Democrats displayed more depression than anger in the weeks following Donald Trump’s 2024 victory. Alas, partisans on the progressive left and their camp followers among conventional liberals could avoid succumbing to nihilism for only so long. An occasion to indulge their negative passions came along soon after the election in an act of cold-blooded murder on a predawn December morning in midtown Manhattan.

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot in the back on 53rd Street. His alleged killer was a young man whose writings display the usual disordered thinking of those who slaughter complete strangers. In covering the murder, however, national media outlets did not take their cues or find their moral compass from the victim’s devastated family and colleagues. Instead, they looked to social media, where a consensus quickly formed around the notion that the killer had struck a righteous blow—an explosion outward of what the journalistic echo chamber constantly referred to as the “anger” and “frustration” of all Americans with the excesses of capitalism and the greed of the health-care system.

Thompson’s killing ignited “a public display of Americans’ pent-up anger at the nation’s complex health insurance industry,” CNN reported. New York Times journalists observed that the activists making this argument “highlighted the anger and frustration over the state of health care in America.” The shooting “is surfacing the public’s deep frustration with the health insurance industry,” CBS News explained. From the jump, the press forgot everything we’ve ever learned about the incentives that inspire copycat killers, and all this before the assassin’s identity was even known. He was an abstraction, the masked Lone Ranger supplying frontier justice outside the New York Hilton during the 2024 Christmas season.

That became more complicated once the shooter was identified, arrested, and charged. Luigi Mangione didn’t fit the role. He was not a victim of capitalist depredation; he was a scion of privilege from a wealthy Baltimore family whose own health-care woes relating to a back injury never implicated UnitedHealthcare, since he had been covered by another insurer. Brian Thompson, the man he murdered, grew up in Iowa, the son of an Iowa grain-elevator operator. He had worked his way up to the C-suite through the ranks. And yet it was Mangione’s visage blasphemously etched onto prayer candles; it was Mangione who was celebrated at a well-attended concert. It was Mangione who received a round of applause from the live audience at Saturday Night Live. The words he had etched onto shell casings recovered at the scene of Thompson’s death—“delay,” “deny,” and “depose”—were featured on in-demand merchandise.

Soon enough, progressive politicians would attempt to co-opt this emerging trend to burnish their own political brands. “You don’t kill people. It’s abhorrent. I condemn it wholeheartedly,” Senator Bernie Sanders told a reporter at the aptly named Jacobin magazine. Then came, as it did with every subsequent politician’s quote, the key word: But.

But,” he continued, “what it did show online is that many, many people are furious at the health insurance companies,” presumably for making a profit in a sector that should run on altruism alone. And apparently Mangione wasn’t just representing American emotions about health care: “The campaign finance system is broken, the health care system is broken, the housing system is broken, the education system is broken. It is broken.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren followed the same “but” rule. “Violence is never the answer,” she mused. “But people can only be pushed so far” and will “start to take matters into their own hands” when the political system doesn’t cater to their demands.

“This is not to say that an act of violence is justified,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez intoned. “But they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them.”

Senator Chris Murphy wouldn’t condone violence, of course—“but we need to listen to what people are feeling.” The feeling Thompson’s murder exposed must be “matched by the anger over the thousands of people who die, often anonymous deaths every single day at this country at the hands of a health-care industry that mostly doesn’t give a s—t about people and only cares about profits.”

These Democrats weren’t justifying violence, you see. No, they were just arguing that Brian Thompson had been shot multiple times at point-blank range as an act of self-defense against an unjust system and all its malevolent works. His death should be mourned, but not more than the environmental conditions that rendered that outcome inevitable—perhaps even desirable.

It was an appalling exhibition—and, sadly, not an unfamiliar one.

For more than a quarter century now, the post–Cold War progressive left has made a fetish out of violent expressions of political zeal. And in so doing, they have not only glamorized but made increasingly more likely the kind of social-political violence that is despoiling American public life.

1999:
IT BEGINS WITH
SEATTLE.

The tragedy of our current moment has many antecedents, some of which can be understood only in hindsight because they’ve since been subjected to so much historical revisionism. Let’s start with the 1999 riot in Seattle that greeted a meeting of the World Trade Organization.

Seattle officials were “exultant,” the New York Times reported, when the city’s bid to host the WTO’s ministerial conference that year was accepted. Five thousand delegates and bigwigs from 134 nations descended on the city. They were instantly flanked by a multitude of anti-capitalist demonstrators. The anti-free-trade protests quickly devolved into a melee. Demonstrators from all walks of left-wing life—from scruffy hippies to academics to union-backed thugs—smashed storefront windows, graffitied the city’s façades, and assaulted police and civilians alike.

The violent protests expanded, given the sluggish initial response from those charged with keeping law and order, until state and local officials called in riot police who fired nonlethal ordnance into the hostile crowds, declared a state of emergency, deployed the National Guard, imposed a city-wide curfew on residents, and established a 50-block “no-protest zone” perimeter around the WTO delegates.

