Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order last week claiming to designate antifa as a “domestic terror organization.” On Thursday, he issued a directive for his government to pursue antifa. Talk spread of another, imminent order on dismantling left-wing groups. It was the culmination of years of obsessing over antifa.

As someone publicly associated with anti-fascist organizing, the proclamations weren’t the greatest shock. The repression is to be expected.

The reaction to Trump’s nakedly illegal designation from progressives, liberal media, and left-leaning think tanks, however, has given me a sense of dread.

That’s because opponents of MAGA have embraced a dangerous narrative: The antifa designation is moot because there is, simply, nothing to designate. “Antifa,” in this telling, will simply be used as a catchall to repress anyone opposed to Trump when, in truth, it’s just an idea with no concrete grounding in the world.

Opponents of MAGA have embraced a dangerous narrative.

Trump will indeed label just about all his opponents “antifa,” but the terms “antifa” and “antifascist” aren’t hollow references to mere ideas.

Contrary to Republicans’ portrayals, there is no overarching antifa organization or official network. The terms “antifa” and “antifascist,” though, do reflect an actually existing world of activists, researchers, thinkers, and organizers at real risk of persecution and dedicated to a specific politics.

If left-wing organizing is to be defended against Trump’s repression, denying their existence will only do further harm.

What Liberals Get Wrong

Anti-fascism was one of the most unifying and electrifying banners to organize under during Trump’s first administration. We may already be losing that framework, as Trump certainly hopes, to a deliberately nebulous sense of criminality associated with its language and symbols.

Instead of recognizing this, corporate media, mainstream commentators, and liberal voices have largely dismissed antifa

Consider how Luke Baumgartner, a research fellow in the program on extremism at George Washington University, responded while discussing antifa in a television interview on the heels of the latest designation.

Asked if there was anything real for Trump to target, Baumgartner said, “There is no hierarchical organizational structure. It is primarily a movement and an ideology. And there are no leaders. There are no assets. There are no bank accounts or revenue streams to go after either.”

The mainstream fact-checking site PolitiFact responded to the latest designation by citing past remarks from Michael German, a fellow from the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program.

Comparing antifa’s designation to that of foreign terror groups, German said, “Antifa isn’t organized in that fashion in the first place​, as it has no leaders, assets, or infrastructure, so banning material support to foreign anti-fascist groups would have little legitimate anti-terrorism effect here or abroad.”

This take — which is pervasive in mainstream and liberal circles — gets right that antifascist movements do not operate according to a centralized hierarchy. It is wrong, however, to dismiss the ways in which Antifa is grounded firmly in reality.

You can take it from me: I have organized and raised funds for the real-world structures that make up the anti-fascist movement.

Antifa in the Real World

Dismissing antifa runs the risk of leaving the people in the movement to the wolves.

A casual observer of mainstream, liberal, or Democratic Party talking points might be left with the impression that a “real,” organized, large, coordinated, and uncompromising anti-fascist movement may in fact be worthy of being treated as a terrorist organization.

At the very least, they might think that such a movement — which is precisely what we need right now — doesn’t need a robust defense. Why, after all, would you need to protect something that doesn’t exist?

The truth is that antifa and anti-fascist groups have been responsible for some of the most prescient and impactful organizing countering the far-right during the last decade.

Related

Trump’s Idea of the Criminal Left Is a Fiction. A Coordinated Defense Against His Fascism Shouldn’t Be.

Until the recent empowerment of an unleashed Trump administration and the support of wealthy business interests, the far right was languishing. Many notorious far-right groups and personalities were bankrupt, unemployable, facing prosecution, unable to attract audiences, plagued by infighting, harassed in public, under a constant microscope, and generally rendered weak and inert.

It was the work of dedicated and organized anti-fascists that made this possible. And that work was, I might hasten to add, perfectly legal.

Groups that have considered themselves antifa or anti-fascist run the gamut of organizational possibilities. They are formally and informally constituted, with and without membership, and range from publicly facing to completely anonymous. Their activities include the publication of research on the far right, producing cultural events, staging self-defense trainings, organizing de-platforming campaigns, and mounting counter-demonstrations.

As for assets, George Soros and liberal financiers certainly do not fund these activities. Activists themselves usually do. All groups need some money and assets to carry out the most basic work, even if the sums are paltry. I myself have fundraised for the basic infrastructure needed to do things like host meetings, run online platforms, call demonstrations, and produce educational materials.

A Better Approach

Instead of demeaning antifa by focusing on questions of organization or the technical feasibility of a domestic designation, liberals should rally around it — by putting the very values they espouse into action.

You don’t need to consider yourself antifa to believe in defending protected political speech or the right of free association.

If they want to foster a functional opposition, liberals must say what they already know, despite their discomfort, and fight for these constitutional guarantees — even for protected speech that advocates for self-defense and discusses the politics of violence.

Anti-fascists tend to be more concerned with questions of morality than questions of legality, but liberals concerned about the rule of law ought to take succor in past precedents.

Direct action-focused groups in American history that moved to protect their communities, like the Black Panthers or militant labor unions, have shown that it cannot be made illegal to advocate for or practice community self-defense, whether that means learning to use arms, conducting boycotts and demonstrations, or feeding and educating your constituencies.

Related

The Persistent Push to Depict Luigi Mangione and His Supporters as Terrorists

Considering the current administration’s open assault on “hostile” communities and “blue” states and cities, and the inability of courts and lawmakers to restrain its weaponization of the legal system, military, and law enforcement, that direct action example is more important than ever.

In the absence of fascist adversaries that are as concerned with free speech, the rule of law, or polite disagreement as their opponents are, a politics of mutual aid and community self-defense remains our most powerful choice.

Anti-fascism and anti-fascists have demonstrated how we might walk this path toward a politics of empowerment, in which we take direct responsibility for our own communities.

If we are going to foster a thriving, powerful movement equal to this dangerous moment, we must not surrender “antifa” to Trump’s whims and the worst fantasies of our opponents. The health and safety of our friends, family, and society may depend on it.

The post What Liberals Get Wrong About Trump’s Executive Order on Antifa appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order claiming to designate antifa as a “domestic terror organization.” On Thursday, he issued a directive for his government to pursue antifa. Talk spread of another, imminent order on dismantling left-wing groups. It was the culmination of years of obsessing over antifa.

As someone publicly associated with anti-fascist organizing, the proclamations weren’t the greatest shock. The repression is to be expected.

The reaction to Trump’s nakedly illegal designation from progressives, liberal media, and left-leaning think tanks, however, has given me a sense of dread.

That’s because opponents of MAGA have embraced a dangerous narrative: The antifa designation is moot because there is, simply, nothing to designate. “Antifa,” in this telling, will simply be used as a catchall to repress anyone opposed to Trump when, in truth, it’s just an idea with no concrete grounding in the world.

Opponents of MAGA have embraced a dangerous narrative.

Trump will indeed label just about all his opponents “antifa,” but the terms “antifa” and “anti-fascist” aren’t hollow references to mere ideas.

