What to do about a dictator. I was in New Jersey with my family when I got the first text. My sister sent her kids to the other room to play, out of earshot of the television, and we watched the mainstream channels with my mom and dad while I scrolled X for updates. Donald Trump was shot. When he got up, and we saw the blood, my mom cried. Americans were furious, frightened, confused. It’s been fifty years since a presidential candidate has come so close to being killed, and among folks less obsessively plugged into the news (“sane, well-adjusted humans” we typically call these people) there was a general sense of disbelief. How could something like this happen? But how could it not? Our political climate is total cancer. An attack like this was probably inevitable. I’m just grateful we escaped the darker timeline — by about an inch.

Now, how do we stop this from happening again?

Since the attempted assassination, many of the pundits and donors who most prolifically contributed to our nuclear waste dump politics have retreated to “both sides” hand waving, with no clear enunciation of what led to this tragedy, or how we might avoid such tragedies in the future. For the most part, this is probably just indicative of a natural human allergy to accountability. But the media’s budding focus on “conspiracy theories,” and the targeting of platforms that tolerate them, strikes me as something a little more alarming than merely obnoxious.