Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Of we the People, tackling current issues, both political and legal, with common sense.
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[00:00:24] Speaker A: Good evening. I'm Alina Gonzalez Dakri, and this is we the People.
Tonight, we're talking about political violence and the more dangerous shift happening underneath it.
How quickly a country can get used to it.
When threats and shootings become just another headline.
When it gets folded into the feed, something changes in the public conscious.
So tonight we're going to separate facts from narrative, look at what's driving this normalization in our media culture, and talk about what it's doing to kids, teens, young adults, and for us all who are absorbing it nonstop.
So let's slow this down and start in the right place, because the way this conversation is being had right now is part of the problem.
Since July of 2024, there have been three separate attempts on President Donald Trump's life.
That is not a political statement. That is not rhetoric. That is a factual, factual one as it's being widely reported and discussed. Three separate attempts. This does not include all those that have been thwarted and fleshed out.
This is a fact that should stop people cold, at least for a moment, to reflect and ask, where is our stability as a system when we have repeated attempts on the life of a sitting president?
This is not something that should be absorbed into the background of daily discourse or made as a joke and fodder for comedy.
They are supposed to register as serious, destabilizing and outside the bounds of what we consider normal political conflict. Or even, how about this? Normal bounds of decency and morals.
And yet what is striking is not just that that it has happened and happened again and again and again, but how quickly it has been processed and then folded into everything else people are consuming, just swept aside.
It becomes one story among many.
It becomes something you hear, react to briefly and then move past because there is always something else coming behind it.
Now widen the lens slightly because focusing only on that would be incomplete.
Let's look at what has happened in the most recent past.
You have the killing of Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist, someone who would go around to college. Universities, had a podcast to discuss and debate differing sides.
You had the killing of Melissa Hortman and her husband, a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, all because why? Because she was seen as more moderate.
You have an attack on the Pennsylvania's governor, residents, arson striking the governor's mansion.
And then many, many years ago, the violent assault inside Nancy Pelosi's home where her husband was seriously injured.
And then to our most recent event, what has been reported widely as the shooting at the White House Correspondent's Dinner, where an attacker that was caught and is now being prosecuted for an attempted assassination once again, on Trump as well as top Cabinet members.
This should be chilling to the bone for all of us.
And more particularly, the correspondence dinner setting matters more than people are treating it, because this is not an uncontrolled environment. This isn't like Butler, Pennsylvania.
This is a banquet room at the Hilton in D.C. that is used every year with the president.
This is an event that exists at the intersection of media and political power, a space that is deliberately constructed to reflect a functioning system.
And in that space, you had gunfire, confusion, people trying to assess in real time whether they were safe, people hiding, people evacuating.
Now, if you list all of that in rapid succession, all of these events, it creates a very particular impression.
It feels like escalation, accumulation.
It feels like the system is under sustained pressure from multiple directions at once. And that is exactly how most people are experiencing it, through accumulation, through repetition, through a constant sense that one thing is happening after another without any break in between.
But that experience is not the same same as analysis.
And this is where most of the conversation is breaking down, because people are reacting to the feeling of accumulation without asking a more precise question, which is whether what they are feeling reflects a measurable change in the level of violence or whether it reflects a change in how that violence is being to deliver to them.
Because those are not the same.
And if you do not separate them, you will misread the situation.
There is a tendency, especially in today's media environment that rewards urgency to treat anything that feels intense as it must also be unprecedented.
But when you actually step back and place the present moment in historical context, the picture becomes more complicated.
Between 1865 and 1901, through three out of the nine United States presidents were assassinated. Granted, this was in the beginning of the inception of our country. There was still a lot of turmoil back then.
But if that rate existed today, the modern political landscape would look very different than it does now. It would mean that we would have had three assassinations of president since 1980.
And I'm not counting the attempted assassination on Ronald Reagan, which almost was an assassination, or the three on President Trump. We're talking three dead presidents now. Move forward into the 1960s and 1970s, and you see a period marked by assassinations, organized domestic extremism, and coordinated acts of violence that in terms of scale and structure exceed what we are seeing in the present moment.
But it's also because it was organized bombings, Usually organized by black Panthers or groups such as that.
But that does not diminish what is happening now. It is something more important than that. It corrects the instinct to interpret the present as something entirely new, Entirely outside historical experience.
Because once people begin to believe that they are living through something unprecedented and uncontrollable, Their ability to think clearly about it starts to erode.
Fear compresses context. It compresses time. It reduces complex patterns into single emotional conclusion, which is that things are falling apart and cannot be fixed.
