Senior National Security and Legal Analyst Mehek Cooke warned that political rhetoric from the Left is contributing to a dangerous climate of violence surrounding President Donald Trump during an appearance on “Mornings With Maria” on Fox Business Network. Cooke sharply criticized former President Barack Obama for publicly suggesting there was “no motive” behind recent attacks and threats targeting President Trump and those around him at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. According to Cooke, the evidence points clearly in the opposite direction. Cooke argued that Obama’s statement was not an expression of uncertainty but a deliberate political calculation. She said Democrats are concerned that continued attacks against Trump could generate sympathy among voters and drive turnout for Republicans in the midterm elections. “This is all politics,” Cooke said. “The sympathetic voters, the people who did not know what they would do this midterm. The Left is aggressive—they have spent the last 10 years calling Trump Hitler, a fascist, everything under the sun.” Cooke described the moment as a political turning point, saying millions of Americans—including undecided voters—are beginning to see through what she called years of inflammatory rhetoric from the Left. She accused Democratic leaders of spending a decade portraying Trump as a fascist and a dictator, only to now feign surprise when violence follows. “The leaders of the Left are showing who they are,” Cooke said. “They’re not for us.” Drawing a historical comparison, Cooke referenced the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, noting that political activity paused while the nation confronted the seriousness of the threat. She contrasted that response with today’s environment, where she said partisan politics continue unabated despite repeated threats against Trump. Cooke stressed that President Trump is not Joe Biden and requires constant, enhanced protection. She called for a comprehensive overhaul of security protocols, including the Secret Service, to address what she described as repeated failures and unresolved questions following recent incidents. “We have to have a massive overhaul of our security,” Cooke said. “We have to start thinking differently about threats in this country.”

The Department of Justice is investigating allegations of ties between left-wing groups and Cole Tomas Allen, the 31-year-old California teacher charged with attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. When asked by The Daily Signal if the department is investigating Allen’s reported association with leftist groups, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said “yes, of course.” The Justice Department held a press conference Monday shortly after the suspected shooter was charged with attempting to assassinate the president of the United States. .@DAGToddBlanche tells @DailySignal an emphatic “YES” when asked if the DOJ is investigating left-wing groups allegedly affiliated with Cole Allen.— Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (@TheElizMitchell) April 27, 2026 Reports said Allen was associated with a progressive collective known as “The Wide Awakes,” but the organization denied the connection in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation‘s Hudson Crozier. Posts from the Wide Awakes Instagram account include a call to defund ICE and a declaration of American land as “Indian Land.” Shortly before the Justice Department press conference, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt addressed the attempted violence. “Those who constantly falsely label and slander the president as a fascist, as a threat to democracy and compare him to Hitler to score political points, are fueling this kind of violence,” she told reporters. “The left-wing cult of hatred against the president and all of those who support him and work for him has gotten multiple people hurt and killed, and it almost did so again this weekend.” Leavitt said Allen’s manifesto echoed the rhetoric about the president on social media and in the press. “Much of the manifesto of the would-be assassin is indistinguishable from the words that we hear daily from so many,” she said. The California man also faces charges of transporting a firearm across state lines and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence. He appeared in federal court in Washington for his arraignment on Monday. Allen left a manifesto with family members referring to himself as the “Friendly Federal Assassin” and expressing plans to target senior Trump administration officials who were present in the hotel ballroom.

