Violence Made Manifesto

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Violence Made Manifesto"

The Commentary Magazine Podcast
Date: April 27, 2026
Host: John Podhoretz
Guests: Noah Rothman (National Review, author "Blood and Progress"), Seth Mandel, Christine Rosen, Eliana Johnson, Abe Greenwald

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Episode Overview

This urgent episode addresses the attempted assassination of President Trump over the weekend, the troubling role of political violence—particularly emerging from the political left—and the responsibility of cultural and media institutions in shaping, enabling, or policing dangerous rhetoric. With Noah Rothman (author of the forthcoming Blood and Progress, focused on the rise of left-wing political violence in the US) as guest, the group analyzes the event, its context, and consequences for American political discourse and safety.

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1. The 60 Minutes Interview and Media Amplification

[00:53, 48:44]

• Norah O’Donnell’s 60 Minutes Segment: The panel opens with scathing criticism of Norah O’Donnell’s interview with President Trump following the assassination attempt. O’Donnell is accused of irresponsibly reading the attacker’s allegations (from his “manifesto”) to Trump on air, thus becoming a transmission point for an act of political violence and further incentivizing such behavior.

  • “Cole Allen, the would-be assassin, ... didn’t get to shoot anybody, he didn’t get to kill Trump, but he did get his message out on the number one news program in the United States...” — John Podhoretz [02:19]

• Parallel with Publishing Unabomber Manifesto: John draws an analogy with historical decisions to publish terrorist manifestos and the dangerous incentives they create ([06:38]).

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2. The Manifesto: Content, Culture, and Radicalization

[09:25, 18:08, 22:52]

• Nature of the Manifesto: The attacker, Cole Allen, wrote a letter to his family and students—not a lengthy ideological tract but one that echoed conspiratorial, mainstream “rapist, traitor, pedophile” rhetoric directed at Trump. The group finds it eerily normal in tone and disturbingly cold and methodical.

  • “There’s something really creepy about that...he’s almost making it a life lesson.” — Seth Mandel [22:52]
  • “No such thing as just a nut. Without the context of this socialization of terrorism, without the media popularizing it...There’s no such thing as just a nut. It’s not a sole phenomenon.” — Abe Greenwald [18:20]

• Social Media as Incubator: The performative outrage and violent fantasizing once limited to the fringe are now mainstreamed and amplified on platforms (e.g., BlueSky), collapsing the gap between thought and actual violence.

  • “Assassins...have existed throughout time...but bathing in an atmosphere...the shift between thought and action, the gap between thought and action starts to shrink, maybe.” — John Podhoretz [15:58]

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3. Media and Political Double Standards

[14:14, 53:05, 54:19]

• Selective Scrutiny of Political Violence: The media and society have a lopsided vigilance regarding violence. Right-wing rhetoric and atrocities are thoroughly investigated, while left-wing violence and the rhetoric inspiring it are often minimized or contextualized—a double standard panelists argue is dangerous.

  • “If there was a right-wing equivalent of this…we’d be having a much different conversation and we would have had it months ago.” — Noah Rothman [10:53]
  • “When it’s on the right...the idea itself is...out of bounds...but now on the left...if we don't engage with these ideas and give them an outlet...these ideas and these actions will take over. So it's the opposite.” — Seth Mandel [53:05]

• Example: Hasan Piker celebrated in the New York Times despite violent rhetoric; leftist lawmakers and activists (AOC, Abdul El Sayed, Zoran Mamdani) go unchallenged by party leaders ([41:49, 74:15]).

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4. Patterns and Shifts in Political Violence

[29:06, 32:12, 35:46, 58:06]

• Historical Comparison:

  • Classical lone-wolf actors—Lee Harvey Oswald, Arthur Bremer, John Hinckley—were motivated by personal delusions or nihilistic attention-seeking. The current wave, typified by Allen, is more ideological, collective, and coldly rationalized.
  • “That was not political action as we understand it...They do believe that they are acting in service of something higher.” — John Podhoretz [44:54]

• Left vs. Right:

  • Right: More mass attacks on symbolic public spaces; antisemitic violence.
  • Left: Direct attacks on individual political figures to effect immediate political change.
  • “The left is interested in using violence against individual figures to create instant political change. That is a difference.” — John Podhoretz [29:06, 32:12]
  • Noah notes that right-wing extremists are now adopting some “leftist” mob and cell tactics ([32:12]).

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5. The Normalization and Cultural Failure

[40:00, 41:49, 48:44, 70:44]

• Legitimization by Institutions: When influential institutions and figures treat extremist views as legitimate or even “lucid,” violent posturing is normalized, and would-be assassins or terrorists see themselves as mainstream heroes.

  • “They wield this as an instrument of political utility also with the understanding ... it could be turned on them at any moment. So they just have to keep it pointed in the direction of their enemies.” — Noah Rothman [42:07]
  • “This activation, this mass activation of the idea that there is a legitimacy to taking matters in your own hands...That’s a little new.” — John Podhoretz [44:54]

• Doxxing and Targeting by Politicians: Example of Zoran Mamdani (NYC mayor) doxxing Ken Griffin, painting him as a target:

  • “He doxed Ken Griffin...the elected mayor of New York City is using social media to place Ken Griffin’s life in danger.” — John Podhoretz [75:03]

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6. The Cycle of Violence, Policing Rhetoric, and Responsibility

[63:35, 65:48, 71:36, 73:15, 77:29]

• Potential for Escalation and Copycats: While there was no surge of copycats after previous high-profile murders, the normalization and valorization of such acts only increase the risk. Rothman warns that increasing “waves” of political violence are self-reinforcing.

  • “At some point one of these bullets will find its target and that could be a really destabilizing situation because violence begets violence.” — Noah Rothman [65:48]

• Society’s Failure to Police the Left: Although the right faces aggressive scrutiny and self-policing, there are “literally no examples” of the left policing itself or denouncing extremists in its ranks, which further abets radicalization.

  • “The right has had to engage in [self-policing] over the last 10 years... we have literally no examples that we can think of...of the left or liberals saying enough is enough.” — John Podhoretz [67:58]

• Mainstreaming Dehumanization: Increasingly, moral arguments are made for political violence—against healthcare executives, for example—mirroring the logic of past extremists.

  • “These are political objections that have become a sort of moral argument. And they now make a moral case for violence to pursue a policy objective.” — Eliana Johnson [73:15]

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7. Notable Quotes

• “There’s no such thing as just a nut. Without the context of this socialization of terrorism...it’s not a sole phenomenon.” — Abe Greenwald [18:20]
• “We should be policing this sort of thing. And the right has its violent elements too. ...[but] there’s whole structures...looking for [right-wing] violence before they start. ...the same is not true on the left.” — Noah Rothman [26:39]
• “If you don’t say what Cole Allen did is despicable no matter what he said...you’re subsidizing it and you get more of it.” — John Podhoretz [58:06]
• “We can get our hands around it. We’re never going to eliminate the problem...but we can tackle the whole problem by refusing to identify only one part of it.” — Noah Rothman [77:29]

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8. Final Reflection and Call to Action

[78:44]

• The outlook is grim: as radicalization becomes normalized, the risk of successful, history-altering political violence grows. The podcast closes with an urgent call to recognize and oppose all political violence with equal condemnation, and to resist the impulse to excuse “our side’s” extremists as tragic or lucid.
  • “All of it has got to be tackled with the same vehemence and hostility that we view political violence from our political opponents.” — Noah Rothman [77:29]

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Recommended:

• “Blood and Progress” by Noah Rothman (preorder encouraged) [78:44]

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Key Timestamps

• [00:53]—Opening discussion on the 60 Minutes interview and media amplification.
• [09:25]—Rothman analyzes press reaction to manifestos and disordered thinking.
• [18:20]—Greenwald on the end of “just a nut” as an explanation for lone violence.
• [22:52]—Mandel and Podhoretz analyze the letter’s pedagogical, creepy tone.
• [29:06, 32:12]—Right vs. left violence: different targets, different purposes.
• [41:49]—Panel on institutional and Democratic Party reluctance to denounce the left.
• [53:05, 54:19]—Shift in cultural and media treatment of left vs. right wing manifestos.
• [65:48]—Rothman: Violence begets violence—potential for escalation.
• [75:03]—Mamdani doxing Ken Griffin as a case study in normalization of targeting.
• [77:29]—Final warning: necessity of equal condemnation for all political violence.

