[Pieter Vree is Editor of the NOR.]
The history of the United States reads like a timeline of violence. It’s a nation that was born in violence (Revolutionary War), secured by violence (War of 1812), preserved by violence (Civil War), and expanded by violence (Mexican-American War, Spanish-American War, and the American Indian Wars). Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the United States has brought its expertise in violence to bear on the world at large (World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War, not to mention numerous brushfire conflicts, gun-running ops, and personnel training here, there, and everywhere, including two present proxy wars in Gaza and Ukraine).
American history classes are taught according to this very timeline, with attention allotted to exceptional periods “between the wars.” Such classes teach not only about “wars between countries, but wars declared on poverty, drugs, and crime. Even when we teach about the civil rights movement, we are not necessarily teaching about nonviolence, but an orchestrated response to violence,” writes Kellie Carter Jackson in Daedalus (Winter 2022).
We love our war heroes: George Washington, Alvin York, George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, James Doolittle, Audie Murphy, Desmond Doss, Chris Kyle, Marcus Luttrell — each has been immortalized not only in our history books but on the silver screen. And we love our outlaws, too. Their lore is just as lengthy and celebrated in academics and popular culture. The names of our favorites are etched in our national memory: Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, Black Bart, Doc Holliday, Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, and Bonnie and Clyde. Heck, there was even a popular “outlaw” subgenre in country and western music. Perhaps you’ve heard of Waylon Jennings?
What do those in the foregoing lists of heroes and outlaws all have in common? They were all masters of violence. They all used violence to achieve a certain end: overwhelming defeat of their enemies. The primary thing that distinguishes the killers in the first group from those in the second is that the former were commissioned by the U.S. government. This, we believe, means they are due obeisance. We honor our commissioned killers, great and unremarkable, with three national holidays: Independence Day, Memorial Day, and Veterans’ Day.
Killing for a cause holds a place of honor in our national heart. But our national heart is also a rebel heart. Despite ostensibly fighting wars “For God and Country” (as is the motto of the American Legion, an organization of U.S. veterans), we also see ourselves as the heirs of revolution, standing athwart received traditions and systems of “control,” be they monarchism, colonialism, slavery, papism, communism, fascism, or any other form of “oppression.” And this fighting American revolutionary spirit endures.
It is a spirit that has informed the outlaws whose mission (usually of their own devising) has been to kill members of the U.S. government, especially our presidents. In addition to the famous (or infamous) American assassins — John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, and John Hinckley Jr. — we have:
- Richard Lawrence (who attempted to assassinate Andrew Jackson in 1835)
- Charles Guiteau (who assassinated James Garfield in 1881)
- John Schrank (who shot former president Theodore Roosevelt in 1912)
- Giuseppe Zangara (who shot at Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 but instead mortally wounded Anton Cermak, mayor of Chicago)
- Arthur Bremer (who shot presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972, leaving him permanently paralyzed from the waist down)
- “Squeaky” Fromme and Sara Jane Moore (who attempted to assassinate Gerald Ford in 1975)
- Francisco Martin Duran (who attempted to assassinate Bill Clinton in 1994 by firing a semi-automatic rifle at the White House)
- Oscar Ortega-Hernandez (who attempted to assassinate Barack Obama in 2011 by the same means as Duran)
- Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Routh (who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump in 2024; the former shot him in the ear)
Presidents are not the only political targets of American assassins; lower-level politicians are in their crosshairs, too. Carl Weiss assassinated Huey Long, Democratic governor of Louisiana, in 1935. John Patler assassinated George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, in 1967. Dan White assassinated George Moscone and Harvey Milk, Democratic mayor and homosexual supervisor, respectively, of San Francisco in 1978. Charles Harrelson assassinated John Wood Jr., a federal judge, in 1979. Dennis Sweeney assassinated former New York Rep. Allard K. Lowenstein, a Democrat, in 1980. Julie Van Orden assassinated Russell Lloyd Sr., Democratic mayor of Evansville, Indiana, in 1980. Othniel Askew assassinated James E. Davis, a Democratic New York City councilman, in 2003.
