It’s a humid evening in late March and we are at the kickoff event for the Tri-County Young Republicans, the organization that Nalin, the 24-year-old son of former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, launched in February. Featured guests include gubernatorial candidate Ralph Norman and state senator Wes Climer. Several have driven hours to get here. And Nalin appears to be the main attraction.

“He’s a rising star,” Matthew Carlyon, a 21-year-old campaign staffer for Norman, told me. “I think he’s going to get into politics one day.”

A day earlier, Nalin assured me that wasn’t on his mind: “People who plan that far ahead are kind of psychotic.” But in the past year, while working a finance job outside Charlotte, he has quickly become a poster boy for the young, post-Trump right that believe the system is rigged and the old guard has failed.

In November, he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and argued, among other things, that naturalized immigrants should not be able to hold public office and that dual citizenship should be illegal. A little more than a week later on Fox & Friends, he urged Republicans to reject “free market neoliberalism” to win over Gen Z. A recent X post, calling for a shift away from foreign wars to domestic spending, amassed 29,000 likes. (He has over 42,000 followers on the platform.) Even former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino is a fan.

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I’ll go with President Trump’s description of Allen. He’s a whack job. A whack job with an impressive level of intellect culminating in climactic stupidity.

Trump attracts assassins. At his black-tie briefing later last Saturday night, the president seemed to revel in this fact a bit, saying that assassins shoot only at the impactful presidents, Gerald Ford and James Garfield excepted. Then Trump laid some statistics on us about race car drivers having safer jobs than presidents. Exaggerated, but four presidents assassinated out of 45 is actually a pretty high percentage.

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Dan was a longtime friend and mentor, the man I jokingly called my “Jewish dad.” I’d known him since my early 20s, when we met at a political event in Washington. Over three decades of lunches, always with dessert, he coached me through building a business, navigating personal crises, and thinking seriously about the world. A few days before Christmas, we met one last time at his usual table in the back of his usual restaurant. We caught up, joked around, and swapped advice.

“How do I get people to stop nagging me about my health?” he asked.

I didn’t know that would be our last conversation. Or maybe, deep down, I did.

Dan was born in 1944, on the outer edge of the baby boomer generation, part of a cohort now entering its 80s. His death was personal, but it felt epochal. The Long Boomer Farewell, I realized, had begun.

That’s what I’ve come to call it: the roughly 20-year period, from now through the mid-2040s, during which the boomer generation will pass from dominance into history.

Sleepwalk into this era and we’re looking at decades of gerontocratic drift, fiscal implosion, and a younger generation that inherits a country stripped of the investments it needed. Get ahead of it and we have a genuine shot at renewal. Almost no one is treating it as the civilizational reckoning it is.

To understand why this generation’s passage will be different—harder, slower, more disorienting—it helps to remember the last one.

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Such dramatic consequences are very unlikely, as I’ll explain in a moment. But first—what happened in Callais, and what did the Court hold?

The background of the case is tortuous. In 2022, Louisiana’s Republican-dominated legislature drew a redistricting map that created five safe Republican congressional seats and one safe Democratic seat. Black voters were the majority in the safe Democratic district.

That map was challenged in federal court. The plaintiffs argued that under the Voting Rights Act, the state should have a second majority-black district because blacks make up about 32 percent of Louisiana’s population, whereas one out of six districts amounts to only 16 percent.

The plaintiffs won, and the federal court ordered Louisiana to redraw its map to create a second majority-black district.

Louisiana complied, but then was sued again—in a different case, in a different federal court, this time by plaintiffs representing white and other non-black voters. These plaintiffs argued that deliberately creating a second black-majority district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Equal Protection Clause, violating the rights of non-black voters. And if the Voting Rights Act mandated that result, the plaintiffs argued, then the Voting Rights Act itself was unconstitutional.

The plaintiffs in this new case also won, which directly contradicted the outcome of the first case. In other words, in 2022 a federal court ordered Louisiana to create a new majority-black district on statutory grounds, but in 2024 a second federal court ordered the state to undo that district on constitutional grounds. That second holding went to the Supreme Court, and this week the Court, by a 6–3 vote, affirmed, concluding that purposefully creating a majority-black district was indeed unconstitutional.

