#political violence

#political violence

House Republicans are proposing increasing security funding by $30 million in the wake of growing concerns about political violence in the country. The funding is included in a stopgap bill to fund the government that Republican leaders hope to approve this week ahead of a Sept. 29 deadline. It is unclear if the legislation has enough votes to pass. House Administration Chair Bryan Steil, R-Wis., briefed House Republicans about existing safety resources for members during a closed-door weekly conference meeting Tuesday morning.

For a moment, the fatal shooting of conservative activist and influencer Charlie Kirk last week pushed an already divided nation to its brink. Members of Congress screamed at each other on the House floor: Democrats blamed Republicans for fostering gun culture and mass shootings, while Republicans blamed Democrats for branding them "Nazis" and "fascists." MAGA influencers posted calls to rain retribution and vengeance on the left, citing dubious reports that the bullets had been carved with "pro-trans" messages.

But in fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical. Rather than grappling with reality, right-wing figures are using Kirk's murder to prop up their fictional world. Briefly, they claimed Robinson had been radicalized in college. Then, when it turned out he had spent only a single semester at a liberal arts college before going to trade school, MAGA pivoted to attack those who allegedly had celebrated Kirk's death on social media.

Lee said he wants to calm the "charged atmosphere" in the wake of Kirk's death. Bittner said the violence briefly gave her pause about running for office, but she concluded that "there's no way to solve this problem if we shrink back in fear." Lee, a former Brooklyn Park City Council member, easily won a three-way Democratic primary in August. Bittner, a real estate agent, was the sole Republican on the primary ballot for the seat in the heavily Democratic district.

REPORTER: Do you think it would have been fitting to lower the flags to half-staff when Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota House Speaker, was gunned down by an assassin as well? TRUMP: I'm not familiar. The who? REPORTER: The Minnesota House Speaker, a Democrat TRUMP: Oh. REPORTER: who was assassinated this summer, and the TRUMP: Well, if the Governor had asked me to do that, I would have done that, but the Governor of Minnesota didn't ask me.

a visa "means you're a visitor to the United States" and "we are not in the business of inviting people to visit our country who are going to be involved in negative and destructive behavior."

That led some in MAGA to question whether Patel was capable of leading the Kirk investigation, much less the crackdowns on political violence the movement desires. What they're saying: Patel "performed terribly in the last few days, and it's not clear whether he has the operational expertise to investigate, infiltrate, and disrupt the violent movements - of whatever ideology - that threaten the peace in the United States," right-wing writer Christopher Rufo wrote on X.

"I believe that social media has played a direct role in every single assassination and assassination attempt we've seen over the last five, six years. There is no question in my mind," Cox told NBC News' 'Meet the Press' on Sunday. "Cancer probably isn't a strong enough word. What we have done to our kids. It has taken us a decade to understand how evil these algorithms really are."

The student, he said, wondered whether recent events carried any echoes of the past. Hyperbolic comparisons between modern political conflict and the horrific bloodshed of past centuries have previously been the stuff of doomsday prepper threads on Reddit, but this week's shooting made it a mainstream topic of conversation. While cautioning that the country is nowhere near as fractured as it was when the Civil War erupted, Waite and other scholars of the period say they do increasingly see parallels.