No Time for Sanctimony

We don’t know exactly what happened at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. A man—Cole Allen—managed to get through the metal detector with guns and knives. Shots were fired, but, as reported today by the Washington Post, not by Allen, but by the Secret Service.

The incident raises more questions than it answers. How did Allen get past the metal detector? Even if he “charged” it, wasn’t there an agent manning it, perhaps following up with a hands-on search? I’ve seen tighter security at a rock concert. If Allen was planning on assassinating political figures, why would he carry a gun in full view, on a separate floor? Why did Trump seem curiously unfazed? Why did he and his cohorts, within two hours of the incident, use it as a rationale for lifting limitations on the ballroom construction?

Be that as it may. The Free Press, in an editorial yesterday, not only failed to ask these questions, but used the incident as an excuse for stomach churning sanctimony: “How does the unacceptable become acceptable?….It is impossible to see the weekend’s thwarted attack in the context of our increasingly upside-down culture, one in which political speech is derided as violence and political violence is tolerated, excused, and even celebrated.” They note one survey showing that 40 percent of Americans with graduate and professional degrees—compared to only 23% of those with a high school education—agreed that “violence is often necessary to create social change”. In another study by Emerson College, more than 40% of Gen Z said the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was acceptable.

Ahem. Just last week, our Vice-President JD Vance derided Pope Leo for criticizing America’s unprovoked attacks on Iran. He invoked religious rationalization for “just wars” and suggested that the Pope be more discreet in his discussions of theology. Perhaps the unacceptable has become acceptable because we have an Administration that stretches the bounds of acceptability to an extent (to paraphrase our great leader) never known before. When you have a President who threatens to “destroy a civilization” , who shrugs off the killing of 160 elementary school children in Iran, who thinks the killing of 70,000 people in Gaza and the razing of their entire country is a great real estate opportunity, who invades US cities and encourages ICE to terrorize immigrants and shoot peaceful protestors—-how can the Free Press, with a straight face, blame the left and “NYU coeds” for a violent culture?

Nonviolent, “within the system” change is always preferable. But its hard to sit back and wait for the elections when you have an Administration continuously eroding trust in the electoral process and threatening democratic institutions like mail in voting. It’s hard to get too excited about the electoral process in any case when progressive candidates are repeatedly shut out of the process by the corporate-controlled Democratic establishment. Just this week, The Lever reported at length on a coordinated effort between wealthy donors, PACs, and party operatives to “bring the party back to the center” and align with the “abundance” agenda. The center keeps losing, and the majority of Americans are feeling none too abundant, but the Democratic oligarchy actually prefers Trump to serious progressive change..

As far as the assassination of Thompson, I’ve already written extensively on this topic. Thompson was a human being with a life and a family. He was not solely responsible for the actions of his company, but he was the CEO. The actions of United Health Care and other rapacious health insurance companies, by limiting the access to health care, by denying needed procedures, by putting profit before people, kill people just as surely as with the barrel of a gun. I do not condone his assassination—but I can well understand how Luigi Mangione has become an antihero similar bank robbers in the Depression.

Back to the Correspondents dinner—the fact that there is so much suspicion of fraud on both ends of the political spectrum is a clear indication of how deeply trust in our institutions has eroded during the Trump era. Maybe—just maybe—we’ll penetrate the spin and the obfuscation and find out what really happened. In the mean time, Free Press and other Trump enablers—please spare us the sanctimony.