Contrary to Republicans’ portrayals, there is no overarching antifa organization or official network. The terms “antifa” and “anti-fascist,” though, do reflect an actually existing world of activists, researchers, thinkers, and organizers at real risk of persecution and dedicated to a specific politics.

If left-wing organizing is to be defended against Trump’s repression, denying their existence will only do further harm.

What Liberals Get Wrong

Anti-fascism was one of the most unifying and electrifying banners to organize under during Trump’s first administration. We may already be losing that framework, as Trump certainly hopes, to a deliberately nebulous sense of criminality associated with its language and symbols.

Instead of recognizing this, corporate media, mainstream commentators, and liberal voices have largely dismissed antifa

Consider how Luke Baumgartner, a research fellow in the program on extremism at George Washington University, responded while discussing antifa in a television interview on the heels of the latest designation.

Asked if there was anything real for Trump to target, Baumgartner said, “There is no hierarchical organizational structure. It is primarily a movement and an ideology. And there are no leaders. There are no assets. There are no bank accounts or revenue streams to go after either.”

The mainstream fact-checking site PolitiFact responded to the latest designation by citing past remarks from Michael German, a fellow from the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program.

Comparing antifa’s designation to that of foreign terror groups, German said, “Antifa isn’t organized in that fashion in the first place​, as it has no leaders, assets, or infrastructure, so banning material support to foreign anti-fascist groups would have little legitimate anti-terrorism effect here or abroad.”

This take — which is pervasive in mainstream and liberal circles — gets right that anti-fascist movements do not operate according to a centralized hierarchy. It is wrong, however, to dismiss the ways in which Antifa is grounded firmly in reality.

You can take it from me: I have organized and raised funds for the real-world structures that make up the anti-fascist movement.

Antifa in the Real World

Dismissing antifa runs the risk of leaving the people in the movement to the wolves.

A casual observer of mainstream, liberal, or Democratic Party talking points might be left with the impression that a “real,” organized, large, coordinated, and uncompromising anti-fascist movement may in fact be worthy of being treated as a terrorist organization.

At the very least, they might think that such a movement — which is precisely what we need right now — doesn’t need a robust defense. Why, after all, would you need to protect something that doesn’t exist?

The truth is that antifa and anti-fascist groups have been responsible for some of the most prescient and impactful organizing countering the far-right during the last decade.

Related

Trump’s Idea of the Criminal Left Is a Fiction. A Coordinated Defense Against His Fascism Shouldn’t Be.

Until the recent empowerment of an unleashed Trump administration and the support of wealthy business interests, the far right was languishing. Many notorious far-right groups and personalities were bankrupt, unemployable, facing prosecution, unable to attract audiences, plagued by infighting, harassed in public, under a constant microscope, and generally rendered weak and inert.

It was the work of dedicated and organized anti-fascists that made this possible. And that work was, I might hasten to add, perfectly legal.

Groups that have considered themselves antifa or anti-fascist run the gamut of organizational possibilities. They are formally and informally constituted, with and without membership, and range from publicly facing to completely anonymous. Their activities include the publication of research on the far right, producing cultural events, staging self-defense trainings, organizing de-platforming campaigns, and mounting counter-demonstrations.

As for assets, George Soros and liberal financiers certainly do not fund these activities. Activists themselves usually do. All groups need some money and assets to carry out the most basic work, even if the sums are paltry. I myself have fundraised for the basic infrastructure needed to do things like host meetings, run online platforms, call demonstrations, and produce educational materials.

A Better Approach

Instead of demeaning antifa by focusing on questions of organization or the technical feasibility of a domestic designation, liberals should rally around it — by putting the very values they espouse into action.

You don’t need to consider yourself antifa to believe in defending protected political speech or the right of free association.

If they want to foster a functional opposition, liberals must say what they already know, despite their discomfort, and fight for these constitutional guarantees — even for protected speech that advocates for self-defense and discusses the politics of violence.

Anti-fascists tend to be more concerned with questions of morality than questions of legality, but liberals concerned about the rule of law ought to take succor in past precedents.

Direct action-focused groups in American history that moved to protect their communities, like the Black Panthers or militant labor unions, have shown that it cannot be made illegal to advocate for or practice community self-defense, whether that means learning to use arms, conducting boycotts and demonstrations, or feeding and educating your constituencies.

Related

The Persistent Push to Depict Luigi Mangione and His Supporters as Terrorists

Considering the current administration’s open assault on “hostile” communities and “blue” states and cities, and the inability of courts and lawmakers to restrain its weaponization of the legal system, military, and law enforcement, that direct action example is more important than ever.

In the absence of fascist adversaries that are as concerned with free speech, the rule of law, or polite disagreement as their opponents are, a politics of mutual aid and community self-defense remains our most powerful choice.

Anti-fascism and anti-fascists have demonstrated how we might walk this path toward a politics of empowerment, in which we take direct responsibility for our own communities.

If we are going to foster a thriving, powerful movement equal to this dangerous moment, we must not surrender “antifa” to Trump’s whims and the worst fantasies of our opponents. The health and safety of our friends, family, and society may depend on it.

The post What Liberals Get Wrong About Trump’s Executive Order on Antifa appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

In the month since Iryna Zarutska was murdered on a Charlotte, North Carolina, light rail train, the Ukrainian refugee has become an icon of the right.

When the gruesome footage of her murder, in which a large Black man attacked an attractive white victim, was released on September 5 and circulated widely on social media, it unleashed a frenzy of racism, panic, and outlandish claims about the criminal legal system. The fevered response wasn’t steeped in reality but rather in far-right mythology.

Elon Musk went into a rage spiral about Black-on-white crime. Chaya Raichik, the right-wing provocateur behind LibsofTikTok, accused the media of covering up the crime so as not to offend racial justice activists. And numerous right-wing accounts mocked the idea that better mental health care might have anything to do with crime.

The far-right Fox News personality Jesse Waters blamed the murder on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, pointing out that the magistrate who freed Zarutska’s killer was a Black woman “who doesn’t even have a law degree.” And right-wing pundit Jesse Kelly suggested judges and prosecutors be imprisoned themselves when someone they’ve let out of prison goes on to commit another crime.

Elsewhere on Fox, commentator Brian Kilmeade contemplated what to do with homeless, mentally ill people and offered a simple solution: “Just kill them.”

Next up, of course, was the White House. President Donald Trump weighed in, with his typically calm and diplomatic demeanor.

Following the murder of Charlie Kirk on September 10, Zarutska become paired with Kirk in right-wing media as a martyr to an imaginary, soft-on-crime left. Trump has continued to post memes and images of Zarutska on his Truth Social platform in the weeks since.

This furor has also turned into legislative action. On Wednesday, the North Carolina state legislature passed a bill, “Iryna’s Law,” which would limit cashless bail, reinforce the ability to involuntarily commit people on the basis of mental health, and open the door to restarting executions in the state.

Every murder is a tragedy. Zarutska’s murder was horrific, brutal, and heartbreaking, particularly given that she had come to the U.S. from Ukraine to seek safety from the war.

Her murder, however, is not a common sort of crime, and it is not indicative of any larger trend. The people screaming most loudly about her death are advocating policies that will do little to stop similar crimes from happening again.