And once that conclusion takes hold, people become more reactive, more susceptible to manipulation, and more willing to accept extreme responses to what they perceive as an extreme situation.
So the correct position is not to minimize what is happening, and it's definitely not to exaggerate, Is to understand it accurately.
And accuracy in this case, requires shifting the focus slightly away from the events themselves and toward the way those events are being experienced.
Because what has changed is not simply the presence of violence.
What has changed is the frequency with which it is being placed in front of people, the speed at which it is being processed, and the lack of separation between those events and everything else people are consuming.
You are no longer encountering a violent event in isolation.
You are encountering it as part of a string, a constant. It sits alongside entertainment, alongside commentary, alongside humor, Alongside everything else that fills the day. And when something is embedded in that kind of environment, it does not carry the same weight that it would if it were experienced on its own.
And this is not a moral judgment. It is a neurological one. The brain adapts to repeated exposure. It does not ask whether something should be normal. It adjusts to what it sees consistently. And over time, that adjustment changes the baseline.
The first time a person encounters something violent, it disrupts them. It unnerves them.
There's a moment where their brain registers what they are seeing does not belong in the normal flow of life.
But that reasoning is not static. With repeated exposure, the intensity of that response begins to diminish, not because the person agrees with what they are seeing, but because the brain has learned to process it more efficiently.
And eventually, the disruption is just replaced with recognition.
And recognition is a completely different state of mind.
Because recognition means that something feels familiar. It no longer stands apart from everything else. There is no more shock factor. It fits inside the broader experience. And once that shift takes place, you are no longer dealing with only with acts of violence. You're dealing with a population that is gradually becoming less sensitive to them, less disrupted by them, and less likely to respond to them with the same level of intention or seriousness.
That is what normalization actually is. It is not approval, it is not endorsement. It is adaptation.
Adaptation that happens quietly and quickly. It does not announce itself. It does not feel like exchange while it is happening it. But over time, it alters the threshold for what feels extreme and what feels ordinary. And so when I say this isn't normal, I'm referring to two things at the same time. The events themselves are extremely serious and they should not be dismissed or absorbed without thought. But equally as important is the shift in how those events are being experienced, because that shift is what determines how a society responds.
If the response becomes weaker, more fragmented, or more inconsistent, not because people do not care, but because they have adapted to the presence of these events, then the long term effect is not just the violence itself.
It is the gradual erosion of the reaction to it. And that is part that is much harder to see, but ultimately more consequential. Because once the reaction changes, everything that follows changes with it. A free society cannot remain free if it loses its ability to be shocked by evil.
We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I want to look at what actually caused this shift because it didn't happen on its own.
Tune right back in.
Welcome back. We've established that the perception of violence is shifting. Now we need to look at what actually moved that line.
If you follow that line of thinking honestly, the next question becomes unavoidable.
If normalization of violence is happening, and it is, did it happen by accident?
Something moved the line. And the mistake people make is assuming that it moved all at once or that it moved because of a single event or a single political moment or a single political party.
That's not how cultural shifts work.
They move gradually, they move through repetition, and they move through permission.
And once permission is granted, especially in a visible, public way, it becomes very difficult to contain the downstream effects.
Now, this is where people tend to get uncomfortable, because it requires looking at moments that were at the time dismissed or defended and asking what their broader impact actually was.
During President Trump's first term, there was a noticeable shift in the tone of public discourse, and not just in the sense that things became more heated or that people were making fun of his orange bad tan or orange hair, things like that.
Politics has always been heated. What changed was the willingness to cross into imagery and language that historically been understood as out of bound ounce.
You had a well known comedian holding up what was presented as a severed head of a sitting president.
You had a major public figure standing on stage and talking openly about thoughts of blowing up the White House.
You had public comments that treated the idea of assassination as something to flirt with rhetorically, or even wonder whether there were still political assassinations occurring while on stage, on a concert.
The immediate response to those moments from any many corners was to frame them as expression or satire or protected speech. Or even look at what with Kimmel, you know, doing a pretend roast of Trump as if he were at the correspondence center and looking at Melania and stating that she was beautiful and glowing with the expected of expectant widowhood.
Who says that? I don't care if it was comedic. I'm not even looking at. In light of what happened in the Correspondence center, we've already had two attempted assassinations against her husband and constant threats of assassination and people wishing him death.
What is that?
Now, as a legal matter, there are important distinctions here.
There is a difference between speech that is offensive and speech that is criminal. Kimmel's speech is not criminal. It is offensive.
