spin it, to make it work in their favor. They are masters at DARVO, a term coined for behavior that causes harm but then reverses the roles, trying to make the victim the abuser. You would also be forgiven for assuming that that means that narcissists are brilliant, wildly intelligent people: They’re not. Anecdotally, the narcissists I know are actually pretty fuckin dumb, but they’re exceptionally skilled at manipulating people and situations to get what they want.
Like a ballroom (I guess).
You see evidence of this narcissism in the way this administration takes credit for “fixing” things that they themselves broke. You see that they blame everyone else for the mistakes they’ve made. You are not protected if you are in their inner circle–you are only collateral damage waiting to happen. They have no loyalty to anyone but their own image and public perception. And because of this, they really have no need to manufacture these events to distract people–they will simply leverage whatever happens to BE the distraction. Even accusations of manufacturing the situation just feed into the attention…the accusations give them something to work from, to continue to spin and exploit.
Back to my point (and what you’re no doubt swimming in on the internet right now): Was it staged? Was it real?
But…does it actually matter?
Okay, yes, it MATTERS when it comes to “inciting events” that have downstream impacts (as this one assuredly will). It matters when we consider the new changes to capital punishment and suddenly having someone basically allow themselves to be an offering on that altar. It matters when we consider that gun violence is still a huge fucking problem that isn’t being taken seriously at all. It matters that our federal government demonstrates over and over and over again its glaring ineptitude around security and that likely will have searing consequences in the way that they basically open our country up to national security incidents. It matters in the way of sycophantic members of Congress salivating over the chance to offer up $400 MILLION8 of OUR tax dollars that they can kneel on as they lift their mouths to his backside, promises of ornate, elegant space for Victorian dance circles on their lips.
But does it matter to you and me, on a sort of “living on a daily basis” level? No. Not really at all.
What would it look like if, instead of wringing our hands over whether TRSWHCDE was real or staged, and putting our stake in the ground of a hill that doesn’t really deserve us dying on, we just decided it was all theatre and that it wasn’t worth spending our time on? If we simply disengaged from the conversation, especially since we have no control over what comes after this?
What if, instead, we focused all our energy on what DOES come after this?
I understand the inclination toward believing this was a setup. As I said, I leaned that way myself initially. And then I realized that I don’t have all the facts or information. That I will likely NEVER have all the facts or information (unless Pete Hegseth slides into my Signal DMs or something). That, most importantly, it is not worth my time9 to go dig through all the information…because the outcome will be exactly the same, no matter what I learn or THINK I learn.
As I said: The spin remains the same. The exploitation of it all remains the same. Whether or not it was manufactured, these two things will be true no matter what. If it’s real, that sucks TREMENDOUSLY. Gun violence is a fucking travesty. And, in my personal opinion, it was a really fucking selfish thing for the gunman to do, despite how selfless he positions himself. The actions he took have downstream consequences for more than just him; in one evening, he handed the GOP a ceaseless news cycle in their favor and a sympathetic moment from the fence-sitters months before the midterms. He claims to do this for the victims, but all he did in his misguided white knighting is to take the spotlight away from them, away from their pursuit of justice. No one is talking about them. We’re all talking about him. In a moment supposedly centered around victims, he ended up centering himself, and that was always going to be how that played out, regardless of what he fantasized it might be.
And if it’s staged? That also sucks TREMENDOUSLY because WOW we have reached the stage of fascism where we can’t tell what reality is anymore. It is so, so bad for our mental health to live in a constant state of not knowing what is real and what is not, and that is just ONE of the reasons to steel yourself from the seduction of a story that this was staged.
There are many who, in a backlash cycle you can set a clock to, would say that the belief that this was staged is the result of what they’re calling “Blue Anon” or the QAnon of the left. There are plenty who suggest that many on the left don’t even realize they’ve been radicalized (in a bad way) and they’re all conspiracy theorists as a result. I reject this notion outright. I think there are a LOT of smart people who are not radicalized in this way, who still buy into this “false flag” story. And I think that is an absolutely natural and understandable byproduct of the environment created by technocratic billionaires who are building our environments to MAKE SURE that we cannot trust what we see anymore. This is by design. You have never been able to trust this administration (largely because you shouldn’t trust narcissists who aren’t actively working to manage their condition). They lie to us without compunction. There is nothing “radicalized” about feeling like you can’t trust a goddamn thing they say or do.
