Speaker 1: Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of the 8th District in Tucson, Arizona, she has been shot outside a supermarket.

Speaker 2: A gunman opened fire on Republican members of Congress during a baseball practice near Washington. Several people were wounded, including House of Representatives Majority Whip, Steve Scalise.

Speaker 3: It is hard to put into words what exactly we witnessed today because we've not seen this before. Thousands storming the Capitol after a rally with President Trump.

Speaker 4: Six men connected with a right-wing group are charged with attempting to carry out an elaborate plan to kidnap Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

Speaker 5: The man convicted of attacking Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer inside of their San Francisco home in 2022 has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Speaker 6: Multiple US law enforcement agencies this morning are investigating the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania yesterday.

President Biden: There's no place in America for this kind of violence. It's sick. It's sick.

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Kai Wright: It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. Welcome to the show. We are responding this week to the latest example of political violence in our lives, the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. As of now, there are still many, many unknowns. Sadly, a lot of speculation and misinformation is rapidly filling that information gap. We're going to sort through some of that chatter. We'll talk about the way misinformation has spread and then consider the broader story of political violence, both in the US and globally.

We're going to start by checking in with national security expert Juliette Kayyem. She's a professor of national security at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, CNN's national security analyst, and author most recently of the book The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters. Juliette, welcome back to Notes from America.

Juliette: Thank you for having me.

Kai Wright: The shooting touched off tons and tons of speculation about what happened and why, in part because people do want to know how is it even possible that a 20-year-old man with an AR-15 could climb up on a roof, have a sight line to the former president, and be able to shoot him? Those facts seem incredulous to a lot of people, and that spawned a lot of theories. I wonder, as a security expert, are those facts incredulous to you? Were those bizarre facts?

Juliette: Yes. There's no point in saying, we love the Secret Service and they're great. Look, it's a great institution, but they have one job, and this-- It was not a successful day for them. They were obviously able to kill the gunman, but only after he got to about 150 yards of the protectee with an AR-style weapon. The number of questions I have are related to operational planning. Why wasn't the building more secure? Things around communication. He seems to have been noticed by a variety of people beforehand, but no one seems to have acted on it. Then also just the pace of the response.

I don't know about you, but my visuals of it, [unintelligible 00:03:32] a TikTok of it, are that it took a little bit longer than you would think that the Secret Service would act to respond to protect Donald Trump. The conspiracy theories out there are just that. They are just conspiracies. They are not true. The former president of the United States and the GOP nominee, whatever you feel about him, was nearly assassinated yesterday. Just a turn of the head would have changed a lot for this country, and the Secret Service needs an accounting.

I was glad to hear President Biden say that that review would be external. The Secret Service cannot monitor itself. I suspect that the director of the Secret Service will probably not keep her job. This is just something that doesn't happen and ought not to happen.

Kai Wright: What kind of things will you be looking at? There's the review is coming. There will be House hearings. You've named some of the general stuff you're thinking about. Are there specific questions you'll be looking for them to answer in those investigations?

Juliette: Oh, yes. Why was the building where the sniper shot from actually outside the security perimeter? I looked at the pictures, could not believe it, could not believe it, that this building is not in the security perimeter, meaning you could not access it without going through the metal detector or whatever kind of review they had.

Kai Wright: Just because it was so close, you're like, how was something this close not?

Juliette: It was so close. 150 yards and elevated. That's your shot. As I keep saying to people, we all saw that movie. You do not want to give the line of sight to the assassin. The second was how was the sniper threat understood and addressed. It's a catch-22 for the Secret Service. They clearly are worried about essentially a sniper, because they've deployed counter-sniper capabilities, but there seems to be a mismatch between the deployment of those capabilities and what they're doing to protect from that threat, including accessibility of the building.

Third, and I'll end here. You can tell I have a lot of questions. The third is, who said what to whom? We're hearing anecdotally that the local law enforcement had viewed him as suspicious, but no one seems to have followed him or even approached him. Various members of the public are trying to get law enforcement to notice. Maybe or maybe not, there's a phone call or communication made to the Secret Service about what's going on. This stuff has to happen in real-time. You've got seconds, you don't have minutes. That breakdown seems to have occurred.

