American Political Violence Is Not Symmetrical

The increasingly militant culture of grievance on the Left is leading to a spiraling cascade of vengeance and reprisals.

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Radical chic is all the rage on the Left.

This isn’t exactly new. Such has been the case for a long while now in large part because “Progressivism has practically become an entry ticket into the elite,” and there’s no better way to flaunt your progressive bona fides than protesting in furtherance of left-wing causes and performing near-hysterical levels of hyperawareness for issues that have absolutely no material bearing on your life.

Think, for example, of the Keffiyeh Klux Klan and the wholesale moral appropriation of an entire people and their plight by the political intimates of high society. Juvenile bluster, megaphoned virtue, shrill sloganeering, fact-lite blather, fanatical self-regard, silly-ass shahadas—it’s all there, courtesy of individuals ignorant of what they’re most assured, atrophied of mind yet obstinate in opinion, and beholden to an arrogance entirely out of proportion to intelligence, but who became overnight authorities on Israel-Palestine as soon as the war in Gaza became the cause du jour.

Well-heeled products of progressive madrasas (elite universities),¹ most of these morons are your standard “social justice” evangelists who operate like morally neutered herd animals trained to shout slogans fed to them by their generational commissars. Comfortable, affluent, cosseted. Naive and emotional. These mindless marionettes indulge in mediagenic morality plays featuring a vibes-based facsimile of radical activism driven by a toxic twist of myopia and infantile solipsism because of the status opportunities that the movement affords during a time when having contempt for Israel and compassion for the “marginalized” is an entirely requisite credo for access to the cultural establishment in the 21st century. Purchasing some made-in-China Bedouin headgear off Amazon² and glamping in the middle of gated campuses while cosplaying as revolutionaries is fundamentally a statement of your moral fitness for political high society. Far from being an act of solidarity, being “pro-Palestine” is more about making a spectacle of your own rectitude and raising awareness of yourself than it is about raising awareness of the Palestinians and their challenges.

It is tempting to lump the armies of bourgeois youths doing third world intifada solidarity dress up and participating in an institutionally-sanctioned LARP (please watch this video) with the resistance 2.0 agonistes. But this is a mistake, because the latter have long since departed the realm of “activism” for low-intensity civil conflict.

As someone who spends a fair amount of time peering into the dark corners of our modern discourse, I say this with confidence: Progressive jihadists have talked themselves into believing that widespread political violence is an acceptable tool of social change during a time when the “failure of representative Democracy” has turned America into the Third Reich. And this delusional nonsense is intensifying thanks to the hothouse environments provided by Reddit³ and Blue Sky, where you will literally be banned for stating that biological men are stronger than women and “all racism is bad,” but are allowed to post deranged calls for violence against Trump, Vance, Musk, and “MAGAts.” Have a look at this slideshow I put together:

Note all the Luigi Mangione references. David Shor, Head of Data Science at Blue Rose Research, recently pointed out that support for Mangione is negatively correlated with mental health.

A whopping 41% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 believe that murdering healthcare CEOs is acceptable. “It’s no surprise that age is inversely correlated with support for left-wing assassination,” writes Heather Mac Donald, “since the younger the voter, the more recent his exposure to the American education system.”

For those unfamiliar with how to read these numbers, look for the negative sign. Those traits are negatively correlated with support for Mangione—that is, less likely to be held by his supporters.

The other thing I want to bring attention to is this:

Musk is a techno-libertarian who has absorbed elements of Trumpian populism. He’s an immigration hawk, a fierce opponent of war and mainstream media, and an anti-elitist. You have to be a special kind of cerebral speed bump to associate any of that with being a Nazi. Libertarianism is antithetical to Nazism: one fears the state, the other glorifies it. Anti-interventionism is antithetical to Nazism: one seeks to avoid military conflict, the other welcomes it. Populism is antithetical to Nazism: one considers popular consent paramount, the other imposes totalitarian rule.

I’ve long despised how the Left alleges Nazi-coded wrongdoing by anyone to the right of Mao Zedong, defining that which doesn’t accord with the progressive worldview as “far right” and “fascist” and “literally worse than Hitler.” It’s disgusting hyperbole born of historical ignorance that trivializes the Holocaust and softens what real evil is.

Moreover, when you go from zero to one hundred by casually pulling out a Hitler/Nazi comparison, the dehumanizing effect makes real discourse and dialogue all but impossible. Once somebody is equated to that degree of evil almost anything is justified to stop them. And that’s exactly the point.

It cannot be overstated how ubiquitous this sort of unhinged rhetoric has become. These people are utterly convinced that they’re not battling mere political opponents but a fascist movement led by evil figures bent on imposing totalitarianism. When Trump won in 2016, his supporters were characterized as racist troglodytes pining for the past; today, Trump supporters are considered modern day brown shirts. And when a political movement subsumed by fear genuinely believes something like this, then it is not only expected but even rational to embrace violence in order to stave off such an existential threat.