The riots were a source of profound discomfort for Democrats at all levels in 1999, especially for President Bill Clinton. He had hoped to showcase the WTO meeting as an example of how his administration was knitting the post–Cold War world together with a series of trade agreements. The protesters scuttled not only the images Clinton hoped to broadcast but his policies, too. “The Millennium Round” of trade talks collapsed and would not resume for two years.

The riot has undergone a wholesale reputational renovation in the intervening decades; leftist journalists, historians, and documentarians now refer to it as “the Battle of Seattle” and see it as the first great counterassault against economic “neoliberalism.”

There is an unbroken line between the globalization Clinton sought and the brutal colonialist projects of the 17th and 18th centuries, said Vandana Shiva, who had been a delegate to the 1999 convention. During a 2019 appearance on the far-left talk show Democracy Now!, Shiva claimed that the riots were a fight for “food sovereignty” and “a continuation of the fight against neoliberalism, a fight against austerity, a fight against the permanence of structural adjustment, which is what free trade is about.”

The online educational resource Khan Academy now describes the days-long spree of violence as “peaceful,” save for the few who resorted to “disruptive techniques such as vandalism to criticize multinational corporations.” To be sure, “On the fringes, there were anarchists who had a mix of goals,” the lesson plan dedicated to the event reads. “But they mainly wanted to destroy what they called neo-liberal ideologies and increasing globalization.”

In an interview with Jacobin, the author D.W. Gibson attributed all the violence to the “Black Bloc,” a militant island within a sea of otherwise peaceful demonstrators. Nevertheless, he celebrated their agitation, which “successfully shut down meetings” of WTO delegates, and he mourned how “obsessed” Americans are with “protecting private property.” Gibson credited the protests with reviving a spirit of socialist unrest that had been dormant since the 1980s. “So, what begins in Seattle continues to Occupy,” the author observed. He couldn’t have been more right.

2011:
ENTER OCCUPY
WALL STREET.

Violent street action in the United States had to take a break after 9/11, for obvious reasons—radical gatherings by the hundreds or thousands would have backfired on those looking to persuade others to join their cause. But once memories of that trauma began to fade, the passions that had overcome the left in Seattle came roaring back in the wake of the financial meltdown of 2008. In a vest-pocket patch of greenery and benches in lower Manhattan called Zuccotti Park, over which city authorities had limited jurisdiction, demonstrators decided to take a stand by moving in and taking up residence in September 2011. They called it Occupy Wall Street.

The scene became a media sensation. It was covered as though it were the Arab Spring come to America. Occupy Wall Street would be the reason Time magazine named “The Protestor” its Man of the Year for 2011. And possessed of a vague sense that these left-wing protests might restore some of the enthusiasm for the Democratic Party’s governing program lost amid the debate over Obamacare, Barack Obama’s party was quick to endorse Occupy and its aims.

Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park on November 17, 2011. (Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty Images)

“I support the message to the establishment,” said Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. “It’s young, it’s spontaneous, and it’s focused. And it’s going to be effective.” Obama also expressed his sympathy and support: “The protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works,” he said at the time. Occupy seeks only to “rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street.” Just as Martin Luther King Jr. was “vilified by many, denounced as a rabble-rouser and an agitator, a Communist, and a radical,” Obama averred, so, too, had Occupy been unjustly branded an anarchist mob by its detractors.

Encampments began to arise across the country, eventually establishing themselves in 28 cities. They were physically and hygienically squalid—occupiers caught diseases from each other, such as tuberculosis, that had gone unseen in America for decades—and became centers of lawlessness. Occupiers left their occupation zones and broke store windows, destroyed ATMs, attacked reporters and police, and attempted to shut down commerce in their cities (700 Occupiers were arrested in a single day amid a failed attempt to seize the Brooklyn Bridge by force).

Things got worse as autumn turned to winter. Accounts of chronic illegal drug use, muggings and theft, and episodes of sexual assault in which the abusers were protected from law enforcement by Occupy’s self-appointed officials, proliferated. A mob of violent protesters bum-rushed security and invaded Washington, DC’s Air and Space Museum. Denver police resorted to pepper balls and tear gas to disperse a crowd that violently resisted the demolition of its bivouacs. Three thousand Occupiers stormed the port of Oakland, California, with the aim of burning it to the ground—and but for a running street fight with police that eventually subdued the protests, they might have succeeded. In Ohio, five members of the local Occupy branch were charged with plotting to fix eight packages of plastic explosives to the support structures of a local bridge—which prosecutors said had been designed as an element of a terrorist campaign targeting the symbols of “corporate America.”

