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Speaker 1: The brilliant Noah Rothman is the author of a brand new book entitled Blood and Progress, A Century of left Wing Violence in America. It's armstrong and getty extra large.
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Speaker 2: Because four hours.
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Speaker 1: Simply this is armstrong and getty extra large. What a pleasure this is to talk to Noah Rothman, senior writer with the National Review, author of a number of terrific books through the years, and we are big fans of years around here. Mister Rothman, how are you.
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Speaker 2: Noah, Thank you, sir. I'm very well. It's a pleasure to be here. Excellent. Thanks.
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Speaker 1: So I have dived into the book with great enthusiasm, my compliments. First of all, it's one of those momentum reads. The more I read, the more I was enjoying reading it. And one of the points you made early on in the book. Actually, just as an aside fan of your work on the National Review podcast, and I remember when you first brought up that you were working on this book. My immediate reaction was, oh my god, there's going to be an avalanche of what aboutism about right wing violence. But you made the point early in the book that the way we as media and society react to left wing violence and right wing violence are very very different. Can we start there?
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Speaker 2: Of course? Sure? So. My book is Blood in Progress, a Century of left Wing Violence in America. It's an attempt to answer a question that I think we all probably encounter too frequently, because we often hear about how the right in America is uniquely violent, the primary threat to the civic compact and individual life and liberty. We hear about it after an attempted or successful assassination of a right wing figure, an armed assault on an ICE facility or a CBP facility, the mobs that descend almost nightly on places like Portland, Oregon. We hear about it all the time. And there's something of a taboo in there. Right If your fingerpoint and you're saying no, no, no, you're the violent one, there's a concession there that the public doesn't like political violence, or you're imposing this on the other side so that they'll have to defend themselves. But the degree to which we hear this reflex, this inversion is reflective, I think, less of a desire to get the facts right and more of an attempt by left of center Americans and institutionalists in venues that happen to have progressive proclivities to avoid looking at the problem, to turn their eyes away, and that's why we have so much violence in this country. It's a reciprocal phenomenon. Those who are inclined towards political violence take inspiration from those who execute attacks on their side and especially to meet out vengeance against their political adversaries, so they already perceive to be violent. That often includes the state. Both sides of this equation perceive the state to be on the side of their political enemies. So you're never going to get your hands around this problem if you refuse to acknowledge its contours and scope. And that's what I do in this book. I look not only at the wave of left wing violence that we're experiencing right now, which is a genuine way of left wing violence. I put together a ton of evidence in Blood and Progress to demonstrate that we are experiencing a classic wave of political terrorism from the left. But I also explore the other waves of political terrorism from the left, all of which have been described by their scholars who study them as forgotten. The nineteen tens and the nineteen twenties, the nineteen seventies, the nineteen eighties and today, the twenty tens, in the twenty twenties, all of this history has some similar features, predictive and prescriptive elements, and I argue that it's not an obscure history, it's a suppressed history. And on my goal with Blood and Progress is to remove the omerta, you know, destigmatize the notion that we can talk about left wing violence with the authority and clarity that it deserves, because otherwise we're never going to get our hands around this problem.
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Speaker 1: I like the way you pointed out that if there is right wing violence, we have a long, solemn faced national discussion about it, many many articles and panels and that sort of thing. If there's agreed completely, we abhor all political violence around here. But if there's left wing violence, it becomes well, he understands, and it's an expression of people's discontent with healthcare or what have you, no longer discussion.
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Speaker 3: Let me give you my best example a note. I think you guys talked about this maybe in one of the many podcast interviews i've heard you do when Trump first started running for president, before it became all controversy, and it was still kind of just fun in a joke. He flew into Sacramento in the big Trump plane, and I took my kids, which in retrospect seems crazy taken I think they were. They were like six and four something like that. I mean, there were little kids, But it was still just kind of fun to go to a Trump rally that was in Sacramento on like a Wednesday night. The next night he's in San Jose and some Trump people wherein Trump hats.
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Speaker 4: Got beaten up on the sidewalk, got beaten up in the middle of the day, and it got zero news coverage and nobody was bothered by it, and I was like, holy crap, when did political violence become okay?
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Speaker 3: Since then, I've been highly disturbed.
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Speaker 2: Yeah. I remember writing a piece for Commentary magazine, where I was employed at the time, in twenty sixteen, because I had written a bunch about sharing the apprehension that the national press had over the degree to which the president was inclined to excuse or even give license to people on his side who would react violently to the protesters who were protesting his events, demonstrating against his events, infiltrating his events, and harassing his supporters. I was unerved by that, But I was just as unerved by the degree to which Trump supporters were being attacked in the streets in Sacramento, as you said, in places like Arizona and Chicago, they shut down a rally that beat up, cops, beat them bloody, had the clothes torn from their backs, bell pelted with eggs, etcetera, etc. Got no coverage, and throughout the course of the Trump presidency, first Trump presidency, which got much much worse than Joe Biden's presidency, I've been unnerved by the degree to which there is not an excuse making exercise necessarily on the part of the left, but certainly an effort to contextualize left wing violence and render it, as you say, an excusable or forgivable response to environmental conditions, many of which are completely subjective in the minds of progressive activists. And you noted the degree to which you got to understand the violence. A lot of that came in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of CEO but United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, where you heard leading lights in the Democratic Party Alexandria Kosio Quortez, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Bernie Sanders. All of them condemned the murder, but then say, but big pregnant butt, that renders everything that came before it dismissable and perfunctory. But you have to understand the healthcare system is broken in Bernie Sanders' case, But you have to understand not just the healthcare system, but the finance system, the election system, the housing system, the education system. Everything is broken. Therefore, what is necessary a revolutionary social upheaval, something that will reset everything to year zero. We can get back to the kind of social contract that we know we need, and how do we get there. In the minds of the revolutionary activists throughout the centuries now, it has been that one galvanizing act of violence and bloodshed and human sacrifice will ignite passions that are otherwise dormant in the public, and they will rise up and join us in our campaign against these oppressive structures, the civilizational oppression that the public is just yearning to slough off themselves, and they only need permission to do so, and we're going to give it to them. This is a violent mindset, This is the violent activist mindset, and it's the sort of thing that is very pervasive on the left, even among political professionals and responsible institutional stewards.
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Speaker 1: And what we're about to talk about, what I'm about to ask about is not all left wing political violence.
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Speaker 2: The Lord knows.
