“It has always been this way,” people have told me many times during the last twenty-five years. In particular when I complained about the twin cultural demons of censorship and polarization (which are perhaps one and the same), my peers told me I was imagining that things were getting worse.
“When have people not been rude to those whom they disagree with? Politics and religion have always polarized people, which is why they are the great taboos of bars and family picnics.” Such is what people told me.
Yet a tragic affirmation of my complaints came on July 13, 2024, when a gunman came within a few millimeters of killing Donald Trump — a former president and frontrunner challenging the current president. Indeed, something has changed for the worse. Many Americans were not even born or too young to remember John Hinckley shooting then president Ronald Reagan. For roughly 60% of the US population, last Saturday was the first time they ever heard about an attempted assassination of a (former) president on the news.
It has not always been this way. I had to go back over 40 years to remember a moment when a sitting president had been shot. I had to backtrack over 50 years to read about a moment, before I was born, when a frontrunner in a presidential election (Bobby Kennedy) was shot.
Something has indeed changed. Things have gotten uglier. Public discourse is more impotent than ever at modulating or moderating extremist impulses. Even the reaction to Trump’s shooting showed the vast difference between an earlier time, when such a descent into barbarism provoked a kind of tribal unity, no matter how short-lived, such as we saw after 9/11; and the pervasive cruelty of 2024, when millions of Trump haters thought it was normal to gloat over, ridicule, mock, and glorify the notion of killing Donald Trump.
A liberal friend whom I’ve known for over 30 years and always loved despite any ideological differences shocked me. After the shooting he confessed, “my first reaction was disappointment, because I would have been so happy if Trump had been killed.” That a friend whom I love and respect would say such a thing is shocking. But the truth is, his statement was not an outlier. On Twitter countless anti-Trump individuals openly stated their sadness not at the shooting, but rather at the fact that Trump wasn’t killed. As reported by the Media Research Center:
“Twitter is angry that Trump isn’t dead,” [Tom] MacDonald rapped in one of his lyrics, “you know who got shot [and killed]? Innocent people.”
What exactly led to the worsening of our national culture?
To grasp what is happening around us, we must expand beyond the microanalysis of one individual gunman, whose inner thoughts will likely never come to us in authentic form. To restrict our investigation to the interior life of the one known assassin would be like trying to understand the mind of one man in the crowd surrounding Lot’s house in Genesis 19. To understand what happened to Sodom we have to think on collective and generational scales. We must ask how a whole civilization devolved to make such an assassination thinkable, doable, and in many people’s minds, normal.
Mystery surrounds the motives of the alleged July 13 assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, because of the conspicuous absence of writings or statements left behind in the usual corners of the Internet (Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) As reported by Justin Rohrlich at the Independent, law enforcement officials found no convincing record of Crooks’ expression of a motive. Family members, including an uncle and his own father, appear dumbfounded as to why Crooks tried to assassinate Donald Trump.
“Reached by phone on Sunday morning, Crooks’ uncle, Mark Crooks, said he was inundated with calls following his nephew’s attempt on Trump’s life, which was, “of course,” a tremendous shock, he told The Independent. He said he had “no idea” what might have motivated the shooting, and is just trying to process the news.
“I don’t know what to say,” [Crooks’ uncle] conceded.
The 68-year-old lives in Allison Park, Pennsylvania, about 20 miles from Crooks’ hometown of Bethel Park, but said he hadn’t had any contact with Crooks “in years.”
“I haven’t seen the kid since he was little,” Mark Crooks said. “He never wanted to bother [with maintaining a relationship], so we don’t see him.”
Reuters reported more mystery about Crooks after looking into his employment record:
Crooks was a registered Republican, according to state voter records, and donated $15 to a Democratic political action committee when he was 17. At the time of the shooting he was employed as a dietary aide at a nursing home. The Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center said Crooks “performed his job without concern and his background check was clean.”
