This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** As we celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, it seems our nation is falling apart. Assassinations have claimed the lives of Charlie Kirk, Melissa and Mark Hortman, and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. President Donald Trump has now survived three assassination attempts in the past two years, including the incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this past weekend. While political violence has long been part of our country’s history, this recent wave reflects a deeper deterioration of America’s core values. But the origins of this cultural and spiritual rot are not a mystery. Since the early 2010s, America’s polarization has been furthered by individuals and interest groups profiting from emotional outrage. Groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was recently exposed for fraudulently siphoning money to the white supremacists it was publicly fighting, have engaged in malicious smear campaigns designed to make us suspicious of one another. This political stratification, deepened by online echo chambers, has spawned a new generation of violent radicals. One of these radicals, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen, checked into the Washington Hilton Hotel on Friday with the alleged intention of carrying out a mass assassination at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner the next day. The event has been held for over 100 years to celebrate America’s press freedom. The sound of shots fired outside the banquet hall brought the celebration to an abrupt end. Journalists and attendees hid below tables as administration officials were quickly swept away. Erika Kirk, widow of the late Charlie Kirk, was seen leaving in tears. The shooter was quickly subdued by security officials and taken into custody. As news broke, Americans around the country were likely struck with deja vu. This shooter is one among many who have attempted to silence political opponents with bullets in the past few years. Cole Tomas Allen does not fit the American imagination of a mass shooter. He was not a bullied, anti-social teen or a crazed maniac, as far as we know. He blended into society as a well-educated teacher and video game developer who participated in No Kings protests and donated to Kamala Harris. His manifesto offered more insight into his motivations for carrying out the attack.  “I apologize to everyone who was abused and/or murdered before this, to all those who suffered before I was able to attempt this, to all who may still suffer after, regardless of my success or failure,” he wrote to family members. “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” Allen evidently feared being morally complicit in Donald Trump’s presidency and viewed everyone in attendance at the dinner as fair targets for being in his proximity. The grandiose sense of self and catastrophic views expressed in his manifesto are eerily similar to the rhetoric repeated daily across social media platforms and news stations. For years, Americans across the political spectrum have been spoon-fed paranoid and hyperbolic narratives about their political opponents. On the Left, this was particularly aided by groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC gained prominence in the 2010s for its “Extremist Files,” which frequently equated conservative groups such as PragerU and figures such as Daily Wire host Matt Walsh with neo-Nazi and far-right organizations. Soon its practice of labeling moderate political and religious opinions as hateful, racist, and bigoted trickled into the language of mainstream media, college classrooms, and our homes. This language is often used to justify violence against conservatives. According to the federal indictment released last week, the SPLC took things further than mischaracterizations. The group paid $3 million to leaders and organizers in the KKK, the American Nazi Party, and others between the years 2014 and 2023 without the consent of donors. The group now faces 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. When the Southern Poverty Law Center was unmasked last week as the Scooby-Doo villain hiding under the KKK hood, it called into question how much of our political reality has been falsely constructed or magnified for financial gain. The SPLC claimed the money was used to save lives through information gathering and infiltration, but Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said, “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” As political rhetoric and violence continue to heat up, we must ask ourselves: Where does this end? If we continue to fan the flames of political hysteria, America will not see another 250 years. This great experiment in peaceful democracy and diversity of thought could disappear because we’ve lost the understanding that our civic responsibilities secure our rights. When shots ring out, people harden their hearts as if they are at war. Journalists and politicians will likely continue to turn up the heat, but we must do something different. We must extend an olive branch of understanding to one another and love our neighbors. If we don’t, we risk losing it all. *** Maggie Anders is a video journalist and commentator at Young Voices. Her work explores international political movements, history, pop culture, economics, the cost-of-living crisis, and Gen Z social issues.

