Public support for political assassination is supposed to be rising, especially among women, even as overall murders fall. The claim comes from a new survey that few people outside a small research circle have actually seen.
The Study Behind The ‘Assassination Culture’ Claim
Fox News recently reported on a survey by the Network Contagion Research Institute, or NCRI, that it says tracks what the group calls an emerging American “assassination culture.” In that framing, assassination culture means ordinary people becoming more willing to tolerate or justify killing political figures for ideological reasons.[1]
NCRI is a nonprofit research group that studies online extremism and networked threats. It describes its mission as using data science to detect “emerging threats and contagions” across digital platforms.[2] The new survey, according to Fox, asked just over 1,000 people nationwide about whether violence against political figures such as former President Donald Trump and New York politician Zohran Mamdani could ever be justified.
Respondents were reportedly asked to rate, on a scale from zero to six, how justified they believed political violence was. Zero meant “completely unjustified.” Six meant “completely justified.” Anything above zero was treated as some level of tolerance for political violence.
Joel Finkelstein, NCRI’s director, told Fox News Digital that the group was not only interested in the small minority willing to say violence is fully justified. It was also tracking what he sees as a widening gray zone in which people say they can imagine situations where assassination might be acceptable. He said the group found that “political violence is up” in its indicators, even as overall violent crime has fallen in recent years.
Who The Survey Says Is Most Tolerant Of Political Violence
The Fox article reports three main patterns among respondents who were more likely to endorse political violence in at least some circumstances.
Item 1: They reported spending a lot of time on social media.
Item 2: They were more likely to agree that the United States is “an empire in decline.”
Item 3: They were, according to Finkelstein, more likely to be women.
Fox says NCRI found that women overall were about 15 percentage points more likely than men to show some support for what the researchers call assassination culture, with higher tolerance scores toward both Trump and Mamdani. Within that, liberal women were described as the group most likely to say political assassination could be justified, and conservative men the least likely.
Finkelstein told Fox, “I thought we were looking for unemployed men and young men, and that’s not what we’re seeing.” He argued that heavy social media use and pessimism about the country’s future appear to be more important than traditional demographic markers like gender alone.
The survey, as summarized in the article, looked at attitudes rather than plans or specific threats. It did not claim that respondents intended to carry out violence. It tried instead to measure how many people see murder as at least thinkable in politics.
High Profile Crimes, Unresolved Cases
To explain why this kind of attitude research matters, Fox ties the NCRI survey to several recent crimes and alleged crimes. Among them is the killing of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, which Fox describes as an assassination carried out in December 2024. The article says a man named Luigi Mangione has been charged in that case and has pleaded not guilty. It notes that Mangione has not yet gone to trial and that the allegations have not been tested in court.[1]
The piece also references two failed attempts on Trump’s life and the fatal shooting of activist Charlie Kirk at a speaking event. Those incidents, if accurately described, would be among the most serious political crimes in recent U.S. history. At the same time, they involve ongoing investigations and, in some instances, pending criminal cases. That means key facts, including suspects’ motives and any connections between them, have not been fully established in court.
Fox reports that in response to the survey and the broader pattern of attacks, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, “It must end.” She urged an end to what the administration describes as violent rhetoric from the political left about conservatives.
None of those individual incidents, however, can prove that a broader culture has shifted. They are extreme outcomes. The NCRI survey is trying to measure the quieter part of the story: what people who have not committed crimes think about the possibility of political killing.
How These Findings Compare With Other Research
One important question is whether the NCRI survey results line up with other, more established polling on political violence. On that point, the Fox summary sits uncomfortably with a growing body of independent data.
A 2022 survey by researchers at the University of California Davis, published through the Violence Prevention Research Program, found that about one in five American adults believed that political violence is at least sometimes justified.[3] That figure is significant but far below the majority-level numbers reported by Fox from the NCRI poll.
Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan research organization, has asked a related question for several years: whether respondents agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence.” The 2023 American Values Survey found that support for that statement, while rising in some groups, remained a minority view even among the most sympathetic partisan blocs.[4]
Both the UC Davis and PRRI surveys also tend to find that support for political violence is higher among men than among women, and higher among people who identify as very partisan or hold extreme ideological views. That pattern appears to differ from the gender story described in the Fox article about NCRI’s work.
Without access to the full NCRI questionnaire, crosstabs, and weighting methods, it is difficult for outside researchers to explain why its gender patterns appear to diverge from earlier studies. NCRI has a record of publishing detailed reports on its website. As of now, independent analysts will need that level of documentation before they can test whether this new survey reflects a real shift or a quirk of sampling and design.
Violent Crime Is Falling, Political Tension Is Not
The NCRI director is correct on one major point that is easier to verify. Violent crime, including murder, has generally been falling in the United States in recent years. Preliminary FBI data for 2023 show reported murders declining compared with 2022, part of a wider drop in violent offenses after a spike during the early pandemic years.[5]
At the same time, high-profile incidents of ideologically motivated violence have drawn intense media attention. Examples include mass shootings tied to racist manifestos, attacks on members of Congress, and the January 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol. Those events have helped fuel concern that a small number of people might be ready to turn extreme political language into lethal action.
Finkelstein told Fox that people who accept violence against their opponents are also more likely to say violence is acceptable when used against their own political side. He described the situation as “a spiritual crisis about the belief in democracy.” That is a value judgment, not a legal finding. It does, however, match a broader theme in contemporary research: that dehumanizing opponents can make many forms of harm feel more acceptable, even if most people never act on it.
What Remains Unknown
The NCRI survey, at least as described in one news article, highlights real concerns about public tolerance for political violence. It also raises methodological questions that cannot be answered without fuller data. How exactly were questions worded? How many people refused to answer? How did researchers ensure a representative sample? Those details matter when the headline claim is that more than half of some political groups see murder as at least sometimes justified.
For now, the clearest points are that overall violent crime has been trending downward, that a nontrivial minority of Americans in multiple surveys say political violence can sometimes be acceptable, and that most credible polls still find that a large majority reject it outright. Whether the gender and ideological patterns described in the NCRI work hold up under independent scrutiny, and whether they translate into more real-world crimes, remains an open and important question.