The silence of the wolves
What might appear like an enigma is actually quite explainable if you will accompany me on a journey of cultural meditation. Many have speculated online, and I share in their suspicions, that the narrative of this twenty-year-old operating entirely alone seems far-fetched.
Today it is far less taboo than it once was to suggest a conspiracy, since we have seen so many instances of people in power gaslighting the public. On a simplistic level, to believe that Thomas Crooks carried out his plans entirely on his own would require that we believe in an extraordinary number of coincidences. Most experts in event security and the Secret Service who have given interviews have noted how unusual the lax security was on July 13. Here, for instance, is what former agent Bill Gage told NPR:
GAGE: It’s very troublesome, Steve, that someone was able to get on a rooftop at an outdoor event that close to a Secret Service protectee — in this case, a former president, major political candidate. So, you know, very worrisome that that was able to happen…there was a time in this country when politicians would battle each other all week in the press and then have a glass of scotch and a cigar on a Friday night. But you know, this is where we are in America… As a security consultant, I see that, and as a former agent, you know, I’m looking at that and wondering how in the world that happened. Now, when I first saw the news reports and watching the video, I thought maybe someone had smuggled a firearm into the event…
The exceptional strangeness of the July 13 shooting comes from two tragic miracles, each of which is bizarre alone, and which combined lead one to disbelieve the “lone gunman” hypothesis.
First, through the eyes of the shooter, this mission would have been impossible unless Crooks assumed with marvelous luck that everything about the July 13 rally would break away from business as usual. He would have had to do sufficient research into how such events were handled, to know where to set up his firing position; yet he would have to hope against all hope that in a confluence of unusual events, the typical protocols would break down. He would have had to hold some reasonable optimism that the Secret Service would strangely not clear and deny access to such a key building with a rooftop affording a line of fire directly to Trump’s head.
ABC reports that indeed law enforcement officials were posted inside the very building Crooks climbed, and were heavily armed. He would have had to harbor some expectation, no matter how unlikely, that he could scale the ladder, crawl across a roof, set up his firing position and shoot a round at Trump, without being stopped, restrained, or killed; even with thousands of people watching him, sniper teams having him in their sights, and a number of armed officers inside the building whose roof he planned to shoot from.
On the other hand, as Gage pointed out to NPR, the security team had to commit an amazing number of rare mistakes for the shooting to happen. They had to draw the security perimeter such that the vulnerable building fell under no surveillance. They had to fail at clearing the building and disabling access to it (i.e., entry and ladder). They had to fail at confronting Crooks after multiple spectators called the suspicious activity to the policeman’s attention. The communication among the guards on stage, the snipers on the opposing firing position, the policemen inside the building Crooks had climbed onto, and the officers tasked to monitoring behaviors outside the perimeter; had to break down in multiple unlikely ways.
The police officer who climbed the ladder and confronted Crooks either did not send a message to the guards on stage alerting them that they may have to get Trump away from his podium, or his message was not duly received and acted on — despite the fact that there were at least a half-dozen or so Secret Service agents on the stage with Trump. Nor does it seem that the snipers who had Crooks clearly in their vision communicated with the guards on stage to stop Trump’s speech until the threat could be cleared. As a result, Trump continued speaking with no barrier between him and Crooks’ rifle. Crooks scaled the roof and fired enough rounds to come within millimeters of killing Trump before being killed himself.
One or two failures might be conceivable. But all of these failures combined with Crooks’ choices to exploit all these same vulnerabilities lead average people to suggest a conspiracy. For instance, someone may have manipulated the police and Secret Service so that the holes in their security plan would coincide perfectly with Crooks’ scheme. The fact that Crooks got instantly killed would fit in neatly with a strategy, since the perfect conspiracy leads to the fortuitous death of the one known perpetrator, who can never reveal who orchestrated the whole affair. The only thing that went wrong was Trump’s lucky turning of his head, which caused the bullet to strike his ear only a few millimeters from his brain. This matches much of what I have seen in schemes that failed in academia (as I will discuss below); namely, the best stooges to be recruited into a dangerous plot are conveniently disposable on account of being mentally unstable, which then brings risk to conspirators because such people often fumble when it is time to carry out the plan.
