Air Date: 5-9-2026

Full Show Notes

[00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we examine how political violence has always been woven into the fabric of American life and who gets to decide what counts as violence in the first place. We'll hear about presidential assassinations, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, and the long history of state-sanctioned violence. And I'll discuss the only real way to bend the curve back away from endemic violence in the US.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include

Taylor Lorenz

The PBS NewsHour

Front Burner

The Chauncey DeVega Show

and Democracy Now!

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 5 sections;

Section A, The Framing Wars

Section B, The Long American Tradition

Section C, State Violence and Anti-Blackness

Section D, The Right-Wing Engine

Section E, The System and What Comes Next

And now, on to the show.

Speaker 46: When political leaders [00:01:00] and the media wring their hands about political violence, they're not actually talking about violence in any, universal sense.

They're talking about violence specifically against elites or people who look like them or people who maintain these existing power structures. The violence that is already a daily feature of life for poor, immigrant, Black, disabled, and queer communities is completely invisible to them. Police tear-gassing a crowd of teenagers demanding accountability for the murder of George Floyd is never deemed political violence.

Federal agents shooting pepper balls at medics in Portland is not seen as political violence. But the second a right-wing figure is harmed, it becomes a crisis for democracy on cable news This double standard, of course, has always been there, and it's why so many people, especially in the Middle East and other countries that we've inflicted horrific levels of violence upon, hate the American government.

But cell phones and social media have finally made this hypocrisy crystal clear to members of the American public. And I'm not even just [00:02:00] talking about atrocities abroad. After George Floyd's murder in 2020, millions of people took to the streets to demand an end to racist police killings. What they were met with, however, was an unprecedented wave of state-sanctioned violence.

The Department of Homeland Security deployed tactical teams into cities. Police kettled and beat and arrested journalists. Protesters were shot point-blank with less lethal munitions, losing eyes and sustaining permanent injuries. People died in protest-related incidents, but how many of those deaths were mourned by the mainstream media as martyrs of democracy?

None. And just months after the peak of Black Lives Matter protests on January 6th, 2021, a violent mob stormed the Capitol, calling for the lynching of elected officials and overturning the election, but their violence was excused. Those rioters overwhelmingly received lighter sentences than Black Lives Matter protesters.

Some even used the event to launch their careers as influencers. Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges for shooting anti-fascist protesters dead, while peaceful [00:03:00] college students ended up in jail. And of course, none of this is new. You can look back at American history and see the state enact violence on our own citizens over and over and over again.

I think a lot of what happened in Standing Rock in 2016, the government, under Obama, mind you, sent armored vehicles and a militarized police force to attack indigenous people who were defending their sacred land and water. Protesters were blasted with high-pressure hoses in freezing temperatures. They had dogs set on them.

People got concussions and other injuries. The media framed the event as clashes, but thankfully, we were able to witness what actually happened as it was live-streamed on Facebook. When the COVID pandemic hit, violence against marginalized people was fully normalized. Immigrants, people of color, and the poor were and are currently being sent into deadly workplaces with no airborne disease protections.

Prisoners are being left to die of COVID-19 in overcrowded facilities with, again, zero airborne disease mitigations, even today. Joe Biden successfully convinced liberals and even [00:04:00] leftists to completely devalue the lives of people around them to the point that, again, even leftists today believe that it's morally neutral to infli- Infect and kill or permanently maim those around you by infecting them with airborne disease because you don't wanna wear a mask.

Killing and disabling millions of Americans by encouraging the spread of an airborne vascular disease is also violence. In Atlanta, in 2023, when activists protesting Cop City were stalked, arrested, and even killed, these pundits mourning political violence were nowhere to be seen. Manuel Teran was shot and killed, and the state labeled them a domestic terrorist for peacefully resisting a police project.

According to Mapping Police Violence, more than 1,000 people are shot and killed by the police every year, overwhelmingly people of color. When ICE raids rip apart families in the middle of the night- That is also police violence. Since January 1st, 2017, at least 70 people have died in ICE custody. [00:05:00] ICE detention facilities recorded 13 more deaths just in the first half of this year alone, and these figures are a massive undercount of the harm that ICE does.

ICE will also release people shortly before their death just so they're not counted as dying under ICE custody. Just last month, a man fleeing an ICE raid at Home Depot right here in Los Angeles was killed. The ACLU found that 95% of people's deaths under ICE detention were preventable. And then, of course, we have school shootings, which are completely normalized in this country.

Almost the exact same time that Charlie Kirk was shot, students at Evergreen High School in Colorado were running for their lives from yet another school shooter. Kirk defended these shootings and said that victims of gun violence were necessary casualties to defend the Second Amendment. But we've had dozens of school shootings over the past couple decades, resulting in hundreds of casualties and injuries to children.

Just last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a report saying that school shootings were at an all-time [00:06:00] high and becoming even more deadly My point is that Americans are already exposed to unfathomable levels of political violence every day.

Speaker 4: complicated story of MOVE begins in the early 1970s. The organization followed the teachings of their founder, John Africa, who advocated a lifestyle rooted in nature. All members took Africa's last name and lived communally in West Philadelphia.

We must fight back. They were known for staging disruptive demonstrations and frequently clashing with authorities, protesting everything from police brutality and war to pet stores and zoos.

Speaker 5: MOVE is and was an organization that's very much committed to life in all of its forms, in whatever that looks like.

Speaker 4: Tommy Oliver is the director of 40 Years a Prisoner, a 2020 HBO documentary that traces the group's origins.

Speaker 5: They're committed to eating naturally, to living naturally, [00:07:00] to not being reliant on technology.

Speaker 6: We walked around naked a lot. As children, the, the organization did not... They believed in vitamin D from the sun.

They believed in allowing your skin to be tougher and stronger. And

Speaker 4: Mike Africa Jr.'s parents were both members of MOVE ...

Speaker 6: Yes, it was unorthodox and yeah, it was some things were strange to some people, but for me, that was life.

Speaker 4: That way of life often put MOVE at odds with local police and their neighbors, who accused them of creating unsanitary living conditions.

Speaker 5: Them trying to live in the way that they wanted to live didn't sit well with a lot of people. So sometimes the neighbors, sometimes the city, and it escalated pretty significantly pretty quickly.

Speaker 4: In 1978, more than a year after the city issued an eviction notice, Philadelphia's then mayor, Frank Rizzo, ordered an attack on MOVE's home.

Speaker 7: They're going to [00:08:00] go either easy or hard way. That can be standing up or laying down.

Speaker 4: The months-long standoff culminated in a shootout.

One police officer was killed and MOVE's home was demolished. While MOVE maintains that the officer died by friendly fire, nine of its members were convicted and sentenced to up to 100 years in prison, including Mike Africa Jr.'s parents.

Speaker 6: The mayor admitted that he believed my parents were innocent He believed that my parents were not in prison for the charge that they were charged with.

Speaker 8: Police are inside MOVE headquarters in West Philadelphia conducting an intensive search for weapons

Speaker 4: He says the media's portrayal of MOVE was often exaggerated, and he says the organization was misunderstood even among many African Americans.

Speaker 6: MOVE members are not the turn the other cheek type people, and a lot of people felt like m- pacifism was the answer, and MOVE members were not pacifistic.

[00:09:00] If a p- if a cop attacked them, they would fight back.

Speaker 4: Tommy Oliver says those early confrontations, including that 1978 shootout, are critical to understanding what eventually happened seven years later.

Speaker 5: You had officers and members of the police force who wanted revenge.

Speaker 4: In May of 1985, Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode ordered the organization to be removed once again from a home where they were living.

Speaker 3: What we have out there is war.

Speaker 4: And on May 13th, local news stations like WCAU in Philadelphia covered the escalating crisis throughout the day. The sporadic fire lasted about an hour Police would fire more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition into MOVE's row house before eventually dropping a bomb on it.

The city's police commissioner at the time, Gregory Sambor, defended his officers that evening.

Speaker 9: At no time did any police [00:10:00] position fire in an offensive posture. It was purely in a defensive posture.

Speaker 4: 11 MOVE members, including five children, were killed. While no city officials were criminally charged, a Philadelphia investigative commission later concluded the police actions were clearly excessive, and quote, "unconscionable."

Speaker 6: I don't think I'll ever recover or heal from what happened.

Speaker 4: Mike Africa Jr., who was six at the time of the bombing, is now working as the legacy director of MOVE. He's reunited with his parents, who were released from prison in 2018, but remain on parole.

Speaker 6: I've never heard of another case where a government has dropped a bomb on citizens in America.

This is not something that you can repair back to normal. You have to find other ways to cope, and that's what I've been doing for the last 40 years.

Speaker 4: In [00:11:00] 2020, Philadelphia City Council formally apologized for what happened, as has former Mayor Wilson Goode. But Africa Jr. says four decades later, he'd like the city to create a permanent memorial to commemorate all that was lost that day.

Speaker 9: In your opinion, why do you feel that so few Americans know about,

Speaker 4: the events that took place 40 years ago?

Speaker 6: I think the city of Philadelphia does a really good job- Of limiting the amount of exposure to what happened. I also think that MOVE history is a very controversial history that brings up a lot of trauma for a lot of people.

Black people were killed by law enforcement and, if you saw what happened to George Floyd, and at a certain point you're tired of hearing about the people that were getting killed by these police officers.

Speaker 4: But that doesn't stop Mike Africa Jr. from his mission of making sure the history of MOVE and the tragic event [00:12:00] that claimed 11 lives isn't forgotten.

Speaker 32: "Death in politics has long been a possibility in American public life."

And just flesh that out for me. What did you mean by that?

Speaker 36: While the assassination attempt on President Trump this past weekend was as harrowing as it surely was inexcusable, it's not an aberration in American politics. Over, a little over 40% of all American presidents, no fewer than 19, have been targeted by assassins.

Speaker 32: Wow.

Speaker 36: And following the failed assassination of Andrew Jackson in 1835, the time between the shooting of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump this past weekend is actually the longest period in American history where a bullet has not been directed toward a president, and that's a remarkable 43-year span.

Speaker 32: Why do you think that is? What do you think explains this e- era of relative calm?

Speaker 36: That's [00:13:00] a really good question. So on the one hand, the short answer is I don't think we have a really good explanation. The 1960s, of course, were a period of extensive political assassinations in public life in the United States, beginning in November of 1963 with, the killing of John F.

Kennedy. After Kennedy, Malcolm X, then to Reverend Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy in June of 1968, Fred Hampton in late 1969. And I think in American political discourse, the shift in the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s was in many respects- That political murder or assassinations are something that happen elsewhere, but they're not necessarily something that happens within the life of the United States.

On the other hand, we do know that throughout the 1970s into the 1990s, that there are [00:14:00] ascertained plots to assassinate presidents and additional failed attempts. Ascertained plots against Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Presidents Barack Obama and President Donald Trump.

Speaker 32: Huh.

Speaker 36: Fortunately, in each of those incidents, the assassinations were shut down before, they could be pushed forward. So I think the relative silence can sometimes be misleading, because I think the failure of plots, quote, unquote, "failure of plots," can seem to suggest that the possibility of assassination goes away, and I actually don't think that's the case.

Speaker 32: political violence is a broad term that would include, as we talked about on the show yesterday, incidents Charlottesville, the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, Dylann Roof's assault on a Black church in South Carolina.

Speaker 37: The suspect is Dylann Storm Roof. [00:15:00] This Snapchat video taken last night shortly before the shooting shows the suspect in the church basement sitting at a table, part of a small prayer meeting.

He'd been with them about an hour when he stood up and, according to witnesses, said something like, "I have to do it. You're raping our women and taking over our country, and you have to go." And then he opened fire.

Speaker 32: But assassination as a specific phenomenon, I wonder when dealing with assassination specifically, what kinds of issues have we seen compel American citizens to try to kill their own leaders?

Speaker 36: So in the history of the United States, would-be assassins have often been, inspired by any number of ideas about rights, ideas about personal rights- Human rights, economic rights, social rights, state rights, and national rights in the belief that particular [00:16:00] presidents were causing an obstruction of the political rights of the people.

So when Leon Czolgosz, for example, assassinated William McKinley in 1901, he believed that McKinley was obstructing popular labor political rights, and one of the best way to address the negative impacts of capitalism on American society would be by removing, a president. John Wilkes Booth saw himself as removing a political tyrant and vindicating a secessionist South and its violent racial hierarchies.