What the Right Gets Wrong

First, there is no epidemic of Black-on-white crime. About 80 to 90 percent of homicides in the U.S. are intraracial: They have a Black perpetrator and Black victim, or a white perpetrator and white victim.

And homicides and violent crime in general are in rapid decline. According to data analyst Jeff Asher, the FBI’s crime report next year will likely show 2025 to have the lowest murder rate ever recorded. In many cities, serious crimes are approaching all-time lows. Both homicides and violent crime in Charlotte are down significantly from last year, and even more from the nationwide surge in 2021 and 2022.

Murders committed by strangers are also rare. The data here are dirtier — most police departments don’t track the relationship between killer and victim — but from what we do know, about 10 percent of murders are committed by strangers. Women in particular are far more likely to be murdered by a relative than a stranger.

As for the DEI allegations, the fact that Mecklenburg County Magistrate Judge Teresa Stokes isn’t a lawyer isn’t unusual. By one estimate, magistrates and judges in low-level courts aren’t required to have a law degree in 32 states. Those judges’ responsibilities often include setting bail and signing warrants. Their lack of legal training is often a problem, but as any public defender will tell you, the problem rarely manifests as a tendency to be too lenient. And leniency doesn’t appear to be evident in this case, either.

It’s true that Decarlos Brown, Zarutska’s killer, had a long criminal record. Based on public reporting, however, his most serious convictions are for shoplifting, larceny, breaking and entering, and armed robbery. He served six years in prison and one year of probation for the armed robbery — right around the national average.

Related

How the Criminal Justice System Fails People With Mental Illness

To say that Brown should never have been released from prison implies that one or more of these crimes should have resulted in a life sentence — and I doubt most would say armed robbery deserves a punishment of life behind bars. And certainly none of his other crimes do.

Brown was arrested again in January for abusing the 911 system. Brown, who is schizophrenic, had called 911 to say that police had put a “chip” in him that controlled his thoughts and actions. It’s for this charge that Brown was released without bail. Brown’s attorney then asked for a psychiatric evaluation. A judge agreed but didn’t order the evaluation until July, and that evaluation never appears to have taken place.

Here, too, there are few jurisdictions in the country where Brown would have been held in jail. Misusing the 911 system is a minor offense, and in Brown’s case it was clearly driven by mental illness.

The Real Lesson

There is a lesson we ought to learn from this murder, but almost certainly won’t.

Over the last couple years, I’ve visited nearly two dozen public defender offices around the country. Over and over, these attorneys have told me that the most urgent problem in the criminal legal system is the way it treats the mentally ill, homeless people, and people battling addiction.

These three problems are inextricable from one another, and often drive one another. All three problems became immeasurably worse after Covid, and all three were then exacerbated by significant cuts to public funding for municipalities during the pandemic.

When a court orders a competency evaluation for someone charged with a crime who may be suffering from mental illness, it can take months for them to be evaluated — and then months more before they’re treated. In some states, it can be more than a year.

If it’s a serious crime, they spend that time waiting in a jail cell. If they get any treatment at all in jail, it’s typically cursory. The wait to be evaluated and treated is often longer — sometimes far longer — than the maximum sentence they could have received for the crime they were charged with in the first place. That’s because the most common charges for someone who is, say, homeless and mentally ill are for crimes like public trespass or public urination. Sometimes they’re still held in jail, anyway. Sometimes they’re released.

For those who are finally treated, the goal is only “restoration” — treatment to the point where they’re competent to stand trial. Once they’re released, the treatment stops. As you might expect, the whole experience is toxic and destructive for someone already suffering from mental illness. They’re often released in worse condition than they were before.

This is a problem all around the country, and North Carolina is no exception. The state’s mental health system is vastly underresourced. There aren’t enough doctors, facilities, or beds. This report from February found that the average wait time for someone charged with a crime to get into a state mental health facility in North Carolina is around six months. Some people accused of crimes in the state had waited more than a year.

Brown’s case didn’t even get that far. His attorney asked for a competency evaluation after his arrest in January. It wasn’t finally authorized by a judge until July, and it doesn’t appear to have happened at all. That’s a flaw in the system, but it isn’t the product of a system that’s too lenient.

Some commentators have pointed out that Brown’s mother said his condition deteriorated after he was released from prison in 2020, and that she repeatedly tried to get him treatment, but only succeeded in getting him in a facility for two weeks. After he was out, he stopped taking his medication. This, they say, is evidence that he should have been locked up for good.

Perhaps that’s true. But at that point, his worst crime was armed robbery, and it was one for which he’d served his sentence. How we determine when someone is a threat to themselves or others — and what to do about it — sits at a particularly perilous intersection of law and medicine.

We have to balance community safety with the rights and autonomy of the person in question. Involuntary commitment is a blunt instrument that can be easily abused. There are no easy answers. But given his record, a system that committed Brown against his will would be a system that commits thousands of people who pose no threat at all.

It’s understandable why some who favor harsher punishment might think that making this a discussion about mental illness absolves Brown of his culpability. But someone who commits a murder while severely schizophrenic isn’t deterred by a long prison sentence or the death penalty. By definition, they aren’t acting rationally.

The severity of Brown’s punishment will have no effect on how many murders like this we might see in the years to come. How we treat mental illness in our jails very well could.

The post GOP Reviving Executions for Iryna Zarutska’s Murder, but Rolling Back Reforms Won’t Prevent These Crimes appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

American shootings have put a weird spin on the old tradition of writing on messages on munitions: Recent suspects have begun scrawling memes, slogans, or in-group codewords on shell casings.

On Wednesday, after a sniper opened fire on a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Dallas, investigators found an unfired shell casing with “ANTI-ICE” written on it. Before too long, the FBI chief Kash Patel posted a photo of the bullets to social media.

Just two weeks earlier, at the scene of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, authorities in Utah recovered spent rifle cartridges etched with internet references like “Notices bulges OwO what’s this?”; a sequence of arrows used to drop a bomb in the video game “Helldivers 2”; the anti-fascist song “Bella Ciao”; and “If you Read This, You Are GAY lmao.”

The messages-on-casings approach echo a similar assassination in December 2024, when Luigi Mangione allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare’s CEO in the middle of New York City. Investigators later revealed that his spent shells were engraved with the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” — an apparent critique of the insurance giant that gave rise to spiraling conspiracies about Mangione’s own political inclinations. Other killers seem to have taken note.

In the warped arena of memetic warfare, the press often plays along with the shooters’ messaging.

At first glance these inscriptions may seem to hint at ideology — perhaps in Mangione’s case they did — but experts warn they can be something else entirely: a twisted performance for the internet age.

It’s too early to say if these shootings have ideological motives, but in the rush to judge, the media keeps choosing to interpret these messages not as memes but as coherent political manifestos.

Usually, the media shies away from publishing manifestos. In this warped arena of memetic warfare, however, the press often plays along with the shooters’ messaging, treating each slogan like a puzzle piece in some ideological scavenger hunt. In doing so, the killer’s viral power beyond is magnified the act itself.

