I keep coming back to Paul Graham’s Tweet: when a political figure is attacked, the story is rarely as grand as his supporters want it to be. We want the powerful cabal. We want the hidden hand. We want to believe that history is being sculpted by titans colluding in the shadows. The harder truth is that history is often twisted by someone unremarkable, unstable, and unorganized.
It isn’t the grand conspiracy.
It’s the random nut.
Lincoln, Kennedy, Reagan, Trump, Pelosi, Kirk - pick your example. We retroactively mythologize their attackers into representatives of something larger than themselves.
We don’t want to believe that Booth was a delusional actor chasing his own fame, that Oswald was a lonely drifter with a warped ego, that the man with the hammer outside Pelosi’s home was just a fringe obsessive drowning in his own stew of online paranoia.
The impulse is to inflate them into agents of something systemic.
The human mind craves meaning, and meaning is more satisfying when it involves plots, networks, “them.”
I understand the temptation. When someone with power, charisma, or influence is attacked, their supporters need the death // assault to be proportional to the stature of the victim. A world where Kennedy is cut down by a nobody feels unbearable. A world where a president can be brought down by a man barely able to plan his own life feels like chaos, and we don’t like chaos. So we construct the story that makes us feel stable again: it wasn’t a random nut, it was The Enemy.
But if we’re being honest with ourselves, that’s a dangerous fantasy. Because conspiracies, as terrifying as they sound, can theoretically be protected against. You can find the cabal. You can wiretap the plotters. You can break up the network. You can guard the airports and seal the borders. But how do you safeguard against the next person who wakes up in the morning, hears a voice or reads a meme, picks up a weapon, and decides today is the day? You can’t. That’s the brutal fact.
And if you ask me, randomness is scarier than conspiracy.
This is where the left and the right both lose their footing. The right wants to believe that Trump’s attackers - a shooter at a rally or hiding out at his Golf Course - are acting as coordinated members of a regime. The left wants to believe Pelosi’s assailant or the January 6th rioters are the forward army of fascism. In reality, many of these acts are carried out by individuals at the margins of sanity, by loners whose ideological convictions are shallow excuses for personal instability.
There’s no catharsis in admitting that.
There’s no narrative arc.
Just disorder.
I remember watching the Kennedy assassination footage as a teenager and thinking, it can’t possibly be the truth that one guy in a book depository shaped the destiny of a superpower. Surely the Soviets had a hand. Surely the mob. Surely the CIA. I didn’t want to face the fact that the hinge of history sometimes comes down to a man who got a rifle and aimed well once.
Do we really want to live in a world where history is so fragile, where one unhinged person can alter the trajectory of nations? No. And so we tell ourselves it must have been something bigger. But lying to ourselves makes us weaker. It makes us build defenses against the wrong threats. It makes us chase phantoms while ignoring the real problem - that the line between order and chaos is a single individual deciding to act.
Saying this out loud feels like sacrilege. It feels cold to strip meaning from events that shook millions. It feels like insulting the dead to say their killer was a nobody. It feels like denying the importance of the victim. But it’s the truth. Lincoln’s greatness isn’t affected because Booth wasn’t an agent of a shadow empire. Kennedy’s legacy isn’t diminished because Oswald was a pathetic loner. If anything, their greatness stands taller against the smallness of those who tried to erase them.
Here’s the part that enrages people: the more we pretend attacks on political figures are coordinated plots, the more we empower the next random nut. Every conspiracy theory, every viral YouTube video “proving” hidden networks, every fever swamp blog painting maps of invisible elites - it all gives the delusional loner the stage he craves. We turn his lonely act into world-historical significance. We feed the beast.
So maybe the heresy we need is acceptance. Acceptance that history is more vulnerable than we like to admit. Acceptance that no amount of surveillance, fences, or bodyguards can guarantee safety. Acceptance that freedom itself carries the risk of instability, because freedom means individuals will sometimes act outside reason, outside institutions, outside sanity. That’s not a comfortable truth. It’s barely tolerable. But it’s real.
I don’t like saying this. I’d much rather believe in the big story, the master narrative, the powerful Them. It’s cleaner and it’s cinematic and it’s damned easier. But the world is not a movie, and the villains are not Bond villains. They’re far more pathetic, which makes them rather more terrifying.
We’d do well, left and right alike, to remember that. The random nut is not an outlier to be explained away with elaborate plots. He is the plot. And our refusal to accept that is why we keep being surprised when it happens again.