An Occupy DC protester on October 27, 2011. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Well after Occupy exposed its penchant for violence to all who were willing to see it, the left-liberal intelligentsia reserved most of its revulsion for the police who were ordered by their superiors to contain displays of public disorder. The Atlantic’s James Fallows mourned “what has happened before the world’s eyes at Davis, Berkeley, and other recent Occupy sites,” by which he meant local law enforcement’s efforts to roll up illegal encampments.

“The aggressive new police tactics have focused attention on the ongoing protests against economic inequality that began in New York City last month and have spread to several U.S. cities,” NPR reported.

“Over the past few weeks, increasingly irritated and trigger-happy local officials have received glimpses of ‘people power,’” Fordham University associate professor Heather Gautney wrote of the “collective will of the people” in the Washington Post. Effective “historical movements, as well as today’s Occupy, engage non-violent resistance because they know that violence is not a conduit of power.” Tell that to the store owners whose windows were smashed by the dozens.

Occupy’s apple polishers were willfully closing their eyes to the violence and lawbreaking that preceded police action. That, or they hoped to fool their audiences into believing law enforcement alone behaved provocatively. Either way, their excuses were the tribute vice pays to virtue: Occupy could not be violent because violence is wrong, and Occupy is not wrong.

In the years that followed, the American elite would stop pretending, or lying, and simply make a case for violence itself on the merits.

2012:
THE JUSTIFICATIONS
BEGIN

In August 2012, Floyd Corkins, a gay-rights activist, walked into the offices of the Family Research Council in downtown Washington with murderous intent. He managed to shoot a security guard before he was subdued. FRC President Tony Perkins called the attack an act of “terrorism” inspired by left-wing activist organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had branded the FRC a “hate group.” The Justice Department effectively agreed with Perkins’s assessment. “Acts of terrorism, like the one that Mr. Corkins admitted to committing in pursuit of political aim, are horrific events that instill a sense of fear on our community,” said FBI Assistant Director Michelle Parlave. But there were others—highly respected others, others who would rise to higher heights over the years—who thought the shooter had a point.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center’s classification of the FRC as a hate group stems from FRC’s more than decade-long insistence that gay people are more likely to molest children,” Mother Jones columnist Adam Serwer observed. “If labeling the FRC a hate group armed Corkins with a justification for violence, should we be holding groups like the Family Research Center and the National Organization for Marriage responsible for every homophobe who lashes out violently? After all, listening to what the FRC and NOM have to say about gays and lesbians, one might reasonably conclude non-heterosexuals are a public menace, if not a threat to the republic.” What consequences did Serwer face for this support for the shooting of a security guard? Only a job for life at the Atlantic, presumably with a salary increase many multiples higher than his compensation at Mother Jones.

That was due in part to the fact that his words were not at all controversial. Indeed, all through America’s elite institutions, violence of this sort was greeted with highly theoretical justifications according to which speech could be considered violence while violence was to be treated as a form of free-speech expression. Take campus newspapers, for example.

“When someone calls a black person the ‘n’ word out of hatred, he or she is not expressing a new idea or outlining a valuable thought,” a 2012 editorial in the Harvard Crimson read. “They are committing an act of violence.” Wellesley College’s student newspaper editors endorsed “appropriate measures” to deal with dissenters from the progressive paradigm. “[I]f people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted,” the outlet warned.

2014:
BLACK LIVES MATTER
BEGINS.

By 2014, these sentiments had migrated off campus and onto media sites that were not dedicated, as Serwer’s Mother Jones was and is, to explicitly left-wing causes. “A little violence can sometimes work to defend against predatory bankers,” the freelance journalist Christopher Ketcham wrote for Vice that year. “The people have a moral right to rise up against such a government and, ultimately, to question its monopoly on violence; this is the imperative of revolution.”

Ketcham got what he wanted. In the summer of 2014, the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson exploded in an outburst of racially charged rioting following the arrest-related killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. From the outset, the media assumed an activist posture. They branded the spot where he was shot “ground zero,” retailed the false notion that this “gentle giant” was shot while his hands were raised in a universal sign of surrender, and speculated that the city’s militarized police presence didn’t just fail to thwart crime but had inspired it. And some of the leading figures in mainstream media literally put themselves in between rioters and police. Then-CNN anchor Don Lemon proudly joined the protesters on the front lines and dared police to intervene. “People are angry, man,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes observed from a vantage close enough to the action to be nearly pelted with the rocks that protesters were hurling at police.

A rioter celebrates arson in Ferguson, Missouri, after the grand jury declined to indict officer Darren Wilson. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

“Media, can you get out of our way?” one exasperated officer pleaded over a loudspeaker. “We’re trying to do our job.” The press did not oblige. Within a year of the Ferguson riots, Darren Wilson, the officer accused of engaging in improper conduct when he shot Brown, was exonerated by St. Louis County prosecutors—and by the civil-rights division of Barack Obama’s Justice Department. But the logic the press deployed to justify mob violence would not be stilled by the facts. Instead, it would become increasingly unholy writ. It was in Ferguson that the movement called Black Lives Matter came into being, and it would come to play a key role in legitimizing political violence not only on the left but in the mainstream as well.

