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Conversations with Coleman
The Charlie Kirk Killing and America’s Forgotten History of Left-Wing Terror
01:02:21
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Noah Rothman. Noah is a senior writer at National Review and author of the new book Blood and A History of Left Wing Violence. In this episode, we talk about the assassinations of Charlie Kirk and the United Healthcare CEO. We also talk about the forgotten histories of terrorism in the anarchism and socialist movements in early 20th century America. And we talk about the memory holing of left wing violence in general. So without further ado, Noah Rothman. Okay, Noah Rothman, thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [00:44]
B
My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
- [00:47]
A
I think I. Did I have you on for, for your book Unjust many years ago, or did I just read that book and not have you on? I forget.
- [00:54]
B
I think you just read that book, which is really gratifying.
- [00:57]
A
Yeah, yeah, I did enjoy it. Yeah. But you have a new book out called Blood in Progress about left wing violence, and it couldn't have hit the shelves at a better time. What, when did you start working on this book and what, why are you focusing on violence from the left?
- [01:16]
B
Well, I've been writing about political violence for a long time. I write about things that freak me out. And political violence is something that I find uniquely unnerving. And I've been really focused on it, especially after 2015, 2016, when Donald Trump came on the scene and there was a just and due amount of opprobrium heaped on him and his campaign for entertaining the violent delights of some of the supporters of his movement who had just crawled out under a rock. And the president allowed for, I think, far too much license for those who were attracted to violence on his side of the aisle. But there was a reciprocal response from the political left, one that had been marinating for a very long time, that I'd also been chronicling for the better part of a decade and a half that got no coverage. The attacks on Donald Trump's supporters in places like San Jose, California, where they had their clothes ripped off their bodies, they had rocks hurled at their faces, were beaten bloody, police officers in Chicago assaulted outside our Trump rally that was subsequently closed down as a result. None of this generated anywhere near the amount of focus and attention that I thought it deserved, because I didn't think these two phenomena were extricable from one another. They were linked. Political violence on the right begets violence on the left. The political violence on the left begets violence on the right. And subsequently, the disparity that I noticed just became ever more pronounced because there was ever more incidences of left wing violence, after which we were repeatedly told that the American right is uniquely violent. It is the font from which all domestic political violence springs. So I wrote an essay for Commentary magazine. John Pot Horowitz commissioned it in the end of December of 2024, after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead in the streets. And the reaction to that was abhorrent. And it was indicative, in my view, of a level of tolerance for violence on the left that was growing because it was not being confronted, not by institutional forces in the media or in the Democratic Party's establishmentarian quarters. And when I sold the book I sold the book in June of last year, but it took a while to find somebody to endorse that project. And when I finally got a publisher, it was after Sarah Milgram and Yaron Leshinsky were shot dead on the street in front of a Jewish event by Elias Rodriguez. There's a textbook case. Marxian, inclined towards revolutionary violence, energized and enthused by Islamist radicalism. And the book was supposed to come out in October of this year, but we pushed the publication date up after Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September of 2025. So the book is bound up in bloodshed from beginning to end. It is a chronicle of America's descent into Emilieu that is, if not outright supportive of violence, at least finds instrumental utility in a certain level of political bloodshed. And it's just a horrifying prospect that I hope readers of Blood in Progress will be awakened to and resolve to confront with the aim of beating back this horrible tide.
- [04:30]
A
So given that you just continue condemned political violence on both sides in the context of 2016 and Trump, given that I condemn political violence on both sides of the aisle, why write a book specifically about one side? You're open to accusations of partisanship obviously by doing that, but what justifies the special focus on on one side?
- [04:55]
B
Well, folks who would render that claim would be guilty of judging a book by its cover, which most people tend to do. Don't judge a book by its cover is probably the least observed axiom in American intellectual life, but if they get to the end of the book, they will find that it is decidedly both sides ism. But there have been a dozen or more books written about and articles and blog posts and social media posts about how the American right is especially violent. You hear about it after a confirmed or suspected left wing assassination or assassination attempt, after a shooting or assault on an ICE or CBP facility, after the mob violence that descends almost nightly on Some American urban centers like Portland and Seattle and parts of Los Angeles. And the question is why? Why is it that so many are committed to retailing this notion, which is increasingly in conflict with the evidence of your own eyes that reflexes what Blood in Progress is about? And I look at not just the cascade of violent episodes, many of which, some of which you've probably already compartmentalized, even having lived through them, putting them in a timeline, a beat by beat, moment by moment set of conditions here is really sobering in my view. And if you look at the last 125 years or so, as I do, American history is peppered with anarchistic and socialistic episodes of violence, terroristic campaigns, ideologically motivated campaigns. They tend to come in waves. They did so in the we experienced one in the 1910s and 1920s, 1970s, 1980s, 2010s, 2020. And I don't think this is an obscure history. I believe this is a suppressed history. It is suppressed through mis. Misapplied and misclassified data sets which purport to claim that the American right is uniquely violent in contrast with the left. It is advanced by an academic culture that applies a stigma to the research into left wing violent extremism. There is a smoking gun document that I describe in the book prepared for the Department of homeland security in 2021, in which researchers into this field describe social isolation from their colleagues, the threat of physical retribution for doing this work. To say nothing of the fact that many who focus on the study of left wing violent extremists extremism are themselves left wing extremists. They are members of the movements that they claim to be studying with a critical eye. This whole enterprise has been rendered fatally subjective. And it's desperate, desperate, important, desperately important, and an acute problem that needs to be remedied in this country because. Because we have a metastasizing problem of left wing violent extremism. And it is reciprocal. Violent extremism feeds on the notion that it is meting out retribution against its adversaries. Those who are inclined towards that outlook believe the state is on the side of their adversaries, both left and right. And so they take inspiration from their side and they resolve to mete out vengeance against the other. So you really can't get your hands around the problem of political violence in this country by looking at only one side of the equation. And that's what we have been doing for far too long. And the violence has only been getting worse as a result. So I'm hoping blood in Progress reorients the national conversation away from this finger pointing exercise and towards more productive solutions.
