The United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the country’s founding document, in 2026. Twenty years later, America will celebrate the 250th anniversary of President George Washington’s Farewell Address, which was published on Sept. 19, 1796.

The two documents are the bookends of the American Revolution. That revolution began with the inspirational language of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote much of the Declaration of Independence; it ended with somber warnings from Washington, the nation’s first president.

After chairing the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and serving eight years as president, Washington announced in a newspaper essay that he would not seek another term and would return to his home in Mount Vernon. The essay was later known as the “Farewell Address.”

Washington began his essay by observing that “choice and prudence invite me to quit the political scene” while “patriotism does not forbid it.” The new nation would be fine without his continued service.

But Washington’s confidence in the general health of the union was tempered by his worries about dangers that lay ahead – worries that seem startlingly contemporary and relevant 229 years later.

Focus on the domestic

Washington’s Farewell Address is famous for the admonitions “to steer clear of permanent alliances” and to resist the temptation to “entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition.”

Important as those warnings are, they are not the main topic of Washington’s message.

During the four decades that I have taught the Farewell Address in classes on American government, I have urged my students to set aside the familiar issues of foreign policy and isolationism and to read the address for what it says about the domestic challenges confronting America.

Those challenges included partisanship, parochialism, excessive public debt, ambitious leaders who could come to power playing off our differences, and a poorly informed public who might sacrifice their own liberties to find relief from divisive politics.

Washington’s address lacks Jefferson’s idealism about equality and inalienable rights. Instead, it offers the realistic assessment that Americans are sometimes foolish and make costly political mistakes.

Rule by ‘ambitious, and unprincipled men’

Partisanship is the primary problem for the American republic, according to Washington.

“It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration,” he wrote. Partisanship “agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection” and can open “the door to foreign influence and corruption.”

Though political parties, Washington observes, “may now and then answer popular ends,” they can also become “potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

Washington’s fear that partisanship could lead to destruction of the Constitution and to the rule of “ambitious, and unprincipled men” was so important to him that he felt compelled to repeat the warning more than once in the Farewell Address.

Politicians’ ‘elevation on the ruins of public liberty’

The second time Washington takes it up, he says that “the disorders and miseries” of partisanship may “gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual.”

Sooner or later, he writes, “the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.”

So why not outlaw parties and rein in the dangers of partisanship?

Washington observes that this is not possible. The spirit of party “is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind.”

Americans naturally collect themselves into groups, factions, interests and parties because that’s what human beings do. It’s easier to be connected to local communities, states or regions of the country than to a large and diverse nation; even though that large and diverse nation is, by Washington’s assessment, essential to the security and success of all.

The central problem in American politics is not a matter of devious leaders, foreign intrigue or sectional rivalries — things that will always exist.

The problem, Washington warned, lies with the people.

Excesses of partisanship

By their nature, people divide themselves into groups and then, if not careful, find those divisions used and abused by individual leaders, foreign interests and “artful and enterprising” minorities.

Political parties are dangerous, but can’t be eliminated. According to some people, Washington observes, the competition between parties might serve as a check on the powers of government.

“Within certain limits,” Washington acknowledges, “this is probably true.” But even if the battles between political parties sometimes have a useful purpose, Washington worried about the excesses of partisanship.

Partisanship is like “a fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest instead of warming it should consume.”

Where is America today? Warmed by the fires of partisanship or consumed by the bursting of flames? George Washington suggested that provocative question more than two centuries ago on Sept. 19, 1796. It’s still worth asking.

Robert A. Strong is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University and Senior Fellow, Miller Center at the University of Virginia. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Lawmakers’ efforts to free up state money for sober homeless housing have been thwarted for a second year in a row, after Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that had sailed to his desk with few “no” votes.

Assembly Bill 255 would have allowed cities and counties to spend up to 10% of their state funding on “recovery housing,” where people live in a sober environment and work on overcoming an addiction. The move would have tweaked California’s “housing first” strategy, which generally frowns on programs that put up barriers to housing — such as requiring people to stay clean or participate in treatment. 

“It’s disappointing that the Governor vetoed AB 255,” the bill’s author, Assemblymember Matt Haney, a San Francisco Democrat, said in a statement. “This bill was about giving people in recovery a real choice to have safe, sober housing when they need it. Californians who are working hard to stay sober are often forced into housing where drug use is allowed, and that puts their recovery and their lives at risk.”

