Given his usual instincts, Donald Trump showed an impressive degree of restraint on Saturday evening shortly after a California man named Cole Tomas Allen attempted to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with two guns and a pair of knives. “This was an event dedicated to freedom of speech that was supposed to bring together members of both parties, with members of the press, and in a certain way it did,” Trump said, avoiding, for the moment, his typical partisan point-scoring. “I saw a room that was just totally unified. It was, in one way, very beautiful.”

But it was only a matter of time before Trump and his allies would use the latest attempt on his life to blame the American left—and the Democratic Party—for inspiring a climate of toxic politics. On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt walked out to the podium in the Brady Briefing Room loaded for bear, with a list of Democrats who have called Trump a fascist or a dictator over the years. Ed Markey. Elizabeth Warren. Adam Schiff. “Those who constantly, falsely label and slander the president as a fascist and threat to democracy and compare him to Hitler to score political points are fueling this kind of violence,” Leavitt said.

Many of Leavitt’s examples were out of context, or just cynically intentional misreadings of how people who work in politics (or sports, for that matter) commonly speak about their profession. Campaigns are battles. Opponents are targeted or “in the crosshairs.” Primary rivals slinging negative attacks against each other sometimes commit “murder-suicides” that kill off both candidacies (see: Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt in Iowa in 2004). Leavitt herself boasted on Saturday, previewing Trump’s speech, “There will be some shots fired tonight.”

These terms have been commonplace in politics for as long as I can recall. I’m old enough to remember when liberals—and the New York Times editorial page—lost their minds at a Sarah Palin staffer placing gun sights on an infographic aimed at various Democrats she was targeting with her super PAC in 2010. Months later, the pundit class rushed to blame her for somehow inspiring the googly-eyed weirdo who shot and nearly killed Gabrielle Giffords (and did kill six others) in Arizona. They were wrong. And even though they were wrong, they were also making those accusations in the United States of America, where the First Amendment exists.

Leavitt claimed that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called for “maximum warfare” against Trump. Well, no. Jeffries recently was talking about the congressional redistricting “wars” going on across the country. “We are in an era of maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” he said a few weeks ago. “And we are going to keep the pressure on Republicans at every single state in the union, to ensure at the end of the day, that there is a fair, national map.”

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By claiming that words are violence, Leavitt sounds very much like the safe-space snowflakes that she and her MAGA cohorts love to mock. “The left criticizing Trump is not the same as an incitement to violence,” said Brian Tyler Cohen, the popular progressive YouTube host and creator. “I get that Trump would love to label all criticism of him as incitement in an effort to chill all speech against him, but we have a First Amendment right in this country that allows us to criticize our government, and we should use it.”

But despite the half-truths, Leavitt said something else on Monday that liberals need to reckon with. “The deranged lies and smears against the president, his family, his supporters have led crazy people to believe crazy things, and they are inspired to commit violence because of those words,” she said.

Yes, Donald Trump ushered the crazies into the political mainstream a decade ago. No need to argue with that. He broke the thin membrane that kept the online kooks away from the real world. Mail bombers, Nazi marchers, the scoundrels who broke into the U.S. Capitol on January 6—that’s on him. Add in a collective addiction to social media brain rot—along with a global pandemic, mass protests about race and policing, wars in the Holy Land—and things get even uglier. There is an American sickness these days that just wasn’t in our lungs before Trump came around.

Still, as savvy people in politics like to say, two things can be true at once. And it should not be controversial to state what’s becoming obvious: There is a rising miasma of conspiratorial thinking, dangerous fact-denying, and dehumanizing language that has taken hold on the American left. It’s a political coalition that has long held itself to a higher epistemological standard than the right. Yes, the schizophrenic ’70s had their violent leftist radicals—the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, etcetera—but since at least the 1990s, liberals could plausibly claim the nutjobs and wackos were mostly on the other side. But now it feels like the libs have a screw loose once again—and a few of them are getting guns, too.

In November of 2018—after the synagogue mass shooting in Pittsburgh and the arrest of a Trump-supporting man who sent explosives through the mail to CNN and other critics of the president—NPR and Marist ran a poll asking voters about civility in politics and who was to blame for its decline. Clear pluralities of voters—and independents—blamed Trump and Republicans for the increasingly nasty tone of politics. Almost no one blamed Democrats. That echoed other NPR polling from 2017, which found that a massive 70 percent of Americans said the tone of politics had worsened in Trump’s first term.

Plenty of research from that era bore out a consensus: While political violence wasn’t as widespread as media coverage suggested, it was far more likely to come from right-wing extremists than left-, and Americans generally believed that the Republicans under Trump were more responsible for toxic politics than Democrats or people on the left. That consensus is now over. The number of Americans who blame the left as much as the right for political violence has skyrocketed over the last six years.

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In October, Pew found that 53 percent of Americans see left-wing extremism as a major problem, basically tied with those who view right-wing violence the same way (52 percent). In September, Morning Consult asked voters, “Who commits more violence, left- or right-wing extremists?” More Americans named left-wing extremists (29 percent) than right wing-extremists (27 percent), while a quarter said “both sides” are responsible for violence. Again, a sea change from the early years of Trumpian politics, defined by violent campaign rallies and racists marching in Charlottesville.

