Much is already known about the gunman who killed three Black customers at a Dollar General shop in Jacksonville, Florida, yesterday. He was in possession of an AR-15-style weapon and a handgun; he left manifestos about his hatred toward African Americans; he was wearing a tactical-style uniform as if going to war. There are still questions about how he acquired the guns, his mental state, and whether he had accomplices. But the basic storyline is written. He made it easy. He wanted us to know.

His actions yesterday were not just a hate crime. They were a performance for all the world to see. This is the age of mass shooting as production. And we misunderstand what is happening if we see this as a play with only one act at a time.

At the powerful post-shooting press conference yesterday, Sheriff T. K. Waters was clear, sharing as much information as was readily available. He did not sanitize, quoting the N-word directly from the manifesto, the shock of hearing the word putting to rest such euphemisms as racially motivated or tinged.

Waters plainly wanted to calm the public, the Black public, by stating that the gunman “acted completely alone,” as if to assure the community that it was no longer under threat. His statement that “there is absolutely no evidence that the shooter is part of any large group” may technically be true but is a false narrative. White supremacists, and in particular neo-Nazis, are not acting in isolation, and they like to put on a show.

Right-wing violence is done by individuals, but they are organizing and learning from an online apparatus as well as the actions of previous like-minded killers. Mass killings from the past, in New Zealand or Norway or South Carolina, are studied and replicated, each feeding off of the others. Like foreign terror groups, these men seek to use violence as a way to attract attention to their cause. “The culture of martyrdom and insurgency within groups like the Taliban and ISIS is something to admire and reproduce in the neo-Nazi terror movement,” a 2019 online poster advocated on a neo-Nazi site. These killings are done to amplify that movement’s perverse narrative of America—that white people are still in charge and that many of them are willing to kill to prove it, and they do so publicly to terrorize.

In an age of social media and the dark web, members of this sect find one another on platforms that welcome them. The public display of hate is part of the act. In recent years in Jacksonville, and in Florida more generally, the neo-Nazi movement has grown. Earlier this year, neo-Nazis projected anti-Semitic messages on buildings—look at us!—throughout the state. These were linked to a Jacksonville-based neo-Nazi group called National Socialist Florida (NSF). We do not yet know if the Jacksonville shooter had any knowledge of or ties to that group, but a federal civil-rights investigation will surely look into that question.

According to information released at yesterday’s press conference, before he pulled the trigger, the gunman called his father. He directed him to look at his computer, where he had left his manifestos, the playbill of right-wing terror. He wanted to make sure his intentions were known. Hate-filled screeds were written to his parents, law enforcement, and the media; he was leaving nothing unsaid.

A picture posted by the police shows one firearm with swastikas drawn on it, as if it had to be branded not simply as a gun but as a Nazi one. We get the message.

The Jacksonville killer, though, wasn’t just killing for his own and neo-Nazi branding. His other audience was the Black community, there and throughout the nation. After all, he was first spotted earlier in the day not at the store but at Edward Waters University, Florida’s oldest historically Black university. In a state where Governor Ron DeSantis has fought the culture wars around African American studies, Edward Waters was founded in 1866 by members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church for freed Black people and their children. Every HBCU in America—as well as their students and the students’ parents—will feel vulnerable, especially after last year’s slate of bomb threats against them. An on-campus security officer had approached the Jacksonville gunman as he was putting on his tactical gear and asked him to leave. The killer didn’t want a confrontation; he wanted a hunt. The Dollar General store, with its unprotected customers, is down the street.

The Saturday shooting occurred on the fifth anniversary of the Jacksonville Landing mass shooting—a fact the killer was apparently aware of. It also occurred on the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the civil-rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Whether the killer knew this doesn’t really matter. African Americans do.

The Jacksonville shootings could have been worse. The gunman certainly had the ability to kill more. What he did do with chilling exactitude was carefully produce a day of violence by controlling the message and means. The public will talk of gun control and mental illness, but the story is also the story. And what we know for sure is that there will be more performances, with new actors and victims, over and over again, in large and small community venues, to continue this endless and outraging American tragedy. This play never ends.

The future of progressive politics in America just might revolve around whether someone like Chris Murphy, a U.S. senator from a prosperous New England state, can find common ground culturally and politically with a man like Oliver Anthony. Earlier this month, Anthony, a young country singer, dropped his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” into the nation’s political-cultural stew pot. A red-bearded high-school dropout, former factory hand, and virtual unknown, he strummed a guitar in the Virginia woods and sang with an urgent twang about the despair of working-class life:

I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day

Overtime hours for bullshit pay

So I can sit out here and waste my life away

Drag back home and drown my troubles away.

