Front Burner - The return of political violence

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk we're joined by Bruce Hoffman, a Senior Fellow for counter terrorism and homeland security at the Council for Foreign Relations.He helps us understand the history of assassinations, the connections between violent rhetoric and incidents of material violence, and the online meme-world that communicates motives that are unintelligible to those outside that ecosystem.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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This is a CBC podcast. Hi, everyone. I'm Jamie Poisson. After one of the least politically violent eras in American history, the last few years have seen the reintroduction of political violence as a mainstream threat. A non-exhaustive list of these incidents would include but is not limited to. the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, with gallows erected outside and chanced to hang the vice president, a plot to kidnap Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, pipe bombs near the RNC and DNC headquarters,

the assault of Nancy Pelosi's husband in her own home and assassination attempts against Donald Trump himself. In Minnesota, the killing of Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and the shooting of state Senator John Hoffman and his wife, There's Luigi Mangione's alleged assassination of a pharmaceutical executive in New York City, a suspected assassination attempt at Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's home, two young staff members killed at the Israeli embassy in Washington, Molotov cocktails thrown at demonstrators during a pro-Israel rally in Colorado, and now the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

This weekend, Donald Trump appeared on Fox News and was asked how to bring the country together at such a fractured and polarized time. He answered with the following. I'll tell you something that's going to get me in trouble, but I couldn't care less. The radicals on the right, oftentimes they're radical because they don't want to see crime. The radicals on the left are the problem.

Today, we want to talk about the tradition of American political violence and how what we have seen in the past compares to this moment. Bruce Hoffman is a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council for Foreign Relations. And he is the co-author of the book, God's Guns and Sedition,

Far Right Terrorism in America. Bruce, thank you so much for coming on to Frontburner. It's a real privilege to have you. Well, thank you very much for having me. So you have been writing about the growing specter of political violence for many years now, following the 2022 attempt on the life of New York City congressman and now Trump appointee Lee Zeldon. The man, 43-year-old David Jack Bonas, apparently had a knife.

Investigators say Zeldon was pulled to the ground by the man swung a weapon toward his neck and told him, you're done. That's when the audience members got in the law. You wrote the quote, we may be entering a similarly dangerous period in the United States where elected or appointed officials and political candidates face a heightened risk. Beyond that incident, what were some of the themes and patterns you identified as changing in American life, helping to usher in this new era of violence? Well, certainly we're in an unprecedented period where the power of social media, for example, is exerting an enormous gravitational pull on people.

What we've seen time and time again is that words matter and that rhetoric has an impact. And we've seen individuals, in contrast, let's say, to the past when we had terrorist groups attacking the World Trade Center in the Pentagon on 9-11 or ISIS, running rampant across Western Iraq and eastern Syria. We're not seeing terrorist groups. We're seeing lone individuals, often animated by views either on the extreme right or the extreme left, but even more so what's becoming common is you have, what the FBI call salad bowl ideologies, where lots of, in some cases, even contradictory belief systems are being mixed together to not just inspire and motivate, but actually animate people to undertake acts of violence. I want to get into those muddled motivations with you a bit later. But when thinking about Charlie Kirk specifically, but also some of his peers

in the viral and lucrative world of right-wing influencing, how openly was this community of people ever endorsing or joking about political violence. Charlie Kirk, for example, previously referred to Joe Biden as, quote, The bumbling dementia-filled Alzheimer's corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and or given the death penalty for his crimes against America. Conservative influencer Matt Walsh just last week said that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson should be, quote, arrested, charged with treason convicted, and then given the requisite punishment for a capital offense. There are countless examples of this kind of thing.

And what relationship do you think this kind of rhetorical violence shared by these influencers have on the general climate of real world violence? It serves to, in many instances, to justify or legitimize acts of violence, even if that, let's give people the benefit of the doubt, even if that isn't their intention to incite to motivate violence. These messages, though, are taken as a green light, as permission to go out and do something

and then to post it online or commit an act of violence that the perpetrator knows will be recorded and therefore can go viral. Yeah. The language of violence, it's also president

in the Republican Party, right? And among high-profile supporters of Trump, there are examples. I'm thinking about Donald Trump himself, who last year joked about putting Liz Cheney in a firing squad or joked about the assault of Nancy Pelosi's husband. We'll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi who ruined San Francisco. How's her husband doing, by the way?

