Essay 1: Historical Arsonists

In Dan Carlin’s series “The Wrath of the Khans” he spends quite a bit of time on an idea he describes as “historical arsonists.” What Carlin is describing is this idea among historians that some people who become world-dominant leaders do so by laying waste to the societies all around them, and often to their own society as well.

For example, the Mongol conquests (1206 to 1368 CE) killed about 60 million people, or about 10% of the world’s population. That is a particularly gruesome body count when you realize that all of those people were killed basically one at a time. The Mongols didn’t have bombs or other weapons of mass-death. They had to shoot people with arrows, slice them to death with a sword, or blockade a city and starve people to death. 60 million people were either killed slowly by siege or personally in up close ways.

But the Mongol scourge didn’t end there. The Black Plague of Europe (1346 – 1352) seems to have started in Mongolia, spread to the rest of Asia, and then made its way to Europe. In Europe the plague killed about 33% of the population. The Mongolian death count is probably north of one-hundred million when you consider everything that happened as a result of their conquests.

Today some historians speak about Genghis Khan, the man who kicked off this era of massive death and

destruction, as a necessary and good thing for the progress of humanity. The theory is that you periodically need someone to burn down society. It’s like a forest needs periodic forest fires to thrive. The forest is better for the fire but the trees incinerated in the fire weren’t too thrilled about being turned to ash.

Historians typically can’t make the argument about the good of these historical arsonists if they are in too close of proximity to the destruction that the arsonist caused. If you do you will get scores of angry people coming for you. No, historians who want to remain credible and make this argument often have to wait until everyone who survived the trauma is dead. And it is probably a good idea to wait until the children of the generation who survived the trauma are gone as well. Once you are a generation or two removed from the arsonists events then you can say “look at all the good that came from this leader’s activities!”

Carlin goes on to point out that someday people will write books about all the good that came from Hitler’s time in power. They will point to advancements in flight, plastics, energy. They may even give him credit for humans getting to the moon. But credible historians don’t do this yet because there are people alive who survived the concentration camps or who stormed the beaches of Normandy. You can’t talk about all the good of Hitler when there are people around who will shame you for trying to have that take.

I was thinking about Carlin’s ‘historical arsonist’ take and his comment about these future ‘good things of Hitler’ historians after I saw the Toronto Blue Jays celebrated Canada Day by having Canadian World War 2 veterans on the field for the pre-game festivities. During this pre-game one of the announcers noted that there are only a handful of people in Canada left that actually fought in the second world war.

This Canada Day event and a similar one a few weeks earlier (June 6^th, 2024) in France were both reminders of how few World War 2 vets are left. Organizers of the D-Day commemoration event held in France said that since they do the event only every five years then 2024 may be the last time the event has people in attendance who actually fought on D-Day. This year the youngest attendee who fought on D-Day was 98 years old.

If Dan Carlin is correct, we are approaching the time when the people who want to write about all the good things that came from Hitler are going to be able to do so without facing admonishment from those who lived through Hitler’s reign of terror.

It is notable to me that as the number of people who have a memory of Hitler, and the other fascists of the 1920s to 1940s diminish to zero we are seeing the rise of neo-Nazi and pro-fascist political movements all over the world. I don’t think it is a coincidence that people coming out of the woodwork promising to be better fascists this time around coincides with the dying out of the last people with a living memory of the last fascists who nearly burned the world down.

Essay 2: America’s First Arsonist President: Andrew Jackson  

America’s history with historical arsonists is pretty slim. There are a few candidates like Huey Long, who was assassinated just as he was really getting going, that may have burned the world down with their blend of efficiency, charisma, and corruption if they had been given the time to do so. Someone like Charles Lindbergh had potential but was derailed by global events and a mood change against his party due to Pearl Harbor and World War 2.

Probably our most prolific historical arsonist was Andrew Jackson, 7^th President of the United States (1829 – 1837). His record of destruction is nowhere near the scale of people like Genghis Khan so it is not a perfect comparison.

Jackson’s arsonist behavior was focused on Native Americans. During his 8 years as President, Jackson ordered the forcible removal of tens of thousands of Native Americans from their lands east of the Mississippi River and marched them west to places like Oklahoma. His aggressive and hostile actions towards Native Americans led to the deaths of thousands of Native Americans.

Jackson also was extremely antagonistic to the status quo of American Politics. He fought with the Supreme Court, shut down attempts at creating a central bank, is the reason we have a popular vote and electoral college selection process for President, was the first president to have a “cabinet” of advisors and more.