When we review all the attempts to assassinate presidents since 1835, none took place in the surveillance-saturated environment, full of drones, AI, and facial recognition technology, which one would assume would render such an attempt infeasible today. Unfortunately, every technological craft that would allow us to surveil, predict, and prevent threats, goes along with technology that can falsify the documentary record. Online records seem to indicate that Crooks registered as a Republican — but can we trust that record if we know that someone who might want to confuse us could have easily gone into the online database and forged it? Nothing we imagine, no matter how crazy it sounds, can be entirely excluded from the realm of possibility.
So this brings me to my deeper point here, which I hope you will take a moment to consider. Whether Crooks acted completely alone or as part of a conspiracy, the contours of which we may be eternally unable to know; the takeaway is the same. The key is the disappearance of a functional “public square” or “public commons” where people can come together to discuss important political issues.
Crooks found something about political issues so impassioning that he died attempting to kill a political figure. But as of now, we don’t have any trace of what he was thinking. America has changed; young men who are full of burning questions about politics have nowhere to engage in normal conversations with people. I can be certain that Crooks could not raise his thoughts in school, where teachers would shush him and say his statements were “inappropriate.” He could not discuss what he was thinking in church, where someone would shut down his discomforting words. Any Facebook group moderator would undoubtedly take down his posts and send him a note telling him he would be disallowed from posting anymore. Twitter users would likely report him and get his account suspended. Tiktok would flag him. Reddit would flag him. Close family, such as the uncle and father referenced above, would probably not want to listen to what he was thinking about. Male friends would probably change the topic if he started discussing politics, while women as a group would largely shun him by calling him “creepy.” If he commented on forums or comment sections I am certain someone would come along and say something like, “this is not the place for this” and lock him out of commenting. He probably knew that if he told anyone what he was thinking, he would risk getting doxed and losing his job.
So where do people like Thomas Crooks go to discuss their views? Increasingly, I find them flocking to dark corners of the Internet or fringe discussion communities where they only connect with others who become increasingly extreme. They have no access to a public square. They are denied any normal exchange with well-grounded people who could engage with them and have fruitful debates.
My close friend who wished that Trump had died also told me that he recently got someone blocked on one of his online discussion groups for bringing up Joe Biden’s infirmities.
“Where do you want such a person to go to discuss politics?” I asked my friend.
“I don’t care, it’s not my problem.”
“But I think this is your problem. Politics affects every part of our lives, and everyone you meet is touched by politics. Saying other people’s political feelings are not your problem is like saying other people are not your problem.”
“I don’t see why I should have to listen to someone’s political views.”
“But if everyone in this person’s life tells them that exact same thing, unless they kill themselves, they won’t go away. Their ideas won’t go away. They will end up withdrawing into a closed loop with other people who share their radical views.”
“How is that my problem?”
“It’s your problem because one day the politician you want to lead your country may get assassinated by such a person, and by then it will be too late to intervene.”
We have heard about “the silence of the lambs.” Today, over 30 years after that film, it is the silence of the wolves we must dread. Our country has built its entire contemporary culture on silencing discussions that we find “uncomfortable.” The problem is that due to the silences we set as the standard, we have no foreknowledge of when those who held such ideas will come back to destroy us.
Even if there was no conspiracy, the silence of the wolves can explain the bewildering breakdown of the Secret Service and the police. Law enforcement functions within the realm of civilized institutions, but this is the very realm that has exiled increasing numbers of people whose views have made them untouchable in polite society. Even the best intelligence experts have no lead on the countless young men who have been pushed out of every campus, Facebook group, listserve, discussion board, family gathering, sports event, church revival, social club, and happy hour. Nobody whom the intelligence analysts view as normal and trustworthy talk to such people about their increasingly radical views. Therefore, intelligence and security professionals have no clue about how deep into the abyss millions of “banished” people with “dangerous” opinions have gone. Having been “ghosted” by society, they function, indeed like ghosts.
