← Hold These Truths with Dan Crenshaw
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We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created. As a member of Congress, I get to have a lot of really interesting people in the office, experts on what they're talking about.
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This is the podcast for insights into the issues.
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China, bioterrorism, Medicare for all. In depth discussions, breaking it down into simple terms.
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We hold.
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We hold. We hold these truths. We hold these truths.
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With Dan Crenshaw. The eagle has landed, folks.
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Welcome back to hold these Truths. Greatest podcast ever. I know we've been away for a while, but we're back, you know. So tell all your friends and give us five stars. If you're not going to give us five stars. I don't even know what you're doing with your life. But we have a really great guest, as we often do today, is Noah Rothman. Noah is a senior writer at National Review, one of my favorite publications. One of those publications when people ask Dan, what am I supposed to read? I don't know how to get news. And I'll list out a few, and National Review is always one of them. He's the author of a book called Unjust, that's Social justice and the Unmaking of America. And I screwed that up. Unjust Social justice and the Unmaking of America and the Rise of the New Puritans Fighting It Back Against Progressives War on Fun. Okay, but his recent book, we're going to start with this one. It's called Blood and A Century of Left Wing Violence in America. So, hey, Noah, thanks for coming on the show.
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Thank you so much for having me, Congressman.
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Let's start there with the left wing violence in America. You know, that's, I think those of us who are constantly in politics have a, I think, more nuanced understanding of like which side commits acts of violence. Look, it's, it's objectively both, but there's just so much more on the left than I think your mainstream, especially left leaning sources would have you believe. So is that why you felt the need to write this book?
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B
Yeah, I mean, you've, your audience is familiar with it. I'm sure you're familiar with it. It's become a shibboleth every time we have an obvious episode or even confirmed act of left wing violence, an attack on an ICE facility or a CBP facility, an attempted or successful assassination of a right wing political figure. You know, the mobs that descend almost nightly on some of America's major urban centers. You hear about how all the right is just uniquely violent, just the primary threat to American security. And civic comedy. And it's, it's not that it's not true. It has become an excuse. And I'm not saying that it is true because I think that the, the data that is used to, to make that case is fatally subjective and deeply flawed. If you go into these databases that are bandied about anytime there's an act of left wing violence, it's really suspicious data. Gang violence, prison violence, intra family violence, a person who spray paints graffiti on the side of a church, Right wing violence, a homeless man who's hurling racial slurs at a hotel. Hotel, yeah, racial right wing violence. It has become sort of an excuse to avoid looking at what has become a real significant wave of left wing political terrorism, by which I mean violence diluted thinking, fueling it, but violence designed in the act of the perpetrator, in the mind of the perpetrator to achieve some political end. And that's what Blood in Progress confronts. It looks at this wave of violence and compares it to previous waves of violence in this country, left wing political violence in the 1910s, 1920s, 1970s, 1980s. And finds some real prescriptive and predictive elements. I just don't, I don't think that's an obscure history. I think it is a suppressed history and it is suppressed for a reason.
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Yeah, I'd like to get into what the causations are that you might have identified. I think most people are familiar with recent bouts of left wing violence. There's three attempts, assassination attempts on the President, but those aren't coming from the right. No one disputes that you have the Charlie Kirk assassination. And gosh, I mean, only Republican members of Congress have been shot up during a baseball practice. That was years ago. You know what, I don't know because I don't know the actual statistics perfectly or the data sets. And there's always this question of what constitutes political violence. And you hit on this. It's like there has to be a definition. I bring this up a lot when we talk about mass shootings because the definition of mass shooting is just I think four or more people injured or killed by a firearm, by a shooter. And, but that's not really what the public thinks about when they think of mass shootings. They think of these, these dramatized like almost like first person shooter game type of mass shooting, which is going, going into a soft target like a school or a church or a mall, and, and committing an extreme acts of mass violence. Like that's, that's really what we should be thinking about. But of course they want to inflate the data, make it seem like there's all these other problems, and in the end we don't get to solve any problems because we're not even having the right conversation about characterizing the phenomena in the first place. And that seems to be the case oftentimes with political violence. And you gave some interesting examples, like things that are considered right wing political violence. No, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about somebody who made a plan to commit an act of violence for a political purpose. Yeah. And you would call that terrorism. That's generally the definition of terrorism. So as I guess I'm going to make that whole of all of that a question. Have we seen more of that recently or does it just seem like we've seen more of it recently because of these kind of these, these, these major attempts?
