The Pattern That Connects
A Different Way of Seeing the News
I woke up, scrolled through the news, and saw that the FBI raided a journalist’s home. The drumbeat of war with Iran grew louder. The violent clashes over immigration in Minneapolis is ongoing. And buried beneath it all, a quiet report about 1.4 million people losing their health insurance. For years, this cycle has defined my relationship with the news. I’ve swung between frantic engagement and protective numbness, feeling both responsible for everything and powerless to affect anything.
Years ago, I began this journey that led me to creating a radical framework for understanding the world. It has since helped me move from overwhelm and frustration to a different kind of clarity. It doesn’t offer easy answers or simple solutions. It offers something more valuable: a way of noticing. This is what I want to share with you today.
Four Stories, One Pattern
Over the past 24 hours, four major narratives have dominated the American news cycle, each seemingly occupying its own distinct universe of concern:
The Press and the State: The FBI conducted an unprecedented raid on the home of Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, seizing her electronics in connection with a national security leak investigation. This has been widely condemned as a grave threat to press freedom.
The Brink of War: Following a brutal crackdown on protests in Iran, with death tolls estimated in the thousands, the Trump administration has signaled that military intervention is a possibility, evacuating personnel from regional bases and preparing strike options.
The City and the Nation: In Minneapolis, the fatal shooting of a legal observer, Renee Nicole Good, by an ICE agent has escalated into a full-blown crisis, with thousands of federal officers deployed, a second shooting, and the President threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell protests.
The Invisible Crisis: As a January 15th deadline looms, new data reveals that 1.4 million fewer Americans have enrolled in Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace plans after enhanced pandemic-era subsidies expired. For many, premiums have more than doubled, a quiet catastrophe of structural violence.
On the surface, these stories appear disconnected. They involve different actors, different locations, and different scales of conflict. The dominant narratives, from both mainstream and progressive outlets, treat them as such, inviting us to debate each crisis on its own terms: press freedom, foreign policy, immigration enforcement, healthcare access.
But this separation is a form of misdirection. The real story is the pattern that connects them. To see this pattern, we need a different lens. When we look at the four narratives through the tfp Collective lens, they cease to be separate crises. Instead, they become visible as different expressions of the same underlying pattern: domination reproducing itself through responsive processes that appear as isolated events.
The first thing we notice is the visibility trap. The FBI raid, the threat of war, and the street clashes in Minneapolis are all forms of spectacular violence. They are dramatic, photogenic, and emotionally activating. They generate immediate attention and outrage. The ACA story, by contrast, is a form of structural violence. Its harm is diffuse, statistical, and largely invisible. 1.4 million people quietly slipping into the ranks of the uninsured does not produce a viral video.
Domination thrives on this dynamic. It uses spectacular violence to command our attention, drawing it away from the slower, deeper, and often more pervasive violence of its institutions. The raid on a journalist’s home, while a real and dangerous escalation, also serves to obscure the very story she was reporting: the “dramatic culling” of the federal workforce, a form of structural violence affecting thousands.
In each narrative, we can see domination adapting and responding to challenges:
In the press freedom narrative, journalism exposes government actions, and the state responds by criminalizing the act of reporting. This is not a simple violation of norms, but an adaptation designed to make future exposure more costly.
In the Iran narrative, protests challenge the regime, and the regime responds with violence. The U.S. responds with threats of intervention, which emboldens protesters, who then face a more intense response from the regime. It’s a deadly paradox where U.S. imperial power is reinforced whether it acts or not, simply by positioning itself as the arbiter of the conflict.
In Minneapolis, community members organize to monitor ICE, an act of interruption. The state responds with lethal force, killing a legal observer. The community responds with protests and the state responds again by deploying thousands of agents and threatening military force. Each act of resistance is used to justify a greater escalation of state power.
In the ACA narrative, a public health crisis (the pandemic) forces a response (enhanced subsidies). When the immediate crisis fades, political forces respond by framing the subsidies as excessive, leading to their expiration. Power adapts to contain the challenge and then returns to its baseline state of managed neglect.