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This episode is a sobering, multi-voiced exploration of America’s political violence problem, with a strong critique of media and cultural gatekeepers who fail to discourage or even legitimize radicalization from their own side. Highly recommended for those seeking to understand the currents beneath violent acts—and the pressing need for cultural self-correction before further tragedy unfolds.

Transcript

[John Podhorz]

Hope for the best, expect the worst Some drinks and pain Some die of

[Seth Mandel]

thirst no way of knowing which way

[Noah Rothman]

it's going Hope for the best, Expect the worst, hope for the best.

[John Podhorz]

Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, April 27, 2026. I am Jon Podhorz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me as always, senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[Seth Mandel]

Hi, John.

[John Podhorz]

Social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

[Eliana Johnson]

Hi, John.

[John Podhorz]

Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.

[Christine Rosen]

Hi, John.

[John Podhorz]

And joining us today, the inceptor of the Commentary magazine podcast, now, senior editor at National Review and author of the forthcoming book Blood and Progress, our old friend Noah Rothman here from his vacation redoubt in the Caribbean. Because of course, the topic of Blood and Progress is the rise of political violence on the left in the United States. So who better could we have to discuss this matter today of what happened over the weekend than Noah Rothman? Hi, Noah.

[Noah Rothman]

Hi, John. Thank you for having me. Acts of violence like this create a lot of victims and I am just one of them coming to you and breaking my vacation.

[John Podhorz]

You're a victim and a hero.

[Noah Rothman]

I, I understand, yes.

[John Podhorz]

We all have children and your wife is a hero. And your wife, you're doing a podcast while she is probably trying to sleep. Okay, so let us,

[Seth Mandel]

I got so

[John Podhorz]

many directions to go in and some of this is going to be media related. Maybe it's the cart before the horse to talk about Norah o' Donnell's absence.

[Christine Rosen]

We gotta start with there.

[John Podhorz]

We gotta start with, okay. Nora o' Donnell covered her head in shame, did something last night on 60 Minutes that should fired and drummed out of both the journalism and civilized society compelling a person who had just survived what was not a direct assassination attempt, but an attempt to do a direct assassination attempt with the accusations levied by the monster who attempted to decapitate our government and change American political and world history by saying, he says you beat your wife. What's your response in that sense? NORA o', donnell, in my view, Cole Allen won. Cole Allen, the would be assassin, wrote a manifesto or a letter really to his family and friends and he didn't get to shoot anybody, he didn't get to kill Trump, but he did get to get his message out on the number one news program in the United States through the vehicle of having the person that he wanted to kill have to answer for the crimes that he believes that person killed not even 24 hours after the event itself.

[Christine Rosen]

ELIANA there are a couple aspects to this. So yes, he wrote this manifesto. And he seemed fixated on, he didn't say Trump, but, you know, a racist and, excuse me, a rapist and pedophile is running our government. Which I read as an outgrowth of the absolute furor created by the Epstein files. And the name Epstein wasn't mentioned in this 60 Minutes episode. And it seemed to me a failure of this segment to explore with the President because he and his people were actually a part of whipping up this furor, to explore with him whether they thought this, you know, they made a mistake whipping up some of this furor and to talk about this a little bit because the Democrats have ended up leveraging this against the president. We saw this in the Abdul El Sayed leaked audio. He is the left wing Senate candidate in Michigan and he says, I don't want it to. He said, I don't want to take a position on the death of the Ayatollah. If I'm pressed about it by the media, I'm going to say rapist, pedophile. Precisely this. I'm going to change the topic to Epstein. The second thing is we're hearing talk about political violence. And Nora o' Donnell explicitly said, you know, also in that ballroom, and this relates to Noah's book, she said, also in that ballroom were RFK Jr. Whose father was assassinated, and Erica Kirk, whose husband was assassinated, and Steve Scalise and there was an attempt on his life. And oh my gosh, there's just so much political violence. And there is an absolute refusal on the part of the media to to say this is left wing political violence whipped up by Democrats and others portraying Republicans and Trump in particular as an existential threat to the country and to the world.

[Seth Mandel]

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[John Podhorz]

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[Seth Mandel]

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[John Podhorz]

So you can argue better.

[Seth Mandel]

Can I?

[John Podhorz]

Just before you go on. In 1997, 1998, maybe after Ted Kaczynski got the Washington Post. Remember to. Part of the way that the Unabomber was dealt with in an unprecedented fashion was that the Washington Post agreed to publish in this sort of four page broadsheet insert the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who had by this point, I think, injured 12 or 14 people with his bombs, including our friend David Guler. And they agreed to do this. And it was wildly controversial because why are you giving this is what he wants and you're giving him what he wants. It turned out that it was one of the means by which the government got Ted Kaczynski because his brother recognized the prose from the manifesto. But a couple of years after that, a very left wing publishing house run by a disgraceful person named Ezra Freelander decided that he was going to publish the Unabomber's manifesto as a book in his weird altar publishing world. And I went absolutely ballistic and berserk because at the time, because, and I don't think I was the only one, because this is granting the terrorist the victory. If you engage with the ideas of the terrorist, who is after all doing this in part to expound upon his ideas through real world action, you are granting him at the bookstore or in the page of the Washington Post, or on CBS on 60 Minutes, you are granting him his desideratum. So first of all, aside from the moral stain, that means that you are a transmission point for a civilization destroying impulse, which is that what you want to do is kill off your political leaders when you don't like them after they've been legitimately elected. You are creating further incentives for people to do exactly this if they know that their material is going to get engaged with by the people whom they are targeting. What disincentive is there? Cole Allen isn't even dead. Meaning at least you know, you could be. You have to face the possibility of being dead. He's alive. So that's where I am.

[Noah Rothman]

This is going to sound super uncharitable.

[John Podhorz]

Yeah.

[Noah Rothman]

But the press, media figures deal with these ideas every day, engage with these ideas every day. A lot of folks are telling on themselves insofar as they read this manifesto and they say, wow, he sounds so lucid. He sounds like he's just engaging with the ideas of the moment, as though this isn't indicative of disordered thinking. The rapist allegation is not true. It just floats around and social media. But it has no verifiable basis in fact, it was disproven. In fact, in a courtroom, the pedophile accusations, similarly, the traitor accusations, similarly, all these things are vestages of investigations that went nowhere. Threads that you tug on and go nowhere. Highly indicative of conspiratorial thought and paranoid thought. So too is his apparent belief that he could rush security and have some sort of a John Wick moment where he's running through this security officers and then selecting his targets in, in really precise ways in the heat of a fight. He doesn't quite understand ballistics, even though he appears to have trained extensively on firearms use, thinking that, you know, buckshot wouldn't go through walls or something along those lines. It's all disordered thinking. And then there was this other thought that he's like, well, he is a Caltech guy. He's so well educated, he's lettered. You know, how, how could this happen? This is not the profile of this sort of person. It is exactly the profile of this sort of person. It is Elias Rodriguez. It is Luigi Mangione.

