Three Waves of Left-Wing Violence in America—We're in the Third One Now | Ep. 31 w/ Noah Rothman

The Southern Poverty Law Center calls it a myth. Most American institutions act as if it doesn't exist. But Noah Rothman's case is that the United States is in the middle of its third major wave of left-wing political violence in the last century—and the polling, the assassinations, and the institutional response all tell the story of a society losing the social taboo that has historically held this kind of violence in check.

Jeremy is joined by Noah Rothman—Senior Writer at National Review, columnist, and author of three books, including the brand-new Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence, alongside The Rise of the New Puritans and Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America. Noah is one of the few Trump-skeptical voices on the right who has continued to keep his eyes locked on the threat from the left even as conservative media has, in some quarters, drifted toward its own conspiracies and grievances.

They get into: the three historical waves of left-wing violence in America—the anarchist and socialist violence of the 1910s and 1920s, the Marxian guerrilla movements of the late 1960s, '70s, and '80s, and the wave we are inside of right now; why the SPLC and most academic databases of "political violence" double-count prison fights and homeless-person epithets to manufacture a top-line that the right is uniquely violent; the rhetorical tactic Noah calls "the pregnant 'but'" —how Bernie Sanders, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, and Chris Murphy all condemned Brian Thompson's murder and then immediately appended a "but" justifying it; the Charlie Kirk assassination and the institutional left's largely respectful response versus the campus and online cheering, the Saturday Night Live applause for the name Luigi Mangione, and the conspiracy ecosystem on the dissident right (Candace Owens, Ian Carroll, and the Epstein-pedophile-class framings) that now exists in symmetry with it; the Network Contagion Research Institute polls showing 50% of self-identified left-of-center Americans say it is at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk, and 56% say the same about Donald Trump; the three publicly known attempts on Trump's life and Norah O'Donnell asking the President on CBS to respond to his would-be killer's manifesto; January 6 and the BLM 2020 riots as comparative case studies in mob violence, the blanket pardons issued by both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and why blanket pardons are never a good idea; Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn—the Weather Underground revolutionaries who killed people, never went to prison, and got tenure at major universities—and Alexander Berkman, Howard Zinn, and the Marxian intellectual lineage that fed them; Helen Andrews's "feminization of society" thesis and whether the rise of female representation in hegemonic left-wing institutions tracks with the rise in intolerance and willingness to censor; the strange evolution by which Marxists became Pan-Arab Baathists became Islamists, the Red-Green Alliance, and Jason Burke's The Revolutionists as the international companion text; the Sarah Milgrom and Yaron Lischinsky shooting in Washington and the textbook Marxian writings of Elias Rodriguez; the Soviet-era "Zionology" academic project that invented most of the anti-Israel narratives that now circulate on college campuses (white settler colonialism, brown-South genocide, rape as a weapon of war); two "cellphone moments" America is failing to reckon with—COVID accountability, foreclosed when Trump became the 2024 nominee, and the Charlie Kirk assassination, foreclosed by the dissident right's choice to build conspiracies instead of confronting left-wing violence; Tucker Carlson, the Catholic integralists, and the rise of "rhetorical statue-toppling" on the right; and Noah's recommendations on what actually works—civic education, law-enforcement modeling, and the patient, unglamorous restoration of the social taboo around political violence.