We are dealing with a growing number of resentful Raskolnikovs who’ve contracted a black, misanthropic spiritual outlook and are prone to the most nihilistic forms of oppositional politics. These rootless beings exist in a state of permanent aggrievedness. Their lives are devoid of meaning and purpose, and they seek consolation in the delusive analgesic of performative radicalism found in solidaristic communities of self-righteous spazzes that gravitate toward alibis for sadism, humiliation, and even outright murder of arbitrarily designated sacrificial scapegoats responsible for the ills of the world and who, by their very existence, serve as impediments to Progress™.

But it’s abundantly clear that these people are animated more by their desire to break things and hurt people than to somehow engineer restorative outcomes and immanentize the eschaton. Look no further than the dozens of violent attacks on Tesla dealerships over the past few weeks — which both CNN and MSNBC have described as “peaceful” despite the arson and gunfire involved — and the countless instances of privately-owned Tesla vehicles vandalized and destroyed.⁴

Mainstream media have been blasé about all this, of course, as is the norm when it comes to left-wing political violence. Journalists long ago adopted the strategy of pretending that such behavior is very rare, and that Trump and his supporters have pretty much invented the problem of violence. Schrödinger’s principle of “moral pollution” is heavily applied: Any bad behavior by anyone on the Right pollutes the integrity of the Right as a whole; but any bad behavior by anyone on the Left is merely one bad actor misbehaving and pollutes no one else on the Left.

Yarns of abstract ideological bullshit are spun in an attempt to render left-wing political violence comprehensible by lending moral authority to the perpetrators and presenting their actions as a calculated form of rational political behavior, with coverage and commentary invariably implying that unless the Left’s bête noires begin to operate in a manner more acceptable to critics, there will be more “unrest”—which is just a threat masquerading as a sort of rueful prediction.

I would even go as far as to say that Democratic politicians and their media lackeys have used the Trump-as-existential-threat framing to successfully create a “permission structure” that left-wing Raskolnikovs are falling back on to justify regular, kinetic acts of violence. One need only peruse the “Quotes of the Week” posts I send out on Fridays. You’ll quickly gather that the goal is to inspire a terror akin to what Jonathan Edwards’s congregation must have felt as they listened to his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon. Every single day you have “thought leaders” like Tim Walz bemoaning that the country is in the process of being “stolen by fascists and Nazis,” and Democratic Senator Chris Murphy telling anyone who’ll listen that “our democracy” will be gone in six months, and the New Yorker’s Timothy Snyder posting nonstop about how “Musk wants the United States to collapse” and seeks to “destroy the functioning democratic state everywhere,” and Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters confidently declaring that a civil war is Trump’s ultimate goal.

Is it really a stretch to think that low-identity Leftists are being radicalized by a false sense of emergency buttressed by apocalyptic predictions made by Democratic politicians and mainstream media wordcels and cable news emoticons who really should know better, but who seem intent on driving people insane by convincing them that extreme steps must be taken to halt an imagined doom?

There’s every reason to believe that the ongoing hysteria and deliberate attempts to whip up a psychotic level of animus for Trump, Musk, Vance, and Republicans in general will lead to more and more political carnage in the form of sustained peripatetic hikikomori violence waged by these deranged jihadists.

1. Last May, The Washington Monthly’s Marc Novicoff and Robert Kelchen published an investigative report titled “Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges?” They surveyed 1,421 public and private colleges and concluded, “The answer is a resounding yes.” A few schools with a large number of lower-income students, they found, had Gaza protests, “but in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity.” Among private schools, encampments and protests “have taken place almost exclusively at schools where poorer students are scarce and the listed tuitions and fees are exorbitantly high.”

2. Fantastic bit of irony that goes unacknowledged by the keffiyeh set: The growing popularity of the keffiyeh in the West has not led to a boon for the Palestinian economy. Far from it. The vast majority of these scarves worn on campuses and in urban enclaves across the country are mass-produced in China. There is only one Palestinian weavery left that makes keffiyehs, and it has struggled immensely to compete with the low prices of imported counterfeits.

3. Incredibly, The Atlantic recently published a piece arguing that Reddit is “gorgeously human” and “the nicest swamp on the internet.” Believe me when I say that Reddit is even more of an extremist petri dish than Blue Sky.

4. Trump is right to call violence against Tesla “domestic terrorism.” The Code of Federal Regulations defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” Part of the definition of domestic terrorism according to the Patriot Act (which I’m not defending, just merely citing) is acts “dangerous to human life” intended “to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.”