operating in a low-trust world
Pizzagate to CDC, it's the same pipeline. Mainstream media skips the connective tissue.
Trust in institutions and organizations is often treated as an abstract measure: a number in a survey, a sentiment that fluctuates with news cycles. The past decade has shown it is anything but abstract. It is the barrier between disagreement and direct confrontation. Once that barrier weakens, the space fills with rumor, resentment, and people who believe they are justified in acting on both.
The evidence for this is not hard to find. Pew Research shows trust in the federal government hovering at 22% in 2024, near a historic low. Gallup’s tracking puts trust in media at 31%, also a historic low. In every domain where trust has dropped sharply—public health, elections, higher education, the courts—there has been a measurable rise in threats, harassment, and, in some cases, violence. The Princeton Bridging Divides Initiative documented a 170% increase in threats against school board officials between 2022 and 2024. The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials logged over 1,500 harassment incidents against public health personnel in just the first year of the pandemic.
Friday’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shooting is one chapter in that story. Another agency, another profession, another building could be next. The logo on the wall will change. The sequence of events will not. Without sustained work to rebuild legitimacy and close the gap between institutions and the people they serve, the line between politics and personal risk will keep moving in the wrong direction.
Which raises the harder question: how do you restore confidence in a way that actually changes the trajectory?
I don’t have an actionable fix for America’s trust problem. But the trust collapse creates a predictable risk mechanism that leaders must operate inside. And I have a fix for that: The Intelligence Council exists to help you see that mechanism early, understand its implications for your business, and move before the risk hardens into a crisis.
CDC as a Live Risk Pipeline
Read the CDC incident through the same pipeline: legitimacy in question, hostile frames take hold, mobilization follows, physical risk arrives.
The headquarters of the CDC turned into a crime scene. Glass panels were punched through with bullet holes. Shell casings littered the sidewalk. Inside the campus, thousands of scientists, doctors, and administrators were told to shelter in place.
The gunman was a 30-year-old from suburban Atlanta. According to investigators, he was convinced the COVID-19 vaccine had caused his medical problems. He came armed with five weapons, including four long guns, one fitted with a scope, and opened fire on the agency he saw as responsible. A rookie police officer was killed in the response.
The act did not come out of nowhere. It happened after years of public trust in the CDC falling sharply: from 82% in early 2020, at the start of the pandemic, to 56% by 2022, according to Pew Research Center surveys. That decline tracked with an unprecedented surge in threats against public health officials. The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials documented more than 1,500 harassment incidents against public health personnel between March 2020 and January 2021.
The bullet holes in the CDC’s windows are not just evidence of a single attack. They are the visible result of a much longer deterioration: in trust, in the safety of those who work in public institutions, and in the basic guardrails of public life.
The Pattern is Repeating
The harder part is seeing this as more than an isolated act of violence.
The CDC shooting is part of a longer chain of events that have shifted the boundaries of what is imaginable in American public life. The pattern is visible once you look at the past decade.
In December 2016, a man drove from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., carrying an AR-15, a shotgun, and a revolver. He had absorbed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory: the online fiction that Democratic Party officials were running a child trafficking ring out of a pizzeria. He fired multiple rounds inside the restaurant before surrendering. There was no basement, no trafficking ring, only a false story that had been repeated and reinforced until someone acted on it.
In October 2018, a gunman entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed 11 people. His posts on extremist forums made clear his belief that Jewish organizations were conspiring to bring immigrants into the United States as part of a plot to weaken the country. The Anti-Defamation League later noted that this was the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history.
On January 6, 2021, the U.S. Capitol was breached by thousands, including dozens of people wearing QAnon symbols or openly espousing its theories. At least 60 self-identified QAnon adherents were arrested in the aftermath. Five people died during or shortly after the events of that day, and more than 140 police officers were injured.
Since then, the incidents have moved closer to the daily work of governance and civic life. In Georgia, election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss were falsely accused of ballot tampering during the 2020 election. They endured months of threats, harassment, and stalking, forcing them from their homes. In December 2023, a jury awarded them $148 million in damages from Rudy Giuliani for defamation.
School board officials across the country have also been targeted. A 2025 mixed-methods study by Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative found that 81% of surveyed local officials had experienced harassment, threats, or violence—a rate far higher than before the pandemic.
The CDC shooting belongs on this same timeline. The motives shift from child trafficking conspiracies, to white replacement theories, to stolen elections, and opposition to vaccines, but the mechanism repeats: a false or distorted narrative circulates widely, finds an audience primed to distrust the target, and ends with someone willing to turn belief into action.
How Mistrust can Escalate to Violence
Legitimacy shock: The progression is rarely sudden. It begins with a loss of legitimacy: whether reality or outright misinformation, that an institution no longer serves the public interest, or that it answers to some hidden agenda. That loss can be measured. Trust in the CDC fell by 26-points between 2020 and 2022. Gallup’s tracking of confidence in physicians and hospitals shows a similar pattern: from 71.5% trust in 2020 to just over 40% in 2024, a 31-point decline.
Narrative capture: Once legitimacy erodes, an information vacuum forms. That vacuum fills with narratives that are more emotionally compelling than dry institutional explanations. Conspiracy theories, partisan framing, grievance-driven accounts of cause and effect—these stories spread through cable news segments, social media posts, encrypted group chats, and word-of-mouth.
Dehumanization: When those narratives take hold, the people inside the institution stop being seen as professionals doing a job. They become villains, traitors, or existential threats in a story. The language shifts. Terms like “corrupt,” “criminal,” and “enemy” begin to dominate the conversation.
Permission: That shift creates a permission structure. If you believe your target is corrupt enough, dangerous enough, then confronting them becomes a moral act. The leap from moral duty to physical action becomes easier.
