Four days after a shooting at Brown University killed two students and wounded nine others, neither the shooter’s identity nor motive is known. But that hasn’t stopped internet sleuths from insisting that they know who did it. Now, powerful influencers are amplifying their claims. Almost as soon as the shooting happened, conservative influencers were quick to blame the shooting on “leftist activists”—but as the days wore on and the details were still sparse, they latched on to a more specific narrative. By Tuesday evening, social media accounts began noting that Brown University had scrubbed the pages on its website that had referred to a third-year student who used they/them pronouns and was involved in pro-Palestine organizing on campus. It wasn’t long before internet sleuths went to work, even deploying AI gait monitors to attempt to match the grainy footage that exists of the shooter with the student in question. Early Wednesday morning, an account with the handle @MadeleineCaseTweets claimed in a widely circulated tweet that the shooter’s physical attributes closely matched those of a third-year student at the university. The account, which has 27,000 followers, also noted that the third-year student was involved in “activism” and included a photo of the student speaking into a bullhorn and wearing a keffiyeh, a checkered scarf often used as a symbol of solidarity with Palestine. Those claims only added fuel to unconfirmed rumors already circulating that the shooter shouted “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” before opening fire. It didn’t take long for a who’s who of powerful conservative influencers, including far-right activist Laura Loomer, podcasters Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, and feminist-icon-turned-Covid-conspiracist Naomi Wolfe, to take the narrative and run with it. “In the video below, notice how he holds his hands behind his back in the surveillance video released by Providence, Rhode Island, police yesterday,” wrote Loomer. “This is common in Middle East culture, and witnesses said it sounded like the shooter was speaking Arabic, in addition to screaming Allahu Akbar!” Other accounts on X have taken the rumors further still, calling the university itself “extremist” and baselessly suggesting that a professor of Palestinian Studies was also involved in the attack. In a press conference on Tuesday, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said there were “lots of reasons” that a university would take a page offline. He strongly rebuked the internet sleuths and influencers who were spreading rumors. “It’s easy to jump from someone saying words that were spoken, to what those words are, to a particular name, that reflects a motive targeting a particular person,” he said. “That’s a really dangerous road to go down.” In a statement, Brown University echoed those concerns, noting, “Accusations, speculation, and conspiracies we’re seeing on social media and in some news reports are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous for the safety of individuals in our community.”

On Saturday, a gunman opened fire on the campus of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, killing two students and wounding nine more. The shooter escaped, and students sheltered in place overnight as authorities tried to track down a person of interest who had appeared in a low-quality security camera video. One suspect was apprehended, but on Sunday, authorities released him. On Monday, the shooter still had not been identified or apprehended—but that didn’t stop a host of conservative influencers from insisting on social media that the perpetrator must have been a disgruntled leftist. Why? Because one of the two victims, 19-year-old Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama, was president of the campus Republicans. (The other was identified as Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an 18-year-old freshman from Virginia whose political beliefs thus far have not been reported on.) Cook’s tragic death was enough to whip the conspiracy machine into high gear. Early Monday morning, Elon Musk reposted to his 229 million followers a since-deleted tweet blaming the left for the shooting. He commented, “The murderous indoctrination needs to stop now.” The theory about the targeting of Cook seems to have gained significant traction from an X account with the handle @AutismCapital, which announced to nearly a million followers that “the police explicitly claimed it was likely a targeted attack to [Cook’s] family and that when he came in the room he looked specifically for her first before he fired?” The post didn’t mention that there has been no credible reporting about the shooters’ motive or his actions before he fired the first shot, only rumors on social media. After this, Katherine Boyle, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, reposted that tweet and added her own thoughts in a post to her 95,000 followers: “Now young men and women like Ella know they can be killed for their political beliefs on a college campus, even if they’re not provocateurs or influencers or public officials, just normal young people participating in a student club.” Shaun Maguire, a partner at the firm Sequoia Capital with 295,000 followers, also retweeted the post from @AutismCapital, commenting, “To the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and now to the tragic murder of Ella Cook, it’s impossible to shake the feeling that we’re not getting the truth fast enough from law enforcement and our media … when it doesn’t fit their narrative.” Far-right influencer and Trump favorite, Laura Loomer, tweeted to her 1.8 million followers, “Jewish and Christian conservative students and faculty targeted at Brown University and they want you to think western civilization isn’t under attack.” She also repeated an unconfirmed rumor that the shooter had shouted “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” before opening fire. Vickie Palladino, a conservative New York City councilwoman, posted to her 38,000 followers, “Very clear now that the attack at Brown was perpetrated by a leftist activist and targeted Republicans. The people who openly celebrated Charlie Kirk’s murder en masse and faced exactly zero consequences for it have been emboldened to kill more conservatives.” The tweet has since been deleted. Raw Egg Nationalist, a British far-right influencer, put his own spin on the leftism-run-amok theory. He implied in a post to his 309,000 followers that the shooting occurred because the left had not been sufficiently punished for conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s murder. “I hate to say it, but it’s true: Charlie Kirk’s murder has shown the left they can get what they want by killing right wingers,” he wrote. “They killed the most important young right winger in America, a surrogate son to the president, at basically no cost to themselves. Just one person arrested. No reprisals or even real threat of reprisals. Of course, there are going to be more murders.” Another unproven narrative making the rounds was that the attack was an act of antisemitic terrorism because the venue was a study session for a popular lecture class that happened to be taught by a Jewish professor. “Prof Rachel Friedberg, whose class at ⁦@BrownUniversity⁩ was targeted last night by a shooter, taught at Hebrew University and advised the Knesset on immigration to Israel, among other credentials,” Naomi Wolf, the feminist writer turned Covid conspiracy theorist, posted to her 489,000 followers. “I wonder who the shooter was and what could have possibly motivated him?” In response to the shooting, President Trump offered only a few terse words. “Brown University, great school,” he said. “Great, really, one of the greatest schools anywhere in the world. Things can happen.” Meanwhile, Trump took to social media to opine about the murder of film director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, which occurred the day after the shooting at Brown. The president baselessly suggested that the Reiners’ progressive politics contributed to their untimely deaths. The murder was “reportedly due to the anger [Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial. “He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump.” Reiner’s son Nick, who has struggled with drug addiction, was arrested on suspicion of murder on Monday.

