| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Federal employees know who stands on their side. | ||
| It's us, House and Senate Democrats. | ||
| They've lived the experience of the Trump administration going after them in the most horrific ways possible since January 20th, and we, as House and Senate Democrats, are going to continue to stand up for them. | ||
| We're going to continue to stand up for nutritional assistance. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's the Republicans who cut. | |
| $186 billion, the largest cut to snap in American history. | ||
| They just did this in July as part of their one big ugly bill so they could reward their billionaire donors and continue to subsidize the lifestyles of the rich and shameless. | ||
| It's out of control. | ||
| That's their track record. | ||
| That's the Republican track record. | ||
| And of course we're going to continue to stand up for the health care of the American people. | ||
| And I don't know why Republicans think this is a game. | ||
| This is not a game. | ||
| This is about the health and the well-being economically of the American people. | ||
| And Democrats are going to stay in this fight until we win this fight for working class Americans, for middle-class Americans, and for hardworking American taxpayers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you all. | |
| Live now to a hearing on political violence. | ||
| Witnesses include former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf. | ||
| We'll join this in progress. | ||
| Aggressively, assertively, but without the kind of hatred that foments bad, bad, bad behavior. | ||
| And political violence touches all Americans regardless of their political affiliation. | ||
| You know, I got involved in politics when I was involved in the Civil Rights Movement. | ||
| And two of the people that I most admired in politics, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, were both assassinated. | ||
| And I unequivocally condemn Mr. Kirk's assassination unequivocally. | ||
| I know Mr. Knowles, you're very, very close to him. | ||
| I know Senator Schmidt was very, very close to him. | ||
| And I know millions of Americans were inspired by him. | ||
| I condemn that. | ||
| Let me be clear. | ||
| I condemn that killing. | ||
| I was also want to say this. | ||
| The stakes are really too high for the American people and the health of our democracy to use this hearing as an opportunity to demonize one side or the other. | ||
| If all violence, all political violence is wrong, is evil, is corrosive, the debate about where there's more on one side or the other, I don't see how that helps us get anywhere. | ||
| Politicizing violence with inflammatory rhetoric has real consequences. | ||
| So all of us have to turn that temperature down, those of us who are in public office, those of us who are in public life. | ||
| You know, one of the things that happens when we have a reaction that's political and demonize it as being one side or the other is there can be governmental action that then starts suppressing the rights of all of our citizens, whether on the right or on the left. | ||
| And we've got that history in our country. | ||
| The Alien and Sedition Acts made it illegal to criticize the government under the guise of national security. | ||
| My predecessor, Matthew Lyon, Vermont congressman in 1797, went to jail because he criticized President Adams. | ||
| That was wrong. | ||
| He ran for re-election and Vermonters responded by re-electing him from jail, standing up for his free speech rights. | ||
| In the 20s, we saw the Palmer raids and what that would happen there with illegal searches and seizures without arrest and without warrants and other constitutional attacks on the rights of organized labor and of everyday citizens under the name of going after, quote, the far left. | ||
| And of course, in the 50s, McCarthyism fueled a campaign of fear and prosecution against left-wing groups, and I put that in quotes until the Supreme Court stepped in to ensure civil rights and civil liberties were guaranteed. | ||
| You know, I was listening to Mr. Kirk, and I do believe what he did going on campuses to encourage dialogue was a good thing to do. | ||
| That's what we should have, and there should be a civil reaction to that. | ||
| But I'm worried that if we're just going to use the violence that we all abhor to get into an argument about whether it's more left or more right, we kind of lose the point, that it's all to be condemned. | ||
| So I'm willing to work with any and all of us to condemn political violence and renew our commitment to civility. | ||
| And Mr. Chairman, he's not here, but I sent over to his office a resolution about civility that is just basic agreement to disagree but not to use invective or hate at all in our discourse. | ||
| So my view, we can't stop the discussion by having it focus on whether it's left or right wing, not to leave that unexamined, but it has to be wholly and completely condemned. | ||
| And I look forward to hearing from our witnesses about your suggestions and how we as a country can do better. | ||
| Is are you going to go? | ||
| And I yield to Senator Lee. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I want to thank each of you for being here. | ||
| I look forward to hearing your testimony. | ||
| I'm also very grateful to Senator Schmidt, Ranking Member Welsh, and those who put together this hearing working with them. | ||
| Violence for the purpose of achieving political ends in the United States of America is itself un-American. | ||
| It's something that is anathema to who we are as a people, and it must be universally condemned and should be regarded as an unthinkable relic of societies that manifestly lack the rule of law, because it is. | ||
| Our republic has regrettably become infected by a type of ideological cancer, one that tends to excuse even the most heinous acts so long as they can be said to achieve or somehow advance politically favored causes. | ||
| Now, because of the way our news media tends to lean and a number of factors, those are often leftist causes that are embracing this. | ||
| If they weren't, if it happened the other way, the media would serve as a check on that. | ||
| The media doesn't always serve as a check on that when it comes from the left, because very often a number of voices within the media tend to agree with those odds. | ||
| And I think that's part of how we get to the point where such a high percentage of those who identify themselves as part of the left are willing to say that the murder of President Trump is morally justifiable. | ||
| And other polls have come out since Charlie Kirk's assassination that show that trend getting worse, not better, just in the last few weeks. | ||
| For examples of this alarming trend, one need look no further than the mostly peaceful burning of various American cities throughout the so-called Summer of Love in 2020, or the coddling of pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic mobs by university administrators just in the last year or two, | ||
| and even the disgusting attempts to rationalize, excuse, and in many cases even praise the cold-blooded assassination of Charlie Kirk through grotesque distortions of his past public statements and otherwise. | ||
| This must end. | ||
| Today, this hearing gives us a real chance to reflect upon and confront this very disturbing and building trend within our society. | ||
| It's not enough to state that political violence is wrong. | ||
| We must expose it, call it out where it exists, and root out the forces that tend to enable it. | ||
| Now, to those who would cite the First Amendment somehow in defense of actions that cannot be defended on their own merits, let us be very clear. | ||
| Violence is not protected speech. | ||
| Neither is incitement to violence or funding of violence or facilitation of violence, any more so than a conspiracy to commit violent acts would be protected by the First Amendment. | ||
| These things are not. | ||
| They are analytically distinct, legally, constitutionally distinct from speech. | ||
| They're not covered by the First Amendment. | ||
| Indeed, the preservation of free speech itself depends on our ability to shield peaceful discourse from those who would silence dissent through any form of violence. | ||
| Look, modern American society is the greatest civilization the world has ever known. | ||
| Now, many on the other side of the aisle have decided that they ought to repeatedly engage in inflammatory, sometimes irresponsible rhetoric that creates permission, sort of establishes a permission structure, you might say, for violence directed at our civil institutions. | ||
| As the Trump administration works tirelessly to safeguard Americans from this wave of criminal, illegal aliens that have come through over the last four and a half years, many Democrat leaders have fought back tooth and nail, describing federal law enforcement as quote, quote, modern-day Gestapo, as slave patrols, as thugs, and as a collective terror force. | ||
| Despite multiple assassination attempts against Trump, it was and remains today fashionable in leftist circles to compare President Trump to Hitler and smear his reporters, his supporters, as fascists. | ||
| What has been the result of this? | ||
| Well, across the country, ICE agents have been under attack personally, not just as a group. | ||
| At an ICE facility in Texas, officers were attacked, with one even being shot in the neck. | ||
| Investigators later found evidence of left-wing anarchist and anti-government ideology, anti-ICE slogans, Antifa imagery, and online discussions specifically targeting federal agencies. | ||
| And yet again, much of the left either ignored the story altogether or blamed the government for provoking the attack, and leftists in the media, meanwhile, did at best nothing to stop it and, in other cases, tended to foment it. | ||
| This violence toward the executive branch is not itself isolated. | ||
| In 2022, a California man boarded a plane to Maryland with a pistol, with ammunition, and with a fairly distinct plan. | ||
| His goal? | ||
| To assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh because he disagreed with the leaked ruling in the Dobbs case that would go on to overturn Roe v. Wade. | ||
| He disagreed with that ruling, therefore he decided he had to kill this justice. | ||
| He was consumed by far-left ideology and the belief that violence is justified somehow when our system does not result in the outcomes desired by the left. | ||
| He later told investigators that he wanted to quote-unquote give his life by killing Brett Kavanaugh himself. | ||
| That is not activism. | ||
| That is radicalism. | ||
| That is extremism. | ||
| It is driven by the same ideology that calls violent protest resistance and dressing it up in as many euphemisms as people can find. | ||
| Shockingly, some leftists suggest almost as a matter of routine that daring to question their misguided beliefs is akin to perpetuating violence against certain favored groups or disfavored groups. | ||
| I hope we can find bipartisan consensus in condemning all political violence without reservation and without regard to the ideology of the person at whom the violence might be directed. | ||
| To overcome the very worst instincts of human nature's somewhat natural tendency toward violence, although it's a tendency that can and must be suppressed in any free civilization, we must first remember that we are one nation and one people under God, united by bonds far stronger than any passing political moment or cause. | ||
| Political violence, regardless of the alleged justification, regardless of the political beliefs of those embracing it or opposing it, will never and must never be tolerated by this body or by the United States of America. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Thank you, Senator Lee. | ||
| Would the witnesses please rise? | ||
| I will now administer the oath. | ||
| Would you raise your right hand, please, and answer this question? | ||
| Do you swear that the testimony you are about to give, this committee, will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you, God. | ||
| I do. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| And I want to introduce our first witness. | ||
| It's Mr. Wolf. | ||
| Thank you for being here, Mr. Wolf. | ||
| And I understand that you have a very distinguished career. | ||
| You serve as America First Policy Institute's Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy Officer, and Chair of AFPI's Homeland Security Immigration. | ||
| And I also understand prior to that, you're acting Secretary of Homeland, Acting Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. | ||
| And during your time at DHS, you successfully navigated an incredible number of global and domestic challenges to the nation's security, including COVID-19, civil unrest, numerous border and immigration crises, and historic natural disasters and threats to global aviation security. | ||
| And I understand, too, that you serve now as president and founder of Wolf Global Advisors. | ||
| Welcome. | ||
| You may proceed. | ||
| Thank you, Chairman Schmidt, Ranking Member Welch, members of the subcommittee, for the opportunity to testify today. | ||
| Political speech and violence should never go hand in hand. | ||
| I'm here today because I've seen this play out firsthand over the last several years and certainly during my time in government service. | ||
| Let me be clear. | ||
| I support those who lawfully exercise their constitutional rights, but when speech turns to violence, we must hold those committing violence accountable. | ||
| The increase in politically motivated violence over the last several years has been driven largely by radical left-wing extremist groups and individuals that believe violence is a legitimate means to achieve political goals. | ||
| A recent analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies shows that, quote, left-wing violence has risen in the last 10 years and left-wing incidents in 2025 are on track to reach 30-year highs. | ||