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Speaker 1: But I've been fascinated by what Matt Tybe recently called upper class twits promoting revolution since I was a kid. I grew up in a very pleasant suburb of Chicago where the Harris family that were central to the Patty Hurst kidnapping debacle lived, Their parents lived there, and it astounded me that somebody coming from a very pleasant place, well educated, certainly affluent enough to get by in America, would turn to revolution. And I've since learned that that's far from uncommon, a pretty good common thread from the seventies of violence through at least some current left wing violence, isn't there?
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Speaker 2: Oh my gosh? Yes. And we had some very recent evidence of this. The third, not first, not second, third attempt on Donald Trump's life was executed by a man who the press seemed to be confused by because he was erudite, because he was educated, because he came from the same milieu that they come from. CBS host Nora O'Donnell asked the president to opine on the ramblings of a madman who tried to kill him in years past. The guy's actions have discredited everything that came before, But no, Nora o'donalds didn't seem much there that was beyond reason. Therefore, maybe the president should have to answer why he's not a pedophile, a traitor, a criminal. That's the sort of thing that strikes those of us who are familiar with the history and the profile that's associated with those who execute violence in the pursuit of positive social change, which is its own sort of disordered thinking that the profile is that guy, especially the education part. The sociologists. There are sociologists that I quote in this book who find that within the context of Islamist terrorism, at least the common thread there is that they share not privation, want and hardship. They have an engineering degree, they come from means they come from an educated background. And it makes it a little bit of intuitive sense when you think about it, that those who would pursue violence as a vehicle for social change have at least some familiarity with movements that engaged in similar pursuits in history. So it's the sort of thing. That is. You can chalk it up to ignorance, but it's an ignorance that's cultivated and licensed and encouraged by people in positions of power and authority in this country, who who scan the horizon for any evidence of right wing violence, as they should, and as you say, are treat us to prolonged lectures about our permissiveness when we experience episodes of right wing violence, as we should. The same cannot be said on the left. There is a huge asymmetry here, and as a result, I fully expect more right wing political violence because these two things are intertwined. Those who are inclined towards violence again resolved to meet out vendetta against their political adversaries, and if they perceive that the state is no longer concerned with their safety and that of their families, then yeah, vigilantism could become a much more pronounced feature of the American social compacts. And that's a big fear of mine, something I'm hoping to stave off with my book.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, Progress, I hope you can also. So it's so tawdry to get into a compare the left wing scorecard to the right ring scorecard to see who's ahead or behind, depending on how you look at it. But you kind of have to because the FBI director or a president or the media is going to give you a list of, you know, what percentage of violence is right wing, and I like how you break down some of the crazy things that they put on that side of the ledger to kind of fix the numbers.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I'm not dueling in databases here, like I'm not competing in the database world because I think it's a hopelessly subjective enterprise. As you say, there are a bunch of these statistical analyzes that purport to conclude that the American right is uniquely violent or at least uniquely murderous. Sometimes there's a distinction there with a difference, But if you go into the databases, depending on which one you're looking at, you see a lot of stuff that the general public does not perceived to be political violence, gang violence, prison violence, intra family violence. Now there's a person who spray pains the slurs on the side of a church writing violence, a homeless man who wanders into a hotel and hurls racial epithets at the hotel and insults the right wing violence. It's sort of like those databases that are put out by gun control groups that purport to claim, like there have been seventy school shootings this year, and you say to yourself, well, I don't remember seventy school shootings. And you look at the data and it shows somebody discharged a firearm adjacent to a school property. Like, that's just not what people think of when they think of political violence. And then, most importantly, what I think is a smoking gun. In the first chapter of this book is a document that was prepared for the Department of Homeland Security in twenty twenty one, in which researchers say that the study of violent left wing extremism is shot through with problems, one of them being the fact that people who are allegedly participants in these violent movements are themselves the authors of these studies of those violent movements. And then those who are not are subjected to by their colleagues intimidation campaigns, social isolation, even the threat of physical retaliation for merely doing the job. It's right for exploration. It is shot through with problems, and it's the sort of thing that a society invested in its own preservation would take very seriously. And it's a wonder why it seems like very few are and there haven't been any real, pronounced, sustained efforts to grapple with the problem of left fling violence in this country. That's why blood and progress, I think is so necessary.
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Speaker 1: Right. The oversimplified version of what I want to bring up is that conservatives think progressives are misguided or wrong. Progressives think conservatives are evil, which is obviously a thread that runs, you know, directly into the violence. Is there anything we can do as a society to I don't know, some sort of forced interchange so folks have the left can be exposed to more conservative ideals and realize we're not evil. We just see the world more differently than they do.
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Speaker 2: Well, I really hope they read my book. First of all, I don't offer that'd be nice, right, I mean, it's step one. I don't offer a panacea for the problem of political violence in the United States, and I would be suspicious of anyone who does. There's been political violence in this country since its founding. It's a feature of civic life in America. And then lovely one but one nonetheless, but nevertheless, I do recommend things that we can do on the margins. To address this problem, the New Lines Institute, for example, offers some advice to law enforcement officials, for example, to deprive those who are inclined towards violence of the narrative that they often promulgate, in which they maintain that they, the state and the police, are on the side of the other side, the political adversaries, and therefore they're valid targets too. I recommend that we restore politics to its proper place. Politics currently knows no rational bounds. It's not about education. It's not about elections and legislative affairs and enumerated duties in a constitution. It's about the commercials you watch and the shows that you watch, and the music you listen to, and the foods you eat, and the people you surround yourselves with and your hobbies, and all of it has nothing to do with politics. Properly understood. It might be political, but it's that is a construct, and it's immune to remedy from the governmental entities by virtue of the constitution, which is desirable. It's good. But if you're so convinced that you have this moral imperative on your hands, and society is deaf to it, it's a radicalizing thing, and it can either lead you to withdraw entirely from the political process or resolve to attack the foundations of this holy, immoral enterprise that is deaf to your appeals. So I do have a couple of, you know, ideas for getting our hands around this problem. But the biggest problem but I attempt to address with this book is the fact that that so few are willing to acknowledge it. If all I've achieved with this book is the acknowledgment of the degree to which we're experiencing a pronounced and disproportionate way of left wing violence, and that is not uncommon in this country, then I will have achieved my objective.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, when you've got both sides constantly saying this election will be the last election if the other side wins, I mean, you could justify lots of stuff, you know, if you actually believe that. How do you separate out a crazy person like completely nuts who happened to latch on to a political point of view versus you know, the somewhat sane.