Charles Guiteau believed that by murdering James Garfield, he was going to unify the Republican Party. And those types of incidents really ask us to stop and think about what are the types of inner historical arguments that assassins are making, to think about, political murder as a real possibility in public life.

Speaker 32: But it's interesting, right? Because [00:17:00] historically, and please correct me if I'm wrong here- They have these visions, but they don't succeed, right? is it fair for me to say that those two examples that you just gave, that, that, that didn't come to fruition?

Speaker 36: I think that's absolutely right, and I think that's a consistent theme that we see in the history of assassinations, that assassins may be able to control the time and space within which they pull the trigger, but at the end of the day, they have no control over the ultimate outcomes of their assassination.

Very briefly, I think a global or a larger example is more interesting, and that would be the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

When Gavrilo Princip pulled the trigger, he had in mind the unification of Slavic nationalists in Eastern Europe. Little could he have imagined that the pulling of that trigger would result in around 40 million casualties, the beginning [00:18:00] of the end of numerous colonial empires, the repartition of the Middle East, and the economic contexts for a second World War.

So I think you're right. There's a real disconnect between the vision of assassins, but what this actually brings about in ways that we really don't quite know, and I think that's also part of what makes the conversation with Trump really interesting, that very shortly after the failed assassination attempt on his life, political pundits and popular commentators were writing that this will secure the election in November, and there's really nothing the Democrats can do about that.

But we know in the past it also hasn't quite worked that way. Theodore Roosevelt was shot within a 10-minute walk from where President Trump will speak at the GOP convention in the coming days, and even after being shot with a bullet in his chest and giving an address for 60 minutes, he was still unable to secure electoral victory in that election of 1912.

So I [00:19:00] think even when it comes to talking about the failed assassination on President Trump, w- it's not quite clear how this is going to play out.

Speaker 32: That is such an interesting historical example. I did not know about that. much has been said since Saturday about what may or may not have been the motivations of the shooter.

But, one thing I wanted to ask you is, in terms of reverberations, in terms of consequences of what might come of the event itself, does it even matter what the motivations are? I

Speaker 36: think this is a very important point, and it's one that echoes back to the failed assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981.

We don't know Thomas Crooks' motivations, but let's just say they're not political at all. I think what the Reagan assassination attempt shows that, if any president had a bullet fired at him for non-political motivations, it was Ronald Reagan. John Hinckley's motivation was to prove his love to Jodie [00:20:00] Foster.

But even then, it had very real political outcomes for the next several decades surrounding the controversies of the Brady Bill, the regulation of gun reforms.

Speaker 38: Brady was wounded in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan. Afterwards, he became a crusader, along with his wife, for gun control efforts.

Speaker 36: So I think this idea that if somehow, it comes out that Thomas Crooks was motivated because he wanted to, win the love of Taylor Swift or something that, it doesn't matter. It's still going to play out in very real political

Speaker 96: let me begin at the beginning for me with this book, and it was through the killing of Philando Castile, and who was the Black man in Minnesota that the cops had pulled over. And when the police officer asked to see his ID, he alerted the officer that via NRA guidelines, that he had a license to carry weapon with him.

But he was reaching for his ID as the officer had asked, and the officer began shooting. Just killed him. And he wasn't [00:21:00] threatening the officer. He w- didn't pull out his gun and point it at the officer, none of that. He just merely had a license to carry weapon, and the NRA went virtually silent on the killing of Philando Castile, which then led pundits to ask, " don't Black people have Second Amendment right?"

And I went, "Ooh, that's a great question," because my research had been all about basically the fractured citizenship of Black people, how the lack of citizenship, how the struggle for basic human rights and civil rights, but this was a right that I hadn't looked at. And so I went hunting and ended up back in the 17th century, and what I saw was this inordinate fear of Black people and wrapped in the language of Black people as dangerous, as a threat, as inherently criminal, and that white society had to be protected against Black folk.

And that language of inherently criminal, inherently dangerous, as a threat to whites, as a threat to American society, that is the [00:22:00] anti-Blackness that is coursing through. And when I got to the Second Amendment and I saw the battles over it, the battles over the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and it was the language of Patrick Henry and George Mason at the Ratification Convention in Virginia, who were arguing that the militia was absolutely essential to being able to put down a slave revolt, and that having the militia oversight put under federal control, which is what James Madison did, would leave them defenseless, would leave them to the mercy of these Black people.

And the role of that militia then became central to the way that you understood whiteness and the way you understood white safety and the way that you understood Black subjugation. And after the Second Amendment, one of the first things that Congress passed, one of the first pieces of legislation that Congress passed is the [00:23:00] 1792 Uniform Militia Act that says that all white men between the ages of 18 and 45 must join the militia and they must have a gun.

This is an act of citizenship. This is a definition of citizenship that is white, male, and a gun owner. Meanwhile, we've got laws just propping up all over the place that are about how Black people cannot have- Gun. And we end up with the 1857 Dred Scott decision that deals with whether Black people can be free.

If you're enslaved and you're then brought to free soil, does that make you free? And Chief Justice Roger Taney, in that horrific decision, wrote, "They weren't citizens at the founding of this nation. They weren't... If they were citizens, they'd be able to get a passport. If they were citizens, they'd be able to carry the mail.

If they were citizens, they'd be able to go from state to state, and if they were citizens, they'd be able to carry a weapon wherever and whenever they wanted to. [00:24:00] But a Black man has no right that a white man is bound to respect."

Speaker 94: And think about brother Philando Castile. What do we do with the fact that he was armed, borrowed from a right-wing propagandist, with his big, Black, scary self?

And he dared to have a gun. And

Speaker 96: so this is what I've been laying out in the second, that it is Blackness that is the designated threat in American society, the default threat in American society. So whether we're armed or unarmed, we are a threat. Having a gun only heightens that threat exponentially, but how many folks do you know who were killed who had a cell phone in their hand?

" I thought he was armed." Who were absolutely unarmed, "But I was afraid." I think of Jonathan Ferrell, who was the Black man who was in a car accident in North Carolina, and he went to get help. The woman was afraid, called the cops. He sees the cops coming, he thinks they're there to help him because he was in a car accident.

He's moving towards them going, "Oh, I'm [00:25:00] so glad you guys are here," and they shoot him down, "Because we were afraid."

Speaker 94: How do we think about that gun ownership and guns along the color line in terms of projection and fear?

Speaker 96: One of the things that became really clear, like I said, I went back to the days of slavery, was the fear that when Black folks rose up, it wasn't about freedom, it was about retribution.

It was that Black people would do to whites what whites had done to them. And that fear, so you had a combination of the fear of Black people, you also have this underlying guilt and this fear of retribution. Because when you have guilt, you have a knowledge that what you're doing is messed up. So when Thomas Jefferson says, I'm paraphrasing the quote, "I fear that God is just," when you fear that God is just, then that means that you know what you're doing is unjust.

Speaker 94: So how does the gun play in terms of the Black freedom struggle in our imaginary, in our struggle? And the imaginary's important in terms of the stories we tell.

Speaker 96: One of the key pieces [00:26:00] is that we get these stories of this completely non-violent civil rights movement as the hallmark of the way that Black folks should be protesting, right?

Now, the language of non-violence and the strategy was deployed as a way to discombobulate that narrative of a violent Black person. So that when the cameras were on, what you saw were Black people in their Sunday best getting the crap beat out of them by white people, and you couldn't get the default, " if only they had done..."

Because what you saw was that Black people were doing, and they were getting beaten for it. That language of nonviolence then elides over the role that, say, the Deacons for Defense played in providing protection for nonviolent Civil Rights workers who were trying to register folks to vote, and the Klan was trying to kill them.

The Klan was coming after people trying to register Black folks [00:27:00] to vote. That narrative of nonviolence becomes the kind of hallmark as a way to understand the appropriate way for Black folks to agitate for their freedom. But what we also know is that Colin Kaepernick took a knee to protest the killing of Black people by the state, and the thing was, how dare he?

That was inappropriate. So it isn't the type of protest. It is in fact that there is a protest that becomes the problem in this society. It is the fact that Black folks see it. They see it. They see the fissures. They see the crack. They see the inequality. They see the injustice. They see that the narrative does not match up with the reality, and the protests are to make that reality match up with what the nation says it is.

Speaker 94: One of the areas of American history, social history in particular, I'm very fascinated by are the Red Summers. Black folks, World War I, we come back. [00:28:00] The hundred years of Tulsa, for example, for some folk, this was very provocative. The idea that Black people fought back, that these were veterans of World War I who were in the trenches.

These are some bad men, honorable men, gonna defend their families and their communities, that all across the country we've... Washington, DC, World War I vets forming blockades, building bunkers to protect their neighborhoods. We fought back against the Klan and other white terrorists during Reconstruction and afterwards.

We're always resisting, right? So you've got that narrative, and we make a simple statement. We have the same rights as you. We're gonna... Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We have inalienable human rights, and just like you, we're gonna pick up guns just like you would to defend our freedom.

Why is that, to this day, so frightening and provocative to some?

Speaker 96: When Black folk do self-defense, when they are engaged in self-defense, the response is just sheer raw anger that Black people have the temerity to believe that they have the right to self-defense, and that you then get inordinate state power [00:29:00] raining down on that Black community as a way to say, "No, you don't have the right to self-defense."

This is what we saw in Knoxville. This is what we saw in Elaine, Arkansas. This is what we saw in Colfax, Louisiana. This is what we saw in Hamburg, South Carolina. This is what we saw in Atlanta. No, you do not have the right to self-defense. And it is, again, because when Black is the default threat in American society, that threat does not have the privilege, the honor, the right of self-defense.

That threat must be neutralized. That's the power of anti-Blackness in this society. Basically, the modern day, looking at those kinds of standards for gun rights, stand-your-ground, the right to self-defense, the castle doctrine, the right to self-defense, and open carry, which is the right to bear arms, and looking at these examples of what happens when Black folks believe that they can stand your [00:30:00] ground, or what happens to Black folk who believe that their castle should not be invaded, and what happens to Black folks who believe that they can open carry.

The results are disastrous. The results are fatal.

Speaker 10: President Trump has repeatedly claimed that the suspected shooter was anti-Christian. This is Trump appearing on Fox News Sunday.

Speaker 12: The guy w- is a sick guy. When you read his manifesto, he hates Christians, that's one thing for sure. He hates Christians, a hatred.

Speaker 10: Jeff Sharlet, can you respond?

Speaker 11: It's, a startling and on h- his part savvy claim. He, of course, had access to what we believe to be, it's not even really a manifesto, it's just a statement of intent by this man Cole Allen, and was able to characterize it as anti-Christian, which was then picked up, across right-wing media and, across as well as legacy and mainstream media [00:31:00] declaring this as an anti-Christian, attack.

So when you come to read the document itself, it's startling to see that in fact, Cole Allen understood his mission in very explicitly Christian terms, and not just Christian terms, but terms, familiar, i- if you've ever read the manifestos of abortion clinic bombers, the idea that you can't turn the other cheek when it comes time to save the lives of the innocent, that the Christian imperative to turn the other cheek doesn't apply, i- if lives are on the line.

and he goes further than that. He goes into deeper specificity. he... and a list of five objections that could be made to his, his awful attack, he offers what are in his mind his justifications. and one of them is, "Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar's," and it's a paraphrase of a biblical passage that appears in the Gospels of, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

the idea of render unto Caesar's what is Caesar's. The, the Christians are called upon to defer to the authority of the land. He comes with an [00:32:00] argument that says, "Yeah, but that's not when the leaders of the land are breaking the law," because the land, the Caesar there stands for the law of the land.

And since, these administration officials, are in his mind breaking the law as they are in fact, that he sees this as justification. This is almost the exact same justification used by Vance Bolter, the assassin, the far right, the fascist assassin in Minnesota who killed state legislators.

This is the much the same rhetoric that you'll find and the old language of the Army of God, the, the militia that would attack abortion clinics. He's turning it to different ends, but the last thing you can say is this is anti-Christian.

Speaker 10: In a Sunday opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald headlined America's Burning With Political Violence: It's a Fire that Trump Keeps Stoking, a former White House staffer, Cory Alpert, writes, quote, "Political violence has risen sharply over the past decade, more so than any of the [00:33:00] five moments in US history where a sitting president has been shot, leaving four dead and one gravely wounded.

