It's Time For a National Conversation About Left-Wing Violence

David Harsanyi on Dec 13, 2024

Even before we knew the targeted killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione was politically motivated, many leftists were justifying, celebrating and rationalizing the shooting. There's a real debate going on in some quarters of the progressive Left over whether slaying CEOs is a bad thing. And it's unsurprising.

Of course, if any MAGA professors or journalists were online publicly defending the killing of perceived political enemies, there would be thousands of wringing hands lamenting the menacing rhetoric of conservatism. And rightly so.

But the unhinged demonization of the health care insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry and Big Oil are now the norm. A generation of college students have been indoctrinated into believing the profit motive is killing people when the opposite is true.

And there's a clear ideological continuum between those who rationalize the shooting of a CEO and rationalize the murder and rape of Jews by Palestinian terrorists and rationalize the burning down of cities for "social justice."

One expects Mangione's writing will be largely indistinguishable from what a person hears from elected progressives and pundits. Yet few will ponder why a seemingly rational Ivy League-educated engineer decided to become a hitman.

Instead, the public is incessantly warned that white supremacists are gathering in the shadows, readying to spring their coup. So dangerous were these alleged impending "major civil disturbances" in 2023 that the Justice Department created a new category of extremists to "track and counter" the "anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism."

When Black Lives Matter rioting enveloped the nation, causing billions in damage, destroying thousands of lives, one could barely get anyone in the media to admit it was even happening. To the Left, parents who protest school boards over critical race theory and mask mandates are "domestic terrorists," but those who burn down cities are "mostly peaceful."

The Left has been prone to violence since Year Zero. In the early 1900s, the United States was awash in communist and anarchist bombings, culminating in the deaths of over 30 people on Wall Street in 1920. Most cultural depictions of the '60s upheavals were of a genteel, peace-loving movement, but it was imbued with extremists, as well. By the 1970s, left-wing terrorist groups such as the Weather Underground were setting off bombs at the Capitol, police stations, the Pentagon and state attorneys general offices. In an 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, there were an amazing 2,500 bombings in the U.S. by leftist groups.

Worse, then as now, violence was often ignored or idealized by the "intellectual" Left. When I was young, self-style socialists would sometimes commemorate mass murderers such as Che Guevara or Mao Zedong on T-shirts. Today, feted contemporary public intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates write bestselling books celebrating terrorism. The late Kathy Boudin, a former Weather Underground member who was involved in a Brinks truck robbery that killed three innocent people, operated the Columbia University's "Center for Justice" for decades.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention Angela Davis, widely considered a hero by younger progressives, who not only championed murders and terrorist regimes her entire career but bought two guns used in a courtroom kidnapping-shootout perpetrated by the Black Panthers in 1970, when three hostages and a superior court judge were killed in Marin County, California. There is simply no comparable mainstreaming of right-wing extremists.

It was James Hodgkinson who walked onto an Alexandria, Virginia, baseball field in 2017 and opened fire at a Republican congressional delegation. He was a Bernie Sanders fan. Certainly, no reporter ran around the halls of Congress asking every elected Democrat if they were going to lower the rhetorical temperature.

Nor did they do so when a left-wing assassin showed up at the house of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, promising to "stop roe v wade from being overturned" by "shooting for 3" justices. After years of hearing the demonizing of the Supreme Court, the man showed up with a Glock, zip ties, duct tape and various other tools.

When Paul Pelosi was attacked by a deranged man, the entire media conversation revolved around conservative rhetoric. When we had two attempted assassinations of Donald Trump, most of the Left could barely stop calling him Hitler.

None of this is to maintain there isn't right-wing violence. Of course, there is. It's simply to say that we should acknowledge that a lot of our contemporary political violence emanates from the Left. And a lot of it is girded by the hard-left progressive turn in mainstream America's politics.

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David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books -- the most recent, "The Rise of Blue Anon," available now. His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on X @davidharsanyi.