When politicians cheer American violence | Will Bunch Newsletter

War. Good God, y’all. The increasingly deadly aerial conflict between Israel and Iran, sending the Middle East cycle of violence into hyper-spin, is a level of human awfulness that eludes any worthwhile commentary at this point. Except the obvious that a) no, no one wants a nuclear Iran but b) that’s why Barack Obama forged a deal to prevent it, only to watch Donald Trump rip it up so we could have the current mess instead. No one has ever said it better than Boy George. War is stupid. And people are stupid.

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It’s the worst game in America right now: the madcap dash after breaking news of yet another act of political violence — an opportunity that comes far too often in 2025 — to find the magic bullet of evidence that will prove that your ideological enemies are to blame for it.

And the most horrific example happened this Saturday, as an already anxious day of protests and a military parade was shattered by breaking news from suburban Minneapolis that a top Democratic lawmaker had been assassinated in the dead of night, along with her husband, while a state senator and his wife had been wounded nearby.

When the alleged killer was identified as Vance Luther Boelter, the wheels of conspiracy theory spun faster on the right. After a nanosecond Google search showed that Boelter had been reappointed in 2019 to a statewide workforce advisory board by Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the party’s recent vice presidential candidate, far-right influencers ran with it. The alleged assassin was, in the words of YouTuber Benny Johnson, a “left-wing” radical — the latest apostle of Democratic derangement.

Remember when Republican political leaders used to respond to shootings with “thoughts and prayers”? How quaint. Now, a shocking number of MAGA adherents not only skipped over any condolences for a political leader, former House Speaker Melissa Hortman, who was beloved by many in her home state, but gleefully celebrated what they thought was a “Eureka!” moment against their leftist enemies.

None more shockingly than Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who posted the first ominous surveillance photos of Boelter and joked about them not once but twice. “This is what happens (w)hen Marxists don’t get their way,” Lee tweeted, and then posted the photo a second time with the caption, “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” apparently a misspelled reference to the viral allegation that a killer had ties to the governor, Walz.

And Lee wasn’t alone. “The degree to which the extreme left has become radical, violent, and intolerant is both stunning and terrifying,” newly elected Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno wrote, while X’s owner and world’s richest man Elon Musk piled on for his 221 million followers, calling the Minnesota murders proof “the far left is murderously violent.”

There’s two big problems with all of this. The first is that a slightly longer Google search might have revealed that the advisory board to which Walz reappointed Boelter is nonpartisan and not really political. The notion that a liberal Democrat embarked on a killing spree against liberal Democrats was, not surprisingly, utterly false. The gunman was described as a conservative who attended Donald Trump rallies and an evangelical church, and held strong anti-abortion views before targeting supporters of abortion rights.

The second problem is even more serious. With their callous and politicized words about an American tragedy, elected officials like Lee and Moreno offered a textbook definition of once obscure terminology that every American should learn: Stochastic terrorism. Simply put, it’s the demonization of a foe so that they might become targets of violence.

Too many politicians and self-proclaimed thought leaders are too happy in the present moment to use hateful language and endorse brain-dead conspiracy theories for likes on X, or Fox News glory — with no regard for how their messages are received by the troubled and increasingly misinformed masses.

The fish stinks from the head. Trump’s angry and violent rhetoric — marked by Monday’s 10th anniversary of the “golden escalator” moment when a developer launched his political career by calling Mexicans murderers and rapists — has only escalated further into an authoritarian second presidency. POTUS 47 posted Sunday night that “Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities...”

In other words, who will rid me of these meddlesome libs?

It doesn’t help that a lot of elite, mainstream journalists are eager to portray the rising tide of political violence across America as a “both sides” problem. Look, humans are human, and some acts of violence are perpetrated by the extreme left, like a few scattered car fires in downtown Los Angeles. Two high-profile crimes in the last six months — the assassination of a health insurance CEO and the murder of two Israeli embassy employees in D.C. — were also associated with causes on the left.

But in-depth studies have shown that, overall, the threat of domestic terrorism in America is coming largely from the right.

“Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years,” the Center for Strategic & International Studies reported in 2020. “Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.”

Consider how many Republican politicos not only voiced support for motorists to plow their cars into crowds of protesters, but even enacted laws in red states to reduce or eliminate penalties for that particular brand of violence.

“We also have a policy that if you’re driving on one of those streets and a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you, you have a right to flee for your safety,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said in an interview last week. “And so if you drive off and you hit one of these people, that’s their fault for impinging on you.”

You’ll be shocked to learn that the last week has seen an outbreak of drivers plowing into liberal protesters — at an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) march in Chicago, and at “No Kings” protests in San Francisco and in Culpepper, Va., where a 22-year-old man was arrested for his alleged crime.