He is also the reason the Democratic Party’s logo is a donkey. Jackson’s critics often portrayed him as a donkey or ‘jackass’ which was meant to be derisive. But Jackson loved the image. He described the donkey as the hardest working animal on the farm and one that doesn’t get the credit it deserves. He embraced the donkey image for himself and his party and it is still the logo for the party to this day.

Jackson also gets a lot of credit for being a populist. He overcame the political elite’s efforts to shut him out of the Presidency by rallying the common (re: white) people of America to his side. He created such a fervor with his rallies and touring that he forced the system to change to be more inclusive. The political elite of the 1820’s was able to hold off a full popular vote system by compromising to the electoral college, but it was way more inclusive than the selection by a handful of elites that had been the system before Jackson forced it to change.

Jackson also owned close to 300 slaves, and ‘adopted’ two Native American children as his own. It would be more appropriate to describe this adoption as kidnapping; tomato / tomAto. The two children certainly benefitted from Jackson’s wealth but they also were often made to dress up like caricature Indians and perform dances and chants for guests and to entertain Jackson.

As an aside: I think it is interesting that most of history’s great monsters have some bald-faced exception to the worst thing they did. Hitler flew his mom’s Jewish house-servant and her family to England before he embarked on a genocide of the Jews. Jackson adopted two Native American children and raised them as Jacksons while he conducted his genocide of the Native Americans. It is a weird quirk of this type of historical figure that they seem to always have a ‘tell’ in their deeds to the fact that they know, somewhere deep down inside, that they are monsters.

Donald Trump seems to be a fan of Jackson’s. During Trump’s four years in office he spoke of him often and he even moved a portrait of Jackson in to the oval office. Jackson is a fairly famous American figure in his own right but I think it is also the case that Trump’s term helped give Jackson broader awareness among people today.  

In July, 2024 a new similarity between the two presidents was added to list when someone made a failed assassination attempt on Trump. Like Donald Trump, Andrew Jackson’s survival from the attempt on him seemed almost miraculous. Many people today have talked about Trump in messianic terms and that also happened after Jackson’s assassin failed to kill him.

On January 30, 1835 a man named Richard Lawrence got up close to Jackson at a funeral. He pulled a pistol from his pocket and fired on Jackson from less than a foot away. The gun misfired. Fortunately for Lawrence he had a second gun on him. He pulled that one out of his other pocket and fired it, also from less than a foot away. Amazingly that gun misfired as well.

Why they both misfired is one of America’s great mysteries. The guns Lawrence used were highly susceptible to humidity and the assassination attempt happened on a very humid day. So maybe that was it. After both guns misfired Jackson beat the assassin with his cane until he could be subdued by people at the funeral. A day or so later the guns were tested and both fired just fine.

Jackson, like Trump, had a long list of scandals and misdeeds; and enemies as a result of them. He was one of the first people in the Southern United States to get divorced, he was held prisoner as a child by the British (and had the scars to prove their abusive behavior of prisoners), he fought in several gun duels, he killed a few people, and so on. Like Trump, Jackson seemed to be immune to the scandals and problems that dogged him. He always seemed to be one step ahead of the consequences of his actions. And now they both seemed to have some divine intervention in their assassination attempts as well.

We don’t know much about the motives of Jackson’s would-be assassin even though Lawrence lived for about 30 years after the attempt. Richard Lawrence was a painter who used lead-based paints for painting houses. He also used lead-based paint for his hobby of landscape painting. In addition to the lead-paint he was around constantly for his work and hobby he also made his own bullets; which were also made from lead.

In the months leading up to the assassination attempt Lawrence developed bizarre behaviors. He kept saying he was going to England, then wouldn’t go. He became erratic and forgetful. He started to tell people about a mass conspiracy in motion to trap him in the United States. He developed a clumsy walk, known as an “ataxic gait,” which is common with people who have severe lead-poisoning. He developed chronic stomach pain, known as “Painters Colic,” another symptom of extreme lead-poisoning.

Lawrence was tried for the assassination and found not guilty by reason of insanity. His behavior was so strikingly bizarre in court that the jury needed only five minutes of deliberation to come to the conclusion he was cookoo for cocoa puffs. He spent the rest of his life in a mental institution and he died in 1861.

After the assassination attempt Andrew Jackson was determined to pin the attempt on his political rivals John C Calhoun and George Poindexter. Senator Calhoun was harassed by the media for weeks until he eventually had to go on to the Senate floor and make an official speech declaring that he was not involved in any way with the assassination attempt or any plot to assassinate Jackson.

