Slanders That Inspire Murder

Overview

In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, many people are condemning “political violence,” including prominent Democrats like Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Chris Murphy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Gavin Newsom.

However, these individuals and their colleagues have repeatedly spread falsehoods that can inspire people to commit murder by misleading them to believe that their very lives are in danger. Such fictions have also been widely spread by the upper echelons of media and academia.

Despite what some claim, this is not a case where both sides are guilty. Even ChatGPT, which often draws from left-leaning sources, failed to produce a single legitimate example of a comparable false claim from a leading Republican or conservative.

Moreover, icons of the left have embraced a moral code that allows for such slander if it advances their agenda.

Criticism & Culpability

When people openly criticize each other—a common occurrence in politics—there’s always a chance that a third party will use those words as a license for violence.

On the other hand, countless misdeeds wouldn’t be exposed and stopped were it not for public criticism. Even in cases where such critiques provoke lethal violence, more lives may be saved than if the critics remained silent and let the wrongs continue. This is a major purpose of the First Amendment.

Under legal standards, critics are not generally liable for violent actions provoked by their words. However, the legal and moral case for blame arises if they make direct calls for violence or maliciously or recklessly mislead others to believe that certain people pose a serious threat to their lives.

This is a very real danger given that a 2024 scientific survey sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services found that 14.6 million non-institutionalized, non-homeless adults in the U.S. say they have a “serious mental illness.” These include 9.4% of young adults aged 18 to 25, who are more likely to commit murder than people of any other age groups.

Yet, leading Democrats, media outlets, and scholars have spread such murder-inspiring slanders on hundreds of occasions. These involve, but are not limited to, the following five categories of falsehoods.

#1: Bloodbath

In the months leading up to the shooting of Donald Trump and the killing of Corey Comperatore in 2024, hundreds of media outlets and Democrat officials alleged that Trump threatened lethal violence because he said, “If I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath.”

In reality, Trump used the term “bloodbath” to describe the effects of Biden’s policies, particularly on “car manufacturing,” not as a violent threat. This is unmistakable from the 38-second clip of what Trump said.

Yet, one day after the Butler shooting, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and Martha Raddatz poured fuel on the fire by declaring that Trump “contributed” to “violent rhetoric” because he said “it’s going to be a bloodbath” if “I don’t get elected.”

And one day after that, President Biden claimed that he never said anything that could “incite” violence against Trump while simultaneously accusing Trump of threatening “a bloodbath if he loses.”

To those who gullibly believe such fictions, they are a license for violence because they mislead people to fear that Trump and his supporters are plotting to kill them.

#2 Transgenderism

Another group of falsehoods with potential to inspire murder involves transgenderism, an issue that fervently motivated the person who assassinated Charlie Kirk.

Inflammatory rhetoric of this nature was spread by the likes of U.S. Senator Ed Markey (D–MA), who stated that “the far-right justices of the Supreme Court endorsed hate” because they didn’t overturn Republican laws that ban “life-saving care” for “trans youth.”

Similarly, Democrat Senate Leader Chuck Schumer accused Republicans of conducting a “cruel crusade against trans kids” by enacting laws that ban the use of surgeries and drugs to transgender children.

In reality, no credible evidence shows that such practices save lives, despite what Democrats and institutions like the American Academy of Pediatrics stridently assert. This is clear from a 2023 paper about transgenderizing drugs and surgeries in the journal Current Sexual Health Reports, which documents that:

• “systematic reviews” have found “the risk/benefit ratio of youth gender transition ranges from unknown to unfavorable.”
• “three recent papers examined the studies that underpin the practice of youth gender transition and found the research to be deeply flawed.”
• “results of long-term studies of adult transgender populations failed to demonstrate convincing improvements in mental health, and some studies suggest that there are treatment-associated harms.”