More recently, Jared Loughner attempted to assassinate Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords, a Democrat, in 2011, shooting her in the head outside a Safeway and killing six others, including John Roll, a federal judge. James Hodgkinson attempted to assassinate Republican congressmen at a charity baseball event in Virginia in 2017, wounding Steve Scalise, U.S. House majority whip. Eight men were convicted in 2020 of plotting to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, Democratic governor of Michigan. Quintez Brown attempted to assassinate Craig Greenberg, Democratic mayor of Louisville, Kentucky, in 2022. Jeffrey Michael Kelly was arrested in connection with three shootings at a Democratic Party campaign office in Tempe, Arizona, in 2024.
In this year alone, Vance Boelter shot and killed Melissa Hortman, Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representative, and her husband (and injured Sen. John Hoffman and his wife). Cody Balmer set fire to the home of Josh Shapiro, Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, while Shapiro and his family were inside. Shotsie Michael Buck-Hayes set Lee Vogler, a Republican city councilman of Danville, Virginia, on fire, leaving him with burns on 60 percent of his body. And Louis Geri was apprehended with over 200 explosives outside the Catholic Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C., where the annual Red Mass was scheduled to mark the start of the new term of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Not only are politicians targeted, so are significant public figures. From Joseph Smith, leader of the Mormon Church (1844), to John Lennon (1980), from Malcolm X (1965) and Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) to investigative journalist Don Bolles (1976) and talk-show host Alan Berg (1984), the list of the assassinated drags on. We can add to it Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Luigi Mangione has been accused of shooting Thompson to death in 2024. Like many before him, Thompson’s alleged assassin has become something of a folk hero — in this case, among young women. Mangione has a veritable harem on his trail. One lass even says she fell in love with — and married — Mangione’s AI avatar. No, that’s not weird at all. “I talk to him every day. He’s like my best friend,” she told the New York Post (Sept. 16). “We plan, like, a whole future together. We named our kids together. He’s, like, so supportive of me and everything I do.” The unnamed 27-year-old was one of a throng of female supporters wearing “Free Luigi” shirts and hoisting anti-health-insurance-industry placards outside the Manhattan Supreme Court during Mangione’s trial. Yes, we do love our outlaws, whom we treat like celebrities. Assassination is the ultimate form of political theater.
The latest sensational assassination occurred this September, when a gunman shot and killed Charlie Kirk, 31, a conservative polemicist and Trump defender who was known for setting up tables on university campuses and inviting students to debate him about whatever topic they choose, often sexual libertinism. Kirk’s assassination, like the majority listed above, was committed with a firearm. He was shot through the neck from a distance with what is believed to have been an older German-made rifle. Regardless of the type used, firearms are “symbolic objects in their own right,” writes Maurizio Valsania in The Conversation (Sept. 12). They embody “authority,” carry “cultural meaning,” and give those who wield them “the sense that legitimacy itself could be claimed at the barrel of a gun.” Consider this: Inscriptions on four bullet casings left at the scene of Kirk’s killing at Utah Valley University in Orem reference transgender ideology and Antifa, a decentralized left-wing movement that opposes “fascism,” often through violent means. (For a look into the violence inherent in the trans movement, see my column “Mirror of Society,” Oct.). Here we can see cultural meaning in, and the attempt to claim legitimacy through, force of arms.
On some level, Kirk — a Christian who leaves behind a wife and two young children — must have understood the risk he was running with his open-air, open-space debates. “Assassination culture is spreading on the left,” he posted on X five months before his own assassination. “The left is being whipped into a violent frenzy. Any setback, whether losing an election or losing a court case, justifies a maximally violent response. This is the natural outgrowth of left-wing protest culture tolerating violence and mayhem for years on end.”