There's other issues about pacing and time and is the Secret Service really built for the 21st century threats and the threats that you led this show about-

Kai Wright: What do you mean by that?

Juliette: -the larger. The threat environment now is not focused on a person or place, but essentially on democracy. That's what I wrote about for The Atlantic yesterday, as things were unfolding, that democracy has-- Let me put it in a different way. Violence or the threat of violence is being utilized as a natural extension of our democratic differences. I've been glad to hear people try to ratchet it down a little bit. I don't know if that's going to sustain itself. We haven't heard from Donald Trump.

I'm not going to be shy here. It's a hard thing to say, but I've been writing about it for, gosh, for six or seven years now is that incitement, and the FBI concurs with me, generally comes from those emboldened by language on the right or conservatives. This is what the FBI has been saying, that this particular case may or may not have been that. I don't know. I do know that you can't deny the threat environment that exists on both the right, then, of course, some on the left, but I'm just quoting you FBI numbers, the vast majority is on the right.

How do you protect for that? That's not really about a security perimeter and do you have enough snipers and there's communication. That's really about leadership. All of us, people who have microphones, commentators, critics of former President Trump, critics of President Biden, that's something that all of us need to be more engaged with and condemn the violence.

Kai Wright: Let me ask you a basic question related to that. It seems like there has been this enormous amount of political violence that is escalating in both frequency and severity in the past, I don't know, eight years. Is that a fact or a feeling?

Juliette: It's-- Let me put it differently. This country has always had political violence. We certainly can name the litany of candidates, civil rights leaders, nominees, and, of course, a president, John F. Kennedy, and then, of course, the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. You can name these incidents. They're more common than I think the high school kid learns in high school. Many don't think of us as violent, but it's been part of our nature.

I think there's two significant changes. One is that it has been nurtured at the top, that the violence or threat of violence has been nurtured through techniques that were utilized from the White House. We saw it on January 6th, in which, whether you're actually approving violence or simply not condemning violence, they end up being the same thing. That's what I talk about and have been talking about in terms of that permissive structure that's been established.

Kai Wright: The threat environment that you're talking about. That's what you mean. It's just there's a lot of rhetoric.

Juliette: The threat environment. That permissive threat environment. Yes, that we're allowed to do this, that this is acceptable. We don't shame it. It's like you can criticize a judge and say you're going to go after his kid. That's the first. That is new that it is coming from leadership. Look, people will criticize me for maybe saying this in light of it, but these are the facts, is that while there are members of the left who might be promoting or condoning violence, you cannot compare the leadership, let's say, between Biden and Trump. That's very different. Of course, there's bad actors on all sides. It's just whether that permissiveness, that permissive structure has been condoned at the top.

The second is just the nature of social media, the nature of outrage right now, that one can feel outraged and vindicated in their outrage really easily now. We see it. I'm on CNN, I've been on a lot the last 24 hours. There's a sentence I wish I had said slightly different, although I think it was okay. I cannot believe the outrage culture that exists.

Kai Wright: In terms of the blowback you got just for a sentence?

Juliette: For a sentence, as if I haven't had a long career in condemning violence. I think that cacophony then creates an increased basically mobilization. We haven't had that before. We've had that in the last 10 years. That combination of things I think has contributed to this national challenge we have, which is we don't condemn violence enough. I have a hope out of this, and this is-- I do appreciate people trying to bring it back, but I wish if I could, and I'm not a political reporter, is that instead of asking politicians whether they will accept or not accept an election or whatever, that everyone plays games with, but whether we can get a consistent agreement on condemning violence should your side lose.

Kai Wright: I'm going to make the rest of your hope a cliffhanger. We're going to take a break. This is Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. I'm talking with national security expert Juliette Kayyem about what went down this weekend, an attempted assassination on President Trump. More with her and more with you just ahead.