His song, which became an unlikely national hit, also took jabs at “obese” welfare recipients and high taxes. The right applauded and that turned off the left. Vox christened Anthony a right-wing breakout star; Variety floated accusations that he was an “industry plant”; The Washington Post divined in his song the “mainstreaming” of conspiracy culture. The press coverage of Anthony, and the dismissive tone on the left, would change only on Friday, when the singer released a video in which he disowned the right’s championing of his song.

From the start, Senator Murphy, a liberal Democrat from Connecticut, winced at the anti-welfare and anti-tax tropes, which are hardly new to country music. But he was more struck by the anguish encoded in a haunting song by an artist who struggles with alcoholism and depression, and who lives in a camper in rural Virginia.

I got on the phone with Murphy recently to talk about all of this. “To just ridicule and dismiss the things that he is saying is a real lost opportunity,” the senator told me. “I worry that we are entering a world where we don’t talk unless people are 110 percent in alignment with us.”

[Read: Why Democrats are losing Hispanic voters]

By proposing a broader conversation, Murphy has given himself an intriguing task. At times, he wonders if liberals can recognize a primal call of pain for what it is. Anthony sings in an argot filled with cultural allusions that may sound offensive or at least alien to some (one commentator criticized his supposedly inferior use of rhyme). Progressives who want to fix a broken economy, Murphy argues, better find a way to hear out people like Anthony. It was with that in mind that a few weeks ago Murphy typed out a post on X (formerly known as Twitter):     

a. I think progressives should listen to this. In part, bc it’s just a good tune.

b. But also bc it shows the path of realignment. Anthony sings about the soullessness of work, shit wages and the power of the elites. All problems the left has better solutions to than the right.

Murphy’s comment did not please his tribe. Some social-media liberals—skeptical that ties between Democrats and the rural working class can be repaired—decried Murphy’s apostasy and wondered archly if he had hit his head. Others muttered that the 50-year-old second-term senator deserved a primary challenge.

Murphy is a repeat provocateur. In July, he tweeted that “there are a lot of social conservatives who believe in populist economic policies, and it would be a good idea to have those people a part of a Democratic/left coalition and accept a bit more intra-movement friction on culture issues as a consequence.” That post included a thoroughly unscientific but still revealing poll that found that 77 percent of those who responded disagreed with him.

Murphy insisted to me that he remains steadfast in support of gay and transgender rights—a major wedge separating upscale college-educated liberals from socially conservative, less affluent voters. But Murphy declined to sidestep his broader view: Working-class people, rural and urban, are in pain and drifting away from politics in general and liberalism in particular.

Murphy backed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries and Joe Biden in the 2020 round but nods now toward a populist polestar. “There is a realignment afoot out there in America that is not recognized by the elites,” Murphy said. “Tackling this metaphysical crisis for the working class may involve elements of the Bernie Sanders coalition and the Trump coalition.”

The Democrats’ challenge, he notes, extends beyond white people. Latino working-class voters have steadily distanced themselves from Democrats in recent elections. Even Black working-class support, the very core of the Democratic Party, has shown signs of fracture. “The anguish in that song was voiced by a rural young white man,” Murphy said. “But that anguish would sound familiar if you were listening to a young African American in Hartford, Connecticut, talking about a system set up to enrich economic elites.”

Murphy, who is the clean-cut son of a corporate lawyer and has what appear to be national ambitions, makes an unlikely populist. But he seems intent on listening. Earlier this month, he headed to the Blue Ridge Mountains city of Boone, North Carolina, where 37 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. “It’s one of the poorest regions in America and offers a different conversation than in suburban America,” he said. “That trip reinforced to me that we should not obsess on what divides us.”

Deaths of despair—that is, from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcoholism—are rising at a frightful pace. Overdose deaths in the United States topped 106,000 in 2021. By comparison, the European Union, which has 100 million more people, recorded about 6,200 overdose deaths that year. Such deaths often break along economic and educational lines.

Jennifer Sherman, a Washington State University professor who is president of the Rural Sociological Society, has spent decades among working-class and poor people in the mountains and plains of the West. She has observed a pervasive sense of loss. Workers drop out or end up in service jobs, she told me, and fight losing struggles with the wealthy over zoning and for control of land, forests, and water. “If the Democrats want to figure out how to be relevant, they have to move beyond ‘Trust us, we care,’” Sherman said.