These findings are corroborated by:

• a 2023 investigation in the British Medical Journal which found that transgendering children with drugs and surgeries is not “evidence-based.”
• a 2025 paper in the Journal of Sexual Medicine which found that “gender-affirming surgery, while beneficial in affirming gender identity, is associated with increased risk of mental health issues….”
• at least 9 studies which have found that puberty blockers given to youth significantly interfere with their bone development.

Thus, Republicans enacted policies to protect children from the harms of those practices, as have the nations of Britain, Finland, and Sweden.

With no regard for the facts or the dangers of her rhetoric, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed “anti-trans fervor fueled by extreme Republicans” for the “death” of a high schooler “from a brutal assault in their high school bathroom.”

In reality, the student died of suicide.

Spreading another false narrative that could lead people to violently lash out, President Biden’s Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, claimed in 2023 that “26 transgender Americans” “were killed this year” and that “no one should face violence” for “being themselves.”

In reality, 26 killings is 0.14% of the 19,000 people who are murdered per year, and 1% of the adult population claims to be transgender. That means the general U.S. population is about seven times more likely to be murdered than people who identify as transgender.

Such slanderous claims also animated the killer of three children and three staff at the Christian Covenant School shooting in Nashville during 2023.

#3 Fascism & Nazism

Accusations of fascism and Nazism—which were etched on the ammunition of Charlie Kirk’s assassin—are another major category of murder-inspiring falsehoods from high-profile Democrats and journalists.

The following bullet points contain some lurid examples:

• MSNBC’s Jen Psaki asked California Governor Gavin Newsom, “Is Donald Trump a fascist?” and then nodded in agreement as Newsom replied, “I know it’s a loaded word, but when you say you’re ‘gonna be dictator on day one,’ look up the definition of fascism, the characteristics of a dictator, an authoritarian.”

The “dictator on day one” accusation was widely reported by the media, lending credence to Newsom’s claim. But in reality, Trump said that he is “not going to be a dictator” “except for day one” to “close the border” and “drill, drill, drill.” The interviewer replied, “That sounds to me that you’re going back to the policies when you were president,” and Trump said, “That’s exactly right.”

• Cal Berkeley professor and former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich claimed that Donald Trump used “the language of fascism” by “describing immigrants as not humans, but animals.”

That accusation was also widely reported by the media, but in reality, Trump used the word “animals” to describe murderous illegal aliens like “MS-13” gang members—not immigrants in general. This context is obvious from simply watching the video of what Trump said.

• The 2024 Democratic Party Platform asserts that Donald Trump “called white supremacist and openly-antisemitic Charlottesville protesters ‘very fine people’.”

In reality, Trump called them “very bad people” and said that the “very fine people” were those who showed up to “innocently” protest—“not” the “neo-Nazis and the white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.” Yet, the media and Democrats widely alleged that Trump “praised white supremacists” as “very fine people.”

• A slew of prominent media outlets and Democrats accused Donald Trump in 2020 of threatening to “dominate protestors” during a speech in which he called for law and order amid widespread riots. This led U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D–OR) to declare, “The fascist speech Donald Trump just delivered verged on a declaration of war against American citizens.”

To unhinged extremists who genuinely believe Wyden, this is all the justification they need to wage a literal war against Trump and his supporters. In reality, however, Trump stated in the speech that he is an “ally of all peaceful protesters,” “we cannot allow the righteous cries and peaceful protesters to be drowned out by an angry mob,” and governments have a duty to protect “innocent people” from “professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters.”

• U.S. Congressman Dan Goldman (D–NY) stated on MSNBC, “There’s no question that Donald Trump has visions, as we saw from his video with the ‘Unified Reich,’ which was completely knowing and intentional inclusion in that video—let’s be real here—he is paving the wave to become a Vladimir Putin or to become an Adolf Hitler or a Kim Jong-un.”

Once again, the media participated in this hoax by widely reporting that Trump posted a video containing the text “Unified Reich,” a supposed reference to Hitler and Nazism. In reality, the words are practically invisible in the video, which was made from a generic vintage newspaper template that costs $21.