| A recent Rutgers University poll found that 55%, over half of the respondents of left of center said it would be somewhat justified to murder President Trump, and 48% said the same about Elon Musk. | ||
| According to another recent poll, one in four people on the far left believe that violence can be justified. | ||
| That is one in four. | ||
| The data paints a disturbing picture that some on the left, especially younger adults, are increasingly supportive of violence as a form of protest. | ||
| In 2020, as acting Secretary of Homeland Security, I witnessed 100 consecutive nights of violence in Portland, Oregon. | ||
| Every night, hundreds of violent anarchists surrounded the Hatfield Federal Courthouse. | ||
| They hurled commercial-grade fireworks, sledgehammers, concretes, and even IEDs at our federal officers. | ||
| They set fire, they vandalized property, and assaulted law enforcement. | ||
| Their goal was not peaceful protest. | ||
| It was destruction, coercion, and intimidation. | ||
| At the time, I pleaded with local officials, including the governor and the mayor there in Portland, to help protect our officers, and time and time again, they refused to act. | ||
| They chose politics over public safety. | ||
| The result was more than 280 injuries to law enforcement officers and millions of dollars of damage to federal property and to local businesses. | ||
| Back then, we saw public officers attacking federal law enforcement officers, calling them stormtroopers, Gestapo, and thugs, comparing American law enforcement to Nazi Germany was irresponsible, reckless, and dangerous then as it remains so today. | ||
| Unfortunately, this disgusting rhetoric and behavior has only intensified. | ||
| Once again, we're seeing violent attacks against law enforcement officers, and again, public figures are describing them as Nazis. | ||
| The difference between 2020 and now, however, is that the Trump administration knows what to expect and is fighting aggressively to hold these violent offenders accountable. | ||
| The administration has rightfully designated Antifa as domestic terrorist, has began a whole of government investigation into the financing and resourcing of this group, and has charged Antifa members with providing material support for terrorism. | ||
| Despite what the mainstream media insists, groups like Antifa are not disorganized. | ||
| They are increasingly organized, funded, and networked. | ||
| They plan online, they operate anonymously, and execute in ways that make detection difficult. | ||
| Make no mistake, their lack of structure is not a feature. | ||
| It is a feature, sorry, not a bug. | ||
| And it is designed to evade accountability and prosecution. | ||
| Critics argue because they have no formal leadership, they shouldn't be treated as domestic terrorists. | ||
| I believe this completely misses the point. | ||
| This decentralized model mirrors what we have seen from jihadist networks, cyber criminals, and other criminal groups. | ||
| Their lack of a hierarchy makes them more dangerous. | ||
| This past summer, the American people witnessed multiple anti-fascist-inspired attacks and threats on law enforcement, journalists, and civilians. | ||
| This includes threats against ICE officers, other government officials, and even Attorney General Bondi just yesterday. | ||
| Tragically, this also includes the sickening assassination of Charlie Kirk. | ||
| I want to state this as plainly as I can. | ||
| Enforcing immigration law, laws passed by Congress almost 60 years ago, is in no way shape or form fascism. | ||
| Every sovereign nation has a right to choose who is allowed to legally enter the country. | ||
| Throwing around worlds like fascists and Nazi not only cheapens history, but it fuels increasing hostility towards law enforcement, journalists, and ordinary citizens. | ||
| The rise in political violence presents a grave threat to our constitutional order and rule of law. | ||
| The federal government has a duty and a responsibility to respond. | ||
| We must continue to give law enforcement the tools and the resources they need, allow ICE to operate safely in courthouses and jails across the country, increase penalties for those that dox federal officers, and expand joint task forces to dismantle. | ||
| We owe it to the families who have lost loved ones, including Erica Kirk and others who continue to grieve, to ensure that their calls for accountability are answered and that our nation restores respect for law and order. | ||
| Thank you again for the opportunity to testify. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Wolf. | ||
| By the way, our chairman has had to go vote, and I'm going to have to go do that after I introduce Mr. Braniff. | ||
| Mr. Braniff is the Director of Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, where he's working on research and programming to prevent violent extremism, targeted violence, and the drivers of polarization in American society. | ||
| I also want to note that he's a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and served as a company commander in the U.S. Army. | ||
| Mr. Braniff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Chairman Schmidt, Ranking Member Welsh, distinguished senators, thank you for your leadership on this critical issue and the opportunity to testify today. | |
| 26 years ago, I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution. | ||
| I've spent my career honoring that oath as an Army officer, a terrorism researcher, and leading prevention programs at the Department of Homeland Security. | ||
| It's a lifelong commitment to protect kids and schools, families and faith communities, public spaces and workplaces, and the democratic institutions and freedoms our founders gave us. | ||
| This isn't about politics or party for me. | ||
| It never has been. | ||
| I'm here representing a community of like-minded practitioners, law enforcement, mental health, educators, veterans, who work every day to prevent violence before it destroys families and communities. | ||
| We're united by a simple belief. | ||
| Targeted violence is preventable, and American communities deserve better than waiting for the next attack. | ||
| We should all condemn targeted violence. | ||
| It's tragic, unethical, and illegal. | ||
| I want to start by acknowledging the threats, the loss, and the fear that too many Americans and too many elected officials have experienced. | ||
| But we should also not mistake the blame game for advancing solutions. | ||
| Solutions must be based on data and evidence. | ||
| Solutions must focus on preventing political violence in the first place instead of reacting after the damage has been done. | ||
| And solutions must reinforce our constitutionally protected freedoms, not erode them. | ||
| To inform policymaking, Congress legislated that the executive branch provide data on terrorism and targeted violence. | ||
| DHS contracted with START at the University of Maryland to produce the TTV data set, although the administration abruptly canceled funding in March. | ||
| START data demonstrate clearly that violent events do not fit neatly into any one ideological category and that there has been an alarming increase in attacks and credible plots in the United States, including over a 2,000 percent increase in mass casualty plots since the early 1990s. | ||
| We average more than two and a half attacks and credible plots per day in the U.S., and over 50 percent of them succeed. | ||
| They occurred in over 1,200 U.S. towns and cities. | ||
| This year, compared to last year, terrorism events are up 67 percent and fatalities are up nearly 150 percent. | ||
| Americans are dying from ISIS-inspired, white supremacist, anti-Semitic, anti-government, anti-vax, anti-law enforcement, and nihilistic attacks. | ||
| So these data highlight three challenges that we need to solve for. | ||
| The volume problem. | ||
| With 2.6 events per day, we are at risk of accepting targeted violence as inevitable. | ||
| It is not. | ||
| It is preventable. | ||
| The structural gap problem. | ||
| These plots succeed 55% of the time. | ||
| The structural gap is due to appropriate limitations placed on criminal justice investigations to protect privacy, civil liberties, freedom of speech, and freedom of association. | ||
| So we can't fill the structural gap with criminal justice-only solutions and maintain the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution. | ||
| And third, the reality is that targeted violence manifests in many different forms of terrorism, hate crime, and school shootings. | ||
| Any approach that only addresses one manifestation will be both operationally ineffective and fiscally inefficient. | ||
| At DHS, I led prevention programs that partnered federal resources with local teams, sheriffs who knew their counties, schools who knew their students, mental health professionals who knew their patients, pastors who knew their congregations, local Americans protecting local communities. | ||
| This allowed us to engage in early interventions that addressed all of the challenges I mentioned. | ||
| Volume, we supported nearly 1,200 interventions for people on the pathway to violence. | ||
| Zero committed violence while in the program. | ||
| We filled the structural gap and bridged to public safety. | ||
| In 94% of the cases, the individuals received support from mental health professionals, social workers, or other helping professionals. | ||
| 6% were referred to law enforcement. | ||
| Most of the individuals, 70%, were not yet self-medicating on any one specific ideology when they came to us. | ||
| Just angry, isolated, and struggling. | ||
| And yet, without indexing our programs on any one ideology, the intervention succeeded across all ideologies, making this approach both effective and cost-effective. | ||
| Nearly 1,200 people at risk of hurting themselves and others. | ||
| But before families had to bury loved ones, we invested in prevention instead. | ||
| Political violence threatens our constitutional order, but not just the violence, also how we respond to it. | ||
| Whether we choose to do what works, quietly investing in scaling up prevention efforts, or we feed political polarization that makes Americans less safe and erodes our Constitution. | ||
| Americans deserve, and the Constitution demands the former. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next up is Michael Knowles. | ||
| Michael Knowles is the celebrated host of the Michael Knowles Show on the Daily Wire as well as the book club on PragerU. | ||
| He has published two number one national best-selling books, including Speechless, a history and analysis of the American Free Speech Tradition. | ||
| Michael has received numerous awards, including the Conservative Mind Award from the American Conservative Magazine and Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Ave Maria University. | ||
| Michael is a graduate of Yale and has lectured at universities and research institutions around the world. | ||
| Floor is yours. | ||
| Thank you, Chairman Schmidt, Ranking Member Welsh, and all the members of this committee. | ||
| The ranking member suggested that we condemn political violence, which surely we must all do, but then he suggested that we not try to pinpoint exactly which side the violence comes from. | ||
| This seems to me confusing and misbegotten, as one cannot solve a problem if one does not know where the problem lies. | ||
| In light of the murder of my friend Charlie Kirk by a leftist assassin, I am gratified to see that at least some members of our federal legislature are now confronting the consistent and escalating pattern of left-wing terrorism in the country. | ||
| Lest I be accused of partisan invective, on September 23rd, no less an emblem of American liberalism than the Atlantic Magazine published an article, citing a recent study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, admitting that the left is more violent today than the right. | ||
| Less honest liberals, including members of Congress, continue to deny this fact. | ||
| Democrat Congressman Seth Moulton, for example, reacted to Charlie's assassination by blaming the right. | ||
| Congressman Moulton claimed that three-quarters of political violence in the United States comes from the right, while only 4% comes from the left. | ||
| That claim struck me, as it probably does many of you, as suspect. | ||
| So I looked into just a few recent examples that came to mind of prominent left-on-right violence. | ||
| The Covenant School massacre in Nashville, in which a trans-identifying shooter murdered Christian school children after outlining her ideological motivations. | ||
| According to authorities, there was no ideological motive there. | ||
| Go figure. | ||
| The Black Lives Matter riots, overtly leftist demonstrations that left dozens of people dead and over a billion dollars worth of property damage. | ||
| Likewise, those failed to show up on registers of left-wing political violence. | ||
| Even an attack by Antifa that targeted me personally, as well as conservative college students for our political views, appeared in official records and data sets as nothing more than obstructing law enforcement. | ||
| It turns out the left commits relatively little political violence when you don't count the political violence that the left commits. | ||
| I am here today to speak about that single illustrative incident. | ||
| On April 18, 2023, I was invited to participate in a debate at the University of Pittsburgh on the topic of transgenderism. | ||
| Before the debate, several hundred left-wing protesters gathered outside the student center, many dressed uniformly in black with face coverings. | ||
| They lit the street on fire while burning me an effigy with a little Hitler mustache painted on my face. | ||
| All because I hold the view, as most Americans do, that men cannot become women. | ||
| Buildings in the area were placed on a soft lockdown. | ||
| As the Pittsburgh Bureau of Fire put out my burning effigy, an Antifa operative named Brian DePippa, hiding behind his wife, Crystal, rolled two smoke bombs under police barricades. | ||