- [08:29]
A
Okay, so let's start with Charlie Kirk. What's really puzzling about the Charlie Kirk discourse is that usually when there is a political shooting, the side that is the victim of the political shooting is all too eager to point to the fact that the shooter belongs to Democratic Party ideology, progressive ideology, or vice versa. Right. If it's a right wing shooter, Democrats are all too eager to point out that the guy was a Trump supporter to score political points. And in the case of Charlie Kirk, literally within 24 hours, we had very strong evidence that the person who killed him was motivated by a kind of anti bigotry ideology. Right. The notion that Charlie was an anti gay or anti trans bigot. Everyone in the person's family, everyone who knew this person was saying this, they've been getting more and more left wing recently, especially with respect to LGBTQ issues. And yet instead of doing the sort of the. The typical move, which is, you know, this is a problem of the left, what too many people on the right did is somehow bend themselves into pretzels to blame Israel or, or Jews in some way. Right? So what went wrong here?
- [09:58]
B
So in my view, that reaction was a little delayed. And you're talking about some really notorious bad faith actors like Candace Owens and others who are beholden to a very online audience. And one of the points that I make at the outset of this book where I describe the Charlie Kirk aftermath, is that the nation reacted to this trauma that we were all forced to witness in a really salutary way. The vast, vast majority of this country responded to it like it was a trauma, had vigils and remembrances and interrupted concerts and major MLB games and race NASCAR events and what have you to observe solemnly and remember solemnly that which would have just happened. There was, however, the first reaction that I remember encountering was an effort to obfuscate on the left and in media. It came in the form of the notion being retailed by very major figures that this guy was likely a groper, likely on the side of the very people you're describing. And if he wasn't on their side, then maybe he had no motives at all. CBS News retailed the notion that this guy was just in love with violence for violence's sake and couldn't possibly have any sort of discernible agenda, all of which designed, in my view, to retail and reinforce the notion that the American right is uniquely violent when compared with the left. And by the end of two weeks or so, YouGov had a poll out that indicated a plurality of Americans believed that Charlie Kirk was killed by a right winger. That was the goal of this campaign.
- [11:34]
A
So, but remind me, wasn't it true that like within 24 hours we had the engravings on the bullet cases?
- [11:40]
B
Oh, yeah, the gray hats, the text
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A
messages to his roommate, all of which painted a totally crystal clear picture that this was a person with left wing
- [11:50]
B
political beliefs, to say nothing of Governor Spencer Cox saying as much, that he was inclined towards left wing ideology. And prosecutors who subsequently within a week, retailed the evidence that they had which indicated that this guy was marinated in left wing ideology and resolved to mete out violence in accordance with that ideology. There's no minimization, Coleman, of what you're describing on the right. That reaction on the right, what I remember it as being much more opportunistic and slightly more delayed in pursuit of what I can only imagine are the foreign dollars that are associated with retailing these anti Israeli fictions that generate a lot of traction online and in the podcast universe, but don't seem to have too much traction here in the real world. By contrast, that notion that Charlie Kirk was killed by a right winger is almost surely still believed by a lot of people because initial impressions are hard to get rid of. And creating the conditions in which that initial erroneous impression would proliferate and latch onto, embed itself in the minds of as many Americans as possible was the initial reaction of major establishmentarian forces in this country, institutional forces in this country, in the press and in politics.
- [13:06]
A
I mean, I think in your book you cite like the Harvard professor Lawrence Tribe was saying this and you know, to say nothing of Jimmy Kimmel, which I think, you know, I don't remember when Jimmy Kimmel show aired after the Charlie Kirk murder, if it was like, like within 24 hours or a few days later.
- [13:23]
B
But if I recall correctly, it was almost a week later.
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A
It was almost a week later.
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B
Subsequently a weekend elapsed and he came back when it became a controversy that Monday and doubled down on this initial erroneous impression.
- [13:35]
A
So something about this episode is particularly depressing for me and what it says about how people consume information, how our fractured media landscape leads to just bald faced, ridiculous lies, not differences of opinion, but just straight up media echo chamber nonsense that never gets corrected because this was just one of the most open and shut cases of, I mean, compare it to the United, United Healthcare shooting, right? Like that guy was at large for, for how long? I forget, almost a week. Almost a week. Right. So we knew who killed Charlie Kirk and why he was killed within 24 hours. And yet there were two competing stupidities on the right and the left. The left being that somehow, because his parents were. Were probably Republicans or conservatives, that therefore he was a conservative. Which is an argument I've never heard made ever in the history of American political stupidity. Right. Like the idea that your politics are whatever your parents are.
- [14:39]
B
Yeah.