[John Podhorz]

It is Ted Kaczynski.

[Noah Rothman]

It is Ted Kaczynski, sure, in a certain way. And his manifesto, while it really does animate a lot of right wing fascist elements in Europe, it's proven particularly attractive. His sort of neoludism has proven particularly attractive to a type of progressive. A type of progressive for whom progress is the problem. So I think, yeah, quite a lot of these, the seeds that we're getting from this, exploring this manifesto create the profile of somebody who's very, very prone to this sort of violence. And the degree to which we're focusing on Blue Stick Guy as an incubator of this sort of thing, you know, you can, you can overread that. Certainly a lot of people are on this platform and it's, this is how they talk. And most of them consume this as entertainment and don't act on it. Nevertheless, if there was a right, a right wing equivalent of this sort of thing where people just spoke with such ease and liberty about drawing the blood of their political opponents, we'd be having a much different conversation and we would have had it months ago.

[Seth Mandel]

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[Eliana Johnson]

I'm so glad you brought up Blue sky because that's what has struck me so far about the coverage of this attempt at the President's life. So if, if we thought about this in reverse, which in a way we can, because the media has for many decades now, whenever there's a Republican in office or some Republican control of institutions has done these deep dives into 4chan and into Reddit and to all the places where they think lurk this terrible right wing conspiracy. And as you say, Noah, there are terrible people on some of those platforms calling for the death of their political enemies on the left. But what's different about Blue Sky? And I think what's different about the conversation that we must now have going forward if we want to pre this in the future is that our legitimize that legitimizing cultural institutions that for a very long time in this country have at least expressed skepticism about those sorts of views, have now fully integrated them. I mean, I know you all talked last week about Hasan Piker in the New York Times. That was a big deal. Because when you see an institution like the New York Times not even endorse, but just allow that kind of, you know, fun conversation about looting and about, you know, murder and all the kind of. So it's like, oh, it's just all of us chatting over coffee. The movie Mood on Blue sky is similar. So as you say, the problem isn't that they're doing it. Yeah, it's very self righteous, but it's also performative. It's also performative. And this is where I think it is why we worry about these lone wolf attacks. Because the inability of someone like this obviously very intelligent, completely lucid guy to take action is that he cannot any longer distinguish between the performative political posturing and actually murdering someone or attempting to murder someone.

[John Podhorz]

I mean, let's put it this way. And Abe Greenwald has now joined us.

[Eliana Johnson]

Abe has joined the chat.

[John Podhorz]

He has joined the chat. One important element of this distinction between performative outrage and actual world and actual worldly action is that the world of performative outrage certainly existed, but it is social media that has weaponized it and turned it into a mass phenomenon. You know, assassins have. Political, politically motivated assassins have existed throughout time. Sometimes they're parts of conspiracies, sometimes they are lone actors. All of that is true. But bathing in an atmosphere that would lead you, if you were Cole Allen and I, we haven't, we don't yet know, like, what his mental health history is. And we don't know if he has a criminal record. We don't know anything about what he's like yet. But let's just assume that he's sort of like Luigi Mangione and doesn't really have a record of violence or violent acts. Maybe that doesn't matter anymore. Maybe we have moved into a sort of third area, third category in which if you are drenched, drowning, swimming in this ocean, the shift between thought and action, the gap between thought and action starts to shrink, maybe. And things that would have been unthinkable to a Cole Allen 50 years ago, like, how am I gonna get to. I don't even have enough money to get to D.C. from Torrance, California. How am I gonna stay in this hotel? How am I supposed to do this? Suddenly, he's got instructions on how to use firearms. He has a sheet he can download that will tell him down a long gun and then reassemble it. He's got train schedules. He's got the ability to make a reservation online at the Washington Hilton. He's got this. He's got stuff and constant noise in his ear that says, rapist, predator, traitor, traitor, raper, traitor, rapist, predator. He's part of the movement.

[Eliana Johnson]

I mean, sorry to interrupt, but he sees himself. He's not a lone actor in his own mind. He's part of a movement, but he's the one bold hero able to pick up a gun and do something about what he knows all of his fellow travelers believe. You think that's the distinction?

[Abe Greenwald]

This reminds me of the night it happened. I was texting with someone and he said what? Trump ended up basically saying, probably just a nut. And I said, I actually don't know what that means anymore. Because there's sort of no such thing as just a nut. Without the context of this socialization of terrorism, without the media popularizing it, making it okay. Without the constant cascade of causes. There's no such thing as just a nut. It's not a sole phenomenon.

[Noah Rothman]

This isn't revolutionary Marxian rhetoric. Right. He didn't have the kind of Ouija man. Elias Rodriguez, you know, appeals to a revolutionary chic. In that sense, it was much more mainstream, which is even more terrifying.

[John Podhorz]

Well, we should talk about the letter again. It's not a manifesto as we've understood it, where people sit down and write this political statement. Brevik, the guy who shot up, was it Norway? He wrote 135 page document with footnotes and things like that. And the guy in New Zealand did the same thing. You know, Kaczynski being the model for this. This was a letter to his family, his friends and his students because he's like an SAT tutor for a living. First, he apologizes, I think, to his students for screwing up their schedules. Like, and this is a weird thing because it indicates how normal he is in some odd way. He's like, this is SAT taking season. Saturday is the sat. So he may have students that he's been like, training for a year, and he's now no longer gonna be able to be in touch with them as they're heading on to taking the SAT on Saturday. And he apologizes to them. He apologizes to his friends and family. He has a jaunty, weirdly jaunty tone, kind of upbeat and cheerful, like, yeah, here I go. It's sort of like I'm going on my mountaineering trip and here's who I'm gonna kill. I mean, I have a whole, I have like, you know, a list of who is safe and who's not safe. I'm obviously going after the head, you know, the heads of the government. I'll go through them and then the Secret Service if they try to stop me. But like, I don't want to kill anybody else. I will if I have to. If I have to go through them to get to Trump, I'll do it. But that's not my goal. That's not what I'm about here. I'm looking for the Epstein person, right? As you say, the traitor, rapist, pedophile. And then it ends with this passage of self pity or something where he's like, as I'm writing this, I'm thinking about all the things that I'm not gonna be able to do and all the experiences that I, a 31 year old man, am not gonna be able to have because I will either obviously be dead or he doesn't say it this way, but you know, he'll either be dead or in prison and it makes him sad to think about, but. And you're like, he's writing this and he gets to that paragraph in some odd way. It's almost as though this is the last moment at which he could say, you know what? I'm not gonna do this. I'm sitting down, writing this down on a piece of paper. I'm not gonna do this. I don't wanna like miss out on going and seeing universal islands of adventure or whatever. Like, I don't wanna live that. I don't wanna live the rest of my life in prison or be dead. And yet he still went through it in this, as Noah says. And this is where, you know, it's performative in this. Okay, I'm going to take my best shot. I'm going to, I've done this. I'm walking down the stairs from the 10th floor where my room is and then I'm going to run across the ballroom. I'm going to run, not the ballroom, I'm going to run across the floor, across the ballroom, past the guys who are there and see if I can beat them as I go down the stairs into the ballroom. Like that's where he crosses the line into fantasy.

