Shapiro, in his polish, in his pragmatism, and in the frequency with which he invokes a spirit of bipartisanship, operates in the liberal tradition of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—an appeal to hope and public good will that has been tested by the recent wave of attacks. In his speech, he criticized Trump, without naming him, for condemning only left-wing acts of violence and suggested that the trouble was a kind of ennui, especially among the young, who no longer trust American institutions to solve their problems. “Consumed by this feeling of hopelessness,” he said, “they find refuge in the dark corners of the internet.” The remedy he offered was for institutions to address those problems—he mentioned delivering building permits more quickly—so that people walked away with “just a little more faith in the system.” But Shapiro himself seemed to acknowledge a mismatch, in proposing incremental policy changes to counter acts of murder. He told the crowd, “I realize getting your permit earlier isn’t going to end political violence.”
America is a violent country. Nowhere else that is remotely as rich tolerates so many murders or so many weapons. But, sometime during the tumultuous decade of the Trump era, it began to seem that simply participating in the political process put you at risk.
After the riot on January 6th, 2021, when thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, Tom Manger, a tall, mustached sixty-six-year-old former police chief in Montgomery County, Maryland, was hired to lead the U.S. Capitol Police. Part of the department’s job is to investigate threats of violence against members of Congress. Manger soon learned that, in the years before his appointment, such threats had been increasing dramatically. A decade ago, he told me, members typically reported fewer than two thousand threats per year. “But around 2017 that really started to escalate,” Manger said. “Last year, it was almost ten thousand.” As Manger and his team analyzed the data, he concluded that one of the best predictors of which members received the most threats was not party, seniority, race, or gender but how much attention they generated on social media. “A lot of people love you,” Manger told me. “And a lot of people hate you.”
Nearly ten thousand violent threats a year amount to about twenty-eight a day, a number that overwhelmed the investigative capacities of the Capitol Police. A common type of threat, Manger found, emerged from a mundane situation: a member of the public would call his representative to say that he was dissatisfied with his care at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and then, frustrated by a lack of response, call a second time. “Then he calls a third time and says, ‘I’m gonna kill the congressman,’ ” Manger told me. The most ominous threats implied that a member of Congress was under surveillance. “A member will get a letter mailed to his house, and there will be a photo of the congressman’s kid walking the family dog, and there will just be a little Post-it note stuck to the letter that says, ‘What a pretty dog,’ or whatever,” Manger said. “And this sends the message: ‘I was close enough to your kid to take this picture.’ ”
When Kirk was assassinated, in September, the size of his private security force appeared roughly equal to the number of campus cops on the scene. In the aftermath of the shooting, the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro told a story about a recent talk he’d given in Oxford, in which his security detail had insisted that, because of threats against him, he stay at a rural inn that could more easily be protected from attack. The following week, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who often addresses college audiences, told me that “the difference among conservative speakers is between those like Charlie, who have their own security, and those like me, that don’t.” (He said that he was revamping his speaking contracts to require more protection.) But such fears have become commonplace on both sides. This year, a Democratic Washington state senator named Adrian Cortes told a local newspaper that he had begun to wear body armor whenever he gave a speech in “an uncontrolled area.”
The Pennsylvania governor’s residence after Cody Balmer set off two Molotov cocktails in the state dining room.Photograph by Matthew Hatcher / Getty
