Tag Archive for: Political Rhetoric

Secret Service Threat Investigations up 40% over 2025

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A corrosive cocktail of foreign plots, explosive rhetoric, and homegrown left-wing extremism has caused major headaches for the agency tasked with protecting America’s top federal officials. Secret Service agents have investigated approximately 10,000 cases of threats against designated protectees this year alone, according to Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi. The number represents “a roughly 40% increase from this time compared to last year.”

The spike in threats comes amid an environment of escalating security concerns driven by far-left ideology. Since 2024, three individuals have attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, and three more killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman (D), and conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Each was motivated by far-left ideology.

In the past five years, violent leftists have also targeted Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (D), Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, ICE officers, Christian schools, and Jews — all motivated by a political ideology that embraces violence as an acceptable means to achieve political ends.

As the above incidents suggest, no one is safe from this leftist fury, not even Democratic politicians, who often go along with the Left’s agenda. On Wednesday, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee, revealed that he and his family were the target of a nasty intimidation campaign by anti-Israel activists. “To date, my family and I have had our home vandalized, a fire has been set in my driveway, my neighbors’ lives have been disrupted by demonstrations in the middle of the night, town halls meant to be forums for dialogue have been shut down, and a staff member has been physically assaulted.”

The activists demanded that he vote for the Massie amendment to the State Department appropriations bill that would cut off military aid to Israel. Smith ultimately joined 102 Democrats and Massie in voting for the amendment, which failed.

Given the variety of threats from a variety of sources for a variety of reasons, the Secret Service must remain extremely vigilant to keep top officials protected from every angle. “A person doesn’t have to make a direct threat to draw the agency’s attention,” CBS News summarized. “The threat assessment process relies on behavior, rather than a specific demographic profile. Agents look for potential warning signs like obsessive fixation, escalating grievances, stalking, harassment, paranoia, delusions, suicidality, significant behavioral changes and an unusual interest in violence.”

But a 40% increase in threat investigations is sure to tax the resources of an agency that already feels stretched. Besides protecting sites like the White House complex and individuals like the president and vice president, the Secret Service also provides protection for the Supreme Court, cabinet officials, former presidents, presidential candidates, and the families of all these top officials, not to mention visiting foreign dignitaries.

The Secret Service is also responsible for securing any American site to which its protectees intend to travel. Advance teams arrive days ahead of time to make security arrangements, and then dozens or even hundreds of officers travel to the location to man security perimeters, magnetometers, and observation posts. This year alone, the Secret Service said it has conducted nearly 3,000 protective visits. The Secret Service screened approximately 100,000 attendees at the World Cup Final match, as well as every occupant of the National Mall for the July 4th celebration.

On top of all this official work, Secret Service has had a much busier time than usual protecting the White House. Every so often, Secret Service officers encounter a mentally unstable individual who insists on being let in to see (or perhaps kill) the president, or who otherwise makes absurd claims. The Secret Service takes these individuals into custody and transfers them to the D.C. Metro Police, where they can (or at least should) receive mental help. Doing so makes paperwork and takes officers off the front line for transport purposes.

According to the Secret Service, “Mental health interventions have increased tenfold from the same period last year, including referrals and both voluntary and involuntary commitments involving people encountered during its protective mission,” Axios summarized.

To add another headache to an agency that doesn’t need more, Secret Service also suspects that someone has been leaking the location of Vice President J.D. Vance and is currently investigating a member of his security detail for doing so.

The consequences of all this extra work are potentially dire. For years, Secret Service has been chronically understaffed, with agents and officers forced to work large amounts of overtime to cover the gap. Although it is always hiring and training new staff, it has never been able to close the workforce gap.

This means that the Secret Service cannot simply cover a 40% increase in threat investigations by hiring 40% more investigators, nor by swinging reserve investigators into action. That massive spike in a single year means a massive spike in the workload of its current investigative staff. Either these investigators must work much longer hours, producing exhaustion, or they must investigate each case much more briefly. Either way could lead to mistakes. And, when threats against senior government officials are in view, mistakes can be catastrophic.

“We do expect bad people to show up. It’s just a reality of where we are,” said Secret Service Director Sean Curran. But the extra burden of threats issuing forth from the radical Left only makes the Secret Service’s job harder.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Public Figures Face More Dangerous America after Kirk Assassination

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“You might want to stay back and call the federales, I have explosives,” warned a man occupying a green tent on the steps of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C. It was roughly 6:00 a.m. on Sunday, October 5 (roughly an hour before sunrise), and officers from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) had arrived to secure the area before the cathedral’s annual “Red Mass,” an invocation service for the U.S. Supreme Court’s fall term, which some justices historically attend.