Donald Trump has been the leading accelerant of that rise, throwing fuel on the fire at every opportunity." Professor Sharlet, can you respond?

Speaker 11: yeah. it, it's indisputable and it's, in fact, the point that far rightists and fascists, make themselves, pointing to the number of assassination attempts he's survived, which is either three or four or five, depending on how you count it, and they can debate amongst themselves.

but I, I think what it points us to is, we're losing the, the usefulness of the term political violence. The better term is violence. As you opened the show, what do we call... I- This is violence. This was a... This was attempted murder, and we can oppose it plainly and simply as that.

what do we call, the boat strike, with which you opened the show, that was barely reported, yesterday? is that political violence? It's [00:34:00] murder. I think what Trump, Trumpism has done has given us a spectacle politics, that has gotten us far past. What we're hearing all these cries, "We mustn't normalize political violence."

That ship has sailed. It is normal, as evidence you can see the number of people who are boasting online, " I didn't really pay attention to this. I was watching something else. I was out being normal." this idea that this is just the humdrum, the boat strike doesn't need to be reported, the shooting in Indiana, as you mentioned, barely reported.

It's just the weather. And I think that is the spectacle of Trumpism, and Trump knows, that weather is good for fascism.

Speaker 10: And what about this issue of gun violence? You just heard Congressmember Khanna calling for a commission on political violence. where does the easy availability of guns, whatever a shooter's political views are, fit into this story, [00:35:00] Jeff?

Speaker 11: w- whatever the number, the latest number is 450 million, maybe 500 million guns in civilian hands in the United States. guns so readily available, such powerful guns. we know this is true, in sit- situations of domestic violence. If there's guns in the house, they're more likely going to be used, and there's gonna be murders committed.

If there's guns there, someone is going to take whatever logic, whatever grievance they have, and apply a gun to it. a gun in the the American vernacular is the cure-all for whatever pro- whatever ails you. I think, again, when you look at the manifesto of, this shooter, what's striking about it is that so much of it is fairly conventional.

People have been combing over his social media. N- nothing really stands out. He was a fan of very many popular liberal and, mostly liberal, some left, websites. and yet then there's that moment where he says, "Okay, but I'm gonna add a gun to this, because I've got a gun." and it, [00:36:00] even through the manifesto, you see him following the logic of his own gun.

He says, "Okay, I'm gonna try and not harm innocent bystanders," or whatever he says. But then at the end he says, "But I will go through anybody. I'll kill anybody to achieve this." Gun in hand, he lets the gun lead him. And it's, we saw it on video, this man charging like he thinks he's an action hero in a movie, with his gun into the ballroom.

A fool on a deadly errand.

Speaker 10: Very quickly, what is being made of, in social media, this, alleged shooter, saying, the man that they now are going to be arraigning today, he was going after Trump administration officials except for Kash Patel, the head of the FBI.

Speaker 11: I have no idea what his intention was.

but, what we're seeing... A- and I get it, the temptation is to read this as a, a joke, like he's owning Kash Patel. and, that's as much the normalization of political violence, of [00:37:00] gun violence, as, I'm thinking of T-shirts and bumper stickers by gun zealots with sexual innuendos around bullets that are too grotesque to say on the air.

To make a joke of guns is to diminish any possibility we ha- ever have of reducing their absolute prevalence, everydayness. They are normalized in our lives. So I think that's what's happening, and I think that's- That's the kind of... That's Trumpism, even if it's an anti-Trumper saying it. It's the idea that all this is just entertainment.

Speaker 10: last question. We just have 30 seconds. We're going on to Sister Helen Prejean responding to the Trump administration reinstating firing squad. But, the shooting took place at the Washington Hilton. The venue, was of course the venue of the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. How does this shooting fit into what you describe as the slow civil war, that [00:38:00] you believe is occurring in the United States, Jeff?

Speaker 11: Yeah, I think the s- the slow civil war is best understood a- as almost like episodic. i- in the same way that what played out on Saturday night was, was, as my colleague Anthea Butler calls it, the story arc of the week in Trumpism. and it will be forgotten by next week.

That's why it's important to remember, to keep tally of all these violent incidents. And by violent incidents, I don't mean shooters, just shooters like this, although certainly them. but to put them in, one long list that includes wars in Iran and Venezuela, the, the, all the bombs sent to Gaza.

To understand that this, to put them into, a conversation with the war on trans folks. All those are part of this slow civil war. This is just one more episode.

it has been breathtaking to see how quickly the West has dismantled itself to sustain its own power and the power of its elites. That I wasn't prepared [00:39:00] for. I didn't really think they meant equality when they spoke about equa-- I didn't really think they meant democracy when they spoke about democracy.

I come from parts of the world where I've seen that not to be true. But I am surprised how phenomenally quickly they cannibalized their own society to protect power. And I think it's not just a dystopian moment, it's really a whiplash moment. We're living through unprecedented change and transparency and exposure, but really we're not built for it.

We're not built to have this level of whiplash every day. Very tough to keep up with it on a daily or hourly basis. What is the cost of this been to your mind and body? I have a friend/colleague doing this type of work about these subjects. He's had multiple heart attacks and he won't stop. He's "Somebody has to do it."

So what has the cost been for you to us? For me personally, I've suffered, I've struggled with anxiety really most of my life. I was a [00:40:00] very young girl. I would get debilitating stomach aches that were fear, that were anxiety and panic attacks really. I suffered them in college. I've really spent a lot of my time being afraid on earth.

And all the coping mechanisms that I spent decades cultivating and understanding and trying to incorporate into my life, they fall apart. They fall apart all the time, but I think that's normal. But I've been surprised by the extent to which, just two weeks before we're talking, I woke up with an anxiety so crushing, I went to my husband and said, "I think I can't breathe."

I said, "I've had panic attacks for years now. We're talking decades. I literally wrote a book about it." Very seriously telling you that I think I'm having a heart attack. He had to tell me, " maybe go to the doctor." And I went to a doctor and said, " I cannot breathe. I don't know this feeling. I'm really worried there's something wrong with my heart."

And the doctor, like I was a 17-year-old again, had to say to me, "I think this might be anxiety." and I [00:41:00] was convinced it wasn't. I was really convinced that I was dying. So I think a fear that is constant, that is unmanageable has been the cost to me. And on the other hand, it feels so ridiculous to say this when there are children dying of cold.

We're in the 21st century. We're talking oceans apart over a phone, a computer, and there's babies dying of hypothermia. I feel so embarrassed to tell you that I'm scared or that I have anxiety because it's nothing. What is it compared to hunger, compared to, a child that doesn't know if their parents are gonna be taken away from them from one morning to the next.

So it, it feels absolutely ludicrous to talk about me or I or us when we see the world as it is. But I do think if there's anything that the experience of talking in community and writing does, it's to build a link between our feeble- worries and puny sorrows to others, to people who are experiencing much [00:42:00] more than us.

It's to transcend divides and gulfs in order to make us feel for people that we might not think about otherwise. So I have to hope whatever we're all feeling, whether it's that heart attack or that nervousness or that worry or, I have to hope that it becomes a fuel, that it galvanizes us, and it pushes us towards some kind of action, some kind of collective action.

I don't know what shape that will take yet, but I know that without it, we're going to be lost. Let's have a moment of synchronicity here. We're not saying anything other folks are not thinking and sharing as well. We're channeling something here. How for yourself have you balanced the need to take care of oneself with feeling the pain of the world?

But on the other hand, I can say, "Boy, there are people being bombed out of existence. There are people who are suffering far more than me, but I'm still feeling what I'm feeling. I still got the fear I got." I think this is in a way a lot of the heartbreak and a lot of the grief that people all around us are feeling, which is we feel a kind of sorrow that is an act of compassion.

It is an act of empathy. It is an [00:43:00] act of suffering because you cannot stop something terrible around you. But at the same time, we also live with this crushing guilt that we are so lucky. We have it so easy, and I personally have never been very good at managing this. Again, it, I think it comes from growing up in an environment where the fate of the world was always right next to us it felt like.

I didn't feel I could say as a child that I was unhappy about something because it was very easy to remind me of the country I lived in and the place I lived in and the time I lived in, and I was lucky. So I didn't really have any reason to complain. But I do struggle. I just, yesterday I had a long day.

I had been a bit ill. I had to travel. I was a bit exhausted. Nothing any of us haven't felt, nothing special. But I was tired, and I was overwhelmed. I got into my bed at night feeling a little bit droopy, and I looked at my phone, and I turned on my social media, which used to be a place that I saw people's salads and summer vacations, and the [00:44:00] first thing I saw was a father mourning his fourteen-year-old boy in Gaza who had been shot by an Israeli sniper.

And I just thought, "What right do I have to feel overwhelmed by anything?" It really shamed me. I don't know, to answer your question. I know we feel what we feel, but I felt really ashamed to feel tired in the face of that kind of violence. And I do think in the end that part of it is a reminder to us that our fate is connected to each other.

Our fate is connected to the world, and what happens in Minneapolis or Minnesota or Ramallah or Pakistan or Greenland at the end of the day can very easily travel to us. Wherever we are. And it really bears remembering that in this moment we live in. It cannot be said enough that your privilege doesn't protect you, your silence doesn't protect you, your comfort doesn't protect you.

Nothing is gonna protect us unless we are willing to face this together. What advice would you give to [00:45:00] folk who are feeling things they never felt before? "I don't know what to do." I would say two things really helped me. The first is that whenever I would start to feel anxious, my body and my system and my teaching was to stop it, to immediately put up a defense against it, to try and confront it by pushing it away.

And with any force, if you are trying to walk into a hurricane, who's gonna win? Not you , the hurricane. Part of what really helped me was understanding that I cannot move a mountain with my hands, and if I'm feeling anxious, to just let that feeling come to me, to welcome it, and to say, "You're coming to me for a reason.

What do you want me to know? What do you want me to feel? I w- I will feel it." And to embrace it in a way. So if I start to get a panic attack again, and I speak as someone who their entire life has had, I'm in my 40s, has had anxiety, I still have to re- remind myself when the anxiety starts to come [00:46:00] to drop my defensive nature and just say, "I'm here, and I'm listening, and you want to tell me something, and you want me to feel something, so I'm gonna feel it."

And that act of surrender is very difficult. It allows you to experience something quite remarkable, which is that the anxiety is like a wave. It will hit you and then wash over you, and it'll leave you. And surrendering to it is part of what allows you to be separated from it. That would be the first thing.

The second thing I would say is what you alluded to earlier, is that you would be absolutely brain-dead and heartless not to feel anxiety at this moment, not to feel a kind of panic and a dread and a worry. And so part of it is to accept it and let it come to you and to embrace the feeling, but the other part is to know that you're not alone, that we are all feeling this.

Every single one of us is walking through their life thinking, "How do I go from here to tomorrow?" [00:47:00] And I think speaking about it, removing some of the stigma, some of the shame, does help. It does allow us to build links to each other instead of isolate ourselves from each other. I have met, 'cause I say hi to everybody, to strangers, to people I see in my daily walks and travels, so I say hi.

I may not know your name, I'll say hi to you, and I love this. You know all the animal people, so I know all the dogs in the neighborhood, all the cats, I talk to the squirrels, to crows. I know the dogs more than the people. The dogs are like, "There's that man. I'ma get belly rubs." And I had an experience about a month and a half ago, one of the few, warm days here, relatively warm here in Chicago.

I'm sitting outside on a bench, 'cause we're going through something, and I feel the pain of the world like you do. If I feel like crying, I cry. Gotta find a way to get it out. I'm sitting on the bench having a particularly rough day. I didn't- Think it was that obvious. And I'm just sitting there trying to meditate.

I don't think this would've happened under other circumstances. This older gentleman walks past me, older meaning late 60s, early 70s. He stops and he looks at me, and he says, 'cause I'm relatively younger than him, he says, "Young man, I can see you're going through something. I'm a very empathetic person, and I'm feeling it, too."

And he said, [00:48:00] "Whatever it is, it'll pass." And we s- ended up talking for 90 minutes, and now we text each other. I don't know if I would've had those types of interactions under better circumstances.

