Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect in the attempted White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, is unusual among attempted assassins — in his normalcy. His political grievances, laid out in a manifesto and social media posts, are not dissimilar from those of an ordinary Democrat. He believed that President Donald Trump was a lawless, corrupt leader who abused immigrants, perpetrated war crimes, and presented an existential threat to American democracy. I spoke with five leading experts on political violence in the United States. The picture they painted was complicated; they often didn’t agree on key points. But my best read of the evidence they presented led me to three conclusions. * Political violence becomes more likely when people believe that politics takes on existential stakes — that their way of life or cherished values are at risk — and that there is no hope of peaceful resolution to their conflicts. * For this reason, it’s not absurd to worry about that existential rhetoric on both sides — that whites are being “replaced,” that the 2020 elections were stolen, or that American democracy is dying — might create an environment where violence becomes more likely. * However, this risk can be mitigated significantly by emphasizing the ability to resolve perceived dangers through peaceful political processes. He is not alone. Ryan Routh, the man who attempted to kill Trump at Mar-a-Lago, displayed notably more bizarre behavior — but had writings that [echoed similar themes](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/us/politics/trump-assassination-suspect-book.html) to Allen’s. While primarily preoccupied with Trump, they join the ranks of [Luigi Mangione](https://www.vox.com/culture/390911/luigi-mangione-uhc-shooter-manifesto-reddit-blackpill) and [Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson](https://www.vox.com/politics/462173/charlie-kirk-killer-motive-tyler-robinson-jimmy-kimmel), in what has increasingly been called “[normie extremism](https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/04/cole-allen-whcd-trump-extremism/686993/).” These are people who express grievances in the center-left mainstream — [for-profit health insurance is wrong](https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/04/us/luigi-mangione-diary-entries-murder-case), the right shouldn’t spread “[hatred](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/us/charlie-kirk-tyler-robinson-murder-utah-court.html)” — yet who apparently act on those beliefs in violent ways typically associated with political extremists. It is not fully clear whether “normie extremism” is a coherent category. There have only been a handful of incidents that might qualify, and they differ from each other in important ways: The two would-be Trump assassins had distinct views from those of either Mangione or Robinson, who were also quite different from each other. Moreover, most of these cases still haven’t gone to trial, meaning we have only a fraction of the insight into motives we might eventually get. Even so, the incidents are raising a real question: Is the mainstream liberal critique of Trump pushing people toward actual violence? To call this question “real” is not to endorse the White House’s disingenuous efforts to exploit these incidents by turning the government on enemies like [Jimmy Kimmel](https://www.npr.org/2026/04/28/nx-s1-5802997/fcc-abc-license-renewal-melania-trump-jimmy-kimmel) or [James Comey](https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/487279/james-comey-indictment-seashells-threat-trump-blanche-revenge) or [ordinary Americans](https://www.vox.com/on-the-right-newsletter/461722/charlie-kirk-killing-trump-vance-miller-free-speech-cancel). Nor does it ignore the bad faith of Republicans leveling complaints about Democratic rhetoric while supporting Trump, a one-of-one outlier in our political system when it comes to [inflaming](https://www.npr.org/2025/12/15/nx-s1-5644927/trump-rob-reiner-death-truth-social), [mocking](https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/29/trump-mocks-pelosi-family-as-he-rallies-conservative-support-in-california-00119243), and [excusing](https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/485871/trump-justice-department-january-6-seditious-conspiracy-convictions) [political violence](https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/27/politics/trump-violent-rhetoric-analysis). But even if we stipulate all of that, there are still good reasons to take the question seriously. Trump’s second term has been an extended exercise in attacking democratic fundamentals. Raids by the unaccountable and growing ICE forces; his obsession with trying to undermine elections; his seemingly unpunished corruption and lying; even his lieutenants’ efforts to shut down comedians he doesn’t like — all of these are serious threats to democracy, and none of them have any real Republican opposition. I’m among the many writers who have been sounding alarm bells, and it requires some [unavoidably blunt rhetoric](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/trump-language-policing/686977/?gift=Ut5zkH9vG00uzi0vmoT5f6LyExD-UgFHT29ZxBmQjlU&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share) to do so, given the gravity of the situation. But these valid concerns do not justify assassinating the president or anyone else; all mainstream liberals agree on this point, and that the threat of violence makes things worse rather than better. If there is indeed any legitimate concern about “threat to democracy” talk leading to violence, Trump’s critics have an obligation both to the country and their own cause to figure out how best to minimize it. So what should we do? If you (very reasonably) believe Trump is actively assaulting our democracy, how can you state these fears clearly while also tamping down the risk of destabilizing violence? To grapple with these issues, I spoke with five leading experts on political violence in the United States. The picture they painted was complicated; they often didn’t agree on key points. But my best read of the evidence they presented led me to three conclusions: 1. Political violence becomes more likely when people believe that politics takes on existential stakes — that their way of life or cherished values are at risk — and that there is no hope of peaceful resolution to their conflicts. 