The Department of Homeland Security’s 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment documented a rise in ideologically motivated violence, with three fatal domestic extremist attacks in 2022–2023 and more than half a dozen plots disrupted.
From there, the escalation path is predictable: online abuse, doxxing, in-person intimidation, and, in some cases, direct attacks. The CDC shooting followed the same path, even if the public didn’t see each stage.
The Cross-Sector Blast Radius
What happened in Atlanta yesterday, based on a collapse in trust and rise in hostility, has been playing out across multiple domains.
In higher education, Gallup data shows public confidence at 57% in 2015. By 2023 it had fallen to 36%, before a modest recovery to 42% in 2024. That decline has coincided with more frequent targeting of universities over topics ranging from DEI programs, to trans athletes, free speech, anti-semitism, climate research, and international students. Faculty have reported harassment ranging from coordinated email campaigns to threats at their homes. A University of Michigan survey in 2024 found that hundreds of faculty members had experienced external threats tied to their academic work, with most unaware of any institutional support available.
The judiciary has also been drawn into the same dynamic. Gallup measured confidence in the Supreme Court at 40% in 2020. After the Dobbs decision in 2022, it dropped to 25%, the lowest on record. That decline has been accompanied by security incidents, including threats to federal judges and protests at their homes.
Election administration has become one of the most visibly dangerous public functions in the country. Since 2020, thousands of election workers have reported death threats or harassment. Freeman and Moss are the most widely known case, but they are not unique. Many local officials have resigned or taken steps to keep their identities private.
As discussed above, healthcare has taken one of the steepest hits of all. The drop in trust has been matched by incidents of harassment and even violence toward clinicians, often over vaccine mandates or gender transition related care.
The specific grievances change by sector, but the underlying mechanics remain constant. An institution loses trust, alternative narratives take root, and those narratives make violent confrontation thinkable.
Why it Matters for Business and Academia
The lessons aren't limited to the public sector.
The mechanisms that turn mistrust into operational risk for the CDC are not fundamentally different from those that can impact a higher educational institution wrestling with hot button issues, or a business in a politically sensitive supply chain, or an AI company in a time of unprecedented technological disruption and fear about human job displacement. The audience may be different. The stakes are just as high.
In a low-trust environment, missing context is itself a risk. Context gaps create risk across four fronts: governance and license, market and customers, people and capability, and supply and partners. The Intelligence Council’s job is to identify the connective tissue, and shorten the distance between “something’s brewing” and “we know what to do next.”
By “connective tissue,” I mean four things:
Signals: policy drafts, enforcement hints, platform rule changes, activist or test-case litigation, media frames that travel.
Actors: who is pushing which narrative, with what reach, and which regulators, coalitions, or influencers are picking it up.
Exposure: where that narrative intersects your products, geographies, supply chain, workforce, and customer segments.
Trajectory: whether this fizzles, normalizes, or escalates, and the likely trigger points and timelines.
My objective with The Intelligence Council is to close that gap for decision-makers in the private sector.
The goal isn’t to flood our executive audience with information. It is to surface the few signals that matter, explain their implications, and put our reader ahead of risks before they materialize.
Again—I don’t have a fix for the national trust problem in this essay. But I have thoughts on how leaders can choose to operate wisely, facing the reality of this problem. That means tracking the signals, naming the actors, knowing your exposure, and reading the trajectory. I’m building so that when something is brewing, our audience knows what to do next.
Adil Husain is the founder of The Intelligence Council and Managing Director of Emerging Strategy. He’s spent over two decades in the trenches of global business, advising multinationals, building remote-first teams, and helping clients outmaneuver competitors across markets they barely understand.
He’s not a pundit. He’s a strategist who got tired of watching business journalism get softer while the world got sharper. Through The Intelligence Council, Adil is building what B2B media should have been all along: a platform that rewards clarity, calls bullshit when it sees it, and arms decision-makers with judgment they can use.
He writes his personal Substack, The Husain Signal, to test ideas, challenge conventional wisdom, and draw smart people into orbit.
If you want to connect, collaborate, or argue, you can reach him at adil@intelligencecouncil.com
Related Articles
b2b media has no teeth. we're here to bite.
Most B2B media isn’t boring by accident. It’s boring because it’s bought.
Trade publications no longer make money by informing readers. They make money by flattering vendors. Their job isn’t to provoke thought. It’s to pitch.
the whisper you finally hear
There’s a certain kind of idea that doesn’t arrive with fanfare. It doesn’t announce itself as a bold new chapter or wrap itself in the language of reinvention. Instead, it hovers quietly in the background. It’s less a call to action than a shift in pressure. A whisper you keep hearing, until ignoring it takes more effort than following it.
The acts of terrorism against various govt workers and their agency positions are the result of conscious conspiratorial acts pushed by Trump and his administrative cabal. Front and center is Kash Patel, dir. of the FBI.
Officier David Rose, who was lauded by Kash Patel for his sacrifice, is the victim of Patel's MAGA revenge against US society. Patel has been a staunch, hardcore promoter of Qanon, especially through his promotion of a "Q conspiracy" in nearly every event you listed.
Both as a board member of Truth Social, and through numerous rightwing podcasts he has participated in as a guest; he has purposefully promoted absurd positions regarding what our American govt has been doing to promote human welfare and ensure full participatory democracy.
His grift is part of the fundamental MOD of MAGA's "alt right" political agenda, and intentionally promotes violence against govt workers, most notably, election workers, and frontline public health workers.
These workers are now exposed to more risk than the police who respond to this MAGA generated terrorism. Ironically, in the past year, Patel has even promoted health kits that market a host of supplements to restore health and counteract alleged "poisoning by the Covid vaccine".
It is long past time for real Americans to stand up and take to the streets en masse to counter the idiocy and violence being promoted by Trump's fascist agenda.