The governor said the bill was unnecessary and would have created a “duplicative and costly new statutory category” for recovery housing. “Recent guidance” already allows cities and counties to spend state homelessness funds on sober housing, Newsom said in his veto message. 

That was news to Haney.

“Unfortunately that is not the understanding shared by housing providers themselves, the legislature, the cities, counties and their attorneys, or people seeking recovery housing,” he said in a text to CalMatters.

In response to CalMatters’ request for more detail on the state’s policies for funding sober housing, the governor’s office sent a link to a draft policy document dated January, 2025, but then followed up with a final version dated July, 2025. The document says state money can fund sober housing as long as the people in that housing are sober by choice.

Haney’s office had not seen the document until it was sent by a CalMatters reporter, said spokesperson Nate Allbee.

In his veto message for AB 255, Newsom said any future changes to the state’s recovery housing policy should be considered through the annual budget process.

“California remains committed to advancing recovery housing within Housing First,” he said. “I encourage the author and stakeholders to continue working with my Administration to strengthen these options in ways that complement, rather than complicate, the state’s approach.” 

Haney’s bill would have set up a new system for the state’s housing department to regulate recovery housing, which would have cost an estimated $4.12 million in the first year, according to the Senate Appropriations Committee’s analysis. Recovery programs would have paid a fee for state certification. But those fees, likely amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, would not entirely offset the state’s costs, according to the analysis. 

“I was a little surprised,” Sharon Rapport, California state policy director for the Corporation for Supportive Housing, said of the governor’s veto. “But when I thought about it, I thought it probably did make sense, because part of the bill does require a certification program to be created, and there wasn’t funding for that.”

Rapport’s organization worked with Haney’s office on some amendments to the bill, including reducing the percentage of state funding that can go to sober housing from 25% down to 10%. 

Newsom’s veto message referenced the original 25% version of the bill. His office did not respond to an email asking why he used the old number. 

In an effort to adhere to housing first principles, Haney’s bill specified that recovery housing residents wouldn’t be evicted just for relapsing. If they no longer wanted to participate in recovery, they could have continued living onsite until the program operator found them a new place to live. 

This was Haney’s second attempt to funnel state money into recovery housing. His first, Assembly Bill 2479, died last year amid worries that it would siphon too much money away from low-barrier housing, and that people might lose their placement if they relapsed.

Since 2016, California has required housing providers to adopt a “housing first” model, which emphasizes getting people into housing even if they are addicted to drugs or alcohol, or struggling with a mental illness. Instead of requiring people to participate in treatment programs as a condition of getting housing, providers offer voluntary services. The idea is to get people housed as quickly and easily as possible, because it’s much easier to tackle someone’s other problems – such as their drug addiction – once the person has a roof over their head. 

While both Haney and the governor are attempting to work sober housing into California’s existing housing first strategy, the federal administration, meanwhile, is attempting to blow up the entire policy. 

President Donald Trump this summer issued an executive order directing federal agencies to end support for ‘housing first’ policies that “deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency.” It directs those agencies to require people participating in federally-funded housing programs to participate in addiction and mental health treatment.

Haney said he remains a firm believer in housing first.

“I  don’t think it is at all intended to help us be more responsive and effective,” he said of the federal policy change. “It’s intended to undermine responses to homelessness and affordable housing.” 

This story has been updated to include a response from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office.

It looks like California Gov. Gavin Newsom has learned to stop worrying and love fake, AI-generated political satire videos—or at least, he loves them enough to share one on X.

Newsom has discovered a meme streak that is positively Trump-ian as of late, and now constantly publishes troll-ish posts on social media, with the aim of getting under the president's skin and also calling attention to himself; he seems to be succeeding on this second goal, and is currently arguably the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.

Here was his latest contribution: a heavily manipulated video of Vice President J.D. Vance discussing the government shutdown. (Note the squeaky voice and cartoonish wardrobe embellishments.)

PSA from JD. pic.twitter.com/fhnuX7leOL

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) October 1, 2025

There's nothing wrong with this, of course. Newsom is free to use his own speech to belittle Trump, Vance, or anyone else. The irony, however, is that Newsom adamantly tried to prevent other people from doing something incredibly similar.

Indeed, Newsom is a major advocate of legislation to criminalize so-called deep fakes: convincing misrepresentations of other people on social media. In the midst of Kamala Harris's 2024 presidential campaign, Elon Musk retweeted a fake, AI-engineered video of Harris appearing to admit to being a DEI pick; the video used AI to accurately mimic her voice. Newsom wrote on X that this should be illegal, and shared that he would soon be banning the practice in California. Sure enough, the governor signed the deep fake bill into law a few weeks later.