The phrase in question appears in a blurred headline from 1914 that read, “German Industrial Strength Significantly Increased After 1871 Driven by the Creation of a Unified Reich.” The word “Reich” simply means “the territory or government of a German state,” and the headline dates to World War I, predating the outset of the Nazi Third Reich by two decades.

With callous disregard for the truth and the safety of Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris said that Trump “highlighted language from Nazi Germany,” and President Biden said, “It’s the language of Hitler’s Germany.”

After this uproar, the creator of the template was asked, “Did you ever think this template would be the center of so much controversy when you made it?” He replied, “I wouldn’t have dreamed of it. It’s really strange. This is just a template.”

Most of those falsehoods (and others like them) appear on a Wikipedia paged titled “Donald Trump and fascism.” These slanders are further amplified by Big Tech companies like Google, which presents the Wikipedia page as the first result for a search on Donald Trump and fascism.

In short, a colossal Democrat/media ecosystem is broadly popularizing murder-inciting misinformation.

#4 Racism

Charges of racism are another massive group of lethally provocative falsehoods spread by prominent progressives. For example, the most-visited news site in the nation, the New York Times, has published these racially charged untruths:

• Black people face “increasing terror” from white people on “a daily basis.”

In reality, black people are 2 to 3 times more likely to murder white people than vice-versa.

• “All Black people pretty much, we need guns to protect ourselves” from “white people” and the “police.”

In reality, black people are about 13 times more likely to be murdered by blacks than by whites and are about 4,000 times more likely to be murdered by blacks than by police.

• The man who shot Trayvon Martin told a 911 dispatcher, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.”

In reality, the Times chopped and spliced the 911 tape, and the man only said “He looks black” in reply to the dispatcher asking, “OK, and this guy—is he white, black, Hispanic?”

• It is unclear if the police shooting of “unarmed black teenager” Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri was “unjust.”

In reality, the Obama administration’s Department of Justice had already investigated this matter and reported physical evidence, forensic evidence, and witness testimony which proved that Brown, who was 6-foot-4 and roughly 300 pounds, brutally attacked the officer, and the officer shot Brown in a clear-cut case of self-defense.

• “Black people suffer disproportionately from police brutality,” and “many police officers see black men as expendable figures on the urban landscape, not quite human beings.”

In reality, police are 42% less likely to use lethal force when arresting blacks than when arresting whites, and police are more likely to fatally shoot whites than blacks given how frequently each group engages in behaviors that warrant the use of lethal force.

Such fictions have provoked the slayings of police officers in cases like these:

• Before Ismaaiyl Brinsley murdered New York City policemen Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in 2014, he posted on Instagram: “I’m Putting Wings On Pigs Today. They Take 1 Of Ours….. Let’s Take 2 of Theirs #ShootThePolice, #RIPErivGardner and #RIPMikeBrown. This may be my final post.”

• During a 2016 “Black Lives Matter” protest in Dallas, TX in which the crowd chanted the slanderous mantra, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” Micah Johnson killed five white police officers while declaring that he wanted to kill white people, especially white cops.

• Ten days later, Gavin Eugene Long shot six Baton Rouge, Louisiana police officers, killing three of them and leaving behind a suicide note which stated, “I must bring the same destruction that bad cops continue to inflict upon my people,” meaning people of color.

Beyond specific murders, multiple criminologists have found that such narratives spurred a “Ferguson Effect” that is the most likely cause of a 20% nationwide surge in murder after the death of Michael Brown and a 35% surge after the murder of George Floyd.

The last of those surges translates to an additional 11,000 murders in the wake of Floyd’s death, despite the absence of evidence that racism played any role in the case. Although association doesn’t prove causation, this deluge of murders accords in time and place with progressives’ false accusations of systemic racism and no other identifiable causes.

#5 Climate Change

Another incendiary realm of fabrications spread by leaders of the left involves climate change.

For a poignant example, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder wrote a 2024 piece for the New Yorker in which he accused Trump and JD Vance of being murderous fascists because of their energy and climate policies.