2015:
WHAT DO YOU EXPECT
 BUT VIOLENCE?

In January 2015, two heavily armed attackers infiltrated the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and shot 10 of its employees dead. Two police officers were killed and another 11 were injured before the gunmen fled the scene. Almost instantly, the commentary class and the elite they represent accused the employees of the sardonic periodical of inviting their own murder.

Charlie Hebdo has a long record of mocking, baiting, and needling French Muslims,” Financial Times columnist Tony Barber wrote. Arthur Chu of the Daily Beast offered this: “I’ve already seen what happens when you get a culture that, rather than asking to what end we defend free speech, valorizes free speech for its own sake and thus perversely values speech more the more pointlessly offensive it is.”

Later that year, Paris was shaken to its foundations again by another Islamist terrorist attack, this time on the Bataclan theater. In response, no less a figure than Secretary of State John Kerry reflected that sometimes terrorism has a “particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of—not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry about this and that.” This massacre went a little bit too far, sure, in the eyes of the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate for 2004. But even when the killers’ methods are questionable, there is at least an argument that terroristic violence has a purpose.

The covered body of a terrorist victim in Paris, France in 2015. (Photo by Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images)

This impulse to defer to abstract ideological proclivities to explain, if not outright defend, the actions of mass murderers arose in the wake of a bloody attack on Dallas police in 2016. There, 800 demonstrators protesting police violence and chanting false narratives like “Hands up, don’t shoot”—an appeal falsely attributed to Michael Brown before he was killed—marched peacefully until a sniper started targeting police officers. The gunman, Micah Xavier Johnson, killed five police and injured nine others before he was neutralized.

“The suspect said he was upset about Black Lives Matter,” Dallas Police Chief David Brown told reporters. “The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”

And yet, in memorializing the slain officers, Barack Obama himself legitimized the killer’s delusions:

And so when African Americans from all walks of life, from different communities across the country, voice a growing despair over what they perceive to be unequal treatment, when study after study shows that whites and people of color experience the criminal-justice system differently, so that if you’re black you’re more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested, more likely to get longer sentences, more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime … we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid.

Thus, Obama flattened a complex set of socioeconomic conditions into a yarn that didn’t necessarily forgive the violence in Dallas but did render it comprehensible—and therefore implicitly forgivable anyway. Those on the left who are seduced by moral equivalencies like these had marinated in them for so long that, by the time Donald Trump arrived on the political scene, overwrought responses to political stimuli had become the norm.

2016–2020:
THE TRUMP YEARS

Trump contributed to the sense that the primary danger to public safety came not from the left but from his supporters on the right. He spent much of the 2016 primary season giving his followers permission to indulge in their own violent proclivities. “Throw them out in the cold,” he’d say of the protesters infiltrating his rallies. Trump would goad his devotees to “knock the crap” out of his detractors, saying he would “pay the legal fees” incurred by those who caught an assault charge. At least one of his followers took Trump up on the offer; the future president reneged.

Trump’s recklessness inspired much-deserved hand-wringing and conveniently blinded political observers to regular, kinetic acts of left-wing violence that were happening in response to his rise.

Anti-Trump protesters who amassed around his Chicago rally venue in March 2016 succeeded in their stated goal: “Shut s—t down.” The mob compelled Trump to cancel the rally after they lashed out violently at police, injuring two officers, including one who was hit over the head with a bottle. In April, 20 were arrested outside a Trump event in California when hundreds of protesters blocked traffic, harassed Trump supporters, and smashed up a police cruiser. In June, Trump supporters in San Jose, California, were pelted with eggs, had their clothes torn from their back, and, in some cases, were beaten bloody. The media effort to downplay these spasms of leftist violence was encapsulated in an absurdly vague Washington Post headline published in October: “After bombing of GOP office, locals worry that presidential race is fueling hate.”

The far-right responded. In June, a group of aspiring brownshirts emboldened by Trump’s agitation gathered in Sacramento for a licensed march. They were met by counterprotesters holding signs bearing slogans like “anti-fascist,” “Nazi scum,” and “smash patriarchy + racism.” What followed was a bloody melee in which nine people between the ages of 19 and 58 were treated for injuries, including serious stab wounds. “If I had to say who started it and who didn’t, I’d say the permitted group didn’t start it,” California Highway Patrol officer George Granada told the press. It was the agitators who “came onto the grounds and were met almost instantly with a group of protesters there not to talk.”

The self-described “anti-fascists” proudly claim-ed as much: “Our objective is to force the Nazis off our streets and to send a strong message that they are not welcome in society and especially Sacramento,” said one Yvette Felarca. “To us, there’s no free speech for fascists; they do not have the right to organize for genocide.”

