The shots that rang through the ballroom at the Washington Hilton last week bounced off the same walls as when President Ronald Reagan was shot and nearly killed 45 years ago. But the reaction to the two events shows how much our culture has degraded.

In 1981, the Academy Awards were postponed for 24 hours. When emcee Johnny Carson opened the broadcast by wishing Reagan well in his recovery, there was thunderous applause from the Hollywood audience.

All those years later, two days before the attempt, liberal talk show host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about the First Lady having the “glow of an expectant widow,” which he later defended as a joke aimed at her age difference to the president. Some prominent Democratic influencers on Bluesky began peddling a theory that the whole incident was somehow “staged.”

It leads bestselling author Peter Schweizer to ask: “You call someone a ‘Nazi’ … but then you say you are ‘glad they are okay.’ How can you sincerely maintain both those sentiments at the same time? You are either lying about one or the other.”

The crazed gunman was Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old Cal Tech graduate from Torrance, California. He charged the entrance to the ballroom of the Washington Hilton Hotel. Inside were some 2,600 people, including President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and several cabinet members. Allen’s social media presence indicated frantic retweeting of left-wing rhetoric calling Trump “literally Hitler” and a manifesto where he presented himself as a righteous defender of democracy.

On the most recent episode of The Drill Down podcast, Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers call out not just incendiary rhetoric that maddened Cole Allen into murderous rage but parallel it to another story that broke last week — the federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center on charges of defrauding its left-leaning donors by secretly funding right-wing extremists.

Political violence has accelerated on the left in recent years, Schweizer says, quoting Sen. Steve Schmidt (R-MO) who cited survey findings that more than 25 percent of those identifying as “very liberal” believe political violence is legitimate. Worse, he says, there are prominent commentators and podcasters amplifying or excusing that belief, creating what some call “permission structures” for justifying violent political acts like rioting and making heroes out of crazed killers like Luigi Mangione, who shot the CEO of United Healthcare in cold blood on a New York sidewalk.

Left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker recently excused that crime as a “social murder,” justified by the high cost of health insurance, before stating he has “no problem stealing from big corporations” because they make profits.

“You have people with podcasts who believe they’re right and true,” Schweizer says. “It’s the classic definition of narcissism.”

Eggers adds, “When they are competing in the ‘attention economy,’ they’re going to say things like this.”

So, how does this connect to the other big news story that broke last week, that of the Southern Poverty Law Center being the subject of a Justice Department indictment?

Schweizer recalls an influential article from 2019 that blew the lid off a previous scandal at SPLC when its founder Morris Dees was accused of multiple incidents of sexual harassment against female staffers and sharply criticized by former employees there of creating a hostile work environment. Dees was quoted talking about how he viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals. “We just run our business like a business,” Dees told a reporter. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same.”

The SPLC stands accused of disguising the funding of several violent right-wing extremists who were part of groups involved in the riot that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. That funding, which SPLC has said was for informants, has been characterized as a cynical effort to “drum up” contributions for itself. In the years immediately following that event, SPLC’s annual fundraising rose from about $50 million to more than $100 million per year.

Much as the media have done with incendiary rhetoric that they have platformed, SPLC was allegedly caught trying to exaggerate the problem of racism and rightwing extremism in order to make money opposing it. “The SPLC and the media both need for this to be true,” Schweizer says. “It’s classic cronyism.”

Most of us know people who are political “junkies,” hanging on political news and partisan coverage of events in Washington. The risk now, as the hosts discuss, is whether those junkies are becoming zombies.

Schweizer sees the problem of political violence accelerating. “Unless we deal with these issues, it’s going to get worse,” he says.

For more from Peter Schweizer, subscribe to The DrillDown podcast.