Poindexter was a US Senator from Mississippi. He got roped in to Jackson’s plot conspiracy because Lawrence once painted Poindexter’s house. Jackson was convinced that it was during this period of employment by Lawrence to Poindexter that the plot came together. As a result of Jackson’s constant pressure Poindexter lost his next Senate bid. Jackson’s attempt to connect him to the assassination plot ended Poindexter’s political career and even forced him to move out of Mississippi for a while. 

One more similarity between Jackson and Trump: John C Calhoun was Jackson’s Vice-President in his first term. By the end of this first four years Calhoun hated Jackson to the point where he opted to resign the office rather than do what Jackson wanted. For Jackson’s second term Calhoun became one of his most vocal and bitter critics. Jackson, who believed that all politics was personal, was convinced that Calhoun tried to have him killed for the way Jackson shoved him out of the VP job.

Richard Lawrence, Jackson’s failed assassin, is worth remembering today because many people are leaning in to vast conspiratorial thinking to try to understand why this guy tried to shoot Donald Trump. One thing that has come out is that he apparently was googling things like “political rallies near me” to see which politicians would come within 50 miles of his house.

If you go on Tik Tok or X or Threads, or whatever you will see the spectrum from Q-Anon to Blue-Anon all saying they know why he did it. Or they will paint some broad conspiracy of anyone from Joe Biden to some secret group of Republicans who put this kid up to it. Maybe it was Trump himself who plotted the assassination to be like the movie Bob Roberts!

The reality is that Andrew Jackson’s would-be-assassin did it because he went crazy from lead-poisoning and was convinced the world was out to get him. Trump’s would-be assassin, based on his google searches may have only went after Trump because he was the first politician to come within driving distance of his house.

Reality is often far less satisfying than we want it to be; that is a big reason why conspiracy theories do so well; they create a movie-like narrative that makes sense of our random world. It is easier to cope with the world if you think that some group of people, even if they are evil people, are in control of events. Randomness is scarier for many people than an evil cabal controlling everything.

Essay 3: Accelerationism

Here is a quote about Accelerationism from a West Point Article, “Understanding Accelerationism: An Anti-Ideology,” QUOTE:

https://ctc.westpoint.edu/uniting-for-total-collapse-the-january-6-boost-to-accelerationism/

“Accelerationism is not an ideology in itself. Rather, it is an ideological style and a strategic method, meant to bring about the failure of the ideologies that prevail in any given system or country at this particular moment in time. In the United States, these systems include representative democracy with a strong federal government, …equality under the law,…. Under accelerationism—as a goal and a tactic—individuals with <different> beliefs are united in the goal of hastening the… end of economic, political, and social systems so as to more rapidly bring about what is seen as an inevitable end-times collapse and subsequent rebirth into a utopian afterworld.

…The question of what happens after systems collapse does not matter in accelerationism per se, even if most extreme-right tendencies do have a ‘utopian’ vision to follow the collapse. Within the anti-government fringe, ideologies such as… anti-federalism envision a restoration of “self-government” and “natural rights” in a gauzy re-envisioning of the days of the U.S. founding—implicitly if not explicitly white and male dominated. For QAnon <style> conspiracy theorists, the utopian future centers on “the Storm,” a preordained day of reckoning for satanic global leaders, in which mass arrests and execution of their political opponents will vindicate them in the public eye. To the ideologies most associated with the Trumpist base, this entails delivery of authoritarian power via mob violence to existing political figures such as former president Donald Trump. And for still others, it means the beginning of a race war, genocide, and Armageddon itself, followed by a rebirth into a “restored” white civilization. END QUOTE.

Within Republican politics there are a group of idealogues who want Trump to be their new historical arsonist. If you listen to people like Steven Bannon they regularly talk about the need to collapse the Liberal Democratic order and replace it. They support Trump because they think he will be a catalyst for toppling the status quo in favor of revolution and something new.

This view of politics is nihilistic in nature. Nihilism is the idea that things like wisdom, loyalty, and morality have no real meaning. Nihilism can be positive or negative but this brand of negative nihilism says that once you abandon morals and wisdom then you can see what really matters: Power and destruction. It is why so many historians make the connection between people like Bannon to Hitler and the Nazis.

