If He Shot Someone on Fifth Avenue

If he incited people to attack the seat of government, you would say he didn’t march with them.

If they marched with malice and forethought, incited by his words, you would say his words were not literally violent.

If they acted violently, you would say he didn’t personally desecrate anything.

If they desecrated the symbol of our society’s achievement, you would say they didn’t actually stop the Government.

If they stopped the government for a few hours, you would say they didn’t overtake it to the point of hurting people.

If they hurt people, you would say they didn’t kill anyone.

If they killed people, you would say it was a mob scene and they didn’t mean to.

So now we know the answer to this old mystery: if you shot someone on Fifth Avenue, they would say it was self defense.

For five years we have been learning new expressions that were not in common use prior to this: “shocked but not surprised,” and most pertinent now, “there is no bottom.” When the gangster says “That’s a nice family you have there… it would be a shame if anything happened to it,” that is not what is meant by the ‘plausible deniability’ of inconclusive circumstantial evidence. Rather, it is overtly criminal. This man became an expert at gangster talk honed by a lifetime as a grifter. (And don’t forget this little highlighted fact: in addition to the half-billion grifted from his family, he was given the equivalent of a billion dollars in advertising by his network TV show. This inequity was never counter-balanced by our election laws.) But he was also a master propagandist whose ascent coincided with the birth of social media. And therein lies most of our explanation.

Yes, you can point to white grievance, and race-less ignorance, and the self-preservation of those who technology has left behind, and the unprecedented greed of those who technology has taken to hideous heights, but those were already here in abundance without his doing. And they also won’t quickly disappear or in some cases disappear at all. But words matter and the words of this man sanctioned all of the hate that was ripe for the harvest, and his words, however gangster, were criminally seditious no matter how many seditious enablers excused them and continue to do so.