When an officer from the MPD bomb squad told the man he had to move because of a special event (the “Red Mass”), the man replied, “I’m aware of that,” but he refused to budge.

The man, 41-year-old Louis Geri, threatened to throw a bomb into the street, claiming, “I have a hundred-plus of them.” Thus, he created a pre-dawn stand-off with law enforcement officers. When the police said they would remove him forcibly, Geri threatened that “several of your people are gonna die from one of these.”

Geri then handed over a nine-page manifesto, which “revealed his significant animosity towards the Catholic church, members of the Jewish faith, members of SCOTUS and ICE/ ICE facilities,” police said. As he handed over the pages, Geri flicked on a butane lighter with his other hand, warning, “You [had] better have these people step away, or there’s going to be deaths.”

Fortunately, Geri’s threats of destruction came to an anticlimactic resolution when he was betrayed by his own bladder. When he left his tent to urinate on a tree, three officers apprehended him without incident.

Nevertheless, the subsequent investigation showed that MPD had been wise to heed Geri’s threats. Inside the tent, they found “a large cache of handmade destructive devices.” In an affidavit submitted Monday, a bomb technician said the cache contained “over 200 devices,” and “the devices appeared to be fully functional.” The explosive devices were reportedly of the Molotov cocktail variety, consisting of bottles filled with explosive chemicals with an ignition mechanism.

Providentially, the attempted perpetrator is better described as a prolific bomb maker than a mastermind criminal. Originally from New Jersey, Geri had spent the past several years living in an Arizona motel, during which time he spent nine months in prison for indecent exposure. Before his futile standoff with police on the cathedral steps, Geri had previously been barred from the premises. And his ill-timed, arboreal “pit stop” was an amateurish mistake. Geri likely deserves pity for an evidently hard life, but praise God that his incompetence resulted in no loss of life or property!

The deeper irony of the tale also portends ill for America. Even if Geri had more competently executed an explosives plot against the Mass frequented by Supreme Court justices, he would have missed his targets on Sunday. According to the National Catholic Register, “due to security concerns, no Supreme Court justices attended this year’s Red Mass.”

Quick-witted readers may begin to discern a pattern. Only two days into the court’s term, conservatives canceled a customary rally outside the Supreme Court during oral arguments in a case over whether counselors can be forced to push gender ideology on their patients.

Once again, security concerns were the issue. “Experienced security professionals warned that the threats of violence at an outdoor event were too great,” wrote ADF CEO Kristen Waggoner. “Our allies sponsoring the rally couldn’t simply ignore those threats. We’ve all witnessed the wave of violent attacks in recent weeks — many of which are politically motivated, with apparent ties to radical gender ideology. And that ideology is at the center of this case.”

When public figures cannot attend worship services or hold outdoor rallies due to safety concerns, it suggests the level of political violence now presents an existential threat to America’s system of representative government. This level of fear and uncertainty is unacceptable, unsustainable, and either the violence or the country must eventually give way.

These cancellations mark a low point in American civic life. Let us pray that this low point is America’s nadir, not the beginning of a deeper slide.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

The Left Must Acknowledge Its Violence Problem

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Joanne Chesimard (“Assata Shakur” to her revolutionary fans) died a few days ago in Havana, under the protection of Castroism. The former member of the Black Liberation Army had been living in Cuba since 1984 after escaping from prison, where she was serving a sentence for murdering a police officer in New Jersey. Shakur went from the FBI’s most wanted list to the pages of leftist American media, which applauded her as a revolutionary example.

The fashion and entertainment magazine Essence romanticized Shakur as if she were a runway model: “She is survived by a legacy of revolutionary thought which urges us to reflect on the lessons of power, beauty, and preservation that can be found through her physical representation.” The website Democracy Now! republished a letter from the woman “in memory of her life and her work.” The Chicago Teachers Union’s social media account honored “the life and legacy of a revolutionary fighter, a fierce writer, a revered elder of Black liberation, and a leader of freedom whose spirit continues to live on in our struggle.”