Historian Timothy Snyder talks at length about Hitler’s worldview. A common misunderstanding of Hitler is that he was crazy or evil and not calculated or philosophical. Understanding his core ideology is useful in a world where neo-fascists and neo-Nazi’s are on the rise once again. Hitler believed that the true core nature of humanity was violence. In a pure state of nature humans were organized from top-to-bottom by who was the strongest or the most competent at using violence to gain power.

Hitler’s anti-semitism comes from a view that Jews were weak but smart. They used their cunning to subvert the natural order and create a false structure of society. In this false structure “feminine” qualities like compassion and intellectualism subvert nature by diminishing the value of strength and violence.

There is this quote that Tucker Carlson liked to use when he was on Fox News: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” It captures the essence of fascism in that it asserts that you need violent men to rise up from hard times to undo the damage caused by the weak who have led us astray. It is the ultimate “kids these days have no respect” or “I used to walk up hill in the snow both ways to school” form of thinking. It is regressive and also completely imaginary. There are almost no real examples from history of these hard men emerging to fix the world.

The men this type of thinking prop up as the ideal are all men who came from privilege, not hard times. Donald Trump was born in to an already established real estate Empire. Julius Caesar’s family was a member of the elite class of Rome. Alexander the Great’s dad was King Philip the Second of Macedonia. Charlemagne (King Charles the Great or Karl del Grosso) was born in to the Carolingian Dynasty (his father was Pepin the Short who ruled France from 751 to 768).

Over and over these supposed “hard” men are almost all pampered babies of privilege. They also all do the “feminine” things they purport to lash out against. Julius Caesar wore a toga in a girlish way and became a fashion icon. Donald Trump wears more makeup than a circus clown. Adolph Hitler’s first love was the masculine activity of painting with water colors.

Anyway, fascism asserts that this false structure, created by Jews and feminine coded elites, leads to misery and people feeling that they are not living up to their potential. It is not your fault you are a failure because you are a victim of the cunning Jews who made a world that doesn’t make sense.

Hitler’s belief was that if you kill the Jews then you can break humanity out of this false structure and return humanity to a state of violence; our natural order. He believed his Germans were the rightful heirs to the top of this power-based hierarchy; but he also probably would have argued that if someone beat Germany in a natural fight of power then that was fine with him. It was more important to him to return humanity to its original nature than it was to preserve German sovereignty; especially if Germany didn’t earn their place by exerting dominance through violence.

Ok enough about Hitler and his bad ideology. I thought it was important to describe accelerationism and Hitler’s brand of fascism together because in 2020’s America many of our mass shooters are committing their violent acts out of a twisted desire to be famous and also a desire to return society to a natural order; where that order is similar to the one Hitler imagined for the world.

There has been no announced motive from the would-be assassin of Donald Trump. But the people who knew him have so far consistently described him as pretty far-right and conservative in his views. Many pundits have talked about how surprising it was to them that the shooter was a Republican. But this detail made a lot of sense to me. Accelerationism does not require end-to-end ideological purity or even vocal adherence. It is simply the idea that the perpetration of violent or destabilizing acts will lead to the toppling of the status quo and trigger humanity to return to its natural or proper state.

When you think about the profile of this kid he sounds a lot like a typical 21^st century American school-shooter. These are people who have become disillusioned with their lack of place or purpose in the world. What triggers them to commit their final violent act varies widely. Sometimes its lack of attention from girls, or confusion about sexual feelings, or problems at home. Some have ideological or political aims. But a through-line for all of them is that the act is rooted in a desire to change the status quo to something else. They are all accelerationists hoping that their act of violence will start a chain reaction of events that lead to something different.

Accelerationism is nothing new. Most attempts to accelerate fail. Even when the violent act is successful they usually don’t lead to revolution or something bigger. I think most people who commit these acts understand that the odds are long. But they have reached some level of desperation where it has become logical to them to take a home run swing to try to make change happen.

Arguably the most successful accelerationist in history was a man named Gavrilo Princip. In 1914 he assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. This assassination set off the events that started World War I. On trial Princip described his motivations. QUOTE “I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free from Austria… The plan was to unite all South Slavs. It was understood that Serbia as the free part of the South Slavs had the moral duty to help in the unification, to be to the South Slavs as the Piedmont was to Italy… In my opinion every Serb, Croat and Slovene should be an enemy of Austria.” END QUOTE

What is useful about Princip’s story was that there is no way Princip, or the group he was a member of called ‘The Black Hand’, could have imagined the events that unfolded after they assassinated Ferdinand. Austria declared war on Bosnia in response to the assassination of their Archduke. Germany entered the war because they had a treaty with Austria that required them to do so. Russia entered the war because of a treaty they had with Bosnia. France entered the war because of a treaty with Russia. Britain entered the war because of a treaty with France… and so on until things were thoroughly out of control all over Europe.

