The Accelerating Threat of the Political Assassination

Another man was arrested outside the home of Congressional Progressive Caucus chairwoman Pramila Jayapal for threatening to kill her. Recent reporting by the Guardian found that “U.S. Capitol police reported 9,625 threats and directions of interest (meaning concerning actions or statements) against members of Congress last year, compared to 3,939 such instances in 2017.” 

Assassins have long believed that their vicious acts would change the course of history. The murder of the heir to the Habsburg throne in 1914 achieved that aim with destructive consequences: igniting the first global war ever and killing nearly 20 million. “[W]hile assassination has generally failed to direct political change into predetermined channels,” Harvard University historian Franklin Ford argued in his seminal work, Political Murder, “it has repeatedly demonstrated the capacity for affecting, often in the most dramatic fashion, situations which, in the absence of lethal violence, might conceivably have developed very differently.” The lives claimed by assassins in the twentieth century of political leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi, Jordan’s King Abdullah, John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert in 1968, Martin Luther King that same year, and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, among others, are testament to how different the course of history might have been had they been allowed to eventually die of natural causes.

As in those cases, today’s growing wave of assassination attempts has crossed ideologies. Certain adherents of the far left have been responsible for attempts on the Republican baseball practice and more recently Justice Kavanaugh. But the far-right is also active in this space and was responsible for the most recent successful high-level political assassination in the country: the killing of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, state senator of South Carolina, at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015. Jihadists often place prominent figures in their crosshairs, as demonstrated by a recently disrupted plot against George W. Bush. Even the more nascent male supremacist movement has its targets: A so-called “men’s rights activist” attacked the home of U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas in July 2020, killing her son.

The emerging trend is due in no small part to the reemergence of so-called “accelerationism” as a distinct violent extremist strategy. For extremists seeking to sow chaos and speed up some cataclysmic societal collapse, high-profile politicians provide an attractive target, as symbols of the mainstream liberal political order. “We need to kill the HVT’s,” one poster wrote on Telegram in August 2019, using a military acronym for high-value target. “When a popular HVT is gunned down, it inspires hope and dreams.” The COVID pandemic then added fuel to the fire as public officials were blamed and then threatened for the lockdowns and enforced quarantines. Targets ranged from prominent health officials like cerebral National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, as well as many other lower-level state officials responsible for the imposition of these extraordinary public health measures. Fauci was forced into constant law enforcement protection because of threats against his life — which was only a prelude to the death threats and serial harassment that now routinely are directed against local and state election officials.

Hoffman and Ware conclude:

The emerging trend is due in no small part to the reemergence of so-called “accelerationism” as a distinct violent extremist strategy. For extremists seeking to sow chaos and speed up some cataclysmic societal collapse, high-profile politicians provide an attractive target, as symbols of the mainstream liberal political order. “We need to kill the HVT’s,” one poster wrote on Telegram in August 2019, using a military acronym for high-value target. “When a popular HVT is gunned down, it inspires hope and dreams.” The COVID pandemic then added fuel to the fire as public officials were blamed and then threatened for the lockdowns and enforced quarantines. Targets ranged from prominent health officials like cerebral National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, as well as many other lower-level state officials responsible for the imposition of these extraordinary public health measures. Fauci was forced into constant law enforcement protection because of threats against his life — which was only a prelude to the death threats and serial harassment that now routinely are directed against local and state election officials.

….

Political assassinations have indeed changed the course of history — and most often not for the better. Now, COVID lockdowns, explosive new political phenomena which demonize political opponents as evil, and divisive elections cast in existential terms have left a charred political landscape in which those leaders still standing are particularly vulnerable. At a time when the system is again “blinking red,” we must ensure that we take this threat seriously and are doing everything possible to deter any future American assassin through a combination of prudently robust defenses and proactive law enforcement engagement with this dire potentiality.