Felarca’s advocacy sparked debate in progressive and mainstream media. “What is the best way to react to white supremacists,” the Intercept asked, “with physical confrontation or verbal mockery?” The discourse on the virtues of violence continued into 2017 because the attacks on Trump’s most incendiary supporters kept happening. “Is it O.K. to punch a Nazi?” New York Times reporter Liam Stack asked in January of that year after the self-described “alt-right” activist Richard Spencer was hit in the face on camera on the day of Trump’s inauguration. “Opponents of the punch tended to say that violence had no place in political debate,” Stack continued. “Supporters tended to say the punch was funny.”

The correct answer was, and is, “No.”

2017:
THE THIRST FOR VIOLENCE

In the hothouse environment that followed Trump’s 2016 victory, far-left activists revealed their increasing discomfort with a program of nonviolent civil disobedience advocated by an earlier generation of liberal activists. The New Republic’s Jess Zimmerman was among them.

When an organic mass-protest movement emerged in the form of the Women’s March, she castigated it for not being violent enough. “If the police stay their hand with you, white women, it is not a compliment,” she wrote. “It’s condescension.” One of the march’s chief organizers, Linda Sarsour, wished specific violence against people with actual experience of sexually charged violence. “I wish I could take their vaginas away,” she said, aiming her remark at the author and female genital-mutilation victim, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Sarsour also provided a glowing endorsement of the concept of “jihad” and sought to extirpate Jews from her organization’s leadership. It was only due to the efforts of investigative reporters such as Tablet’s Armin Rosen that the world learned about all this; the mainstream media continued to treat Sarsour and her compatriots as the next generation of feminist leadership.

In June 2017, a man who had immersed himself in left-wing infotainment in the form of MSNBC programs and activist websites descended on a field in Alexandria, Virginia, where members of the House Republican conference were practicing for an annual charity baseball game. He shot four people, seriously wounding House GOP Whip Steve Scalise. The attacker did not survive, and the social-media groups to which he belonged posthumously lauded his sacrifice—just as they had surely praised previous attackers and, probably, helped inspire this one.

Just weeks later, a small group of self-described white nationalists gathered at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. The highly provocative Unite the Right rally had its intended effect on the opposition. A conflict ensued. “Shoves. Punches. Both groups sprayed chemical irritants,” the Washington Post’s Joe Heim reported. Police failed to intervene, setting up a confrontation the following morning that shocked the national conscience.

White supremacists bearing “makeshift weapons” and shields bore down on counterdemonstrators wearing paintball masks and rallying beneath their red-and-black banners. “With a roar, the marchers charged through the line, swinging sticks, punching, and spraying chemicals,” Heim recalled. The orgy of revolutionary cosplay culminated in an atrocity when one of the white nationalists rammed his truck into a group of peaceful demonstrators, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

The horrifying display sparked a national debate, primarily over Donald Trump’s arguably impolitic insistence on condemning the violence on “both sides.” It was, Joe Biden said later, the reason he decided to reenter politics and run for the presidency. But the truth was the truth: There had been violence on both sides. Charlottesville represented an opportunity to identify and denounce the delusions that had become so prominent on the activist fringes of the American political spectrum. That opportunity was lost amid a frenzied effort among elites to lend moral authority to only one side of the conflict in Virginia.

In the coming months, a loose confederation of left-wing insurgents calling itself “antifa” captured the hearts of those who arbitrate American political discourse. Whipped up into a frenzy by the apocalyptic rhetoric about what Trump and his party were capable of doing to the country, masked mobs routinely took to the streets, especially in the Pacific Northwest, to vandalize property, attack motorists, beat random passersby, and even take functional control of portions of their cities, all in the name of “anti-fascism.” The guerilla journalist Andy Ngo made a vocation out of chronicling these marauders’ nightly proclivities and the curious lethargy apparent in the police’s response. Eventually, Ngo was attacked and hospitalized with head trauma—an ordeal for which he was mocked by leftists because the weapon that put him in the hospital was a “milkshake” made of dried cement.

When journalists and activists weren’t papering over antifa’s violence, they were lauding it in highly abstract terms. Dartmouth College lecturer and “historian of human rights” Mark Bray argued in the wake of the riots in Charlottesville that “physical violence against white supremacists is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective.” The Nation’s Natasha Lennard gushed over the virtue of “militant left-wing and anarchist politics” and dismissed antifa’s “civility-fetishizing” critics. A profile of the outfit in Mother Jones praised a zealous resistance that “sometimes goes beyond non-violent protest—including picking up arms.” Big-name media figures including NPR’s Mara Liasson and then-CNN anchor Chris Cuomo likened these roving hordes to the soldiers who stormed the beaches at Normandy. “People who show up to fight against bigots are not to be judged the same as the bigots, even if they do resort to the same petty violence,” Cuomo mused. “All punches are not equal morally.”

