In recent weeks, American politics have stopped resembling a democracy and started looking more like a Manson family group chat, with a flag emoji right next to the “pile of poo” emoji in our bio.
First it was the Young Republicans (you know, the nerds who used to wear ill-fitting sports jackets and drone on about budgets) who were caught on Telegram saying things such as “I love Hitler,” calling Black people “watermelon people,” and joking about gas chambers and rape. Hilarious, right?
Then came Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s now-aborted nominee to head the Office of Special Counsel, who texted that he has “a Nazi streak” and that Martin Luther King Jr. Day belongs in “the seventh circle of hell.”
But the moral rot isn’t exclusive to Republicans. Not to be outdone, Democrat Jay Jones (who is currently running for attorney general in Virginia) was caught with texts from 2022 saying another Virginia lawmaker should get “two bullets to the head,” and that he wished the man’s children would “die in their mother’s arms.”
Charming.
Meanwhile, in Maine’s race for the U.S. Senate, old posts on Reddit reveal that Democrat Graham Platner — oysterman, veteran and self-described communist — said that if people “expect to fight fascism without a good semi-automatic rifle, they ought to do some reading of history.”
What we are witnessing is a trend: Bipartisan moral collapse. Finally, something the two parties can agree on!
Keep in mind, these are not randos typing away in their parents’ basements. These are ambitious young politicos. Candidates. Operatives. The ones who are supposed to know better.
So what’s going on? I have a few theories.
One: Nothing has really changed. Political insiders have always done and said stupid, racist and cruel things — the difference is that privacy doesn’t exist anymore. Every joke is public, and every opinion is archived.
It might be hard for older generations to understand, but this theory says these people are merely guilty of using the kind of dark-web humor that’s supposed to stay on, well, the dark web. What happened to them is the equivalent of thinking you’re with friends at a karaoke bar, when you’re actually on C-SPAN.
For those of us trying to discern the difference, the problem is that the line between joking and confession has gotten so blurry that we can’t tell who’s trolling and who’s armed.
Two: Blame Trump. He destroyed norms and mainstreamed vulgarity and violent rhetoric. And since he’s been the dominant political force for a decade, it’s only logical that his style would trickle down and corrupt a whole generation of politically engaged Americans (Republicans who want to be like him and Democrats who want to fight fire with fire).
Three (and this is the scary one): Maybe the culture really has changed, and these violent and racist comments are revelatory of changing hearts and worldviews. Maybe younger generations have radicalized, and violence is increasingly viewed as a necessary tool for political change. Maybe their words are sincere.
Indeed, several recent surveys have demonstrated that members of Gen Z are more open to the use of political violence than previous generations.
According to a survey conducted by the group FIRE, only 1 in 3 college students now say it is unacceptable to use violence to stop a speaker. And according to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, “53 percent of those aged 18-34 – approve of one or more forms of hostile activism to bring about change.” This includes “threatening or committing violence, and damaging public or private property.”
Of course, it’s possible (and probably likely) that some combination of these theories has conspired to create this trend. And it comes on the heels of other trends, too, including the loss of trust in institutions that began somewhere around the Nixon administration and never reversed.
Put it all together, and we’ve arrived at a point where we don’t believe in democracy, we don’t believe in leaders, and we barely believe in each other. And once you lose trust, all that’s left is anger, memes and a primal will to power.
Worse, we’ve become numb. Every new scandal shocks us for approximately 15 minutes. Then we scroll to another cat video and get used to it.
Remember the Charlie Kirk assassination? You know, the gruesome murder that freaked us all out and led to a national discussion about political violence and violent rhetoric? Yeah, that was just last month. Feels like it was back in the Eisenhower administration.
We’re basically frogs in a pot of boiling political sewage. And the scariest part? We’re starting to call it room temperature.
Like with cigarettes, la migra should come with a warning label: Proximity to ICE could be hazardous for your health.
From Los Angeles to Chicago, Portlandand New York, the evidence is ample enough that wherever Trump sends in the immigration agency, people get hurt. And not just protesters and immigrants.
That includes 13 police officers tear-gassed in Chicago earlier this month. And, now, a U.S. marshal.
Federal agents boxed in the Toyota Camry of local TikToker Carlitos Ricardo Parias — better known to his hundreds of thousands of followers as Richard LA. As Parias allegedly tried to rev his way out of the trap, an ICE agent opened fire. One bullet hit the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant — and another ricocheted into the hand of a deputy U.S. marshal.
Neither suffered life-threatening injuries, but it’s easy to imagine that things could have easily turned out worse. Such is the chaos that Trump has caused by unleashing shock troops into U.S. cities.
Rather than take responsibility and apologize for an incident that could’ve easily been lethal, Team Trump went into their default spin mode of blaming everyone but themselves.
Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the shooting was “the consequences of conduct and rhetoric by sanctuary politicians and activists who urge illegal aliens to resist arrest.”
Acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli chimed in on social media soon after: “I urge California public officials to moderate their rhetoric toward federal law enforcement. Encouraging resistance to federal agents can lead to deadly consequences.” Hours later, he called Times reporter James Queally “an absolute joke, not a journalist” because my colleague noted it’s standard practice by most American law enforcement agencies to not shoot at moving vehicles. One reason is that it increases the chance of so-called friendly fire.
Federal authorities accuse Parias of ramming his car into agents’ vehicles after they boxed him in. He is being charged with assault on a federal officer.
Time, and hopefully, evidence, will show what happened — and very important, what led to what happened.
The Trump administration keeps claiming that the public anger against its immigration actions is making the job more dangerous for la migra and their sister agencies. McLaughlin and her boss, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, keep saying there’s been a 1,000% increase in assaults on immigration agents this year like an incantation. Instead of offering concrete figures, they use the supposed stat as a shield against allegations ICE tactics are going too far and as a weapon to excuse the very brutality ICE claims it doesn’t practice.
Well, even if what they say is true, there’s only one side that’s making the job more dangerous for la migra and others during raids:
La migra.
It turns out that if you send in phalanxes of largely masked federal agents to bully and intimidate people in American cities, Americans tend not to take kindly to it.
Who knew?
Gregory Bovino, center, of U.S. Border Patrol, marches with federal agents to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Aug. 14.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
We’re about to enter the sixth month of Trump’s plan to rid the country of undocumented immigrants. Sycophants are bragging that he’s doing the job, but they’re not caring to look at the mess left in its wake that’s becoming more and more perilous for everyone involved. They insist that those who are executing and planning raids are professionals, but professionals don’t make constant pendejos out of themselves.
Professionals don’t bring squadrons to chase after tamale ladies or day laborers, or stage flashy raids of apartments and parks that accomplish little else than footage for propaganda videos. They don’t go into neighborhoods with intimidation on their mind and ready to rough up anyone who gets in their way.
A ProPublica investigation showed that ICE has detained at least 170 U.S. citizens this year, many whom offered proof that they were in this country legally as la migra cuffed them and hauled them off to detention centers.
