All Blood, No Progress (5/19/26)

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:03]Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, May 19th, 2026.

[00:00:09]I am John Fordes, the editor of Commentary. With me as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[00:00:16]>> Hi, John.

[00:00:17]>> Senior editor, Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[00:00:20]>> Hi, John.

[00:00:21]>> Social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

[00:00:25]>> Hi, John. And joining us today, our old colleague, uh, senior editor at National Review and the author of published today, out today.

[00:00:38]Today, May 19th, his long-awaited book, Blood and Progress, Noah Rothman. Hi, Noah.

[00:00:46]>> Hi, John. Uh, so I should say that Blood in Progress originated as an article in commentary two years ago. Uh, and your subtitle is a century of left-wing violence in America.

[00:01:04]>> And the president tells us last night that this is the only thing that's going to happen today. There will be no world historic events that interrupt the roll out of Blood and Progress. What's important is that yes, Donald Trump has postponed the uh war in Iran so that Noah could get a free shot at an open pub day for blood and progress. And uh Trump is not the only person conspiring to give Noah's book a boost because uh yesterday uh outside the courtroom in New York City where uh the judge hearing the case of accused murderer Luigi Manion, the uh the accused assassin of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. uh some controversial rulings yesterday by the judge in that case. But outside the courtroom, oddly credentialed by the press office of Zoran Mamani were three young women uh who then gave an impromptu press conference by themselves that it itself justifies the publication and indeed the place at the top of the bestseller list of Noah Rothman's blood and progress. So, let's just let me just quote what what they said. Um, Ashley Roas, uh, who has some kind of weird analog place in the new media, uh, 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.

[00:02:48]This is a man who was shot in the back on the street in New York at 6:45 in the morning uh on 53rd Street uh dead. Uh so f him and f his mom apparently who uh somehow has multigenerational evil on her in her uh DNA. Uh her colleague in this press conference, one Lena Weissbrought 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.

[00:03:44]So this story emerges uh as the judge is hearing the evidence and trying to rule inadmissible or admissible the evidence in the Brian Thompson case. Um, 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.

[00:04:24]>> Yeah. Yeah. Well, it certainly justifies the opening of the first chapter of the book with the slaying of Brian Thompson and more um poignantly the reaction to it which featured a halfozen members of Congress condemning murder but also understanding where human sacrifice comes from and the desiraability of it from the perspective of those who would celebrate it. Um, it justifies exploring the degree to which Manion'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 uh brought blasphemous prayer candles with his face etched on them. and the degree to which uh far too many Americans subordinated all discretion um all civic propriety to celebrate murder because it it channeled in them something cathartic. Uh and it's hardly the first episode. It's probably not going to be the last. And it it sets up the exploration of the last five to seven years of left-wing violence. manic lone gunmen. Um, riotist 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. So, of course, the first objection uh 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 eye 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? So yeah, um that takes on the quality of an excuse um when it's deployed with the um frequency that it is being deployed to counter the evidence of our own eyes, which is uh increasingly uh we're increasingly confronted with episodes of leftwing violence. But I'm very suspicious of I don't call them out for being completely uh 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 um data sets, you see gang violence, intraf family violence, prison violence, episodes in which somebody graffitied the sight 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 hotel. Yair, 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 fraud. Um, nevertheless, you know, I try to explore these as individual episodes, identify the manic thought process that leads in which to some extent is AC, you see it across the board. Somebody who engages in violence in the pursuit of policy outcomes is in some degree succumbing to disordered thinking. So, you do have to explore them on an individual level. And then also in the first chapter I cite um pretty extensively a report that was prepared for the department of homeland security by this organization insight.

[00:08:04]Um and in it they describe the degree to which researchers who study leftwing violent left-wing extremism are face intimidation campaigns, loss of professional reputation, social isolation, even the threat of physical retribution 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 leftwing 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. Um the the two phenomena are intertwined.

[00:08:44]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.

[00:08:53]And we certainly can't wrap our hands around. We can't address it if we don't acknowledge its full scope.

[00:08:58]>> So, and this this is actually why I think um your excellent book, which I demanded an advanced copy of and got, so I'm halfway through. It's wonderful.

[00:09:05]>> One of the things that really struck me about it that's important is because um I do think there'll be a mainstream media attempt to do just that, to do the what aboutism 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 um winked at not you know sort of nodded approvingly in private with fellow travelers. The idea that the left-wing causes uh 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 for Manion instantly released a statement saying, "No, no, no, no, no.