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I think we've seen more of it recently. I think we've seen an uptick in that kind of activity. I think I would say that, and I do say in the book that the current wave of left wing political violence that we're experiencing began in the beginning of the last decade in the 2010s, 2011, and has been accelerating dramatically since 2020. And yeah, I think that's a perfect analogy. The mass shooting and even school shootings, I would say, because those who attempt to inflate the data around those do so by including gang violence in which the perpetrators know each other, which is not really what you think of when you think of an indiscriminate act of mass violence. School shootings where certain groups will count the discharge of a firearm adjacent to, not even on school property, to inflate that data in order to create political narratives. So what I do in this book is not. Statistics are valuable. I used to, when I was in grad school, I did a stint with CSIS creating a database full of Islamist terrorist events in the year 2005. You know, statistics are valuable, but it flattens the whole cat, the whole phenomena into a series of categories that strip them of sort of the nuance and the details that help you actually understand what you're looking at. So I do go into the stories of these individual acts of violence, what these people were thinking to the extent that they were thinking anything, the degree to which they were deluded, what kind of motives they had, if they had motives, you know, somebody who could be really engaged in, in delusional thinking to the degree that they think an act of mass violence will beget some sort of positive Social change. I mean, there's always a degree of self delusion there and, and somebody who's deranged can have as big an impact on history as a clear eyed ideologue, of course. But when you flatten that subject out, the design being to avoid confronting what you tacitly acknowledge is bad, if you're accusing the right of being more violent than the left, you're implicitly saying that political violence is bad and we should not have political violence. I can work with that. That's a really valuable admission, concession to me. But it has become something that seems increasingly designed to avoid confronting the phenomenon. And there's some real disturbing evidence that this is an actual agenda on the part of some who are inclined towards this kind of intimidation. There was an insight study prepared for the Department of homeland security in 2021 that maintains that people who study left wing violent extremism in this country face actual real life intimidation campaigns, smear campaigns, social isolation, reputational harm, the prospect of physical retribution for their work. This is all in writing, to say nothing of the fact that left wing studies of left wing violent extremism are shot through with people who are participants in those movements who are actually then tasked with studying and evaluating the relative nature of the threat. So it is a, it is a fraud enterprise that is ripe for exploration. And I'm just, I'm wondering why no one else has done it, given the obvious urgency of this subject. If you're at all interested in preserving, you know, the American civic compact, what
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are some of the reasons you think it's increased as of late?
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I think there is a new, a revivified, not new, a revivified appeal of Marxian revolutionary socialist narratives. The generational immunity that was conveyed throughout the Cold War has worn off. And there is a generation that is very much attracted to Marxism, capital M and sort of a lowercase Marxian quasi Cuban revolutionary focalism. It was the sort of thing to which the Marxist terrorist elements in the 70s and 80s, internationally as well as domestically, in fact it was far more pronounced internationally, were attracted to revolutionary violence. It is an expression of zeal, of sort of romantic political enthusiasm.