- [14:40]
A
Regardless of what you actually believe or how you depart from them is something certainly Jimmy Kimmel wouldn't agree with in the abstract. But. But that was almost the argument he was making on air. And then the competing stupidity, which has survived to this day on the right, which is that we weren't really allowed to look into Charlie Kirk's murder. There's a lot of red flags, and he was buckling on Israel support, and that's why he was killed. It says something deeply damning about the information pipeline. People are receiving that. That in. In a case where there was genuinely no cause for ambiguity. So, like, consider the JFK case. Like, there's like, these weird things, like his head jerked in a weird way, and there's all. All of. All of these reasons that a normal person might look at that not knowing very much and say, okay, there's something suspicious here with Charlie Kirk. There was nothing like that. And yet you have the American population fracture into these echo chambers of total nonsense. And it's a very depressing statement on the modern political landscape.
- [15:56]
B
Yeah. When it comes to episodes of really traumatic modern political violence, the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson's assassination, alleged murder by Luigi Mangione, is really illustrative of that, in my view, because there's this thing that happens, and it's on the left and the right in particular. But with respect to these fractured audiences and these atomized and siloed media environments, there's this it's not happening and it's good that it's happening dynamic. So in mixed company, you'll hear, oh, yeah, murder's horrible. And yeah, this act of human sacrifice in pursuit of political goals, that's not what we're about. But in friendlier venues or perceived, what are perceived to be liberal silos, you had an, if not sympathy, outright celebration for the slaughter of this father of two. His name, Luigi Mangione's name, was cheered on Saturday Night Live. They put his face up in concerts, and the concerts would roar with applause. They would sell those. The slogans that were on his bullet casings on esty and merchandise that did A lot and went pretty well. You know, there's this Shine retailer who used AI images of Luigi Mangione to sell floral T shirts to teenagers. His face was on prayer candles blasphemously. And then you had the reaction of Democratic political figures, leading lights like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Elizabeth Warren and others, Chris Murphy, all of whom condemned the murder. But they added a very pregnant but on the end of that condemnation, which renders everything that came before it perfunctory and dismissible. And the but is, well, you have to understand that everybody's angry. You have to understand that the health care system in this country is broken. When it comes to Bernie Sanders. It wasn't just the healthcare system. It was. The education system is broken, the finance system is broken, the housing system is broken, the election system is broken. This country is broken. And what they want, or what they're at least willing to entertain in the violent, revolutionary Marxian left that exists on the fringes but is nevertheless increasingly being welcomed out from the cold is this conception that you see across history from the 1910s and 1920s to today, which is this delusion on the part of those who will engage in violence for political causes that one galvanizing act of violence could really ignite the revolution. If we can demonstrate that the God bleeds, that, that these people are vulnerable to the kind of social upheaval that would finally deliver unto them that which is their due comeuppance, then the American people would rise up and engineer the revolution that they so desperately want but don't have permission to pursue. That is the delusion to which the revolutionary Marxian left, from time immemorial, has been beholden to. And it's what fuels quite a lot of the violence of our age, the politically inspired violence of our age.
- [18:58]
A
So your book goes into the history of left wing violence and there's a lot in there that I did not know about before reading your book. Before we get into the specific examples, I want to ask you about the memory holding of left wing violence in general. There is, I think, a real phenomenon where, wherein, you know, examples of left wing violence are just not durably remembered in the way that examples of right wing violence are. I think they make a big splash at the time, but, you know, set your watch for 10 or 20 years and very few people remember them. They're just less a part of the national discourse. And people that weren't alive at the time. Right, set your clock for one or two generations. People certainly are less likely to hear about them from their school textbook or just from the way that, you know, from Hollywood movies. But the reverse is not true for right wing violence. I mean, they tend to be remembered more. So we're going to get into some examples that I think will bear this out for most listeners. Like, I assume most listeners are not going to be aware of many of these examples. But what explains the general memory holding to the extent that that's true? Is it just the fact that most academics. There is a left leaning tendency in academia and in all the institutions that are responsible for creating historical memory in the American population?
- [20:33]
B
Well, it would be hard to describe or ascribe motives to the individuals who are engaging in this memory holding, because I'm sure they abound and every individual is a unique little snowflake and maybe has its own particular motives doing so. Perhaps just disinterest or general or the incentive structure is not conducive to that kind of study. Either way, the effect is the same, that these eras have been forgotten according to their scholars who are very recently digging them up. And I say recently because it's just been basically this century that this research has been done. But if we're talking about the last 120 years, I think that's relatively recent. And yeah, the terrorist wave of the 1910s and 1920s has been forgotten according to their chroniclers. And indeed there's a linguistic, an anachronistic linguistic convention that we're still saddled with that aids them in the effort to consign that to the mystic cords of memory. Because these people were anarchists, they were self described anarchists. If you actually review what they wanted and thought and the people with whom they socialized, they were as socialistic and communistic as the self described socialists. Where they differed with the socialists was on the speed with which the state could dissolve after the revolution and the need for violence to beget the revolution. But even today, the FBI uses as its term of art anarchistic, violent extremism as the term to capture most, if not all, but most left wing politically inspired violence. The right has its own categories, but that one is the one that captures a lot of left wing violence. And yet, you know, modern democrats and modern socialists get to say, like, what does anarchism have to do with us? We want a bigger role for the state, they want no state. These two things are distinct only when they get in front of a mixed company behind closed doors. These distinctions, particularly tactical distinctions, because that's mostly what they are, not programmatic. They tend to Dissolve. But also, you know, 1910s, 1920s, forgotten. The nationalistic wave, the Puerto Rican independence wave, for example, in which nationalist elements attempted to assassinate Harry Truman, shot up Congress, and I think 1954, forgotten. The Marxian guerrilla movements of the late 1960s, 70s and early 1980s, forgotten, according to the chroniclers. Again, there's like a, you can see a through line here developing. You're beginning to get a sense of deja vu. And I can't tell you why these waves have been memory hold as they were, but I can tell you what the consequences are is that the generations that come after, as you said, have no immunity to this sort of thing because they have no experience with it. So it all comes as a surprise, even though you see remarkable similarities across the historical record in these varying waves of politically inspired left wing terroristic violence designed to intimidate and to, in the minds of the delusional thinkers who engage in political violence to beget positive social change. That's the sort of thing that the Democratic Party is very attracted to. They're attracted to people power and they don't want you to rethink the utility of setting and entertaining the mobs that glut the streets every decade or so. They fall for them every single time. And it's about time that they confront the degree to which they just refuse to acknowledge that these people are not on their side. Anybody who engages in violence in pursuit of political ends is not on your side. I really hope this book popularizes that notion.
