The Ritual

A Crisis Dispatch

A man named Cole Allen, thirty-one years old, from Torrance, California, charged a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. He had written — and his family had been alarmed enough to send the writing to the police minutes before he acted — that he intended to target Trump administration officials. He got off a few shots before being subdued. One Secret Service officer was struck in the vest and lived because the vest was good. The president and the vice president and the cabinet were rushed out of the ballroom. The shooter was taken into custody alive.

Trump returned to the White House briefing room within the hour. He said, of the long list of figures who have been targeted in attempts on their lives, that they’re the big names, and I hate to say I’m honored by that, but I’ve done a lot. He used the moment to advocate for the construction of his new ballroom, which he said in a Truth Social post would never have happened in had it been built already. He has not, at the time of this writing, expressed any concern for the populations his administration has spent the past year designating as enemies of the state. He has not expressed any reflection on the relationship between the rhetoric he has been producing for ten years — vermin, enemy within, the dehumanization of his political opponents as a campaign strategy — and the fact that an American citizen, with apparently sufficient grievance against his administration, walked up to a security checkpoint with three weapons and a manifesto.

There is no concern for the populations because the populations are not real to him in the relevant sense. Their suffering is priced in, to borrow Ben Shapiro’s term from yesterday’s interview. Their fear is priced in. Their dead are priced in. The only fear that registers is his own fear, which he has converted, within sixty minutes of the event, into political capital for a building project.

That was the night.

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On CNN, while the ballroom was still being cleared, Van Jones went on the air and said the following:

“I’m starting to worry about something, though, which is that the shooter survived, which means on Monday he’s going to court, which means there is a danger that people try to make him some sort of hero. You watch what happened with Luigi [Mangione], who shot a CEO to death and somehow became a hero. So, they said tonight you saw the worst of America. You saw the best of America. Tonight, you definitely saw the best of America. I hope on Monday we don’t see the worst again. I just want to say very clearly — this kind of despicable behavior has no place in America.”

I want to be careful here, because I have respect for Van Jones as a person and as a presence in the discourse, and because the substance of what he said is not wrong on its face. Political violence is wrong. Lionizing it is wrong. The hypothetical of someone making Cole Allen into a folk hero is real, given that exactly that did happen with Luigi Mangione, and that the country is in a condition where the basic taboo against celebrating violence against political enemies has been visibly degraded.

But I want to look at the structure of the move Jones made, because the structure is the thing.

The structure is this. A would-be assassin, motivated by what appears to have been grievance against the most authoritarian American administration in living memory, attempts to kill that administration’s officials at a press dinner. The substance of the moment — the actual content of what just happened — is the second assassination attempt within eighteen months on figures associated with the Trump project, in a political climate the Trump project itself has produced through a decade of explicit incitement against its enemies. The frame the moment demands, if the frame is to track reality, is the frame that names the relationship between the climate and the act. The climate was produced by a specific coalition. The act is downstream of the climate. The carriers of the climate include nearly everyone seated in that ballroom on the right side of the aisle, including Trump himself, who has been producing eliminationist rhetoric against his political opponents at industrial scale and would, given the chance, produce more of it before breakfast tomorrow.

Jones did not name this. The frame Jones reached for instead — within minutes, on live television, with the country watching — was the frame in which the most pressing concern was not the climate of incitement that produced the act, but the hypothetical future leftist who might celebrate it. He pre-condemned a celebration that had not happened. He pre-condemned it on behalf of an audience that had not asked for the pre-condemnation but that he, Van Jones, in his role as the liberal-coded panelist on cable news, had been trained to perform the pre-condemnation for. The performance was not addressed to the people who had just been frightened. It was addressed to the people on his right at the panel desk, the conservative-coded figures whose approval the structure of cable news requires the liberal-coded figure to seek by ritually denouncing the worst possible version of his own coalition before any real version of it has shown up.

This is what genuflection looks like in the cable-news register. It looks like a sincere, articulate, well-intentioned man using his airtime, in the immediate aftermath of an attempt on the president’s life, to perform the ritual demanded of his slot.

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I want to talk about condemn as a speech act, because the ritual that Jones performed last night is the ritual that the entire American discursive apparatus has been disciplining liberals into performing for the better part of a decade, and the discipline has worked, and the working of it is one of the load-bearing reasons we are where we are.

Condemn in current American political usage is not a neutral term for expressing disapproval. It is a ritualized performance with specific structural properties. The performance requires the speaker to interrupt whatever else they were saying, deliver a denunciation in a register of theatrical seriousness, and only then resume their actual argument. The denunciation itself does no analytical work. It is a tax paid for permission to continue speaking. The tax is asymmetric — certain speakers are required to pay it before being heard, others are exempt — and the asymmetry tracks political alignment rather than the actual moral weight of the events being denounced.