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It is romantic. I, I would say that all the time and trying to, I, I used to talk about this stuff a lot more in my earlier days in Congress and I get busy with more legislation, but I would always point that out there, there is there. Revolution is romantic and, and young people are always looking for romantic ideas to attach themselves to and a bigger, a
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bigger cause, a bigger thing than just, yeah, the Quotidian details of your own life to, to be a part, to be an instrument of history. People who are engaged in. Yeah. In political violence especially, again, you know, because they succumb to disordered thinking, tend to see themselves as the instruments of capital H history. And that is, that's one of those motivating factors that will lead you to commit violence. Just as we saw the third, third attempt on the President's life. You know, Norah o' Donnell asked the President to respond to the deranged ramblings of somebody whose actions should have discredited his own writings but didn't in the mind of that CBS News anchor, perhaps because they were pretty banal as far as she was concerned. You know what he was beholden to? All myths. The notion that the President is a pedophile, a traitor, a criminal. All of them sort of a mishmash of little details that are taken from courtroom proceedings, for example, but aren't. Don't include the invalidation of those arguments in that courtroom setting. And so he's beholden to this stuff that is just common currency on forums like Blue Sky. And it doesn't move Norah o' Donnell to violence. So what's wrong with it? You know, this is the sort of thing that, this is the miasma that they marinate in and don't see anything wrong with it. So they don't understand why it is motivating the kind of irrational behaviors that they're discomfited with and should be, but don't really want to confront head on for fear of it indicting their allies or people perhaps to whom they're sympathetic, perhaps not necessarily allied with. I mean, one of the things that has really, really unnerved me while in the research for this book, and I think it would unnerve everybody, is the degree to which federal and local law enforcement have been singled out for violence and murderous assaults. That to me is really redolent of the anarchist socialist wave of violence in the 1910s, 1920s. The attacks on police officers by marxine guerrilla terrorists in the United states in the 70s and 1980s and the attacks on the ICE and CBP facilities last year, some of which featured some pretty sophisticated ambush tactics. There's one attack in Texas that featured at least ten terroristic elements drawing their targets out with fireworks and then firing on them from overlapping fields. I mean, that's not something that you just discover.
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They learned that, yeah, yeah, those are guerrilla tactics. Yeah, you saw, you saw these in Minnesota. You saw some. I mean, it was Laughable to those of us who have actually done this kind of thing, you know, in the military, from a military perspective for a while. But, you know, they were setting up, like, basically 911 call centers, operations centers that people would call back to. They're reporting in license plates. They're setting up checkpoints. They have some level of organization. You know, they're. They're. They're.
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They're.
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They're trying to use. I forget the terminology that we say, but, you know, when. When in the military, when we. When we say letters, we say, you know, if we're saying the word what we say, you know, whiskey, Hotel, Alpha Tango. Like, they're using that, but. But they're getting it all messed up. They're using, like, the wrong words sometimes, which is. So. It was hilarious to listen to, but also kind of freaking scary because, like, what are you guys doing? And. And, you know, and then I was on the airplane and I watched this movie, and it was called Leonardo DiCaprio, but it came out like, oh, yeah. A solid year before this.
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Yeah. One battle after another. Which is the weatherman. It's an old weatherman.
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Yeah, it was, but. But in modern times and against ice. So I was like, wait a second. Did you guys just watch this movie and then just copy it? Is that what you did? Like, this was just a movie, you idiots. This is. It was a. I mean, it was Leonardo DiCaprio. He makes good movies. It was. It was an entertaining movie. It wasn't a bad movie. I have no. I'm not angry at the movie, but, like, did you idiots just copy this and just want to do cosplay just to, like, you feel. I don't even, like, feel some kind of sense of meaning. I don't even know what you're talking about.
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There is an element of cosplay to it, but I don't. I wouldn't call it anything, especially.
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But now, no, you would call it dangerous.
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You would call black block tactics cosplay. I would. And black block tactics are deadly serious. This is when you.
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What are black?
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So you dress up in all black if you're a member of this movement. And this is. This is old stuff. This goes back to the mid 20th century. You dress up in all black. It's usually. You have to. It's a uniform, and you share it. The point being to be unidentifiable in a crowd, but all black. Black hats, black face masks, balaclava, bandana, maybe a gas mask, which is somehow shuttled in. In the back of a of a truck full of gas masks that somebody paid for and nobody knows where they came from.
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Some. Some hockey armor. It's basically antifa.
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Yeah, yes, precisely. It happens pretty consistently. And that's cosplay. But it's very violent cosplay. It's revolutionary cosplay.
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Yeah, no, it's, it's wild. And I'm just trying to figure out, because you mentioned this in your book, identifying some things that, that, that cause an uptick and. Okay, you mentioned one of them. There's just been a resurgence generally of the romanticism surrounding Marxism. I got to one or two does. But you also mentioned, like, the manifesto of some of these killers are based totally on conspiracy theories. I mean, look, if you look at my primary election, a lot of people think it was because, you know, and they want to be kind to me. They're like, well, it's because he stood up to Trump about the 2020 election. And I'm like, Gu, I had two elections since then. That's not what it was. It was people being stupid and believing that I was worth millions of dollars trading stocks, which is fundamentally untrue among like 12 or 15 or 20 other conspiracy theories. But there was some hyped up at the top. Only social media, only people getting increasingly more news from social media and podcasting and the podcasting grift that has occurred, only that can create that. That is a new phenomenon.