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A
Yeah. So what's wrong with the theory I sketched out briefly? Just that all the institutions that preserve and transmit historical memory. If you think of like, how do you learn about history as an average Joe in America, you learn about it through the textbooks you grew up with. What your teachers told you was also what your parents told you, which varies a lot from family to family. But that's endogenous because they learned about history through the same institutions. There's also. Hollywood films are a big transmitter of history, usually distorted. The occasional documentary. All of those institutions, if they're left leaning, are going to, without even trying to overlook examples of left wing violence and be motivated to preserve and transmit historical examples of right wing violence. Right. So isn't it just downstream of the general left leaning nature of most American institutions?
- [25:08]
B
Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with that theory. It sounds right to me. I mean, you just had that hit movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, who was, you know, an unreconstructed, basically a weatherman. A Marxian terrorist who had, you know, been left behind by his movement. And it was a sympathetic portrayal. I mean, it wasn't hardly condemnatory. But these people are complicated figures who deserve to be explored in the breadth of the humanity that they bring to the table. Which is fine and you know, true to a certain extent. Again, we're all human beings, but, but there's an element of sympathy for the cause, the zeal, the romance of a commitment to political reform and revolutionary political reform that is so total that it is willing to engage in violence in the pursuit of those outcomes and the creation of a better world. And there's a lot of sympathy for that on the American left. They are romantics in their soul and see in the expression of violent passions an element of commitment to a cause that they themselves are committed to and perhaps are willing to overlook a little bit of extremism in the pursuit of a good cause. I think that theory is perfectly fine
- [26:25]
A
and often it's not even a full fledged cause so much as a generic emotional resentment of a particular class of people. Right. So if you look at the United Healthcare shooting, there's really no, there's no coherent anti health insurance cause. Right. You read his manifesto, it's clear he doesn't understand much or have the solution to America's, you know, which I would fully acknowledge, like it's, it's, it's really annoying. And to interface with the American, the interlocking set of systems that we call healthcare and health insurance, it's like it can be a nightmare. Although you shouldn't, you shouldn't gloss over the fact that it can be a nightmare for different reasons. In all of the countries that we, that the left would point to as examples, like if you speak to a Canadian or, or someone in the uk, they can give you horror stories that are of a different flavor and have a lot more to do with, you know, waiting eight hours for an ambulance to arrive or waiting eight months for a medical procedure that's free. Right. So there are trade offs, trade offs abound. But the United Healthcare shooting, it wasn't like he was articulating a philosophy or a movement that is actually real. He was articulating a generic resentment towards a class of people, which is to say anyone making money off of the healthcare system. I mean, he chose insurance companies for reasons that were never clear to me, given that like their profit margins aren't that high and there's like a lot of other nodes in the, in the healthcare system which would seem equally illegitimate targets by the Same logic, but it's really just like a generic resentment of a certain class of people.
