We begin with a response to last Saturday’s attacks on Minnesota State legislators and their families from Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, as well as her comment about Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee’s ugly social media posts.
Our title is a nod to Richard Slotkin’s classic text on America’s historical embrace of violence, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Atheneum, 1992).
News roundup:
On Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court delivered an unsurprising, distressing, decision in United States v. Skrmetti. In a 6-3 decision, SCOTUS ruled that a Tennessee state law banning pharmaceutical treatments or surgery for trans minors does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. Key point: it does not ban the treatments or procedures, only using them for transition for minors. Here’s the response from Samantha Williams, the parent who brought the case.
On Tuesday, New York City Comptroller and mayoral primary candidate Brad Lander became the second Democratic politician to be detained by ICE as he sought to escort an immigrant who had showed up for a hearing out of the building. Numerous Democrats, including Governor Kathy Hochul, defended him: Hochul went down to retrieve Lander and, in an unusual display of anger, tell the press Lander’s arrest was “bullshit.” Right-wing media went berserk, with many misleadingly characterizing the arrest as a “campaign stunt.”
Right after last week’s broadcast, Israel launched air attacks on Iran that decapitated its military leadership, damaged nuclear facililties, and killed at least two leading nuclear scientists. Those attacks, and Iranian retaliation (which one friend of mine on the spot characterized as “terrifying,” continue as we speak. The possibility of US involvement in this war has split the MAGA coalition, with many Trump allies urging their President not to betray his America First pledge. Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14) has opposed intervention; on his X podcast, Tucker Carlson pilloried Ted Cruz, a traditional GOP Israel hawk on his X podcast; and there is bipartisan legislation invoking the War Powers Act floating around Capitol Hill.
Your hosts:
Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.
Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
While the right-wing American militia movement began outside the two-party political system, since 2017, it has visibly supported President Donald Trump. Above, members of the Proud Boys mustered in Raleigh, NC, as part of a “Stop the Steal” protest on November 28, 2020. Photo credit: Anthony Crider/Wikimedia Commons
Today’s focus: escalating political violence
On Friday, the New York Times delivered a stinging rebuke to Donald Trump for having fomented political violence against politicians in both parties.
On Saturday, Vance Boelter, a 57-year-old evangelical Christian and registered Republican executed Democratic Speaker of the Minnesota House Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark; afterwards, he severely wounded Democratic State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette. He apparently planned the attacks for months, left behind a long list of other targets, and disguised himself as a policeman.
Although President Donald Trump posted a long, rambling repudiation of the violence on Truth Social, when asked whether he would call Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Trump said no, that it was “a waste of time.” He then went on to insult Walz. Other Republicans, and Republican influencers, also spread disinformation and mockery about the attacks. Most egregiously, Utah Senator Mike Lee posted a series of now-deleted remarks on X, now deleted, including: “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.” Lee was personally confronted by Senators Klobuchar and Smith; he removed the post, but has not publicly apologized.
The Minnesota shootings have restarted the conversation about American political violence, which has escalated in the years that Donald Trump has been in political life. Trump has twice been a target himself, as have other members of Congress. Are Democrats targeted disproportionately? It’s hard to know: in February, Axios published a list of how much members of Congress and Senators spend for security: Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz topped the list at over $350,000 a year. Last year, at least one Republican, Mike Gallagher, may have left his Wisconsin House seat because he feared for the safety of his family. but research from the Brennan Center shows that female politicians and politicians of color are most frequently targeted with online hate and threats of violence.
On Wednesday, the Democratic Mayor of Memphis, Paul Young, who is Black, confronted found a 25-year-old White man in his yard. Trenton Abston, who had climbed over a wall to, as he explained, have a conversation, was armed with a stun gun, rope, and duct tape.
What we want to go viral:
Neil wants you to read historian Nicole Hemmer’s review of Sam Tannenhaus’s towering biography, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America (Random House, 2025). As it turns out, “Buckley was no stranger to ethical vacuums,” Hemmer writes in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. “Throughout his life, Buckley was guided by ideology and personal gain far more than truth and virtue. Yet his charm, generosity, and loyalty ensured that he never paid much of a price for his transgressions.”
Claire wants you to listen, if you have 90 minutes to spare, to Ezra Klein’s interview with Democratic Congresswoman Sarah McBride (DE-01), the first transperson to serve in the House of Representatives. In “Sarah McBride On Why the Left Lost Trans Rights” (New York Times, June 17, 2025), McBride reveals herself as a savvy politician, a pragmatic gradualist, and one of the party’s up-and-coming leaders.
You can also get all video and audio content by subscribing to my podcast, Why Now? available for free on Apple iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, or Soundcloud.
Short takes:
ICE raids are not just a danger to Latinos, Sherdell Baker warns at Ebony: Black immigrant workers are vulnerable too. “As these raids have persisted, Afro Latinas have been left out of the conversation and media representation as Black immigrants can also be impacted,”Baker writes. “This can impact African Americans based on appearance generalizations, and commonalities between the two cultures.” Racialized policing makes it likely that African Americans will suffer the same assaults from police that legal Latino citizens have. “To help combat this growing issue, those who are African American should share resources from organizations that are helping to aid immigrants, and heighten their awareness when traveling,” Baker writes. “It is also helpful to keep up with ICE raid announcements in their area via news outlets or social media to stay up to speed with locations on where they’re taking place. Carrying identification with you at all times can also be helpful when it comes to stay alert.” (June 20, 2025)
A lawyer in Cambridge, MA told me last week that the Trump administration was likely to lose every case that Harvard University has brought, and you could probably extend that prediction to individual academics who have been swept up by the government. The release of former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil “is the latest setback for the Trump administration’s effort to detain and deport foreign academics who have been involved in pro-Palestinian campus activism,” Erica Orden and Kyle Cheney write at Politico. “Judges have ordered the release of Georgetown researcher Badar Khan Suri, Tufts University PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk and Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi, who were similarly detained after Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked the same law used against Khalil.” (June 20, 2025)
We know that the right has embraced pronatalism, but are falling g birthrates only a conservative issue? As Amanda Taub argues in The New York Times, there is also a feminist case to be made for policies that encourage child-bearing, and we child-free folks should support them. Why? Because the next generations support all of us. “As the problem of falling birthrates attracts more concern — and previous efforts to reverse it have proved insufficient — a growing body of research indicates that a genuine solution will require a paradigm shift in society’s understanding about what is worth paying for and who ought to pay it,” Taub writes. “As the ratio of working-aged adults to dependent children and retirees falls, there are fewer workers to support the social safety net. The result is that taxes rise, the quality of public services deteriorates, and the economy eventually shrinks.” (June 20, 2025)
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