The Left has created permission structures for violence. The violence is not going to stop. It’s not going to stop because the Left has decided to mainstream it. You cannot hug Luigi Mangione and pretend you hate political violence. You cannot celebrate and hug Hasan Piker and claim to oppose political violence. You can’t spread wild, evidence-free conspiracy theories about the president of the United States, calling him a pedophile, the Antichrist, a child killer, Hitler, and then pretend that you’re shocked when someone picks up a gun and tries to kill him for the third time. I’ve been talking about this for a long time. The permission structures for violence have been set up, bolstered, and put into place for years now.  But permission structures for violence, ideologies, and ideas are not all created equal.  It would’ve been shocking if this person had written a manifesto about being upset over the Trump tax cuts. People don’t get shot in the United States over differential tax rates. We need to discuss which ideas and ideologies are the most likely to lead to violence, because they’re not all equivalent.   Let’s talk about the common factors here.  First, ideologies and ideas that lead to violence typically share an evidence-free conspiratorial view of the universe. Shadowy forces of powerful people are responsible for all of your failures and shortcomings, and arguments to the contrary are just facades for power. According to this view, there’s a group of people who are victimizing you. They are shadowy, and they are nefarious, conspiratorial, and able to get away with truly horrific crimes.  Second, ideologies and ideas that lead to violence share a belief that you and your group, the people that you care about, are being targeted for destruction by this shadowy cabal.  And if that’s true, then third, violence is a form of self-defense. To take a couple of examples, when Charlie Kirk was assassinated, it was obvious almost immediately that the ideology that was driving the shooting was a left-wing, radical trans ideology.  Why? Because there’s an ideology that says that if I argue a man is not a woman, that is a form of “trans genocide,” of “trans erasure.” If you believe a shadowy group of people is trying to destroy you and your family, you’re likely to justify violence in response.  That is why somebody shot Charlie. They believed in that bag of nonsense.  Another example: There’s an ideology that is quite prominent in the United States, which argues that President Trump is responsible for the collapse of America. The crux for these ideologues is not that they disagree with his policies, but because they believe he is actually involved in crimes such as pedophilia, starving children, blowing kids up, and that if you don’t stop him, no one will.  That Trump tyrannically controls all aspects of media, that he tyrannically controls all aspects of government, and that the only answer is a form of violence. That’s the same sort of ideology that led to the shooting of the United Healthcare CEO. As Hasan Piker put it in an interview with the New York Times five days ago, the United Healthcare CEO was engaged in “social violence.” He was part of a predatory group of people who were literally killing people for profit.  “You can understand why somebody might want to shoot the guy, I mean, it’s totally understandable,” these leftists might say. That is a permission structure for violence.  When it comes to President Trump, it is one thing to oppose his policies. I’ve opposed many of President Trump’s policies, but nobody is shooting the president over a set of policies. It’s another thing to say that he is a pedophile, that he is the Antichrist, that he is a child murderer, that he is Hitler. These are not the same sorts of things.  The sort of language that has been truly routine on the Left is a permission structure for violence. For example, take Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who says that Republican policies do violence to the American people. It’s not just that the Republican policies are wrong; they’re malign. They’re designed to be malign.  This approach to politics has harsh consequences. The permission structure for the violence of the congressional baseball shooting in 2017 was the Bernie Sanders line that people who disagreed with him about Obamacare or nationalized health care wanted 50,000 people to die, that they were killing grandma, and wanted grandma to die.  That sort of approach to politics is dangerous.  What politics should be about in the United States is ironing out our differences. We may not always agree with one another, but that doesn’t mean you wish for them to die. They simply disagree with you.  An obvious case is the Left fully embracing Hasan Piker. Last week, he was given the royal treatment by The New York Times. He once lauded the “great video” by Taylor Lorenz that discussed the meme that someone had to “do it,” which was a tacit suggestion to kill Donald Trump. When people are pushing such a meme, that is a potential for revolutionary activity.  Piker has endorsed violence over and over and over again, and yet has been embraced by the Democratic mainstream. You have people who are supposed moderates, like Ezra Klein, pushing Hasan Piker as a legitimate voice inside the Democratic Party.  You can’t do this and then pretend you hate political violence. The permission structures for violence are also skewing young because everyone in the younger demographic is constantly online, where the incentive structure is to be passionate and crazy. The echo chamber that facilitates violent and charged language tends to draw higher numbers. Period.  This is always true. Not every word is created equal. When people curse, it goes directly to your limbic system. The same thing is true if they use passionate language. So if you’re 18 through 29 and you’re imbibing from that well over and over and over, and if mainstream political parties that are trying to channel that passion into votes start justifying that sort of stuff, you should not be surprised when political violence becomes more common.  It’s not just true in the United States. It’s true everywhere. Every violent, radical revolution begins with young people. It always begins with young people who start acting and speaking violently. And then there is always a group of moderates who decide that they need to work with the young, violent people, to use their rage and channel it toward political change.  And that’s how political violence becomes incredibly common. That’s how street battles happen. We are playing with fire as a society if we continue to pretend that all ideologies and permission structures are created the same.  They are not. Conspiracism is bad. It is not just bad in terms of utilitarianism. It is wrong. It is evil.  Conspiracism unbacked by evidence generates violence, mental illness, and stupidity. It wrecks our politics. But most importantly, it wrecks our civilization.