| Attendees scattered while demonstrators chanted, Fascists go home. | ||
| DePippa then threw a lit firework into a group of police officers protecting the building. | ||
| The explosion injured several officers, including severe and life-altering injuries to a female officer. | ||
| The debate was forced to end early after campus police determined that the protests outside were becoming even more destructive. | ||
| The campus issued a safety emergency notification. | ||
| Despite popular efforts to deny the existence of organized left-wing terrorism, Brian and Crystal DePippa were not merely two citizens protesting a speaker with whom they disagreed. | ||
| Things just got a little out of hand. | ||
| No. | ||
| They are members of an extremist cell, a cell that meets at an anarchist bookshop, the sort of venue that operates as training grounds for left-wing terror attacks. | ||
| Brian DePippa repeatedly set off TSA screeners for explosive material on his body. | ||
| The Torch Antifa network has claimed the DePippas as members and raised money for them through a tax-exempt nonprofit organization. | ||
| Imagine. | ||
| Thanks to a courageous FBI agent who happened to be on the scene, the Department of Justice was impelled to bring charges. | ||
| Unfortunately, our justice system gave them only a slap on the wrist. | ||
| I think we should all be able to agree that throwing an explosive at a group of people is no mere minor indiscretion. | ||
| That is a very serious crime. | ||
| That's attempted murder, the kind of crime that merits life in prison. | ||
| Instead, our justice system sentenced Brian DePippa to minimal jail time for obstructing law enforcement. | ||
| His wife got off with probation. | ||
| The federal government must act now to stop the consistent and accelerating trend of leftist terrorism. | ||
| For a legislator to deny the threat and neglect the remedy might once have been chalked up to ignorance. | ||
| Today, it is nothing less than complicity. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr. Chairman, I'd like to introduce the next witness. | ||
| Daniel Hodges was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, studied at George Mason University, currently studying at the University of Virginia, joined the Virginia National Guard in 2012 and was honorably discharged after a six-year contract. | ||
| He joined the Metropolitan Police Department in 2014 and has served the city of Washington, D.C. as a police officer since earning awards, since earning awards, citations, and commendations. | ||
| On January the 6th, 2021, Officer Hodges responded with his colleagues to the U.S. Capitol to help defend against the mob who was attempting to stop the transfer of power. | ||
| Officer Hodges was injured during the attack, but returned to full duty weeks later. | ||
| In 2022, he testified before the House Select Committee to investigate the January 6th attack and has since been honored with the Presidential Citizens Medal by President Joe Biden for his heroic service to the nation during the assault on the Capitol. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Hodges. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I'm speaking in my personal capacity. | ||
| However, I draw upon my experiences as one of the few police officers in this country who has policed both the protests and riots of 2020 as well as the insurrection of January 6, 2021. | ||
| I am intimately familiar with political violence, as when I fought to defend the United States Capitol and many of your very lives. | ||
| I was beaten, bloodied, crushed, with my eye gouged and my skull smashed with my own baton. | ||
| Political violence is a worthy topic for discussion. | ||
| However, the press release I saw from the subcommittee chair made it clear this was not going to be an honest consideration of various causes and effects, but rather a ham-fisted attempt to propagate the unsupported notion that liberal ideology is the greatest origin of modern political violence. | ||
| This is particularly galling to me since every single member of the majority on this subcommittee has either contributed to one of the most infamous examples of conservative political violence of our age or the protection of its perpetrators. | ||
| Every majority member who could do so voted to acquit Donald Trump during a second impeachment, and now we find ourselves in a new horrific age of political violence, one where it is carried out by the state itself. | ||
| A permanent resident was arrested without a warrant and is being threatened with deportation simply for his politics. | ||
| A Tennessee man was arrested and is being held on $2 million bail for sharing a Trump meme on social media. | ||
| Members of Congress have been denied access to ICCLEs despite the law granting them unannounced oversight rights. | ||
| These detentions and prohibitions are all grounded in the threat of deadly force and violence, are absurd or outright illegal, and politically motivated by right-wing ideology. | ||
| The fact that these actions are carried out by agents of the state doesn't make them acceptable. | ||
| It makes them far worse. | ||
| The current administration is doing whatever it can to downplay the threat that right-wing violence presents to the United States, including literally erasing data. | ||
| Between September 12th and the 13th of this year, the Department of Justice deleted their own study from their website, which came to the conclusion that right-wing extremism poses a much greater threat than left-wing extremism. | ||
| I quote now the opening paragraph of this National Institute of Justice report published just last year. | ||
| Quote, militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States. | ||
| In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violence extremism. | ||
| Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives. | ||
| In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives. | ||
| A recent threat assessment by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security concluded that domestic violent extremists are an acute threat and highlighted the probability that COVID-19 pandemic-related stressors, long-standing ideological grievances related to immigration, and narratives surrounding electoral fraud will continue to serve as a justification for violent actions. | ||
| There will always be those who seek to further their own political agenda through extra-legal violence, and that is what law enforcement is for. | ||
| But to reduce the risk of the population at large from falling into radicalization, the solution is simple. | ||
| It's unfettered democracy. | ||
| One of democracy's greatest assets is how, when unsullied, it provides a mechanism for everyone to have their voice heard. | ||
| And when people believe their government speaks for them in some manner, then they're less apt to seek violent means to accomplish their political agendas. | ||
| So make voting easier, not harder. | ||
| Stop gerrymandering people into oblivion. | ||
| Stand on the strength of your ideals, not the depth of your donors' pockets. | ||
| Stop shopping for judges and start seeking ideas that will stand scrutiny from any political ideology. | ||
| When you tell the people that an election was stolen from them, they will take up arms against their neighbors without a shred of evidence, I know. | ||
| But if you tell them brilliant political rhetoric is their birthright and civic engagement is their privilege, they'll instead take up the book and the pen and will all be richer for it. | ||
| And when you just so you know, that this is the helmet that U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick wore on January 6, 2021. | ||
| And he died the following day. | ||
| The family member just got back that today. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you for your service. | ||
| Next up is Kyle Scheidler, is the Director and Senior Analyst for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, where he conducts research and analysis on domestic threats to the U.S. homeland and an emphasis on the doctrines which fuel terrorism and shape the variety of kinetic and non-kinetic threats to America's security. | ||
| He's briefed senior U.S. government officials, members of Congress, federal, state, and local law enforcement officers and testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and the Canadian State Senate, the Canadian Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defense. | ||
| He is the author of Understanding Black Identity Extremism, Considerations for Law Enforcement, and editor of Unmasking Antifa, Five Perspectives on a Growing Threat, and a contributing author to Saudi Arabia and the Global Islamic Terrorist Network. | ||
| His writing has appeared at The Federalist, The Hill, FoxNews.com, and the Claremont Review of Books, amongst others. | ||
| He's a graduate of Boston University and a Lincoln Fellow with the Claremont Institute. | ||
| The floor is yours. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Welch, distinguished senators. | |
| I would like to thank you for the invitation to testify today about the threat our country faces from growing political violence. | ||
| In my capacity at the Center for Security Policy, one of the things I am most proud of is our program to provide educational briefings to law enforcement officers at the federal, state, and local levels. | ||
| And for the five years of this program's operation, the number one most requested briefing topic that we have been asked to provide has been on the topic of Antifa and related left-wing extremist groups. | ||
| The reason it has been the most requested topic is not because, contrary to media reports, Antifa does not exist. | ||
| America's law enforcement knows it exists because they see the effects every day. | ||
| The reason it is the most requested topic is because they cannot get accurate and quality information about the threat. | ||
| Until recently, the federal government has failed to define the extensive nature of this threat and has demonstrated a history of dismissing or reducing charges against left-wing extremists. | ||
| But despite this failing, we have seen convictions for acts of political violence by Antifa members who were identified as such. | ||
| In 2021, officers and citizens were injured in a violent, pre-planned riot carried out by Antifa. | ||
| The San Diego District Attorney successfully secured convictions against 11 Antifa members, including on charges of conspiracy to riot. | ||
| In 2023, the state of Florida successfully sued Antifa members under the FACE Act, securing civil fines and felony pleas for their attack on pregnancy crisis centers. | ||
| This is just one case, but in the five months after the Dobbs decision was leaked, more than 100 churches, pregnancy resource centers, and pro-life organizations across the country were attacked. | ||
| Mr. Knowles has already mentioned the case against Brian DePipa and the federal government's guilty plea, but I think it is worth adding that Mr. DePippa was also the web creator for It's Going Down, an Antifa website, which has for years published both ideological manifestos and tactical instructions for aspiring Antifa members, including a 2007 Forming an Antifa group manual, which I first brought to the attention of this committee when I testified before it in August of 2020. | ||
| But what is Antifa? | ||
| Well, as a recent Department of Justice indictment accurately describes, quote, Antifa is a militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups ascribing to a revolutionary anarchist or autonomous Marxist ideology, which explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States government, law enforcement authorities, and system of law. | ||
| Antifa adherents have espoused insurrection and advocated violence to affect the policy and conduct of the U.S. government by intimidation and coercion. | ||
| That's a good working definition, which would bring U.S. law enforcement into line with the definitions which are utilized by other Western governments, which also have an Antifa threat. | ||
| That would include Germany and Sweden. | ||
| These networks of small direct action groups are connected through ideologically aligned organizations, online platforms, and support networks, which provide significant amounts of material support. | ||
| But much of this material support is in the form of services rather than financial transactions. | ||
| One example, the website Abolition Media posts communiques from the PFLP, the ELN, the PKK, and the MPA, all of them designated communist terror groups. | ||
| That alone is actionable material support for terrorism. | ||
| But it also posts claims of responsibility for anarchist arson attacks and propaganda on behalf of Antifa members currently in prison for violent attacks in the United States, Germany, Chile, Greece, and Hungary. | ||
| The site distributes calls for actions and organizes efforts for Antifa groups across international borders and even posted an anarchist manual discussing the value of, and I quote, complex coordinated terrorist attacks. | ||
| If this site were promoting and advocating violence for al-Qaeda, there would be absolutely no question in the minds of U.S. authorities that it serves as a media arm for a terrorist organization. | ||
| According to a recent article by journalist Hudson Krozier, Abolition Media is just one of 100 such websites hosted on NoBlogs, a blogging suite provided by the Italy-based Autistici Inventi Collective, which provides websites, emails, digital encryption tools to Antifa and related left-wing extremist groups, all while hiding their personal data from law enforcement. | ||
| Very similarly, the International Antifa Defense Fund has distributed over a quarter of a million dollars to 800 Antifa members across 26 countries, including not just for legal support, but up to 20 percent has gone to security improvements and emergency relocation costs for Antifa members. | ||
| It would be a reasonable avenue of investigation to determine if funds have gone to help fugitive Antifa members avoid arrest. | ||
