As I write this column, I am on the way to Milwaukee to cover the Republican National Convention. My plane is packed with GOP delegates from New Jersey and New York, journalists, and civilians who have love or business somewhere in the Midwest.
There’s a palpable sense of apprehension on board. It’s the day after former president Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt in what can only be described as a spectacular failure of the multi-billion dollar national security apparatus. As passengers who boarded at Newark Liberty International, we’ve all just submitted to being poked and prodded by the TSA after taking our shoes and belts off in a kind of homage to a decades-old regime virtually unchanged since after 9/11.
Since the last in-person national Republican convention in 2016, there’s been a global mass death event, global mass protests after the police murder of George Floyd and a violent insurrection timed to happen as President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral college win was to be certified.
On the plane, reporters and Republican activists feel each other out in their across-the-aisle introductions. "What outlet do you work for?" comes the inquiry, and then the cautious response.
Even in a wounded state, former President Trump struck a pugilistic profile mouthing what appeared to be the word “fight!” That footage of his blood streaming down his face from his ear is like a Rorschach video. For tens of millions of Americans he was a near martyr for others he’s a TV reality star.
The gunfire that exploded in Butler, Pennsylvania left dead the alleged gunman and an innocent bystander, Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief, who shielded his family from the incoming sniper fire from the shooter’s AR-15. Once again, a nation that spends close to a trillion dollars of borrowed money on weapons and security is made to seem vulnerable to the actions of a lone actor.
While media commentators assert the broad daylight high-profile shooting of a former President shocks the conscience, it’s just another day in a nation where the smell of gunpowder always hangs in the air. There’s a gun violence epidemic in America with the Brady Center estimating that on an average day 327 Americans are shot and 117 die from their wounds.
Political violence is in our DNA and anyone who says otherwise hasn’t been paying attention. As I was packing up my reference materials for the convention, I came across a letter I wrote in August of 1964 to Senator Clifford Case, who was the last New Jersey Republican to be elected to the U.S. Senate. I wrote to suggest that the FBI should be in charge of the investigation into Kennedy’s murder. In my third-grade voice, I expressed concern that the 1964 presidential campaign was well underway and there were still so many unanswered questions about the circumstances surrounding John Kennedy’s murder. I had been in charge of my younger brothers and sisters when my parents went to mass at St. Catherine’s in Glen Rock in the days after JFK was killed. I watched in real time horror on TV as Lee Harvey Oswald was shot in the gut during his transfer in Dallas. It was just a warmup for Malcolm X, MLK Jr., and RFK. It’s what we do.
In the decades since the national security state’s need to control information has come at a price of public confidence. Back in 2023, a Gallup poll found that 65 percent of Americans believed there was a conspiracy behind the JFK murder. Files from that era are still classified. Scroll forward to the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection and the MAGA movement’s efforts in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 defeat to subvert the electoral college. According to the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security, which has responsibility for overseeing the U.S. Secret Service, “many U.S. Secret Service text messages from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021 were erased as part of a device-replacements program.” We never got a full accounting of what the U.S. Secret Service knew and when they knew it about the first-of-its-kind attack on the U.S. Capitol. It’s always "need to know."
There’s precious little time for self-examination of any kind.
After a twenty-year-plus military binge driven by our further war on terror, Brown University’s Watson Institute estimates the world lost 2.5 million lives indirectly due to the economic collapse, “the destruction of public and health infrastructure," and environmental contamination. Watson estimates the U.S. spent $8 trillion dollars in the 20 years since 9/11, setting off the worst refugee crisis since WW II, and collapsed a few nation-states in the process. Did we have any reason to feel safer?
It’s a very open question as to whether or not we can gather as Americans in large crowds at a national political convention in a convivial way that harkens back to those halcyon days captured by Norman Rockwell. The decimation of local newspapers and community-based owned and operated TV and radio stations has left us as a nation that’s had authenticated news and information replaced by aggregated cheap to produce social media.
This content is distributed by the corporate news media that’s entirely fixated on driving online traffic and uses analytics that customize our “news” feeds to match our existing prejudices and biases. Is it any wonder we don’t have a consensus on who won the 2020 election?
This degraded information ecology has both profound public health and civil defense implications. No doubt, this fracturing of our national narrative along the faultiness of red and blue states helped drive our catastrophic COVID death toll of close to 1.2 million Americans. Consider the challenge of finding the necessary public consensus required to confront the real challenges presented by the climate crisis.
By becoming reliant on a news media that relies on affirming our biases we’ve lost the intellectual capacity to challenge ourselves by asking how we know what we know. This becomes particularly problematic when as citizens in a democracy we have to try and hold the national security apparatus accountable, yet we don’t have a clue about what’s actually going on.
