Washington: The assassination of one Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, and the shooting of another lawmaker and his wife at their homes, is just the latest addition to a long and unsettling roll call of political violence in the United States.
The list, in the past two months alone: the killing of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC.
The firebombing of a Colorado march calling for the release of Israeli hostages, and the firebombing of the official residence of Pennsylvania’s governor — on a Jewish holiday while he and his family were inside.
And here’s just a sampling of some other disturbing attacks before that — the assassination of a health care executive on the streets of New York City late last year, the attempted assassination of
Donald Trump in small-town Pennsylvania during his presidential campaign last year, the 2022 attack on the
husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by a believer in right-wing conspiracy theories, and the 2017 shooting by a liberal gunman at a GOP practice for the congressional softball game.
“We’ve entered into this especially scary time in the country where it feels the sort of norms and rhetoric and rules that would tamp down on violence have been lifted,” said Matt Dallek, a political scientist at Georgetown University who studies extremism. “A lot of people are receiving signals from the culture.”
Politics have also driven large-scale massacres.
Gunmen who killed 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, 23 shoppers at a heavily Latino Walmart in El Paso in 2019 and 10 Black people at a Buffalo grocery store in 2022 each cited the conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Jews were trying to replace white people with people of colour.
That has become a staple on parts of the right that support Trump’s push to limit immigration.
The Anti-Defamation League found that from 2022 through 2024, all of the 61 political killings in the United States were committed by right-wing extremists.