Former House intel leader points to Dem rhetoric 'encouraging' violence as 8th man charged in UFC terror plot
An eighth person was charged in connection with a thwarted plot targeting the Freedom 250 Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event at the White House, as a former key lawmaker, ex-FBI agent and current candidate for Senate warned that escalating rhetoric on the left is stoking violence.
"They're calling people Nazis and anti-American," former House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers, who is running for Senate in Michigan, told Fox News Digital. "This No Kings notion. People are destroying your government and your way of life. It gives people who are already out there a little bit of permission to take the next step, and they've got to control their rhetoric on this."
Rogers said Democrats are "encouraging" people to move beyond "normal political discourse" and into violent attacks. All eight suspects are accused of conspiring to use explosive-laden drones to trigger a mass evacuation of the June 14 event before directing fleeing crowds toward pre-positioned shooters, with a "second wave" planned to target the White House gate, FBI officials previously told Fox News Digital.
"They are encouraging a lot of people to get worked up to cross that line between what would be normal political discourse into radical, aggressive political behavior, including attempted murder, which you just saw in the UFC fights," Rogers said.
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Rogers, a former FBI special agent, is running in Michigan's Republican Senate primary on Aug. 4 for the seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Gary Peters.
Rogers said "self-radicalized" individuals are harder to identify, but praised law enforcement for stopping the alleged plot in time.
"That self-radicalization can be really dangerous," he said. "It causes somebody to get in the car, drive, run over somebody or, you know, do some other act of violence."
According to the Washington state complaint, the suspects allegedly used a Telegram chat to conspire to obtain multiple drones capable of carrying heavy explosive payloads, while federal investigators said they also acquired firearms, ammunition, ballistic gear and other tactical equipment in preparation for the attack.
The plotters allegedly met around March through a TikTok community before moving to encrypted Signal chats, according to the complaint, and later agreed to commit murder on White House grounds and in the surrounding area during the UFC Freedom 250 event, prosecutors said.
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The alleged plot was eventually foiled with the help of a tip from the mother of one of the suspects.
Pointing to a recent attack on a Michigan synagogue, Rogers said the rhetoric can lead some people to believe political violence is "okay."
"In Michigan, we had an individual who decided that it was okay to drive a car full of explosives into a synagogue where 130 schoolchildren were being educated and tried to blow himself up," he said.
In that March attack, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali allegedly crashed his pickup into a West Bloomfield synagogue with more than 100 children inside before officers fatally shot him. Officials previously said the attack came after several of his family members were killed in Lebanon during the country's war with Israel, and he became radicalized by Iran-backed Hezbollah.
Rogers said social media has contributed to political violence, saying the violent rhetoric plastered online is "very, very concerning."
"All of that activity is fed online and through the internet, through conversations and through this heated and wrong-headed violent rhetoric, and their violent terminology is very, very concerning," he said.
Fox News Digital's Morgan Phillips, Michael Ruiz, David Spunt and Jake Gibson contributed to this report.