This is CBSI on the world with Malcolm Homeland.

I'm John Batchel.

We welcome Joel Finkelstein, who is the founder and director of the National Contagion Research Institute.

Joel, the assassination culture I read. what is it? What's happened?

Look, I mean, I think we've seen a number of things changing, specifically on the left side of the political aisle, unfortunately, most recently.

You know, you had attempted assassinations at Donald Trump, at least two.

Some of them came literally within inches of his life.

And we had the

assassination attempt, or the successful assassination against the UHC United Healthcare CEO by

Louis Gangeone. In the wake of these assassination attempts, the NCRI measured significant

increases in social cyber activity, cartoonish gamification, glorifying the assassins,

working to really increase hostility, revolutionary sentiment.

Ideas like eating the rich spiked close to 400% on several social media platforms when Luigi

Manjeone killed the United Healthcare CEO.

People made a sex symbol out of him.

They began buying his fashion, paying literally crowdsourcing funding for his trial.

$400,000 has been raised this way.

You have people getting involved, calling law enforcement officials, interfering with the investigation, harassing people.

You know, in the age of social media, what has happened is that there appears to be a growing

hostility, a growing celebration of political violence and assassination that is being embraced

in a widespread way to create a permission system that justifies this, that prepares to welcome the next

assassin as a hero. And as that's happened, we begin measuring this, John. So I'm happy to tell you a little

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