The fight-or-flight response is an extraordinary adaptation. It narrows focus, accelerates decision making, and prepares the body to survive immediate danger. In the presence of a genuine threat it can save a life, but what protects us in moments of crisis becomes destructive when permanent, and a body trapped in fight-or-flight mode eventually begins to break down.
Civilizations are no different.
For most of modern American history, political opponents were viewed as wrong, misguided, or perhaps even dangerous, but they were still viewed as fellow citizens. The assumption was that political disputes would ultimately be resolved through peaceful means.
The left began pushing people into fight-or-flight mode the instant it became evident that Donald Trump would become President of the United States, on November 8, 2016, but it needed something structural to fully encapsulate things.
Once Covid hit, the state suddenly had not only emotional justification, but also the procedural justification to suspend norms. Censorship became public health, mandates became morality, and civil liberties were treated as epidemiological threats.
The world was locked down.
I was personally guilty of falling for the hype. My wife and I were on vacation in San Antonio when the disease hit the United States and traveled home in fear. We got lucky and bought toilet paper at Costco the day before the lockdown in Michigan started, and for a brief period we were disinfecting everything we bought from the store, on the rare occasions we left the house.
Then the lies started.
I don’t know when I realized just how bad the lies were, but by the time I heard, “Not having symptoms is a symptom,” the lockdown suddenly made me feel angry rather than safe.
I’ve had COVID-19 at least four times. It lasts longer than a regular flu, and since I work from home I’ve missed a total of two days of work. My wife had a fever of over 103 from it one morning, but I gave her Ibuprofen and her fever came down. For us, at its worst it was like getting a flu when you were a kid, before your body knew how to deal with such things.
For the public at-large, it was said to be much more than that, and it gave left-leaning political pundits, comedians, and celebrities an excuse to lash out at the unvaccinated.
Once fear became the organizing principle, every institution that could amplify fear became a de facto arm of governance: media, academia, bureaucracy, Big Tech, and even the medical establishment. Much of what they were telling us was clearly not true. We were being lied to, and more to the point, we were being conditioned.
Today, much of our political discourse is built on the language of emergency. Opponents are not mistaken; they are existential threats. Elections are not contests between competing visions of government, but battles for survival. Every disagreement becomes a crisis, every crisis becomes a catastrophe, and every catastrophe becomes justification for extraordinary measures.
Joe Biden went so far as to say about Donald Trump, in a November 9, 2022, press conference, “We just have to demonstrate that he will not take power by, if he does run, making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next president again.”
I don’t know what a sitting President can do, “under legitimate efforts of our Constitution,” to prevent a qualified U.S. citizen from running, or to throttle a campaign if someone you do not like does run, but the message to the American people was that Donald Trump was such a massive threat that we could not risk a competitive election if he was on the ballot, and the result of such messaging is a society that increasingly resembles a cornered animal, ready to strike.
As it became evident that Donald Trump was going to be the 2024 Republican nominee, all of the hatred came right back out.
As Rachel Maddow said on MSNBC, “Trumpism is not a political movement. It is a fascist threat to the United States.” Don Lemon, still with CNN at the time, said, “Trump is a dictator. He wants absolute loyalty and obedience.”
The Washington Post Editorial Board wrote that “Trump is the gravest threat to American democracy since the Civil War”; Slate magazine ran the headline: “The GOP is now a fascist movement”; and Anne Applebaum wrote in The Atlantic that “Trump is not merely populist. He is leading a proto-fascist movement.”
None of those are open calls to commit acts of violence, but, when paired with statements such as this from journalist and author Jonathan Chait—“If you could travel back in time and kill Hitler, would you?”—which is a statement echoed by many journalists and opinion writers, the comparisons of course lead to violence.
Donald Trump was then shot in the upper right ear on July 13, 2024, during a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania. A gunman, later identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, fired multiple rounds from a nearby rooftop. One attendee, Corey Comperatore, was killed, and two others were critically wounded before Secret Service snipers killed the shooter.
On September 15, 2024, there was a second assassination attempt at Trump’s golf course in Florida, and then on April 7, 2025, the Network Contagion Research Institute released a report titled Assassination Culture, showing that 38% of Americans believed murdering Donald Trump would be at least “somewhat justified” while 31% said the same about Elon Musk. Among respondents categorized by the researchers as “left of center,” 55% of left-leaning respondents considered killing Trump at least somewhat justified, and 48% said the same about Musk.
None of this was happening in a bubble. What tied these events together was not ideology, but psychology. Human beings are capable of hating their opponents without resorting to violence. Violence becomes acceptable only when opponents cease to be viewed as rivals and become perceived as existential threats. The reaction then becomes physiological.
And then we have the left’s abandonment of Israel.
On October 7, 2023, stunned British travelers posted videos of what can only be called jubilant celebrations in English train stations, as London learned of the Hamas attack against Israel. This was while the attacks were still unfolding. Listening to the videos, you would have thought England just won the World Cup.
Hamas was posting videos of the attack to YouTube, almost in real time, and the images were horrific. All told, almost 1,200 Israeli civilians were killed and 251 hostages were taken.
Hamas said in no uncertain terms that October 7 was not a one-time event, but something Hamas would do again, and again, and again, until either Israel or Hamas was destroyed, and the political left along with the mainstream media quickly turned on Israel as Israel acted to defend itself against further attacks.
Israel is a small country: 1,200 people represents about 0.0122% of their population. To put that in terms Americans can relate to, the same percent of our population would be almost 42,000 people—incidentally, the current, official (likely low) estimate for the Iranian freedom protesters massacred by their Islamic rulers over the course of two days in early 2026.
