Nine months after her husband was gunned down, Erika Kirk became the target of an alleged bomb plot, and a new study obtained by Fox News Digital argues the threat did not materialize in a vacuum. The Network Contagion Research Institute, a research lab that tracks how radical ideologies spread across digital networks, examined the alleged plan to bomb a Turning Point USA event where Kirk was the keynote speaker and placed it inside a broader pattern the researchers call "assassination culture."
Bexar County, Texas, charged 26-year-old valet driver Jacob Wenske in late May with a third-degree felony count of making a terroristic threat involving public fear of serious bodily injury or public disruption. An arrest warrant states Wenske sent an email to TPUSA declaring he was targeting Kirk, other event speakers, and so-called "Christian nationalists." He also posted multiple threats on social media, the warrant says.
The charge arrived against a backdrop of rising political threats nationwide. U.S. Capitol Police Threat Assessment Section data show a 58% increase in threats against members of Congress from 2024 to 2025. Threats overall have nearly doubled since 2020.
The NCRI report, obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital, describes what researchers call a "permission structure", the social and digital process by which the idea that a murder is justified gains traction online before someone acts on it. That concept sits at the center of the institute's analysis of the Kirk threat and of the wider surge in political violence targeting conservative figures.
A separate 2025 NCRI study quantified the problem in blunt terms. Researchers found that 1,264 U.S. adults, 38% of those surveyed, considered it "somewhat justified" to murder President Donald Trump. Among respondents who identified as left of center, the figure rose to roughly 55%.
Those numbers deserve a moment of silence. More than a third of the people polled told researchers that killing a sitting president carried at least some justification. That is not a fringe sentiment buried in an anonymous chatroom. It showed up in a structured survey of American adults.
Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder and Erika Kirk's husband, cited the NCRI study in a post on X, blaming "left-wing protest culture" for the rise in political violence. He was assassinated 153 days later, shot and killed during an event at Utah Valley University.
Travis Hawley, a cyber threat and open-source intelligence analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute, told Fox News Digital that the domestic threat environment cannot be understood apart from foreign manipulation campaigns running through American social media.
"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. What you could call our digital diet is really shaping how people see ourselves, our values, our country, and even our history."
Hawley identified specific actors. He pointed to Neville Roy Singham, a U.S. tech tycoon and Shanghai resident, as one example of a wealthy individual putting a "thumb on the scale." A previous Fox News Digital investigation reported that Singham poured $278 million into nonprofits that promoted Chinese Communist Party propaganda at protests across the country. Organizations named in that reporting include CodePink, the People's Forum, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, groups Fox identified as part of a network organizing protests, messaging, and rallies in support of the Communist Party of Cuba.
Erika Kirk, who now leads Turning Point USA as CEO, has emerged as a prominent conservative voice in her own right since her husband's death. That visibility has made her a target, a reality she has confronted publicly more than once.
Hawley framed the foreign influence operations as deliberately anti-Western in design, telling Fox News Digital:
"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."
He warned that the resulting unrest is accelerating.
"It seems to be bubbling up increasingly is these protests, these riots, whether it's against the government itself, whether it's against ICE and the military, the war."
The timeline around the Kirk family alone tells a grim story. Charlie Kirk spoke at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on September 10, 2025, during his "American Comeback Tour." He was assassinated there. FBI Director Kash Patel said the suspected killer, Tyler Robinson, confessed to the shooting on the chatroom platform Discord, a platform members of Congress have criticized for radicalizing users.
By December 2025, Erika Kirk was speaking out publicly against political violence in America. Within months, Wenske allegedly emailed TPUSA with threats against her and other speakers, singling out "Christian nationalists" by name.
Kirk has had to weigh security concerns against her public role repeatedly. She skipped a rally over security fears before being welcomed to a Phoenix stage by President Trump himself. She has spoken out after other security incidents, including a shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner from which she was forced to flee.
Meanwhile, the cultural signals keep rewarding the wrong side. Luigi Mangione, the man accused of assassinating UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, arrived at Manhattan Supreme Court on May 18, 2026, for an evidence suppression hearing. Pro-Mangione demonstrators regularly frequent the courthouse to support him. A legal fund for Mangione has collected more than $1.5 million.
That detail is worth sitting with. A man accused of a premeditated public execution has a seven-figure legal fund and a cheering section at the courthouse steps. That is the "permission structure" the NCRI report describes, not in theory, but in practice.
Hawley put the stakes plainly in his interview with Fox News Digital:
"This is really concerning and really showing how democracy actually has a weakness if it is not protected."
He added:
"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."
That question, how much is organic and how much is manufactured, may be the most consequential open question in American public life right now. If $278 million from a single individual living in Shanghai can fuel protest networks that push Chinese Communist Party talking points on American streets, and if foreign adversaries are deliberately accelerating anti-Western narratives through social media, then the threat environment facing conservative leaders like Erika Kirk is not simply a domestic law-enforcement problem. It is a national security problem.
Kirk's growing role in conservative politics, including her position as a bridge between the Trump coalition and the MAHA movement, makes her continued visibility both important and dangerous. The NCRI report suggests the danger is not random. It follows a traceable digital path from radical ideology to online threats to real-world violence.
The Wenske charge in Bexar County is one data point. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is another. The 58% spike in congressional threats is another. The 38% of Americans who told researchers that killing a president is "somewhat justified" is yet another. Taken together, they describe a country where political violence is not just tolerated in certain quarters but actively encouraged, and where foreign actors have every incentive to keep stoking the fire.
When a society crowdfunds the legal defense of an accused assassin and surveys show that more than half of left-leaning respondents find presidential murder at least partly acceptable, the problem is no longer at the margins. It is the mainstream of a movement that has lost its moral bearings, and the people paying the price are the ones brave enough to stand at the podium anyway.