2020:
VIOLENCE IS LIONIZED

Riots engulfed nearly every major American metropolitan area in the summer of 2020. Ostensibly, the violence was inspired by the arrest-related killing of George Floyd, but the causes were myriad. Driven to madness by Covid-related restrictions on social and economic life and led by the hand into the streets by politicians and public-health officials who insisted that racism was a bigger crisis than the pandemic and that in-home confinement could be suspended if you were going to protest it, banditry ran rampant.

A participant of the Ohio statehouse break-in after the killing of George Floyd. (Photo by Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images)

Good liberals fell in line and fell in love, as evinced in a remarkable Washington Post report by Greg Jaffe on white “allies” of the rioters. Torching a Target store and its surroundings in Minneapolis was “a perfectly warranted and justified response” to environmental conditions, said one 39-year-old mother of two in a conversation with reporters—“an expression of righteous rage.” Another young woman confessed that “it felt wrong to say we’re with you until you start looting.” She struggled to “understand looting” and “understand that we have to go outside the law sometimes to make things happen.”

The intellectuals and wannabe intellectuals had an easier time of it. In a conspicuously soft NPR interview with author Vicky Osterweil, the outlet observed that “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.” “The demand to protest peacefully is a trap,” the New Republic’s John Patrick Leary wrote. “Show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful?” CNN’s Cuomo asked at the time. “Because I can show you that outraged citizens are what made the country what she is and led to any major milestone.” To progressive reformers such as Rolling Stone’s José Martín, the remedy to the urban violence that stretched into the fall of 2020 was a “cop-free” world in which “almost every nonviolent crime” would be decriminalized. 

This notion, which came to be known as “defunding the police,” enjoyed broad purchase among left-wing reformers in positions of real authority, a lapse in judgment for which Democrats would pay a steep political price.

At the time, Joe Biden could not be counted among the lunatics, and voters would reward him for his prudence. Set against a backdrop of chaos on so many fronts, Biden promised a return to normalcy. It’s one of the many tragedies of his presidency that he could not or would not deliver on that pledge.

THE BIDEN YEARS

On a summer night in 2022, a 26-year-old California native was arrested outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. He showed up with a pistol and mountable handgun light, two magazines, pepper spray, a tactical knife, zip ties, a nail pouch, duct tape, and a variety of hand tools. The would-be killer’s plan was to murder the justice as a protest against the Court’s decision in the Dobbs case ending the constitutional right to abortion—an act that would “give his life purpose,” according to police—before committing suicide.

The episode led to no soul-searching whatever. The attempt on Kavanaugh’s life was “not especially hair-raising,” Politico’s Michael Schaffer opined. This event “would have to elbow for space in our mental lists of near-misses,” which were proliferating. “Threats against federal judges were up 400 percent, according to a report last year,” he wrote. “Threats against members of Congress are up 107 percent, according to Capitol Police.” The fact that such attempts are increasingly commonplace would, in a saner world, be less than cold comfort.

The attacker had been at least partially motivated by rhetoric on the left, and some on the left responded by doubling down. “Good,” the Nation’s Washington, DC, correspondent, Aída Chávez, said in reaction to a report detailing the growing threats against conservative justices and their families. The group “Ruth Sent Us,” a reference to the late Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, published a list of conservative justices’ residencies and urged its followers to “rise up to force accountability using a diversity of tactics.” As the New York Times observed in its dispatches on the menacing encampments forming outside the justices’ homes, the “incivility was the point.”

According to Claire Lampen of The Cut, “The suggestion that we can just vote this problem away ignores the fact that the people who promise to fight for abortion rights have failed again and again to uphold them.” Desperate times called for desperate measures—a view shared by those at the highest levels of American politics. “Look, I think the president’s view is that there’s a lot of passion, a lot of fear, a lot of sadness from many, many people across this country about what they saw in that leaked document,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in direct response to the attempted assassination of Justice Kavanaugh (the leaked document being the majority opinion in the Dobbs case).

Later that year, a canvasser with Senator Marco Rubio’s reelection campaign in Florida was accosted and beaten bloody “because he was a Republican,” according to police. Florida Democrats responded by alleging that the campaign staffer deserved it. He was “a misogynist and a racist,” a “white supremacist,” someone with a “history of being tied to hatred and bigotry” who deserved to be “condemned” by his own employer.

Throughout 2022, dozens of pro-life pregnancy centers were targeted with threats, vandalism, and even arson. “Next time the infrastructure of the enslavers will not survive,” read a letter attributed to the group Jane’s Revenge following just one of these attacks. “Medical imperialism will not face a passive enemy.” Amid this spasm of violence, Vice President Kamala Harris praised Democratic attorneys general for “taking on rightly, the crisis pregnancy centers” and the “misinformation” and “predatory practice” of which she thought them guilty.