Hamas was hoping that Hezbollah would invade from the North at the same time Hamas attacked from the South, with the goal of destroying the Israeli state and killing every single Israeli citizen, including the Muslim ones, who are considered apostates for living peacefully inside a Jewish state.
It blew my mind watching the political left become pro-Hamas, and then on December 4, 2024, Luigi Mangione killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Mangione has been turned into a hero in some left-leaning circles.
Violence becomes acceptable only when opponents cease to be viewed as rivals and become perceived as existential threats. The reaction then becomes physiological.
Hasan Piker, nephew of Cenk Uygur, has repeatedly referred to Luigi Mangione as “our boy,” and justified the killing as “social murder.” Hasan Piker also spent an inordinate amount of time discussing how good looking he thinks Luigi Mangione is.
Between YouTube and Twitch, Piker has close to five million followers.
His uncle, Cenk Uygur, deserves a special note, as he is the founder of a popular YouTube outfit called The Young Turks. The namesake of the Young Turks was a group of Turkish nationalist leaders who, amidst the disappointments of the Great War, committed the Armenian Genocide, in which somewhere between 800,000 and 1.5 million Armenian Christians were killed between 1915 and 1917.
Piker also said, “If you care about Medicare, you would kill Rick Scott,” and, “Let the streets soak in their …capitalist blood.”
And then on September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, on camera, leaving behind a wife and two young children. Social media platforms immediately had to remove posts that celebrated his killing and, in some cases, even encouraged violence against other public figures. Some posts and memes said “do Trump next” or “Elon next please,” referencing back to the Network Contagion Research Institute report from 2024.
Hasan Piker’s comment on Charlie Kirk’s death was, “Kill them! Kill those motherf—kers!”
Of what was Charlie Kirk guilty? Open communication with those with whom he disagreed. Charlie Kirk was killed for being persuasive.
Political hatred, of course, goes back further. When Margaret Thatcher—arguably one of the most competent, dynamic, intelligent, and courageous British political leaders of the past century—died in 2013, many leftist British communities threw what they called “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead!” parties. The hatred of Thatcher—who had not been prime minister for more than 22 years—was so strong that the song by that name briefly re-entered the music charts.
Hatred does not automatically spill over into violence though, and the normalization of violence is something new. The normalization of violence occurred only after the political left moved from hatred to fear, and the catalyst for that was Donald Trump.
The left remains in fear, driven on by Hasan Piker, his uncle, Joe Biden, Hakeem Jeffries, Rachel Maddow, CNN, The Atlantic, Hillary Clinton, and hosts of others across the mainstream media and the political left.
The real question, of course, is what happens next.
Panic needs constant reinforcement to remain stable, and once the left committed to treating Trump as an existential threat, it trapped itself inside the logic of its own emergency. As with shock humor, panic requires escalation, meaning that each new lie has to make Trump even worse than the last lie did.
When George Floyd died, it created emotional permission to loot, riot, and commit mayhem, and once emotional permission was granted, some people predictably escalated from violence to attempted assassination on the grounds that if an opponent is “fascist,” suppression becomes self-defense. Once “silence is violence” became a thing, anything goes, and as the violence escalated across the country, the politics of fight-or-flight crept into the political right as well.
Rather than de-escalating the panic, Trump inverted it. He discovered that outrage is energy, and recognized that the left’s fear could be redirected. This instinctive judo created a feedback loop: the more the left panicked, the more his base felt validated; the more validated his base became, the more the left escalated its panic. Each side began to metabolize the other’s existence as proof of its own fears.
Trump did not try to put his own followers into fight-or-flight mode, but he certainly encouraged the left to go further and further into it such that the rhetoric got more and more extreme, and thus easier and easier to ridicule.
Trump’s supporters learned that panic unnerved their opponents, and unnerving them felt like “winning” such that the left’s fear became the right’s entertainment. Once politics became emotional theater, neither side had any incentive to restore equilibrium. Conflict was no longer about outcomes—it became identity reinforcement.
The right entered its own version of fight-or-flight reactively rather than initiatively. Its adrenalization came not from ideological vulnerability, but from spectacle. As of yet this has not spilled over into violence, but it could easily do so, and having both political parties operating in panic-mode is dangerous.
Panic needs constant reinforcement to remain stable, and once the left committed to treating Trump as an existential threat, it trapped itself inside the logic of its own emergency.
All of this comes at a cost. There comes a point where the arterial pressure exceeds what the body can withstand.
The United States, and the West in general, is not drifting toward collapse so much as toward what biology would diagnose as cardiac arrest: a system that has mistaken constant tension for life and has lost the ability to self-regulate. Countries like Iran and China, who would love to see us have a civilizational heart attack, encourage both sides.
Our political class still behaves as if this is a contest over policy, but it is not. It is a contest over emotional territory in which one side believes panic is survival, and the other believes panic is retaliation. Neither has any interest in governing. They are too busy reacting to one another.
Perhaps after the midterms, when the public begins to gear up for an election Trump is not a part of, we will begin to calm down, or perhaps the Republican nominee will be considered an equally detestable Trump 2.0. I’ve already heard people say that J. D. Vance would be a more effective version of Trump and thus even more dangerous. Would Democrats prefer to run against Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz? I, personally, doubt it.
I asked my mother who on the political right she could tolerate being President. She initially said that she is tolerating Trump, but when I asked her to name someone on the right she would prefer to Trump, she could not do it.
I know from experience that a person in hypertension does not know it. It is only when your blood pressure comes back down and the periphery comes back into focus that you can tell you were in hypertension. This is no different for society.
Neither the left nor the right know they are in fight-or-flight mode, and they will not know that they were until they no longer are. I can take lisinopril for my hypertension, but I know of no medication that can fix an entire country, or the larger civilization it is a part of.
I guess we’re going to find out.
