The man who stormed the WHCD in the apparent hope he could assassinate President Donald Trump and other high-ranking government officials made a series of arguments that, if not quite reflective of mainstream progressivism, are at least adjacent to it. It is fairly standard anti-Trump agitprop, if it is permissible to describe it with a Russian-derived word.

That doesn’t mean this boilerplate is necessarily true. There’s no conclusive evidence that Trump participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual crimes or continued to associate with the disgraced financier once they were widely known. Allen mischaracterizes what the jury found in the E. Jean Carroll case, which wasn’t in any event a criminal trial. The late special counsel Robert Mueller was unable to establish that Trump or anyone associated with his 2016 campaign conspired with Russia to fix that year’s presidential election, much less anything else that could be legally defined as treason.

The WHCA dinner attack at the same Washington, D.C., hotel where then-President Ronald Reagan was nearly assassinated in 1981 revealed systemic problems. This is the third known serious attempt on Trump’s life since 2024. Secret Service protocols and hotel security measures can be studied and reformed, but the normalization of political violence among a nontrivial segment of the population that is disproportionately young, well-educated, and left-wing — what political commentator Brendan O’Neill describes as “the depthless self-pity and child-like vengeance of overeducated fools” — is not so easily fixed, especially in a free society.

To fix a problem, however, one must first identify it. But there is a great deal of denial among people who should know better that there is anything linking together the attempted storming of the correspondents’ event, the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the celebration of Luigi Mangione after he was charged in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and the wounding of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), now House majority leader, at a 2017 Congressional Baseball Game practice. Democrat Jay Jones was elected attorney general of Virginia last year after the publication of text messages showing him fantasizing about the deaths of Republican opponents.

In an extremely polarized, hyperpartisan political environment supercharged by the ease and (sometimes) anonymity of posting on the internet, irresponsible, dumb, and ugly things are said by people of all political persuasions all the time.

“A lot of rhetoric is flying in all directions, yes, including from the president,” my Washington Examiner colleague Guy Benson observed on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier. “The bullets seem to be flying in one direction toward the president, and that should be intolerable for every single American.”

That doesn’t mean that every American who indulges in overheated rhetoric about Trump or Republicans is dangerous. Only a fraction of those trafficking even in violent political talk will ever take up arms and act upon it. The man who shot Steve Scalise was a supporter of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). But Sanders himself has been quite unequivocal in his denunciation of political violence, from the murder of Charlie Kirk to the Trump assassination attempts.

“A functioning democracy relies on the premise that people can express their political views without fear of being attacked or assassinated,” Sanders wrote the day after the WHCA dinner. “Political violence is political cowardice. It is unacceptable in all forms.”

But there is data as well as impressions from TikTok videos or Bluesky posts that support the idea that left-wing political violence is inching closer to the mainstream. A YouGov poll published shortly after Kirk’s death found that 17% of liberals and 25% who branded themselves as very liberal believed “political violence can sometimes be justified.” Only 9% of self-described moderates and 6% of conservatives said the same.

Another survey by the Skeptic Research Center found that a third of younger Americans supported political violence, including 53% of black Gen Zers, and more than 40% of those who described themselves as very liberal. “Liberal GenZ women were more supportive of political violence than were GenX and Baby Boomer men,” the executive summary reports, adding, “Americans with the highest level of educational attainment (graduate or professional degree) were about twice as likely to support political violence than those with less formal education.”

An Emerson College poll found that nearly one in five voters believed the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO was either “acceptable” or “somewhat acceptable.” Among respondents aged 30 to 39, that percentage jumps a bit to 23%. But among voters between the ages of 18 and 29, the number reached an eye-popping 41%.

“[O]ne thing we can say with certainty is that the culture of fragility begets intolerance, and intolerance begets violence,” writes spiked’s Brendan O’Neill. “It seems insane now that we thought we could teach the young that everyone who fails to bow to their ideology is ‘the enemy,’ and that everything would be just fine.”

A Manhattan Institute survey found that 46% of Democrats believed it was definitely or probably true that “the assassination attempt against Donald Trump in July 2024 was orchestrated by his supporters to increase sympathy for him.” This may have been the opinion of the latest person alleged to have tried to assassinate Trump himself, much like Holocaust denial is common among people who lament that the Nazis did not eradicate more Jews.

“We went through 4700 of Cole Allen tweets/posts and one of the strangest things we found was he shared a lot of posts claiming the Butler assassination attempt was staged,” reports CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski. “He also repeatedly compared Trump to Hitler and urged people to buy firearms.”

This conspiracy theory is common on the internet despite being amplified by virtually no major Democratic elected officials or mainstream liberal opinion leaders. The closest might be a social media post by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) mocking Trump’s Butler “fight” pose by holding aloft a bottle of ketchup, some of which is dripping from his ear, while surrounded by laughing Secret Service agents. “It’s about time someone called this hoax out,” read a Reddit post about it.

The Manhattan Institute also found that 64% of Democrats believe that Vladimir Putin has compromising information on Donald Trump that the Russian leader uses to sway Trump’s policy positions. In 2018, a YouGov poll found 67% of Democrats thought it was “true” or “probably true” that Russia tampered with the 2016 vote totals to get Trump elected.

Mainstream Democrats have dabbled in these conspiracy theories, going beyond the (equally unproven) Trump-Russia collusion narrative to talk about how the Kremlin “hacked” the election. Based on this data, we were lucky to avoid a Jan. 6-style event from the Left during the electoral vote certifications of Trump’s two victories.

Yet it is clear that this kind of thinking is fueling violent fantasies, and in rarer cases, actions, now. If you take seriously what many ordinary liberals claim to believe about Trump-led America, it would lead inexorably toward it. The Resistance will not be televised.

Liberals certainly argued that the pro-life conviction that abortion is killing logically led to the murder of abortion doctors in the 1990s. Major pro-life leaders and institutions denounced these killings, which never became anywhere nearly as common as the belief that abortion ends a human life, on explicitly pro-life terms.

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie maintained in 2022 that a white supremacist murdering black people in Buffalo flowed from opinions widely held by ordinary conservatives.

“There is a huge difference here: nobody on the Right justified, rationalized, or celebrated the white supremacist in Buffalo,” countered conservative activist Christopher Rufo. “But many people on the Left, including in prestige media, have justified, rationalized, and celebrated left-wing violence, from BLM to the present.”

When confronted with evidence of violent sentiment among young left-wingers, progressives invariably point to studies showing that most incidents of political violence are right-wing in nature. But the examples are usually dominated by extremists like the Buffalo or Charleston, South Carolina, shooters with no mainstream conservative support and whose views in no way resemble those of the Right’s main voices. Recent revelations about the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center call into question how organic the biggest white nationalist event of this century, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville during Trump’s first term in 2017, really was.

INSIDE THE ROOM: TERROR AT THE WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS’ DINNER

Even if political violence is going to increasingly be committed not by people with particularly extreme views but by people who are extremely angry about normal political disagreements going on throughout the country, intensified by conspiratorial thinking that’s becoming more common across the ideological spectrum, we are entering very dangerous territory. 

There are no easy answers, and Trump is far from a calming, unifying political leader. The person most responsible for political violence is the one who throws the Molotov cocktail or pulls the trigger. But the cultural problem is real, possibly growing, and it reared its ugly head on what was meant to be a rare night of bipartisan unity in our nation’s capital.

W. James Antle III (@jimantle) is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.