Hey everyone Max here. So when we recorded this episode Joe Biden was still insisting he would stay in the

2024 race and that is no longer the case. Something fundamental about how our politics work is changing before our eyes, and it's changing very quickly, which is why you will hear us in this episode refer to Biden as if you were still the nominee.

But both conversations in this show show and especially the first one about

Kamala Harris are I think even more relevant. Okay, here's the show. You would think

and I would think that this event would have been much more stabilizing than it has been so far.

And I mean, you know, obviously things could change very quickly and there's a lot of reason to be cautious and to be attentive to what's going on, but I think the more extreme partisans of Donald Trump and the extremists who orbit that part of the Republican Party

really kind of baked in the idea that the bad guys are out to kill Trump and so so it's almost kind of like just confirmation of something

that they already believed to be true. Welcome to offline I'm Max Fisher. John is at the RNC so we've got two

conversations this week I think you all will find really fascinating.

So we still don't know and may never know precisely why 20 year old Thomas Matthew Crooks

opened fire on Trump last week and that's become a familiar pattern.

Lone shooters whose paths from normalcy to vigilanteism seem esoteric, obscure or plain

mysterious. But we are not as in the dark as you might think.

There's actually a lot we now understand about the origins of political violence,

the psychology of it, and especially what role the internet plays in it as it often does.

Later I will talk with the terrorism scholar J.M. Berger.

That was his voice you heard earlier.

J.M. has a specific theory on how people come to embrace political violence that for me has shed more light on

the topic than anything I've read or heard. But before we get to that, we are starting

this week with an optimistic story about the internet's influence on politics.

How's that for a change of pace?

It's a story about looking to the future while remaining unburdened by the past, about what

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