Maybe They Just Like Violence

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, December 10, 2024

 

Rich, Charlie, Jeff, and Jim have written astutely on the likely motives animating the ghouls who have, if not celebrated, found at least understandable the cold-blooded murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. As Jim observed, however, the righteous backstory the Left’s political entrepreneurs crafted for Thompson’s alleged killer doesn’t remotely resemble the suspect’s background. Indeed, the boutique but nevertheless coherent ideological affinities to which the shooter was supposed to subscribe don’t seem to match his addled thinking at all.

 

Maybe promoting a political outlook peculiar to the far left wasn’t the objective at all. Maybe the killer and those like him just like violence?

 

Cato Institute vice president Alex Nowrasteh recently ran across a spectacle and reacted to it in the only way a functional and productive member of civilized society should:

If the street-level activists on the left are now using lampposts to valorize a homicidal lunatic, it’s not much of a pivot. After all, these same characters spent the last year using lampposts for that same purpose. However, that expression of antisocial maladjustment took the form of taking posters down — specifically, those featuring the Jews who survived the October 7 massacre and were taken into Hamas’s custody.

 

The demonstrators who marched menacingly through Jewish neighborhoods in America chanting eliminationist slogans — “From the river to the sea,” “Long live the intifada,” and “There is only one solution” among them — did so with relative impunity and little in the way of repudiation from prominent Democratic lawmakers for months. Encountering little resistance, they intensified their campaign. Windows were smashed. Counter-demonstrators were attacked. Public property was occupied and vandalized. People were hospitalized and even killed amid the spasm of senseless violence unleashed by those who couldn’t stand to watch Israeli Jews defend themselves.

 

But not everyone thought these violent delights were so senseless. After all, the protesters “have a point,” according to the president — a legitimate grievance, the expression of which might sometimes take violent forms. In the effort to talk itself out of the instinctual moral revulsion we should expect from most who encounter irrational violence, Democrats invented an elaborate theoretical framework to which they insisted the demonstrators were beholden. But the protesters never displayed much in the way of deep geopolitical knowledge, and the more violent sort seemed animated more by their desire to break things and hurt people than to somehow engineer restorative outcomes in a conflict raging half a world away.

 

What seems to entice those who would clear their throats on behalf of the violent is the opportunity — any opportunity — to indulge in the notion that the United States is riven with Dickensian disparities and marred by systems of oppression that only their Jacobin bloodlust can remedy. We’ve been dealing with this phenomenon for years.

 

In a piece for Commentary published in 2019, I outlined how this campaign of excuse-making was applied to the thugs who had the temerity to call themselves “anti-fascists.”

 

Dartmouth College lecturer and “historian of human rights,” Mark Bray, has refashioned himself as America’s foremost Antifa apologist. In his book and in places like the Washington Post, he’s argued that “physical violence against white supremacists is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective.” The Nation’s Natasha Lennard has similarly praised this organization’s “militant left-wing and anarchist politics,” and mocked its critics as “civility-fetishizing” liberals who “cling to institutions.” Nor is Antifa alone in this campaign. A Mother Jones profile of the many left-of-center grassroots groups whose resistance “sometimes goes beyond nonviolent protest—including picking up arms” is anything but condemnatory.

 

Likewise, the arbiters of elite discourse treated Americans to a lecture about the understandable inducements to mass murder that Western society had imprudently imposed on the killers who descended on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015. How else should we expect devout Muslims to behave in a society that “valorizes free speech for its own sake and thus perversely values speech more the more pointlessly offensive it is,” the Daily Beast’s Arthur Chu asked. Months later, when Paris’s Bataclan Theater was attacked, then–secretary of state John Kerry mused that at least the killers had “a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, ‘Okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.’” It helped that, in both cases, the killers’ motives were assumed to align with the oppressor–oppressed paradigm to which the Left is partial.

 

In general, the actual killers or attempted murderers in these stories are immaterial to the narratives that get spun up around their actions. Indeed, the truth of these people tends to eventually conflict with the didactic story their whitewashers craft to justify the killers’ and would-be assailants’ actions.

 

It’s no wonder why more and more Americans fear political violence. They should.