2. For this reason, it’s not absurd to worry about that existential rhetoric on both sides — that whites are being “replaced,” that the 2020 elections were stolen, or that American democracy is dying — might create an environment where violence becomes more likely. 3. However, this risk can be mitigated significantly by emphasizing the ability to resolve perceived dangers through peaceful political processes. There is, in short, a “right way” to talk about existential risks in a democratic society: one that emphasizes the need to respond through that system, either by voting or peaceful activism. Trump violates this approach routinely by claiming elections are rigged by shadowy, unaccountable forces and has been deservedly criticized for it. To the extent that Democrats, progressives, and aligned figures stay within the above confines, it is largely unfair to hold them responsible for the actions of people like the WHCD shooter**.** To their credit, they overwhelmingly tend to do so. But there are some worrying currents, floating around the periphery of left-leaning conversation, worth taking more seriously in light of these incidents. It is important, at the outset, to note that it is extremely difficult to link any specific piece of rhetoric to a specific act of violence. Even when you can precisely trace a killer’s information diet — like with Alexandre Bissonnette, [a frequent Ben Shapiro and InfoWars consumer](https://www.nationalobserver.com/2018/04/17/opinion/bissonnette-was-far-right-internet-junkie-whose-addiction-turned-him-killer#:~:text=Bissonnette’s%20motives%2C%20clearly%20outlined%20during,turn%20him%20into%20a%20monster.) who killed six at a mosque in Quebec City in 2017 — you can’t prove that their media consumption _caused_ the shooting. It could be that they were already violent before they started watching or reading a particular news outlet, or that something other than politicians and pundits pushed them to kill. It’s also important to note that political violence is still very rare, even as it’s [been on the rise](https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/the-year-of-the-molotov-cocktail-american-antigovernment-violence-hits-a-30-year-high-bca03a67). While different datasets tally incidents differently, even higher-end estimates put our yearly tally of politically motivated killings of anyone — from politicians to ordinary people — at somewhere in the dozens. In a country of 340 million people, that’s barely a rounding error. It can be very tricky to draw too many broad conclusions from such a small sample size. Rather, the small number of incidents tells us that the people who commit political violence are highly unusual. We’re not in a civil war with organized factions directing and normalizing violent acts; the people who commit political violence are, quite frequently, dealing with mental health issues or experiencing severe life challenges. The rarity of political violence does not make it unimportant. Quite the opposite: political violence is unique in that a single successful attack — like a presidential assassination — can have history-changing implications. “Humans naturally are inclined away from violence — most of the time, when they’re feeling normal in their day,” says [Lilliana Mason](https://hub.jhu.edu/experts/profiles/lilliana-mason/), a political scientist at Johns Hopkins and co-author of _Radical American Partisanship_, a book on American attitudes toward political violence. “To convince them that harming another person is good requires you to take some steps.” For all these reasons, we should be generally skeptical about claims about the direct causes of political violence in the United States. What is more reasonable, instead, is to talk about the background conditions that make it more likely for any one person — most likely, one with mental health issues — to believe that they must play the violent hero in America’s political movie. And there is good reason to believe that the rise of a specific kind of inflammatory rhetoric from leaders is one of those conditions. Research on political violence in America, both historical and contemporary, tells us that individuals who commit political violence tend to feel a specific blend of fear and hopelessness. Fear, in this context, is not the ordinary partisan trepidation felt about losing an election. Rather, it is a sense that the stakes of politics are _existential_: that if your side loses, there will be no future for your party, the country, or the planet. When the stakes feel that high, people become more likely to turn to violence. An example is Klan violence in the post-Civil War South. After slavery’s abolition, the white Southern elite believed that their way of life was on the verge of extinction. In this, they were not wrong: the multicultural democracy that Reconstruction was attempting to construct would indeed mean the end of the South’s hierarchical social structure. In that case, this fear was widespread enough to fuel an extremely bloody, and tragically successful, insurgency. But fear alone is not always enough. Oftentimes, that fear needs to be combined with a collapse of faith in the political process: a sense that whatever you’re afraid of cannot and never will be resolved through electoral means. It’s this sense of hopelessness, or powerlessness, that makes the turn to violence much more likely. “Terrorism emerges when people feel like their legitimate political avenues have been exhausted,” says Jacob Ware, an expert on domestic terrorism at Georgetown University. A [recent study](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40621-025-00652-3) led by [Garen Wintemute](https://profiles.ucdavis.edu/garen.wintemute), director of the Violence Prevention Program at UC-Davis Medical Center, studied how over 9,000 Americans’ attitudes toward political violence changed between 2022 and 2023. Wintemute’s team found that one of the best predictors of radicalization — whether a person expressed an increased willingness to commit political violence — was whether they said they “gave up on politics” during the study period. “Violence,” Wintemute told me in a phone call, “is politics by other means.” Take, for example, the wave of white nationalist shootings targeting Jews (Pittsburgh in 2018), Latinos (El Paso in 2019), and Blacks (Buffalo in 2022). Each of those shooters was explicitly motivated by fears of [white demographic replacement](https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/11/11/20882005/accelerationism-white-supremacy-christchurch) — a belief that the United States was not just becoming increasingly populated by people of color, but that the browning of America was a _plot_ to destroy the country as they knew it, and one intended to render future democratic action impossible. This is a classic existential narrative of politics: If we don’t act now, our way of life will be doomed forever. And it happened at a moment when President Trump was warning of a migrant invasion and [stolen elections](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/us/politics/donald-trump-congress-democrats.html), and prominent right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson were [accusing Democrats](https://www.vox.com/23076952/replacement-theory-white-supremacist-violence) of importing minority voters to lock Republicans out of power forever. We cannot say, with any confidence, that Trump or Carlson or any other right-wing figure was _directly_ responsible for any one of those instances of political violence. But you can say that they were spreading a narrative of existential political struggle to a wider audience, raising the stakes of politics and making it more likely that such ideas would reach one of the handful of exceptional people who would believe in the Great Replacement enough to see it as justification for violent actions. Applying the same lens to recent left-coded violence must begin by noting an obvious difference. The “Great Replacement” is a racist conspiracy theory, and liberal claims that Trump is a threat to democracy are straightforwardly true. Yet we are not talking about truth at the moment. We are talking about consequences: whether a particular narrative, when mainstreamed and widely broadcast, raises the risk that a mentally unwell individual hears it and sees it as justification for violent action. The recent record suggests some reason for worry. Allen, the WHCD shooting suspect, had a long history of posting this kind of anti-Trump rhetoric on X and Bluesky (including referring to Trump as “Hitler”). In one recent post, he expressed a collapse in faith in the political system to stop the president and a growing frustration with others for [not acting more directly](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/us/politics/cole-allen-coldforce-bluesky-investigation.html), writing that “waiting for someone else to do something about it is not working.” Routh, who was [recently sentenced to life in prison](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdfl/pr/ryan-wesley-routh-sentenced-life-plus-seven-years-prison-attempted-assassination) for the Mar-a-Lago attempt, laid out his grievances in a [letter to Politico’s Ankush Khardori](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/26/ryan-routh-trump-alleged-assassin-letter-column-00190211). While rambly and at times incoherent, the note described Trump as a “dictator” and warned that “we must limit all Presidential power before Trump seizes our country.” Now, both of these men failed to kill anyone — unlike the white nationalist killers, who have a collective body count in the dozens. And the shooter who actually did nearly kill Trump in Pennsylvania, Thomas Crooks, had no coherent grievance. His Google search history suggests he was interested in shooting Joe Biden and, as an FBI official put it, saw the Trump event as a “[target of opportunity](https://www.npr.org/2024/08/28/g-s1-19944/trump-rally-assassination-motive-attack).” But Routh and Allen’s rhetoric is enough, for at least among some experts on political violence, to take worries about violence seriously. “Does saying ‘Trump is a threat to democracy’ make it more likely that a person with mental distress, or having a mental break, would commit violence against Trump? Yeah, it probably does,” says [Rachel Kleinfeld](https://carnegieendowment.org/people/rachel-kleinfeld), a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program. “But I’m not sure that one can stop saying something that is true against a leader who is posing a threat \[for that reason\].” Not every expert shared Kleinfeld’s fears. Mason, the Johns Hopkins professor, pointed out that Thomas’s manifesto and social media tended to cite specific Trump actions — such as boat killings in the Caribbean or ICE raids — as grievances with the president. For Mason, this suggests that he was reacting less to heated Democratic rhetoric than to actual events: that Trump, by acting radically, inspired a radical response. “Would this individual guy have been less violent if \[media and Democrats\] hadn’t said anything critical of Trump, and he had just witnessed ICE attacking and murdering people in Minneapolis?” she asks rhetorically. “Would reality not get through to him if you didn’t talk about it? I think it would.” Surely, there’s something to that. But political violence is poisonous to a democracy. If indeed Trump is a threat to democracy — and I’m certain he is — it’s incumbent on those of us who believe that to calibrate our rhetoric in