On Saturday, June 14, 2025, our nation watched with collective grief as two Minnesota state legislators and their families became the latest targets in a grim crescendo of political violence.

In Champlin and Brooklyn Park, a man disguised as a police officer entered the home of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark and killed them. That same gunman also entered the home of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, gravely wounding them.

This wasn’t merely a crime — it was an assault on the very marrow of democracy.

Over the past decade, the American political landscape has been scarred by mounting violence. In 2020, a militia planned to kidnap Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — a plot that was foiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s arrest of more than a dozen men. In 2022, Paul Pelosi, husband of then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was viciously attacked in his own home — hammer blows echoing through an already fractured civic discourse

And just last year, an assassination attempt was made against President Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania — a chilling reminder that no public figure is beyond danger.

And yet, the pattern persists.

We see attacks on journalists. We see arson at governors’ mansions. We see rhetoric become permission — permission to threaten, permission to vandalize, permission to invade. Each act chips away at the trust that binds our institutions.

These are not isolated eruptions. They are symptoms of a deeper malady — one born of polarization, inflamed by conspiracy, nurtured in the echo chambers of social media. As the Anti‑Defamation League has observed, extremist ideologues have been responsible for dozens of politically motivated killings just in the past few years.

And official warnings — like the leaked Department of Homeland Security memo last March — spoke of a ruthless shift: from staging violence in government buildings to targeting threats where families sleep at night.

This is our reckoning.

When public officials and journalists bleed, democracy bleeds too. We cannot stand silent as the walls between political difference and physical violence crumble. Our values — pluralism, respect, reverence for disagreement — must become our armor.

I’ve spent my life as a journalist — my pen pointed not at people, but at power, policy and the pursuit of truth. As editor-in-chief of a media and tech company dedicated to covering state governments, I’ve seen firsthand the toll that public service can take on the men and women who choose it. These are people who walk into their statehouses — whether in Topeka or Baton Rouge, Harrisburg or Lansing — not with capes, but with conviction. They fight for budgets, for roads, for education, for justice. They fight, sometimes quietly, for us.

I’ve also seen what happens when those fights are distorted into weapons, when disagreement becomes dehumanization and political opposition becomes personal enemy. I’ve lost sleep wondering: When did we stop seeing one another as human first?

Journalists have not been immune. We’ve been threatened, doxxed, harassed. Some of us have been killed. But still we go on, because our democracy depends not just on those who legislate, but on those who illuminate.

This moment — this fractured, fevered time in our history — requires a recommitment from all of us: to truth, to tone, to civility. That includes the media. We cannot bend toward tribalism. We cannot hide behind the fig leaves of false balance or shrink from hard stories. We must strive every day to present the full truth — not just what’s easy or palatable or popular. All of it.

Because when journalists do their job with integrity, and politicians do theirs with courage, and when the public holds us all to account with fairness — that is when democracy doesn’t just survive, but thrives.

The attacks in Minnesota must not become just another headline. They must be a line in the sand. A moment to say: enough. We will not surrender our nation’s better angels to its worst instincts. Not today. Not ever.

Alison Bethel is chief content officer and editor-in-chief of State Affairs. Her team covers statehouses, on the ground, in 13 states.