Anybody know? And she's against building a wall at our border, even though she has a wall around her house, which obviously didn't do a very good job. Or in 2016, when he said people with guns should maybe take care of Hillary Clinton to protect the Second Amendment, more recently, Trump official Stephen Miller has referred to the Democratic Party as a domestic extremist organization. The organized docks and campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people's addresses,

combining that with messaging this design to trigger incite violence. And the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence, it is a vast domestic terror movement. And with God is my witness, we are going to use every research. we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie's name. Is there another moment in modern U.S. history where really mainstream figures talked about

their political opponents in this kind of way? Well, don't forget, too, that this is set in motion, you know, a chain reaction on the other side. And you had, you know, seen in the United States Congress just last week after Charlie Kirk. murder where you have members on both sides of the aisle shouting and yelling at one another about, you know, who's more aggrieved and how should we mark instances of violence and that one side ignores the other. The house will be in order. So that's part of the problem now is it's not just one side.

It's become both sides. And in that respect, that's what makes it unique. You probably have to really go. back to the period before the American Civil War in the 1850s when the country was coming apart over the question of slavery or the abolition of slavery. So that sort of vitriol scenes of congressmen actually engaged in fisticuffs on the House floor. Now, fortunately, it's just verbal, but nonetheless, it's really something that we have to stretch back almost two centuries to imagine.

Just when you talk about it coming out of both sides, are you seeing it come out of both sides in the same way? Like, I'm just not sure of a moment in the current Democratic Party where anyone in sort of party leadership or one of their high-profile benefactors are joking about political violence. in the same kind of way, and I could absolutely be wrong. No, no, you're right, but it's a degree of magnitude where, and again, I'm not making a value judgment, I'm just reporting what's it, when there's a stream of calls that the United States is becoming an authoritarian society, that fascism is on the march, comparing the president to Hitler. I mean, the rhetoric and the temperature isn't being lowered. It's being increased. It's not by necessarily mainstream figures, but I think on both extremes of either party, you found people

who engage in rhetoric that a decade or more ago would be unacceptable. I guess that's my point, is that the rhetoric is increasingly vitriolic, and even if it's not actively encouraging violence, and you're very right to make that distinction. But nonetheless, we're not turning down the temperature. We're not. I think many people are looking for leaders, such as Governor Spencer Cox of Utah who will come out and forcefully state that this has to stop. But that's why there's been so much attention focused on Governor Cox in the past few days. Every one of us has to look in the mirror and decide, are we going to try to make it better or are we going to make it worse? And I just, I pray that God will help us find him again and find our souls and find each other

again. He's really been one of the few salient voices, especially in the Republican side, arguing for this. So just on that point, I'm thinking there have been many instances, right, of political violence in America throughout history. Four U.S. presidents have been murdered. But the country was able to make it through these moments, in part due to the capacity of leaders to put their differences aside and bring people together. You know, you just mentioned this example of Governor Cox. I'm thinking of the Charleston shooting 10 years ago when an avowed white supremacists. killed black parishioners in a historical African-American church. And at the funeral, President Barack Obama eulogized the Reverend Kildeney attack.

That reservoir of goodness, if we can find that grace, anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change. Also a very unifying message. He sang Amazing Grace. And I wonder how sweet the sound. And I wonder how you would compare his handling of that moment and others like it with the current president's handling of the Charlie Kirk killing. And like what is lost when presidents respond not with unity, but with division? everything is lost and then you're absolutely right to focus on that comparison i think things began

to come apart at the seams and then 2017 charlottesville rally where you know marchers with tiki torches recreating you know naziara type of marches chance of jews will not replace us and then the next day in charlottesville there was rioting and certainly fisticuffs and brawling and then a young demonstrator was killed in a vehicular homicide. And President Trump then said there were fine people on both sides. I mean, that was an astonishing statement that whether or not he meant it or not, the message that was very clearly received by far-right extremists was an imprimatur, was a green light. And, of course, when President Trump in the first presidential debate in September 2020, said,