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Speaker 2: How do you do that. One of the reasons why I don't tell this story in numbers and statistics is because I wanted to do just that, to dive into the disordered thinking of somebody who believes that an act of political violence will beget positive outcomes and positive social change. That's the sort of thing you can only tell in stories, and so I do tell those stories, and some of the individuals who engage in acts off look. First of all, a crazy person can have as big an impact on history an act of violence as a clear eye idiologue. So there is, you know, there's a distinction as a fine one to a certain degree. But there are plenty of people who act out in deference to schizophrenia, for example, or other disorders, who end up committing horribly violent acts and may or may not have a political motive behind them. Some of them are explicitly apolitical. But then there's also the audience for that sort of thing, and there usually is an audience, especially for political violence violence that is designed to inflame passions, and sometimes they leave manifest us behind indicating that that is their ideal, And the audience for this sort of thing sometimes give you clues as to what their motives are and what the milieu in which they're operating in is like. And the first thing that comes to mind. There is Shane Temora, who about two years ago, walked into a high rise in mid time Manhattan seeking the offices of the NFL because he wanted to execute as many people in the NFL as he possibly could, operating under the delusion that the NFL was responsible for the concussions that he suffered as a kid. He was disordered, and he ended up going to the wrong place. He went to a real estate firm, and he shot a bunch of people, one of them being Wesley Lepattner, whose young real estate executive. And his act was a completely senseless act of violence, but the audience for it saw a lot of sense in it. They saw the execution of a rapacious capitalist, somebody who had it coming by virtue of her station and the degree to which she had benefited from ill begotten goods in society, just by virtue of her participation in enterprise, and they perceived that act of violence to be a good thing that was do everyone else. It brought us one step closer to the revolution in which you and me and everybody who's a participant in this immoral network that we all inhabit the United States will get what's coming to us. That's the mail you in which we're operating in right now. This is our environment and it's going to get worse if we don't confront it.
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Speaker 1: Well, that's just spiteful envy. A disordered individual shoots the wrong person, but you think, well, that person, let's find some sins and pronounce them deserving of their fate, which is horrifying, Which brings us to, speaking of horrifying, the the rising numbers of people, in most notably young people, who will justify political violence of one sort or another. Where did that come from?
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Speaker 2: Well, it's hard for me to say whether the degree to which it's been with us forever, because I do think there's an element of this that can be overrid, that there's a something in the young mind that is attracted to breaking taboos, to shocking elders. There are so few taboos left that do shock with the commensurate commensurate to their desire to be provocative. Anti Semitism is one, and violence is another. The celebration of bloodshed for its own sake is another. But that performative ghoulishness, and we saw some of it the other day outside of the trial of Luigi Mangioni, where three young ladies into camera competed with one another to be as gooulish as they possibly could. Called Brian Thompson, his alleged victim a terrorist, said his children were better off without him, his two young children, that they would anything that he had bequeathed them was blood money. And most importantly, in my view, was that an indictment of the country, Because in the minds of one of these activists, we are the most passive and coowed population in the history story of the planet that anybody, any other civilization that was experiencing the kind of oppression that we're subjected to on a daily basis, would have already risen up and overthrown the repressors. And the fact that we don't is an indictment of us and indicative of how badly we need revolutionary violence in this country to wake us from our passivity. That is clear eyed. In my view. It is performative, it is a spectacle, but it's also designed to beget the kind of violent outcomes that are often encouraged tacitly, even if they don't acknowledge it, by democratic political officials who attempt to co opt these movements. Why did they append the butt when they were condemning Brian Thompson's murder? Why do they lean into Occupy Wall Street or the twenty twenty George Floyd Bobs? They see in these expressions of political zeal which may be a little excessive, maybe unrefined, but it could be harnessed and directed towards productive ends and maybe contribute to democratic political prospects. It's a really utilitarian approach to what is, in my view, a cancer on American society and one that needs to be excised, not encouraged.
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Speaker 3: Are you more worried about individuals coming together under an ideology and acting out individually? Or the groups? The Antifa, the Proud Boys, the whatever.
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Speaker 2: Wow, it's sort of a matter of degrees, isn't it? Am I? What am I more worried about? They're both extraordinarily troubling.
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Speaker 3: Well, which is more unique in this moment?
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Speaker 2: Well? What is most troubling? I would say, where we've seen more violence from individuals, so it's a more pronounced threat. But what's really unnerving to me is the group violence, in particular the violence targeting police. Last year we saw three armed assaults on ice and CBP facilities, some which were quite deadly, one of which featured extremely sophisticated ambush tactics. There's about ten individuals and there was no ambiguity about what they were trying to do. They left behind literature advocating for the proletarian revolution. We know who these people are. But they used fireworks to target this facility, lore their targets out, and then open up on them from overlapping fields of fire on the tree line. That's sophisticated. That's an assault. That's a small self terrorist act, and it's akin to what we saw in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties with the Marxist guerrilla groups who targeted police explicitly. And it's similar to the socialist anarchists' movements of the nineteen tens nineteen twenties who targeted police specifically. That's the sort of thing that is a portent of a possible convulsion, a spasm of organized left wing terroristic violence of the sort that we haven't experienced in this country in fifty years. But if you don't know that we haven't experienced it in fifty years or the fifty years before that, you won't know what you're looking at. You won't have any immunity to it. You won't know how to stop it. That's why Blood and Progress is my view so important. Again.
00:24:07
Speaker 1: Noah Rothman's new book is Blood and Progress, a Century of left wing violence in America. We know your time is limited. In a couple of minutes we have left, can we talk about a couple of contemporary issues?
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Speaker 2: Of course?
00:24:20
Speaker 1: First of all, what the hell is going on with the negotiations with Iran? Is this going anywhere? Or are we just getting strung along? I think we're getting.