| I look forward to working with the committee on ways U.S. policy and legislation might address the threat posed by Antifa and related left-wing extremist groups. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| The Chair will recognize Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Durbin, for his opening remarks. | ||
| I thank Senator Schmidt for that courtesy. | ||
| At the outset, I want to recognize law enforcement who are here today, including those who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and the family members of those who are no longer with us. | ||
| Ken Sicknick, brother of fallen officer Brian Sicknick, is here. | ||
| He reminds us, and I quote, the simple act of not letting the events of that day be whitewashed, revised, or forgotten is more important than anyone can ever know. | ||
| That statement by Mr. Sicknick rings true, painfully true today. | ||
| This hearing examines a critical issue, political violence in America. | ||
| I've said before over and over from this podium, and will repeat, violence is not acceptable, whatever the source or origin. | ||
| I do not believe that one party owns the right to say it's the other party's fault. | ||
| It is the fault of both parties in differing degrees. | ||
| And it's our fault if we try to whitewash that reality. | ||
| To seriously address this problem, we must be honest. | ||
| We must start with the facts, not with partisan conclusions. | ||
| To claim, as the chairman of the subcommittee has, and I quote, political violence comes predominantly from one side of the aisle, and don't give me this both sides, BS, is not supported by the facts. | ||
| In fact, those facts tell a different story. | ||
| For more than a decade, for more than a decade, data from the FBI, DHS, and nonpartisan experts show that far-right extremists have been responsible for most domestic terrorism, including on this chart, which you can see behind me, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, also known as CSIS, terrorist attacks from the right are in red and attacks from the left are in blue. | ||
| CSISIS found that since 2016, 112 people have been killed as a result of right-wing attacks, while three have died as a result of left-wing attacks. | ||
| These are not partisan talking points. | ||
| They are the facts established by federal law enforcement and national security experts across numerous administrations, both Democratic and Republican. | ||
| Indeed, one of today's majority witnesses, Mr. Chad Wolf, in his confirmation hearing before Congress as acting DHS Secretary during President Trump's first term, testified, and I quote: white supremacist extremists from a lethality standpoint over the last two years are certainly the most persistent and lethal threat when we talk about domestic violent extremists. | ||
| Far-right extremists were responsible for the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. | ||
| I lived through it. | ||
| And they've been responsible for a string of hate-fueled massacres targeting ethnic and religious minority communities, including the 2012 Goodwarik shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, targeting Sikh Americans, killing seven. | ||
| The 2015 Mother Emmanuel AME church shooting in Charleston targeting black Americans, killing nine. | ||
| The 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh targeting Jewish Americans, killing 11. | ||
| The 2019 Walmart shooting in El Paso targeting Latino Americans, killing 22. | ||
| and the 2022 top supermarket shooting in Buffalo targeting black Americans, killing 10. | ||
| Political violence has continued to rock the nation in recent months, from the assassination of Mr. Kirk to the assassinations of Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the attempted assassination of Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and his wife. | ||
| Just last week, a man was arrested after allegedly offering $45,000 for the killing of Attorney General Pam Bondi. | ||
| And a January 6th rioter who was pardoned by President Trump full and unconditional pardon was arrested for allegedly threatening to kill the House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. | ||
| I've said it before and I'll say it again. | ||
| There's no room for political violence in America ever, ever, not from the right or from the left. | ||
| I'm deeply concerned by the Trump administration's response to the political violence crisis. | ||
| On the one hand, the administration is threatening a crackdown on constitutionally protected speech based on false claims that in the words of Stephen Miller, the words of Stephen Miller, there is, quote, a vast domestic terror movement on the left. | ||
| At the same time, the administration is gutting programs that have proven effective in combating domestic terrorism. | ||
| For example, the administration has slashed the budget of DHS's Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships by more than 30 percent, cut the center staff by 80 employees to fewer than 20, and appointed a 22-year-old Trump campaign official to run the center. | ||
| We honor our Constitution and serve our country not by rewriting history or weaponizing tragedy, but by telling the truth, even when it's uncomfortable, because democracy cannot survive selective outrage or deliberate amnesia. | ||
| To the officers and families here today and watching at home, we will never forget January 6th. | ||
| Our duty is to protect the truth, to defend the rule of law, and to be an American that rejects violence in every form. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Thank you, Senator. | ||
| I want to point out that the CSIS study that's been mentioned here and repeated ad nauseum excluded violence at protests from their study, allowing them to systematically ignore Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots. | ||
| But they did make an exception for Charlottesville, interestingly. | ||
| Even using their flawed methodology, CSIS recently reported that left-wing violence in 2025 outpaces right-wing violence. | ||
| Imagine how much bigger that disparity would be if they actually weren't cooking the books. | ||
| So without objection, I'd move to enter into the record an article by Tim Carney explaining CIS's biased methodology. | ||
| Without objection, it'll be entered into the record. | ||
| We'll start with questionings. | ||
| Mr. Knowles, I want to start with you. | ||
| You're not going to have any bigger proponent of free speech than me, given especially what I did in my last job in this one. | ||
| I believe in it wholeheartedly. | ||
| I think it's the First Amendment is the beating heart of our Constitution. | ||
| But what we're really talking about here is conduct, of course, violent conduct. | ||
| And you've talked about you can't really have this competition in the marketplace if the marketplace is being destroyed and shot up in many instances. | ||
| How do we get at this problem? | ||
| What's the road forward in your view? | ||
| We might be able to find a little bipartisan agreement if we acknowledge something that both parties at different times have acknowledged, which is that marketplaces of ideas or any other kind of marketplace only function when there are rules and when we abide by those rules. | ||
| You can't have a marketplace if bandits keep shooting up the marketplace. | ||
| And this is why it's so important to identify where the threats to the marketplace have really been coming from. | ||
| Have we seen left-wing speakers shouted down on campuses? | ||
| Have we seen left-wing events interrupted by terrorists? | ||
| Rarely so, if ever. | ||
| I can't think of an occasion. | ||
| I am amused that Senator Durbin began by warning against pointing to one side or the other, making this a partisan issue, before beginning one of the most partisan invectives that I have ever heard. | ||
| But I'm not even opposed to a partisan invective here because I think it is very important that we identify where the threats are. | ||
| I think any honest Democrat even would have to acknowledge, as the Atlantic Magazine did, as even CSIS has acknowledged, that the threats today to the free marketplace of ideas come from the left. | ||
| And so, in order to restore the open marketplace of ideas, the healthy exchange of ideas, essential to our self-government, we must regulate where the problem is. | ||
| And today, the problem lies on the left. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr. Wolf, I want to ask you, and thank you for your service. | ||
| A common refrain is that Antifa is an ideology, not an organization. | ||
| Could you talk about, in your experience, how that is complete and utter nonsense, that this is actually a pretty well-coordinated organization with safe houses and money that's laundered internationally, quite frankly, not just domestically? | ||
| Yeah, well, I think we've seen that across the country. | ||
| I think the indictment by the Department of Justice in Texas talks about the Antifa cell there in North Texas, about how they do coordinate, how they do pool their resources. | ||
| I saw it firsthand in Portland, although it was very difficult to prove at the time. | ||
| Those types of anarchists and others there being well organized, being well funded, being resupplied daily, not that they were doing that themselves, but that they had help. | ||
| And so as you look across the spectrum here, is Antifa like other organizations? | ||
| Does it have a hierarchy and an org chart and everything else? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| It's very different. | ||
| But that doesn't make it any less dangerous. | ||
| That doesn't say, and that shouldn't mean from a law enforcement perspective, well, let's not actually investigate. | ||
| Let's not actually start to look at who these individuals are, how they're organized, how they're funded, how they're financed. | ||
| Just because they're decentralized doesn't make them any less threatening. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr. Scheidler, I'm going to go to you and pick up on that point because you alluded to it in your testimony. | ||
| Understanding what Antifa is and its connections and organization, what are some suggestions you might have of how we could get at this problem of this radical organization hellbent on destroying America? | ||
| I mean, this is their stated mission. | ||
| How do we get about that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'm a firm supporter of the President's recommendation to target Antifa as a foreign terrorist organization. | |
| There are a number of Antifa organizations that operate across Western Europe and Latin America, which would be justified, we would be justified in designating as a foreign terrorist organization. | ||
| There are also a number of networks which provide material support, including the one that I mentioned in my testimony. | ||
| And that is a very common method in which Antifa receives support. | ||
| Much like, for example, Islamic State or Al-Qaeda, where they host media outlets like DeBeek and INSPIRE, which will give you both ideological instructions as to how to become Antifa, what you need to believe and how you need to believe it. | ||
| They also provide instructions on what you should do if you wish to be Antifa, including how you should organize, how you can avoid arrest, what encrypted apps to use, what websites to use. | ||
| They also provide instructions on how to destroy critical infrastructure, including 5G wireless communications and how to derail trains, as, for example, the website It's Going Down did in a case that was related to two anarchists in the Pacific Northwest that derailed a number of trains in which the federal government received, was able to achieve a conviction. | ||
| So these networks can be targeted for engaging in material support for terrorism. | ||
| We are not talking about speech. | ||
| We are talking about manifestos describing how to overthrow the government and how to do that with violence. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And President Trump has designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. | ||
| And I've written to Secretary Rubio for the International, the Foreign Terrorist Organization, and we'll see what happens with that. | ||
| Ranking Member Welsh. | ||
| Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| I want to ask Mr. Hodges, you were here in duty in uniform on January 6th. | ||
| Can you tell us just what you went through and what the size of the crowd was that was attacking the Capitol? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Certainly. | |
| I'll try to be brief. | ||
| It was a very long day. | ||
| Started at 7 in the morning on Constitution Avenue. | ||
| Everyone filed into the ellipse to hear Trump give his rally, so to speak. | ||
| And then afterwards, they started heading back towards the capital, up Constitution Avenue, towards the Capitol. | ||
| I heard on my radio that they discovered bombs. | ||
| I heard on my radio that the Capitol is becoming under attack. | ||
| The commander who was on scene at the Capitol is getting overwhelmed and called for my platoon to reinforce them. | ||
| So we did. | ||
| We got on our pads, made our way down to the Capitol. | ||
| So you went to where the trouble was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct, yes. | |
| We got as far as the edge of the western property, but the crowd was so dense, you know, we couldn't get any closer than that in a vehicle. | ||
| So we got out on foot, started making our way towards the western terrace itself. | ||
| While we were walking through the crowd, you know, all Trump supporters, Trump flags, Trump gear. | ||
| They started yelling at us, calling us stormtroopers, telling us to remember our oaths, calling us traitors, and we hadn't done anything yet. | ||
| You were uniformed officers, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| No mask. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| And you were insulted with those terms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Stormtroopers, remember our oaths, all that nonsense. | ||