What’s behind the alarming spike in leftist political violence? In the past two years, President Donald Trump has faced three assassination attempts, with the most recent one arguably coming Saturday night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Members of his administration have also faced violent threats. Last year saw the assassination of Charlie Kirk, one of Trump’s most prominent supporters, and some on the Left have celebrated the assassination of a health care CEO, Brian Thompson. Just last week, leftist podcaster Hasan Piker suggested in a New York Times interview that Thompson deserved to die because he “was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder.” Piker argued that “the systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty, the for-profit, paywalled system of health care” justified the assassination. Also last year, Virginia elected Jay Jones as attorney general, despite the fact that he previously sent messages fantasizing about shooting Republican former speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates Todd Gilbert. Jones stated at the time that he wished Gilbert’s young children would die in their mother’s arms, and he justified this death wish by saying, “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.” Jones later apologized for the texts after they were made public during his campaign for Virginia attorney general. Meanwhile, Democrats largely looked the other way while riots in the name of the Black Lives Matter movement took over city streets in the summer of 2020, claiming the lives of at least 27. Many of them demonized Supreme Court justices who had voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, even as pro-abortion activists stalked these justices and tried to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh. The Right is far from perfect, but this torrent of political violence isn’t an accident. It arguably traces back to the Left’s ideological foundation. Progressivism and Political Violence Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas explained it well when he contrasted the vision of Progressivism with the principles of the Declaration of Independence earlier this month. “Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement—with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War—to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration,” Thomas said. “Progressives strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident.” Under Progressivism, “liberty no longer preceded the government as a gift from God but was to be enjoyed at the grace of the government.” Thomas noted that President Woodrow “Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, whose state-centric society they admired. Progressives like Wilson argued that America need to leave behind the principles of the founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated system of relatively unimpeded state power.” This arguably opened Pandora’s box. Totalitarian governments in Germany, Russia, Cambodia, and China utilized state power to remake society, causing the deaths of millions. In the U.S., Wilson re-segregated the federal workforce and launched sterilization programs. WHAT IS PROGRESSIVISM?Clarence Thomas explains why Progressivism is "a new set of first principles" and inherently incompatible with the Declaration of Independence. He lays out where it comes from and why it's a threat.https://t.co/yJFqQ0oaKm pic.twitter.com/Fv3zrj50xS— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) April 17, 2026 Immanentizing the Eschaton Of course, the Left has rejected Wilson’s racist vision, but preserved the overall worldview. The Marxist theory that capitalism constitutes a form of oppression expanded in the 1960s to a social vision, in which the “oppressed” classes—racial minorities, LGBTQ people, women, and others—must rise up and overthrow the current system. The Left has weaponized a culture of grievance to paint its opponents as oppressors. The Southern Poverty Law Center—which just made news last week because the Justice Department accused it of lying to donors by secretly funding members of the KKK—maintains a “hate map” that plots mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits alongside Klan chapters. This map demonizes conservatives as agents of “the infrastructure upholding white supremacy.” Such a claim only makes sense if you follow critical race theory, which starts with the assumption that America is systemically racist and urges people to deconstruct our colorblind laws to find a hidden “white supremacy.” This demonization is bad enough, but the Left also maintains that it is the government’s job to achieve near-perfect justice, effectively bringing the kingdom of God to earth. That’s why they misquote Martin Luther King Jr. on the “arc of the moral universe.” King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He grounded this statement in his faith in God, citing Isaiah 40. Today, however, leftists say they need to “bend the arc.” President Joe Biden said his party had “a giant opportunity to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.” President Barack Obama praised civil rights marchers as people who did “their part” to “bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries recently said that Americans have a “responsibility” to “bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.” That’s not what King meant, however. King meant that, because God is the ultimate author of morality and the universe, his justice will ultimately prevail. It is vain hubris to believe that we ourselves can alter the moral structure of the universe. That’s the grandiose language of a tyrant who considers himself “king of the universe,” unbound by “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” If you legitimately believe that the morality of the universe is up to you, and you legitimately believe that your political opponents are hateful on the level of the KKK, is it any wonder you might take the law into your own hands?

