News blues on an apprehensive flight to Milwaukee

A version of this article originally appeared in Insider NJ.

As I write this column, I am in the air on the way to Milwaukee to cover the Republican National Convention. The plane is packed with GOP delegates from New Jersey and New York as well as journalists and civilians who have love or business somewhere in the Midwest.

There’s a palpable sense of apprehension on board. It’s the day after former President Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt in what can only be described as a spectacular failure of the multi-billion dollar national security apparatus.

As passengers who boarded at Newark Liberty International, we’ve all just submitted to being poked and prodded by the TSA after taking our shoes and belts off in a kind of homage to that same national security apparatus in place since after 9/11.

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Since the last in-person national political convention in 2016, there’s been a mass death event, a violent insurrection timed to happen as President Joe Biden’s 2020 Electoral College win was to be certified and the massive street protests that came after the police murder of George Floyd.

On the plane, reporters and Republican activists feel each other out in their across-the-aisle introductions.

"What outlet do you work for?" comes the inquiry and then the cautious response.

Even in a wounded state, Trump struck a pugilistic profile mouthing what appeared to be the word “fight.” That footage of his blood streaming down his face from his ear is like a Rorschach video. For tens of millions of Americans, Trump was a near martyr. For others, he’s a TV reality star and a convicted felon who should never again hold elected office.

The gunfire that exploded in Butler, Pa., left dead the alleged gunman and an innocent bystander, Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief, who shielded his family from the incoming sniper fire from the shooter’s AR-15. Once again, a nation that spends endless amounts of money on weapons and security is made to seem vulnerable to the actions of a lone actor.

While media commentators assert the broad daylight shooting of a former and would-be president shocks the conscience, it’s just another day in a nation where the smell of gun powder always hangs in the air.

There’s a gun violence epidemic in America with the Brady Center estimating that on an average day 327 Americans are shot and 117 die from their wounds.

Political violence is in our national DNA, and anyone who says otherwise hasn’t been paying attention. As I was packing up my reference materials for the convention, I came across a letter I wrote in August 1964 to Sen. Clifford Case, who was the last New Jersey Republican to be elected to the U.S. Senate. I wrote to suggest that the FBI should be in charge of the investigation into President John F. Kennedy’s murder.

In my third-grade voice, I expressed concern that the 1964 presidential campaign was well underway and there were still so many unanswered questions about the circumstances surrounding Kennedy’s murder. I had been in charge of my younger brothers and sisters when my parents went to mass at St. Catherine’s in Glen Rock in the days after JFK was killed.

I watched in real time horror on TV as Lee Harvey Oswald was shot in the gut during his transfer in Dallas. It was just a warmup for Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — it’s what we do.

In the decades since, the national security state’s need to control information, has come at a price of public confidence. Back in 2023, a Gallup poll indicated that 65 percent of Americans believe there was a conspiracy behind the JFK murder. Files from that era are still classified.

Scroll forward to the lead up to Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and the MAGA movement’s efforts in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 general election defeat to subvert the Electoral College. According to the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, which has responsibility for overseeing the U.S. Secret Service, “many U.S. Secret Service text messages from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021 were erased as part of a device-replacements program.”

We never got a full accounting about what the U.S. Secret Service knew and when they knew it about the first of its kind attack on the U.S. Capitol. It’s always "need to know." And the House of Representatives is now controlled by a majority of Republicans who voted NOT to certify Biden’s electoral college win AFTER the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol.

There’s precious little time for self-examination of any kind.

After a 20-plus-year military binge driven by our war on terror, the Brown University’s Watson Institute estimates the world lost 2.5 million lives indirectly due to the economic collapse, “the destruction of public and health infrastructure” and environmental contamination.

Watson estimates the United States spent $8 trillion in the 20 years since 9/11, setting off the worst refugee crisis since WWII, and collapsed a few nation states in the process. Did we have any reason to feel safer?

It’s a very open question as to whether we can gather as Americans in large crowds at a national political convention in a convivial way that harkens back to those halcyon days captured by Norman Rockwell. The decimation of local newspapers and community owned and operated TV and radio stations have left us as a nation that’s had authenticated news and information replaced by aggregation and social media.

This content is distributed by the corporate news media that are entirely fixated on driving online traffic and uses analytics that customizes our “news” feeds to match our existing prejudices and biases.

Is it any wonder we don’t have a consensus on who won the 2020 election?

This degraded information ecology has both profound public health and civil defense implications. No doubt, this fracturing of our national narrative along the faultiness of red and blue states helped drive our catastrophic COVID-19 death toll of close to 1.2 million Americans. Consider the challenge of finding the necessary public consensus required to confront the real challenges presented by the climate crisis.

By becoming reliant on a news media that relies on affirming our biases we’ve lost the intellectual capacity to challenge ourselves by asking how we know what we know. This becomes particularly problematic when as citizens in a democracy we have to try and hold the national security apparatus accountable, yet we don’t have a clue about what’s actually going on.