More than that, the Court—in a lengthy opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito—strongly suggested that nearly all deliberately created majority-minority districts are likely unconstitutional. Dividing up citizens by race, said the Court, is “odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.” And “where the State assumes from a group of voters’ race that they ‘think alike, share the same political interests, and will prefer the same candidates at the polls,’ it engages in racial stereotyping at odds with equal protection mandates.”

The Supreme Court ruling in Callais leaves open a possible exception for cases where the evidence strongly suggests that a redistricting map deliberately discriminates against minority voters. What about the fact that black voters are 32 percent of Louisiana’s population but got only one of six districts in the state’s original map? Doesn’t that show purposeful discrimination?

No, according to the new ruling—not if it was simply the result of partisan redistricting. If the state’s Republican-dominated legislature was just trying to cram as many Democratic voters as they could into a single district—while spreading out the rest harmlessly in safe Republican districts—that’s a partisan gerrymander, not a racial gerrymander. And partisan gerrymanders, said the Court, are perfectly constitutional. As long as state legislators pursue purely partisan objectives or other constitutionally permissible goals, and do not prejudice minority voters on account of their race, their map will get the green light.

The Callais dissenters were harshly critical, accusing the majority of distorting the Constitution and gutting the Voting Rights Act. As she often does, Justice Elena Kagan—who wrote the dissent—came up with a powerful hypothetical. Imagine, she wrote, that due to a history of racial discrimination, almost all of a state’s blacks live in one city, while almost all of the state’s white voters live outside that city. Imagine further that most blacks vote Democrat, whereas most whites vote Republican. Under traditional districting schemes, that city would get to be its own district, and blacks would be able to elect a congressman of their choice.

But instead, a Republican-dominated legislature draws a map that breaks that city into six little pieces and assigns each of those pieces to one of six outlying districts, drawn in such a way as to create six safe Republican seats. The result is that blacks are not a majority in any district and can’t elect the candidate of their choice. In that scenario, Kagan argues, blacks’ votes are “wasted”; they “matter less” than white votes. Yet under the Court’s new Callais opinion, Kagan concludes, that would be a mere political gerrymander, violating neither the Voting Rights Act nor the Constitution.

I think Kagan is correct in this conclusion: The Callais majority’s decision would indeed allow a state legislature to break up a racial bloc of voters so long as the legislature did so for purely partisan reasons. To the conservative majority, that’s no more an act of racial discrimination than it would be for a college to use only SAT scores to admit applicants. If fewer applicants from certain minority groups happen to be admitted as a result, that’s disparate impact, not racial discrimination.

I predicted the outcome of Callais in these pages six months ago, precisely because of the Court’s 2023 decision prohibiting affirmative action in university admissions. To the conservative justices, using race to benefit black voters is essentially another form of affirmative action. For Justice Kagan, along with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, deliberately dividing up voters by race and drawing majority-minority districts is critical in some contexts to overcoming this country’s history of racial discrimination. But to the conservatives, doing that is itself racial discrimination.

Callais’ implications for the midterms will probably not be as dramatic as some have predicted. While Republicans are likely to pick up an additional seat in Louisiana, the Court’s decision comes almost certainly too late to spur a wave of judicial decisions finding other majority-minority districts unconstitutional. Cases alleging racial gerrymanders take time, and federal courts are not allowed to interfere in state electoral rules too close to an election. So while Callais is of great importance, its immediate impact will probably be limited.

But I’ll conclude with one point against the Callais dissenters, and one point in their favor.

Here’s the point against. The liberal position on affirmative action and other uses of race to benefit minorities would be much stronger if the left, over the last couple of decades, had not steered the ideology and practices of affirmative action in so palpable an anti-Asian and anti-white direction. What the left called “anti-racism” became racist, and everyone with eyes could see it. What the left called “inclusion” became exclusion.

By overplaying its hand on affirmative action, and by engaging in doublespeak while pushing “anti-racism” and “diversity,” the left made a huge tactical mistake, undermining its own credibility and empowering the conservative backlash. When, today, Democratic opponents of Louisiana’s partisan gerrymandering call it racist, they are not going to be taken seriously. And they shouldn’t be: They are simply playing a race card to conceal their own partisan objectives.

Now here’s the point in the dissent’s favor. The Callais dissenters vigorously decry the Court’s 2019 Rucho case, which held that partisan gerrymanders are constitutional. I agree with them. The sorry and democracy-eroding effects of that decision are now playing out all over the country.