Though it was hardly a national focal point of the 2025 elections on Tuesday, Maine became the twenty-second state to adopt a “red flag” law for regulating guns, with the approval of nearly 59 percent of voters. Starting in January, Maine will allow families to petition a judge to remove firearms temporarily from a family member who appears to pose a threat to themselves or others. It’s a notable development in a state with a strong gun and hunting culture, where even the Democratic governor, Janet Mills, opposed the measure.   The new policy stands as a clear response to the devastating mass shooting that took place in Lewiston, Maine, in October 2023 at the hands of a profoundly troubled man, whose worsening condition had long alarmed those around him. As I reported previously: > Army reservist Robert Card, the 40-year-old suicidal perpetrator who killed 18 > people and injured 13 others at a bowling alley and a bar on October 25, > displayed numerous warning signs far in advance. His erratic behavior going > back months included complaints he was hearing voices, angry and paranoid > claims about being smeared as a pedophile, punching a colleague, and > threatening to shoot up the Army base where he worked. Some of his family > members and supervisors sounded the alarm. After a two-week stay and a > psychiatric evaluation in July at an Army hospital, Army officials directed > that Card should not possess a weapon or handle ammunition. Despite the fact that people close to Card felt he was becoming dangerous, they had little possible recourse; at the time, the state had a weaker “yellow flag” law in place that allows only law enforcement to seek removal of guns—and only after the person of concern has been given a medical evaluation. As Card’s case showed, though, that is a high bar to taking action. A few weeks before the massacre, as I further reported, “the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office, which had communicated with family members and Army authorities since May, attempted a wellness check at Card’s residence.” Unable to locate him, they alerted other agencies that he was “armed and dangerous” and should be approached with “extreme caution” based on his reported behaviors.    In other words, opportunity for intervention at an earlier stage of Card’s downward spiral, flagged by family members and others, was already gone. An investigation later published by the New York Times revealed that Card had suffered from serious brain injury connected with his military service. As red flag laws have spread throughout the country in recent years, research in California and beyond has shown that they can be effective for preventing suicide and mass shootings. (A majority of mass shootings culminate with the perpetrators ending their own lives.) California led the way with the policy in the aftermath of a 2014 mass killing near University of California, Santa Barbara. During my recent two-year investigation into that notorious case, violence prevention experts at the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office told me that in the decade since, the state’s red flag law has become “a key tool in a lot of, if not most of, the threat management cases that we’ve worked.” Evolving policy nationally on gun regulations and violence prevention remains a mixed picture, particularly since Donald Trump returned to the White House. He quickly issued executive orders aimed at rolling back years of progress on red flag laws, “ghost guns,” and more, and he has gutted key violence-prevention programs within the federal government. Some Republican allies of Trump at the state level have moved in a similar direction, including in Texas. That state has suffered several of the worst gun massacres in recent memory, from a Walmart in El Paso to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, but nonetheless, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the state GOP’s Anti-Red Flag Act into law in June. In stark contrast to Maine’s new policy, the use of such violence-prevention strategies—once backed even by Abbott himself—is essentially no longer an option in Texas.