We've just heard clips starting with

Taylor Lorenz who drew a sharp line between the violence mourned by media elites and the daily state violence against Black, immigrant, and disabled communities that goes completely unnamed.

The PBS NewsHour revisited the MOVE bombing as a case where the government dropped a bomb on its own citizens, killing five children, with no criminal charges ever filed against city officials.

Front Burner traced assassination attempts from Andrew Jackson through Reagan to Trump, revealing that assassins consistently fail to achieve the political outcomes they envision.

The Chauncey DeVega Show explored how anti-Blackness embedded in the Second Amendment means that from Dred Scott to Philando Castile, armed Black people are treated as threats to be neutralized.

Democracy Now! challenged Trump's anti-Christian framing of the latest assassination attempt by showing the shooter used the same [00:49:00] biblical justifications found in anti-abortion extremist manifestos.

And The Chauncey DeVega Show also reflected on the crushing anxiety of watching the world's crises unfold daily while urging listeners to channel that pain into collective action rather than isolation.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

But first, speaking of world crises unfolding daily, I’m just repeating some sad news about our new show, SOLVED! A confluence of events, which we think were largely driven by widespread economic instability, caused such a dramatic cut in ad revenue that it forced us to put SOLVED! on indefinite hiatus. We were already stretching ourselves quite thin trying to build something new and so when Trump threw the world into chaos and marketing dollars dried up in response, we were extremely vulnerable to those shockwaves. Right now, I have to get back to basics and focus on building Best of the Left to be the best it can be with the greatest reach it can. So, that’s where my focus is going to be and [00:50:00] I’ll be keeping you posted on our progress as it develops.

Regarding members supporting the show, you really are more and more of what’s getting us through right now so thanks to everyone who is a member or has made one-time donations.

If you haven’t signed up yet, it’s important to remind you that each episode of Best of the Left takes about 25 hours of human labor to produce.

So, if you get value out of the show and want to support all of the work that goes into it and get it delivered ad-free to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support - there's a link in the show notes - through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.

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You can message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,

or you can simply email me to [email protected]

As for today's topic, you know I like to begin with a story when I can.

In 1893, during the [00:51:00] economic crash, a wireworker named Leon Czolgosz lost his job at a Cleveland mill and was blacklisted for participating in a strike. Over the next eight years he was radicalized by the labor disasters of the era: the Haymarket bombing, the Homestead steel strike, the Pullman strike, and the killings of nineteen Slavic workers by deputies at the Latimer Mines in 1897. By 1898 he'd quit working, moved to his family's farm, and started reading anarchist literature. On September 6, 1901, he walked into the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and shot President William McKinley twice in the abdomen. McKinley died eight days later. Czolgosz was executed six weeks after that. His confession: "I killed President McKinley because I done my duty. I didn't believe one man should have so much service, and another man should have none."[00:52:00]

The political response to McKinley's killing came from two directions. The first was crackdown. Teddy Roosevelt, who became president upon McKinley’s death, signed the 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act, the first U.S. law since the Alien and Sedition Acts more than a hundred year prior to question immigrants about their political beliefs. The second was structural accommodation. Roosevelt was already a known progressive when he became McKinley's vice president. In fact, the Republican party bosses had pushed him into that office specifically to bury him politically because VPs traditionally have very little power. Within a few years of being elevated to the presidency, Roosevelt was breaking up monopolies, signing the Pure Food and Drug Act, and intervening in a coal strike on behalf of workers in a way no president had before. He wasn't a labor radical, but the resulting deal raised wages by ten percent and cut the workday from ten to nine hours, defusing what [00:53:00] he feared could turn into "social war."

The historian Richard Hofstadter, writing in 1955, said Roosevelt and the broader Progressive Era reformers might never have been as progressive as they were if they hadn't been trying to fend off more radical movements coming up from below like calls for real socialism rather that just slightly less brutal capitalism. The reforms of Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive era weren't a moral awakening, they were strategic concessions made by an elite that understood crushing the radicals alone wasn't going to keep the lid on. The injustice was becoming too great to justify and the discontent was destined to spread.

When the political class reads that dynamic, they end up with two basic choices: structural accommodation to reduce injustice or build their own fortress to protect them from their own citizens.

When we look at the contemporary version, there’s plenty of injustice that’s being tolerated. Around [00:54:00] 45,000 Americans died from gun violence last year, according to CDC data. A 2020 Yale study in The Lancet estimated that universal healthcare would prevent about 68,000 deaths a year in this country. But those supporting injustice call the lack of universal health care and insurance claim denials market efficiency and the gun deaths are the price of freedom.

We already have a term that captures this dynamic. Stochastic terrorism describes public rhetoric that statistically increases the likelihood of violence without being predictably tied to specific actors. For instance, when Charlie Kirk argued that transgender people are mass shooters, he was statistically increasing the likelihood that someone, somewhere, would attack a trans person, even though no specific attack can be cleanly traced back to him. The same dynamic applies to structural violence. Economic immiseration, denied healthcare, eviction, untreated despair are all conditions [00:55:00] that statistically generate violent reactions over time. We can explain the pattern without endorsing or excusing any individual act. So, we’re anti-violence on this show but we can certainly help explain why it’s continuing to rise in predictable ways.

Now, to the immediate moment. There’s been a third apparent assassination attempt on Trump in less than two years, and his response on 60 Minutes the next day was to use it to argue for his ballroom. He told Norah O'Donnell that the Hilton was "not a particularly secure building," which is why he needed his own.

Nine days later Senator Chuck Grassley released the text of a $72 billion reconciliation package which contained $1 billion specifically earmarked for, quote, "above-ground and below-ground security features" of the East Wing Modernization Project, which is the formal name for Trump's $400 million ballroom. The security request alone is more than twice what the ballroom [00:56:00] itself costs. Grassley's office is arguing the billion isn't technically for the ballroom, while the White House's statement supporting the funding cites the Correspondents' Dinner shooting directly. The whole thing is moving through reconciliation specifically to bypass the filibuster so Democrats can’t block it.

This is happening five months after the same Congress let ACA subsidies expire on January 1, raising premiums an average of 75 percent for 22 million Americans according to KFF. It's happening on the heels of Trump’s Big Ugly Bill, which the Congressional Budget Office scored as adding $4 trillion to the deficit through tax cuts to the wealthy while cutting Medicaid by more than at any time in the program's history. And it's happening less than six months after Congress put 42 million people through 43 days without reliable food assistance during the shutdown, because the administration refused to use [00:57:00] a contingency fund Congress had set aside for exactly that purpose.

Historically, there have been two release valves for these levels of injustice. One is structural accommodation, which means a system that actually works for ordinary people, with regulators that can stop the worst corporate harm and a healthcare system that doesn't kill tens of thousands of people a year because they can't afford to see a doctor. The other is bloodshed. The political class of 1901 made the structural choice partly out of strategic self-preservation, because they understood they couldn't keep crushing people forever.

Some of the wealthiest people in the country can clearly see the same dynamic playing out right now. The tech investor David Friedberg, who co-hosts a podcast called All-In with three other venture capitalists, said this recently. For context, his co-host David Sacks now chairs Trump's science and technology council, and raised $12 million for Trump's campaign back in 2024. [00:58:00] So this isn't a left analysis. This is a billionaire talking to his three billionaire friends.

[CLIP: David Friedberg][00:59:00]

A billionaire on a podcast that's literally hosted Trump in the Oval Office, whose co-host is now chairing his science council, just said out loud that wealth redistribution may be necessary to prevent civil war. We might be frustrated that people like him are only just now coming to this conclusion but it’s better late than never. He’s making the historical argument for accommodation to avoid bloodshed in real time and the fact that it’s coming from the billionaire class is a critical shift.

However, the political party his fellow billionaires fund is making the opposite choice, fortifying the ballroom while the floor underneath everyone else is allowed to crumble.

So, what does real accommodation look like? Most of what insurance companies and corporate landlords are doing right now to maximize profit at the cost of people's [01:00:00] lives isn't actually against the law, people are playing by the rules of the game that are designed to create structural injustice. So, laws need to make that kind of injustice illegal, with regulators funded to enforce them. Healthcare needs to stop being attached to employment, so losing your job doesn't mean losing your insurance. And the donor-funded political corruption needs to be ended so the people writing the rules aren't owned by the people who benefit from them.

But all of this requires people in power who actually want to do it, and in 1901 that's accidentally what we got, because Teddy Roosevelt was already a progressive when the assassination promoted him. There's no Roosevelt in the wings now. JD Vance would govern in essentially the same direction Trump has, and while Trump rode populist discontent into office, every move his administration makes intensifies the conditions producing it.

The only path that runs through accommodating people rather than fortification for the elite is electing and pressuring [01:01:00] real progressive reformers. Not every Democrat fits that bill, but the overwhelming concentration of people willing to do this work is on that side of the aisle. So the work is concrete: support politicians publicly committed to making healthcare universal and restoring labor power, and pressure everyone else in office to either get on that program or get primaried, because primaries are where this fight actually gets decided.

Czolgosz didn't have much when he shot McKinley. No union to support him, and nothing in the institutional landscape that might have given his rage anywhere to go besides violence. The Progressive Era happened, to the limited extent that it happened, partly because there were enough genuine reformers in 1901 to channel the moment when it came. Most of the people in power right now are choosing the fortifications instead but the fortifications plan is always temporary, they never hold indefinitely and so the smart money is always on helping to [01:02:00] make life manageable for people so they never want to grab their pitchfork and march on your fortified compound.

Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them! Link in the show notes.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 5 topics today. First up;

Section A, The Framing Wars

Followed by Section B, The Long American Tradition

Section C, State Violence and Anti-Blackness

Section D, The Right-Wing Engine

And Section E, The System and What Comes Next

Speaker: By the time I stopped counting, I had seen more than 50 posts from across the Democratic establishment, senators, House members, governors, mayors, the operators around them, the talking heads who do the amplifying, all hitting the same five beats in more or less the same order: express thanks that no one was harmed, salute law enforcement, classify what happened as political violence, condemn political violence, invoke democracy.

Check your own feed right now. You're gonna [01:03:00] find it. The wording shifts a little. The priorities don't. They all got the same push alert. The first two beats are pro forma these days, like thoughts and prayers, but the last three are different. They're a choice, a particular choice, a coordinated choice, made before anyone could possibly know what had happened, all reaching for the same vocabulary at the same time.

What makes the forced consensus so jarring is how wildly disconnected it is from the actual public conversation. While the establishment locked arms around their script, the rest of the country's feed fractured instantly into two competing realities. The right immediately seized on the chaos to argue this is exactly why Trump needs his $300 million secure ballroom.

Meanwhile, massive segments of our public took one look at the breaking news and immediately asked whether the whole thing was staged. Those competing narratives, a reflexive grift on one side and the deep disbelief on the other, tells you a lot more about the actual state of our democracy than any coordinated social media post.

But here's something worth remembering about presidents getting shot at in [01:04:00] this country. The famous lone wolf cases of the last hundred years or so have mostly not been driven by anything you would call a coherent political program. The clearest example happened at exactly the same place. John Hinckley fired six rounds at Reagan outside the Washington Hilton in 1981, trying to impress Jodie Foster.

The pattern is not necessarily the absence of politics, but maybe the collapse of politics into fixation, pathology, parasocial obsession, and a grandiose belief that one person is the problem and removing them is the answer. The last point is what produces lone wolves. There's a studied psychology to it.

Individuals do not reach for it unless they've decided every other channel is closed to them. Not a- actually closed, but closed in their heads. They've reduced their world to a single face. Remove the face, fix the world. Nobody else is gonna do it, so I will. But as far as resistance history is concerned, it's also the worst possible form of anything you would want to call political violence, and it's not what political violence means inside [01:05:00] any serious resistance.

Lone wolf violence isn't resistance. It's what someone does after he has stopped believing in resistance and collective action. Real resistance understands that abuse of authority is structural, that removing one functionary produces a replacement functionary, that what has to be intervened in is the apparatus itself.

It's in the Declaration of Independence, the right of the people to alter or abolish destructive governments. Not alter or abolish people. Alter or abolish the structure. Direct action is intervention in the abuse, not violence as an outcome. It's making the mechanics of abuse costly, slow, and impossible for the people running it.

