The Left Has Normalized Assassination Talk

Actor Mark Hamill made big news this week when he posted an AI generated image of President Trump laying in a shallow grave. The caption began "If only..." The White House was quick to respond, calling him "one sick individual."

Hamill, who still does work as a voice actor, seems to have thought better of wishing President Trump was dead and deleted the post. He then posted another one in which he vaguely apologized and claimed people had misunderstood his point.

Others didn't even pretend to be sorry. One response read, "Your post made it to the White House and you got called out. Congratulations, well done."

I saw all of this Thursday when it happened and thought it was sad to see an actor who played one of my childhood favorite characters behaving like this. But what I didn't realize at the time is that Hamill's outburst is actually part of a trend on the left.

Today the Washington Post reports that there is a whole world of videos on TikTok where young progressives try to come as close as possible to calling for Trump's death without actually saying anything that might get them a visit from the Secret Service.

Peyton Vanest was fuming about President Donald Trump when he grabbed his phone and hit record. “Somebody should,” he declared, pausing for dramatic effect. “Somebody should, you know?”

“If somebody knew what needed to be done, that person should probably just do it …” the 27-year-old progressive influencer continued, conspicuously not defining “it.”

Then he uploaded the 62-second video to TikTok, where it accumulated more than 700,000 likes and 3.2 million views. His version on Instagram garnered another 1.4 million views.

“Crazy how we all know exactly what you’re talking about,” one of thousands of commenters replied.

That was posted just 18 days before Cole Allen attempted to storm the White House Correspondent's Dinner with the goal of killing President Trump. Interest in the "Somebody should do it" trend spiked after Allen's attack.

This trend didn't start a few weeks ago. It seems to taken off last February, about a month after Trump took office. A Brooklyn comedian went viral with another clip vaguely suggesting someone should kill Trump.

As I said, I wasn't really aware this was part of a trend, but apparently younger people who spend time on TikTok are very aware of it.

Tim Weninger, an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies how social media is wielded to dehumanize enemies, first encountered the trend last fall when a teenage family member happened to scroll upon it. This week, he said, he asked a few students on campus whether they’d seen “Somebody should do it” appeals, too. Every single one, he said, knew what that meant.

In retrospect, I think this is exactly what James Comey was doing when he posted his image of shells he claims he found on the beach. And, as I've argued before, while I think Comey very much intended that to have two meanings, charging him for it is never going to succeed. He can easily claim he had no ill intent and create all the reasonable doubt needed. Unless there's some email where he joked about mocking Trump's assassination, he'll never be convicted.

And that's what this whole trend is really about. Can you say it without saying it in a way that would result in consequences. In short, leftists on TikTok (and elsewhere) have normalized assassination talk.

Do they really mean it? The Post interviewed six people about the trend and most of them said it was just a way to vent, but at least one said she hoped someone would really do it.

Grace, a 26-year-old university employee in Louisiana, said it felt like writing in her diary when she logged onto X and typed “somebody should do it” to her few hundred followers...

“I don’t have a violent bone in my body,” she said. “I’d never do it myself.”

I suspect that's a lot more common on the left than this 6-person survey suggests. The whole point is to say it without saying it. If you admit you really mean it, you've failed to play the game properly.

Most of remember how many people seemed eager to celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk in the weeks after his death. Kirk was well known but nothing compared to Trump. If Trump were assassinated, I suspect there would be hundreds of thousands if not millions of people on the left celebrating, led by a lot of very well-known celebrities.

Do the memes have any impact on real life? That's harder to say, but we can say that there have been three assassination attempts so far and the number of threats is striking. Here's a list of some recent ones that resulted in a law enforcement response.

- Dean DelleChiaie - An FAA worker from New Hampshire threatened to kill Trump last month. He had previously done searches on how to get a gun into a federal facility.

- Nathaniel Sanders - Out of Florida. The FBI got a tip which led them to threats to bomb the White House and also to kill Melania Trump and Sec. Marco Rubio.

- Michael Kovco - Chicago man threatened to kill Trump and his son Barron. He sent a message to the WH website saying it came from "Mr. I'm going to f***ing kill your child Kovco"

- Andrew D. Emerald - From Massachusetts, he repeatedly threatened to kill Trump on Facebook. When the FBI showed up, he brandished a sword.

- Shawn Monper - From Butler, PA. He pleaded guilty last month to threatening to murder Trump. He called himself Mr. Satan on YouTube and got a firearm permit not long after Trump's 2nd inauguration.

All of those cases are fairly recent, and there are more if you keep going back to last year. Again, you can't directly connect the death threats to the memes about killing Trump. These individuals may or may not have seen those memes. But what you can say for sure is there is a lot of assassination talk and thoughts circulating out there. It's not hard to find at this point. It's everywhere out in the open.

He can easily claim he had no ill intent and create all the reasonable doubt needed.

If Comey is charged in a DC court, he will never be convicted of anything. "Reasonable doubt" will be assumed. Any available jury will likely applaud the actions for which he might be charged.

We are not going to solve our problems using the court system. It remains to be seen if we can solve our problems with the "elections" systems.

Comey is charged in the Eastern District of North Carolina, where his beach house is located. The DOJ has stated that the Instagram post is not all of their evidence. There are also possible charges from the South Florida District grand jury related to the lawfare conspiracy against Trump including the Russiagate hoax and the Mar A Lago FBI Raid.

I have not been a Star Wars fan for a while but not because of Mark Hamill. George Lucas screwed it up pretty good with his prequel trilogy, then he sold the whole thing to Disney who screwed it up even more and then proceeded to ruin it. Now that Hamill is using his one accomplishment of life as a political tool there is nothing left to destroy except the very tiny vestiges of his career. Success!

It continues unabated because it hasn’t been punished appropriately.

Start handing out 20-year prison sentences to supermax facilities and see how quickly it stops.

Oh? You say we can’t do that? Sometimes you can just “do things” when push comes to shove. One just needs to find the intestinal fortitude to do it. Just ask the left about it.

RE: ...young progressives try to come as close as possible to calling for Trump’s death without actually saying anything that might get them a visit from the Secret Service. >

Like the Dem politicians and TV “comics” and news panelists. Schumer had his rebuttal ready last year “I of course meant that only in political terms, not physically.”

2025. Schumer stated: “We have people going to the Republican districts and going after these Republicans who are voting for this and forcing them to either face — change their vote or face the consequences”.

Rep. Mike Lawler and other Republicans interpreted this as “inciting far-left activists” to harass lawmakers and “gaslight folks”. The comments came amidst tense, sometimes disrupted, protests in New York congressional districts

This 2025 incident drew parallels to a 2020 incident where Schumer told conservative Supreme Court Justices “you will pay the price” and “you won’t know what hit you.” Following that 2020 incident, Schumer stated his words were intended to indicate “political consequences” for Republicans, not physical threats, though he later admitted he “should not have used the words”.
—LA Times on rhetoric conroversy.

And almost all of this kind of craziness is on the left.

The only "other side" meaning the Right they used as examples on CNN recently were two from Trump that the traitors like Mark Kelly if found guilty should face execution under federal law.

This is from the Left, day after day. Once the Saul Alinsky plan of "hold your enemy up to ridicule; they can't recover after that" is worked on by the late night comics to make Melania a widow (God forbid) then it's mainstream.

When Chuck Schumer said “you will pay the price” and “you won’t know what hit you.” to threaten Supreme Court justices such as Kavanaugh, Trump found out.

What hit him was a bullet that hit his ear and caused blood to flow down his face in Butler.

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