The public release of a Young Republican group chat that included racist language, jokes about rape and flippant commentary on gas chambers prompted bipartisan calls for those involved to be removed from or resign their positions.
The Young Republican National Federation, the GOP’s political organization for Republicans between 18 and 40, called for those involved to step down from the organization. The group described the exchanges, first reported by Politico, as “unbecoming of any Republican.”
Republican Vice President JD Vance, however, has weighed in several times to speak out against what he characterized as “pearl clutching” over the leaked messages.
Politico obtained months of exchanges from a Telegram conversation between leaders and members of the Young Republican National Federation and some of its affiliates in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont.
Here’s a rundown of reaction to the inflammatory group chat, in which the operatives and officials involved openly worried that their comments might be leaked, even as they continued their conversation:
Vance
After Politico’s initial report Tuesday, Vance posted on X a screen grab from 2022 text messages in which Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate in Virginia’s attorney general race, suggested that a prominent Republican get “two bullets to the head.”
“This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat, and the guy who said it could become the AG of Virginia,” Vance wrote Tuesday. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”
Jones has taken “full responsibility” for his comments and offered a public apology to Todd Gilbert, who then was speaker of Virginia’s House of Delegates.
Vance reiterated his initial sentiment Wednesday on “ The Charlie Kirk Show ” podcast, saying when asked about the reporting that a “person seriously wishing for political violence and political assassination is 1,000 times worse than what a bunch of young people, a bunch of kids say in a group chat, however offensive it might be.”
Vance, 41, said he grew up in a different era where “most of what I, the stupid things that I did as a teenager and as a young adult, they’re not on the internet.”
The father of three said he would caution his own children, “especially my boys, don’t put things on the internet, like, be careful with what you post. If you put something in a group chat, assume that some scumbag is going to leak it in an effort to try to cause you harm or cause your family harm.”
“I really don’t want to us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive, stupid joke is cause to ruin their lives,” Vance said.
Republicans
Other Republicans demanded more immediate intervention. Republican legislative leaders in Vermont, along with Gov. Phil Scott — also a Republican — called for the resignation of state Sen. Sam Douglass, revealed to be a participant in the chat. A joint statement from the GOP lawmakers termed the comments “unacceptable and deeply disturbing.”
Saying she was “absolutely appalled to learn about the alleged comments made by leaders of the New York State Young Republicans,” Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York called for those involved to step down from their positions. Danedri Herbert, chair of the Kansas GOP, said the remarks “do not reflect the beliefs of Republicans and certainly not of Kansas Republicans at large.”
In a statement posted to X on Tuesday, the Young Republican National Federation said it was “appalled” by the reported messages and calling for those involved to resign from their positions within the organization. Young Republican leaders said the behavior was “disgraceful, unbecoming of any Republican, and stands in direct opposition to the values our movement represents.”
Democrats
Democrats have been more uniform in their condemnation. On Wednesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote to House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer asking for an investigation into the “vile and offensive text messages,” which he called “the definition of conduct that can create a hostile and discriminatory environment that violates civil rights laws.”
Speaking on the Senate floor, Senate Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer of New York on Tuesday described the chat as “revolting,” calling for Republicans including President Trump and Vance to “condemn these comments swiftly and unequivocally.”
Asked about the reporting, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called the exchanges “vile” and called for consequences for those involved.
“Kick them out of the party. Take away their official roles. Stop using them as campaign advisers,” Hochul said. “There needs to be consequences. This bulls—- has to stop.”
Kinnard writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.
CHICAGO — Cook County’s top judge signed an order barring ICE from arresting people at court. Cook County includes Chicago, which has seen a federal immigration crackdown in recent months.
Detaining residents outside courthouses has been a common tactic for federal agents, who have been stationed outside county courthouses for weeks, making arrests and drawing crowds of protesters.
The order, which was signed Tuesday night and took effect Wednesday, bars the civil arrest of any “party, witness, or potential witness” while going to court proceedings. It includes arrests inside courthouses and in parking lots, surrounding sidewalks and entryways.
“The fair administration of justice requires that courts remain open and accessible, and that litigants and witnesses may appear without fear of civil arrest,” the order states.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security defended the practice of making arrests at courthouses, calling it “common sense.”
“We aren’t some medieval kingdom; there are no legal sanctuaries where you can hide and avoid the consequences for breaking the law,” DHS said in a Wednesday statement. “Nothing in the constitution prohibits arresting a lawbreaker where you find them.”
Local immigration and legal advocates, including the county’s public defender’s office, have called for an order like this, saying clients were avoiding court out of fear of being detained. The office has confirmed at least a dozen immigration arrests at or near county courthouses since the end of July, when representatives said they’ve seen U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s presence outside courthouses increase.
“I have had numerous conversations with clients who are presented with a difficult decision of either missing court and receiving an arrest warrant or coming to court and risk being arrested by ICE,” Cruz Rodriguez, an assistant public defender with the office’s immigration division, said at a news conference earlier this month.
Domestic violence advocacy organizations also signed on to a petition earlier this month calling for Cook County Circuit Chief Judge Timothy Evans to issue the order. This comes after advocates said a woman was was arrested by ICE last month while entering the domestic violence courthouse.
Alexa Van Brunt, director of MacArthur Justice Center’s Illinois office, which filed the petition, said she was “gratified” by Evans’ order.
“This is a necessary and overdue action to ensure that the people of Cook County can access the courts without fear,” she said in a Wednesday statement to the Associated Press.
Evans said justice “depends on every individual’s ability to appear in court without fear or obstruction.”
“Our courthouses remain places where all people — regardless of their background or circumstance — should be able to safely and confidently participate in the judicial process,” Evans said in a statement.
ICE tactics outside courthouses seen across country
The tactic of detaining people at courthouses in the Chicago area is part of a larger jump in courthouse immigration arrests across the country. The flurry of immigration enforcement operations at courthouses has been condemned by judicial officials and legal organizations, and has drawn lawsuits from some states and the adoption of bills seeking to block the practice.
In June, President Donald Trump’s administration sued the state of New York over a 2020 law barring federal immigration agents from making arrests at state, city and other municipal courthouses.
Statehouse Democrats vow to adopt resolutions condemning federal immigration crackdown
Opening the second day of the six-day fall legislative session in Springfield, Ill., House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch decried the federal government’s immigration squeeze and vowed that his majority Democrats would use floor time Wednesday to adopt resolutions condemning the action.
“We won’t sit back and let our democracy be taken from us,” Welch said at the Capitol, surrounded by two dozen of his caucus members
Questioned about the practical impact of resolutions, Welch said there also are discussions about legislation to restrict federal agents’ patrol statewide. He lambasted reports of ICE arrests in medical facilities and applauded Evans’ ruling prohibiting warrantless arrests near courthouses.
“If we can do something similar statewide, I’d love to get that done,” Welch said. “These should be safe spaces.”
Republicans questioned their opponents’ sincerity. Debating a resolution condemning political violence, GOP Rep. Adam Niemerg noted incendiary language from Gov. JB Pritzker — in the spring he called for “street fighters” to oppose the administration — although the governor has not espoused violence. Rep. Nicole La Ha, who said she has received death threats, accused Democrats of trying to stifle opposition.
“This is not a stand against violence,” La Ha said. “It is a tasteless tactic to punish dissent and difference of opinion.”
Illinois governor denounces tear gas use on protesters
Meanwhile, Pritzker suggested federal agents may have violated a ruling by a federal judge last week that said they could not use tear gas, pepper spray and other weapons on journalists and peaceful protesters after a coalition of news outlets and protesters sued over the actions of federal agents during protests outside a Chicago-area ICE facility. Pritzker said he expected the attorneys involved to “go back to court to make sure that is enforced against ICE”
“ICE is causing this mayhem,” he said. “They’re the ones throwing tear gas when people are peacefully protesting.”
The comments also come after Pritzker denounced Border Patrol agents for using tear gas on protesters who gathered Tuesday after a high-speed chase on a residential street on Chicago’s South Side.
A few protesters also gathered Wednesday afternoon outside an ICE facility in the west Chicago suburb of Broadview, where a fence that has been at the center of a recent lawsuit had come down.
A judge ordered ICE to remove the fence after the village of Broadview sued federal authorities for “illegally” erecting an 8-foot-tall fence outside the facility, blocking public streets and creating problems for local emergency services trying to access the area. On Monday, state legislators and Black mayors of nearby suburbs gathered outside the facility to demand the fence be removed and announce an executive order limiting protests in the area to designated zones. Trump has long targeted Black mayors in large Democratic cities, many of whom have voiced solidarity with one another in recent months amid federal interventions in their areas.
Community efforts to oppose ICE have also ramped up in the nation’s third-largest city, where neighborhood groups have assembled to monitor ICE activity and film any incidents involving federal agents in their areas.
On Tuesday, hundreds of people attended “Whistlemania” events across the city and made thousands of “whistle kits” with whistles, “Know Your Rights” flyers and instructions on how to use them to alert neighbors of when immigration enforcement agents are nearby.
An increasing number of GoFundMe pages have also been launched to pay for legal costs for community members detained by ICE, most recently a landscaper and father of three children detained earlier this month.
Fernando writes for the Associated Press. AP writer John O’Connor in Springfield contributed.
When my father was crossing the U.S.-Mexico border like an undocumented Road Runner back in the 1970s, la migra caught him more than a few times.
They chased him and his friends through factories in Los Angeles and across the hills that separate Tijuana and San Diego. He was tackled and handcuffed and hauled off in cars, trucks and vans. Sometimes, Papi and his pals were dropped off at the border checkpoint in San Ysidro and ordered to walk back into Mexico. Other times, he was packed into grimy cells with other men.
But there was no anger or terror in his voice when I asked him recently how la migra treated him whenever they’d catch him.
“Like humans,” he said. “They had a job to do, and they knew why we mojados were coming here, so they knew they would see us again. So why make it difficult for both of us?”
His most vivid memory was the time a guard in El Centro gave him extra food because he thought my dad was a bit too skinny.
There’s never a pretty way to deport someone. But there’s always a less indecent, a less callous, a less ugly way.
The Trump presidency has amply proven he has no interest in skirting meanness and cruelty.
“The way they treat immigrants now is a disgrace,” Papi said. “Like animals. It’s sad. It’s ugly. It needs to stop.”
I talked to him a few days after a gunman fired on a Dallas ICE facility, killing a detainee and striking two others before killing himself. One of the other wounded detainees, an immigrant from Mexico, died days later. Instead of expressing sympathy for the deceased, the Trump administration initially offered one giant shrug. What passed for empathy was Vice President JD Vance telling reporters, “Look, just because we don’t support illegal aliens, we don’t want them to be executed by violent assassins engaged in political violence” while blaming the attack on Democrats.
It was up to Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem to try and show that the federal government has a heart. Her statement on the Dallas attack offered “prayers” to the victims and their families but quickly pivoted to what she felt was the real tragedy.
How ungrateful critics are of la migra.
“For months, we’ve been warning politicians and the media to tone down their rhetoric about ICE law enforcement before someone was killed,” Noem said. “This shooting must serve as a wake-up call to the far-left that their rhetoric about ICE has consequences…The violence and dehumanization of these men and women who are simply enforcing the law must stop.”
You might have been forgiven for not realizing from such a statement that the three people punctured by a gunman’s bullets were immigrants.
This administration is never going to roll out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants. But the least they can do it deal with them as if … well, as if they are human.
Under Noem’s leadership, DHS’ social media campaign has instead produced videos that call undocumented immigrants “the worst of the worst” and depict immigration agents as heroes called by God to confront invading hordes. A recent one even used the theme song to the cartoon version of the Pokémon trading card game — tagline “Gotta catch them all” — to imply going after the mango guy and tamale lady is no different than capturing fictional monsters.
That’s one step away from “The Eternal Jew,” the infamous Nazi propaganda movie that compared Jews to rats and argued they needed to be eradicated.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) as prisoners stand, looking out from a cell, in Tecoluca, El Salvador, in March.
(Alex Brandon/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
Noem is correct when she said that words have consequences — but the “violence and dehumanization” she decries against ICE workers is nothing compared to the cascade of hate spewing from Trump and his goons against immigrants. That rot in the top has infested all parts of American government, leading to officials trying to outdo themselves over who can show the most fealty to Trump by being nastiest to people.
If there were a Cruelty Olympics, Trump’s sycophants would all be elbowing each other for the gold.
Politicians in red states propose repulsive names for their immigration detention facility — “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, for instance, or “Speedway Slammer” in Indiana. U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, Trump’s top prosecutor in Southern California, has trumpeted the arrests of activists he claimed attacked federal agents even as video uploaded by civilians offers a different story. In a recent case, a federal jury acquitted Brayan Ramos-Brito of misdemeanor assault charges after evidence shown in court contradicted what Border Patrol agents had reported to justify his prosecution.
Our nation’s deportation Leviathan is so imperious that an ICE agent, face contorted with anger, outside a New York immigration court recently shoved an Ecuadorian woman pleading for her husband down to the ground, stood over her and wagged his finger in front of her bawling children even as cameras recorded the terrible scene. The move was so egregious that Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughin quickly put out a statement claiming the incident was “unacceptable and beneath the men and women of ICE.”
The act was so outrageous and it was all caught on camera, so what choice did she have? Nevertheless, CBS News reported that the agent is back on duty.
Noem and her crew are so high on their holy war that they don’t realize they’re their own worst enemy. La migra didn’t face the same public acrimony during Barack Obama’s first term, when deportation rates were so high immigration activists dubbed him the “deporter-in-chief.” They didn’t need local law enforcement to fend off angry crowds every time they conducted a raid in Trump’s first term.
The difference now is that cruelty seems like an absolute mandate, so forgive those of us who aren’t throwing roses at ICE when they march into our neighborhoods and haul off our loved ones. And it seems more folks are souring on Trump’s deportation plans. A June Gallup poll found that 79% of Americans said immigration was “a good thing” — a 15% increase since last year and the highest mark recorded by Gallup since it started asking the question in 2001. Meanwhile, a Washington Post/Ipsos September poll showed 44% of adults surveyed approved of Trump’s performance on immigration — a six-point drop since February.
I asked my dad how he thought the government should treat deportees. Our family has personally known Border Patrol agents.
“Well, most of them shouldn’t be deported in the first place,” he said. “If they want to work or already have families here, let them stay but say they need to behave well or they have to leave.”
That’s probably not going to happen, so what should the government do?
“Don’t yell at people,” my dad said. “Talk with patience. Feed immigrants well, give them clean clothes and give them privacy when they have to use the bathroom. Say, ‘sorry we have to do all this, but it’s what Trump wants.’
“And then they should apologize,” Papi concluded. “ They should tell everyone, ’We’re sorry we’ve been so mean. We can do better.’”
At a tense political moment in the wake of conservative lightning rod Charlie Kirk’s killing, President Trump signed a presidential memorandum focusing federal law enforcement on disrupting “domestic terrorism.”
The memo appeared to focus on political violence. But during a White House signing Thursday, the president and his top advisors repeatedly hinted at a much broader campaign of suppression against the American left, referencing as problematic both the simple printing of protest signs and the prominent racial justice movement Black Lives Matter.
“We’re looking at the funders of a lot of these groups. You know, when you see the signs and they’re all beautiful signs made professionally, these aren’t your protesters that make the sign in their basement late in the evening because they really believe it. These are anarchists and agitators,” Trump said.
“Whether it be going back to the riots that started with Black Lives Matter and all the way through to the antifa riots, the attacks on ICE officers, the doxxing campaigns and now the political assassinations — these are not lone, isolated events,” said Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. “This is part of an organized campaign of radical left terrorism.”
Neither Trump nor Miller nor the other top administration officials flanking them — including Vice President JD Vance, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel — offered any evidence of such a widespread left-wing terror campaign, or many details about how the memo would be put into action.
Law enforcement officials have said Kirk’s alleged shooter appears to have acted alone, and data on domestic extremism more broadly — including some recently scrubbed from the Justice Department’s website — suggest right-wing extremists represent the larger threat.
