The IRS can hit political violence where it hurts: Funding



Political violence in the United States no longer lives in the realm of theory. We are watching it unfold in real time. Assassination attempts, targeted harassment, and violent disruptions have become disturbingly common. The chaos at Berkeley in November offers a bracing reminder.

A majority of Americans now believe a political candidate will be assassinated within the next five years. We have already witnessed two assassination attempts against President Trump, the brutal murder of Charlie Kirk, and a foiled plot to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Increasingly, this violence draws fuel from activist organizations that exploit tax-exempt status to advance their agendas through intimidation rather than debate.

If the government is serious about de-escalating political violence, it must lawfully deploy every available tool.

That exploitation must end. The federal government already has the tools to act. It should use them — starting with the IRS.

We cannot tolerate nonprofits mobilizing radicals under the banner of free speech while trampling the First Amendment rights of others. At Berkeley, activist groups operated as coordinated foot soldiers. One organization, “By Any Means Necessary,” lived up to its name. Protesters circulated flyers depicting Charlie Kirk’s assassination, labeled attendees “fascists,” and openly called for President Trump’s removal.

This is not debate. It is coercion.

Growing numbers of activists no longer seek persuasion but submission. Polling reflects the danger. Roughly one-third of Americans under 45 now say political violence is sometimes justified. Berkeley showed what that belief looks like when put into practice.

The moment demands a firm, whole-of-government response. As a former state criminal prosecutor and Senate chief of staff, I understand that crises require decisive action. Protecting citizens and enforcing the law are core functions of government. The time to act has arrived.

The first step toward dismantling the nonprofit infrastructure that enables political violence is straightforward: The IRS should revoke tax-exempt status from organizations that finance or coordinate violent activity. Cutting off these funding streams deprives radical networks of oxygen.

Critics will claim this amounts to political targeting. That claim collapses under scrutiny.

RELATED: Trump declared war on leftist domestic terror. The IRS didn’t get the memo.

Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

The real problem is that the IRS has lost focus. For years, the agency engaged in overt political targeting — scrutinizing conservative groups while leaving ideologically aligned organizations untouched. That imbalance allowed certain nonprofits to operate with near impunity while exploiting the protections of tax-exempt status.

Restoring evenhanded enforcement does not mean ignoring violations on the left. It means applying the law as written. The IRS has both the authority and the obligation to act when nonprofits facilitate violence. Looking the other way is not neutrality. It is abdication.

Consider Antifa, which has been designated a domestic terrorist organization yet continues to benefit indirectly from nonprofit support structures. That contradiction should not stand.

If the government is serious about de-escalating political violence, it must lawfully deploy every available tool. That includes the IRS. The assassination attempts against President Trump should have been a wake-up call. The murder of Charlie Kirk should have erased any remaining illusions.

Subversive actors are gaming the nonprofit system to tear the country apart — using tax-exempt dollars to silence, intimidate, and physically endanger those exercising their most basic constitutional rights.

We either enforce the law now, or we accept that the violence will escalate.

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‘Faces of meth’: How Antifa radicalizes its foot soldiers



Antifa first rose to mainstream prominence during the summer riots of 2020. While how the group managed to recruit so many young people has remained a mystery to most Americans, domestic security expert Kyle Shideler knows its methods well.

“So as to the psychological perspective, you know, you talk about those mug shots. There’s almost, like, if you look at, over the course of 2020, there’s almost like a ‘faces of meth’ campaign,” domestic security expert Kyle Shideler tells BlazeTV hosts Christopher Rufo and Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman on “Rufo & Lomez.”

“You see them at their first arrest, and they’re kind of fresh-faced and relatively normal-looking, and you see them in the next one and the next one and the next one, and by the end of it, you know, five years later, they’re unrecognizable. Clearly hard living, drugs, homelessness, and the like,” he continues.


“This is part of that affinity-group structure is to suck people in so that the group becomes their only social outlet. … So they get these masses of people out into the streets, and then the goal is to try to get them to engage in some criminal act, right, to get them to step over the line and then bring them further into the group,” he explains.

When they successfully get these college students to commit even just a small crime that could land them in jail, that’s when they organize their "jail support."

“You pay their bail. You tell them how much you care about them and how the movement’s going to take care of them. They get out of jail, and now they’re, you know, more tightly bound to the group. And that’s what we saw all through 2020,” Schideler says.

“And that’s what these things are really for,” he explains. “The large-scale mass-movement protests, from the point of view of Antifa, it's to slowly weed through and bring people further and further along into radicalization to be willing to do more and more radical things.”

Want more from Rufo & Lomez?

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Media Research Center releases SHOCKING POLL about Charlie Kirk's killer



The coverage surrounding the murder of Charlie Kirk may have been honest if you watch conservative media, but the rest of the media wasn’t so keen on telling the truth — and a recent poll just made that hard to ignore.