Yes, parroting the “staged” story is returning the cuckoo bananas that the other side has given us for years and yes, it gives them a valid reason to say we’re delusional, but let’s be real: They were gonna say that anyway, no matter what we say or do. There are really two primary important reasons to avoid the allure of this “false flag” story, the first of which I’ve mentioned, that it’s dreadful for your mental health. It is not good for our brains to spend all this time trying to understand the uncanny valley we find ourselves in. It is not good for us to feel so constantly and thoroughly unmoored from reality that we can’t tell what it is or isn’t. It’s not good to indulge that. And it’s not good to spend all this time consuming narratives and swipey-swipe content playing detective or investigator around details that don’t matter in a story that doesn’t matter.
Put simply, it is not good for us to ingest a steady diet of propaganda. It’s worse when we shovel it in ourselves. And treating narrative or monetized content like fact when we do not actually have all the facts (and likely never will) IS propaganda. It’s seductive. It’s designed to be. And when you indulge it, you participate in your own erosion of boundary lines around what you are willing to entertain as fact. Possibility becomes certainty through repetition and not through verification.
But also, it’s a fucking distraction. One of the reasons people believe this was staged is that it IS a distraction, but the more oxygen we give this fire, the more we PARTICIPATE in its growth AS a distraction. Litigating the “facts” of this story (when, again, not a single one of us has them) is time spent on the “truth” of a scenario that does not matter.
Now, I want to be clear about something. There are a million people who use “DO NOT CARE ABOUT THIS, IT IS A DISTRACTION” in day-to-day online jargon anymore. Typically, it’s code for, “I do not care about this thing, it does not matter to me, therefore it should not matter to you.” That is not what I mean here when I call it a distraction. I personally think that distractions are a fucking necessity when we are being overwhelmed with harmful and/or inane nonsense every single day. My distractions include becoming unreasonably invested in low-stakes gossip that doesn’t affect my life at all. I don’t even hate conspiracy theories wholesale (I’m partial to the one where Lea Michele can’t read). But you need to ask yourself: Is this particular story that type of distraction for you, where you can laugh about it and move on, completely forgetting it even happened, or are you finding yourself getting invested in what could be a dangerous way?
I’m reminded of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary10, when Newsmax and Infowars put out a steady stream of content alleging that this was a staged operation with paid actors; that no children were actually harmed. Curious about the nonsense, I sat down to watch one of their 30-minute explainer videos that would show me that it was all staged. I need to make it very clear that I do not and have never believed this mass murder of children was an act. And yet, 20 minutes into the video, I found myself really wondering at, nearly entertaining some of their arguments. This is not because I’m not a critical thinker (I think you can probably tell if you’ve read like, anything of mine, that’s not the case). It is because this content is DESIGNED to be alluring. It eschews the bigger picture in favor of focusing on details and minutiae (like facial expressions or what people are doing in the background) so that it can lure you in on those tiny pieces.11 It’s a slow erosion of truth; we are Hansel & Gretel picking up the crumbs which, on their own, aren’t a problem…the destination the crumbs were carefully set up to lead to is what destroys us.
Do not allow yourself to be party to or complicit in distracting from what is coming, what was going to be coming no matter what, but what now has justification to proceed. Do not allow yourself to center this man who made himself the center of attention, taking attention away from the victims he claimed to be intending to help.12 Do not allow yourself to give air to this story that takes focus away from the midterms or worse, alienates voters we NEED for the midterms, by taking attention away from the things that DO matter: The absolute fucking mess in Iran that threatens our national security AND our economy every day, the Epstein files wherein the president is allegedly mentioned more times than Jesus is in the Bible, the record numbers of ICE detainees and the fact that the majority of them have never committed a crime and therefore were not the “intended audience” that was sold to the public, the fact that 4.3 MILLION people lost their SNAP benefits in the last year, that rates of food insecurity and homelessness in “THE GREATEST NATION ON EARTH” are steadily increasing, that we are repeatedly told that we simply do not have enough money in the budget to pay for housing or universal basic income (as unemployment rates are forecasted to increase) or single-payer healthcare, but the government wants to take $400M of our taxpayer dollars to build a ballroom that none of us will likely ever even see the inside of.
