A new report reveals that a dangerous dynamic of anti-Christian extremism and “assassination culture” could have fueled the recent attempt to kill conservative leader Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, as threats against public officials and figures rise to historic levels.
In late May, Bexar County charged Jacob Wenske, 26, with a third-degree felony count of making a terroristic threat involving public fear of serious bodily injury or public disruption for his alleged plan to bomb a Turning Point USA event where Kirk was the keynote speaker.
In an email to TPUSA, Wenske said he was targeting Kirk, other event speakers and so-called “Christian nationalists,” according to an arrest warrant.
Wenske, who worked as a valet driver, also posted multiple threats on social media, according to the warrant.
Wenske’s arrest emerged amid a record number of threats against political figures and members of Congress. The US Capitol Police Threat Assessment Section showed a 58 percent increase in threats against members of Congress from 2024 to 2025, and threats overall have nearly doubled since 2020.
The Network Contagion Research Institute, a research lab that studies how radical ideologies spread across digital networks and social media, analyzed the threats against Kirk to assess the level of danger and how “permission structure” plays a role in originating the threat.
“What we’re seeing is a massive influx of foreign malign influence that is truly shaping the Western world right now, particularly through social media,” Travis Hawley, cyber threat and open-source intelligence analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute, told Fox News Digital. “What you could call our digital diet is really shaping how people see ourselves, our values, our country, and even our history.”
“And there are many countries, organizations, and wealthy individuals, whether it’s [Neville Roy] Singham in China, who are really pushing or putting their thumb on the scale, trying to push us and accelerate us into violence, dystopian even, and a civil unrest type of environment,” Hawley added. “This is really concerning and really showing how democracy actually has a weakness if it is not protected.”
The targeting of Kirk comes nine months after the assassination of her husband, who was shot and killed during an event at Utah Valley University.
FBI Director Kash Patel said that Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s alleged assassin, confessed to the killing on the chatroom platform Discord, a platform which members of Congress have criticized for radicalizing users.
In the case of Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, pro-Mangione demonstrators regularly frequent the courthouse to support him, and a legal fund for Mangione has collected more than $1.5 million.
The new study obtained by Fox News Digital shows that “permission structure” plays a role in promoting the idea that a murder is justified.
Permission structure gives individuals the excuse to commit an act that would normally be unacceptable, like murder, assassination or political violence.
In 2025, a Network Contagion Research Institute study found that 1,264 US adults, or 38 percent of people surveyed, considered it “somewhat justified” to murder President Donald Trump, and the figure increased to about 55 percent among those identifying as left of center.
In a post on X, Charlie Kirk cited the study, blaming “left-wing protest culture” for a rise in political violence. He was assassinated 153 days later.
Hawley also told Fox News Digital that alleged malign foreign influence in protest and agitator networks plays a role in boosting radicalized beliefs. Hawley said that the far-left network stokes an anti-West ideology that aligns with the propaganda messages of America’s adversaries.
“The motivation of our adversaries to push Marxist ideology, Islamist ideology, Marxist ideology, socialists, you name it, anything that is anti-Western, anti-democratic, anti-capitalist is to defeat us from within,” Hawley explained.
He also noted that malign actors can easily use social media platforms to quickly mobilize pro-communist, anti-Western agitators.
A Fox News Digital investigation uncovered that US tech tycoon and Shanghai resident Neville Roy Singham has poured $278 million into nonprofits that have promoted Chinese Communist Party propaganda at protests around the country, often taking aim at US leaders and public figures, like the Kirks.
“It seems to be bubbling up increasingly in these protests, these riots, whether it’s against the government itself, whether it’s against ICE and the military, the war,” Hawley told Fox News Digital. “We’re living in a time where it is very clear that our ability to protect our country really hinges on understanding how much of the civil unrest we are living through in recent years is actually organic.”