By Todd Davis
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinions on ScoonTV
We live in violent times. Many have written that before. Maybe it’s always true. Unless you believe Eden was once paradise on Earth, the world is, and always has been, violent. Violence, in turn, should be graded on a scale. Now, 1944, Black ‘44, that was a degree of violence that is incomprehensible to us today. And yet, that exists as a date in the past. Even though we are less than a hundred years removed from that time, it exists in black and white. Our 48-hour news cycle-trained brains can’t process it as a data point in relation to our own colorized time.
Today, we look around and see a major war in Ukraine. Whatever the final butcher’s bill ends up being, there, the dead will number over a million combined. Now, that is a number from the black and white era. It’s a number that will exceed every war since Japan surrendered on the deck of the USS Missouri, ending World War 2.
Ukraine isn’t even the only war killing thousands every week. There is currently a Sudanese civil war going on that is as brutal as you might expect, but it never gets a single mention on Meet the Press. Our attention spans can only process so much, and the Western mind tunes out what happens in Africa as Africa being Africa.
The Middle East is not Africa, though, and that we do follow, since Israel is the sacred cow of American politics. Problem is, Israel spent the last couple of years committing genocide and collective punishment on Palestinians. Ceasefires don’t heal those kinds of wounds.
Violence today is not rising randomly; it is the predictable output of political systems that deny legitimacy, representation, and moral accountability.
Israeli Butterfly Effect
Neoconservatives and their Democratic equivalent, neoliberals, are in unanimous agreement that Israel is, somehow, necessary to the national security interests of the United States. The physical location, a democracy amidst a sea of autocracies, is sold to the public as being important. Should you wish to attack or destabilize those autocracies, Israel serves as both a proxy attack dog and a stationary aircraft carrier from which your own attacks and schemes can be launched.
The question is never asked, or never allowed to be debated anyway, what would happen if we didn’t use Israel as a fulcrum at all? Perhaps, at one time, back when Jim Morrison was alive, Israel was the beleaguered Ewoks fending off a (very) poor man’s Empire personified by the Muslim stormtrooper hordes. One cannot even sell that fiction today as Israel is now the aggressor, violently attacking its neighbors over whatever squabble it invents. Israel causes more harm to America than any benefit it once provided.
President Trump’s rapprochement with Arab nations like Qatar makes this even more pertinent. Many of the countries in the Middle East are either American allies or are willing to be American allies. There are no government-sanctioned “Death to America” chants. And yet, somehow we have been tied to Israel to fight all the “From the River to the Sea” chants – a sentiment largely brought upon the Israelis by their own capricious and genocidal actions. Instead of Israel being our attack dog, we are Israel’s muscle-bound bodyguard, allowing it to act in any manner it pleases.
Murder, Political, and Otherwise
Israel’s geopolitical choices do what wars against people without the means to fight back always do: create more insurgents. People don’t randomly attack Jews because they are bored; they strike back against them because they’ve been radicalized by the death of a brother, cousin, or mother who was killed by the Israelis because they went too close to a fence, or were trying to get to a hospital, or it was a Wednesday in the Gaza Strip.
Asymmetrical violence does spread to America. Political violence is not new to this country. We’ve had major political violence since the pre-Civil War period with John Brown. The 1960s saw numerous political assassinations bring down a president, his brother, and social activists like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
Charlie Kirk falls into that category. Kirk wasn’t King, but he did preach a message of unity and peace. He wanted to talk to his neighbors. Listen to them. And hoped they would listen to him. Kirk was killed by an assassin’s bullet, and his death will be inspected for years, decades to come. Conspiracy theories will always surround it. The simple answer, the Occam’s Razor answer, is never going to be enough for people. Kirk was killed because we are a violent society that no longer wants to talk to each other.
Violence does not remain neatly contained within the borders where it originates. When states normalize asymmetrical force abroad, they export the logic of coercion, intimidation, and elimination back home. Citizens observe, imitate, or are affected indirectly by a society that prizes dominance over dialogue. When political opponents are treated as existential threats rather than fellow participants in a shared system, the line between conflict and murder begins to blur. At that point, violence no longer requires a distant battlefield; it only requires a proximate target.
Taxation Continues, Representation Recedes
Some of our founders started a revolution against the most powerful nation in the world at the time because they didn’t want to pay marginal taxes without having a say in the government at Whitehall.
