Deeds, Not Words: The Myth of Polite Revolution

Last night, a man named Cole Tomas Allen walked into the Washington Hilton with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives, and charged a Secret Service checkpoint while Donald Trump sat forty feet away eating dinner. He's thirty-one years old and from Torrance, California. He was tackled. One agent took a round to the vest. Trump went home and gave a press conference. By tomorrow the news cycle will have metabolized it, filed it under lone wolf, moved on. What was your reaction to this? Note: this essay is not a defense of the man with the shotgun, and it is not a call to violence. It is a refusal of the sanitized history we are handed about how rights were won, and a refusal to perform appropriate shock at one failed assassination attempt while forty-six people have died in ICE detention this year without anyone being charged. We know what the answer to the question of political violence is. But accepting the acceptable answer without interrogating is complicity with the harm our…