- [28:12]
B
Yeah. And there's a theme in this book. It is that flattening individuals and their unique histories and their capacity for individual agency and flattening them out into a category and rendering them avatars of a particular class really greases the skids for political violence. That's the first step in dehumanizing your target and thus rendering them, you know, attempting focus of your violent hostilities. And you know the reaction to that. And there's always an audience for political violence, even the deluded, and they are all to some degree deluded. If you believe that an act of political bloodshed, step, step, step, begets positive social change, positive political reforms. You've elided a lot of things that happen in the interim and are succumbing in some way to disordered thinking. But the disordered thinker can have as broad an impact on history as a clear eyed ideologue if they engage in violence like this. And the design is to galvanize an audience, as I said. And how did the audience react to this sort of thing? Well, we saw just recently outside the courthouse where Luigi Mangioni is on trial, some of his supporters. He does have supporters. They're very vocal and not coy about it to the benefit of us who actually want to hear precisely what these people think so that we can refute it. And it reminded me of this old David Horowitz quote, who was a contemporary of the Weather Underground and a chronicler of their pathologies, who said, summarizing in an SDS radical, that the issue is never the issue. The issue is the revolution. It doesn't matter what the galvanizing incident is. The issue is always to overturn the existing social order and replace it with something that's much more retributive. And that's what we heard outside that courthouse. A young lady by the name of Lena Weinbrot is a very highly educated person, received a lot of scholarships over her lives, invested in the arts. You know, Jemmins said this killing should have ignited a revolution. We are the most cowed and subservient population in the history of the planet. Any other society would have overturned the existing power structures by now. And this is our lot, and we are just resigned to it. We should be having a revolution. And that to me, crystallized pretty much most of the reaction that you heard from the far engaged, far, far left in this country that this act of bloodshed might have been lamentable in its particulars but as an abstract force that might foment social change. Wow. It's quite useful. And it accompanies one of the more disturbing elements that we've seen in this recent wave of left wing violence that is very similar to what we saw in the 1910s and 20s from the anarchists and the Marxian guerrillas in the 70s. And that is assaults on police officers, attacks on police officers, efforts to kill police officers, the attacks on ICE and CBP facilities last year, some of which featured pretty sophisticated ambush tactics. There was One attack in McLaren, Texas, I believe, where about 10 individuals who were associated with a anarchistic far left outfit and left propaganda posters to that effect about the onset of the proletarian revolution behind them. They used fireworks to draw their targets out and then fired on them from overlapping fields. Overlapping fields of fire, which is some pretty sophisticated ambush tactics. And that's the sort of thing that you did see when this country was beset by small cell anarchistic and socialistic terrorism in the 70s. And even the people who lived through it don't remember how incredibly violent it was. Not just the high profile assassinations, there were bombings in this country to the tune of 100 a week or so for, for years. And it just became background radiation. We have an incredible capacity to compartmentalize trauma and not revisit it when we don't want to. That's like a human evolutionary trait, but it is exploited by those who, whose political interests are advanced by our forgetting and don't want us to remember. My goal with blood and progress is to get us to remember.
- [32:29]
A
Yeah, so. So tell me about the Preparedness Day terror attack. I had, I had not heard of this. And it's, it was quite big.
- [32:37]
B
It was incredibly big. Yeah. In the Wilson years, in the months preceding American involvement In World War I, there were preparedness Day events held throughout the country. In cities across America. Preparedness Day meant that you were prepared to engage in the coming war. And they were kind of competitive spectacles where everybody would engage in really performative patriotism and try to out patriotism. The other city, San Francisco, was just one of these unimaginable.
- [33:07]
A
Today probably there's no Preparedness Day for the Iran war, let's put it that way.
- [33:13]
B
Yeah, but it wasn't, I mean this was the Wilson era. So we should be careful about giving too much credit to the Wilsonian objective here, which was very militaristic and statist in his own fashion. But yeah, there was a, there was an anarchistic bombing there associated with the Guyanists. Luigi Gayani was the spiritual leader of this relatively leaderless anarchistic sect, most of whom were Italian immigrants. And the preparedness day bombing was an incredibly bloody spectacle in which men, women and children were slaughtered as a result of this explosive device that was planted right on the side of the road. And it's just one of dozens of really violent terroristic attacks by the anarchists, the far left anarchists in that period, some of which would have been history altering had they succeeded. There was one in Chicago where a gentleman by the name of Nestor Dondaglio had infiltrated a state dinner that was being held by Chicago luminaries, the former Illinois governors, current Illinois governors, Chicago mayor, head of the Catholic church in Chicago, dozens of functionaries and dignitaries, all of whom attended this dinner. That was subsequently where Don d' Oglio poisoned the soup and everybody succumbed to poisoning. If he had used a little less cyanide than he did, if there hadn't been a doctor present who administered and a mustard amnetic, they would have been a decapitation strike on some of the leading lights of Chicago. It might have been one of the worst, most high profile mass murder events in American history. It didn't succeed because the guy used too much poison and most everybody purged it from their systems before they could succumb to it. But it was just one of many high profile attacks. The highest profile that is still somewhat remembered, but only dimly, is the Wall street bombing in September of 1920, which killed dozens and was a shock to the American senses because at the time there had been decades of labor unrest and violent confrontations between labor and labor activists and police going all the way back to the Haymarket riot of 1886. So Americans have become kind of inured to it. But what that was was an attack on civilians just who happened to be passersby. It was aimed at the financial class, but it killed couriers, it killed bag boys, it killed mailmen, it killed people walking to lunch. And it was regarded as a real shock to the system, which is perhaps why it's still only dimly remembered today. Also, at the outset of the Roaring twenties, it didn't derail America's pathway to prosperity and relative, I say relative peace. After the subsidence of a lot of this very violent labor unrest and subsequent bombings every other week or so. And that proved to be the apex of anarchistic socialistic terrorism in the pre war period in this country. It would return with a vengeance just 30 years later.
- [36:33]
A
I want to tell you about a podcast I think you're going to appreciate. It's called Unpacking Israeli History. If you follow the news about Israel, you're just getting headlines. But headlines are just a tiny slice of a long, complicated and genuinely fascinating story. One of the things I care about on this show is engaging seriously with complexity rather than flattening it. That's exactly what host Dr. Noam Weissman does on Unpacking Israeli History. He dives deep into the events, the people, and the moments that shaped Israel past and present, with genuine empathy and a willingness to explore multiple perspectives. And when he brings in guests like philosopher Micah Goodman or journalist Haviv Retsigor, they add real depth to the conversation. It's deeply researched storytelling for people who want to understand Israel rather than just confirm what they already think. In today's climate, that's rare and it matters. Find Unpacking Israeli History on your favorite podcast app or YouTube and subscribe today. So how and why did the pro labor, the violent wing of the pro labor movement, how did that violence subside?
