The attack that ended the lives of Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, unfolded swiftly. As the two Israeli embassy aides left a reception at Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum on 21 May, a man pointed a 9-mm pistol at the couple and fired 21 rounds. Witnesses heard the assailant shout “Free Palestine!” The gunman, later identified as 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez of Chicago, later told officers, “I did it for Gaza.” Rodriguez now faces federal counts of first-degree murder and of killing foreign officials. Interim US attorney Jeanine Pirro described the murders as a “death penalty eligible case.”

Lischinsky and Milgrim’s deaths — unfolding amid a war that has already radicalised debate worldwide — carry a grim sense of inevitability. The rhetoric of activism has grown not only more urgent but more violent. In 2025, explosive, headline-grabbing acts of political violence perpetrated by US nationals have now displaced school shootings as the country’s prevailing nightmare, just as Pirate Wires founder Mike Solana presciently predicted after Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. (As a morbid data point towards Solana’s prediction, Rodriguez praised Mangione in social media posts).

There may also be data that indicates that the gap between posting and physical world gunfire is shrinking. Robert Pape, director of the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats, points to a series of national surveys he and political scientist Liliana Mason have run since 2021 that reveal a slow — and critically, bipartisan — rise in the share of Americans who regard political violence as “sometimes justified.” Pape argues that the United States has entered an “era of violent populism.”

Extremists may assume that a segment of their audience—something nearly everyone now has—will celebrate. “No more hashtag activism” has taken on new and very frightening possibilities — possibilities alluded to and, indeed, illustrated by Rodriguez himself.

In his 900-word manifesto, he argued that posting was powerless, insisting that “an armed action” must be staged on US soil to shatter public indifference. Rodriguez supplies almost no logistical detail, casting violence instead as a moral performance, similar in character, if not content, to Mangione’s hastily scrawled note. In some sense, Mangione and Rodriguez both have lowered the operational bar. Gone are the days of detailed, clandestine how-tos: today’s violence requires only a weapon and a grievance. The victim may be others, or it may be yourself. This offers would-be imitators an easily personalised template.

Copycat behaviour, of course, long predates smartphones. Imitation is human nature, and its happening at scale has become a by-product of mass media — not digital media alone. What platforms like X and TikTok add, however, is a more lethal blend of speed and scale: violence can be livestreamed, clipped, and reframed before police even secure the scene. Social capital now accrues not only to the so-called “main character” who pulls the trigger but also to the journalists first on the scene, the self-appointed archivists and in some cases, even super-fans who chronicle the act.

As novelist Leigh Stein astutely observes in her latest book, If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You, algorithms privilege what feels familiar. Mimicry is the engine of social-media success. The real skill lies in knowing when to move on.

A human form in crisis — burning, bleeding, collapsing — hijacks attention in a way “sincere-posting” never will. Extremists may mistakenly believe they’re punching through the noise, but in truth they are submitting to the noise’s own logic. The quickest route to virality is visceral spectacle, and there is nothing more visceral than a wounded or self-sacrificed body. That insight reshapes the incentives of political violence.

What began as an attempt to break through indifference ends as another throwaway post, swallowed by the feed almost as quickly as it appears. Whether the Washington murders mark an endpoint, or a threshold depends on the collective response. Every new shock may further debase the cause it claims to champion.

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Katherine Dee is a writer. To read more of her work, visit defaultfriend.substack.com.

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