The Left Has to Speak to Average American Values — or Perish

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Deer hunting for trophies is also allowed in Vermont.
I remember being told that people would listen on their scanners for reports of deer being killed in auto accidents so they could take the deer home.

They have a procedure in Vermont where you can be issued a tag so you can take it home.

So its legal to leave the deer in the field in Indiana and Michigan and not have it prepared for food because thats a big no-no in Texas which is what I meant.

As a complete non-hunter, I googled. I had assumed that trophy hunting didn't mean leave to rot, but to take home, mount the head, & dispose of the rest. Looking up the licensing stuff, it looks legal to kill the deer then bag it up to dispose of properly (or take it home to turn into dinner). I'm not going to bother for Michigan.

And there are bag, tagging, & licensing rules. Not my thing.

The above quote is from history professor Lauren Thompson.

The problem is that Trump's supporters are so focused on the culture wars that they don't really care about the economy anymore. "He'll lower the cost of eggs" is the new "I'm not racist, but..."

I do remember being surprised when the gay rights movement united behind same sex marriage. As I recall originally they were against it because they believed it was accepting straight norms. Mona as part of the movement can correct me or add context if she so desires.

I do remember being surprised when the gay rights movement united behind same sex marriage. As I recall originally they were against it because they believed it was accepting straight norms. Mona as part of the movement can correct me or add context if she so desires.

Which Obama or Biden scandal is on par with the scale of Trump's many scandals?

Trump is the most corrupt president in US history, Obama wore a tan suit.

I love all of you guys, but people need to grow up about Trump. A lot of what he is doing is pretty good for our country (at least his economic and criminal justice policy), but everybody thinks he is a complete monster and every action of his is original sin. I had to vent, it peeves me off.

I heard Pierre Trudeau was a flashy dresser.

At a recent protest in Midtown Manhattan—one of many against Donald Trump's administration—a pair of masked women stood quietly outside the stone lions that loom over the New York Public Library, a life-sized cutout of Luigi Mangione propped between them.

No one seemed to mind. As chants against authoritarianism echoed down Fifth Avenue and homemade signs called for due process and migrant rights, Mangione's effigy stood unchallenged—just another figure in one particular demonstration's crowded landscape.

Mangione, 26, who is charged with shooting and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in a targeted attack last December, remains something of an enigma more than six months since he was arrested in Pennsylvania in connection with Thompson's murder. His political views — or what are known of them — are contradictory if not incoherent. He was the highly educated scion of a well-off Baltimore family who had no obvious beef with the capitalist system of which he benefited. Mangione wrote about his chronic back injury, but he was never insured by UnitedHealth.

None of that has stopped a left-wing activist movement from embracing him and coopting his image as a vigilante fighting against the perceived wrongs of the American healthcare system. In today's fractured political climate, such selective silence is becoming increasingly common.

'Assassination Culture'
While right-wing extremism is regularly dissected and denounced in mainstream media, conservatives have long complained that political violence from the left regularly receives less scrutiny—or is reframed entirely to dismiss the perpetrators' progressive views. This perceived imbalance has fueled a growing belief, often discussed on conservative subreddits, in right-leaning Substacks, and on X, that left-wing violence is minimized or rationalized, while right-wing violence is amplified and condemned.

The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a nonpartisan organization that studies the spread of hate, manipulation, and extremism across digital platforms, has raised these concerns recently. Based at Rutgers University, the group uses machine learning and data analytics to identify emerging threats and ideological patterns online.

"We're witnessing the alarming rise of what the NCRI calls an 'assassination culture,'" said Max Horder of the NCRI, in an interview with Newsweek. "Violence targeting figures like Donald Trump or Elon Musk has gone beyond normalization—it's being sanctified as resistance by parts of the political left."

