This week Bill Maher’s comedy-and-news bit is about the “Assassination Generation,” referring to all the young men who kill or commit arson for ideological reasons. As we know, a big proportion of young people (about 40%) think that political violence is sometimes warranted. As you might expect, Maher deplores this behavior and the ideas behind it. Given that this is the social-media generation, Maher suspects that the deeds are done in part to get popular if your life sucks. As he says, referring to Cole Allen, “This is about being 31 and still living with your mom in Torrance. Life was supposed to come out better.” But he avers that these kids have it a lot better than they think (Cole Allen stayed at the Hilton before his failed assassination attempt at the correspondents’ dinner).
Maher does imply that sometimes political violence may be warranted—he mentions Stalin and Hitler—but, he says, “that’s not where we are now.”
The mantra for Young Assassins at the end: “What this is really about for today’s young assassins is, ‘When life lets you down, and doesn’t properly reward you for being the awesome person you’re sure you are, there’s one big save left: convince yourself you were meant for a cause bigger than yourself. And for Cole Thomas Allen, it was I’m Fighting Hitler‘.”
The guests you see are Represemtatove Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), and Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile.
I rate this better than the average bit, and it’s time someone said that it’s insane to make a hero out of Luigi Mangione.
I’ve said it all along.
This is how I put it online:
I showed photos of Mangione, Vance Boulter, Elias Rodriguez, and Mohamed Soliman
And posted this:
“These criminals thought that their politics were so perfectly correct that they had to take matters into their own hands.
If you minimize, excuse, or joke about political violence, then you are agreeing with them.”
This actually got some of my online interlocutors to change their minds about Mangione.
Maher : “When life lets you down, and doesn’t properly reward you for being the awesome person you’re sure you are, there’s one big save left: convince yourself you were meant for a cause bigger than yourself.”
Ooo, that is a brutal one-two punch – especially the last part – it should give everyone pause – it does me.
I think everyone understands the good idea of finding something bigger than yourself. It is valuable to counteract selfishness. Maher is accurately highlighting where it gets pathologically connected to an alienation, or envy.
Watch out for this boundary, I think he’s saying.
The 40% figure is a gross over-interpretation. Here’s the scale: “For questions assessing the justification of political violence, a score of 0 meant that the
respondent considered the political violence completely unjustified. Scores from 1 to 6 indicated that they believed there was at least some justification for political violence, and, in the case of those choosing 6, that it was completely justified.”
So, unless someone chose 0 (NEVER justified), this is taken as support for them seeing violence as possibly justified and presumably interpreted as their willingness to engage in political violence, which then warrants the label “assassination generation.” Even Maher says assassination is justified in cases like Hitler and Stalin, so presumably he would not answer 0 to the above scale if either of these were named. Surely it is not that hard for people to imagine circumstances under which Trump (for left wingers) or Mamdani (for right wingers) would be legitimate targets and move people from 0 to 1 (i.e., into the assassination generation category). Doesn’t even mean they think it is justified now.
Perhaps the clearest indication that responses are hypothetical is that 40% of people on the left responded 1 or more indicating some justification for murdering Mamdani and 43% of people on the right responded 1 or more indicating some justification for murdering Trump. Very unlikely that those figures represent support for assassination of either person.
Two my horror, I actually know two (female, elite) people who rued the close assassination’s (in Butler, PA) failure.
At that moment I realized “TDS” is a real Thing.
Plus… I’m no fan and didn’t vote for him (thrice) but I think a lot of objections to him are what I call stylistic, or aesthetic: they don’t like his macho baring, his Brooklynisms, his bullying. Grown up policy objections are rarer, maybe b/c he doesn’t have many developed policies?
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Jim, I was wondering why you did not tell us what the survey question was for which you give us the answer scale. It seems that you did not look at the report from which the data come. For instance, your quote regarding the answer scale is wrong. The correct quote is this:
You make it sound as if the survey question was about political violence quite generally (which then could include cases like the assassination of Hitler, or the killing of Khamenei, etc.). But this is not true – the question was asked in the current political context in the US. And then you write:
The bold part is simply wrong – no such presumption is made. See page 11 here, section titled “Discussion”:
https://networkcontagion.us/reports/4-7-25-ncri-assassination-culture-brief/
I find the data from this report of the Network Contagion Research Institute alarming.
There is also this more recent report (Jan. 2026):
https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Assassination-Culture_-How-Shifting-Gender-Patterns-Signal-a-New-National-Instability-1.pdf
US political culture is really fucked up these days (comparatively speaking).
