All Blood, No Progress

Summary

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The Commentary Magazine Podcast

Episode: "All Blood, No Progress"
Date: May 19, 2026
Host: John Podhoretz
Guests: Abe Greenwald, Seth Mandel, Christine Rosen, Noah Rothman (author of Blood and Progress)

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Episode Overview

This episode focuses on the theme of left-wing political violence in America—its normalization, cultural justification, historical roots, and the current troubling shift in public attitudes. Central guest Noah Rothman discusses his new book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, examining recent high-profile violent acts, the responses to them, and the broader implications for American society. The roundtable explores how violence has become excused, even celebrated, within parts of the culture and contrasts the media's treatment of violence from the political left versus the right.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Celebration of Violence and Cultural Excuses

• Brian Thompson Case as Exhibit A ([01:19]–[04:43])
  • Outside the New York courtroom of the Luigi Mangione trial, activists gave a shocking press conference justifying the murder of Thompson, a UnitedHealthcare CEO.
  • Quotes from activists at the scene showed a blatant celebration and justification of the killing, treating the victim’s family as deserving targets.
  • John Podhoretz: “This...seems to be, I don't know, exhibit A in your argument about how political violence has crossed from being an occasional or very occasional or very odd thing in American life in the last decade to becoming something with which we are all too distressingly and commonly familiar.” ([04:10])
  • Noah Rothman: Describes the manic celebration of Mangione—merchandise being sold, prayer candles, SNL cheering his name—and contextualizes this outburst within recent American tendencies to justify or romanticize leftist violence.

2. The Subjective Bias in Cataloguing Political Violence

• Countering 'Whataboutism' ([06:19]–[09:18])
  • Rothman critiques datasets that purport right-wing violence as dominant, arguing that many entries are mis-coded or subjective.
  • He emphasizes the importance of examining individual cases rather than abstract numbers, and acknowledges reciprocal, mutually fueling cycles of violence between left and right:
    • Noah Rothman: “...the two phenomena are intertwined, they're reciprocal, they feed on one another. And to look at one side of this equation at the expense of the other is to fail to comprehend the problem.” ([08:35])

3. Mainstream Culture's Glorification of Left-Wing Violence

• Media and Pop Culture's Role ([09:18]–[10:54])
  • Abe Greenwald underscores the long-standing cultural approval—if sometimes tacit—of left-wing violence as “pure,” “revolutionary,” or somehow justified.
  • This, he argues, sets double standards and contributes to the normalization and excusing of such acts.

4. Rhetoric, Social Decay, and the Breakdown of Norms

• Psychology of Violent Celebrants ([10:54]–[16:34])
  • Seth Mandel points out the language of activists showing not just political dissent but a willingness to wound, even “as if they could enact some further violence, they would have.” ([11:30])
  • Christine Rosen describes how the children of the murdered are rhetorically tainted and blamed for “sins of the father,” a logic she finds both extreme and disturbingly mainstream in leftist discourse.
  • The conversation notes eerie echoes of primitive or tribal notions of collective guilt and multigenerational blame.

5. Modern Martyrdom and the Normalization of Criminality

• Left-Wing Martyr Culture ([16:34]–[18:38])
  • Noah references the elevation of criminals to heroic status (e.g., Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Assata Shakur, even Michael Brown and George Floyd) and the creation of alternate histories or mythologies around their acts.
  • The panel discusses the creation and persistence of catchphrases (“Hands up, don’t shoot”) which outlive and obscure objective findings.

6. The Asymmetry of Media and Institutional Responses

• How the Left’s Violence Gets Downplayed ([21:34]–[28:53])
  • John lists incidents of left-wing political violence that receive little sustained coverage or urgent policy focus, while right-wing episodes like January 6 are amplified and framed as legendary.
  • Rothman draws attention to the Biden administration’s explicit efforts to frame political violence as primarily a right-wing phenomenon, to the neglect of left-wing threats.
  • Noah Rothman: “Physical [threats] for doing their work. To say nothing of the fact that quite a lot of the study of left wing extremism is conducted by individuals who are members of the organizations and groups that are accused of engaging in extremist tactics and left wing violence.” ([07:45])

7. Political Leaders' Failures

• Lack of Moral Clarity from Politicians ([25:25]–[28:53])
  • Rothman laments the lack of exemplary leaders willing to draw firm moral lines against violence justified by any political cause.
  • The episode critiques the tendency of Democrats to maintain relationships with unruly street activists for “people power,” and Republicans’ newer populist embrace of crowds.

8. Historical Patterns and Ideological Drift

• Comparing Eras of Violence ([30:05]–[34:38])
  • Rothman identifies three major waves of left-wing violence in America (1910s-1920s anarchists; 1960s-1980s Marxian guerrillas; post-2010s era).
  • He draws parallels between the adoption of revolutionary, even religious-tinged violence by segments of the modern left and earlier infatuations with foreign revolutionary movements.

9. The Risk of a Violent Generation

• Youth Populism and the Erosion of Norms ([34:38]–[38:17])
  • Christine Rosen raises concerns about polling showing young left-leaning Americans more likely to excuse or endorse violence for political aims.
  • Rothman cautions against pure pessimism, noting violence today is less widespread than in the earlier 20th century, but warns that a lack of memory and education about past violence could remove guardrails for the next generation.

10. Cultural Shifts: From Martin Luther King Jr. to Malcolm X?

• Which Model is Winning? ([38:17]–[43:06])
  • Podhoretz claims that the culture and its intellectual leaders now default to Malcolm X over Martin Luther King, valorizing extra-institutional, even violent resistance over the pursuit of gradual, system-driven change:
    • “I would say that inarguably in popular culture, this is a Malcolm X culture and not a Martin Luther King culture, though Martin Luther King is of course, like one of our few secular saints.” ([39:15])
  • Rothman notes the neglect and erasure of America’s history of left-leaning terrorist campaigns.

11. Progressive Ideology and the Allure of Violence

• The Illusion of “Progress” ([43:06]–[46:29])
  • Explores the overlap—and sometimes lack thereof—between progressive reformers and revolutionary destroyers.
  • Rothman draws from the rhetoric of violent activists: the desire to produce a “cataclysmic event” that will shatter the status quo and reveal the supposed rot of America.

12. The Fragility of Peace and the Problem of the Outlier

• Violence as the Act of the Few ([46:29]–[49:21])
  • Even if only a handful believe violence is justified and act on it, the costs can be catastrophic.
  • Podhoretz draws a parallel with societies afflicted by chronic violence, arguing that the US is showing early warning signs.