[00:09:49]We're pleading not guilty. Let's let's not let's not have these people out there justifying his cause." So I do think that the mainstream cultures acceptance, glorification, certainly in popular culture, its elevation of the idea of left-wing violence being pure, being um uh revolutionary, all these things that code good uh is a huge part of the problem. And I think your book does an excellent job just through uh power of narrative and and the stories you tell and what you're showing uh 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 meed out. It is murder.

[00:10:34]>> You know just um Yeah. Go ahead. Can I just touch on that point about about the what what those uh women said yesterday um about Brian Thompson? Uh the fact that they were they felt so comfortable unapologetically reing not only in his death in the misery uh of his family um over it. The point and I I'm not someone who obviously I don't believe speech is violence and I don't believe in hate speech laws and but the point of that speech was to wound um it was it was as if if they could enact some some further violence they would have. Um, and the fact that they felt so comfortable spitting it out, making a show of this ugliness, um, I think really speaks to, and there's a lot of this on the left, too. This is this is I mean on the right, too. This is another sort of, uh, area in which which they they feed off each other's. It's a sort of arms war of ugly rhetoric.

[00:11:51]um something has gone wrong on the social level as well. It's not just political uh ideological. There is a component here um 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.

[00:12:21]Look, part of this is these two things are intrinsically related. If Luigi Manion, we don't know what, you know, disordered thinking and all of that. Um, if 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 even a disordered thinking person that might 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.

[00:13:12]Not that you did something that breached every bond of safety and that will create if we don't nip it in the bud or that will create a completely anarctic uh and hobbsian society in which you know we literally came together to form societies and rules in order to prevent moments like Luigi Manion shooting Brian Thompson in the back. That's like why society exists. so that you 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? Can I can I add something to that which is the the the quote that you quoted um about I hope >> the son enjoys the blood money or whatever it was that sort of that latches on to that by making it you know we used to argue over whether you were that you know 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 healthc care uh health insurance uh corporation, not the murder 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 this child is now somehow carrying the burden. That 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 um that is so extreme even among you know very left-wing economic minds and and and and uh you know and pundits in the US.

[00:15:22]>> It's not that extreme. It's very uh it's very um uh intrinsic to what you might call more primitive societies. Right? I mean, and I don't believe that the Bible is primitive, but you know, the sins of the father are visited upon the child unto the fourth generation, says the Bible. The idea being that, you know, uh, an evil stain is something not 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. There is nothing about these people for doing it. I am perfectly comfortable saying these women were steeped in the martyology around violent criminals, pathological murderers, people who were kill cops. I have a whole chapter on it. Leonard Peltier, Mumia, Abu Jamal, Assatada Shakur. I mean, these people have buildings named for them on college campuses. There's there's a whole um a whole apparatus a lattis work uh around them an intellectual effort to uh render their crimes excusable, forgivable or perhaps having not even happened.

[00:16:48]Sometimes these mutually exclusive thoughts exist in the same head and the notion being that they are persecuted by systematic forces. uh anything they did, if they did it, is justified by virtue of their revolutionary ethos, their desire to engineer a social reversion, bringing low the people who deserve it and raising up the the systematically oppressed, etc., so forth, all this nonsense. It's very common. It's totally normalized within far-left discourse.

[00:17:17]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. It night outed 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 um normalized, generalized. I still probably a lot of people believe hands up don't shoot is something that was >> going to say it generated a catchphrase that's still used today in >> even to a certain extent George Floyd who was murdered according to a jury.

[00:17:51]Um, but they 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 I'm 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.

[00:18:15]So, um, just to you you we we you talk about, um, Michael Brown and indeed in in the pages of commentary in the, you know, in the years that you worked here, uh, I think your second piece for commentary was about Michael Brown and and so this was the beginning sort of the inaugural look at the rise of this excusing of of violence, leftwing violence, not not the killing of Michael Brown, but the riots that resulted. did after after Michael Brown was shot and and and killed uh in Ferguson, Missouri. And then following on into 2016 when the when the violence became almost explicitly political because it was related to the presidential election, right? A riot in San Jose, California that was explicitly targeting followers of of Donald Trump. San Jose, Chicago, um half a dozen other small cities, one in Arizona.