Everything is bigger in Texas—except, apparently, memory of devastating mass shootings. In late June, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a bill known as the Anti-Red Flag Act, which preemptively bans the creation or enforcement of extreme risk protective orders. Such orders are legal tools used to temporarily prohibit a person from having access to guns after a judge evaluates evidence of alarming behavior and deems that person to be a danger to themselves or others. Abbot and Republican state lawmakers have extensive knowledge of the harm that red flag laws are designed to prevent. Several of the worst gun massacres in recent memory took place in Texas, including when a suicidal 18-year-old slaughtered 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in 2022. Three years earlier, a 19-year-old right-wing extremist murdered 23 people and injured 22 others at a Walmart in El Paso. In 2018, a high schooler fatally shot 10 and wounded 13 at Santa Fe High School near Houston. In 2017, a 26-year-old military veteran with a history of domestic violence massacred 26 people and wounded 22 others at a Sutherland Springs church. That’s only a partial list of these calamities in Texas over the past decade. (See also: the attack at an outlet mall in Allen; a rampage in Midland-Odessa; and a deadly ambush of police officers in Dallas.) Most, if not all, of these cases were preceded by observable warning behaviors from the perpetrators—red flags indicating that access to weapons made them dangerous. In his public remarks about gun violence and mass shootings, Abbott consistently has focused heavily on the role of mental illness, a tactic political conservatives often use to deflect arguments for stricter regulation of firearms. And while mental illness is not fundamentally the cause of mass shootings, the governor obviously is well aware that there can be identifiable individuals who should not have access to guns. “Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge, period,” he said as the state and nation reeled from Uvalde. Following the massacres in El Paso and Midland-Odessa, Abbot pledged to work with the legislature on laws “to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals.” After the mall shooting in Allen, he spoke of the need to address “anger and violence by going to its root cause, which is addressing the mental health problems behind it. People want a quick solution. The long-term solution here is to address the mental health issue.” Abbott himself once urged the state legislature to “consider the merits of adopting a red flag law,” after the Santa Fe High School shooting seven years ago.   Texas legislators also know the reality behind these attacks—they were the first to publish an official investigative report on Uvalde, two months after the massacre, in July 2022. The 77-page state House report focused foremost on the disastrous tactical response, including how law enforcement officers waited more than an hour to confront the perpetrator inside the building. But it also summarized the perpetrator’s troubled background and detailed some of his warning behaviors leading up to the attack: A former girlfriend told the FBI that he’d been lonely and depressed and had “told her repeatedly that he wouldn’t live past eighteen, either because he would commit suicide or simply because he ‘wouldn’t live long.’” The perpetrator also began wearing black clothes and combat boots, the Texas House report said, and his online activity “reflected themes of confrontation and revenge.” It continued: > The attacker began to demonstrate interest in gore and violent sex, watching > and sometimes sharing gruesome videos and images of suicides, beheadings, > accidents, and the like, as well as sending unexpected explicit messages to > others online. Those with whom he played video games reported that he became > enraged when he lost. He made over-the-top threats, especially towards female > players, whom he would terrorize with graphic descriptions of violence and > rape. Yet despite those and other red flags, the perpetrator had been able to purchase an arsenal—legally—within just days of turning 18 years old. As the Texas House report also detailed: > An online retailer shipped 1,740 rounds of 5.56mm 75-grain boat tail hollow > point to his doorstep, at a cost of $1,761.50. He ordered a Daniel Defense > DDM4 V7 (an AR-15-style rifle) for shipment to a gun store in Uvalde, at a > cost of $2,054.28. On May 17, 2022, he bought a Smith and Wesson M&P15 (also > an AR-15-style rifle) at the same store in Uvalde, at a cost of $1,081.42. He > returned the next day for 375 rounds of M193, a 5.56mm 55-grain round with a > full metal jacket, which has a soft core surrounded by a harder metal. He > returned again to pick up his other rifle when it arrived on May 20, 2022, and > he had store staff install the holographic sight on it after the transfer was > completed. Four days later, 19 children and two teachers were dead. Opponents often make a blanket argument that red flag laws are unconstitutional and deprive citizens of due process. In reality, evidence of threatening behavior must be presented to a civil court judge, who rules on whether or not to remove access to guns on a temporary basis; to varying degree there is also a petitioning or review process for potential restoration of access. And while the US Supreme Court has not addressed red flag laws directly, in 2023 it ruled on a Texas case about gun rights and domestic violence restraining orders: “When an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.” The core function of red flag laws, in other words, is not deprivation of firearms but rather the twin purposes of protecting the community and getting the troubled person help. > Violence prevention experts at the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office told me that > the law has become “a key tool in a lot of, if not most of the threat > management cases that we’ve worked.” With the growth of these laws over the past decade—22 states and Washington, DC, now have some version of the policy—research in California and beyond has shown that they are effective for reducing suicides and targeted shootings. Last year, as I completed a deep investigation into the 2014 mass attack in Isla Vista, California—which gave rise to the state’s pioneering red flag law—violence prevention experts at the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office told me that the law has become “a key tool in a lot of, if not most of the threat management cases that we’ve worked.” The senior US senator in Texas, Republican John Cornyn, was the lead cosponsor of the landmark Bipartisan Safer Communities Act authorized by Congress in 2022. Signed into law by President Biden but now jeopardized under President Trump, that legislation included $750 million in grant funding for states to implement crisis-intervention programs and policies, including red flag laws. Cornyn did not respond to my request for comment about his state’s Anti-Red Flag Act, which takes effect on Sept. 1. When the next major mass shooting occurs in Texas, it’s likely to be followed once again by a Texas-size round of “thoughts and prayers,” as Ted Cruz, the state’s other Republican US senator and a vocal opponent of red flag laws, can well attest. Likely even bigger, though, will be the missed opportunity to have prevented yet another round of carnage and devastation.

