Dr. Stacey Patton

10/22/2025

Christopher Moynihan, 34, once convicted for storming the Capitol and swept back into the world by that clemency, is charged with threatening to assassinate House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. He typed out a promise: “Hakeem Jeffries makes a speech in a few days in NYC I cannot allow this terrorist to live” and “Even if I am hated he must be eliminated. I will kill him for the future.”

“Kill him for the future.” Listen to that. This man isn’t fantasizing, he’s auditioning to be a sacrificial agent purging the present so a particular, racialized vision of America can breathe.

When this racist president wiped these rioter’s records, he did more than erase their sentences. He sent a juridical benediction to a subculture steeped in white grievance and racialized conspiracism. These were not peaceful demonstrators. They carried Confederate flags through the halls of Congress, smeared feces on the walls and pissed on furniture, dragged a guillotine onto federal grounds, dressed in medieval headdresses, and built a hanging gallows where they chanted for the hanging of the vice president. The imagery was ancestral. They resurrected the symbols of white terror and spectacle violence and the same theater of domination that once defined America’s public square.

And those rioters walked out baptized and convinced that history has their back. “For the future” is a threat. It’s a political creed that means violence is holy and murder is the price of racial preservation and the highest office has become an instrument for legitimizing terror. And the Oval Office has become an altar where white terror is consecrated.

This isn’t random political nastiness, it is racial political terror aimed at re-inscribing a white order. Hakeem Jeffries’s race and rank make him a lightning rod for white-supremacist rage, and the threatened violence against him is both a personal danger and a political message.

And the mainstream media is complicit too. Outlets have reported the basics of this threat against Jeffries. They’ve focused on the arrest, the texts, and the charge but stopped short of connecting the deeper pattern. Most coverage treats the threat against Jeffries as an isolated incident instead of the logical extension of Trump’s mass pardons or his long silence toward white-supremacist violence. Few outlets have named this as what it is: the aftershock of policy and not coincidence.

They’ve largely ignored the racial dimension and the fact that the first Black party leader in Congress is now the target of a man pardoned by a president who told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” What’s missing is the connective tissue, and the story of cause and consequence. When journalists flatten this to “a threat,” they miss the larger crisis that political violence is no longer fringe, but state-enabled, racially coded, and publicly blessed from the top.