There is a difference between a tasteless joke and a true threat. Again, his great example of a tasteless joke, Kathy Gifford holding or Griffith holding up the severed head, bloody head of Trump, tasteless.
And there is a difference between difference between political commentary and incitement. And that's when we look at the rhetoric that has been stated by many heads of political parties or elected officials on both sides.
But here's what I want to say carefully. The question is not only what someone has the right to say. We are blessed in this country to have our right to free speech.
The question is, what happens when those kinds of images and statements enter the mainstream of a culture and are then repeated, circulated, and absorbed without consistent rejection?
Because culture does not operate on legal standards, culture operates on exposure. And once something is exposed often enough, it begins to lose its edge. It stops feeling like a violation of a boundary, and it starts feeling like one more variation of acceptable expression.
That is, the mechanism by which the line moves, not because everyone agrees with it, not because everyone approves of it, but because enough people are exposed to it often enough that it stops triggering the same level of resistance.
And once that shift takes place, the consequences are not immediate, but they are predictable, because what has been normalized rhetorically becomes easier to express behaviorally.
There is a difference between thinking something and acting on it. But the gap between those two things narrows when the underlying idea is no longer treated as inherently outside the bounds now, that's the cultural side.
But the cultural side alone doesn't explain why this feels so constant.
For that, you have to look at the environment.
A teenager today does not encounter political discourse in a structured setting.
They do not sit down at a fixed time, watch a limited broadcast, and then move on with the rest of their day.
Honestly, none of us do.
They exist into. Inside a continuous stream reels, videos, clickbaits.
And within that stream, there is no meaningful distinction between categories of content.
Something serious appears next to something trivial. Something violent appears next to something entertaining. Something disturbing appears next to something humorous. And the transitions between those things are instantaneous.
Now that matters. Not because of the contrast itself, but because of the way the brain is processing it.
The brain relies on context to determine how to respond to what it is seen.
When context is removed or flattened, the response becomes less differentiated.
Everything begins to be processed through the same lens. And over time, that changes not just what people think, but how they behave and how they feel.
If a person is repeatedly exposed to violent imagery, but the imagery is embedded within a broader string that also includes humor, entertainment, and distraction, the brain begins to associate that violence with the same processing pathway as everything else.
It's not isolating, integrates it.
And once it is integrated, it loses its ability to disrupt.
That is the part that people are underestimating, because they assume that repeated exposure to violence will make people reactive.
The opposite is the truth.
It makes them less reactive, less sensitive, less likely to stop, reflect, assign weight to what they are seeing. And that does not mean people are becoming indifferent in a moral sense. It means their response systems are adapting.
Now, when you combine that adaptation with that earlier shift in cultural boundaries, you begin to see how the environment changes in a way that is not immediately obvious, but is deeply consequential.
You have a culture in which the language around violence has been loosened. You have an environment in which exposure to violent imagery is constant and unstructured. And you have individuals, often younger, often male, often already dealing with instability, who are forming their understanding of reality within that environment.
So when we talk about lone wolves, what we're really talking about are individuals who are not part of formal organizations, but who are operating within a shared informational ecosystem.
They are being influenced by the same content.
They are being exposed to the same patterns. They are absorbing the same signals about what is acceptable, what is attention grabbing, and what is powerful.
And one of the most powerful signals in that environment is attention.
Attention is becoming a form of carnacy. Think about it. What is viral? What catches the eye How I can be an influencer, How I can do this. We are seeing it more and more on reels, on. On simple videos through here, constant streaming. There are times that I'm shocked at what younger kids are even exposed to. And this goes far beyond to, like what those of us in my generation grew up on with Looney Tunes.
If attention is a reward, then behavior that generates attention becomes incentivized.
That does not mean that every act of violence is driven by a desire for attention, but does mean the environment rewards the kinds of actions that produce strong reactions.
It creates distortion.
Because what gets amplified is not what is most representative of reality.
It is what is most extreme. And when that. And when what is most extreme is what people see most often, their perception of reality begins to shift accordingly.
So now we have a situation where a relatively small number of incidents can feel like a constant presence.
Not because they are happening everywhere, all the time, but because they are being delivered in a way that creates that impression. And once that impression takes hold, it begins to influence behavior at every level. People become more anxious, more reactive, more likely to interpret ambiguous situations as threatening, and more likely to believe that extreme responses are justified and warranted.
So when you step back and look at the full picture, what you see is not a rise in violent incidents.
You see a convergence of factors that make those incidents feel larger, closer, and more constant than they actually are.