Since March, the Trump administration has dismantled a leading office at the Department of Homeland Security whose mission was averting terrorism and targeted violence. The Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, known as CP3, has been stripped of funding, and most of its 40-plus personnel have been fired, reassigned, or otherwise pushed out. Amid this process, the White House temporarily put in charge a 22-year-old Trump superfan who arched an eyebrow for his agency portrait and has zero leadership experience in government, let alone in national security. The demise of CP3 comes as the White House has diverted major law enforcement and security resources toward deporting undocumented immigrants. It also comes as high-profile acts of political violence have surged in the United States. The list of recent devastation includes an ISIS-inspired truck massacre in New Orleans, the bombing of a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, and a spate of antisemitic attacks—including the murder of a young couple working for Israel in Washington, DC; an arson attack against the governor of Pennsylvania; and a fiery assault on peaceful marchers in Boulder, Colorado. Last year, a healthcare CEO was gunned down point-blank in Manhattan, and President Trump barely avoided death from an assassin’s bullet on the campaign trail. Twelve days ago, a right-wing extremist in Minnesota targeted Democratic state lawmakers in a deadly gun rampage, killing former house speaker Melissa Hortman and her spouse, and gravely wounding two others. The nation is now also on heightened alert after Trump ordered the bombing of Iran, a major state sponsor of terrorism. Though political extremism has been rising, it is almost never the only factor in targeted violence, including with most, if not all, of the above cases. Most perpetrators are also driven by a mix of rage and despair over acute personal problems, such as financial or health crises—and many are suicidal. This complexity was a focus of CP3’s $18 million in annual grants to state and local partners. Drawing on long-established public health research, the office worked with law enforcement, educators, faith leaders, and others to use “upstream” interventions with troubled individuals who may be planning and moving toward violence. The work gained traction over the past couple of years, according to William Braniff, a military veteran and national security expert who was director of CP3 until March. He said that many states were working with the office to build this kind of strategy and that CP3 was flooded with $99 million in eligible grant applications—exceeding its funds by more than fivefold. He resigned when eight of his colleagues were fired without cause. “I think that CP3 has been dismantled out of ignorance,” Braniff told me. “A lot of the headquarters-based offices within DHS are being drastically reduced in size or shuttered, and CP3 was among them. This is incredibly short-sighted.” As the wave of recent attacks shows, a variety of extremism is fueling the danger. Researchers have tracked growing acceptance and endorsement of political violence in America in recent years, particularly among people who identify as MAGA Republicans, a finding reaffirmed in a new national study from the Centers for Violence Prevention at University of California, Davis. > “We’re at real risk of normalizing political violence as a part of our > democracy.” In response to my email asking for an explanation of the shutdown, DHS assistant secretary of public affairs Tricia McLaughlin said CP3 “plays an insignificant and ineffective role” in DHS counterterrorism efforts, and further claimed, without providing any evidence, that CP3 was “weaponized” under the Biden administration for partisan purposes. Braniff, who is now executive director of the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University, explained in our recent interview (lightly edited below for clarity) how CP3 built out its national model for violence prevention. He also spoke about what citizens and communities can do to counter the danger of political violence—and the disturbing normalization of it. First, can you talk a little bit about the CP3 strategy and how the programs worked? From school shootings and grievance-based workplace violence, to hate-fueled violence, to terrorism, we needed an approach out of the federal government that would address all of those. And so we looked to the public health community, and specifically the decades of work on violence prevention from places like the Centers for Disease Control—evidence-based programs for prevention of suicide, intimate-partner violence, violence against children, and community-based violence. And we said, well, what if we could apply those tested approaches to some of these more “exotic” forms of violence? For too long, and especially after 9/11, we exoticized terrorism as this foreign kind of violence, when in reality, underneath the manifestation, you have these very human things happening: individuals who have unaddressed risk factors in their lives. That might be an adverse childhood experience, trauma, or financial hardship. That might be social isolation. And these risk factors, when left unaddressed, might spur the individual to go seeking answers down dark rabbit holes that preach hate, that preach violence for the sake of it. And regardless of the way that violence might manifest later, there are these upstream preventative programs that we can put in place. So CP3 was the primary entity in the US government for creating these upstream programs, informed by public health. Social isolation is a massive risk factor for all kinds of negative health outcomes, including self harm and perpetration of violence. And so you look at these underlying risk factors and you say, well, we can actually mitigate against them. Very rarely in the national security realm do we get to talk about building positive programs that make us all happier and healthier and less susceptible to violence as a solution. Sometimes people still might gravitate towards violence. And in those instances, we invested in secondary prevention. These are multidisciplinary interventions, so that if someone makes an offhand comment about starting a racial holy war, accelerating the downfall of the government, or being an infamous school shooter, these ideations of violence are not dismissed. We created these programs so that bystanders had a place to refer someone they cared about. And the purpose wasn’t criminal justice, it was to get them access to help. > “You have law enforcement officers around the country begging to get help from > more mental health professionals and social workers. We were bringing these > folks together and blending their assets.” Out of the 1,172 interventions that we funded through our grant program, 93.5 percent of the individuals who were exhibiting threatening behavior got help. They got access to a clinician or a caring