[Seth Mandel]

Well, and the letter, the fact that he writes this also caught me as really creepy because, you know, he's a trusted, he's writing in this letter that because he's writing this letter the way he's writing it, it is an acknowledgment that he's a trusted adult in the lives of these young people. I'm your teacher. It's like Mr. Miyagi or something. It's, you know, I'm your teacher and I'm. I'm, you know, and I'm telling you that I'm weighing both sides of this, and here's where the scales end up. Let's all look at this together. Again, I'm your teacher. I'm the guy you trust to do these equations with you, to figure out which path to take, et cetera, et cetera, how to study for exams, to realize how to recognize what's the important part of a question, blah, blah, blah. Right? And let's weigh all this, and I'm going to go through with it. And there's something really creepy about that, about the fact that he is, you know, he. Because he's a kind of tech guy, because he's a bit of a math head, right. Because he's an engineer and, and therefore something of a numbers guy, there's something very, very cold, cold blooded about this letter that makes it seem almost like a life lesson in a way. And that I just. It strikes me as making the whole thing even darker.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, he has this part in it where he mentions. He goes through what he sees as potential objections to what he's about to do and then tries to refute them. And what struck me about that was it was. I mean, not that I could ever be convinced, but it was so thoroughly uncompelling. He didn't have. There wasn't. I got no sense of urgency that he's doing this because the world is teetering on the brink. It didn't seem that way at all. It was just like, well, no one else is gonna do it. Basically came down to this, and it has to be done, so I'm going to do it.

[Eliana Johnson]

That's the normalization of the radicalization that I think this is where Noah's book is going to be so helpful for shifting the perspective on how we approach these things, given its history. That is creepy, Abe, your absolute right word for it, because that is different than, I think, some of the political violence we've seen, as Noah mentioned, that's either driven by ideology or some sort of other fervor.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah. And also, like, it's the fact that he. It's. It's like. It's like the way to, you know, what he's doing is saying it doesn't have to be Flight 93. Right? I mean, that's the scary part is that we've. What we've had since 2016 is the argument that it's Flight 93, you have to rush the cockpit because, yeah, you'll down the plane and everybody on the plane will die, but you don't have a choice otherwise. You have to do this. And this guy's making an argument that it doesn't have to be Flight 93. You don't have to be trying to save the Republic. Everyone's not going to die otherwise, or whatever. And that worries me, too, because at least in the past, you had somebody try to say like, it's Armageddon or this, and now he's like, well, you know, it just, it's, it seems like the right time to do this and somebody really should. So I'm doing it. And it is the stakes. He makes the stakes sound lower. And if we see copycat violence, I mean, maybe Noah can speak to this, but, you know, if we see like the, what's the potential for copycat violence on, you know, non emergency, non the world is burning, non Flight 93 stuff, wouldn't that open us up to this whole other pipeline of.

[Noah Rothman]

Well, I was actually really surprised that we didn't see nearly as much copycat violence as I expected after the assassination of Brian Thompson, the United Health Care CEO, because every media outlet and every Democratic politician, through everything they know about what inspires copycats out the window in order to valorize this guy's behavior. And people sort of forget how they acted in the immediate wake of that guy's murder. And it was repulsive. And that is something that I dwell on at length in the book because it was revealing. But we didn't see a wave of violence like I expected after that. We may after this, in part, just because of the extent to which he's mouthing sort of really accepted Democratic rhetoric, basic elementary Democratic rhetoric. But there's a lot of folks who are on the right now who are saying, well, this basic boilerplate Democratic rhetoric is now is radicalizing, and it's obviously not true just by virtue of the numbers. You know, a lot of people consume that sort of thing. But the type who is attracted to Democratic politics now is that type. It's not representative of the broader element on the left or the progressive, a Democratic average voter, not even remotely representative, don't get me wrong. But there is an element that is attracted to that sort of behavior, that talk that and it's not even again, as you say, it's not like it's. There's an urgency there to it. It's just the milieu in which they're in. And some people take it to its logical conclusion because why wouldn't they? At some point, just the law of large numbers, somebody is going to internalize this sort of thing. So it's not as though Democrats are incubating this per se, but they do have a condition in which the sort of person who's attracted to this sort of rhetoric and these, the actions that evolve from that rhetoric, logically, they're, they're finding their way over to a respectable level of politics on the left that is policed on the right. And that is the other thing in my book that I try to make plain is that we should be policing this sort of thing. And the right has its violent elements too, and they're too accepting of them too. But there's whole structures on society that are very geared towards identifying patterns that lead to right wing violence before they start. This is not the sort of violence that they have to be coached into looking for. They're forever scanning the horizon for it and finding it. But the same is not true on the left. There is no that the structure of policing internally and externally just does not exist.

[John Podhorz]

Well, there's a policing right. So I think one of the interesting divides here, as I was thinking about it over the weekend, is, and this is something you do go into in the book, but is the nature of the violence and terrorism inside the borders of the United States over the last 12, 13 years. And there is some kind of weird divide and it functions a little like this. When you hear about a, what appears to be a politically oriented. Mass shooting, a lot of them, particularly when they are anti Semitic coded at synagogues, at Poway, which I always mispronounce, so I can't remember if I pronounce it right. A Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, the shul that was invaded in Texas and other places, these really are right wing. This is right wing terrorism. The guy at the Tree of Life was stimulated by the fact that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society supports open borders and things like that. The directed act of political violence that we know about, with the maybe possible exception of Paul Pelosi, which is a, which is an odd case obviously, but what was the targeting of the home of the leading Democrat in the House seems overwhelmingly to be leftist. So individual acts of political attempts at political assassination, going after Trump, going after the congressional softball game, even things that Aren't like leadership amends like the shooting at the Jewish Museum in D.C. and others. There seems to be this divide. The right has a problem with individual actors who want to go into places and shoot the places up symbolically. The left, and this is a tradition on the left dating back to the 1880s. The left is interested in using violence against individual figures to create instant political change. And that's a real thing. That is a difference. Different kinds of violence, different valences, nothing acceptable whatsoever about the. The violence that the right wing terrorists are engaged. In some ways it's more horrifying because it's terrorism. It's an attack on non actors and on people just going about their daily lives. But we really don't have a. It isn't a problem on both sides.

[Noah Rothman]

One of the points that I attempt to make in the book at the end is to compare sort of like patterns of political violence, political terrorism. And there is still obviously sovereign citizen movement violence, militia type violence. That's the sort of thing that the FBI would identify in the broader universe of domestic violent extremists. More right leaning, racially motivated violence or ethnically motivated violence, more right leaning. And typically, yes, anarchistic violence on the left had a very different flavor to it, different patterns. But you're beginning to see now the right sort of adopt the tactics that we would typically associate with the left. Black bloc tactics, mob violence, mob action, small cell terrorist attacks. The sort of things that, yeah, in the Weather Underground years in the 1910s and 1920s with the anarchistic violence, socialistic violence, you would associate more typically with the left. And we are seeing more of the right adopt that. And I'm not sure if I would posit a theory, I don't in the book, but just the virtue of the degree to which it's valorized and lionized and has become popularized in, you know, popular culture. We all exist in the, in the left leaning milieu of, you know, broader cultural movements. And this is the sort of violence that takes on a noble character when we talk about it.

