Tribal Terrorism
Over the last two years, brainwashed by the narratives of networked tribalism, people have been self-mobilizing as assassins targeting their tribal enemies. Let's dig into this.
Over the last two years, there have been multiple assassination attempts targeting Trump and a successful assassination of Charlie Kirk.
July 13, 2024, Thomas Matthew Crooks fired shots at Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
September 15, 2024, Ryan Wesley Routh was spotted with a rifle near Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, while Trump was golfing.
September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk (founder of Turning Point USA, prominent conservative activist, and Trump ally) was fatally shot by a sniper while speaking at an event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
February 22, 2026, Austin Tucker Martin (21) breached the secure perimeter at Mar-a-Lago (Trump’s Florida resort), armed with a shotgun and a gas can.
April 25, 2026, Cole Tomas Allen (31, from California) fired shots while attempting to storm the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton, where Trump and administration officials were present.
This violence has a pattern that sets it apart from the random violence associated with it.
Globalization hollowing out the nation-state (loss of societal cohesion, economic stress, rampant corruption, unbounded competition, loss of identity and trust, etc.).
Becoming global villagers (McLuhan). Interconnectivity turned us into global villagers — narrow-minded, petty, vindictive, greedy, ready to burn outsiders (witches, heretics, etc.).
A wholesale psychological collapse driven by new technologies. Networking (from AI to social networking) is aggressively rewiring our minds, and we are still far from finding a stable psychological and social framework that can successfully integrate this technology. Until then, depression, anxiety, and delusion will run amok like a plague.
Networked Tribalism
The pattern driving this violence is networked tribalism. Networked tribalism emerged during the 2016 Presidential campaign (see my early work on this: Weaponized Social Networks), and as it evolves, it has become central to our sociopolitical system. Here’s how and why it emerged;
Networked tribalism is the first, early solution to the information overload created by packetized media. It does this by providing a shared, co-curated context that enables participants to rapidly process events, information, and ‘facts’ through tribal pattern matching (picking information out of the flow and snapping it into the tribe’s prefabricated pattern for rapid sensemaking).
Unfortunately, the patterns developed through networked tribalization are extremely crude, chaotic, and warlike. Unlike classic tribal narratives (the story of our tribe’s emergence, what we have overcome together, and why we are better together), the narratives that form the basis of networked tribalism center on opposition to a shared enemy (an approach similar to the one used by fascism, one of the three competing approaches to organizing a nation-state).
As a result of this negative approach, tribal patterns focus on identifying, contextualizing, and analyzing every behavior, action, and utterance of the enemy to vilify, dehumanize, and demonize them. Like classical tribalism (where we spent 99.99% of our time as homo sapiens sapiens) and some extreme forms of modern nationalism, this makes it possible to see everyone outside of the tribe as less than human (which lowers all barriers to killing people outside of the tribe).
In this specific situation, tribal pattern matching turns every news item into a characterization of Trump as an existential enemy, evil incarnate, a Nazi/Fascist, a traitor, a threat to democracy, etc. Every assassin or would-be assassin’s manifesto is full of this type of pattern matching.