While admitting that “Hitler was obsessed with coming ecological catastrophe,” Snyder flips that around by alleging that “the new fascists” like Trump and Vance “will kill by a politics of catastrophe, a deliberate acceleration of global warming, and its exploitation in the service of the politics of us and them.”

Likewise, George Washington University law professor Donald Braman co-authored a 2024 paper for the Harvard Environmental Law Review in which he calls for prosecuting fossil fuel companies for “homicide” because “fossil fuel-induced global warming has killed many thousands of Americans and, if it continues unabated, may kill millions.”

Such claims—also spread by the likes of NPR, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres—are undercut by wide-ranging climate-related measures that have remained stable or improved for the past 30–170 years, contrary to predictions that they would have radically degraded by now. These include but aren’t limited to:

• hurricane frequency & intensity.
• floods & droughts.
• forest mass & tree cover.
• foliage productivity.
• coral reef island area.
• mainland coastal area.
• extinctions.
• tornadoes.
• agricultural production.
• weather fatalities.
• weather economic damages.

Apocalyptic predictions about the future are all based on models, a class of studies that are notoriously unreliable. This fact is routinely ignored by those who spread tales of climate doom. An academic paper aptly summarizes the situation:

• Model-based “analyses of climate policy create a perception of knowledge and precision that is illusory and can fool policymakers into thinking that the forecasts the models generate have some kind of scientific legitimacy.”

• “The argument is sometimes made that we have no choice—that without a model we will end up relying on biased opinions, guesswork, or even worse. … This might be a valid argument if we were honest and up-front about the limitations of the model. But often we are not.”

That lack of honesty, which comes from the halls of academia and is amplified by Democrats and the media, provides ample reasons for fanatics to slay people who don’t subscribe to the notion that climate change is going to annihilate humanity.

Not Both Sides

A common refrain is that both sides of the political aisle are guilty of inciting political violence.

Thus, Just Facts asked ChatGPT to “provide 5 compelling examples of false claims from prominent conservatives that could easily incite people to commit murder by misleading them to believe that certain people pose a serious threat to their lives.”

Despite multiple follow-up requests, ChatGPT failed to produce a single example that met those criteria. Instead, it produced statements that are not from prominent conservatives, are not false, or don’t mislead people to believe that others pose a serious threat to their lives.

Here are the five examples that ChatGPT provided while describing them as “compelling” and “well-sourced”:

1. Alex Jones alleged that “high-ranking Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria” called “Comet Ping Pong.”

Jones is not a “prominent conservative” but a fringe conspiracy theorist who has been described as a crackpot and liar by prominent conservatives like Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro, although Trump once told Jones in 2015, “Your reputation is amazing.” Nevertheless, there is no equivalence between Jones and the eminent Democrats, major media outlets, and scholars cited above. Moreover, Jones apologized for getting this story wrong, something that none of the perpetrators of the above falsehoods have done.

• ChatGPT alleges that Donald Trump falsely described “Central American migrant caravans” in 2018 as an “invasion” and said that “many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border.”

ChatGPT claims this is false because “immigrants (including undocumented ones) commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens, and no terrorist infiltration was documented.” Beyond the fact that these claims don’t directly debunk Trump’s statement, the first one is based on fatally flawed studies promoted by the media, and the second one is pointless because the caravans were stopped in Mexico under pressure from Trump.

• ChatGPT alleges that “Trump and allies claimed—without evidence—that the 2020 election was stolen,” which led to the Capitol Hill riot on January 6, 2021.

In fact, Trump cited evidence of this from a PhD-vetted study published by Just Facts, and Biden’s DOJ prosecuted him for doing so. Moreover, an attempt by USA Today to debunk the study fell completely flat.

Charges of a stolen election are clearly inflammatory, but they don’t lead people to believe that their lives are in danger, and none of the J6 rioters committed murder, attempted murder, arson, or fired a gun. Despite this, Democrats falsely accused J6 rioters of murdering Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, another inciteful fiction.

