Today there is about twice as much political violence from the left as from the right. By John Tierney in City Journal.
When a leftist turns violent, Democratic politicians and their media allies offer a familiar response: yes, this is terrible, but right-wing violence is the greater threat. They have made that claim for decades, and it has always rested on a dubious premise.
The premise depends on statistics compiled by advocacy groups that exclude a vast catalog of left-wing violence — from the George Floyd riots to murders committed by pro-Palestinian activists and attacks on synagogues, Catholic churches, Tesla dealerships, and ICE facilities. Meanwhile, conservatives are routinely held responsible for the actions of violent loners, drug dealers, and conspiracy theorists with no coherent political program. Deranged anti-Semites, racists, incels, and antigovernment extremists get classified as right-wing, even when their targets span both parties.
These statistical games obscure a fundamental distinction. Mentally disturbed lone wolves appear on the fringes of both sides, but organized violence in pursuit of political goals is not a right-wing specialty; it is a left-wing one. Since the French Revolution, it has been a recurring strategy for movements seeking to gain and wield power. Yet the Left’s influence over legacy media and cultural institutions continues to sustain the myth that right-wing violence poses the greater public danger. …
The vast professional armies of political violence:
Why didn’t the vast network of right-wing fanatics mobilize its troops [after the US 2020 election]? Because the network doesn’t exist. There’s no right-wing equivalent of Code Pink, Extinction Rebellion, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the rest of the Left’s protest-industrial complex.
The professionals inhabiting that world have spent decades mastering the art of turning out crowds for the progressive cause du jour: Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Global Climate Strike, the Women’s March, Free Palestine, Abolish ICE, No Kings, No Data Centers, No Billionaires, and whatever banner the Omniprotest flies next.
The protest organizers have permanent jobs, funded by foundations, unions, left-wing philanthropists, and government grants to nonprofit groups. While assuring donors that the money supports peaceful, law-abiding demonstrations, they also provide lawyers and medics (trained to treat tear-gas injuries) at events, just in case protesters decide to shut down a bridge, occupy a building, topple a statue, or brawl with police.
This violence is not exactly spontaneous. Leftist protesters draw on instruction manuals like the Do-It-Yourself Occupation Guide, regularly updated since its creation during Occupy Wall Street. Police found the latest version — along with bolt cutters, padlocks, and chains — among pro-Palestinian activists preparing to occupy a building at UCLA in 2024. …
Antifa, USA
When masked Antifa members carry clubs and other weapons to disrupt right-wing events across the country, they can draw on both practical guidance and philosophical justification from The Anti-Fascist Handbook, the New York Times bestseller by Rutgers historian Mark Bray. The vandals at Black Lives Matter protests could likewise find support from sympathetic scholars, who argue that “property destruction may be integral to the success of the uprising” and that “a reified notion of nonviolence is a mistake.”
You will not find conservative professors justifying this sort of violence. Conservative students do not establish “liberated zones” on campus.
How do you know the violence at universities is left wing?
Liberals who speak at conservative schools do not require special police protection or personal security teams, like the one accompanying Charlie Kirk on the day he was killed. …
So different:
You can find violent rhetoric and fantasies on alt-right websites, some of which have been quoted by shooters classified as right-wing. But their manifestos tend to be a jumble of idiosyncratic grievances, conspiracy theories, political demands, and personal invective. They don’t cite Republican members of Congress or the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.
By contrast, Luigi Mangione’s accusations against health-care executives echoed themes common in progressive politics: that insurance companies prey on the sick, enrich themselves through suffering, and place profits above human lives. The avid Rachel Maddow fan who opened fire on a congressional baseball practice in 2017 targeted Republicans because of their policies. And the accusations leveled against Trump by his would-be assassins — that he is a dictator, a threat to democracy, a rapist, and a pedophile — had circulated for years among Democratic politicians and their media allies.
Demonizing opponents was a leftist monopoly — until Trump:
Donald Trump is often criticized — by some conservatives as well as liberals — for shattering norms of civility through insults and name-calling. It is true that his style of personal attack is unprecedented for a U.S. president. But he was also the first Republican to grasp intuitively the power of the Left’s chief rhetorical weapon. The tactic is captured in Saul Alinsky’s 1971 playbook, Rules for Radicals: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
Instead of criticizing abstractions like capitalism or a corporation’s policies, Alinsky advised going after specific executives …
Instead of complaining about school segregation, accuse the superintendent of being a “racist bastard.” And to generate the “necessary hostility,” Alinsky warned against the “political idiocy” of acknowledging any redeeming qualities in one’s target: “One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.”
Demonizing political opponents is second nature to Democrats, as the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer observed in what he called the fundamental law of politics: “Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”
Every Republican president since Richard Nixon has been branded a racist, a fascist, or both — and routinely compared to Hitler. …
If you convince followers that an opponent is Satan or Hitler, some will conclude that murder is justified.
Mangione and his many admirers believe that he acted on principle. So did Charlie Kirk’s accused killer, whose justification — “Some hate can’t be negotiated out” — echoed the demonization of Kirk by trans activists and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had put Kirk’s organization on its “hate map.” …
Trump’s mass rallies are often compared with Hitler’s, and they do differ from traditional Republican events. But the crowds at Barack Obama’s rallies could be just as fervent. Democrats have long been the party of mass mobilization, with streets filled by protesters chanting, “The people . . . united . . . will never be defeated!” …
The media’s double standard:
Journalists apply a similar double standard to contemporary political violence. Tea Party rallies were not known for violence — participants famously cleaned up after themselves in city plazas and on the National Mall — yet Democrats and mainstream journalists routinely compared them to Nazi gatherings.
Reporters also eagerly amplified accusations that Tea Partiers at one rally had shouted racial slurs at black members of Congress. In response, the late Andrew Breitbart offered $100,000 for evidence. Yet despite the presence of countless journalists and camera phones, no one ever came forward to substantiate the claim.
Journalists weren’t so keen on drawing Nazi parallels with masked Antifa members, who repeatedly disrupted conservative speeches and marches (a common tactic of the Brownshirts) around the country, attacking police and conservatives with clubs, bricks, fireworks, and Molotov cocktails. While a handful of independent journalists — notably Andy Ngo, who was hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage after getting pummeled by masked Antifa “counter-protesters — covered the group, the mainstream media largely ignored it. The few articles were often uncritical or even sympathetic. …
So how does the violence compare?
Shortly after Charlie Kirk’s murder last year, the media trumpeted a calculation from the Cato Institute that, since 1975, right-wingers had committed five times as many politically motivated killings as left-wingers. It was the usual accusation, but this time it prompted rebuttals.
Conservatives complained that virtually none of the supposedly right-wing killers was pushing an agenda endorsed by Republicans and that Cato’s definition of politically motivated violence unfairly excluded lethality by leftists. The Conservative Action Project listed methodological objections in a letter to Cato, urging that the study be withdrawn. (Cato demurred.) A conservative writer, Jennifer Emick, posted her own tally of political murders since 1975, excluding some on Cato’s list and adding others. She concluded that left-wingers had committed twice as many as right-wingers.
It is refreshing to see some conservatives finally challenge the myth of right-wing violence, but they have less incentive than leftists to keep the argument going. Conservatives do not make a living sending angry crowds into the streets, so they have less need for statistics that distract from the resulting mob violence. Nor do they depend on mobilizing the masses against the latest Hitler. But the Left’s professional activists will always need to find a new demon to rally the troops — and then pretend it was the other side that started the war.
And that’s before we even get to Islamic violence. Islam has expanded historically almost entirely by the sword and by force, not by peacefully convincing free people.