- [37:45]
B
Well, again, I think my theory is that the country was genuinely repulsed by the Wall street bombing as a display of the excesses of the anarchistic movement and a demonstration that they really meant it when they said there are no innocents. A lot of people could compartmentalize that as just hot talk, hot rhetoric. And most of their targets were police, government officials, clergy within the Catholic Church. So they were targeted terrorists. And so most Americans probably didn't believe they had a target on their back and could perceived themselves to be genuinely safe from threat no longer after that 1920 bombing. And they lost a lot of taste for it. Law enforcement had rolled up through some pretty unsavory tactics. The Palmer raids of 1919, 1920, had rolled up a lot of innocent people, but also a lot of people who were attracted to anarchistic and socialistic terrorists. And the inefficacy of this terror campaign in concert with increased law enforcement pressure led a lot of these movements to dissolve and a lot of the anarchistic terrorists of that period self deported back to Italy. Mario Budda, who was likely the executor of that 1920 Wall street bombing, and Luigi Gianni himself both returned to Italy and lived in relative obscurity until their both of their deaths. So the wave itself dissolved by virtue of external pressure and internal pressure. And that's pretty much the story of the Marxian guerrilla movements as well. That the tools that law enforcement has on hand are sufficient to meet the threat. They just have to be applied and applied consistently.
- [39:35]
A
Isn't there Also an element that the, the, the violent faction has to lose legitimacy among the, the population it seeks to represent. Or even better yet, if it never had that much legitimacy to begin with, then there's, there's, there's a time limit on its, on its, its energy. Right. I mean if you think about the Puerto Rican case, which again is one of these, that people, people just don't realize how much Puerto Rican independence terror there was in the 1970s. It was maybe the, the responsible for the highest number of bombings in the 70s. Is that right?
- [40:13]
B
Of any, I don't think highest number, but probably deadliest. The F was probably, probably had the highest body count of all the guerrilla Marxist Marxian guerrilla terrorist movements of that period. And a lot of them have tendrils linking back to Moscow. The Puerto Rican independence movement was a project of the kgb. It wasn't completely inorganic, but it was fueled and sponsored in some ways, as documents demonstrate, by Soviet elements that saw it as an opportunity to fracture political stability within the United States and exacerbate tensions in the territories.
- [40:55]
A
Yeah, and my, I think one of the takeaways from that is that, you know, we have many, many plebiscites of Puerto Ricans going back to 1967 and the independence vote has never gotten higher than 5%. So it's like that probably understates a little bit the level of sympathy for Puerto Rican terrorists in Puerto rico in the 70s. But as a measure of how many Puerto Ricans actually agreed and wanted their political project for Puerto Rico, it says something about the lack of legitimacy that they ever had with, with the Puerto Rican population. And you know that, that has, I think, something to do with why it faded.
- [41:42]
B
Right.
- [41:42]
A
Like if you never had more than 5% support among your people, there's just only so much energy and so many new recruits that, that you can hope to, hope to sustain over the long run.
- [41:54]
B
I think that's a really good point that the violent activists go just a step further than the people who they think are on their side and they still think they're on their side. Right. So there's systemic oppression out there, Right? Right. These people are behind the systemic oppression. Right? Right. So we should take a sledgehammer to the foundations of this wholly immoral system and bring it down and erect a communist dictatorship around it. Right? Whoa, whoa, whoa, guy, you just jumped way ahead of the queue here. But yeah, I think that probably is the logic to which they commit themselves or at least work themselves into. And they also cloister within like minded groups and self radicalize in these siloed by their own lights, siloed holdouts. Because these are lawless individuals who perceive themselves to be underground. You know, Luigi Gayani's men were underground. They invented the concept of underground. The Weather Underground did not. They borrowed that tactic from communist guerrilla movements that preceded them. So, yeah, they just don't have a lot of access to or exposure to countervailing narratives within their own political tribe. And the people who would be ostensibly on their side, they think would be on their side at the outset of the revolution. So, yeah, exposure to counter narratives from people who are sympathetic to the cause, as it were, does probably have a dampening effect on the enthusiasm for political violence.
- [43:27]
A
Talk to me a bit about the Weather Underground. What was that organization? What were their goals? What were their tactics?
- [43:34]
B
This was a. It's probably the most famous, but by no means the most effective of the late 60s 1970s Marxist guerrilla movements. This was a splinter group within the Students for a Democratic Society, which was the outlet that wrote the Port Huron statement in 1962, which is just really kind of a humanist document, relatively banal. But this organization got increasingly radicalized over the course of the 1960s. Very anti war by the end of the 1960s and very admiring of black liberation movements like the Black Panthers. And so within it you had this constellation of political philosophies. Some of them were just liberal, center left. Some of them were outright Marxists and communists. And then within that ecosystem there was sort of a nebulous but very radical element that was very admiring of the Black Panthers. Did want to see violence meted out against cops in particular. And they had a lot of friction with the liberals and the communists as well. They didn't fit with either group. And they managed to form sort of this insurgent outfit at one of the SDS conferences and organized the expulsion of the Marxian communists and subsequently the diminution of the authority of the liberals. And so they emerged.
- [45:02]
A
Why didn't they fit with the communists?