According to a November 25 McLaughlin & Associates national poll of 1,000 likely voters conducted for the Media Research Center, only 24% of respondents correctly asserted that Tyler Robinson — Kirk's assassin — was left-wing.

The participants were asked, “On September 10, 2025, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking on a college campus. What was the political ideology of his killer?”

Of the respondents, 27.5% answered that they didn’t know Robinson’s political ideology, and only 24.1% correctly answered that he was left-wing. A whopping 22.3% incorrectly answered that he was right-wing, while another 13.2% claimed he was a moderate or a centrist.


While that’s bad, it gets worse when you break it down by the party affiliation of the likely voters.

“Only 18.8% of those who primarily watched left-of-center cable news outlets were able to correctly describe his ideology, as compared to 27.7% who asserted that he was right-wing. Surprisingly even among right-of-center cable news viewers, barely over a third of participants (33.5%) answered that Robinson was left-wing, and a still-considerable 18% believed him to be right-wing,” a LifeNews article reports.

“The professed political ideology of respondents also heavily affected their perception of Robinson’s own political proclivities. A whopping 35.4% of liberals believed he was right-wing, while just 12.7% identified him as left-wing. For conservatives, 17% answered that he was right-wing, whereas over 41.9% described him as left-wing,” it continues.

“Students were the single least likely cohort to correctly identify Robinson’s political bent; 33.2% of students believed Charlie Kirk’s accused murderer was right-wing, while a paltry 4% accurately labeled him left-wing,” the article concludes.

“I was shocked when I read this, and I had to take some time to process,” BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler comments.

“We know so much about every terrorist, every mass shooter, every assassin, every school shooter, almost immediately after they commit their grizzly crime. How is it that only 24% of voters know that Charlie Kirk’s killer was left-wing? This is the most horrendous, grizzly, political assassination in our lifetime, if not in our nation’s history, and 3/4 of people don’t know the truth,” she says.

“Well the reason why is because the loudest voices ... on both sides of the aisle, had from the beginning, from the moment that this happened, from the day that Charlie Kirk was murdered, they had in their mind preconceived villains,” she explains, pointing out that the mainstream media had immediately focused on Robinson’s family being registered Republicans.

“They assumed without any journalistic diligence,” she adds, “because this is what they wanted to believe was true, that Tyler Robinson was a Trump supporter.”

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Despite terrorist designation, Antifa still runs wild — and conservatives want real action



Antifa radicals have been causing chaos throughout America for years and have finally been designated as a terrorist network by the Trump administration.

However, they’re still getting away with crimes.

“Antifa radicals in Berkeley, California, disrupted a Turning Point USA event outside of UC Berkeley, punched a conservative in the face. The conservative gets arrested,” BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo tells co-host Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman on “Rufo & Lomez.”

“But our policy prescription is, the administration has to dismantle the left-wing terror networks, whether it’s Antifa, other organized militant groups. They have to actually get mugshots, case numbers, inmate numbers,” he continues.


“The tangible evidence that these left-wing terror networks, which are essentially saying that we can control the streets in places like Portland, we can veto peaceful conservative speech in places like Berkeley — we have to ensure that they can no longer do so and can no longer exert control through violence,” he adds.

While Rufo points out that Antifa is still out there disrupting whatever it can, Lomez notes that it was a “huge step in the right direction” that it has at least been designated as a terrorist network.

“The administration is making the right moves and/or saying the right things. What’s missing is the conspicuous action so that your average American, let alone Trump supporter, but just your average American goes, ‘Yeah, I don’t like Antifa, and the administration is doing something about it, and that’s good,’” Lomez says.

But the next step is taking the terrorist designation and doing something with it.

“Let’s just take this case at UC Berkeley, this recent event. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, released a great tweet,” Rufo says.

“Antifa is an existential threat to our nation. The violent riots at UC Berkeley last night are under full investigation by the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force. We will continue to spare no expense unmasking all who commit and orchestrate acts of political violence,” Bondi wrote.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, and pursuant to his Executive Order designating Antifa as a domestic terror organization, the Department of Justice and our law-enforcement partners are dismantling violent networks that seek to intimidate Americans and suppress their free expression and First Amendment rights,” she added.

While Rufo is glad to see Bondi using such strong wording, he’s skeptical.

“Why hasn’t UC Berkeley been defunded? Just say, ‘Hey, we’re withholding funds until you can establish a basic environment of civil discourse,’” Rufo says.

“You have to make sure that the directive that comes from the, you know, FBI director’s office, the attorney general’s office, you have to make sure that it means something at that regional level, at that agent level,” he explains.

“And I am not convinced that the current leadership, that the current structure, the current techniques that they’re using has sufficiently done that,” he adds.

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Triggernometry Hosts Try to Hide Their Shock at Sam Harris’ Charlie Kirk Claim
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Triggernometry Hosts Try to Hide Their Shock at Sam Harris’ Charlie Kirk Claim