[music]

It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. A special welcome to our new listeners at WABE in Atlanta. Thanks for joining us. Glad to have you in the community. We're responding this week to the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. I've been speaking with Juliette Kayyem. She's a professor of national security at Harvard School of Government, CNN's national security analyst, and author of the book The Devil Never Sleeps.

I want to also welcome now reporter David Gilbert, who covers disinformation and online extremism for WIRED. He's been tracking the digital conversation about the attack and the conspiracies that are swirling around it. David, welcome to Notes from America.

David: Thanks, Kai.

Kai Wright: David, from your vantage, it was to me striking how quickly things turned from shock to conspiracy. Juliette was talking about what she wants to hear from leadership around this. I wonder, as you were following what was happening this weekend, were you seeing and hearing from people who are the usual suspects around conspiracy theories and reactions to violence, or were they people you hadn't seen before?

David: It was both, I guess. Definitely, the usual suspects were out in force very early. It was within minutes, really. It's incredible how quickly the discussion online these days turns to conspiracy and disinformation, driven quite a lot on X, because that's how the platform is established, it's monetized, and that's what people want, is to try and get clicks as quick as possible.

Interestingly, in this case, the narrative shifted because a lot more people got involved in pushing disinformation that typically do it. What was interesting, because I suppose I heard the news last night, I'm based in Ireland, so when I woke up this morning, there was a good eight hours of conversation that I was trolling through to write about this. What I found was that the groups of people who were spreading conspiracies weren't just the usual suspects. As you mentioned, people from every kind of political viewpoint were pushing conspiracies, I suppose for two reasons.

One, there was a lack of information about the shooter and his motive and what exactly or how exactly it had been allowed to happen. Then secondly, it's because it was Trump. There was this group of people who previously don't typically get involved in pushing conspiracies, but they very much embraced the idea that this was somehow staged or something was not right. They were pointing to the Secret Service's failings effectively as we've heard about as a way to push these conspiracies that something must be happened. It's this whole idea of asking questions.

It was really interesting to see that there was this whole other group of people online who now were seemingly very willing to engage or to push conspiracy theories, where previously they may have been criticizing or mocking the pro-Trump side of things for spreading conspiracy theories around COVID or around elections.

Kai Wright: You wrote that the terms false flag and stage were the things that quickly began trending. As you're saying, that they were driven, not by the normal conspiracy theorists, but by people on the left and Democrats. Are you able to say where those kinds of things start? Does it take off with a particular person, in this case, or a particular person, or a particular kernel, or is it a spontaneous crowd moment?

David: It's different for each conspiracy. For example, in this case, there was a conspiracy, went around quickly, identifying the shooter as a guy called Mark Violets. There was a picture attached to the tweet. It turns out that it was actually an Italian YouTube journalist who covers football. The tweet went everywhere very quickly, and his picture was all over Twitter. The tweet was actually from a person who has been harassing him online for years. In those cases-

Kai Wright: Wow.

David: -you can identify very specifically what happened. That guy was just trying to take advantage of the situation, and it worked. The thing went viral.

Kai Wright: It's crazy.

David: In the case of the stage of the false flag thing, I think it was more the power of the crowd where people were just unwilling to accept reality really and want a different answer. They didn't want to maybe admit to having sympathy for Trump or that he had been shot at, that someone had tried to kill him. Therefore, they have an inability really to empathize with him. Therefore, they have to come up with an idea that something is wrong, that [unintelligible 00:18:49] as you say, is a false flag, or the security service were in on it, or something else is happening, but what we're actually looking at and what is clear [crosstalk]

Kai Wright: Juliette, just to take the idea for a second seriously of a staged assassination attempt, because part of what I want to be able to do here in this moment is just make ourselves literate when we hear and see some of these things. As a security expert, how feasible would it be to fake an assassination attempt like this?

Juliette: Oh, it would be absolutely impossible. The number of people-- Let me put it differently. That would require a level of sophistication when the most obvious explanation is actually quite simple, which is all the things that I said, which is this is just a massive security breach. I am glad that we're addressing these conspiracy theories. They are coming from all sides about both, whether it was real and how did it only graze his ear?