If the Left is willing to bring its murderers from the violent 1960s and 1970s, when “anti-colonial” and Marxist terror reigned, out of the basement, it’s no wonder they celebrate or justify today’s political violence. The Center for Strategic and International Studies defines left-wing terrorism as “that which is motivated by an opposition to capitalism, imperialism, or colonialism; black nationalism; support for LGBTQ+ rights; support for environmental causes or animal rights; adherence to pro-communist, pro-socialist beliefs or ‘anti-fascist’ rhetoric; opposition to government authority under the belief it is a tool of oppression responsible for social injustices; support for decentralized political and social systems, such as anarchism; or partisan extremism, where violence is justified against political opponents and parties perceived as advancing right-wing agendas.”

The last 12 months have exposed the Left as the protagonist of violence, although today its main stenographers misinform their own audience and remain in denial.

Let’s recall two assassination attempts on presidential candidate Donald Trump, Luigi Mangione’s assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City in December 2024, the bullet that pierced the neck of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the assassination of two Israeli diplomats while the murderer chanted “Free Palestine!” in Washington, D.C. Let’s also recall the violent trend against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. In one example on July 4, 2025, a dozen individuals dressed in black clothing and equipped with tactical gear attacked the Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas.

The events I’ve mentioned reveal a terrible truth: that the extremist charge isn’t found in dark corners of the leftist base, but rather constitutes the very foundation of leftist beliefs.

A YouGov survey conducted immediately after the fatal shooting of Kirk asked if “it is ever justified for citizens to resort to violence in order to achieve political goals.” The results showed that the more liberal respondents were, the more likely they were to say violence can sometimes be justified.

A quarter of respondents who identified as “very liberal” said violence can sometimes be justified to achieve political goals, along with 17% of those who identified as “liberal,” 9% of moderates, 6% of those who said they’re “conservative” and 3% of those who identified as “very conservative.”

Twenty-six percent of liberals under 45 years old, compared with 12% of liberals 45 and older, said political violence can sometimes be justified; 12% of moderates under 45 years old, compared with 6% of moderates 45 and over, said it’s sometimes justified; and 7% of younger conservatives, compared with 4% of older conservatives, said it’s sometimes justified.

At the same time, the Democratic elite, including the mainstream media and several politicians, seem to justify political violence. Examples include Kamala Harris promoting donations to bail violent protesters during the 2020 “Summer of Love” and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) repeating falsehoods about Kirk’s character.

The first step to curbing the problem isn’t creating false equivalencies by saying it’s a “problem on both sides,” because while there may be violence from the other political spectrum, it’s proportionally incomparable right now.

The first step to curbing political violence isn’t shouting to the winds about everyone “turning down the heat.” It’s the Democratic establishment that has unfairly labeled its political opposition as “fascists.” And that label is the key to the structure of permissiveness that justifies violence against conservatives. If “fascism” (defeated militarily, politically, and culturally in World War II, that is) is the representation of Satan for a secular society, then if someone is a “fascist,” ending their life would be justified.

A tentative acceptance of the problem has begun to make its way into media outlets across the left-wing political spectrum. The Atlantic magazine acknowledged that left-wing terrorism has increased since 2016, and that 2025 marks a milestone in that regard.

But to change course, Democratic leaders, strategists, and propagandists (like the addict mired in his own justifications) must accept that they are politically sick, but sick nonetheless. They must commit to shifting their rhetoric away from the constant inflammatory adjectives from platforms like California Governor Gavin Newsom’s (D).

The response from the Right has been exemplary: memorials, mass prayers, a revival of faith.

In response to those who celebrated silencing a man like Kirk who promoted dialogue, conservatives promoted more debate, although the Left continues to react with cancellations and coercion, as the Fearless Debate Tour experienced at Tennessee State University.

YouTuber Steven Crowder recently resumed his debates on college campuses under the slogan “Change My Mind.” It was precisely this format that inspired Kirk for his viral “Prove Me Wrong” videos. However, as a sign of the times, Crowder had to wear a bulletproof vest and hire private security to hold the event. He himself admitted that the cost amounted to a quarter of a million dollars.

The Left has a problem. It must acknowledge the violence that is overwhelmingly coming from its ranks today and call on its members to focus on dialogue, not bullets or blows. Otherwise, all the money, hours, and risks invested by conservatives in debating will be in vain, because there will be no one sitting on the other side of the table.

AUTHOR

Yoe Suarez

Yoe Suárez is a writer, producer, and journalist, exiled from Cuba due to his investigative reporting about themes like torture, political prisoners, government black lists, cybersurveillance, and freedom of expression and conscience. He is the author of the books “Leviathan: Political Police and Socialist Terror” and “El Soplo del Demonio: Violence and Gangsterism in Havana.”

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.