These nights, sleep won’t take me. Thirty-one weeks pregnant, I’m too big to ever be comfortable. I toss; I turn; I move to the guest room in the vain hope that having a bed to myself might offer some reprieve from the fact my bones can no longer support my weight. Some time around 3 or 4 a.m., I give up and open TikTok, where the algorithm offers its nightly liturgy of dread.
“If you’re seeing this, it’s meant for you,” a woman in her car, voice low, telling me to install a Ring doorbell because somebody could be casing my house. I live in Chicago, and someone just stole my neighbor’s catalytic converter. It’s plausible, I think. Next, a five-year-old girl in a diaper, horribly abused by her grandmother, multiple Child Protective Services complaints filed and ignored, the child dead now and the complaints a matter of public record – a TikTok. A corpse dredged from a body of water in Elk Grove, Illinois. First, no foul play was suspected. The next video proclaims, “There’s a serial killer in the suburbs of Chicago.” A new fungal disease, drug-resistant, spreading – sexually transmitted? I guess I don’t care very much about that.
Is America numb? Am I numb? Am I going to let my emotional life be run by selfie videos posted to Twitter?
Then Al Jazeera, on TikTok live, the chyron sliding into frame: attempted assassination at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. A man named Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, charged at a Secret Service checkpoint at the Washington Hilton armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and several knives. He fired; agents fired back; he was tackled near a staircase. Trump and the senior cabinet, Vance, Patel, RFK Jr., Rubio, were rushed out. Allen is a Caltech-trained mechanical engineer who tutored part-time at a place called C2 Education and was an indie video game developer on the side.
Allen’s writings, his manifesto, or suicide note, or whatever it is, surfaced not through law enforcement but through the New York Post, and from there onto every timeline by morning. There is a bizarre casualness to his note. It opens “Hello everybody! So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today.” He apologizes to his parents for telling them he had a job interview without specifying that it was for “Most Wanted.” He apologizes to his students. He signs off as “coldForce, also Friendly Federal Assassin.” Trump has already pivoted to using the breach as an argument for his new White House Ballroom. The incident has become just another news story. This should be scary, shouldn’t it?
I open Safari and google “why does nothing scare me anymore,” and then I am on X, learning about the case in fragments. A small flare of jealousy: I wish I were in Washington. Stir-crazy, on bed rest, I find myself imagining hotel bars and the particular pleasure of sleeping somewhere new, the bleached-cotton smell of over-laundered towels and pillowcases. I read hungrily about Jim Acosta and Michael Tracey getting into a fight at Substack’s New Media party. Somewhere in the scroll there is a photograph: Tracey has forgotten to remove the size tag from his pleated chinos.
Assuming this assassination attempt wasn’t a false flag, an “op,” staged for the cameras, and granting that it feels like one while admitting that “feels like” and “is” do not belong to the same category of claim, it seems impossible to care. I mean, really care. Did Trump care? I wonder.
His own response suggests not really. And the pearl-clutching register on the other side, the thousand hungry Mary Whitehouses looking for their next paycheck, each looking to be the first mover on the cottage industry of moral alarm. “Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino normalizing violence in the New York Times did this,” or whatever the formulation will be, reads as so transparently shallow that I find I cannot summon any feeling toward it either, not even contempt, just a kind of recognition. And again that flare of jealousy: I wish that I, too, could pretend that Jia Tolentino stealing a lemon from Whole Foods could galvanize someone to commit murder. It would make my job easier.
Is this all the nasty result of left-wing radicalization? Of course, that is what some segment of some paying audience wants to hear. And of course there will be a version of the story that is true. This is how, after all, I explain the more radical pockets of the pro-life movement to my progressive friends. “Well, of course they would be willing to bomb an abortion clinic or murder a doctor. Imagine you literally believed that babies, actual babies, were being murdered, in numbers, daily, with state sanction. Wouldn’t you do anything to stop it? They’re babies.”
And to my conservative friends: “Well, imagine if you believed, literally believed, that Trump was an authoritarian threat rising to the level of Hitler, to you perhaps not just a blurb in a textbook, but rather, an inherited memory, perhaps a scar on your family history, your grandmother’s number on her arm, your great-aunt’s name on a list. Wouldn’t the math, on some terrible afternoon, start to look different?”
Or maybe the more instructive frame is not “radicalization” at all, but something more like “going postal.” This man, Cole Tomas Allen, went to the WHCD because his grievance had nowhere else to go. Because the WHCD is where the cameras were. Because killing the President, or trying to, was the only way he believed he could be heard.
Would I be scared, were I there? I genuinely do not know. The reactions in the room seem unstirred. A beautiful young journalist’s selfie video stands out. Maybe her journalist’s instinct kicked in, the media-trained response, but it does not read as trained at 3 a.m., scrolling. It reads as familiar, as though everyone in that ballroom had already lived through this, somewhere, before. No need to face the camera to the shooter – this isn’t narcissism; it’s something else. She is the story because she is the unique variable here.
Do these events happen too often or not often enough to break the spell? Do we live inside the machine now, or is the media – the 2,000-something journalists who attended the dinner – drowning in information? Is America numb? Am I numb? Am I going to let my emotional life be run by selfie videos posted to Twitter? I open up TikTok again. The fungal disease video starts playing on autoplay. Somebody in the comments writes “2026 is unbeatable.” Somebody else writes “not even close.” I lock the phone.
I hear something that sounds like my front door rattling open. The knob turning, slowly, back and forth, as though someone is testing it. I close my eyes and do nothing. My babies kick, twin girls, a little twitch in my belly, “Mama, we’re here,” and I hope that after two hours of blue light I might still fall asleep.
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