But they are not ghosts. They are silent wolves. And we saw on July 13 what happens when even security professionals have no clue what they are up to.
The five-point turn that destroyed the public square: shame, shun, ban, damn, and kill.
After speaking with my friend, I realized I had something to add, which might provide some insights into what has happened. Though I have no expertise in law or mental health, my 25-year career in education gave me a front-row seat to the destruction of America’s public square. And this loss of a commons in which to discuss differing political views, I will demonstrate, played a key role in producing an infinite number of young men like Thomas Crooks. Institutions have largely tried to erase such men. In their attempts to erase them, polite society delivered them up to destructive discourse communities where once correctible ideas turned into nihilistic and dangerous ideologies beyond anyone’s intervention.
Let me begin some time ago, in the late years of Clinton’s presidency.
When I began my odyssey through academia in 1998, I confronted a new kind of uptightness, which felt unfamiliar. In seminars we would be reading some great work — for instance Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew— and the professor would forbid certain interpretations or digressions. We could, for the time being, discuss the sexism in Taming of the Shrew, but we could only do so in safe, restrictive limits, and certain readings were evidently taboo. We could not speculate as to whether Shakespeare was sexist himself, since this would either validate sexism or invalidate “Shakespeare Studies,” either of which would throw the entire project of feminist Shakespeare scholars into panic. The professor would frown if discussion wandered into discussion of the battle of the sexes, since this would supposedly cheapen the discussion and bring it down to a vulgar level that somebody was bound to find degrading.
All grad students in English departments understood that in a seminar, the professor made the rules. If the rules were that you could not stray into taboo topics, you followed them. If you didn’t, you would be kicked out.
As someone with severe social ineptitude, I was destined to crash and burn in such an environment, no matter how well I mastered the languages or great texts. Even at this early stage, I could never figure out how to discuss the text within acceptable discourse limits. I grew particularly fearful of women in the academy, who seemed to have more triggers than men and who had a stronger likelihood to complain about being made to feel uncomfortable.
I was struggling with my own political views, which came across to many people as disturbing. I’d been raised in a liberation theology household, simultaneously devoutly Christian and Marxist. Having gone through childhood traumas, I had troubles with boundaries in general, which made my political homelessness ever more likely to alienate people. When I spoke of Christ and holiness, this angered left-wing people (at that time, predominant in academia), who disdained any statements that sounded remotely like Newt Gingrich or the supposed prudes who crusaded against Bill Clinton. When I spoke of the failure of capitalism and the need for a government actively engaged in workers’ rights and antiracism, this cast me as a lunatic Communist.
Anyone who could unite with me on one issue would have to cut ties with me based on the other issue being a “non-starter.” Thus I befriended gays, pious Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, people of color, feminists, evangelicals, Army veterans, libertarians, mainstream conservatives, and any number of subgroups that might scurry around a literary conference, but the friendships had a short shelf life. As soon as these friends heard me express a view at the opposite extreme from where they stood politically, they had to “distance themselves.” “Distancing oneself” was polite Nineties-speak, born of self-preserving therapists’ advice, for blowing people off.
And so, as I sat reading “Taming of the Shrew,” I found no inroad. I could try to engage in simple Shakespeare worship, but academia had no shortage of people extolling the value of the Bard, and talking about his genius would not a seminar paper make. I could parrot the feminist professor’s narrow reading of the play as a satirical critique of misogyny, but that too had already been done. And it wasn’t what I believed. I could discuss the Christian virtue of Paul’s advice to “offer your body as a living sacrifice” or his advice for husbands and wives to “submit to one another,” but these would get me kicked out of the program. If I instead considered the breakdown of the marriage market from a Marxist perspective, this would likely irritate the professor, who had written articles rejecting such a notion since a strict class-based analysis denied the central role of the woman’s point of view in the play.