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Speaker 2: Strong along, and I'm a little disappointed with how this has gone in the ceasefire period. I think the Operation Epic Fury was a tactical triumph. The ceasefire has been a mess, and it's not advancing our interests, and the President risks sacrificing a lot of the gains that were made in this process in two ways, the first of which being that during Operation Epic Fury, the Gulf States abandoned this pretense of neutrality and gravitated towards the United States and Israel. Of course they did because the United States and Israel were defending them against barrages of fire that were coming from Iran. We're seeing now as the ceasefire breaks down, those barrages continue. Kuwait, Bahrain, Uae all getting struck over the course. In last night, a very significant assault on Kuwait City in which one person died, sixty three were injured. And the President is kind of taking it all in stride. So that really risks the prospect of this kind of regional realignment that was very beneficial to American strategic interests. The second being that the president is moving towards the Iranians and the Iranians aren't moving towards us in this very specific way. He confirmed. Trump confirmed today that he did have this profanity laced tirade when he was yelling at Bibnetnyah, who is really Prime Minister Ntnyaho, for constantly fighting in Lebanon his words, his Belaw attacked Israel during Operation Epic Fury. That war is ongoing, but has Belot started it? And now Iran, which used to deny that it had any links to Hesbela, is under duress saying you got to reign in Israel. Hesbelah's in real trouble and he's doing that. Why that's leverage. That's something you can use to get the Iranians to come to the table and be a little bit more pliant in talks if there were ever going to be. That's something they really hold dear and you can hold it over their heads. But Trump's just giving it away and he's not getting anything for it, and I don't understand why he's Obviously he thinks time is on his side and he has some evidence in that to that effect. The blockade is a stranglehold on the Iranian economy and they're starting to feel it and act like it. But at the same time, he too is operating under obvious duress and obvious pressure, political pressure, and practical pressure. You know, the United States really is short on these interceptor missiles, exquisite munitions that take a lot of time to refill. Nevertheless, he picked this war. The time is now, and it's time for him to finish the job that he started. So I've been very disappointed with this ceasefire process.
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Speaker 3: Well, in a steak is whether or not Iran gets a nuclear weapon, which I think has gotten lost at least in the mainstream media or buy a lot of people that the what's that steak is not the price of gas for the summer vacation. You're going on. It's whether or not Iran gets a nuke, And we're saying on the air the other day, Iran getting a nuke would be one of the biggest moments in world history. You agree or disagree.
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Speaker 2: I do agree. And it's also beyond that. It's the shape of the region for decades to come. The next fifty years is on the table right now. Why have we been unable to execute the pivot to Asia that George W. Bush wanted, that Barack Obama wanted, that Trump wanted, that Biden wanted. It's Iran and Iran will not let us extricate ourselves from that region. It has been at war with us. It sounds like a cliche, but it's true. It has been at war with US, executing killing Americans and executing operations on US soil and on our allies soil designed to murder our allies and Americans for forty seven years, not going to stop until that regime implode. But we can contain that regime and the design being to collapse it so that we could finally execute our strategic priorities in other parts of the planet Earth. That's a really desirable goal. If the President were able to engineer it, it would have dividends that we would reap for generations to come. But it's a big project, and it's one that isn't going to take a couple of weeks to engineer. So yeah, I understand that Americans are feeling the price at the pain at the pump. I am too, And the President hasn't asked us to bear any burdens, which is one of the reasons why I don't blame the American people for not really being all that jazzed about this operation. He should have enlisted the public in what is a national project that would entail sacrifices on their part. He still can't. Nothing's stopping him, but he seems content to pretend that this is all going to work out in the end and it's not a big deal, and anybody who's complaining about it doesn't really know what they're talking about. And so yeah, I don't blame anybody for repaying that lack of trust in kind. But it's not working out for him, and it's not going to work out for America in the long run. Anybody who really appreciates the scope and gravity of what we're doing right now in the Middle East. Should want the President to take this more seriously. I certainly do.
00:29:10
Speaker 1: Finally, meanwhile, back in Europe, Vladimir Putin in Russia hopelessly admired in the situation, Ukraine probably losing ground. What do you hope for and what do you fear will be Vladimir Putin's next move?
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Speaker 2: He's severely constrained materially and tactically. What he's doing is trying to say a face and executing some horrific crimes in the process. This week, I believe it was two days ago or last night, perhaps even a volley of ballistic missiles on civilian targets, indiscriminate targets inside Kiev. The Putin regime is just engineering a crisis in warfare akin to nothing like the continent has seen since World War Two. And what I fear is a nuclear standoff. I've always feared that, not a nuclear exchange, not a detonation. People have a tendency to alli these things as though they don't have a difference. There's a huge difference. But a nuclear standoff a crisis that I believe is diffusible because it certainly wouldn't be the first nuclear crisis between Washington and Moscow and our histories, but I've felt for a long time that that was going to be the tipping point. I mean, I could because that's the only that's the only arrow in Moscow's quiver at this point. They're severely tactically limited in what they can achieve on the battlefield, and they need a face saving way out of this crisis, and a face saving way out of this crisis would be to compel the West to back down in some fashion or form. I'm just kind of surprised that we haven't gotten there yet, in part because the only value to nuclear weapons are to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. They otherwise have no tactical or strategic value. But I do feel like that is a very live possibility, and it would be a very scary prospect. I don't want to downplay it. Think it's resolvable in a positive way, but it would be very scary and it would be very unnerving to a lot of people. And cooler heads may not prevail. They don't always do, so we shouldn't talk lightly about that sort of thing. But that's my biggest concern.
00:31:12
Speaker 1: One more time. The book is Blood and Progress is centrally a century of left wing violence in America. No, we're authman, great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for the time, Thank you very much, appreciate it.
00:31:21
Speaker 3: So I admire Noah's efforts here. I hope it works that we can sort of balance the conversation out there that's not just right wing violence as we're told by whoever it was, McKay or Comy, one of the your FBI directors and the media on a regular basis, because like Noah says, we're never going to be able to wrap our heads around this or have any sort of conversation until we realize there's lots of political violence on both sides. There's way too much we need to condemn it.
00:31:47
Speaker 1: All right, right, and the whole and is listing out in the book of the reactions to not only the assassination of Brian Thompson, but he goes into a great deal of detail about the assassination to Charlie Kirk and all of the people who condemned it, but condemned it, butt condemned it. But as you described, it is really quite striking when you read it. Yeah, and I think it's more powerful psychologically than it seems at first. Blush, because if you truly condemned something, you would say, this is a horror, and nobody's frustration with healthcare justifies murder. Ever, but if it takes the form of, of course I condemn political violence, but people are very unhappy about their healthcare, and blah blah blah, that takes you to a different place rhetorically, of.
00:32:44
Speaker 3: Course it does. Yeah, yeah, Ugly couldn't recommend the book more highly, especially if you're gonna end up in an argument with any liberal friends about who's got the most violence on their side. Blood and Progress by Noah Rothman
00:32:57
Speaker 1: Extra large
Speaker 1: The brilliant Noah Rothman is the author of a brand new book entitled Blood and Progress, A Century of left Wing Violence in America. It's armstrong and getty extra large.