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[John Podhorz]

We all went to college and we all had our moment of the late night dorm room bull session where it was if you could go back in time and kill Hitler or if you had to kill Hitler as a baby, would you kill Hitler as a baby? Right? And that's the ultimate 19 year old's effort to grapple with what it means to be a moral actor in the world. What level of have to go above the written law under certain circumstances when the written law no longer counts is acceptable. You know, let's have a fun debate about that. And it's no longer a fun debate because there are millions of people in this country who think that Trump is Hitler. And the idea that somebody might show up at the White House Correspondents Dinner to do something about that is axiomatic. I mean, it's one of the reasons why you have so much security at the White House Correspondence center or have so much security wherever the President goes, any President in theory, to his enemies since, you know, since the 1930s could be Hitler. Right? We didn't like what biden did on, you know, social laws and rules and regulations around Covid and thought that he was behaving somewhat dictatorially. He could have been Hitler. They've coded Trump as Hitler since 2015, 2016. He brought some of that on himself. So I'm not, you know, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna cleanse him of responsibility when he goes around and says to the proud boys, stand back and stand tall or whatever it was he said, or he says, you know, go beat other. Go beat up people in the stadiums who are attacking me and I'll. I'll pay for your defense. Like, that's that. That crossed the line into a new kind of politics in the United States, that the leading. Leading presidential candid encourage violence against people who were shouting at him at a rally. So he is not guiltless, but he is not responsible for people who wrongly think that he is Hitler coming to take a shot at him for being Hitler. Although should be said that this letter does not go at him as Hitler. That's in part a little bit, but not entirely, because it does say, I can't live with the predator pedophile traitor. So that's Russiagate, you know, Epstein, Russiagate,

[Noah Rothman]

E. Jean Carroll and Epstein Gate Epstein.

[John Podhorz]

Yeah. Right. Okay. So all. So those are the three. It's not, you know, it wasn't the. He's limiting our liberties. He's breaking, you know, the Constitution, the executive orders are undemocratic. And then he goes into this riff in the course of the letter about being a Christian. The first objection that he answers is, how can you do this as a Christian? And he says. He kind of says, how can I not do it as a Christian? I'm living here. I'm not the one who is being tortured in a detention camp or something like that, but somebody has to do something. I would turn the other cheek, but I'm not the victim. I'm acting on behalf of the victims. That is Christian. He says. Now, it's interesting that that's the first place that he went. And don't think that we're not going to be hearing about this over the next couple of days, because obviously he went there first for some reason. We'll find out. Maybe his family is religious. Maybe he himself, you know, is a. Is a religious person. And so he had to sort of make the excuse that he was acting as a person of faith in enacting this effort to, you know, assassinate the President of the United States.

[Noah Rothman]

What have we been saying for years about wokeness? He was literally a member of the Wide Awakes, hearkening back to civil, Civil War era activism. What have we been saying about Wokeness forever? That the quality of a secular religion, the zealotry especially, that's indicative of a secular religion.

[Eliana Johnson]

Can I just.

[Christine Rosen]

I do.

[Eliana Johnson]

Oh, go ahead. No, go ahead, Eliana.

[Christine Rosen]

Okay. I do think. I mean, there's a thread to pull on, on the far left that has not been pushed back on in the least by the Democratic Party leaders and folks in the mainstream of the Democratic Party because they are terrified of these people. And Cole Allen represents it, but so do Zoran Mamdani, standing outside the apartment of Citadel CEO Ken Griffin and pointing up at it on the sidewalk. Is that not an invitation to. To violence and terror? Saying, this person doesn't contribute enough to New York City and now we're going to levy attacks. But is that not something somebody who is a little off can run with? And so too does Abdul El Sayed out in Michigan, who's leading the Democratic primary for Senate, campaigning next to Hassan Piker and refusing to condemn his views. And then asked about the synagogue attack in Michigan, in Bloomfield, Michigan, that targeted children and his response to the Hezbollah terrorist who carried that out, saying, hurt people, hurt people. And what have we heard from Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries about any of these people? It's not, hey, this stuff is unacceptable.

[Noah Rothman]

This is such an important.

[Christine Rosen]

Because they are afraid because AOC is coming for Chuck she Schumer, because Abdul El Sayed has said, I will not vote for Chuck Schumer for leader. They are afraid to stand up against this. But this is the far left of the Democratic Party now.

[Noah Rothman]

This is such an important point. It's not just they're afraid of the activists. They're afraid of the people who are calling them up on the phone and saying, you need to get shot in order to demonstrate your zeal for the cause. This is happening all through last year. Axios is reporting on it. They're saying, just constantly getting threats of physical violence against them and their families and being genuinely worried about it. We had a whole debate over the degree to which members of Congress and political professionals and civil servants need more protection in this environment, this milieu. But they also incubate it, and they have been doing it for decades, trying to foment activism on the street, regardless of whether it's civic or civil. Or maybe it's got a bit of an unhinged flavor to it, but either way, some evidence that their political program can generate bodies in the street is how they measure their own political efficacy. And so they, they wield this as an instrument of political utility also with the understanding, I think Eliana is 100% right, that it could be turned on them at any given moment. So they just have to keep it pointed in the direction of their enemies.

[Christine Rosen]

This is also what happened on college campuses all over the country after October 7th. And by the way, Ilhan Omar, whose daughter was out protesting at Colombia and other members of the squad went to visit and high five all those protesters who were menacing Jewish students. It is very much. I totally agree with you. Now this, you know, these are the far left lawmakers whose numbers are only growing in size in the party and the mainstream to the extent it even exists really anymore. They're petrified.

[John Podhorz]

I mean, I had one.

[Eliana Johnson]

Can I just add one other thing? Because I think this, this point that Eliana is making is, is important in trying to think about how we prevent this in the future. And it's not a crazy person, it's not a cons, only a conspiracy theorist. He wrapped his. His letter included policy disagreements about how ICE was enforcing the law. And I think that's in part to Eliana's point about why the more mainstream Democratic politicians aren't responding to. They would be seen as, as giving negative feedback on that. I mean, they are. A lot of these people, a lot of these crazy, threatening people wrap their discussions in some conspiratorial language, but also in policy disagreements, they are, they are arguing implicitly and in this guy's case, explicitly that if you disagree on policy matters, we're at such a point where you have to take action. And that is what I think is, is a real shift in terms of the difference between people who were motivated by any messianic or political ideology in the past and the ones who are like, I don't like ICE enforcement. Someone should die. That's bad. That's really, really bad, because that can radicalize people who might otherwise not subscribe to some grander ideological theory.