Aiming for Viral

Tyler Robinson, the suspect in the Kirk shooting, admitted that he was, to borrow a phrase, in it for the lolz. Prosecutors report Robinson texted his roommate: “Remember how I was engraving bullets? The fuckin messages are mostly a big meme.”

Extremism researchers and journalism critics have said Robinson’s description of his actions matches the evidence. As Alex Newhouse of University of Colorado at Boulder explained, in cases like these it’s less about context of the message. “It’s not the specific ways that things are written on the gun,” he told Wired, “but that they’re writing something on the gun at all.”

In other words, the content — whether anti-fascist songs, furry memes, or snarky insults — could be interpreted largely as an ironic flourish. Michael Senters, a researcher at Virginia Tech, noted that the media sees a puzzle of “ideology,” but for “internet natives” the bullet etchings look like jargon spilled straight from a teenager’s group chat: They “only show he spent a lot of time on the computer, being terminally online.”

Experts say the scrawled messages embody a new wave of online propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation wrapped in absurdist humor — a communication strategy rooted in meme culture and mockery. It’s performance, not persuasion.

The goal is to spark interest, to make the uninitiated give informational chase. It’s not winning converts, but winning attention. In a country where gun violence is so common that some killings receive little news coverage, such messages can bait the media into repeating the graffiti and turning the act, and shooter themselves, into a viral moment.

In the case of Mangione, his message materialized into a shared reality and virality: print‑on‑demand shops relaying the message on shirts and magnets. Supporters have dedicated billboards and trucks depicting him as a saint.

Related

The Data Shows Political Violence Is Actually Down

Criminal justice experts say this viral iconography is exactly how politics are being meme‑ified today: The idea is to bring the fringes into the mainstream.

Inscribing slogans onto weapons and ammo can serve a psychological function too. It allows the perpetrator to absolve their victims of choice or humanity. In the shooter’s mind, the act may become destiny, the message pre-written on brass casing, as if the bullet carried a justification before it was ever fired.

An Old Tradition

Graffiti on weapons is not new. In ancient Greece, slingers carved taunts on lead projectiles — one surviving shot literally reads: “Catch!” Roman legions and medieval mercenaries marked their arrows with similar jeers.

In the 20th century, American bomber crews chalked slogans on bombs during World War II, and soldiers in Vietnam scrawled everything from “War Is Hell” to crude cartoons on helmets and rifles.

Even today, artillery shells and bombs sometimes leave bases with Sharpie messages like “Rest in Hell” or “Say Cheese. Your Dead” — spelling error and all. Police officers’ patrol rifles have been inscribed with messages like “You’re Fucked.”

For soldiers, scrawling messages on bombs or bullets is perhaps less about reaching the enemy than about reaching themselves: a ritual of control, gallows humor, and catharsis that helped impose meaning on violence and gave them a fleeting sense of agency over death or certain doom.

The act is ancient. What’s new is the medium and audience: Shooters now write for cameras, news cycles, and the viral churn of social media.

Media, the Straight Man

The problem is that mainstream media has fallen squarely into the trap. 

Reporters have gravitated toward these cryptic messages as if they were the key to motive. 

Press conferences and headlines highlighted every word scratched on casings, even amplifying dubious accounts of “transgender ideology” on fired brass without evidence. This swift parsing, however, only plays into the shooters’ game.

Experts warn: Do not play along. Criminologists like Adam Lankford have shown that modern attackers often crave exactly this kind of fame, even in death. “A lot of these shooters want to be treated like celebrities. They want to be famous,” he told The Associated Press — making coverage of their cryptic graffiti exactly the reward they seek. 

In the hours after every assassination, the country plays the same cynical game, parsing the killer’s bullet graffiti or online trail like tea leaves. There is a palpable desperation to pin the gunman’s politics on the other side or disclaim him from their own — as Patel seemed to be doing with the “ANTI-ICE” casing.

Indeed, one analysis found 87 percent of mass shooters explicitly sought fame in their planning, using media coverage of prior attacks as a blueprint.

In many cases, excessive focus on the killer has turned them into anti-heroes of an online cult, while root causes fade from view. What remains is their cultural staying power, and the tactics used to achieve it.

In amplifying these cryptic scribbles on shell casings, newsrooms become unwitting collaborators in the shooter’s performance.

Violence as Spectacle

Journalism ethics is clear: Moving forward, newsrooms should invert their priorities.

The “No Notoriety” guidelines — backed by victims’ families, the Giffords Center, and even law enforcement agencies — urge reporters not to immortalize killers or their messages. By immortalizing the message, we may inadvertently immortalize a methodology.

The meme-ification of violence is a reminder: Public assassinations and mass shootings today are as much about theater as ideology.

These high-profile killers are staging a performance, knowing the audience is global and the press will play along. The choice to etch bullets with song lyrics or anime jokes isn’t about belief; it’s about spectacle. And every time we give breathless coverage to these details, we reward that spectacle.

The true danger is not that shooters will successfully recruit through manifestos or casings. It’s that society, hypnotized by their trolling, will mistake intentional noise for a signal — and replicate it. In that sense, the most successful act of viral violence is not the attack itself, it’s the conversation afterward, when the killer’s notoriety and stylings are a message of its own.

Once amplified, the shooter’s dialect becomes its own weapon of inspiration — loosed into public life, doing damage long after the last round was fired.

The post The Bullet as Shitpost: Media Won’t Publish Manifestos but Reproduces Scrawls on Casing appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

When ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday for comments he made about Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer, outrage poured out of all corners of the liberal body politic. It was an example of “government silencing dissenting voices,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said. Pod Save America’s Tommy Vietor called it “a wild overreaction.” If you fall for it, according to commentator Hasan Piker, “you’re an easily tricked adult and a fucking loser.”

In light of threats from Trump’s Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, ABC’s move to crush Kimmel over the comments stands as a particularly craven example of capitulation by the corporate media — especially given the relatively banal and careful wording Kimmel used.

The corporate media has not covered itself in glory during President Donald Trump’s second term. Poor coverage decisions, a willingness to give the powerful the benefit of the doubt, and an eye toward profit at the expense of journalistic integrity are nothing new.

Yet the Kimmel affair is a prime demonstration of how the president’s vindictiveness and greed have pushed those failures to a new low. 

What might be more telling about the mainstream media’s failure to stand up against the assault on free speech, however, was something few commentators have bothered to mention: what happened to sometime student activist Mahmoud Khalil just hours earlier. 

Cowardice Begets Cowardice

Khalil, who was detained by immigration authorities for three months earlier this year over his advocacy for Palestinian rights, was ordered deported to Algeria or Syria on Wednesday afternoon. 

The Palestinian green card holder, who was born in Syria, became a flashpoint after his detention was explicitly tied to his activism against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

The news that he may now be expelled from the country should have been met with equal or greater condemnation from liberals and the left than Kimmel’s was. (Khalil appears safe so long as his federal case against the original detention proceeds, but the new immigration ruling was under new pretenses, meaning he could be deported when the federal trial ends.)

