Donald J. Trump and Brian Thompson.

I’m going to say something that will seem like complete gibberish to anyone who watches a lot of mainstream media political coverage. It’s going to seem this way because the mainstream media is allowed to exist in its current form—and is promoted in its current form—precisely because it erases this part of reality.

One thing that the Democratic and Republican establishments don’t get is that the same social forces that put DJT in the White House are the same social forces that led to the assassination of Brian Thompson.

For decades now, through the wage gap, through the rigging of the primary system, through the elite social networks of the top universities, through the hollowing out of small businesses and the conglomeration of industries like farming and retail, through the takeover of mass media, through the censorship of social media, through the outsourcing of jobs, through so-called free trade agreements, through the financialization of the economy, through using their own bodies and the bodies of their children as part of the culture war, through setting the sexes and races against one another, through the growing Gini index, through a tax code that favors the powerful, through the slashing of the bankruptcy safety net, through cost disease in essential areas of medicine, education, utilities, and housing, through underemployment being portrayed as a robust jobs market, through the denigration of non-capitalist social institutions such as churches, scouting, families, small communities, and community-based charities, through permissive illegal immigration, through the prison industrial complex, through the breakdown of community-based policing, through the militarization of the police, through the mass surveillance state—equally the sin of Democratic and Republican presidents—through the expansion and legalization of state propaganda in mass and social media, through the narrowing of the Overton window, through relentless shaming tactics, through the denigration of the working class, through the promotion of wedge issues, gender war, and racial conflict, through greenwashing, through the corruption of the medical system and our food supply, through the corruption of scientific authority, through the corruption of our regulatory system, and through the Pollyanna proclamations that everything is getting better in every way all the time, “be happy and trust us,” through the status quo collusion where Democrats and Republicans use each other to avoid passing populist reforms but railroad class warfare provisions as “centrist” and “bipartisan,” etc.—

People have had a growing sense that they are being fooled. They are being disenfranchised. They are being kicked to the curb. They are not swinging right or left. They are looking for ideas outside the box and finding anarchist strategies. They would rather have reckless narcissists trampling all over the status quo institutions, or random vigilantes taking out elite sociopaths, than live with this status quo any longer—because they know they are being painted out of the picture.

You can literally see this across the globe, and that’s why, over and over again, you see right-wing extremists and left-wing extremists getting elected. It’s not that the people are swinging right or left. It’s that they are looking for someone who will disrupt the system and bring about general reforms. It’s like a bucking bronco thrashing wildly because it finally realizes it’s got a predator on its back.

The sad thing is that the biggest supporters of the predator—the loyal apparatchiks in the parties, the mass media pundits, the anointed-degreed bureaucrats, the university morality police and indoctrinators, the NGOs that used to formally fight for human rights—are all now populated by apologists. But they will be victims too. They think the status quo will protect them. No, they’re going to come for those people also as soon as they’re confident the grassroots has been neutralized.