- [45:05]
B
The communists were much more so. They were themselves far left communists. What became the Weather Underground out of this conference. But they had tactical distinctions that they were frustrated with when it comes to the Communists. The communists wanted a real proletarian movement akin to the Soviet bureaucracy. They wanted to seize the means of production. And the SDS wanted to foment the revolution in other ways in much more violent ways. So it was a tactical disagreement. Much the same way the anarchists and the socialists kind of disagreed over really highly theoretical and very abstract communist philosophy elements of the revolution and how we would get there, all agreeing that ultimately we would have something akin to a dictatorship of the proletariat, if not a stateless proletarian regime. So, yeah, there was this friction within the sds. What became Weather Underground emerged from this friction and they sort of suffocated sds. SDS basically ceased to exist after they captured it. There was a shadow SDS that existed for a little bit and then mostly dissolved. And the Weather Underground resolved to protest. At first, disruptive protests, violent protests, throw rocks at windows, you can clash with police, what have you. But it didn't evolve into a terroristic mode where literally went underground and executed bombing campaigns targeting police and the military only after it became clear that they didn't have enough support. Really weird. They tried very hard to galvanize a big mass movement and just could not attract any proletarians, any true working class supporters, and not nearly the number of students that they thought they would. So they too resolved. Like Lena Weinbrot outside the trial of Luigi Mangioni. We're just too subservient. We are too cowed. We are too inured to our conditions. We are not possessed of the sufficient consciousness necessary to rebel against our own oppressors. Therefore, we should galvanize that sort of sentiment with some real cathartic bloodletting. And I think that was the thought process that led to what was a very violent and in many ways successful because it was well known. The Weather Underground was again, probably the most famous of all these groups, but it wasn't the most effective. There was a Keystone Cops version of a terroristic outfit, the faln, the Black Liberation army, the New World Order. All these groups from the 1970s were more successful at executing these bombings. Even Sam Melville, who was the inspiration for a lot of this stuff and just attacked targets that were really familiar to Marxian guerrilla movements like the United Fruit Company. They were attempted to bomb the United Fruit Company, Sam Melville, and failed because the United Fruit Company had moved from this warehouse that he thought they were at. So then he selected another target that was. That turned out to be a bank. But he only selected it because it looked bank like from the facade. You know, these people, they have sort of a fragmentary understanding of their oppressors as they see them, of the targets of their hostility. They don't really know enough about them, don't really want to know enough about them. And they aren't especially attractive to a broader universe of spectators, which is good and desirable even today. The finger pointing exercise where you say the right is especially violent, not like the left. Implicit in that is the taboo around political violence, that that's a bad thing, to be violent in service to political ends. That's good. I can work with that. I can take that stigma and breathe new life into it and apply it universally. And that's what I hope this book attempts to do. But the Weather Underground types and the anarchistic types, and even today, the Occupy Wall street types and the George Floyd mob types, they perceive that these elements of destabilizing, possibly violent social friction are going to beget positive social change. And too many people don't disabuse them of that notion. I think they think that it's a useful idea. Just they have a lot of energy. What if we could harness it and direct it towards productive and positive ends? And all of that's a misconception. Anyone who is attracted to disordered thinking like that, to the notion that violence will beget positive social change, is not going to be on your side. In fact, they're a detriment to your political success. And I just hope to popularize that notion. It seems intuitive to me, but very few seem to agree.
- [50:00]
A
How should we understand the violence of the late sixties in northern urban black ghettos? In other words, part of the puzzle of explaining that is that they happened right after really the great successes of the civil rights movement. And you would think, wow, after the nation has come on this journey and finally achieved multiracial democracy, Jim Crow has been destroyed, schools have been integrated, or in the process of being integrated. At that moment, you at least expect a massive upswelling of anger and frustration among African Americans. But that's when you get it.
- [50:46]
B
That's interesting. Well, I mean, a lot of that violence preceded, for example, the Civil Rights Act. There was plenty of urban riots, race riots in the country in 1963, in 1964, and 1965, but the real big ones are in 1966, 67, and 68. But it isn't until after all of that subsides that you get the Weather Underground. 69 is when the Weather Underground emerges. And the big terror groups that we remember are the 1970s and even the late 70s and early 1980s. So, yeah, the militancy that resembles left wing terroristic political violence follows that. But the SDS and the Weather Underground took a lot of inspiration from the race riots in the country at the time. Not just because it was a desirable cause. And the cause of racial rapprochement. And eliminating institutional racism from the country was something that really fueled their activism, deservedly so. But they related to it in a very opportunistic way too, and said as much out loud that in the ashes of America's cities the seeds of revolutionary fervor can take root and bloom into this new socialistic social contract that we hope to create. So in some ways they perceived the race riots of the period not to be an expression of pent up frustration with the country that was desirable and needed to be expressed and obviously and then mitigated. They didn't want to see it mitigated. They want to see it used as an accelerant to create the conflagration that they wanted so that the conflagration could clear the space for an entirely new social contract. So they saw it more as an instrument than necessarily an expression of the human desire for freedom and flourishing.
- [52:48]
A
How should we understand Portland and Seattle today? In particular, the popularity of antifa, the seeming tolerance for the violent acts of antifa members. Why does it take place in those two cities in particular to such a degree and what's going on there with the wider population and the tolerance of it?