Professionals don’t lie like there’s a bonus attached to it — but that’s what Trump’s deportation Leviathan keeps doing. In September, McLaughlin put out a news release arguing that the shooting death of 38-year-old Silverio Villegas González in Chicago by an ICE agent was justified because he was dragged a “significant distance” and suffered serious injuries. Yet body cam footage of local police who showed up to the scene captured the two ICE agents involved in the incident describing their injuries as “nothing major.”
Closer to home, a federal jury in Los Angeles last month acquitted an activist of striking a Border Patrol agent after federal public defender Cuauhtémoc Ortega screened footage that contradicted the government’s case and poked holes in the testimony of Border Patrol staff and supervisors. Last week, ICE agents detained Oxnard activist Leonardo Martinez after a collision between their Jeep and his truck. McLaughlin initially blamed the incident on an “agitator group … engaged in recording and verbal harassment,” but footage first published by L.A. Taco showed that la migra trailed Martinez and then crashed into him twice — not the other way around.
Professionals don’t host social media accounts that regularly spew memes that paint the picture of an American homeland where white makes right and everyone else must be eliminated, like the Department of Homeland Security does. A recent post featured medieval knights wearing chain mail and helmets and wielding longswords as they encircle the slogan “The Enemies are at the Gates” above ICE’s job listing website.
The Trump administration has normalized racism and has turned cruelty into a virtue — then its mouthpieces gasp in mock horror when people resist its officially sanctioned jackbootery.
This evil buffoonery comes straight from a president who reacted to the millions of Americans who protested this weekend at No Kings rallies by posting on social media an AI-generated video of him wearing a crown and dropping feces on his critics from a jet fighter. And yet McLaughlin, Noem and other Trump bobbleheads have the gall to question why politicians decry la migra while regular people follow and film them during raids when not shouting obscenities and taunts at them?
Meanwhile, ICE is currently on a hiring spree thanks to Trump’s Bloated Beastly Bill and and has cut its training program from six months to 48 days, according to The Atlantic. It’s a desperate and potentially reckless recruitment drive.
And if you think rapidly piling more people into a clown car is going to produce less clown-like behavior by ICE on the streets of American cities, boy do I have news for you.
WASHINGTON — President Trump rocked American politics at the outset of his first campaign when he first labeled his rivals as enemies of the American people. But the rhetoric of his top confidantes has grown more extreme in recent days.
Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff, declared over the weekend that “a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country” is fueling a historic national schism, “shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general.”
“The only remedy,” Miller said, “is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”
It was a maxim from an unelected presidential advisor who is already unleashing the federal government in unprecedented ways, overseeing the federalization of police forces and a sweeping deportation campaign challenging basic tenets of civil liberty.
Miller’s rhetoric comes amid a federal crackdown on Portland, Ore., where he says the president has unchecked authority to protect federal lives and property — and as another controversial Trump advisor harnesses an ongoing government shutdown as pretext for the mass firing of federal workers.
Russ Vought, the president’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, plays the grim reaper in an AI video shared by the president, featuring him roving Washington for bureaucrats to cut from the deep state during the shutdown.
His goal, Trump has said, is to specifically target Democrats.
As of Monday afternoon, it was unclear exactly how many federal workers or what federal agencies would be targeted.
“We don’t want to see people laid off, but unfortunately, if this shutdown continues layoffs are going to be an unfortunate consequence of that,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt said during a news briefing.
‘A nation of Constitutional law’
Karin Immergut, a federal judge appointed by Trump, said this weekend that the administration’s justification for deploying California National Guard troops in Portland was “simply untethered to the facts.”
“This country has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs,” Immergut wrote, chiding the Trump administration for attempting to circumvent a prior order from her against a federal deployment to the city.
“This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition,” she added: “This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law.”
The administration is expected to appeal the judge’s decision, Leavitt said, while calling the judge’s ruling “untethered in reality and in the law.”
“We’re very confident in the president’s legal authority to do this, and we are very confident we will win on the merits of the law,” Leavitt said.
If the courts were to side with the administration, Leavitt said local leaders — most of whom are Democrats — should not be concerned about the possibility of long-term plans to have their cities occupied by the military.
“Why should they be concerned about the federal government offering help to make their cities a safer place?” Leavitt said. “They should be concerned about the fact that people in their cities right now are being gunned down every single night and the president, all he is trying to do, is fix it.”
Moments later, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that though he does not believe it is necessary yet, he would be willing to invoke the Insurrection Act “if courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up.”
“Sure, I’d do that,” Trump said. “We have to make sure that our cities are safe.”
The Insurrection Act gives the president sweeping emergency power to deploy military forces within the United States if the president deems it is needed to quell civil unrest. The last time this occurred was in 1992, when California Gov. Pete Wilson asked President George H.W. Bush to send federal troops to help stop the Los Angeles riots that occurred after police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King.
Subsequent posts from Miller on social media over the weekend escalated the stakes to existential heights, accusing Democrats of allying themselves with “domestic terrorists” seeking to overturn the will of the people reflected in Trump’s election win last year.
On Monday, in an interview with CNN, Miller suggested that the administration would continue working to sidestep Immergut’s orders.
“The administration will abide by the ruling insofar as it affects the covered parties,” he said, “but there are also many options the president has to deploy federal resources under the U.S. military to Portland.”
Other Republicans have used similar rhetoric since the slaying of Charlie Kirk, a conservative youth activist, in Utah last month.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) wrote that posts from California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office have reached “the threshold of domestic terrorism,” after the Democratic governor referred to Miller on social media as a fascist. And Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) said Monday that Democrats demanding an extension of healthcare benefits as a condition for reopening the government were equivalent to terrorists.
“I don’t negotiate with terrorists,” Fine told Newsmax, “and what we’ve learned in whether it’s dealing with Muslim terrorists or Democrats, you’ve gotta stand and you’ve gotta do the right thing.”
Investigating donor networks
Republicans’ keenness to label Democrats as terrorists comes two weeks after Trump signed an executive order declaring a left-wing antifascist movement, known as antifa, as a “domestic terrorist organization” — a designation that does not exist under U.S. law.
The order, which opened a new front in Trump’s battle against his political foes, also threatened to investigate and prosecute individuals who funded “any and all illegal operations — especially those involving terrorist actions — conducted by antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of antifa.”
Leavitt told reporters Monday that the administration is “aggressively” looking into who is financially backing these operations.
Trump has floated the possibility of going after people such as George Soros, a billionaire who has supported many left-leaning causes around the world.
“If you look at Soros, he is at the top of everything,” Trump said during an Oval Office appearance last month.
The White House has not yet made public any details about a formal investigation into donors, but Leavitt said the administration’s efforts are underway.
“We will continue to get to the bottom of who is funding these organizations and this organized anarchy against our country and our government,” Leavitt said. “We are committed to uncovering it.”
