There Are No Individuals Left In America

If you've been avoiding social media and newspapers for the past few days, if you've cut off all contact with humans and carrier pigeons, if you've stayed away from the oceans lest you stumble across a message in a bottle, there’s still no way you don't know that a guy called Thomas Matthew Crooks shot Donald Trump in the head last week.

If the bullet had flown an inch or two to the right, Trump’s final words would have been “Take a look what happened…”

But instead, dozens of "hurr, hurr, shame he missed" videos popped up on TikTok, photos of Trump’s defiant fist pump sent right-wing Twitter into bacchanalian raptures, and social media offered up the kind of balanced, measured analysis we all know and love:

“ANTIFA SCUM Thomas Matthew Crooks is the shooter who tried to assassinate Trump. He was a registered Democrat who voted for Clinton and Biden,” claimed one viral Facebook post, even though Crooks was a registered Republican and was just thirteen-years-old when Clinton ran for president.

“If we learned anything today, I hope it’s realizing [that] having a firearm means absolutely nothing if you don’t spend time at the range practising with it,” snarked political “influencer” Destiny, as part of a three-day tweet bender that included claiming that conservatives aren't worthy of respect as humans and mocking the firefighter who died shielding his daughter.

And my personal favourite:

F*ck every single one of you f*cking worthless Democrats. Every last one of you miserable f*cks has perpetuated this lie and created this false reality where you have convinced yourself Trump is Hitler. All based on lies…Now, we are going to f*cking destroy you.

And sure, you could point out that Trump gets compared to Hitler because he has an unfortunate habit of quoting and praising Hitler, you could ask whether Trump fans are the best-qualified to talk about perpetuating lies and false realities, you could quibble about whether “every last one” of the ~81 million people who voted Democrat in 2020 are responsible for the rhetoric of a few journalists and politicians.

But I think we can all agree that doubling down on this brainless tribalism is the best way to ensure nothing like this happens again.

In the 1999 cult classic Fight Club, Tyler Durden delivers a speech championing the kind of fierce, anti-consumerist individualism that sane people used to aspire to:

You are not your job, you are not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your f*cking khakis...

Sadly, times have changed.

In 2024, you are your skin colour, you are your gender, you are your sexuality and religious beliefs and the emoji in yourInstagram bio. And topically enough, you are whoever you voted for in the next election. So, anything anyone who shares those traits does can and will be held against you.

A woman in Trump's security detail looked flustered and out of place during the shooting, so all women “have no place in the Secret Service. At any level.”

Progressives like Destiny make crass, despicable statements about political opponents. So all Democrats “want Republicans dead.”

A white, heterosexual man tries to blow the former president's brains out, so all...uh, there's no broader pattern to be gleaned from that...

And all this because there are no individuals in America anymore. No white people who aren’t racist, no black people who aren’t criminals, no Republicans who aren’t MAGAts or Liberals who aren’t “leftists.”