professional. In 6.5 percent of the incidents, the persons had already broken the law or were an imminent threat to public safety, and they were referred to law enforcement. And that wasn’t the point of the intervention, but there was that safety net there for when that person really was an imminent risk to their community. We could balance public health and public safety through these multidisciplinary, evidence-based programs. There’s a lot of research on their efficacy, including to make sure that persons of color are getting equitable treatment and programs are not succumbing to implicit bias in schools and workplaces. And so there’s all sorts of value to these programs socially as well as economically. They’re much cheaper than criminal justice or the cost of violence. Given that we’re in this heightened environment of political extremism and attacks, why shut down CP3? What is your view of that? I don’t think that CP3 was targeted by the Trump administration specifically. I think that CP3 has been dismantled out of ignorance. A lot of the headquarters-based offices within the Department of Homeland Security are being drastically reduced in size or shuttered, and CP3 was among them. This is incredibly short-sighted. Ignorance is not an excuse for what’s happening. The primary mission of DHS, as enshrined in the Homeland Security Act of 2002, is to prevent terrorism. And CP3 was the latest manifestation of an office within DHS that was trying to find a way to get traction in this prevention space. And we got it in the last couple of years. Eight states worked with CP3 to publish a state strategy, and when I left in March, another eight states were drafting their strategy with CP3’s help. Twenty-seven states had agreed to work with CP3 and were in the queue. So we were normalizing this at the state and local level. Why? Because it’s pragmatic. It’s cost-effective. It works. You have law enforcement officers around the country begging to get help from more mental health professionals and social workers, because law enforcement officers are not equipped to do this kind of upstream intervention. We had $99 million of eligible grant applications for our $18 million grant pool, which means we were wildly oversubscribed. We were bringing these folks together and blending their assets. A whole range of political ideology and extremism feeds into targeted violence, but we also know there’s been a steady rise in far-right domestic terrorism in recent years. I’m curious how you view the long-term impact of losing this type of work in the federal government, particularly as it relates to things like Trump’s clemency for January 6 insurrectionists, including a lot of violent offenders who attacked police. Some groups associated with that event are again instigating on social media for potentially violent behavior. What message is this all sending, and what does it do in terms of the political environment that we’re in? It’s such a good set of questions. We’re at real risk of normalizing political violence as a part of our democracy. And that is a potential death blow to a free and open society. It’s not to say that these things can’t gravitate back towards a norm of nonviolence. But right now we are creating permission structures for individuals to dehumanize the transgender community, to dehumanize Jews or equate their individual actions with that of the Israeli government, half a world away. We’re at risk of normalizing school shootings among youth who don’t imagine a healthy future for themselves and are succumbing to this kind of nihilistic manipulation that we’re seeing in [online extremist] movements like “764.” And when these norms are accepted at a societal level and encouraged at a political level, they become entrenched and really difficult to reverse. And so what we were doing at CP3 and what we’re doing now at my current organization at American University is trying to normalize prevention, the idea that we can and should build thriving communities where individuals don’t need to buy the violent empowerment that either a politician or an online groomer is selling that leads to violence. The things you’ve listed are incredibly concerning, and frankly, we all have to decide that we care about this issue. If we don’t, if we decide we’re going to be apathetic about it, the violence is going to win the day because it’s going to capture the news headlines, and the algorithms, and the path of least resistance is to surrender to violence as a norm in our current information environment. And so it’s going to take intentional decision making by all of us as individuals to decide that’s not the country or the community that we want to live in. So there are some real problems in our political system right now with a permission structure, as you describe it, for violence. Isn’t rejecting that part of not normalizing it? Yeah, absolutely. One of the techniques that we study and work with at PERIL is called video-based inoculation. It’s the idea that you can give individuals a microdose of some sort of manipulative tactic that they might come across on social media or cable news. And you give them this microdose of this manipulation so that they develop “antibodies” to it. They realize that they’re being manipulated. That is really important, for us to sort of throw sand in the gears of what otherwise spreads like wildfire when we’re passive consumers of information. And so with the last antisemitism video that we tested, individuals were 24 percent more likely to openly challenge manipulative material online if they saw the inoculating video first. So we think there’s a lot of promise there to engage all of us as stewards of our information environment. Is it your hope or expectation that this kind of prevention work will come back more strongly in the federal government in the future? Yes, it has to. The threat is growing and manifesting in more and different ways. There’s been nearly a 2,000-percent increase in mass casualty attacks in the United States since the early 1990s. There are approximately three violent attacks per day that either are plotted or carried out in the United States. School shootings are up linearly since the Columbine attack of 1999. Political assassinations are being normalized. We have to marshal resources to push back on this. I do believe it’ll come back—I think Americans will demand it, but only if they know that violence is preventable, which it is. If, instead, they’re told by their government or anyone else that this is just inevitable and we should be resigned to it, they may believe that. Instead of recognizing that the overwhelming majority of school shooters tell someone in advance they’re going to do it, and that nearly 50 percent of mass-casualty attackers tell someone in advance they’re going to do it, we’ll ignore that reality and just accept the violence. And so it’s really important that we continue to push on this now, but ultimately demand it of our federal government.