The man suspected of attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump on Saturday emailed family members detailing his motivations and intended targets, according to court documents unsealed Monday afternoon. An FBI affidavit includes a message from Cole Tomas Allen saying he was no longer willing to allow “a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” Authorities have charged Allen with attempting to assassinate Trump and multiple firearms offenses.  Allen was detained Saturday night after authorities say he charged into the lobby of the Washington Hilton, where Trump and other top cabinet officials were attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.  “An act of violence occurred at a gathering that symbolizes something fundamental to our system of government. The ability of a free press and public officials to come together in celebration and not fear,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on Monday. “Secret Service agents promptly tackled and detained the suspect.” During the attack, a Secret Service agent was struck by a bullet. Federal officials have not yet revealed who fired the shot that hit the agent. Investigators believe Allen fired his shotgun, while another agent fired five rounds at him but did not strike him, Blanche said.  Allen sent the email to family members at approximately 8:40 p.m. on the night of the attack, appearing to acknowledge his actions, according to the affidavit.  “So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today,” the email read. “Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused. I apologize to my parents for saying I had an interview without specifying it was for ‘Most Wanted.” The message also identified potential targets. “Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest,” the email stated.  When asked by The Daily Wire about the reference, Patel declined to comment. He did say that the FBI was “constantly” tracking potential threats when asked if there were any other credible threats being looked into at the time. The affidavit further indicates the attack appeared to have been planned for weeks. Allen booked a room at the Washington Hilton on April 6, then traveled by train from the Los Angeles area to Chicago on April 21, arriving April 23 before continuing on to Washington, D.C. 

Every time I read a post or article from a mainstream leftist, I endure the five stages of grief.  First comes denial, that something so deranged, so tone-deaf, so nakedly divisive could have been stated publicly in the first place. Then rage, that anyone could feel entitled to say such things at all. Then bargaining — a naive, fleeting hope that if I just explained it calmly, they’d stop spreading the lies. When that fails, I am hit with a wave of sadness at the state of this country, and the Left’s iron refusal to reflect. And finally, I accept, again and again, the reality of the leftist mind. They are unchanging, unreasonable, and utterly immune to consequence. Sighs. Scrolls. All of this happens within 30 seconds of reading a typical lefty post, and it happened again Sunday afternoon, when our feeble, smug, former divider-in-chief Barack Hussein Obama took to his social media accounts to pretend that he had absolutely no idea what could have motivated another attempt on President Trump’s life. Yes Barack. It’s a mystery, wrapped in a puzzle, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a riddle! Bangs head against wall repeatedly. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that the gunman described Trump as a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” — the exact language parroted by Obama’s closest allies, and spelled out explicitly in the shooter’s own manifesto. No, no. Couldn’t be. Obama has to feign ignorance, because the alternative is honesty, and an honest tweet from Barack Obama would read something like: “For the last eighteen years, my party and I have systematically divided this country, using inflammatory rhetoric, identity-based grievance-stoking, and outright lies to make you all hate each other. This has culminated in a surge of Left-wing violence. Sorry!”  He’ll never write that post. Instead, he’ll continue to play dumb, while our sitting president, his cabinet, and virtually every prominent conservative in the country fear for their physical safety. That’s the daily reality of American political life, and Obama helped build it. For my younger friends who have only ever known the media’s soft-focus, golden-hour portrait of the Obama years: they lied to you. In 2008, he promised healing. “There are no red states or blue states. Only the United States.” Members of the media will often reminisce on the “good ol’ days” when he was in office. But were they all that good, or did they foment much of the hatred we see online and in reality today? Obama repeatedly injected race into incidents before the full facts would emerge, knowingly amplifying identity-based grievances. When they arrested Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at his home, Obama declared the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” before a shred of evidence supported that conclusion. He personalized the Trayvon Martin shooting by saying, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” a calculated statement not meant to comfort, but to inflame. He amplified the Ferguson narrative as it was still collapsing under its own contradictions. He pitted “the 99%” against job creators and entrepreneurs, fueling the kind of class warfare that made half the country