The vehicle kill switch may be getting another chance to be killed in Congress this week as a member of the House Rules Committee wants to repeal legislation that directs automakers to install surveillance technology on all new vehicles starting in 2027. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, a committee member and influential congressman on the conservative House Freedom Caucus, says the Biden-era mandate poses “a direct threat to our Fourth Amendment rights.” “Republicans should not be continuing a blatantly invasive Biden-era policy that enables round-the-clock monitoring of Americans in their own cars,” Roy told The Daily Signal while the possibility of the amendment was still being discussed by the Rules Committee. “That’s why I introduced an amendment to FISA to eliminate the ‘kill switch’ and stop this Big Brother technology from being built into new vehicles.” This is Roy’s second attempt at killing the kill switch this year. We’ve forced amendment votes on this repeatedly but Republicans block it. Your car is unaffordable and you are not free. As Attorney General I will sue to defend you against these infringements on your rights. https://t.co/hcMmFmsT5L— Chip Roy (@chiproytx) April 25, 2026 The need for an amendment already has large support from House conservatives, including Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., Scott Perry, R-Pa., and Keith Self, R-Texas. “The government should never have the ability to remotely kill your car or anything else you own,” Self told The Daily Signal. “When a group of us conservatives in the House tried to repeal this Joe Biden-era mandate set to take effect next year, 57 Republicans teamed up with 211 Democrats to stop us. That’s unacceptable.” Federal law says new cars after 2026 must monitor drivers and shut down if the car disapproves. Your dashboard should not be judge, jury, and executioner.@RepScottPerry @RepChipRoy offered an amendment to defund the automobile kill switch mandate. Here’s our debate: pic.twitter.com/ZYvAHCs5e7— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) January 22, 2026 The kill switch mandate comes from the HALT Drunk Driving Act (Sec. 24220 of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act), which Democrats passed with support from 19 Republican senators and 13 Republican representatives. The text of the bill requires installing technology to monitor drivers’ performance, passively detect blood alcohol, or detect impairment. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) supported this 2021 bipartisan bill. The organization claims that once the technology is in place, it will save 10,000 people a year from drunk driving incidents. According to the group, the technology is not a government tool and will be “passive,” operating without the driver needing to do anything. The HALT Act required the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to publish a draft of the mandate for the technology by 2024. In 2023, the agency reported that technology didn’t exist yet to comply with the federal mandate. As of January 2026, NHTSA has not completed the required draft, which was originally due in 2024. Conservatives are already facing a fight over the FISA reauthorization bill, as many Republicans, including congressional leadership, do not want to reform the bill to require warrants to investigate American citizens. Related PostsRFK Jr. Must Cease Flow of Tax Dollars to CAIR, Roy SaysFIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Rep. Chip Roy of Texas sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday, urging him to suspend funding for the Council on American-Islamic Relations and its affiliates and initiate debarment proceedings. “Why should Americans’ taxpayer dollars go to groups like CAIR that facilitate terrorism?”…Trump Administration Is ‘Looking Beyond the SPLC’ to Broader ‘Marxist’ Network: Chip RoyRep. Chip Roy told The Daily Signal that the Justice Department’s indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, while a welcome move, represents just one step in a broader effort the administration has undertaken against leftist groups. “The indictments are an enormously important step forward and an indication that the administration is taking this seriously,”…EXCLUSIVE: Bill to Dismantle Taxpayer-Funded Democrat ‘Talent Pipeline’ Expected to Pass House CommitteeFIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A House committee will likely pass a bill to reform a taxpayer-funded scholarship that critics call a “talent pipeline for the Democratic Party and liberal activist organizations,” a committee spokesperson told The Daily Signal. The spokesperson for the House Committee on Education and the Workforce predicted that the bill will pass…

Most justices seemed unconvinced Monday that law enforcement’s use of Google data to track a bank robber violates the Constitution. The case stemmed from the prosecution of Okello Chatrie, who conditionally pleaded guilty in 2022 to robbing a Midlothian, Virginia, credit union. He reserved his right to make the case for suppressing evidence if it was illegally obtained. His lawyer, Adam Unikowsky, argued to the high court Monday that a court-approved geofence warrant used to identify and apprehend him violated the Fourth Amendment. The warrants were to compel third-party companies such as Google to search customer locations from multiple devices in a finite area during a finite time, in this case, being the time of the robbery. Chatrie was reportedly sentenced to 12 years for taking $195,000 from the bank. Law enforcement argued it exhausted other leads in its investigation before resorting to a geofence warrant. Chief Justice John Roberts asked Unikowsky on Monday, “If you don’t want the government to have your location history, you just flip that off. You don’t have to have that feature on your phone. So what’s the issue?” Unikowsky replied it was not implied consent. “I just don’t agree that one should have to flip off one’s location history, as well as other cloud services, to avoid government surveillance,” he said. Roberts responded, “If you don’t want someone to peer in your window, you can close your window or the shades.” Justice Samuel Alito said, “I’m struggling to understand why we are hearing this case.” He noted that the debate is about a Google feature that no longer exists. “We are all free to write law review articles on this fascinating subject, but that seems to be what you’re asking for,” Alito said. The attorney responded, “All we’d ask for in this case is, if the court finds a Fourth Amendment violation, to reverse and send it back for the Fourth Circuit to consider the good faith issue in view of this court’s guidance.” The plaintiff did seem to get some sympathy from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, on the liberal wing of the court. She noted that Google documents, Google calendars, and other information can be obtained by law enforcement. “If this is consent, that means the government can seek those documents for any reason, not just the commission for crime,” Sotomayor said. “So that means the government, a police officer, randomly decides, I don’t like that person. Let me just go look at their life to see if I can find the crime. That would be okay,” Sotomayor continued. Unikowsky replied, “Correct.” Arguing for the Trump administration, Deputy Solicitor General Eric Feigin said ruling with the plaintiffs would constitute an “unprecedented transformation of the Fourth Amendment into an impregnable fortress.” “In doing so, he would make that fortress so impregnable that not even a judge’s warrant, for even a moment of the public location of someone who, again, affirmatively opted to allow Google to have those records and to access them, would be available to law enforcement,” Feigin added. “That’s a debilitating and counterintuitive reading of the Fourth Amendment that would impede the investigation of kidnappings, robberies, shootings, and other crimes.”