Kirk was referring to a report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), released in April, which found that a growing number of Americans are willing to justify and even approve lethal violence in the name of politics. NCRI conducted a survey of more than 1,200 adults, weighted to reflect national census demographics, and found that 38 percent said it would be “somewhat justified” to murder Trump, with 31 percent saying the same of Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and, until recently, head of Trump’s federal Department of Government Efficiency. When counting only left-leaning respondents, justification for killing Trump rose to 55 percent, and Musk to 48 percent. “What was formerly taboo culturally has become acceptable,” said Joel Finkelstein, lead author of the report. “We are seeing a clear shift — glorification, increased attempts and changing norms — all converging into what we define as ‘assassination culture.’”
The NCRI report ends on a cautionary note: The normalization of political violence is spilling into everyday life. Whether it’s vandalism of Tesla cars and dealerships or assassinations and assassination attempts, political violence is no longer a fringe occurrence but culturally fashionable, encouraged by online interactions. Indeed, the Internet is now the primary breeding ground for assassins. But before we lay blame for the legacy of political violence entirely at the feet of leftists, let’s acknowledge that American “assassination culture” cuts across genders, races, creeds, party lines, and political persuasions. Just see the lists above. And though left-wing violence appears to be outpacing right-wing violence at the moment (contrary to the larger trend), most political violence “is committed by people who do not belong to any formal organization,” as people now “self-radicalize via online engagement,” writes Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Journal of Democracy, Oct. 2021). If that’s so, then most assassins are not operatives of larger organizations but lone wolves, though their beliefs might align with popular ideologies or movements. Theirs, then, are acts of disorganized violence.
Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s alleged assassin, seems to fit this description. He’s what’s called a Very Online youth who spent considerable time in niche corners of the Internet, where extremists often congregate to share ideas and tactics. “I had enough of his hatred,” Robinson reportedly texted his transgender lover on the day of Kirk’s killing. “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Robinson seems to have pegged Kirk, who was known to argue against transgenderism, as a purveyor of hate speech.
For this reason — and because he was engaged in a debate when he was murdered — Kirk has been called a martyr for free speech. If that’s the case, then there’s at least a little irony in the fact that leftists who’ve spoken ill of Kirk on social media since his death (for example, calling him a fascist or a Nazi) or celebrated his death (which is even more despicable) are being fired from their jobs for doing so — to the glee of conservatives. As these same conservatives have long argued, free speech includes hate speech. You might not like what’s being said, but it’s protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
What constitutes hate speech is, however, in the ear of the listener — generally, it’s whatever offends your sensibilities. Charlie Kirk lost his life for what someone else considered hate speech. Should others, even unhinged moral reprobates, lose their livelihoods because someone with a different set of values disagrees with them? Free speech is a double-edged sword. It cuts both ways.
Some conservatives are even calling for prosecution of those who’ve gloated over Kirk’s death. But if hate speech were a punishable crime, the NOR would have been shut down and its writers and editors locked up long ago for speaking out against such things as abortion “rights,” assisted suicide, same-sex “marriage,” Muslim terrorism, Zionism, eugenics, and COVID-19 hysteria.
As we grieve for Kirk — “I’m this close” to converting to Catholicism, he told Bishop Joseph Brennan of Fresno a little more than a week before he was killed (Angelus News, Sept. 18) — and ponder what his murder means for the future of American political discourse, we must acknowledge that our so-called assassination culture is nothing new. The blood shed by assassins runs deep into our national soil. “Violence has never been a distortion in American politics. It has been one of its recurring features, not an aberration but a persistent force,” writes Valsania. “Political violence has always been part of America’s story, not a passing anomaly, and not an episode.” Political violence, especially in the form of assassinations, has a long and storied history in the United States.
Assassination culture is here to stay. And assassination culture has always been here. It’s the shadow across our politics, an internal expression of the violence on which our nation was founded, by which we identify ourselves as a people, and which we still celebrate in all its lurid appeal.
©2025 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.
The foregoing article, "Assassination Nation," was originally published in the November, 2025 issue of the New Oxford Review and is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.
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