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That's a new phenomenon.
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Does that play into this? It must, right? I mean, it's just the ability, the ability for dumb people to get together and affirm each other's ideas is easier than ever before in human existence.
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Yeah. And you know, it's not a new phenomenon. This has always been with us. The idea that you want your misconceptions reinforced and create a, like a like minded circle of people who will not challenge your misconceptions. But don't you remember, you know, this real. There was a fire under the Democratic Party over misinformation and disinformation. Like it was an actual threat to the republic.
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Yeah.
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And then it just kind of disappeared and it just sort of disappeared.
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Yeah, they don't talk about it as much. You're right.
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Coinciding with the degree to which the Democratic left had embraced disinformation and misinformation, that the attempted assassin of Donald Trump was beholden to a ton of myths. You know, the, the, the pedophile myth is supported by nonsense about Epstein. Non, non.
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Evidence about Epstein stuff is just getting out of control. I mean, out of control. Like Joe Kent. Joe Kent leaving the administration to be like, it's the Epstein. Like, what do you. We all voted to release Epstein files. They are releasing them. Like, un. Unprecedented, by the way, that we release case files like this. Like, what do you people expect, too? Yeah.
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Because innocent people have been caught up in that thing.
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Yeah. I mean, which is why it was a question to begin with.
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But anyway, yeah, among many other things, there's the traitor. The traitor narrative, which is stems, I believe, from the. The Robert Mueller investigation into Donald Trump, which came up a little bit more ambiguous than. Than what some people want it to be, but certainly not a smoking gun. And then the general criminal allegations, which, again, are supported by inference, not evidence. But there's very few. There's no energy to correct those misapprehensions. And then you go into everything surrounding Israel, and if you want to talk about primary politics, there is the claim being made by Democrats and Republicans alike that there is something like a fifth column in the United States that is very well healed, well funded by foreign interests, and they don't have the United States in mind, and they're working their will inside the United States in order to undermine what the good working order of what the average American citizen wants. That is a powerful narrative on both respective fringes, and it is supported by precisely zero empirical evidence. Indeed, it's kind of insulting because, you know, when you hear the left talk about aipac, they talk about it like it's a foreign influence operation. These are Americans. Those are American dollars. These are Americans with their interests performing their constitutional duty to lobby their representatives for redress of grievances. Nothing but nothing unusual about it, but it has become the focus of so much conspiratorial, paranoid energy, and there's just no enthusiasm on the mainstream media or their Democratic allies. We shouldn't pretend there's a distinction there to fact check this sort of stuff all of a sudden. And why? Just because it became popular among a certain segment of the activist left.
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A
Yeah, the left is having a problem there. And people ask me about the Civil War on the right, and I'm like, I love it. That's what you're supposed to do. That's what a healthy movement is supposed to do. I was a little early to the game, which is when I was a victim of it. You know, somebody's got to be. You know, somebody's got to be the bullet sponge as you. As you cross the beachhead. And because I've been fighting Tucker and pointing out his grift for God knows How long and everyone in that network. And, and there's a lot of other elements to my relationship with the online troll community. But that civil war is much more prominent now. It's very easy now for influencers and conservative podcasters, influencers to come out and actually call out the grift.
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But what is Marxism if not an elaborate conspiracy theory? It is a conspiracy theory of capital, which is part of the reason Marxism so linked in with anti Semitism. Marx himself was deeply suspicious of Jews. But it has everything to do with the notion that rapacious capitalist interests, unseen, ill defined, yet omniscient, are controlling things in ways that advantage them, disadvantage you, steal from you that which is your cosmic do. All this stuff is still with us two centuries later. It's probably, there's probably something deep in the human evolutionary trait that's, that leads you to these conspiracy theories because they're so endemic and permanent.