I don’t remember what I wrote about “Taming of the Shrew.” I loved the play and found it ingenious, largely because I had always heard the old saying, “if you want true love, treat a princess like a whore and a whore like a princess,” but this was barracks talk and not “appropriate” for a seminar. The plot had to exist somewhere else, in a realm disconnected from the world in which we loved, in order for us to have a safe discussion. The old professor who taught the Shakespeare seminar advised me, if I ever became a professor, simply never to offer any of my personal interpretations of the play. I lacked the social graces to deal with its topic and as a man I had no credibility. I should assign several articles accepted within the discipline and have my students read those.
This experience introduced me to a profound cultural shift, which accelerated. Something felt quite different about the academic environment I was entering, relative to my high school and college years in the 1980s. I had read Taming of the Shrew in high school without much consternation. I had seen productions of it in the 1990s, as well, without people treating it as a repulsive affront to their senses. I didn’t remember being told I couldn’t have an opinion on it, until I was in grad school.
After that initial experience, something in me rebelled. I had left a good job in broadcasting to go to graduate school and it seemed unjust to me that I should waste years in the academy chasing after some perfect innocuousness that I knew I could never attain.
The Taming of the Shrew gave me my first inklings of an American discourse where people were evolving into global censors. Rather than an intelligentsia based on the famous adage, “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” discussion spaces were growing into venues for testing and vetting people, with the ultimate goal of restricting platforms to those whose ideas fit in with people already in power. Academia, with its cumbersome tenure system, led the way, well before social media brought a whole new technology to make this possible. But this culture of uptightness and social ostracism spread beyond the academy to other cultural realms in the 2000s, then to business, law, the military, political clubs, and virtually every social hub by the 2010s. Social media and its cliquish inclinations made it all worse.
Between 1998 and 2021, whatever inside me that made me rebellious — whether the Christian longing for martrydom or the Marxist railing against the system — that thing constantly compelled me to speak. I have tried, so many times, to tame my tongue and stop myself from speaking. My success at silence was typically short-lived. Some of this urge is incomprehensible to me, even now, coming up from deep within my psyche and stemming, perhaps, from childhood traumas that steered much of my behavior well into adult life. Yet some was perfectly rational, since I could articulate a logic behind it: “There is no point in having freedom of speech if you do not speak freely.” It is a strange freedom that vanishes when you choose of your own free will not to exercise it.
But I paid a terrible price to speak my mind. I do not consider myself a stubborn person, since I have always enjoyed listening to others and encouraging others to express their points of view as well. But everywhere I went I found short-lived friendships that morphed into lifelong blood feuds. These are not rare in academia, where a vicious tenure system and copious hours of idle neurosis lead to conflict-ridden and anxiety-laden relationship with peers and superiors. My trajectory, however, was embarrassingly unique.
As I was completing my Master’s degree in 2001, I came into bruising conflict with an African American Studies professor who took issue with a paper I wrote about Christianity in slave narratives. I almost got kicked out of the literature program. At that point I threw myself into Greek and Latin, where I had found far more support and acceptance. In fact I shifted my doctoral program so it would rely most heavily on classical antiquity, even though it was also heavily multicultural.
I defended my dissertation in late 2002 and went on the job market, finding that I was in high demand. I would go through four professorships; in each instance, I was hired because the last Greek scholar in the literature program was retiring and I appealed to feminists and people of color who thought I could offer a digestible form of classicism mixed blissfully with ethnic studies. In the first three jobs, however, the classicist part became increasingly irritating to people in the field, largely because my discussions of classics invariably exposed my conservative Christianity. I proceeded down a staircase of prestige, with each professorship being located at an institution less renowned than the previous. After the end of the second job, as I transitioned to the third, I finally came out as a Christian who believed that the classics were an integral, indispensable part of world literature that deserved a central place in the canon. A religious experience in 2008 shook me to the core and gave me strange tremors — after which, I felt called to be born again as an evangelical.
