SOCIETY
A wave of high-profile assassination attempts in recent months has pushed politically motivated violence to the forefront of America’s national conversation. Commentators are drawing comparisons to the 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and, five years later, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy met the same fate. Then as now, these acts of violence unfolded against the backdrop of a deeply fractured society. The blame game between left and right is relentless, but the reality is more unsettling: the perpetrators are often disturbed individuals with no coherent ideology. The current spike in violence seems less about politics per se than about a broader culture of aggression that has taken hold across society.
That tension was on full display during a Sept. 10 student Q&A with far-right commentator Charlie Kirk. “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?” a student named Hunter pressed. “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk shot back, suggesting that street crime posed a greater threat than unstable lone gunmen. Hunter was about to respond when a gunshot rang out. Before a stunned audience of three thousand, Kirk collapsed in his chair, covered in blood. Security rushed him to a hospital, but doctors could not save him: the bullet had torn through his neck. It took police and the FBI nearly two days to capture the suspect, 24-year-old Tyler Robinson, whose motives remain murky. The killing has already been ranked among the most consequential acts of political violence in recent memory — on par with the near-fatal attempt on Donald Trump’s life in 2024.
America has been stunned by the murder of Charlie Kirk — a man who left no one indifferent. To some, he was a source of inspiration; to others, an object of hatred. Kirk was no ordinary blogger, but the leader of a youth-driven ultraconservative movement. Most radical conservatives share the view voiced by Donald Trump, who in an Oval Office address a few hours after the assasination called Kirk “a martyr for truth and freedom.”
A shocking viral video of the attack has only polarized reactions further. Combined with the cumulative effect of a series of assassination attempts over the past year, many Americans feel that the country is spinning out of control. Yet the political blame game continues: right and left accuse each other and justify their own side in ways that may well pave the road to further killings.
“The deceased was no saint”
Kirk’s supporters hailed him as the Republican Party’s best organizer among young people. In 2012, the teenage Kirk founded Turning Point Action, which went on to raise up to $10 million in annual donations while shaping the messaging and strategy of numerous GOP candidates. Kirk never ran for office, nor was he a party ideologue or official. He thrived as an activist and polemicist, first making his mark by confronting liberals on university campuses where, in recent decades, conservative voices had faced little competition. Tirelessly touring colleges across America, he relished debating Democratic activists, working to reduce their arguments to absurdity and subjecting them to ridicule. Though he offered few original ideas, Kirk had a talent for argument and delighted in trolling liberals on their own turf.
To his opponents, Kirk was a professional provocateur. Beyond the standard conservative talking points — support for gun rights, criticism of Islam, and opposition to abortion, transgender rights, and progressive social policies — he eagerly courted controversy with the clickbait tactics of the “alt-right.” Kirk compared abortion to the Holocaust, claimed that in urban areas “prowling Blacks go around for fun” in search of white people to target, denounced environmentalists as “a Trojan horse” and a “wrapper around Marxism”, and accused Jewish business leaders of opening the country’s borders borders, promoting Marxism, and controlling American culture.
Kirk also embraced the far-right “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which blames liberal elites for allegedly seeking to replace white citizens with immigrants of different cultures and skin colors. Over time, he became a staunch supporter of Donald Trump, amplifying support for Trump’s policies and political allies.
Rhetoric that many have described as openly hateful enabled Kirk to build a modern political organization with wide influence — not only within the Republican Party, but among young people all across American society.
Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July 2024 when a bullet grazed his ear
Kirk’s murder is just one in a series of high-profile political attacks since Trump’s return to the center of American political life. In July 2024, the Republican candidate came within a hair’s breadth of death when a bullet fired by Thomas Matthew Crooks grazed his ear. Two months later, Ryan Routh attempted to assassinate Trump in Florida. In December 2024, Luigi Mangione shot and killed Brian Thompson, the head of insurance giant UnitedHealthcare. In April 2025, arsonists set fire to the home of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, and in June, a string of armed attacks on Democratic politicians in Minnesota left state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband dead.
Political violence is nothing new in the United States. Four presidents have been killed by assassins’ bullets. Two others, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, narrowly escaped death in assassination attempts. In the modern era, plots against sitting presidents are uncovered almost every year. Yet the current wave of high-profile murders and attempted assassinations of political figures is comparable only to the violence of the 1960s.
There is little doubt that both Charlie Kirk’s killing and last year’s attempt on Trump were politically motivated. In both cases, the attacks occurred as the targets addressed thousands of people. But the broader phenomenon of rising violence against political figures — and the motives of the attackers — cannot be explained simply by ideology. The roots of this aggression may lie outside politics altogether.
Madness Without a Clear Ideology
Like the mass shootings in American schools that recur with alarming regularity, political violence can be difficult to explain. Those who attempt to kill politicians often remain enigmas to investigators, and in instances when their political statements surface, they frequently border on incoherent rambling.
Charlie Kirk’s killer, Tyler Robinson, left behind cryptic engravings on his bullet casings — references to sexual memes, the protest song Bella ciao, and vague anti-fascist slogans. Robinson’s worldview was evidently politicized, yet it is unclear what ideology, if any, he actually adhered to. According to voter rolls, Robinson was registered as unaffiliated and was listed as “inactive,” meaning he had not participated in recent elections.
