Dear Weekend Jolter,
The “chat room” or “online forum” was a recurrent phrase in stories about mass shooters from Columbine onward. “Did the Internet play any role in warping the worldviews of the teenage killers?” the Washington Post asked of that massacre in 1999.
Often, the suggestion was that these rooms, where future killers marinated and rambled, were obscure internet alcoves that required directions to find.
Today, millions gather in the chat room. Only it’s called X, or Reddit, or TikTok, or Bluesky. Most of what goes on is innocuous. But some is febrile — dark, conspiratorial, violent. There is a reason we see more and more about the salutary effects of digital detoxes and the harmful impact on children of digital dependence. But apart from implications for mental health, the nexus between the social-media swamps and political violence is becoming bolder, as the online experience becomes totally democratized.
Studies show violent online rhetoric against officials rising and social media acting as an accelerant. As Brittany Bernstein reports, Cole Tomas Allen, charged in the attempted assassination of President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last weekend, “was apparently an active user of [Bluesky], having posted more than 1,000 times under the username ‘coldforce.’” While he may not have threatened violence on the forum, it is no stretch to think his views were validated and reinforced by, as Jeff Blehar puts it, “the panic and apocalypticism common in such spaces.” On X, he shared posts speculating that the Butler assassination attempt was staged and comparing Trump to Hitler. Before his own attempt, the suspect warned Bluesky followers about the Trump administration and boosted posts that did the same. Brittany writes:
His feed — and the platform in general — are rife with messages that cast the Trump administration and its supporters as an existential threat to the country that must be resisted by any means necessary. Take someone with the wrong kind of psychological predisposition and marinate him in that message long enough, and he may decide he has to take matters into his own hands.
A study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that online threats of violence against public officials in the U.S. increased more than threefold between 2021 and 2025, across platforms including not only Bluesky but X, Reddit, YouTube, and other forums. Republicans received 33 percent more violent threats than Democrats, according to the analysis, while 47 percent of all threatening content was targeted toward President Trump.
As political passions burn ever brighter online, Michael Brendan Dougherty sees the phenomenon playing out in multiple directions in the WHCD case — the shooter seemingly becoming further radicalized by his social media feeds, possibly intending to become content, while the public ingests the act itself on those same platforms:
This was an assassination attempt as meme. . . .
Allen didn’t build a logical case for his actions. He retweeted and reposted images and memes of the Trump administration’s supposed perfidy, and his assassination attempt becomes the comment. “Please like and share.”
A meme doesn’t require an argument. It doesn’t even really need to elicit a full thought. It’s meant to stimulate, to drip out your brain’s dopamine with a sense of recognition, even as the rest of your nervous system is relaxing. Assassins want to be heroes in their story of political struggle. Cole Allen seemed to be aiming to be a smirk in your doomscroll.
It would help, of course, if the Trump administration didn’t also trivialize assassination threats, as with its new indictment against James Comey or the bluster over Jimmy Kimmel.
But I digress.
Jeff writes in this week’s Carnival of Fools about the terrible cost of the left’s loose political rhetoric. The suspect’s manifesto appeared to reflect that discourse, seizing upon the very worst of online accusations against Trump.
“Never before have people — evil as well as good — been able to find each other so easily,” the aforementioned Washington Post article said, a statement that’s as true today, even as the internet has moved well beyond its novelty phase. The tendency toward conspiracy theory grips right as well as left, as the podcast world of the former has lately shown. But many progressives remain loath to acknowledge the left’s demonstrable political violence problem (have we mentioned Noah Rothman’s new book?). That includes Barack Obama, who somehow portrayed the WHCD suspect’s motives as a mystery nearly 24 hours after the fact.