Many on the right cheered Trump’s memo — just as many on the left cheered calls by Democrats for a clampdown on right-wing extremism during the Biden administration, particularly in light of the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. In that incident, more than 1,500 were criminally charged, many convicted of assaulting police officers and some for sedition, before Trump pardoned them or commuted their sentences.
Many critics of the administration slammed the memo as a “chilling” threat that called to mind some of the most notorious periods of political suppression in the nation’s history — a claim the White House dismissed as wildly off base and steeped in liberal hypocrisy.
That includes the Red Scare and the often less acknowledged Lavender Scare of the Cold War and beyond, they said, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy and other federal officials cast a pall over the nation, its social justice movements and its arts scene by promising to purge from government anyone who professed a belief in certain political ideas — such as communism — or was gay or lesbian or otherwise queer.
Douglas M. Charles, a history professor at Penn State Greater Allegheny and author of “Hoover’s War on Gays: Exposing the FBI’s ‘Sex Deviates’ Program,” said Trump’s memo strongly paralleled past government efforts at political repression — including in its claim that “extremism on migration, race and gender” and “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” are all causing violence in the country.
“What is this, McCarthyism redux?” Charles asked.
Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, said the Trump administration is putting “targets on the backs of organizers” like her.
Abdullah, speaking Friday from Washington, D.C., where she is attending the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual legislative conference, said Trump’s efforts to cast left-leaning advocacy groups as a threat to democracy was “the definition of gaslighting” because the president “and his entire regime are violent.”
“They are anti-Black. They are anti-people. They are anti-free speech,” Abdullah said. “What we are is indeed an organized body of people who want freedom for our people — and that is a demand for the kind of sustainable peace that only comes with justice.”
Others, including prominent California Democrats, framed Trump’s memo and other recent administration acts — including Thursday’s indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over the objections of career prosecutors — as a worrying blueprint for much wider vengeance on Trump’s behalf, which must be resisted.
“Trump is waging a crusade of retribution — abusing the federal government as a weapon of personal revenge,” Gov. Gavin Newsom posted to X. “Today it’s his enemies. Tomorrow it may be you. Speak out. Use your voice.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, left, FBI Director Kash Patel and Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi listen to President Trump Thursday in the Oval Office.
(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta noted that the memo listed various incidents of violence against Republicans while “deliberately ignoring” violence against Democrats, and said that while it is unclear what may come of the order, “the chilling effect is real and cannot be ignored.”
Bonta also sent Bondi a letter Friday expressing his “grave concern” with the Comey indictment and asking her to “reassert the long-standing independence of the U.S. Department of Justice from political interference by declining to continue these politically-motivated investigations and prosecutions.”
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said the Trump administration is twisting Kirk’s tragic killing “into a pretext to weaponize the federal government against opponents Trump says he ‘hates.’”
“In recent days, they’ve branded entire groups — including the Democratic Party itself — as threats, directed [the Justice Department] to go after his perceived enemies, and coerced companies to stifle any criticism of the Administration or its allies. This is pure personal grievance and retribution,” Padilla said. “If this abuse of power is normalized, no dissenting voice will be safe.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said it was “the highest form of hypocrisy for Democrats to falsely claim accountability is ‘political retribution’ when Joe Biden is the one who spent years weaponizing his entire Administration against President Trump and millions of patriotic Americans.”
Jackson accused the Biden administration of censoring average Americans for their posts about COVID-19 on social media and of prosecuting “peaceful pro-life protestors,” among other things, and said the Trump administration “will continue to deliver the truth to the American people, restore integrity to our justice system, and take action to stop radical left-wing violence that is plaguing American communities.”
A month ago, Miller said, “The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization” — a quote raising new concerns in light of Trump’s memo.
On Sept. 16, Bondi said on X that “the radical left” has for too long normalized threats and cheered on political violence, and that she would be ending that by somehow prosecuting them for “hate speech.”
Constitutional scholars — and some prominent conservative pundits — ridiculed Bondi’s claims as contrary to the 1st Amendment.
On Sept. 18, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that unnamed national security officials had told him that the FBI was considering treating transgender suspects as a “subset” of a new threat category known as “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” — a concept LGBTQ+ organizations scrambled to denounce as a threat to everyone’s civil liberties.
“Everyone should be repulsed by the attempts to use the power of the federal government against their neighbors, their friends, and our families,” Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said Wednesday. “It creates a dangerous precedent that could one day be used against other Americans, progressive or conservative or anywhere in between.”
In recent days, Trump has unabashedly attacked his critics — including late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, whose show was briefly suspended. On Sept. 20, he demanded on his Truth Social platform that Bondi move to prosecute several of his most prominent political opponents, including Comey, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” wrote Trump, the only felon to ever occupy the White House. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Comey’s indictment — on charges of lying to Congress — was reported shortly after the White House event where Trump signed the memo. Trump declined to discuss Comey at the event, and was vague about who else might be targeted under the memo. But he did say he had heard “a lot of different names,” including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and George Soros, two prominent Democratic donors.
“If they are funding these things, they’re gonna have some problems,” Trump said, without providing any evidence of wrongdoing by either man.
The Open Society Foundations, which have disbursed billions from Soros’ fortune to an array of progressive groups globally, said in response that they “unequivocally condemn terrorism and do not fund terrorism” and that their activities “are peaceful and lawful.” Accusations suggesting otherwise were “politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with,” the group said.
John Day, president-elect of the American College of Trial Lawyers, said his organization has not taken a position on Trump’s memo, but had grave concerns about the process by which Comey was indicted — namely, after Trump called for such legal action publicly.
“That, quite frankly, is very disturbing and concerning to us,” Day said. “This is not the way the legal system was designed to work, and it’s not the way it has worked for 250 years, and we are just very concerned that this happened at all,” Day said. “We’re praying that it is an outlier, as opposed to a predictor of what’s to come.”
James Kirchick, author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington,” which covers the Lavender Scare and its effects on the LGBTQ+ community in detail, said the “strongest similarity” he sees between then and now is the administration “taking the actions of an individual or a small number of people” — such as Kirk’s shooter — “and extrapolating that onto an entire class of people.”
Kirchick said language on the left labeling the president a dictator isn’t helpful in such a political moment, but that he has found some of the administration’s language more alarming — especially, in light of the new memo, Miller’s suggestion that the Democratic Party is an extremist organization.
“Does that mean the Democratic Party is going to be subject to FBI raids and extremist surveillance?” he asked.
If you thought Jimmy Kimmel saved free speech, think again.
To hear President Trump tell it, no one, especially law enforcement officers, is safe from the dangers caused by opposing his policies — and he’s ready to do something about it.
“This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically,” Trump wrote in a new executive order. “A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies — including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them — is required.”
Of course, despite his menacing tone, I agree with Trump that politically motivated violence against law enforcement — or anyone, be it Charlie Kirk or immigrant detainees — is reprehensible and completely unacceptable.
The deadly shooting in Dallas this week, which Trump referred to in the order, is a tragedy and any political violence should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the many laws on the books that protect our public servants, and the public at large.
But criticizing government overreach is not inciting violence, and calls for Democrats to stop attacking Trump’s policies are just calls to silence dissent — one more attack on free speech at a moment when it’s clear this administration is intent on demolishing opposition.
If we are serious about preventing further political violence, trust in our justice system must be a priority. And you know what’s really eroding trust? Scary masked agents on our streets who refuse to even say what agency they work for.
The anxiety brought on by an unaccountable and unknowable federal force, one that is expected to grow by thousands in coming years, is what is raising the temperature in American politics far more than the words from either side, though I am not here to argue that words don’t have power.
Ending the fear that our justice system is devolving into secrecy and lawlessness will reduce tension, and the potential for violence. Want to protect officers — and our democracy?
Ban masks.
“Listen, I understand that it being a law enforcement officer is scary,” former Capitol police officer Harry Dunn told me Wednesday during a press event for the immigration organization America’s Voice.
Dunn was attacked, beaten and called racial slurs during the political violence on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Nobody ever signed up to be harassed, to be targeted. That should never happen,” he said.
But Dunn said he’d never don a mask, because it harms that public trust, that mission to serve and protect.
When officers cover their faces and demand to be nameless and faceless, “They are terrorizing … with something just as simple as a mask,” he said.
Which is why California just passed a law attempting to ban such masks, effective next year — though it will likely be challenged in court, and federal authorities have already said they will ignore it.
“We’re not North Korea, Mr. President. We’re not the Soviet Union. This is the United States of America, and I’m really proud of the state of California and our state of mind that we’re pushing back against these authoritarian tendencies and actions of this administration,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom before signing the bill.
The argument in favor of masks is that some officers are afraid to do their jobs without them, fearing they or their families will be identified and targeted. The Department of Homeland security claims that assaults on officers are up 1,000%, though it’s unclear what data produced that figure.
“Every time I’m in a room with our law enforcement officers, I’m talking to them before they go out on our streets, I’m just overwhelmed by the fact that all of these young men and women have families that they all want to go home to,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said. “(P)eople like Gavin Newsom are making it much more dangerous for them just to go do their job.”
Federal immigration authorities are not required by their agencies to wear masks. Not ski masks, not balaclavas, not even medical masks — which many officers refused to don even during the pandemic.
Like the choice to become a federal law enforcement officer, hiding their identity while doing their duty is a personal decision. Some agents aren’t masked. There is no rule to bring clarity, only leaders pushing the false narrative that protecting officers is impossible at this moment of unrest, and they must do what they see fit to protect themselves.
Which raises the question, why not help all officers feel safe enough to go unmasked, rather than allowing some to work in a fearful environment? Surely, if some officers feel safe enough to go about their duties in a regular fashion, there must be something their leaders can do to promote that sense of strength among the ranks rather than cave to the timidity of anonymity and helplessness?
“Things can be done,” Gabriel Chin told me. He’s a professor of law at UC Davis and an expert on criminal procedure.
“The nice thing about being a law enforcement officer is if somebody does something illegal to you, you have the resources to investigate and have them criminally charged,” Chin said. “But you know, this kind of thing has happened to judges and police and prosecutors, apart from ICE, for some years, unfortunately, and yet we don’t have masked judges and masked prosecutors.”
Salas did not respond by demanding judges become faceless. Instead, she successfully lobbied for greater protection of all judges nationwide.
U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, a Republican-appointee who was the first to block Trump’s executive order axing birthright citizenship, has spoken publicly, along with five other federal judges, about continuing threats facing his brethren, including both a recent “swatting” incident and a bomb threat against him and his family.
“It’s just been stunning to me how much damage has been done to the reputation of our judiciary because some political actors think that they can gain some advantage by attacking the independence of the judiciary and threatening the rule of law,” he told Reuters — an attack coming from the right.
Speaking at the same event, Chief U.S. District Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island said that like many other judges, he’s been harassed with pizzas being sent to his home address — including “one in the name of Daniel Anderl,” Reuters reported. That’s the name of Salas’ murdered son.
But McConnell’s face is still visible when he takes the bench, as is Coughenour’s and every other judge and prosecutor. They face those who come before them for justice, because that is what justice requires.
What ultimately keeps them — and our system — safe is our collective belief that, even if imperfect, it has rules, stated and implied.
The most basic of these is that we face each other, even if we are afraid.
It wasn’t the greeting I was expecting from my dad when I stopped by for lunch Wednesday at his Anaheim home.
“¿Quién es Charlie Kirk?”
Papi still has a flip phone, so he hasn’t sunk into an endless stream of YouTube and podcasts like some of his friends. His sources of news are Univisión and the top-of-the-hour bulletins on Mexican oldies stations — far away from Kirk’s conservative supernova.
Papi kept watering his roses while I went on my laptop to learn more. My stomach churned and my heart sank as graphic videos of Kirk taking a bullet in the neck while speaking to students at Utah Valley University peppered my social media feeds. What made me even sicker was that everyone online already thought they knew who did it, even though law enforcement hadn’t identified a suspect.
Conservatives blamed liberalism for demonizing one of their heroes and vowed vengeance. Some progressives argued that Kirk had it coming because of his long history of incendiary statements against issues including affirmative action, trans people and Islam. Both sides predicted an escalation in political violence in the wake of Kirk’s killing — fueled by the other side against innocents, of course.
“So who was he?” Papi asked again. By then, Donald Trump had announced Kirk’s death. Text messages streamed in from my colleagues. I gave my dad a brief sketch of Kirk’s life, and he frowned when I said the commentator had supported Trump’s mass deportation dreams.
Hate wasn’t on Papi’s mind, however.
“It’s sad that he got killed,” Papi said. “May God bless him and his family.”
“Are politics going to get worse now?” he added.
It’s a question that friends and family have been asking me ever since Kirk’s assassination. I’m the political animal in their circles, the one who bores everyone at parties as I yap about Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom while they want to talk Dodgers and Raiders. They’re too focused on raising families and trying to prosper in these hard times to post a hot take on social media about political personalities they barely know.
They’ve long been over this nation’s partisan divide, because they work and play just fine with people they don’t agree with. They’re tired of being told to loathe someone over ideological differences or blindly worship a person or a cause because it’s supposedly in their best interests. They might not have heard of Kirk before his assassination, but they now worry about what’s next — because a killing this prominent is usually a precursor of worse times ahead.
I wasn’t naive enough to think that the killing of someone as divisive as Kirk would bring Americans together to denounce political terrorism and forge a kinder nation. I knew that each side would embarrass itself with terrible takes and that Trump wouldn’t even pretend to be a unifier.
But the collective dumpster fire we got was worse than I had imagined.
President Donald Trump shakes hands with moderator Charlie Kirk, during a Generation Next White House forum at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex in Washington, Thursday, March 22, 2018.
(Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press)
Although conservatives brag that no riots have sparked, as happened after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, they’re largely staying silent as the loudest of Kirk’s supporters vow to crush the left once and for all. The Trump administration is already promising a crackdown against the left in Kirk’s name, and no GOP leaders are complaining. People are losing their jobs because of social media posts critical of Kirk, and his fans are cheering the cancel cavalcade.
Meanwhile, progressives are flummoxed by the right, yet again. They can’t understand why vigils nationwide for someone they long cast as a white nationalist, a fascist and worse are drawing thousands. They’re dismissing those who attend as deluded cultists, hardening hearts on each side even more. They’re posting Kirk’s past statements on social media as proof that they’re correct about him — but that’s like holding up a sheet of paper to dam the Mississippi.
I hadn’t paid close attention to Kirk, mostly because he didn’t have a direct connection to Southern California politics. I knew he had helped turn young voters toward Trump, and I loathed his noxious comments that occasionally caught my attention. I appreciated that he was willing to argue his views with critics, even if his style was more Cartman from “South Park” (which satirized Kirk’s college tours just weeks ago) than Ronald Reagan versus Walter Mondale.
I understand why his fans are grieving and why opponents are sickened at his canonization by Trump, who seems to think that only conservatives are the victims of political violence and that liberals can only be perpetrators. I also know that a similar thing would happen if, heaven forbid, a progressive hero suffered Kirk’s tragic end — way too many people on the right would be dancing a jig and cracking inappropriate jokes, while the left would be whitewashing the sins of the deceased.
We’re witnessing a partisan passion play, with the biggest losers our democracy and the silent majority of Americans like my father who just want to live life. Weep or critique — it’s your right to do either. But don’t drag the whole country into your culture war. Those who have navigated between the Scylla and Charybdis of right and left for too long want to sail to calmer waters. Turning Kirk’s murder into a modern-day Ft. Sumter when we aren’t even certain of his suspected killer’s motives is a guarantee for chaos.
I never answered my dad’s question about what’s next for us politically. In the days since, I keep rereading what Kirk said about empathy. He derided the concept on a 2022 episode of his eponymous show as “a made-up, new age term that … does a lot of damage.”
Kirk was wrong about many things, but especially that. Empathy means we try to understand each other’s experiences — not agree, not embrace, but understand. Empathy connects us to others in the hope of creating something bigger and better.
It’s what allows me to feel for Kirk’s loved ones and not wish his fate on anyone, no matter how much I dislike them or their views. It’s the only thing that ties me to Kirk — he loved this country as much as I do, even if our views about what makes it great were radically different.