[00:19:15]>> Yeah. 2017, uh Congress, members of Congress practicing, uh uh for a a softball game, uh shot, uh Steve Scaliz, now the whip of the house, basically miracle that he survived, uh and lived to tell tell the tale. guy drives from, you know, hundreds and hundreds hundreds of miles um to take out Republican politicians that he doesn't like. Uh 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 Sauron Mandani and the encampment people and all of that. We have the uh effort to burn down the governor's mansion in Pennsylvania uh at which um Governor Josh Shapiro observant Jew had just held.

[00:20:16]>> Why wouldn't we think that's left violence? Well, I'm just saying because you can perfectly leftwing the the uh shibilist 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.

[00:20:36]Elias Rodriguez, who murdered two people outside of a Jewish event uh last year, which also accelerated the publication of this book actually. Yeah.

[00:20:44]>> Yeah.

[00:20:44]>> Um, that guy was a classic far-left radical with militant >> elements to his rhetorical approach to politics and there's substantial overlap to a degree that I don't think the two phenomenon are separable.

[00:20:56]>> Fair enough. My I think it is incumbent on us to acknowledge that anti-semitic violence in the United States over the past decade has been a by ideological bipartisan uh affair in which >> I think 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.

[00:21:22]>> Yeah. and he was he was against uh the the the synagogue's support for immigrants uh and the Hebrew immigrant aid 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 but but uh these cases I'm bringing up just to say that there has been a steady and persistent drum beat and then there are these moments of right-wing violence January 6th riot uh you know Charlottesville uh stuff like that that are amplified through megaphones by the media and become like legendary events in American political history and the steady drum beat of uh violence on left-wing violence for political reasons is not collated and seen as a threat. In fact, you might say that the uh Biden administration desperately attempted to disentangle the left 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 on political violence in 2022 or 2023.

[00:22:59]Right. Do I have that right?

[00:23:01]>> The the schoolboard moms, the schoolboard parents being seen as terrorists versus Yeah.

[00:23:05]>> Right.

[00:23:06]>> which actually it I have a question for No about this. You mentioned um some of the political leaders when we first started talking at the top of this hour.

[00:23:14]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 uh 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 uh 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?

[00:23:45]>> I mean my focus is on the terrible. I'm hardressed in this moment to think of somebody who I think has been exemplary and uh you know a moral paragon. Um 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 in especially so I'm reluctant to to draw a straight line a causal line between obviously political rhetoric and political violence.

[00:24:19]However, responsible communicators should be aware of the elevated nature of the threat environment, the deteriorating threat environment, and the degree to which we're encountering a substantial amount 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. Um to say that there's one person out there who who I really admire and who's who's done a great job in this, I can't even really think of one.

[00:25:03]And part of the reason why I think >> but that's the point. 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. Um 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 desire they would love to see the party thrown into the sea. But nevertheless, they were fetted with a desire to um co-opt that movement and create some, you know, a 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 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 um something desirous desirable about the um about crowds and um unruly perhaps but nevertheless passionate uh 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, um we're going to be in a really bad place very quickly.

[00:26:25]>> No, we've had polls Yeah. Go ahead.

[00:26:28]>> Well, I I just want to ask know about a 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 and we know it goes back uh well, it goes back to the birth of the left uh as we think of it, but I mean but in but in in our time it it it it goes back uh uh decades. So, but it does seem to me that the left's embrace post October 7th of Hamas and jihad and uh calling for inif uh and um praising these foreign terrorists the way the way it did in the 60s in terms of um uh like paramilitary Marxist groups and and and Marxist uh army communist armies abroad. Um that opened the left up to a sort of new range of uh horrible conduct, not even exclusively pertaining to Jews in Israel. Um but it opened the range of possibilities cuz you've you you've you've now they've now sort of um let in embraced this exotic foreign deadly uh sense of mass killing uh uh c celebrated religious uh violence. And I think if you look at sort of the the recent spate of political assassinations or attempted political assassinations, >> it's kind of all after October 7th. Uh actually, >> the Trump assassinations, >> the Trump assassination, >> Trump assassination, Charlie Cook, uh even uh Brian Thompson.

[00:28:34]>> True. Um but the attempt on Brett Kavanaaugh preceded it. Um, >> and there were a couple others that I'm blocking on, but I I can I can think of that. Over the course of the 20 years or so, um, that constitutes our current wave of violence. And in the book, I essentially established three um, waves of leftwing political violence occurring over the course of a half century or so.