It’s a far more dangerous and brutal consequence of speech the White House doesn’t like than a suspension from late night hosting duties. 

Never mind the imbalance — the two cases didn’t even merit equal treatment in the eyes of the corporate media.

Kimmel is certainly more prominent and famous — a household name to much of the country — than Khalil is. That isn’t the only reason for the differing levels of outrage. Indeed, the recognition gap was in large part thanks to the corporate media’s failings to properly cover Khalil’s detention in the first place, due to the uniqueness of the main issue animating his ordeal: his advocacy for Palestine. 

As with so many cases of the “Palestine exception” to free speech, Khalil’s detention was treated by much of the media as being implicitly justified by baseless accusations of antisemitism against him. Media figures on the left and right alike created a permission structure for his silencing. 

The same fear, miscalculations, and hostility to free speech that informed coverage of Khalil are now resulting in corporate media censorship of its own on-air personalities. 

Eager to please a president who is notoriously thin-skinned and obsessed with his treatment on television, ABC and its parent company Disney folded instantly to pressure from the FCC chair as well as local syndicators Nexstar and Sinclair. 

In both cases — pressure against directly confronting the lies behind Khalil’s detention and the capitulation on Kimmel — the political forces at work came from the ideological right. Sinclair is a longtime ideological ally of Trump and the conservative movement, having served as a useful organ for the right, including through a literal fake news scheme. 

There were, of course, other interests at work — business interests. Nexstar is preparing for a $6.2 billion merger with competitor Tegna, one that would require regulatory approval from an administration that has shown its willingness to weaponize government power in service of its agenda.

Cashing Out

Nexstar isn’t the only media company to put corporate interests above speech in Trump’s second term. 

Before the election, the Washington Post pulled its expected endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, a move that reportedly came from owner Jeff Bezos, whose Amazon Web Services holds billions in federal contracts.

Related

How Columbia’s Leadership Refashioned the University in Trump’s Image

In July, Paramount settled a lawsuit from Trump to the tune of $16 million over an episode of CBS’s “60 Minutes” — just ahead of a Paramount sale to the son of pro-Trump billionaire Larry Ellison, a sale that required regulatory approval. 

Yet more media consolidation under craven pro-Trump political forces is looming. David Ellison’s Paramount is angling to make two mega-network deals, eyeing acquisitions of Warner Bros. Discovery and CNN.

And the younger Ellison allegedly floated the idea of buying anti-speech conservative gadfly Bari Weiss’s The Free Press and putting the ideological Weiss — who once, as a college student, sought to ban professors for their views on Israel and Palestine — in charge of CBS. 

Ellison’s control of CBS News has already resulted in policy changes to appease administration officials and canceling the show of Trump critic Stephen Colbert. 

With men like Ellison ready and willing to deploy their billions in service of the ruling party and a media institution so weak it can’t stand up to a despotic regime tightening the screws, the future of news media in the U.S. looks exceptionally bleak. 

Kimmel’s suspension is only the latest example of mainstream media’s willingness to bend over backward to appease Trump, but a sign of an increased willingness from corporate giants to cannibalize their own popular figures. 

It’s not hard to see how the administration’s demands are getting more brazen when mainstream media capitulated so early in a clear-cut free speech case like Khalil’s.

The post Jimmy Kimmel Wasn’t the Biggest Corporate Media Capitulation to Trump This Week appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

It would be easy to believe America is tipping into an era of rampant political bloodshed.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, voices from across the spectrum sounded alarms that the shooting was just the latest flashpoint in a rising tide of violence.

Progressive commentator Hasan Piker, shaken after watching video of Kirk’s murder, warned his audience of “people looking for decentralized forms of violence.” A Reuters analysis was even more blunt, declaring Kirk’s killing “a watershed moment in a surge of U.S. political violence.” Even Utah’s Republican governor mused whether this marked “the beginning of a darker chapter in our history.”

These aren’t the first calls for open strife. When Donald Trump himself was shot last year, some right-wing figures rushed to declare it the opening salvo of a new civil war.

Are we on the brink of another 1960s-style season of political assassinations and unrest?

A funny thing is happening beneath the apocalyptic headlines: Rather than surging, key indicators of political violence and extremism in the U.S. have actually been trending downward in recent months. New findings from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, or ACLED, show that protest and extremist activity has dropped significantly nationwide.

In August, the number of public demonstrations in the U.S. plummeted by nearly 40 percent compared to the month before. A much-hyped progressive day of action called “Rage Against the Regime” fizzled with only modest turnouts, contributing to the sharp decline in protests.

And, perhaps most tellingly, organized extremist incidents — rallies, hate marches, militant group meet-ups — fell off a cliff. ACLED reports that extremist group activity dropped by over one-third in August, hitting its lowest level in more than five years. It’s part of a steady decline in far-right mobilization that dates back to 2023.

In other words, according to ACLED, by the time commentators were warning that Kirk’s murder heralded a new wave of violence, extremist activism on the ground was at a multiyear low.

Five-Year Low

The contrast between the panic-stricken narrative and ACLED’s hard numbers is striking. Yes, politically motivated attacks still occur and can be horrific. Yet the broader trend in extremist mobilization suggests less organized violence, not more.

ACLED’s data-driven analysis notes multiple factors behind the slump. There are possibly more clandestine tactics by groups. Leadership failures could account for a lack of organization. And a big one: There is a loss of “urgency” among extremist followers because they see their views reflected in mainstream politics.

It turns out that when your side is already winning, you don’t need to storm the barricades.

Even Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative, which closely monitors political violence across the country, acknowledges that incidents remained relatively low in 2024. Their analysis, grounded in real-time event tracking, confirms that, while we’ve seen marked upticks in threats recently, the overall trend in political violence has declined since the peak years around 2020.

Related

Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Is Part of a Trend: Spiking Gun Violence in Red States

The Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, observed the same phenomenon in its latest Year in Hate and Extremism report. The SPLC counted 1,371 active hate and extremist groups in 2024, down from 1,430 in 2023. The group concluded the slight drop “does not signify declining influence” at all. Rather, it’s because many on the far right “feel their beliefs have become normalized in government and mainstream society,” according to the report.

In plain English: Why organize a fringe militia when your agenda is being adopted on Capitol Hill and made into policy by the White House?

This dynamic helps explain why the immediate wake of Kirk’s assassination hasn’t unleashed the spate of tit-for-tat violence some feared.

The far-right ecosystem, which in years past might have exploded with vengeful rallies or vigilante reprisals, has been relatively muted in terms of on-the-ground action. To be sure, there was plenty of online fury and calls for crackdowns. Offline, organized extremist events, though, remain in a lull.

The shock and outrage did not translate into a Proud Boys revival or a new wave of militias taking to the streets.

Energy on the left, meanwhile, is already flagging. Its protest movements have been quieter than expected during Trump’s second term.

Progressives pulled off several “days of action” earlier in the year, but by late summer the protests were losing steam. The energy that fueled huge anti-Trump demonstrations in 2024 ebbed, reflected in the 40 percent drop in protest activity.

At least for now, both sides of the spectrum are mobilizing less in the streets — albeit for very different reasons.