I saw something about some guy who never moved behind him and maybe he was part of it to whether Biden didn't have enough protective services, whether the Trump administration denied a request, which Biden has shot down, that Trump had the safety that he needed. I think the simplest explanation is the most accurate and the only likely one, which is a 20-year-old loner, what we understand from him, with easy access to a rifle that could have done a lot more damage was motivated for reasons that we just quite don't know yet to try to take out the former president.

Kai Wright: You mentioned this theory about a person that was sitting behind Trump.

Juliette: Yes.

Kai Wright: David, you wrote about that theory as well. Can you explain what Juliette is talking about? This is Vincent Fusca they're talking about. Clue as in here.

David: He is a figure who, if you're deep in conspiracy world, you'll know who this guy is. He's been around for quite a while. He's someone who is a character within the QAnon universe. They believe that he is John F. Kennedy Jr. comeback from the dead or in hiding or in disguise or something like that. He attends Trump rallies and he attends conspiracy conferences and Republican conferences. He's just pictured a lot at these things.

In this case, he was sitting right behind Trump. You can see him if you look back at the video. He's just standing there looking. The theory goes that everyone else jumps down for cover and as Trump is ducking down on the stage, he stands there and isn't moving. If you actually look at the video, there are other people around him. Some of them are ducking for cover. Others are just looking around not sure what's happening. Others are even out with their phone filming the thing. He is standing there and he doesn't seem to move. Whether he doesn't know what's going on or he just wants to see what's happening, it's unclear.

It's just the fact that he was there and he has this whole backstory behind him within the QAnon universe, it very, very quickly morphed into that he was somehow orchestrating this staged assassination attempt. As Juliette says, it's the efforts that people go to come up with these conspiracies when the very, very obvious is staring you in the face. It's just this time, it's not one side that's coming up with those conspiracies, it's all sides.

Kai Wright: We're using the word conspiracy here, but, David, you covered disinformation, which to my mind is specific and malicious. How much of the latter have we seen here? How much of this is stuff that is intentional and cynical versus an organic response to a horrific event?

David: What you see when you open Twitter or X in response to any breaking news situation is disinformation because what it is, is accounts who have paid for the premium subscription and are trying to monetize their content will post everything, anything that they can get their hands on, no matter how true it is or how untrue it is. That's disinformation because they're doing that purposely to try and get engagement.

A lot of the rest of the stuff is just people engaging in conspiracy theories. It's probably too early yet at this point. I'm tracking it, but there hasn't been any coordinated efforts from oversee nation-state actors, particularly Russia and Iran, to push a particular narrative, but almost certainly that will come because they're just sitting there waiting to take advantage of moments of chaos like this and just push one narrative or the other. We'll see that will probably happen over the coming days, especially because it was the weekend, they probably didn't have as many people working on their disinformation efforts at the weekend, so tomorrow that will probably pick up again.

Kai Wright: It's shocking to-- It's hard for me to take in that we're talking about a foreign effort to destabilize democracy and weekend shift hours.

Juliette: Oh, yes.

David: It is very professional. They work to a very specific schedule. I was talking to researchers in Russia last week. I asked them, "Are the Russian bots pushing this story?" I was working on a different story. They said, "Not yet, but we expect to see it at 5:00 PM this evening." Because they're tracking them so closely, they're able to know exactly when the next round of posts on social media will be put up.

It's not exactly predictable, but you can make a very strong guess as to what they're going to do. A situation like this where the country is in chaos to an extent, that's something that they can really take advantage of.

Kai Wright: Juliette, you were nodding along about this idea of the threat that's coming to take advantage of this moment. You want to chime in on that?

Juliette: Yes. It is professional. It has weekends. We're waiting for them to get unionized. The idea that anything is organic, people are like, "Well, I just want to go viral," this stuff is well orchestrated to do a variety of things, depending on what the agenda is.