[John Podhorz]

Well, I think that really is the difference in kind and in degree from the past and where we are treading on new ground, which is a very rare thing to say in the history of political violence, because as I say, you know, political violence has existed forever. I mean, you know, the conspiracy stabbed Julius Caesar to death 2,000 years ago. It's not like. It's not like political violence isn't, isn't a feature of all life. And there are 10,000 different kinds of political violence. But this, this activation this mass activation of the idea that there is a legitimacy to taking matters in your own hands. That. That's a little new. I mean, it's a little new because when would it have occurred to a Cole Allen 50 years ago to do something like this? 50 years ago, we were in a period in which we did have these weird lone gunmen whose motivations were kind of unclear. Not Lee Harvey Oswald, whose motivations I think were clear, but, you know, but Arthur Bremer, who shot George Wallace. I talked about this yesterday. Sarah Jane Moore and Squeaky Frome, who were Manson family members who in 17 days apart, tried to kill Gerald Ford. And then, of course, John Hinckley, who shot Ronald Reagan. They were motivated by this, I think, is Noah's, I mean, obviously disordered thinking. I want Jodie Foster to pay attention to me, so I'm gonna kill Ronald Reagan. That kind of thing. That is, that was not political action as we, as we understand it. That was the assassination era, leeching down into people's consciousnesses and being like, well, this is one way of getting attention. That's not what Cole Allen was about. That's not what a lot of these people are about. It's not like this is how I can get myself attention. They do believe that they are acting in service of something higher. And that adds the possibility. I want to get back to Norah o' Donnell of leading figures in the media. And I've known Norah O' Donnell for 30 years. When I first met Nora O', Donnell, she was like climbing the journalistic ladder in Washington. She worked for Hotline, which was. Which was this sort of sweatshop place that produced a morning newsletter, the original sort of morning newsletter that was produced for Washington insiders. You had to get up at 2:30 in the morning to do it. She did it. Our friend Steve Hayes did it. You know, a whole bunch of people did it. She's been, you know, there in Washington from, you know, a kid out of college to now having hosted the CBS Evening News. And now she's on 60 Minutes. And she goes to a person again, less than 24 hours after he has been the target of an assassination attempt and demands that he engage with the accusations of his assassin. You know, what's new? That's new. He has a beef against you, Mr. President. What do you have to say about that? I mean, he says, you know, how do you respond?

[Christine Rosen]

He called her out on it too.

[John Podhorz]

Like Trump is.

[Christine Rosen]

Trump is channeling. I mean, I was struck in the interview the extent to which he channeled normalcy, actually, like, he really is at his best in these moments, you know? And he said, like, he has an

[Seth Mandel]

unusual amount of practice. Yeah, well, now it's assassination attempt number three.

[Christine Rosen]

He said, like, how dare you read that to me.

[Noah Rothman]

What's unusual, what's new about it, right. Is that the actions of the would be assassin were self discrediting previously. So that all, all behaviors that led to this, all the disordered thinking that led to this reprehensible action were retroactively discredited by your behavior. Not anymore. Now the actions don't discredit you.

[John Podhorz]

No. And an important, important element of what you just said, Noah, is that the idea would be, oh my God, this guy just did this thing, maybe saying

[Noah Rothman]

the stuff that we all believe, Right?

[John Podhorz]

No, but maybe the things that drove him to do this, we really need to have a conversation about because this means that they're leading people to do potentially. And I say this like civilization ending things or civilization redirecting things. Like you assassinate a president, you change history at that moment. That's not how we want history to change. We better figure out what earworm got into his head so that we can stop making that music and driving people to do this instead. It's like, you know, he made this accusation against you. What's your. What do you have to say about it?

[Seth Mandel]

Huh?

[Abe Greenwald]

So. So I have to read this quote. I was pretty heavily steeped in Don DeLillo yesterday because he writes a lot about political assassination and terrorism and how it affects the culture and vice versa. And in his novel Mao 2, which was like in either the late 80s or like 90s or something like that, the main writer, character Bill Gray, says this. It's a piece of dialogue, he says. Years ago, I used to think it was possible for novelists to alter the life of the culture. But now bomb makers and gunmen have taken over that territory. They make raids on human consciousness, what writers used to do before we were all Incorporated. Now DeLillo got a ton of crap for that at the time, as if he were endorsing it, but he wasn't. He was describing a shift in who influences the culture. Unbelievably prescient, because at the time I wouldn't have said he was right, but to me, this is exact. This describes sort of the post 10-7-world where it's the terrorists who have say on what is acceptable, what is not acceptable. The media and tastemakers are going by Hamas's lights or Hamas supporters lights, as opposed to intelligent thinking people who are working on constructive Ideas about civic society.

[Eliana Johnson]

Well, whether they realize it or not, they're legitimizing those views. And I think that's the issue with what Norah o' Donnell did in that interview. There's a sense of putting on par with, you know, by talking about it in that way rather than as, I think, framing it as it. As I hope we're doing today and saying, look, we're trying to understand where this guy comes from, but obviously he's disordered thinking. I mean, this is a, this is a problematic situation. That, and I think the Hamas example is another one. It's like, well, here are these people who've done this thing. Let's, let's legitimize their views by discussing their merit or not and their tactics or not. That's not how typically this country has dealt with those sorts of extremist views. But that's why I think, to Noah's point and why everyone should read his book, and it's not an extremist view anymore. It's becoming normalized through cultural channels that otherwise used to be the point of resistance to those views.

[Seth Mandel]

You know, and, and the logic to it is, you know, when it's on the right, if there's an idea that appears in a manifesto, the idea itself is then considered, you know, out of bounds, right? It's like, oh, this person listens to Ben Shapiro. So, you know, we look at, he listens to so and so on podcast. You know, we had that for a while where right wing, you know, people who committed right wing violence, people were looking at their podcast history, you know, as if it was, you know, when Joe Biden suggested people look at the Supreme Court nominees, blockbuster rental history and all, and everything was supposed to be out of bounds. Well, if he listens to you, if Anders Brevik listens to you, listen to your podcast or visited your website, you are out about. But now on the left, and we noticed this with Hasan Piker, right? It's if we don't engage with these ideas and give them an outlet, a sort of blow off steam in a productive way, outlet, these ideas and these actions will take over. So it's the opposite. It's like because the killer said this, it's legitimate, whereas when it's on the right, it's because the killer said this, it's illegitimate.

[Abe Greenwald]

The best example of that is in the Brian Thompson killing. I mean, that's like, this is, this should be a time that we should talk about his manifesto. We should talk about the problems with health care and Health insurance.

[Noah Rothman]

It's not always terrible either. Like some. There's an element of hygiene to that. For example, when media goes after. There are shooters who described their fealty to Great Replacement Theory. And that was indicative in the press. The narrative was that was indicative, a leading indicator of potentially violent inclinations. And maybe it's certainly unhealthy, it's certainly conspiratorial and paranoid. So it's a sort of thing that should be scrutinized, but there's just nothing like that, no equivalent on the left. And even into Abe's point, when these shooters act on their delusions, the delusions become something that people have to like, ruminate on and really find the layers of truth buried under all the delusion. Right. But there's a nugget in there that's reasonable and perhaps even lucidly stated by, you know, somebody who acts on their delusions.

[John Podhorz]

Like Colella I am, because Abe. Abe has now stimulated my literary pretentiousness. You know, One of the two or three most famous English language poems of the 20th century was September 1, 1939, by W.H. auden, which was written in the wake of the beginning of the Second World War and the attack on Poland that led England to. Led all of Europe to understand that how they had behaved toward Nazi Germany had led inexorably to Germany starting, you know, the conflict that was going to engulf all of Europe. And Auden published this poem. It was an immediate sensation, very well known. Auden came to loathe September 1, 1939. Later on in his life, he believed it to have been an unserious and even evil work. He would not allow it to be anthologized. Edward Mendelssohn's biography of him explains this as part of his Christian awakening and various other qualities that Auden possessed. And it's important because it shows how the mind, how the literary mind or like the elite mind excuses the inexcusable by going into theory. So here's the offending verse, the famous offending verse. Auden writes, accurate scholarship can unearth the whole offense from Luther until now that has driven a culture mad. Meaning. As scholars, we can figure out how German history led to this point, that the Nazis came to power and have invaded Poland, right? Find out what occurred at Linz, what huge imago made a psychopathic God, meaning that the psychopathic God is Hitler. The imago is the sort of like the pagan image. But now Auden is going to cut through all that crap. The scholarship, the trying to figure out how Hitler came to be. I and the public know what all school children learn. Those to whom evil is done do evil in return. That's hurt people. Hurt people, right. That's what Abdul El sayed about the Hezbollah monster who tried to blow drove into the synagogue.

