All the Rage
It's a political virus, and it's spreading like wildfire
I can’t say that I was particularly surprised at the assassination of a Minnesota state senator and her husband, and the attempted assassination of another state senator and his wife. The normalization of politically motivated violence in America has been going on for many years now, and it poses a greater danger to “our democracy” than Donald Trump—supposedly the man who would be king. Political violence feeds upon itself. It encourages the unhinged, the fanatical, and the malevolent to act on their instincts. That’s what happened in Minnesota.
Because the two targeted senators are Democrats, we’re probably in for an avalanche of denunciations of Trump, MAGA, and the Republican Party. There’s no need to detail their content; we’ve heard it all before. I will just note that coming as they do from people who’ve played a major role in the normalization of political violence, such denunciations are not only vile but hypocritical.
Substack, alas, has its fair share of chest thumpers who bloviate about taking the fight to the opposition, smashing this, tearing down that—all for the good of the country and the world, of course! Israel must be destroyed, Zionism must be crushed, because the Jews are a toxic blight on humanity. Lunatics on both the Left and the Right shoot that line. ICE agents must be harassed and assaulted, they and their families must be doxed, all because the Trump Administration’s immigrant enforcement policy is pure evil.
The term mostly peaceful has become a prize specimen of Newspeak. What it really means is that the violence connected with protests and demonstrations is righteous. In 2020, Democrats and progressives became so deranged that many of them actually refused to acknowledge that looting and arson were acts of violence. (On the other hand, an op-ed that made New York Times staffers feel “unsafe” was condemned as an act of violence.) It might be illegal to burn down a building or loot a drugstore, they said, but the higher morality of fighting systemic racism and white supremacy trumped the law. The same argument has been trotted out again to justify the anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
I trust that it’s not necessary to review the Left’s equivocal attitude—to put it no more pointedly—toward the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump. Nor does the glee with which the comrades greeted the assassination of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson require comment. These things speak for themselves.
What motivated the Minnesota assassin remains unclear—though he’s said to be a Trump supporter. On the strength of that, the Drudge Report lost no time in branding him as a MAGA MANIAC. Quite a rush to judgement by comparison with the kid-glove treatment meted out to that Hero of the Resistance, Luigi Mangione! He received the benefit of countless Yes, buts. So have “anti-Zionist” firebombers and assassins.
But one thing is perfectly clear: Political violence in America is a bipartisan problem. It’s a bigger problem on the Left, not least because the Democratic Party is too fearful of its progressive base to condemn it forcefully. But radicals on the Right also embrace righteous violence, as the events of January 6, 2021, have shown. Israel’s attack on Iran cued a chorus of rage in natcon circles, with the odious Tucker Carlson calling the tune. His best buddy, bogus historian Darryl Cooper, declared that America should “commence airstrikes on Tel Aviv immediately.” And Candace Owens denounced Israel’s “demonic bloodlust.” So it goes. The radical Right and the radical Left agree on one thing: The “Zionist entity” must be obliterated.
An article I wrote last month about the Left’s love affair with righteous violence included this observation: “I greatly fear that things are going to get much worse before they get better.” After what happened in Minnesota, it seems necessary to add: on both extremes of the political spectrum. And as Left “anti-Zionism” has shown, the rage virus is not confined to a small group of lunatics. It’s highly contagious.
The Resistance has developed the bad habit of denouncing political violence on the Right while perpetrating it on the Left. As ye sow, so shall ye reap comrades. Or more prosaically, what goes around comes around. Gavin Newsom should take a break from whipping up the mob against federal law enforcement to think about that.
On the right it goes back at least to the 1984 murder of Alan Berg, and on the left it dates back at least to the 1999 Seattle OTC protests. Either way, political violence must be condemned and prosecuted.
It's more recent, potentiated by social media, just as the wave of violence on the 1960s and 70s was stimulated by the rise of television and the political violence of the late 19th century was enabled by the telegraph and penny press.
Our current wave started around 2013 or so, visible through BLM, the harassment of Jewish students on campus, and campus cancel culture. The far right became a thing in 2017, like in Charlottesville. The constant drum beat of race in the media, pushed by the Obama White House and the New York Times starting in 2010, definitely played a role.