An Advancing Agenda

All of this leads to an ironic possibility: Political violence may be declining largely because the would-be perpetrators feel they don’t need it anymore.

The American far right, once relegated to the fringe, now sees its formerly “extremist” ideas being enacted through mainstream institutions.

As the SPLC report noted, positions that might have once only been pushed via hate rallies — anti-LGBTQ+ hostility, attacks on “woke” education, dismantling diversity programs — have seeped into legislation and school board policies.

In 2024, militant groups harassed diversity and inclusion efforts, and soon after, Republican lawmakers, egged on by Trump, moved to ban discussion of race and gender in classrooms.

After Kirk’s killing, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller went on Kirk’s podcast to vow revenge on left-wing groups. Vice President JD Vance, for his part, announced his intent to attack two of the top liberal foundations and a historic magazine of the left.

Guns and intimidation aren’t necessary.

The decline in violent extremism is welcome, but the apparent reasons behind it should give us pause. What does it say about the state of the country when extremists stand down not because they’ve been defeated, but because they think they’ve won? It suggests that the battleground has shifted. The fights that once took place at the margins — in backwoods compounds or tense street protests — are now unfolding in courtrooms, statehouses, and school boards.

Related

Nothing Will Stop Trump From Weaponizing Charlie Kirk’s Killing to Attack the Left

Liberals know it too: The relative quiet on the left could well be a sign of resignation, as if even the opposition recognizes that the hard right’s agenda has the upper hand.

America may be “a very, very dangerous spot” as one expert told Reuters, but not for the reasons cable news would have us believe. The danger isn’t an impending civil war in the streets; it’s a creeping normalization of hard-line political goals that no longer require mob violence to be realized.

The assassins and agitators are stepping back, confident that the system now carries their torch for them.

Still, Kirk’s assassination cannot be brushed aside. For all the evidence that political violence has ebbed, singular events can act as catalysts, jolting extremists out of dormancy. This killing could become a ramp toward a new future of violence.

If history is any guide, however, it won’t be in the form of clashes. The capacity, and appetite, for that kind of confrontation seems to have dwindled.

Today’s great danger likely isn’t open war in the streets, but the quiet march of an extremist agenda already advancing through institutions. That may bring with it an even greater violence.

The post The Data Shows Political Violence Is Actually Down appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Conservative America was shaken this week when Charlie Kirk, a prominent ally of President Donald Trump, was shot and killed during a campus event at Utah Valley University. 

The incident recalls a disturbing pattern: Even the champions of “pro-gun” politics are not immune to America’s epidemic of gun violence. 

Just last year, Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally. Four decades ago, Ronald Reagan was shot and nearly killed by a would-be assassin. More recently, in 2017, a far-left gunman opened fire on Republican members of Congress at a baseball practice, critically wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. From Gerald Ford, who survived two separate assassination attempts in one month in 1975, to local GOP staffers dying in common gun crime, the list of right-wing political figures hit by gun violence is a long one.

These bloody episodes underscore a grim irony: The very politicians and pundits who promulgate expansive gun rights and tough-on-crime rhetoric have repeatedly found themselves on the receiving end of bullets.

These attacks have grabbed headlines, but there are other conservative victims of gun violence whose stories often go unmentioned — many of them. They are the rank-and-file of the GOP, the voters who put the elected officials in office and follow the likes of Kirk on social media. 

It is the residents of conservative America — the so-called “red states” — who are suffering the heaviest toll in daily gun deaths.

Gun Violence Gap

Despite rhetoric painting liberal big cities as lawless war zones, the most dangerous places in America in terms of gun violence are often deep-red states and rural towns.

Federal health data reveal that states with conservative leadership consistently have higher firearm death rates than their blue-state counterparts. 

In 2021, eight of the 10 states with the highest gun death rates per capita were won by Trump in the 2020 election. Mississippi — with a staggering 33.9 per 100,000 firearm death rate, the worst in the nation — voted solidly Republican. By contrast, states with the lowest gun death rates — like Massachusetts, at 3.4 per 100,000 — reliably vote Democratic.

This pattern holds nationwide. Public health research confirms that states in the South and Mountain West with weaker gun laws and higher gun ownership have the highest gun death rates, whereas Northeast states with strong gun safety laws see far fewer deaths. 

In other words, the “gun-friendly” policies of red America correlate with more funerals and grieving families, year after year.

Crucially, this gap isn’t just about suicides in isolated areas; it extends to violent crime and murders as well. A recent analysis of homicide data found that the murder rate in Republican-voting states — such as Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama — was 33 percent higher than in Democratic-voting states in both 2021 and 2022.

Even when researchers control for big urban centers, the red-state murder problem persists. Remove the largest city from every red state, and their homicide rate still far exceeds that of blue states. 

The notion that “Democrat-run cities” alone drive violence collapses under scrutiny. People are statistically safer in New York City or San Francisco than in many rural or Southern Republican-led states.

A groundbreaking study also found that firearm fatalities are now more likely in small rural towns than in big cities — a reversal of historical trends. Thanks largely to soaring gun suicides, the most rural counties experienced overall firearm death rates 25 percent higher than the most urban counties in recent decades. That means the archetypal “American heartland” — often solid Republican territory — quietly endures a higher per-capita burden of gun death than metropolises like Los Angeles or New York.

The carnage encompasses tragic self-inflicted shootings, domestic violence with firearms, and, yes, the mass shootings that now regularly strike church gatherings, small-town Walmarts, and school classrooms in conservative communities. 

No corner of the country is spared, but red America is bleeding most.

Paradox of Pro-Gun Politics

Why do those who govern the most gun-afflicted states seem least inclined to acknowledge the crisis?

Republican leaders have long styled themselves as the party of “law and order,” yet they preside over what one analyst dubbed a “red state murder problem.” They champion the Second Amendment as a sacred pillar of freedom, but fail to target root causes that contribute to homicide and suicide rates that dwarf those in other advanced nations. 

The Trump administration’s response to violence has instead been to deploy federal agents into conducting roving patrols in democratic strongholds such as Washington to help enforce some of the country’s most restrictive gun laws. Meanwhile, Trump and the GOP are hobbling the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives by leaving it without a leader; legalizing fully automatic simulation devices; and cutting key research into understanding and preventing violence. 

It’s a cruel paradox. The right wing’s permissive gun policies have boomeranged to haunt their own constituents and politicians.

Related

Nothing Will Stop Trump From Weaponizing Charlie Kirk’s Killing to Attack the Left

When even a figure like Kirk — who once declared that more armed citizens make us safer — ends up bleeding from a bullet wound, it highlights how indiscriminate and all-encompassing America’s gun scourge has become. 

The victims are subsequently left with no solace. This year, the Trump administration shut down the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and slashed $158 million in gun violence prevention grants.

Rather than face the uncomfortable reality that easy access to firearms, poor gun trafficking controls, and under-resourced research is fueling more death in red states, GOP officials often deflect to problems in blue cities or pin violence on mental health alone. The numbers, though, don’t lie. 

