ROOKE: Trump Assassination Plot Goes Unnoticed As Media Refuses To Look In Mirror
'Sadly, Americans are likely to see a lot more violence before the end of this year'
I remember being a young Hill staffer, cheerfully emerging from the staircase at the Capitol South Metro station. On the walk to work, you would pass a few far-left cranks waving scary, hand-lettered signs demanding REAL! CHANGE! NOW!
Back then, you could roll your eyes and keep moving. Today, the cranks work inside the building.
President Trump promised accountability. He has the mandate. He has the tools. He should use them now.
When I arrived in Washington 20 years ago, the baseline assumptions still held. America was good. The Constitution mattered. Terrorists were the enemy. That consensus has collapsed. Over the last several years, political violence has risen and elected Democrats have poured gasoline on the flames instead of trying to put them out.
If a radical had murdered Ann Coulter in 2006, Democrats in Congress would have condemned it. After Charlie Kirk’s assassination last year, Democrats offered little beyond silence, snide distancing, or moral equivocation — while much of the progressive ecosystem treated it as a punch line.
Americans have had enough. They’re sick of protesting without purpose, for-profit rioting, and the endless indulgence of radicals who would rather watch the country burn than let it thrive. That disgust helped carry President Trump back into office on a red wave. He promised to crack down on left-wing extremism. He needs to deliver now more than ever.
In recent months, reports have described widespread Somali-linked fraud in deep-blue Minnesota, elected Democrats flirting with open defiance, and physical attacks on federal law enforcement. Conservative voters keep asking the same obvious question: Why hasn’t the administration used federal tools — IRS audits, DOJ investigations, and financial tracing — to identify who finances this fraud and violence?
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None of this looks organic. It looks organized. Someone trains the activists, coordinates the logistics, pays the legal bills, and bankrolls the infrastructure.
Recent reporting by Gabe Kaminsky at the Free Press suggests senior advisers and Republican donors have urged restraint, warning that investigations of left-wing networks will trigger retaliation when Democrats regain power.
President Trump should reject that advice — decisively. No more playing Mr. Nice Guy with these maniacs.
Democrats don’t need “provocation” to use government power against their enemies. They do it because it works. They did it under Obama. They expanded it under Biden. They will do it again the moment they get the chance.
Trump should listen to the silent majority of law-abiding Americans who are tired of watching violence, fraud, and abuse go unpunished while ordinary citizens get lectured to accept disorder as the price of “progress.”
The pattern isn’t subtle.
During Obama’s first term, the IRS targeted Tea Party groups for lawful political activity. The people responsible faced little accountability. Many stayed in government. Senior leadership protected them after Lois Lerner’s misconduct became public. Our enemies in the corporate left-wing press called it “scrutiny.”
Under the next phase, left-wing NGOs leaned on social media companies to suppress conservative viewpoints and blacklist influential outlets. Under Biden, federal law enforcement treated ordinary dissent as suspicious. Justice Department initiatives, such as “Arctic Frost,” and task forces consistently aimed their rhetoric — and often their resources — at the right. Merrick Garland’s Justice Department smeared concerned parents as domestic threats for protesting radical gender ideology in public schools.
Americans don’t want persecution. They want basic law enforcement.
They want an IRS that applies the same level of scrutiny to left-wing networks that obstruct law enforcement as it applies to small business owners and seniors who make honest accounting mistakes. An agency that can ruin someone’s life over paperwork can spare resources to investigate whether donors and nonprofits fund violent criminal activity.
If top Treasury officials like Ken Kies and Kevin Salinger cannot meet that simple standard, they need to go.
RELATED: Trump declared war on leftist domestic terror. The IRS didn’t get the memo.

This isn’t a witch hunt. Legitimate questions exist about whether charitable dollars move through nonprofit networks to finance criminal obstruction, coordinate rioting, or facilitate fraud against U.S. taxpayers. If charitable organizations fund efforts to intimidate and obstruct ICE agents, the public deserves to know. If nonprofit lawyers coach migrants on how to defraud federal programs, consequences should follow — including professional discipline.
Equal justice under law means equal. It can’t mean impunity for the left’s allies while government reserves its full weight for targeting conservatives.
President Trump promised accountability. He has the mandate. He has the tools. He should use them now.
We’re no longer dealing with a few amateurs loitering outside the Metro station. The extremists moved inside the institutions. If the administration still acts like the old norms apply, it will lose the country it just barely won back.
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.

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.
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.”
To enjoy more of the news through the anthropological lens of Christopher Rufo and Lomez, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
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.”
To enjoy more of Liz’s based commentary, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.