In a recent interview, Ben Shapiro outlined media lies and false framing that have led to a dramatic increase in political violence in America. Photo by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
On April 6, 2026, Ben Shapiro appeared on the Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson and argued that three institutional lies, stacked in sequence, had produced a collapse of trust so severe it was generating dangerous anti-establishment radicalism. Nineteen days later, on April 25, that argument was confirmed with the assassination attempt on President Trump during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, fired shots and attempted to breach security at the Washington Hilton during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Trump, Melania, Vice President Vance, and cabinet members were evacuated unharmed.
Allen who worked as a teacher at C2 Education, was a member of a group called “The Wide Awakes” and attended a “No Kings” protest in California. Allen described himself in writings as the “Friendly Federal Assassin.”
The April 25 attack was the fifth documented attempt or plot against Trump across a decade. On June 18, 2016, Michael Steven Sandford, a British national, attempted to grab a police officer’s weapon at a Trump rally at the Treasure Island casino in Las Vegas with the stated intent of shooting Trump. On July 13, 2024, Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, grazing Trump’s right ear, killing one rallygoer and critically wounding two others before being shot dead by Secret Service on the scene.
On September 15, 2024, Ryan Wesley Routh was found with a rifle in the tree line outside Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach with documented intent to kill the president and was apprehended before firing. He was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison in February 2026.
Separately, U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Justice documented an active Iranian government conspiracy to assassinate Trump in retaliation for the killing of IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, resulting in federal criminal charges against named individuals, though no physical attempt was executed on U.S. soil.
Shapiro’s Uncommon Knowledge framework explains how that environment was built. In his own words: “I think there were three things that happened right in a row, historically, that really shifted the mindset and it matches up with the timeline.” He identified three lies, each containing what he called a “grain of truth” exploited by mainstream media and Democrat lawmakers, and then amplified on social media. Together, these lies produced what he described as a “vast anti-institutional burgeoning” that has “exploded over the course of the last five years.”
The first was Russiagate. The claim that Vladimir Putin manipulated the 2016 election, blackmailed Trump, and installed him as a foreign puppet was, in Shapiro’s words, “trash,” sustained by establishment media for four years. The Mueller Report (2019) found no evidence of criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The Durham Report (2023) concluded the FBI launched its Crossfire Hurricane investigation without adequate factual basis and applied a double standard not used against Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The Steele Dossier, which drove much of the coverage, was largely discredited, and its primary sub-source Igor Danchenko was indicted for lying to the FBI.
The narrative shaped impeachment proceedings for the entirety of Trump’s first term, then collapsed under scrutiny. For those who had accepted it, it established that Trump was not a legitimately elected president but a foreign-installed puppet, a framing that made violent removal easier to rationalize.
The second lie was that COVID would kill anyone who went outside, that the young faced the same mortal risk as the elderly, and that refusing vaccination was a betrayal of the social compact. As Shapiro put it, media and Democrat lawmakers were pushing the message: “COVID is going to kill you. If you go outside, it will kill your parents as well. You must end your life as we know it.” Shapiro went on to add, “And you must also get a shot that you really don’t have to take because, as a young person, your chances of surviving COVID are basically 100%.”
CDC data showed infection fatality rates for Americans under 30 consistently below 0.01–0.02%, comparable to seasonal influenza in that cohort. Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis published peer-reviewed work estimating population IFR far below official projections. Sweden kept schools open and recorded negligible teacher or child mortality. Vaccine mandates were nonetheless imposed on college students, military personnel, and federal workers regardless of prior infection or age-based risk, a policy even some pro-vaccine researchers publicly questioned as disproportionate.
Millions lost businesses, missed funerals, were barred from dying relatives, and watched children fall behind, all under mandates framed as non-negotiable, with Shapiro noting that refusing the shot meant having “fundamentally vitiated the ties that bind us all together.” The grievance this produced had nowhere legitimate to go, because the institutions that should have processed it destroyed their own credibility through what came next.
The third lie was exposed by the BLM riots of 2020. The same public health establishment that banned outdoor funerals and church services endorsed mass street protests that summer on explicitly political grounds. In Shapiro’s words: “The idea that you could go out and riot in the streets, and that was okay…rioting in the streets about BLM, spitting on each other and being in close proximity with one another.”
The belief being promoted by media and democrat lawmakers gave the virus agency. They claimed “That the virus was not only going to kill you if you went outside, but it was so woke that if you went outside for the right reason, you’d be totally fine.”
In June 2020, over 1,200 public health professionals signed an open letter declaring that protests against police brutality and systemic racism were “vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States,” that public health officials should not condemn or attempt to shut down the demonstrations on COVID-19 grounds, and that white supremacy was itself “a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.”
The same letter declared anti-lockdown protests “rooted in white nationalism” and contrary to respect for Black lives, endorsing one category of mass gathering as a public health intervention while condemning another on explicitly ideological grounds.
Those signatures came from the same public health community that weeks earlier had condemned Memorial Day gatherings. The epidemiological conditions were identical in both cases: large crowds in close contact. The political valence was not. COVID was apparently, the first virus in history that responded to political will.
The treatment of the unrest that followed defied that same logic. The occupation of city blocks, the establishment of self-declared autonomous zones, and months of property destruction, arson, theft, and assaults on police officers produced no serious institutional condemnation. Arrests were relatively few, and offenders were released by activist prosecutors and district attorneys without charges.
The same media and institutional voices that had cheered or excused those months of disorder then condemned January 6, a single day, in terms they had never applied to sustained riots that ran from June through September 2020. No serious Republican defense of January 6 exists. It was condemned across party lines. Yet the media continued to frame it as an insurrection despite no defendant being charged with insurrection and no court finding evidence sufficient to sustain that charge.
To Shapiro’s three lies, a fourth must be added: the Democrat and media framing of ICE as a Nazi-style secret police force. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, in a May 2025 commencement address at the University of Minnesota Law School, called ICE “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo,” claiming agents were shipping people to “foreign torture dungeons.” The White House compiled 57 documented instances of Democrat officials branding ICE officers as Nazis, Gestapo, the SS, terrorists, and vigilantes. These include Rep. John Larson calling ICE “the SS” and “the Gestapo.”
This framing carries no legal foundation. The Supremacy Clause of Article VI establishes federal law as supreme across all U.S. territory. As the Supreme Court held in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), states have no power to impede or control constitutional federal operations.
A three-judge Ninth Circuit panel recently found California’s law requiring ICE agents to display identification violated the Supremacy Clause, writing that it “attempts to directly regulate the United States in its performance of governmental functions.” Every square mile of California, Minnesota, and Illinois is sovereign U.S. territory subject to federal jurisdiction.
The violence that followed was documented and continues to escalate. In January 2026, the Department of Homeland Security released a report stating that officers had been subjected to a 1,300% increase in assaults, a 3,200% increase in vehicular attacks, and an 8,000% increase in death threats.
The five assassination attempts on President Trump, the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the violence surrounding ICE operations are not separate phenomena. They are the documented output of four institutional lies propagated by the mainstream media, pushed by Democrat lawmakers, and amplified across social media.
The post The Fifth Assassination Attempt: Ben Shapiro on the Media Lies Driving Political Violence appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.