Not All Violence Against Politicians Is Political

In response to the political assassination of Charlie Kirk on Wednesday, I’ve seen many people on the left posting “what abouts” regarding the tragic murder of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the wounding of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, allegedly by a 57-year-old gunman. (Yes, we still have to say “allegedly” until there’s a conviction.)

The comparison many are making is to label these killings as “political violence.” But here’s the key difference: while the victims were politicians, it does not yet appear that they were targeted because of their politics.

That matters.

The Distinction: Political Assassination vs. Violence Against Politicians

A true political assassination happens when the killer disagrees with the target’s views and wants to eliminate an opponent. That clearly seems to be the case in Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Similarly, the attack on the Annunciation Catholic Church was allegedly driven by hatred toward the Church itself, as shown in the shooter’s disturbing online posts that mixed antisemitic, anti-Catholic, and racist rants with praise for mass killers.

But many attacks on political leaders throughout history had nothing to do with political ideology. John Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981, not because of Reagan’s policies, but because Hinckley wanted to impress actress Jodie Foster. A man once tried to assassinate President Andrew Jackson because he thought Jackson had blocked him from becoming King of England. President James Garfield’s assassin was a disgruntled office seeker furious over being denied a patronage job.

Back in December 2023, a few of my friends who hold elected office were targets of Swatting, false calls to the police with the hope that the cops would accidentally kill the target in the mistaken belief that a crime was occurring. Most of the Swatting calls were to the homes of Republicans, and on Christmas Day. Luckily, no one was injured or killed. Ironically, the two men indicted for the swatting and other similar hoaxes, including fake bomb threats, were operating from outside the U.S. and had no connection with their victims.

The alleged shooter in the Hortman case, months later, still has not revealed any motive connected to her votes or political positions.

What We Know So Far

In July 2025, the New York Post interviewed Vance Boelter, who had once been appointed by Gov. Tim Walz to Minnesota’s Workforce Development Council. Boelter admitted to supporting Trump but declined to explain his relationship with or attitude toward Walz. Nothing in his statements suggested he targeted Hortman out of partisan hatred.

By contrast, the motivation of the January 6 rioters was explicit and undeniably political—which is why many Republicans, myself included, strongly condemned that day. Likewise, leaders on the left, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, have been unequivocal in condemning Kirk’s murder.

The Hortman killings, by contrast, happened in private and out of the public eye. Kirk’s murder unfolded in front of 3,000 students, broadcast within minutes across millions of screens.

Another stark difference: I have not seen conservatives celebrating the Hortmans’ deaths. I certainly would not tolerate it if I did. Yet when Kirk was shot, even in the crowd, some students began to immediately cheer in the crowd.

Violence Against Politicians Isn’t Always Partisan

Melissa and Mark Hortman did not deserve their fate. Though I would have disagreed with her politically, her constituents believed she represented them well, and she had every right to serve without fear for her life. Her husband Mark also did not deserve to be murdered because of who he was married to. For now, their death seems senseless.

This is why the distinction matters. Not every violent act against a politician is an attack on democracy itself. Sometimes, as history shows, the motive is personal, delusional, and, too often, tragically senseless. We still don’t know why the Hortmans were targeted, and we may never know. Andrew Jackson’s would-be assassin was acquitted by reason of insanity—the first successful use of that plea in U.S. history.

ABC News has even noted that the FBI has created a new category of those to watch precisely because of a tendency to commit violence without a political motive:

Bruce Hoffman, who studies terrorism at Georgetown University, noted that the FBI has created a new category, Nihilistic Violent Extremism, to track the increasing number of attacks that seem to have no clear political motivation.

“Extremism is becoming a salad bowl of ideologies where you can pick whatever you want,” Hoffman said, adding that the increasing number of lone wolf attacks means violence is increasingly unmoored from organizations with clear political goals.

What’s more important than the attackers’ state of mind, experts stressed, is the broader political environment. The more heated the atmosphere, the more likely it’ll lead unstable people to commit violence.

But Charlie Kirk’s murder seems to have been explicitly for his views. His killer wanted to silence him for speaking them. That’s not just violence—it’s the very definition of political violence.

As Piers Morgan put it: “Charlie Kirk’s assassin Tyler Robinson, 22, killed him because he hated his opinions and thought he was a fascist. Yet ironically, HE was the fascist, killing someone to silence their opposing views. The woke left love to say ‘speech is violent.’ It’s not—violence is.”

The left seems to want to absolve itself of any blame by using the Hortmans as some sort of morally equivalency shield to point to partisan violence on both sides. Rather than making a commitment to call out and condemn rhetoric that paints every conservative as a “racist”, a “fascist”, and a “threat to democracy”, far too many on the left only want to claim, “Well, your side commits murder too!!!”

This leaves Democrats free to continue a drumbeat of dangerous rhetoric while absolving themselves of the possible ramifications. There are few better examples than Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), who was engaging in such rhetoric just hours before Kirk was assassinated, telling his viewing audience, “We’re in a war right now to save this country. And so you have to be willing to do whatever is necessary in order to save the country.”

It took less than two days after Kirk’s murder for Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) to start spewing the left-wing talking point that Trump and Republicans were leading our nation “down the dangerous road of dictatorship.”

While there were plenty of Democrats expressing sympathy for the Kirk family, there didn’t seem to be anyone on the left telling Murphy and Schiff to “SHUT UP!”

For the past couple of years, I have been working to bring down the temperature in the political room, inviting both sides of the aisle to sit down and find what we have in common as a way to, as Utah Governor Spencer Cox has been doing for years, disagree better. On September 10, that cause had a tragic setback, and in Cox’s own state as well. But we are never going to stop this until both sides are equally as willing to condemn those who poison the political well. I pointed this out almost a year ago that Democrats have been calling Republicans “Nazis” almost since the end of WWII. But thanks to the Internet, there seems to be more opportunities for that rhetoric to lead to radicalization than ever before.

Melissa and Mark Hortman should still be here. Their murder is no less tragic, even if it was apolitical. But we must be clear-eyed: not all violence against political figures is “political violence”. And if we blur that line, we risk losing sight of the very real threat posed when violence is used to silence speech.