The Myth of Innocence: Why Political Violence Refuses to Stay Partisan

Every side in American politics believes the same comforting lie: that violence belongs to the other team.

It has become one of the more tedious habits of our age that a claim, if repeated loudly enough and with sufficient indignation, is presumed to have graduated into fact. Thus we are now treated to the endlessly recycled assertion from the American right that every individual who has attempted violence against Donald Trump must, by some mystical law of partisan physics, be a Democrat, while conservatives apparently float above such earthly vulgarities like monks untouched by the sins of the flesh.

This is nonsense, tidy, convenient nonsense, but nonsense all the same.

Let us start with the facts, those irritating little things that so often ruin a perfectly serviceable political fairy tale.

Thomas Matthew Crooks, the would-be assassin at Butler, Pennsylvania, was not a Democrat in hiding, nor some sleeper agent dispatched by the Democratic National Committee in an absurdly elaborate plot involving a teenage donation. He was a registered Republican. Full stop. Not “Republican-adjacent,” not “secretly liberal,” but actually registered in the party itself. The right has clung to his adolescent $15 donation to a Democratic-aligned PAC with the desperation of medieval theologians clinging to a splinter of the True Cross. One imagines that if the boy had once purchased a soy latte, this too would have been entered into evidence as proof of Bolshevism.

Yet the investigation found no coherent political motive. None. The FBI closed the matter without uncovering some grand ideological thesis. What remained was the altogether less cinematic reality of a disturbed and socially isolated young man. But disturbed loners make for poor partisan propaganda, so the mythology machine must keep grinding.

Then there is Ryan Wesley Routh, whose biography resembles less a party registration form than a psychiatric weather report. Former Democrat decades ago, later independent, at one point claiming he had voted for Trump himself before souring on him, hardly the profile of a disciplined Democratic operative. He donated modest sums to Democratic causes, yes, which in the fever swamps of partisan media apparently now constitutes lifelong ideological branding. By that logic, a man who once bought a Greenpeace tote bag is forever an environmental extremist.

Routh’s real defining features were not partisan consistency but instability, obsession, and grandiosity. His fixation on Ukraine, his sprawling criminal history, and his bizarre self-mythologizing all suggest a man in search of historical significance through violence. In other words: the pathology came first, politics merely supplied decorative wallpaper.

“This is not analysis. It is catechism.”

– Civil Heresy

And then we arrive at Cole Tomas Allen, whose attempted attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has already been recruited into the same simplistic morality play. Described only vaguely as possessing a mildly left-of-center digital footprint, Allen left behind grievances against Trump administration policies. Very well. But grievances do not amount to party membership any more than owning a gym membership guarantees physical fitness. His writings, his strange self-appointed title of “Friendly Federal Assassin,” and the manner of the attack point again toward the far murkier territory where ideology, ego, alienation, and personal instability mingle into something combustible.

But the right’s mythology does not stop at claiming these men as Democrats. It goes one step further, insisting that conservatives, uniquely, do not engage in political violence. This is where the argument ceases to be merely silly and becomes actively dishonest.

Consider Solomon Peña, failed Republican candidate turned orchestrator of drive-by shootings targeting Democratic officials. Consider Cesar Sayoc, whose van looked as though it had been decorated by a meth-addled campaign intern at a Trump rally, and who mailed pipe bombs to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. Consider David DePape, whose attack on the husband of Nancy Pelosi was marinated in the familiar toxins of conspiracy culture, paranoia, and far-right digital sewage.

Recall also the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, in which militia enthusiasts fantasized openly about insurrection and civil war as though auditioning for the most deranged community theater production in America.

And then, because reality has an unfortunate habit of refusing ideological neatness, there is the 2025 assassination of Melissa Hortman and the attempted murder of John Hoffman. The perpetrator, Vance Luther Boelter, was described by those around him as right-leaning, pro-Trump, evangelical, anti-abortion. He posed as a police officer, murdered Hortman and her husband, and shot Hoffman and his wife multiple times. Authorities found a target list containing Democratic politicians and abortion-rights advocates. Yet because he possessed flyers linked to anti-Trump protests, there was an almost immediate effort by some on the right to paint him as a Marxist infiltrator, a leftist wolf in sheep’s clothing. This theory collapsed under scrutiny almost instantly, but not before serving its purpose: muddy the waters, confuse the audience, and preserve the myth of conservative innocence for one more news cycle.

