The Biden administration’s targeting of, and rhetoric about, conservative groups and Christians has contributed to an alarming assassination culture on the left, says Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.

While FBI Director Kash Patel says the agency is now investigating “a lot more” than the reported 20 individuals who chatted online with Charlie Kirk’s assassin, it is also probing left-wing groups allegedly behind anti-ICE riots, anti-Tesla attacks and other crimes mischaracterized as protests.

Speaking to Vice President J.D. Vance on Kirk’s podcast this week, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller warned of “a vast domestic terror” ring of left-wing organizations promoting violence in America, citing “the organized doxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging that is designed to trigger [or] incite violence and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence …”

So, did the Biden administration’s actions give a green light for the left to target and even kill conservatives?

“I hold them responsible”

It would seem so, Hawley says in an exclusive interview Wednesday with The Heartlander.

“Well, I think that what the Biden administration did in the last four years, and we’re continuing to find out more and more of it – going after conservatives; yesterday, new information coming out of the Judiciary Committee that they targeted groups like TPUSA Turning Point, Charlie Kirk’s group – this is really outrageous,” he says. 

“And I hold them responsible for a lot of the climate here of hysteria on the left. I mean, just outright hysteria. When you’ve got 25% of self-identified liberals in this country saying they think it’d be fine to commit a political assassination – 25%! That is millions of people. 

“I just think when you look at Joe Biden’s rhetoric: He gave an entire speech on Nazism, calling Trump and Trump supporters, which is over half the country, fascists. I mean, that rhetoric has an effect, especially when it comes to the president of the United States. 

“When you’re talking about deranged lunatics, like this guy who shot Charlie Kirk, they are swayed by rhetoric like that. And I just think you look at what Joe Biden and his administration did for years, and I think they bear a lot of blame here. It is time to turn the page on that era, that chapter in our country’s history.”

The numbers back up Hawley’s assertions.

Snap poll: left finds violence “acceptable”

“The acceptance or justification of violence against public figures, including their murder, is higher the further to the left of the political spectrum the voter or activist is,” journalist Israel Duro writes at Voz.us. “This reality has come to light again in the wake of reactions to the murder of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk.

“That’s the result of a YouGov poll indicating that 24% of people who identified themselves as far-left sympathizers consider the death of a public figure they oppose as ‘always or usually acceptable.’ … [A]another 20% are “not sure” how they feel about it.”

“A Sept. 11 snap poll,” reports The Hill, “asked respondents about whether it’s acceptable for a person to be happy about the death of a public figure they oppose.

“Liberals were again more likely to say it’s usually or always acceptable to be happy about a public figure’s death, with 16 percent holding this position, including 24 percent of ‘very liberal’ respondents and 10 percent who said they identify as liberal but not very liberal.

“Only 4 percent of conservatives and 7 percent of moderates held this view.”

The chilling “Arctic Frost”

Meanwhile, a Biden probe called “Arctic Frost,” ostensibly looking into Trump’s questioning of the 2020 election results, swept up some 92 conservative groups and individuals for “investigation” – whether there was any evidence of criminality or not – according to a Tuesday bombshell report by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa.

Was that probe an excuse to spy on Biden’s political enemies?

“That’s certainly what the whistleblowers say,” Hawley tells The Heartlander. “That’s what the documents tend to show. And I believe it, because that’s what we’ve seen over and over.   

“And listen, I lived through it in the Senate. These people tried to expel me from the United States Senate after Jan. 6th, after I said, ‘You know what? I’m not going to vote to certify results in Pennsylvania that I think, frankly, are unconstitutional.’ You had Democrats who attempted to expel me from the United States Senate. 

“These people are nuts. They are absolutely nuts. And they abuse their power in ways we have never seen before in this country. 

“In this case, you had about a hundred conservative organizations that were targeted by the FBI for years on end, including organizations like Turning Point. And what was Turning Point doing? Going to college campuses and hosting debates. That’s a crime in this country now? 

“It was under Joe Biden. 

“This is the same FBI, by the way, that was putting spies into Christian churches at the same time. It’s unlike anything we’ve seen in this country’s history. And we’ve just got to fumigate FBI headquarters. It needs a top-to-bottom, thorough cleaning, and everybody who was involved in any of that stuff needs to be fired. Wherever possible, they should be prosecuted. And we have got to end the culture and hysteria that the Biden administration created in these last four years.”

What did Charlie Kirk do to deserve this?

The nearly 100 conservative groups and individuals targeted by Biden in Arctic Frost included Kirk’s Turning Point USA.

What was shady about TPUSA?

“Nothing, of course. Nothing at all,” Hawley argues. “Their only sin was, they were conservative – just like Obama used the IRS to go after conservative groups. 

“But Biden was even less restrained. I mean, we’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of records that were subpoenaed, including bank records. If you look at this information from whistleblowers, you look at these documents released yesterday, we’re talking about hundreds of bank records of individuals and organizations. 

“There’s no allegation that these organizations were improperly formed or that they were conducting their business in an illegal way. They just had the wrong message. 

“You know, Turning Point – they were just a conservative campus group, and yet the FBI went after them, the IRS went after them. I mean, it’s just outrageous. It is so abusive. 

“And this is why I say again, we’ve got to put a stop to this and turn the page on this. We can never allow this to happen again. And we’re still living with the aftermath and the aftershocks of what has happened in the last four years – and, I’m sad to say, I think that includes the events of last week.”

Consequences for targeting churches?

And while much of the country seems to have moved on from the Biden administration’s targeting of Catholics and other Christians, Hawley is all over it – peppering Patel with questions about it at a hearing Tuesday.

The Biden FBI’s Richmond Field Office produced a memo casting unnamed “radical traditionalist Catholics” as potential violent extremists. The Biden administration claimed at the time the memo was contained to that one field office, but that turned out to be false.

Hawley is at once appreciative and impatient with the Trump FBI’s work on ferreting out the scandal.

“I asked Kash Patel this yesterday. He said that they’re making progress. Frankly, I’d like to see some public results on this. I want to see people fired. He told me that some people had resigned who had been involved in the targeting of churches. Now, that’s good. But I want to see firings, and I want to see a written report. 

“And I asked him, I said you need to make public what you know about this and what you’re doing on it. The fact that this memo that attempted to recruit informants into Catholic parishes, the fact that it ever got published, and then it was distributed to 1,000 FBI agents nationwide, that is an outrage. It is one of the all-time lows in the FBI’s history, to put it mildly.

“So, there needs to be consequences for that. I’m not satisfied yet that we really have gotten the consequences, frankly, that we need to get. We need to see people held accountable for it. We need to see new protocols in place to make sure it never happens again. We need to see new personnel. 

“I think that Patel is making some progress, but frankly, we need to make more progress. It needs to be faster. It needs to be public.”