America’s already roiling debate around transgender rights sharply escalated in recent days after Charlie Kirk — one of the nation’s most prominent anti-transgender voices — was fatally shot by a suspect whose life and social circles have been meticulously scrutinized for any connection to the transgender community.
Taking over Kirk’s podcast Monday, top Trump administration officials suggested they are gearing up to avenge Kirk by waging war on left-leaning organizations broadly, despite law enforcement statements that the shooter is believed to have acted alone. Queer organizations took that as a direct threat.
Kirk railed against transgender rights in life, and just prior to being shot on a Utah college campus last week was answering a question about the alleged prevalence of transgender people among the nation’s mass shooters — an idea he had personally stoked, despite pushback from statistical researchers.
Those circumstances seemed to prime the resulting outrage among his conservative base to be hyper-focused on any transgender connection.
The connection was further stoked when the Wall Street Journal reported on a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives report that suggested — seemingly erroneously — that etchings on bullet casings found with the rifle suspected as being used in the shooting included transgender “ideology.”
It was further inflamed when Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said that suspect Tyler Robinson’s roommate and romantic partner — who he said was “shocked” by the shooting and cooperating with authorities — is currently transitioning.
Leading conservative influencers, some with the ear of President Trump, have openly called for a retribution campaign against transgender people and the LGBTQ+ community more broadly. Laura Loomer called transgender people a “national security threat,” said their “movement needs to be classified as a terrorist organization IMMEDIATELY,” and said that Trump should make transitioning illegal.
LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, meanwhile, have condemned such generalizations and attacks on the community and warned that such rhetoric only increases the likelihood of more political violence — particularly against transgender people and others who have been demonized for years, including by Kirk.
“The obsession with tying trans people to shootings is vile & dangerous,” state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), one of California’s leading LGBTQ+ voices, wrote on social media. “First they try to say the shooter might be trans & WSJ amplifies that lie. Once that fell apart, they pivot to ‘he lived with a trans person.’ Even if true, who cares? It’s McCarthyism & truly disgusting.”
Many political leaders have called for calm, and for people to wait for the investigation into the suspect’s motivations before jumping to conclusions or casting blame. Cox has said that Robinson’s political ideology, different from that of his conservative family, appeared to be “part of” what drove him to shoot Kirk, but that the exact motivations for the crime remained unclear.
“We’re all drawing lots of conclusions on how someone like this could be radicalized,” Cox said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “Those are important questions for us to ask and important questions for us to answer.”
Searching for a connection
Officials were expected to release charging documents against Robinson on Tuesday that could contain more information about a motive. However, the debate has hardly waited.
Both the political right and left have searched for evidence connecting Robinson to their opposing political camp.
One of the first pieces of information to catch fire was the ATF reporting on the bullet etchings including transgender “ideology” — which turned out to be untrue, according to Cox’s later description of those etchings. That reporting immediately inspired condemnations of the entire transgender community.
“Seems like per capita the radical transgender movement has to be the most violent movement anywhere in the world,” the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. said in a Rumble livestream Thursday.
On Friday morning, President Trump said “vicious and horrible” people on the left were the only ones to blame for the political violence. “They want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone,” he said on “Fox & Friends.”
Trump was asked Monday afternoon if he thought the suspect acted alone.
“I can tell you he didn’t work alone on the internet because it seems that he became radicalized on the internet,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “And he was radicalized on the left, he is a left. A lot of problems with the left and they get protected and they shouldn’t be protected.”
The ATF declined to comment on the leaked report. The Wall Street Journal published an editor’s note walking back its reporting, noting that Cox’s description of the etchings included no references to the transgender community.
The Human Rights Campaign, a leading LGBTQ+ advocacy group, responded to the uproar by criticizing the Wall Street Journal for publishing unsubstantiated claims that fueled hateful rhetoric toward the transgender community.
“This reporting was reckless and irresponsible, and it led to a wave of threats against the trans community from right-wing influencers — and a resulting wave of terror for a community that is already living in fear,” the group said.
Spreading the narrative
The debate has heightened existing tensions around transgender rights, which Trump campaigned against and targeted with one of his first official acts — an executive order that said his administration would recognize only “two genders, male and female.”
He and his administration have since banned transgender people from military service, blocked the issuance of U.S. passports with the gender-neutral X marker, threatened medical providers of gender-affirming care for minors, and sued California for allowing transgender athletes to compete in youth sports.
In September, the Department of Justice also reportedly began weighing a rule that would restrict transgender individuals from owning firearms — a move that came after a shooter who identified as transgender killed two children and injured 18 others at a Catholic school in Minneapolis.
That shooting led prominent conservatives, including senior Trump administration officials, to link gender identity to violence. National security advisor Sebastian Gorka claimed that an “inordinately high” number of attacks have been linked to “individuals who are confused about their gender” — a trend he claimed stretched back to at least 2023, when a transgender suspect shot and killed three children and three adults at a Nashville Christian school.
After that shooting, Trump Jr. had said that “rather than talking about guns, we should be talking about lunatics pushing their gender-affirming bull— on our kids,” and Vice President JD Vance, then a senator, had said that “giving in” to ideas on transgender identities was “dangerous.”
After it was reported that Robinson’s partner is transitioning, Matt Walsh, a right-wing political commentator, wrote on X that “trans militants” pose a “very serious” threat to the country. Billionaire Elon Musk agreed, saying it was a “massive problem.”
Many in the LGBTQ+ community have strenuously pushed back against such claims, noting research showing most shootings are committed by cisgender men.
The Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University has found that the majority of shootings where four or more people were wounded in public were by men, and less than 1% of such shootings in the last decade were by transgender people.
An analysis by PolitiFact found that data do not show claims that transgender people are more prone to violence, and that “trans people are more likely to be victims of violence than their cisgender peers.”
A legacy amplified
Kirk espoused a Christian nationalist worldview and opposed LGBTQ+ rights broadly, including same-sex marriage. He called transgender people “perverted,” the acknowledgment of transgender identities “one of the most destructive social contagions in human history,” and gender-affirming care for young people an “unimaginable evil.”
Just before he was shot at Utah Valley University, Kirk had said that “too many” transgender people were involved in shootings.
It was not the first time Kirk had addressed the issue.
Days after the 2023 shooting in Nashville, Kirk went after then-White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for unrelated comments denouncing a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in state houses and saying the transgender community was “under attack.”
“It is the first shooting ever that I’ve seen where the shooter and the murderers get more sympathy than the actual victims,” he said, appearing to blame all transgender people for the attack.
The idea that liberals generally or members of the LGBTQ+ community specifically should be held accountable for Kirk’s killing has gained momentum in the days since. Vance and Trump advisor Stephen Miller seemed to allude to reprisals against left-leaning groups on Kirk’s podcast Monday, with Miller saying federal agencies will be rooting out a “domestic terror movement” on the left in Kirk’s name.
LGBTQ+ advocates called such rhetoric alarming — and said they worry it will be used as a pretext for the administration to ramp up its assault on LGBTQ+ rights.