Those “pro-life” conservative lawmakers have effectively enacted policies that make their communities less safe, with more grieving parents, more emptied school desks, and more devastated towns as the predictable outcome.

Bullets Know No Politics

It’s increasingly apparent that the right wing’s embrace of guns has exacted a disproportionate price on its own side. From the would-be assassins targeting GOP presidents to the quiet epidemic of firearm suicide among rural white men — a demographic that leans conservative — American gun culture is, in a dark twist, victimizing the very communities that most fiercely defend it.

Related

Intercepted Podcast: Guns Before Country

If this country is going to surmount its gun violence crises, it must confront an uncomfortable truth: The people of red America are not being protected by the gun-centric promises of the far right — they are being buried by them. 

How many more Republican politicians must be rushed to the ER with gunshot wounds? How many small-town obituaries must quietly note a firearm tragedy, before ideology yields to reality? 

The right’s reflexive answers to any shooting — more patrols, militarized police, more guns, and less firearm regulation — are looking less like freedom and more like a death pact. Until conservatives reckon with this it, the cycle will continue. The communities they lead will continue to suffer the highest rates of murder and suicide, and even their most venerated leaders will remain in the line of fire. 

In the end, America’s gun violence crisis is not a red or blue issue. Right now, however, red America is paying the steepest price. The hope is that acknowledging this truth could spur the kind of cross-partisan soul-searching and reform that has so far proved elusive. 

Until then, the grim paradox persists. The loudest champions of an absolutist gun culture are among its foremost casualties.

The post The American Right’s Self-Inflicted Gun Violence Crisis appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Conservative America was shaken this week when Charlie Kirk, a prominent ally of President Donald Trump, was shot and killed during a campus event at Utah Valley University. 

The incident recalls a disturbing pattern: Even the champions of “pro-gun” politics are not immune to America’s epidemic of gun violence. 

Just last year, Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally. Four decades ago, Ronald Reagan was shot and nearly killed by a would-be assassin. More recently, in 2017, a far-left gunman opened fire on Republican members of Congress at a baseball practice, critically wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. From Gerald Ford, who survived two separate assassination attempts in one month in 1975, to local GOP staffers dying in common gun crime, the list of right-wing political figures hit by gun violence is a long one.

These bloody episodes underscore a grim irony: The very politicians and pundits who promulgate expansive gun rights and tough-on-crime rhetoric have repeatedly found themselves on the receiving end of bullets.

These attacks have grabbed headlines, but there are other conservative victims of gun violence whose stories often go unmentioned — many of them. They are the rank-and-file of the GOP, the voters who put the elected officials in office and follow the likes of Kirk on social media. 

It is the residents of conservative America — the so-called “red states” — who are suffering the heaviest toll in daily gun deaths.

Gun Violence Gap

Despite rhetoric painting liberal big cities as lawless war zones, the most dangerous places in America in terms of gun violence are often deep-red states and rural towns.

Federal health data reveal that states with conservative leadership consistently have higher firearm death rates than their blue-state counterparts. 

In 2021, eight of the 10 states with the highest gun death rates per capita were won by Trump in the 2020 election. Mississippi — with a staggering 33.9 per 100,000 firearm death rate, the worst in the nation — voted solidly Republican. By contrast, states with the lowest gun death rates — like Massachusetts, at 3.4 per 100,000 — reliably vote Democratic.

This pattern holds nationwide. Public health research confirms that states in the South and Mountain West with weaker gun laws and higher gun ownership have the highest gun death rates, whereas Northeast states with strong gun safety laws see far fewer deaths. 

In other words, the “gun-friendly” policies of red America correlate with more funerals and grieving families, year after year.

Crucially, this gap isn’t just about suicides in isolated areas; it extends to violent crime and murders as well. A recent analysis of homicide data found that the murder rate in Republican-voting states — such as Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama — was 33 percent higher than in Democratic-voting states in both 2021 and 2022.

Even when researchers control for big urban centers, the red-state murder problem persists. Remove the largest city from every red state, and their homicide rate still far exceeds that of blue states. 

The notion that “Democrat-run cities” alone drive violence collapses under scrutiny. People are statistically safer in New York City or San Francisco than in many rural or Southern Republican-led states.

A groundbreaking study also found that firearm fatalities are now more likely in small rural towns than in big cities — a reversal of historical trends. Thanks largely to soaring gun suicides, the most rural counties experienced overall firearm death rates 25 percent higher than the most urban counties in recent decades. That means the archetypal “American heartland” — often solid Republican territory — quietly endures a higher per-capita burden of gun death than metropolises like Los Angeles or New York.

The carnage encompasses tragic self-inflicted shootings, domestic violence with firearms, and, yes, the mass shootings that now regularly strike church gatherings, small-town Walmarts, and school classrooms in conservative communities. 

No corner of the country is spared, but red America is bleeding most.

Paradox of Pro-Gun Politics

Why do those who govern the most gun-afflicted states seem least inclined to acknowledge the crisis?

Republican leaders have long styled themselves as the party of “law and order,” yet they preside over what one analyst dubbed a “red state murder problem.” They champion the Second Amendment as a sacred pillar of freedom, but fail to target root causes that contribute to homicide and suicide rates that dwarf those in other advanced nations. 

The Trump administration’s response to violence has instead been to deploy federal agents into conducting roving patrols in democratic strongholds such as Washington to help enforce some of the country’s most restrictive gun laws. Meanwhile, Trump and the GOP are hobbling the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives by leaving it without a leader; legalizing fully automatic simulation devices; and cutting key research into understanding and preventing violence. 

It’s a cruel paradox. The right wing’s permissive gun policies have boomeranged to haunt their own constituents and politicians.

Related

Nothing Will Stop Trump From Weaponizing Charlie Kirk’s Killing to Attack the Left

When even a figure like Kirk — who once declared that more armed citizens make us safer — ends up bleeding from a bullet wound, it highlights how indiscriminate and all-encompassing America’s gun scourge has become. 

The victims are subsequently left with no solace. This year, the Trump administration shut down the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and slashed $158 million in gun violence prevention grants.

Rather than face the uncomfortable reality that easy access to firearms, poor gun trafficking controls, and under-resourced research is fueling more death in red states, GOP officials often deflect to problems in blue cities or pin violence on mental health alone. The numbers, though, don’t lie. 

Those “pro-life” conservative lawmakers have effectively enacted policies that make their communities less safe, with more grieving parents, more emptied school desks, and more devastated towns as the predictable outcome.

Bullets Know No Politics

It’s increasingly apparent that the right wing’s embrace of guns has exacted a disproportionate price on its own side. From the would-be assassins targeting GOP presidents to the quiet epidemic of firearm suicide among rural white men — a demographic that leans conservative — American gun culture is, in a dark twist, victimizing the very communities that most fiercely defend it.

Related

Intercepted Podcast: Guns Before Country

If this country is going to surmount its gun violence crises, it must confront an uncomfortable truth: The people of red America are not being protected by the gun-centric promises of the far right — they are being buried by them. 

How many more Republican politicians must be rushed to the ER with gunshot wounds? How many small-town obituaries must quietly note a firearm tragedy, before ideology yields to reality? 