order to best minimize the risk of inspiring individuals to act violently, however low that risk may be at baseline. Happily, every expert I spoke to agreed that there’s a way to do that: to emphasize, at every turn, the immorality of violence and the relative efficacy of _political_ solutions to America’s Trump problem. “People who want a democracy must speak honestly about existential threats to democracy. That is inherently antagonistic,” says [Nathan Kalmoe](https://sjmc.wisc.edu/news/staff/kalmoe-nathan/), a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (and Mason’s co-author). “At the same time, we must help people see that the most moral and effective means to defend and build a democracy are usually non-violent.” Here, I think, there is a categorical difference between left and right — one that makes it less fair to blame mainstream Democrats for violence linked to their ideas than Trump. When Democrats criticize Trump as an authoritarian, they almost always advocate for change through the political system. They call for people to attend protests, join local activist groups, and (above all else) turn out to vote in the midterm elections. They go out of their way to say the situation _isn’t_ hopeless. By contrast, Trump and the right’s rhetoric often positions the system as hopelessly broken: compromised by Democrats and the deep state. The clearest example of the dangers here being, of course, January 6. That day’s violence was a rare case where violence could be traced directly to political rhetoric: the Capitol rioters convened because they believed Trump’s claim that political change was impossible through the system. If the 2020 elections really were rigged, the only alternative was to “fight, fight, fight.” Similarly, it would make sense that there’s been less right-wing violence recently: Trump won the election, pardoned January 6 convicts, began mass deportations, and generally governed without restraint. This gave the likeliest perpetrators more confidence that the system is working for them: Enrique Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys, recently told The Atlantic, “[we’ve got what we wanted](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/09/proud-boys-enrique-tarrio-charlie-kirk/684247/)” in Trump’s second term, and that they’ve been a less visible street presence as a result. Yet the fact that there is a categorical difference between Democrats and Republicans here does not mean the left should be complacent. To see why, it’s useful to look at two different left-wing movements: the New Left student radicals of the 1960s and ’70s, and the climate movement of today. Both movements saw politics in existential terms: if they failed, the country (and perhaps even the world) was doomed. Yet while ’60s and ’70s radicals produced one of the most sustained terrorism campaigns in American history, with groups like the Weather Underground [bombing government offices](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/02/28/when-the-left-attacked-the-capitol-471270) and [murdering police officers](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/02/kathy-boudin-former-weather-underground-radical-dies), comparable ecoterrorism in contemporary America is basically unheard of. That’s because the two movements had fundamentally different views about _democracy_. The Weather Underground saw American democracy as a bourgeois, racist, fundamentally irredeemable system; the only redemption could come with its destruction and replacement with some radical left alternative. The climate change movement, by contrast, has been resolutely democratic: seeing hope in policies ranging from market-friendly cap-and-trade proposals to a more expansive Green New Deal. This faith in the political process helps explain why the movement’s existential warnings of human extinction have not, to date, produced meaningful amounts of political violence. Maintaining this faith takes work, though. That means liberals need to be especially vigilant about doomsaying: pushing back hard on false viral claims that Trump will [cancel or invalidate the midterm elections](https://www.factcheck.org/2025/06/viral-graphic-makes-false-questionable-claims-about-house-reconciliation-bill/), for example, or posts that mock the [value of voting](https://www.reddit.com/r/alltheleft/comments/qc6n98/how_liberals_think_fascism_works/), even as they confront his [real threats](https://www.vox.com/politics/478708/donald-trump-2026-midterm-elections-threat-take-over) to election integrity. And it also means guarding against rhetoric that rationalizes or trivializes violence — turning Charlie Kirk’s murder into an edgy meme, say, or treating preventable deaths from a flawed health care system the same as cold-blooded murder. When I observed the No Kings protests in DC earlier this year, I was struck by the signs I saw depicting guillotines or other violent anti-Trump imagery. It was only a small fraction — consistent with surveys showing [No Kings protesters generally reject violence](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-kings-protesters-reject-political-violence-survey-shows/) — but enough to be uncomfortable. When I logged onto Bluesky afterward, I saw a lot of posters treating the signs as kind of a curiosity, or even a joke. Isn’t it [funny how radicalized the normie grandmas are getting](https://bsky.app/profile/rincewind.run/post/3mi5kx5nypc2c)? The assumption behind the joke is that these people are too normie to ever be violent. We now know that’s not necessarily the case. And going forward, as Trump’s anti-democratic behavior is likely to escalate, his opponents need to maintain the rhetorical high ground. See More: * [Political Violence](https://www.vox.com/political-violence) * [Politics](https://www.vox.com/politics)