Escalation is a calculated tool used only when every permitted channel has been foreclosed. Isolated violence is not how serious resistance movements build the capacity to act at scale, to push back abuse operating at scale, like across a nation. Because it's a strategic disaster. It often triggers crackdown that damage the very movement trying to change the structure.

[01:06:00] Resistance organizers have learned this from history, particularly on the left, and they've learned it expensively. So when Democrats across the establishment reach for political violence within minutes of an event they cannot possibly have understood yet, they're accomplishing two things. First, they're inflating a lone act into a strategic threat that almost certainly was not its origin.

But the bigger point for resistance is the second one. They're flattening the entire spectrum of opposition. By characterizing an armed charge at a hotel checkpoint as political violence, the Democratic establishment creates a massive rhetorical umbrella, but once that umbrella is open, it becomes remarkably easy to sweep any unsanctioned, disruptive political action underneath it, anything they don't filter and organize and promote as their own.

They intentionally conflate the image of chaotic desperation of a lone gunman with the organized strategic escalation of actual resistance movements, the kind of patient structural work that has historically changed conditions in this country. So the intended effect is to preemptively discredit all opposition that isn't theirs.

[01:07:00] They are the legitimate opposition. They are the defenders of democracy. Anyone else, by definition, isn't. They get to call those shots and only them. Whatever anyone else is doing to oppose Trump and MAGA suddenly becomes the exact same thing under the exact same label, condemned in advance by people who have no interest in distinguishing them.

Trump might call it the radical left's political violence, but establishment Democrats don't necessarily disagree with that, because that's not them. They're not the radical left. So if all escalation not related to their election in November is immediately branded as synonymous with unhinged gun violence.

Legitimate resistance is treasonous even before it begins. It traps the non-establishment opposition in a perpetual defensive crouch. They're forced to spend their time joining in with the condemnations, publicly distancing themselves from whatever lone wolf whack job, as Trump called him, just snapped.

The establishment sets the terms, and the opposition is forced to waste its energy proving they aren't the monster. And that leads directly to what I think is the ultimate goal, chilling the opposition. [01:08:00] By demanding that everyone universally condemn the event under the banner of protecting democracy, the establishment aggressively polices the boundaries of what that means.

Anyone who tries to introduce complexity, discuss the systemic failures that drive people to those breaking points, or advocate for structural disruption is immediately painted as a sympathizer to violence. It's a trap. Don't fall for it. They use the fear of being ostracized, the fear of being lumped in with a shooter, to keep the opposition docile, compliant, and safely contained within the permitted channels that the establishment almost completely controls.

So, back to the hard question. Why are Democrats writing the administration's lines for it? Trump's people are reading from virtually the same script. The classification, the condemnation, the democracy invocation, law and order reinforcement. If your political identity and your electoral strategy is built around opposing Trump, wouldn't you pause before parroting language he's using to target the left?

But the Democratic establishment didn't pause. It went straight to it within minutes. [01:09:00] It's because the script serves them too. It centers the people reading from it as the heroes. It positions the security state law and order as the natural response to disorder. And it treats any disruption to the smooth running of the offices they hold as the enemy of democracy itself.

It makes the establishment and the administration and everyone occupying the rooms they are in as the thing democracy is. They might not be defending democracy. They might be actively destroying it. But as far as you plebs are concerned, they are democracy. So you better treat them right. One of the posts from Chris Coons closed with the line, fear cannot win.

Others work the same theme. Urgency, threat, condemnation, unity. And they drive the implication for you scanning it. Not hitting the like or share button makes you part of the problem. And that's deploying fear, not defending you against it. But fear is what makes all these scripts land. Fear is doing their work for them.

Fear is winning every time you repeat it. [01:10:00] Fear is what collapses lone violence, direct action, mass protest, and organized resistance to abusive authority into one category for you to condemn. And fear is what keeps you from asking the more dangerous question. Not about what happened at the Hilton, but whose interests are being served by naming what happened before we really know it.

Speaker 63: we had the terrible shooting at the Catholic school in Minnesota. We've had other attacks. Is there a sense in which... I don't mean Democrats, the left perhaps more generally. The radical left somehow has perhaps been told that Donald Trump is fascist and that Republicans are taking away people's rights and they're trying to destroy democracy.

Has that, do you think, fed this radicalization? Is there a problem, frankly, with some people, some very prominent critics of Donald Trump, who are somehow through their rhetoric perhaps radicalizing and actually encouraging people to go out and commit acts of violence?

Speaker 64: that's certainly a story from the right it's interesting in the episodes that you mentioned just now, you didn't even ask about the Minnesota lawmakers, the sitting [01:11:00] Democrats who were assassinated by MAGA extremists.

And of course, the president didn't ask if there was a problem on the right. The president didn't even bother to lower the nation's flags when these innocent people were, killed or tried to be killed in their homes. the statistics are actually very clear that there's more of a problem with political violence on the right than the left.

But as a Democrat, Jerry, I am not afraid to stand here and condemn whatever violence is coming from the left. I just wish I could hear that from Republicans on the other side.

I wish that even people like you would just say, in the wake of Minnesota, is there a problem with MAGA extremists trying to kill Democrats?

And does the rhetoric that we're hearing from people like Jesse Watters on Fox or the president in the Oval Office or J.D. Vance when he hosted Charlie Kirk's podcast, is that rhetoric contributing to this? there were a lot of polls after January 6th, for example. There was a [01:12:00] December 2021 poll where it said, 40% of Republicans said, quote, "Violence against government is sometimes justified."

Only 23% of Democrats agree. 33% of Republicans agree with the statement that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country. Only 13% of Democrats agree with that. So if we're going to honestly admit that there are problems on both sides, we have to be willing on both sides to actually go after our own base, to police our own.

That's where this should start if we're going to tamp things down. And while I'm a Democrat Unafraid to say that, yes, we need to stop violence on the left. I sure wish I would hear from some Republicans who would take on violence and incitement to violence on the right.

Speaker 63: Since you asked, I will respond and say 100%, I totally condemn.

I frankly hate this phenomenon of both sides, because it actually in the end it somehow is used [01:13:00] to, if not justify, then at least to somehow to lower the moral turpitude of people who do these things when people say both sides. But I think there is, I personally, I do think there's a problem on both sides.

I think that's extremely clear. I didn't mention the terrible murder of the Minnesota state senator because I was saying I think it is a problem on both sides, and I was talking to you particularly as a Democrat. But I think it is absolutely, I think it's a problem. I don't think any of my colleagues on the Wall Street Journal editorial page have been any doubt about that.

We've written about this, and I have certainly condemned on both sides. I think there absolutely is a problem on both sides. We saw the assassination attempts on Donald Trump last year. Whether there is something about the way in which people talk about what Trump is doing that actually creates this mood among a tiny fraction here.

And again, we need to be careful what we're talking about. We're not talking about mainstream Democrats or members of Congress or people like you. But whether or not this is ginning up the sense of a country facing an existential crisis, and when a country faces an existential crisis, people do extreme things.

And I wonder whether just some of that rhetoric from some on the left is [01:14:00] contributing to that.

Speaker 64: You preface your question by talking about the two assassination attempts really on the president. One was a registered Republican who expressed anti-immigrant views and a lot of things aligned with the president.

We don't really know why this is the one who was killed. We don't really know what his motives were. The other was a, an independent who had no clear connection to the left whatsoever, but also no clear connection to the right. So I guess the question I have is why in the wake of this violence, whether it's in the wake of the assassinations in Minnesota or the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Are Republicans unwilling to ask this question if there's a problem on the right?

Speaker 71: Do you think in America there's an overstated fear of political violence?

Speaker 72: I think that there is a dramatic overstatement in the threat that political violence poses to our country and the extent to which Americans actually support political violence.

So there, there are two things that I would say. The first is that the definition of political violence has become very fuzzy. [01:15:00] So it's not just violence committed because of partisanship or because of partisan affiliation. It's much looser. It's violence related to race or gender or other forms of identity.

And surely those are inherently political. There's certainly a political component to all of those, kinds of violence, but it's very different from an assassination attempt on a political leader. So if we're trying to cure political violence in the more, narrow sense, we want to target those who are, willing to attack members of the other party, who are willing to support those who might attack members of the other party.

But if we're to take a larger view of political violence, it might be that we're misdirecting resources. So if we want to stop hate crimes against Asians or if we want to stop hate crimes against African Americans, calling those incidents political violence lumps those acts in with assassination attempts and maybe [01:16:00] misdirects us to focus on the partisan component and not the, institutional racism or not the other factors that are driving race-based crime.

So I, I fear not only that we're overstating the problem, but that we're expanding the label to a point where we're absorbing and perhaps co-opting other really important divides in society.

Speaker 71: Yeah, that's something I hadn't even w- tried to focus on for this episode, and that's, yeah, that's an interesting point.

I, I was gonna... The main thing I was gonna focus on for this was going to be the many surveys and survey int- interpretations that have been shared pretty prominently in the mainstream media and by leaders and activists that state there's high support amongst Americans for political violence. For example, often see in the 20% to 30%, f- framing, but also even 40% sometimes in, in some framings of Americans who, sup- lend, have support for political violence.

But considering the work that you've done and some other work [01:17:00] by, for example, I think it's, Democracy Fund and then another, survey study that I just saw come out recently, tho- those show that it's more like 3%. And maybe you could talk a little bit about the discrepancy there and how you see that discrepancy.

Speaker 72: Yeah. So I think we have to just be very careful when interacting with any polling result that doesn't seem to match reality. So day to day, we don't see much political violence, but if we're to believe that nearly half of the country or a quarter of the country supports partisan violence, it's really hard to reconcile that with what we're observing.

So I think that's the first, real source of concern that I have with these results. But the second is if you actually look at the questions, they're almost designed in a way to inflate, the proportion of Americans who say that they might support partisan violence. So I'll give you a, a couple of examples.

So when we try to measure partisan violence, we try to use very concrete examples. So we're [01:18:00] describing an individual who has committed a crime. We describe what that crime is, and then we ask individuals do they support or oppose what that individual did. So it's very clear in the respondent's mind what they're being asked to evaluate.

But some of the more alarmist work leaves that information out of the question. So instead of describing a specific event, a specific scenario, a specific act of violence, they ask more general questions. "Would you be okay with your party committing violence if your party lost in 2024?" for example. If you think about that question, what does that mean, right?

So what does it mean for your party to commit violence? For some individuals, that might mean going and storming the Capitol. For others, it might mean saying, nasty things on Twitter. It might mean going to protests and really vocally attacking the other side. So by not defining violence, you're allowing individuals to [01:19:00] use their own imagination when they're answering that question.

And it turns out that if you use that very vague question, then you ask a very simple follow-up, "You said that you supported violence," if someone says they supported violence, "What violence do you support?" It's the case that almost 80% will say that they support something that isn't actually violence, right?

So they'll say that they support the examples I was just, I just gave. So saying something nasty on Twitter, or even more importantly, they'll say, " now that I think about it, I don't think I support partisan violence."

Speaker 71: They're venting the... Is it-- They call that expressive response or something like that?

Speaker 72: Yeah. It's expressive responding. So they're mad, and they wanna show that they're mad, and one way to do that is to, signal in answering a question that they're, upset with one side and they're loyal to the other. But the other thing that, that's going on with these questions is that a lot of them are not structured in a way that gets around people who aren't paying attention on surveys.

So if you ask a question [01:20:00] and the response scale or the way that you would answer that question ranges from never to always, and if someone's just, randomly clicking through the questionnaire, if only one option indicates you don't support violence and three options indicate that you do support violence, just randomly clicking is going to inflate the amount of, violence that we researchers are going to measure because three of the four options indicate violence.

So you have a 75% chance of indicating support for violence if you're randomly clicking. So it, it's partially due to the lack of detail, and it's partially due to just really bad methodological choices by some of these researchers. Now, to be fair, they have corrected, some of the, those researchers have corrected that last problem, and that does lead to much smaller estimates of support for partisan violence, though I still think the lack of specificity is in inflating their estimates.

So that takes us from a world where someone's saying 40% or 20% down to a world where they're saying that the actual support [01:21:00] level is around 10%, which I still think is too high, but it's much more reasonable and potentially more credible.

Speaker 71: And, y- I think you found, specifically your work, what was the percentage range you found, and do you think that's pretty accurate when you factor in expressive responding and all that?