| And then eventually, when we were making our way through the crowd, we were attacked, cut off from our leadership. | ||
| I was hit over the head from behind, lurched forward, and someone tried to steal my baton. | ||
| I was able to retain my weapon, and I tried to forge a path through the crowd. | ||
| Unfortunately, I looked back and saw that the rest of my colleagues were under attack from more of the mob. | ||
| I went back to try and succeed in pulling some of the assailants off my colleagues until I was attacked again. | ||
| Someone tried to steal my baton again. | ||
| We wrestled for control, went to the ground with it. | ||
| He kicked me in the chest. | ||
| I went to my hands and knees. | ||
| And the medical mask, I wasn't going to have time, got pulled up over my eyes. | ||
| So I was blind, surrounded by the mob. | ||
| But thankfully, my colleagues were able to free themselves from their attackers and came to my defense. | ||
| I got up and I forged another path through the crowd. | ||
| It was chaotic explosions going off, smoke grenades, bike rack barriers being broken down into poles to use as weapons. | ||
| Then eventually we made our way to the West Terrace itself where a police line was being held. | ||
| We joined the defense there where we held the line as long as we could. | ||
| Unfortunately, we were comically outnumbered, 150, 175 officers to I think it was like 10,000 insurrectionists. | ||
| I remember looking out over the crowd and I couldn't see the end of it. | ||
| I couldn't see the end of their numbers. | ||
| And they broke through. | ||
| About three or four of them attacked me, pushed me into a waist-high barrier. | ||
| One of them reached underneath my visor, gripped my face with his hand, and tried to gouge out my eye with his thumb. | ||
| I was able to shake him off before any permanent damage was done. | ||
| But we lost the line. | ||
| We had to fall back to the building itself, and that's what we did. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| And I understand that the brother of Officer Suskik is here. | ||
| I just want to acknowledge him. | ||
| He's the officer who died, one of your fellow Capitol Police officers. | ||
| I want to ask a question of the panel. | ||
| As you know, everybody who was involved and convicted was pardoned. | ||
| Raise your hand if you believe that those pardons were appropriate. | ||
| All right, so that includes pardons for folks who were involved in attacking Officer Hodges. | ||
| It does. | ||
| You know, Mr. Chairman, I have to say, I'm not. | ||
| Are we being invited to speak? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pardon me? | |
| Was that an invitation to speak? | ||
| Oh, understood. | ||
| It was not. | ||
| I mean, but you said, and I said, and I agree with you, political violence is to be condemned, whether it's on the right or the left. | ||
| I mean, we just heard a pretty frightening description of political violence on a sustained basis against this Capitol Police officer. | ||
| And there's a view that he should be pardoned. | ||
| I guess I'll just say I disagree with that. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Senator Cornyn. | |
| Thank you for being here. | ||
| I'm glad at least we can agree on one thing: that political violence is unacceptable, no matter where it comes from. | ||
| But I want to talk about the leadership and what some leaders have said, which I believe has contributed to that political violence. | ||
| In 2018, when Nancy Pelosi was asked about policies she disagreed with, instead of saying she would do her job and legislate or try to persuade people to the contrary, she replied, I just don't even know why there aren't uprisings all over the country, and maybe there will be. | ||
| About that same time, Kamala Harris was asked about being stuck in an elevator with President Trump Mike Pence and Jeff Sessions. | ||
| And she replied while laughing, Does one of us have to come out alive? | ||
| And then there's this, Mr. Schumer. | ||
| In March 2020, the majority leader of the United States Senate, Chuck Schumer, said about Supreme Court justices the following: I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. | ||
| You won't know what hit you. | ||
| In August 2020, Representative Ayana Presley said there needs to be unrest in the street, encouraging rioters. | ||
| Then Maxine Waters said in 2021 that Democratic rioters should, quote, get more confrontational, close quote, with police. | ||
| She said, if you see anybody from Trump's cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gas station, you get out and create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they're not welcome anymore anywhere. | ||
| And then in 2023, delegate Stacey Plaskett said on MSNBC that President Trump needs to be shot. | ||
| In 2024, President Biden told Democratic donors that it was time to put Trump. | ||
| This is the president of the United States. | ||
| Told Democratic donors it was time to put Trump in the bullseye. | ||
| And recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted in an Instagram story that people should resist ICE. | ||
| And then Jasmine Crockett, a member of the House of Representatives from the state of Texas. | ||
| Kayla Hamilton was a young man who was sexually young woman who was sexually assaulted and strangled to death by an illegal alien, an MS-13 member. | ||
| I lead a bill named in her honor here in the Senate. | ||
| Representative Jasmine Crockett called Kayla Hamilton a, quote, random dead person. | ||
| We've talked about the person, the would-be assassin that was going to kill Justice Kavanaugh, and of course the assassination attempts on President Trump. | ||
| Does everybody on the panel feel like the or believe that the individuals who actually commit acts of violence should be held accountable? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Would you raise your hand? | |
| So we agree. | ||
| Acts of political violence are unacceptable, and the individual who commits those acts should be held accountable. | ||
| But I want to talk about the political leadership that I think has a greater responsibility. | ||
| People who serve as the elected representatives of the American people, is there anybody believed that they bear no responsibility for inciting or encouraging acts of violence? | ||
| Well, we've always had in our course of our nation's history people who are ideologically driven to violence, anarchists, maybe the modern, the historical antecedent of Antifa, people motivated by ideological reasons. | ||
| But I believe that leaders elected to Congress should not say or do things which suggest that political violence is acceptable. | ||
| And the examples I read to you just now, I think, should be condemned. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, Senator. | ||
| Senator Durbin. | ||
| Thanks, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Mr. Braniff, you previously served as director of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, or CP3 at DHS, an initiative created under the Biden administration to take a comprehensive approach to combating domestic violent extremism. | ||
| CP3 prioritized public and community health programming to identify people before they commit acts of violence in coordination with federal, state, and local law enforcement. | ||
| In your experience, how have these investments in public health led to identifying at-risk individuals and stopping violent acts before they occur? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Senator. | |
| I'm actually perhaps the one person who has something to offer in terms of solutions today, and I'm really excited to talk about that. | ||
| At CP3, we learned from the violence prevention community, the same people who for 30 to 40 years have been studying suicide prevention and violence against children prevention, intimate partner violence prevention. | ||
| And we started to apply those methods and that evidence to targeted violence prevention to try to prevent terrorism, hate crime, school shootings. | ||
| And the great thing about this approach is that it's upstream, right? | ||
| Violence is a universal human phenomenon. | ||
| It just manifests differently. | ||
| When someone starts to struggle, they might go answer-seeking online, and they might fall down one rabbit hole, or they might fall down another rabbit hole. | ||
| And after time, if whatever underlying crisis goes unaddressed, they might decide that violence is a solution to their problems. | ||
| Sorry to interrupt you, but we've heard allegations from both sides of the table as to whether there's more violence on the right, more violence on the left. | ||
| What I hear you saying is that certain persons are predisposed towards the editorial. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, Senator Actor, thank you for the question. | |
| All of us have vulnerabilities, and if those vulnerabilities go unaddressed, we could wind up being manipulated into engaging in violent extremism. | ||
| We did 1,172 interventions. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| 1,172 interventions for individuals who are exhibiting risks of violence. | ||
| They were making veiled threats of violence. | ||
| They were socially isolated. | ||
| And those interventions were across the ideological spectrum. | ||
| Some people were flirting with white supremacy. | ||
| Some people were flirting with anti-government extremism. | ||
| Some people were just flirting with violence for violence's sake. | ||
| The point is, we didn't wait until something terrible happened and then blame the ideology behind it. | ||
| We actually did a therapeutic intervention. | ||
| And in 94% of those interventions, the individual got help. | ||
| And there was no violence. | ||
| In 6%, they had made a threat to public safety that was imminent or they had crossed a criminal threshold and they were referred to law enforcement. | ||
| So we supported those individuals, averted nearly 1,200 potential acts of violence, and never sacrificed public safety. | ||
| We have a solution that's cost-effective, that does not violate civil rights, civil liberties, and protects our Constitution. | ||
| And I would encourage us to look at that as a potential solution. | ||
| As you know, the Trump administration significantly cut the staff at CP3, which you worked with, which led to your resignation. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Senator, there is no more office at all. | |
| The entire thing was dismantled on the final two people left on September 11th and 12th. | ||
| So the prevention effort you're describing to us is now no longer funded. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is correct. | |
| Are you concerned about the potential rise in attacks that we may see without similar level of inquiries taking place under this administration? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Senator, I've given my life to protecting American people. | |
| I'm incredibly worried about the rise of targeted violence and terrorism across the ideological spectrum at the same time that we've dismantled the very apparatus that can prevent it. | ||
| And we've seen 150% increase in fatalities from terrorism last year to this year. | ||
| We've seen about a 70% increase in terrorist incidents from last year to this year. | ||
| We've seen an increase of violence across the board, and I would encourage us to think about investing in prevention going forward because I know that it works. | ||
| An ounce of prevention, as they say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, Senator. | |
| Well, I think that's an important lesson for us to take. | ||
| The Republican members of this committee believe they're right. | ||
| The Democrats believe they're right. | ||
| The American people want to see less violence. | ||
| I hope we all want to see less violence. | ||
| This is one agency with an agenda directed toward reaching that goal. | ||
| And unfortunately, it's virtually been shut down. | ||
| If we're sincere about this on a bipartisan basis, let's do something to revive that effort. | ||
| I yield. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Senator Lee. | ||
| Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Mr. Knowles, I'd like to start with you, if that's okay. | ||
| I hardly need to expand upon the violence that has recently been committed on campuses across the country. | ||
| Most notably, and prominently of late, Charlie Kirk was assassinated not too far from where I live in Utah at Utah Valley University. | ||
| That assassination occurred amidst many of the developments that you've referred to in your opening testimony. | ||
| And it arose in the context of a public debate he was holding in a public forum specifically about some political issues. | ||
| Now, while that conversation at that investigation remain ongoing, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence suggesting a political motivation for this attack. | ||
| Can you help this body understand the violent tendencies inherent in some of these ideologies that are prompting a lot of this violence? | ||
| I certainly can. | ||
| Thank you, Senator. | ||
| Charlie was probably the most prominent proponent of civil and gracious dialogue in the entire country, and they killed him for it because there is in a certain type of left-wing ideology the belief that ideas don't really matter and that we're really just warring groups that must clobber each other over the head, which is why you're seeing the increased violence there. | ||
| I think you saw this not only in the horrific assassination of Charlie, but in the reactions that came afterward. | ||
| You know, as the scene was unfolding, a Democrat analyst, Matthew Dowd on MSNBC, the left-wing cable outlet, blamed Charlie Kirk. | ||
| He said, quote, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. | ||
| The New York Times reacted by publishing the assassination-related musings of Hassan Piker, a prominent left-wing streamer who has suggested the assassination of Senator Tom Cotton and who has said, quote, of conservatives, kill those mother effers, murder those mother effers in the street, let the streets soak in their effing red capitalist blood. | ||
