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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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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