The Republicans are aware of these shifting class tectonics. “I have a very smart conservative friend who describes the next five years as a race,” Murphy said, “to see whether the right can become more economically progressive before the left becomes a bigger tent.”

In the current tumult, some people with heterodox politics see opportunities for political and economic change. Sohrab Ahmari, the editor of Compact magazine, identifies as a man of the right, but his politics are a curious amalgam. He is a Catholic cultural conservative who also is pro-union and admires President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. His recent book, Tyranny, Inc., argues that Republican and Democratic leaders have deregulated business and allowed corporations to gut the stable well-paying jobs of working-class Americans. It’s as if Opus Dei danced a tango with the Catholic Worker.

[Read: How working-class white voters became the GOP’s foundation]

Ahmari gives grudging credit to Biden for sluicing money into working-class communities and openly admires Murphy for challenging a neoliberal writ that has dominated both parties. The Connecticut senator “takes seriously the dealignment of the rural working class and the Democratic Party,” Ahmari told me. “He’s right to insist on more from his party than sneering.”

Several times in our conversation, Murphy mentioned his party’s populist standard-bearer, Bernie Sanders. That reminded me of a day several decades ago when I traveled to the Lamoille River Valley in northern Vermont to watch Sanders campaign in a room of dairy farmers—predominantly French American, Catholic, and conservative. Sanders was none of those, fluent only in Brooklynese. He went on about milk prices and corporations fixing rates and hammering people like them, and the audience nodded along. He would take 65 percent of the vote in that county; as one of those farmers told me: “Bernie speaks like me. He’s got my vote.”

Murphy is seeking something like that language to address the pain of the country’s working class. Perhaps that’s a pipe dream and American politics are too broken.

But as a countervailing view, consider this: On Friday, Anthony posted a YouTube video of himself sitting in the cab of his truck and talking about the swirl of the past few weeks. It was fascinating in all respects.

“It’s aggravating seeing people on conservative news trying to identify with me, like I’m one of them,” he said at one point. “I see the right trying to characterize me as one of their own,” he continued, “and I see the left trying to discredit me, I guess in retaliation.” Addressing complaints from the left that he is attacking the poor, he quoted some lyrics from another of his songs:

Needles in the street, folks hardly surviving

on sidewalks next to highways full of cars self-driving,

The poor keep hurtin’, and the rich keep thrivin’.

He sounds like exactly the sort of guy whom progressives should be trying to win over.

  

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Good morning, and welcome to The Daily’s new Sunday culture edition. Every weekend, one Atlantic writer will reveal what’s keeping them entertained.

Today’s special guest is senior editor Hanna Rosin, who hosts our Radio Atlantic podcast. Hanna is rewatching The Sopranos with her teenage son, reading three pages of a graphic novel before bed every night, and taking “evidence-based” life advice from an astrologist.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

David Brooks: The new old age When wealth fixes (almost) everything The raunchy teen comedy gets a queer twist.

The Culture Survey: Hanna Rosin

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: I’m watching The Sopranos with my teenage son, beginning to end. I’d forgotten so many details: how Tony Soprano’s eye twitches when he gets mad. How early-Millennial Christopher Moltisanti is, with his thirst for minor fame. Carmela’s hair! Uncle Junior’s vanity! I also forgot what a large role Tony’s mother plays in the first season; somehow I remembered her dying earlier. And I forgot how absolutely correct and bold Dr. Melfi was in pushing Tony to realize that his mother was trying to kill him, and not in a Freudian way. #narctok would be impressed!

My son, who just took his first creative-writing class, keeps asking me, “Is this a comedy? Is it a drama?” And I want to answer from the lordly perch of the aged and wise, “Son, this is the source of all television as you have known it.” [Related: James Gandolfini, beyond The Sopranos]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: My favorite book I read this summer was The Rabbit Hutch, by Tess Gunty. She interweaves the stories of tenants in a crappy midwestern apartment building, and her character sketches are exquisite. Everything pops through them—American boredom, class, desperation, genius from unlikely sources, an undercurrent of violence. She’s a first-time novelist, and I will read everything she writes.