This is the larger disease: not merely political violence itself, but the compulsive need to launder it through partisan mythology.

Every act of political violence is immediately seized upon not as a tragedy or warning, but as an opportunity for tribal bookkeeping. Was he ours or theirs? Which cable network gets to crow? Which social media faction gets its dopamine hit of vindication? The dead, one suspects, are not consulted.

The obvious truth is that political violence in America is not the property of one ideology. It emerges from a toxic brew of grievance, narcissism, radicalization, social fragmentation, and yes, sometimes explicit ideology. But there is no partisan purity here, no saintly exemption.

The more troubling truth is that each side is deeply invested in pretending otherwise.

It is politically useful to imagine that violence is always imported from the enemy camp, never incubated in one’s own. This absolves everyone of introspection. It spares one the inconvenience of examining the rhetorical sewage pumped daily into the bloodstream of public life: the apocalyptic language, the dehumanization, the fantasies of national betrayal and existential struggle.

No serious person need believe in a cartoonishly simple theory of direct incitement to observe the obvious: a political culture marinated in rage, paranoia, and theatrical hatred is not one that naturally produces civic restraint.

As for figures like Charlie Kirk and others who trade in perpetual outrage, they are less unique villains than profitable symptoms of a wider decay. Outrage sells. Nuance does not. Complexity is tedious; moral melodrama is lucrative.

And so we arrive at the final absurdity: the insistence that “our side doesn’t do this.”

This is not analysis. It is catechism.

It survives only because tribal loyalty demands it, and because facts, however stubborn, are no match for the emotional satisfaction of self-exoneration.

The truth is uglier, less flattering, and infinitely more useful: political violence is not a partisan monopoly. It is an American pathology. And if one insists on converting every shooting, bombing, or assassination attempt into a childish exercise in partisan scorekeeping, then one is not confronting the problem at all—merely auditioning to become part of it.

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Why It Matters

This piece dismantles one of the most comforting—and dangerous—lies in American politics:

That violence belongs to the other side.

That belief isn’t just inaccurate. It’s protective. Because once violence is framed as external:

• There’s no need for introspection
• No need to confront rhetoric
• No need to acknowledge escalation

And that’s how the cycle sustains itself. Political violence doesn’t follow party lines. It follows conditions:

• grievance
• alienation
• dehumanization
• and a culture addicted to outrage

The myth of innocence doesn’t reduce violence.

It enables it.

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Key Takeaways

• Political violence in the U.S. is not confined to one ideology
• Attackers often have inconsistent or unstable political identities
• Partisan narratives distort facts to maintain tribal innocence
• Violence is used post-event as propaganda fuel
• A culture saturated in outrage increases the likelihood of radical behavior
• Denying internal responsibility prevents real solutions

Key Questions to consider

Q1: Is political violence in the U.S. limited to one party?
No. Incidents have involved individuals across the political spectrum, often with mixed or unstable motivations.

Q2: Why do people believe only one side is violent?
Because it reinforces group identity and avoids internal accountability.

Q3: What drives political violence?
A mix of grievance, radicalization, social isolation, and exposure to extreme rhetoric.

Q4: Why is denying internal responsibility dangerous?
It prevents societies from addressing root causes and allows harmful patterns to continue.

Further Reading: The Truth They Don’t Teach

1. Hate in the Homeland. A deep look into domestic extremism and the forces driving radicalization. `https://civilheresy.com/hate in homeland
2. The Storm Is Upon Us. Explores conspiracy culture and its role in modern political movements. https://civilheresy.com/storm is upon us
3. American Carnage. Examines the evolution of grievance-driven politics in the United States. https://civilheresy.com/american carnage

If you think violence only comes from the other side, you’re not paying attention.
Civil Heresy gear is for people who don’t outsource responsibility.

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