Preaching empathy might be a fool’s errand. But at a time when we’re entrenched deeper in our silos than ever, it’s the only way forward. We need to understand why wishing ill on the other side is wrong and why such talk poisons civic life and dooms everyone.
Kirk was no saint, but if his assassination makes us take a collective deep breath and figure out how to fix this fractured nation together, he will have truly died a martyr’s death.
NEW YORK — Matthew Dowd’s firing has opened a floodgate.
The MSNBC political analyst, who lost his job shortly after on-air comments about slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, was the first of many figures to face consequences Thursday for public statements or actions about the shooting.
Raw feelings about the killing have ignited a campaign to shame — and worse. Several conservative activists sought to identify social media users whose posts about Kirk they viewed as offensive or celebratory. Right-wing influencer Laura Loomer said she would try to ruin the professional aspirations of anyone who celebrated Kirk’s death.
MSNBC said Dowd is no longer with the network after his comments, shortly after the shooting, in which he said that “hateful words” can lead to “hateful actions.” Both MSNBC President Rebecca Kutler and Dowd apologized for the remarks, which Kutler called “inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable.”
Dowd said he didn’t intend for his comments to blame Kirk for the attack, as some may have construed them. Still, it brought an abrupt interruption to his work as a television commentator, which the former aide to President George W. Bush has done for nearly two decades.
The moves to curb certain public commentary after Kirk’s death are particularly notable, as his admirers had lauded him as a champion of free speech.
Actions spread across country
A Florida reporter was suspended for a question posed to a congressman. A comic book writer lost her job because of social media posts, as did educators in Mississippi and Tennessee. “CBS Mornings” host Nate Burleson was attacked for a question he asked. An Arizona sports reporter and a Carolina Panthers public relations official lost their jobs.
An anonymously registered website pledged to “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” and asked people to offer tips about people who were “supporting political violence online.”
The site published a running list Thursday of targeted posts, along with the names, locations and employers of people who posted them. While some posts contained incendiary language, others didn’t appear to celebrate the shooting or glorify violence. There were several similar efforts, including one by activist Scott Presler, who asked his followers about teachers purported to have celebrated Kirk’s killing and posted findings on X.
A staff member at the University of Mississippi was fired after sharing “insensitive comments” about Kirk’s death, according to the school’s chancellor, Glenn Boyce. The university did not identify the employee or immediately respond to questions from the Associated Press.
The president of Middle Tennessee State University said he’d fired a staffer who offered “callous and inappropriate comments on social media” about Kirk’s shooting. President Sidney A. McPhee did not identify the staff member but said the person “worked in a position of trust with our students.”
It wasn’t clear if it was the same person, but an X post by Tennessee GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn identified an assistant dean of students at MTSU who posted online that she had “ZERO sympathy” after the shooting. Blackburn said the person should be ashamed and fired.
A warning to teachers in Florida
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ education commissioner warned the state’s teachers that making “disgusting” statements about Kirk’s killing could draw sanctions, including the suspension or revocation of teaching licenses. Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas said in a memo to school district superintendents that he’d been made aware of “despicable” comments on social media.
“I will be conducting an investigation of every educator who engages in this vile, sanctionable behavior,” Kamoutsas said in the memo, which he also posted on X on Thursday. “Govern yourselves accordingly.”
The rush to police commentary appeared to have little precedent in other recent examples of political violence, such as the 2022 home-invasion hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; or the shooting deaths in June of Minnesota House Democratic leader Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark.
DC Comics announced that it was ditching a new “Red Hood” series, a Batman spinoff, after one issue had been published and two more were in the works. The comics’ writer, Gretchen Felker-Martin, had published comments about Kirk’s shooting online that DC called offensive.
“Posts or public comments that can be viewed as promoting hostility or violence are inconsistent with DC’s standards of conduct,” the comics publisher said.
Loomer, an informal advisor to President Trump whose pressure campaigns have resulted in several firings in his administration, attacked the entertainment website TMZ for what she called a “disgusting” livestream in which employees could be heard laughing and cheering seconds before Kirk’s death was announced. TMZ said the noise had nothing to do with the Kirk story — the staff members were crowded around a computer watching a car chase — but apologized for the bad timing and how it looked to viewers.
A writer for the Arizona media company PHNX Sports was fired after conservative activists called attention to a series of online posts that attacked Kirk’s positions on guns and Gaza and called him evil.
The NFL’s Carolina Panthers distanced themselves from an employee who posted comments about Kirk and a photo referencing Wu-Tang Clan’s song “Protect Ya Neck.” Kirk was shot in the neck. Football communications coordinator Charlie Rock was fired, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who spoke under condition of anonymity because the team typically doesn’t announce firings.
Rock’s name has been removed from the team’s website. He did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
CBS News anchor under attack
Burleson, a former NFL star turned anchor for CBS News’ morning show, was attacked online for asking former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on the air Thursday whether this was a moment for the Republican Party to reflect on political violence. His co-anchor, Gayle King, immediately tried to soften the question by interjecting, “I’d say both parties.”
Another former NFL player, Jay Feely, running for Congress in Arizona, said the question was offensive. “Charlie Kirk was assassinated in front of his family and you ask if Republicans need to tone down their rhetoric?” he said. (Kirk’s family was not present at the shooting.) Some conservative media stars also weighed in, with talk show host Erick Erickson calling for Burleson to be fired and Clay Travis calling him a ”moron.”
A reporter for the Floridapolitics.com news site was suspended for texting a Florida congressman a question about gun control immediately after Kirk’s shooting. Peter Schorsch, Floridapolitics.com publisher, said he was concerned that reporter A.G. Gancarski was trying to provoke a source rather than initiate a serious policy discussion. Utah law allows people to carry guns on college campuses; Kirk was slain on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem.
U.S. Rep. Randy Fine, a Florida Republican, texted back that he had learned of Kirk’s shooting only 23 minutes earlier and was repulsed to get the question when people should be praying for Kirk’s safety. Schorsch said he agreed that the timing was inappropriate, and didn’t want any of his staff members to be put in danger by anyone angry about it.
“I think everybody today should be asking questions about a wide range of policies,” Schorsch said in an interview Thursday. “But when a house is on fire, I don’t think you should ask questions about a person’s insurance policy. You put out the fire first.”
He said Gancarski was a good reporter who made a mistake. He’ll be back on the job after a few days out. Gancarski, reached by phone, declined comment.
The feminist website Jezebel removed a post headlined “We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk” that was published Monday, two days before Kirk’s death. “The piece was intended as satire and made it absolutely clear that we wished no physical harm. We stand by every word,” Jezebel said in an editor’s note.
“We may republish at a later date, but out of compassion for the victim’s family, we want to make clear that we prioritize an end to violence over anyone wanting to read about Etsy witches,” Jezebel said, in a reference to the online storefront.
Bauder and Swenson write for the Associated Press. AP journalists Sophie Bates, Kate Payne, Steve Reed and Nicholas Riccardi contributed to this report.
Professor Kevin Waite had just finished a seminar on the run-up to the American Civil War on Friday morning when a student cautiously raised her hand.
“Can I ask about the Charlie Kirk situation?” she said in Waite’s classroom at the University of Texas at Dallas.
The student, he said, wondered whether recent events carried any echoes of the past. Hyperbolic comparisons between modern political conflict and the horrific bloodshed of past centuries have previously been the stuff of doomsday prepper threads on Reddit, but this week’s shooting made it a mainstream topic of conversation.
While cautioning that the country is nowhere near as fractured as it was when the Civil War erupted, Waite and other scholars of the period say they do increasingly see parallels.
“Our current political moment is really resonating with the 1850s,” the historian said.
He and other scholars note similarities between the deployment of troops to American cities, widespread disillusionment with the Supreme Court, and spasms of political violence — especially from disaffected young men.
“What we call polarization, they called sectionalism, and in the 1850s there was a growing sense that the sections of the country were pulling apart,” said Matthew Pinsker of Dickinson University.
Even before Kirk’s alleged assassin was publicly identified as a 22-year-old who left antifascist messages, President Trump blamed the shooting on “radical left political violence.”
Conservative influencers amplified the rhetoric, with Trump ally Laura Loomer posting on X, “More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.”
Violence was far more organized and widespread in the late 1850s, historians caution. Congressmen regularly pulled knives and pistols on one another. Mobs brawled in the streets over the Fugitive Slave Law. Radical abolitionist John Brown and his sons hacked five men to death with swords.
But some aspects of modern politics are worryingly similar, scholars said.
“What almost scares me more than the violence itself is the reaction to it,” Waite said. “It was paranoia, the perception that this violence was unstoppable, that really sent the nation spiraling toward Civil War in 1860 and ’61.”
Top of mind for Waite was the paramilitary political movement known as the Wide Awakes, hundreds of thousands of of torch-toting, black-capped abolitionist youths who took to the street out of frustration with their Republican representatives.
“There was this perception that antislavery Republicans hadn’t been sufficiently aggressive,” Waite said. Wide Awakes, he said, believed “that it was the slaveholders that were really pushing their agenda much more forcefully, much more violently, and antislavery [politicians] couldn’t just sit down and take it anymore.”
Most Democratic politicians of the era were fighting to expand slavery to the Western territories, extend federal power to claw back people who’d escaped it, and enshrine slaveholders rights to travel freely with those they held in bondage.
The Wide Awakes struck terror in their hearts.
“For their political opponents, it was a really scary spectacle,” Waite said. “Any time a cotton gin burned down in the South, they pointed to the Wide Awakes and other more radical antislavery Northerners and said, ‘This is arson.’”
For Waite, the Wide Awakes can be compared to an antebellum antifa, while the paramilitaries of the South were more like modern Proud Boys.
“The South was highly militarized,” he said. “Every adult white man was part of a local militia. It was like a social club, so it was easy to take these local militias and turn them into anti-abolitionist defense units.”
Still, incursions by abolitionists into the South were rare. Incursions by slave powers into the North were common, and routinely enforced by armed soldiers.
Legal scholars have already noted striking similarities between Trump’s use of the military to aid his mass deportation effort. The Trump administration has leaned on constitutional maneuvers used to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act — a divisive law that empowered slave catchers from the South to make arrests in Northern states — in legal arguments to justify the use of troops in immigration enforcement.
“I argue it was the fugitive crisis, more than the territorial crisis, that drove the coming of the Civil War,” Pinsker said. “The resistance in the North essentially made the Fugitive Slave Law dead-letter. They broke the enforcement of that law through legal, political and sometimes protest resistance.”
Many Northern states had passed “personal liberty laws” to prevent Black people from being snatched off the streets and returned to slavery in the South — a move Waite and others compare to sanctuary laws across the country today.
“The attempt to uphold these personal liberty laws and simultaneously the government’s attempts to take these Black fugitives led to violence, and to perceptions that the so-called slave-power was the aggressor,” Waite said.
By the late 1850s, Northerners were equally fed up with the Supreme Court, which under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney was seen as a rubber stamp for slaveholders’ goals.
“The Supreme Court in the 1850s was dominated by Southerners, mostly Southern Democrats, and they were pro-slavery,” said Michael J. Birkner of Gettysburg University. “I think the Dred Scott case and the court being on one side is absolutely a parallel with today.”
The Dred Scott decision, which ruled Black people ineligible for American citizenship, is widely taught in schools.
But far fewer Americans know about the Lemmon case, a New York legal battle that could have effectively legalized slavery in all 50 states had the Taney court heard it before the war broke out in 1861.
“Slaveholders were eager to get that case before Taney, because that would have nationalized slavery,” Waite said.
Despite the similarities, scholars say that there is nothing inevitable about armed conflict, and that the imperative now is to bring the political temperature down.
“Donald Trump has not been offering that message with the clarity it needs,” Pinsker said. “He says he’s a big fan of Lincoln, but now is the moment for him to remember what Lincoln stood for.”
When it comes to parallels with America’s deadliest conflict, “there’s only one lesson,” the historian said.
“We do not want another civil war,” Pinsker said. “That’s the only message that matters.”
The event quickly spiraled after a request to pray for Kirk from Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado led to objections from Democrats and a partisan shouting match.
Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, a close friend of Kirk’s, told Democrats on the floor that they “caused this” — a comment she later said she stood by, arguing that “their hateful rhetoric” against Republicans contributed to Kirk’s killing.
Johnson banged on the gavel, demanding order as the commotion continued.
“The House will be in order!” he yelled to no avail.
The incident underscored the deep-seated partisan tensions on Capitol Hill as the assassination of Kirk revives the debate over gun violence and acts of political violence in a divided nation. As Congress reacted to the news, lawmakers of both parties publicly denounced the assassination of Kirk and called it an unacceptable act of violence.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said he was “deeply disturbed about the threat of violence that has entered our political life.”
“I pray that we will remember that every person, no matter how vehement our disagreement with them, is a human being and a fellow American deserving of respect and protection,” Thune said.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), whose husband, Paul, was attacked with a hammer three years ago, also denounced the fatal shooting.
A few hours after the commotion on the House floor, the White House released a four-minute video of President Trump in which he said Kirk’s assassination marked a “dark moment for America.” He also blamed the violent act on the “radical left.”
“My administration will find each and every one of those that contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it,” Trump said as he grieved the loss of his close ally.
Over the next few days, we are going to hear politicians, commentators and others remind us that political violence is never OK, and never the answer.
That is true.
There is no room in a healthy democracy, or a moral society, for killings based on vengeance or beliefs — political, religious, whatever.
But the sad reality is that our democracy is not healthy, and violence is a symptom of that. Not the make-believe, cities-overrun violence that has led to the military in our streets, but real, targeted political violence that has crept into society with increasing frequency.
Our decline did not begin with the horrific slaying Wednesday of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old father and conservative media superstar, and it will not end with it. We are in a moment of struggle, with two competing views for where our country should go and what it should be. Only one can win, and both sides believe it is a battle worth fighting.
So be it. Fights in democracy are nothing new and nothing wrong.
We can blame the heated political rhetoric of either side for violence, as many already are, but words are not bullets and strong democracies can withstand even the ugliest of speeches, the most hateful of positions.
The painful and hard specter of more violence to come has less to do with far-right or far-left than extreme fringe in either political direction. Occasionally it’s ideological, but more often it isn’t MAGA, communist or socialist so much as confusion and rage cloaking itself in political convenience. Violence comes where trust in the system is decimated, and where hope is ground to dust.
These are the places were we find the isolated, the disenfranchised, the red-pilled or the blue-pilled — however you see it — and anyone else, who pushed by the stress and anger of this moment, finds themselves believing violence or even murder is a solution, maybe the only solution.
These are not mainstream people. Like all killers, they live outside the rules of society and likely would have found their way beyond our boundaries with or without politics. But politics found them, and provided what may have seemed like clarity in a maelstrom of anything but.
In the past few years, we have seen people such as this make two attempts on Donald Trump’s life. One of those was a 20-year-old student, Michael Thomas Crooks, still almost a kid, whose motives will likely never be known.
The American flag at the White House is lowered on Wednesday after the slaying of Charlie Kirk.
(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)
A few months ago, we saw a political massacre in Minnesota aimed at Democratic lawmakers. Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were killed by the same attacker who shot state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, and attempted to shoot their daughter Hope. Authorities found a hit list of 45 targets in his possession.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home was broken into in 2022 and her husband, Paul, was attacked by a hammer-wielding assailant with a unicorn costume in his backpack.
Despite the fact that these instances of violence have been aimed at both Democrats and Republicans, we live under a Republican government at the moment, one that holds unprecedented power.
Already, that power structure is calling not for calm or justice, but retribution.
“We’ve got trans shooters. You’ve got riots in L.A. They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not. They are at war with us,” said Fox News commentator Jesse Watters shortly after Kirk was shot. “What are we going to do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? And that’s the question we’re just going to have to ask ourselves.”
On that last bit, I agree with Watters. We do need to ask ourselves how much political violence we are going to tolerate.
The internet is buzzing with a quote from Kirk on gun violence: “I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
Like Kirk, I think some things are worth ugly prices. I don’t think guns are one of them, but I do think democracy is.
We can’t allow political violence to be the reason we curb democracy. Even if that violence continues, we must find ways to fight it that preserve the constitutional values that make America exceptional.