[Christine Rosen]

And it's the root causes theory.

[John Podhorz]

It is the ultimate root causes, but it's the purest. All school children know this. If you're mean to that kid, maybe he'll be mean to somebody else or something like that. And that's where we are. That's in my view, this. And as I say, Auden, who was a serious person and became a more serious person as he aged, found his own perspective here. That was the reason that this poem became so deathless and famous. Despicable, morally despicable. Because it is not true that the Versailles Treaty caused Hitler, meaning that the west brought this upon itself, just as Israel did not bring October 7th on itself. And Donald Trump did not bring Cole Allen upon himself. In particular, if Cole Allen's charges are going to be that Trump deserved it because of Russiagate, he really didn't bring this on himself. And no legitimately elected political leader brings such things upon themselves. They are representatives of the American people who, particularly in the case of Trump, who he was, what kinds of things he thought, the way he would behave, and all of that were subject to three different referenda by the entire public of the United States. Three different elections. He won two, he lost one, and he came back into power. And he is not the imago of a psychopathic God. That is the result of, you know, who has sort of taken over this, you know, this barbaric country or something. He is the legitimately elected representative of the people. And you, it is you, the arrogance with which, if you're going to take it seriously, somebody believes that it is there. It is his right to say, no, no, he's baby Hitler, I'm going to go kill him. Because of course, Hitler never was. Hitler came to power without having won a majority of the German vote. He won a third of the German vote and then was empowered by the German government. I only bring this up in this way. Not that I want to defend the reductio ad Hitler, but to say that there is a world in which we have to understand that we're not supposed to provide or grant understanding to behavior like this. We are supposed to prevent it, we are supposed to stop it, we are supposed to punish it and we are supposed to prevent it. And what Norah o' Donnell did last night. And what I think the press is going to do all week is they are going to amplify it. Just as saying AOC is okay, as Nancy Pelosi or the Democrats effectively did in 2019, that the squad is okay. Right. Did not denounce, refused to denounce the anti Semitism of Rashida Tlaib in 2019 when Nancy Pelosi wanted to do so, but had a revolt on the hands of her of the Democratic caucus in the House. You don't censor Rashida Tlaib in 2019. You get Abdul El Sayed in 2026. That's how it works. If you don't say what Col Allen did is despicable no matter what he said, and that we are not going to amplify it by making it a discussion point, you're subsidizing it and you get more of it. Noah, as your book comes to publication in the next couple of weeks, so everybody should go and pre order Noah's book Blood in Progress at Amazon. How do you feel things are different from when you wrote the originating article and commentary, Clockwork Blue that we published? I think it was at January 25th.

[Noah Rothman]

It was a February 2025, the COVID essay. And you commissioned it at the tail end of 2024.

[John Podhorz]

Right.

[Noah Rothman]

So like early December, late December.

[John Podhorz]

So the point, the reason that we talked about this and then that we, that we decided to do it was this question. And I thought that Commentary had the right to do this because we had never been, you know, we, we, we had been critical of Trump's horrible and reckless and irresponsible rhetoric in 2015 and 2016. We were critical. I don't want to get into the question of whether it was unfair to say that he did what he did in Charlottesville and he didn't mean it.

[Noah Rothman]

Yeah, but I've been an obsessive on this topic four years.

[John Podhorz]

Yeah, right.

[Noah Rothman]

Yeah, four years. And very critical of Trump of inciting but radicalizing people.

[John Podhorz]

Yes, but this question of whether or not left wing political violence had a specific valence that was being ignored. Do you feel like. So that was the spark that ignited this project? Do you feel as you look at this today that it's gotten worse?

[Noah Rothman]

Yeah, I think it's gotten worse. Certainly from the perspective of writing it in December of 2024. 2025 was an annus horribilis when it comes to political violence. It hasn't been as bad in 2026 as 2025. But we're only four months into this Thing. So I have, I'm not willing to say that we've, we've achieved a peak here and certainly obviously we haven't. The actions of this individual demonstrate that we have not. No, we've gotten very, very lucky over the course of the last few years. Very lucky. And a lot of near misses and close calls and luck runs out. As you know, the sanest thing that Cole said, Cole Allen said in that in the manifesto is like, look how easy it was for me to do this. If there was actually a trained assassin, assassin on the trail of the President, he would probably be able to pull this off citing Iranian intelligence assets. And yes, state based terrorism is terrifying, but that's not what it would take. We just need somebody to get lucky. And there are too many people out there who are responding to incentives in the culture to engage in acts of a brutality like this. And one of them will succeed. Hopefully it won't, you know, won't be a history altering event. But I'm, I'm, I have no confidence that we're going to escape what we've just barely managed to avoid forever. At some point one of these bullets will find its target and that could be a really destabilizing situation because violence begets violence. These people as something I talk about in the book, they take inspiration from successful attacks on their side and vow to avenge what they perceive to be attacks on them from the other side. And that includes the state, especially when it comes to left wing violence. The state is an instrument of fascistic elements on the right. So anything that is done to them by the state is commensurately dealt with by meting out violence against wholesale categories of people who are presumed to be on the right. That sort of cascade, that self reinforcing cycle is very tough to stop when it starts. And it could easily start by virtue of one of these assassins succeeding.

[John Podhorz]

Look, the worst part about this is how many political targets there are in the United States. I mean honestly, how many elected offices are there? There are thousands.

[Eliana Johnson]

Well, in the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court.

[Noah Rothman]

Not elected.

[John Podhorz]

Let's go to unelected people. Right? Yeah, so, but, but you know, we're not just talking about Trump in a ballroom with Secret Service protection, a city councilman that offends somebody, you know, a town selectman, you know, in the, in the most brilliant.

[Seth Mandel]

We had somebody just murder state, you know, a state House in Minnesota.

[Noah Rothman]

Yes, it was the speaker of the Minnesota State House. Her assassin knew these people, which is a little bit different. Well, not new, but he Was he was, he had contact with Democratic officials and he was clearly mentally deranged. But that doesn't really matter. You know, a mentally deranged individual who's an assassin can have as big an impact on history as a clear eyed ideologue.

[John Podhorz]

Right.

[Noah Rothman]

But we do need to demonstrate, you know, the distinctions there. When that person who perceived himself to be trained off the books by the military and being directed by Tim Walls to assassinate, you know, Democratic officials so that Amy Klobuchar could become a US Senator, which is what he wrote, all that's pretty nutty and lacks a clear ideological valence. And people get very offended when you, when you demonstrate that this does this guy's right wing lunaticness, his lunaticness was much more pronounced than his right wing ness.

[John Podhorz]

Right.

[Noah Rothman]

But when it comes to somebody like Cole Allen, his lunacy is not pronounced. And you're not getting the flavor of somebody who perceives himself to be, you know, the instrument of history in the way that these people talk themselves up into this delusion. Right. They perceive themselves to be this avenging angel. Cole Allen doesn't talk like that. He talks about himself as though he's a cog in a machine who's just doing his job. He's a widget and he's performing his function, which is much, much colder.