If you think about the national security aspects of this, one is clearly foreign actors want to take advantage of our divisions, which have been prevalent recently, and will do stuff to amplify those so that the divisions, so that that common ground that maybe we find with our neighbors who we might disagree with or, "I really like that guy, but I don't talk politics with him because then we'll hate each other," that kind of intimacy that you could have one-on-one is totally manipulated and undermined by a very well-calculated foreign threat. We knew that was coming in 2024. Why would a foreign enemy sit this one out? This one is so good for a foreign enemy.

The second is just something I think a lot about the security perimeter and how we think about security, which is just how damaging this is for-- this idea that Western democracy, relatively free market, a social safety net that is bigger or that is strong or less strong depending on what country you're in, a freedom of expression can all thrive equally. This is what we sell. NATO, you talk about the war in Ukraine, whatever.

Look, there's a lot of people out there in the world who look at this and think, "Well, China has a free market and they don't seem like this." The idea that this is the only model, that we're the end of history, is really a fool's-- We can't sell it anymore. We can't sell it anymore.

Kai Wright: Yes. Indeed. We are struggling to do that. What do you think in terms of countering-- When we think about the Biden administration's investigation that's coming, when we think about the House hearings that are coming, the kind of questions you ask, what needs to be said from the national security end to explain what happened in a way that people can hear it who have already heard a lot of these conspiracy theories given how large the mistake seems to have been? It is, again, quite incredulous that this could happen. What is it you think that they need to be saying to people that would counter some of the stuff that David's hearing on X and elsewhere?

Juliette: Say something. The Secret Service had a press conference just right before I was on with you about the Republican Convention to which the spokeswoman, I don't blame her, she's given the talking points, is basically saying, "I can't talk about that thing that brought all of you to why you're watching this press conference."

Kai Wright: Wow.

Juliette: We have not heard any apology, any explanation, and any public accountability by anyone but the president. Here's what I would do if I were the president. You put the head of the Secret Service on leave. She's got to go. I know this sounds dramatic and I am no fan of Donald Trump, but they do have one job. One. This is protect the presidents, the sitting ones, the former ones, and maybe the future ones.

You've got to do something dramatic that shows that you are being responsive for the people that may not be susceptible to the conspiracy theories but are looking for an explanation. Then you get your former someone. I can't believe they haven't done this yet. Get your former, I don't know, Secretary of the Army or someone, former US attorney, to do the review. They could have done that in the first 24 hours, honestly. I know it sounds harsh, but that's what you do to combat the notion that people think the government is not doing anything.

Kai Wright: David, the last 20 seconds here, what are you watching in the coming days?

David: I guess it's going to be more of the same. As I said, nation-states will get involved at some point. It's going to be whether, as Juliette points out, something happens and the authorities take steps to give us more information about what happened. That will quite end the conspiracies because if they don't and if there's a void of information, these conspiracies will just continue to flourish.

Kai Wright: David Gilbert covers disinformation for WIRED. Juliette Kayyem is a professor of national security at Harvard School of Government and author of the book The Devil Never Sleeps. Thanks to you both.

Juliette: Thank you.

Kai Wright: Just ahead, we'll talk about political violence past and present. How do we understand this era in a global context as well? I'm Kai Wright. You're listening to Notes from America. Stay with us.

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Regina: Hi. It's Regina, a producer with the show. I'm so excited to announce it's time for our third annual Notes from America summer playlist. It's an election year and we're feeling a lot of emotions, to say the least. A lot of us don't feel represented or heard, but we at Notes from America want to hear from you. No matter where you land politically, tell us about your politics through song. What's a song that tells us something about your political priorities or your political identity?

Let me share an example. I went to an event called Arts as Resistance put on by the Museum of the Palestinian People. I asked some attendees what they would add to our playlist.

[MUSIC- What's going on: Marvin Gaye]

Attendee 1: Marvin Gaye, What's going on. There's a cycle in history when people don't learn from past mistakes. Obviously, he was talking about oppression in America and in the world in general. For me, this is what is going on right now and just to be aware.

[MUSIC- What's going on: Marvin Gaye]

[MUSIC- Small Axe: Bob Marley]

Attendee 2: Small Axe by Bob Marley. There's a part of that song where he says if you are the big tree, we are the small axe, sharpened to cut you down.