13. Lack of Media & Academic Exploration of Left-Wing Violence

• Institutional Blindness or Sympathy? ([49:21]–[50:33])
  • Rothman and others lament the lack of serious, sustained exploration of left-leaning violence, suggesting it’s due in part to implicit sympathies among cultural elites.

14. The “Definition Game” and Disingenuous Political Framing

• Relabeling of Ideological Violence ([51:31]–[57:41])
  • When leftist figures or groups are inconveniently exposed as violent or bigoted, attempts are made to reclassify them (e.g., Louis Farrakhan as “right wing” due to his social views); this rhetorical sleight of hand sidesteps the reality of left-wing extremism.

15. Left-Wing Radicalization within Mainstream Movements

• The Women’s March Case Study ([57:41]–[60:57])
  • The march drew millions of peaceful, “normcore” participants. But organizers and activists tried to infuse the movement with deeper, more radical, and even violent aims, usually unwelcome to mainstream members.
  • The elite’s fascination with radicalism contrasts with the average American’s preference for peaceful, lawful protest.

16. Diverging Patterns of Ideology and Self-Policing

• Cultural, not Doctrinal, Differences ([60:57]–[65:52])
  • Seth Mandel contrasts the conservative tendency for ideological specificity and internal critique with the left’s more diffuse, “vector-like” directionality, which tolerates greater vagueness and rationalization of extreme elements within its ranks.
  • Rothman warns that segments of the right are now borrowing left-wing tactics and martyr narratives, which constitutes “a really unnerving” development and forms the closing warning of his book.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Culture’s Blind Spot:
  “There is no symmetry when it comes to violence from the left. And I don't recall ever encountering a sustained grappling with this phenomenon, even as it's so ripe for exploration and so obviously paramount in our national life. It's the background radiation that we've all begun to get used to.”
  — Noah Rothman ([49:00])

• On the Martyrdom of Killers:
  “I am perfectly comfortable saying these women were steeped in the martyrology around violent criminals, pathological murderers, people who can kill cops...There is...a whole apparatus, a lattice work around them, an intellectual effort to render their crimes excusable, forgivable, or perhaps having not even happened.”
  — Noah Rothman ([16:34])

• On Generational Amnesia:
  “The extent to which these narratives are not passed on to the next generation, our experiences are not passed on to the next generation, then the generation that comes after us has no immunity to them.”
  — Noah Rothman ([36:25])

• On Relabeling Left-Wing Violence:
  “Radical Islamist terrorism is revolutionary. It is not conservative. It seeks not to conserve a single thing about the American founding. So we should just toss that one at the outset.”
  — Noah Rothman ([54:25])

• On What Motivates Violent Radicals:
  “What would wake us up? Some cataclysmic event, a clarion call to the great oppressed, systemically displaced American population who will rise up once they understand that victory is achievable. And how is victory achievable? We make the god bleed.”
  — Noah Rothman ([44:09])

• On Parallels with the Right:
  “Mobs, affinity groups, shock forces, all this stuff, black block tactics. All this stuff was once exclusive to the left, no longer. And that's the sort of thing that I hope after seven chapters of exploring where the left has gone wrong, you can hold up a mirror to the American right.”
  — Noah Rothman ([65:45])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Opening and incident recap: [00:22]–[04:43]
• The 'whatabout' objection / Data skepticism: [06:19]–[09:18]
• Cultural glorification and media role: [09:18]–[11:30]
• Dehumanization of targets’ families: [14:15]–[16:34]
• Martyrdom and myth-making: [16:34]–[18:38]
• Media asymmetry and institutional bias: [21:34]–[28:53]
• Political elites’ failures: [25:25]–[28:53]
• Three generational waves of violence: [30:05]–[34:38]
• Rising youth acceptance of violence: [34:38]–[38:17]
• MLK vs. Malcolm X in popular culture: [38:17]–[41:45]
• Violence as revolutionary gateway: [43:06]–[46:29]
• Cultural erasure of leftist violence history: [46:29]–[49:21]
• Definition games (Farrakhan, radical Islam): [51:31]–[57:41]
• Women's March as microcosm: [57:41]–[60:57]
• Right beginning to mirror left’s tactics: [63:44]–[65:52]
• Closing and book plug: [65:52]–end

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Concluding Thoughts

The episode provides a bracing, erudite discussion of America’s blind spots in confronting left-wing violence, warning against cultural and scholarly complacency that enables its normalization. Blood and Progress is positioned as an urgent historical corrective and a call for moral and civic clarity—both for the left and, increasingly, for the right. Rothman’s tone is sober, meticulous, and sometimes sardonic. The roundtable’s discussion is accessible yet searching, full of memorable commentary on history, society, and the psychological mechanisms at play.

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Transcript

[Noah Rothman]

Foreign. Expect the worst. Some drinks and pain Some die at first no way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, Expect the worst, Hope for the best.

[John Podhoretz]

Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, May 19, 2026. I am Jon Pot Hordz, the editor of Commentary. With me as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[Seth Mandel]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[Christine Rosen]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

And joining us today, our old colleague, senior editor at National Review and the author of published today, out today today, May 19, his long awaited book, Blood and Progress, Noah Rothman. Hi, Noah.

[Noah Rothman]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

So I should say that Blood in Progress originated as an article in Commentary two years ago and your subtitle is

[Noah Rothman]

A Century of Left Wing Violence in America. And the president tells us last night that this is the only thing that's gonna happen today. There will be no world historic events that interrupt the rollout of Blood in Progress.

[John Podhoretz]

What's important is that, yes, Donald Trump has postponed the war in Iran so that Noah could get a free shot at an open pub day for Blood and Progress. And Trump is not the only person conspiring to give Noah's book boost. Because yesterday, outside the courtroom in New York City where the judge hearing the case of accused murderer Luigi Mangione, the accused assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, some controversial rulings yesterday by the judge in that case. But outside the courtroom, oddly credentialed by the press office of Zoran Mamdani, were three young women who then gave an impromptu press conference by themselves that in itself justifies the publication and indeed the place at the top of the bestseller list of Noah Rothman's Blood and Progress. So let me just quote what they said. Ashley Rojas, who has some kind of weird analog place in the new media, said this quote F. But she didn't say F Brian Thompson. That's all I want to say. F. Brian Thompson. F his mom. This is a man who was shot in the back on the street in New York at 6:45 in the morning on 53rd street, dead. So F him and F his mom, apparently, who somehow has multi generational evil in her DNA. Her colleague in this press conference, one Lena Weisbrot, added, his children are better off without him. They need to learn to not be like their dad and enjoy the blood money. Kids, he's responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden. And I remember Americans celebrating when Osama bin Laden was killed. It's not like we don't understand Heroic violence or like when violence is good. So this story emerges as the judge is hearing the evidence and trying to rule inadmissible or admissible the evidence in the Brian Thompson case. Noah, this does seem to be a, I don't know, exhibit A in your argument about how political violence has crossed from being an occasional or very occasional or very odd thing in American life in the last decade to becoming something with which we are all too distressingly and commonly familiar.