What changed? Two Trump assassination attempts—now three—at least two of them by lefty social media addicts. The murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk by a supporter of trans rights who marked his bullet casings with anti-fascist memes. A handsome college grad named Luigi Mangione who murdered the C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare in a fit of anti-corporate rage, and was celebrated for it in certain corners of the internet. And long before all that, civil rights protests in 2020 that turned violent, with plenty of voices on the left encouraging and celebrating vandalism and looting as an act of political resistance.

Right-wing violence still exists. The family of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman knows this all too well. But it’s also a fact that left-wing political violence is on the rise. Democrats can pretend it isn’t, but scoreboards don’t lie. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2025 marked the first year in over three decades that the number of violent left-wing incidents and plots surpassed the number of right-wing ones.

Trump and the MAGA movement have amplified all of the above with their powerful network effects on the internet, blaming Antifa or Democrats or whoever for whatever violent incident shows up in our push alerts. It’s J.D. Vance’s favorite pastime. And while some Democratic politicians have said inflammatory things in recent years, the real problem isn’t elected officials, as Leavitt tried to claim. Democratic electeds and other party leaders vehemently condemn political violence all the time—and most did over the weekend once again.

The problem is a new generation of podcasters, blue clout-chasers, and TikTok commenters who have overtaken the mainstream media not just as purveyors of facts, but as self-appointed brokers of common decency. Like anyone who spends too much time online, slowly drained of human empathy, many on the left have become too comfortable celebrating violence or bad luck that befalls their Trumpian enemies. They are too loose with their language, too cozy with conspiracies that can lead to a dark place.

Trump allies have been complaining for a while now that the mainstream press isn’t covering the conspiracy creep on the left with the same passion they gave to the right in Trump’s first term. “There was a cottage industry of reporters writing six pieces a day on QAnon years ago, but now when mainstream liberals are absolutely nuts, it’s silence,” said Alex Pfeiffer, a Republican strategist and veteran of the Trump White House. “You don’t need to attend a D.S.A. meeting to hear the filth in the shooter’s manifesto, you can just check out Ted Lieu’s X feed.”

Even podcasters on the left have started to urge their listeners and followers to tone it down. On Pod Save America last year, after Kirk’s murder, host Jon Favreau pleaded with viewers to try to maintain some kind of intellectual and moral high ground after seeing far too many on the left praise Kirk’s death and find excuses to justify violence against the right. “This is horseshit,” Favreau said in an emotional viral video. “Just because politics has failed in the past to prevent violence—just because it seems to be failing now—doesn’t mean that we should give up on it. That we should give up on speaking and acting and fighting in a way that represents our best attempt to change people’s minds; to bring the rest of the country a little bit closer to our point of view.”

Allen, the alleged attempted Trump assassin, seemed like the kind of guy who listens to Pod Save America. By all accounts, he was a Millennial normie Democrat, not the kind of person who dabbles in 9/11 truther content. What was striking about his alleged manifesto, written shortly before he attempted to rush the Washington Hilton basement, was how much it sounded like any of the pundits and anti-Trump content creators he reportedly followed on Bluesky. In addition to calling the president a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor,” he wrote that most of the people in the room—members of the media, mostly—were “complicit” in his crimes because they were attending the dinner. Not all left-wing podcast hosts and YouTube creators use this kind of language. But many of them absolutely do—and the manifesto sounded indistinguishable from paranoid online commentary that is regularly shared by Resistance pundits and grifters.

After I scooted out of the Hilton on Saturday, on my way to get a stiff drink with a pal at an Adams Morgan bar, I stopped on the street to post a little breaking news update on Snapchat, giving my followers there some color from inside the ballroom. The comments on my posts flooded in—and they were jarring. “Staged.” “False flag.” “Staged.” It was a fake operation, many said, a pretext for Trump to finish building his White House ballroom. Fortunately, I’m able to moderate comments on Snapchat, and I blocked them from public view. But the smooth brains were pretty easy to find everywhere else.

The actress January Jones—I know, not exactly a public intellectual—posted to her 1 million Instagram followers that the shooting was faked, “a small-scale low risk assassination attempt.” Silly celeb or not, the post was a symptom of a much larger problem of a disintermediated world where people get information from influencers with a lot of followers rather than credentialed reporters and news organizations. Here was a celebrity, a loud disciple of the Resistance, pumping 4chan-level slop, without discretion, into the world. She wasn’t alone. The New York Times reported on Sunday that the term “staged” had appeared in more than 300,000 posts on X.

It’s impossible to know whether all of these posts are from Democrats or liberals—or even real humans. Nor does posting a conspiracy theory on social media mean you’re going to suddenly grab a gun, hop a train across the country, and go hunting for Republicans at the Washington Hilton. Political violence remains rare relative to other forms. But dabbling in tinfoil hats can be a slippery slope. The great liberal thinkers of the past, I imagine, would look upon this moment with shame. I dug up a quote Sunday from Isaac Asimov, a proud Democrat during his lifetime. He wrote in 1980 about “a cult of ignorance in the United States”—his take on the anti-intellectual right—and said conservatives thrive on the belief that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” He would not be pleased to learn, today, that many of his fellow travelers have settled on fighting ignorance… with ignorance.

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