It was a weekend of horrible news, with appalling outbreaks of violence both here in America and abroad. We’re praying for all those affected by the attacks at Brown University and on the Jewish community in Australia. It’s not a happy Monday.
Numbness in Providence
by Hannah Yoest
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND—The doors are not the problem. In the aftermath of the mass school shooting at Brown University on Saturday, in which two died and nine were injured, many have started to call for the school to follow Columbia and Yale in completely locking down and gating the campus. This willful avoidance of the real issue says a lot about how we deal with these tragedies. The continued failure to address gun violence has engendered learned helplessness. We treat the Second Amendment—and a questionably broad reading of it—like an immutable commandment rather than a matter of policy.
The Rhode Island School of Design, where I’m a graduate student, shares much of Brown’s campus. The security measures in place are already extensive. Most buildings require you to swipe an access badge to get through multiple locked doors.
In a press conference Sunday morning at the local fire station, one reporter mentioned the two Brown students who were already survivors of a mass shooting from their time in high school. She pressed Providence Mayor Brett Smiley, “What do you feel needs to be done to keep this from happening, to stop that cycle of violence?”
Smiley declined to address her concern directly, admonishing her that, so soon after the murders, the time for advocacy was not yet right. But he recalled what one student in the hospital who “showed tremendous courage” told him: ”You know that active-shooter drill they made me do in high school actually helped me in the moment.”
That observation, Smiley said, “provided me hope, and was so sad. We shouldn’t have to do active-shooter drills, but it helped, and the reason it helped and the reason we do these drills is because [mass shootings are] damn frequent.”
Active-shooter drills are a way of hardening our softest targets. They’re also a way of hardening our hearts, accepting that to be a student in America is to be a victim-in-waiting.
After so many years and so many young deaths, it’s not hard to see why America has become such a low-trust society. But it’s jarring to be treated as if reporting on a mass shooting is to be an accomplice after the fact. Walking around campus and at the hospital, asking people if they’d be willing to share their experience, I was met with a range of suspicion, and even hostility.
There was a time when the families and friends of victims—and the survivors—wanted their stories told. Not anymore. Maybe in past years they knew the power of their experiences, but since then they’ve seen their impotence.
The problem is threefold: First, after Sandy Hook, we saw the families of victims targeted, smeared, and plagued by lies and conspiracy theories promoted by charlatans posing as “journalists,” with little recourse but the glacial judicial system.
In the dozen years since, things have gotten worse. At the top, we have a leader who has made lying the foundation of his movement while attacking the media at every turn, weakening a once-robust force for accountability.
And on the opposite end of the spectrum, there is a streak of political correctness, especially among people my age or younger, whose sensibilities about media gatekeeping and the morality of telling someone else’s story is, to borrow a term, “problematic.” The net effect is that no one seems to believe in the power of the truth anymore.
Those few who were willing to open up showed grace in the wake of the tragedy. I spoke with a pair of sophomores on the main quad who asked to not be named because their parents had warned them never to trust the press. They were building a snowman.
“It’s a terrible situation, and we’re all shocked,” one said, “Brown, though, is the ‘Happy Ivy.’ It’s in our nature to be out on the green here doing fun things, but it’s obviously not the same now.”
Later in the evening, at a vigil held by the Providence City Council in lieu of a planned holiday celebration, more than 200 people gathered to light candles and mourn together. The Red Cross provided hot drinks and blankets as snow fell on the crowd. Two other sophomores, who had known one of the victims, encapsulated the feeling of helplessness attendant to grief: “Vigils always help,” one said.
The Murder of Innocents
by William Kristol
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
“The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”
The cascade of murders of innocents this past weekend—students preparing for final exams at Brown, Jews celebrating the festival of Hanukkah in Sydney, Rob and Michele Reiner in Los Angeles—hit home for me, as I imagine it did for many of us, with particular force.
And so this morning, though I’d jotted down notes last night on several possible topics for this newsletter, I find I don’t really want to address any of them yet. I’m not quite ready to move on.
Mind you, it’s not that I have any great insights to share on the terrible events of the past weekend. It’s not as if I have compelling or comforting words to offer in the face of these tragedies.