Well Peter, if you looked at that last report (2026) as I did, you will find the quoted scale that I copied and pasted into my post (note the quotation marks in my post). Here it is again. “For questions assessing the justification of political violence, a score of 0 meant that the respondent considered the political violence completely unjustified. Scores from 1 to 6 indicated that they believed there was at least some justification for political violence, and, in the case of those choosing 6, that it was completely justified.”
Your quote is from the 2025 report, not the most recent one, which I did read before posting. Since the authors collapse the scale into just two levels, 0 vs 1-6/7, the number of alternatives doesn’t matter much. Any deviation from 0 puts respondents into the “assassination generation” category.
Jim,
Forgive me if I am missing something, but where are you getting your data and how does this connect to what Maher said? Peter suggests you are using a Rutgers study, but it’s not clear to me why either of you are citing that study. Maher draws the 40% number from a Harvard Crimson article of December 4, 2025. That article reports on the Fall 2025 Harvard Youth Poll from the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School. Here is the question, with results:
“The past year has seen an increase in political violence in America. Under what circumstances, if any, do you think political violence would be acceptable in America today? Select all that apply.”
None of the above 56%
When the government violates individual rights 28%
When election outcomes are fraudulent 12%
When someone promotes extremist beliefs 11%
When someone else encourages violence 11%
When peaceful protests fail to accomplish their goals 10%
Refused 5%
I find no comforting way to spin this data, especially since each set of terms can be defined by the person answering the question. What is a violation? Who defines “rights”? When are outcomes fraudulent? What counts as extreme? What does it mean to encourage? What constitutes failure of peaceful protests? What goals are worth killing for?
The above data come from question #61 in the IOP poll’s “Toplines,” available below:
https://iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/51st-edition-fall-2025
The circumstances are sophomoric at best. Even high-school students who attend classes ought to have no trouble parsing the dangers there.
The first four “when”‘s are disturbingly subjective and would generally amount to a call for violence before the case had been fully adjudicated to determine its truth. “Fraudulent” elections are an obvious example which the Left should be particularly careful about, lest they find themselves justifying Jan 6, 2021. If an election were found by the recognized authorities to have been truly cooked, what we call a by-election would be ordered, so there shouldn’t be any need to resort to violence to correct it. Besides, revolutionaries don’t riot over rigged elections. They want to do the election-rigging themselves when they install their Provisional Government.
The fifth is deeply concerning and shows that 10% don’t understand how politics works. If a peaceful protest fails to bring about a policy change — it almost never does, because governments can’t be seen as cravenly succumbing to intimidation — it usually means that the cause simply lacks public support. Nobody wants what you’re selling. Protests calling for an end to fossil fuels are demanding something that hardly anyone wants to do. Escalating to violence would then be profoundly anti-democratic: a tiny minority would be using violence to impose its will on the large majority and on their government (and usually on the owners of private property) who won’t give them what they want at the ballot box.
The response by any democratic government to that sort of violence has to be superior violence to crush the terrorists, to protect itself if for no other reason. (That is sometimes the goal of political violence, agreed, but I doubt that freshmen Harvard students grasp that. The hardened 10% that do, probably went to Columbia or someplace in Portland instead.)
I heartily concur with Maher.
A quibble: in the context of Allen being a mechanical engineering graduate of Caltech (and also having a graduate degree in computer science from wherever), Maher gets in a dig at Allen for being a substitute teacher instead of doing engineering. I thank Maher for going on record about his opinion of substitute teachers. I wonder what his opinion is of K-2 and Special Education teacher assistants. (And those who mow his lawn and collect his garbage for that matter.) Does he expect “someone” to do those jobs?
It being widely known how much Maher enjoys being around juvenile human primates, no doubt he would thrive working as a substitute teacher and/or teacher assistant and showing us how it’s done.
I know the feeling. I skated through high school getting straight A’s the last two years. Received two scholarships to attend college. Graduated Cum Laude in four years. Eventually got a “real” job, which I hated. Moved to Houston, the started doing what would be considered blue collar work, which I still do to this day.
You’d be surprised how many people look down upon me, until they find out I actually have a college degree, and have been self employed since 1990. At least one commenter here seemed to look forward to all of us <90 IQ people losing our jobs to automation and AI.
My favorite class in junior high school? SHOP !!! I look back fondly on two of the part time jobs during my senior year in high school: Working in a railroad yard, and working for a Sound Reinforcement company, ie, I was a roadie. Three days after high school graduation, I worked as a drill press operator at Ridge Tool. If you are a plumber, or use high quality tools, you are familiar with Ridge Tool.