I don’t think you’re radicalized if you’ve been believing this was staged. And I don’t think you’re stupid. And I don’t think you’re delusional. I just think that this doesn’t matter and that you and I do not need to spend a single additional second of our time trying to understand what happened. Scroll past it, don’t consume it, don’t argue or litigate the “facts”, don’t give it another second of oxygen. Do your brain and your body and your community a favor and shake it off, and pick your new focus.
It’s all political theatre at this point. You don’t have to attend the casting call.
1yes, i know that a million other things have happened in those 22 days. this is not meant to minimize or diminish them in any way.
2if we can even call it “security” seriously i feel like my house is more secure than anywhere this administration orbits
3i wanted to link to more of the things that had been reported originally, like that there were two shooters, that the shooter was confirmed dead, that one shooter was confirmed dead but the other was still at large, etc. but one thing that pisses me off about publishers and digital newsrooms is that bad reporting or “mistakes” can be overwritten with the correct information and so there’s no real proof that there had been a mistake at all unless the publisher issues a correction, which doesn’t always happen. it’s very untethering to know you saw something being reported, but now there’s no proof it ever was reported that way.
4i think 2017 was basically the year of “wait, he can’t do that. wait, he CAN do that? but i thought that was illegal. wait, no one ever MADE it illegal because everyone had just kind of agreed to not do it, but now this guy is doing it and we can shake our fingers at him but it doesn’t matter bc he’s gonna do it anyway? oh. well. that’s fun.”
5if you got this reference without clicking into the short story, i just want you to know that i see you, you nerdy fuck. middle school short stories fucked me up too.
6am i a clinician who can diagnose this? not yet. do people often use this word for everything without knowing what it means? absolutely. am i one of those people? i am not. try me. i have almost 40 years of narcissistic abuse to work from, i know this man is one.
7see, if you clicked on this footnote, it might be because you think i forgot about “money.” but i didn’t. he just doesn’t care about it. he never has and he’s never had to. he does not prioritize money, because if he did, he wouldn’t have so many failed businesses or so much debt. he cares about two things. everything else is just icing or background noise.
8i’ve now read that, of the $400M, $332M is taxpayer dollars, but i haven’t quite figured out where the other $68M is coming from. when it was originally announced, this ballroom was only supposed to cost $200M and would be paid entirely by private investors/donors. somehow, that has doubled, but also it may have tripled? because why do we need an additional $400M if people already gave $200M? where did that money go?
9one of the most important lessons i’ve learned as i’ve grown up is how to let go of things that simply do not affect my life. does whether or not this shooting was staged affect my life? it does not. what happens afterward DOES affect my life, but that will not change whether or not this was staged. if you find yourself really getting heated about an argument or an opinion, ask yourself if it really actually affects your life. my favorite thing to remember: everybody dies. i don’t have a ton of time here, so whether or not this dream team hamfisted an assassination attempt is just not a super priority place for me to spend it.
10please avoid assuming that i am comparing the actual massacre of children with shots fired in a hotel lobby that didn’t kill anyone. i’m obviously not.
11and, unlike 13 years ago, we have more swipey-swipe content being produced than ever before. you no longer have to search this content out. it’s in your passive scroll. don’t give it life.
12in case it wasn’t obvious, i do not find the “friendly federal assassin” to be a hero. i find him to be like too many other men who, upon hearing about my own past as a survivor of sexual violence and trauma, centered themselves. like they cried uncontrollably “for me” and needed me to comfort them. or they tried to start a fight with someone who i would just be having a conversation about sexual violence with, and now i gotta break it up and calm them down. this is not valiant. this is not green flag masculinity. this is a desperate, pathetic, public attempt to perform sympathy and be perceived as a hero while sucking all the air out of the room. put very simply: if this man had not done what he did, the news cycle would have focused on the serious contrast between journalists and the white house in celebration with each other versus the survivors of Epstein & his fellow monsters who still have not received any form of justice, whose path to justice has been routinely blocked by the lawmakers in that ballroom, and whose liberation is so often punted by the newsrooms too afraid to publish bad things about powerful people. instead, we have to talk about this dipshit for weeks on end.