The adult baptism in 2008 marked my departure from Catholicism and with it, a lost connection with the Marxist liberation theology that had afforded me some possibility of reconciliation between my own conservative and radical selves. I did not leave Catholicism simply for political reasons, but it just so happens that Catholic education had become, by that time, indistinguishable from the secular left, and therefore equally hostile to the scriptural purism that I had had since childhood. I found great comfort and deeper camaraderie in the Baptist church where I was saved, for I could worship with people who savored the Bible as an inerrant and sufficient text.
The rise of Barack Obama threw even more wrenches into my situation. He betrayed his antiwar persona early on with his escalation in Afghanistan. His model for health care was adapted from a model drafted by the free-market Heritage Foundation. To the extent that I still held the socialist beliefs of my childhood, the mainstream left — or simple “liberals,” as progressives dismiss it — no longer promised any economic allegiance. All that Obama’s movement promised was progressivism on social issues where I adamantly disagreed based on biblical grounds.
The overt rejection by the left, especially by feminists and queer theorists, placed my family’s survival in real danger. As a father and husband of a stay-at-home mom, I could not afford to lose a job. By 2009, I was no longer dealing only with colleagues rolling their eyes and humiliating me at conferences. Now there were letters being written behind my back to deans and tenure reviewers, urging them to fire me lest they allow someone with dangerously sexist and homophobic views to have lifelong job security at their institutions. Colleagues openly agitated for my being denied course assignments, grants, fellowships, and promotions. Even worse, they gave me a communal cold shoulder, swiftly ending conversations with me. They viewed who I had become — a conservative evangelical — as something cursed and untouchable.
The left-wing academy did not merely react against me. They also blocked my wife’s professional prospects at the university. They knew she was an immigrant and had a citizenship petition pending. And thus, when several leftist colleagues agitated against the university’s job-saving plan in 2009, they did not hide their satisfaction at the thought that my untenured job would be cut, and my family would be gone from their community.
It was in this stressful moment, worried about my family’s survival, that I signed up with the Army Reserves. I had signed an affidavit of support when I sponsored my wife’s immigration. If I had no income, she would not be allowed to stay for citizenship. In 2009 the recession offered me extremely poor job prospects. Suddenly my status as an army reservist fueled the left-wing contempt for me even more. On the listserve, leftist colleagues replied to anything I posted with hostile replies nitpicking anything I said. Whenever I tried to engage them in mature discussion, they went to the chair privately to complain that my attempts to converse with them were unwelcome.
I returned from one tour of training to find X’s carved over the Army stickers on my door, “CIA” scrawled in red ink, and my flag torn. This vandalism had apparently stayed on my door for months and nobody did anything about it.
I grew increasingly dependent on politically conservative allies to protect my livelihood. Drawn to my defense of orthodox Christianity and the Classics, conservatives took a keen interest in my plight. They offered free legal help, which did get me past some of the darker moments on the faculty. I felt lost during most of the 2010s, uncertain of who I was anymore. The cycle of backlash, defiance, and retaliation kept escalating the conflict between me and the university, especially the radically feminist dean.
I still had many leftist ideas, and I longed to have someone to talk to about them. To indulge this need, I decided to avoid the fruitless outreach to colleagues, who were already united in their desire to drive me out. I turned instead to various education blogs run by leftists. I would find, so often, refreshing moments of connection when the topic fell on some common ground. But then if I disagreed honestly on some topic where my values clashed with the blogger, I would get flamed and banned. And finally, in 2014, the worst happened. A lesbian feminist whose blog I sometimes bantered on wrote to people at my university to let them know I was engaging in offensive discussions online.
Everything turned into my personal hell for the following six years. Every week it was something new, with colleagues bringing screen shots of my Facebook postings, tweets, online articles, and personal blogs to officials at the university in a never-ending drumbeat to harass me out of the job.
I could not post anything on the listserve. I could not engage in familiar chatter with my colleagues. I could not speak at faculty meetings. I could not post anything online anywhere. I published many articles — but colleagues and off-campus parties combed these as well to find offensive parts and complained to people at the university.