And that convergence is what is driving the sense that something fundamental has changed.
Because something has.
Not just in what is happening, but in how it is being experienced.
And you got to look at what is the influence that we are now 247 in some type of media. And sometimes you can't tell if it's AI or not. But one thing is for certain.
What we are experiencing, what we are witnessing, is a heightened sense that violent actions, violent reactions to or extreme outbursts is okay.
And then you have that coupled with, really, rhetoric from some of our elected officials, which is absolutely astonishing.
We're going to take a short break, but when we come back, I want to look at the system that reinforces that perception because it doesn't sustain itself on its own.
This is something that we are all sustaining, but we're witnessing.
Tune right back in after this.
Welcome back.
If you follow this all the way through, then the next question becomes less about what people are seeing and more about why they keep seeing it.
Because once you understand that normalization is happening, and once you understand that it is being driven by exposure and repetition, you still have to explain what is sustaining that repetition. Why is it that the click baits, the viral moment, even the false narratives that are being pushed, or even the violent outburst to sec, you know, an extremism to something that should not have warranted such an extreme reaction emotionally, what is driving it?
And the answer is that it's not accidental, it is structural.
It is almost like the algorithms are feeding it because we are operating inside a media environment that is built around engagement.
Engagement is driven by emotional intensity. It is not a critique, it is a design feature.
Just like this is an emotional topic.
The system is not evaluating content based on whether it is representative of reality or whether it is proportional or even particularly important.
All the evaluation, those algorithms, the content is based on whether people react to it, if people are watching the videos, commenting on them, liking them.
And what people react to most consistently is not calm, it's not clean humor, it is not nuance, it is not context. It is shock, outrage, conflict, violence.
And anything that produces a strong emotional response such as these is a hit.
So what happens over time is that the system begins to prioritize the kinds of content that generate those reactions. I mean, think about it. Look just at movies.
It used to be horror movies only came out during Halloween. Now it's constant. It's constantly violent or scary or murderous. I mean, there are apps now with short reels and things that have a lot of extreme violence, especially against women. And it's shocking.
But this is not because of selective, selectively.
It's not consciously. It's automatically, it is just feeding and feeding one's vision, one's, you know, senses, and it learns what holds attention.
I mean, we could look at traditional media. Yes. I mean, every single news source is not even a news source. It's an op ed and they do have their audience and they feed into it. You can see it. Fox goes towards the more conservative cnn, left leaning, slightly progressive, and then so on. But then what you get on social media, what you get on X, tick tock.
I mean, reels is just a constant barrage of what is going to be a clickbait, what holds your attention, what feeds more of it back into the environment.
Because now once that process begins, it creates a feedback loop. The more extreme the content, the more likely it is to be engaged with. And the more of an influencer you are, the more it is engaged with, the more widely it is distributed.
That could mean profits, money. And the more widely it is distributed, the more it shapes the perception of what is common, what is acceptable behavior.
And that is where the distortion begins to take Hold. Because what is being amplified is not what happens most often.
It is what produces the strongest reaction, but is actually the most small percentage of actual interactions that occur.
So even if the actual number of violent incidents remains relatively limited, the perceptions of those incidents expands because they are being repeatedly surfaced, reframed and circulated.
And once that persistent, persistent perception expands, it starts to take on a life of its own.
This is what some analysts have referred to as kind of a doom loop.
And that description is useful not because it's dramatic, but because it is re accurate.
The violence itself generates attention loop. The attention drives amplification loop.
The amplification creates the impression of constant escalation.
Loop and loop.
That impression increases sensitivity, anxiety and reactivity, which in turn drives more engagement with the same kinds of content.
Once that loop is established, it becomes self reinforcing.
Now, here's the part that matters for parents, because adults can tell themselves they are just watching the news or they're just watching some reels on Tik Tok.
But kids are not just watching the news.
Kids are being trained by a feed.
And the feed is not neutral.
It is optimized. It is optimized for reaction.
So here's the question worth asking plainly, much like in the 1980s at 10 o' clock at night, when it would ask the parents, there would be a break in the news or what have you, and says, do you know where your children are at?
I ask you now, do you know what your child is being trained to laugh at?
Do you know what your teenager is being trained to scroll past without feeling anything?
Do you know what your young adult is being trained to treat as normal?
Because the feed, it is becoming one of the biggest teachers in these young people's lives.
It is teaching values.
And even when you never agreed to the lesson plan.