[MUSIC- Small Axe: Bob Marley]

He's talking about things like imperialism and colonialism. We have to be the small axe to really use our voice to push people in power.

[MUSIC- Small Axe: Bob Marley]

Regina: Okay. Now it's your turn. What is a song, artist, or album that represents your political priorities this election year? Leave us a message at 844-745-TALK. That's 844-745-8255, or you can send us a voice memo to notes@wnyc.org. I can't wait to hear from you. Let's get this playlist started.

[music]

Kai Wright: This is Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. We are processing and responding to the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. I have been joined by David Gilbert who covers disinformation and online extremism for WIRED. David is still with us. I'm also joined now by Jacob Ware. He's a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations where he studies domestic and international terrorism and counterterrorism. Jacob, welcome to Notes from America.

Jacob: Thank you so much, Mr. Wright. It's a pleasure.

Kai Wright: Listeners, if you have a question about the political violence that we are all processing, either this most recent attack or a previous one, call or text us at 844-745-8255. Jacob, we have been talking about disinformation and the online response to the shooting. I just want to first start there and see if there's anything you've seen online that sparked your interest, for better or worse, when you think about this from a terrorism perspective.

Jacob: Sure. I would echo what David already said. Not at all surprising to see conspiracy theories flourish, especially in that lack of information space. We're past 24 hours now and we still don't really have a reliable motive. We might not get one. Conspiracy theories have flourished in that space. I've been surprised to see the spread of conspiracy theories among people on the left. As was discussed in the previous segment, conspiracy theories arguing that this was staged, that this couldn't possibly be authentic.

Often in these incidents, of course, the simple explanation, the one that you don't want to believe is often the real one. It's been surprising to see people so reluctantly accept that just a terrible thing happened yesterday.

Kai Wright: Yes. Were you surprised by it?

Jacob: I'm not surprised. To give you some context on a couple of points here, we are witnessing a rise in political violence and domestic terrorism in this country. Now, most of that, to be honest, has been far-right white supremacist violence against minority communities in places like Charleston, South Carolina; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; El Paso, Texas; Buffalo, New York. We have seen left-wing violence during that period.

The other thing I think that is really the bigger trend is, we seem to be witnessing a wave of assassinations around the world. Assassination attempts and successful assassinations in places like the UK, Germany, Japan, Slovakia, Haiti, Argentina, several in the US, of course, if you think about plots against the Speaker of the House and Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh. It is not surprising to me that somebody made the decision that they were going to have an attempt on the life of the former president. They are not the first person.

Just to echo what Juliette said in a previous segment, I am surprised, shocked, stunned by the absolute failure of the security detail in this case. It is truly shocking that this could happen.

Kai Wright: Yes. David, I asked you before the break about what you're watching moving forward. You did write a piece, I think today, saying that what you've been seeing on the right in terms of what's coming and the kind of rhetoric that you're hearing. You want to talk about that? What have you been hearing about what's coming next?

David: I suppose just to caveat this, what we're seeing online in terms of far-right groups is something that is again unsurprising and it's something that you could nearly have predicted. There's a lot of talk on, this is in more fringe corners of the internet, private Telegram groups, on message boards, where far-right groups are talking openly about calls to violence, talks of civil war, civil war coming. They talk generally about Democrats that they want to take action. One comment that I found on one message board said they wanted to eliminate all Democrats in the country.

Some of the language is quite specific in terms of what exactly they want to do to people. This is the kind of reaction we saw, we'll say, for example, following Trump's 34 felony convictions earlier this year. We saw similar reactions online and there wasn't really any real-world follow-up that was directly connected to that. Following the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home in 2022, there was a similar reaction. Then a few days later, a Trump supporter walked into an FBI office with a gun and tried to shoot FBI officers. Obviously, January 6th, we saw ahead of that lots of online rhetoric talking about civil war and talking about calls to violence. We saw what happened on January 6th.