[Noah Rothman]

Yeah, well, it certainly justifies the opening of the first chapter of the book with the slaying of Brian Thompson and more poignantly, the reaction to it, which featured half dozen members of Congress condemning murder. But also understanding where human sacrifice comes from and the desirability of it from the perspective of those who would celebrate justifies exploring the degree to which Mangione's name was cheered on Saturday Night Live that in demand merchandise was sold with the manic musings that he scratched onto the bullet casings that he fired into Brian Thompson's back. The blasphemously brought blasphemous prayer candles with his face etched on them. And the degree to which far too many Americans subordinated all discretion, all civic propriety to celebrate murder because it channeled in them something cathartic. And it's hardly the first episode. It's probably not going to be the last. And sets up the exploration of the last five to seven years of left wing violence. Manic lone gunmen, riotous mobs that descend on American urban centers nightly. Sophisticated ambush tactics deployed against ICE and CBP facilities by small cell terrorist groups. This is what we're facing today. And looking at square in the face is what I hope this book achieves.

[John Podhoretz]

So of course the first objection to an argument like yours is the what about objection, which is, well, isn't there a lot of political violence on the right? Why are you focusing your ire on the left? That would seem to be an effort to excuse problems within your own conservative camp and lay them at the feet of the camp that you are not ideologically a part of. So how do you answer that? Objection.

[Noah Rothman]

So, yeah, that takes on the quality of an excuse when it's deployed with the frequency that it is being deployed to counter the evidence of our own eyes, which is increasingly. We're increasingly confronted with episodes of left wing violence. But I'm very suspicious of. I don't call them out for being completely, completely wrong. But there's quite a few databases that purport to claim, using statistical evidence that the right is the font from which all domestic political violence springs. And if you dig into the actual individual cases that support that narrative based on these data sets, you see gang violence, intra family violence, prison violence, episodes in which somebody graffitied the site of a church, and that's coded as right wing violence. Episodes in which a homeless man walked into a hotel and started hurling racial slurs at the hotelier. That's right wing violence. So you start to get a little suspicious of the conclusions that are supposedly justified by these data sets. I don't counter them with my own data set. I think the whole enterprise is subjective and fraught. Nevertheless, I try to explore these as individual episodes, identify the manic thought process that leads, which to some extent is, you see it across the board. Somebody who engages in violence in the pursuit of policy outcomes is in some degree succumbing to disorderedness thinking. So you do have to explore them on an individual level. And then also in the first chapter, I cite pretty extensively a report that was prepared for the Department of Homeland Security by this organization, Insight. And in it they describe the degree to which researchers who study left wing, violent left wing extremism are face intimidation campaigns, loss of professional reputation, social isolation, even the threat of physical retribution. Physical for doing their work. To say nothing of the fact that quite a lot of the study of left wing extremism is conducted by individuals who are members of the organizations and groups that are accused of engaging in extremist tactics and left wing violence. So the whole enterprise is kind of fraught when you start to look into it. And I'm not saying that, I'm not pointing the finger at the left and saying, well, you're more violent than the right. I find that to be a childish argument. The two phenomena are intertwined, they're reciprocal, they feed on one another. And to look at one side of this equation at the expense of the other is to fail to comprehend the problem. You don't understand its contours or scope. And we certainly can't wrap our hands around, we can't address it if we don't acknowledge its full scope.

[Abe Greenwald]

So, and this is actually why I think your excellent book, which I demanded an advance copy of and got. So I'm halfway through. It's wonderful. Thank you. One of the things that really struck me about it that's important is because I do think there'll be a mainstream media attempt to do just that, to do the whataboutism about this argument. And I think what's important is it's not just a numbers game who's more violent than the other. You're right, that's absolutely the wrong argument. But that our culture has long supported, winked at, you know, sort of nodded approvingly in private with fellow travelers, the idea that the left wing causes justify a little bit of violence. And that's where I think we see what was interesting to me about yesterday's sidewalk display by the journalist so called journalists that John described is that the lawyer for Mangione instantly released a statement, no, no, no, no, no, we're pleading not guilty. Let's not have these people out there justifying his cause. So I do think that the mainstream culture's acceptance, glorification, certainly in popular culture, its elevation of the idea of left wing violence being pure, being revolutionary, all these things that code good is a huge part of the problem. And I think your book does an excellent job just through power of narrative and the stories you tell and what you're showing, that that has always been a lie and that people on the right have long pointed to that. But the rest of the culture needs to catch up and understand that going forward. We're going to have a bigger problem if we don't understand that at core this is not revolutionary justice being meted out. It is murder.

[Seth Mandel]

You know,

[John Podhoretz]

go ahead.

[Seth Mandel]

Can I just push on that point about the. What those women said yesterday about Brian Thompson, the fact that they felt so comfortable unapologetically reveling not only in his death, in the misery of his family, over it. The point, and I'm not someone who obviously I don't believe speech is violence and I don't believe in hate speech laws, but the point of that speech was to wound. It was as if they could enact some further violence, they would have. And the fact that they felt so comfortable spitting it out, making a show of this ugliness, I think really speaks to. And there's a lot of this on the left too. I mean, on the right too, this is another sort of area in which they feed off each other's. It's a sort of arms war of ugly rhetoric. Something has gone wrong on the social level as well. It's not just political, ideological. There is a component here having to do with just how you're supposed to interact in a world in space that you have to share with other human beings.

[John Podhoretz]

Look, part of this is these two things are intrinsically related. If Luigi Mangione, we don't know what disordered thinking and all of that, if somebody like that would think that the world would believe him to be one of the great villains in history. That might be the sort of thing that could retard even a disordered thinking person. That might retard him justifying to himself his own bloodlust and going at Brian Thompson. There is an understanding, I think, that when you take these steps or do these things in this world, there's going to be a bunch of people who are going to think that you did something noble and heroic, not that you did something that breached every bond of safety and that we'll create if we don't nip it in the bud, or that will create a completely anarchic and Hobbesian society in which we literally came together to form societies and rules in order to prevent moments like Luigi Bagioni shooting Brian Thompson in the back. That's like why society exists. So that that's not something that goes unpunished and that you therefore are deterred from doing because of the punishment. What if there's a reward? What if there's a reward instead of a deterrent?

