A Man of the Left

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, May 22, 2025

 

Somewhere between the time when Luigi Mangione’s psychopathy led him to shoot United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back and the point at which artists and musicians lionized him, his visage etched onto prayer candles and his ravings canonized on popular merchandise, too many Democratic politicians admitted that he had a point.

 

“But” became the watchword. Yes, “violence is never the answer,” Democrats like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others perfunctorily intoned. “But people can only be pushed so far,” Warren said. “But,” AOC added, people “interpret and feel” the banal machinations of the insurance industry “as an act of violence against them.” “But,” Sanders observed, “people are furious” at the health-care system. And the American system is “broken” anyway.

 

You know who else had a point, according to the Democratic Party’s luminaries: the vandals, brutes, and criminals who made up the most menacing vanguard of the pro-Palestinian protest movement that erupted, grotesquely enough, within hours of the worst single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. That movement and the expressions of violence that so regularly accompanied it were subject to a similarly contrived beatification.

 

They “have a point” about Israel’s efforts to retrieve its hostages and avenge the blood Hamas spilled on 10/7, Joe Biden insisted. The demonstrators were “showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza,” Kamala Harris agreed. Their respective 2024 campaigns courted this element explicitly and with undue obsequiousness. And even when the outreach yielded no electoral benefits — indeed, we can assume it backfired by orienting the majority of Americans who regarded this movement and its aims with suspicion further away from Democrats — the Harris camp’s alumni still held their fire against their “pro-Palestinian” tormentors.

 

I bring this up in the wake of the slaughter of two Israeli Embassy staffers, Sarah Lynn Milgrim, an American, and Yaron Lischinsky, because the time for pleasantries is over. It does American society no favors to pretend their murderer was someone other than who he was. He had an association with the “Party for Socialism and Liberation,” an organization that, like other socialist activist groups, is doctrinally anti-Zionist and supported the October 7 massacre. He shouted, “Free, free Palestine,” as he was led away from the scene of his crime — an act to which he confessed and for which, we can assume, he expects accolades. He was “steeped in anti-Israel rhetoric,” The Forward alleged, producing ample evidence in support of the charge.

 

The disordered thinking that leads someone to murder strangers notwithstanding, this killer surely thought that he “had a point” when he set out to kill Jews because they were Jews. It was a point he was led to believe America’s most prominent public figures would recognize and laud.

 

It makes no difference at all that this murderer’s ideological proclivities were to the left of the mainstream Democratic Party. His politics were of the left. He made a career out of activism for the left. He responded to the incentive structures established and maintained by the left. He is a creature of the left. It is, therefore, incumbent on the left to disown him and disabuse his ilk of the delusion that their darkest impulses are righteous.

 

We’re long past the point at which antisemitic violence can be explained away as a perverted manifestation of an otherwise noble cause. We’ve seen homes invaded by knife-wielding assailants because a mezuzah was affixed to their doorframe. We’ve witnessed murderous attacks on pro-Israeli demonstrators. We’ve seen marchers chant genocidal slogans as they march through Jewish neighborhoods. We’ve seen American campuses paralyzed, efforts to blockade bridges and highways, and dangerous attempts to disrupt air traffic in the name of a cause that takes explicit inspiration from Hamas’s “al-Aqsa Flood.” We’ve seen the attempt to burn a Jewish Democratic governor’s home to the ground with him and his family inside it.

 

This violence cannot be divorced from the attempts on Donald Trump’s life, nor should it be distinguished from acts of political terrorism with a right-wing valence. Radicalization doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it is a compounding phenomenon that feeds on the perceived and real threat posed by the radicals on the other side. Political violence begets more political violence, all the while the risk of a cascading spiral of vengeance and reprisals grows ever larger. We’re all obliged to be vigilant for and to police the passions that can manifest in bloodletting. That begins with rejecting the temptation to appropriate the zeal that animates those who could be stirred to violence, a test that both political coalitions are currently failing.

 

But at this moment, it’s the Democratic Party’s failure to check the intemperate sort on the fringes of its coalition that is the most urgent crisis facing the country. It does no one any favors to pretend otherwise. The threat is here, now. Terrorism isn’t somewhere over there; it’s on our doorstep. Today, we face the conundrum that the targets of terrorism always face: Do we defend ourselves by hardening every soft target, militarizing American life in ways that are equal parts onerous and unequal to the task, or do we go on offense and plug the font from which this violence springs? The answer seems obvious to me.