[00:28:57]the 1910s and 1920s anarchist socialist anarchist wave, the Marxian guerilla movements of the 1960s through 80s and today beginning in about 1999 and accelerating rapidly after 2010. Um there I didn't write about the international context for this book. It is exclusively within the United States.

[00:29:17]that 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 focoism and uh the urban guerilla movements uh that were inspired by the Cuban revolution and how they transitioned first into panarab nationalists gravitating towards the ba'ist socialist model of Iraq and Syria and then eventually into full-on Islamists after the 197 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran which incorporated Marxism and uh CHA warship etc with uh revolutionary green not environmentalist but Islamist um uh traditional uh sort of a religious tinged element to what was a revolutionary philosophy which really enlivened people like John Paul Sartra and and others um 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. Um but maybe there was a long tale on that.

[00:30:25]Maybe that evolutionary course that the international left followed over the course of the ' 60s '7s and ' 80s was just delayed before it got here and has just been 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 academ that was just a way to launder anti-Israeli narratives into the broader discourse and what we hear from the activist class. I mean that's it's a it's a precise mirror. So a lot none of this stuff is quite new. Perhaps it was just delayed. Well, so can I can I ask about the the an element of the of the um ideological aspect of it, which is that we see polls that say uh left-wingers more likely to excuse political violence or say political violence is justified.

[00:31:19]We saw a Yugov poll I think recently about that. but also that, you know, what concerns me is that the those left-wing respondents tend to be younger, right? And now we have uh obviously we have you know a ground swell 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 uh 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? We I I I guess we just if the kids say it, the kids must be right. We have to couch out to the kids, you know, whatever. So my question is, do you see any pattern about like are we in for a storm? Is there a rising violent generation coming up through?

[00:32:15]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 guard rails? like are we looking are we at are we in danger of you know a sort of next generation being violent?

[00:32:40]>> 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 you the obscure history of leftwing violence in this country but a suppressed history of leftwing 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. Um, there is still a taboo around violence. It's real. institutionalists understand that if if embracing political violence is not immoral, it's certainly goch and impractical.

[00:33:28]Um that, you know, maybe that's an instrumentalist argument, but I can work with that. Um the political utility of pointing fingers in this in this game uh 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 um the sin here? What is the uh 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? Um, so you know, I I don't want to succumb entirely to uh dispondency 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.

[00:34:35]If we are inclined to look at it rationally and and to have a proactive approach to it. I mean the problem is that scale with violence scale matters a lot less than say other social trends like supporting singlepayer healthcare that scale matters there if you go there then you have a sort of leftwing shift here one person can shoot Charlie Kirk takes one person with a with a rifle and and a and a good gun sight to shoot Charlie Kirk it takes one person on a badly scoped roof and you know improperly searched ROF in Butler, Pennsylvania to nearly kill former president and the leading candidate for a presidency in the United States in 2024. So it so the the net effect of a 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.

[00:35:36]The barrier to entry is very low. the 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. We, you know, hundreds of plots are are are intercepted every year by the FBI and by local law enforcement and all of that. So get actually achieving the terrorist aim or the political violent aim is 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.

[00:36:37]One of which is who is more viewed as more popular or more present, more current, more of a role model in the world. Uh, is it Martin Luther King Jr.

[00:36:53]or is it Malcolm X? They were they were polar opposites. Martin Luther King was live within the system.

[00:37:03]Dis be civily disobedient against laws that are that are uh disruptive, unfair, unjust, but shame the system into change. And Malcolm X is the system stole us. We're being bamboozled. We've been we you know we're here uh 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 our 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?

[00:38:08]>> Yeah. Are you earlier?

[00:38:11]>> I mean, the popular narrative is that in in American history, of course, is precisely nothing happened in the United States between the Hey Market 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 study of the bombing campaigns, the efforts to assassinate heads of state, heads of government in this country. um the attempt on multiple attempts on the attorney general's life, the slaughter of uh you know clerks and traders in Manhattan in September 20 1920. 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 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 leftwing militant wave in the 1910s, 2020s, 1960s,7s and 80s and today. Um and it is the sort of thing that precages and heralds perhaps um 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. Right.

[00:39:29]>> Can I ask a question about because your title we've been talking a lot about the blood part of the title, but I want I want to hear a little bit about the progress side because that 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 uh clear throughine in a lot of uh progressive and quasi utopian theorizing. And it's not just academic.