[Christine Rosen]

Can I add something to that, which is the quote that you quoted about I hope the son enjoys the blood money or whatever it was that latches onto that by making it. We used to argue over whether the child was, could be blamed for the sins of the father, whatever. In this instance, the culture is positioning the sin as the father running a health care health insurance corporation, not the murderer of the health care executive. And she's, and, and implying that the children are responsible for the sins of the father and that thanks to the blood money, this child is now somehow carrying. Not only did his father deserve to die, but the implication is he's tainted. He's tainted by merely being the offspring of a corporate executive. That is an idea that is so extreme even among very left wing economic minds and pundits in the U.S. it's not that extreme.

[John Podhoretz]

It's very intrinsic to what you might call more primitive societies. Right. I mean, I don't believe that the Bible is primitive, but the sins of the father are visited upon the child unto the fourth generation, says the Bible. The idea being that an evil stain is something that may not even be like praiseworthy. It's just an evil stain. One of the other things that's supposed to keep you from doing evil is the idea that it will haunt your children and your children's children and your children's children's children and be an overcast, overshadow their lives. But what if you're Ashley Rojas and you think, or you're, you know, you think that being a celebrator of this murder, your, Your children are going to be proud of you.

[Noah Rothman]

They're going to say nothing about these things.

[John Podhoretz]

Great for doing it.

[Noah Rothman]

I am perfectly comfortable saying these women were steeped in the martyrology around violent criminals, pathological murderers, people who can kill cops. I have a whole chapter on it. Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu Jamal, Assata Shakur. I mean, these people have buildings named for them on college campuses. There is. There's a whole, A whole apparatus, a lattice work around them, an intellectual effort to render their crimes excusable, forgivable, or perhaps having not even happened. Sometimes these mutually exclusive thoughts exist in the same head. And the notion being that they are persecuted by systematic forces. Anything they did, if they did it, is justified by virtue of their revolutionary ethos. They, their desire to engineer a social reversion, bringing low the people who deserve it and raising up the. The systematically oppressed, et cetera, so forth. All this nonsense. It's very common. It's totally normalized within far left discourse and nobody follows the logic of the conclusion, which would be, and we've seen some of it too, within that chapter. You know, Michael Brown, teenager shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, ignited a whole bunch of riots around him. It took a couple of months for Barack Obama's civil Rights division of his Justice Department to exonerate Officer Darren Wilson, but not before the mythology around his murder became normalized, generalized. I still probably a lot of people believe hands up, don't shoot is something

[Abe Greenwald]

that was going to say. It generated a catchphrase that's still used

[Noah Rothman]

today, even to a certain extent, George Floyd, who was murdered according to a jury. But there's literally a movement around him to affix a halo to his head and put wings on his back and make him into a. A saint. And not being figurative, there, there was a literal effort on the part of religious figures who are caught up in the mania of the moment to flatten him, to render him a caricature, an instrument of utility in a political argument. You see it all the time.

[John Podhoretz]

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[Noah Rothman]

San Jose, Chicago, half a dozen other small cities, one in Arizona.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. 2017, Congress. Members of Congress practicing for a softball

[Noah Rothman]

game

[John Podhoretz]

shot Steve Scalise, now the whip of the house. Basically a miracle that he survived and lived. To tell the tale, guy drives from hundreds and hundreds, hundreds of miles to take out Republican politicians that he doesn't like. We have cases that aren't necessarily left wing violence per se, but are very troubling in the anti Semitism sphere that I think does because of Gaza and the way the Gaza war has dovetailed with people like Zoran Mamdani and the encampment people and all of that. We have the effort to burn down the governor's mansion in Pennsylvania at which Governor Josh Shapiro, an observant Jew, had Just held.

[Noah Rothman]

Why wouldn't we think that's left wing violence?

[John Podhoretz]

Well, I'm just saying because you can

[Noah Rothman]

say perpetrator was perfectly left wing. The, the, the shibboleth to which he was beholden. The, the narratives that are embraced by the pro Hamas 107 protesters are the same that were advanced by the Soviet union in the 1960s and 1970s. Elias Rodriguez, who murdered two people outside of a Jewish event last year, which also accelerated the publication of this book. Actually that guy was a classic far left radical with militant elements to his rhetorical approach to politics. There's substantial overlap to a degree that I don't think the two phenomenon are separable.

[John Podhoretz]

Fair enough. I think it is incumbent on us to acknowledge that anti Semitic violence in the United States over the past decade has been a bi. Ideological, bipartisan affair in which I think

[Noah Rothman]

the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter could be fairly classified as racial. Ethnically motivated violence, which is the FBI's term of art, captures a lot of right wing political violence. Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

And he was against the synagogue's support for immigrants and the Hebrew immigrant AIDS society and stuff like that. So there. So the anti Semitism of all things actually does bring in both political violent tendencies, which is an issue with anti Semitism. I'm not excusing the anti. I'm not excusing the left wingery of.

[Christine Rosen]

But

[John Podhoretz]

these cases I'm bringing up just to say that there has been a steady and persistent drumbeat. And then there are these moments of right wing violence, January 6 riot, Charlottesville, stuff like that, that are amplified through megaphones by the media and become legendary events in American political history. And this steady drumbeat of violence on left wing violence for political reasons is not collated and seen as a threat. In fact, you might say that the Biden administration desperately intended to disentangle the events of left wing violence, focusing instead on the idea that the violence, political violence in the United States was primarily from the right. That was explicitly a goal or effort of the Biden Justice Department and its other other and its report on political violence in 2022 or 2023. Right. Do I have that right?

[Abe Greenwald]

The school board moms, the school board parents being seen as terrorists versus yeah, right. Which actually I have a question for Noah about this. You mentioned some of the political leaders when we first started talking at the top of this hour. Where do you see political leaders absolutely failing in terms of how they talk about this? Even well intentioned ones who want to condemn violence. And how do you see going forward? What role should we expect from our elected officials when these things happen, either on the left or the right. But largely I'm thinking now about the left where they might actually have sympathies with the political motivations of the attackers, but need to draw a line. Where do you see? Are there any examples where you think they've done well? Are there ones that we should actually call out as being pretty terrible?

[Noah Rothman]

I mean, my focus is on the terrible. I'm hard pressed in this moment to think of somebody who I think has been exemplary and you know, a moral paragon. And also, you know, there's, you can't hold individuals, individual rhetoricians, responsible for the interpretation or misinterpretation of their language by people who are mentally disturbed especially. So I'm reluctant to draw a straight line, a causal line between obviously political rhetoric and political violence. However, responsible communicators should be aware of the elevated nature of the threat environment, the deteriorating threat environment, and the degree to which we are encountering a substantial amount of, of chatter that is suggestive of a pronounced threat environment. And it's having a pernicious effect on lawmakers behaviors. They'll admit as much, and I describe it in this book, the degree to which those threats are shifting behavioral patterns and even affecting votes in ways that we should be deeply disturbed by, that is not how American democracy proceeds. That is how it breaks down to say that there's one person out there who I really admire and who's done a great job on this. I can't even really think of one. And part of the reason why I

[Abe Greenwald]

think that's the point.