Now there's another layer to this. Because the algorithm does not just amplify violence. It amplifies narratives about violence. It amplifies the idea that everything is falling apart. It amplifies the idea that collapse is inevitable.
And that narrative is powerful because it does two things at once.
It keeps people afraid and it keeps people engaged.
Fear is sticky.
Fear drives clicks.
Fear drives shares.
Fear drives the sense that you have to keep watching.
And when people are afraid, they are easier to manipulate.
They are much easier to radicalize. And we have been witnessing that.
They are easier to push into extremes.
So the system ends up doing something very dangerous.
It turns fear into a product.
It turns outrage into a habit.
It turns anxiety into a baseline. And then it calls that Being informed.
Now, I want to be disciplined here because it is a monarchy of fear that we are dealing with.
The answer is not to pretend violence isn't happening, because it is.
The answer is not to tell people to bury their head. That is not the solution. Turn a blind eye. Oh well, I don't do social media so I don't have to worry about it. That's not. It is. We are a society that is being affected by it.
The answer is to recognize that visibility is not the same thing as frequency and engagement is not the same thing as importance. In that the most viral thing in your feed is not necessarily the most representative thing in your country or your community.
And that distinction matters because if you lose it, you will begin to interpret the world through the lens of whatever the system is incentivized to show you.
Because I'm telling you what you see even. I mean, it's like we are stuck in this 24 hour loop. You wake up in the middle of night, people are reaching for the phones, they see something violent, we're seeing that kids cannot regulate their own emotions.
They think it's okay to go from 0 to 100 on the emotional scale and attack back.
It is not okay when you're starting to see that our political leaders that say vitriolic, hateful language and then dismiss that their language is being act upon because somebody actually felt like our democracy is under attack or that someone should die. It is not.
I mean honestly, we should probably say this is really, I mean in a way reprehensible how our society has denigrated to the fact that it's as shots are being fired, people are being shoved underneath tables and, and evacuated at a White House correspondence dinner that there were people in the crowd going, God, I hope he got Trump.
What the hell has happened to our country?
That is not normal. The amount. Look, you could hate him all you want, you can disagree with how he talks and stuff, but I have never seen the level of disrespect, dehumanization and explosive emotionality for every little thing.
And it's interesting because maybe, just maybe the solution is we need to go back to simpler times.
Because what we are experiencing based on what you see on constant social media or 24 hour news loops is not reality. It is a product.
We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I want to pull this together and talk about what a discipline response actually looks like. Because if you only focus on the symptoms and not the structure, you don't fix the problem. And we need solutions. We need to figure out how we can take back control and start gearing our society back to being a respected, respectful society. Tune right back in after this foreign welcome back. At this point, we've identified the problem clearly.
We have serious events. We have a cultural environment that has loosened boundaries. We have a media structure that amplifies intensity. We have a population, especially young people, being trained by repeated exposure. So the question becomes, what does a disciplined response look like?
Because the end, the undisciplined responses are everywhere.
One of this undisciplined response is denial. Deny, deny, and deny doesn't happen. Oh, that's not my kid. Oh, that's just an extremist position.
It's not a proper response.
Another panic screaming out there. Oh, my God, the, you know, the sky is falling now.
Another undisciplined respond since turning violence into entertainment, normalizing the killing of a president, normalizing attacks just because someone doesn't agree with your opinion.
Another is treating threats as humor because there's nothing humorous when someone is actually threatening you.
Another is excusing rhetoric when it's our side, but saying, oh, but we're not responsible if someone takes our rhetoric, rhetoric saying that we need to punch them, we need to attack them. If you see them, show them who you are and teach them a lesson. You need to own what you say.
You may not be walking the walk that you talk, but others are walking the talk that you're giving. And you need to take responsibility for that. And I'm looking towards Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, I'm looking at Schumer and as well as President Trump. Stop the vitriol.
All those responses in different ways feed the same problem.
So here's the standard I want to put down. Plus, plainly, I mean, flat out, political violence is evil.
You do not have to admire someone to believe they should not be attacked.
You do not have to agree with someone to believe they should not be hunted.
And we have to be willing to say that sentence no matter who the target is.
No exceptions.
No. Yeah, but he's the mean orange man.
No.
And don't say it's complicated, because now here's where the my attorney brain kicks in.
A society is not held together only by laws. It is held together by norms, by ethics, by morals, by standards.
And norms are enforced socially long before they are enforced legally.
So when you normalize assassination talk as comedy, you are not just making a joke.
You are weakening the very fiber of this country. You are weakening a norm when you Share violent clips for entertainment. You're not just staying informed.