| I could go on and on with the reactions. | ||
| We all saw it, and they're reflected in other public opinion surveys relating to approval of violence. | ||
| So it would appear that this is not merely a matter of some fringe actors, some extremists who simply have an emotional problem, as has been suggested here today. | ||
| This would seem to be clearly an ideological issue at every level of the American left, which needs to be addressed accordingly, or else we're just twiddling our thumbs. | ||
| We are not doing anything to solve the problem. | ||
| Now, if those things arose in the context of someone in the right-of-center universe, what would be the reaction? | ||
| Would there be a self-correction set in motion as a result of the media response? | ||
| There is no question, Senator. | ||
| When I think of right-wing political violence, the clearest example we can think of in recent memory goes back about 30 years. | ||
| It was the Oklahoma City bombing. | ||
| And it was a little confusing, but we could place it on the right. | ||
| What would happen after an attack like that? | ||
| It was universally, uniformly condemned on the right. | ||
| That is true any time there is some fringe attack, a shooting. | ||
| And yet, on the left, what happened after President Trump came within 1 20th of an inch of being assassinated? | ||
| You saw jokes, you saw minimizations, you saw comments throughout social media saying maybe we'll get him next time. | ||
| What happened after Charlie's assassination? | ||
| We could be here all day reading the excuses and the celebrations from normal and even mainstream figures on the left. | ||
| There is no equivalence whatsoever. | ||
| If we're to solve the problem, we have to acknowledge that. | ||
| There are a few tells, a few tells that go along with it, perhaps without some of these people realizing it. | ||
| Every time someone refers to a conservative, it's always far right. | ||
| I don't ever hear the same publications using the term far left to describe someone who believes deeply and fairly consistently in the political ideology of the Democratic Party. | ||
| But far right is the consistent mantra going the other direction. | ||
| It almost seems like an homage to Ad Hitlerim and the frequent invocation of Ad Hitlerim attacks tend to prompt other Operation Valkyrie moments. | ||
| And perhaps that's some of what's behind the 55 percent figure that you referred to earlier. | ||
| Now, you are someone who gets around a lot of college campuses. | ||
| You do a lot of public speaking. | ||
| How has this impacted you personally, and what measures have you had to take, if you're comfortable sharing some of that with us, to ensure your own personal safety when all this is happening? | ||
| We have dramatically had to increase security, of course. | ||
| And there is appropriate concern, the kind of concern that one would never have on the left because they don't face any threats on college campuses. | ||
| College campuses are key, though, here, Senator, because when some fringe right-winger does something awful, he's castigated, thrown into prison, as he should be. | ||
| When a fringe left-winger commits terrorist attacks, sometimes he's given university positions, as happened with the Weather Underground, an organization which blew up part of this very building, and they were rewarded with sine cures at universities. | ||
| For you and for others in the movement, this means that it's more expensive from a personal security standpoint, a preserving your own life standpoint, far more risky than it would be for someone else. | ||
| I can't help but wonder whether that is a feature and not a bug. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's also worth noting that a member of the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers, actually hosted Barack Obama's first fundraiser when he ran for state senate. | ||
| Senator Booker. | ||
| I find hearings like this frustrating. | ||
| And they deepen to me what is a problem in our country, which is a growing tribalism and our inability to come together and work on issues where we have so much common ground. | ||
| So I'm a senator in the United States, and I know them well and have friends on both sides of the aisle that condemns political violence, that does not condemn political violence. | ||
| But when we hold hearings that come at this issue that reflects the partisanship of our time and the tribalism of our time, we don't get to a solution. | ||
| We are in a crisis right now, and there is growing political violence and a glowing justification for it. | ||
| But I find it stunning that the way we talk about it seems more about grievance politics and trying to score points than actually getting to the root of what is an American problem. | ||
| And it frustrates me when that is so transparent and clear, especially when we don't talk about people on our own side of the aisle. | ||
| Chuck Schumer was very wrong in what he said, and my colleague held up the quote. | ||
| I've actually seen that quote. | ||
| I've lost count of how many times my colleagues have raised that quote. | ||
| But you know what they never say is that he came out and apologized for it. | ||
| That Chuck Schumer, using self-interrogation, said I was wrong. | ||
| I've never seen the President of the United States who has spoken about punching people in the face, who has said a lot of violent rhetoric, has never given that type of self-interrogation. | ||
| I don't understand how we could be having a hearing right now at a time when threats on the senator sitting up here have gone through the roof, where we can't have a constructive conversation but instead are pitting witnesses against witnesses, many of whom, like Mr. Hodges, have had to sit there and relive his trauma over and over again in hopes that something would be done about the problem. | ||
| And God, we should just tell the truth. | ||
| There is political violence. | ||
| Extremists who have left-wing ideologies and right-wing ideologies. | ||
| To say it's just one and not the other is to deepen the problem. | ||
| But we have an administration right now who is eviscerating the people that should be keeping us safe and who is pulling down from the website as they did earlier this year when the Department of Justice removed from its website a government-funded report published last year that found that the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violence extremism. | ||
| If we can't accurately describe a problem and do it without partisan rhetoric or seeking to score partisan points, we will not solve this problem. | ||
| I have a lot of colleagues that are wiser and more full of grace. | ||
| I'm a big believer about faith, that before you tell me about your religion, first show it to me and how you treat other people. | ||
| If you ascribe to the beliefs of my faith of Jesus Christ, God, show grace. | ||
| And I still remember bemoaning to Tim Kaine about the problems we have in our growing hostile, degrading, and demeaning political climate. | ||
| And he said, the only way this is ever going to be cured, he said to me, was by each of us showing every single day a relentless commitment to ideals of extending grace to one another. | ||
| I haven't heard any of that rhetoric in the little bit of this hearing that I've listened to. | ||
| I've heard finger-pointing, condemnation, demeaning, and degrading that reflects our partisan divide. | ||
| This is the American problem. | ||
| I am so frustrated to sit before members of our law enforcement who have suffered in our house trying to protect us violence that I never imagined could happen. | ||
| And yet we have an inability to name it and condemn it and commit ourselves to doing something about it. | ||
| I will do my best to call it like it is. | ||
| To hear quotes that I've even said that need to be tamped down. | ||
| Because the only thing that's going to save our country now is not more political posturing and partisan finger pointing. | ||
| The only thing that's going to get us out of this condition is for courageous leaders in both parties to start standing up and extending grace and self-introspection. | ||
| It's a lot easier when I call out Chuck Schumer's comments to make a difference. | ||
| And God, I wish I'd see more of my colleagues being willing to call out the President of the United States for his outrageous comments as well. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Senator Blackburn. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | |
| Thank you to each of you for being here today and to our law enforcement that is here. | ||
|
unidentified
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We thank you for your service. | |
| Mr. Knowles, I do want to come to you. | ||
| And it is wonderful to have you here with us today. | ||
| And we appreciate that you're a Nashville resident, have been there for several years now. | ||
| And I want to return to the topic of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. | ||
| And one of the things that was quite disturbing to me was quotes that came from activist professors. | ||
| And we had in Tennessee three professors that made just horrendous statements. | ||
|
unidentified
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Two have been terminated. | |
| One is going through a termination hearing at this point. | ||
| An assistant dean at MTSU posted on Facebook, looks like old Charlie spoke his fate into existence. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hate begets hate. | |
| Zero sympathy. | ||
| There was an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee. | ||
| And their post referenced Charlie Kirk, and it was, the world is better off without him in it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Even those who are claiming to be sad for his wife and kids. | |
| His kids are better off living in a world without a disgusting psychopath like him and his wife. | ||
| And then an English professor at Cumberland University posted on Facebook, crying about a Nazi getting shot while staying silent about the school shooting in Colorado today is peak Republican. | ||
| Now, I believe that people that praise violence should not be anywhere near our children. | ||
| I do not know of a parent that wants their child to be receiving instruction from an individual who glorifies and applauds brutal murder and the murder of a husband, a father, the murder of someone who believes like me that our nation has been kept free because we believe in robust, respectful, | ||
|
unidentified
|
bipartisan debate. | |
| And I would like for you to talk for just a minute about what is happening in higher education and the role that seems to be playing in some of this violence and violent rhetoric. | ||
| I think you make a marvelous point, Senator. | ||
| You cannot possibly expect a parent to send their children to a school where the professors might endeavor to kill half the students. | ||
| It would be like going to a restaurant with the assumption that the waiters want to poison half the customers or something like that. | ||
| You can't go to a hospital where the nurses want to kill half the patients. | ||
| It's just, you cannot operate a society that way. | ||
| That is obviously beyond the pale. | ||
| And if you are to permit that kind of speech into the marketplace of ideas, it doesn't have the effect of expanding the marketplace of ideas. | ||
| It actually shrinks the marketplace of ideas. | ||
| This is why the First Amendment obviously prohibits things like direct threats or obscenity or fighting words, because these are forms of speech that actually undermine rational discourse. | ||
| You know, I think Senator Booker made a good point just a moment ago when he said we have to self-examine, we have to be introspective. | ||
| And I can't help but think of a line today. | ||
| Jay Jones has the vision, commitment, and integrity to keep families safe and make sure every Virginian gets a fair shake in the justice system. | ||
| I'll be working every day to ensure Jay wins this race. | ||
| That's the endorsement of Senator Booker for a man who would seek to be the Attorney General of Virginia. | ||
| This is a man who, if people have not been reading the news, has called for a Republican to be murdered, for his children to be murdered, for the children to die in their mother's arms in order to persuade the Republican to change his policy views, and a man who says that he would urinate on the graves of multiple Republicans. | ||
| Senator Booker, in this spirit of introspection, is standing by this endorsement. | ||
| So I suppose I would invite, perhaps I should have looked because Senator Booker has left the room and I think I can guess why. | ||
| Senator Booker, I think, should practice what he preaches, because this is the kind of moment. | ||
| You cannot have a professor who wants to teach students and is going to desire to kill half of them. | ||
| You certainly cannot have law enforcement officers who would engage in this kind of violent rhetoric against half of their constituents. | ||
| So long as anyone stands by an endorsement such as that, their words are meaningless. | ||
| They are shedding crocodile tears on the topic of political violence. | ||
| I find it just so astounding that we have professors that continue to be in classrooms and hold such views as I put on the posters behind me and that parents are then having to address those issues with their kids. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Senator Padilla. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | |
| I just want to join all of my colleagues in the stance that political violence is never acceptable and should be denounced at every turn, regardless of where it comes from. | ||
| We've seen what happens when violence becomes a political tool. | ||
| It's not protests. | ||
| It becomes an attack on our very democracy itself. | ||
| And it strikes at the principle that political change in this country should happen through healthy, rigorous debate and at the ballot box, not through fear or intimidation. | ||