[Noah Rothman]

Yeah, part of the reason why I think that is is because the Democratic Party has always been attracted to people power. They always find the, the desirable side of a large street presence. And as a conservative, I'm deeply suspicious of crowds, to say nothing of incipient mobs. But they don't see it that way and they cultivate relations with them even in places like Occupy, where if you ask the average occupier, they had no use for Democratic politicians. In fact, they were designed, they would love to see the party thrown into the sea. But nevertheless, they were fet with a desire to co opt that movement and create some, you know, sense that there was this grassroots enthusiasm and passion that had waned over the course of the arguments around Obamacare. Likewise, you know, 2020, very similarly embracing the mobs because they were a display of enthusiasm, people power. And as the Republican Party has gravitated more towards a populist camp, they too have found something desirous desirable about the about crowds and unruly perhaps, but nevertheless passionate displays of political enthusiasm in the streets, which is a little different for the Republican party. But if we have two parties that are agreed that mobs are great, we're going to be in a really bad place very quickly.

[Matt Ebert]

I started with one shop. No college degree, no big investors. It was just a willingness to work. Over time, that one shop turned into a multi billion dollar business called Crash Champions. All the lessons I learned along the way came from the grind. And that's what my show Pod Crash is all about. We have real conversations with people who've built things the hard way. We talk to founders, athletes and blue collar leaders who kept going when things got tough. You'll hear stories of grit, leadership and growth, plus real world lessons you can take back to your team and your life tomorrow.

[John Podhoretz]

When you get momentum, you step on the gas.

[Noah Rothman]

That's how you get separation from everybody else. I was at Harvard Law School.

[John Podhoretz]

I was, blah, blah, blah.

[Noah Rothman]

I looked up, let me tell you something, there's kids in my neighborhood putting in sheetrock that are smarter than you. AI is going to disrupt a lot of stuff. It is never going to disrupt physical blue collar trade skill. And the guy just looked at me and he said, it's bloody impossible. So I asked him this question. I said, it's impossible, possible.

[Matt Ebert]

Unless that's Podcast with me, Matt ebert, watch on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

[Seth Mandel]

Well, I just want to ask. No, about a sort of pet theory of mine here, or not really a theory kind of framework. The way I think about it, you've been chronicling left wing violence for years and years now. We know it goes back. Well, it goes back to the birth of the left as we think of it. But I mean, but in our time, it goes back decades. But it does seem to me that the Left's embrace post October 7th of Hamas and jihad and calling for Intifada and praising these foreign terrorists the way it did in the 60s in terms

[John Podhoretz]

of

[Seth Mandel]

paramilitary Marxist groups and Marxist communist armies abroad. That opened the left up to a sort of new range of horrible conduct, not even exclusively pertaining to Jews in Israel, but it opened the range of possibilities because they've now sort of let in, embraced this exotic, foreign, deadly sense of mass killing, celebrated religious violence. And I think if you look at sort of the recent spate of political assassinations or attempted political assassinations, it's kind of all after October 7th, actually.

[John Podhoretz]

You mean the Trump assassination?

[Noah Rothman]

The Trump assassination assassination.

[Seth Mandel]

Charlie Cook, even Brian Thompson True, but

[Noah Rothman]

the attempt on Brett Kavanaugh preceded it and there were a couple others that I'm blocking on. But I can think of that over the course of the 20 years or so that constitutes our current wave of violence and then the book, I essentially established three waves of left wing political violence occurring over the course of a half century so. The 1910s and 1920s, anarchist, socialist, anarchist wave, the Marxian guerrilla movements of the 1960s through 80s and today beginning in about 1999 and accelerating rapidly after 2010. I didn't write about the international context for this book, it is exclusively within the United States. But I reviewed for commentary a couple of months ago Jason Burke's book the Revolutionists, which describes the pathway that the international Marxian left took, beginning with their infatuation with Cuban style Marxism focalism and the urban guerrilla movements that were inspired by the Cuban revolution and how they transitioned first into pan Arab nationalists, gravitating towards the Ba' Athist socialist model of Iraq and Syria, and then eventually into full on Islamists after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, which incorporated Marxism and che worship, etc. With Revolutionary Green, not environmentalist, but Islamist, traditional, sort of a religious tinged element to what was a revolutionary philosophy which really enlivened people like John Paul Sartre and others. And you could see that didn't happen in the United States in part because the United States had a very different relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran from the outset than for example, Europe did. But maybe there was a long tail on that. Maybe that evolutionary course that the international left followed over the course of the 60s, 70s and 80s was just delayed before it got here and has just been on an accelerated pathway because you can see the same very, the same language as I describe in my book from Soviet era efforts to agitate against Zionism, Zionology being a phenomenon in Soviet academe that was just a way to launder anti Israeli narratives into the broader discourse. And what we hear from the activist class, I mean, it's a precise mirror. So a lot of none of this stuff is quite new. Perhaps it was just delayed.

[Christine Rosen]

Well, so can I ask about an element of the, of the ideological aspect of it, which is that we see polls that say left wingers more likely to excuse political violence or say political violence is justified. We saw a YouGov poll, I think recently about that, but also that, you know, what concerns me is that those left wing respondents tend to be younger, right? And now we have, obviously we have, you know, a groundswell of youth Populism, if you want to call it that, on the left, but we also have a growing number of people now on the right who, and this is something I don't usually hear from Republicans, but. Well, if the kid, you know, the kids don't like Israel, so, you know, how are you going to, how are you going to win elections in the future? I guess we just, if the kids say it, the kids must be right. We have to kowtow to the kids, you know, whatever. So my question is, you see any pattern about, like, are we in for a storm? Is there a rising violent generation coming up through and rather than in the past where young people are tempered by the norms of society, if we're seeing those norms erode right in front of our eyes, are they going to be coming up through a system with no guardrails? Like, are we looking, are we at, are we in danger of, you know, a sort of next generation being violent?