Remarkably, the brazen architects of gerrymandering on both Republican and Democratic sides have put into place a system this year that is blatant taxation without representation. And people are already taxed immeasurably more today than they were in 1776. After the passage of Proposal 50 in November, California, a state of 39 million people, will redistrict away most Republican representation. A state that voted 40% Republican will have 3 out of 52 seats. That comes out to 5.77%. 38% of the state voted for Trump.
Political violence is inevitable under such a system. Citizens will feel disenfranchised. At first, they will drop out of the electoral process, saying their vote doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t under such a system as we’ve put into place. Eventually, a galvanizing force, economic duress, for example, will crystallize this very real grievance and lead to action against a government that no longer allows things to change at the ballot box.
When the system offers no outlet for change, and citizens feel their country is slipping beyond recognition as its streets, schools, and neighborhoods transform into something they no longer feel a part of, anger hardens into action. Immigration, unmanaged, allowed, endorsed, and weaponized by elites, becomes a spark on top of already volatile grievances.
The Immigration Question
Uniparty and gerrymandering as allies to ensure the American people are never able to electorally change a fixed system creates the environment for violence. Immigration is a force multiplier for that.
Immigration is not a side issue. It is not a culture-war distraction. It is not a talking point to be toggled on during election years and ignored afterward. Immigration is the slowest-moving, most consequential force acting on the legitimacy of the American political system, and therefore on the future trajectory of political violence in this country.
Empires do not usually collapse because they are invaded. They collapse because the people inside them no longer agree on what the empire is. The Austro-Hungarian Empire did not fall apart because it was poor or militarily weak. It fell apart because it was heterogeneous without being unified. Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Hungarians, Austrians. Each group lived under the same crown but not under the same identity. When pressure arrived, loyalty fractured along national, linguistic, and religious lines.
What followed was not peaceful decentralization but decades of Balkan bloodletting, as newly conscious nations fought to define themselves against one another. The tribe takes supremacy over the state.
The United States is not an empire in the 19th-century European sense, but it is becoming one in the sociological sense: a political structure governing multiple populations with divergent historical narratives, moral frameworks, and expectations of the state. Unlike past waves of immigration, which arrived into a comparatively coherent national story and were absorbed over generations, today’s immigration occurs amid institutional distrust, economic stagnation, and a governing class openly hostile to assimilation as a concept. The result fragments the country, exacerbating existing economic and political chasms.
A system that denies legitimacy and representation cannot absorb large-scale demographic change without consequence. When native-born citizens are told their votes no longer matter, their districts are engineered out of relevance, and their economic prospects are declining, immigration becomes a multiplier of grievance rather than a neutral demographic fact. At the same time, immigrants entering such a system are not joining a confident republic with a clear civic identity; they are entering a hollowed-out state that offers benefits without belonging and rights without responsibility. Integration isn’t even attempted. These people wave foreign flags and speak foreign languages. There is no social pressure to “become and act like an American”. Instead, it’s bringing Somalia or Haiti here, with free stuff paid for by Americans. That is managed coexistence, and it has failed everywhere it has been tried.
Political violence emerges from this kind of environment not because people are inherently violent, but because the system provides no legitimate outlet for conflict. Competing groups retreat into identity blocs. Politics becomes zero-sum. Institutions lose moral authority. At that point, every economic downturn, every police shooting, every foreign intervention becomes a spark in a room filled with gas. The violence is not random. It is the predictable output of a system that has severed the link between citizenship, representation, and accountability.
The United States has avoided this fate before because it possessed a strong, if imperfect, national identity capable of absorbing newcomers and channeling conflict through institutions that people believed in. That belief is eroding. Unmanaged, ideologically weaponized immigration accelerates it. Just as in the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, the danger is not difference itself, it is difference without a shared framework of meaning.
Violence, then, is not a moral failure of individuals. It is a system failure. When legitimacy disappears, when representation becomes performative, and when moral accountability is replaced by managerial indifference, history tells us what comes next. We have seen it in black and white. We are watching it re-emerge in color.
Curtis Scoon is the founder of ScoonTv.com Download the ScoonTv App to join our weekly livestream every Tuesday @ 8pm EST! Support true independent media. Become a VIP member www.scoontv.com/vip-signup/ and download the ScoonTv App from your App Store.
