We are Steeped in Violence
It is all around us.
from PxHere
Let’s start here, via the AP: Man kills 7 of his children plus another child in shooting in Louisiana neighborhood.
A Louisiana father fatally shot eight children, including seven of his own, in an attack on his family Sunday morning that stretched across two houses in a Shreveport neighborhood left shaken by one of the nation’s deadliest mass shootings in recent years, police said.
Two women, including the gunman’s wife who was the mother of their children, were also shot and critically wounded, according to Shreveport Police Department spokesperson Chris Bordelon. Officials said the children — who were all killed in the same house — ranged in age from 3 to 11 years old.
This happened roughly a week ago. While I suspect that most readers of this site are aware it happened, given that most of us are news junkies, it would not be surprising to me if it escaped the notice of some. I remember seeing the news alert about the event pop up on my phone while I was doing some yardwork. I did not even bother to click the link. The whole thing is just too common in America. I did, for what it is worth, feel a tinge of shame for not caring more about the story.
The Mass Shooting Tracker tells me that there have been, as of this writing, 148 such shootings in the United States this calendar year. I would note, dear reader, that just under 32% of 2026 has passed as of today.
By the way, yesterday’s event at the Correspondent’s Dinner doesn’t even count as a mass shooting by their definition, since only one person was shot. Their minimum number is four.
How many instances this year with one to three people being shot, I wonder?
Meanwhile, also within the week, Fox News reports Justice Department announces it’s readopting the firing squad as a means of execution. The administration is concerned, you see, that we are not executing enough people, and apparently not doing it dramatically enough for their tastes.
In other news, you may have heard the Secretary of Defense carrying on (and on and on and on) about lethality. You know, “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” Masculine men are warriors, dontcha know.
In a related note, I was listening to the Bulwark Takes podcast yesterday, and they were talking about the acting Secretary of the Navy, Hung Cao, who said the following when he ran for Congress in 2024:
“What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat ’em and ask for seconds. Those are young men and women that are going to win wars.”
Or, like I have done with previous recent examples of obvious political violence (the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the two previous attempts on Trump), that Trump has a long history of violent rhetoric. Here’s a post from 2018: Radicalizing Rhetoric. Others could be found and cited.
May I add that we are currently highly polarized, and there are real fears of authoritarianism in the air. I have called Trump a fascist on multiple occasions, find and post examples of corruption, authoritarianism, and just plain weird behavior by the administration daily. Some people who oppose Trump call themselves, euphemistically, “The Resistance.” While I do not advocate for violence (and have markedly and pointedly asked commenters not to fantasize about the death of politicians), do I think that someone out of 340ish million people might think violence is a good idea? Well, I think we know the daily answer to that question.
So, I ask myself, what is more likely in the United States of America in 2026?
That Trump and his allies staged an event, or somehow orchestrated it to make Trump look better so as a boost to his ballroom?
Or
That some individual, likely with mental health problems, got a gun and brought it to DC?
I don’t even think I need Occam’s Razor for that one.
CBS News has the following on the suspect: What we know about the suspect in shooting at White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Cole Tomas Allen, 31, was an educator from Torrance, California with an engineering degree from a prestigious university. He also owned two firearms, one of which was used in the shooting at the Washington Hilton Hotel, according to two law enforcement sources.
[…]
Law enforcement sources told CBS News he checked in on Friday, the day before the event. They said he traveled there via train from Los Angeles to Chicago and then Chicago to D.C.
That reminded me, in part, that the man who engaged in a shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum in DC had also travelled from Chicago. I feel like there was another recent example of a person travelling some distance to engage in their act of violence, but again, who can keep track?
At the risk of raising some hackles, I would highly recommend not falling into conspiracy thinking on this topic. Further, I would note that commenters often express incredulity, if not derision, about people on The Other Side who believe what is clearly nonsense. So don’t fall for it, and if you see it in your political allies, let it be a reminder that no group is immune.
Demand evidence and clear thinking; don’t succumb to conspiratorial thinking.
A shooter in America? Sadly, a daily occurrence.
Trump using an event to promote his ballroom and to self-aggrandize? What is so hard to believe about that?
That his followers on social media and on TV would parrot his nonsense? Seems par for the course for the last ten years.
Steven, Steven, Steven… You’re missing the obvious. It’s all there if you just look!
King Charles is coming to visit. It’s well known that he’s a member of the Silurans (a ancient lizard race that lives in cities deep in the Earth) wearing a “human suit”. I mean… why do you think Princess Di had to be taken out and replaced by Camilla? Di was *obviously* catching on!
Charles is coming over to make sure that Trump opens the Strait of Hormuz–because if the oil doesn’t flow, there’s no jet fuel. And if there’s no jet fuel, there’s nothing to put the mind-controlling chemicals into to create the chemtrails.
Without the mind control chemtrails, we’ll soon regain our ability to think clearly and realized that it was the Jewish space lasers that brought down the twin towers! (Because that’s where the props used to fake the moon landing were stored.)
Open your eyes, man! It’s all right there in front of you!
There used to be a party game in which someone picked three random stories from a newspaper (which dates this) and a player had to come up with a conspiracy tying the stories together. Apparently it wasn’t difficult.
I fear my reaction to this is, “Stop the presses! Nothing happened to the president!!!”
I don’t think our military would be an effective fighting force if they were engaged in self-mutilation and self-cannibalism. We should want fewer young men and women tearing apart their own bodies for snacks, not more.
I don’t think this Hung Cao, if that even is his real name, should be anywhere near any source of power — political, moral or electrical.
At the risk of raising some hackles, I would highly recommend not falling into conspiracy thinking on this topic. Further, I would note that commenters often express incredulity, if not derision, about people on The Other Side who believe what is clearly nonsense. So don’t fall for it, and if you see it in your political allies, let it be a reminder that no group is immune.
The Trump administration is filled with paranoid and stupid people, but they also have a ton of access to our data. From shooter to shooter, models and parameters are being built in attempt to sort the signal from the noise. If I were going to write a story about how this was a false flag, it would be pretty simple. Someone was alerted that a guy who was been ID’d for various suspicious activities online has suddenly bought a train ticket ending in DC and is now staying at the exact hotel where the president will be. The person in charge of this data is a fanatic, and thinks (or has been instructed) that a bound-to-fail assassination attempt will be beneficial. Instead of warning the Secret Service and giving them his room number, they delete this guy from the dataset, and there you go.
Do I think this happened? No. But I get why people might think that. It’s not like antifa staging January 6th.
True, as the paranoid style in US society predates the founding. After all, the 1690s Salem Witch Trials is one of those cases (like the Lizzie Borden tragedy and the OJ Simpson saga) whose class, race, and gender politics explain why Americans are the way we are.
If conspiratorial thinking under Trump is still intolerable and invalid, it’s also an inevitable, even normal reaction to MAGA’s compulsive lying.
Paranoia greets this unqualified president and his incompetent minions because they choose to be sinister liars who’ve perpetrated violence on women and girls literally, on Americans like Alex Pretti and Renee Good, on Iranian civilians, etc. The modern right and its enablers in business and media are abnormally, malevolently dishonest. The trust gap Republicans deliberately worsened and widened fuels conspiracy. Normal people must piece together news from curated sources.
FWIW, the Candace Owens right immediately claimed the shooter is linked to the IDF, so the Hasan Piker left gleefully amplified the claim. I rather enjoy seeing a conservative admin’s official narrative haunted by the very QAnoners they nursed from infancy. Boomerang!