In the first years of the Biden administration, student-led “anti-racism” demonstrations on college campuses and in high schools grew more hostile, too, and increasingly required police intervention. But this inchoate violent streak lacked a unifying principle until October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists would provide one. Just as the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville had borrowed from fascist semiology, so, too, did the pro-Hamas demonstrators who paraded through campuses and streets chanting “Kill another Zionist now” and “Intifada revolution, there is only one solution.”

A pro-terrorist ‘Day of Action’ in New York City in 2023. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Jews and their supporters were harassed and assaulted. Some were barricaded inside locked buildings (at Cooper Union in New York City and at Cornell University upstate) lest they be sacrificed to the braying mob. Others were forced to stay away from their institutions of higher learning by administrations that did not otherwise know how to handle the spasm of reptilian violence. The windows of Jewish-owned businesses and charitable organizations were shattered. Holiday parades were disrupted. Roads and bridges were blockaded. Balloons were released in front of tarmacs to shut down air traffic. The Democratic National Committee’s headquarters was assaulted, forcing lawmakers to flee the scene.

To all this, Democrats responded with a palpable fear that objecting too strenuously to these misanthropic displays could cost them politically. Biden himself didn’t condemn the ongoing anti-Semitic activism until April 2024, more than six months into a nationwide campaign of terror. And yet, following the example of John Kerry in 2015, Biden nevertheless observed that at least the radicals taking a sledgehammer to the foundations of the American civic compact “have a point.”

Indeed, as late as October 31, the Associated Press revealed that Biden’s vice president and his replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket still believed she could convert the violent protesters into useful surrogates if she could only “validate their concerns” to their satisfaction. But the protesters would not be appeased. Violence was not a tool in their arsenal designed to achieve limited aims. To this cohort, violence is not a means to an end but an end in itself.

And so it should have come as no surprise when a would-be assassin shot Donald Trump in July 2024 at a rally in Pennsylvania. There was certainly nothing shocking in the second attempt on Trump’s life on a golf course in Florida in September. Both before and after those events, political violence had become almost routine. In Michigan in late July, a man vandalized cars adorned with Trump campaign paraphernalia before running over an 80-year-old man who was putting a pro-Trump yard sign up on his lawn. In Pittsburgh in August, two Jewish students were attacked by glass-bottle-wielding assailants.

INTELLECTUALIZING
VIOLENCE

The narrative I have laid out here could be fairly accused of eliding many episodes of right-wing violence. It does, but not because those events were inconsequential. Just the opposite: When they occur, they occasion prolonged bouts of national introspection and finger-pointing. Moreover, political violence that can be attributed to the American right is just the sort of violence for which law enforcement, politicians, and media are constantly on the lookout.

To hear the Nation’s Joshua Holland tell it, “The extreme right has held a near-monopoly on political violence” since the 1980s. The growing threat posed by “right-wing extremists” coincided with a “decades-long drop-off in violence by left-wing groups,” the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism averred. The very idea of a “violent Left” is a “myth,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The growing threat posed by “white supremacist and far-right violence,” PBS reported at the outset of the Biden administration, represents “the biggest domestic terrorism threat facing the country.” As late as 2023, Biden himself maintained that “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.”

Of course, there has been more right-coded violence than anyone should be comfortable with. As the far-right has come to look more and more like the far-left, we’ve seen more right-wing violence. Still, the disparity between the bandwidth devoted to scanning the horizon for right-wing terrorism and the left-wing attacks that somehow evade this vigilance is astounding. That is especially true given the history of radical intellectuals and their embrace of violence. We can draw a through line from the Committee of Public Safety and the Reign of Terror at the end of the 18th century to Vladimir Lenin and his ideological successors in the early 20th century and onward to today.

“Within a few months of seizing power, Lenin had abandoned the notion of individual guilt, and with it the whole Judeo-Christian ethic of personal responsibility,” the historian Paul Johnson wrote in his masterly chronicle of the 20th century, Modern Times. “First came condemned categories: ‘prostitutes,’ ‘work-shirkers,’ ‘bagmen,’ ‘speculators,’ ‘hoarders,’ all of whom might vaguely be described as criminal. Following quickly, however, came entire occupational groups.” As the Chekist Martin Latsis famously mused, the “essence of the Red Terror” is not what the accused had done but “to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing, education, or profession.”

This was the logic to which the lodestar of the bloody Algerian revolution, Frantz Fanon, was partial. In his preface to Fanon’s 1961 polemic The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre declared that “either one must remain terrified or become terrifying. For in the first phase of the revolt, killing is a necessity: killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free.”