But since I don’t want to wear a suit and tie, and sit behind a desk 10 to 12 hours a day, like many of my friends from college did, I’m thought of as less than intelligent. Go figure.
The automation revolution happened for touch labor in the 1980s and 1990s. So the AIs will contribute little to job losses there. We will always need plumbers, electricians, the guys who pick up our garbage (bless them), fix our power lines, delivery our Amazon packages.
The AIs are coming for all of those who spend their working day at a computer keyboard.
I am a retired engineer who worked in three different industries, including commercial aerospace and implantable medical devices. I worked with many brilliant technicians who didn’t have a college degree: They were vital parts of our team. They all could have been classified as engineers except for that missing bit of paper. When I first began my career, there were still a few engineers in my organization who did not have a degree, who “came up through the hawse-hole”. They were brilliant (which is why they got promoted to engineers).
To be fair, I suspect Maher was referring to the disappointment of being in low-paid work and still living with mom after getting fancy degrees. He wasn’t suggesting that substitute teachers are unnecessary.
Yes, an excellent bit.
(Political) violence is very memetic.
I like Bill’s habit of having crazies from left (Donna Brazille) AND right (Crenshaw) on his show.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
I saw Maher’s show on Friday with Crenshaw and Brazille. Neither of them struck me as crazy. I watch Maher regularly and can’t remember the last time I thought that one of Maher’s guests was crazy. And I do remember Marjorie Taylor Greene being on the show several months ago – that is, she did not strike me as crazy, which surprised me (and made me wonder whether the mainstream media had given a distorted image of who she is).
40% claiming that “violence is justified” is a unmistakable infection of Herbert Marcuse’s screed, “Repressive Tolerance.”
Premise: polite and civil tolerance for evil, namely capitalism, individualism, private property, and affluence, must be excoriated and demolished. Obversely, any challenge to collectivism, wokism, and left-activism must never be tolerated–it must always be shouted down.
Violence is justified to attain and sustain this end.
I think “Represemtatove” is now my favourite spelling mistake ever.
” it’s time someone said that it’s insane to make a hero out of Luigi Mangione.”
Absolutely. It should be a test question for every politician.
I don’t like Trump. I did not vote for him, though I could not bring myself to vote for his opponent either. But Trump is no Hitler, and he is no Stalin. Trump has many faults, but comparing him to mass murderers is stupid. It detracts from his real faults to refer to him as such. And such comparisons encourage political violence.
the people carrying out such acts seem to be either social failures living in their parents’ basements, or spoiled children of upper-class parents believing that the world owes them everything–or a combination of both. I would bet that in all cases, these yahoos spend more time online than they do in real life.
I believe the appropriate term is “Main Character Syndrome”. They see themselves as the main character of every scenario, but they are merely bit players. And when their lives do not unfold as it should for a main character, they act in maladaptive ways.
While the message opposing political violence is good and sadly needed, there was one assertion of Maher that was just dead wrong:
GenZ is not living in “the best of times”. The reasonable estimates I have seen make it a near certainty the “ease of living” has peaked with the boomer generation and the following generations will be severely impacted by unsolved problems and boosting standards of living on credit. Those issues will come due and times will be much tougher.
minimizing the danger that Trump represents i think, but i guess we’ll see
I would think that most people realise that ‘political violence is sometimes warranted. But the operative word there is ‘sometimes. Most people I know have a very high bar. I can’t think of it being warranted in the UK or the USA despite our inept political class. We will survive the bad politicians and, hopefully, one day we will elect better ones. There’s no reason to shoot the politicians that the majority of people voted for.
I don’t think it’s easy for kids nowadays, but the older generation have parents and grandparents who fought in wars and we’ve heard what it was like. I think that gives us better perspective about what hardship is.
Joolz’s comment reminds me that given the preponderance of women on college campuses, we should interpret the taste for political violence among college students as in the abstract. When women answer surveys like the one in The Crimson, I trust they understand that the question is really,
That’s very much different from doing the violence herself. Let’s be clear that if there’s real violence on the menu, violence that might be met with lethal force from the authorities, it’s gonna be men doing the whacking…. and getting whacked back.
Easy to be brave when safe. Given how few young women will allow men to dare approach them no matter what valorous and chivalrous things they do, I don’t think we have much cause to worry that Harvard men will resort to violence just because Harvard women egg them on.