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Well, that's, Yeah. I mean, nothing's new about the, the human mind, right, that the human nature doesn't change. But what has changed is our, our ability to access each other's minds, you know, through social media, through the 247 news cycle. And everything seems, you know, you've got news across the world, and if you're deep diving some people are just on the Internet all day, you can easily start to believe that things are just insane. And I'll get those questions often at events. I'd be like, look, you just need to take 30 days off the Internet. Just go about your community and talk to normal people. And I think you'll feel better about the world because it hasn't changed all that much. You're just, you know, the, the Internet is just putting things in front of you and, and you're feeding into it, and you, you got to stop.
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Does anybody take your advice?
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I don't know. Maybe. I mean, I tell them and then I leave. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah, generally speaking, probably not, because it's only getting worse, you know, and, and like I said, you know, there's that civil war on the right, and I'm glad we're seeing that. Like, people are realizing, okay, influencers are pay to play. That doesn't mean there's not good ones out there. But, like, nobody ever asked a basic critical thinking question, why do I trust what this person is saying? I know nothing, you know, nothing about them. All you know is that they have an incentive to get more engagement because that's how they sell ads. And by the way, they do sell ads, and they also sell their influence to political PACs and they don't have to report it. So it's something we need to fix. And then there's the, the podcast grift again. That's now become like a more normal term on the right. But remember when everyone was taking Sean Ryan's side back in December? Well, yeah, now, now everyone's seeing what a quack he is and how anti Trump he is. And so it's, it's fun for me to kind of look back and say, yeah, I, to tell you, I tried to tell you people but you didn't want to listen. But on the left, going back full circle here to what the less problems are they, they don't really have a civil war. They need one. And you know, there, there, you would think there would be one between kind of your, your betterman Democrat party, your Bill Clinton Democrat party and whatever this current Democrat party is of just kind of wild eyed mix of socialism and whatever, I don't know, whatever new antics they can come up with just to like move the Overton window a little bit further because I always point out, you know guys, they're progressives. Progress forever. It's like they always need to progress. So yeah, they might have won. They were against gay marriage, then they were for it, then they won it. And now it's, we have boys and girls, sports like junior, like what? You can never keep up with it.
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B
Yes. And their definition of progress tends not to include technological innovation. And there's a new ludism that is very fashionable on the, on the left, it takes two sides to have a civil war. Right. And you have one side of this equation. The Democratic establishmentarians that are seem preternaturally disinclined to engage in conflict with the loudest elements of the activist base. And more importantly, they have a weakness for people, power, people in the streets, crowds, masses. That's the sort of thing that seems to them like political enthusiasm that could be harnessed and directed in utilitarian ways. They fell for Occupy Wall Street. They fell for the 2020 mobs. And if you interviewed any of these people, to say nothing of their leaders but their participants, they had no use for the Democratic Party or Democrats broadly, but they were fetid and they were complimented and told how they were the instruments of history and how they were on the right side of history and how they were maligned like MLK was maligned. That was Barack Obama's words about Occupy Wall Street. And they give these people a lot of space to engage in antisocial and even criminal behaviors, and refuse to acknowledge the extent to which a lot of their, what I would call deviancy is not in service to any political motive. It is more a service to base human emotions. Envy, covetousness, sort of dissatisfaction with one's own life, therefore meeting out that dissatisfaction in. In the same measure, in order to bring others down rather than to lift them up. I mean, these really base but essential elementary human emotions. And that is what they find, that they find themselves attracted to, and they just kind of shove all this unlovely stuff to the side and refuse to confront it. Because there's the promise of votes around it, there's the promise of political power around it. It gets them every single time. But before they come to their senses, a lot of damage is done and a lot of violence is meted out.
