BS Summary: This article contains 29 faulty reasoning types, including Availability Heuristic, Hasty Generalization, and Anecdotal, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 34.4% saturation with 706 hits. Analysis detected 4,085 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,054 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 46.8% and a BS Rank of 43% (9,148 of 15,985 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 57.20% of the article peer group.
It’s been just over a year since a gunman in Minnesota attacked two Democratic state lawmakers and their families in their homes — killing state Rep.
Melissa Hortman and her husband, while injuring state Sen.
John Hoffman and his wife.
This “night of terror” stunned the political world: the gunman had a hit list and intended to carry out more assassinations of state elected officials, according to federal prosecutors.
Only a couple of months later, Charlie Kirk, the conservative founder of the Turning Point USA student political organization, was fatally shot at a campus event.
As young and politically engaged Americans watched footage of his murder travel across social media, many worried that civic life would never be the same — and whether it was even safe for them to participate.
“It was terrifying and it was horrible and I will never forget where I was when I heard the news of Charlie Kirk,” Katie Fire Thunder, a 26-year-old Democratic member of the Montana House of Representatives, told me recently.
At the time of Kirk’s death, the Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe member was preparing to enter public service herself — she’d go on to be appointed in December 2025 to replace a retiring state representative after years of political organizing and activist work — and was suddenly pondering if it would be worth it.
It was not the first time she’d had the thought.
Growing up, she was well aware that public officials faced violence — whether at a community event, or a baseball practice, or at their home — even as she was drawn to the idea of service.
“Strangely, I always had a fear when I was little of being assassinated — I don’t know what it was, but I remember telling my mom, ‘I think I want to be a judge or an attorney, but I’m too scared that someone would get upset at me and try and come after me and shoot me’,” she told me.
Yet the calling to pass policy and engage communities won out.
She’s now running for a full term in office — and wrestling with what the future will hold for her as polarization and political violence seem to be reaching new heights in tandem.
“Now being an elected official, I’m really like, ‘Okay, what was little Katie thinking?’
And I’m really trying to process that,” she said.
In conversations with young politicians and public servants, people in both parties described going through a similar journey.
They feel a calling to change the status quo, an imperative to serve their neighbors and help the marginalized, and a drive to replace the aging establishment.
But in addition to all the other challenges of politics — poor pay, demanding work schedules, nonstop fundraising — they’re increasingly grappling with the risk of violent retribution.
These fears are already shaping the next era of politics — changing how leaders behave, how they engage with constituents, and whether they run at all.
In ways subtle and loud, the costs will be borne by all of us.
Young legislators are balancing two clashing priorities
Security challenges — in the shadow of the Hortman and Kirk killings — dominated discussions at a gathering of Gen Z and millennial state lawmakers last week on Capitol Hill.
The four-day event was organized by Future Caucus, a bipartisan political organization that supports rising young lawmakers.
Speakers and panelists discussed ways elected officials can modernize legislatures, craft policy, and exchange tips on being young and in office.
But a recurring question hung over the room: Who even wants to run for public office these days?
And what’s preventing a new generation of leadership from sticking with the job once they’re in?
Security was tight this year, just like last year’s Future Summit, which took place just days after Hortman’s killing.
Attendees weren’t advertised before the event, guards buzzed around elevators and conference room entrances, and scheduling and programming was not released in advance, including to news media.
These preventive measures, combined with panel conversations about the trade-offs of public service, emphasized the struggles these young politicians from both parties are facing: balancing openness, accessibility, and idealism with the reality that the very efforts they make to organize and participate in their communities may put their digital and physical safety and security at risk.
“Most electeds have to use social media in order to be successful and it also opens us up to critical attacks from people whose identities we can’t often verify,” Tiara Mack, a 32-year-old Democratic state senator from Rhode Island, told me.
“We have to be able to reach a broad audience, which also means a broad audience can reach us.”
Since first being elected to the state legislature, she has received countless death threats, bigoted verbal abuse, and a terrifying episode of doxxing a couple of years ago: after a video of herself twerking in support of reproductive rights went viral, her home address and the floor plans of her apartment were posted online.
“When I had my floor plans leaked and when I had bomb squad dogs come to my home, circle my building to make sure that there were no bombs — very few people know what that experience is like,” she told me.
The incident caused her to reconsider whether her political career was worth continuing.
Instead of leaving public service, though, she and her colleagues looked together for ways to feel safer and more in control.
But these measures often come with sacrifices, including keeping constituents at a distance at a time when young voters frequently want more engagement, more access, and more authenticity from their leaders.
Though she uses Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, and Facebook actively, Mack draws a line at indulging in parasocial relationships with followers who she doesn’t know offline.
She and her colleagues employ a “post-and-ghost” policy online now: publishing content online and then deliberately not reading or replying to the comments.
She doesn’t advertise event locations in advance, only sending out addresses after RSVPs are submitted.