- [53:12]
B
Well, it takes place all over, but it is regular there to an extent that you would think would be anathema. The population looks beyond it, the population is permissive towards it, and the political leaders there are responsive to that sentiment. There is a broad generalized assessment assumption rather on the part of residencies there, residents there and political leaders there, that that kind of lawlessness, and it is often lawlessness and that kind of vandalism, and it's often, it's often that. And sometimes it's assaults on police stations and police officers and certainly federal law enforcement officers, that it's just kind of a quirky feature of the urban scene that like this is, this is what real life is like in American cities. At least that's how they defend it to people who are skeptical.
- [54:02]
A
Sort of like the Seth Rogen comment. I can't remember when he made this, but Seth Rogen was like about carjackings. Well, look, if you, if you live in a big city, your car is going to get jacked every once in a while, right? Like the multi million dollar actor telling everyone, well, you know, if you live in San Francisco, yeah, you're gonna have to take a couple carjackings to the face. And that's that. That's what that is.
- [54:23]
B
Yeah. And you also. And yeah, precisely. And then they sort of, if you push them on that one, right, they'll say, well, what is, what's the Motive of the carjacker. I mean, where does the carjacker come from? These probably impoverished. He was probably denied opportunities in his life due to systemic forces. He's a victim of the capitalist, the rapacious capitalist enterprise, of course, as we all are. So maybe he's not the perpetrator at all. Maybe he's the victim, and maybe you're not the victim at all. Maybe you're the perpetrator, being a participant in this rapacious capitalist enterprise yourself and benefiting from all its, you know, all the beneficences that have been bestowed on you by cosmic forces, none of which you contributed to in any meaningful way. You just sort of tripped and fell into this privilege of yours and should probably be stripped of it or at least a little defensive of it, knowing that others don't have it and are willing to take it from you. This is the sort of mindset that gets you into the place where you have the progressive prosecutor project in which DAs across this country decided to stop prosecuting crime. Not just quality of life crimes either, but real violent crimes, based on the presumption that the perpetrator was himself a victim of the system and that the justice system itself is imperfect or indeed incapable of serving as a neutral and dispassionate conflict resolution mechanism. So all this stuff works you into this mindset in which you create a structure that helps you rationalize violence and criminality and then have no perception of the fact that maybe the people on the other side of that thing will resent that and resent the extent to which the state doesn't seem to care about their family's safety or their safety at all. And they will resolve at that point to take matters into their own hands. People don't just sit back passively and absorb this sort of thing. And that gets you to a place that really freaks me out. The prospect of vigilantism becoming something that's a much broader feature, bigger feature of American public life. These cascading series of reprisals and retributions that really could consign this country to a Hobbesian ordeal. And I realize that we're not there yet. And in fact, the violence that we're experiencing in this particular wave is nothing like the violence we experienced in the 70s or the 1910s and 1920s. But that doesn't mean we won't get there. And the quickening pace of these episodes does have the potential. One of them does have the potential to have a galvanizing effect. The president has been the target of mature assassination Plots not once, not twice, but thrice. We've been lucky, but our luck won't hold out forever. And the nature of this threat environment is so significant, so pronounced, that lawmakers who are on the other end of it, judges, public officials, civil servants, some of them are altering their behaviors, even altering their votes, according to the allegations that I discuss in this book, in accordance with the threat environment. That is a really undesirable place to be, and I would call it a terroristic campaign, just by virtue of the definition of the word. Because what is the desire of terrorism but to alter behaviors based on the presence of menace and the threat of force? It is effectively terrorization. And if your behavior is altered by the threat of violence, you are terrorized. That's the place we're in today.
- [57:50]
A
Okay, so final question. How should we address these politically motivated lone wolf killers like Luigi Mangione, Tyler Robinson, etc. Is the why is the wise strategy to not talk about their names and show their faces and read their manifestos, or do we have to do that as a matter of journalistic duty?
- [58:20]
B
I think some of us have to, but some of us have to do that with a critical eye. It's a balance. You don't want to make celebrities of these people, and I'm cautious about using their names only in the context necessarily of their thinking. But. But I think it's important to expose their delusion and call it their delusion. It would be. I can understand the impulse to say, well, these people are obviously crazy, and to a certain degree I agree, but there's nothing to be gleaned there. Because if we cede that to motivated actors who are inclined to lend credibility to the claims retailed by the politically motivated violent actors on the left and the right, then there's no counter narrative out there. And the people who are attracted to that thought process don't have anybody out there giving them a critical reflection on why it doesn't make any sense. Why? The Unabomber manifesto, for example, is lunatic nonsense. Like, it's the sort of thing that needs to be engaged with in a critical way because it's already being engaged with by the people who are attracted to it. So I'm of two minds on that. I can kind of understand why you'd want to consign these people to ignominy and just anonymity into the future, but that will just create space for those who want to create a cult around them, create a martyrdom around them to do that unmolested. And there are far too many cults around, just naked criminals, just basic criminals who have become causes celeb for the far left. Leonard Peltier is one. Mumia Abu Jamal is another. Assata Shakur is another. Under the surface of this country, there's a lot of reverence for these people, and there shouldn't be. And there has to be somebody out there willing to say that, because the other side is far too willing to. To retail their revisionist history in order to make space for more violent radicals to emerge.
- [60:30]
A
Okay, Noah Rothman. The book is Blood and Progress. Thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [60:35]
B
Thank you, Coleman. I appreciate it.