Why Are We Having More Political Violence? (New title, same meeting)

New introduction added after the initial announcement (based on new events). Could we have an uptick in rhetoric and actual political violence because we have a president who posts a video of himself dumping crap from a helicopter on protestors? Perhaps it's because he told protestors on his side to go to the capital and "fight like hell", so they did by attacking, injuring, and killing law enforcement officers and threatening to hang Mike Pence. Then they were pardoned after being convicted. Violence is definitely made easier because the U.S. has more guns than citizens.
Google AI says:
Political violence is on the rise in the U.S. and other democratic nations, driven by extreme polarization, political leaders' incendiary rhetoric, and increasing distrust in institutions.
Recent incidents include assassinations, attacks on officials, and a surge in vigilante violence.

• Assassination of Charlie Kirk: In September 2025, conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was fatally shot at a speaking event in Utah.
• Assassination of Melissa Hortman: Democratic Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed in an assassination in June 2025.
• Attacks on government facilities:
• In October 2025, a shooting targeted an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Dallas.
• The Republican Party headquarters in New Mexico was set on fire in 2025.
• In 2024, a Democratic campaign office in Arizona was fired upon multiple times.
• Other attacks on officials:
• An arsonist set fire to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's residence in 2025.
• In 2024, then-candidate Donald Trump survived two separate assassination attempts.

Contributing factors: Intense political polarization: Extreme ideological division creates an "us vs. them" mentality, making followers more likely to excuse violence from their side.

• Leader rhetoric: Incendiary language from political and media leaders that dehumanizes opponents has been identified as a key driver of violence. Conversely, when leaders insist on non-violence, it can help curb aggression.
• Structural factors: A two-party, winner-take-all system can intensify competition and create incentives for a zero-sum approach to politics, which increases the likelihood of violence. Social media algorithms also contribute to online radicalization by amplifying conspiracy theories and hate.
• Lack of trust: Waning public trust in institutions, including the justice system and elections, pushes some people toward extra-legal violence.

From PBS Newshour: Over a third of the presidents in the 20th century experienced assassination attempts, and two of them were killed. Activists were also assaulted and killed. During the Jim Crow era, in the first half of the 20th century, ordinary citizens, especially Black Americans, were regularly lynched. But historians say the closest analogue to today’s uptick in political violence is the 1960s and 1970s, when President John F. Kennedy, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy and George Wallace were shot.
While the perpetrators often had mental health issues, they seemed to have been shaped by the heated political times that seemed to polarize the population, said Kevin M. Schultz, a University of Illinois-Chicago historian.
Recent political violence has affected both Democrats and Republicans. Republicans were targeted in a mass shooting at a congressional baseball practice in 2017. Democrats were targeted in the 2011 shooting of then-Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz.; a 2022 attack on the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; and the attacks on Hortman and Shapiro in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, respectively.
The most dramatic event was on Jan. 6, 2021, when the U.S. Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters who falsely claimed Democrats had stolen the 2020 election. When Trump won back the White House four years later, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of everyone who had been charged in the attack. In 2023, Reuters identified about 200 more instances of political violence since Jan. 6, 2021. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-recent-political-violence-in-the-u-s-fits-into-a-long-dark-history#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20Left%20is%20the%20party,side%20in%20doing%20the%20same.%E2%80%9D
From the New York Times:
The 20-year-old man who nearly killed President Trump last summer in Butler, Pa., remains a cipher, with a profile more typical of a self-annihilating school shooter. The 57-year-old accused of murdering Melissa Hortman, the Democratic state lawmaker in Minnesota, and her husband, Mark, was a job-hopping father of five and apparently a committed conservative, though he offered no explanation for his acts.
There’s little doubt that the young man accused of shooting Charlie Kirk was angry with the right-wing activist’s political views. “I had enough of his hatred,” the 22-year-old suspect wrote in a text to his roommate, according to evidence released on Tuesday. “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” (Video of Charlie Kirk explaining acceptable gun deaths to protect gun freedoms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMzr5cDKza0)
“Understanding political violence is often about understanding an ideology of last resorts,” Kellie Carter Jackson, a historian and professor at Wellesley College, writes in her book, “Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence.” But if previous periods of violence could be understood as clashes of grand visions for the nation, today’s ideologies are just as likely to be nihilism and despair. Once there were movements and organizations. Today we have the lone individual, lost in a conversation with an online void.
Fevers of violence tend to occur during periods of political realignment, when the country’s two political parties are closely matched combatants and their constituencies are shifting, according to Rachel Kleinfeld, an expert on political violence and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We are witnessing that kind of movement now as the right gains support from the working class and the Democrats become the party of wealthy suburban voters. Neither side has been able to build a lasting majority coalition. The popular vote margin for the White House has been in the single digits for 10 straight cycles, longer than any other stretch in the country’s history.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/magazine/tyler-robinson-political-violence.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nk8.aNnO.qOPxeKobH0TA&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare#
Politico reported on Tuesday that young Republican leaders (some who work in government positions) had a private Telegram group chat where they made racist, antisemitic, homophobic and pro-Hitler comments and made violent jokes about political opponents, including proposing sending them to gas chambers.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/private-chat-among-young-gop-club-members-00592146
This just happened: “I just have to warn our Sunday morning viewers here, this the president of the United States posting this,” network mainstay Manu Raju said Sunday morning before playing the clip, which features a computer-rendered, crowned version of Donald Trump flying a fighter jet that proceeds to dump mounds of feces over crowds of protesters. Trump had indeed himself posted the video to Truth Social, later also shared on X by the official White House account, the evening before. The post was shared in response to more than 2,600 “No Kings” demonstrations across the country and at U.S. embassies around the world.

Why is political violence happening and becoming acceptable?
Can it be tamped down?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/