The killing of three men at a [San Diego](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/san-diego) mosque on Monday is the latest example of a disturbing trend in recent decades: hate-motivated shooters learning from – and copying – each other in acts of violence meant to push the nation toward a race war and, ultimately, societal collapse. The two San Diego shooters, who were 17 and 18, killed 51-year-old Amin Abdullah, a security guard at the Islamic Center of San Diego, 78-year-old Mansour Kaziha, a mosque elder and founding member of the center, and Nadir Awad, 57, who lived across the street and whose wife worked as a teacher at the center’s school. The shooters later died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. The pair appears to have been deeply entrenched in online extremist networks and looked up to shooters who have killed dozens of people in US places of worship, schools and grocery stores. In a 75-page document the shooters wrote before Monday’s attack, they expressed hatred for Muslim and Jewish people, for Black people, the LGBTQ+ community, women, and for both political parties in the US. In addition to the document spelling out their extremist views, they also livestreamed their violence and wrote on their firearms in white marker – all common tactics among shooters who have been radicalized online, said Matthew Kriner, executive director of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, which has been investigating the shooters’ digital footprint to understand a possible motive for the attack. “Preliminarily, we’re seeing two individuals who jointly radicalized into this digital space and then jointly radicalized into this moment of violence,” Kriner said. In a Tuesday briefing, JD Vance, the vice-president, decried the shooting as “reprehensible”. “The principle of religious violence is particularly disgusting, especially in the United States of America,” he said. “And as a devout Christian, I would say it’s one of the most anti-Christian things and anti-American things that you could do.” After the killing of Charlie Kirk in Utah in September, and assassination attempts on Donald Trump’s life, the president, his administration and their allies have said rhetoric from Democrats and the left is catalyzing political and extremist violence. Earlier this month, the White House released its [counter-terrorism strategy](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-USCT-Strategy-1.pdf), which said the biggest threats of domestic terror and violence come from “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs, Legacy Islamist Terrorists and Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists”. Experts say there is a growing body of research showing that recent high-profile shootings in the US are mostly committed by people heavily influenced by online spaces, where traditional political divides are largely irrelevant. The counter-terrorism strategy also made no mention of white supremacist violence or young people who are being radicalized online, even though federal officials have previously acknowledged the risks these networks pose. In the past year, researchers and the FBI have also warned of an increase in nihilistic violent extremism (NVE), which the federal government describes as violence “motivated by a hatred of society and a drive to cause its collapse through indiscriminate chaos”. It’s unclear how many high-profile shootings are tied to this specific brand of hate. But in February [the FBI said](https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/boston/news/fbi-boston-warns-of-nihilistic-violent-extremists-targeting-children-and-vulnerable-victims-online) it was investigating at least 350 people across the US who it believes are connected to NVE networks that are extorting vulnerable young people into acts of terrorism and sexual violence. Last March, the [FBI released a notice](https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2025/PSA250306?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery) warning against groups that radicalize young people toward hate-motivated violence and use “threats, blackmail, and manipulation” to coerce them into acts of violence against themselves or the public. And in March this year, the US attorney for the central district of Illinois [issued a press release](https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdil/pr/frightening-reality-online-predators) about how these groups were continuing to use “digital platforms to exploit and radicalize children”. In their manifesto, the San Diego shooters both frequently refer to the man who shot and killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch in New Zealand in 2019. Kriner said this shows that many violent extremists are not tied to conventional political beliefs, but instead are adopting the ideology of other shooters before them. The 23-year-old who shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007 [was inspired by](https://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/18/vtech.shooting/index.html) the two Columbine high school shooters. Nearly a decade later in 2016, authorities [found a book](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/23/munich-gunman-book-columbine-virginia-tech-killers) about the Virginia Tech and Columbine shooters in the bedroom of an 18-year-old German man who shot and killed nine people at a Munich shopping mall. The 18-year-old who shot and killed 10 Black people in a Buffalo grocery store in 2022 [had been inspired by](https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099372659/parts-of-the-buffalo-shooters-alleged-screed-were-copied-from-other-sources#:~:text=Detailed%20in%20the,Buffalo%20shooting%20suspect%3F) the Christchurch shooter three years prior, as well as the shooters at an El Paso, Walmart and a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. The gunman who killed two children at the Annunciation Catholic school in Minneapolis last August expressed admiration for the 28-year-old shooter who killed three children and three adults at a school in Nashville, two years before. Kriner said most high-profile extremist shooters were not constrained by traditional political binaries such as Democrat or Republican. Instead, their views are a mashup of fascist ideals and a feeling that the world has fallen into such a state of disrepair that extreme violent action must be taken. “The core belief of doing something, taking action, appeals across social, racial, economic and national lines,” Kriner said. “It makes it hard for us to find the motivating factor because everything becomes a factor.”