What do you want to call him? Give me a name. Give me a name. White supremacist. Who do you like me to condemn? The proud boys stand back and stand by, but I'll tell you what. That was, we know for a fact taken by the proud boys as a green light. And not surprisingly, many members of the proud boys were indicted for offenses on January 6th, 2021. And I think that's the problem is that rhetoric, whether it's intended to encourage violence,

whether it's a nod in the wing, it nonetheless is having that effect. And you're right to contrast it to President Obama, who tried to bring the country. together and made an unequivocally bold statement against violence as opposed to some of the rhetoric we see now that casts blame rather than seeks unity. And being the first man, I had to fight some pretty tough battles on and off the battlefield. You know they're going to use this to say women can't be in combat arms. If this picture gets out, it would damage the men who are bravely serving this country. Discover my true story on screen for the first time.

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There is no unity with people who scream at children over their parents' politics. There is no unity with someone who lies about what Charlie Kirk said in order to excuse his murder. There is no unity with someone who harasses an innocent family the day after the father of that family, lost a dear friend. There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk's assassination. Before I came into this interview, I was briefly watching Vice President J.D. Vance asked Stephen Miller about, quote, all of the ways that we're trying to figure out how to prevent this festering violence that you see on the far left from becoming even more and more mainstream. I just want to come back to this left-right divide for a second. I know the governor of Utah, who we've talked,

talked about and the FBI director Cash Patel have been talking about how people around the suspect and the Charlie Kirk killing have told them he subscribed to like a left wing or leftist ideology. As you mentioned, it's very muddled. The governor also said that his roommate was indeed a boyfriend who is transitioning from from male to female. That's that's information that the FBI had had mentioned yesterday. They have not provided any tangible evidence for all of these. claims, but you are someone that studies political violence, and what does the data actually tell us about where it is coming from? Is it coming equally from the extreme right and the extreme left, not just the rhetoric, but the violence itself? No, no, it hasn't been equal. It's wrong to say that there is no political violence coming from the far left. In fact, with the exception of January 6, 2021, I would say the most serious, terrorist incident in recent years was in June 2017 when a self-professed supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders attempted to murder a Republican congressman at an early morning baseball practice.

It was only because the House Minority Whips, Steve Scalise, Republican from Louisiana, because of his rank, had a U.S. Capitol Police personal security detail that great tragedy wasn't averted and that these Congressmen weren't killed. I mean, several people, including Steve Scalise, were seriously wounded. The gunman has been identified as 66-year-old James K. Hodgkinson of Illinois. Social media accounts linked to him indicate he was upset about the current state of politics and was also upset about the election of Donald Trump. He was a volunteer for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.

Sanders condemned the shooting. But that's exactly the point. When you look, for instance, that the figures provided by the Anti-Defamation League that is tracked political homicides and terrorism and hate crimes now for decades, virtually all of the political murders over the past five years have come from far-right extremists. So it's not to say there isn't violence coming from the far left, but it's more common and it has been more lethal from the far right. But, you know, in the context of the Charlie Kirk killing, I think we're just in a different place than we've been in that sometimes these labels of extreme left and extreme

right or a Republican and Democrat. I'm not sure they matter all that much anymore. I mean, we're seeing something of a paradigm shift where this assassination is tough to view in the same light as previous ones. The reason I say that is the assassin had several bullets that he carved internet memes onto. I mean, memes that in some cases were decades old. Inscriptions on a fired casing read notices bulges, capital OWO, what's this question mark? Inscriptions on the three unfired casings read, Hey, fascist, exclamation point, catch exclamation point. Up arrow symbol, right arrow, and symbol, and three down arrow symbols.

A second unfired casing read, oh, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, and a third unfired casing read, if you read this, you are gay, L-M-A-O. You know, these memes are meant to be ironic or post-ironic. They're meant to, you know, convey a message that's not necessarily a partisan message. And this is precisely why just a few months ago, the FBI in the United States created a new category of domestic terrorism called Nealistic Violent Extremist, which in essence are individuals who seek societies collapse by sewing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability, are very much versed in the internet, in some cases occupy manosphere spaces, but really just have a very dim view of society. And that's their motivation. And I'm still trying to figure out, I think, is almost everyone, is what Tyler Robinson's motivations were. But I'm not sure when we finally