“It is extremely important to caution U.S. policymakers in this heated environment to act responsibly and not use the specter of political violence as an excuse to suppress nonviolent movements, curb freedoms of assembly and expression, encourage retaliation, or otherwise close civic spaces,” a trio of Brookings Institution researchers wrote as part of their “Monitoring the pillars of democracy” series. “Weaponizing calls for stability and peace in response to political violence is a real threat in democratic and nondemocratic countries globally.”
The slaying of Charlie Kirk is reprehensible, and his family and friends have suffered a loss I can’t imagine. Condolences don’t cover it.
But the legacy of his death, and of political violence, can’t be crackdowns — because if we do that, we forever damage the country we all claim to love.
If we take anything away from this tragic day, let it be a commitment to democracy, and America, in all her chaotic and flawed glory.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration and the conservative movement were stunned Wednesday by the shooting of Charlie Kirk, a disruptive leader in GOP politics who accomplished what was once thought a pipe dream, expanding Republican ranks among America’s youth.
Inside the White House, senior officials that had worked closely alongside Kirk throughout much of their careers reacted with shock. It was a moment of political violence reminiscent of the repeated attempts on Donald Trump’s life during the 2024 presidential campaign, one official told The Times.
“We must all pray for Charlie Kirk, who has been shot,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “A great guy from top to bottom. GOD BLESS HIM!”
Kirk, a founder of Turning Point USA, was instrumental in recruiting young Americans on college campuses to GOP voter rolls, making himself an indispensable part of Republican campaigns down ballot across the country. That mission made his shooting on a college campus in Utah all the more poignant to his friends and allies, who reacted with dismay at videos of the shooting circulating online.
His impact, helping to increase support among 18- to 24-year-old voters for Republican candidates by double-digit margins in just four years, has been credited by Republican operatives as driving the party’s victories last year, allowing the GOP to retake the House, Senate and the presidency.
Democrats have recognized his prowess, with California Gov. Gavin Newsom hosting him on his podcast earlier this year in an appeal to young, predominantly male voters lost by the Democrats in recent years.
“The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form,” Newsom said on X in response to the news.
As videos of the shooting circulated online, a number of prominent Republicans, including senior members of the Trump administration, reacted to the news by asking the public to pray for the young activist.
“Say a prayer for Charlie Kirk, a genuinely good guy and a young father,” Vice President JD Vance said in a post on X.
Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said federal agents were at the scene of the shooting in Utah. FBI Director Kash Patel added the FBI will be helping with the investigation.
Wilner reported from Washington, Ceballos from Tallahassee, Fla.
The assassination of one Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and the shooting of another lawmaker and his wife at their homes are just the latest addition to a long and unsettling roll call of political violence in the United States.
The list, in the last two months alone: the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, D.C.; the firebombing of a Colorado march calling for the release of Israeli hostages; and the firebombing of the official residence of Pennsylvania’s governor — on a Jewish holiday while he and his family were inside.
Here is a sampling of other attacks before that — the assassination of a healthcare executive on the streets of New York City late last year; the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally during his presidential campaign last year; the 2022 attack on the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) by a believer in right-wing conspiracy theories; and the 2017 shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) by a gunman at a congressional softball game practice.
“We’ve entered into this especially scary time in the country where it feels the sort of norms and rhetoric and rules that would tamp down on violence have been lifted,” said Matt Dallek, a political scientist at Georgetown University who studies extremism. “A lot of people are receiving signals from the culture.”
Individual shootings and massacres
Politics have also driven large-scale massacres. Gunmen who killed 11 worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, 23 shoppers at a heavily Latino Walmart in El Paso in 2019 and 10 Black people at a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store in 2022 each cited the conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Jews was trying to replace white people with people of color. That has become a staple on parts of the right that support Trump’s push to limit immigration.
The Anti-Defamation League found that from 2022 through 2024, all of the 61 political killings in the United States were committed by right-wing extremists. That changed on the first day of 2025, when a Texas man flying the flag of the Islamic State group killed 14 people by driving his truck through a crowded New Orleans street before being fatally shot by police.
“You’re seeing acts of violence from all different ideologies,” said Jacob Ware, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who researches terrorism. “It feels more random and chaotic and more frequent.”
The United States has a long and grim history of political violence, including presidential assassinations dating to the killing of President Abraham Lincoln, lynchings and other violence aimed at Black people in the South, and the 1954 shooting inside Congress by four Puerto Rican nationalists. Experts say the last few years, however, have reached a level not seen since the tumultuous days of the 1960s and 1970s, when political leaders the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., President Kennedy, Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated.
Ware noted that the most recent surge comes after the new Trump administration has closed units that focus on investigating white supremacist extremism and pushed federal law enforcement to spend less time on anti-terrorism and more on detaining people who are in the country illegally.
“We’re at the point, after these six weeks, where we have to ask about how effectively the Trump administration is combating terrorism,” Ware said.
One of Trump’s first acts in office was to pardon those involved in the largest act of domestic political violence this century — the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob intended to prevent Congress from certifying Trump’s 2020 election loss.
Those pardons broadcast a signal to would-be extremists on either side of the political debate, Dallek said: “They sent a very strong message that violence, as long as you’re a Trump supporter, will be permitted and may be rewarded.”
Ideologies not always aligned — or coherent
Often, those who engage in political violence don’t have clearly defined ideologies that easily map onto the country’s partisan divides. A man who died after he detonated a car bomb outside a Palm Springs fertility clinic last month left writings urging people not to procreate and expressed what the FBI called “nihilistic ideations.”
But each political attack seems to inspire partisans to find evidence the attacker is on the other side. Little was known about the man police identified as a suspect in the Minnesota attacks, 57-year-old Vance Boelter. Authorities say they found a list of other apparent targets that included other Democratic officials, abortion clinics and abortion rights advocates, as well as fliers for the day’s anti-Trump “No Kings” parades.
Conservatives online seized on the fliers — and the fact that Boelter had apparently once been reappointed to a state workforce development board by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — to claim the suspect must be a liberal. “The far left is murderously violent,” billionaire Elon Musk posted on his social media site, X.
It was reminiscent of the fallout from the attack on Paul Pelosi, the former House speaker’s then-82-year-old husband, who was seriously injured by a man wielding a hammer. Right-wing figures falsely theorized the assailant was a secret lover rather than what authorities said he was: a believer in pro-Trump conspiracy theories who broke into the Pelosi home echoing Jan. 6 rioters who broke into the Capitol by saying: “Where is Nancy?!”
No prominent Republican ever denounced the Pelosi assault, and GOP leaders including Trump joked about the attack at public events in its aftermath.
On Saturday, Nancy Pelosi posted a statement on X decrying the Minnesota attack. “All of us must remember that it’s not only the act of violence, but also the reaction to it, that can normalize it,” she wrote.
After mocking the Pelosis after the 2022 attack, Trump on Saturday joined in the bipartisan condemnation of the Minnesota shootings, calling them “horrific violence.” The president has, however, consistently broken new ground with his bellicose rhetoric toward his political opponents, whom he routinely calls “sick” and “evil,” and has talked repeatedly about how violence is needed to quell protests.
The Minnesota attack occurred after Trump took the extraordinary step of mobilizing the military to try to control protests against his administration’s immigration operations in Los Angeles during the last week, when he pledged to “HIT” disrespectful protesters and warned of a “migrant invasion” of the city.
Dallek said Trump has been “both a victim and an accelerant” of the charged, dehumanizing political rhetoric that is flooding the country.
“It feels as if the extremists are in the saddle,” he said, “and the extremists are the ones driving our rhetoric and politics.”
He openly advocated for the death of then-President-elect Donald Trump, hailing himself as an “assassin” and threatening to shoot the would-be 47th commander-in-chief shortly after the election, prosecutors say.
Those words, left on Facebook posts, are at the center of a federal grand jury indictment. On Tuesday, Yucca Valley resident Thomas Eugene Streavel, 73, pleaded not guilty to three felony counts of making threats.
The San Bernardino County man was arrested Monday just before 11 a.m. by United States Marshals and arraigned the next day inside Central District Court in Riverside.
He’s out on a $10,000 bond and is expected back in court July 28. Streavel could serve up to 15 years in prison if found guilty on all counts.
“This defendant is charged with threatening the life of our President — a man who has already survived two deranged attempts on his life,” said U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi in a statement. “The Department of Justice takes these threats with the utmost seriousness and will prosecute this crime to the fullest extent of the law.”
A number listed for Streavel was not answered, and no attorney was listed for him in court documents.
His actions were detailed in a grand jury indictment from May 29 that was unsealed Tuesday.
Streavel posted a variety of threats in the days after Trump’s electoral victory in November, according to the Justice Department.
“[T]rump is a dead man walking for the time being until a patriot like myself blows his [expletive] brains out in the very near future,” Streavel posted on Nov. 6., according to court documents.
Six days later, Streavel posted on Facebook that he was “willing to make America great again and blow his [expletive] brains out,” the indictment says.
There were similar Facebook rants on Nov. 19 and on 28.
In the earlier instance, he wrote, “Let me put a bullet right between the ears of your president-elect…That’s my purpose for living,” according to the indictment.
He later posted, “I’m praying for a successful assassination of your president-elect.” He then added, “my life’s mission is killing the worthless LOSER [expletive] and my mission starts tonight so watch yourself trump [sic], you are a dead [expletive] and I am your assassin,” court documents show.
Streavel’s posts extend to before the election, when on Oct. 15 he wrote, “today is the perfect day to blow his brains out and I’d love to be the one to pull the trigger.”
The Secret Service is also investigating the matter.
“The type of rhetoric and threats made by this defendant are similar to those that led to an attempt on the President’s life last year,” said United States Atty. Bill Essayli. “There is no place for political violence or threats of violence in the United States.”
Trump was injured in a shooting at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13. The shooting left one rally attendee dead and two critically injured, and the unidentified gunman was killed by the Secret Service, according to that agency.
At Trump’s West Palm Beach, Fla., golf course on Sept. 15, a Secret Service agent scoping out the area one or two holes ahead of him saw the muzzle of an AK-47-style weapon pointing out of the tree line on the perimeter of the course.
Trump was unharmed in the second attempt on his life in two months.
Actions, we know, have consequences. And an apparent Marxist’s cold-blooded murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington on Wednesday night was the natural and inevitable consequence of a conscientious, years-long campaign to dehumanize Jews and otherize all supporters of the world’s only Jewish state.
Seriously, what did you think was going to happen?
Some of President Trump’s more colorful all-caps and exclamation-mark-filled social media posts evince an impending jackboot, we’re sometimes told. (Hold aside, for now, columnist Salena Zito’s apt 2016 quip about taking Trump seriously but not literally.) Words either have meaning or they don’t. And many left-wing Americans have, for a long time now, argued that they have tremendous meaning. How often, as the concept of the “microaggression” and its campus “safe space” corollary took off last decade, were we told that “words are violence”? (I’ll answer: A lot!)
So are we really not supposed to take seriously the clear calls for Jewish genocide that have erupted on American campuses and throughout American streets since the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023? Are we really supposed to believe that chants such as “globalize the intifada,” “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “there is only one solution, intifada revolution” are vague and open to competing interpretations?
That doesn’t even pass the laugh test.
When pro-Israel Jewish American Paul Kessler died after being hit on the head during a clash of protesters in Thousand Oaks on Nov. 5, 2023, that is what “intifada revolution” looks like in practice. When Israeli woman Tzeela Gez was murderedby a jihadist while en route to the hospital to deliver her baby earlier this month, that was what “from the river to the sea” looks like in practice. And when two young Israeli Embassy staffers were executed while leaving an event this week at Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum, that is what “globalize the intifada” looks like in practice.
Really, what did you think was going to happen?
Indeed, it is the easily foreseeable nature of Wednesday night’s slayings that is perhaps the most tragic part of it all. The suspect in the deaths of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim left behind a handy manifesto laying out a clear political motivation. This was not a random drive-by shooting. Hardly. This was a deliberate act — what appears to be an act of domestic terrorism. And the suspect, Elias Rodriguez, has a long history of involvement in far-left activist causes. If the killer intended to target Jews, then the fact that both victims were apparently Christian only underscores the “globalize” part of “globalize the intifada.”
Zito had it right back in 2016: Trump’s social media posts should be taken seriously, not literally. But when it comes to the murderous, genocidal clamoring for Jewish and Israeli blood that has become increasingly ubiquitous ever since the Jews themselves suffered their single bloodiest day since the Third Reich, such anti-Israel and antisemitic words must be taken both seriously and literally.
A previous generation of lawmakers once urged Americans to fight the terrorists “over there” so that they can’t harm us “here.” How quaint! The discomfiting reality in the year 2025 is this: The radicals, both homegrown and foreign-born alike, are already here. There are monsters in our midst.
And those monsters are not limited to jihadists. Domestic terrorists these days come from all backgrounds. The deaths of two Israeli diplomats are yet another reminder (not that we needed it): Politically motivated violence in the contemporary United States is not an equivalent problem on both the left and the right.
In 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins attempted to shoot up the socially conservative Family Research Council because he heard it was “anti-gay.” In 2017, James Hodgkinson shot up the Republican congressional baseball team a few weeks after posting on Facebook that Trump is a “traitor” and threat to “our democracy.” In 2022, Nicholas Roske flew cross-country to try to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and thus prevent Roe vs. Wade from being overturned. Earlier this year, anti-Elon Musk activists burned and looted Teslas — and assaulted Tesla drivers — because of Musk’s Trump administration work with his cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency. And who can forget Luigi Mangione, who is charged in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare Chief Executive Brian Thompson?
Both “sides” are not culpable here. They just aren’t. Israel supporters in America aren’t out there gunning down people waving the PLO flag. Nor are capitalists out there gunning down socialists.
There is a real darkness out there in certain — increasingly widespread — pockets of the American activist left. Sure, parts of the right are also lost at the moment — but this is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Regardless, the violence must end. And we must stop treating open calls for murder or genocide as morally acceptable “speech.” Let’s pull ourselves back from the brink before more blood is shed.
Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. @josh_hammer
Insights
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The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that the killings of two Israeli Embassy staffers were a “natural and inevitable consequence” of widespread anti-Semitic rhetoric and the dehumanization of Jews since the October 7 Hamas attacks, citing officials who labeled the shooting an “act of terror”[1][3].
It links the attack to pro-Palestinian chants like “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea,” asserting these phrases are explicit calls for violence rather than protected political speech[1][3].
The author claims political violence in the U.S. is disproportionately perpetrated by the far left, citing historical examples such as the 2012 Family Research Council shooting and the 2022 attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh[3].
Hammer emphasizes that the suspect’s far-left activism and manifesto reveal a deliberate, ideologically motivated act of domestic terrorism, underscoring a broader trend of anti-Israel radicalization[1][3].
Different views on the topic
Critics caution against broadly attributing isolated violent acts to entire political movements, noting that most activists condemn violence while advocating for Palestinian rights through nonviolent means[1][2].
Some argue that condemnations of Israeli government policies should not be conflated with anti-Semitism, emphasizing the distinction between criticizing a state and targeting a religious group[1][3].
Legal experts highlight that while the attack was labeled antisemitic, the victims’ identities as non-Jewish Israeli staffers complicate narratives framing the shooting solely as religiously motivated hatred[1][2].
Advocates for free speech warn against equitating protest chants with incitement, stressing the importance of contextualizing rhetoric to avoid suppressing legitimate political dissent[1][3].
Vance dismisses bipartisan outrage over offensive Young Republican messages as ‘pearl clutching’
The public release of a Young Republican group chat that included racist language, jokes about rape and flippant commentary on gas chambers prompted bipartisan calls for those involved to be removed from or resign their positions.
The Young Republican National Federation, the GOP’s political organization for Republicans between 18 and 40, called for those involved to step down from the organization. The group described the exchanges, first reported by Politico, as “unbecoming of any Republican.”
Republican Vice President JD Vance, however, has weighed in several times to speak out against what he characterized as “pearl clutching” over the leaked messages.