That cycle of alliances triggering war declarations was beyond what The Black Hand members could have predicted. Princip and his organization surely did not intend to kick off a global war that would lead to the deaths of 50 or 60 million people. But the point of accelerationism is not to get to a certain series of events. Rather the point is to start a series of events that lead to catastrophe, destruction, and revolution.

At the end of World War I the country of Yugoslavia was formed as a nation for the “South Slavs” as Princip described them. In a “ends justify the means” type of analysis it would seem that Princip’s act of violence was successful.

But time keeps going. In World War 2 the Nazi’s and their allies killed around 15% of all Yugoslavians. After World War 2 the country fractured and became mostly part of the USSR. Today this area is still marked by regular violence and conflict. From Bosnia-Herzogovina in the West to Ukraine in the East the “Slavic” region of Europe still feels like it has unresolved issues that make it hard, even over 100 years later to know how to rate the success of Princip’s act of acceleration.

America has had its share of accelerationists. I mentioned school-shooters as one set of examples. But our past has more specific examples like the assassination of JFK, the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah building, and so on.

Sometimes we know the motives. McVeigh wanted to kick off the events of the book the Turner Diaries. He picked the date of his bombing to align to the date of the burning of the compound in Waco (which also aligned to the date of an FBI raid on the compound of the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord organization in the 80’s).

Sometimes we don’t know the motivation. Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered by Jack Ruby before he could tell the world what he was hoping for. That empty space in the history leaves open a lot of room for conspiracy and conjecture about what ‘really’ happened regarding JFK. But maybe Oswald was suffering from mental illness or some other underlying condition that caused him to break from reality? Maybe there was a conspiracy going to the top. Or maybe Oswald was just sad or angry or whatever and saw this as a way to be heard?

I think the key lesson is that there always has been and always will be people who commit acts of accelerationist violence. Bin Laden believed America was a monstrosity and that he could use violence to get America to show its true nature in response. Unfortunately, America showed itself to be exactly what Bin Laden thought it was.

The best response to an act of aggression is to respond with kindness and compassion. That is the only way to break a cycle of violence… to quote the Gospel of Matthew 5 38 and 39: “You have heard it was said ‘an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist the one who <does> evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other cheek as well.”

There were people in 2001 warning about America’s desire for retribution after 9-11. House Member Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against the AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force), which gave the President nearly unlimited latitude to conduct a military response against terrorism after 9-11. Here is her speech that accompanied her ‘no’ vote on the authorization for use of military force: QUOTE  

“This unspeakable attack on the United States has forced me to rely on my moral compass, my conscience, and my God for direction.

“September 11 changed the world. Our deepest fears now haunt us. Yet I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States.

“I know that this use-of -force resolution will pass although we all know that the President can wage war even without this resolution. However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint. There must be some of us who say, let’s step back for a moment and think through the implications of our actions today-let us more fully understand their consequences.

“We are not dealing with a conventional war. We cannot respond in a conventional manner. I do not want to see this spiral out of control. This crisis involves issues of national security, foreign policy, public safety, intelligence gathering, economics, and murder. Our response must be equally multifaceted.

“We must not rush to judgment. For too many innocent people have already died. Our country is in mourning. If we rush to launch a counterattack, we run too great a risk that women, children, and other non-combatants will be caught in the crossfire.

“Nor can we let our justified anger over these outrageous acts by vicious murderers inflame prejudice against all Arab Americans, Muslim, Southeast Asians, and any other people because of their race, religion, or ethnicity.

“Finally, we must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target. We cannot repeat past mistakes.

“In 1964, Congress gave President Lyndon Johnson the power to “take all necessary measures” to repel attacks and prevent further aggression. In so doing, this House abandoned its own constitutional responsibilities and launched our country into years of undeclared war in Vietnam.

“At this time <1964>, Senator Wayne Morse, one of the two lonely votes against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, declared, “I believe that history will record that we have made a grave mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution of the United States. I believe that with the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake.”

“Senator Morse was correct, and I fear we make the same mistake today. And I fear the consequences. I have agonized over this vote. But I came to grips with it in the very painful yet beautiful memorial service today at the National Cathedral. As a member of the clergy so eloquently said: “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” END QUOTE

Essay 4: Would You Kill Baby Hitler?