[00:39:54]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 this does uh 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 uh situation occurs?

[00:40:31]>> Well, listen, the title is literary.

[00:40:33]There is significant overlap among progressives um who are just basically uh slightly to the left of American liberals and Marxian revolutionary elements. You know, this is a ven 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 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 uh bringing the revolution to America, irrespective, if that's your goal, then uh engineering um 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. Um they want to engineer that kind of a conflict. So galvanizing acts of violence are designed to ferment 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.

[00:42:03]And what would wake us up? Some cataclysmic event. a a a clarion call to the great oppressed, systemically displaced um 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 in the armor. We can demonstrate how how 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 is 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. Again, I think what you're describing is something that is is almost anatic to most people who want to live within the 40 yard lines. like they want to live ordinary lives and be unmolested by by others, by criminals, by people who were could want to tax them confiscatorily or whatever. But they're just going along. The issue here is this is a 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 uh irresponsible, dangerous, demagogic and uh uh 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. He's unless unless every single person in America lives like uh 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 um you know uh commercial gain. You know, you kidnap somebody to get money and then you release them. But here >> by the way even then it takes one person who's willing to give their own life in order to to carry it out.

[00:44:38]>> Exactly. And you know, so so we are so the 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 it is a history of the last it is a it is a history of left-wing violence uh that tells a narrative story. And so it is it's interesting and exciting and full of all sorts of things that you didn't know before that that Noah uh illuminates. And so you know uh it's uh >> I mean the extent to which the the very recent scholarship into some of these periods that all of them are described by their chronicers 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 1960s7s and 80s as described by Brian Burroughs in his book. Um you know why is everything forgotten?

[00:45:36]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.

[00:45:44]>> Puerto Rican nationalists tried to kill Harry Truman when he was in office.

[00:45:49]>> Right. Puerto Rican nationalism which evolved into which evolved into the FALN.

[00:45:53]>> Um but the there's no symmetry here on the right. Duly so and I'm thankful for it. Every institution in America doesn't need to be goated 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 on right-wing political um 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 shape >> it does it doesn't it well this is this is the ultimate question here which is it does it not does it 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 health care system is terrible and he was at the top of it.

[00:47:36]And sometimes people are just going to crack. Or if you're Bernie Sanders, it's not just it's not just the health care 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.

[00:47:49]Everything is broken.

[00:47:51]>> We need throw it all out.

[00:47:53]>> Right.

[00:47:54]>> 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 uh Lewis Farrakhan was in the news again because you know the Nation of Islam leader because uh the the whim the women's march leaders were associates of his and you know some other people were seen taking there was a photo surfaced that you know a couple members of Congress took of 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, Lewis Farrakan." The Washington Post wrote in an article the, you know, the right-wing Farrakhan, you know, whatever. I think it was, you know, Adam Surer at the Atlantic chimed in also, you know, along those lines. There were a few people that were just like it w it was bizarre that you could tell this was on the tip.

[00:49:03]They'd been waiting so long to pass Farrakhan off and then it was like well why is he rightwing? Well, he hates gays so clearly. So can my question to you is we're seeing as you discussed and as you discussed in the review of that book the revival 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-ionism that is clearly left-wing How do we how do we have this conversation when somebody uh you know an Islamic terrorist tries to shoot up a synagogue in Michigan and the the left does not see this as leftwing in origin or influence at all and in fact resent the implication that this could possibly be be called left-wing violence. So, how I I I'm curious to know your your point of view on how we have that conversation about the unwillingness because that is the key uh issue right now on the left with the campus protests and all that stuff.

[00:50:29]The one thing bringing it all together is this kind of rabid anti-Zionism.

[00:50:34]And they 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 how do we have this conversation under those circumstances?

[00:50:48]>> Well, call it the BS that it is. I mean, that's just trash. And it it's intellectually indefensible trash. If you were the the notion here being that radical Islamist terrorism in the Wahhabist context, I suppose is ultraconservative.

[00:51:03]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 um 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 the when the thing was being fetted by the likes of uh Christristen Gillibrand as the suffragettes of our time in Time magazine's profile of of um uh the women's march its organizers were celebrating the birthday of the quote revolutionary Assad Shakur, black liberation army activist who was uh jailed and then subsequently escaped after um participating in the murder of a New Jersey state trooper on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike um who was a revolutionary leftwing activist who's who lived the last comfortably until she died last year in Cuba. um 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 um anxiety and was actually a healthy expression of dissent against Donald Trump in March of 2020 2017 it was attacked by its allies for not being violent isn't enough. Um, there was one woman in the um 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 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 a its organizers, its supporters in the intelligencia.