A few hours after Charlie Kirk was killed, Sean Feucht, an influential right-wing Christian worship leader, filmed a selfie video from his home in California, his eyes brimming with tears.
The shooting of one of the nation’s most prominent conservative activists, Feucht declared, was no less than “a line in the sand” in a country descending into a spiritual darkness.
“The enemy thinks that he won, that there was a battle that was won today,” he said, referencing Satan. “No, man, there’s going to be millions of bold voices raised up out of the sacrifice and the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk.”
Soon afterward, Pastor Matt Tuggle, who leads the Salt Lake City campus of the San Diego-based Awaken megachurch, posted a video of Kirk’s killing on Instagram, adding the caption: “If your pastor isn’t telling you the left believes a evil demonic belief system you are in the wrong church!”
People place lighted candles below a photo of Charlie Kirk at a vigil in his memory in Orem, Utah.
(Lindsey Wasson / Associated Press)
Kirk’s death has triggered a range of reaction, much of it mournful sympathy for the 31-year-old activist and his family. But it also has sparked conspiracy theories, hot-take presumptions the left was responsible and calls for vengeance against Kirk’s perceived enemies.
At a vigil for Kirk in Huntington Beach this week, some attendees waved white flags depicting a red cross and the word “Jesus,” while some chanted, “White men, fight back!” Kirk spread a philosophy that liberals sought to disempower men, and some of his male supporters see his killing as an attack against them.
Whether the calls for vengeance will ebb or intensify remains to be seen, especially with Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s announcement Friday that a suspect in the fatal shooting, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, had been arrested after a family member turned him in.
In life, Kirk spoke of what he called a “spiritual battle” being waged in the United States between Christians and a Democratic Party that “supports everything that God hates.”
In death, Kirk, one of the Republican Party’s most influential power brokers, is being hailed by conservative evangelical pastors and GOP politicians as a Christian killed for his religious beliefs.
President Trump called Kirk a “martyr for truth and freedom,” and ordered flags to be flown at half-staff in his honor. He blamed Kirk’s death on the rhetoric of the “radical left.” Vice President JD Vance, who helped carry Kirk’s casket to Air Force Two, retweeted a post Kirk wrote on X last month reading, “It’s all about Jesus.” And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, quoting Jesus, wrote on X: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
A woman lays her head down on a seat during a vigil at CenterPoint Church for Charlie Kirk in Orem, Utah.
(Lindsey Wasson / Associated Press)
Experts on faith and far-right extremism say they are troubled by the religious glorification of Kirk in this era of increased political violence — and the potential vengeance that may spring from it. The activist’s death, they say, seems to have ignited various factions on the right, ranging from white supremacists to hard-core Christian nationalists.
“The ‘spiritual warfare’ rhetoric will only increase,” and Kirk is now being lifted up as “a physical manifestation” of a religious battle, said Matthew Boedy, a professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia who has written a forthcoming book about Christian nationalism that prominently features Kirk.
“Spiritual warfare rhetoric was a big part of Jan. 6,” he said of the deadly 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. “Making a martyr out of Charlie Kirk will change our nation in severe ways.”
Samuel Perry, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma and expert on Christian nationalism, said he is a Christian himself but that religion, cynically used, “has the potential to amplify what would otherwise be very secular political conflicts between Democrats and Republicans.”
“What if those are amplified with a cosmic and ultimate significance?” he said. “It becomes, ‘This is God vs. Satan. This is angels vs. demons — and if we lose this next election, we plunge the nation into a thousand years of darkness.’ … It basically provokes extremism.”
Kirk — who rallied his millions of online followers to vote for Trump in the 2024 election — declared that God was on the side of American conservatives and that there was “no separation of church and state.” He was also known for his vitriol against racial and religious minorities, LGBTQ+ people, childless women, progressives and others who disagreed with him.
Kirk called transgender people “a throbbing middle finger to God.” He said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was “a huge mistake” and called the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “awful.” On his podcast, he called with a smirk for “some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area [who] wants to really be a midterm hero” to bail out of jail the man who attacked then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer in their home in 2022.
A memorial is set up for Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
(Lindsey Wasson / Associated Press)
In 2023, Kirk sat on the stage of Awaken Church in Salt Lake City and said: “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the 2nd Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
Two days before his death, Kirk retweeted a video of himself saying that a “spiritual battle is coming for the West,” with “wokeism or marxism combining with Islamism” to go after “the American way of life, which is, by the way, Christendom.”
Perry said, “There’s no need to whitewash the legacy of Charlie Kirk.”
“This is a tragedy, and no one deserves to die this way,” Perry said. “Yet, at the same time, Charlie Kirk is very much part of this polarization story in the U.S. who used quite divisive rhetoric, ‘us vs. them, the left is evil.’”
Perry noted that Kirk’s Turning Point USA had placed him on its Professor Watchlist, a website that says it aims to expose professors “who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda.” The entry on Perry flags him for “Anti-Judeo-Christian Values.”
Some on the right say their recent fiery words are only a response to the hateful rhetoric of the left. One widely shared example: Two days before Kirk’s killing, the feminist website Jezebel published an article titled, “We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk.” It has since been removed and replaced by a letter from the site’s editor saying it had been “intended as satire and made it absolutely clear that we wished no physical harm.”
Kirk was killed by a single sniper-style shot to the neck Wednesday during an outdoor speaking event at Utah Valley University.
After announcing the suspect’s arrest Friday, Gov. Cox said he had prayed that the shooter was not from Utah, “that somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country.” But that prayer, he said, “was not answered the way I hoped for.”
He then said that political violence “metastasizes because we can always point the finger at the other side” and that, “at some point, we have to find an offramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse.”
Some of Kirk’s most prominent evangelical followers have said that his death represents an attack on conservative Christian values and that he was gunned down for speaking “the truth.”
Jon Fleischman, Orange County-based conservative blogger and former executive director of the California Republican Party, who started out as a conservative college activist, knew Kirk and said “there is one hell of a martyr situation going on.”
“A lot of people are getting activated and are going to walk the walk, talk the talk, and give money as their way of trying to process and deal with losing someone they care about,” he told The Times.
In recent years, Kirk had become more outspoken about his Christian faith. He founded the nonprofit Turning Point USA in 2012 as an avowedly secular youth organization and became known for his college campus tours, with videos of his debates with liberal college students racking up tens of millions of views.
But in 2020, during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, college campuses closed. Kirk started speaking at churches that stayed open in violation of local lockdown and mask orders, including Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Ventura County, which was led by Pastor Rob McCoy, a former Thousand Oaks mayor.
McCoy is now the co-chair of Turning Point USA Faith, which encourages pastors to become more politically outspoken. McCoy, who could not be reached for comment, wrote in a statement Friday: “For those who rejoiced over his murder, you are instruments of evil and I implore you to repent. For those of you who mock prayer, you would do well to reconsider. Prayer doesn’t change God, it changes us toward a more peaceful and civil life.”
