Chief Investment Strategist, The Freeport Society
Our warning since the beginning has been: We’re living in an Age of Chaos… and face years of upheaval.
Well, few things are more chaotic that an assassination attempt on a former president and current presidential candidate.
We still don’t know what specifically motivated the alleged gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks.
The shooter who tried to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981 thought it would get him a date with Jodie Foster. We may find an equally crazy explanation this time around, if any is discernible. For all I know, the kid wanted to be a TikTok celebrity.
Regardless, let’s just be glad the attempt failed.
Elections should be settled at the ballot box, not with an AR-15.
Still, it’s important to consider how we got here… and to look at what this might mean for the future.
How Did We Get Here?
Speech is free in America. But it’s basic economics: The cheaper something is, the more of it you get. And in a world with virtually infinite voices competing for attention, the loudest and most extreme are what tend to get heard.
Back in the days when you had to set up a TV studio or a printing press, there were expensive barriers to entry for aspiring hack journalists.
The introduction of the internet in the 1990s dropped the cost to essentially zero.
And the introduction of social media platforms like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) made it possible to “speak” to potentially billions of people instantaneously.
That was just the start.
Moral outrage creates a dopamine rush in the brain not too dissimilar to recreational drugs or even sex. It’s literally addictive to be angry and to have others share in your rage and reinforce it. And just as tobacco companies knowingly sold a dangerous and addictive product for decades – depending on addiction to pad profits – we have the same forces at work with Facebook, X, and the rest.
Writing for Johns Hopkins University, Saralyn Cruickshank writes:
The rewards are also amplified by another powerful player: social media companies. In an effort to engage users for as long as possible on their platforms, many companies employ algorithms that prioritize content in feeds that is emotional in nature and likely to contain examples of moral outrage. By emphasizing emotional content, social media companies contribute to a content ecosystem that finds outrageous content, shares it, and elicits more outrageous content in response.
Social media is a toxic cesspool.
Yet neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have any incentive to clean it up… because both are equally addicted to the outrage-dopamine cycle and are cynical enough to believe they can use it to their advantage.
Big Tech is also a generous campaign contributor, so any congressional representative or senator who proposes regulating it does so at their career peril.
Yes, we had presidential assassins long before we had social media. I don’t recall Lee Harvey Oswald or John Wilkes Booth posting their manifestos on their Instagram pages. But the media’s perverse incentive structure that monetizes outrage certainly made the attempt on Donald Trump more likely…
And makes future attempts on other political targets (or even voters) likely as well.
What Happens Now?
Well, given the incentive structure in place, probably not much.
In the time it took Trump’s security entourage to rush him off the stage, the social media outrage cycle had already gone into overdrive.
We’ll probably see most of the large media outlets and both political parties, at least briefly, dial down the extreme rhetoric. But it won’t really matter because “the media” isn’t really an identifiable group anymore. It’s billions of people exchanging outrages for dopamine over social media.
Trump will almost certainly get a significant sympathy boost in the polls from this. Of course, given the short attention span in today’s news cycle, there’s no guarantee that “benefit” carries over into the November election. We’ll have to wait and see.
There’s also the elephant in the room…
Trump survived the assassin’s bullet, but both Trump and Biden are already older than the actuarial life expectancy of the average American male. And the average American male doesn’t deal with the day-to-day stress of running for president… or having people shooting at them.
There’s a real chance that whoever wins in November won’t be around to hand the White House keys to the next occupant in 2029.
That means we’re only in the beginning innings of this Age of Chaos. Be ready.
To life, liberty, and fewer attempted murders.