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How much longer will Democrats accept their supporters’ escalating calls for violence?
The weekend “Hands Off” protests were wholly expected. President Trump riles up the left like few can.
During his first term, the pink-hat protesters hit the streets days after his inauguration. That this administration made it to April without them was something of a miracle.
But Saturday’s demonstrations featured an undercurrent of violent rhetoric.
In New York, a man dressed up as Luigi of “Super Mario Bros.” to honor Luigi Mangione, the murderer of health-care executive Brian Thompson. He carried a sign calling for Trump to be “deposed” — that is, violently overthrown.
In Holland, Mich., Redmond, Ore., and elsewhere, grinning marchers wore shirts and carried placards emblazoned with the number “8647,” pairing the old slang term for murder with a 47 for Trump.
One 8647 protester stood right alongside Minnesota Attorney Gen. Keith Ellison in Minneapolis.
“Hands off or heads off,” read the message on a life-sized guillotine paraded about in Denver.
Protesters vandalized ICE and DHS vehicles in Washington, DC, defacing several and puncturing their tires — after weeks of viral videos of people keying, graffitiing or burning Teslas permeated social media.
It’s not just property either: Over the weekend, a man was arrested in Portland after he used a laser to attempt to blind a Tesla employee.
A leftist protester who blocked traffic at a “Hands Off” rally in Lafayette, Ind., head-butted a driver who confronted him, bloodying the driver’s nose, local police said.
On Thursday, conservative students hosting a speaker at the University of California-Davis were targeted by masked assailants who tore up literature and wrecked tents and tables.
That same day in Harlem, an angry leftist punched a pro-life activist in the face while she was conducting a live interview. She was left bloodied and needed stitches.
A new report from the Network Contagion Research Institute found that more than half of left-leaning Americans say political violence is “acceptable” — with 55% of them seeing “some justification” for assassinating Trump.
It certainly feels like a powder keg, as violence is excused and celebrated online as never before.
I saw my first inkling of this trend on my Facebook feed soon after November’s election — political memes and posts with increasingly savage imagery and language.
I didn’t follow any of these pages, or any accounts similar to them. Yet Facebook began repeatedly showing me far-left commentary that veered into violent fantasy.
One of these was a photoshop of Melania Trump cozying up to Mangione, murmuring, “I was wondering if you could do me a little favor.”
Fantasizing about killing Trump, just after two attempts were made on his life, is perfectly acceptable on the platform that once banned people for questioning whether masking was effective against COVID.
Another group, Guillotines for a Better America, revels in this imagery.
One recent post, picturing cartoon children beating a piñata, was captioned, “Instead of fruitlessly waiting for wealth to trickle down, beat the rich with blunt instruments until the gold flows.”
I’ve been fed multiple versions of a purported still from “The Simpsons” showing a blood-covered Trump in a casket with the date April 12, 2025. It’s fake, but disturbingly popular.
This kind of content is served to me regularly. This is, allegedly, humor.
The hysterical online aggression is beginning to spill off the internet into the real world. It feels dangerous, much like the run-up to the “mostly peaceful” riots of 2020 that left 25 people dead.
We watched cities burn then as Democrats, and their media friends, tried to excuse away the horror.
But now Democratic politicians have gotten very quiet.
For months they’ve been agitating their base.
“We are at war,” Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) shouted in February, as she denounced what she called Trump’s “hostile takeover” of the government he was elected to lead.
“We have to fight in the streets,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.).
Now, the fuse is lit — and the elected firebrands have nothing to say.
Voters chose Trump, very recently and very specifically, to shake Washington up.
It’s OK to protest, to loudly oppose the changes Trump was elected to make. That’s part of America’s political legacy.
But “assassination culture,” as the lead author of the NCRI report calls the new spike in violent rhetoric, is not.
Democrats don’t get a pass on it this time. They set this ball rolling; they own it. Their silence now is encouragement.
They need to be the ones to stop it. Time to take responsibility and lower the temperature.
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