[Noah Rothman]

Well, so I'm of two minds on that. One is that there is, there is a pernicious element to what I believe isn't the obscure history of left wing violence in this country, but a suppressed history of left wing violence in this country. And the extent to which these narratives are not passed on to the next generation, our experiences are not passed on to the next generation. Then the generation that comes after us has no immunity to them. However, those three ghouls outside that Manhattan courthouse shocked the senses and that we should take appreciation of that too. There is still a taboo around violence. It's real. Institutionalists understand that if, if embracing political violence is not immoral, it's certainly gauche and impractical. Maybe that's an instrumentalist argument, but I can work with that. The political utility of pointing fingers in this game, to contend that one side is more violent, more of a threat, is to absolve you and your co partisans of blame for what you implicitly believe is a problem. If you're pointing fingers at somebody and saying, well, you're violent, the implication there is that violence is bad. Again, this is desirable, but it's the sort of thing that needs to be cultivated and explored. You have to say outright, you know, why, what is, what is the, what is the, the sin here? What is the, the, the assault on basic morality and human decency that you're accusing me of and therefore implicitly saying that it's, that it's bad. So, you know, I don't want to succumb entirely to despondency because I don't think this problem is anywhere near as bad as it was in the 1910s and 1920s or 1970s and 1980s. In terms of the scale of the violence, it's really not. It's something we can get our hands around if we are inclined to look at it rationally and to have a proactive approach to it.

[John Podhoretz]

I mean, the problem is that scale with violence, scale matters a lot less than, say, other social trends like supporting single payer healthcare. Scale matters there. If you go there, then you have a sort of left wing shift here. One person can shoot Charlie Kirk. Takes one person with a rifle and a good gun sight to shoot Charlie Kirk. It takes one person on a badly scoped roof and improperly searched roof in Butler, Pennsylvania to nearly kill former president and the leading candidate for a presidency in the United States in 2024. So the net effect of a world that is more accepting of this violence and more triggering to people who might take their ideas and put them into action, the barrier to entry is very low. The ability to achieve the violent aim is still very high. The barrier is very high. People are trying to do it all the time and they get caught. You know, someone's on the golf course for Trump and gets caught, or, you know, approaches the White House compound and gets caught. Hundreds of plots are intercepted every year by the FBI and by local law enforcement and all of that. So actually achieving the terrorist aim or the political violent aim is very, very difficult. But in a world that celebrates it, and I would say culturally, for the last 50 years, we have celebrated, particularly at the elite level, the idea that political violence is justified to fight injustice. And I'll just give you two examples of this, one of which is who is more viewed as more popular or more present, more current, more of a role model in the world? Is it Martin Luther King Jr. Or is it Malcolm X? They were polar opposites. Martin Luther King was. Live within the system, be civilly disobedient against laws that are destructive, unfair, unjust, but shame the system into change, and Malcolm X is the system stole us. We're being bamboozled. We're here in America unjustly, and whatever means we think we need to take to get our way are fine. I would say that inarguably in popular culture, this is a Malcolm X culture and not a Martin Luther King culture, though Martin Luther King is of course, like one of our few secular saints. Now, similarly, if you're somebody who studies American history in colleges and universities, so you're at the elite level, you are studying lionizations of Marxist groups, terrorist Groups, American terrorist groups. What do you think you read if you read about the 60s and 70s.

[Noah Rothman]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

Are you reading earlier?

[Noah Rothman]

I mean, the popular narrative is that in American history courses precisely nothing happened in the United States between the Haymarket riots and the Palmer Raids except the degree to which the United States descended into an anti immigrant fervor. No reason for anti labor sentiment. No. No study of the bombing campaigns, the efforts to assassinate heads of state, heads of government in this country, the attempt on, multiple attempts on the Attorney General's life, the slaughter of, you know, clerks and traders in Manhattan in September 20, 19, 20. None of that is really worth exploration. So nobody understands where it came from and what the nature of that terrorist campaign was. One of the things that really disturbs me over the course of the last couple of years is watching the degree to which the violent left has begun targeting law enforcement, federal and state and municipal law enforcement. That is a feature across every left wing militant wave in the 1910s, 20s, 1960s, 70s and 80s and today. And it is the sort of thing that presages and heralds perhaps something far more radical and far more violent than what even we've already experienced if it follows the trajectory of those two previous waves of militancy.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right, because your title, we've been talking a lot about the blood part of the title, but I want to hear a little bit about the progress side because the point you just made about the history of this, where the ideology sees violence as a means to an end, that has been an extremely clear through line in a lot of progressive and quasi utopian theorizing. And it's not just academic. It then enlists people to serve as foot soldiers for these missions. And I think the anarchists were a very good example of that in American history. And you're absolutely right, it is not taught well in schools, and it should be. We have disappeared a lot of our more unsavory aspects of American history over the years. So I hope that this does encourage greater study of that. But where do you see progressive ideology as a, as opposed to liberalism or conservatism having at its core a kind of acceptance of the idea that sometimes violence is necessary? Or is that just something we tend to superimpose after a violent situation occurs?

[Noah Rothman]

Well, listen, the title is literary. There is significant overlap among progressives who are just basically slightly to the left of American liberals and Marxian revolutionary elements. You know, this is a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap, but not perfect overlap. And the Marxian revolutionary types are those who embrace the Poetic, romantic zeal of expressions of political enthusiasm that manifest in violence. They want to see radical social reversals and they think violence is the instrument to get there. And indeed, they have a lot of historical reason to suspect that that is the pathway to achieving their objectives. Regardless of what you think of their objectives, you know, the moral, the morality of bringing the revolution to America, irrespective, if that's your goal, then engineering a violent confrontation with the symbols of the state, between the, you know, the public, the masses, as they, as they believe them to be still the, you know, the, the hangers on, the fellow travelers, the dead enders, they want to engineer that kind of a conflict. So galvanizing acts of violence are designed to foment that kind of movement. They perceive as. Again, let's go back to these women. What did she say? The United States must, is, must be, in the course of human history, the most acquiescent population that has ever been. We are beset by forces that we should be rebelling against, and yet we are not. It's time for us to wake up. And what would wake us up? Some cataclysmic event, A clarion call to the great oppressed, systemically displaced American population who will rise up once they understand that victory is achievable. And how is victory achievable? We make the God bleed. We show that there is a chink in the armor. We can demonstrate how rotten this edifice is and all it needs is a good push to topple over. That's sort of the mentality that I think the revolutionary types who are not progressives, who are not simply reformers, but are destroyers. That's what they're attracted to and that's what they think a lot of other people are attracted to too, and would have the courage to say as much if only the conditions were right.