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A
Yeah, I mean, one of the things I think we all see when we follow this kind of stuff is that, you know, the right has trouble making arguments the way the left does. The left makes arguments based on some kind of moral superiority, you know, whatever. You know, the means justify the ends because the ends are so much more holier than what the rights ends are, you know, and, and our ends are a little bit more boring, just generally. It's like our ends are a stable society where, where, you know, you have the, you have the. Your own individual agency to, to grow and succeed and to prosper and the government basically stays out of your way. Is that. And, and nowhere in there does it say, the God, someone's going to take care of me in my time of need. Like, so it's, it's harder to sell. And so the Democrats always have a much easier thing to sell, and there's always some kind of moral superiority attached to that. And that's easy to vilify. Anybody who has capital, let's say it's. Again, it's like, that's like you said, Marxism is its own kind of giant conspiracy theory. It's easy to vilify just based on disparities within ethnic groups or something. Vilify an entire group of people and animates a minority to be into thinking that they are helpless and can only be helped by the Democrat party. This has always been tough to contend with just from a political perspective. But the subsequent problem is that it also gives them a lot more moral standing, at least their own crazy minds, to actually commit violence in support of those ends, because in their mind, they're trying to save people's lives from us evil Republicans who are trying to steal Medicaid away from people. Now, of course, I would say, look, actually no one who is needing Medicaid is losing Medicaid. Here are the numbers up. You've already lost the argument because it's too detailed at that point or to.
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B
Yeah, I mean, but from that intellectual tendency that you're describing comes a pathology in which you invert victim and victimizer and you see in victim some. An instrument of systemic oppression and victimizer somebody who's beset by that systemic oppression. So when you have Daniel Penny, who's prosecuted for. For trying to subdue and inadvertently killing via chokehold a menace on the subway system, who was engaged in violence according to the people who were witness to him and those who were dealing with him on a regular basis, and that's described as vigilantism. And they don't understand and refuse to acknowledge even the evidence that was before a courtroom. For example, from that intellectual tendency you get the Progressive Prosecutor Project, which in places like Philadelphia and Baltimore and Chicago and elsewhere decriminalized and New York City especially decriminalized certain objectively criminal offenses insofar as they're destructive of society. And in order to give these individuals who engage in that behaviors a leg up that society has supposedly denied them and from. And then you invert that. And the people who are then victimized by this new reimagining of the American social compact, well, they're actually excessively privileged and they have enjoyed too many of society's benefits to. They should be stripped of them. They should know what it is to suffer, therefore be brought low and experience that which their true victimizer has already experienced. It is a weird melodrama that exists in the heads of people who suffer from an excess of empathy that compels them to subordinate critical and rational faculties to what is essentially an emotional. An emotional tendency.
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Yeah, There's a pathological empathy and then there's a pathological sense of resentment. And you know, that's populism, basically. And I don't like that we're seeing it on the right now too. And I've always described populism as just telling people what they want to hear instead of the truth. I don't know how else to define the movement of populism. They'll make an argument, well, no, it's for the people. It's what the people want. I'm like, okay, let's see what the people want. Let me put out a policy idea. Everyone gets $2,000 a month for free. That's the policy idea. Do you think you know what, actually, let's even make it more interesting. Everyone gets $2,000 a month except for the top 1%. So that's the policy. And I, and I'll do a poll and I guarantee you I'm going to go to at least 50% of people to say of course I want that. I'd probably get 80% of people. Does that make a good policy? No, because there's no limiting principles to that. That's the whole reason we have something called conservatism. Conservatism was in a box. There are limiting principles. There are certain questions you ask before you implement a policy. It' just what's popular. I yelled at this about this all the time.
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B
It's literally unrepublican, small r Republican. It's, it's if my, if my rights or my liberties are subject to a vote and 51% can decide to strip me of my property and put me in prison. That may be Democratic, but it's not Republican and it's not what the center is founded on.
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A
And it's often what large d Democrats support. Right. And so I've always, I've always said that like populism isn't inherently a liberal or left wing ideology. I don't like to see it enter right wing politics. Okay, but speaking on a real quick before we're done is this, this really feeds into some of the craziness on left wing violence. That story that came out with the Southern Poverty Law center secretly paying informants that are embedded in extremist organizations. But, you know, that's probably a nice way of putting it. You know, maybe I haven't followed exactly what they've come up with here, but I mean, they were putting a lot of money into these organizations. That seems like a lot more than you would pay just an informant, for instance. What do you make of that?
