On April 25th, what should have been another annual event of lively discussion on national policy and the media quickly became a near-tragedy as the President, First Lady, Vice President, and cabinet officials were frantically evacuated from the hotel hosting this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Guests were just beginning to receive their appetizers when, at roughly 8:30 pm, a 31-year-old California man identified as Cole Allen tried to storm into the event to murder administration officials with several firearms. The would-be assassin opened fire on a Secret Service officer, who thankfully, due to his bulletproof vest, survived and is in stable condition. At a moment’s notice, the brave men and women of our secret service agency quickly apprehend the shooter, and the Justice Department swiftly pressed charges and will keep this deranged individual in custody.

This incident, which used to be considered shocking, adds to the laundry list of political violence inflicted on conservative voices, from Charlie Kirk’s assassination to President Trump nearly losing his life at the infamous Butler rally in 2024. It’s to the point where the president is no longer frightened by these events and decides to taunt his would-be assassin with pictures of his pathetic face kissing the floor while in handcuffs on Truth Social. The intense rhetoric of hate and existential demands to win at all costs, propagated by both extremes of the political spectrum, has led to a system of violence that puts the lives of our president and top public officials in constant risk. Lawmakers can’t even get a break at the Congressional Baseball game! Axios has publicly documented at least eight separate highly credible cases where President Trump’s life was put in extreme danger as a result of political extremist would-be assassins. This is just what is shared publicly; imagine how many more serious attempts exist but were thwarted by the Secret Service in private. Why must we, as the greatest nation on Earth, tolerate political disagreements that can bring our society to the brink of collapse, where people are radicalized to think they will save the world by killing a president?

Perhaps sometime during the 2010’s social media revolution, we lost the ability to disagree respectfully with each other. Jonathan Haidt, a NYU professor, has examined this topic in great detail in his book The Coddling of the American Mind. He described how, when social media rapidly expanded to a majority of college and high school aged students, terms like “microaggressions” and the sort were invented to characterize speech that offended sensitive students. “Offensive speech” became not just speech that people didn’t like, but speech that was dangerous. After all, things that are dangerous warrant strong action, thus causing a spread of rhetoric providing justifications for trying to kill a husband, father, and grandfather in the name of becoming a martyr to their fellow comrades. Let me be clear: The most dangerous issue currently facing American society is the deadly combination of engineered social media algorithms and irritable, ungrateful, and borderline psychopathic individuals who will stop at nothing to die for their cause of destroying the American identity that you and I hold dear.

President Trump and mainstream Republicans more broadly have become increasingly targets of violent threats over the past decade. The Anti-Defamation League reported that in 2016,Ben Shapiro was the top target of antisemitic death threats, primarily coming from the alt-right and the militant branch of the far left. The rise of abhorrent grifters like Nick Fuentes and Hasan Piker is also extremely alarming and warrants serious consideration about what to do when a growing portion of young males’ political beliefs are fueled by hate rather than critical inquiry and reflection. This rise in hatred and violence is emblematic of a broader decay in our society, one that we must perhaps only solve through a moralistic lens. You do not have to be a Christian to acknowledge that what Jesus Christ said inMatthew 5:44 and 5:48 could heal a lot of the problems facing our world today: “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you… Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”​

If we want to preserve freedom of inquiry and expression, existential rights that the “American Experiment” was founded on, we must follow the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and learn to love our enemies. That means Democrats must learn to respect the human dignity afforded to  President Trump, and Republicans must respect the dignity of democratic Governors and people in positions of power. If we continue to fail, our beloved experiment is doomed to falter as the structures of civility and respect that held up American society for over 250 years fall. Crumbling concrete can last a long time, just look at the Pantheon, but only if its foundational ideas are well built in the first place. I love America and (almost) everything it stands for, and to best preserve it for posterity, I urge all decent, reasonable, normal Americans to learn how to listen to the other side of the political spectrum with decency, respect, and most of all with curiosity and the desire to understand why the opposite side believes what it does.