Threats of Violence Are Bad. Actual Violence Is Worse

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, November 02, 2025

 

Without question, the threats that are reportedly being directed at Indiana’s Republican lawmakers are a big story. Indeed, they’re part of a larger story — one that the coverage of that ongoing national disgrace is missing.

 

“At least 11 elected Republicans in Indiana have been the targets of swatting attacks and other threats in the weeks since President Donald Trump publicly pressured state lawmakers to approve a new congressional map that would benefit Republicans,” NBC News reported Monday.

 

The harassment campaign has taken many forms, from prank pizza orders delivered to lawmakers’ homes (which is unnerving enough, insofar as the pranksters know where these lawmakers live) to bomb threats:

 

 

NBC News’ dispatch pins the blame for the Indian GOP’s torment on the president. Senator Chuck Schumer did the same on Monday when his office published a statement alerting the public to threats to his office in emails with the “subject line ‘MAGA’ and from an email address alleging the ‘2020 election was rigged.’”

 

The threats against lawmakers, appointed officials, judges, and other representatives of the state have increased markedly in recent years. Congressman Jared Golden cited those threats as one of the conditions that forced him out of politics. So, too, did Marjorie Taylor Greene in explaining her resignation from Congress. The threat environment surely has other effects on the psychology of lawmakers, some of whom have reportedly confessed to colleagues that they were successfully cowed by the mob into doing its bidding.

 

At least now, the press is attuned to the challenge posed by threats of violence — or, rather, they are when those threats are believed to come from right-wing lunatics. If only we could say we were a long way off from the summer of 2022, when an advanced attempt on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s life prompted Politico’s Michael Schaffer to call the thwarted attack “not especially hair-raising.” After all, threats against judges and lawmakers had increased by orders of magnitude in this decade, forcing the attempted assassination of Justice Kavanaugh to “elbow for space in our mental list of near-misses.”

 

The parts of this equation that the press and their Democratic allies continue to miss — perhaps because they’re professionally obligated to miss it — are the ongoing acts of violence that have made the present threat environment so unnerving.

 

You’ll struggle to find coverage of the firebombing attack on a Los Angeles federal building on Monday outside of Fox News. The potentially deadly assault was described by its perpetrator as a “terrorist attack.” His targets were fortunate that the Molotov cocktails he threw into the building failed to produce much damage, although the attacker had additional incendiary devices in his possession at the time of his apprehension.

 

The attacker’s motives are not hard to divine:

 

Federal investigators said the man appeared to be motivated by his anger at the federal government over immigration enforcement activities. After his arrest, the suspect allegedly told federal agents they were “separating families” and added, “this is a terrorist attack anyways,” and, “I attacked your b—- a–.”

 

The disparity between the coverage of potential right-wing violence and active episodes of left-wing political terrorism is hard to ignore. That disparity features prominently in my forthcoming book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America (available now for pre-order wherever fine books are sold).

 

The practitioners of political violence take inspiration both from their comrades in arms and the provocations of their opponents — especially when it seems that their opponents enjoy the support or, at least, the deference of governmental and institutional stakeholders. The history of political terrorism in America is replete with violent actors who convinced themselves that the state had already gone to war with them. Retaliation, therefore, isn’t even preemptive; it’s proportional.

 

The threats against lawmakers are real, condemnable, and a threat to the good working order of the republic. Actual acts of violence are all those things and more. But amid this current wave of left-wing violence, the left’s allies have no incentive to observe consistency. This asymmetry is as much an environmental contributor to a potentially violent psychology as any other inducement.