You are training your nervous system and your child's nervous system and others nervous system to treat suffering as content.
And when you treat suffering as content, you reduce human beings into objects.
That is the path to cruelty.
And cruelty is not a political strategy.
Cruelty is a moral failure.
And I'm looking at all sides of this now. I also want to add something that is easy to miss.
If we are serious about healing the country. I mean, we are on just months away of celebrating our 250th anniversary of independence. What some may recall and don't put our morals and what we see today back then, I'm not talking about the slavery. I'm talking about that, that independence, that declaration of independence, what had occurred in 1776, that was true enlightenment.
We should be coming together as a country to celebrate the achievements what our forefathers have put forward. What many of us or many of our parents have left countries so that they can have the American dream.
So we cannot only condemn violence when it is politically convenient.
We cannot only care when it is our team. I mean, do you look back several years ago when a gunman gunned down Republican senators for the, you know, that were practicing for the annual Democrat Republican softball game?
That is not normal.
When you have people that are wearing MAGA hats, whether you like it or not, they should not be attacked.
We cannot only grieve when it is our tribe.
We cannot say that it's unfair because you believe in one opinion and don't like somebody else's opinion.
Because that is how we fracture.
And a fractured nation is easier to push into the next crisis.
And here's a data point that matters.
As one scholar noted, political violence incidents over a multi year period are relatively rare, measured in dozens.
But hate crimes are far more numerous.
Thousands. And those crimes do not just harm individual.
We're talking violent crimes. There are thousands of violent crimes occurring and it's not just harming the individual.
It poisons communities.
They teach fear, they teach suspicion. They teach people to see neighbors as enemies rather than common friends that may have differing opinions.
So if we want to be morally serious, we have to widen our lenses.
We had to condemn political violence. We have to condemn political violent rhetoric. We have to condemn our own leaders and hold their feet to the fire. And I'm not saying literally to say enough is enough. Lead by example.
If you want to lead by example, then tell, then show us by talking the talk and walking the walk. So therefore stop inciting violence and we have to condemn the broader culture of dehumanization that makes violence easier to justify.
So now what can you do this week?
Not in theory, in practice.
Okay, first, stop sharing violent clips unless there is a clear public interest reason to do so.
You can hit that not interested button. The more of us that go, not interested, not interested, it may shake up the algorithm to stop playing those.
Because remember, every share is a vote to say, keep giving us more.
Every share tells the system. Show me more of this.
Second, refuse assassination jokes in your circles, left or right. I never heard anyone joking on television about assassinating Obama, assassinating Biden, assassinating Clinton or W. Bush or George W. Bush. Excuse me.
And we should be refusing these styles of jokes.
Not because you are humorless, because you are disciplined, because you actually deserve better, because you understand that repeated exposure moves boundaries.
And thirdly, audit your media diet.
If a channel profits from rage, it will keep you enraged.
If an account profits from humiliation, it will keep you contemptuous.
And if a platform profits from fear, it will keep you afraid.
Now, it's interesting. There's this commercial now that comes out and it shows clips of home movies from back in the 70s going, how did we survive when we didn't have constant social media presence? We didn't worry about posting our latest outfits or food or. Or, you know, pictures next to a Lamborghini or something. We just lived. We experienced. We were in the moment. And maybe that is what we need to get back to.
Less reliance on social media. Rest. Less reliant on being, you know, seen 24, 7 or showing people, hey, look at me. And actually experiment experiencing it.
And fourth, talk to your kids. Plainly not with panic, with clarity, with calmness.
Tell them that's a real person, that's a real family.
And your heart is not meant to treat suffering like entertainment.
Then do something even more important, because this is where it is. A wave. One little pebble. The waves increase, increase, increase. And that is to model it.
Let your children see that you turn off your phone.
Let them see you refuse to watch the clip or even state, not interested.
Let them see you choose dignity over dopamine.
And fifth, rebuild local community.
The offline world reduces online radicalization.
It gives young people identity that isn't built on outrage. It gives them belonging that isn't built on cruelty. And it gives them a life that is bigger than the feed.
And that is how you reverse normalization. You do not reverse it by yelling at the screen. You reverse it by rebuilding standards in our homes, in our friendships, in our churches. In our neighborhoods and in our community.
Because a nation cannot remain free if it loses its sense of humanity.
And a people cannot remain self governing if they are being trained to treat violence as normal.
That is the line and that is the fight.
Thank you for watching another episode of we the People. I am Alina Gonzalez Dachry. Wishing you all a good night. It.