| And while political violence is rare, its impact is profound. | ||
| Now, I want to ask a question specifically in the context of threats and intimidation that becomes aimed at public officials. | ||
| And those are more than just personal attacks. | ||
| They're attempts to make people too afraid to serve. | ||
| We've seen that danger spread not just from members of Congress and state officials, local elected officials, but to judges and election workers now too. | ||
|
unidentified
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Now, protecting those who uphold our democratic system should not be controversial. | |
| Mr. Braniff, what does current research show about the surge in threats to members of Congress since 2017 and how can Congress strengthen threat assessment capacity without chilling legitimate speech? | ||
| Thank you, Senator. | ||
| Individuals who wind up fixating on elected officials or the integrity of our election system are clearly espousing anti-democratic sentiment, right? | ||
| And often those are observable, right? | ||
| These individuals leak their intent or express things that others can pick up on. | ||
| So in other contexts, 80% of school shooters leak their intent. | ||
| About 50% of mass casualty attackers leak their intent. | ||
| So there's often these indications that someone is starting to self-medicate on the idea of violence. | ||
| And that's an opportunity to do an intervention. | ||
| And unfortunately, the U.S. Secret Service is, of course, an exceptional organization when it comes to behavioral threat assessment and management. | ||
| There are other entities in the U.S. government that still train behavioral threat assessment and management. | ||
| This is becoming a normal practice across the country. | ||
| Some states have mandates for behavioral threat assessment and management, but we really need to invest in nationalizing these programs. | ||
| I don't mean in having one national program. | ||
| I mean having them scale nationally, ensuring those individuals are trained, that those programs are resourced so they can operate with fidelity. | ||
| But there's a really important opportunity to do non-punitive interventions for individuals before they get to the point of criminality, but have a handoff mechanism there in case they have crossed that criminal threshold so we can maintain and ensure our democracy remains intact and these individuals receive accountability if that's what the situation calls for. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And this is a follow-up, two follow-ups, if you don't mind. | ||
| One, we've seen doxing of federal judges and attacks on elected officials. | ||
| Which protective measures have proven most effective at deterring or preventing these types of threats? | ||
| Senator, I don't know that I have a great answer on the prevention of doxing. | ||
| We live in a very online world. | ||
| There's a lot of information available for all of us. | ||
| We can all do the best we can to protect our personal information. | ||
| I think that at the end of the day, a lot of what we've been talking about is important in that there are norms. | ||
| What are the norms that we allow for that we think are acceptable in our nation, in our community, in our households, among our friends? | ||
| Norms actually really do matter. | ||
| Norms and culture shape behaviors. | ||
| And we right now are really struggling with the power that the online world gives us without a lot of norms that work against our worst impulses. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And one question for Mr. Hodges, and again, appreciate your service and all you've been through and your willingness to be here today. | ||
| Based on your experience, Mr. Hodges, what operational or resource gaps must be addressed to safeguard democratic processes and better protect public servants? | ||
| That's an excellent question. | ||
| I'm just a regular old patrol officer. | ||
| I'm not in the meetings of management. | ||
| I don't have the bird's eye view. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what resources we can dedicate to stemming this problem. | ||
| I believe the other witness here had a great point earlier about intervention. | ||
| I had never heard of that before from a scholarly point of view, and that sounded very promising. | ||
| I think that we should look towards funding that if it gets the results that he spoke of. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And I know my time is up, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| I just offer an invite in closing that we as members of the committee, members of the Senate as an entire body, can do a whole lot of good by leading by example. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Senator Hawley. | ||
| Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Thanks for calling this hearing on such an important topic. | ||
| Sadly, it's very, very timely. | ||
| Mr. Braniff, can I start with you? | ||
| Actually, I just want to follow up on something you were just saying to Senator Padilla. | ||
| So I wasn't quite clear from your answer to him. | ||
| You're anti-doxing or pro-doxing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Anti-doxing, Senator. | |
| So, and you were talking about norms, that we're struggling with norms now around the Internet and what is public and whatnot. | ||
| Did I hear that correctly? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, Senator. | |
| So what would you say about elected officials who are actively doxing federal law enforcement agents? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Senator, I'd say that's problematic behavior. | |
| Yeah, I'm glad to hear you say that. | ||
| Let's just be a little more specific. | ||
| The doxing of ICE agents, the doxing of border patrol agents that elected members of Congress have engaged in. | ||
| Do you think that's a norm that ought to be encouraged? | ||
|
unidentified
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No, Senator. | |
| Would you condemn it here today? | ||
|
unidentified
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I condemn anti-democratic behavior that puts individuals at risk when there are alternatives. | |
| Well, I'm sorry, what does that mean? | ||
| Does that mean no, not really, or what? | ||
| You're saying it's wrong to dox these people or not? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, Senator. | |
| I'm saying it's wrong to dox individuals instead of using normal order, policy debates, civil discourse, voting to address differences in a democracy. | ||
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay, good. | |
| Well, I'm glad to hear to say that. | ||
| I think that's important. | ||
| And I think that your point about norms is well taken. | ||
| But I've been shocked just on the doxing question. | ||
| I've been absolutely shocked to see elected members of this body and of the House of Representatives actively advocating for the doxing of federal law enforcement officers and then doing it. | ||
| Some of them posting information about ICE agents, trying to post their pictures online, trying to post where they live online. | ||
| I mean, that's just, that's unbelievable. | ||
| And I don't want that to happen to anybody. | ||
| Judges, sure, but let's start with our federal law enforcement who are out there doing a terrific job and literally putting their lives on the line. | ||
| I think of our brave police officers. | ||
| There's some in this room here who currently are not getting paid, by the way. | ||
| The idea that these folks would be doxed is, I think, just unbelievable. | ||
| I would plead with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to stop this. | ||
| Mr. Knowles, while I've got you here, welcome. | ||
| Great to have you here. | ||
| Can we just drill down a little bit on the political violence question and maybe just do even a little more truth-telling? | ||
| Because I feel like we talk about political violence generally. | ||
| We talk about violence against conservatives generally, but let's just be real specific. | ||
| A lot of the violence that we're seeing is actually against people of faith, and more particularly, it's against Christians. | ||
| Isn't that fair to say? | ||
| That's certainly fair to say, Senator. | ||
| I mean, Charlie Kirk, what he said just a month before his death, and I heard it, he said it to me. | ||
| I mean, Charlie was a friend. | ||
| I knew him for almost a decade before his assassination. | ||
| What he said was he wanted to, the legacy he wanted to leave was a legacy of faith. | ||
| What he wanted to be known for was his faith in Jesus Christ. | ||
| And I thought he was just incredibly bold about saying that publicly all the time. | ||
| You know, when he could be talking about politics, and sure, he talked a lot of politics, of course. | ||
| But what he really talked about was his faith. | ||
| And you can't tell me that that did not play into the reason that he was killed. | ||
| Let's look at some numbers, though. | ||
| Here's the Center for Religious Liberty. | ||
| These are some recent stats. | ||
| The most recent stats that we have for the year 2024, 415 separately reported instances of acts of violence against churches in the United States. | ||
| We're talking now about arson, bomb threats, firearm incidents, and shootings, as well as vandalism more broadly. | ||
| The Biden administration prosecuted about zero of these particular threats in their time in office. | ||
| What do you think it says that we're seeing this massive uptick in violence against people of faith, against Christians? | ||
| I mean, what's the reason for this, do you think? | ||
| Cardinal Manning wisely observed that all human conflict ultimately is theological. | ||
| A lot of our big policy debates in recent years have really been anthropological and religious in nature. | ||
| What is a man? | ||
| What is a woman? | ||
| These kinds of questions. | ||
| And there is no doubt, Senator, that the attacks, widespread and increasing, on churches, has been underreported and ignored in some cases entirely. | ||
| You know, there has been a lot of dispute over where the violence lies, on the left or on the right. | ||
| And we've observed, now it seems, I think, indisputable that it's mostly on the left, but in earlier years, it has been observed that a lot of incidents just don't appear on the registers. | ||
| And two of the most prominent that come to my mind recently: the Covenant school shooting, in which a trans-identifying killer massacred Christian children when they were at school, and of course the Annunciation school shooting, another coincidentally trans-identifying shooter killing school children. | ||
| The fact that these were shootings related to churches, related to faith, is no coincidence at all. | ||
| And the fact that Charlie Kirk said that what he most wanted to be remembered for was his faith is no coincidence either. | ||
| He was absolutely right. | ||
| That's the heart of the matter. | ||
| Let me, I'm almost done, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| I know my time is nearly at an end, but I just want to press on this point. | ||
| What message do you think it sends, Mr. Knowles, when our own government implicitly encourages this kind of anti-Christian animus? | ||
| And I'm thinking in particular of the infamous FBI memo in which the Biden DOJ and FBI attempted to recruit informants into Catholic parishes, in particular traditional Latin Mass Catholic parishes. | ||
| This is our government now effectively telling the world, you know, we think these believers are kind of crazy. | ||
| I mean, we think they need to be spied on. | ||
| These people need to be watched. | ||
| You know, we need informants in the choir. | ||
| We need them in the pews. | ||
| We need them at Mass on every Sunday. | ||
| What kind of a message do you think that that sends when our own government is attempting to spy on people of faith and put people, put spies into pews and churches? | ||
| Four words, Senator. | ||
| The message is don't go to church. | ||
| And coincidentally, I'm here today to testify about this event at the University of Pittsburgh when Antifa threw an explosive during one of my events. | ||
| The FBI reached out to me afterward. | ||
| They asked if I would speak, and I said no because the story had just come out that the FBI had been infiltrating Catholic parishes under the Biden administration. | ||
| We know that the DOJ had been prosecuting nuns, had been going after pro-lifers, had been going after Christians broadly, and I couldn't take that risk. | ||
| A damning fact about how our government has operated and the position of Christians in the United States. | ||
| I just want to leave everybody in the room and watching this with one more picture of Mark Hauk. | ||
| Speaking of pro-lifers, Mark Hauk is a devout Christian who believes in the right to life of every American. | ||
| Here he is with his beautiful family. | ||
| Our own government sent an FBI SWAT team to this man's door at five in the morning to arrest him with guns drawn in front of his children. | ||
| He was later acquitted, I might add. | ||
| They charged him with ridiculous crimes that would amounted to essentially praying in front of an abortion clinic. | ||
| I think we've got to do, I think it's time for our government to do some soul searching. | ||
| You talk about soul searching that needs to go on. | ||
| How about the fact that our own government in the last four years used the FBI against pro-lifers, used the FBI against Christian parents, attempted to recruit spies into Catholic churches? | ||
| When our government is doing this, is it any surprise that we see deranged lunatics out there shooting people like Charlie Kirk? | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Senator Cruz. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Welcome to each of the witnesses. | ||
| Mr. Knowles, welcome to the swamp. | ||
| I will say I'm very confused being in a room with you and there are no cigars and no scotch. | ||
| I cannot recall the last time that transpired. | ||
