A man rushes a sitting member of Congress at a town hall and sprays her with a syringe.

The video is twenty-six seconds long. A community room in Minneapolis. A representative of the United States House of Representatives at a lectern. Her own constituents in front of her. The representative is in the middle of a sentence. The sentence she is in the middle of is a sentence about the homeland security secretary and impeachment.

A man, a fifty-five-year-old man named Anthony James Kazmierczak, walks down the center aisle of the room. He is carrying a syringe. He gets close to the lectern. He sprays her in the face. He yells “you must resign.” A security guard tackles him. The video ends.

Hon. Hon, hon, hon. I want you to count on your fingers what just happened. A sitting member of Congress. In her own district. At a town hall for the constituents who elected her. Got assaulted by a man with a syringe full of liquid who walked down the center aisle while security stood at the back of the room.

The liquid was, in the lab’s report on Wednesday morning, apple cider vinegar and water. I know enough about apple cider vinegar to know it stings the eyes if it gets in them, but the relevant fact is not the chemistry. The relevant fact is that a man brought a syringe into a room with a member of Congress and used the syringe. If apple cider vinegar had been bleach, we’d be writing a different column today. If apple cider vinegar had been fentanyl, we’d be writing about a funeral.

You ever notice how, every time the country gets one of these, the people who spent the previous six months on cable television naming the member of Congress by name as a threat, say nothing. That part. The Speaker of the House, who runs the institution Representative Omar serves in, did not, by Wednesday afternoon, issue a statement about the assault on his colleague. His colleague. Not in the personal-buddies sense. In the institutional sense. The institution does not work if the members of the institution are unsafe in the rooms named for the institution.

Representative Omar herself, to her credit, took thirty seconds to wipe her face and kept talking. She told the room what the rhetoric of the previous six months had been pointing at. She named ICE. She named Noem. She named the death of Renée Good. She finished the town hall.

That part is the part the country is supposed to learn from. The room kept being a room. The lectern kept being a lectern. The member of Congress kept being a member of Congress. That is the load-bearing part of an open society. The institution holds even when the institution is being sprayed.

The institutions holding now, in the fourth week of January 2026, is what we are running on. We are running on it the way a casino runs on a generator after the lights have gone. The lights are out. The generator is on. The generator is supposed to be the backup. We’re running on backup.

That ought to concern you.