When Tribalism Becomes Violence: America’s Bipartisan Descent **POLITICAL VIOLENCE · ANALYSIS** *Security Intelligence Review · April 26, 2026* ----- **A 2025 poll asked Americans whether political violence is ever justified for political gain. Republicans said yes at 35%. Democrats said yes at 23. Both majorities said no. But in a country where political violence has hit its highest level since the 1970s, those minority percentages represent millions of people who have already crossed a psychological threshold.** **Last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is not an isolated event. It is the latest data point in a documented, accelerating pattern — and it runs in both directions.** ----- ## The Numbers Don’t Lie — But They Do Surprise Before assigning blame, look at the data. It tells a story more complicated than either side wants to hear. Political violence is now at its highest level in the United States since the 1970s. In the first half of 2025, there were roughly 150 recorded politically motivated attacks — almost double from the same period in 2024. Threat actors have crossed the political spectrum, including right-wing extremists, left-wing militants, and unaffiliated actors. The U.S. Capitol Police is on track to investigate over 14,000 possible threats against lawmakers this year, up from 9,474 in an already busy 2024. Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative recorded almost 300 instances of threats and harassment against mayors, city councilors and other local officials in just the first half of 2025 — up 9% year over year. This is not a partisan problem. It is an American problem. ----- ## The Right: A Longer, Deadlier History The historical record on the right is unambiguous. Right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for approximately 75% to 80% of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths since 2001. Illustrative cases include the 2015 Charleston church shooting, when white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine Black parishioners; the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue attack in Pittsburgh, where 11 worshippers were murdered; and the 2019 El Paso Walmart massacre, in which an anti-immigrant gunman killed 23 people. The threat did not disappear in 2025. It evolved. Brandon Russell, founder of the Florida-based neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, was sentenced in August 2025 to 20 years in federal prison for a plot targeting the Baltimore power grid. A 24-year-old Tennessee man affiliated with white supremacist movements was arrested by the FBI before he could execute a plan to attach explosives to a drone and fly it into a Nashville electric substation — motivated by accelerationist ideology seeking societal collapse. Right-wing extremist activity is dominated by intimidation, coercive rhetoric, and explicit threats rather than sustained physical violence — a strategic reliance on psychological pressure and symbolic violence to instill fear, gain visibility, and exert influence while minimizing immediate legal risk. The infrastructure of radicalization — online platforms, decentralized cells, accelerationist ideology — remains active and expanding. ----- ## The Left: Rising From a Low Base The left’s record is shorter, less lethal historically — but the trend line in 2025 is undeniable. From 1994–2000, the average was approximately 0.6 left-wing terrorist incidents per year. Beginning roughly in 2016, the trend picked up substantially, averaging about 4.0 per year from 2016 through 2024. Two dominant ideological motives underpin the rise: partisan extremism — attacks on officials viewed as illegitimate or evil — and anti-government extremism targeting institutions viewed as oppressive. The cases in 2025 are concrete and serious. On January 28, 2025, Riley Jane English, 24, was arrested on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., carrying two Molotov cocktails and a folding knife. According to prosecutors, she intended to kill Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — whom she described as a “Nazi” — before shifting focus to House Speaker Mike Johnson and then Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. In September 2025, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on a Utah college campus. The alleged shooter told his roommate, “some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Three months earlier, Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed at home. On March 30, 2025, an assailant set fire to the headquarters of the Republican Party of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Both Kirk and Hortman — a conservative and a liberal — were killed within months of each other. That is the reality of 2025. ----- ## The WHCD Shooter: Where Does He Fit? Cole Tomas Allen — the man who breached security at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner — had documented anti-Trump and anti-Christian rhetoric across his social media. He was linked to “The Wide Awakes” and attended a “No Kings” protest in California. His manifesto targeted administration officials by rank. On the surface, his profile reads as left-motivated. But researchers who study political violence urge caution about clean categorization. “The rush to assign blame to the traditional binary of left versus right politically, I think, is an exercise in futility — because it’s much more complicated than that a lot of times,” said Luke Baumgartner, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. Political violence is “primarily conducted by individuals who have a highly personalized and individualized ideology, if you can call it that.” Allen fits the broader profile more than the partisan one: a person radicalized by grievance, consuming extremist content, seeking significance through violence, and constructing a personal moral framework that justified targeting other human beings. That profile has no party registration. ----- ## Thomas Matthew Crooks: The Butler Question The same nuance applies to Butler. Thomas Matthew Crooks — who shot and nearly killed Donald Trump in July 2024 — was registered Republican who had donated to a progressive group as a teenager. The FBI concluded he had **no clear political motive**. He fits the profile researchers describe most commonly: a socially isolated young man seeking notoriety, not a political soldier. Forcing Crooks into either partisan box distorts the picture. And distorting the picture is precisely what feeds the cycle. > *When we insist every act of violence belongs to the other side, we make the problem worse. We tell our own tribe that they are under attack, and we give the fringe permission to respond.