Politico obtained months of exchanges from a Telegram conversation between leaders and members of the Young Republican National Federation and some of its affiliates in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont.
Here’s a rundown of reaction to the inflammatory group chat, in which the operatives and officials involved openly worried that their comments might be leaked, even as they continued their conversation:
Vance
After Politico’s initial report Tuesday, Vance posted on X a screen grab from 2022 text messages in which Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate in Virginia’s attorney general race, suggested that a prominent Republican get “two bullets to the head.”
“This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat, and the guy who said it could become the AG of Virginia,” Vance wrote Tuesday. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”
Jones has taken “full responsibility” for his comments and offered a public apology to Todd Gilbert, who then was speaker of Virginia’s House of Delegates.
Vance reiterated his initial sentiment Wednesday on “ The Charlie Kirk Show ” podcast, saying when asked about the reporting that a “person seriously wishing for political violence and political assassination is 1,000 times worse than what a bunch of young people, a bunch of kids say in a group chat, however offensive it might be.”
Vance, 41, said he grew up in a different era where “most of what I, the stupid things that I did as a teenager and as a young adult, they’re not on the internet.”
The father of three said he would caution his own children, “especially my boys, don’t put things on the internet, like, be careful with what you post. If you put something in a group chat, assume that some scumbag is going to leak it in an effort to try to cause you harm or cause your family harm.”
“I really don’t want to us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive, stupid joke is cause to ruin their lives,” Vance said.
Republicans
Other Republicans demanded more immediate intervention. Republican legislative leaders in Vermont, along with Gov. Phil Scott — also a Republican — called for the resignation of state Sen. Sam Douglass, revealed to be a participant in the chat. A joint statement from the GOP lawmakers termed the comments “unacceptable and deeply disturbing.”
Saying she was “absolutely appalled to learn about the alleged comments made by leaders of the New York State Young Republicans,” Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York called for those involved to step down from their positions. Danedri Herbert, chair of the Kansas GOP, said the remarks “do not reflect the beliefs of Republicans and certainly not of Kansas Republicans at large.”
In a statement posted to X on Tuesday, the Young Republican National Federation said it was “appalled” by the reported messages and calling for those involved to resign from their positions within the organization. Young Republican leaders said the behavior was “disgraceful, unbecoming of any Republican, and stands in direct opposition to the values our movement represents.”
Democrats
Democrats have been more uniform in their condemnation. On Wednesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote to House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer asking for an investigation into the “vile and offensive text messages,” which he called “the definition of conduct that can create a hostile and discriminatory environment that violates civil rights laws.”
Speaking on the Senate floor, Senate Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer of New York on Tuesday described the chat as “revolting,” calling for Republicans including President Trump and Vance to “condemn these comments swiftly and unequivocally.”
Asked about the reporting, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called the exchanges “vile” and called for consequences for those involved.
“Kick them out of the party. Take away their official roles. Stop using them as campaign advisers,” Hochul said. “There needs to be consequences. This bulls—- has to stop.”
Kinnard writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.
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County judge in Chicago area bars ICE from arresting people at court
CHICAGO — Cook County’s top judge signed an order barring ICE from arresting people at court. Cook County includes Chicago, which has seen a federal immigration crackdown in recent months.
Detaining residents outside courthouses has been a common tactic for federal agents, who have been stationed outside county courthouses for weeks, making arrests and drawing crowds of protesters.
The order, which was signed Tuesday night and took effect Wednesday, bars the civil arrest of any “party, witness, or potential witness” while going to court proceedings. It includes arrests inside courthouses and in parking lots, surrounding sidewalks and entryways.
“The fair administration of justice requires that courts remain open and accessible, and that litigants and witnesses may appear without fear of civil arrest,” the order states.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security defended the practice of making arrests at courthouses, calling it “common sense.”
“We aren’t some medieval kingdom; there are no legal sanctuaries where you can hide and avoid the consequences for breaking the law,” DHS said in a Wednesday statement. “Nothing in the constitution prohibits arresting a lawbreaker where you find them.”
Immigration advocates decry immigration enforcement outside courthouses
Local immigration and legal advocates, including the county’s public defender’s office, have called for an order like this, saying clients were avoiding court out of fear of being detained. The office has confirmed at least a dozen immigration arrests at or near county courthouses since the end of July, when representatives said they’ve seen U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s presence outside courthouses increase.
“I have had numerous conversations with clients who are presented with a difficult decision of either missing court and receiving an arrest warrant or coming to court and risk being arrested by ICE,” Cruz Rodriguez, an assistant public defender with the office’s immigration division, said at a news conference earlier this month.
Domestic violence advocacy organizations also signed on to a petition earlier this month calling for Cook County Circuit Chief Judge Timothy Evans to issue the order. This comes after advocates said a woman was was arrested by ICE last month while entering the domestic violence courthouse.
Alexa Van Brunt, director of MacArthur Justice Center’s Illinois office, which filed the petition, said she was “gratified” by Evans’ order.
“This is a necessary and overdue action to ensure that the people of Cook County can access the courts without fear,” she said in a Wednesday statement to the Associated Press.
Evans said justice “depends on every individual’s ability to appear in court without fear or obstruction.”
“Our courthouses remain places where all people — regardless of their background or circumstance — should be able to safely and confidently participate in the judicial process,” Evans said in a statement.
ICE tactics outside courthouses seen across country
The tactic of detaining people at courthouses in the Chicago area is part of a larger jump in courthouse immigration arrests across the country. The flurry of immigration enforcement operations at courthouses has been condemned by judicial officials and legal organizations, and has drawn lawsuits from some states and the adoption of bills seeking to block the practice.
In June, President Donald Trump’s administration sued the state of New York over a 2020 law barring federal immigration agents from making arrests at state, city and other municipal courthouses.
Statehouse Democrats vow to adopt resolutions condemning federal immigration crackdown
Opening the second day of the six-day fall legislative session in Springfield, Ill., House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch decried the federal government’s immigration squeeze and vowed that his majority Democrats would use floor time Wednesday to adopt resolutions condemning the action.
“We won’t sit back and let our democracy be taken from us,” Welch said at the Capitol, surrounded by two dozen of his caucus members
Questioned about the practical impact of resolutions, Welch said there also are discussions about legislation to restrict federal agents’ patrol statewide. He lambasted reports of ICE arrests in medical facilities and applauded Evans’ ruling prohibiting warrantless arrests near courthouses.
“If we can do something similar statewide, I’d love to get that done,” Welch said. “These should be safe spaces.”
Republicans questioned their opponents’ sincerity. Debating a resolution condemning political violence, GOP Rep. Adam Niemerg noted incendiary language from Gov. JB Pritzker — in the spring he called for “street fighters” to oppose the administration — although the governor has not espoused violence. Rep. Nicole La Ha, who said she has received death threats, accused Democrats of trying to stifle opposition.
“This is not a stand against violence,” La Ha said. “It is a tasteless tactic to punish dissent and difference of opinion.”
Illinois governor denounces tear gas use on protesters
Meanwhile, Pritzker suggested federal agents may have violated a ruling by a federal judge last week that said they could not use tear gas, pepper spray and other weapons on journalists and peaceful protesters after a coalition of news outlets and protesters sued over the actions of federal agents during protests outside a Chicago-area ICE facility. Pritzker said he expected the attorneys involved to “go back to court to make sure that is enforced against ICE”
“ICE is causing this mayhem,” he said. “They’re the ones throwing tear gas when people are peacefully protesting.”
The comments also come after Pritzker denounced Border Patrol agents for using tear gas on protesters who gathered Tuesday after a high-speed chase on a residential street on Chicago’s South Side.
A few protesters also gathered Wednesday afternoon outside an ICE facility in the west Chicago suburb of Broadview, where a fence that has been at the center of a recent lawsuit had come down.
A judge ordered ICE to remove the fence after the village of Broadview sued federal authorities for “illegally” erecting an 8-foot-tall fence outside the facility, blocking public streets and creating problems for local emergency services trying to access the area. On Monday, state legislators and Black mayors of nearby suburbs gathered outside the facility to demand the fence be removed and announce an executive order limiting protests in the area to designated zones. Trump has long targeted Black mayors in large Democratic cities, many of whom have voiced solidarity with one another in recent months amid federal interventions in their areas.
Community efforts to oppose ICE have also ramped up in the nation’s third-largest city, where neighborhood groups have assembled to monitor ICE activity and film any incidents involving federal agents in their areas.
On Tuesday, hundreds of people attended “Whistlemania” events across the city and made thousands of “whistle kits” with whistles, “Know Your Rights” flyers and instructions on how to use them to alert neighbors of when immigration enforcement agents are nearby.
An increasing number of GoFundMe pages have also been launched to pay for legal costs for community members detained by ICE, most recently a landscaper and father of three children detained earlier this month.
Fernando writes for the Associated Press. AP writer John O’Connor in Springfield contributed.
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Commentary: There’s no nice way to deport someone. But Trump’s ICE is hosting a cruelty Olympics
When my father was crossing the U.S.-Mexico border like an undocumented Road Runner back in the 1970s, la migra caught him more than a few times.
They chased him and his friends through factories in Los Angeles and across the hills that separate Tijuana and San Diego. He was tackled and handcuffed and hauled off in cars, trucks and vans. Sometimes, Papi and his pals were dropped off at the border checkpoint in San Ysidro and ordered to walk back into Mexico. Other times, he was packed into grimy cells with other men.
But there was no anger or terror in his voice when I asked him recently how la migra treated him whenever they’d catch him.
“Like humans,” he said. “They had a job to do, and they knew why we mojados were coming here, so they knew they would see us again. So why make it difficult for both of us?”
His most vivid memory was the time a guard in El Centro gave him extra food because he thought my dad was a bit too skinny.
There’s never a pretty way to deport someone. But there’s always a less indecent, a less callous, a less ugly way.
The Trump presidency has amply proven he has no interest in skirting meanness and cruelty.
“The way they treat immigrants now is a disgrace,” Papi said. “Like animals. It’s sad. It’s ugly. It needs to stop.”
I talked to him a few days after a gunman fired on a Dallas ICE facility, killing a detainee and striking two others before killing himself. One of the other wounded detainees, an immigrant from Mexico, died days later. Instead of expressing sympathy for the deceased, the Trump administration initially offered one giant shrug. What passed for empathy was Vice President JD Vance telling reporters, “Look, just because we don’t support illegal aliens, we don’t want them to be executed by violent assassins engaged in political violence” while blaming the attack on Democrats.
It was up to Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem to try and show that the federal government has a heart. Her statement on the Dallas attack offered “prayers” to the victims and their families but quickly pivoted to what she felt was the real tragedy.
How ungrateful critics are of la migra.
“For months, we’ve been warning politicians and the media to tone down their rhetoric about ICE law enforcement before someone was killed,” Noem said. “This shooting must serve as a wake-up call to the far-left that their rhetoric about ICE has consequences…The violence and dehumanization of these men and women who are simply enforcing the law must stop.”
You might have been forgiven for not realizing from such a statement that the three people punctured by a gunman’s bullets were immigrants.
This administration is never going to roll out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants. But the least they can do it deal with them as if … well, as if they are human.
Under Noem’s leadership, DHS’ social media campaign has instead produced videos that call undocumented immigrants “the worst of the worst” and depict immigration agents as heroes called by God to confront invading hordes. A recent one even used the theme song to the cartoon version of the Pokémon trading card game — tagline “Gotta catch them all” — to imply going after the mango guy and tamale lady is no different than capturing fictional monsters.
That’s one step away from “The Eternal Jew,” the infamous Nazi propaganda movie that compared Jews to rats and argued they needed to be eradicated.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) as prisoners stand, looking out from a cell, in Tecoluca, El Salvador, in March.
(Alex Brandon/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
Noem is correct when she said that words have consequences — but the “violence and dehumanization” she decries against ICE workers is nothing compared to the cascade of hate spewing from Trump and his goons against immigrants. That rot in the top has infested all parts of American government, leading to officials trying to outdo themselves over who can show the most fealty to Trump by being nastiest to people.
If there were a Cruelty Olympics, Trump’s sycophants would all be elbowing each other for the gold.
Politicians in red states propose repulsive names for their immigration detention facility — “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, for instance, or “Speedway Slammer” in Indiana. U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, Trump’s top prosecutor in Southern California, has trumpeted the arrests of activists he claimed attacked federal agents even as video uploaded by civilians offers a different story. In a recent case, a federal jury acquitted Brayan Ramos-Brito of misdemeanor assault charges after evidence shown in court contradicted what Border Patrol agents had reported to justify his prosecution.
La migra regularly harass U.S. citizens even after they’ve offered proof of residency and have ignored court-ordered restraining orders banning them from targeting people because of their ethnicity. Border Patrol sector chief Gregory Bovino continually squanders taxpayer dollars on photo ops, like the Border Patrol’s July occupation of a nearly empty MacArthur Park or a recent deployment of boats on the Chicago River complete with agents bearing rifles as if they were safari hunters cruising the Congo.
Our nation’s deportation Leviathan is so imperious that an ICE agent, face contorted with anger, outside a New York immigration court recently shoved an Ecuadorian woman pleading for her husband down to the ground, stood over her and wagged his finger in front of her bawling children even as cameras recorded the terrible scene. The move was so egregious that Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughin quickly put out a statement claiming the incident was “unacceptable and beneath the men and women of ICE.”
The act was so outrageous and it was all caught on camera, so what choice did she have? Nevertheless, CBS News reported that the agent is back on duty.
Noem and her crew are so high on their holy war that they don’t realize they’re their own worst enemy. La migra didn’t face the same public acrimony during Barack Obama’s first term, when deportation rates were so high immigration activists dubbed him the “deporter-in-chief.” They didn’t need local law enforcement to fend off angry crowds every time they conducted a raid in Trump’s first term.
The difference now is that cruelty seems like an absolute mandate, so forgive those of us who aren’t throwing roses at ICE when they march into our neighborhoods and haul off our loved ones. And it seems more folks are souring on Trump’s deportation plans. A June Gallup poll found that 79% of Americans said immigration was “a good thing” — a 15% increase since last year and the highest mark recorded by Gallup since it started asking the question in 2001. Meanwhile, a Washington Post/Ipsos September poll showed 44% of adults surveyed approved of Trump’s performance on immigration — a six-point drop since February.
I asked my dad how he thought the government should treat deportees. Our family has personally known Border Patrol agents.
“Well, most of them shouldn’t be deported in the first place,” he said. “If they want to work or already have families here, let them stay but say they need to behave well or they have to leave.”
That’s probably not going to happen, so what should the government do?
“Don’t yell at people,” my dad said. “Talk with patience. Feed immigrants well, give them clean clothes and give them privacy when they have to use the bathroom. Say, ‘sorry we have to do all this, but it’s what Trump wants.’
“And then they should apologize,” Papi concluded. “ They should tell everyone, ’We’re sorry we’ve been so mean. We can do better.’”
Well, that ain’t happening, dad.
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In Trump’s ‘domestic terrorism’ memo, some see blueprint for vengeance
At a tense political moment in the wake of conservative lightning rod Charlie Kirk’s killing, President Trump signed a presidential memorandum focusing federal law enforcement on disrupting “domestic terrorism.”
The memo appeared to focus on political violence. But during a White House signing Thursday, the president and his top advisors repeatedly hinted at a much broader campaign of suppression against the American left, referencing as problematic both the simple printing of protest signs and the prominent racial justice movement Black Lives Matter.
“We’re looking at the funders of a lot of these groups. You know, when you see the signs and they’re all beautiful signs made professionally, these aren’t your protesters that make the sign in their basement late in the evening because they really believe it. These are anarchists and agitators,” Trump said.
“Whether it be going back to the riots that started with Black Lives Matter and all the way through to the antifa riots, the attacks on ICE officers, the doxxing campaigns and now the political assassinations — these are not lone, isolated events,” said Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. “This is part of an organized campaign of radical left terrorism.”
Neither Trump nor Miller nor the other top administration officials flanking them — including Vice President JD Vance, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel — offered any evidence of such a widespread left-wing terror campaign, or many details about how the memo would be put into action.