As for nonfiction, last week, I started When Crack Was King, by Donovan X. Ramsey (an adapted essay from it appeared in The Atlantic last month). We’ve done so much contemporaneous analysis of the opioid crisis: books, movies, documentaries, congressional hearings (if you want to dip into that analysis, watch All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, an incredible documentary about Nan Goldin that follows, among other things, her addiction to pain pills and then her successful protests against the infamous Sackler family’s museum philanthropy). But we haven’t reckoned with the crack era, or pinned it as the historical marker it was. I’m halfway through this book, and Ramsey gives the full view, from teenagers who grew up in the shadow of crack to city leaders who got overwhelmed by it. The sweep is long overdue. [Related: What we meant when we said crackhead]

My final pleasure of the summer: The Unfortunate Life of Worms, a graphic novel by the Italian illustrator Noemi Vola. I miss reading illustrated children’s books, so I read three pages before bed every night.

An online creator that I’m a fan of: Zillions of shiny creators have come and gone, but two have stuck around for me:

QueerCosmos, a.k.a. Colin Bedell. He does life advice for queer people by combining astrology and “evidence-based research.” (Fact-checkers of the world, move on). He is my Brené Brown, my Malcolm Gladwell, my Oprah, my therapist, and my couples therapist. May he live forever in the cosmos. Blackforager, a.k.a. Alexis Nikole. She forages in Columbus, Ohio. She’s my nutritionist, my healer, the fairy in the garden. Alexis makes me feel for a minute that I don’t need to buy or achieve or food-optimize my way to happiness. I just need to walk outside and find myself a mulberry leaf.

The upcoming entertainment event I’m most looking forward to: The Janelle Monáe tour. I already have tickets. The Age of Pleasure has been my easy soundtrack of the summer. [Related: The age of pleasure is here.]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to:

There is no single particular noun

for the way a friendship,

stretched over time, grows thin,

then one day snaps with a popping sound.

— “Special Problems in Vocabulary,” by Tony Hoagland

The end of a couple of close friendships, in the last half of my life, have shocked me. (Jennifer Senior, thank you for helping.) I didn’t see it coming, and I puzzle over it every day.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I went to this exhibit mostly to see Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death. I’d read a lot about this 2016 video by the cinematographer Arthur Jafa and seen it online, but never in a gallery space. The gentle phrase gallery space makes me wince when I think about the images in the video. It’s a cascading series of video clips about Black culture, Black experience, and violence. It feels like image poetry, the most concise and affecting portrayal of the Back American experience I’ve seen. As the actor Amandla Stenberg asks in the video, “What would America be like if we loved Black people as much as we love Black culture?”

The Week Ahead

Happiness Falls, a new novel by Angie Kim, illustrates a family in crisis after their beloved father goes missing (on sale Tuesday). One Piece, a live-action series adapted from the popular manga (premieres Thursday on Netflix) The Equalizer 3 features Denzel Washington as a former government assassin trying to reconcile with his past (in theaters Friday).

Essay

Lionsgate

You’ve Had a Good Run, Liam Neeson

About 15 years ago, Liam Neeson picked up a cellphone and growled a haunting, threatening monologue that changed the course of his career. Playing the hardened ex-CIA agent Bryan Mills in the movie Taken, Neeson warned the men who’d kidnapped his teenage daughter about his “very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.” It was the beginning of a surprising renaissance for the esteemed actor. In his mid-50s, he became an action star, headlining a long run of cheaply made, typically European-set thrillers in which he played gun-toting men in leather jackets with, well, murderous skills.

There are too many of these movies to name, and they tend to be better known by a one-sentence plot description. Neeson on a plane? That’s the marvelous Non-Stop. On a train? The decently schlocky The Commuter. Neeson at a ski resort? Cold Pursuit. Neeson as an ice-road trucker? They just called that one The Ice Road. Further evidence that the studios are running out of ideas for him comes in Neeson’s latest effort, the depressingly blank Retribution, which shamelessly steals the premise of another famous film.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

​​Stephen King: My books were used to train AI. Megan Rapinoe answers the critics. A still-shocking masterpiece worth catching in theaters Love is magic—and also hormones. Diamonds are for girls’ best friends. A very silly movie about some very good dogs The death of an indispensable person Poem: “A Better Story” Poem: “Heritage”

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Trump’s mug shot gives his haters nothing. What Bradley Cooper’s makeup can’t conceal The first GOP debate makes it obvious where the Republican Party is headed.

Photo Album

Migrating flamingos in Turkey, paddleboarding in Maine, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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