[John Podhoretz]

Again, I think what you're describing is something that is almost anathematic to most people who want to live within the 40 yard lines. Like they want to live ordinary lives and be unmolested by others, by criminals, by people who want to tax them confiscatorily or whatever, but they're just going along. The issue here is this is a question of the triggering of people who in other times and in other circumstances, because the society had not tipped so radically intellectually into irresponsible, dangerous, demagogic and destructive philosophies, would probably themselves have remained inside the 40 yard lines. And you just don't need very many of them. You don't need it Takes one assassin's bullet to take out a president. It takes one guy with the idea of shooting the United Healthcare executive and somehow figuring out where he is on that morning in December to shoot him in the back. Unless every single person in America lives like a Brazilian rich guy surrounded by four vehicles every time he drives anywhere. Because there's a kidnapping culture in Brazil that is simply a form of, you know, commercial gain. You know, you kidnap somebody to get money and then you release them. But here, by the way, even then,

[Seth Mandel]

it takes one person who's willing to give their own life in order to carry it out.

[John Podhoretz]

Exactly. And, you know, so we are. So the issue here is, and I think it's also fair to say this book, we're making it sound very theoretical. And it is a history of the last. It is a history of left wing violence that tells a narrative story. And so it is interesting and exciting and full of all sorts of things that you didn't know before that, that Noah illuminates. And so, you know, it's, I mean,

[Noah Rothman]

the extent to which the, the very recent scholarship into some of these periods that all of them are described by their chroniclers as forgotten for a reason. The forgotten terrorists, the anarchist wave, you know, the forgotten Puerto Rican nationalists who shot up Congress in 1954. The forgotten militants of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, as described by Brian Burroughs in his book, you know, why is Everything Forgotten? Is, Is there a reason why we keep forgetting this sort of thing? Is it just trauma that we banish from the national imagination? No, I don't think so.

[Christine Rosen]

Because Puerto Rican nationalists tried to kill Harry Truman when he was in office, right?

[John Podhoretz]

Well, that was the Puerto Rican nationalism

[Noah Rothman]

which evolved into, which evolved into the faln. But there's no symmetry here on the right. Duly so, and I am thankful for it. Every institution in America doesn't need to be goaded into the noble work of scanning the horizon for signs of right wing violence. They're attuned to that threat and they should be. And anytime there's an episode that can be plausibly blamed on right wing political activism manifesting in violence, we're treated to prolonged national lectures about our complacency and why we should address our blind spots. And that is all to the good. But there is no symmetry when it comes to violence from the left. And I don't recall ever encountering a sustained grappling with this phenomenon, even as it's so ripe for exploration and so obviously paramount in our national life. It's the background radiation that we've all begun to get used to. So where is that exploration? And why is it just so it doesn't seem to capture the imaginations of America's opinion makers and shapes.

[John Podhoretz]

Well, it doesn't. Well, this is the ultimate question here, which is, does it not fail to capture them, to fail to capture the imagination? Because so many people in that world who are the opinion leaders and decision makers have a weird implicit reservoir of sympathy with the aims and goals of the violent people, even if they don't support the violent ends. And therefore there comes the. Well, it's terrible that a man is shot on a Street on 53rd street, but our healthcare system is terrible and he was at the top of it. And sometimes people are just gonna crack.

[Noah Rothman]

Or if you're Bernie Sanders, it's not just the healthcare system. In his own estimation, as he said in that quote, it's the electoral system, it's the housing system, it's the banking system. It's broken. Everything is broken. It's a Mary need. Throw it all out.

[John Podhoretz]

Right.

[Christine Rosen]

Can I ask a follow up on this? Because I'm really interested in, Noah, how you see one aspect of this. Few years ago, Louis Farrakhan was in the news again because, you know, the Nation of Islam leader, because the, the, the Women's March leaders were associates of his. And, you know, some other people were seen taking. There was a photo surface that, you know, a couple members of Congress took a photo with him or whatever it was. And there was a concerted effort immediately. It was instinctive. It wasn't even organized. It was instinctive by pundits on the left who came in and said, this guy is right wing and therefore this is a right wing hate preacher. Louis Farrakhan, the Washington Post wrote in an article, the right wing Farrakhan, whatever I think it was. Adam Serwer at the Atlantic chimed in also, you know, along those lines, there were a few people that were just like, it was bizarre that you could tell this was on the tip. They'd been waiting so long to pass Farrakhan off and then it was like, well, why is he right wing? Well, he hates gays. So clearly. So my question to you is, we're seeing, as you discussed and as you discussed in the review of that book, the revival of something that, you know, I've commented on how I can't believe how much I've written on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine since October 2023, the revival of sort of Marxist, clearly left wing Palestinian or pro Palestinian nationalism or Pro Palestinian anti Zionism that is clearly left wing. How do we, how do we have this conversation when somebody, you know, an Islamic terrorist, tries to shoot up a synagogue in Michigan and the. The left does not see this as left wing in origin or influence at all and in fact, resentment, the implication that this could possibly be called left wing violence. So how. I'm curious to know your point of view on how we have that conversation about the unwillingness, because that is the key issue right now on the left with the campus protests and all that stuff. The one thing bringing it all together is this kind of rabid anti Zionism and they refuse to believe that because, you know, Islamists are clearly ultra conservative. If you read the New York Times, you know, the ultra conservatives of isis. How do we have this conversation under those circumstances?

[Noah Rothman]

Well, call it the BS that it is. I mean, that's just trash and it's intellectually indefensible trash. If you were the notion here being that radical Islamist terrorism in the Wahhabist context, I suppose, is ultra conservative in the United States. Radical Islamist terrorism is revolutionary. It is not conservative. It seeks not to conserve a single thing about the American founding. So we should just toss that one at the outset. It is a rhetorical trap that they're attempting to lure you into and it is easily negotiable. Walk around it. The notion also that the Women's March was somehow co opted by ultra conservative forces and therefore descended into anti Semitism is similarly bunk. I mean, when the thing was being feted by the likes of Kristin Gillibrand as the suffragettes of our time. In Time magazine's profile of the Women's March, its organizers were celebrating the birthday of the, quote, revolutionary Assata Shakur, Black Liberation army activist, who was jailed and then subsequently escaped after participating in the murder of a New Jersey state trooper on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike, who was a revolutionary left wing activist who lived the last comfortably until she died last year in Cuba, a fugitive from American justice. And she was a radical left wing militant. And this organization was radical left wing and militant, but not nearly enough for those who wanted it, who wanted the individual supporters of this thing, when it became, when it was an organic phenomenon, when it was just an expression of anti Trump anxiety and was actually a healthy expression of dissent against Donald Trump. In March of 2017, it was attacked by its allies for not being violent enough. There was one woman in the New Republic who wrote an essay about the degree to which the police are staying their hands with these white women and that is an insult to you white women. It is a provocation that you should respond to with far more aggression than you're displaying because it just suggests that you're on the side of the system and you should be far more revolutionary than that. This was its organizers, its supporters in the intelligentsia. We're hostile to the American civic covenant as we understand it. And one expression of that hostility was anti Jewish animus, which Linda Sarsour evinced, which others, others within that apparatus.