It was no surprise. Instead, call it the October reveal. In the final days of the 2024 election, ugly rhetoric from Donald Trump’s campaign drew major national attention when a speaker made a racist joke about Puerto Rico as part of the ex-president’s Oct. 27 rally at Madison Square Garden. The event was an inevitable culmination for the Trump campaign, a six-hour pageant of divisiveness and bigotry that featured multiple speakers launching racist and misogynistic attacks on Kamala Harris. It concluded with Trump at the podium delivering the same demagoguery he has used in dozens of rallies this year: painting a wildly exaggerated picture of national decay, promoting baseless conspiracy theories, and stoking fear and anger about an alleged “invasion” of America by murderous migrants. Such themes have been at the dark heart of Trump’s politics ever since he entered the presidential race nearly a decade ago. As he has taken these tactics to new extremes over the past few months, law enforcement and national security sources I’ve spoken with have warned about a growing danger of far-right political violence inspired by Trump’s messaging. This is not theoretical. It’s based on a lengthy history of violence associated with Trump’s rhetoric, which by 2021 led a bipartisan group of top national security experts to take the extraordinary step of labeling Trump, effectively, a terrorist leader—the de facto head of a violent extremist movement within the United States. Given that another central tactic of Trumpism is to try to cover up the truth and push anything damaging down the memory hole, the time is ripe to revisit some of the major violence coinciding with Trump’s incitement. I’ve been documenting these grim events for more than six years. As I reported in an investigation begun in summer 2018, white supremacist attacks grew deadlier during Trump’s tenure in the White House. The violence unfolded amid a surge in far-right plots and threats, according to law enforcement sources I spoke with then. That included a wave of menace specifically targeting journalists, who Trump and his allies smeared repeatedly as “the enemy of the American people.” Two devastating mass shootings—one at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and another at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas—involved perpetrators who were focused on a migrant “invasion,” a core theme also emphasized back then by Trump. The echoes of Trump’s rhetoric in the El Paso case were particularly stark, as I detailed again recently: > The gunman had driven to the border city from 650 miles away. In custody, > he told police he’d come to kill Mexicans. Some writings he’d posted online > said his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and that > his mission was “defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement > brought on by an invasion.” He cited an extremist ideology known as “The Great > Replacement.” > > These were not obscure ideas. The gunman wrote that he agreed with a recent > mass shooter in New Zealand who had espoused them. He also knew some of these > themes were being championed at the time by President Donald Trump. With help > from Fox News pundits, Trump was whipping up fear and hatred of an alleged > “invasion” coming across America’s southern border—the message was central to > Trump’s reelection campaign in 2019, a focus of his ads and speeches warning > ominously of a national demise. > > > > At the end of the shooter’s screed posted online, he sought to validate his > attack with a pseudo-clever twist, suggesting that his views predated Trump in > the White House. “I know that the media will probably call me a white > supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric,” he wrote. Then he used Trump’s > own rhetoric as supporting ammo: “The media is infamous for fake news.” Notably, Trump backer Tucker Carlson, who has long pushed Great Replacement themes, alluded to the ideology again in his caustic speech at the Madison Square Garden rally. And Trump’s biggest financial backer, Elon Musk, has also been emphasizing it down the campaign homestretch. Most infamously, of course, Trump’s incitement provoked the brutal insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The former president and his allies have spent the years since then trying to erase the truth about Trump’s indelible role in motivating that unprecedented attack on American democracy. Numerous Republican Party leaders have consistently helped deny, justify, and cover up Trump’s incitement of political violence, and some have since adopted his tactics. Others, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have just played dumb. As one national security source told me recently, “Silence is its own form of participation.” Trump continues to weave his virulent strands of demagoguery into a grand conspiracy theory alleging the election will be “stolen” from him. As I reported in late October, the further escalation of his extreme rhetoric has been accompanied by a rise in violent threats reflecting his messaging. With the 2024 voting results imminent, the question now is where this defining feature of Trumpism may take us next.