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B
Yeah, I tend to share your. Again, this is something for, I believe, law enforcement to adjudicate. But from what we've heard, it does seem like there was a whole healthy, a lot of money that was going to people who would typically be associated with the sorts that SPLC is attempting to anathematize or draw attention to in order to limit their activities, not fund them. SPLC has been, in my view, a bad actor in a lot of this stuff for a very long time. You can go back to, you know, Floyd Corkins, who was the gentleman who was so aggravated by attacks on a anti gay conservative organization that he walked into the front door and shot a security guard. And the attempt to shoot far more people. I believe that was 2013. And he directly, the perpetrator directly said he was emboldened to that act by the SPLC's data. To say nothing of the fact that SPLC is one of the primary organizations that maintains left wing violence is, quote unquote, a myth that it generally does not exist. And to the degree that it exists, it's dismissible as a strange and non indicative phenomena that is pales in comparison to the preternaturally violent American. Right.
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Yeah.
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Again, all you gotta do is peel back the layers of this narrative to see, well, there's a lot of problems with it. And from there what conclusions do you draw? Because if that shibboleth is wrong, then maybe we have to re examine a whole lot of what we thought about domestic political violence in this country. Where it comes from, what its objectives are and who are the perpetrators.
- [32:43]
A
Well, let's help us through that. Help us understand our current moment by. In your book, you look back to, you look back about a century. Right. So you've maybe assessed some patterns evolving. What can we learn from past instances? You know, I would hear the anarchist bombing campaign, the Wall street bombing, the. I don't even know what this is. It's just in my notes here, the Gallianists, the Guyanists. Yeah.
- [33:09]
B
Who's an Italian anarchist and led one of the most brutal terrorist bombing campaigns in this country in the name of anarcho socialism. You know, he gets to claim he was an anarchist and anarchistic. Violent extremism is the term of art in the FBI that captures most, not all, most of left wing political violence in this country century. And it really immensely helps progressives because they get to say, well, what does anarchism have to do with us? You know, we, we're progressives, we want a bigger government. In 1910, you can kind. 1916, you can kind of imagine the smoky parlor in which the anarchists and the socialists would argue over whether the state could dissolve at the outset of the revolution or would it take a dictatorship of the proletariat to dissolve the state over time? This is sort of intellectual history that historians like to maintain and it's preserved in the historical record, but it is, it obscures sort of the nature of what we're seeing across the centuries. And yet in, in the liberal imagination, nothing happened in the United States between the Haymarket Riots of 1886, which, which by the way featured a bombing of police and the Palmer Raids, which was a reaction to the Soviet putsch the Bolshevik putsch and all. The only thing that happened in the interim was America descended into a reactionary anti immigrant fight fervor. And that's just a very narrow telling of a complex period in American history which was typified by a ton of left wing bombing attacks, assassination campaigns, attempts on the lives of figures within the Wilson administration, including Attorney General Palmer. And you know, it's just sort of brushed aside and all of it in service to, by the way, advancing the interests of the proletarian revolution and sort of those figures who find themselves alienated from society and by the way persecuted by the states. I mean they were very much persecuted by the state. And the Wilson administration in particular was an unlovely period in American history. So there is, you know, it's not like they don't have. The Italian anarchists didn't have a reason to do one of the two things that the Italian diaspora did in this country because they were, they were faced with discrimination, persecution and even lynchings. One expression of that, you know, hostility was the Italian mafia. Another was the Italian anarchist. Set you fast forward to the 60s 70s and 80s where you have dozens of Marxian guerrilla groups. You know, the Weather Underground is the most famous. But you had the Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter Black Liberation army organization, the faln, the New New Liberation Order, you know, dozens and dozens. And they engaged in terrorist bombings. You know, in the absence of 9 11, we probably have a lot more bombings today than we do because it's much harder to get your hands on explosive material. But that was the instrument of, you know, preferred weapons of the terrorist movements. And we do see some, I mean there was, there was a, there was a bombing in the Chaz. The, the, the so called autonomous zone in Seattle. Blew the side of a police station off. Nobody remembers that one. But yeah, you also see some, some prescriptive elements across the field here because the, the psychology of the individual who, and it is individuals who engage in this sort of violence. There's a distinction that I draw between the reptilian mob, you know, the, the lizard brain that takes over when you're in a crowd and, and even the well adjusted can be moved to violence in that setting. Whereas the individual who conducts premeditated acts of political terrorism is a slightly different figure with a slightly different set of motives. But you do see in that, that level of dispossession, a sense of unfulfillment from their own delusions of grandeur, the sense that they are an instrument of history and the disordered Thinking, as I said, that leads them to conclude that a galvanizing act of mass violence, mass bloodshed, will finally demonstrate that the God bleeds, will finally give permission to those, the masses who would otherwise tear down the structures of oppression around them if they had permission to do so, finally give them permission to do so. This is the delusion to which they're all beholden. And when you see that across history, you begin to see it in those who are acting out today in service to revolutionary, violent, revolutionary fantasies. There's predictive and prescriptive elements here and it's just been ignored. I think in part because a lot of people do not want to reach conclusions about the nature of violent, radical left wing political elements incorrectly assuming that it will reflect poorly on left wing, more legitimate, mainstream left wing political movements. We got to get to a point where you say, no, no, no, if you're violent, you're not on my side, you are not part of my tribe, and you do not reflect poorly on me. I hope we can inculcate that sort of sentiment.