Partisan redistricting can lock in control of a political party even if that party does not represent the majority. In Louisiana, for example, registered Democrats actually outnumber Republicans by about 37 percent to 35 percent (the rest are independent or belong to other parties). But if, in a given year, Republicans happen to get control of the statehouse, they can in theory draw redistricting maps that lock in their party’s legislative control, and assure it disproportionate congressional representation, for decades. The same, of course, goes for Democrats—as recent developments in Virginia may illustrate.

That’s not democracy, and it shouldn’t be constitutional.

Caitlin, a great American writer, until recently at The Atlantic magazine, has been a mentor and friend since before this whole thing was a glimmer in our eyes. During long days at her house in Pasadena, we hammered out the details of The Free Press. We complained; we brainstormed; we rehearsed hard conversations. Her husband Rob coached Bari in how to, you know, be a boss. Which is all to say, we adore Caitlin Flanagan. And now, finally, we get Caitlin Flanagan as a writer. And what is she like as a writer?

She’s sharp, smart, lyrical, honest, poignant, and funny, surprising and contrarian in her thinking but not just to be contrarian for its own sake, and she’s equal parts kind and ruthless. Deeply Californian and deeply American (two different things), she’s everything you want in a writer. For a sense, read Caitlin Flanagan on the abortion debate—or listen to her talk about it on Honestly. Read her Atlantic archive here. Buy her books here and here. If I had to pick two of her pieces, I would say to read Caitlin’s article on Bill Clinton and #MeToo and her story on the college admissions scandal, which I’ll excerpt a little taste of:

Down, down, down she went in the FBI car, in her handcuffs and athleisure, down below Outpost, down below Lake Hollywood, down below the Dolby Theatre where she had been so many times—in a beautiful gown, with her famous husband, William H. Macy, beside her—to watch the Academy Awards, once as a nominee. All the way down to—my God!—the downest place of all: Spring Street. The federal courthouse! This was where Donald Trump was supposed to go, not Felicity Huffman. Cool your heels, defender of the downtrodden: There is no rushing through all this—the mug shot, the phone call, the hearing. And this can’t even be grist for the mill of a new devotion to the plight of American mass incarceration. You’re now Exhibit A of law enforcement finally treating rich, white Americans as unsparingly as it treats poor, black ones.

In a shallow and nasty era, Caitlin Flanagan is a complex, humane, deep writer. You don’t need me to sell you on her (all this doesn’t even count; this is just how I introduce her at dinner). You’ll start finding her words in your inbox, and you’ll see for yourself. She’ll usually be behind a paywall, but there’s none today—as a special treat.

Caitlin Flanagan is a Free Press columnist. Caitlin! Flanagan! We couldn’t be prouder.

—Nellie Bowles

I was born in the era of assassinations. I was two, almost to the day, when John Kennedy was shot dead, and by the time I was eight the same thing had happened to Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy. These were the most famous of the killings, but there were many more: Medgar Evers, Fred Hampton, three civil rights workers who had traveled to Mississippi and been murdered by Ku Klux Klan members.

The ’60s dissolved into the ’70s and political violence rolled on, often in the form of acts committed by what seemed like endlessly proliferating radical groups who tied the possibility of enormous political change to limited acts of great violence. I grew up in two places, mostly in Berkeley but also in Ireland, and spent the Irish equivalent of first, fifth, and 10th grades there as well as most summers. In June 1968 Bobby Kennedy was shot dead in Los Angeles, and on October 5 of that year Northern Irish Catholics marched in protest of discrimination and were set upon not just by Protestants but by agents of the British state; most people believe that the Troubles began with this event.

During those years I saw many things I should not have seen, even though I lived in Dublin, which was almost untouched by this violence. My family was in Derry on the first anniversary of internment—a policy of the British government whereby Irish Catholics could be imprisoned without charges or trials—and we got caught in some street fighting. Soldiers of the British Army were firing rubber bullets, and some people were so furious that they set their own houses on fire. My internal threat assessment is permanently stuck on high alert, and I think that experience had something to do with it.