A darkness begins to cover your mind when you undergo the kind of persecution I experienced. At first you want, like any human being, to be loved, so you try even harder to curry favor with people who have defined you as so offensive as to be untouchable. These gestures meet escalating hostility. You go through a period of being argumentative, and wanting to take on their ideas in a real debate. They make debate impossible, however, by either blocking you from venues or by making it clear that if you initiate a debate, they will treat your outreach as harassment. They have defined not only your ideas, but you, as a human being, as beneath the dignity of contempt.
When I refused to back down, opponents on campus ultimately entangled several students in a self-destructive scheme. It seems the dean met with several students from the office of students with disabilities, and worked with them to file a complaint against me. This is the lowest tactic of the low, but I have seen universities pull the same trick against those whom they want to drive out. Students are offered massive protections so their complaints against a professor are difficult to counter without being accused of “retaliation.” Students with disabilities are the ideal recruits to file such complaints because if the complaints prove frivolous, whoever coached the complainers can write them off as mentally unstable or fragile and therefore deserving of grace. One such student filed a complaint against me, but the complaint failed because he claimed he was in a Roman mythology class when he was really enrolled in an American literature class, which he had only attended three times and apparently didn’t follow class discussion. This is the risk of recruiting unstable conspirators; their strength is their weakness — they can be discarded easily but quite often they can’t keep their stories straight.
I did what so many young men do when they find themselves redefined as “non-persons” within such a suffocating economy. I gave up on the left. I gave up on the mainstream/center, which functioned as a cowardly pander to the left. I retreated more and more into a conservative bubble, until I finally left the tenured position I had for a post at a conservative Christian college in a red state.
Once Trump became the president, I found myself in a false and impossible position. The left had driven me out of tenure and inflicted horrors on me. The only safe zone I had found was the Christian right. Yet racism, which I had stopped thinking about years ago, became increasingly de rigueur on the right wing, especially when it came to immigration. I believe that many of my conservative colleagues sank into worse and worse extremism precisely because the left had cast them out of any normal discussion spaces, leaving them only with other wounded exiles holding extreme views to talk to. Married to an immigrant, and the child of immigrants — not to mention that I was not white and identified with critical race theory — I found myself having to sit silently and endure more and more humiliation, until finally I cracked.
I began speaking up about the need for cultural diversity on campus. I wrote articles defending affirmative action. I found the thrill of this transgression emboldening, so I came out of the closet with my support for reparations, universal health care, student loan forgiveness, and workers’ rights. Within about four years all but a handful of conservatives ghosted me. I had to leave academia and rebuild myself in a whole new career.
I bring up my personal experience because I see, in my own journey, a parallel to what is happening with extremist viewpoints all across America. I became most reckless and extreme when I felt I had nothing to lose because polite society had already rejected me. Once you have no outlets for reasonable discussion anymore, you gather with those who have common grievances, and you become increasingly detached from any moderating influence. The only debates you have are with straw men or with colleagues about who is purer in the dogma that unites your homogeneous hive.
Countless people have stories like mine in the reverse configuration, having been exiled from conservative circles and pushed into increasingly outrageous leftist circles like the kinds that openly said they would love to see Trump assassinated.
The problem is non-partisan. All sides do this equally. The problem is our country’s loss of a public commons in which to have political discussions about issues that matter enough to have strong opinions about.
Too often I see people trying to solve our extremism problem by censoring or condemning extremist ideas even more. That’s like putting out the fire with gasoline.
My story differs from the trajectory of many young men who are becoming radicalized in dark corners of the Internet, but I have a keen sense how their radicalization has progressed. There are five points in the turn that leads ideological exiles into extremist radicalism.
The first step is shame. Whatever view you hold that mainstream society doesn’t like, they humiliate you, often sadistically. They rally a crowd to gang up on you and label you with some denigrating pejorative — “sexist,” “homophobe,” “bigot,” etc. They orchestrate social interactions into a performance script that traps you in the role of bad guy. They convince everyone that your wrongthink is your fault, and the problem is you. And you are disgusting.