Unfortunately for Newsom, the First Amendment broadly protects political satire, even if the underlying speech is wrong or misleading. And so a federal judge struck down the law—just in time for Election Day—noting that it "hinders humorous expression and unconstitutionally stifles the free and unfettered exchange of ideas."

Now that the governor is enjoying channeling his inner troll, perhaps he has gained more appreciation for this right. One can perhaps argue that the optics of the Vance video make it much more obviously fake than the sound from the Harris video, but this is a difference of distinctions. It's key that the widest possible latitude be given to speech that makes fun of politicians, as there is no kind of expression more obviously protected by the First Amendment.

This Week on Free Media

I'm joined by Amber Duke and Niall Stanage to process the news of the week. Check out the Free Media YouTube channel, which now features news collaborations with Duke, Stanage, and also Reason's Andrew Heaton.

Worth Watching

I am hard at work on the novel I vowed to write two weeks ago: In fact, I've actually already written about 18,000 words. I imagine it will be at least 100,000 words when I've finished. It feels really refreshing to be working on a creative project again. Last night I stayed up way, way too late writing it, as I realized very suddenly that I was going to reveal a notable side character as evil, and I was determined to make it to the scene where he outs himself.

The post Gavin Newsom Loves AI Satire Now! appeared first on Reason.com.

The internet can be more physically vulnerable than you think. Last week, thousands of people in North and Central Texas were suddenly knocked offline. The cause? A bullet. The outage hit cities all across the state, including Dallas, Irving, Plano, Arlington, Austin, and San Antonio. The outage affected Spectrum customers and took down their phone lines and TV services as well as the internet.

“Right in the middle of my meetings 😒,” one users said on the r/Spectrum subreddit. Around 25,000 customers were without services for several hours as the company rushed to repair the lines. As the service came back,, WFAA reported that the cause of the outage came from the barrel of a gun. A stray bullet had hit a line of fiber optic cable and knocked tens of thousands of people offline.

“The outage stemmed from a fiber optic cable that was damaged by a stray bullet,” Spectrum told 404 Media. “Our teams worked quickly to make the necessary repairs and get customers back online. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Spectrum told 404 Media that it didn’t have any further details to share about the incident so we have no idea how the company learned a bullet hit its equipment, where the bullet was found, and if the police are involved. Texas is a massive state with overlapping police jurisdictions and a lot of guns. Finding a specific shooting incident related to telecom equipment in the vast suburban sprawl around Dallas is probably impossible.

Fiber optic cable lines are often buried underground, protected from the vagaries of southern gunfire. But that’s not always the case, fiber can be strung along telephone poles in the sky and sent to a vast and complicated network junction boxes and service stations that overlap different municipalities and cities, each with their own laws about how the cable can be installed. That can leave pieces of the physical infrastructure of the internet exposed to gunfire and other mischief.

This is not the first time gunfire has taken down the internet. In 2022, Xfinity fiber cable in Oakland, California went offline after people allegedly fired 17 rounds into the air near one of the company’s fiber lines. Around 30,000 people were offline during that outage and it happened moments before the start of an NFL game that saw the Los Angeles Rams square off against the San Francisco 49ers.

“We could not be more apologetic and sincerely upset that this is happening on a day like today,” Comcast spokesperson Joan Hammel told Dater Center Dynamics at the time. Hammel added that the company has seen gunshot wounds on its equipment before. “While this isn’t completely uncommon, it is pretty rare, but we know it when we see it.”

Milton Friedman liked to quip that there's nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.

We're seeing more evidence for this adage as the government shut downs following Democrats' refusal to vote for a spending bill that did not include an extension of "temporary" Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare, subsidies passed during the pandemic.

Those enhanced subsidies were passed as a temporary measure as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act in March 2021, and then extended through the end of 2025 by the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Obamacare always provided subsidies for individuals to purchase insurance plans on ACA marketplaces set up by the law. The 2021 Act passed enhanced subsidies eliminated the income eligibility caps for those subsidies and also made them more generous for current recipients.

Making these subsidies permanent would not be cheap. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would cost $340 billion a year.

On the flip side, letting the tax credits expire would result in about 1.6 million higher-income earners losing subsidies completely. Millions more would continue receiving a smaller subsidy and see their premiums rise as a result.

With their sunsetting deadline approaching and their votes necessary in the Senate to pass a spending bill, Democrats attempted to use what leverage they had to pass a more permanent extension of the "temporary" subsidies.