It was just one symptom of a day when protests were largely peaceful and even joyous, yet the threat of violence lingered. A lot of it came from the government in the form of tear gas and “less-lethal” projectiles fired at demonstrators in Los Angeles, including an alarming number of journalists targeted with rubber bullets. A lurker with firearms was arrested outside the “No Kings” rally in suburban West Chester. In Salt Lake City, a marcher was killed after a bizarre incident in which one man with a gun was allegedly shot at by armed “peacekeepers” (really dumb idea, guys) hired by the protesters.

But that’s the thing about violence: It spirals, whether it’s in the Middle East or here at home. At the Philadelphia march on Saturday, the American University sociologist Dana R. Fisher was surprised to get survey results that 40% agreed that “Americans may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” And we’re not going to ratchet those numbers any lower until U.S. senators who ought to know better start dialing down the temperature.

Question: Do you see any hope that as more and more people express disapproval of Trump’s policies, [especially] his handling of deportations without due process, that the Republicans in Congress will be ready to vote against his bills or even join a resistance? — @factaddict.bsky.social via Bluesky

Answer: Not much hope, unfortunately. Look at the president’s recent TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) backflip on deportation raids against key workplaces such as farms and hotels. What for 48 hours looked like a rare concession to rising public sentiment against mass deportation was reversed again this weekend, probably at the behest of White House immigration guru Stephen Miller. Or look at how top Republicans responded to this weekend’s Minnesota political assassination — a chance for olive branches, if there ever was one — with mean tweets about liberals. His mentor Roy Cohn taught Trump to never back down and never admit defeat, and some Republicans seem determined to follow that mantra to their doom in the 2026 midterms.

Not surprisingly, newsletter readers’ views of L.A. protesters were mostly positive. This was best summed up by Louise Willis: “The real protesters are heroes, behaving humanely by protecting their neighbors from brutality.” But several expressed concern that violent folks on the fringes could taint the entire exercise. Wrote Steve Lubin: “While I support protesting against our dictator wannabe, the violence is only playing into Trump’s plan to find excuses to militarize his response to any violence and declare martial law.”

📮 This week’s question: Israel’s assault on Iran and its nuclear program seems to have put the Trump regime between a rock and a hard place, torn between a muddled effort to broker a deal or going all in with the Netanyahu government, perhaps dropping a massive “bunker-buster” bomb on Iran. Should the U.S. in any way get involved? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Israel-Iran war” in the subject line.

Saturday’s massive “No Kings” protests promised Americans a split screen — a boisterous contrast to Donald Trump’s multimillion-dollar D.C. military parade that turned out to be a sparsely attended bust. But there was another sharp contrast bubbling behind the surface: the growing divide between an increasingly radicalized base of rank-and-file liberals eager to resist the 47th president, and a Democratic Party leadership that is struggling with how to represent them.

Some Democratic elected officials seized the moment at Saturday’s protests — none more than Maryland U.S. Rep. Jaime Raskin, who electrified the large crowd in Philadelphia by telling them “you know how to topple kings here.” But “No Kings” was largely a day for the behind-the-scenes resisters who planned it, and many of the top speakers were unions leaders or civil-rights and immigration activists. And while the party’s base was celebrating its unified stand against MAGA autocracy, the party elites were feuding, publicly.

The head of the powerful American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten — who also spoke at “No Kings” in Philly — sent lightning bolts this weekend by resigning from the Democratic National Committee and taking public her dispute with the new DNC chair Ken Martin. She wrote, “I do not want to be the one who keeps questioning why we are not enlarging our tent.” Another top union head — Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — also left the DNC. This came right after the very brief tenure of youthful gun safety advocate David Hogg also crashed and burned over Hogg’s desire, while serving as DNC vice-chair, to support primary opponents for some older Dems.

A new poll of rank-and-file Democrats revealed a whopping 70% prefer the confrontational style of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over any compromise with Trump, even on issues they might support. So far, too few party leaders have gotten the message. It seemed beyond ironic when a gaggle of the party’s biggest names — Kamala Harris, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, among others — spent the night of “No Kings” partying at the regal wedding of former Clinton aide Huma Abedin and billionaire scion Alex Soros. OK, sure, it’s just a wedding, and Schumer did attend the “No Kings” event in New York. But everything at the Hamptons reception from the hired band of Boyz II Men to a menu of truffle agnolotti and grilled prawns hinted at a party brass still more inclined to toast the oligarchy than to topple it.

In the summer of 2009, a still-very-hot topic — especially for me — was just how the mainstream media had gotten it so wrong on the case for the Iraq War. It felt important because — heaven forbid — we didn’t want elite journalism to fail the next time America faced a crisis. On this date 16 years ago, I seized on an essay by the since-departed Michael Hastings that concluded, in my words, that “Beltway journalists felt that staying with ‘the pack’ — avoiding what would be a contrarian, and thus uncool...position — was the safest way to climb the well-paying and prestigious career ladder." Read the rest: “What’s 100,000 or so deaths ‘to retain political and professional credibility’?”

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