Professor Boedy said McCoy turned Kirk toward Christian nationalism, specifically the Seven Mountains Mandate — the idea that Christians should try to hold sway over the seven pillars of cultural influence: arts and entertainment, business, education, family, government, media and religion.
Christian nationalism, which is rejected by mainline Christians, holds that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that the faith should have primacy in government and law.
Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and a professor emeritus at Cal State San Bernardino, said, “the more violent fringes of Christian nationalism have disturbing aspects that are eliminationist and antidemocratic.”
He noted that some of the same Christian nationalists and white supremacists who are now calling Kirk a martyr already deified Trump, especially after he survived two assassination attempts on the campaign trail last year and said he had been “saved by God to make America great again.”
Levin said many Christian nationalists portray Trump as “an armed Christian warrior protecting America from a disturbing assortment of immigrants, religious minorities, genders and sexual orientations.” And so, when he uses martyr language to describe Kirk, his adherents latch on.
“Where do martyrs come from? From violent conflicts and wars,” Levin said. “The fact of the matter is that this is a moment that Trump could have more effectively seized, but he veered into divisive territory.”
California Senate Minority Leader Brian W. Jones (R-Santee) also called Kirk “a modern day martyr.” In a statement, Jones quoted Thomas Jefferson, who said, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Jones wrote: “Let us take care that we allow that tree to grow and blossom as it feeds on the lifeblood of Charles J. Kirk in the years to come.”
Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.
Two assassination attempts on President Trump. The assassination of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and the wounding of others. The shooting death of a top healthcare executive. The killing of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington. The storming of the U.S. Capitol by a violent mob intent on forcing the nation’s political leaders to their will.
And, on Wednesday, the fatal shooting of one of the nation’s most prominent conservative political activists — close Trump ally Charlie Kirk — as he spoke at a public event on a university campus.
If it wasn’t already clear from all those other incidents, Kirk’s killing put it in sharp relief: The U.S. is in a new era of political violence, one that is starker and more visceral than any other in decades — perhaps, experts said, since the fraught days of 1968, when two of the most prominent figures in the civil rights movement, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, were both assassinated in a matter of months.
“We’re very clearly in a moment where the temperature of our political discourse is extremely high,” said Ruth Braunstein, an associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University who has studied religion and the far right in modern politics. “Part of what we see when that happens are these outbursts of political violence — where people come to believe that violence is the only solution.”
While the exact motives of the person who shot Kirk are still unknown, Braunstein and other experts on political violence said the factors shaping the current moment are clear — and similar to those that shaped past periods of political violence.
Intense economic discomfort and inequity. Sharp divisions between political camps. Hyperbolic political rhetoric. Political leaders who lack civility and constantly work to demonize their opponents. A democratic system that many see as broken, and a hopelessness about where things are headed.
“There are these moments of great democratic despair, and we don’t think the political system is sufficiently responsive, sufficiently legitimate, sufficiently attentive, and that’s certainly going on in this particular moment,” said Jon Michaels, a UCLA law professor who teaches about the separation of powers and co-authored “Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy.”
“If we think there are no political solutions, there are no legal solutions, people are going to resort to forms of self help that are really, really deeply troubling.”
Michaels said the country has been here before, but also that he worries such cycles of violence are occurring faster today and with shorter breaks in between — that while “we’ve been bitterly divided” for years, those divisions have now “completely left the arena of ideas and debate and contestation, and become much more kinetic.”
Michaels said he is still shaken by all the “defenses or explanations or rationalizations” that swirled around the country after the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City in December — which some people argued was somehow justified by their displeasure with UnitedHealthcare’s policies or frustration with the American healthcare system.
That the suspect, Luigi Mangione, would attract almost cult-like adoration in some circles seemed like an alarming shift in an already polarized nation, Michaels said.
“I understand it is not the beliefs of the typical person walking down the street, but it’s seeping into our culture slowly but surely,” he said — and in a way that makes him wonder, “Where are we going to be in four or five years?”
People across America were asking similar questions about Wednesday’s shooting, wondering in which direction it might thrust the nation’s political discourse in the days ahead.
How will Kirk’s many conservative fans — including legions of young people — respond? How will leaders, including Trump, react? Will there be a shared recognition that such violence does no good, or fresh attempts at retaliation and violence?
Leaders from both parties seemed interested in averting the latter. One after another, they denounced political violence and defended Kirk’s right — everyone’s right — to speak on politics in safety, regardless of whether their message is uplifting or odious.
Democrats were particularly effusive in their denunciations, with Gov. Gavin Newsom — a chief Trump antagonist — calling the shooting “disgusting, vile, and reprehensible.” Former President Obama also weighed in, writing, “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.”
Many seemed dismissive of such messages. In the comments on Obama’s post, many blamed Obama and other Democrats for rhetoric demonizing Republicans — and Trump and his followers in particular — as Nazis or racists or fascists, suggesting that the violence against Kirk was a predictable outcome of such pitched condemnations.
Trump echoed those thoughts himself Wednesday night, blaming the “radical left” for disparaging Kirk and other conservatives and bringing on such violence.
Others seemed to celebrate Kirk’s killing or suggest it was justified in some way given his own hyperbolic remarks from the past. They dug up interviews where the conservative provocateur demonized those on the left, suggested liberal ideas constituted a threat to Western civilization, and even said that some gun violence in the country was “worth it” if it meant the freedom to bear arms.
Experts said it is important to contextualize this moment within American history, but with an awareness of the modern factors shaping it in unique ways. It’s also important to understand that there are ways to combat such violence from spreading, they said.
Peter Mancall, a history professor at USC, has delved into major moments of political violence in early American history, and said a lot of it stemmed from “some perception of grievance.”
The same appears to be true today, he said. “There are moments when people do things that they know are violating their own sense of right or wrong, and something has pushed them to it, “ he said. “The trick is figuring out what it is that made them snap.”
Braunstein said that the robust debate online Wednesday about the rhetoric of leaders was a legitimate one to have, because it has always been true that “the way our political leaders message about political violence — consistently, in public, to their followers and to those that don’t support them — really matters.”
If Americans and American political leaders truly want to know how we got here, she said, “part of the answer is the intensification of violent political rhetoric — and political rhetoric that casts the moment in terms of an emergency or catastrophe that requires extreme measures to address it.”
Democrats today are talking about the threats they believe Trump poses to democracy and the rule of law and to immigrants and LGBTQ+ people and others in extremely dire terms. Republicans — including Kirk — have used similarly charged rhetoric to suggest that Democrats and some of those same groups, especially immigrants, are a grave threat to average Americans.
“Charlie Kirk was one of many political figures who used that kind of discourse to mobilize people,” Braunstein said. “He’s not the only one, but he regularly spoke about the fact that we were in a moment where it was possible that we were going to see the decline of Western civilization, the end of American society as we know it. He used very strong us-vs.-them language.”