Republicans were not inherently opposed to extending four-year-old "temporary" subsidies, with some GOP lawmakers proposing to extend them by at least one year. But Republican leadership in the Senate insisted on funding the government first and then negotiating on health care subsidies.

With the federal government partially shuttered for the time being, both parties are now rolling out their well-worn attack lines. Democrats complain Republicans are trying to take away people's health care. Republicans say Democrats are trying to give health care to illegal immigrations.

That the expiration of "temporary" ACA tax credits resulted in a government shutdown shouldn't surprise anyone, says Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute.

"The fact that [the temporary subsidies] create a phony crisis every couple of years when they expire, from a political perspective, is a feature, not a bug. This is how spending grows," he says.

Democrats are particularly insistent on preserving subsidies that were pitched as a temporary COVID measure because they help hide the costs of Obamacare, he says.

The 2010 law required health insurance companies to cover certain "essential health benefits." It also forbade them from refusing to cover, or charging higher premiums to, people with more expensive medical conditions.

The twin effect of these mandates has been to raise premiums generally, particularly for healthier people. Ge Bei, a professor of accounting and health policy at Johns Hopkins University, notes in The Wall Street Journal that premiums have increased 80 percent since 2014, when the ACA went fully into effect.

The 2021 expansion of the ACA subsidies attempts to mask the cost of rising premiums by shifting more of the expense onto taxpayers as a whole.

Those expanded subsidies have been successful at reducing the cost of ACA individual plans, for policyholders at least if not for taxpayers.

The health policy research outfit KFF says that since the enhanced subsidies were passed, enrollment in the ACA marketplace plans has increased from 11 million to 24 million, the vast majority of whom are benefiting from the post-2021 subsidy enhancements.

Cannon says the increased post-2021 enrollment in Obamacare marketplace plans merely shows how unpopular the insurance products created by the law really are.

Only through extensive subsidization of high-income earners are people willing to participate in ACA marketplaces.

Without the subsidies, many people would simply not purchase the high-cost ACA marketplace plans. (The penalty for not purchasing health insurance was zeroed out in 2019.)

The CBO says extending the subsidies will lead to nearly 3.8 million more insured people by 2035. KFF estimates that ACA marketplace premiums would more than double if the expanded subsidies were allowed to lapse.

The immediate increase in policyholders' premiums helps explain why Democrats felt this was an issue they could get political mileage out of during a shutdown fight. It also explains why plenty of Republicans are willing to negotiate on yet another extension of "temporary" enhanced subsidies to prop up a law the party uniformly opposed when it was passed.

Cannon, in contrast, says the subsidies should be allowed to lapse. That would force policymakers to actually deal with the regulations driving up the cost of health insurance premiums, as opposed to just hiding the cost in the federal budget.

"Everything in U.S. health care is a fiscal illusion. They want to keep hiding the cost of Obamacare's health insurance regulations," says Cannon.

The post Democrats Shut Down the Government to Obscure Obamacare's Failures appeared first on Reason.com.

The horrific murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on September 10 should have started a long-overdue conversation about the danger of political violence and of rhetoric that demonizes political opponents. Instead, all too predictably, it set off a cycle of finger-pointing and attempts to prove that violence is only—or primarily—a problem for the “other side.” And the Trump administration set the tone.

On the day of the shooting, Donald Trump blamed “the radical left” and its rhetoric before the shooter’s identity or motive was even known. Since then, he has explicitly and repeatedly stated that “the radicals on the left are the problem” and that “the violence comes largely from the left.” And, hosting Kirk’s podcast from the White House on September 15, Vice President JD Vance asserted that national reconciliation is impossible until Democrats and liberals not only agree that political violence is unacceptable but concede that “this is not a both sides problem”—that both support for political violence and political violence itself are “much bigger and [more] malignant” on the left.

Pundits on the right amplified this claim:

Meanwhile, some left-of-center commentators such as Vox’s Eric Levitz have countered with data purporting to show the exact opposite:

Who’s right? Should we see political violence as primarily a problem on one side—and which one?—or treat it as a danger across the board?

The real picture is complicated. If you set out to list only left-wing acts of political terrorism, as Erick Erickson does—especially if you reach all the way back to 1954—you can easily “prove” that it’s a left-wing problem. One could just as easily make a list that would inculpate solely the right: The 1963 Birmingham, Alabama church bombing targeting civil rights leaders; the 1984 murder of liberal talk show host Alan Berg by white supremacists; the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by an ex-soldier turned far-right extremist; a series of deadly attacks on abortion providers; several massacres by perpetrators obsessed with the migrant “invasion”; July’s killing of Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband by an anti-abortion, anti-vaccine zealot.