And it’s not as if I claim especially close connections here. I’ve been friendly with Brown students and faculty, and I very much admire the Australian Jewish community. I’ve enjoyed getting to know Rob Reiner a bit in the last decade. But there are so many others who have been and who are so much closer to those worlds than I. They’re speaking eloquently about their loss, and ours. They’re offering moving tributes to those who are gone. They’re discussing the various policy issues raised by the events.
I respect and admire those contributions.
For my part, words fail me when I read that Alex Kleytman, an 87-year-old Ukrainian Holocaust survivor, was celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach with his wife of 57 years, also a Holocaust survivor. He was killed while shielding Larisa from the bullets with his own body.
What can one say? We can bow our heads in respect—to him, and to all this weekend’s victims and their families and friends. We can take a moment to reflect. We can vow to remember. And then we can move forward, re-dedicating ourselves to creating a world in which such horrors are less likely in the future.
Our community is dedicated to trying to make our politics a little less horrible. If you’ve been reading Morning Shots for a while, we’d love for you to join us. Start a free trial today. You can also give Bulwark+ memberships as gifts this holiday season. And as always, money should be no impediment to membership, so if you want to join but can’t swing it right now, send us an email and we’ll work something out.
The RNC Is Mad at Me
by Andrew Egger
It’s a fact of life that you can’t please everybody. I’ve had plenty of subjects grouse about my coverage over the years. But I was still taken aback by the outsized blowback Friday’s Morning Shots got from the Republican National Committee, which a spokesperson denounced as “stupid, desperate lies” and “false smears on behalf of the DNC” from “a bunch of shameless hacks pretending to be journalists.”
What had The Bulwark (well, I) done to earn their wrath? I’d written down things RNC Chair Joe Gruters said in public radio appearances this month.
As I wrote last week, Gruters has been on a remarkable conservative-radio press tour, where he’s been doing a routine of radical midterms expectation-setting: “We are facing almost certain defeat.” “The chances are Republicans will go down and go down hard.” “It’s a pending, looming disaster heading our way.”
His basic point was that the party in power nearly always loses the midterms, and his basic argument was that Republicans’ only chance to avoid this fate was to cling to Donald Trump for dear life. But to make that case in such desolate language—to essentially argue that anything short of a clobbering at the hands of Democrats next year should count as a GOP overperformance—is extremely unusual for a party chair. It was a powerful illustration of just how bad the 2026 vibes are on Team Red right now.
Well, anyway, the RNC wasn’t happy. Not only did their communications team spend most of Friday morning tracking down prominent accounts who shared Gruters’s quotes to call them “liars” and “scumbags,” they also deleted their own Soundcloud audio clips of those interviews that I’d linked to in the piece.1 They also talked a few reliable transcribers at Townhall and Washington Reporter into denouncing The Bulwark and repeating the party’s grievances at length.
It was odd. Not only was the RNC obviously flat wrong in these ritual denunciations and accusations, the whole thing brought lots of extra attention to the story and to Gruteres’s quotes—seemingly the opposite of what they’d have wanted. These are communications professionals. So what was the point?
I can only speculate, but I think it comes down to two things: the sorry state of our information silos, and the audience of one.
Who is the RNC talking to when they respond to a story like this? In the old days, this would seem obvious: The point of responding to a story was to win over the readers of that story. A political apparatus that responds to a fair but unflattering story by lashing out and calling names obviously isn’t trying to do that. Instead, they’re trying to win over people who have not and likely will never read the story.
But maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe they just know that the president hates Republicans talking down about the midterms and loves to see journalists getting dunked on. So what better way to divert his attention from the former than to pivot to the latter?
Around The Bulwark
Rob Reiner, 1947–2025… SONNY BUNCH remembers one of the best and most versatile directors of his era. RIP.
Double Taps and Drug Lord Pardons…On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN critique the new National Security Strategy—its incoherence, its hostility toward Europe, and its refusal to name Russia, China, and Iran as U.S. adversaries. They also discuss renewed pressure on Ukraine to give ground to Russia before welcoming REP. JIM HIMES to talk through the Trump administration’s Venezuela policy.
If Any Dem Can Be Governor of Alabama, It’s This Guy. It Still May Take a Miracle… Running against Tommy Tuberville may not seem like a major challenge. But it is in the deep-red South, reports LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.