The Black Panther Party was a presence in the Berkeley of my youth, as were a number of less disciplined radical organizations dedicated to the overthrow of the United States government by force or violence. I was 12 when the far-left Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst from her apartment off Telegraph Avenue, a significant event in the lives of many Berkeley kids. It was followed three months later by the worst after-school special in history, when the gang was tracked to a small house in Compton and the Los Angeles Police fired over 5,000 rounds of ammunition into it as well as tear gas that started a massive fire that killed most of the six people inside; others died of gunshot wounds. It wasn’t until the next day that police announced that Patty Hearst hadn’t been in the house, all of us glued to the television thought we were watching her burn.

My hatred of political violence makes me bewildered by my own response to the news of a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I glanced at my phone, took in the essential facts, and didn’t really feel anything at all. It just seemed like one more event that hovered on the edge of the real and the unreal. I was at a dinner party and when I got back to the table and told the other people sitting there what had happened, they all seemed to have the same response I’d had. Nobody reached for a phone to learn more, no one wondered about a motive; we had all absorbed the essential fact that nobody had been injured and we went on to other things.

That’s when I realized that political violence is truly back, that an attempt to assassinate the American president is within the realm not just of possibility but of the unremarkable, and that we’ve once again crossed the river where we may not countenance violence of this kind, but we understand it as an aspect of the known world.

Now that we’ve reentered the cycle, here are two things to know about political violence. The first is that young people are the most attracted to it, for the same reason so many young people enlisted in the military after 9/11: because they were aware of and angry about an intolerable situation, and because the condition of youth includes an awareness of one’s own physical power. It also involves a bravery that trembles on the edge of foolishness. That’s why old people don’t fight wars; they declare them. The second thing to know about political violence is that it produces romantic heroes faster than MGM in the 1940s.

The photograph of Huey Newton in a peacock chair, flanked by a gun and a spear, still occasionally appears in dorm rooms now, and the 1960 photograph of Che Guevara is as much a part of move-in day as the Starbucks logo. It’s also why even Luigi: The Musical can’t stop an infatuation with Luigi Mangione, the young man who allegedly murdered Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, 17 months ago. All these men represent the romantic ideal of standing up against a seemingly intractable force—respectively, white supremacy, capitalism, and the profiteering of the American healthcare industry—risking their lives at the barricades and accepting whatever happens to them. When I saw a photograph of Cole Tomas Allen and learned that he, like the other three, is handsome, I knew that soon enough he would join their ranks.

I was 20 years old the day I walked through a student commons and heard that Ronald Reagan had been shot. The first thing I did was find a payphone and call my parents. I was young and callow and—because my parents were extremely opposed to Ronald Reagan, hated Ronald Reagan—I made a flip remark. My father cut me off at the knees: “This is very serious.” It was a different time.

A day after the Correspondents’ Dinner, I looked through as many video recordings of it as I could, partly to make it seem more real. I came across something that seemed to emanate from that different time. Weijia Jiang, the head of the White House Correspondents’ Association and longtime White House correspondent for CBS News, stepped to the podium to make an announcement. She said that law enforcement had requested that everyone leave the premises, and she also said that Trump “wanted to emphasize that nobody was hurt. He and the First Lady, the cabinet—everybody’s safe.”

The moment shimmered in the air. Donald Trump has called journalists “nasty,” “stupid,” “terrible,” “enemies of the people,” and many other vile things. The moment called for the people in the room to be larger than the president, for them to do what he might not have done had the situations been reversed. After a moment, one person, perhaps not a journalist, loudly cheered the news. But perhaps without intending to, he triggered something, and other people applauded as well, soberly and briefly, but in a recognizably American way. For those few moments, at least, the office was larger than the man. It was a moment in which journalists were upholding American norms and standards, two things the president breaks on an almost daily basis. Jiang said that the president also wanted to say that he would hold a press conference “in 30 minutes” and there was a big laugh, although not a cruel one.

I noticed that NBC posted the moment on TikTok, but with an edit. The moment between Jiang’s announcement that the president, his wife, and the cabinet members had survived was spliced together with the one in which she announced the press conference. The applause was gone; the laughter stayed. This is America right now, where nothing seems real and where your sympathies are open to constant manipulation. When I was a girl, the priest always asked for prayers for the United States, which seemed silly to me, like asking for prayers for the moon or gravity. For the first time in my life, I’ve been doing what those priests instructed.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

That may sound like a grave accusation. But the actual “crime” described in the indictment is a joke. The indictment says Comey posted a photo on Instagram “which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out ‘86 47.’ ” The indictment then says a “reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret [this] as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.”