The asymmetry is documentable across decades. When violence is committed by figures or movements coded right, the demand for ritual condemnation falls on the right with a feather and on the left with a hammer. The right is permitted, after a token of course we don’t condone violence, to immediately pivot to its actual political project — which is often, in fact, the political project that produced the violence. The left is required to spend days performing the ritual, with each performance scrutinized for adequate fervor, before being permitted to speak about anything else. When violence is committed by figures or movements coded left, the demand inverts entirely. Liberals are required to condemn before being heard on any topic. Conservatives are permitted to use the violence as a cudgel against the entire liberal coalition, as evidence that the coalition is morally bankrupt, as a frame within which any subsequent liberal political claim is automatically suspect.

This is the discipline. It has been operating in plain sight since at least 2016 and probably much longer. It has trained an entire generation of liberal commentators to genuflect preemptively, to lead with the condemnation, to perform the ritual before the demand for it has even been uttered, in the hope that performing it preemptively will earn them permission to speak about the actual subject without being interrupted again.

It does not earn them permission. The ritual must be performed every time. The next time the demand will be made again. The genuflection produces no goodwill, because goodwill was never what the ritual was for. The ritual is for the maintenance of an asymmetry. The asymmetry is what the apologist class on the right uses to keep the moral attention of the country pointed at the wrong populations.

Van Jones, last night, was performing the ritual. He performed it preemptively. He performed it before the hypothetical hero-making had occurred. He performed it on behalf of an audience that did not include him in the populations the night’s events were about. He performed it because the cable news panel desk has rules, and the rules require the liberal-coded panelist to lead with the denunciation, and the denunciation is the price of the slot.

He may have believed every word he said. I am not impugning his sincerity. What I am naming is the structural function of his performance, which was not to express a moral commitment Jones genuinely holds — he holds it, I do not doubt it — but to perform that commitment in the specific ritualized form the apparatus has trained him to perform it in, and at the specific moment when the performance is most useful to the very project that produced the violence he was condemning.

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The reactionary nature of the condemn demand is worth being precise about, because reactionary in this usage is not the colloquial right-wing. Reactionary names a structural posture — the demand that political analysis be paused, that the ground of the conversation be reset, that the speaker prove their bona fides through ritual performance before being permitted to continue. The demand is reactionary because it operates by interrupting forward analytical motion in favor of returning the conversation to a baseline where the speaker has to re-establish their fitness to participate.

This is the move that reactionary projects always make. Stop. Recite the catechism. Then we will see whether you can speak again. The catechism varies by era and by movement. The structural shape does not.

In the current American context, the catechism is condemnation of political violence in the abstract, regardless of who committed it, regardless of the conditions that produced it, regardless of the asymmetry of the demand. The recitation of the catechism is treated as a precondition for serious moral engagement. Refusal to recite it is treated as evidence of moral failure. The speaker who notices that the catechism is functioning as a control mechanism rather than as an honest moral demand, and who declines to recite it on the grounds that recitation is what the control mechanism requires, is treated as someone who has admitted the moral failure the catechism was constructed to test for.

This is a trap. The trap was constructed by a specific coalition for a specific purpose. The purpose is the maintenance of an asymmetry in moral attention that allows the coalition to commit violence — at the level of policy, at the level of rhetoric, at the level of stochastic incitement — while keeping the moral spotlight pointed at the populations the coalition has designated as morally suspect.

We should be against violence. We should support laws against it. We should be glad, when the alternative was worse, that no one was killed last night. None of these substantive moral commitments require the performance of the ritual. The substance is one thing. The ritual is another. The ritual has been functioning, for the better part of a decade, as a control mechanism on a specific side of the discourse. We can affirm the substance and refuse the ritual at the same time. The two are not the same operation.

I am not going to give a sermon against political violence in this moment, all things considered. The all-things-considered includes the specific way the demand to condemn has been functioning in our discourse, the specific architecture of the trap it represents, the specific coalition that benefits from the trap’s continued operation, and the specific historical record of which violence gets the ritual demanded of its critics and which violence does not.

What I will do, instead, is name what I think the moment requires.

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What the moment requires is the analytical work the ritual is designed to prevent.

The analytical work begins with the observation that political violence in this country is an output of a political climate, and the political climate is not equally produced by both sides. The current political climate is overwhelmingly the product of the Trump coalition, which has spent ten years producing eliminationist rhetoric at a scale and intensity that has no parallel in modern American political history. The dehumanization of immigrants. The dehumanization of trans people. The naming of political opponents as vermin and enemies within. The repeated, near-daily characterization of journalists as enemies of the people. The encouragement of violence at rallies. The pardoning of January 6 attackers. The reframing of January 6 as a day of love. The Charlie Kirk truly impactful people-style fantasies of his own enemies’ deaths. The Stephen Miller architecture of cruelty as policy. The Vance posture of no boundaries on right-wing alliance. The decade of exactly this material, produced and amplified at industrial scale.

