(Daily Signal)—This past year, the Left crossed a Rubicon in normalizing political violence.
The year opened with many on the Left praising a man who allegedly murdered a health care CEO, and it ended with Virginia Democrats overwhelmingly voting for a man who fantasized about shooting his political opponent and wished death on his opponent’s children.
Jay Jones, now Virginia’s attorney general-elect, made the most bloodcurdling endorsement of political violence I have ever seen from an elected official, and he justified it with this sentence: “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”
Jones apologized for the remarks, but he remained in the race, and he even shared a stage with none other than former President Barack Obama. I had hoped my fellow Virginians would reject this message in November, but Jones won the election—setting a horrifying precedent for American politics.
Jones’ election victory highlights the negative partisanship in America, and it comes at the end of a truly horrifying year of left-wing violence. Here are 10 incidents of threats or violence aligning with the Left’s attacks on Trump and his party.
1. Targeting ‘Nazi’ Pete Hegseth
On Jan. 28, Capitol Police arrested Riley Jane English, 24, after she told officers she was carrying a folding knife and two Molotov cocktails. English traveled to Washington, D.C., intending to kill War Secretary Pete Hegseth, whom she referred to as a “Nazi,” or House Speaker Mike Johnson, according to a police affidavit. She also reportedly mentioned wanting to burn down The Heritage Foundation.
This attack followed media reports claiming that Hegseth had a tattoo “associated with white supremacist groups,” when the tattoo merely features the Jerusalem Cross. It also followed a year of false claims about Project 2025, a policy project The Heritage Foundation led.
2. Tesla Vandalism
As the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, cut wasteful and ideological spending in the early months of this year, vandals targeted Tesla vehicles, dealerships, and charging stations. Agitators burned vehicles to the ground, and protesters marched with a banner reading, “Burn a Tesla, Save Democracy.”
Some agitators even published a map claiming to plot the location of every Tesla owner across the U.S., suggesting users should attack them.
3. New Mexico GOP Vandalized
In April, the Justice Department charged Jamison Wagner, 40, for two attacks: an arson attack on two Tesla vehicles in February featuring swastikas and the graffiti “Die Elon”; and an arson attack on the New Mexico Republican Party headquarters, featuring the graffiti “ICE=KKK.”
“Hurling firebombs is not political protest,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said at the time.
4. National Jewish Museum
In May, a gunman yelling, “Free Palestine,” shot and killed a Jewish couple—Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim—outside the National Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. Elias Rodriguez, 31, faces local and federal murder charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
Rodriguez had previously been associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, though the party said he has not been involved with the group since 2017.
5. Boulder Molotov Cocktail Attack
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, faces 12 hate crime charges for allegedly using Molotov cocktails on June 1 to attack people who marched in solidarity with the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. He shouted, “Free Palestine!” during the attack, and reportedly described Israel as a “cancer entity.” Soliman allegedly wounded 12 victims, one of whom died from her injuries the next day.
6. Apparent Revenge for Hortman
In June, Vance Boelter, 57, allegedly murdered former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, her husband, and shot state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, both of whom survived. Boelter appears to have been motivated by opposition to abortion, and he targeted Democrats. The Center for Strategic and International Studies categorized the attack as right-wing.
A few days after the assassination, a Democratic Party lobbyist reportedly sent text messages to a former friend of an opposing political viewpoint. The lobbyist wrote, “Excited to have my gun at the capitol and blow somebody’s f—ing face off.”
The Minnesota State Patrol reported in October that it has investigated 50 threats against Minnesota state commissioners, lawmakers, and the governor’s office, more than double the 19 from last year. These threats targeted Republicans, as well as Democrats.
7. Alvarado ICE Attack
On July 4, 10-12 people wearing black clothing started shooting fireworks at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, spray painting “Ice pig” and “F— you pigs,” on cars and structures, according to prosecutors. When Alvarado police arrived at the scene, one of the agitators allegedly shot one of them in the neck.
About 18 people face federal and state charges for the attack on the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. Four defendants pleaded not guilty in December.
Joshua Jahn, 29, killed two ICE detainees at a Dallas detention center before taking his own life in a September shooting.
In November, the Department of Homeland Security reported that ICE and Customs and Border Protection have faced nearly 100 vehicular attacks this year, more than double the amount for 2024.
Attacks on federal law enforcement follow years of leftist demonization, comparing ICE to the KKK and the Nazi Gestapo.
8. Annunciation Church Shooting
On Aug. 27, a man who legally changed his name to affirm a transgender identity shot and killed two children and injured thirty others at a school mass at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis.
Other offenders who identified as transgender have also targeted Christians for threats and shootings.
9. Kirk Assassination
On Sept. 10, a man in a relationship with another man who identifies as transgender allegedly murdered Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. The shooting came a few months after the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is notorious for comparing mainstream conservative and Christian groups to the KKK by putting them on a “hate map,” added Turning Point USA to that map.
Many on the Left celebrated Kirk’s death.
10. Arson Attempt
The Kirk assassination sparked more violence. The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office in Minnesota filed charges against a man who allegedly made violent threats in retaliation for Kirk’s death.
On Sept. 17, police in El Paso, Texas, arrested 35-year-old Marynka Marquez and charged her with arson against a place of worship, specifically Beth El Bible Church.
According to police, Marquez “had gone to the church, placed a large bag against the outside wall of the church, set it on fire, and then fled the scene.” The pastor had been leaving the church, so he spotted the fire and put it out.
On Sept. 18, the day after the attack, Beth El Bible Church held a vigil honoring Charlie Kirk.
Many Kirk memorials also faced vandalism.
Political Violence
Neither the Left nor the Right has a monopoly on political violence, as this list demonstrates. Both conservatives and liberals need to condemn these violent attacks.
That said, the normalization of political violence seems particularly worrying on the Left. A YouGov poll conducted in October found that self-identified Democrats are more likely to have a favorable view of Antifa (+15%) than they did in September 2022 (-5%) or even in March 2025 (-7%). The Proud Boys, a right-leaning group that has engaged in street brawls with Antifa, finds no such popularity among self-identified Republicans (-20%), though it is, of course, even less favorable among Democrats (-59%).
While conservatives must remain vigilant to threats from the Right, the Left cannot merely dismiss political violence as a “far-right” or even a “both sides” problem.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
