I think in a healthy society with the basic rudiments of solidarity, decency, neighborliness,

where people's basic needs are met in a political culture that's healthier than ours.

Let's say, you know, there's a very tiny percentage of people who are going to become radicalized

and try to assassinate someone. But as society becomes more and more like the

one we're actually living in, where people feel desperate, where they're fed a steady stream of

violent and racist or just like, you know, mynumbing slop and video clips and, you know,

TikTok and Instagram and X and everything, right?

An unhealthy society where people are bombarded with these extreme messages or images,

like just the number of people in that society who are probably going to go a little crazy.

That's what I see happening, or at least that's one

considerable factor I have in mind, just like we now have created a society that will sort of

breed more and more of this because of like the circumstances people find them in.

And whether they think there's a democratic path to having their needs met.

Exactly. Some place where, you know, political despair and personal defeat combine is at least one major kind of element in how you get people like this assassin.

And there's only one of them we can really do something about. And that's the political despair.

It reminds me of the conversation we're

having with Ocita about how, like, antagonism in politics is not a bad thing. It's normal. It's good.

It just needs to have a vehicle. People need to have a vehicle, which makes their antagonism

feel even remotely efficacious. That makes it feel like they're actually participating

in democracy and not just watching a spectacle take place that they have no control over,

that in most cases just like makes them feel disempowered and alienated from their fellow Americans.

I do kind of feel like this gets to the sour note in some of the

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