Domination is not a static structure but a responsive process. The individuals involved maintain their power relation not through top-down control, but through repeating patterns of interaction that adapt to challenges and resistance. They use our resistance, our outrage, and our very attention as fuel.
The Alternative Narrative: Interrupting the Pattern
This way of noticing produces an alternative narrative. The four separate crises don’t need to be solved but re-framed as a single, responsive pattern of domination that is intensifying across multiple domains. This pattern uses spectacular violence to distract from structural and physical violence, and it co-opts resistance to fuel its own escalation. This re-framing changes the nature of our task. The static “goal” is not to win the debate on press freedom, prevent the war in Iran, get ICE out of Minneapolis, and restore healthcare subsidies as four separate campaigns. The intent is to interrupt the underlying pattern that connects them all. Interruption is not creating a better plan or planning a more perfect protest. It’s the practice of skillful divergence. It’s refusing to play those roles, producing alternative patterns of relation that move away from domination.
What does this look like?
It looks like journalists continuing to report on the culling of the federal workforce, refusing to let the spectacular violence of the raid distract from the structural violence they were exposing.
It looks like building international solidarity with Iranian organizers that bypasses state power and refuses the binary of “intervention vs. non-intervention.”
It looks like the community defense networks and mutual aid projects in Minneapolis that provide safety and support for immigrants, making enforcement more costly and less effective, regardless of how many federal agents are deployed.
It looks like creating community health clinics and mutual aid funds that provide care, making people’s well-being less dependent on the whims of political negotiation in Washington D.C.
Concrete Proof: Seeing the Pattern in the Data
You don’t have to take my word for it. Proof isn’t in a secret document; it’s in the effects we can already observe:
Visibility Trap: Compare the media attention and public outrage directed at the FBI raid to the relative silence surrounding the 1.4 million people who lost healthcare. The numbers clearly show which form of violence affects more people, but the spectacular nature of the raid commands our focus. This is a measurable pattern effect.
Competing Solidarities: In Minneapolis, online fundraisers have raised over $1.4 million for the family of Renee Good, the slain legal observer, while a separate fundraiser for the ICE agent who shot her has raised over $740,000. These figures are concrete, material evidence of the deep polarization that domination thrives on. It pits communities against each other, creating a responsive loop of escalating conflict.
Structural Violence: The Kaiser Family Foundation calculated that the average monthly premium for a benchmark ACA plan would rise by 114%, from $888 to $1,904, for those who lost their subsidies. This feature of representative government in this country makes access to a basic human need subject to political bargaining.
Escalation: The number of federal agents in Minneapolis grew from a small contingent to approximately 3,000 in a matter of weeks. Random? No. The pattern is clear: resistance is met with disproportionate force, which is then used to justify the initial claims of a “threat” that required the force in the first place.
From Overwhelm to Practice
Seeing this pattern doesn’t make the world less frightening. The threats are real. But it does change the nature of our relationship with them. The feeling of being overwhelmed by a thousand separate fires is replaced by the clarity of seeing a single, responsive process at work. Our task is no longer to put out every fire, an impossible and exhausting endeavor. Our task is to interrupt the pattern that sets them.
This task requires a shift from a politics of reaction to a politics of practice. It means cultivating our capacity to notice these patterns in our own lives, in our communities, and in the news we consume. It means asking a different set of questions:
Instead of “Whose side am I on?” we ask, “What pattern is being reproduced here, and how can I interrupt it?”
Instead of “What is the solution?” we ask, “What would make domination work harder to persist right now?”
Instead of focusing only on the spectacular, we learn to notice the invisible, structural harms that are often more pervasive. This also requires us to unlearn the habits of thought that have been ingrained in us. It requires us to move beyond heroes and villains, beyond purity and innocence, and into the messy, complex reality of our shared entanglement. It’s the work of building new patterns, new relationships, and new ways of being together that, in their very practice, create the world we want to live in. It’s the work of solidarity. It’s the work of life making.
Ultimately, it’s, I believe, the only work that can lead us out of the cycle of outrage and despair.