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Last week, the Trump administration announced the first part in what will be a broad new regulatory scheme that will unleash American nuclear power (again), with new rules on how the NRC approves new projects for so-called “microreactors,” small-scale atomic power plants that, rather than powering a whole region, are small enough to power things like a military base or remote area. These smaller nuclear reactors are a sensible place for the administration to start. They are easier to find sites for and have more applications, and so with the administration poised to roll out a game-changing suite of new regulations over the coming months—undoing the old regime that kept America from building nuclear power for half a century—it’s starting with simple, safe microreactors.

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Why do we seem to hate each other so much here in the United States? Why do so many people seem obsessed with conspiracies, steeped in anger, and ready to spend large segments of their day fulminating on the internet about people they don’t know, on topics that they know nothing about?

There’s a simple answer: Our institutions are failing.

Trust in American institutions—in the media, in church, in the scientific establishment, in government and, of course, in academia—is at an all-time low. And because of our lack of trust in institutions, Americans also mistrust one another.

You might think that it would be the opposite—that we mistrust one another, therefore we mistrust our institutions—but that’s not the case. If you grow up in a religious community, going to church helps shape you. Likewise, the people you hang out with shape you, the institution of your family shapes you, your school shapes you, your university shapes you. Once we lose faith in the capacity of these institutions to shape us, we become incapable of coming together anymore.

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On March 2, Daniel LaGattuta rose to speak at a meeting of the New Canaan Republican Town Committee (RTC), a group dedicated to electing GOP candidates at both the local and national levels. He wanted to discuss what he called the “Lesley Groff problem.”

Groff, 59, is a longtime resident of New Canaan, Connecticut, an upscale suburb of some 20,000 people. She had also spent much of her career as Jeffrey Epstein’s executive assistant. She kept the convicted sex offender’s schedule; managed his day-to-day, overseeing everything from his haircuts to his daily massage appointments, many of which were code for “sex,” according to victims; and made the arrangements for the young women Epstein took to his Caribbean island and his ranch in New Mexico. Groff was so plugged into Epstein’s affairs that her name appears over 150,000 times in the recently released Department of Justice files. Only Epstein’s name appears more often.

In New Canaan, Groff and her husband, Ike, had a long history of donating to the RTC and Republican candidates, a fact that greatly troubled LaGattuta. The Groffs had paid $1,000 to attend a local fundraiser in October 2023, and another $1,000 for an RTC gala seven months later. And they made campaign contributions, as well. On several occasions, LaGattuta told the RTC that taking political donations from someone so close to Epstein was going to cause problems for the New Canaan Republican Town Committee.

Hoping to rally his fellow Republicans, LaGattuta laid it all out at the March 2 meeting. Groff, he pointed out, was listed as a suspected co-conspirator in the un-redacted FBI files that were released by the DOJ. She was a key member of Epstein’s inner circle, he said. She was even the reason New Canaan was mentioned more than a thousand times in the Epstein files. Associating with Groff, he concluded, was “morally abhorrent and a political catastrophe.” If they had any sense, he said, New Canaan Republicans would renounce her contributions and donate the money to an organization for victims of sexual abuse.

But once again, New Canaan Republicans, many of whom were friends of the Groffs, ignored LaGattuta.

Ever since the release of more than three million pages of Epstein emails and documents in January, many powerful people—figures like Larry Summers, Leon Black, Bill Gates, Peter Mandelson, and former Prince Andrew—have been ostracized and punished professionally because of their association with Epstein. (All of them have denied wrongdoing.) We’ve seen high-profile person after person issue the standard apology for ever being in Epstein’s life before taking the obligatory step back to reflect, whether or not they were complicit in unlawful or even just unsavory acts. For some, a mere email correspondence with Epstein cost them their job. Yet the woman who sat in the office next to his for nearly 20 years has somehow managed to resume her life in New Canaan as if Epstein had never been a part of it. In the sweeping Epstein reckoning, Groff is an anomaly. She doesn’t just make political donations—she goes to parties, hosts game nights, and dines at upscale restaurants with her friends and family.

Which makes one wonder: Does anyone in New Canaan even care?

Groff has long maintained her innocence. In a statement to The Free Press, her lawyer Michael Bachner insisted that throughout her tenure with Epstein, Groff “never witnessed or was told of anything illegal related to these massages.”