definitively learn them, they're going to conform to any clear category of politics as it was previously understood. Yeah. I keep thinking about this post somebody made that I saw, which is like here is, you know, half the world trying to find like a coherent explanation here. And then you look deep into the internet and it just responds like LMFAO back at you. Why? But do you want to try and dig into some of it? I would say I am also quite confounded by a lot of it. But, you know, we've talked about these early adaptations of theories framing the Kirk Shooter as a leftist. But one of the other leading theories, which emerged quickly, is that the shooter could have been a so-called Groyper because of some of what was

allegedly written on the ammunition and previous social media posts. Like, for example, his mom posts this picture of him. And people are saying it looks like he's trying to recreate the Groyper mean. The Groyper's are more or less followers of the now incredibly popular American fascist a Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes, someone that many of our listeners may not be familiar with, but he's become maybe the leading voice for the most reactionary strain of conservative youth in America. He's kind of perfected the language and performance of online radicalism. And at different points, he's declared word on just about every mainstream conservative and figure, including Kirk. He's much for the right of Kirk. And President's fault. And Donald Trump.

Yes, yes. And just can you talk to me a bit more about Fuentes and his purchase among the youth and what his stardom reveals about this moment. Well, it does conform very much into this nihilism of a system that's fundamentally corrupt and even individuals like President Trump, who previously Fuentes praised. Of course, he had dinner famously a few years ago at Mara Lago with then former President Trump and Kanye West. Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes. Rapper Kanye West brought Fuentes a neo-Nazi to dinner with Trump, who says he didn't know

him in the aftermath silence from geop but now has gone to extremes and sees trump as as as a sellout and not as effectual and had this very much the same attitude towards um charlie kirk and this plays into i think what we see increasingly in young men in the united states particularly young white men and don't forget almost without exception with very few exceptions the shooters school shooters or mass killers have been young, white men, often too, with apolitical motives, but sometimes with, again, this melange of lots of different ideologies mixed together. What they have in common, though, is this sense of loneliness, hopelessness, despair, not believing they have any future. And they try to be too clever by half. I mean, they compete with one another on social media in either

satire or, what else to say, sick jokes. They kind of want to be comedians of the apocalypse. And unfortunately, what we've seen time and time again is individuals that cross the threshold from the virtual world into the real world and use violence to make their point. I mean, terrorism and assassination is a form of violent communication. The perpetrator is trying to send a message. The challenge we're facing right now with Charlie Kirk's assassin, is divining exactly what that message is for exactly the reasons that you described, that he adopted a whole range of memes and messages. You know, he may not have wanted to communicate a message.

He may just want to confuse us if he believes that society is so corrupt, is so hostile that he's being in some way betrayed by it and the only goal becomes chaos, then not giving us a clear message. I mean, unlike Luigi Mangione at a manifesto, at least he explained. explain to us what he was about. But compare that to President Trump's attempted assassin in Butler, Pennsylvania a little bit more than a year ago. We don't know the motive behind Crooks. Yeah, although Mancione was also kind of of this world too, right? Like, I take your point, but he also had beliefs that were a little bit all over the place. If you really start

to dig into it. I just, what do you think the consequences are of like people in traditional media in politics, in law enforcement, not understanding the language and the culture shared by these young men. Like, is that concerning you right now? Absolutely, and you've hit the nail on the head precisely at a time that we have, for argument's sake, this new paradigm, or certainly a paradigm that doesn't conform to any of their preconceived political notions of the past. Clearly, there was a lot of gaming going on, friends that have confirmed that there was kind of that deep, dark internet, the Reddit culture, and these other dark places of the internet

where this person was going deep. And you saw that on the casings. I think I mean, in the United States, the Department of Homeland Security has, for instance, more or less done away with the programs that tried to understand it and the funding of research institutions to look into it. The domestic terrorism unit in the Department of Justice for all intents and purposes has shrunk tremendously. The FBI, for instance, has been diverted away from domestic terrorism to either jihadi terrorists or immigration issues. So precisely at a time when we need more knowledge and greater understanding of this phenomena, we're moving in a different direction, which means it's going to be very difficult for us to grasp exactly what is going on and what is.

