But we keep getting a very different type of would-be assassin: not the antifa militant from central casting, nor even the Proud Boy thug — but the deranged centrist.   

Thomas Crooks, the Butler, Pa., shooter, was a registered Republican who once gave $15 to the Democratic Party through ActBlue. Ryan Routh, who aimed at Trump with a rifle on a Florida golf course in late 2024, was a pro-Ukraine obsessive who had previously supported Trump. Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect in the White House Correspondents Dinner attack, if the resurfaced online footprint is correct, is less Che Guevara than a #Resistance liberal with an online diet of posts from the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie and the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse.

Oops. The deranged centrist is a much more mundane and annoying figure. Noting the connection, the Lefty British commentator Owen Jones suggested that “centrists appear to be behind all three of the main assassination attempts on Donald Trump,” and that perhaps it was time to start talking about “centrist terrorism.” The term is absurd, which is why it works. Nobody imagines a militant cell emerging from the Abundance book club. There is no armed wing of the Brookings Institution. Chuck Schumer is not slipping coded instructions into someone’s “Melt the ICE” beanie at a No Kings rally.

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“Centrist terrorism” is, of course, not a serious analytical category. Yet neither, in these cases, is the bogeyman trumpeted on the Right as “radical leftist terrorism.” In September 2025, Trump signed an order designating antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. His administration is organizing an international summit this summer focused on countering what the State Department calls “the anarchists, Marxists, and violent extremists of antifa.” 

But where exactly have these antifa hard-liners been these days? They certainly weren’t battling ICE in Minneapolis in force; the top general playing 4D chess against ex-border patrol chief Greg Bovino was the dweeby center-Left pundit-cum-failed statehouse contender Will Stancil (who allegedly helped run an anti-ICE honeypot operation, in which local girls on Tinder would get inside information). Renee Good and Alex Pretti? A middle-aged mom and an intensive-care nurse, respectively.

Likewise, the men accused of trying to kill Trump didn’t emerge from among disciplined communist cadres. They aren’t Maoists arguing about whether Jacobin magazine is too Trotskyist. They look instead like loners from America’s vast political junk drawer: anti-Trump obsessives; Ukraine-war monomaniacs; disillusioned, lonely men marinated in online forums and animated by the belief that history requires their singular intervention.

This matters because the radical Left has become, in conservative discourse, a catch-all for everything the Right dislikes: Tim Walz, No Kings protesters, liberal prosecutors, suburban Biden voters, school administrators, Never Trump Republicans, trans activists, Justice Department lawyers, and anyone who has ever said “protecting our democracy from Trump” in a quivering voice — all treated as members of the same red-hued conspiracy. In reality, the anti-Trump universe isn’t one movement; it is a crowded room of mutually hostile tribes.

Just ask Trump’s would-be killers. Crooks produced a fog of clues but no coherent manifesto. His voter registration and tiny donation became ideological Rorschach tests. To the Right, the ActBlue donation proved he was a Left-wing assassin. To everyone else, the Republican registration complicated the picture. The more honest conclusion is that no faction could comfortably claim him, which didn’t stop everyone from trying to hang Crooks around the necks of their political enemies. Routh was stranger still. He supported Trump before turning against him. He tried to insert himself into a foreign war in defense of NATO and Ukraine. Calling him “the radical Left” would come as news to most Marxists, who aren’t usually known to be fans of the Western Alliance.

And then there is Luigi Mangione, who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024 and was promptly adopted as a folk hero by parts of the left. Mangione’s actual politics were what observers variously described as “new-tech centrist” — a Silicon Valley-inflected hodgepodge of libertarian instincts. He called Tim Urban’s What’s Our Problem? — essentially a centrist manifesto against political tribalism — “the most important philosophical text of the early 21st century.”

As for Allen, some have tried to pin his attempt on the president’s life on the fiery rhetoric of Hasan Piker. But the inconvenient truth is that he was no fan of the controversial Left-wing streamer. Someone compiled a ranked list of the social-media accounts Allen had liked most. Topping the list were Stancil, Kruse, and progressive video-clip obsessive Aaron Rupar. Allen’s archived posts show him retweeting the argument that Palestine protesters are “functionally speaking, Republicans” and reposting Bill Kristol. Not exactly a Bernie Bro.