• ChatGPT alleges Trump “falsely claimed that doctors ‘execute’ newborn babies after failed abortions.” ChatGPT says this is because “infanticide is illegal in all states,” “there is no evidence of systematic post-birth killings,” and “situations of life-limiting fetal anomalies are sometimes misrepresented in this rhetoric.”

ChatGPT relies on PolitiFact for those claims, but the documented facts are that:

• most late-term abortions are not for medical reasons,
• roughly 3–16% of them result in live births, and
• 99% of House Democrats voted against a bill to prosecute any abortionist who “intentionally” “kills a child born alive” after an abortion or fails to give them medical care.

Democrats claimed that they opposed the bill because it was redundant with another federal law to protect newborns who survive abortions, but that law doesn’t have any penalties for breaking it.

• ChatGPT’s final example is that Newt Gingrich said, “We should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in sharia they should be deported.”

This is Gingrich’s opinion, not a false allegation.

In sum, none of ChatGPT’s “compelling” and “well-sourced” examples meet the criteria of being false, murder-inspiring, and from leading conservatives.

Because AI chatbots are programmed to treat untrustworthy sources like PolitiFact and Wikipedia as reliable, they are another large component of the misinformation machine that stokes political violence against conservatives.

Moral Frameworks

The lopsided nature of murder-inspiring slanders from progressives versus conservatives accords with the philosophies of each side.

On the left, Vladimir Lenin gave a speech in 1920 in which he declared that “we reject ethics” based on “God’s commandments” and “our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests” of advancing Communism.

Lenin’s doctrine was also embraced by Saul Alinsky, the influential leftist who was the topic of Hillary Clinton’s 1969 college thesis. In his famed book, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote that the “ends justify almost any means,” and the “most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.”

In other words, these iconic leftists considered it immoral to let ethics get in the way of what they wanted. This stance permits and even embraces slander.

On the right, slander is strictly forbidden by the Bible’s ninth commandment against giving “false testimony against your neighbor.” Thus, Albert Einstein noted in 1940—while Nazis were vilifying Jews—that “only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth.” In contrast, Einstein was disappointed that Germany’s “universities” and “newspapers” were quickly “silenced.”

This certainly doesn’t mean that conservatives or Christians always tell the truth or that progressives or atheists always lie, but it does provide a plausible explanation for the glaring difference in how often they spread murder-inciting slanders.

Summary

In response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, prominent Democrats have widely condemned political violence.

However, the same people—in concert with leading media outlets and prestigious scholars—have incessantly spread falsehoods that could inspire murder by misleading people to believe that they will be slain unless they strike first.

Those slanders include, but are not limited to, hundreds of allegations that:

• Trump threatened a violent bloodbath if he lost the election.

• Republicans are killing children by banning the use of surgeries and drugs to transgender them.

• Trump is a fascist who promised to “be dictator on day one,” vilified “migrants” as “animals,” praised “white supremacists” as “very fine people,” spewed “Nazi” rhetoric about a “Unified Reich,” and declared “war against American citizens.”

• white people and police officers “disproportionately” murder black people and see them as “expendable figures on the urban landscape.”

• Republicans and fossil fuel executives are murdering millions of people through climate change.

Some of these claims are so blatantly false that they raise serious questions about brazen dishonesty and radical confirmation bias among the influential people who spread them.

Many people say this is a two-sided affair, but the left-leaning ChatGPT failed to produce a single example of murder-inciting demagoguery from leading conservatives.

Meanwhile, such examples flow like a river from the highest levels of the Democratic Party, the media, and academia.

That pronounced disparity may be caused by different moral frameworks, one which accepts slander, while the other forbids it.

Given the importance and strength of the First Amendment, effective solutions to this situation will likely not come from government censorship but from efforts to name and shame the perpetrators, instill good character, and master the skills to separate fact from fiction.

By James D. Agresti

James D. Agresti is the president of Just Facts, a research and educational institute dedicated to publishing facts about public policies and teaching research skills.