Far-left crackpots on social media have normalized the idea that President Donald Trump and Tesla tycoon Elon Musk should be assassinated.
The frightening news comes from the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University, which reports that almost 60 percent of leftists polled have no problem with someone murdering Trump. And almost 50 percent have no problem with someone whacking Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency has discovered federal bureaucracies riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse.
Leftists, the report from NCRI says, have normalized the advocacy of political violence. Yet the findings are hardly surprising given the hate-Trump rhetoric that has spewed from top Democrat and far-left celebrities for years.
The Report
NCRI specializes in “cyber-social threat identification and forecasting” and tracks social media to “investigate and identify emerging threats.”
And what it found out about the American Left is what anyone familiar with social media already knows anecdotally. Leftists are becoming increasingly unhinged thanks to Trump Derangement Syndrome and its affiliated mental illness, Musk Derangement Syndrome.
“Political violence targeting Donald Trump and Elon Musk is becoming increasingly normalized,” NCRI reported:
Following the July 13, 2024 attempted assassination of President Trump, tolerance — and even advocacy — for political violence appears to have surged, especially among politically left-leaning segments of the population. This pattern builds on a broader trend NCRI identified in two December 2024 reports which analyzed how viral social media narratives were legitimizing political violence, particularly in the aftermath of the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s assassination.
Even worse, social media is rife with “widespread justification for lethal violence — including assassination — among younger, highly online” individuals. Meanwhile, “spillover” is even affecting politics, as a ballot measure in California — the “Luigi Mangione Access to Health Care Act” — shows. Mangione faces a federal death sentence if convicted of murdering UnitedHealthCare’s chief executive, Brian Thompson.
NCRI’s findings, it avers, “threaten political stability and public safety.”
The group’s key findings showed how the Left’s crazy narratives are pushing people to extremes: 31 percent of those polled say “it would be at least somewhat justified” to murder Musk. 38 percent say the same about Trump.
But leftists are those driving that extremism, the report says:
These effects were largely driven by respondents that self-identified as left of center, with 48% and 55% at least somewhat justifying murder for Elon Musk and President Trump, respectively, indicating significantly higher justification for violence against these figures.
As well, 39.8 percent of those polled say “it is at least somewhat acceptable (or more) to destroy a Tesla dealership in protest.”
NCRI surveyed 1,264 people.
BlueSky Fingered
Not surprisingly, the far-left answer to Musk’s X social platform, BlueSky, “plays a significant and predictive role in amplifying radical ideation,” the report says:
Users are increasingly associating the memeification of Luigi Mangione with calls for political violence against Musk, Trump, and others, reflecting the growing cyber-social presence of assassination culture.
To arrive its startling conclusions, NCRI created scores to measure the acceptability of political violence among leftist. “A score of 1 meant that the respondent considered political violence completely unjustified,” the group said. “Scores from 2 to 7 indicated that they believed there was at least some justification for political violence, and, in the case of those choosing 7, that it was completely justified.”
The “troubling trends” NCRI uncovered include these:
Over half of those who self-identified as left of center (55.2%) reported that if someone murdered Donald Trump, they would be at least somewhat justified.… This includes 13% who said this murder would be “Completely Justified.” Similarly, nearly half of those who self-identified as left of center said the murder of Elon Musk would be somewhat justified (or greater), with about 9% saying this is “Completely Justified” (see Figure 3). Over ⅓ of all respondents believe it is at least somewhat acceptable to destroy Tesla dealerships to protest Elon Musk’s involvement in the Presidential administration.
Besides BlueSky, Reddit is another boiling cauldron of bloodlust, where “users have even made explicit calls for acts of violence against Trump, Musk, and government institutions.”
And the “attitudes are not fringe; they reflect an emergent assassination culture, grounded in far-left authoritarianism and increasingly normalized in digital discourse,” NCRI says:
Cyber-social platforms — particularly BlueSky — play a strong predictive role in amplifying this culture. References to Luigi Mangione now function as coded endorsements of political violence, cloaked in irony, memeification, and plausible deniability. In these ecosystems, violence is not just justified — it is stylized, gamified, and embedded within a broader ideological narrative. Combined with psychological drivers such as external locus of control, these dynamics create a permissive environment in which users feel morally licensed to advocate or celebrate extreme acts.
The report concludes that political and cultural leaders must confront and condemn the trend. If not, NCRI concluded, the nation faces “a growing probability of real-world escalation. Given the current economic volatility and institutional distrust, the online normalization of political violence may increasingly translate into offline action.”
Celebrity Calls for Violence
Yet social media isn’t the only culprit. Far-left celebrities are also famous for normalizing calls for violence. And they have been for years. “He’s a punk, he’s a dog, he’s a pig, he’s a con, a bullsh*t artist, a mut,” declared washed-up actor Robert DeNiro before the 2016 election. “I’d like to punch him in the face.”
In 2017, has-been comedienne Kathy Griffin held up a model of Trump’s bloody, decapitated head.
The same year, a Shakespeare in the Park performance featured a Julius Caesar who resembled Trump being stabbed to death.
Meanwhile, top Democrats, including former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have repeatedly called Trump a hater and a “threat to democracy.” Harris called Trump a “fascist” and likened him to Adolf Hitler after the first attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Last year, New York Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman said Trump “has to be eliminated.”