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My Saturday night began the same way it did for most attendees of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner: being harangued by protesters outside the venue. As I walked up to the hotel, one woman in a keffiyeh screamed at me, “How could you possibly have dinner with a child rapist?”

That was the tenor going in.

The event itself was the normal run of things: pre-parties, pre-drinks, everyone filing into the hall. I sat with my colleagues from the New York Post, along with United Nations ambassador Mike Waltz, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and others. When the president came in, there was great excitement—it was the first time Trump had attended one of these dinners. We were looking forward to him roasting the media, which was what everyone expected.

And then it happened.

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If that sounds hyperbolic to you, we suggest sitting in on any seminar at any number of Ivy League schools with the word anti-colonial or indigeneity in the course title. Or just head down to Washington Square Park and ask the NYU co-eds and twentysomethings if they think murder is ever an appropriate political tool.

Our Tanya Lukyanova did just that yesterday. Listen for yourself:

If you think education provides inoculation against such moral perversion, it’s exactly the opposite. According to one survey, 40 percent of Americans with graduate or professional degrees—compared to just 23 percent of Americans with no education beyond high school—agreed that “violence is often necessary to create social change.”

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Gage was a Secret Service agent for 12 years, including as a special agent in its Washington, D.C., field office, and worked at the very same event multiple times. Much of what Gage saw Saturday night reminded him of the best of the Secret Service, including the officer who was shot while trying to stop the would-be assassin from reaching President Donald Trump.

But America’s growing political violence problem has made the Secret Service’s job much harder, Gage told me. Trump “is the most threatened president in U.S. history,” Gage said, and “the pressure is almost unbearable for a lot of agents, because they know what’s at stake.”

I asked Gage to explain what went right and wrong with security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, what changes should be made if the event is rescheduled, as Trump has said he wants, what morale is like inside the Secret Service, and how much safer the new White House ballroom would really be. His responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

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“There’s a lot of times you think you’re not going to come back,” Rowan told me. “But you do it for your buddy sitting next to you. And because you don’t want to be that little bitch.”

He completed over 150 combat missions in hostile territory without a hitch. But two months after he got back from Iraq, while he was working at Fort Benning Army base in Georgia, an airborne training exercise went horribly wrong.

It was the middle of the night. The plane was 800 feet up. Rowan jumped, as he had so many times before—and his parachute didn’t fully deploy. His body was going 60 miles an hour when it hit the runway.

Miraculously, Rowan survived. But he had broken several bones and sustained a traumatic brain injury. In a Veterans Affairs hospital, a doctor gave Rowan a Percocet pill for the first time, and so began a lifetime of addiction.

For the first year after his injury, Rowan struggled with chronic headaches and struggled to keep his balance while standing or walking. But even after the symptoms subsided, Rowan continued to ingest any opioid he could get his hands on: oxycodone, heroin, and fentanyl. In the past decade and a half, he’s crashed two cars while high and cycled in and out of rehab. In 2010, in the middle of his first child’s birth, he snuck out of the maternity ward to go get a fix. When his wife finally left him with their two kids in early 2023, Rowan admitted, “It was long overdue.”

A few months later, Rowan said, he was ready to end his life.

In April 2023, Rowan told me, he was sitting on his living room couch, beside a small stack of suicide notes, watching Eminem music videos. He was planning to hang himself from a pull-up bar the next day, when something caught his eye in the suggested videos tab: a clip from The Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan was interviewing U.S. Marine Dakota Meyer—Medal of Honor winner, savior of 36 lives in Afghanistan—about an experimental post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatment that, Meyer said, made him feel like “my soul had gone through a workout, just an ass-kicking workout,” and cured him of weekly anxiety attacks. It was then that Rowan heard a word he had never heard before: ibogaine.

“It gave me my life back,” Meyer said to Rogan in the interview.

When Rowan heard those words, he froze. He paused the interview. Then he played it over again. And again.

“It was God, really, telling me, ‘Chase, this is it. This is for you. This is what you need,’ ” Rowan said.

Four months later, he was on his way to Mexico to receive ibogaine treatment.

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The things that were, until recently, obviously off-limits—adhere to the law, not shoot the president of the United States—are no longer off-limits.

Not everywhere, of course. Not to most Americans.

To most of us, the old constraints still apply.