Speaker 72: Yeah. So we've been doing this now for almost two years, actually just slightly larger, slightly longer than two years, with 1,000 survey interviews per week, and we're ver- we're able to very precisely estimate support for political violence at around two percentage points. Now, when I say that, it, it seems small, right?

2%, that, that's not something that we should be hugely concerned about. But I think it's really important to contextualize that. So I'm not saying that nobody supports partisan violence. I'm not saying that partisan violence is impossible or that there aren't individuals who are out there willing to destabilize our, who are willing to destabilize our country.

What I'm saying is that it's not the kind of problem where we want to [01:22:00] run massive PSAs during the Super Bowl trying to reach everyone, right? It's the kind of problem where we need to identify who these people are and in- introduce very narrowly tailored and specific interventions aimed at those groups.

So it's not a problem the country is facing. It's a problem that a small portion, a small but reasonably large proportion of the country is facing.

Speaker 71: Yeah, I think it's important too because some people listening to this might think we're downplaying fears of political violence, which, I myself am concerned about those things, especially a- as they can escalate in unforeseen ways too.

But I think the important thing to me is trying to get a realistic and not overstated sense of the problem because having an overstated sense of the problem can lead to its own forms of escalation in escalating fears and animosity and all of these kinds of things and

Speaker 72: yeah. I think something else that's really important to point out is that the kinds of people who are going to commit acts of political violence, are probably not the kind of people who are gonna be completing these surveys in the first [01:23:00] place, right?

So if you're someone who's, suffering a mental health crisis and you're going to go out and attempt to assassinate the president, you're in all likelihood probably not the person that's gonna be completing surveys. So when we're looking at these measures, we're probably not capturing, data from those who intend to actually commit violence themselves.

We're capturing data on those who would approve of someone else engaged in, an act of partisan violence, which also I think really helps to contextualize how bad the problem is. So we don't have 2% of the country that they-- that would be willing to go out themselves and shoot a politician or a, attack someone from the other side.

We have 2% of the country that would say, "You know what? I get it. That was okay," right? That they went out and-- or that someone else went out and did that on behalf of their party. So we certainly don't want to be in a world where that is, a common attitude, but it is important to note that this doesn't mean that we have 8 million Americans who are willing to go out and incite violence in the [01:24:00] streets, which is really important in suggesting that this isn't a group that's going to begin the next civil war.

This is a group that's gonna sit to the side and say, " maybe I would understand if some people, did something terrible."

Speaker 77: the bizarre thing about this is how routine it feels. Another day, another attempt on Trump's life. Have we become so deadened by what's gone on in the second Trump administration that nothing really stuns us anymore?

Speaker 78: I think we have. It is the third attempt on his life, and he likes to believe that it makes him stronger.

Unfortunately, events like this seem to contribute to his personality cult, to his idea that he is a martyr, that he is transforming America, and people who try to stop him are mad. I think a part of him, obviously, being shot at and someone trying to take your life is obviously going to be frightening for anyone.

But part of him, I think, also enjoys the spectacle. Fundamentally, he believes, I think, that attempts this make [01:25:00] him stronger, and it all takes place, of course, in a country that is in thrall to guns. There are over 600 mass shootings every year in the US. I think in 2023, nearly 47,000 people died from gun-related injuries.

It's one of the things about America that's, I think, very hard for us in the UK to grasp just how endemic gun violence is.

Speaker 77: For once, the extremist reactions online are in a weird form of agreement. The crazy left think it's a false flag so that Trump can overturn the block on construction of the ballroom by a federal judge, and the crazy right thinks it proves he needs the ballroom.

And the other bizarre thing is that it just feels for all of this, this shock and this spectacle and this horror, nothing is really going to change. Is it gonna do anything but just turn up the temperature with the crazy people?

Speaker 78: No, I, it drives people to extremes. Trump's personality, Trump's actions drive people to extremes.

And this morning, [01:26:00] the text of the manifesto, which- ... the shooter wrote has emerged via CBS, and it is, an, a quite logical explanation by the shooter as to why he carried this out. He puts forward various arguments against what he decided to do, and as he sees it, he rebuts them. It's quite literate. He, talks about Caesar in it.

He's a clearly pretty intelligent guy. He was a former computer science student at Caltech. But he has clearly been driven mad by what he sees in the Trump administration and by the fact that it's so easy to get hold of guns in the US. And this unfortunately, you can say that assassination has for a long, long time been a part of American politics, going all the way back to the 19th century.

It's always a risk in America. But Trump seems to have intensified this atmosphere of violence.

Speaker 77: A lot of the [01:27:00] reaction has been along the lines of, how could this happen yet again? But it does actually seem that the security operation in the room worked as designed. The protection team reacted within 20 seconds, got the president out, neutralized the attacker.

But the security system around it seems to have been very lacking. No airport security, measures, or rather very laxly enforced airport security, not much of a, of a kind of control area. But it does... weirdly, you're more concerned about what the conspiracists are gonna think than what the real world of rational-based, human beings are gonna think.

Does the fact that the system actually fundamentally worked quite well enable people to, next time you've got your crazy uncle at, Sunday lunch saying, "Oh, it was all staged," to say, "No, hang on. Look, this is very basic. The system worked, and actually it is unsurprising in a country so full of guns that something like this would happen"?

Speaker 78: Yes, it's completely unsurprising. Security did work, and if a president does want to be seen in public, as Trump obviously does, they can never be immune from these attempts on their lives, particularly when, as we discussed [01:28:00] just now, so many people in the US are packing guns at any one time.

Next, Section B, The Long American Tradition

Speaker 90: If you've taken any type of history class, K-12 education or university, you've heard the name John Brown. And before we get into the story as outlined in your book, here's something I'm curious about. Based on your research, what is something that people would be surprised to know about John Brown? If you look at more, traditional Civil War stories that are more pro-Southern, he's looked as really a lunatic or almost a jihadist.

Northern sources, the more contemporary one, looks on John Brown more favorably, but still see him as a bit misguided. And the most pro-John Brown sources or accounts would be someone Malcolm X, who consider hi- considers him a righteous among the nations for the, African American cause in the United States.

But there's different accounts on him, but what is something about John Brown that you think surprises [01:29:00] people that when they learn about?

Speaker 91: Scott, if you'd asked me this question twenty-five years ago, I could have given you a confident answer. And the reason I cannot now is that I have very much less confidence in what I know about what people know about history.

So you ask me, what would surprise people? To answer the question, I need to have an idea of what I think people know. And I've been teaching college students for thirty-five years, and I'll tell you that they tend to know less and less about history. Now, I don't blame my students. the teaching, the curriculum is different.

And I get a lot... I teach at the University of Texas, and I get a lot of international students. For whom, they may have had almost no American history before. But I will say this, that John Brown is this polarizing character. He is... I'm not gonna say he's as polarizing today as he was then, as nobody more polarizing than John Brown in 1859 and 1860 and 1861.

But I will say that there are differences of opinion [01:30:00] on, to put it very bluntly, was the guy crazy or not? And there were motives, there were incentives for people in his day to dismiss him as crazy. Southerners, whose institution of slavery was being attacked by John Brown, they, some of them wanted to say he was crazy, but in fact, that almost let him off too easily because many of them wanted to indict the North, and the Republican Party in particular, for spawning people John Brown.

So if the Republican Party, this is the line of many people in South, the Republican Party is this avowedly anti-slavery party. They're naturally gonna spin off people like John Brown. And you don't have to decide if you take this view, whether John Brown was a lunatic or not. But in either event, he takes up arms, and he tries to incite a race war that, if successful, will certainly [01:31:00] kill hundreds of people, perhaps thousands of people.

So people then, some they had mixed, but I should add that Abraham Lincoln, who's the co-star of my book, he didn't think John Brown was crazy, but he certainly thought John Brown was wrong, misguided, and counterproductive to the very cause that he espoused. Lincoln thought that John Brown was a net negative force in, on, on the, for the cause of freedom.

Because first of all, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry failed. It didn't start the uprising that John Brown wanted, and it didn't free any slaves, which was the point of all of this, and it got John Brown killed. But from Lincoln's perspective, the worst part of it was that it undermined the cause of moderate anti-slavery people Lincoln himself.

Because Lincoln believed, he certainly [01:32:00] hoped, that Southerners eventually, I'm speaking of white Southerners, even especially including white Southern slave owners, the political classes in the South, he hoped they could be persuaded to see that slavery was no longer in their interest, if not in 1860, maybe in 1865, 1870.

Lincoln had seen, he lived through the time when Northern states had abolished slavery. And they had done so out of self-interest, not because anybody else was hectoring to do but because their economies had changed. And Lincoln believed, and he certainly hoped again, that Southern economies would change in the same way, and Southerners would emancipate their own slaves.

Lincoln's belief was this was the only way it could be done constitutionally. It was the only way it could be done legally, and it was the only way it could be done effectively. So Lincoln was one who [01:33:00] he didn't have to decide whether John Brown was crazy or not, but he certainly wanted to distance himself from John Brown because he thought John Brown was a, an evil, an ill force for the anti-slavery movement.

Speaker 107: political violence is nothing new in America, is it?

Speaker 121: I think that's exactly right.

if you look at the full sweep of United States history, more often than not, violence was endemic to political culture. This was certainly never true more than in the 1850s when the contest over slavery, and particularly over its expansion into the western territories, became an all-consuming feature of American politics.

It really stepped up when Congress passed something called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which essentially abrogated a decades-old agreement that slavery would not be permitted in certain territories north of a certain, demarcation line. The situation in Kansas and in Washington became increasingly fraught and violent.

Ultimately, of course, this [01:34:00] concluded, as it almost seems in retrospect it naturally would have, in a civil war by 1861.

Speaker 103: And then Josh, it's Justin in London here. Can I move us forward 100 years, so to the 1950s, and focus not actually on violence itself, but on violent speech and the conspiracies that make people do violent things?

Because it's fair to say, isn't it, and I'm thinking about the John Birch Society, people who said Eisenhower was a communist, the people who said all peculiar things about life in those days. Long, long before social media, w- we did have conspiracies, didn't we, in the US?

Speaker 121: We had them in the 1850s, we had them in the 1950s, certainly.

And if you look at the years leading up to the Kennedy assassination in 1963, there was a very clear escalation of ultra-right, rhetoric and incitement against John Kennedy, against his running mate, Lyndon Johnson. there were, famously, the Birch Society put out posters, wanted posters that, purported to basically be a law enforcement wanted [01:35:00] poster, for John F.

Kennedy, wanted for treason. So that rhetoric obviously, heated the political environment, and, it, it would be hard, it'd be hard to make a case that it didn't contribute to some of the violent political outcomes in the 1960s in the US, from the Kennedy assassinations, plural, to Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

Speaker 122: Good evening. Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of non-violence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee. Police have issued an all-points bulletin for a well-dressed young white man seen running from the scene

Speaker 121: One point though that is worth making, and this brings us back to the 1850s, we can look at different decades and different periods when violence was a central component of American politics or when violence, polluted American politics.

What was different about the 1850s and what makes it such an interesting parallel to today is that militia violence was both sanctioned and in some cases egged on and led by elected [01:36:00] political officials or party officials. So what we see today is increasingly much more like what we saw in the 1850s or the 1860s and '70s where a political party has decided that it doesn't mind associating itself loosely with militia groups that are clearly seeking to, to bring violence into the political process, and that's something we haven't seen for some time.

Speaker 103: there are also of course, let's be blunt about it, an awful lot of guns around in modern America, and an awful lot of guns that can do a huge amount of damage. When you look at what's going on at the moment and you look at possibly a post next presidential election system where there is a real fight to be had, at least metaphorically, about whether the system has been fair and who the president is, et cetera, does it worry you the simple access that people have to, to the ability to harm each other?

Speaker 121: I think worry generally speaking about the simple access that Americans have to guns. We're a far more armed country, than we were in, in the 1850s, which raises the stakes. I would argue that there are [01:37:00] other countries in which violence is endemic to politics, but in the United States, you have a heavily armed citizenry, or at least a portion of the citizenry that's heavily armed.

It's extremely worrying.

Speaker 107: Now, we're talking about violent threats and violent acts that are coming from the right wing of American politics and being excused or, mocked and, encouraged by p- politicians on the right. And then of course, there are people saying, "Ah, what about the left? They're, they're not blameless.