[Abe Greenwald]

Tamika Mallory was another.

[Noah Rothman]

Yeah, yeah, Tamika Mallory, that's who I was trying to think of, who was instrumental in the expurgation the, the removal of Jewish activists within that organization. That's just one element of its hostility to Westernism. This anti Western theme is a thread across left wing militant groups, thread across the centuries. Again, there are, throughout this book there are predictive and indeed prescriptive elements associated that you can see across the, you know, the century of left wing, violent military militancy in the United States. Which is part of the reason why I don't think it's very well explored because if you know what you're looking at, you can actually predict and interdict and nobody wants that.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, and I, and I would add that the Women's March is a good example of what you're describing in this book because there you had, you really did have an outpouring of civic engagement by women who began the whole situation calling themselves Pantsuit Nation. Cuz they were Hillary supporters who were disappointed. They were the most norm core people you can imagine.

[Noah Rothman]

I'm sure they don't want to be reminded of that.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right, exactly, exactly. But they, but, but the point was that the people who then do the organizing, the ones who actually want to enlist them in a more radical cause, must experience some frustration because actually most Americans don't want to use violence as a political tool. And so there is, but the, but again, the cultural elite see that as a sexy topic, a thing that, you know, let's push the envelope here. Look at how we're really, this is. Donald Trump's a fascist. We have to sort of up our own game. And it was sort of heartening. Setting aside the anti Semitism, which, which was horrifying in that context, it was heartening to see so many of the women just like the most radical thing they did was knit, you know, slightly inappropriate hats and march around D.C. that is, that's how Americans tend to want to protest en masse. And so that has shifted, I think, because those protests are not the Kind of thing that an increasingly removed elite want to see to advance their own cause?

[John Podhoretz]

No, but even more importantly so, the Women's March represented the first moment in what happened at the Women's March. A lot of voter registration, a lot of political activism within the 40 yard lines. That was the beginning of the resistance to Trump that was legitimate and led to the 2018 election, which was a romp by Democrats against Republicans, won 40 seats in the House. And the point here is that that was a mass demonstration, peaceful, that led to a political, that had partially led to a positive political results for the side that had demonstrated. But the people that Noah is talking about and that are in this book, that is unsatisfying to them. They don't want to, they don't want to run, they don't want to like have a majority in Congress so they can pass better legislation. They are looking to re, radically redefine the United States of America. And therefore, in some sense, what I'm talking about here, the use of actual political means of the United States to affect gradual change is worse. It's worse because it accepts the legitimacy of the system and says work within it and you can work your will if you win the argument. And you, you do the work to win the argument with people who don't have very strong opinions. And so that's why I get back to the whole point here, which is that left wing violence and the deployment of left wing violence and the excuses made for it by left wing intellectuals and all of that is uniquely bad now because it really does only take a few people to like, you know, ruin it for everybody or.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah, I just want to add to this point about what happens on the left, the difference between left wing violence and right wing and why the right is scanning its own horizon for radicals and denouncing them and so on. I think there's something inherently different in the way the left and right approach ideology in that conservatives, if you get five conservatives together, they've all got slightly different ideas. They will, they will. Some will, you know, be totally libertarian, some will be hawkish, some will be isolationist, some will, they all have these little heresies that, that they sort of cherish and will argue with other conservatives about and they're very specific in their ideas. And this isn't, this isn't even just for, I think, the intellectual class. I think it's, it's sort of like, you know, it has to do with what one sees in one's own life falling apart or one's day to day Life sort of breaking down and wanting to fix and so on. Whereas on the left, left, liberals, they have a sort of direction that they're in favor of sort of vector. And they see basically anyone who's kind of, if you're going in that direction, which is, system's broken, things are unfair, there's inequity, inequality, social justice, the richer so on. We know the litany. It's like, yeah, it's this sort of cloud that they're generally attached to and there's not a lot of sort of fine differences. There are, I mean, among, you know, certain people who really think about it, of course. But this is why when something like, you know, someone will come out and declare themselves a socialist and then someone on the left or liberal will say, well, I don't think he really means socialism. You know, I think there's just, they just, they appreciate the general direction, you know, and the same thing goes for all the globalizing intifada stuff. This isn't what they really mean. They just mean, you know, it just means they're able to sort of put this fog over it, this cloud that worked that they're comfortable with, that means things are moving in the general direction that they think, think the, the movement should go in.

[Noah Rothman]

There's a lot of vagaries that folks like to hide behind, especially when they're called out on the specifics of why their respective movements are going in the wrong direction. And I don't, you know, I'm not hiding behind the notion that there's some just ill defined miasma and we're all just sort of sifting through it and it's difficult to navigate. You, you know how it feels. No, it's not, it's not the case. I'm very specific about this. There are 80 pages of notes in this book. I'm desperate to see somebody take my arguments apart because I understand that there was going to be, there will be an effort to find the fatal flaw in this thing. And when it comes to the right, I do close with the right. And I find the disturbing degree to which they're adopting the left's tactics and sort of its raison d' etre to be really unnerving. They're also talking themselves into the notion that the system is irreparably broken and that even smart and rational center right voices are working themselves up into a froth over the banalities of constitutional government. They are adopting a martyrology, as they had around Ashley Babbitt, who was not a victim, who was a perpetrator. They're inverting the roles of victim and perpetrator, as the left so frequently does. They're retailing false flags as they contend that January 6th was again a very common leftist tactic. The president's pardons of violent January 6th protesters repeated Joe Biden's mistake by flattening these people into a category he ended up pardoned. Joe Biden ended up pardoning a lot of very violent people in his final days in office. So, too has the president, by virtue of creating a category of people into which these individuals fit, not recognizing them as individuals who have done discrete things that merit discrete punishments. Mobs, affinity groups, shock forces, all this stuff, black block tactics. All this stuff was once exclusive to the left, no longer. And that's the sort of thing that I hope after seven chapters of Exploring where the left has Gone Wrong, you can hold up a mirror to the American right and say, all right, now take a look at this. And isn't this in a lovely reflection?

[John Podhoretz]

Noah Rothman, your book, Blood in Progress, out today. Everybody go buy it. Very important. Also a great read. Important to say it's not homework. It's. It's.

[Noah Rothman]

It's a beach read.

[John Podhoretz]

It's compelling.

[Noah Rothman]

And get it for your dad on Father's Day.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah, absolutely. So great to have you and good luck. And we'll see. We'll see who comes after you, and we'll see who celebrates you. So good luck, Noah, and for back tomorrow. So for Abe, Seth and Christina and John Pothor, it's keep the cattle bur.