The climate produces acts. Some of the acts are committed by the coalition’s own members against the coalition’s designated enemies. Some of the acts are committed against the coalition’s members by people whose grievances against the coalition have built up to the point where the basic taboo against political violence has, for them, broken. Cole Allen, whatever the particular contents of his manifesto turn out to be, is a person operating in this climate. The climate is not his fault. He is responsible for his own actions. The climate did not pull the trigger. He pulled the trigger. The climate produced the field of grievance and resonance and breakdown in which a person like him could come to believe that what he was about to do was justified.

This is not difficult to say. It does not require the speaker to celebrate Cole Allen, or to lionize him, or to suggest that what he did was good. It requires only the analytical honesty to name the relationship between climate and act when the climate is the one that has been producing the conditions for the act.

The cable news panel does not permit this analysis to be performed. The cable news panel requires that the violence, when it lands, be treated as a freestanding event, disconnected from the climate, susceptible to ritual condemnation in the abstract, available to be deployed by the right against the left and unavailable to be deployed by the left against the right. The panel requires this because the panel is shaped by the same asymmetric demand as the rest of the discourse.

Van Jones works in this format. He has worked in it for years. He has been disciplined by it for years. The discipline produces the kind of segment he produced last night, in which the most urgent moral task in the immediate aftermath of an assassination attempt against a Trump administration official is the pre-condemnation of a hypothetical leftist celebration that has not yet occurred. The hypothetical celebration exists, in the segment, as the substitute for the analysis the format does not permit. The leftist who has not celebrated yet is the available target. The coalition that produced the climate is the unavailable target.

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What I am asking of the readers of this piece, and of the people who watched Van Jones last night and felt the unease they probably felt, is not to disrespect Van Jones. Van Jones is doing his job under conditions that constrain what he is able to say. The constraint is real. The constraint is what the format produces.

What I am asking is for the readers to notice the constraint. To see the genuflection as genuflection. To recognize that the framework demanding the genuflection is the framework that has been producing the asymmetric moral attention for a decade, and that the asymmetric moral attention is part of how we got to a country where a man can charge a security checkpoint with three weapons and a manifesto and the very first thing the cable news liberal feels obligated to do is pre-condemn the leftists who might celebrate him.

The leftists who might celebrate him are not the load-bearing problem. The coalition that produced the climate in which a Cole Allen could be produced is the load-bearing problem. The cable news format does not permit this distinction to be made cleanly. The format requires that the load-bearing problem be folded into a both-sides equivalence in which the leftists-who-might-celebrate are positioned as the moral peer of the coalition-that-produced-the-climate. They are not the moral peer. The asymmetry is the analysis. The asymmetry is what the genuflection works to obscure.

The substantive moral position is available to anyone willing to hold it. Political violence is wrong. Trying to assassinate the president is wrong. Trying to assassinate cabinet officials is wrong. Lionizing assassins is wrong. The entire substantive moral position can be held without reciting the catechism. The catechism is a separate thing. The recitation of the catechism is what the trap requires. Refusing to recite it is not refusing the substance. It is refusing the trap.

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The country saw the best of America last night, in the actions of the law enforcement officer who took a bullet in the vest and lived because the vest was good, in the actions of Steve Scalise pulling Jared Moskowitz into the secure room because both of them have lived through political violence and one of them was not going to leave the other one to live through it again, in the actions of the journalists who, as Weijia Jiang said, run toward the crisis instead of away from it.

The country also saw, last night and this morning, the operating apparatus of the discourse the country has built for itself. The apparatus produced Van Jones’s segment. It produced Trump’s I’m honored press conference. It produced the condemn this immediately demand that has been propagating through every panel desk and every Twitter feed since the moment the shots were heard. The apparatus is the thing that has to be named.

The carriers Van Jones was preemptively condemning, the leftists who he worried would lionize Cole Allen — they are mostly not real. There will be a few. There always are. They do not constitute a movement. They do not constitute a meaningful fraction of the coalition Van Jones is supposed to be in. The apparatus that requires Jones to pre-condemn them, on cable, in the immediate aftermath of an attempt on the president’s life, is doing the political work the apparatus was constructed to do. The work is the maintenance of the asymmetry. The asymmetry is the climate’s main protection.

I am not condemning anything tonight that has not yet happened. I am condemning the demand that I do so, and I am naming the coalition that benefits from the demand, and I am refusing the trap.

The substance stands. The ritual is the trap. We can have one without the other.

That is what the moment requires.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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