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Speaker 2: Because four hours.
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Speaker 1: Simply this is armstrong and getty extra large. What a pleasure this is to talk to Noah Rothman, senior writer with the National Review, author of a number of terrific books through the years, and we are big fans of years around here. Mister Rothman, how are you.
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Speaker 2: Noah, Thank you, sir. I'm very well. It's a pleasure to be here. Excellent. Thanks.
00:00:36
Speaker 1: So I have dived into the book with great enthusiasm, my compliments. First of all, it's one of those momentum reads. The more I read, the more I was enjoying reading it. And one of the points you made early on in the book. Actually, just as an aside fan of your work on the National Review podcast, and I remember when you first brought up that you were working on this book. My immediate reaction was, oh my god, there's going to be an avalanche of what aboutism about right wing violence. But you made the point early in the book that the way we as media and society react to left wing violence and right wing violence are very very different. Can we start there?
00:01:16
Speaker 2: Of course? Sure? So. My book is Blood in Progress, a Century of left Wing Violence in America. It's an attempt to answer a question that I think we all probably encounter too frequently, because we often hear about how the right in America is uniquely violent, the primary threat to the civic compact and individual life and liberty. We hear about it after an attempted or successful assassination of a right wing figure, an armed assault on an ICE facility or a CBP facility, the mobs that descend almost nightly on places like Portland, Oregon. We hear about it all the time. And there's something of a taboo in there. Right If your fingerpoint and you're saying no, no, no, you're the violent one, there's a concession there that the public doesn't like political violence, or you're imposing this on the other side so that they'll have to defend themselves. But the degree to which we hear this reflex, this inversion is reflective, I think, less of a desire to get the facts right and more of an attempt by left of center Americans and institutionalists in venues that happen to have progressive proclivities to avoid looking at the problem, to turn their eyes away, and that's why we have so much violence in this country. It's a reciprocal phenomenon. Those who are inclined towards political violence take inspiration from those who execute attacks on their side and especially to meet out vengeance against their political adversaries, so they already perceive to be violent. That often includes the state. Both sides of this equation perceive the state to be on the side of their political enemies. So you're never going to get your hands around this problem if you refuse to acknowledge its contours and scope. And that's what I do in this book. I look not only at the wave of left wing violence that we're experiencing right now, which is a genuine way of left wing violence. I put together a ton of evidence in Blood and Progress to demonstrate that we are experiencing a classic wave of political terrorism from the left. But I also explore the other waves of political terrorism from the left, all of which have been described by their scholars who study them as forgotten. The nineteen tens and the nineteen twenties, the nineteen seventies, the nineteen eighties and today, the twenty tens, in the twenty twenties, all of this history has some similar features, predictive and prescriptive elements, and I argue that it's not an obscure history, it's a suppressed history. And on my goal with Blood and Progress is to remove the omerta, you know, destigmatize the notion that we can talk about left wing violence with the authority and clarity that it deserves, because otherwise we're never going to get our hands around this problem.
00:03:47
Speaker 1: I like the way you pointed out that if there is right wing violence, we have a long, solemn faced national discussion about it, many many articles and panels and that sort of thing. If there's agreed completely, we abhor all political violence around here. But if there's left wing violence, it becomes well, he understands, and it's an expression of people's discontent with healthcare or what have you, no longer discussion.
00:04:11
Speaker 3: Let me give you my best example a note. I think you guys talked about this maybe in one of the many podcast interviews i've heard you do when Trump first started running for president, before it became all controversy, and it was still kind of just fun in a joke. He flew into Sacramento in the big Trump plane, and I took my kids, which in retrospect seems crazy taken I think they were. They were like six and four something like that. I mean, there were little kids, But it was still just kind of fun to go to a Trump rally that was in Sacramento on like a Wednesday night. The next night he's in San Jose and some Trump people wherein Trump hats.
00:04:46
Speaker 4: Got beaten up on the sidewalk, got beaten up in the middle of the day, and it got zero news coverage and nobody was bothered by it, and I was like, holy crap, when did political violence become okay?
00:05:00
Speaker 3: Since then, I've been highly disturbed.
00:05:01
Speaker 2: Yeah. I remember writing a piece for Commentary magazine, where I was employed at the time, in twenty sixteen, because I had written a bunch about sharing the apprehension that the national press had over the degree to which the president was inclined to excuse or even give license to people on his side who would react violently to the protesters who were protesting his events, demonstrating against his events, infiltrating his events, and harassing his supporters. I was unerved by that, But I was just as unerved by the degree to which Trump supporters were being attacked in the streets in Sacramento, as you said, in places like Arizona and Chicago, they shut down a rally that beat up, cops, beat them bloody, had the clothes torn from their backs, bell pelted with eggs, etcetera, etc. Got no coverage, and throughout the course of the Trump presidency, first Trump presidency, which got much much worse than Joe Biden's presidency, I've been unnerved by the degree to which there is not an excuse making exercise necessarily on the part of the left, but certainly an effort to contextualize left wing violence and render it, as you say, an excusable or forgivable response to environmental conditions, many of which are completely subjective in the minds of progressive activists. And you noted the degree to which you got to understand the violence. A lot of that came in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of CEO but United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, where you heard leading lights in the Democratic Party Alexandria Kosio Quortez, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Bernie Sanders. All of them condemned the murder, but then say, but big pregnant butt, that renders everything that came before it dismissable and perfunctory. But you have to understand the healthcare system is broken in Bernie Sanders' case, But you have to understand not just the healthcare system, but the finance system, the election system, the housing system, the education system. Everything is broken. Therefore, what is necessary a revolutionary social upheaval, something that will reset everything to year zero. We can get back to the kind of social contract that we know we need, and how do we get there. In the minds of the revolutionary activists throughout the centuries now, it has been that one galvanizing act of violence and bloodshed and human sacrifice will ignite passions that are otherwise dormant in the public, and they will rise up and join us in our campaign against these oppressive structures, the civilizational oppression that the public is just yearning to slough off themselves, and they only need permission to do so, and we're going to give it to them. This is a violent mindset, This is the violent activist mindset, and it's the sort of thing that is very pervasive on the left, even among political professionals and responsible institutional stewards.
00:07:43
Speaker 1: And what we're about to talk about, what I'm about to ask about is not all left wing political violence.
00:07:48
Speaker 2: The Lord knows.