But the new radicalism, the new ethos, is bubbling up up up, seeping into all our many nooks and spaces.

Last week, thanks to The New York Times, we learned all about the glories of “microlooting” and why it’s good to steal from Whole Foods or the Louvre, and why we need more “cool crimes.”

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Almost half a century ago, in a case called Stone v. Graham, the Supreme Court struck down a Kentucky law requiring that the Ten Commandments be displayed in public schools. The law’s evident purpose, said the Court, was “to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.”

Last week, the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, decided the identical issue but came out the other way. By a 9–8 vote in Nathan v. Alamo Heights, the Fifth Circuit upheld a Texas law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools.

I’m an admirer of many judges in the majority, and when a circuit court splits nine to eight, it’s clear that reasonable people can differ. Nevertheless, I think the Fifth Circuit went profoundly wrong.

Under Nathan, the city of Dearborn, Michigan, could pass an ordinance requiring every public school there to display signs reading “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.”

How did the Fifth Circuit go so wrong? Let’s begin with the fact that the majority chose to ignore Supreme Court precedent, which is pretty surprising in itself.

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We reached a metal gate at the hotel entrance. A woman working the event checked our invitations, which we received via email. The invitations were JPEG email attachments stating that they were “strictly nontransferable.” They were not marked with our names.

Given the rain, I was glad that’s all it took to get inside. Looking back now, maybe I shouldn’t have been. A screenshot of that email could have gotten anyone in.

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Jillian told me that when she was really little, she and her classmates were told to remain in their classroom if they heard gunshots but turn out the lights and stay quiet. They were supposed to pretend they weren’t there. Then at some point, someone realized that was a bad idea, and the advice changed: Kids were told to be more “aggressive,” she said, to look around for weapons—a baseball bat in the closet or maybe even a stapler, which could be thrown at the shooter’s head. They were supposed to run toward the door, and barricade it.

None of us had run toward the door a few hours earlier, when we heard what turned out to be gunshots from our table at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. My boss Olly, like President Trump, thought it might be the sound of an unlucky waiter dropping a serving tray; being of an anxious disposition, I thought to myself, That sounds like a gun. Having spent a lifetime rejecting said anxiety, my next thought was, Don’t be ridiculous. It was probably just someone knocking on the double doors 10 meters away!

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The alleged shooter, Cole Tomas Allen, 31, from California, attempted to storm the ballroom of the Washington Hilton where more than 2,000 guests and senior members of the administration were gathered. He was, according to D.C. police chief Jeffery Carroll, armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. Allen had reportedly been staying at the hotel ahead of the event. CCTV released after the incident suggests he tried to sprint past a security barrier in the lobby, and allegedly fired at a Secret Service agent before he was subdued and taken into custody.

It was the first White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Donald Trump had attended as president, and it had been previewed as an adversarial moment. Many journalists saw Trump’s mere presence as an affront to press freedom, given the lawsuits he and his administration have deployed against critics. Meanwhile, Trump was set to joke about and even mock journalists in his remarks, later saying his speech would have been “rough.”

But barely an hour into the event, the president and the press found themselves on the same side. On the floor after gunshots rang out, Free Press staff witnessed the speedy response from the law enforcement officers who kept Trump and every guest safe. As the audience and dignitaries took cover, armed agents rushed toward the gunfire and suppressed the attacker, while others escorted out the president and cabinet officials.

According to acting attorney general Todd Blanche, the alleged shooter is believed to have targeted Trump administration officials. No evidence has emerged so far that suggests that Allen is mentally impaired, and he graduated from CalTech in 2017. A December 2024 Facebook post from the tutoring service where he appears to have worked described him as “teacher of the month.”

We’ll learn more details in the coming days, but it’s impossible to ignore the fiery pitch of the current political climate. Just outside the hotel, protesters held placards that read “Death to Tyrants” and “Death to All of Them.” They waved these signs in the faces of shaken attendees even after the thwarted attack. Hatred toward public officials and ideological opponents abounds in American politics today, and has too often turned violent.

It struck us, as they waved these placards in the event’s aftermath, that it was the perfect emblem of our present moment. One in which calls for violence against people “on the other side” can be stated flagrantly in public.

