Stop Treating Horoscopes Like Case Law

Short version before the coffee cools, I was going to make a joke about rebooting America, but the screen lit with a murder on live TV and two men with microphones played help desk for the apocalypse. Trump and Stephen Miller watched Charlie Kirk get assassinated and, without a beat, blamed “the left,” then promised a crackdown big enough to make a spreadsheet pivot on the spot. That’s not analysis, that’s superstition in a suit, like yelling at the smoke alarm because it’s loud and nearby while the kitchen burns around you.

If you walk the crime scene instead of the comment section, the pattern is not shy. Political violence that kills in this country leans right, and it has for years. You know the names because they never leave, Dylann Roof in Charleston, the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the El Paso Walmart that turned a shopping trip into a manhunt for immigrants. Oklahoma City is the ghost blueprint, always there when you squint. In early 2025, a Maryland team clocked a jump in attacks on government workers and buildings, roughly a third of the incidents, more than double the year before. During the 2024 cycle, election workers in nearly half the states got doxed or threatened for doing a boring, necessary job. The labels are chaos, researchers call it one thing, states charge another, cable news sells a third, and the DOJ pulled a study that would have helped, which was not an accident (and yes, really, this is where we are, complete with on-air speculation before the facts). The fog is policy, not weather.

Why care before the caffeine hits, because narrative is a budget line. They want us to believe “left groups” are the main menace, which is very handy if your goal is to rummage through membership lists, tax filings, and donor rolls. That line feeds agency wish lists, fattens contracts, fires up a base, and turns the spotlight away from the networks that have produced most of the corpses. Who pays now, the same people who always get hit, Black congregations, Jewish communities, immigrants, and the public servants counting ballots in fluorescent rooms while someone outside records their license plates. Who pays later, the quiet bill, fewer people willing to run precincts, teach, serve, or speak in public, because the risk calculator blinks red and refuses to clear. Meanwhile the chaos merchants collect clicks and cash, and we pretend that’s just the market doing market things. Voilà, perverse incentives, now with merch.

I get the urge to pick a side and blame the enemy team for everything, tribalism comes standard, batteries not included. But principle first, then the damage. If the system promises equal treatment, painting broad left-leaning organizations as terror-adjacent bleeds fast into daily life, surveillance pointed at protests, pressure on charities, bank accounts frozen, people pulled into cases for who they know, not what they did. That chills the parts of civic life that keep us stitched together and, irony of ironies, it leaves the people who build bombs and plan mass shootings feeling less watched, because the spotlight is pointed at the wrong door. Policing by ideology is astrology with handcuffs, it sounds silly until someone gets hauled in for their bumper stickers and the guy stockpiling pipe parts walks past security with a smile.

Two things can be true, slogans can be annoying and also protected, violence can be wrong no matter the flag, and the data can still show a lopsided threat. If you aim resources where the numbers don’t point, you miss the people doing the killing. If you pretend danger is symmetrical because it feels tidy, you insult the dead and you fail the living. When feardrumming pays in contracts and airtime, you get more feardrumming, not fewer funerals. Drum circles are for parks, not policy. And yes, it’s called right-wing for a reason, the right keeps being wrong about who’s pulling triggers and who’s pulling attention, pick one and stop confusing them.

So what actually helps, the boring path, focus on conduct, not ideology. Charge people for what they do, not for the pages they follow. One standard for threats, plotting, and violence, applied evenly. Protect poll workers and public servants with actual security and clear reporting lines, not a podium and a hashtag. Fund deradicalization and local threat assessment where incidents actually trend, not where a press aide wants a headline. Post the criteria in plain English so people can see how calls get made and challenge them when they’re wrong, receipts beat campfire stories when lives are on the line. It is dull in the way a seatbelt is dull, it also keeps you breathing. Actual solutions look different from security theater, they come with checklists you can read, timelines you can measure, and a way to appeal bad decisions. Hiring squads to watch “left groups” while most of the bloodshed comes from the other side is like stationing lifeguards at the kiddie pool while the riptide takes swimmers offshore, it looks absurd until you notice that’s where the cameras are.

If you need a moral stake to hang your hat on, start here, dignity is not negotiable, safety is not a partisan prize. The hope, such as it is, lives in unglamorous fixes, consistent rules, documented processes, audits that arrive on time, not just after a tragedy. It will not trend, it might not even get a blue check to notice, but it keeps families intact. If the administration keeps treating narrative handling as security, the same communities will keep burying their dead, and the pool of people willing to serve will keep shrinking, which, by the way, is also a security risk, just quieter. Facts won’t stop a bullet, but ignoring them makes it easier for the next shooter to walk in, glance at the cameras, and pull the trigger. If that sentence made you queasy, good, me too, because queasy is a compass if you let it be, and it points at work we can actually do.

Which brings us to the main event, how the story got bent, who benefits from the bend, and where to put the wrench. Time to sort the wheat from the chaff, who’s fixing and who’s performing. Bring coffee, we’re turning screws, not heads, and if I sneak in a torque joke, that’s me coping, mon ami. Now please excuse me while I run a quick stat-and-mouse game on the talking points, purely for science, and definitely not because I enjoy watching bad numbers tap dance.

--Doc (yeah I said it!)
find me anywhere under @DocAtCDI