We’ve had two assassination attempts on Donald Trump. Charlie Kirk was gunned down at a speaking event. A CEO was executed on a Manhattan sidewalk. And somehow, a chunk of America looked at all of it and said, “Yeah, that’s fine.”
Welcome to assassination culture. It’s real. It’s growing. And the people driving it aren’t who you’d think.
The Shocking Demographics
Researchers at the Network Contagion Research Institute just surveyed over a thousand Americans about their tolerance for political violence. Not whether they’d commit it themselves — just whether they think it’s justified when someone else does.
The results should terrify everyone.
Sixty-seven percent of left-of-center respondents believe political murder has at least some justification. On the right? Fifty-four percent. Both numbers are horrifying, but one side is clearly winning this race to the bottom.
Here’s the kicker that blindsided even the researchers: women are 15% more likely than men to support assassination culture. Liberal women specifically are the most likely group to condone political violence — by a margin of about 75% over conservative men, who ranked lowest.
Joel Finkelstein, the study’s director, admitted he expected to find angry unemployed guys fueling this trend. Instead, he found something far stranger.
The Luigi Effect
Remember Luigi Mangione? The guy accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in broad daylight? Shot him in the back on a Manhattan street?
Social media turned him into a heartthrob.
Women posted thirst traps about him. Fan accounts sprouted like weeds. His mugshot became a meme. People who’d never read a single page about healthcare policy suddenly decided cold-blooded murder was romantic if the killer had good cheekbones.
Finkelstein compared it to Che Guevara — another murderer repackaged as a sexy revolutionary for people who don’t read history books.
“We see these lurid images of Luigi Mangione that have been packaged into some kind of sexual symbol,” he said. “And I think that we may be seeing some downstream effects of that on people who use social media a lot, on females.”
Translation: the algorithm is literally radicalizing people into thinking assassination is hot.
The Common Thread
The study found three things that predict whether someone tolerates political violence. Heavy social media use. Believing America is “an empire in decline.” And being female.
That last one matters because it shatters the narrative. For years, we’ve been told that political violence is a male problem — specifically a right-wing male problem. White guys in MAGA hats were supposedly the threat.
Turns out the people most likely to shrug at murder are liberal women doom-scrolling TikTok.
Nobody on cable news is going to touch that finding with a ten-foot pole. It doesn’t fit the script. But the data is the data.
A Year of Blood
Let’s recap what 2024 and 2025 looked like.
July 2024: A gunman opens fire at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania. Trump survives with a wounded ear. A rallygoer dies shielding his family.
September 2024: Another armed man is caught hiding near Trump’s golf course. Second assassination attempt in two months.
December 2024: Brian Thompson is executed on a Manhattan sidewalk. His alleged killer becomes a folk hero online.
October 2025: Charlie Kirk is shot and killed at Utah Valley University during a speaking event. His widow has to publicly rebuke people celebrating his death.
And after all of it, support for political violence went up.
On the left, it jumped from 56% to 67% in a single year. That’s not a statistical blip. That’s a movement.
The Spiritual Crisis
Finkelstein didn’t mince words about what’s driving this. It’s not just partisanship. It’s something deeper.
“It’s a spiritual crisis about the belief in democracy,” he said.
People have stopped believing the system works. They’ve stopped believing their vote matters. They’ve stopped believing their opponents are fellow Americans who just disagree — now the other side is the enemy, and enemies deserve what they get.
Social media pours gasoline on all of it. The algorithm rewards outrage. It feeds people increasingly extreme content. It creates echo chambers where political violence stops being unthinkable and starts being justified.
Young people are marinating in this stuff for hours every day. And the study shows it’s changing how they see violence itself.
The Response
The White House didn’t hold back.
“For years, radical leftists have slandered their political opponents as Nazis and Fascists, inspiring left-wing violence,” spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. “It must end.”
She’s right. You can’t spend a decade calling people Hitler and then act shocked when someone decides to be a hero by stopping Hitler. Words have consequences. Rhetoric has consequences. And the left has been playing with matches in a fireworks factory.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the problem is growing on both sides. Conservative tolerance for political violence is lower, but it’s rising too. The infection is spreading.
Where This Goes
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. And right now, America is rhyming with some very dark chapters.
When a society loses faith in its institutions, when people believe the system is rigged, when political opponents become existential threats instead of fellow citizens — violence follows. It always does.
The study’s authors are calling for unity. For people to come together and address “the fissures showing up in our national family.” That sounds nice. It also sounds naive.
Because right now, a significant chunk of the country thinks assassination is acceptable. They’re not hiding it. They’re posting about it. They’re making fan art of murderers.
And until that changes — until we decide that political violence is always wrong, no matter who the target is — we’re going to keep burying people who committed the crime of disagreeing in public.
Charlie Kirk saw this coming. He shared a warning about assassination culture months before he became its victim.
Nobody listened then. Maybe they’ll listen now.
But probably not.