There is violence that comes from the left as well." They'll point to, the shooting of, Steve Scalise in, 2017, five years ago, and that was a left-wing attacker.

Speaker 123: Emergency crews rushed injured House Majority Whip Steve Scalise into a helicopter after a shooter opened fire during an early morning baseball practice for congressional Republicans.

Speaker 124: Steve Scalise was on second base, playing second base, fielding balls, and, all of a sudden we heard a li- very loud shot. Everybody thought that sounds like a gun, and the gunman-

Speaker 107: Is there any real equivalence between the amount of violence we've seen driven by left-wing politics and those that are [01:38:00] happening on the right?

Speaker 121: in terms of volume, there's no equivalence whatsoever. There's certainly examples of left-wing violence or threats of violence. There's what happened to Steve Scalise several years ago. there was a left-wing, protester called a terrorist who threatened the safety of the life of Justice Brett Kavanaugh more recently.

And again, pointing back to the 1850s, I think the key question is that violence being done in concert coordination, or at least with the winking support of a major political party? And the fact of the matter is that you didn't have Democratic members of Congress rushing to defend it or call it fake news or argue that there must have been some other reason that Steve Scalise was shot, and we just don't know what that is, but we could speculate wildly about it.

That just didn't happen. And what you have today is a whole complex of conservative media, in- including con- new conservative media, and a rising generation of Republican members of Congress and other elected officials at the state level, the Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert caucus, who openly defend and support, the actions of people on the right [01:39:00] who've perpetrated violence in, in, in the political process.

There have been Republican members of Congress who've come out, and called the January 6th rioters and insurrectionists heroes. there was one Republican congressman who gave one of them a flag. I just don't see the equivalency and the ... where I do see a really clear comparison is to the 1850s, '60s, and '70s when, a political party became increasingly comfortable in its, coexistence with, violent white militias.

Speaker 90: I'd like to take the subject of your book and address a very large philosophical question, is the tension between those who want reform through non-violent violence Lincoln did originally and those who are willing to use violence to achieve their ends John Brown.

This tension has played out all throughout history. you could think of dozens of cases of Martin Luther and the Reformation versus the radical reformers, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, Gandhi in India versus, let's say, the IRA in Great [01:40:00] Britain, and on. some people say that violence is never justified by its nature, even if it is against an evil cause.

By using violence, you yourself have become evil. Philosophers would call this a deontologist. Others would say if it achieves the greater ends, then it can be justified, a consequentialist. And these questions are being addressed again in 2020 about protest for social change, where some would say that protests must be peaceful, they cannot be violent.

Others would say that violence can be used to achieve our ends. what does this story of the tension between John Brown and Abraham Lincoln do you think says here about the questions of using violence versus not using violence?

Speaker 91: Yeah. So this is an obvious question to pose, es- especially to John Brown or of John Brown.

Were his actions justified? And to come to a conclusion about this, you have to answer yourself, was a civil war necessary to end slavery in the United States? And I don't know the answer to this. None of us knows the answer to this question. A civil war [01:41:00] did occur, and slavery was ended in the context of that.

Would slavery have ended otherwise? I don't know. I'll just point out something for your readers and, for your viewers and listeners, and that is that in 1800, slavery was accepted, was legal in big- nearly every country in the world, and there weren't very many people who were questioning it. It was just something that had been around for thousands of years.

Okay? That's slavery. In 1900 Slavery was legal almost nowhere. A few remnant places in odd parts of the world, but world opinion had changed. Some of this had to do with, I could say maybe a rising level of awareness of what human rights might consist of, but a lot of it had to do with changing economies, and I was talking about a flexible workforce against a non-flexible workforce and so on.

But in this context, it was only in the United States of America, of all those countries in the world that had [01:42:00] slavery in 1800, and none of them had slavery in 1900, it was only in the United States that this massive war was required to end slavery. I have to make a partial exception for Haiti, where slavery was ended, but it was in the context of an anti-colonial revolution as well.

but anyway, that started in the 1790s. But leave aside that exception. So this certainly suggests that there was nothing inherent about slavery that said you have to have a bloodbath to end slavery. Everybody else figured out how to do it peacefully. Even Brazil, where slavery was a lot worse than it was in terms of the conditions that the slaves worked under than the United States, they managed to end it peacefully.

So that makes me think that if decisions had been made differently, then slavery could have ended peacefully. Now, those decisions weren't made, and it wasn't. But if you think, if you do think that slavery could have ended peacefully, then you have to handle [01:43:00] John Brown with real kid gloves because he helped bring on this, what I will now call this unnecessary war in which seven hundred thousand people died.

Now, in his final words, John Brown smuggled a note to his jailer as on his way to be hanged, and the note said that the sins of this country are so great that they cannot be purged except by blood. Now, once the Civil War came, and once the blood started flowing, John Brown seemed like a prophet. And even Abraham Lincoln, who began the war thinking that, this does-- this isn't necessary to end slavery, in his second inaugural address, he said it may be God's will that for every drop of blood drawn by the slaver's lash, another drop of blood must be drawn by the sword before this burden shall pass from us.

So Lincoln was coming around to [01:44:00] John Brown's view of the inevitability of all of this. If you think it was inevitable, then it's easy to embrace John Brown, 'cause you can say the guy was on the right side of history, and he helped move things along. And John Brown, abolitionists, defended John Brown as saying, "Wait, the war over slavery had already begun."

Maybe it began in Kansas. Maybe it began in 1619 when the first slaves arrived in Virginia, because violence was part and parcel of slavery. So for the first time, John Brown is one of the first who's fighting back on behalf of the slaves. So if you wanna like John Brown, and there's a lot to like here because here's a guy who was ahead of his time, and he certainly was on the right side of history.

Pretty much everybody today agrees that the cause of ending slavery was a good cause. But that still raises the question, in a good cause, are all tactics [01:45:00] justifiable? And I would say no. it depends very much on the circumstance, on the context. As a general rule, I would say if you live in a country that still operates under the rule of law, where there is freedom of expression, where there are free elections, if in those countries, then I think it's possible to make an appeal to conscience.

And so I happen to think that Martin Luther King was much more influential in the civil rights revolution in the 1960s than Malcolm X, because King understood that for Black people in America to get their rights, they're gonna have to bring white people on board. There simply aren't enough Black people in America to make the changes in the laws.

And Gandhi, his movement worked in India because there were elections in Britain. Would Gandhi's [01:46:00] nonviolent movement have worked as resistance to Hitler and the Nazis? No. He would've been killed the first time he stood up against the government. so it really depends on the situation. It also depends on how far things have gone.

And, I sincerely believe, and I certainly hope, that the racial tensions in this country and other tensions in this country have gotten us nowhere near the edge of a civil war. but we certainly aren't there yet, and I hope we never get there. if we did get closer to a civil war, then conceivably John Brown's example might be more germane, but we're nowhere near there.

And just one last thing. John Brown had no idea of the consequences of his actions. He wasn't trying to start a civil war in the United States. I hope that John Brown would have been appalled to know that seven hundred thousand people died in [01:47:00] partial consequence to the actions that he took. And if he knew that, and I have no confidence in saying this, if he knew that, maybe he would've, taken pause instead of starting this thing, start that ball rolling.

But nobody knows what the consequences of our actions are gonna be And we can't say, "Okay, time is gonna justify me, and therefore anything I do is fine," because there's a lot, there can be a lot of collateral damage along the way.

Now, Section C, State Violence and Anti-Blackness

Speaker 27: While I was interviewing the survivors, my partners went to the apartment, and when we gathered all the evidence, it turned out that the police had fired 90 shots into the apartment with a submachine gun, shotguns, pistols, and a rifle.

There was only one outgoing shot, and that came from a Panther who had been fatally wounded, and it was a vertical shot, after he was hit himself. So Hanrahan, who was, the police were assigned to the state's attorney, a [01:48:00] politically ambitious law and order prosecutor who wanted to get the political advantage of having attacked and taken out the Panthers, was on the p- on the TV that morning saying the Panthers opened fire.

It turned out we proved that quite to the contrary, it was a poli- it was a shoot in, not a shoot out. What we uncovered years later, we also filed a civil rights suit, after the charges were dropped against the Panthers. And in addition to proving, as I said, that it was a one-sided raid, that the police came in firing, the e- evidence also showed that Fred Hampton was in fact killed with two bullets, parallel bullets fired into his head at point-blank range.

He wasn't killed with the bullets through the walls. But what we uncovered was that the FB- that the FBI had obtained a floor plan of Fred Hampton's apartment. That floor plan was complete with all the furniture, including the bedroom where Hampton and Johnson slept and a rectangle showing the bed. And it turned out that this FBI informant, William O'Neal, and his [01:49:00] control took that floor plan and gave it to Hanrahan's raiders before the raid, so that they came in knowing the layout, knowing where Fred would be sleeping.

And when we looked at the directions of the bullets, in fact, they converged on the bed where Fred Hampton was sleeping that morning

Speaker 22: As I recall, many, a lot of the bullets were shot from the floor below as well? Is, they were-

Speaker 27: No, they were mostly, they were the front door and the back door, and then they took the, one of the machine gun and stitched the wall in the front, and that went through all of the bedrooms- Really

In the apartment.

Speaker 22: And the role of the FBI and of COINTELPRO, the, the FBI's, massive program against dissidents, in the United States, how did you un- uncover that as well?

Speaker 27: First there was a burglary at the Media, Pennsylvania FBI office in which some draft dodgers uncovered that there was this program that talked about, basically it was an attack, on the entire Black movement, and particularly on the Panthers.

And it talked about disrupting, destroy, and neutralizing the Panthers by [01:50:00] any means necessary. And one of their objectives was prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the Black masses. Fred Hampton at 21 was a tremendously charismatic and powerful figure in Chicago. He could talk to welfare mothers, gang kids, and he could talk to law students and college students.

He had the ability to pull people together. you got a little glimpse of that in, in the, in what, the clip that you saw. But he made people believe in themselves. He made people b- feel powerful, and that they could bring about change, and that was his real threat. And so we knew there was this program to, prevent the rise of a messiah.

We knew about the floor plan. Then we uncovered a document that they gave the informant a bonus after the raid because his inva- his information was invaluable to the success of the raid. So internally, the FBI actually took credit for this raid, for the results that Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed.

Speaker 21: Talk about Willie O'Neal.

Speaker 27: William [01:51:00] O'Neal was the... When we, he was uncovered because he became a witness in another case. And I guess, I, we all knew William O'Neal. He was a very flamboyant person, and I guess my idea of an informant was somebody who sits quietly in the corner and takes mental notes.

That was not William O'Neal. He was a provocateur. He built an electric chair that was supposedly to threaten potential informants in the party when he was an informant. He attempted to build what he called a rocket that would go from the Panther office to City Hall until Fred Hampton- Explain

Speaker 21: his position in the Black Panthers.

Speaker 27: He was the chief of security, and at one point he was Fred Hampton's bodyguard, and he was present the night of the raid and left. And there was evidence that Fred Hampton was drugged, and he's never admitted it, but some of that evidence suggests that O'Neal was the one who drugged him the night of the raid.

Speaker 21: I wanna- And- ... ask, just play for a minute a response, get your response to Cook County State's Attorney, Edward Hanrahan. After the raid, he repeatedly claimed the Panthers had [01:52:00] opened fire on the police. This is how he described what happened. The

Speaker 29: immediate violent criminal reaction of the occupants in shooting at announced police officers- emphasizes the extreme viciousness of the Black Panther Party.

So does their refusal to cease firing at the police officers when urged to do so several times.

Speaker 22: that was Ed Hanrahan, the Cook County State's Attorney. your response to him, and also what happened to Hanrahan, as you b- sought to pursue the truth of the murder of Fred Hampton?

Speaker 27: When we gathered the evidence, and you can tell which way a bullet enters from the smaller hole and exits, with a larger hole, and the wood splayed outward, it became clear that, as I said, 90 shots came in, and at most one, a vertical shot, went out.

The Panthers were smart enough to in- invite the community in. The police never sealed it. And the Black community, which had been divided on the Panthers, was not divided on the fact that a young man was murdered in his bed, a young leader, at 4:30 in the morning. So there was [01:53:00] a tremendous reaction, and Hanrahan became defensive and told the story that you just saw.