Particularly given the wave of recent violence, it will be important moving forward for politicians and other leaders to reanalyze how they speak about their political disagreements, Braunstein said.
That’s especially true of Trump, she said, because “one of the most dangerous things that can happen in a moment like this is for a political leader to call for violence in response to an act of violence,” and Trump has appeared to stoke violence in the past, including in the lead-up to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and during racist marches through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
Charlie Kirk speaks during a town hall meeting in March in Oconomowoc, Wis.
(Jeffrey Phelps / Associated Press)
Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Centers for Violence Prevention at UC Davis, agreed messaging is key — not just for responding to political violence, but for preventing it.
Since 2022, Wintemute and his team have surveyed Americans on how they feel about political violence, including whether it is ever justified and, if so, whether they would personally get involved in it.
Throughout that time frame, a strong majority of Americans — about two-thirds — have said it is not justified, with about a third saying it was or could be.
An even smaller minority said they’d be willing to personally engage in such violence, Wintemute said. And many of those people said that they could be dissuaded from participating if their family members, friends, religious or political leaders urged them not to.
Wintemute said the data give him “room for hope and optimism,” because they show that “the vast majority of Americans reject political violence altogether.”
“So when somebody on a day like today asks, ‘Is this who we are?’ we know the answer,” he said. “The answer is, ‘No!’”
The job of all Americans now is to reject political violence “out loud over and over and over again,” Wintemute said, and to realize that, if they are deeply opposed to political policies or the Trump administration and “looking for a model of how to resist,” it isn’t the American Revolution but the civil rights movement.
“People did not paint over how terrible things were,” he said. “People said, ‘I will resist, but I will resist without violence. Violence may be done to me, I may die, but I will not use violence.’”
NEW YORK — As National Guard troops deploy across her city as part of President Trump’s efforts to clamp down on crime, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is responding with relative restraint.
She’s called Trump’s takeover of the city’s police department and his decision to activate 800 members of the guard “unsettling and unprecedented” and gone as far as to cast his efforts as part of an “authoritarian push.”
But Bowser has so far avoided the kind of biting rhetoric and personal attacks typical of other high-profile Democratic leaders, despite the unprecedented incursion into her city.
“While this action today is unsettling and unprecedented, I can’t say that, given some of the rhetoric of the past, that we’re totally surprised,” Bowser told reporters at a news conference responding to the efforts. She even suggested the surge in resources might benefit the city and noted that limited home rule allows the federal government “to intrude on our autonomy in many ways.”
“My tenor will be appropriate for what I think is important for the District,” said Bowser, who is in her third term as mayor. “And what’s important for the District is that we can take care of our citizens.”
The approach underscores the reality of Washington’s precarious position under the thumb of the federal government. Trump has repeatedly threatened an outright takeover of the overwhelmingly Democratic city, which is granted autonomy through a limited home rule agreement passed in 1973 that could be repealed by Congress. Republicans, who control both chambers, have already frozen more than $1 billion in local spending, slashing the city’s budget.
That puts her in a very different position from figures such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Democrats whose states depend on the federal government for disaster relief and other funding, but who have nonetheless relentlessly attacked the current administration as they lay the groundwork for potential 2028 presidential runs. Those efforts come amid deep frustrations from Democratic voters that their party has not been nearly aggressive enough in its efforts to counter Trump’s actions.
“Unfortunately she is in a very vulnerable position,” said Democratic strategist Nina Smith. “This is the sort of thing that can happen when you don’t have the powers that come with being a state. So that’s what we’re seeing right now, the mayor trying to navigate a very tough administration. Because this administration has shown no restraint when it comes to any kind of constitutional barriers or norms.”
A change from Trump’s first term
Bowser’s approach marks a departure from Trump’s first term, when she was far more antagonistic toward the president.
Then she routinely clashed with the administration, including having city workers paint giant yellow letters spelling out “Black Lives Matter” on a street near the White House during the George Floyd protests in 2020.
This time around, Bowser took a different tact from the start. She flew to Florida to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago after he won the election and has worked to avoid conflict and downplay points of contention, including tearing up the “Black Lives Matter” letters after he returned to Washington in response to pressure from Republicans in Congress.
The change reflects the new political dynamics at play, with Republicans in control of Congress and an emboldened Trump who has made clear he is willing to exert maximum power and push boundaries in unprecedented ways.
D.C. Councilmember Christina Henderson said she understands Bowser’s position, and largely agrees with her conclusion that a legal challenge to Trump’s moves would be a long shot. Trump invoked Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act in his executive order, declaring a “crime emergency” so his administration could take over the city’s police force. The statute limits that control to 30 days unless he gets approval from Congress.
“The challenge would be on the question of ‘Is this actually an emergency?’” said Henderson, a former congressional staffer. “That’s really the only part you could challenge.”
Henderson believes the city would face dim prospects in a court fight, but thinks the D.C. government should challenge anyway, “just on the basis of precedent.”
Trump told reporters Wednesday that he believes he can extend the 30-day deadline by declaring a national emergency, but said “we expect to be before Congress very quickly.”
“We’re gonna be asking for extensions on that, long-term extensions, because you can’t have 30 days,” he said. “We’re gonna do this very quickly. But we’re gonna want extensions. I don’t want to call a national emergency. If I have to, I will.”
Limited legal options
Bowser’s response is a reflection of the reality of the situation, according to a person familiar with her thinking. As mayor of the District of Columbia, Bowser has a very different relationship with the president and federal government than other mayors or governors. The city is home to thousands of federal workers, and the mass layoffs under Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have already had a major impact on the city’s economy.
Her strategy has been to focus on finding areas where she and the new administration can work together on shared priorities.
For now, Bowser appears set to stick with her approach, saying Wednesday that she is focused on “making sure the federal surge is useful to us.”
During a morning interview with Fox 5, she and the city’s police chief argued an influx of federal agents linked to Trump’s takeover would improve public safety, with more officers on patrol.
Police Chief Pamela Smith said the city’s police department is short almost 800 officers, so the extra police presence “is clearly going to impact us in a positive way.”
But Nina Smith, the Democratic strategist, said she believes Bowser needs a course correction.
“How many times is it going to take before she realizes this is not someone who has got the best interests of the city at heart?” she asked. “I think there may need to be time for her to get tough and push back.”
Despite Trump’s rhetoric, statistics published by Washington’s Metropolitan Police show violent crime has dropped in Washington since a post-pandemic peak in 2023. A recent Department of Justice report shows that violent crime is down 35% since 2023, reaching its lowest rate in 30 years.
Colvin writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Ashraf Khalil and Will Weissert in Washington contributed to this report.
MONTREAL — Throughout his new term, starting with his inaugural address, President Trump has said he was “saved by God” to make America great again. In Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney rarely evokes religion in public; his victory speech in April never used the word God. “Canada forever. Vive le Canada,” he ended.
As Canada and the U.S. now skirmish over Trump’s tariff threats and occasional bullying, the leaders’ rhetoric reflects a striking difference between their nations. Religion plays a far more subdued role in the public sphere in Canada than in its southern neighbor.