00:07:48
Speaker 1: But I've been fascinated by what Matt Tybe recently called upper class twits promoting revolution since I was a kid. I grew up in a very pleasant suburb of Chicago where the Harris family that were central to the Patty Hurst kidnapping debacle lived, Their parents lived there, and it astounded me that somebody coming from a very pleasant place, well educated, certainly affluent enough to get by in America, would turn to revolution. And I've since learned that that's far from uncommon, a pretty good common thread from the seventies of violence through at least some current left wing violence, isn't there?
00:08:28
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh? Yes. And we had some very recent evidence of this. The third, not first, not second, third attempt on Donald Trump's life was executed by a man who the press seemed to be confused by because he was erudite, because he was educated, because he came from the same milieu that they come from. CBS host Nora O'Donnell asked the president to opine on the ramblings of a madman who tried to kill him in years past. The guy's actions have discredited everything that came before, But no, Nora o'donalds didn't seem much there that was beyond reason. Therefore, maybe the president should have to answer why he's not a pedophile, a traitor, a criminal. That's the sort of thing that strikes those of us who are familiar with the history and the profile that's associated with those who execute violence in the pursuit of positive social change, which is its own sort of disordered thinking that the profile is that guy, especially the education part. The sociologists. There are sociologists that I quote in this book who find that within the context of Islamist terrorism, at least the common thread there is that they share not privation, want and hardship. They have an engineering degree, they come from means they come from an educated background. And it makes it a little bit of intuitive sense when you think about it, that those who would pursue violence as a vehicle for social change have at least some familiarity with movements that engaged in similar pursuits in history. So it's the sort of thing. That is. You can chalk it up to ignorance, but it's an ignorance that's cultivated and licensed and encouraged by people in positions of power and authority in this country, who who scan the horizon for any evidence of right wing violence, as they should, and as you say, are treat us to prolonged lectures about our permissiveness when we experience episodes of right wing violence, as we should. The same cannot be said on the left. There is a huge asymmetry here, and as a result, I fully expect more right wing political violence because these two things are intertwined. Those who are inclined towards violence again resolved to meet out vendetta against their political adversaries, and if they perceive that the state is no longer concerned with their safety and that of their families, then yeah, vigilantism could become a much more pronounced feature of the American social compacts. And that's a big fear of mine, something I'm hoping to stave off with my book.
00:11:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, Progress, I hope you can also. So it's so tawdry to get into a compare the left wing scorecard to the right ring scorecard to see who's ahead or behind, depending on how you look at it. But you kind of have to because the FBI director or a president or the media is going to give you a list of, you know, what percentage of violence is right wing, and I like how you break down some of the crazy things that they put on that side of the ledger to kind of fix the numbers.
00:11:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I'm not dueling in databases here, like I'm not competing in the database world because I think it's a hopelessly subjective enterprise. As you say, there are a bunch of these statistical analyzes that purport to conclude that the American right is uniquely violent or at least uniquely murderous. Sometimes there's a distinction there with a difference, But if you go into the databases, depending on which one you're looking at, you see a lot of stuff that the general public does not perceived to be political violence, gang violence, prison violence, intra family violence. Now there's a person who spray pains the slurs on the side of a church writing violence, a homeless man who wanders into a hotel and hurls racial epithets at the hotel and insults the right wing violence. It's sort of like those databases that are put out by gun control groups that purport to claim, like there have been seventy school shootings this year, and you say to yourself, well, I don't remember seventy school shootings. And you look at the data and it shows somebody discharged a firearm adjacent to a school property. Like, that's just not what people think of when they think of political violence. And then, most importantly, what I think is a smoking gun. In the first chapter of this book is a document that was prepared for the Department of Homeland Security in twenty twenty one, in which researchers say that the study of violent left wing extremism is shot through with problems, one of them being the fact that people who are allegedly participants in these violent movements are themselves the authors of these studies of those violent movements. And then those who are not are subjected to by their colleagues intimidation campaigns, social isolation, even the threat of physical retaliation for merely doing the job. It's right for exploration. It is shot through with problems, and it's the sort of thing that a society invested in its own preservation would take very seriously. And it's a wonder why it seems like very few are and there haven't been any real, pronounced, sustained efforts to grapple with the problem of left fling violence in this country. That's why blood and progress, I think is so necessary.
00:13:38
Speaker 1: Right. The oversimplified version of what I want to bring up is that conservatives think progressives are misguided or wrong. Progressives think conservatives are evil, which is obviously a thread that runs, you know, directly into the violence. Is there anything we can do as a society to I don't know, some sort of forced interchange so folks have the left can be exposed to more conservative ideals and realize we're not evil. We just see the world more differently than they do.
00:14:11
Speaker 2: Well, I really hope they read my book. First of all, I don't offer that'd be nice, right, I mean, it's step one. I don't offer a panacea for the problem of political violence in the United States, and I would be suspicious of anyone who does. There's been political violence in this country since its founding. It's a feature of civic life in America. And then lovely one but one nonetheless, but nevertheless, I do recommend things that we can do on the margins. To address this problem, the New Lines Institute, for example, offers some advice to law enforcement officials, for example, to deprive those who are inclined towards violence of the narrative that they often promulgate, in which they maintain that they, the state and the police, are on the side of the other side, the political adversaries, and therefore they're valid targets too. I recommend that we restore politics to its proper place. Politics currently knows no rational bounds. It's not about education. It's not about elections and legislative affairs and enumerated duties in a constitution. It's about the commercials you watch and the shows that you watch, and the music you listen to, and the foods you eat, and the people you surround yourselves with and your hobbies, and all of it has nothing to do with politics. Properly understood. It might be political, but it's that is a construct, and it's immune to remedy from the governmental entities by virtue of the constitution, which is desirable. It's good. But if you're so convinced that you have this moral imperative on your hands, and society is deaf to it, it's a radicalizing thing, and it can either lead you to withdraw entirely from the political process or resolve to attack the foundations of this holy, immoral enterprise that is deaf to your appeals. So I do have a couple of, you know, ideas for getting our hands around this problem. But the biggest problem but I attempt to address with this book is the fact that that so few are willing to acknowledge it. If all I've achieved with this book is the acknowledgment of the degree to which we're experiencing a pronounced and disproportionate way of left wing violence, and that is not uncommon in this country, then I will have achieved my objective.
00:16:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, when you've got both sides constantly saying this election will be the last election if the other side wins, I mean, you could justify lots of stuff, you know, if you actually believe that. How do you separate out a crazy person like completely nuts who happened to latch on to a political point of view versus you know, the somewhat sane.
