Donald Trump was mere millimeters away from an assassin’s bullet hitting its mark. Weeks later, if it wasn’t for Secret Service spotting a rifle’s barrel poking through a fence, Trump may have been gunned down on his golf course.

These events should have been a shocking wake-up call for Democrats and their increasingly hardcore leftist base. However, aside from the customary and expected rhetoric condemning violence as having no place in our democratic political system, the Democrats’ response has amounted to little more than a dismissive shrug.

Worse, a recent survey conducted by the Network of Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab found that a whopping 55% of self-identified leftists agreed that an assassination of Trump may be “somewhat justified.”

The report notes, “These attitudes are not fringe — they reflect an emergent assassination culture, grounded in far-left authoritarianism and increasingly normalized in digital discourse.”

It comes as little surprise that there has been a troubling growth on the Left of acceptance of violence as a legitimate political expression.

We observed this rise in leftist violence all through the infamous 2020 Summer of Rage following the death of George Floyd. The Leftmedia infamously beclowned itself in arguing that days of rioting, looting, and burning were “mostly peaceful protests.”

Of particular interest was the city of Portland, Oregon, where leftist antifa thugs engaged in 100 consecutive nights of rioting that targeted federal buildings and other facilities. Night after night, the madness went on as hoodlums clad in black with face masks attacked police and any others who dared get in their way. Yet this political violence was explained away, often as only property damage, so who cares?

But Portland was just one among many cities that experienced this leftist violence. Recall the CHAZ zone in Seattle, Washington, where rioters took over several city blocks for weeks and lawlessness prevailed. By the end of that summer, 19 people had been killed in this expression of leftist political violence.

However, instead of widespread condemnation, some Democrat lawmakers dismiss it as having never happened. Infamously, Representative Jerry Nadler called the idea of widespread violence related to the BLM protests a “myth.”

Ignoring bodily cancer won’t make it go away; similarly, ignoring what amounts to social cancer will only make it metastasize. And that is precisely what the NCRI survey is showing.

Beyond Trump, the most recent example of the Left’s embrace of political violence is seen in the cold-blooded murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione. Not only has Mangione gained praise for his killing, but he has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial support for his criminal defense. This is an example of a growing acceptance of an assassination culture on the Left.

In truth, it’s the most basic form of tribalism and the reason why identity politics is so dangerous. Instead of viewing justice correctly through the lens of every single individual being equal in value before the law, identity politics eschews the individual in favor of demographic groups. In doing so, it makes villains or victims out of groups based upon stereotypes and prejudice.

The sudden anger and hatred on the Left toward Elon Musk is a classic example of this tribalism. As the NCRI survey found, 48% of leftists agreed that assassinating Musk would be somewhat justified. What has Musk done to deserve so much hate?

The basic answer is that he’s on Team Trump. But in truth, the hate for Musk has been growing ever since he bought Twitter. He dared to challenge the Left’s hold on social media, allowing — maybe saving — free speech.

Speaking of free speech, maybe one of the biggest ironies exposed by this growing assassination culture on the Left is the fact that leftists have attacked freedom of speech over the objection that it allows for “hate speech.” Indeed, when Musk took over Twitter (now X) and eliminated speech censorship on the platform, the claim from many on the Left was that the platform had become a dangerous hate-speech-promoting site.

Yet Bluesky, the Twitter-imitating social media platform many leftists have flocked to as a safe haven from “hate speech” on X, is awash in the assassination culture. The report notes that Bluesky “plays a significant and predictive role in amplifying radical ideation.”

In other words, Bluesky has ironically become a leftist echo chamber wherein social contagions like assassination culture have been allowed to metastasize unchecked, all thanks to political tribalism. As leftists grow increasingly accepting of violence, that’s going to become more of a problem.