Law enforcement officials have said Kirk’s alleged shooter appears to have acted alone, and data on domestic extremism more broadly — including some recently scrubbed from the Justice Department’s website — suggest right-wing extremists represent the larger threat.
Many on the right cheered Trump’s memo — just as many on the left cheered calls by Democrats for a clampdown on right-wing extremism during the Biden administration, particularly in light of the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. In that incident, more than 1,500 were criminally charged, many convicted of assaulting police officers and some for sedition, before Trump pardoned them or commuted their sentences.
Many critics of the administration slammed the memo as a “chilling” threat that called to mind some of the most notorious periods of political suppression in the nation’s history — a claim the White House dismissed as wildly off base and steeped in liberal hypocrisy.
That includes the Red Scare and the often less acknowledged Lavender Scare of the Cold War and beyond, they said, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy and other federal officials cast a pall over the nation, its social justice movements and its arts scene by promising to purge from government anyone who professed a belief in certain political ideas — such as communism — or was gay or lesbian or otherwise queer.
Douglas M. Charles, a history professor at Penn State Greater Allegheny and author of “Hoover’s War on Gays: Exposing the FBI’s ‘Sex Deviates’ Program,” said Trump’s memo strongly paralleled past government efforts at political repression — including in its claim that “extremism on migration, race and gender” and “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” are all causing violence in the country.
“What is this, McCarthyism redux?” Charles asked.
Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, said the Trump administration is putting “targets on the backs of organizers” like her.
Abdullah, speaking Friday from Washington, D.C., where she is attending the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual legislative conference, said Trump’s efforts to cast left-leaning advocacy groups as a threat to democracy was “the definition of gaslighting” because the president “and his entire regime are violent.”
“They are anti-Black. They are anti-people. They are anti-free speech,” Abdullah said. “What we are is indeed an organized body of people who want freedom for our people — and that is a demand for the kind of sustainable peace that only comes with justice.”
Others, including prominent California Democrats, framed Trump’s memo and other recent administration acts — including Thursday’s indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over the objections of career prosecutors — as a worrying blueprint for much wider vengeance on Trump’s behalf, which must be resisted.
“Trump is waging a crusade of retribution — abusing the federal government as a weapon of personal revenge,” Gov. Gavin Newsom posted to X. “Today it’s his enemies. Tomorrow it may be you. Speak out. Use your voice.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, left, FBI Director Kash Patel and Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi listen to President Trump Thursday in the Oval Office.
(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta noted that the memo listed various incidents of violence against Republicans while “deliberately ignoring” violence against Democrats, and said that while it is unclear what may come of the order, “the chilling effect is real and cannot be ignored.”
Bonta also sent Bondi a letter Friday expressing his “grave concern” with the Comey indictment and asking her to “reassert the long-standing independence of the U.S. Department of Justice from political interference by declining to continue these politically-motivated investigations and prosecutions.”
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said the Trump administration is twisting Kirk’s tragic killing “into a pretext to weaponize the federal government against opponents Trump says he ‘hates.’”
“In recent days, they’ve branded entire groups — including the Democratic Party itself — as threats, directed [the Justice Department] to go after his perceived enemies, and coerced companies to stifle any criticism of the Administration or its allies. This is pure personal grievance and retribution,” Padilla said. “If this abuse of power is normalized, no dissenting voice will be safe.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said it was “the highest form of hypocrisy for Democrats to falsely claim accountability is ‘political retribution’ when Joe Biden is the one who spent years weaponizing his entire Administration against President Trump and millions of patriotic Americans.”
Jackson accused the Biden administration of censoring average Americans for their posts about COVID-19 on social media and of prosecuting “peaceful pro-life protestors,” among other things, and said the Trump administration “will continue to deliver the truth to the American people, restore integrity to our justice system, and take action to stop radical left-wing violence that is plaguing American communities.”
A month ago, Miller said, “The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization” — a quote raising new concerns in light of Trump’s memo.
On Sept. 16, Bondi said on X that “the radical left” has for too long normalized threats and cheered on political violence, and that she would be ending that by somehow prosecuting them for “hate speech.”
Constitutional scholars — and some prominent conservative pundits — ridiculed Bondi’s claims as contrary to the 1st Amendment.
On Sept. 18, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that unnamed national security officials had told him that the FBI was considering treating transgender suspects as a “subset” of a new threat category known as “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” — a concept LGBTQ+ organizations scrambled to denounce as a threat to everyone’s civil liberties.
“Everyone should be repulsed by the attempts to use the power of the federal government against their neighbors, their friends, and our families,” Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said Wednesday. “It creates a dangerous precedent that could one day be used against other Americans, progressive or conservative or anywhere in between.”
In recent days, Trump has unabashedly attacked his critics — including late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, whose show was briefly suspended. On Sept. 20, he demanded on his Truth Social platform that Bondi move to prosecute several of his most prominent political opponents, including Comey, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” wrote Trump, the only felon to ever occupy the White House. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Comey’s indictment — on charges of lying to Congress — was reported shortly after the White House event where Trump signed the memo. Trump declined to discuss Comey at the event, and was vague about who else might be targeted under the memo. But he did say he had heard “a lot of different names,” including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and George Soros, two prominent Democratic donors.
“If they are funding these things, they’re gonna have some problems,” Trump said, without providing any evidence of wrongdoing by either man.
The Open Society Foundations, which have disbursed billions from Soros’ fortune to an array of progressive groups globally, said in response that they “unequivocally condemn terrorism and do not fund terrorism” and that their activities “are peaceful and lawful.” Accusations suggesting otherwise were “politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with,” the group said.
John Day, president-elect of the American College of Trial Lawyers, said his organization has not taken a position on Trump’s memo, but had grave concerns about the process by which Comey was indicted — namely, after Trump called for such legal action publicly.
“That, quite frankly, is very disturbing and concerning to us,” Day said. “This is not the way the legal system was designed to work, and it’s not the way it has worked for 250 years, and we are just very concerned that this happened at all,” Day said. “We’re praying that it is an outlier, as opposed to a predictor of what’s to come.”
James Kirchick, author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington,” which covers the Lavender Scare and its effects on the LGBTQ+ community in detail, said the “strongest similarity” he sees between then and now is the administration “taking the actions of an individual or a small number of people” — such as Kirk’s shooter — “and extrapolating that onto an entire class of people.”
Kirchick said language on the left labeling the president a dictator isn’t helpful in such a political moment, but that he has found some of the administration’s language more alarming — especially, in light of the new memo, Miller’s suggestion that the Democratic Party is an extremist organization.
“Does that mean the Democratic Party is going to be subject to FBI raids and extremist surveillance?” he asked.
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Want to protect officers — and our democracy? Ban masks
If you thought Jimmy Kimmel saved free speech, think again.
To hear President Trump tell it, no one, especially law enforcement officers, is safe from the dangers caused by opposing his policies — and he’s ready to do something about it.
“This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically,” Trump wrote in a new executive order. “A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies — including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them — is required.”
Of course, despite his menacing tone, I agree with Trump that politically motivated violence against law enforcement — or anyone, be it Charlie Kirk or immigrant detainees — is reprehensible and completely unacceptable.
The deadly shooting in Dallas this week, which Trump referred to in the order, is a tragedy and any political violence should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the many laws on the books that protect our public servants, and the public at large.
But criticizing government overreach is not inciting violence, and calls for Democrats to stop attacking Trump’s policies are just calls to silence dissent — one more attack on free speech at a moment when it’s clear this administration is intent on demolishing opposition.
If we are serious about preventing further political violence, trust in our justice system must be a priority. And you know what’s really eroding trust? Scary masked agents on our streets who refuse to even say what agency they work for.
In recent days, about 6,700 federal workers from agencies outside of ICE have been pulled into its immigration mission, according to the non-partisan Niskanen Center.
The anxiety brought on by an unaccountable and unknowable federal force, one that is expected to grow by thousands in coming years, is what is raising the temperature in American politics far more than the words from either side, though I am not here to argue that words don’t have power.
Ending the fear that our justice system is devolving into secrecy and lawlessness will reduce tension, and the potential for violence. Want to protect officers — and our democracy?
Ban masks.
“Listen, I understand that it being a law enforcement officer is scary,” former Capitol police officer Harry Dunn told me Wednesday during a press event for the immigration organization America’s Voice.
Dunn was attacked, beaten and called racial slurs during the political violence on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Nobody ever signed up to be harassed, to be targeted. That should never happen,” he said.
But Dunn said he’d never don a mask, because it harms that public trust, that mission to serve and protect.
When officers cover their faces and demand to be nameless and faceless, “They are terrorizing … with something just as simple as a mask,” he said.
Which is why California just passed a law attempting to ban such masks, effective next year — though it will likely be challenged in court, and federal authorities have already said they will ignore it.
“We’re not North Korea, Mr. President. We’re not the Soviet Union. This is the United States of America, and I’m really proud of the state of California and our state of mind that we’re pushing back against these authoritarian tendencies and actions of this administration,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom before signing the bill.
The argument in favor of masks is that some officers are afraid to do their jobs without them, fearing they or their families will be identified and targeted. The Department of Homeland security claims that assaults on officers are up 1,000%, though it’s unclear what data produced that figure.
“Every time I’m in a room with our law enforcement officers, I’m talking to them before they go out on our streets, I’m just overwhelmed by the fact that all of these young men and women have families that they all want to go home to,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said. “(P)eople like Gavin Newsom are making it much more dangerous for them just to go do their job.”
Federal immigration authorities are not required by their agencies to wear masks. Not ski masks, not balaclavas, not even medical masks — which many officers refused to don even during the pandemic.
Like the choice to become a federal law enforcement officer, hiding their identity while doing their duty is a personal decision. Some agents aren’t masked. There is no rule to bring clarity, only leaders pushing the false narrative that protecting officers is impossible at this moment of unrest, and they must do what they see fit to protect themselves.
Which raises the question, why not help all officers feel safe enough to go unmasked, rather than allowing some to work in a fearful environment? Surely, if some officers feel safe enough to go about their duties in a regular fashion, there must be something their leaders can do to promote that sense of strength among the ranks rather than cave to the timidity of anonymity and helplessness?
“Things can be done,” Gabriel Chin told me. He’s a professor of law at UC Davis and an expert on criminal procedure.
“The nice thing about being a law enforcement officer is if somebody does something illegal to you, you have the resources to investigate and have them criminally charged,” Chin said. “But you know, this kind of thing has happened to judges and police and prosecutors, apart from ICE, for some years, unfortunately, and yet we don’t have masked judges and masked prosecutors.”
In 2020, for example, the son of New Jersey judge Esther Salas was shot and killed by a self-described men’s rights lawyer who came to her front door and had a list of other judges in his car.
Salas did not respond by demanding judges become faceless. Instead, she successfully lobbied for greater protection of all judges nationwide.
U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, a Republican-appointee who was the first to block Trump’s executive order axing birthright citizenship, has spoken publicly, along with five other federal judges, about continuing threats facing his brethren, including both a recent “swatting” incident and a bomb threat against him and his family.
“It’s just been stunning to me how much damage has been done to the reputation of our judiciary because some political actors think that they can gain some advantage by attacking the independence of the judiciary and threatening the rule of law,” he told Reuters — an attack coming from the right.
Speaking at the same event, Chief U.S. District Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island said that like many other judges, he’s been harassed with pizzas being sent to his home address — including “one in the name of Daniel Anderl,” Reuters reported. That’s the name of Salas’ murdered son.
Just this week, a Santa Monica man was arrested and charged with doxxing an ICE lawyer.
But McConnell’s face is still visible when he takes the bench, as is Coughenour’s and every other judge and prosecutor. They face those who come before them for justice, because that is what justice requires.
What ultimately keeps them — and our system — safe is our collective belief that, even if imperfect, it has rules, stated and implied.
The most basic of these is that we face each other, even if we are afraid.
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Empathy is the only way forward after Charlie Kirk’s death
It wasn’t the greeting I was expecting from my dad when I stopped by for lunch Wednesday at his Anaheim home.
“¿Quién es Charlie Kirk?”
Papi still has a flip phone, so he hasn’t sunk into an endless stream of YouTube and podcasts like some of his friends. His sources of news are Univisión and the top-of-the-hour bulletins on Mexican oldies stations — far away from Kirk’s conservative supernova.
“Some political activist,” I replied. “Why?”
“The news said he got shot.”
Papi kept watering his roses while I went on my laptop to learn more. My stomach churned and my heart sank as graphic videos of Kirk taking a bullet in the neck while speaking to students at Utah Valley University peppered my social media feeds. What made me even sicker was that everyone online already thought they knew who did it, even though law enforcement hadn’t identified a suspect.
Conservatives blamed liberalism for demonizing one of their heroes and vowed vengeance. Some progressives argued that Kirk had it coming because of his long history of incendiary statements against issues including affirmative action, trans people and Islam. Both sides predicted an escalation in political violence in the wake of Kirk’s killing — fueled by the other side against innocents, of course.
It was the internet at its worst, so I closed my laptop and checked on my dad. He had moved on to cleaning the pool.
“So who was he?” Papi asked again. By then, Donald Trump had announced Kirk’s death. Text messages streamed in from my colleagues. I gave my dad a brief sketch of Kirk’s life, and he frowned when I said the commentator had supported Trump’s mass deportation dreams.
Hate wasn’t on Papi’s mind, however.
“It’s sad that he got killed,” Papi said. “May God bless him and his family.”
“Are politics going to get worse now?” he added.
It’s a question that friends and family have been asking me ever since Kirk’s assassination. I’m the political animal in their circles, the one who bores everyone at parties as I yap about Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom while they want to talk Dodgers and Raiders. They’re too focused on raising families and trying to prosper in these hard times to post a hot take on social media about political personalities they barely know.
They’ve long been over this nation’s partisan divide, because they work and play just fine with people they don’t agree with. They’re tired of being told to loathe someone over ideological differences or blindly worship a person or a cause because it’s supposedly in their best interests. They might not have heard of Kirk before his assassination, but they now worry about what’s next — because a killing this prominent is usually a precursor of worse times ahead.
I wasn’t naive enough to think that the killing of someone as divisive as Kirk would bring Americans together to denounce political terrorism and forge a kinder nation. I knew that each side would embarrass itself with terrible takes and that Trump wouldn’t even pretend to be a unifier.
But the collective dumpster fire we got was worse than I had imagined.
President Donald Trump shakes hands with moderator Charlie Kirk, during a Generation Next White House forum at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex in Washington, Thursday, March 22, 2018.
(Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press)
Although conservatives brag that no riots have sparked, as happened after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, they’re largely staying silent as the loudest of Kirk’s supporters vow to crush the left once and for all. The Trump administration is already promising a crackdown against the left in Kirk’s name, and no GOP leaders are complaining. People are losing their jobs because of social media posts critical of Kirk, and his fans are cheering the cancel cavalcade.
Meanwhile, progressives are flummoxed by the right, yet again. They can’t understand why vigils nationwide for someone they long cast as a white nationalist, a fascist and worse are drawing thousands. They’re dismissing those who attend as deluded cultists, hardening hearts on each side even more. They’re posting Kirk’s past statements on social media as proof that they’re correct about him — but that’s like holding up a sheet of paper to dam the Mississippi.
I hadn’t paid close attention to Kirk, mostly because he didn’t have a direct connection to Southern California politics. I knew he had helped turn young voters toward Trump, and I loathed his noxious comments that occasionally caught my attention. I appreciated that he was willing to argue his views with critics, even if his style was more Cartman from “South Park” (which satirized Kirk’s college tours just weeks ago) than Ronald Reagan versus Walter Mondale.
I understand why his fans are grieving and why opponents are sickened at his canonization by Trump, who seems to think that only conservatives are the victims of political violence and that liberals can only be perpetrators. I also know that a similar thing would happen if, heaven forbid, a progressive hero suffered Kirk’s tragic end — way too many people on the right would be dancing a jig and cracking inappropriate jokes, while the left would be whitewashing the sins of the deceased.