Violent criminals are ultimately responsible for their own actions, whether indirectly inspired by video games, a rally they just attended, or online rhetoric. But amid debates ranging in topic from school cellphone bans to digital sabbaths to parenting strategies in the social media age, a bias toward detox is a defensible one to have.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Seriously, DOJ? 86 the Comey Indictment
Once again, the FCC is throwing too much weight around: Jimmy Kimmel Being Unfunny Isn’t a Matter for Government
Bravo: A Righteous Blow Against Racial Gerrymandering
Drug regulators must not let personal bias get in the way of their jobs: Don’t Block Progress on Pancreatic Cancer
ARTICLES
Kamden Mulder: Medical Providers Concealing ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors from Insurers, Watchdog Group Says
Sarah Parshall Perry: The ABA Is a Joke. So Why Is It Still Accrediting Law Schools?
Jim Geraghty: If You’re Going to Commit a Terrible Crime, Be Handsome First
Charles C. W. Cooke: Hatred of Data Centers Is Irrational and Self-Defeating
Andrew McCarthy: Leave the United States Out of Trump’s Lawfare ‘Indictments’
Rich Lowry: The New Never Trumpers
Giorgia Meloni: Why ‘Meritocracy’ Enrages the Left
Daniel J. Flynn: Obama’s Obfuscation Fits a Partisan Pattern
Jacki Karsh: Antisemitism Isn’t Random
Jim Thorne: The New Great Game: The True Significance of the Hormuz Struggle
Christian Schneider: ‘Microlooting’: The Left’s Latest Language Deception
Jianli Yang: Handshakes and Humiliation: Beijing’s Play for Taiwan Becomes Clearer
Abigail Anthony: Biden Officials Used Code Word ‘Benghazi’ to Conceal Discussion of Planned Parenthood Loans, Ernst Alleges
John Gustavsson: Model Immigrants No More: Sweden’s Elder Care Nightmare
Erielle Azerrad: A Ticking Time Bomb in Anti-Terrorism Law
CAPITAL MATTERS
John R. Puri explains a distinction with a difference: How Inflation and Tariffs Impoverish People Differently
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White, on an “abysmal” sequel: The Rummage Sale of The Devil Wears Prada 2
Brian Allen tours a “scrupulously, wonderfully restored” presidential house: Walk in Benjamin Harrison’s Footsteps for Gilded Age Glam
EXCAVATED EXCERPTS, NOW ON VIEW
Jim Geraghty finds the common thread among those terrorists and shooters with cult followings. In hindsight, it was obvious:
On December 4, 2024, Luigi Mangione shot and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
Without resorting to an internet search, do you know what Mangione looks like? I suspect you do. You probably know what Mangione looks like from his merchandise store, or perhaps his prayer candles, or perhaps the time a fashion company “accidentally” used Mangione’s image to model a shirt. Or perhaps you caught “Luigi: The Musical.” Or perhaps you heard about the lookalike contests at the University of Florida or the University of North Texas or in New York City.
Mangione inspired, as Wired magazine described it, “a new form of fandom.” . . .
Luigi Mangione is extremely well known and has inspired a twisted fan base; most other perpetrators and would-be perpetrators of left-wing or anti-corporate violence remain obscure.
Yesterday, Josh Barro predicted that the shooter at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Cole Allen, “won’t replicate the lackluster cult of Luigi Mangione because he’s not good-looking. People fail to appreciate how shallow the Luigi phenomenon is.”
Yes, murderers get more attention than attempted murderers. But I can illustrate the same point with Islamist terrorists, too.
Do you know what Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev looks like? My guess is when you hear that name, you picture the cover of Rolling Stone.
What does his older brother look like? What was his older brother’s name?*
What did the perpetrators of the San Bernardino terrorist attack look like?
I’ll bet you cannot name, or picture, the Islamist who stabbed Salman Rushdie in 2022. Nor the al-Qaeda operative who killed three U.S. service members and wounded eight other Americans at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida. Nor the guy who swore allegiance to ISIS and drove a truck down a West Side bike path that killed eight people in 2017.
My guess is no face comes to mind, because no pop culture magazine put those guys on the cover, looking like Jim Morrison.
None of these other aspiring assassins and terrorists inspired a crowd of devoted “Luigi girls” or the “Cougars for Luigi Mangione.”