The Damage to America Is Permanent… On How to Fix It, JOHN AVLON is joined by Judge MICHAEL LUTTIG and former DHS Secretary JEH JOHNSON, co-chairs of the American Bar Association’s Task Force on American Democracy, to talk about their work to lay out concrete, realistic reforms to stop democratic backsliding before it’s irreversible.
The FBI Spent a Generation Relearning How to Catch Spies. Then Came Kash Patel… As China’s spies grow more aggressive, the FBI is distracted and off-balance, write DEREK OWEN and R.M. SCHNEIDERMAN.
Quick Hits
ALWAYS THE BRIDESMAID: Poor Elise Stefanik. The onetime self-styled moderate totally reinvented herself as a MAGA cheerleader to thrive in the age of Donald Trump—but her checks from the big guy keep not cashing. He originally nominated her to be UN ambassador this year, but then changed his mind and kicked her back to the House. Now she’s running for governor of New York—but Trump has hesitated to endorse her, as he plainly also likes another candidate, Bruce Blakeman. Politico has more:
Only Trump has the immense power to short circuit a primary in his native state. Publicly he isn’t exercising it.
Behind the scenes, Trump spoke with Blakeman about running in the days leading up to his announcement. . . . Two people who spoke with POLITICO and are familiar with the exchange, though, said Trump never explicitly told Blakeman not to run. The White House did not comment for this story.
Further complicating matters, the president this week effusively praised Stefanik and Blakeman as “two fantastic people”—going as far as suggesting that a primary may ultimately produce a battle-tested nominee.
THE CRACKING MAGA COALITION?: Mark Mitchell, head pollster at MAGA outfit Rasmussen Reports, headed to the White House last month on a mission: trying to wake Donald Trump up to the fact that he’s bleeding with his populist base. The Washington Post reports:
“Sir, you got shot at the Butler rally,” Mitchell said, invoking the “really strong optics” of Trump raising his fist in defiance after the attempted assassination in July 2024.
“You said, ‘Fight, fight, fight.’ But nobody ever clarified what that means,” Mitchell continued. “And right now, you’re fight-fight-fighting Marjorie Taylor Greene, and not actually fight-fight-fighting for Americans.”
The head pollster at Rasmussen Reports warned Trump that many of his supporters believe he hasn’t “drained the swamp” in Washington, and suggested the president refocus with a plan to embrace “pragmatic economic populism.”
“To the extent to which we were talking about the economic populism message, he wasn’t as interested as I would have hoped,” Mitchell said, adding that it was a “long-ranging conversation.”
Cheap Shots
You can hear the quotes in question in a Bulwark Takes video Sam Stein and I did Friday afternoon; Gruters’s full interviews including those quotes are still accessible in the archives of the shows themselves: the Chris Stigall Show, SiriusXM Patriot with Mike Slater, Brett Winterble’s show on WBT Charlotte, and Cats and Cosby on WABC in New York.
"We treat the Second Amendment—and a questionably broad reading of it—like an immutable commandment rather than a matter of policy."
And therein lies much of the problem in politics overall in this nation. Rather than a one-off matter, it has become firm policy of those on the political right. And it is not a new development, having been inculcated for at least three decades via talk radio and other right-wing platforms, and now reinforced daily by social media, podcasts, and any other form of technology that gets the point out to the willing and eager. The movement has become a commandment to them -- Thou Shalt Destroy Liberals and Liberalism -- that justifies any and all behavior, formally and informally, collectively and individually. The person who (supposedly) wrote The Art of the Deal now feels that deals are for losers and suckers -- the system must be rigged, rules and laws are mere guidelines for them and imperatives for others, and when caught in lies and misbehavior, the solution is to double and triple down on the original approach and give neither ground nor quarter to the opposition.
The right has been on a war footing for decades, despite the absence of a war. It is their cause, their mission, to blow everything up that does not suit them and take us down with it. There is no public policy for them anymore so much as commandments from the Orange Moses who decides it all, seemingly on the fly, not meant to be questioned or obstructed. But you know that. We are left to hope that the cracks in the tablets that we currently see opening up are the signs that the movement itself is cracking up, as more and more people see that give-and-take public policy and shared governance are a better way to do things after all. Fingers crossed for a long-term awakening from our national slumber.
Way to go, Andrew Egger! You gotta love the way these MAGA/GOP jamokes let you know when you've hit the nail on the head. My compliments.