It's important to acknowledge that it's happening. It's important to monitor it, I think, and keep an eye on what's happening. It's also important to note that these are again very, very early days in this. This is the first 24 hours. The researchers I was working with are updating their report to look at what's happening today and seeing if that's evolving, whether it's getting more intense, or whether it's falling off. Again, we'll know more in the coming days about whether this would be sustained.

One of the most interesting things was nearly all of the people or all of the groups and forums that I was monitoring spoke about how if Trump had died, then all rules are off. That people would have been taking up arms and doing whatever they wanted to do.

Kai Wright: Jacob, what do we know about what actually fuels assassination attempts specifically and political violence generally? We know absolutely nothing so far or at least I've that I've heard yet about the shooter in this incident. Is it ideology? Is it revenge of the sort that David is describing? What do we know about what fuels this kind of violence?

Jacob: Typically, assassination attempts are issued or attempted by individuals seeking rapid political change. The term that a lot of people in the terrorism scholarship community and the word that a lot of terrorists themselves use is accelerationism, the concept that small acts of violence, isolated acts of violence, can accelerate some much broader conflagration. It's that shot heard around the world notion, the idea that the one individual act of violence can inspire these other acts of violence. Of course, the ultimate model of that is the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, an isolated political assassination, terrorist attack that set off a world war.

Now, I don't think this person was trying to set off a world war, but I think if there's a political motive, it's probably somebody who feels that their political ideologies, their personal grievances are not being realized quickly enough or that former President Trump poses some existential threat to those views. You're right to point out, we don't have that ideology. We don't have that motive yet. I said earlier, we might not get that. It's not unusual that acts of violence like this are driven by very personal factors, a desire for revenge, notoriety, a desire for suicide, and an intent to make some splash on the way out.

Whether it's one of those three things, or it's a far-left extremist, or if it's a far-right extremist, all of it right now is pure speculation. That's really important to note because the reaction here in the days, weeks, months, years to follow is going to be determined a lot, I think, by what the motive was here. It's going to be hard to make concrete predictions. It's going to be hard to prepare adequately until we know why this happened and why the security failures were so catastrophic.

Kai Wright: Yes. When we think about some of the acts of violence in recent past, Representatives Gabby Giffords and Steve Scalise getting shot, or Nancy Pelosi's home being invaded in a violent attack, and then now this, is there a known through line in any of those attacks, Jacob? Is there something that connects those beyond-- Is there an order to it that someone like you looking at them can draw us to?

Jacob: To be honest, I think if we could answer that question confidently, it would be a lot easier to prevent them. Now, the incidents you've mentioned, the Gabby Giffords assassination attempt where a federal judge was killed, the Scalise incident, a far-left attack, the Kavanaugh incident, a far-left attack, Nancy Pelosi, a far-right incident. January 6th is of course a very prominent assassination attempt. All of those incidents are all across the ideological spectrum. They are all driven for different reasons. They all involve different perpetrators who have different, in some cases, very personal issues like mental health issues. It is really, really hard to answer that question.

I think one thing that is a commonality in the more recent attacks is we have a broader dehumanization of the other in this country right now where your political adversary is not seen as somebody with legitimate but rival ideas, or frankly, with anything at all to offer but they are seen as subhuman, evil, demonic. When you've built that narrative up so much in the media, in your political rhetoric in yourself, it almost demystifies those acts of violence because there is a perception that they'll be welcomed, that they will be cleansing, that they will bring purity to the country.

I think that contributed to incidents like the Speaker of the House attempt, the Kavanaugh attempt, January 6th, of course. Part of what responsible politicians are going to try to do in the next few days, in my opinion, is try to break through that firewall of dehumanization. The optimist in me says it's an opportunity for that. The pessimist in me says, listen, we are so far gone and the Pandora's box has been open for so long. It's hard to know how you reverse those trends because even if you do make that bipartisan commitment to more responsible rhetoric, to be better to each other, I don't know if people want it.

I think sometimes we forget that the kind of conspiracy theories and the kind of disinformation that David is an expert on they are rampant because people want them. It's not an accident. They are appealing to people's innate desires, and that's why we've seen them spread again in yet another incident.