feel like villains in their own economy. His administration’s IRS targeted conservative groups. “Punish our enemies” were the exact words he used to describe political opponents, revealing how he viewed the 60 million Americans who disagreed with him. What started as a promise of unity became a master class in division. And the movement he midwifed — Black Lives Matter, the mainstreaming of political rage, the normalization of viewing your political opponents as existential threats rather than fellow citizens — did not evaporate when he left office. It metastasized. Far from becoming a graceful elder statesman, Obama remains one of the most actively divisive voices in American politics. In recent speeches, he has attacked the Trump administration as a “clown show” of “lawlessness and recklessness,” dripping with “mean-spiritedness and just plain craziness,” while framing Republicans as an existential threat to democracy itself. Instead of calling for calm when conservatives are literally fearing for their lives, he continues to pour gasoline on the very cultural fire he helped ignite. The man who once pledged to heal the nation can’t stop picking at the wound. Of course, Barack Obama is not solely to blame for the toxic state of American politics. The American Left has spent the better part of a decade poisoning it alongside him. Kathy Griffin posed for a photo holding a bloody, severed mock-up of President Trump’s head. Tim Walz — the almost-vice president of the United States, and current governor of Minnesota — publicly wished death on Trump. Sitting members of Congress have declared they’re going to “bury” Republicans under the Capitol. Left-wing cultural figures now openly platform voices calling for the murder of “capitalist motherf*ckers,” romanticizing political violence, and explicitly advocating for Trump’s assassination. And pop culture — just downstream from politics — has followed suit. Jimmy Kimmel, days before the most recent attempt on Trump’s life, delivered a fake White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech with the punchline: “Mrs. Trump, you have the glow of an expectant widow.” Did no one ever tell him that if he can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all? No one should be shocked that “progressive terrorists” exist. Least of all Barack Obama, as he was instrumental in creating the conditions that produce them.  But what is shocking is the Left’s refusal to acknowledge how their incessant denigration and demonization of conservatives has led to conservatives being shot at, doxed, or attacked. As someone who has been harassed by the online Left, I can tell you exactly what his faux-bewilderment feels like from the receiving end. It feels like someone peeing on your leg and telling you it’s raining. And it sends me into my 30-second grief spiral every time. The truth is that Obama does not want the violence to stop. He hopes that one day he’ll wake up to the “threat” extinguished by his foot soldiers and his work finally done. That’s the progressive project. Campaign as a moderate, rule as a radical, divide and conquer, and leave the country more broken — and bloodied — than you found it.

An illegal immigrant was working as a youth soccer coach in Ohio when he allegedly sexually assaulted a child. Timothy Glenn Boggs, 51, a Mexican national, is charged with nine counts of sexual battery and is accused of engaging “in sexual activity” with a teen between the ages of 13 and 17, according to local reports. Prosecutors say Boggs committed the offenses while acting as “an athletic or other type of coach, instructor… or otherwise in a position of temporary or occasional disciplinary control” over the victim, WKYC reported. The assaults allegedly occurred between October 1, 2024, and April 30, 2025, authorities said. Boggs, a former West Salem council member, has since resigned from his role as a girls’ soccer coach at Northwestern Local Schools in Wayne County, WKYC reported. He was also a coach for the Ohio Strikers United Soccer Club, which said the allegations had “deeply shaken” its club community. Boggs last entered the United States legally in June 1995 through the Canadian border, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told The Daily Wire. The agency now refers to him as a “criminal illegal alien.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lodged a detainer on March 31 requesting that local authorities hand over Boggs once he’s released from custody, DHS said. “Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S.,” a DHS spokesperson told The Daily Wire. Northwestern Local Schools Superintendent Julie McCumber said the district “recently learned of an allegation” that “purportedly stems from an incident that allegedly occurred outside of his role as a scholastic coach and was not connected to his employment with our district.” “At no time during his employment with our district did we receive any reports or have any knowledge of alleged misconduct in his role as a scholastic coach,” McCumber said. “The alleged misconduct is not associated with a district student or employee. His last official contact with the team occurred in November 2025.” “In response to learning of the allegation, Northwestern complied with all applicable reporting requirements under Ohio law. District administration also contacted the families of former players as part of our commitment to due diligence and ensuring the safety and well-being of all students,” McCumber added. Boggs was indicted on March 20 and is being held on a $100,000 bond.