We’re witnessing a partisan passion play, with the biggest losers our democracy and the silent majority of Americans like my father who just want to live life. Weep or critique — it’s your right to do either. But don’t drag the whole country into your culture war. Those who have navigated between the Scylla and Charybdis of right and left for too long want to sail to calmer waters. Turning Kirk’s murder into a modern-day Ft. Sumter when we aren’t even certain of his suspected killer’s motives is a guarantee for chaos.
I never answered my dad’s question about what’s next for us politically. In the days since, I keep rereading what Kirk said about empathy. He derided the concept on a 2022 episode of his eponymous show as “a made-up, new age term that … does a lot of damage.”
Kirk was wrong about many things, but especially that. Empathy means we try to understand each other’s experiences — not agree, not embrace, but understand. Empathy connects us to others in the hope of creating something bigger and better.
It’s what allows me to feel for Kirk’s loved ones and not wish his fate on anyone, no matter how much I dislike them or their views. It’s the only thing that ties me to Kirk — he loved this country as much as I do, even if our views about what makes it great were radically different.
Preaching empathy might be a fool’s errand. But at a time when we’re entrenched deeper in our silos than ever, it’s the only way forward. We need to understand why wishing ill on the other side is wrong and why such talk poisons civic life and dooms everyone.
Kirk was no saint, but if his assassination makes us take a collective deep breath and figure out how to fix this fractured nation together, he will have truly died a martyr’s death.
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Matthew Dowd’s firing triggers flood of people facing consequences for comments on Kirk’s death
NEW YORK — Matthew Dowd’s firing has opened a floodgate.
The MSNBC political analyst, who lost his job shortly after on-air comments about slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, was the first of many figures to face consequences Thursday for public statements or actions about the shooting.
Raw feelings about the killing have ignited a campaign to shame — and worse. Several conservative activists sought to identify social media users whose posts about Kirk they viewed as offensive or celebratory. Right-wing influencer Laura Loomer said she would try to ruin the professional aspirations of anyone who celebrated Kirk’s death.
MSNBC said Dowd is no longer with the network after his comments, shortly after the shooting, in which he said that “hateful words” can lead to “hateful actions.” Both MSNBC President Rebecca Kutler and Dowd apologized for the remarks, which Kutler called “inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable.”
Dowd said he didn’t intend for his comments to blame Kirk for the attack, as some may have construed them. Still, it brought an abrupt interruption to his work as a television commentator, which the former aide to President George W. Bush has done for nearly two decades.
The moves to curb certain public commentary after Kirk’s death are particularly notable, as his admirers had lauded him as a champion of free speech.
Actions spread across country
A Florida reporter was suspended for a question posed to a congressman. A comic book writer lost her job because of social media posts, as did educators in Mississippi and Tennessee. “CBS Mornings” host Nate Burleson was attacked for a question he asked. An Arizona sports reporter and a Carolina Panthers public relations official lost their jobs.
An anonymously registered website pledged to “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” and asked people to offer tips about people who were “supporting political violence online.”
The site published a running list Thursday of targeted posts, along with the names, locations and employers of people who posted them. While some posts contained incendiary language, others didn’t appear to celebrate the shooting or glorify violence. There were several similar efforts, including one by activist Scott Presler, who asked his followers about teachers purported to have celebrated Kirk’s killing and posted findings on X.
A staff member at the University of Mississippi was fired after sharing “insensitive comments” about Kirk’s death, according to the school’s chancellor, Glenn Boyce. The university did not identify the employee or immediately respond to questions from the Associated Press.
The president of Middle Tennessee State University said he’d fired a staffer who offered “callous and inappropriate comments on social media” about Kirk’s shooting. President Sidney A. McPhee did not identify the staff member but said the person “worked in a position of trust with our students.”
It wasn’t clear if it was the same person, but an X post by Tennessee GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn identified an assistant dean of students at MTSU who posted online that she had “ZERO sympathy” after the shooting. Blackburn said the person should be ashamed and fired.
A warning to teachers in Florida
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ education commissioner warned the state’s teachers that making “disgusting” statements about Kirk’s killing could draw sanctions, including the suspension or revocation of teaching licenses. Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas said in a memo to school district superintendents that he’d been made aware of “despicable” comments on social media.
“I will be conducting an investigation of every educator who engages in this vile, sanctionable behavior,” Kamoutsas said in the memo, which he also posted on X on Thursday. “Govern yourselves accordingly.”
The rush to police commentary appeared to have little precedent in other recent examples of political violence, such as the 2022 home-invasion hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; or the shooting deaths in June of Minnesota House Democratic leader Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark.
DC Comics announced that it was ditching a new “Red Hood” series, a Batman spinoff, after one issue had been published and two more were in the works. The comics’ writer, Gretchen Felker-Martin, had published comments about Kirk’s shooting online that DC called offensive.
“Posts or public comments that can be viewed as promoting hostility or violence are inconsistent with DC’s standards of conduct,” the comics publisher said.
Loomer, an informal advisor to President Trump whose pressure campaigns have resulted in several firings in his administration, attacked the entertainment website TMZ for what she called a “disgusting” livestream in which employees could be heard laughing and cheering seconds before Kirk’s death was announced. TMZ said the noise had nothing to do with the Kirk story — the staff members were crowded around a computer watching a car chase — but apologized for the bad timing and how it looked to viewers.
A writer for the Arizona media company PHNX Sports was fired after conservative activists called attention to a series of online posts that attacked Kirk’s positions on guns and Gaza and called him evil.
The NFL’s Carolina Panthers distanced themselves from an employee who posted comments about Kirk and a photo referencing Wu-Tang Clan’s song “Protect Ya Neck.” Kirk was shot in the neck. Football communications coordinator Charlie Rock was fired, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who spoke under condition of anonymity because the team typically doesn’t announce firings.
Rock’s name has been removed from the team’s website. He did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
CBS News anchor under attack
Burleson, a former NFL star turned anchor for CBS News’ morning show, was attacked online for asking former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on the air Thursday whether this was a moment for the Republican Party to reflect on political violence. His co-anchor, Gayle King, immediately tried to soften the question by interjecting, “I’d say both parties.”
Another former NFL player, Jay Feely, running for Congress in Arizona, said the question was offensive. “Charlie Kirk was assassinated in front of his family and you ask if Republicans need to tone down their rhetoric?” he said. (Kirk’s family was not present at the shooting.) Some conservative media stars also weighed in, with talk show host Erick Erickson calling for Burleson to be fired and Clay Travis calling him a ”moron.”
A reporter for the Floridapolitics.com news site was suspended for texting a Florida congressman a question about gun control immediately after Kirk’s shooting. Peter Schorsch, Floridapolitics.com publisher, said he was concerned that reporter A.G. Gancarski was trying to provoke a source rather than initiate a serious policy discussion. Utah law allows people to carry guns on college campuses; Kirk was slain on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem.
U.S. Rep. Randy Fine, a Florida Republican, texted back that he had learned of Kirk’s shooting only 23 minutes earlier and was repulsed to get the question when people should be praying for Kirk’s safety. Schorsch said he agreed that the timing was inappropriate, and didn’t want any of his staff members to be put in danger by anyone angry about it.
“I think everybody today should be asking questions about a wide range of policies,” Schorsch said in an interview Thursday. “But when a house is on fire, I don’t think you should ask questions about a person’s insurance policy. You put out the fire first.”
He said Gancarski was a good reporter who made a mistake. He’ll be back on the job after a few days out. Gancarski, reached by phone, declined comment.
The feminist website Jezebel removed a post headlined “We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk” that was published Monday, two days before Kirk’s death. “The piece was intended as satire and made it absolutely clear that we wished no physical harm. We stand by every word,” Jezebel said in an editor’s note.
“We may republish at a later date, but out of compassion for the victim’s family, we want to make clear that we prioritize an end to violence over anyone wanting to read about Etsy witches,” Jezebel said, in a reference to the online storefront.
Bauder and Swenson write for the Associated Press. AP journalists Sophie Bates, Kate Payne, Steve Reed and Nicholas Riccardi contributed to this report.
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After Charlie Kirk, some historians troubled by Civil War parallels
Professor Kevin Waite had just finished a seminar on the run-up to the American Civil War on Friday morning when a student cautiously raised her hand.
“Can I ask about the Charlie Kirk situation?” she said in Waite’s classroom at the University of Texas at Dallas.
The student, he said, wondered whether recent events carried any echoes of the past. Hyperbolic comparisons between modern political conflict and the horrific bloodshed of past centuries have previously been the stuff of doomsday prepper threads on Reddit, but this week’s shooting made it a mainstream topic of conversation.
While cautioning that the country is nowhere near as fractured as it was when the Civil War erupted, Waite and other scholars of the period say they do increasingly see parallels.
“Our current political moment is really resonating with the 1850s,” the historian said.
He and other scholars note similarities between the deployment of troops to American cities, widespread disillusionment with the Supreme Court, and spasms of political violence — especially from disaffected young men.
“What we call polarization, they called sectionalism, and in the 1850s there was a growing sense that the sections of the country were pulling apart,” said Matthew Pinsker of Dickinson University.
Even before Kirk’s alleged assassin was publicly identified as a 22-year-old who left antifascist messages, President Trump blamed the shooting on “radical left political violence.”
Conservative influencers amplified the rhetoric, with Trump ally Laura Loomer posting on X, “More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.”
Violence was far more organized and widespread in the late 1850s, historians caution. Congressmen regularly pulled knives and pistols on one another. Mobs brawled in the streets over the Fugitive Slave Law. Radical abolitionist John Brown and his sons hacked five men to death with swords.
But some aspects of modern politics are worryingly similar, scholars said.
“What almost scares me more than the violence itself is the reaction to it,” Waite said. “It was paranoia, the perception that this violence was unstoppable, that really sent the nation spiraling toward Civil War in 1860 and ’61.”
Top of mind for Waite was the paramilitary political movement known as the Wide Awakes, hundreds of thousands of of torch-toting, black-capped abolitionist youths who took to the street out of frustration with their Republican representatives.
“There was this perception that antislavery Republicans hadn’t been sufficiently aggressive,” Waite said. Wide Awakes, he said, believed “that it was the slaveholders that were really pushing their agenda much more forcefully, much more violently, and antislavery [politicians] couldn’t just sit down and take it anymore.”
Most Democratic politicians of the era were fighting to expand slavery to the Western territories, extend federal power to claw back people who’d escaped it, and enshrine slaveholders rights to travel freely with those they held in bondage.
The Wide Awakes struck terror in their hearts.
“For their political opponents, it was a really scary spectacle,” Waite said. “Any time a cotton gin burned down in the South, they pointed to the Wide Awakes and other more radical antislavery Northerners and said, ‘This is arson.’”
For Waite, the Wide Awakes can be compared to an antebellum antifa, while the paramilitaries of the South were more like modern Proud Boys.
“The South was highly militarized,” he said. “Every adult white man was part of a local militia. It was like a social club, so it was easy to take these local militias and turn them into anti-abolitionist defense units.”
Still, incursions by abolitionists into the South were rare. Incursions by slave powers into the North were common, and routinely enforced by armed soldiers.
Legal scholars have already noted striking similarities between Trump’s use of the military to aid his mass deportation effort. The Trump administration has leaned on constitutional maneuvers used to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act — a divisive law that empowered slave catchers from the South to make arrests in Northern states — in legal arguments to justify the use of troops in immigration enforcement.
“I argue it was the fugitive crisis, more than the territorial crisis, that drove the coming of the Civil War,” Pinsker said. “The resistance in the North essentially made the Fugitive Slave Law dead-letter. They broke the enforcement of that law through legal, political and sometimes protest resistance.”
Many Northern states had passed “personal liberty laws” to prevent Black people from being snatched off the streets and returned to slavery in the South — a move Waite and others compare to sanctuary laws across the country today.
“The attempt to uphold these personal liberty laws and simultaneously the government’s attempts to take these Black fugitives led to violence, and to perceptions that the so-called slave-power was the aggressor,” Waite said.
By the late 1850s, Northerners were equally fed up with the Supreme Court, which under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney was seen as a rubber stamp for slaveholders’ goals.
“The Supreme Court in the 1850s was dominated by Southerners, mostly Southern Democrats, and they were pro-slavery,” said Michael J. Birkner of Gettysburg University. “I think the Dred Scott case and the court being on one side is absolutely a parallel with today.”
The Dred Scott decision, which ruled Black people ineligible for American citizenship, is widely taught in schools.
But far fewer Americans know about the Lemmon case, a New York legal battle that could have effectively legalized slavery in all 50 states had the Taney court heard it before the war broke out in 1861.
“Slaveholders were eager to get that case before Taney, because that would have nationalized slavery,” Waite said.
Despite the similarities, scholars say that there is nothing inevitable about armed conflict, and that the imperative now is to bring the political temperature down.
“Donald Trump has not been offering that message with the clarity it needs,” Pinsker said. “He says he’s a big fan of Lincoln, but now is the moment for him to remember what Lincoln stood for.”
When it comes to parallels with America’s deadliest conflict, “there’s only one lesson,” the historian said.
“We do not want another civil war,” Pinsker said. “That’s the only message that matters.”
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Moment of silence for Charlie Kirk on Capitol Hill spirals into partisan shouting match
Republicans and Democrats came together on the House floor on Wednesday to hold a moment of silence in honor of Charlie Kirk, just as news broke that the magnetic youth activist had been shot and killed.
The bipartisanship lasted about a minute.
The event quickly spiraled after a request to pray for Kirk from Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado led to objections from Democrats and a partisan shouting match.
Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, a close friend of Kirk’s, told Democrats on the floor that they “caused this” — a comment she later said she stood by, arguing that “their hateful rhetoric” against Republicans contributed to Kirk’s killing.
Johnson banged on the gavel, demanding order as the commotion continued.
“The House will be in order!” he yelled to no avail.
The incident underscored the deep-seated partisan tensions on Capitol Hill as the assassination of Kirk revives the debate over gun violence and acts of political violence in a divided nation. As Congress reacted to the news, lawmakers of both parties publicly denounced the assassination of Kirk and called it an unacceptable act of violence.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said he was “deeply disturbed about the threat of violence that has entered our political life.”
“I pray that we will remember that every person, no matter how vehement our disagreement with them, is a human being and a fellow American deserving of respect and protection,” Thune said.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), whose husband, Paul, was attacked with a hammer three years ago, also denounced the fatal shooting.
“Political violence has absolutely no place in our nation,” she said in a post on X.
A few hours after the commotion on the House floor, the White House released a four-minute video of President Trump in which he said Kirk’s assassination marked a “dark moment for America.” He also blamed the violent act on the “radical left.”
“My administration will find each and every one of those that contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it,” Trump said as he grieved the loss of his close ally.
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Charlie Kirk’s killing is horrific — and likely not the end of political violence
Over the next few days, we are going to hear politicians, commentators and others remind us that political violence is never OK, and never the answer.
That is true.
There is no room in a healthy democracy, or a moral society, for killings based on vengeance or beliefs — political, religious, whatever.
But the sad reality is that our democracy is not healthy, and violence is a symptom of that. Not the make-believe, cities-overrun violence that has led to the military in our streets, but real, targeted political violence that has crept into society with increasing frequency.
Our decline did not begin with the horrific slaying Wednesday of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old father and conservative media superstar, and it will not end with it. We are in a moment of struggle, with two competing views for where our country should go and what it should be. Only one can win, and both sides believe it is a battle worth fighting.
So be it. Fights in democracy are nothing new and nothing wrong.
We can blame the heated political rhetoric of either side for violence, as many already are, but words are not bullets and strong democracies can withstand even the ugliest of speeches, the most hateful of positions.
The painful and hard specter of more violence to come has less to do with far-right or far-left than extreme fringe in either political direction. Occasionally it’s ideological, but more often it isn’t MAGA, communist or socialist so much as confusion and rage cloaking itself in political convenience. Violence comes where trust in the system is decimated, and where hope is ground to dust.
These are the places were we find the isolated, the disenfranchised, the red-pilled or the blue-pilled — however you see it — and anyone else, who pushed by the stress and anger of this moment, finds themselves believing violence or even murder is a solution, maybe the only solution.
These are not mainstream people. Like all killers, they live outside the rules of society and likely would have found their way beyond our boundaries with or without politics. But politics found them, and provided what may have seemed like clarity in a maelstrom of anything but.
