No.Nonsense.

On Thursday, July 9th, a 78 year old diminutive woman in a little hamlet in Great Britain opened her door in the middle of the day and was bludgeoned to death with a ball bat. This was not a random attack. This was not a robbery.

It was a man who drove 300 miles to knock on that door. He drove 300 miles to wield that bat. Why? Because he disagreed with her politics.

See, Ann Widdecombe was former member of parliament and supporter of Nigel Farage and the Reform UK party. She was vocal about her conservative principles and spoke on everything from LGBTQ, Brexit, and immigration policies.

And she died for it.

This man felt it was his right to silence her voice.

The UK is not as accustomed to these types of slayings as we are in the US. This past week here we have revisited the assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk with the preliminary hearing of his alleged murderer Tyler Robinson. The reported motive for the killing was because of Charlie’s vocal opposition to pro-LGBTQ policies.

Also within the last few weeks we have had the preliminary hearing for Luigi Mangioni who was arrested for the execution of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson as a statement against the coverage policies within the health insurance industry.

Because of these most recent examples, I did some research on these types of murders and found some interesting statistics. Based on the narrative from our current administration you would think that it’s all left-wing activists engaging in this type of violence. You would be wrong.

A report at Congress.gov cited a study by University of Maryland researchers that found that in the first six months of 2025, 35% of the violent events targeted government personnel or facilities. Since 2001, however, right-wing extremism has represented about 75% of the political violence in this country.

The 2015 Charleston church shooting and 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting were perpetrated by white supremacists. The 2019 Walmart mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, was by a madman who was anti-immigration. These three events resulted in 43 people losing their lives. They are just a handful of examples.

My point in saying all of this is to point out that the ones who are screaming the most right now about political violence don’t have clean hands either. Let’s not forget that the same people who are decrying the “summer of love” and the Black Lives Matter vandalism and violence of 2020 are the same ones who say that January 6th was “merely property damage”. Violence is violence. Period.

No matter which side of the fence you are on, when did it become acceptable for someone to lose their lives as a political statement? There was a time when names like Lee Harvey Oswald who assassinated President John Kennedy and James Earl Ray who shot Martin Luther King were infamous. They were not elevated to icon status like Luigi Mangioni who has women fainting over him.

Have we gone insane?

There should never be a circumstance where it is seen as okay to end another person’s life because you don’t like their opinions. I don’t care how hateful those opinions might be, there is absolutely no excuse for this type of violence.

We must take every opportunity to call out such violence as wrong whether from the right or the left and we must bring the offenders to justice. We will never eliminate extremism completely but we can certainly make it a little less cache if we hold each and every offender accountable.