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Meanwhile, the actual radical Left is in New York City, smiling at Mets mascots and reading to kindergartners. I’m speaking of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist. The great scandal of his first months in office is that he has questionable tastes in housing czars and is annoyingly cheerful. No gulags have been planned for the Upper East Side.

This isn’t to say the Left is innocent of overheated rhetoric or hasn’t been guilty of violent acts — in the past or present. It’s to say, rather, that the troubled political mood in America is ambient; it gathers in the culture like black mold behind drywall.

But, just to be sure, we should start keeping a closer eye on people who go to all The Bulwark’s live podcast tapings. We need a list of all pundits who endorsed Elizabeth Warren for president in 2020. And if Trump insists on a counterterrorism summit this summer, for God’s sake, don’t forget to warn heads of state about everyone who smashed the like button on a Matt Yglesias post. The new Weather Underground isn’t underground at all; it’s all BlueSky ahead. 

Yet the bookish 40-year-old with a reedy voice has undergone a surreal, gritty glow-up. Stancil, who didn’t respond to my interview requests, is now the bespectacled public face the anti-ICE resistance, with his visibility second only to the movement’s two martyrs: Renee Good and Alex Pretti. His transformation comes amid the broader backlash against President Trump’s Operation Metro Surge, especially following the killing of Good on Jan. 7.

In response, Stancil didn’t just tweet through it (though he’s doing that, too). He got inside his battered 2011 Honda Fit with an iffy transmission and took action. Stancil and his army of — as he describes it — pissed-off baristas and suburban moms are speeding through south Minneapolis neighborhoods, bird-dogging federal agents, documenting raids, confronting ICE on the streets with whistles and curses to interfere with their daily snatchings of immigrants (and sometimes citizens).

He’s been tear-gassed, he says, every other day. He’s also narrating confrontations in real time, coordinating responses, and making melodramatic statements on the liberal social-media network Bluesky as if a field general rallying his troops. “Minneapolis is winning. The tide is shifting. Can you feel it?” he posted this week after the Trump administration withdrew Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino. “It’s their Gettysburg. The first Minnesota is charging down the hill, bayonets drawn. This is their furthest advance and they will go no further. WE ARE GOING TO WIN.”

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Stancil is hardly the second coming of Ulysses S. Grant. Even so, online progressives are eating up this real-life Revenge of the Nerds. Social media is filled with half-ironic tributes casting Stancil as a conquering hero. “Hearing word that Trump has abdicated and handed power to Will Stancil,” one post joked. “The Stancilphate is here, inshallah.” Another dubbed the moment “the siege of Stancilgrad.”

Other images circulated of Stancil photoshopped into Braveheart, sword raised, or likened to other conquering historical figures. “The Revolution Will Be Stanciled,” said a caption accompanying a photo of the nebbish lawyer, looking defiant, toward a line of armored ICE agents. Even some of the liberal media are caught up in the mythmaking. Atlantic staff writer Tyler Austin Harper mused that Bovino’s withdrawal symbolized “Total Stancil Victory.”

This kind of hero-making — arched eyebrow or not — isn’t new. But what makes Stancil’s case distinctive is the stark contrast with his recent past, when he existed primarily as an object of ridicule and algorithmic abuse. “Most-harassed man in the history of Twitter might be the first line of my obituary,” he told Slate.

Earlier in the decade, Stancil’s online persona read as exactly the kind of performative woke liberal male ally holding “The Future is Female” tote bags and Ibram X. Kendi books that are now a punchline among college-age Gen-Zers. He was a relative nobody, a research fellow at the University of Minnesota specializing in housing policy, civil rights, and metropolitan planning. He first became one of Politics Twitter’s “power users” during the 2020 presidential campaign, when he mocked Trump and relentlessly hyped Elizabeth Warren’s doomed bid for the Democratic nomination. He assailed both the socialist Left and the MAGA Right with equal fervor, and wrote exhausting threads in defense of wokeness.

