Every so often, an event will take the media by storm and direct a lot of attention toward some social issue. This will typically happen when people have a lot of spare time. People had time to care about the shooting of George Floyd since everyone was at home, while the death of Peanut was quickly overtaken by the election news cycle. With Republicans controlling all three branches of the US government until at least 2026, it's the perfect time for people to care about some social issue that doesn't directly concern politicians and that they can't do much about but yell on the internet.
In these cases, the news cycle acts as a zero-sum game. The more attention people pay to one issue, the less attention they pay to some other issue. When people act logically, they will focus on issues they can do something about. But when emotion gets involved, all of that goes out the window. If some shocking event dominates the news cycle, we will often see a lot of hatred toward an abstract enemy (capitalism, systemic racism, etc.) and an absence of feasible policy goals. If there were feasible policy solutions, they would have likely been implemented before whatever the shocking event was. Defund the Police, for example, took off because people were angry, but fewer people supported it when police brutality was a statistic to be analyzed and not a litmus test of social awareness. During the riots of 2020, I have to wonder how much energy was dedicated toward a movement with remarkably few policy solutions, and how effectively it could have been spent on other things.
Nonetheless, the greatest difference between the activism regarding racism in 2020 and the discussion on healthcare right now is that at least the George Floyd protests accomplished something. These things were mostly bad, of course: an increase in crime, underfunded police, and embezzlement of donations. But with healthcare, the fact that the working class is in lockstep is almost a guarantee that no policy will be agreed on. It's clear by this point that the current movement has zero agreement on a long-term policy proposal beyond assassinations as an incentive. Much like Defund the Police, this has obvious feasibility issues: so long as the profits from denying claims exceeds the cost of private security, and so long as companies don't want to motivate future assassins, this tactic won't work on its own. If all anyone can agree on is "raising awareness" or "sending a message" then you've probably already lost, since no one has figured out what to do with that awareness.
If the end goal is to overthrow the government or radically change it, and if that's at all feasible, then where are the large-scale protests, the policy solutions, everything that comes between internet activism and policy change? The working class can choose universal agreement or policy solutions, but until everyone can agree on a healthcare system, one will always come at the expense of the other. If the goal of this assassination was to raise awareness, what were people focused on before, and what's the cost of diverting people's attention away from that? Yet for all these flaws, one positive is that people's anger right now is relatively harmless. If this assassination has had a positive effect, it's in diverting attention away from something worse. Plenty of news cycles lead to wars or riots. So far, all that's happened is assassinations becoming less taboo, and at worst that will only get a few people killed. Maybe the real PSYOP is keeping people focused on the class war to keep them from starting an actual war.