If the shooter was indeed targeting the president, this would be the third assassination attempt in less than two years. One can find examples of ugly, violent rhetoric being used across the political spectrum in America today, but the animosity aimed at Trump is on a level of its own. That fixation is the symptom of a broken politics.

Trump was collected and resolved at his press conference at the White House shortly after the incident. “This was an event dedicated to freedom of speech that was supposed to bring together members of both parties with members of the press,” he said. “And, in a certain way, it did. Because of the fact that they just unified, I saw a room that was just totally unified. It was, in one way, very beautiful, a very beautiful thing to see.”

Trump’s reaction to the shooting was notably different from his justifiable impulse to “fight” after being struck during the Pennsylvania rally in 2024. On Saturday night, he sought to unify. “We have to, we have to resolve our differences,” Trump said. “I will say you had Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals, and progressives. There was a tremendous amount of love and coming together. I watched, I watched, and I was very, very impressed by that.” That impulse is sorely needed in the country today—and not just in the immediate aftermath of an emergency.

Authorities on Saturday said the suspect will face at least two charges: armed assault on a federal officer and using a firearm while committing a crime. They expect to file more charges soon. Allen is set to be arraigned on Monday, and could face up to 30 years in prison if convicted on both of the currently announced charges.

The shooting is a reminder that the First Amendment alone cannot uphold free speech. Its legal protections for private individuals are essential, but the entire American system of expression, elections, and debate is also built on a shared culture—on the assumption that the elected representatives of the people will never lack the power to speak freely. Today, that can no longer be taken for granted. The assassin’s veto over the president is as great a threat to free expression as is the government’s power to suppress the public. If the shooter was aiming to silence President Trump, his bullet would also have nullified the views of the 77 million who voted for him, along with the entire electoral system.

While journalists celebrate free speech, it’s worth remembering that security guards and law enforcement play an essential role in allowing speech to circulate in the first place. And as in the Pennsylvania shooting, the officers who responded on Saturday acted swiftly and admirably, while the leaders in charge of preventing an attack have much reassessing to do.

Among the guests on Saturday were members of a club that has grown too large: Steve Scalise, shot during a congressional baseball practice in 2017; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose father and uncle were assassinated; and Erika Kirk, whose husband, Charlie, was murdered last year. A video shows Kirk, in tears, being ushered out of the event. It struck us that we were gathered in the same hotel where, in 1981, John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate then-president Ronald Reagan.

The venue and guests help put in context a harrowing notion: Political violence is once again a norm after several generations as a rarity. Trump has been a repeated target in the maelstrom, but it threatens to hit any American who dares to step forward in our divided and deranged era.

As the threats and attacks grow in frequency, they pass in and out of the public imagination with increasing speed. Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost was reportedly punched in the face at an event in January, and Rep. Ilhan Omar was sprayed with a vinegar-like substance at a town hall the same month. Two Minnesota state legislators, Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman, were shot in their homes in June 2025, and Hortman and her husband, Mark, died in the attack. The residence of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro was set ablaze last year while he and his family slept. And only weeks ago, a man threw a Molotov cocktail at the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

With each attack, the price of participation in American public life rises. The toll of this violence for our democracy is real and undeniable, if hard to quantify. It is measured in every speech that cannot go ahead for safety reasons, every candidate who decides not to run for office because of the risks that brings with it, every administration official forced to live on a military base because of the threats they face, and every journalist who suppresses a detail out of fear of reprisal.

In the tangle of causes of this dark trend, one thread stands out: the endorsement or justification of violence. We wish we could say that such language can only be found on the signs of protesters. Only a few days ago, The New York Times published a gleeful podcast conversation in which the participants excused the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

As was widely reported in the hours after the attack, Trump initially wanted to return to the ballroom and resume the evening’s program. Law enforcement protocol mandated otherwise. “We wanted to stay tonight,” he said. “I fought like hell to stay.”

Instead, the event will not be canceled, but postponed. “We’re going to reschedule,” he said. “We’re going to do it again. We’re not going to let anybody take over our society.”

That the event be rescheduled, and be held in as normal a manner as is safe, is a democratic necessity.

Times culture editor Nadja Spiegelman (her dad wrote Maus) opens with a proposal for a cutesy new term for shoplifting. It’s called “microlooting,” and she asks controversial left-wing streamer Hasan Piker (whose uncle founded The Young Turks, a popular long-standing progressive news program) and New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino if it’s a slippery slope.

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