In December 2023, Stancil briefly became unavoidable online after hyperbolically arguing that the US economy under then-President Joe Biden was strong and that claims to the contrary were not merely mistaken, but dishonest. The insistence, delivered with his usual maximalist confidence, triggered a familiar dogpile from both directions.

“For the crime of pointing out the economy looks very strong,” he posted, “I was already getting pummeled by cosplay Twitter communists…. I’m now being swarmed by the right-wing anti-vax types…. This must be how Poland felt in 1939.” It’s the kind of comment that earned him a reputation as a know-it-all who knew very little. “It’s delusional, but it also betrays a staggering level of Messianic arrogance and condescension towards all the people who he thinks he’s manipulating,” Left-wing commentator Carl Beijer told New York magazine.

In Minnesota’s 2024 Democratic-Farmer-Labor primary for House District 61A, that persona followed him into the real world. He was defeated by Katie Jones, an engineer and community figure who went on to win the general election. Stancil blamed the Minneapolis far Left for his loss.

Then came Grok. Last July, Stancil made national news for being the object of grotesque hallucinations of Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok after an update that dialed back “woke filters.” Prodded by Right-wing trolls, the AI began generating graphic, violent rape fantasies specifically targeting Stancil, even offering step-by-step instructions on how to break into his home. It was a moment of peak-derangement: a man so loathed that even an entire artificial network wanted to join in. Stancil responded by threatening legal action and publicly criticizing the platform, pointing to tech companies’ failure to protect individuals from dehumanizing algorithmic behavior.

While the AI was busy hallucinating his assault, the human side of the internet was busy turning him into a literal cartoon. The Will Stancil Show, an AI-assisted animated series and its catchy theme song became an earworm for the irony-poisoned Right. It portrayed him as an overconfident liberal trying and failing to solve problems in a stereotyped black neighborhood with little more than a graduate degree in African-American studies and some free housing vouchers. Some commentators described the series as a glimpse of a racist, AI-generated future of entertainment, while Stancil remarked that it was “extremely surreal to become a main character of the online Nazi phantasmagoria.”

At this point, for all intents and purposes, Stancil seemed more meme than man, a guy who seemingly existed only to be swarmed online by people with hammer-and-sickle emojis and others with Roman-statue avatars. Viewed against this backdrop, the evolution of his image in 2026 is striking. The traits that once made him an object of derision — his earnestness, his verbosity, his high-frequency posting — now make him beloved in a moment that prizes visibility and the documentation of ICE in action.

Many on the liberal left are reconsidering their hatred of him. “Did not have ‘become a huge fan of Will Stancil’ on my bingo card, but gotta give the man credit,” noted Georgia State law professor Anthony Michael Kreis. “He’s stepped up for his neighbors when it mattered most.” Not all Leftist types are convinced, however. Stancil remarked this week that it “sometimes feels like a little bit of a race to see if BORTAC (Border Patrol Tactical Unit) kills me first, or revolutionary Leftists.”

Ironically, some of Stancil’s outsized reputation flows from the Right. Conservative media and Trump administration officials have been eager to depict anti-ICE observers and neighborhood defenders as not just bothersome interlopers, but existential threats, even domestic terrorists. One Right-winger on X even compared him to Leon Trotsky and the ancient Persian emperor Xerxes (“commanders who achieved victory by throwing waves of their own infantry to be slaughtered until the enemy’s will finally broke. Minneapolis was a great moment in the history of human wave attacks.”) That inflationary rhetoric, meant to scaremonger, has paradoxically burnished figures like Stancil into symbols of mainstream resistance. If the state calls you an enemy of the state for pursuing ICE vehicles in a broke-ass Honda Fit, you’re no longer a weenie; you’re an outlaw.

If last summer’s resistance movements in Seattle and Chicago and other blue cities had furries and men in frog costumes as their mascots, Will Stancil fills that role for Minneapolis: a slightly ridiculous figure whose very unseriousness mocks the idea of menace. In an irony-poisoned, hyper-online age, his dissonance — looking like someone who used to be stuffed into a school locker, not a guerrilla fighter — becomes the point, and ultimately the weapon. To paraphrase The Dark Knight, he’s not the hero that Minneapolis deserves, but the one it needs.