00:16:47
Speaker 2: How do you do that. One of the reasons why I don't tell this story in numbers and statistics is because I wanted to do just that, to dive into the disordered thinking of somebody who believes that an act of political violence will beget positive outcomes and positive social change. That's the sort of thing you can only tell in stories, and so I do tell those stories, and some of the individuals who engage in acts off look. First of all, a crazy person can have as big an impact on history an act of violence as a clear eye idiologue. So there is, you know, there's a distinction as a fine one to a certain degree. But there are plenty of people who act out in deference to schizophrenia, for example, or other disorders, who end up committing horribly violent acts and may or may not have a political motive behind them. Some of them are explicitly apolitical. But then there's also the audience for that sort of thing, and there usually is an audience, especially for political violence violence that is designed to inflame passions, and sometimes they leave manifest us behind indicating that that is their ideal, And the audience for this sort of thing sometimes give you clues as to what their motives are and what the milieu in which they're operating in is like. And the first thing that comes to mind. There is Shane Temora, who about two years ago, walked into a high rise in mid time Manhattan seeking the offices of the NFL because he wanted to execute as many people in the NFL as he possibly could, operating under the delusion that the NFL was responsible for the concussions that he suffered as a kid. He was disordered, and he ended up going to the wrong place. He went to a real estate firm, and he shot a bunch of people, one of them being Wesley Lepattner, whose young real estate executive. And his act was a completely senseless act of violence, but the audience for it saw a lot of sense in it. They saw the execution of a rapacious capitalist, somebody who had it coming by virtue of her station and the degree to which she had benefited from ill begotten goods in society, just by virtue of her participation in enterprise, and they perceived that act of violence to be a good thing that was do everyone else. It brought us one step closer to the revolution in which you and me and everybody who's a participant in this immoral network that we all inhabit the United States will get what's coming to us. That's the mail you in which we're operating in right now. This is our environment and it's going to get worse if we don't confront it.
00:19:26
Speaker 1: Well, that's just spiteful envy. A disordered individual shoots the wrong person, but you think, well, that person, let's find some sins and pronounce them deserving of their fate, which is horrifying, Which brings us to, speaking of horrifying, the the rising numbers of people, in most notably young people, who will justify political violence of one sort or another. Where did that come from?
00:19:51
Speaker 2: Well, it's hard for me to say whether the degree to which it's been with us forever, because I do think there's an element of this that can be overrid, that there's a something in the young mind that is attracted to breaking taboos, to shocking elders. There are so few taboos left that do shock with the commensurate commensurate to their desire to be provocative. Anti Semitism is one, and violence is another. The celebration of bloodshed for its own sake is another. But that performative ghoulishness, and we saw some of it the other day outside of the trial of Luigi Mangioni, where three young ladies into camera competed with one another to be as gooulish as they possibly could. Called Brian Thompson, his alleged victim a terrorist, said his children were better off without him, his two young children, that they would anything that he had bequeathed them was blood money. And most importantly, in my view, was that an indictment of the country, Because in the minds of one of these activists, we are the most passive and coowed population in the history story of the planet that anybody, any other civilization that was experiencing the kind of oppression that we're subjected to on a daily basis, would have already risen up and overthrown the repressors. And the fact that we don't is an indictment of us and indicative of how badly we need revolutionary violence in this country to wake us from our passivity. That is clear eyed. In my view. It is performative, it is a spectacle, but it's also designed to beget the kind of violent outcomes that are often encouraged tacitly, even if they don't acknowledge it, by democratic political officials who attempt to co opt these movements. Why did they append the butt when they were condemning Brian Thompson's murder? Why do they lean into Occupy Wall Street or the twenty twenty George Floyd Bobs? They see in these expressions of political zeal which may be a little excessive, maybe unrefined, but it could be harnessed and directed towards productive ends and maybe contribute to democratic political prospects. It's a really utilitarian approach to what is, in my view, a cancer on American society and one that needs to be excised, not encouraged.
00:22:13
Speaker 3: Are you more worried about individuals coming together under an ideology and acting out individually? Or the groups? The Antifa, the Proud Boys, the whatever.
00:22:26
Speaker 2: Wow, it's sort of a matter of degrees, isn't it? Am I? What am I more worried about? They're both extraordinarily troubling.
00:22:34
Speaker 3: Well, which is more unique in this moment?
00:22:37
Speaker 2: Well? What is most troubling? I would say, where we've seen more violence from individuals, so it's a more pronounced threat. But what's really unnerving to me is the group violence, in particular the violence targeting police. Last year we saw three armed assaults on ice and CBP facilities, some which were quite deadly, one of which featured extremely sophisticated ambush tactics. There's about ten individuals and there was no ambiguity about what they were trying to do. They left behind literature advocating for the proletarian revolution. We know who these people are. But they used fireworks to target this facility, lore their targets out, and then open up on them from overlapping fields of fire on the tree line. That's sophisticated. That's an assault. That's a small self terrorist act, and it's akin to what we saw in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties with the Marxist guerrilla groups who targeted police explicitly. And it's similar to the socialist anarchists' movements of the nineteen tens nineteen twenties who targeted police specifically. That's the sort of thing that is a portent of a possible convulsion, a spasm of organized left wing terroristic violence of the sort that we haven't experienced in this country in fifty years. But if you don't know that we haven't experienced it in fifty years or the fifty years before that, you won't know what you're looking at. You won't have any immunity to it. You won't know how to stop it. That's why Blood and Progress is my view so important. Again.
00:24:07
Speaker 1: Noah Rothman's new book is Blood and Progress, a Century of left wing violence in America. We know your time is limited. In a couple of minutes we have left, can we talk about a couple of contemporary issues?
00:24:19
Speaker 2: Of course?
00:24:20
Speaker 1: First of all, what the hell is going on with the negotiations with Iran? Is this going anywhere? Or are we just getting strung along? I think we're getting.