 Evidence tied to last week's deadly [attack on a California mosque](https://www.npr.org/2026/05/20/nx-s1-5827053/san-diego-mosque-shooting-victims) illustrates a violent ideology and playbook that is all too familiar to counterterrorism and extremism experts. A 75-page typewritten document, attributed to the teenage suspects, and a livestreamed video showing the attack show extensive grounding in far-right, neo-Nazi thinking. But one facet of the ideology behind this attack has, so far, been left out of much mainstream coverage. "He just flat out says he hates women and that they're the devil and they're destroying everything. And this is an important thing, because that kind of misogyny did not exist in white supremacist circles, say, 10, 15 years ago," said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. Bierich was referring to the first part of the written document, authored by one of the two suspects. For many, the suspects' apparent misogyny may seem irrelevant, given that they targeted a Muslim house of worship. But Alex DiBranco, executive director and co-founder of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism, says it is comparable to antisemitism, a foundational underpinning of white nationalist thinking that is rooted in conspiracy theories. Antisemitism has been an essential ideological component behind white supremacist attacks at mosques, retail establishments frequented by African Americans and Latinos, gay bars and schools. "We've seen similar kinds of conspiratorial thinking about women 'pulling the strings behind the scenes' as well," DiBranco said. "And so the targeting of a mosque in San Diego is something that is interrelated not only with Islamophobia, but also with antisemitism and deep misogyny." ### "Anti-feminist conspiracies" DiBranco says that scholarship and news coverage of violence that is partly rooted in anti-women conspiracy theories has failed to keep pace with the spread of those dangerous beliefs. The attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego is the most recent example. "I was surprised when I opened the manifesto – having looked at the prior media coverage – at how deeply blatant the misogyny was throughout," said DiBranco. "\[One of the suspects\] starts with talking about Jewish people as the No.1 enemy. And then in his next section says, 'And then right after Jews, women are the No. 1 enemy.' " Just as writings of neo-Nazis and white nationalist killers often use offensive slurs for Jewish people, the document uses a dehumanizing term meant to shorthand "female humanoid organism." "That section on women uses dehumanizing language that's really popular in the misogynist incel community," DiBranco said, referring to "involuntary celibate" communities, which have evolved into virulently misogynistic online spaces, and have even been linked to [femicide](https://www.npr.org/2014/05/27/316452303/a-killers-manifesto-reveals-wide-reach-of-misogyny-online). "\[It's\] a term that is intended to indicate that women are actually not human, that they are 'humanoid,' and this has been popular for a number of years." DiBranco said that the line of thinking expressed in the suspects' writings follows a tired trope: that women are essentially responsible for everything wrong in the world. She has helped to [develop a framework](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/63641c2cb45d131cdacdf497/t/69e89d5756008f2712c5676a/1776852311656/White+Paper+1_+Foundations+of+Supremacism.pdf) for this category of narrative, which she terms "anti-feminist conspiracies." She said that it is important to broaden public understanding of the ties between these narratives and white nationalist violence. One of the clearest examples of an anti-feminist conspiracy theory that lay behind a neo-Nazi attack, DiBranco said, took place in Norway in 2011. There, a man killed 77 people, including dozens of teenagers at a summer camp. In that case, the perpetrator also left writings behind that outlined his beliefs. "That manifesto was very clear as well about the fact that he saw feminism and women … responsible for the 'feminization' of the West and of Europe. They were responsible for what he views as a 'Muslim invasion,' " DiBranco said. "He adhered to another conspiracy theory called '[cultural Marxism](https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/cultural-marxism-catching/),' he talked about anti-political correctness, and all of those things he actually rooted with the idea of feminism of Western women as the key problem." Beirich said there were also other signs that far-right extremist movements were trending toward full-throated endorsement of misogynistic conspiracism. She points to the 2014 "[Gamergate](https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/09/24/349835297/-gamergate-controversy-fuels-debate-on-women-and-video-games)" controversy, which blew the lid off of a culture of sexualized trolling and harassment in the video gaming space; and the culture of violent, anti-woman rhetoric nurtured on _The Daily Stormer_, once the main online messaging board for neo-Nazis. Still, Beirich, whose career tracking far-right extremism spans decades, said the degree to which this misogyny has spread is notable. "It has completely infected the white supremacist realm," Beirich said. "Misogyny is as important, I would argue, as racism or neo-Nazi-ism now to people that traffic in these kinds of ideas and live in these cultures." "It is an ideology that is heavily invested in