The right’s reflexive answers to any shooting — more patrols, militarized police, more guns, and less firearm regulation — are looking less like freedom and more like a death pact. Until conservatives reckon with this it, the cycle will continue. The communities they lead will continue to suffer the highest rates of murder and suicide, and even their most venerated leaders will remain in the line of fire. 

In the end, America’s gun violence crisis is not a red or blue issue. Right now, however, red America is paying the steepest price. The hope is that acknowledging this truth could spur the kind of cross-partisan soul-searching and reform that has so far proved elusive. 

Until then, the grim paradox persists. The loudest champions of an absolutist gun culture are among its foremost casualties.

The post The American Right’s Self-Inflicted Gun Violence Crisis appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Conservative America was shaken this week when Charlie Kirk, a prominent ally of President Donald Trump, was shot and killed during a campus event at Utah Valley University. 

The incident recalls a disturbing pattern: Even the champions of “pro-gun” politics are not immune to America’s epidemic of gun violence. 

Just last year, Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally. Four decades ago, Ronald Reagan was shot and nearly killed by a would-be assassin. More recently, in 2017, a far-left gunman opened fire on Republican members of Congress at a baseball practice, critically wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. From Gerald Ford, who survived two separate assassination attempts in one month in 1975, to local GOP staffers dying in common gun crime, the list of right-wing political figures hit by gun violence is a long one.

These bloody episodes underscore a grim irony: The very politicians and pundits who promulgate expansive gun rights and tough-on-crime rhetoric have repeatedly found themselves on the receiving end of bullets.

These attacks have grabbed headlines, but there are other conservative victims of gun violence whose stories often go unmentioned — many of them. They are the rank-and-file of the GOP, the voters who put the elected officials in office and follow the likes of Kirk on social media. 

It is the residents of conservative America — the so-called “red states” — who are suffering the heaviest toll in daily gun deaths.

Gun Violence Gap

Despite rhetoric painting liberal big cities as lawless war zones, the most dangerous places in America in terms of gun violence are often deep-red states and rural towns.

Federal health data reveal that states with conservative leadership consistently have higher firearm death rates than their blue-state counterparts. 

In 2021, eight of the 10 states with the highest gun death rates per capita were won by Trump in the 2020 election. Mississippi — with a staggering 33.9 per 100,000 firearm death rate, the worst in the nation — voted solidly Republican. By contrast, states with the lowest gun death rates — like Massachusetts, at 3.4 per 100,000 — reliably vote Democratic.

This pattern holds nationwide. Public health research confirms that states in the South and Mountain West with weaker gun laws and higher gun ownership have the highest gun death rates, whereas Northeast states with strong gun safety laws see far fewer deaths. 

In other words, the “gun-friendly” policies of red America correlate with more funerals and grieving families, year after year.

Crucially, this gap isn’t just about suicides in isolated areas; it extends to violent crime and murders as well. A recent analysis of homicide data found that the murder rate in Republican-voting states — such as Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama — was 33 percent higher than in Democratic-voting states in both 2021 and 2022.

Even when researchers control for big urban centers, the red-state murder problem persists. Remove the largest city from every red state, and their homicide rate still far exceeds that of blue states. 

The notion that “Democrat-run cities” alone drive violence collapses under scrutiny. People are statistically safer in New York City or San Francisco than in many rural or Southern Republican-led states.

A groundbreaking study also found that firearm fatalities are now more likely in small rural towns than in big cities — a reversal of historical trends. Thanks largely to soaring gun suicides, the most rural counties experienced overall firearm death rates 25 percent higher than the most urban counties in recent decades. That means the archetypal “American heartland” — often solid Republican territory — quietly endures a higher per-capita burden of gun death than metropolises like Los Angeles or New York.

The carnage encompasses tragic self-inflicted shootings, domestic violence with firearms, and, yes, the mass shootings that now regularly strike church gatherings, small-town Walmarts, and school classrooms in conservative communities. 

No corner of the country is spared, but red America is bleeding most.

Paradox of Pro-Gun Politics

Why do those who govern the most gun-afflicted states seem least inclined to acknowledge the crisis?

Republican leaders have long styled themselves as the party of “law and order,” yet they preside over what one analyst dubbed a “red state murder problem.” They champion the Second Amendment as a sacred pillar of freedom, but fail to target root causes that contribute to homicide and suicide rates that dwarf those in other advanced nations. 

The Trump administration’s response to violence has instead been to deploy federal agents into conducting roving patrols in democratic strongholds such as Washington to help enforce some of the country’s most restrictive gun laws. Meanwhile, Trump and the GOP are hobbling the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives by leaving it without a leader; legalizing fully automatic simulation devices; and cutting key research into understanding and preventing violence. 

It’s a cruel paradox. The right wing’s permissive gun policies have boomeranged to haunt their own constituents and politicians.

Related

Nothing Will Stop Trump From Weaponizing Charlie Kirk’s Killing to Attack the Left

When even a figure like Kirk — who once declared that more armed citizens make us safer — ends up bleeding from a bullet wound, it highlights how indiscriminate and all-encompassing America’s gun scourge has become. 

The victims are subsequently left with no solace. This year, the Trump administration shut down the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and slashed $158 million in gun violence prevention grants.

Rather than face the uncomfortable reality that easy access to firearms, poor gun trafficking controls, and under-resourced research is fueling more death in red states, GOP officials often deflect to problems in blue cities or pin violence on mental health alone. The numbers, though, don’t lie. 

Those “pro-life” conservative lawmakers have effectively enacted policies that make their communities less safe, with more grieving parents, more emptied school desks, and more devastated towns as the predictable outcome.

Bullets Know No Politics

It’s increasingly apparent that the right wing’s embrace of guns has exacted a disproportionate price on its own side. From the would-be assassins targeting GOP presidents to the quiet epidemic of firearm suicide among rural white men — a demographic that leans conservative — American gun culture is, in a dark twist, victimizing the very communities that most fiercely defend it.

Related

Intercepted Podcast: Guns Before Country

If this country is going to surmount its gun violence crises, it must confront an uncomfortable truth: The people of red America are not being protected by the gun-centric promises of the far right — they are being buried by them. 

How many more Republican politicians must be rushed to the ER with gunshot wounds? How many small-town obituaries must quietly note a firearm tragedy, before ideology yields to reality? 

The right’s reflexive answers to any shooting — more patrols, militarized police, more guns, and less firearm regulation — are looking less like freedom and more like a death pact. Until conservatives reckon with this it, the cycle will continue. The communities they lead will continue to suffer the highest rates of murder and suicide, and even their most venerated leaders will remain in the line of fire. 

In the end, America’s gun violence crisis is not a red or blue issue. Right now, however, red America is paying the steepest price. The hope is that acknowledging this truth could spur the kind of cross-partisan soul-searching and reform that has so far proved elusive. 

Until then, the grim paradox persists. The loudest champions of an absolutist gun culture are among its foremost casualties.

The post Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Is Part of a Trend: Spiking Gun Violence in Red States appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.