“But he shouted ‘Free Palestine!’”
That’s the retort from angry Granite Staters being told there’s not enough evidence to declare Saturday night’s shooting at Sky Meadow Country Club in Nashua a politically motivated hate crime. They’re dismissive of, and even a bit astonished by, Attorney General John Formella’s suggestion that it’s more likely the shooter “was trying to make a number of different statements to create chaos in the moment” than that he was motivated by politics.
As one NHJournal reader put it in an email: “Making statements about Palestine is clearly terrorist. WTF? What is wrong with NH? Wow. Cover it up.”
In fact, prosecutor Peter Hinkley told reporters on Sunday he “could not confirm” that the shooter shouted “Free Palestine.”
Given how hard government officials and the left-leaning press have worked to hide motives in cases where they were politically inconvenient, concerned citizens have good reason to be suspicious. In the case of the transgender shooter who killed children at a Catholic Mass in Minneapolis, the New York Times infamously published the headline, “What Motivated the Minneapolis Church Shooter? We May Never Know.” That, despite the stacks of journals and hours of video the shooter left behind, laying out his “Kill Donald Trump,” “Israel Must Fall” politics.
The desire among Democrats and their media allies to cover up crimes is particularly strong when the perpetrators are Muslim or inspired in some way by Islam. Most Americans don’t know that the shooter who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in 2016 literally told police he had sworn allegiance to ISIS and committed his murderous rampage in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.
But if you give Formella the benefit of the doubt and assume the Nashua shooter was shouting “Free Palestine” to create confusion, to distract from his real motives that weren’t linked to the Palestinian cause at all, that still doesn’t answer the question: Why?
Not “Why shout?” Why shout “Free Palestine?”
Why not shout, say, “Make America Great Again,” or “Remember Charlie Kirk!”? Those are political messages, too. The same with “Abortion is murder!” or “The Jews will not replace us!”
Nobody can say what the shooter was thinking. What can be said, however, is that if you’re trying to pass as a violent political activist in 2025, you need to sound like a lefty. Because that’s overwhelmingly where the violence is coming from.
Granite State native Karoline Leavitt offered a litany of examples during a White House press briefing on Monday.
“An attempted transgender assassin traveled to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s family home with plans to end his life. An attempted assassin came within an inch of ending President Trump’s life in Butler, Pa. And on the campaign trail, another attempted assassin tried to kill the president at his golf club in Florida.
“A left-wing assassin shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Bryant Thompson right in the back in the heart of New York City. ICE agents are facing a more than 1,000 percent increase in assaults for simply doing their jobs. Violent radical left-wing mobs engaged in illegal behavior, targeted Jewish Americans, and shut down America’s college campuses under the previous administration.
“Left-wing mobs burned down Tesla dealerships to, quote, protest Elon Musk and his policies. In May, a left-wing activist shouting ‘Free Palestine’ murdered two innocent Israeli embassy staffers outside of the D.C. Jewish Museum here in Washington,” Leavitt said.
“Enough is enough.”
For Democrats, however, it’s still not enough — at least not yet.
The next mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, refuses to reject the phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” literally a call for terrorist violence targeting Israel and its supporters. New Hampshire Democrats attend rallies and chant “From the River to the Sea,” a slogan that means no more Jews in the land of Israel.
All this after the two murders in D.C. After the Jewish Democratic governor of Pennsylvania had his house set on fire during Passover. And after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack that slaughtered more than 1,000 Jews and saw hundreds more taken hostage.
Instead of standing against political violence, Democratic state Rep. Ellen Read is joining a flotilla to run Israel’s blockade, keeping Iranian weapons out of the hands of Hamas.
And so, of course, a murderer who wanted to convince witnesses he was politically motivated shouts about Palestine, or maybe transgender rights, or (always a winner) hating Trump. These are the ideas inspiring political violence today. Shouting about conservative causes would be as out of tune with today’s politics as “Remember the Maine!” or “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!”
Even the solidly liberal Atlantic magazine has an article this week acknowledging “Left-Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise.”
“We found that left-wing terrorism has increased since President Donald Trump’s rise to political prominence in 2016,” the authors wrote.
It reports that left-wing extremists were responsible for 37 incidents of terrorism between 2016 and 2024, and the violence is heading for record levels in 2025. Far-left extremists are on pace for their most violent year in more than three decades.
And yet elected Democrats and media pundits continue to insist the Right is the real danger, or it’s a “both sides” problem.
When a screwed-up country club employee in Nashua can figure it out, it’s long past time America’s progressive leaders do the same.