The selective vision continues with regard to present-day events. Last week, a shooting at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility—which killed two detainees and injured one, but was clearly aimed at the agency itself—was quickly cited as more evidence of the left-wing peril. Meanwhile, some Trump critics recalled that less than a month earlier, a man obsessed with the supposed harms of the COVID vaccine opened a barrage of gunfire at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, killing a police officer.

However, claims about the overwhelmingly right-wing nature of political violence such as the one made by Levitz, which relies on the Anti-Defamation League’s database of “domestic extremist-related killings,” warrant skepticism. The fine print on the ADL graphic Levitz reproduces notes that the numbers include “both ideologically and non-ideologically motivated killings.” In other words, the ADL counts all homicides by everyone classified as a political extremist—including homicides related to drugs, robberies, personal or family conflicts, and prison gang violence—even when mental illness is involved and even when the connection to extremism is tenuous.

In some cases, the ADL’s classifications raise well-founded questions about political bias. The organization’s report on extremist-related domestic murders in 2019 included a mentally ill man who killed his brother and who may have belonged to the far-right Proud Boys group, as well as a man who fatally shot his estranged girlfriend and, after his arrest, “reportedly said he was a sovereign citizen who did not recognize any government.” However, it left out Conor Betts’s shooting spree outside a Dayton, Ohio bar, which killed nine people and injured 17, due to insufficient evidence of extremism and lack of ideological motive. Yet Betts’s Twitter account showed ample evidence of left-wing radicalism and a fixation on righteous violence against “fascists,” “capitalists,” and other perceived oppressors.

A more rigorous dataset, limited to politically motivated killings, was compiled by Cato Institute fellow Alex Nowrasteh, with the following breakdown for the death toll from political terrorism in the United States over the last 50 years:

In this calculus, homicidal right-wing violence still substantially exceeds the left-wing kind, though both are thankfully rare.

An X user called “Recursion Agent” has challenged Nowrasteh’s analysis, claiming that it overcounts violence from the right and undercounts it on the left. The critique accurately flags some apparently misclassified cases and appropriately questions the non-inclusion of others (e.g. several killings linked to the racial protests and riots in the summer of 2020); but it also has its own obvious biases. Besides blatantly downplaying some perpetrators’ racist or far-right views, the thread critiques Nowrasteh for leaving out a “deranged lefty who annihilated his family” out of fear of being targeted by religious zealots—but makes no mention of family murders by people in the far-right QAnon cult.1

Such debates highlight the difficulty of classifying the politics of extremists, especially those whose ideologies may be a mishmash of conventionally “left” and “right” beliefs and who may suffer from mental illness. And there are other thorny questions. If racially motivated killings by whites are counted as right-wing extremism, should killings of whites by nonwhite perpetrators obsessed with racial oppression, such as 1993 Long Island Railroad shooter Colin Ferguson, count as left-wing extremism? Should the deaths during the 2020 racial unrest, mostly related to nonpolitical robberies but enabled by the chaos and violence of the riots, be added to the “left-wing extremism” body count? Should the casualties in the January 6 Capitol Hill attack, all rioters themselves, be added to that of right-wing extremism?

Evaluating public support for political violence can be just as tricky. In a September 10 YouGov poll, 16 percent of self-identified liberals and 24 percent of those self-describing as “very liberal” said that it was “usually or always” acceptable to feel joy about the death of a political opponent, compared to just four percent of self-identified conservatives and seven percent of moderates. Similar numbers agreed that resorting to violence to achieve political goals could sometimes be justified. These results were widely cited—among others, by Vance while hosting Kirk’s podcast—as evidence that approval for political violence is not a “both sides” issue but exists primarily on the left.

But caveats are in order. The survey was taken immediately after Kirk’s murder. As the YouGov report notes, the polling outfit’s earlier surveys show that both Democrats and Republicans are consistently more likely to regard political violence as a serious problem after a widely publicized attack on a figure from their “team.” And the way questions are phrased can also influence answers. For instance, when a poll in March formulated a question about political violence as, “Things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” one in five Trump supporters, but only one in ten Trump opponents, agreed.