In 2015 The New York Times conducted a survey on the question: “If you could go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, would you do it?” 30% of those surveyed said no. 28% were unsure. 42% said yes.

There is a Wikipedia page dedicated to this hypothetical. The first two paragraphs read as follows: QUOTE “Killing baby Hitler is a thought experiment in ethics and theoretical physics which poses the question of using time travel to assassinate an infant Adolf Hitler. It presents an ethical dilemma in both the action and its consequences, as well as a temporal paradox in the logical consistency of time. Killing baby Hitler first became a literary trope of science fiction during World War II and has since been used to explore these ethical and metaphysical debates.

Ethical debates on the problem of killing baby Hitler can demonstrate the outlook of various moral philosophies: utilitarianism holds that killing baby Hitler is justified, as the potential benefits outweigh the potential costs; deontology holds that killing baby Hitler is unjustified, as infanticide is always wrong; and consequentialism may question what the consequences of killing baby Hitler might be, holding that the unforeseen future consequences of such an act make it difficult to judge its morality. It is also used to raise the question of nature versus nurture, whether changing the society that baby Hitler grew up in might be preferable to killing baby Hitler.” END QUOTE

In the immediate aftermath of the attempt on Trump there were a ton of left leaning politicians and pundits who came out and immediately condemned the assassination attempt. They were consistent in their view that violence is not the way to solve our differences. I’m not sure how many of those people were being genuine but it was a pretty consistent theme.

Kyle Gass, who is in the duo “Tenacious D” with actor Jack Black, made a joke onstage where he said his wish for his birthday was that a future Trump assassin would not miss next time. In response Jack Black distanced himself from his bandmate’s comments and announced the suspension of all Tenacious D activity for the foreseeable future. Gass apologized for the comment, condemned violence, and deleted all of his social media accounts afterwards.

Fascism sees violence and power as a viable path to victory. If you think of yourself as “anti-fascist” then you should believe in things like compassion, cooperation, and consensus as the path to solving problems. Anti-fascism is a rejection of violence as the way to solve differences in society.

I started this section with the “Baby Hitler” idea because it is a familiar trope that I think gets right to the heart of the dilemma of using violence to solve problems. For example. If you are left-leaning in your political beliefs and believe that the recent spate of Supreme Court decisions are terrible for America; then you are probably also very worried about what is upcoming from this 6 – 3 conservative majority court. With that in mind it would be tempting to support someone who kills off 3 conservative justices in time for Biden to nominate and the Democrat-led Senate to confirm their replacements.

A small burst of violence to get your beliefs now backed by a 6 – 3 liberal majority at the court. Imagine Ketanji Brown-Jackson as the first black woman to be Chief Justice! I think you would be lying to yourself if this scenario doesn’t tempt you, even for a moment, as a progressive, liberal, or democrat from a purely Utilitarian perspective.

But you should reject this scenario first-of-all because you know that violence leads to more violence. Once you are in a cycle where people have seen, and are convinced, that the way to achieve political ends is through violence then this hypothetical liberal 6 – 3 court won’t have long before several of them are wiped out by people on the right who are willing to take their court back by the now normalized violent means.

Pretty soon all sides of any argument have given in to the idea that violence is the only answer. Consequentialism shows us that once violence starts you really can’t know where it will lead or where it will end (if it ends at all). Violence is only an effective method of getting your way so long as you can keep maximum pressure on your opponent. If you lose your grip at all then the violence will boomerang back on you.

Even if you could create a scenario where the violence would not cycle out of control that also has problems. Returning to the assassination attempt on Trump – if it had been successful it may have taken him out as the candidate but it also would have made him a martyr for the MAGA cause. There is a very good chance that his death would not have ended the movement, but rather galvanized it around their loss in a way to make it even harder to defeat. Trump, the living man, is a beatable candidate for President. Trump, the murdered martyr, lives on in every one of his followers and can never be stopped.

Finally, the main reason not to want an assassination attempt to succeed is about who we want to be. I mentioned Hitler’s view of the world earlier in this episode. He believed in nothing but power and violence. In that view of the world assassins are acceptable because violence is the only thing that determines who wins.

If you claim to oppose ideals like those of fascism then you are obligated to reject that as a path to solving problems. You have a moral duty to oppose violence as a solution. To quote Malala Yousafzai: “If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty and that much harshly, you must fight others but through peace and through dialogue and through education.”