the idea of 'cultural degeneracy' and what are the sources of it," said Elliot Chandler, CFO and researcher at Revontulet, a Norway-based company that does online threat monitoring. "And historically, femininity and the excessive expression of femininity is a core aspect of degeneracy. That is the classic, 'This is what the Nazis think' way of approaching it." This panic over the "feminization" of society also plays a role in the extreme hostility toward LGBTQ people, and to inclusive agendas, said DiBranco. "What's basically at stake at the core is they feel like they had a system in which cisgender white men were supreme and had unshaken dominance. And now these other forces, what they call 'cultural degeneracy,' are undermining that control that they felt … they had and that they felt … they had a right to," she said. ### Following a "cultural script" While the primacy of anti-women, or anti-feminist, conspiracism stands out to extremism experts, the attack at the mosque in San Diego has otherwise followed a predictable pattern. In fact, even as some conservative voices on social media [falsely claimed](https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/san-diego-mosque-shooting-another) that it was "staged," evidence so far suggests that the attack is one of the most ideologically clear-cut to have taken place in recent years. "It's been a while since we've had … a true white nationalist attack in the vein of Brenton Tarrant," said Chandler. Tarrant is a terrorist whose deadly attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 has inspired numerous similar acts of white supremacist violence. The video and document attributed to the San Diego suspects were uploaded to an online forum where users share graphic media of murders, suicide, rape and torture. Both are filled with markers that call back to the Christchurch massacre. Matthew Kriner, executive director of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, said that the very creation of the video and document for public consumption strongly situates this attack within a specific subculture of far-right extremism. "The perpetrators filmed their activities in the same script that we've seen previous accelerationist attackers do," Kriner said. "I think what we're seeing right off the bat is a recreation of the Tarrant model of the 'Saints attacker,' wherein Tarrant provided himself as a cultural script." Accelerationism is a tactic embraced by a subset of far-right white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Its adherents promote terrorism and sabotage to incite a race war and to bring about social collapse. Their ultimate goal is to then rebuild society into a patriarchal, white ethnostate. "Saints culture" is a practice within accelerationist and white nationalist spaces, of glorifying and venerating people who have committed violence in pursuit of their ideological goal. Kriner noted that in addition to referring to themselves as "Sons of Tarrant" in their presumed writings, their manner of dress for the attack, the white scrawlings on their weapons and their display of the ["Sonnenrad" symbol](https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2022/may/berger-sonnenrad-explained.html) on their clothing were all hallmarks of the Christchurch attack. He and other experts say the suspects likely created the document and video to shape their own legacy within that subculture and to guide and inspire others to copy them. "That is the goal, is to \[say\], 'Look at what I am doing … remember me for it. … and venerate it. … And in that veneration, copy it. Do it yourself. Create more of it,'" explained Chandler. "That is one of the goals of accelerationism is that by engaging in accelerationism, more people will do it. … and then it will become this tidal wave of violence that will wash away society." This model of movement violence has been disturbingly successful, Chandler said. The Christchurch attack provided inspiration for numerous attacks on U.S. soil. Those include a deadly 2019 massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas; a white supremacist's 2022 shooting spree at a Tops grocery store in a predominantly African American neighborhood of Buffalo, New York; a 2022 mass shooting at a gay bar in Colorado Springs, Colo.; a 2023 attack on African Americans at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Fla. Outside of the U.S., it has similarly been tied to numerous instances of hate-driven violence. "These movements, they're not confined by borders. They are truly transnational," said Beirich. "There have been killings in multiple countries motivated by the same idea: in Germany, in Norway, in the United States, in New Zealand, in Serbia not that long ago, in Bratislava, in Slovakia." ### Turning a blind eye to far-right violence Beirich and other extremism experts say the attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego is a clear warning signal that the longstanding problem of white supremacist terrorism has not gone away. And so it has rekindled concern over the Trump administration's pivot away from countering violent, far-right extremism domestically and abroad. This month, the White House released the 2025 [United States Counterterrorism Strategy](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-USCT-Strategy-1.pdf) document, outlining its priorities and approach to protecting the homeland. It highlights three major terrorist threats to the U.S.: narcoterrorists, Islamist terrorists and violent left-wing extremists. Nowhere does the document mention far right, neo-Nazi or white supremacist threats. "Far-right terrorism is alive and well, but you wouldn't know it from reading this document," said Colin Clarke, executive director of the Soufan Center, a nonprofit that focuses on global security. "This is an unserious document written by unserious people about a deadly serious subject." In addition to the omission of far-right terrorism, the document's mention of "violent