Donald Trump’s rhetoric during his 2024 campaign has been the darkest in modern memory. He has emphasized grievance and demagoguery ever since he first ran for president, most infamously with his build-up to the January 6 insurrection. But in recent months he has gone to new extremes. In numerous speeches and media appearances, he has peddled false conspiracy theories about the two assassination attempts against him and stoked fear and anger nonstop about an alleged “invasion” of murderous migrants, who he claims are “poisoning the blood of” America and “conquering” cities and towns nationwide. Throughout the election homestretch, Trump has woven these virulent strands into his core message about a supposed grand conspiracy by Democrats to steal the White House from him. Trump and multiple top surrogates have spent months asserting that his political opponents “even tried to kill him” as part of this plot—a canard Trump further amplified when he returned for a second rally at the site in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman opened fire in mid-July. During a speech in Atlanta, Trump reiterated lies about Democrats conspiring to use undocumented migrants to transform America. “It’s so sinister,” he said, “but they want to sign these people up to vote, and if they do that, this country is destroyed. We’d become a dumping ground for the entire world.” Trump has drawn on such “Great Replacement” themes—an extremist ideology embraced by multiple mass shooters—ever since he was in the White House. And Trump’s biggest financial backer, Elon Musk, is now also advancing this theme, speaking at Trump rallies and posting with massive reach on his social media platform, X. Most news media rarely, if ever, frame Trump’s rhetoric for what it is: methodical, sustained incitement. Proving a direct connection between Trump’s incendiary messaging and acts of violence can be all but impossible—a gap of plausible deniability that is central to the method of stochastic terrorism, as it’s known to national security experts. Nonetheless there is a long history of Trump’s rhetoric correlating strongly with subsequent menace and violence: a surge in threats targeting journalists as “the enemy of the people,” a Trump supporter attacking an FBI field office after Trump raged against the raid on Mar-a-Lago, threats to kill FBI agents over a “stolen election” and the Hunter Biden case. The intensifying demagoguery from Trump this election season has caused high concern among threat assessment and law enforcement experts, as I’ve been reporting since June. Fortunately, their worst fears about the kind of catastrophic violence it might provoke have yet to be realized. But according to two senior federal law enforcement sources I spoke with in recent weeks, Trump’s extremism has been accompanied by a rise in violent threats reflecting his messaging. According to these sources, multiple cases of threats have involved individuals citing or parroting Trump’s ongoing claims about violent migrants invading and taking over the country. Trump’s continual focus on that alleged menace has produced a noticeable hardening effect, one source told me: “We see that the longer it’s talked about, the more it becomes perceived as fact.” Other cases have included talk of “payback or revenge” against Trump’s political adversaries for the assassination attempts, including threats focused on elected officials. > “It’s really poisonous, and it’s giving justification to people who are on the > edge to take extreme actions.” Trump’s hyperbole at recent rallies has included macabre descriptions of alleged rape and murder by migrants, such as telling his supporters, “they’ll cut your throat.” After his rally last Saturday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, most media coverage focused on his lewd comments about golf legend Arnold Palmer’s genitals, but less noted was that Trump also conjured a specter of war against migrants: “We will not be invaded, we will not be occupied, we will not be conquered. That’s what they’re doing. This is an invasion into our country of a foreign military.” He has continued to blame Vice President Kamala Harris for this non-reality: “She’s letting vicious gangs take over whole communities,” he inveighed at a rally on Monday in Greenville, North Carolina. “She’s bussing and flying them in by the millions.” A threat assessment expert who consults for federal law enforcement told me that the fear and contempt generated by such rhetoric is potent, and can be interpreted by some people as permission to commit violence. “It’s really poisonous, and it’s giving justification to people who are on the edge to take extreme actions.” In September, the town of Springfield, Ohio, endured waves of paralyzing bomb threats and other harassment after Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, spread lies about Haitian immigrants supposedly stealing and eating neighbors’ pets. Risk for violence escalated in the southeastern US when Trump and his allies seized on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, falsely accusing FEMA and the Biden administration of abandoning victims. These repeated lies were debunked by state and local leaders, including Republicans, but that didn’t stop Trump. “They spent their money on illegal migrants,” he declared again at Monday’s rally in Greenville. “They didn’t have any money left for North Carolina.” Trump has continued to tell this lie in his stump speech—even after a Trump supporter armed with multiple guns was arrested in western North Carolina in mid-October for allegedly threatening to harm FEMA workers. That and other armed threats disrupted the agency’s efforts to help hurricane victims.   Risk for violence around Election Day remains a high concern and a focus for law enforcement, the sources confirmed to me. As one longtime election official in Georgia explained this week to the Wall Street Journal: “People have had four years of just marinating in all sorts of different conspiracy theories, and we worry they’ll come in looking for a problem. Then you got, ‘Hey everyone come down to the polling place,’ and mobs showing up, maybe armed, and it can really snowball very quickly.”  The temperature also has been rising with adversarial partisan crowds, as seen in Pennsylvania on Sunday in the vicinity of a McDonald’s where Trump posed briefly as a fry cook. Concern will extend well beyond Election Day, through a period of uncertainty about voting results that is likely to follow—and that undoubtedly will be further weaponized by Trump and his allies using baseless claims of fraud, sand-in-the-gears litigation, and beyond. National security and threat assessment experts told me after the January 6 insurrection that quashing the violent extremism unleashed by Trump requires a fundamental change in what political leaders treat as acceptable rhetoric. But through the years of Trump’s continuing grip on the Republican Party, that standard has trended in the wrong direction, with many Republican politicians excusing or even joining in on Trump’s tactics. With Election Day fast approaching, no Republican member of Congress or high-profile figure in the party is speaking out forcefully against Trump’s dark rhetoric. House Speaker Mike Johnson and others stick to misdirection or feigned ignorance, if they address the matter at all. As one threat assessment source told me: “Silence is its own form of participation.”