- [37:40]
A
What would be some of the prescriptive elements? I mean, or predictive for that matter? Is there a way to solve it? I mean, related to that question was like my question about, like, how do you get people to stop believing nonsense they read online.
- [37:58]
B
It's a question I ask myself.
- [38:00]
A
People ask me all the time. And I'm like, I do not know how to train everyone in critical thinking. I, I can read something and I can tell you, look, this, this clearly isn't cited very well. I can tell by the way it's written that it's, that has an agenda and yet people believe it or it's just a meme that someone made and it's just being spread around and for some reason people believe it.
- [38:20]
B
Yeah. How am I supposed to fact check a meme?
- [38:22]
A
Yeah, it's wild.
- [38:23]
B
Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, when you're writing a book, your publisher says, can you tell us what we're going to do about this? And I write very specifically in the afterword, no, I don't know how to stop violence in the United States. It's a feature of political life in America, always has been. Anybody who's trying to tell you otherwise probably has something to sell you. And I do have something to sell you. I'm selling you a book. But I promise you that's it. But there is, there are elements that we could. Projects in which we could engage in order to chew away at the margins of this sort of thing. The. There's A New Lines Institute study that recommends, for example, certain linguistic changes that would make it easier for, make it harder rather for the activist class to maintain, as they always do, right and left, that the state is in league with their political adversaries. This is a feature of the violent right, the violent left. They perceive the state to be on the side of their political adversaries. And state based violence is perceived to be just another example of how their, their enemies are meting out violence against them. They have some desirable recommendations around that we could recognize who these perpetrators are. They are not the, the individuals who are impoverished, denied opportunity, systemically oppressed. You know, some sociologists found with respect to Islamist terrorism, one of the features of the perpetrators of it across the board was an engineering degree. These people are usually typically well educated, reasonably comfortable, have some fluency in similar violent movements throughout history, which just sort of makes sense. The revivification of civic education in this country I think is probably extremely valuable. We've made some strides since the first time I made that recommendation, my first book, about a decade ago, but not nearly enough. The degree to which a potentially violent movement becomes a kinetically violent movement is when its unreasonable demands go unmet and then the individual who's beholden to those things, who thinks, wow, my moral imperative is so strong and the state is just not responsive to it. One of two things happens to you when you get like really depressed and despondent and withdraw from politics entirely. The second is to radicalize and resolve to attack the foundations of this wholly immoral system that is just deaf to what you believe, believe are absolute moral imperatives. And a proper civic education would reduce the temptation toward those unreasonable demands. So it's not to say I have no recommendations, but there's no such thing as a panacea. And I don't pretend there is.
- [41:00]
A
It's hard to do a proper civics education. I did a, an eight course, civics 101 for Jordan Peterson Academy. I recommend that or read your book or read any of these books or need to read National Review. That'd be a good start for people. I'm going to, I'm going to call it because my stupid video keeps popping in and out and so but at least hopefully those listening, which is most people got our conversation just fine. But this will be a frustrating one for those watching on YouTube. No, I know you got to be
- [41:32]
B
great for me, Congressman. I really enjoyed it.
- [41:34]
A
Yeah, no, it's plenty more to talk about and you got a heart out and I've got to run as well. But, hey, thanks for being on. Appreciate it.
- [41:40]
B
Thank you, sir.