| I appreciate the testimony of everyone here. | ||
| The topic we're considering is, I think, of exceptional importance. | ||
| There is an epidemic of politically motivated violence. | ||
| And the politically motivated violence in this country is overwhelmingly emanating from the left. | ||
| We saw that during the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots across the country as cities across America burned. | ||
| We saw that during the anti-Semitic protests on college campuses as Jewish students in particular were threatened and feared for their lives. | ||
| We saw that with the pro-open border riots in Los Angeles and other cities. | ||
| And we saw that tragically with the murder of Charlie Kirk, someone who was a good friend to many of us and an extraordinary leader. | ||
| Mr. Knowles, you too were targeted on a college campus. | ||
| What does it say about the state of our universities that holding a debate on a public campus now requires police barricades, bomb squads, and body armor? | ||
| My question is, what are the universities for? | ||
| Aren't the universities for educating students? | ||
| Aren't the universities for pursuing truth? | ||
| If the universities are not advancing those goals, as manifestly they are not, then I think we need to strongly consider defunding those universities. | ||
| I think we need to strongly consider not sending our children to those universities because they have been perverted against their very purpose. | ||
| And this is so apparent in much of the left-wing discourse. | ||
| To me, it seems, hearing even mainstream Democrats on this, that for them, their violence is speech, and our speech is violence. | ||
| There was no more gracious or generous or charitable debater on college campuses than Charlie Kirk. | ||
| He always endeavored to hear out the other side, to steel man their arguments, to give them the benefit of the doubt. | ||
| And he was killed for it. | ||
| He was killed for ideological reasons. | ||
| And that has to be an inflection point. | ||
| And as far as I'm concerned, if the universities in the political order cannot shore up a healthy marketplace for debate, they're useless. | ||
| Look, I think you are absolutely right. | ||
| I think our universities are failing profoundly in that regard. | ||
| At Columbia University, during the anti-Semitic protests, the Orthodox rabbi on campus sent an email to the Jewish students on campus and said, do not come to campus because the university cannot and will not protect you. | ||
| That is a fundamental abdication of their most essential responsibility, which is to protect their students. | ||
| And Columbia refused to protect them because ideologically they sided with the violent protesters. | ||
| And let me ask, the attack on your event, was that a spontaneous protest or was it organized, planned, and well-funded? | ||
| It was the latter, Senator, and we can point to the specific networks. | ||
| We can point to the anarchist bookshops. | ||
| We can point to the email addresses for the tax-free nonprofit organizations that were funneling the donations to these people. | ||
| This is organized left-wing crime. | ||
| I'm not the only person who noticed in the anti-Semitic protests that the tents all matched. | ||
| There is real money. | ||
| There is real money, and it is many of the same networks, unfortunately, whether they are open-border radicals, whether they are anti-capitalist communists, Whether they are jihadists, the funding is steady and significant. | ||
| Mr. Wolfe, in 2020, under your leadership, DHS officers stood on the front lines in Portland, facing more than 100 consecutive nights of siege against the Marco Hatfield Federal Courthouse. | ||
| Officers were assaulted with commercial-grade fireworks, lasers, and Molotov cocktails. | ||
| Were those random outbursts or were they coordinated, resourced operations with strategy, logistics, and financing behind them? | ||
| Without a doubt, Senator, they were coordinated. | ||
| I had the chance to visit Portland during the middle of that 100-day period. | ||
| And from the Hatfield courthouse where I was, you could see into the park below tents, a lot of them, a lot of tents. | ||
| And I asked my federal officers at the time, what's in the tents? | ||
| They said, well, we don't know. | ||
| We can't go over there. | ||
| The Portland police won't help us understand what's going on over there. | ||
| We eventually sent an undercover agent there. | ||
| And his response was, it's weapons, it's munitions, it's a variety of different things that get resupplied almost on a daily basis. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| So yes, organized. | ||
| These same checkbooks are funding the chaos in Minneapolis, in Portland, in Los Angeles. | ||
| It's why I've introduced the Stop Funders Act. | ||
| The Stop Funders Act adds rioting as a predicate offense to RICO to enable the Department of Justice to use the full tools that have been directed at the mafia to go after the corrupt enterprise. | ||
| Because at the end of the day, the thug who is engaged in violence is committing criminal acts, but the billionaire who is trying to tear down this country by writing checks to fund it bears, in many ways, far greater responsibility. | ||
| Mr. Wolf, in your judgment, would passing the Stop Funders Act, adding rioting as a predicate act to RICO, assist DOJ in going after and stopping these coordinated, politically motivated acts of violence. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely it would. | ||
| And happy to say that America Versus Policy Institute has endorsed that piece of legislation as well, because you have to understand where they're getting their finance, where are they getting their backing. | ||
| And if you can't use the resources that the Department of Justice should be using, it's going to make it very difficult. | ||
| In 2020, we simply ran out of time before we left office in 21. | ||
| It's my understanding the Department of Justice and FBI are looking into this financing. | ||
| So giving them additional quivers in their bag, I think would be very good. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, Senator Cruz. | ||
| So I want to thank all the witnesses for being here today and for your testimony. | ||
| Written questions for them may be submitted for the record until Tuesday, November 4th at 5 p.m. | ||
| And with that, this hearing is adjourned. | ||
| This is outrageous. | ||
|
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This is a kangaroo corporate. | |
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| Next, Virginia Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin announces the start of the Virginia Emergency Nutrition Assistance Program to assist residents who rely on the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance or SNAP program, which is set to run out of funds at the start of November due to the government shutdown. | ||
| This is just under 20 minutes. | ||
| Thank you, thank you. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| I've got two friends who are joining me. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Please sit down. | ||
| Yeah, thank you. | ||
| Bless you. | ||
| Listen, this is an important informational session to speak to our emergency effort in order to protect Virginians, | ||
| protect Virginians who are most in need of food assistance from the Schumer shutdown, from this Democrat shutdown that is going to deprive them of the needed assistance that historically would have shown up for them next month and is not. | ||
| And is not because Senator Warner and Senator Kaine and the rest of the Senate Democrats keep voting to shut the government over and over and over again. | ||
| And I'll repeat, they voted 13 times on a clean CR during the Biden administration. | ||
| And here they have now, I think today, are getting ready to vote another time, which would bring them to 13, to shut the government and to deprive Virginians and Americans who are in need of food assistance from that food assistance. | ||
| Not to mention to not pay the military, not pay air traffic controllers, not pay our federal workers, not open the parks, all the things that they've done. | ||
| But to use hungry Americans and hungry Virginians as a hostage in a negotiation that is all about their political future is deplorable. | ||
| And Virginia is not standing for it. | ||
| We are not standing for it. | ||
| And I again ask every Virginian to call Senator Kaine and Senator Warner's office. | ||
| And my understanding is they're just hanging up on people now and tell them to open the government and to do their job, which starts with looking after Virginians. | ||
| We did step forward last week and declare a state of emergency, a state of emergency in order to do what we should all be doing. | ||
| You see, the least of these deserve the best of us. | ||
| And the best of us is to step in when the federal government and Senate Democrats fail to do their job. | ||
| I want to reiterate: this is not easy. | ||
| We are creating a parallel food assistance program or system that, in fact, is going to step in where the federal government is not able to because the Democrats are keeping it shut. | ||
| This parallel system, which we are calling Virginia Emergency Nutrition Assistance, or VENA, is like building an airplane while it's taking off. | ||
| It has never been done before. | ||
| And we are restricted in that we can't just fund into the SNAP program. | ||
| We have to build a parallel system. | ||
| That parallel system has taken an enormous amount of effort from the entire Health and Human Resources Secretariat plus so many agencies in order to get moving. | ||
| And the bottom line is, we think we've got this airplane ready to take off. | ||
| If the Democrat shutdown is not ended by November 1st, we will start the VENA food assistance system on November the 3rd. | ||
| The plan will use the same cards, the existing SNAP EBT cards that everyone currently has, and will deliver benefits to those cards. | ||
| It'll be the exact same group of beneficiaries that received benefits in the month of October. | ||
| The benefits will be funded on a weekly basis, and this is a change. | ||
| The current SNAP program funds those benefits to recipients once a month. | ||
| We will be doing it every week for as long as we can. | ||
| Every week means that we will be moving funds from the state surplus to fund these parallel benefits every week. | ||
| It totals $37.5 million roughly every week. | ||
| And we are pleased that the financial strength of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the surpluses that we've been running, in all candor, the tremendous job growth and business investment has enabled it. | ||
| And again, I'm humbled that Virginia is able to step in when Senate Democrats continually step out. | ||
| These benefits will be deposited each week, and the way they're going to be deposited is again slightly different. | ||
| In the current structure under SNAP, benefits are deposited on the first of each month to a third of the beneficiaries. | ||
| The second third receives their benefits on the third of each month. | ||
| And the final group, the final third, receives their benefits on the 7th of each month. | ||
| Because we are designing this real time, we need to pay the first benefits on a Monday. | ||
| Currently, the first falls on a Saturday. | ||
| And therefore, the first third of the beneficiaries will receive their week's worth of benefits on Monday the 3rd and not Saturday the 1st. | ||
| The second group of recipients will receive their benefits on Wednesday the 5th as opposed to Tuesday the 4th. | ||
| And the final third will receive their benefits on Friday the 7th, which would have been the day they would have received them. | ||
| I fully understand not just the disruption, but the hardship that that delay in two days from Saturday to Monday will cause and that delay from Tuesday to Wednesday will cause. | ||
| And I reiterate, it is so much more than a disruption, it is a hardship. | ||
| And therefore, I have directed as part of my emergency declaration that an incremental million dollars be distributed into the food bank network for Virginia by the weekend. | ||
| An incremental million dollars to make sure that if there are families, and I expect there are, families who will find this delay from Saturday the 1st to Monday the 3rd to be challenging and a true hardship, I hope the food banks will have everything on the shelf that they need. | ||
| But what's more important than hope is action. | ||
| And so we'll be depositing an incremental million dollars into the food bank system. | ||
| To be clear, this is creating a brand new system. | ||
| This brand new system then will fund weekly benefits every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. | ||
| And those weekly benefits will continue, and we will continue to demand that Senate Democrats open the government. | ||
| Finally, as I said, this has never been done before. | ||
| And to create this system as quickly as we are has required Herculean efforts on behalf of many, many, many people in state government. | ||
| I particularly want to thank Secretary Janet Kelly for her leadership. | ||
| Last week, when I told her we were doing this, she didn't bat an eye. | ||
| And she said, Governor, we'll figure it out because these Virginians need our help. | ||
| I want to thank Commissioner Kevin Erskine and Deputy Commissioner Carl Ayers, who have been solving problems round the clock 24-7 since last week. | ||
| We still have a lot of hard work in front of us, but I want our participants, Virginians, who are so dependent on this support to know that we are there for you. | ||
| I also want to know, I want retailers to know that the state benefits will be using the same benefit card infrastructure, and so it will all work the same at the retailer level. | ||
| And finally, I want to thank Virginians. | ||
| I want to thank Virginians for the overwhelming voice of support we have received for stepping into this moment and delivering for the Virginians who are most in need. |