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Another recent survey seems reassuring in that it shows Democrats, Republicans (including “MAGA Republicans”) and independents all overwhelmingly oppose political violence. When asked if it was acceptable for citizens to use a variety of violent tactics to achieve their political goals, around 99 percent rejected politically motivated murder, assault, and arson, with negligible partisan differences well within the margin of error.

Should we conclude that there’s no problem? Not quite. For one thing, it’s easy to oppose political violence in theory; in practice, people often excuse it or hand-wave it when it’s on “their” side. For instance, in a 2024 YouGov poll, 60 percent of self-identified Trump supporters and 55 percent of all Republicans saw the January 6 Capitol Hill riot as an expression of “legitimate political discourse,” while only 18 and 20 percent respectively saw it as a “violent insurrection.” (The “discourse” included police officers being pepper-sprayed, punched, kicked, and beaten with flag poles and fire extinguishers; some 140 were injured, with one officer suffering a fatal stroke shortly after being manhandled by the crowd.)

Democrats have their own blind spots. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s murder, liberal publications such as Slate, The Atlantic and The New Republic published excuses for rioting. (In fact, quite a few black activists condemned the violence as the work of attention-seeking white anarchists.) Today, many liberals tend to fall back on claims that the 2020 protesters were “mostly peaceful.” But while this was true of most protests—of which there were over 7,000 nationwide—nearly 550 events did involve serious violence and/or property damage. At least 30 people died, excluding those killed by law enforcement; some 900 police officers were reportedly injured, and many city blocks were devastated, with damage totaling between $1 and $2 billion.

Both sides are also inclined to try to pin acts of violence on the other side. We just saw this with attempts by many on the left to claim that Charlie Kirk’s killer was a member of the extreme right. But at least people left of center (other than the far left) tend to believe reporting by the mainstream media. On the right, even people who are not particularly extreme can be found parroting false narratives reassigning right-wing violent extremists to the left. One routinely encounters assertions that the killer of Hortman, the Minnesota lawmaker, was not a Trump supporter but a leftist angry at Hortman for voting with Republicans on an immigration bill (a claim debunked by The Blaze, a strongly conservative website).2 And even Ted Cruz has amplified the claim that the 2022 attack on former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was carried out by a “hippie nudist leftist” with no connection to the right. In fact, the attacker, David DePape, had once been involved in progressive activism but had since become immersed in far-right, MAGA-adjacent conspiracies including QAnon.

So, is violence more inherent to one ideology? One can certainly point (as conservative British pundit Douglas Murray does in City Journal) to the American left’s history of sympathy for violent radicals such as the Weather Underground or the Black Panthers. In a fresh, shameful example of this mindset, the Democratic Socialists of America (a group with ties to a number of progressive Democrats) and the Chicago Teachers’ Union both made posts honoring Assata Shakur, a member of a violent black liberation group who died in Cuba where she escaped after being convicted of killing a New Jersey police officer in 1973.

But the nationalist right has its own history of support for violent methods—from rhetoric suggesting that the right of gun ownership authorizes armed resistance to leftist tyranny to sympathy for dictatorships such as that of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. (Ironic references to the Pinochet regime’s practice of killing undesirables by dropping them in the ocean from helicopters have become a popular right-wing meme.) If the left-wing call to fight oppression and “hate” can become a justification for violence, so can the right-wing call to fight the “enemy within,” be it foreign “invaders” or homegrown “Marxists.” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has, for instance, routinely employed rhetoric in his books that treats liberals as a domestic enemy—and sometimes suggested that the fight against them may yet become a literal war.

The truth is that the dominant ideological tenor of political violence is not a constant. It was primarily left-wing in the late 1960s and 1970s, predominantly right-wing in the 1980s and onward; today, terrorism experts Daniel Byman and Riley McCabe write in The Atlantic, we seem to be seeing a swing toward more violence from the left. But that may change again, especially if more people on the right get the message that “it’s war.”

Thankfully, so far, the overall levels of political violence in the United States remain fairly low. But the danger signs are there: in a just-released NPR/Marist poll, 30 percent of Americans—up from 20 percent in March 2024—agree that “Americans may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track.” (While Republicans are more likely to endorse this statement, the most dramatic growth in agreement—from 12 percent to 28 percent—has been among Democrats.)

In this climate, reducing the temperature of political rhetoric is essential. Using the issue to score political points against the other side won’t get us there. The only answer is to stick to the facts—and, above all, to hold one’s own “team” accountable when necessary.

Cathy Young is a writer at The Bulwark, a columnist for Newsday, and a contributing editor to Reason.

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