The second step is “shun.” There are people like me who become shameless when bullied; shaming us does not stop us. When suppressors come across shameless people, they must move to make their targets pay a steep price for continuing to speak their dissent. Shunning today is economically lethal as well as socially traumatic. Shunning involves the systematic elimination of your presence from places of common discourse at first. This is when you are told you can’t post on listserves, your media accounts are suspended, you won’t be accepted to present papers, and you won’t get hired. Basically, it is the moment when people let you know that however far you have gotten up until now, that’s as far as you are going to go. You will never grow or progress beyond where you are right now. And “where you are” is going to become increasingly claustrophobic.
The third step is “ban.” You may be like me; shunning doesn’t work on me because I naturally go to find another community where I will not be shunned. Suppressors hate this. Even though they have shunned you from their own communities, they get terrified that you have found somewhere else to express your opinion, so they cast your viewpoint as somehow legally impermissible anywhere. They may characterize your view as a “hate crime,” “harassment,” “incitement,” “treason,” “defamation,” or “fraud.” The goal is to make it impossible, even for communities who support you, to allow you to be heard in any way. In this stage, often the basis of being banned is not the speech or idea itself, since the suppressors know this is of dubious constitutionality. Instead, they look for some other random legal issue to get you jailed, fined, or delicensed. They might accuse you of plagiarism, financial improprieties, sexual assault — anything that they can accuse you of, which will be such a horrible allegation that you will find it hard to defend your innocence. In the 21st century, many mechanisms exist for them to do this to you outside of the law, such as internal complaints within an organization, complaints to licensing agencies, complaints to businesses you contract, etc. They can skirt constitutional protections of due process and torture you with endless accusations until something finally sticks which costs you heavily. A common trick is to level an accusation that has little chance of being proved, but then to catch you on process violations like failure to do due diligence or retaliation. The banning stage takes away your freedom and threatens even the most basic chance of having a normal life.
The fourth stage is “damn.” If you still keep expressing your viewpoint after you have been shamed, shunned, and banned, they must demonize you in a quasi-religious sense and encourage others to curse you. The idea here is to cast you as entirely evil, in perpetuity, so you know that the punishment for speaking out of turn is unmitigated misery in this life and an eternally villainous reputation after death. At this stage, they try to convince you that your life is so worthless you might as well die.
At last, of course, there must come the fifth stage. If suppressors cannot silence you through shame, shunning, banning, or damnation, they will kill you. If this seems dramatic, remember that this article began as a reaction to an assassination attempt. Those who continue to say things that people do not want to hear cannot be allowed to live. Those who do not want to be discomforted with unwanted speech can be convinced that killing someone is normal once they have damned them already and defined their lives as unworthy.
Given that the five points of the turn are practiced today in America, we have to ask what will become of millions of people who know they can never be part of normal political discussion. With the Internet keeping traces of everything we communicate, such “exiles” cannot suddenly claim to have changed their political mind. There is a distinctly unchristian gracelessness to political taboos now. Break them, and you must pay for your transgression forever. Only in few instances are such breaks with decorum forgiven.
What begins with good manners — a system of decorum that demands certain taboos be respected — ends, sadly, in extremism and madness. It is a slow progression. Many people, such as my friend of 30 years, scarcely realize how they do their part to manufacture extremists. Remember my friend’s question — “why must I listen to another person’s political views?” In a world where much of our pain and suffering is caused by political realities, telling people that their political views must be kept to themselves is the same as telling people that their full selves must be invisible. It is a maddening burden to be told that who you are is discomforting, disgusting, irritating, or shameful. Once they have been given this message everywhere they have turned for personal connection, some people go off and kill themselves (they skip right to step five.) Most, however, will not kill themselves. They will retreat into their dark furrows and find common cause with others around their most outrageous thoughts. They will not die. They will not disappear. They will come back as wolves in silence.
In a nutshell, that is why I think our society has to let people talk, even about politics and religion, and make our taboos very few and far between.
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