It’s easy to conclude that modern American culture has a soft spot for left-wing terrorists and assassins, and that’s true. . . . But what the list above illustrates is that modern American culture has a particular soft spot for young and handsome left-wing terrorists and assassins. I’m not the most qualified judge of male attractiveness, but I think Barro is right. If the White House Correspondents’ Dinner attacker wanted to inspire a fan club, he needed a picture of himself with abs to go viral in the aftermath.
Andrew McCarthy has a suggestion for President Trump, amid his lawfare blitz:
Forget the passport. And the dollar. And the Kennedy Center. And the battleships. Forget the national park passes, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the gargantuan banners draped across federal buildings, the children’s savings and investment accounts. The proprietary interest of the United States on which President Trump should really be etching his name, graven image, and Sharpie signature is the federal indictment.
Throughout its history, the Justice Department has been given the enormous litigation advantage of bringing its cases in the name of the United States because it was created and is funded by the American people’s representatives to act in the public interest by upholding the Constitution and the laws enacted thereunder. . . .
Congress does not underwrite the Justice Department with taxpayer funds to act as the president’s private lawyer — even if the president manages to persuade his party’s slim Senate majority to confirm for top DOJ posts attorneys who have represented the president in private practice, notwithstanding the obvious conflict of interest this creates. (While publicly sworn to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, these lawyers, under professional rules of ethics, continue to owe allegiance to their client, whom the public has elected president. As we’re seeing, these duties can diverge, and they are certain to diverge when the client/president subordinates his public obligations to his private interests.)
The cases the Justice Department has brought against James Comey are not in the public interest. As illustrated by yesterday’s farce, the two-count indictment cum forfeiture filed in the Eastern District of North Carolina, these cases are against the public interest.
Sarah Parshall Perry, from Defending Education, calls into question the American Bar Association’s accreditation “monopoly” over law schools:
As the sole federally recognized accreditor whose approval is required for bar eligibility in nearly every state in the country, the ABA exercises monolithic influence over legal education and, by extension, the judiciary and the bar. But this authority rests on an implicit premise of institutional neutrality, a premise that no longer holds — if it ever did at all.
In our work to secure a high-quality, value-neutral education for every American student from preschool through graduate school, Defending Education has recently released a report identifying the myriad ways that the American Bar Association is unfit to continue in its role of overseeing American legal education.
What are they, you ask? Let us count them.
For starters, the ABA doesn’t represent a majority — or even a plurality — of American lawyers. In fact, its membership represents a paltry 11–12 percent of actively practicing lawyers. As of last count, the ABA itself notes that as of January 2024, while there are 1,322,649 active lawyers in the U.S., only about 150,000 are active ABA members. That kind of skeletal representation could be a function of the ABA’s having taken positions on a multitude of legal issues that reveal a consistently leftward tilt. For example, America First Legal recently noted that over the past decade, at least 80 percent of the ABA’s Supreme Court amicus briefs advanced progressive outcomes, with none supporting conservative legal positions. The ABA has, for example, consistently argued for the losing perspective on abortion, gender identity, gun control, and affirmative action. It has even gone so far as to argue that the Equal Rights Amendment was ratified — a position so untenable that even the Department of Justice and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg laughed it off.
That doesn’t just make the American Bar Association a progressive advocacy organization masquerading as a neutral membership organization; it makes them bad lawyers.
The ABA’s ratings of federal judicial nominees have also long exhibited demonstrable inconsistency when applied to conservative candidates. Empirical studies spanning multiple administrations, including analyses published in Political Research Quarterly, document a pattern: Republican nominees receive lower ratings than Democratic nominees with comparable credentials. During both the first and second Trump administrations, for example, numerous well-qualified conservative nominees received “not qualified” ratings, indicating that rather than relying on objective peer assessments to determine judicial fitness, the ABA’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary is instead applying de facto ideological filters.
CODA
I’m going full prog this week, to end with “Islands,” the enchanting, meandering title track off one of the lesser-known/appreciated King Crimson albums. This was the closing chapter for one period of the band, before Robert Fripp reconstituted the group and went on to record three legendary albums. The song is so airy and wistful it seems to float all on its own.
Thanks for reading.