In our day, the notion of the clarifying and cleansing power of violence has become a key element of activist thinking on college campuses, as embodied not by ignorant young students but by advanced-degreed teachers. George Washington University lecturer Jessica Krug made a name for herself by justifying child murder in the name of anti-colonialism (before being drummed out of the public square for claiming falsely to be African-American). The 2018 slaughter of 15-year-old Lesandro “Junior” Guzman-Feliz by a machete-wielding Dominican gang in New York City might have been ugly, Krug conceded. But it was also reminiscent of revolutionary reversals like the South African practice of “necklacing,” in which collaborators with the apartheid government had their necks fitted with a rubber tire filled with gasoline that was then set alight. “That kind of violence toward people who are collaborating, or who are working against their communities,” Krug said, “we have to consider a radical moment in 2018 in which people are using machetes to hack apart a 15-year-old boy who’s working with the police.”

Down in South Carolina, Clemson University professor Bart Knijnenburg declared, “I admire anyone who stands up against white supremacy, violent or non-violent” during the “Punch Nazis” craze. Over in Ohio, Oberlin assistant professor Jenny Garcia observed that “protests, even when there is violence, right, can make it a more salient issue and provide greater pressure on elected officials and candidates.” She went on: “When we see the destruction of buildings, when we see violence—either by police or by protesters themselves—we actually see greater response by elected officials.” Former Texas A&M associate professor of philosophy Tommy Curry dispensed with all the high-flown euphemisms and got right down to business. “In order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people might have to die,” he mused.

Former Texas A&M University philosophy professor Tommy Curry. (Photograph by Benjamin Rasmussen for the Chronicle)

This intellectual environment is profoundly redolent of the one in which the violent radicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s were steeped. Terrorist groups like Weather Underground, the FALN, and the Black and Symbionese Liberation Armies—organizations that engaged in targeted assassinations and thousands of domestic bombings from the late 1960s through the late 1970s—immersed their members in revolutionary literature to help their followers think of actual people as abstractions, the better to disengage their emotions from the maiming and killing they were pursuing.

In his chronicle of the Students for a Democratic Society and its devolution into a variety of factions, Kirkpatrick Sale identified the psychological predisposition that had radicalized so many of the SDS members. “There was a primary sense, begun by no more than a reading of the morning papers and developed through the new perspectives and new analyses available to the Movement now, that the evils in America were the evils of America, inextricably a part of the total system,” he wrote. “Clearly, something drastic would be necessary to eradicate those evils and alter that system.”

This explanation is as true of today’s left as it was of the left when it was written in 1973. Just as 1960s and 1970s liberals came to echo revolutionary rhetoric that contributed to the foul atmosphere in the country rather than looking to stem the passions and cool the national temperature, so too do today’s liberals make common cause with those who believe the American system is delegitimizing itself.

If one makes a careful survey of the progressive press, there isn’t much about America in 2025 that is still worth preserving—least of all, its legal structure. In the progressive view, the courts are hopelessly corrupt, and the rot goes all the way up to the top. “The Supreme Court has now allowed Trump to carry out this agenda in a second term through literally criminal methods of repression so long as he calls them ‘official acts,’” yelped Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern.

Then-Vice President Kamala Harris speaks in 2021 after Derek Chauvin was found guilty for George Floyd’s death. (Photo by Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)

Even when the courts function in ways progressives like, as they did when George Floyd’s killer was convicted, they are still viewed as tools of a corrupt system. “America has a long history of systemic racism,” Kamala Harris said in response to the conviction of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Joe Biden similarly used the occasion not to speak of justice being served but of the injustice the original crime supposedly represented. “The systemic racism is a stain on our nation’s soul,” he concurred. “The knee on the neck of justice for black Americans.” What is this but a leftward echo of the idea expressed by Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016 that America is “rigged”? Taking measures into your own hands under such conditions is a rational response.

After all this, it surely does not come as a surprise that Americans are growing increasingly comfortable with political violence, at least in theory. A 2017 poll by UCLA’s John Villasenor found that nearly one-fifth of the students he surveyed said violence was acceptable as a form of protest against speakers with whom they disagreed. By the fall of 2022, the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale found more than 41 percent of students believed that physical violence to prevent the articulation of dangerous ideas is justified. In 2024, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression revealed that one-third of the 50,000 college students it surveyed believed violence might be an acceptable response to nonviolent behaviors—even if those polled would prefer that someone else take on the associated risks.

This outlook is migrating off America’s campuses and into the whole of society. A third of respondents in a 2021 Washington Post poll said violent action against the government could be justified, up from just 1 in 10 in the 1990s. A University of Chicago survey in 2024 found that 10 percent of respondents agreed that “violence is justified” to “prevent Trump from becoming president.” Does the percentage sound small? Fine, but it represents some 26 million Americans.

While the argument over the past 25 years in the mainstream media has been that political violence is primarily a threat from the right, the history I have laid out here suggests something very different. We’ve been lucky that no single act has set off a truly cataclysmic chain reaction, but the potential for a spiraling cascade of vengeance and reprisals is ever present. And one day soon—unless we grow sick of the sight of blood or become revolted by the thought of an America descending into actual political carnage, and unless the left is willing to take a long and hard look in the mirror—our luck will run out.

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