That once-theoretical threat turned very real last July in Butler, Penn., when Donald Trump was nearly killed in the middle of a campaign rally by a lone gunman perched on a nearby rooftop. The near miss shocked the country, but polling showed sharp partisan divides even in the case of the near assassination of a presidential candidate.

A YouGov survey conducted shortly after found that 54 percent of U.S. adults said Trump deserved sympathy. Among Democrats, only 31 percent agreed, while 60 percent said he did not. In contrast, 83 percent of Republicans expressed sympathy for the then-candidate, reflecting how politics shapes responses to violence.

Two months later, another attempt on Trump's life took place at his Florida golf club. A poll of 1,000 registered voters by Scott Rasmussen's Napolitan News Institute found that 17 percent said it would have been better for the country if Trump had died. Among Democrats, the number was 28 percent.

"For decades, we've assumed that calls for political violence come from the far right—and often, they have. What we never expected was the enormous growth in similar calls coming from the mainstream left," Horder said.

Both of the men who police say came close to killing Trump last summer also shared something in common with Mangione: political worldviews that ranged between muddled and contradictory.

Thomas Crooks, 20, who was shot dead by Secret Service snipers moments after his bullet grazed Trump's ear in Butler, left virtually no online footprint. He was a registered Republican who donated to Democrats on the day of Joe Biden's inauguration. Ryan Routh, 59, who is accused of lying in wait for Trump in the bushes as he played a round of golf, was a self-proclaimed Trump voter who had grown disillusioned over the war in Ukraine. He also expressed support for Bernie Sanders.

'Corridor to Violence'
The NCRI rose to prominence in recent years due to its prescient early warnings about far-right radicalization, including the growth of the QAnon conspiracy theory and the risk of political violence leading up to the certification of the election on January 6, 2021. Joel Finkelstein, co-founder of the NCRI, recalled in an interview with Newsweek: "They weren't an accident. They didn't come out of nowhere. They were inevitable."

Now, the group is raising similar concerns—this time about rhetoric emerging from the opposite end of the political spectrum. "These aren't fringe beliefs anymore," the group warns. "They're creeping into the mainstream of activist discourse."

A recent survey conducted by the NCRI found that nearly one-third of respondents expressed some level of justification for acts of lethal political violence, with significantly higher support among those identifying as left-of-center. Fixty-six percent of those respondents said murdering Donald Trump would be at least somewhat justified, while 50 percent said the same about Elon Musk.

The poll also found that 40 percent of all respondents believed it was at least somewhat acceptable to destroy a Tesla dealership in protest of Musk's partnership with Trump, with support rising to nearly 60 percent among those who identified as left-of-center.

NCRI's analysis, based on troves of social media data, reveals how fringe internet culture has helped build what the group calls "permission structures" for violence. These are social environments—online or offline—where violent acts are no longer condemned but tacitly accepted, if not outright encouraged.

"It's not just about who pulls the trigger," said Finkelstein. "It's about who stays silent, who reposts a meme, who says nothing when someone jokes about killing a billionaire. That's how the corridor to violence gets built."

The imagery and meme-ification of Luigi Mangione is one such example. Mangione, currently jailed pending his capital murder trial, has become an anti-hero in niche online communities. His likeness is shared alongside memes depicting Nintendo's Luigi character as a stylized assassin—ironic, cartoonish, but deadly serious.

"It looks like a joke," Horder said, linking Mangione's online fame to a pattern of other real-world incidents, including the recent firebombing of elderly Jewish protesters in Boulder, Colo., allegedly by an Egyptian national angry about the war in Gaza. "But it's not. It's a method of radicalization wrapped in humor."

They were acting within a worldview that told them these killings would be celebrated. And online, they were."

Gaza Conflict and Domestic Spillover
Just days before the antisemitic attack in Boulder, two Israeli embassy staffers were gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., in a targeted attack that resembled the style of the ambush on Thompson. According to law enforcement, the suspected gunman, Elias Rodriguez, stalked the two young diplomats after they departed an event. Upon arrest, told officers, "I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza."