* ----- ## The Perception Gap: The Most Dangerous Statistic Here is the single most important finding in the research — and it gets almost no attention. The Polarization Research Lab found that only 3% of Americans actually support partisan violence. But 44% of each party believes members of the *other* party would support it. Read that again. 3% support it. 44% *believe the other side does.* That gap — between reality and perception — is where radicalization lives. When you believe you are surrounded by people who want to destroy you, defensive violence starts to feel rational. The phantom enemy is more dangerous than the real one, because it justifies preemptive action against people who are, in reality, your neighbors. University of Chicago Political Science Professor Robert Pape described America as being in “a rising era of violent populism — not civil war, but definitely not politics as normal.” He warned that further political violence from factions on both the right and the left is likely if public officials do not take swift action to de-escalate partisan tensions. ----- ## The Tribalism-to-Violence Pipeline How does a person move from political frustration to a loaded shotgun at a hotel checkpoint? The pipeline is well documented and it operates identically across the ideological spectrum. **Step 1 — Dehumanization** The other side stops being political opponents and becomes existential threats. “Nazis.” “Groomers.” “Traitors.” “Terrorists.” Language that removes humanity removes the moral barrier to violence. **Step 2 — Existential framing** Politics stops being about policy and becomes about survival. “They will destroy America.” “They will destroy our children.” When the stakes feel like extinction, extreme action feels like self-defense. **Step 3 — Media ecosystem isolation** When your information environment never shows the other side as human — never shows them as parents, neighbors, people with legitimate fears — the dehumanization deepens. Algorithms reward outrage. Outrage rewards extremism. **Step 4 — Leader validation** When political leaders use violent rhetoric as applause lines — on either side — they signal to the fringe that violence is acceptable. Dog whistles become bull horns. **Step 5 — Institutional distrust** When courts, elections, and government feel rigged or illegitimate, extralegal action starts to feel justified. This is the final gateway. Once institutions lose legitimacy, the only remaining authority is force. **Step 6 — The act** A lone actor, immersed in online radicalization, personally aggrieved, seeking significance, and armed with a moral framework that has classified the target as deserving — pulls a trigger, lights a fire, charges a checkpoint. Unlike the 1960s and 1970s, when political polarization focused on specific issues like civil rights or the Vietnam War, the current environment is more nebulous — without a clear goal that both sides could work toward. This leaves parties in an ideological quagmire, with tensions bubbling over into hostility rather than being channeled into productive action. That absence of a shared goal — a shared America — is the most dangerous condition of all. ----- ## What Both Sides Get Wrong **The right** tends to minimize its own history of organized, lethal extremism while amplifying every left-wing incident. The data does not support equivalence in lethality or frequency — the right’s historical record is significantly worse. Denying that makes the problem harder to address. **The left** tends to dismiss the documented rise in left-wing incidents as statistically insignificant or methodologically flawed. According to researchers’ own data, far-right extremism accounted for an average of approximately 20 plots and attacks per year over the last decade, while far-left extremists were responsible for just four incidents per year during the same period. But four per year becoming ten is a trend, not a rounding error — and dismissing it feeds the right’s grievance narrative. **Both sides** use political violence selectively — mourning their own dead, minimizing or even celebrating the other side’s. That double standard is itself a radicalization accelerant. > *When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, parts of the left celebrated online. When a left-wing protester was killed, parts of the right celebrated online. Every celebration of political violence is a recruitment poster for the other side’s extremists.* ----- ## The Off-Ramp Utah Governor Spencer Cox, speaking after the Kirk assassination, said: “We can return violence with fire and violence. We can return hate with hate. And that’s the problem with political violence — it metastasizes, because we can always point the finger at the other side, and at some point we have to find an off-ramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse.” That off-ramp requires several things none of our current political leaders are consistently doing: - **Condemning violence on your own side** without qualification or whataboutism - **Refusing existential framing** — the other party is not trying to destroy America, they are trying to govern it differently - **Holding media ecosystems accountable** for algorithmically rewarding dehumanization - **Rebuilding institutional trust** — the single greatest driver of political violence is the belief that legitimate channels don’t work - **Remembering the 3%** — the vast majority of Americans, left and right, do not want this The poll that opened this piece showed 35% of Republicans and 23% of Democrats believe political violence can be justified. Those numbers are alarming. But they also mean 65% of Republicans and 77% of Democrats said no. The majority is still there. It is just not as loud as the fringe. **It needs to get louder.** ----- *Sources: Toda Peace Institute · University of Chicago Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) · Polarization Research Lab · Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS): “Left-Wing Terrorism and Political Violence in the United States,” September 2025 · PBS NewsHour political violence analysis · CBS News political violence reporting, October 2025 · ASIS Security Management · Lowy Institute · Just Security · Princeton University Bridging Divides Initiative · Observatorio Internacional de Estudios sobre Terrorismo (monthly reports, 2025–2026) · Political Polls (@PpollingNumbers) via X, April 25, 2026.* ----- *Security Intelligence Review publishes independent national security and political analysis. If this piece was shared with you, consider subscribing for ongoing coverage.*