00:24:28
Speaker 2: Strong along, and I'm a little disappointed with how this has gone in the ceasefire period. I think the Operation Epic Fury was a tactical triumph. The ceasefire has been a mess, and it's not advancing our interests, and the President risks sacrificing a lot of the gains that were made in this process in two ways, the first of which being that during Operation Epic Fury, the Gulf States abandoned this pretense of neutrality and gravitated towards the United States and Israel. Of course they did because the United States and Israel were defending them against barrages of fire that were coming from Iran. We're seeing now as the ceasefire breaks down, those barrages continue. Kuwait, Bahrain, Uae all getting struck over the course. In last night, a very significant assault on Kuwait City in which one person died, sixty three were injured. And the President is kind of taking it all in stride. So that really risks the prospect of this kind of regional realignment that was very beneficial to American strategic interests. The second being that the president is moving towards the Iranians and the Iranians aren't moving towards us in this very specific way. He confirmed. Trump confirmed today that he did have this profanity laced tirade when he was yelling at Bibnetnyah, who is really Prime Minister Ntnyaho, for constantly fighting in Lebanon his words, his Belaw attacked Israel during Operation Epic Fury. That war is ongoing, but has Belot started it? And now Iran, which used to deny that it had any links to Hesbela, is under duress saying you got to reign in Israel. Hesbelah's in real trouble and he's doing that. Why that's leverage. That's something you can use to get the Iranians to come to the table and be a little bit more pliant in talks if there were ever going to be. That's something they really hold dear and you can hold it over their heads. But Trump's just giving it away and he's not getting anything for it, and I don't understand why he's Obviously he thinks time is on his side and he has some evidence in that to that effect. The blockade is a stranglehold on the Iranian economy and they're starting to feel it and act like it. But at the same time, he too is operating under obvious duress and obvious pressure, political pressure, and practical pressure. You know, the United States really is short on these interceptor missiles, exquisite munitions that take a lot of time to refill. Nevertheless, he picked this war. The time is now, and it's time for him to finish the job that he started. So I've been very disappointed with this ceasefire process.
00:27:03
Speaker 3: Well, in a steak is whether or not Iran gets a nuclear weapon, which I think has gotten lost at least in the mainstream media or buy a lot of people that the what's that steak is not the price of gas for the summer vacation. You're going on. It's whether or not Iran gets a nuke, And we're saying on the air the other day, Iran getting a nuke would be one of the biggest moments in world history. You agree or disagree.
00:27:22
Speaker 2: I do agree. And it's also beyond that. It's the shape of the region for decades to come. The next fifty years is on the table right now. Why have we been unable to execute the pivot to Asia that George W. Bush wanted, that Barack Obama wanted, that Trump wanted, that Biden wanted. It's Iran and Iran will not let us extricate ourselves from that region. It has been at war with us. It sounds like a cliche, but it's true. It has been at war with US, executing killing Americans and executing operations on US soil and on our allies soil designed to murder our allies and Americans for forty seven years, not going to stop until that regime implode. But we can contain that regime and the design being to collapse it so that we could finally execute our strategic priorities in other parts of the planet Earth. That's a really desirable goal. If the President were able to engineer it, it would have dividends that we would reap for generations to come. But it's a big project, and it's one that isn't going to take a couple of weeks to engineer. So yeah, I understand that Americans are feeling the price at the pain at the pump. I am too, And the President hasn't asked us to bear any burdens, which is one of the reasons why I don't blame the American people for not really being all that jazzed about this operation. He should have enlisted the public in what is a national project that would entail sacrifices on their part. He still can't. Nothing's stopping him, but he seems content to pretend that this is all going to work out in the end and it's not a big deal, and anybody who's complaining about it doesn't really know what they're talking about. And so yeah, I don't blame anybody for repaying that lack of trust in kind. But it's not working out for him, and it's not going to work out for America in the long run. Anybody who really appreciates the scope and gravity of what we're doing right now in the Middle East. Should want the President to take this more seriously. I certainly do.
00:29:10
Speaker 1: Finally, meanwhile, back in Europe, Vladimir Putin in Russia hopelessly admired in the situation, Ukraine probably losing ground. What do you hope for and what do you fear will be Vladimir Putin's next move?
00:29:26
Speaker 2: He's severely constrained materially and tactically. What he's doing is trying to say a face and executing some horrific crimes in the process. This week, I believe it was two days ago or last night, perhaps even a volley of ballistic missiles on civilian targets, indiscriminate targets inside Kiev. The Putin regime is just engineering a crisis in warfare akin to nothing like the continent has seen since World War Two. And what I fear is a nuclear standoff. I've always feared that, not a nuclear exchange, not a detonation. People have a tendency to alli these things as though they don't have a difference. There's a huge difference. But a nuclear standoff a crisis that I believe is diffusible because it certainly wouldn't be the first nuclear crisis between Washington and Moscow and our histories, but I've felt for a long time that that was going to be the tipping point. I mean, I could because that's the only that's the only arrow in Moscow's quiver at this point. They're severely tactically limited in what they can achieve on the battlefield, and they need a face saving way out of this crisis, and a face saving way out of this crisis would be to compel the West to back down in some fashion or form. I'm just kind of surprised that we haven't gotten there yet, in part because the only value to nuclear weapons are to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. They otherwise have no tactical or strategic value. But I do feel like that is a very live possibility, and it would be a very scary prospect. I don't want to downplay it. Think it's resolvable in a positive way, but it would be very scary and it would be very unnerving to a lot of people. And cooler heads may not prevail. They don't always do, so we shouldn't talk lightly about that sort of thing. But that's my biggest concern.
00:31:12
Speaker 1: One more time. The book is Blood and Progress is centrally a century of left wing violence in America. No, we're authman, great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for the time, Thank you very much, appreciate it.
00:31:21
Speaker 3: So I admire Noah's efforts here. I hope it works that we can sort of balance the conversation out there that's not just right wing violence as we're told by whoever it was, McKay or Comy, one of the your FBI directors and the media on a regular basis, because like Noah says, we're never going to be able to wrap our heads around this or have any sort of conversation until we realize there's lots of political violence on both sides. There's way too much we need to condemn it.
00:31:47
Speaker 1: All right, right, and the whole and is listing out in the book of the reactions to not only the assassination of Brian Thompson, but he goes into a great deal of detail about the assassination to Charlie Kirk and all of the people who condemned it, but condemned it, butt condemned it. But as you described, it is really quite striking when you read it. Yeah, and I think it's more powerful psychologically than it seems at first. Blush, because if you truly condemned something, you would say, this is a horror, and nobody's frustration with healthcare justifies murder. Ever, but if it takes the form of, of course I condemn political violence, but people are very unhappy about their healthcare, and blah blah blah, that takes you to a different place rhetorically, of.
00:32:44
Speaker 3: Course it does. Yeah, yeah, Ugly couldn't recommend the book more highly, especially if you're gonna end up in an argument with any liberal friends about who's got the most violence on their side. Blood and Progress by Noah Rothman
00:32:57
Speaker 1: Extra large