In the past few years, we have seen people such as this make two attempts on Donald Trump’s life. One of those was a 20-year-old student, Michael Thomas Crooks, still almost a kid, whose motives will likely never be known.
The American flag at the White House is lowered on Wednesday after the slaying of Charlie Kirk.
(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)
A few months ago, we saw a political massacre in Minnesota aimed at Democratic lawmakers. Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were killed by the same attacker who shot state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, and attempted to shoot their daughter Hope. Authorities found a hit list of 45 targets in his possession.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home was firebombed this year. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer faced a somewhat bumbling kidnap plot in 2020. In 2017, a shooter hit four people at the congressional softball game, including then U.S. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and U.S. Capitol Police officer Crystal Griner.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home was broken into in 2022 and her husband, Paul, was attacked by a hammer-wielding assailant with a unicorn costume in his backpack.
Despite the fact that these instances of violence have been aimed at both Democrats and Republicans, we live under a Republican government at the moment, one that holds unprecedented power.
Already, that power structure is calling not for calm or justice, but retribution.
“We’ve got trans shooters. You’ve got riots in L.A. They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not. They are at war with us,” said Fox News commentator Jesse Watters shortly after Kirk was shot. “What are we going to do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? And that’s the question we’re just going to have to ask ourselves.”
On that last bit, I agree with Watters. We do need to ask ourselves how much political violence we are going to tolerate.
The internet is buzzing with a quote from Kirk on gun violence: “I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
Like Kirk, I think some things are worth ugly prices. I don’t think guns are one of them, but I do think democracy is.
We can’t allow political violence to be the reason we curb democracy. Even if that violence continues, we must find ways to fight it that preserve the constitutional values that make America exceptional.
“It is extremely important to caution U.S. policymakers in this heated environment to act responsibly and not use the specter of political violence as an excuse to suppress nonviolent movements, curb freedoms of assembly and expression, encourage retaliation, or otherwise close civic spaces,” a trio of Brookings Institution researchers wrote as part of their “Monitoring the pillars of democracy” series. “Weaponizing calls for stability and peace in response to political violence is a real threat in democratic and nondemocratic countries globally.”
The slaying of Charlie Kirk is reprehensible, and his family and friends have suffered a loss I can’t imagine. Condolences don’t cover it.
But the legacy of his death, and of political violence, can’t be crackdowns — because if we do that, we forever damage the country we all claim to love.
If we take anything away from this tragic day, let it be a commitment to democracy, and America, in all her chaotic and flawed glory.
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Leaders across the political spectrum denounce Charlie Kirk shooting, political violence
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration and the conservative movement were stunned Wednesday by the shooting of Charlie Kirk, a disruptive leader in GOP politics who accomplished what was once thought a pipe dream, expanding Republican ranks among America’s youth.
Inside the White House, senior officials that had worked closely alongside Kirk throughout much of their careers reacted with shock. It was a moment of political violence reminiscent of the repeated attempts on Donald Trump’s life during the 2024 presidential campaign, one official told The Times.
“We must all pray for Charlie Kirk, who has been shot,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “A great guy from top to bottom. GOD BLESS HIM!”
Kirk, a founder of Turning Point USA, was instrumental in recruiting young Americans on college campuses to GOP voter rolls, making himself an indispensable part of Republican campaigns down ballot across the country. That mission made his shooting on a college campus in Utah all the more poignant to his friends and allies, who reacted with dismay at videos of the shooting circulating online.
His impact, helping to increase support among 18- to 24-year-old voters for Republican candidates by double-digit margins in just four years, has been credited by Republican operatives as driving the party’s victories last year, allowing the GOP to retake the House, Senate and the presidency.
Democrats have recognized his prowess, with California Gov. Gavin Newsom hosting him on his podcast earlier this year in an appeal to young, predominantly male voters lost by the Democrats in recent years.
“The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form,” Newsom said on X in response to the news.
As videos of the shooting circulated online, a number of prominent Republicans, including senior members of the Trump administration, reacted to the news by asking the public to pray for the young activist.
“Say a prayer for Charlie Kirk, a genuinely good guy and a young father,” Vice President JD Vance said in a post on X.
Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said federal agents were at the scene of the shooting in Utah. FBI Director Kash Patel added the FBI will be helping with the investigation.
Wilner reported from Washington, Ceballos from Tallahassee, Fla.
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Political violence is threaded through recent U.S. history. The motives and justifications vary
The assassination of one Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and the shooting of another lawmaker and his wife at their homes are just the latest addition to a long and unsettling roll call of political violence in the United States.
The list, in the last two months alone: the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, D.C.; the firebombing of a Colorado march calling for the release of Israeli hostages; and the firebombing of the official residence of Pennsylvania’s governor — on a Jewish holiday while he and his family were inside.
Here is a sampling of other attacks before that — the assassination of a healthcare executive on the streets of New York City late last year; the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally during his presidential campaign last year; the 2022 attack on the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) by a believer in right-wing conspiracy theories; and the 2017 shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) by a gunman at a congressional softball game practice.
“We’ve entered into this especially scary time in the country where it feels the sort of norms and rhetoric and rules that would tamp down on violence have been lifted,” said Matt Dallek, a political scientist at Georgetown University who studies extremism. “A lot of people are receiving signals from the culture.”
Individual shootings and massacres
Politics have also driven large-scale massacres. Gunmen who killed 11 worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, 23 shoppers at a heavily Latino Walmart in El Paso in 2019 and 10 Black people at a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store in 2022 each cited the conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Jews was trying to replace white people with people of color. That has become a staple on parts of the right that support Trump’s push to limit immigration.
The Anti-Defamation League found that from 2022 through 2024, all of the 61 political killings in the United States were committed by right-wing extremists. That changed on the first day of 2025, when a Texas man flying the flag of the Islamic State group killed 14 people by driving his truck through a crowded New Orleans street before being fatally shot by police.
“You’re seeing acts of violence from all different ideologies,” said Jacob Ware, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who researches terrorism. “It feels more random and chaotic and more frequent.”
The United States has a long and grim history of political violence, including presidential assassinations dating to the killing of President Abraham Lincoln, lynchings and other violence aimed at Black people in the South, and the 1954 shooting inside Congress by four Puerto Rican nationalists. Experts say the last few years, however, have reached a level not seen since the tumultuous days of the 1960s and 1970s, when political leaders the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., President Kennedy, Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated.
Ware noted that the most recent surge comes after the new Trump administration has closed units that focus on investigating white supremacist extremism and pushed federal law enforcement to spend less time on anti-terrorism and more on detaining people who are in the country illegally.
“We’re at the point, after these six weeks, where we have to ask about how effectively the Trump administration is combating terrorism,” Ware said.
One of Trump’s first acts in office was to pardon those involved in the largest act of domestic political violence this century — the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob intended to prevent Congress from certifying Trump’s 2020 election loss.
Those pardons broadcast a signal to would-be extremists on either side of the political debate, Dallek said: “They sent a very strong message that violence, as long as you’re a Trump supporter, will be permitted and may be rewarded.”
Ideologies not always aligned — or coherent
Often, those who engage in political violence don’t have clearly defined ideologies that easily map onto the country’s partisan divides. A man who died after he detonated a car bomb outside a Palm Springs fertility clinic last month left writings urging people not to procreate and expressed what the FBI called “nihilistic ideations.”
But each political attack seems to inspire partisans to find evidence the attacker is on the other side. Little was known about the man police identified as a suspect in the Minnesota attacks, 57-year-old Vance Boelter. Authorities say they found a list of other apparent targets that included other Democratic officials, abortion clinics and abortion rights advocates, as well as fliers for the day’s anti-Trump “No Kings” parades.
Conservatives online seized on the fliers — and the fact that Boelter had apparently once been reappointed to a state workforce development board by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — to claim the suspect must be a liberal. “The far left is murderously violent,” billionaire Elon Musk posted on his social media site, X.
It was reminiscent of the fallout from the attack on Paul Pelosi, the former House speaker’s then-82-year-old husband, who was seriously injured by a man wielding a hammer. Right-wing figures falsely theorized the assailant was a secret lover rather than what authorities said he was: a believer in pro-Trump conspiracy theories who broke into the Pelosi home echoing Jan. 6 rioters who broke into the Capitol by saying: “Where is Nancy?!”
No prominent Republican ever denounced the Pelosi assault, and GOP leaders including Trump joked about the attack at public events in its aftermath.
On Saturday, Nancy Pelosi posted a statement on X decrying the Minnesota attack. “All of us must remember that it’s not only the act of violence, but also the reaction to it, that can normalize it,” she wrote.
After mocking the Pelosis after the 2022 attack, Trump on Saturday joined in the bipartisan condemnation of the Minnesota shootings, calling them “horrific violence.” The president has, however, consistently broken new ground with his bellicose rhetoric toward his political opponents, whom he routinely calls “sick” and “evil,” and has talked repeatedly about how violence is needed to quell protests.
The Minnesota attack occurred after Trump took the extraordinary step of mobilizing the military to try to control protests against his administration’s immigration operations in Los Angeles during the last week, when he pledged to “HIT” disrespectful protesters and warned of a “migrant invasion” of the city.
Dallek said Trump has been “both a victim and an accelerant” of the charged, dehumanizing political rhetoric that is flooding the country.
“It feels as if the extremists are in the saddle,” he said, “and the extremists are the ones driving our rhetoric and politics.”
Riccardi writes for the Associated Press.
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Man who claimed to be Trump’s ‘assassin’ pleads not guilty to threats
He openly advocated for the death of then-President-elect Donald Trump, hailing himself as an “assassin” and threatening to shoot the would-be 47th commander-in-chief shortly after the election, prosecutors say.
Those words, left on Facebook posts, are at the center of a federal grand jury indictment. On Tuesday, Yucca Valley resident Thomas Eugene Streavel, 73, pleaded not guilty to three felony counts of making threats.
The San Bernardino County man was arrested Monday just before 11 a.m. by United States Marshals and arraigned the next day inside Central District Court in Riverside.
He’s out on a $10,000 bond and is expected back in court July 28. Streavel could serve up to 15 years in prison if found guilty on all counts.
“This defendant is charged with threatening the life of our President — a man who has already survived two deranged attempts on his life,” said U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi in a statement. “The Department of Justice takes these threats with the utmost seriousness and will prosecute this crime to the fullest extent of the law.”
A number listed for Streavel was not answered, and no attorney was listed for him in court documents.
His actions were detailed in a grand jury indictment from May 29 that was unsealed Tuesday.
Streavel posted a variety of threats in the days after Trump’s electoral victory in November, according to the Justice Department.
“[T]rump is a dead man walking for the time being until a patriot like myself blows his [expletive] brains out in the very near future,” Streavel posted on Nov. 6., according to court documents.
Six days later, Streavel posted on Facebook that he was “willing to make America great again and blow his [expletive] brains out,” the indictment says.
There were similar Facebook rants on Nov. 19 and on 28.
In the earlier instance, he wrote, “Let me put a bullet right between the ears of your president-elect…That’s my purpose for living,” according to the indictment.
He later posted, “I’m praying for a successful assassination of your president-elect.” He then added, “my life’s mission is killing the worthless LOSER [expletive] and my mission starts tonight so watch yourself trump [sic], you are a dead [expletive] and I am your assassin,” court documents show.
Streavel’s posts extend to before the election, when on Oct. 15 he wrote, “today is the perfect day to blow his brains out and I’d love to be the one to pull the trigger.”
The Secret Service is also investigating the matter.
“The type of rhetoric and threats made by this defendant are similar to those that led to an attempt on the President’s life last year,” said United States Atty. Bill Essayli. “There is no place for political violence or threats of violence in the United States.”
Trump was injured in a shooting at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13. The shooting left one rally attendee dead and two critically injured, and the unidentified gunman was killed by the Secret Service, according to that agency.
At Trump’s West Palm Beach, Fla., golf course on Sept. 15, a Secret Service agent scoping out the area one or two holes ahead of him saw the muzzle of an AK-47-style weapon pointing out of the tree line on the perimeter of the course.
Trump was unharmed in the second attempt on his life in two months.
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Contributor: The Israeli Embassy killings and the ominous turn in political violence
Actions, we know, have consequences. And an apparent Marxist’s cold-blooded murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington on Wednesday night was the natural and inevitable consequence of a conscientious, years-long campaign to dehumanize Jews and otherize all supporters of the world’s only Jewish state.
Seriously, what did you think was going to happen?
Some of President Trump’s more colorful all-caps and exclamation-mark-filled social media posts evince an impending jackboot, we’re sometimes told. (Hold aside, for now, columnist Salena Zito’s apt 2016 quip about taking Trump seriously but not literally.) Words either have meaning or they don’t. And many left-wing Americans have, for a long time now, argued that they have tremendous meaning. How often, as the concept of the “microaggression” and its campus “safe space” corollary took off last decade, were we told that “words are violence”? (I’ll answer: A lot!)
So are we really not supposed to take seriously the clear calls for Jewish genocide that have erupted on American campuses and throughout American streets since the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023? Are we really supposed to believe that chants such as “globalize the intifada,” “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “there is only one solution, intifada revolution” are vague and open to competing interpretations?
That doesn’t even pass the laugh test.
When pro-Israel Jewish American Paul Kessler died after being hit on the head during a clash of protesters in Thousand Oaks on Nov. 5, 2023, that is what “intifada revolution” looks like in practice. When Israeli woman Tzeela Gez was murdered by a jihadist while en route to the hospital to deliver her baby earlier this month, that was what “from the river to the sea” looks like in practice. And when two young Israeli Embassy staffers were executed while leaving an event this week at Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum, that is what “globalize the intifada” looks like in practice.
Really, what did you think was going to happen?
Indeed, it is the easily foreseeable nature of Wednesday night’s slayings that is perhaps the most tragic part of it all. The suspect in the deaths of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim left behind a handy manifesto laying out a clear political motivation. This was not a random drive-by shooting. Hardly. This was a deliberate act — what appears to be an act of domestic terrorism. And the suspect, Elias Rodriguez, has a long history of involvement in far-left activist causes. If the killer intended to target Jews, then the fact that both victims were apparently Christian only underscores the “globalize” part of “globalize the intifada.”
Zito had it right back in 2016: Trump’s social media posts should be taken seriously, not literally. But when it comes to the murderous, genocidal clamoring for Jewish and Israeli blood that has become increasingly ubiquitous ever since the Jews themselves suffered their single bloodiest day since the Third Reich, such anti-Israel and antisemitic words must be taken both seriously and literally.
A previous generation of lawmakers once urged Americans to fight the terrorists “over there” so that they can’t harm us “here.” How quaint! The discomfiting reality in the year 2025 is this: The radicals, both homegrown and foreign-born alike, are already here. There are monsters in our midst.
And those monsters are not limited to jihadists. Domestic terrorists these days come from all backgrounds. The deaths of two Israeli diplomats are yet another reminder (not that we needed it): Politically motivated violence in the contemporary United States is not an equivalent problem on both the left and the right.
In 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins attempted to shoot up the socially conservative Family Research Council because he heard it was “anti-gay.” In 2017, James Hodgkinson shot up the Republican congressional baseball team a few weeks after posting on Facebook that Trump is a “traitor” and threat to “our democracy.” In 2022, Nicholas Roske flew cross-country to try to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and thus prevent Roe vs. Wade from being overturned. Earlier this year, anti-Elon Musk activists burned and looted Teslas — and assaulted Tesla drivers — because of Musk’s Trump administration work with his cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency. And who can forget Luigi Mangione, who is charged in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare Chief Executive Brian Thompson?
Both “sides” are not culpable here. They just aren’t. Israel supporters in America aren’t out there gunning down people waving the PLO flag. Nor are capitalists out there gunning down socialists.
There is a real darkness out there in certain — increasingly widespread — pockets of the American activist left. Sure, parts of the right are also lost at the moment — but this is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Regardless, the violence must end. And we must stop treating open calls for murder or genocide as morally acceptable “speech.” Let’s pull ourselves back from the brink before more blood is shed.
Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. @josh_hammer
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