[00:52:59]um we're hostile to the uh American Citic Covenant as we understand it and one expression of that hostility was anti-Jewish animists which Linda Sarsurvinced which others um others within that apparatus >> Tama Mallerie was another Yeah.

[00:53:17]>> Yeah. Tika Mallerie that's who I was trying to think of who was instrumental in the expregation the uh the um removal of uh Jewish activists within that organization. That's just one element of its hostility to westernism.

[00:53:33]This anti-western theme um is a thread across leftwing militant groups, thread across the centuries. Again, there throughout this book, there are predictive and indeed prescriptive elements associated that you can see across the, you know, the the century of uh leftwing violent 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. 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 um an outpouring of civic engagement by women who began the whole situation calling themselves pants suit nation because they were Hillary supporters who were disappointed. They were the most normcore people you can imagine.

[00:54:23]>> I am sure they don't want to be reminded of that.

[00:54:25]>> 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 uh 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 DC. That is that's how Americans tend to want to protest and mass. And so that has shifted I think because those protests are not the kind of thing that that increasingly removed elite want to see to advance their own cause.

[00:55:21]>> No. But even more importantly, so the W women's march represented the first moment and what happened at the women's march, a lot of voter registration, a lot of political activism within the 40 yard lines. Uh that was the uh 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.

[00:55:52]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 result 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.

[00:56:16]They don't want to like have a majority in Congress so they can pass better legislation.

[00:56:21]They are looking to reradically 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.

[00:56:42]and you can work your will if you win the argument and you 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 and the deployment of left-wing violence and the excusing the excuses made for it uh by left-wing intellectuals and all of that is uniquely bad now because it it really does only take a few people to like, you know, ruin it for everybody or or or >> Yeah. I just want to add to this point about um what happens on the left, the difference between left-wing violence and and and right-wing and and why the right is scanning its own horizon for radicals and denouncing them and so on. Um, I think there's something inherently different in the way uh 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 they all have these little heresies uh that that they sort of cherish and will argue with other conservatives about and um 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 with what one sees in one's own life falling apart and and and or or one's day-to-day life uh uh uh sort of breaking down and uh 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.

[00:58:43]And they see basically anyone who's kind of if you're going in that direction, which is systems broken, things are unfair, uh there's there's inequity, inequality, uh social justice, the the richer, so on. Yeah, we know we know the the litany. It's like yeah, that's it's this sort of cloud that they're generally attached to. Um and they there's not they don't there's not a lot of sort of fine differences. Um there there are I mean among you know certain people who really think about it of course but this is why when something like uh 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 um uh and the same thing goes for all the the globalizing into this isn't what they really mean. They just mean, you know, in it just mean they they they they're able to sort of put this fog over it, this cloud that that that works that they're comfortable with that means things are moving in a general in the general direction that they think the the movement should go in. 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 illdefined 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 I I understand that there was going to be there will be an effort to find the fatal flaw in this thing. Um, 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 um raisin detra uh to be really unnerving. They're also talking themselves into the notion that the system is irreparably broken and that uh even smart and rational center-right voices are working themselves up into a froth over the benalities of constitutional government.

[01:01:09]They are adopting a martyology as they had around Ashley Babbot who is 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 6 was. Again, a very common leftist tactic. Did the president's pardons of violent January 6 protesters repeated Joe Biden's mistake by flattening these people into a category. He ended up pardon 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 discreet things that merit discrete punishments. Um mobs, affinity groups, shock forces, all this 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 an lovely reflection?"

[01:02:15]Noah Rothman, your book, Blood and Progress, out today. Everybody go buy it. Very important.

[01:02:22]Also a great read. Important to say uh it's not homework. It's uh it's a >> it's a beach read.

[01:02:30]>> Compelling. It's compelling and >> get it for your dad on Father's Day.

[01:02:34]>> Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, great to have you and, uh, good luck and we'll see we'll see, uh, who comes after you and we'll see who celebrates you. So, uh, good luck Noah and for back tomorrow.

[01:02:49]So, for Abe, Seth, and Christine, I'm John Podors. Keep the cattle burning.