It is raining in Minneapolis today. A cold, all day rain, the kind that arrives as a rebuke after a few days of seductive spring temperatures that had people believing the nice was here to stay. Even my big expensive water dogs don’t like the pouring cold, but they like to shit in the neighbors yard, so we walk.
The streets are full of earthworms. Thousands of them crossing the sidewalks, slithering the edge of driveways, each a meandering migrant from here to there, or blithely stretched along curbs and drainage easements. They’ve spent the winter deep below the god forsaken frozen crust of ice and snow, waiting, in the dark, until the conditions changed. I can’t blame them for wanting to move.
The rain didn’t create them. They’re always there, just a few feet below every frozen step, or tangled in the garden trowel of summer’s malleable soil. It’s the natural structure in the cycle that draws them out, creating the conditions by which they respond, knowing they’re safe, that they won’t freeze. The worm doesn’t need the rain to exist. It needs the rain to move.
In the landscape of human political engagement, permission structures work the same way, giving hatred and radicalism the ability to move. They don’t generate hatred, anymore than rain makes the worm. That’s the misunderstanding in how people talk about mobs, about the specific social weather that produces ugly rhetoric and violence. We want there to be a source, an origin, a bad actor, a nut job, who manufactured the thing. It’s cleaner that way. It assigns responsibility in a generalized direction, over there somewhere. Close enough.
Many of our fellow citizens harbor low-grade hatreds the way soil holds worms. Quietly, usually inert in the rumble of ordinary life, remaining in the subcutaneous layer, rarely emerging, except at family dinners or over drinks with that asshole that voted for that asshole. But bigger passions come out with enough rain, and movement feels not just possible but logical, necessary, and righteous.
What changes the conditions for the worm is rain and warmth. For the radical it’s permission. This doesn’t require authority, or a written note style of permission. It’s the permission of agreement, of company.
Consider Me Too. The proposition was time’s up for predators and harassers, for the patriarchy and the powerful to be brought to heel for their sexist barbarism. Though rape and sexual violence were already criminal offenses, the cultural conversation created a permission structure for women to safely come forward with their own stories, to tell their truth, to put the powerful in check.
No one I know thought this was a bad thing. But underneath the accountability mechanism was something more primal. The declaration itself, the act of mass, public, named identification of a target class, functioned as rain. It dissolved the barrier between impulse and action for so many women who had been carrying something and waiting.
Some of what emerged was legitimate. Some of the justice was well served. But the structure didn’t distinguish. Once the rain comes the soil releases everything it has been holding, and there are few mechanisms inside it that separate the warranted from the unwarranted. The conditions don’t know the difference. And critically, the people doing the emerging rarely know the difference either. They feel the rain. They move. They experience the movement as justice because the weather tells them it is. Everywhere and everyone all at once looks like an unimpeachable reality. But it’s not reality. It’s why some shooters claim their actions just made sense, that someone had to do it, as if the impulse to kill was universally felt and they were simply the one willing to act on it. An unreasonable action that looks entirely reasonable from inside the weather system these people have been soaking in.
Now the rain has a new name. The target is different. The platforms that function as soil, warming, concentrating, making the dark wet and inviting, are doing what soil does. X. Blue Sky. Truth. The comment sections and the group threads and the dinner tables where a certain kind of contempt has become not just acceptable but socially required. You demonstrate your values by the temperature of your hatred. Hating Trump correctly has become a credential. A fashion. An identity for the left, and now in some factions of the right as well.
The zealot who takes it further is not an aberration. They are the logical product of saturation. They emerge because the conditions are right, because the rain has been falling long enough and hard enough that movement feels not just permitted but ordained. The millions who performed the right contempt, said the right things, cheered from the right angle, they are the worms who didn’t make it quite that far. Not more virtuous. Just not quite as wet.
The structure doesn’t require them to know what they’re participating in. It only requires the rain.
None of this is an argument for diminished responsibility. The people who threaten, who harass, who pull triggers, they own what they do. The rain doesn’t absolve the worm that crosses the road and gets crushed under a tire. The permission structure explains the conditions that made action feel rational. It doesn’t transfer the moral weight of that action onto the culture, the platforms, the rhetoric, or the rain. Mangione chose. The people who came for me chose. Understanding why the conditions were right is not the same as excusing what people did inside them.
Luigi Mangione didn’t emerge from nowhere. He emerged from years of saturated soil. The logic was simple: insurance companies kill people, the courts protect them, the system is captured, and therefore. The “therefore” is where vigilantism lives. It doesn’t require psychosis. It requires convincing enough people that official mechanisms of accountability have failed, that the target class has earned what’s coming, that action outside the law is not crime but correction. Mangione pulled a trigger. Millions of people felt the rain and didn’t. That’s not a moral distinction. That’s a matter of degree.
The same structure produces political assassination attempts. The same structure produces coordinated harassment campaigns. The same structure produced the people who wanted me dead.
I know this from the inside.
In 2018 I was accused. It started with Weinstein. Arguably it started with Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, and the misogynists who needed to be felled. The rhetorical rain had been falling long enough to lubricate the passions, to warm the soil. People who had known me for decades discovered a strange new certainty about me, nearly overnight. People who had never questioned anything I’d done found it not just possible but necessary and even natural to piss on my name. They weren’t manufacturing hatred. They were responding to the downpour. The mechanism told them it was righteous, that the courts wouldn’t be enough to overcome a powerful man at some dinky arts festival in a Minnesota cornfield. Some of them said so directly.
I am not Donald Trump. Neither are most targets of these structures. It doesn’t require a president or a celebrity or a traditional villain of national proportion. It requires a profile high enough to serve as a focal point. The actors experience it as conscience. That is what makes it so effective and so dangerous. When you’re committing violence out of conscience, misplaced or otherwise, strictly speaking, you don’t need to be a lunatic to take action.
These days you don’t need to be guilty of any sin to be the target of violent rhetoric, or violence itself. Last August I visited the Renaissance Festival for the first time since my acquittal, nearly three years after the fact and nearly seven years after my arrest. I became a target once again. The dumb and the damned pitched a fit that I would be allowed entry. Social media roiled. People threatened. Luckily I was only there for a few hours before I went home, unscathed.
Given what I’ve been through, you might forgive me for raging against those who perpetrated this, the cast of characters so deeply dishonest, the painter, the prince, the king, the courtly fool, the peasant, and the moron. But it was never an option for me to step on the worms and bait my hook with them. These days I pick up hundreds of worms caught in the rain, stranded by clearing skies and sunshine, and throw them back into the moistened grass.
That’s what you do with the worms when they come out. You save them, and set them free.