motivating and ultimately animating people to commit these acts of violence. And let's face it, this is not an editorial for against the Second Amendment in the United States, which is the right to bear arms. But the United States, by any metric, is the most armed society in the world. There's 123 firearms for every hundred citizens, for example. So if you do have violent inclinations, it's not difficult to act on them. And that's another reason why we see this violence is you can advocate violence or wink at an odd suggest it. Unfortunately, at the U.S., it's just, you know, a hand-grasp away. And then also, this is something that our producer Matt and I, right,

We're talking about this morning, we're also thinking about the glorification of violence in the U.S. about how, you know, it's kind of vigilantes, men like George Zimmerman became a national celebrity for killing the black teenage boy, Trayvon Martin. I am outraged about the special guest at a Florida gun show this past weekend. Yep, George Zimmerman. He shook hands and he autographed photos of himself. And even though a handful of— Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three protesters during a BLM protest. Your number one goal is to protect your family and to stand strong in the face of opposition from culture and evil.

And Kyle Rittenhouse is a man who does that. God bless Kyle Rittenhouse. Thank you guys. Thank you guys for all the support and everything. Luigi Mangione or Daniel Perni who killed a man on the New York City subway. And there does seem to be a celebration of a certain kind of vigilanteism, right? Certainly, maybe more so on the American right. And I wonder what that represents to you.

Well, there certainly is the celebration of vigilanteism. And certainly, as you pointed out at the beginning, there had been any number of politicians, including the president, that have more or less called for vigilante activity. And look, the pardoning of nearly 1,600 people, the commutation of the sentences of over a dozen individuals who were convicted of the most serious crime in the United States, seditious conspiracy arising from the January 6th, 2021 siege of the Capitol. I mean, the slate was white-clean. So what message does that send?

So people who commit violence may be under the false impression that they're going to be exonerated. They certainly believe they're going to be celebrated in memes. I mean, look, there's a musical now that is selling out about Luigi Mangione. The show is a satire, imagining the lives of Luigi Mangione. I was the CEO of FTX. convicted Crypto King Sam Bankman-Fried A music mogul, Sean Diddy Combs, locked up together in a cell in Brooklyn.

What we're seeing in society, at least in American society, which troubles me deeply, is almost a legitimization or justification of terrorism. And I will say this is by both sides. But one way or the other, what we're seeing musical about an assassin encouragements to violence, commutations, and pardons, is a sense where society is choosing sides and saying, we'll support our side, and it's okay with what they do, or at least it's

acceptable, or we're going to excuse it. And that's very dangerous. We have to condemn all forms of terrorism and all forms of violence. We've laid out some of the tradition of American political violence today. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the five-year period in which the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were killed in the 60s. I don't know if we've really specifically mentioned that yet, as well as the assassinations of dozens of foreign leaders, like Congo's Patrice Lumumba, that were led by the U.S., due in part to the violence of American policy at the time. Malcolm X. famously reacted to the killing of JFK by saying, quote, His assassination was the result of the climate of hate. Only I said the chickens came home to Ruth, which means the same thing.

Do you think foreign assassinations function in this conversation about political violence that we're having? And what do you think are the acts of violence that are most responsible for the version of America that we see today? I think it all boils down to the fact that terrorism never occurs in a vacuum. And it always reflects the tensions, the divisiveness, the polarizations, society, and often that manifests itself in assassinations. There have been two instances in the past decade of British members of parliament, for instance, being assassinated or attacked. Shenzuela, the former Japanese prime minister, was also killed.

As in many things, it's bigger in America, but it's not unique or exclusive to America. We are seeing a rise in populism and nationalism and anti-immigrant fervor, not just in the United States, although many of those issues have been front-page news in recent months. But we're seeing this all over Western Europe, for example, in Asia and in other countries as well. And I think it represents in the post-COVID era of this profound lack of trust in governance, a belief that democratic governments are no longer effective, that they're paralyzed by divisions, that polarization and extremism is the way to get elected.

And it's lamentable because it really is eroding, and I'm saying this with the small L, our liberal democratic society. I mean, the virtues and the ethos that our countries were predicated on or being increasingly called into question. And as we've seen just in the past week when young people are abandoning any faith in the system and become so disgruntled about what they see is a chaotic future, they are embracial. they are embracing a role in creating even more chaos to bring it down. Bruce Hoffman, thank you so much for this. This was really great. Thank you. You're very welcome.

All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.