"This targeting and outright murder of two people is very much an escalation from traditional left-aligned protest tactics," said Katherine Keneally, director of threat analysis at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit that monitors extremism and terrorism, to NPR. "Trends are changing."

Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 Israelis and taking hundreds more captive, at least five deaths in the U.S. have been linked to the Palestine conflict. Experts told NPR that the war between Israel and Hamas has changed the tone of some left-wing protests, making the red lines less clear.

On college campuses across the U.S., protests against Israel have waxed and waned. Some activists have been criticized for spreading messages seen as antisemitic or outright supportive of militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

"Left-wing extremism is often overlooked, in part because the worst state abuses and non-state violence associated with proponents of communist and socialist ideologies happened several decades ago," said Jakob Guhl, director of policy and research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

"Some actors on the broader far left continue to carry out or support acts of political violence and terrorism," he added.

Rodriguez, who is accused of killing the young Israeli diplomats, shared social media posts praising Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah—evidence, researchers say, of a growing wave of pro-Hamas or pro-terrorist sentiment among a small but outspoken group of Gaza-focused activists. According to reports, Rodriguez also spoke admiringly of Mangione in posts unearthed by law enforcement.

Seth Jones, director of the defense and security department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, called the execution of the diplomats "an anomaly"—a rare instance of deadly far-left violence tied to antisemitism. "Typically, attacks against synagogues or Jewish individuals have come from the violent far right," he told NPR.

"The escalation is striking," said Colin Clarke of the Soufan Group, a New York-based security consultancy. "Since October 7th, we've seen an uptick in far-left extremism surrounding Gaza. It's not just pro-Palestinian rhetoric anymore—some of it is explicitly pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah."

However, Keneally, the extremism monitor, said that even as left-wing violence rises, far-right violence—especially from white supremacists—remains the deadliest and most consistent domestic threat, according to federal assessments.

"What the research has shown is that when it comes to – and I don't think there's any other more direct way to say it than the death count – incidents that are typically affiliated with issues or ideologies that might fit in a more far-right bucket have been more lethal," she told NPR.

Guhl also said he would not to conflate radical but peaceful protest movements on university campuses or civil disobedience tactics with far-left groups that promote political violence.

"The term 'left-wing extremism' should not be overused to delegitimize social movements that aim to fundamentally challenge the status quo while still believing in universal human rights rather than the abolition of democracy," he said.

An Asymmetry Amplified
The trends flagged by researchers—online radicalization, meme culture, and the normalization of violence as a means to justify a political end—are increasingly shaping public discourse well beyond the digital sphere.

The trends flagged by researchers—online radicalization, meme culture, and the normalization of violence as a means to justify a political end—are increasingly shaping public discourse well beyond the digital sphere.

Peter Turchin, a University of Connecticut professor and leading theorist of structural-demographic cycles, sees the current moment as part of a predictable historical pattern.

"In 2010, I predicted a period of political instability beginning in the 2020s," Turchin told Newsweek. "And nearly every warning sign—popular immiseration, elite overproduction, eroding state capacity—has only intensified."

While political violence has increased across ideological lines, Turchin said that public perception and media coverage remain uneven.

Right-wing violence is emphasized by mainstream media because it's perceived as an existential threat to the ruling regime," he said. "Whereas left-wing violence is often seen as less threatening—sometimes even as a counterweight to the right."

According to Turchin, this perception gap is no accident. "Narratives around political violence are shaped not just by the acts themselves, but by the stories that elites—and counter-elites—build around them," he said. Both he and Horder agreed that instances of political violence, wherever they come from, perpetuate a cycle in which each side accuses the other of hypocrisy while excusing the bad actors on their own extremes.

"People talk about radicalization like it's something that happens in dark corners of the internet," said Horder from NCIR. "But it's happening on the streets now too, in broad daylight, sometimes behind banners of justice."