She doesn’t post her location online until after she has left a place, and she tries to keep a polite and politically neutral tone online now.
Most shocking to herself — and particularly the version of herself who first ran for office in the pre-pandemic era — is her rethinking her stance on carrying a firearm.
“That’s now a conversation I’ve had with some of my colleagues, who are grappling with what it would mean for me as someone who sponsored gun safety legislation to pursue a concealed weapons permit,” Mack told me.
“And it’s a hard conversation, but I think it’s become more necessary and more and more people and women of color that I know personally are having that conversation, including myself.”
On the policy front, state lawmakers have discussed new security rules, some relevant campaign finance reforms, and mutual assurances to tone down rhetoric.
Speaking during a Future Summit panel, 35-year-old Minnesota state Rep.
Isaac Schultz, a Republican, shared some of the hard lessons learned from last year’s killings.
The state capitol used to have an open-door policy — “we’re a state that believes in high-contact politics,” he said — but weapons screenings now happen at the two building entrances.
The Minnesota state patrol and local law enforcement now have a dedicated communications system with the sergeants-at-arms of each legislative chamber — a “massive change” from before the killings, which revealed the poor channels of communication that existed.
“We had colleagues on a hit list who didn’t have local law enforcement at their homes for over 24 hours,” Schultz recounted.
“They were in their homes hiding…That’s a trauma that remains.”
Minnesota and 24 other states have now passed laws to allow campaign funds to be used to reimburse or cover the cost of camera and home security systems, most of them after the Minnesota shootings.
Future Caucus itself offers a discounted membership to home and digital security services, as well as some in-person security services for special events.
“State lawmakers do not have the tools that Congress has in order to keep themselves safe, but it’s just as important,” Mack said.
“Cameras only do so much to keep individuals safe.
They’re oftentimes a way to check after the fact…There still need to be more robust conversations about how we keep our physical statehouses protected.”
But hearing from these lawmakers themselves, it’s hard to shake the sense that these measures are all, to an extent, stopgaps when polarization and radical thinking, including around political violence, are growing more popular, acceptable, and widespread.
The reaction to the last year of killings only underscored the threat: Charlie Kirk’s death inspired conspiracy theories on the right and cruel mockery on the left, while a US senator made light of the Minnesota shootings on social media and blithely stoked rumors about the motive.
The threat of violence is changing how politics operates
According to Future Caucus’s own research, political violence egged on by hyperpartisan rhetoric is now a defining obstacle for both state legislators and those aspiring to hold public office.
“Combined with structural and cultural barriers, they threaten lawmakers’ ability to effectively serve their communities,” Reed Howard, Future Caucus’s chief strategy and public affairs officer, wrote in a 2025 report detailing reasons young legislators end up leaving public service altogether.
“Even as many Future Caucus members view public office as temporary service rather than a long-term career, it is essential that they have a fair opportunity to be productive and impactful.”
They aren’t alone in these experiences.
Some four in 10 state legislators, and one in five local officeholders, reported experiencing threats or attacks since 2020, according to a series of surveys completed in 2023 by the Brennan Center for Justice.
Significant shares of state legislators reported then that the seriousness and rate of abuse and harassment they have received has increased in the time they’ve been in office.
Elected officials who reported more physical threats tended to be women and nonwhite, while Republicans tended to be more likely to say the severity of abuse has increased.
And since the report, “swatting” — hoax calls to police departments to trigger a show of force at a home — have continued to be a constant threat: Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg were both recent targets.
But the common thread is that lawmakers themselves are worried that more aggressive forms of rhetoric and politicking will become accepted as the new baseline even as more violent incidents occur.
Particularly for younger legislators, who may lack a steady financial base, may be trying to start families, and may be trying to juggle other full-time jobs, these security concerns compound the challenge of public service.
“Especially with young people, they are seeing it way more firsthand than any other generation,” Fire Thunder said.
“And that is having impacts in ways that we may not be seeing yet.
It’s a fear tactic of if you are running and you are standing up and being vocal on these issues, we are going to come after you.”
Fire Thunder’s most recent run-in with a serious potential threat happened not too long ago: a disgruntled citizen showed up at a public comment session her interim legislative committee was hosting, went on a conspiracy-laden rant, and threatened a trans legislator on the committee.
“We did not have security because it was not the actual committee hearing, but in a moment, I realized that this person could have had a weapon, could have had a gun, and just point-blank shot one of us in that room,” she told me.
As she embarks on her first full-term campaign this year, Fire Thunder told me her campaign is preparing not just to engage and rally her community, but also for inevitable threats to her life.
Her campaign manager frequently reminds her, “What is our plan?
What is our safety plan?”
between events.
She’s learning to live with that cloud, but she also worries what the country will lose if others decide it’s all too much to justify getting involved.
“The biggest negative impact of it isn’t even on me,” she said.
“I don’t want other young people seeing the threats and things that I’m getting to discourage them.”
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.