[John Podhorz]

But he's also brave. But he's also, it's also self lionizing in the sense that somebody had to do it. I mean, he says when he makes this weird statement like how, why are you, why is it, why is it for you, a half black, half white person to take this role on, which is odd like that he describes himself as half black, half white and says why should you take this on? And he says somebody had to do it. And that is the ultimate justification, right? Somebody had to do it. Nobody was doing it. Nobody's doing enough. It's not enough. And unless we say or able to delve into or the country goes through a soul search where they say, when somebody gets to this point, an educated person who has obviously probably lost his way a little bit, if he was designing special wheelchairs at Caltech that he ends up as an SAT tutor and then obviously gets on a train to go kill the President, he's lost his way. But somebody who is not, you know, Travis Bickle and Taxi Driver or even Lee Harvey Oswald with his insane personal, political, ideological history does this. Something very wrong is going on that needs to be addressed and it's unbelievably difficult to address it. And it does have to do with the self policing aspect that as Abe and said and Noah, you've said that the right has had to engage in over the last 10 years and Wright does not get credit for it. And maybe it doesn't do enough. And maybe they're caricaturist right wingers who make it worse and talk violent talk on podcasts or act in caricatured ways as officials of the federal government. The guy who was like fired from the job as the head of ICE in Minnesota, who is now saying we should deport 100 million people. And that sort of thing like that is not calming the temperature in the United States. And so this is not a problem. That is not necessarily a problem on one side. But he was policed, he was fired. And that, as you say here, we have literally no examples that we can think of when. Of the left or liberals. Liberals, let's not talk about the left saying enough is enough.

[Abe Greenwald]

Like the opposite. It's moving in the opposite direction as we speak.

[Noah Rothman]

I mean, there was an, yeah, there was an attempt to police Jimmy Kimmel, right, for muddying the waters, at least about a narrative of left wing violence. And due to popular acclaim, that attempt at policing failed in much the same way. The attempt to censure. What's your name?

[John Podhorz]

But the attempt to police him, but the attempt to police him was not hygiene. Was not hygiene on the left, right, that was Trump and the Trump administration and people saying, that's disgusting. And the conservative Sinclair Corporation saying they didn't want to air his show anymore. It wasn't Stephen Colbert saying, jimmy, you went too far. I'm sorry, that would be right.

[Seth Mandel]

And there's a related phenomenon of people on the right going too far, getting policed by people on the right and then being given platforms on the left. You know, Michelle Goldberg will write a column on Nick Fuentes and make him look like James Dean while the right is saying, this guy is a Nazi. And you know, the same that you're seeing now, now he's, Hasan Piker is not on the right. But you, you see this sort of, you know, the pipeline, I guess, happening also a few days ago, two journalists and, you know, Hasan Piker sat under the, you know, the words the New York Times and discussed whether by virtue of their job, health care executives are guilty of mass murder because of the jobs they hold.

[Noah Rothman]

Right.

[Seth Mandel]

Like under the banner of the New York Times. So, but it, but there is that other thing where people on the right get noticed on the left in an attempt to sort of cancel out all right wing ideology entirely to make that they're all look, they're all Nick Fuentes, but in the process, they always take really good photographs. They get the light just right, right. I mean, Fuentes is a dork and she made him look like a heartthrob. And he's, you know, he's really like kind of an angry Nazi elf. And he was like this, like, you know, movie star. There is a valeration in a weird way of, you know, while the right is trying to police itself, they get this, this, you know, this platform on levels. It's like, not now guys. We're trying. You're not helping.

[Eliana Johnson]

Well, the depersonalization, which is a step along the way to dehumanization, definitely supports these sorts of violent acts. And what's different, I mean the healthcare executive is a very bad turn because you can actually be someone who doesn't like the healthcare system in this country. But to argue that someone who works there is so morally reprehensible that they deserve to die. I mean, again, this used to be the extremists of the environmental movement, the extremists of the anti abortion movement. Actually very rarely rare for people to get to a point of dehumanizing their political opponents. These are political objections that have become a sort of moral argument. And they now make a moral case for violence to pursue a policy objective that, that shift. I mean, yes, social media, I hate social media, but it's part of it. But again, that's why the legitimating cultural institutions have a role here and a responsibility here, and they are failing over and over again to fulfill that responsibility.

[John Podhorz]

But I want to end then on the point that Eliana made about Zoram Mamdani's TikTok about on tax day about Ken Griffin, the Citadel CEO. So he stood in front of Ken Griffin's pied a terre. It's not really a pied a terre because Ken Griffin's. Because Citadel is a functioning business in New York City that generates billions of dollars of revenue for. For New York City and therefore should be respected rather than demonized, but nonetheless stands in front of the building. He says we're going to tax the rich. He points to Ken Griffin's apartment building, making it therefore known where it is that Ken Griffin lives, which is a term that we now know to be.

[Christine Rosen]

He said the address.

[John Podhorz]

Said the address too. Sorry. So he doxed Ken Griffin and he's not Nick Fuentes. He's the elected mayor of New York City who is using this medium of Social media to place Ken Griffin's life in danger. He is the mayor of New York City saying, here he is, boys. Come and get him. I know a lot of you loved seeing that guy, Luigi Mangione shoot Brian Thompson in the back. Well, I got another target for you. Now. I don't think that he and his media team gamed this out. He seems to believe that he made a mistake and that he went too far, but that you could even go there at all. So it's not just the institutions. This is now an active way of engaging the public in political discussions in the United States is for the elected mayor of the largest city in the country to target an individual person in a city in which a guy in his kind of role was murdered on a street in New York City within relatively recent memory. That's again, new. Like, that's what analog do we have to that in American history? So it goes beyond the need to have our institutions act more responsibly and the New York Times to act more responsibly. It goes to a disease in the political culture that says,

[Seth Mandel]

when I don't

[John Podhorz]

like something, it should be murdered. And, you know, can we survive? I mean, America survived a lot of stuff, and we'll survive a lot of stuff. But, you know, a lot of. There are a lot of kids. There are a lot of people who have a lot of kids sitting here on this chat. And we have, you know, kids under the age of, you know, 21 and under. And, you know, they're gonna. They're inheriting a world in which this is now.

[Noah Rothman]

I mean, that was the story of this book, right? I sold the book in June of last year, and it was supposed to come out in October of this year. But we pushed up John youn know about this intimately because I was talking to you about it the whole time. We pushed up the publication date because people kept being murdered. There were deaths every month attributable to this phenomenon. It needed to come out sooner. And it needed to come out because the whole point of the book is to establish patterns, to identify these waves when they're about to crest. And we're in the middle of a wave. 2010-1910-1920-1970, 1980, 2010, 2020. We're in a wave, and there is a concerted effort to avoid reckoning with the patterns that have some discernible shape and some discernible features. And we can get our hands around it. We're never going to eliminate the problem of political violence in those countries. It's as old as the country itself. But we can tackle the whole problem by refusing to identify only one part of it and say this is the most abhorrent part of it, whereas this other part has a noble, virtuous element to it that we have to excuse. All of it has got to be tackled with the same vehemence and hostility that we view political violence from our political opponents.

[John Podhorz]

Okay, so Noah Rothman's book Blood in Progress, pre ordered right now pull over the side of the road. If you're listening to the podcast, take your phone, go to Amazon, order the book. If they actually phones often don't let you order from Amazon. But nonetheless, who are somebody else try

[Noah Rothman]

give it a shot.

[John Podhorz]

Give it your best shot. Or from your local bookseller or from Barnes and Noble or from whomever. Very important. We're proud to have been one of the inceptors of the book and and hopefully it will be the most talked about book of the year. We'll be back tomorrow. For Eliana, Seth, Christine and Abe, I'm John Podhortz. Keep the candle burning.