secular political groups" who are "radically pro-transgender" and of political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood have raised eyebrows. "I'm not sure … why gender should factor into a counterterrorism strategy, but there it is," Clarke said. Although the strategy document opens with a rejection of partisanship in the work of assessing and countering security threats to the U.S., Clarke and others say the strategy reeks of partisanship. Clarke pointed out that former President Joe Biden's name is mentioned seven times throughout the document. Lebanese Hezbollah, a proxy of the Iranian government, with which the U.S. is currently at war, is mentioned twice. In a statement about the counterterrorism strategy, the White House's principal deputy press secretary, Anna Kelly, wrote, in part, "When President Trump returned to the White House, four years of weakness, failure, surrender, and humiliation under the failed Biden administration came to an end. Today, our nation is strong, our borders are secure, and the United States is respected all over the world. "I'd like to think about what threats myself and my family will face if we're going to a concert, a parade to the mall, and who is going to harm us," said Michael Duffin, a candidate for Virginia's 8th Congressional District and a former counterterrorism official at the State Department. "And it's not members of the Muslim Brotherhood. It's not members of the far left. It's white supremacists. It's people inspired by ISIS. And those are the actors that this national security strategy should be focused on." "It's quite dangerous," said Clarke. "It makes the country less safe because it shows you what this administration is focused on and what it's not focused on, where we're going to dedicate resources and where we're not going to dedicate resources."

Benjamin Alire Sáenz, an award-winning fiction writer and poet who drew upon his sexuality and his life on the southern border, has died at age 71. He was the first Latino to win the PEN/Faulkner prize. Sáenz, who produced a story collection that won the PEN/Faulkner prize and a young adult novel that received acclaim from readers and reviewers and condemnation from censors, died on 28 July in El Paso, [Texas](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/texas), after a lengthy illness, according to a spokesperson for Simon & Schuster. Sáenz, born in Old Picacho, New Mexico, was an ordained Catholic priest who eventually left the order and came out as gay. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, the story of two Mexican American boys falling in love, was published in 2012 and received a pair of citations for outstanding LGBTQ+ literature: a Stonewall book award and the Lambda literary award. In [a tribute posted](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DbfNztuulYj/) to the late author’s Instagram account on Saturday, Sáenz is described as a writer whose words ensured visibility and belonging among people who have been pushed into the margins of society. “Ben believed that words could build bridges where walls once stood. He believed that every life mattered, every story deserved to be told, and every soul longed to be seen,” the post reads. “He wrote of lonely boys who discovered they were worthy of love. He wrote of deserts, rivers, family, memory, grief, forgiveness, and hope…But more than anything, he wrote toward the light.” This sentiment was echoed by playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, who narrated the audio edition of [Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe](https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/nov/13/review-aristotle-and-dante-discover-secrets-universe-benjamin-alire-saenz), helped produce the 2023 film adaptation, and lent his voice to the audiobook for Sáenz’s sequel novel Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World. “Heartbroken by the passing of \[Benjamin Alire Sáenz\]. Forever grateful he trusted me to narrate both audiobooks of Aristotle & Dante’s adventures…Condolences to his galaxy of friends and family. Rest easy, maestro,” Miranda [wrote in an Instagram post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbYTlZqgIkr/) the day after Sáenz’s death. The film adaptation’s director, Aitch Alberto, also posted a tribute to the man whom she described as more than just an author. “He was a friend, a believer in me, and one of the greatest supporters of my work and my voice. He trusted me with Ari and Dante, with characters and a world that came from somewhere so deeply personal to him, and that trust changed the course of my life,” she wrote. Though Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is considered a part of the LGBTQIA+ literary canon, the love story at its center led to its temporary removal from a school district in Granbury, Texas, and to bans in Russia and in Belarus. Sáenz’s other books included the poetry collection The Book of What Remains and such adult novels as In Perfect Light and Names on a Map. He received the PEN/Faulkner award in 2013 for Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club, a story collection set in El Paso, and across the border in Juarez, Mexico. Starting in the 1990s, he taught for decades at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he had received a master’s degree in creative writing. He served as chair of the school’s creative writing department before retiring in 2016. Next month, Simon & Schuster will publish When the World Was Happy, which draws in part upon the loss of his niece in 1990 in a bowling alley shooting in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Sáenz was reminded of that tragedy by the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. “That was when I decided that this was not gonna leave me alone until I wrote about it,” he wrote in an author’s note shared by the publisher. “I wanted to write a book about how people survive and live through something as senseless as this.”