Trump posed in front of a vandalized Episcopal parish house gripping a Bible. He invites pastors to the Oval Office to pray with him. His ally, House Speaker Mike Johnson, says the best way to understand his own world view is to read the Bible.
Such high-level religion-themed displays would be unlikely and almost certainly unpopular in Canada, where Carney — like his recent predecessors — generally avoids public discussion of his faith. (He is a Catholic who supports abortion rights.)
There are broader differences as well. The rate of regular church attendance in Canada is far lower than in the U.S. Evangelical Christians have nowhere near the political clout in Canada that they have south of the border. There is no major campaign in Canada to post the Ten Commandments in public schools or to enact sweeping abortion bans.
Kevin Kee, a professor and former dean at the University of Ottawa, has written about the contrasting religious landscapes of the U.S. and Canada, exploring the rise of American evangelist Billy Graham to become a confidant of numerous U.S. presidents.
Christianity, Kee said, has not permeated modern Canadian politics to that extent.
“We have a political leadership that keeps its religion quiet,” Kee said. “To make that kind of declaration in Canada is to create an us/them situation. There’s no easy way to keep everybody happy, so people keep it quiet.”
A dramatic loss of Catholic power in Quebec
The mostly French-speaking province of Quebec provides a distinctive example of Canada’s tilt toward secularism. The Catholic Church was Quebec’s dominant force through most of its history, with sweeping influence over schools, health care and politics.
That changed dramatically in the so-called Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, when the provincial government took control of education and health care as part of a broader campaign to reduce the church’s power. The rate of regular church attendance among Quebec’s Catholics plummeted from one of the highest in Canada to the one of the lowest.
Among religiously devout Canadians, in Quebec and other provinces, some are candid about feeling marginalized in a largely secular country.
“I feel isolated because our traditional Christian views are seen as old-fashioned or not moving with the times,” said Mégane Arès-Dubé, 22, after she and her husband attended a service at a conservative Reformed Baptist church in Saint Jerome, about 30 miles north of Montreal.
“Contrary to the U.S., where Christians are more represented in elected officials, Christians are really not represented in Canada,” she added. “I pray that Canada wakes up.”
The church’s senior pastor, Pascal Denault, has mixed feelings about the Quiet Revolution’s legacy.
“For many aspects of it, that was good,” he said. “Before that, it was mainly the Catholic clergy that controlled many things in the province, so we didn’t have religious freedom.”
Nonetheless, Denault wishes for a more positive public view of religion in Canada.
“Sometimes, secularism becomes a religion in itself, and it wants to shut up any religious speech in the public sphere,” he said. “What we hope for is that the government will recognize that religion is not an enemy to fight, but it’s more a positive force to encourage.”
Denault recently hosted a podcast episode focusing on Trump; he later shared some thoughts about the president.
“We tend to think that Trump is more using Christianity as a tool for his influence, rather than being a genuine Christian,” he said. “But Christians are, I think, appreciative of some of his stances on different things.”
Trump’s religion-related tactics — such as posing with the Bible in his hands — wouldn’t go over well with Canadians, Denault said.
“They’d see that as something wrongful. The public servant should not identify with a specific religion,” Denault said. “I don’t think most Canadians would vote for that type of politician.”
Repurposed church buildings abound in Montreal
In the Montreal neighborhood of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, the skyline is dotted with crosses atop steeples, but many of those churches are unused or repurposed.
For decades, factory and port workers worshipped at Saint-Mathias-Apotre Church. Today it’s a restaurant that serves affordable meals daily for more than 600 residents.
The manager of Le Chic Resto Pop, Marc-Andre Simard, grew up Catholic and now, like many of his staff, identifies as religiously unaffiliated. But he still tries to honor some core values of Catholicism at the nonprofit restaurant, which retains the church’s original wooden doors and even its confessional booths.
“There’s still space to be together, to have some sort of communion, but it’s around food, not around faith.” Simard said during a lunch break, sitting near what used to be the altar of the former church.
Simard says the extent to which the Catholic Church controlled so much of public life in Quebec should serve as a cautionary tale for the U.S.
“We went through what the United States are going through right now,” he said.
Elsewhere in Montreal, a building that once housed a Catholic convent now often accommodates meetings of the Quebec Humanist Association.
The group’s co-founder, Michel Virard, said French Canadians “know firsthand what it was to have a clergy nosing in their affairs.”
Now, Virard says, “There is no ‘excluding religious voice’ in Canada, merely attempts at excluding clergy from manipulating the state power levers and using taxpayers’ money to promote a particular religious viewpoint.”
History reveals why role of religion is so different in U.S. and Canada
Why are Canada and the U.S., two neighbors which share so many cultural traditions and priorities, so different regarding religion’s role in public life?
According to academics who have pondered that question, their history provides some answers. The United States, at independence from Britain, chose not to have a dominant, federally established church.
In Canada, meanwhile, the Catholic Church was dominant in Quebec, and the Church of England — eventually named the Anglican Church of Canada — was powerful elsewhere.
Professor Darren Dochuk, a Canadian who teaches history at University of Notre Dame in Indiana, says the “disestablishment” of religion in the U.S. “made religious life all the more dynamic.”
“This is a country in which free faith communities have been allowed to compete in the marketplace for their share,” he said.
“In the 20th century, you had a plethora of religious groups across the spectrum who all competed voraciously for access to power,” he said. “More recently, the evangelicals are really dominating that. … Religious conservatives are imposing their will on Washington.”
There’s been no equivalent faith-based surge in Canada, said Dochuk, suggesting that Canada’s secularization produced “precipitous decline in the power of religion as a major operator in politics.”
Carmen Celestini, professor of religious studies at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, said that even when Canadian politicians do opt for faith-based outreach, they often take a multicultural approach — for example, visiting Sikh, Hindu and Jewish houses of worship, as well as Christian churches.
Trump’s talk about Canada becoming the 51st state fueled a greater sense of national unity among most Canadians, and undermined the relatively small portion of them who identify as Christian nationalists, Celestini said.
“Canada came together more as a nation, not sort of seeing differences with each other, but seeing each other as Canadians and being proud of our sovereignty and who we are as a nation,” she said. “The concern that Canadians have, when we look at what’s happening in America, is that we don’t want that to happen here. “
Henao and Crary write for the Associated Press. Crary, who reported from New York, was the AP’s Canada bureau chief from 1995-99.
Last Thursday, just days after he had ordered strikes upon Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood outside Beersheba’s Soroka Hospital and spoke of his outrage that the building had been hit in an Iranian counterstrike.
“They’re targeting civilians because they’re a criminal regime. They’re the arch-terrorists of the world,” he said of the Iranian government.
Similar accusations were levelled by other Israeli leaders, including the president, Isaac Herzog, and opposition leader Yair Lapid, during the conflict with Iran, which ended with a ceasefire brokered by United States President Donald Trump on Monday.