Tyler Robinson, the man who murdered Charlie Kirk
The political leanings of would-be Trump assassin Matthew Crooks, who was shot dead during his attack, remain uncertain, even if the FBI discovered anti-immigrant and antisemitic remarks typical of the far right in his social media accounts. The beliefs of failed Trump assailant Ryan Routh are even harder to pin down. His trial opened the day after Kirk’s killing, with the defendant representing himself. In his opening statement, Routh digressed into ramblings about the origins of human civilization, international conflicts, and the settling of the American West, forcing the judge to cut him off. The “letter to the world” Routh left behind at the scene of the botched attempt was just as disjointed as his courtroom performance.
Equally murky are the motives of Luigi Mangione, the man who killed UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson. It is known that Thompson’s company had previously refused to cover Mangione’s medical treatment, yet many interpreted the killing as a form of ultra-left terrorism against corporations. As a result, Mangione has attracted a sizable following among left-leaning youth, who call him a political prisoner and a modern-day Robin Hood.
Even among scholars who study political violence, there is no consensus on how significant the recent rise really is. According to The Violence Project, assassination attempts on political figures from 2021 to 2025 reached levels not seen since the 1960s. Still, that tally only includes high-profile incidents, which total only five in the past four years.
Other researchers take a broader view, analyzing crime data for political motives. By that method, the number of cases that qualify as political violence multiplies several times over. Figures from the University of Cincinnati’s Prosecution Project and Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative suggest that political violence peaked in 2018–2019, then declined. Attacks and plots against politicians and public officials are on the rise, but threats and harassment appear to have remained at roughly the same levels as before — even slowing in 2025.
Yet statistics cannot capture the gravity of each crime or the public shock they produce. What has truly unsettled Americans is the impact of the past year’s attacks. Many are left with the sense that the country has crossed a critical threshold — one leading to further chaos.
Left-Wing and Right-Wing Violence
The opaque motives of assassins turn every attack into a battlefield of mutual recriminations between the right and the left. The killing of Charlie Kirk proved no exception.
The loudest accuser against the left was, once again, President Donald Trump. For a fleeting moment during his televised address, it seemed he might call on the nation to unite against violence in all its forms. However, after describing Kirk’s murder as “the tragic result of demonizing those you disagree with,” Trump immediately laid the blame on “radical leftists” who had compared Kirk to the Nazis.
“This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism we are witnessing in our country today, and it must stop immediately,” the president declared. He also vowed to prosecute organizations that “fund and support” such views.
Democrats were quick to respond. Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts argued that the overwhelming majority of political violence comes from the right: “Let’s take a hard look at where this violence is really coming from. Seventy-six percent of extremist killings are committed by far-right extremists, and four percent by far-left extremists. I condemn that four percent, but as a country we must be honest about the true source of this violence.”
The congressman’s office pointed to a report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the nation’s largest organization combatting antisemitism. The same 76 percent figure also appears in research from Princeton’s Prosecution Project, which has reviewed thousands of criminal cases in an effort to distinguish between the mentally ill and ideologically motivated when it comes to political killers.
Yet the question is not only who carries out the attacks, but which side normalizes violence and assassination. After Kirk’s murder, social media users immediately recalled his own past remarks that “the death of a certain number of people each year is justified if that is the price of preserving the Second Amendment.” Trump himself made the normalization of violence and hateful rhetoric central features of his speeches as early as his first presidential campaign. By the end of his first term, this culminated in the storming of the Capitol, and today it is driving the radicalization of society at large.
Still, the overwhelming majority of Americans condemn political violence — while largely assigning blame to their opponents. According to polling by YouGov, 87 percent of Americans view political violence as a serious problem, even if Democrats and Republicans alike usually raise the issue only after members of their own party are targeted.
Still, a poll conducted by States United Action prior to the most recent elections found that a significant minority of voters consider political violence acceptable in certain circumstances. Thirty-seven percent said violence could be justified “always” or “often” in the event of a gun ban, one-third said they could justify it if the government corruptly imprisoned citizens for criticizing the authorities, and a quarter of respondents were willing to condone violence in cases of either gun restrictions or election fraud.
American society faces the urgent task of establishing a broad consensus against political violence. At stake are freedom of speech in public spaces, the safety of political events, trust in institutions, and the risk of further radicalization. So far, there is little indication that Kirk’s murder will prompt a national reckoning with the cultivation of hatred. On the contrary, Trump first blamed “radical leftists” for the killing, and then right-wing supporters organized a website to collect critical comments about Kirk, aiming to have the authors fired or otherwise penalized. Their campaign has already had an effect: across the country, schoolteachers and professors are being dismissed for such online statements, and popular late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended “indefinitely” by ABC for remarks he made about the uncertain political views of Kirk’s killer.
On Sept. 23 it was announced that Kimmel would return to the air, but the episode raises questions about political influence on corporate media. The suspension was backed by the Federal Communications Commission, whose chair, Jimmy Carr, demanded action against the host, and the abortive “cancellation” of Jimmy Kimmel may yet represent the first step Trump’s promised in campaign against his political opponents. If persecution of the left becomes a reality, it would be the most significant consequence of Charlie Kirk’s murder.