November 4, 2025
Dear Readers,
Last week, a GOP-led subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing entitled “Politically Violent Attacks: A Threat to Our Constitutional Order.”
Going from the name alone, one might be inclined to agree: Political violence is a threat to our constitutional order. Only, the main purpose of this hearing was to give the floor to right-wing politicians and representatives of right-wing organizations pushing the lie that it is the political Left, and not the Right, that is the locus of most political violence in the United States.
Multiple studies, including one conducted by the US Justice Department and recently deleted from that agency’s website, conclude that by far the gravest threats of political and ideological violence in this country come from White supremacist and other right-wing extremist groups.
But that inconvenient truth is not stopping the political Right from pushing an agenda of targeting progressive nonprofits and branding them, falsely, as supporters of terror and violence and “left-wing organized crime,” as hearing witness and right-wing pundit Michael Knowles put it.
Decrying the Left as a network of “open-border radicals…anticapitalist communists…and jihadists,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has cosponsored a law he calls the “Stop Funders Act,” which seeks to allow law enforcement authorities to pursue RICO (racketeering) charges against organizations that fund or support “rioting,” conveniently defined broadly enough to likely include peaceful protests and expressions of speech the Right finds distasteful.
To say such actions echo McCarthyism is, at this point, an understatement.
This week’s Leadership newsletter opens with what you need to know about that troubling Senate hearing, and then offers some more hopeful stories about how our beleaguered sector continues to fight for a better country.
As always, we love to hear from you. Email Leadership Editor Isaiah Thompson at [email protected].