However, what was missing from these leaders was an acknowledgement that Israel itself has attacked almost every hospital in Gaza, where more than 56,000 people have been killed, or that the Strip’s healthcare system has been pushed to near total collapse.
It was an omission noticeable in much of the Israeli press reporting on the Beersheba hospital attack, with few mentions of the parallels between it and Israel’s own attacks on hospitals in Gaza. Instead, much of the Israeli media has supported these attacks, either seeking to downplay them, or justifying them by regularly claiming that Hamas command centres lie under the hospitals, an accusation Israel has never been able to prove.
Israel’s siege upon Gaza, supported by much of its media, has pushed the population to the brink of famine [File: Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP]
Weaponising suffering
According to analysts who spoke to Al Jazeera, a media ecosystem exists in Israel that, with a few exceptions, both amplifies its leaders’ calls for war while simultaneously reinforcing their claims of victimhood, all while shielding the Israeli public from seeing the suffering Israeli forces are inflicting on Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
One Israeli journalist, Haaretz’s media correspondent Ido David Cohen, wrote this month that “reporters and editors at Israel’s major news outlets have admitted more than once, especially in private conversations, that their employers haven’t allowed them to present the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the suffering of the population there”.
“The Israeli media … sees its job as not to educate, it’s to shape and mould a public that is ready to support war and aggression,” journalist Orly Noy told Al Jazeera from West Jerusalem. “It genuinely sees itself as having a special role in this.”
“I’ve seen [interviews with] people who lived near areas where Iranian missiles had hit,” Noy added. “They were given a lot of space to talk and explain the impact, but as soon as they started to criticise the war, they were shut down, quite rudely.”
Last September, a complaint brought by three Israeli civil society organisations against Channel 14, one of Israel’s most watched television networks, cited 265 quotes from hosts they claimed encouraged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide. Among them, concerning Gaza, were the phrases “it really needs to be total annihilation” and “there are no innocents.”
A few months earlier, in April, the channel was again criticised within the Israeli media, this time for a live counter labelled “the terrorists we eliminated”, which made no distinction between civilians and fighters killed, the media monitoring magazine 7th Eye pointed out.
Analysts and observers described how Israel’s media and politicians have weaponised the horrors of the past suffering of the Jewish people and have moulded it into a narrative of victimhood that can be aimed at any geopolitical opponent that circumstances allow – with Iran looming large among them.
“It isn’t just this war,” Noy, an editor with the Hebrew-language Local Call website, said. “The Israeli media is in the business of justifying every war, of telling people that this war is essential for their very existence. It’s an ecosystem. Whatever the authority is, it is absolutely right. There is no margin for doubt, with no room for criticism from the inside. To see it, you have to be on the outside.”
“The world has allowed Israel to act as some kind of crazy bully to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants,” Noy added. “They can send their troops into Syria and Lebanon, never mind Gaza, with impunity. Israel is fine. Israel is bulletproof. And why wouldn’t they think that? The world allows it, then people are shocked when Iran strikes back.”
The Israeli media largely serves as a tool to manufacture consent for Israel’s actions against the Palestinians and in neighbouring countries, while shielding the Israeli public from the suffering its victims endure.
Exceptions do exist. Israeli titles such as Noy’s Local Call and +972 Magazine often feature coverage highly critical of Israel’s war on Gaza, and have conducted in-depth investigations into Israel’s actions, uncovering scandals that are only reported on months later by the international media. Joint reporting from Local Call and +972 Magazine has revealed that the Israeli military was using an AI system to generate bombing target lists based on predicted civilian casualties. Another report found that the Israeli military had falsely declared entire Gaza neighbourhoods as evacuated, which then led to the bombing of civilian homes in areas that were still inhabited.
A more famous example is the liberal daily Haaretz, which regularly criticises Israel’s actions in Gaza. Haaretz has faced a government boycott over its coverage of the war.
“It’s not new,” Dina Matar, professor of political communication and Arab media at SOAS University of London, said. “Israeli media has long been pushing the idea that they [Israel] are the victims while calling for actions that will allow them to present greater victimhood [such as attacking Iran]. They often use emotive language to describe a strike on an Israeli hospital that they’ll never use to describe an Israeli strike on a hospital in Gaza.”
Take Israeli media coverage of the siege of northern Gaza’s last remaining functioning healthcare facility, the Kamal Adwan Hospital, in December.
While descriptions of the attacks on the hospital from United Nations special rapporteurs spoke of their “horror” at the strikes, those in the Israeli press, in outlets such as Ynet or The Times of Israel, instead focused almost exclusively upon the Israeli military’s claims of the numbers of “terrorists” seized.
Among those seized from the hospital were medical staff, including the director of Kamal Adwan, Dr Hussam Abu Safia, who has since been tortured in an Israeli military prison, his lawyer previously told Al Jazeera.
In contrast, Israeli coverage of the Soroka Hospital attack in Beersheba almost universally framed the hit as a “direct strike” and foregrounded the experience of the evacuated patients and healthcare workers.
Palestinian children react as they receive food cooked by a charity kitchen in Gaza City, June 21, 2025 [Mahmoud Issa/Reuters]
In this environment, Matar said, Netanyahu’s representation of Israel as home to a “subjugated people” reinforced a view that Israelis have long been encouraged to hold of themselves, even amid the decades-long occupation of Palestinian land.
“No one questions what Netanyahu is saying because the implications of his speech make sense as part of this larger historical narrative; one that doesn’t allow for any other [narrative], such as the Nakba or the suffering in Gaza,” the academic said.
For more than three decades, a familiar refrain has echoed from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons.
Since 1992, when Netanyahu addressed Israel’s Knesset as an MP, he has consistently claimed that Tehran is only years away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. “Within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb,” he declared at the time. The prediction was later repeated in his 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism.
The sense of imminent threat has repeatedly shaped Netanyahu’s engagement with United States officials. In 2002, he appeared before a US congressional committee, advocating for the invasion of Iraq and suggesting that both Iraq and Iran were racing to obtain nuclear weapons. The US-led invasion of Iraq followed soon after, but no weapons of mass destruction were found.
In 2009, a US State Department cable released by WikiLeaks revealed him telling members of Congress that Iran was just one or two years away from nuclear capability.
Three years later, at the United Nations General Assembly, Netanyahu famously brandished a cartoon drawing of a bomb to illustrate his claims that Iran was closer than ever to the nuclear threshold. “By next spring, at most by next summer … they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage,” he said in 2012.
Now, more than 30 years after his first warning, Israel has conducted attacks against Iran while Netanyahu maintains that the threat remains urgent. “If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time,” he argued recently, suggesting the timeline could be months, even weeks.
These assertions persist despite statements from the US Director of National Intelligence earlier this year saying Iran was not building a nuclear weapon.
For Netanyahu, the message has scarcely changed in decades — a warning that appears to transcend shifting intelligence assessments and diplomatic developments.
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.”