Kai Wright: Do you agree with that, David?

David: Yes. Absolutely. It's what I was speaking about earlier where the different group of people we saw spreading conspiracy theories today from the opposite side of the political spectrum were people who do not like Trump and they just can't find it in themselves to have any empathy for him even though someone has just tried to shoot him and tried to kill him and came within an inch of doing so. Instead, they grasp at anything and they push these ideas of a false flag or a staged assassination attempt because they don't want to admit what the reality is, so they're pushing these conspiracies instead.

Kai Wright: We have one listener who asks about can we just understand all of this as part of a bigger question around access to guns in the United States. Jacob, you tweeted something after the attack that I want to ask you about. You wrote, "I'm a survivor of gun violence. It's our national disgrace. My thoughts tonight are with all those, including our former president, whose lives will never be the same, be kind to each other." Can you tell us about that?

Jacob: Sure. Thank you so much for asking that question. It means a lot to me. Obviously, that's something that's very personal to me, and so of course, I have my own personal views on gun violence and gun control. My professional analysis is, listen, there's reasons why countries in Europe, countries in Australia, further afield, there's reasons why they have lower rates of gun violence. There's reasons why these incidents happen less frequently in those countries, and it's because the number one defense that they have is arms control. We have repeatedly banged our head against that wall in this country.

We've seen that we're not going to make inroads there. Juliette in the previous segment used the word in passing that's really important to pause on, I think, and that is the word opportunity. Counter-terrorism analysts typically look at threats as a factor of intent, capability, and opportunity. Now, obviously, here there is intent, part of the problem in the United States is the capability is ever-present. You basically always have capability to conduct an act of violence because of those firearms.

The job of the Secret Service, and one of the reasons why I would be a little bit more generous to this failure is they are facing a massive, massive volume of opportunity to violence every day against these individuals because of that capability, because we have made decisions as a country that capability to violence is not going to be something that we are going to tackle. We are basically always going to be looking at intent and opportunity. Those two things are really, really difficult to make lasting inroads against.

Of course, as you mentioned, I have a personal story there, but I completely agree with the question. It is going to be really difficult I think to make serious inroads at the rising domestic terrorism issue that we have in this country without some reckoning about the extent to which guns just are so widespread.

Kai Wright: David, we have another listener question that is essentially when your elected officials lie to you so often, what are you supposed to turn to? Doesn't it make it easier to fall for conspiracy theories? How much do you think that plays into what you're seeing, that elected officials lie so often?

David: I suppose this is an interesting point because we say that these conspiracies were coming from all sides, but there was only one side where lawmakers and elected officials were claiming that the assassination attempt was ordered by President Joe Biden or that it was in some way orchestrated by the Democrats. It's important to, I think, point out, not to both sides this, that the overwhelming majority of lawmakers who push conspiracy theories and disinformation online are coming from the Republican Party.

Trump himself is the person who has led the charge on that. From the very beginning when he started his campaign for the 2016 election, he was using social media to push lies about his opponent and just blows about himself and his success. I think it's a hugely dangerous thing in US politics right now, where people or lawmakers feel as if going out and posting something like Joe Biden ordered this assassination effort and doing that so openly and so overtly and as seemingly feeling as if there is going to be no pushback on them from either their constituents or their supporters and other party.

There doesn't seem to be, so they are going to continue to do it. As the days and weeks and months go on, they're becoming more and more brazen about the types of extreme ideology and conspiracies that they're pushing.

Kai Wright: We'll have to leave it there. David Gilbert covers disinformation for WIRED. Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations. Thank you to both of you. Notes from America is a production of WNYC Studios. Theme music and sound design by Jared Paul. Juliana Fonda was at the boards for the live show. Our team also includes Katerina Barton, Regina de Heer, Karen Frillman, Suzanne Gaber, Varshita Korrapati, Matthew Marando, Siona Peterous, and Lindsay Foster Thomas. We're on Instagram @noteswithkai. I'm Kai Wright. Thanks for spending time with us.

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