For much of 2024, Donald Trump has used demagoguery against migrants to campaign for the White House. In numerous recent speeches and media appearances, he has continued to inveigh about an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border. He has falsely claimed that hordes of violent and “insane” foreigners have been taking over “hundreds” of cities and raping and killing “thousands of Americans.” His repeated vows to deport millions of undocumented immigrants draw roars of approval at his rallies. Inflaming Americans’ fears about immigration and border security was a hallmark of Trump’s presidency and previous campaigns—and his extreme rhetoric, as I’ve previously reported, has marked spasms of violence, including a horrific mass shooting in 2019 in El Paso, Texas. Earlier this month, he and his running mate, JD Vance, magnified racist lies about Haitian immigrants supposedly stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio—provoking a wave of fear, bomb threats, and major disruption in that community. Now, in the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Trump’s rhetoric about migrants has grown even darker and more foreboding. In three campaign speeches since Friday, he conjured disturbing images of mayhem and death, and spoke of the nation as if it were on the brink of destruction. With no basis in reality, he blamed this cartoonishly grim portrait of American carnage on his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. “She let our American sons and daughters be raped and murdered at the hands of vicious monsters. She let American communities be conquered,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan on Friday, emphasizing, “They’re conquering your communities.” > “They’ll walk into your kitchen,” Trump said of migrants. “They’ll cut your > throat.” “These migrants,” Trump said the following day in Wisconsin, “they make our criminals look like babies. These are stone-cold killers. They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.” In a lengthy diatribe that followed, he falsely claimed that Harris had “let in 425,431 people convicted of the worst crimes.” (This was one of several ways in which Trump wildly distorted recently released data from US Homeland Security covering a 40-year period.) He declared that these were legions of criminals who “Kamala set loose to rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill the people of the United States of America.” “Lock her up!” shouted one person in the crowd. Trump further railed against Harris as being “mentally disabled” and supposedly responsible for tens of thousands of murderers pouring into the country. “I’ve been saying this for three years,” he went on, soon adding: “She’s letting in people who are going to walk into your house, break into your door, and they’ll do anything they want. These people are animals.” Later in the speech, he again highlighted alleged violence by “illegal aliens” and declared: “I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members. I will liberate our nation.” Trump even used an impromptu moment to dehumanize migrants in ugly terms. He claimed that English was fast disappearing from the schools in Springfield, Ohio, and warned that if Harris is elected president, towns in Wisconsin and all over America “will be transformed into a third-world hellhole.” As he continued, a fly apparently landed on the podium. “Oh, there’s a fly,” he said, shooing it away, his tone turning sardonic. “I wonder where the fly came from.” The crowd erupted with laughter. “See, two years ago I wouldn’t have had a fly up here,” he said, grinning. “You’re changing rapidly.” He delivered more of the same on Sunday in Pennsylvania: “The massive number of savage criminal aliens that Kamala Harris has allowed to invade our country, this is an invasion.” He further claimed, “Last week a lot of people came in from the Congo, a big prison in the Congo in Africa. Welcome to the United States.” “Send ’em back!” a person in the crowd yelled angrily. This was all building to a specter of national demise—an invasion, Trump claimed, that will be larger than half the size of the current US population. “Wait till you see what’s going to happen,” he said. “Oh, and if I don’t get in, it’s going to be the worst thing that this country has ever suffered…you’ll have 150, 200 million coming, you will have, this country will no longer be recognizable.” That rhetoric is indistinguishable from the “Great Replacement” ideology that motivated the mass shooter who attacked in El Paso when Trump was in the White House. As I have reported previously, dehumanizing a population by provoking feelings of contempt and disgust—whether it’s Trump smearing migrants for spreading flies, “eating the dogs,” or “poisoning the blood of our country”—increases the likelihood that his extremist followers will commit acts of violence. The danger from this type of incitement, documented in behavioral science research, has been rising with Trump’s rhetoric, according to threat assessment and national security experts I’ve spoken with in recent weeks. As one source put it, “We’ve already seen where this goes, and it can easily go there again.” While America faces profound challenges with immigration, a top issue with voters, Trump’s depictions are as demonstrably false as they are deeply troubling. Immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native-born Americans, extensive research shows. The nation has experienced a sharp decline in violent crime under the Biden-Harris administration, according to FBI data. And recently, migrant encounters at the border dropped to the lowest level in four years. It is important to recognize that Trump’s demonizing rhetoric is clearly by design. He is well known for improvising as he talks and wandering off on long tangents that turn bizarre and incoherent. But much of the incendiary rhetoric above was written into Trump’s speeches. He read it from a teleprompter. When I reported in August on this demagoguery from Trump, I contacted three of his senior campaign advisors separately, asking them for comment about experts’ concerns that Trump’s rhetoric could provoke further violence. None of the them responded, nor did they reply to my follow-up requests for this story.