And later on, he even went further and said, " Fred Hampton personally was firing at the police," and he gave the Chicago Tribune a photograph. The photograph had two black dots on it, and he says, "These are the gunshots that Fred Hampton fired." We invited the press out there. It turns out those dots were nail heads, and I think that was the beginning of the end of, of Edward Hanrahan.

He never got elected to anything again. Even a Republican was elected State's Attorney of Cook County, which was unheard of. He ran for mayor, he ran for congressman, and basically, hi- his political career ended on December 4th, just at the time when I, he thought it would rise.

Speaker 21: Juan, I wanna talk about the overall context, with Jeffrey Haas.

But in 1969, you, you were one of the leaders of the Columbia student protests, one of the founders of the Young Lords. What was the effect 40 years ago today? Where were you, on this day?

Speaker 22: [01:54:00] I remember very well the news coming, about Fred Hampton's death. And of course, a- as you mentioned, his ability to unite people, very few people are aware that Fred Hampton was the original creator of the concept of the Rainbow Coalition- That's right

that Jesse, that a young Jesse Jackson then adopted later because he was building unity between the Black Panthers and the Young Lords and some, white, radical organizations in Chicago, and he called them the Rainbow Coalition, which is- That's right ... what Jesse then adopted, into, as his main, his main program.

But he had this ability to unite all kinds of different groups, r- as you say, racial groups, as well as across economic lines. and in terms of the, the legacy of Hampton, obviously Bobby Rush, who later became a, a congressman, in Chicago, still is a congressman, what has been in Chicago, the way that the political establishment has dealt with the reality of this assassination and of the historical impact, of Fred Hampton?

Speaker 27: I think for one thing it marked the independence of the [01:55:00] Black, political leaders in Chicago who had up until then had been pretty much lackeys of the mayor and the Democratic machine. And a young congress- a young state senator named Harold Washington spoke out, and Danny Davis spoke out, and Jesse Jackson welcomed Bobby Rush.

And all of a sudden you had an independent and much more progressive, Black political machine or part of the machine that w- that, that, was independent. And I think that group and white liberals were given credit for eventually g- electing Harold Washington mayor as Chicago's first Black mayor.

Of course, there's also the legacy that without a young leader, I think the West Side of Chicago degenerated a lot into drugs, and without leaders like Fred Hampton, I think the gangs and the drugs became much more prevalent on the West Side. He was an alternative to that. He talked about serving the community, talked about breakfast programs, educating the people, community control of police.

So I think th- that's unfortunately another legacy of Fred's murder.

Speaker 22: And Jeff Haas, you [01:56:00] talk in the book also about how you, a, a white radical raised in the South, ended up in Chicago that day as part of the People's L- Law Clinic there, working with the Panthers. Could you talk about your own trajectory, and how you got involved in this story?

Speaker 27: I grew up in the South. I came from a progressive family, but also it was a segregated South. And I think being a white person there, we all accommodated ourself in some way to segregation. I think it made cowards o- of us all. When I got to Chicago, I was influenced by what was going on nationally.

Chicago was the hub of all this political activity. You had the Democratic Convention there. Dr. King had marched there. You had the conspiracy trial starting. You had the national office of SDS. All the forces were converging, and I was very much moved by the Black Power movement, the civil rights movement.

So we wanted to be lawyers for the people. We wanted to be... So we started the People's Law Office in a sausage shop. And I think we started it with a sense of collectivity. So it wasn't just me. [01:57:00] There were four or five of us who, from the get-go, worked together. And our mandate was to expose the murders, who the killers were of Fred Hampton.

We did not know that it would take us to J. Edgar Hoover and John Mitchell and the seat of government. But of course, it, it turned out that way. And the more we dug and the more we uncovered, the more interested we got, and the more we realized that this was a, a national program. Some people have compared Hanrahan's group to a local hit squad and ordered but was utilized by the federal government and by Hoover.

And I think unfortunately, or not surprisingly, no one has ever done a day of time for the murder of Fred Hampton for that raid. So I think another legacy is to try to hold our government officials accountable. And interestingly enough, when the Church Committee in the '70s began to investigate COINTELPRO- We have 10 seconds

as well as Watergate, it was Dick Cheney and, and Donald Rumsfeld, Ford's chief aides, who opposed any kind of exposure of this illegality or any kind of restraint on the intelligence committees.

Speaker 94: In [01:58:00] your research and your other work, how do we explain to people what we know empirically from the research? About race and gun ownership and violence, especially stand your ground.

Speaker 96: What we know, for instance, with stand your ground, is that when white kill Black people, that they are 10 times more likely to walk under justifiable homicide than when Blacks kill white under stand your ground.

What we also know is that when white kill Black folk under stand your ground, that they are 281% more likely to walk than when whites kill whites. So when Black are the victims under stand your ground, there is an assumption that the white person was threatened, that this is part of what I call that narrative of Black pathology, that Blacks are vicious, Blacks are criminals, Blacks are inherently violent.

and this is the language we saw coming out of the 1740 Negro Act in South Carolina, inherently criminal. And so as inherently criminal, then you have the right [01:59:00] to protect yourself from these criminals. You have the right to be armed. And I look at it this way as well. We are in a society where we have mass shootings all the time, but you have to ask yourself, "Now, self, why haven't we moved forward in this?

Why haven't we done something about this?" And I really believe it is because of the power of anti-Blackness, the power of seeing Black folks as the threat so that you have to defend yourself from this ominous threat that is all around you. And I look at Jonathan Metzl's Dying of Whiteness, where he lays out that in a study that he's doing in Missouri with white families that have had gun violence in the family, and talking about gun safety laws, and they just are adamant, "No.

No. We have got to hold onto our guns because those people from St. Louis will come down here and try to [02:00:00] take everything that we have." It is that fear of being left defenseless. It is the same fear that George Mason articulated in 1788, being left defenseless before this mass of Black people who are the default threat in American society.

Speaker 94: Jonathan Metzl in that book, you actually hear folk in their own words explaining, I say, their pathology. You had the one white brother say he'd rather die than get Obamacare. Dying of cancer could save his life, and he said, "I'd rather die."

Speaker 96: Yes. That book is so powerful because you see the way that it operates in terms of maintaining the resources and the power for white, and being willing to die in the process for that.

That book, Dying of Whiteness, just lays it out, and that's what the mass of gun violence that we're dealing with really lays out to me as well.

Speaker 94: That point being, so on the right, their exclusive right, they're saying, "If we don't win, we can [02:01:00] use guns. We're white, we're powerful." We're gonna, to quote-unquote, "Defend this country as patriots."

But now you're seeing more Black and brown folks forming their gun clubs and anti-racists forming their gun clubs.

Speaker 96: Negroes with guns, that is the fear because... And now look at it this way. What we're dealing with is a fear of Black power. That is what leads to the massive disfranchisement efforts that we're seeing in voting right, and that is also what is leading to this sense of being willing and able to shoot down Black folk who are armed or who are unarmed.

It is understood that they are a threat. I juxtapose Kyle Rittenhouse, who is the white 17-year-old who crossed state lines to go to a protest march in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a Black man, Jacob Blake, had been shot in the back seven times by police. And Kyle Rittenhouse saw himself there not in terms of protesting with the [02:02:00] protesters, but protecting the property against these people.

And as he sashays up there in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the police see this guy with this AR-15, and they welcome him. They're like, "Oh, we really appreciate you guys being here. Hey, it's hot out here. You want some water?" Rittenhouse then goes and he guns down three men, killing two, seriously wounding a third.

He walks back towards the police with his hands raised as if to surrender, and they go right by him. They don't see threat. Meanwhile, you look at what happened to Tamir Rice in Ohio, also an open-carry state. 12-year-old playing by himself in the park with a toy gun. Now granted, it didn't have the orange tip on it to say, "Hey, I'm a toy," but Ohio is an open-carry state, and the law says as long as you're not pointing it at someone, threatening someone, you are legally able to carry that weapon openly.

Tamir Rice is playing by himself in the [02:03:00] park. Cops roll up, and within two seconds, they gun him down, and they're saying he was a threat. He was dangerous. Kyle Rittenhouse is not a threat, but Tamir Rice is.

Speaker 94: that's the old story of the adultification of Black children and the infantilization of white men.

They even talk about Donald Trump's 40-some-year-old sons as kids.

Speaker 96: Right? And I think about as well, Stand Your Ground, Trayvon Martin, whom they thugified. So you take the real narrative of the story, which is you've got a 17-year-old who goes to a convenience store during the NBA All-Star Game, the halftime, to go get some Skittles and some iced tea, and George Zimmerman sees Trayvon and says, "Oh, this guy looks suspicious, and these kind, they always get away."

And he pulls out his loaded nine millimeter, and he stalks this child through the neighborhood and kills Trayvon. The [02:04:00] story becomes Trayvon was this big, Black, scary guy, grilled up, hoodie up, thugified, dangerous, drug-dealing criminal, all of the language for thugification. They made him taller. They made him heavier.

They darkened his image, and it was like, "Poor George, what was he to do?" So what happens is that you've got a grown man who willingly stalks a child with a loaded weapon and kills that child, and that man walked because Trayvon is this big, Black, scary guy. That's what happens in these narratives.

That's what happens in reality.

Speaker 94: And on that note, thinking about poor Trayvon, and I got all these emails, comments when I did interviews, and I actually believe these people believe this, and I will assume they are white or folks invested in whiteness, "If he had just submitted. Why did he run? If he had just listened."

And I would respond to some of these emails and say, "Number one, he has no obligation to. Why do you have this assumption that someone minding their [02:05:00] business, walking down the street should submit to anybody?" 'Cause if he was white, that wouldn't be the narrative. But again, that assumption of white domination and Black submission.

Speaker 96: So think about Ahmaud Arbery here in Georgia, who was the Black man who was jogging and a group of white men followed him and stopped him and shot him dead. And the language, he was burglarizing, so they criminalized him, and the story that they told did not match up with the video of the killing.

The police had that video but did not move on arresting those men. And you got this, " they were trying to ask him a question. If he had just stopped and answered." Why would he have done that? What is... And this is the narrative, this is the DNA of the slave patrols coming through. The slave patrols had the right to stop Black people wherever they were and question them.

"Where are your papers? Why are you here? Who said you could be out?" The slave [02:06:00] patrols had the right to go into the slave cabin and look for contraband, look for elements of liberation, books, writing paper, weapons, and confiscate them, and this sense of whites having the right to question the presence of Black people wherever Black people are is a legacy of the slave patrols.

Moving on to Section D, The Right-Wing Engine

Speaker 52: two Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota were targeted and shot. One, former Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman, was killed along with her husband. The second, State Senator John Hoffman, was severely wounded, along with his wife. Odette, studies have suggested politically motivated violence like this is only increasing in frequency, right?

Speaker 53: Yeah. Elena, you, I'm sure, recall the discussions that we've had on this podcast and elsewhere about election officials experiencing an increase in harassment and abuse. We've talked [02:07:00] about members of Congress. We've seen, reporting from the Capitol Police about increases in harassment and targeting of, public officials.

For this one, w- the people that we know to have been targeted so far, these were state legislators and their families. And so I was able to speak with someone at the Brennan Center, for Justice. They did a survey back in 2023 of hundreds of state legislators to ask, if they were experiencing this harassment and abuse, and they found that across both parties there was a reported increase in threats and intimidation and harassment.

This is something that I think has just gotten woven, unfortunately, into the political fabric of America right now. The baseline level of threats and harassment that local officials, federal officials, and state officials have been experiencing in recent years has been really elevated.

Speaker 52: Is this [02:08:00] something that neatly fits into po- Party lines, along party lines, or is it more nuanced, Odette?

what are the political leanings broadly of the folks who have been targeted compared to the people who are suspected of these violent acts?

Speaker 53: when I spoke with folks at the Brennan Center, they said that there was no distinction in party when it came to people who were receiving this abuse.

both Republican and Democratic legislators were on the receiving end. But there was some really interesting nuance when it came to the source of those threats and the source of those insults. When I asked Gauri Ramachandran, she's the director of elections and security in the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, I asked her who was directing this harassment and abuse at those state legislators, and here's some of what she told me.

Speaker 55: We definitely, from Republican legislators in particular, heard about a [02:09:00] lot of intra-party, abuse. we talked to some folks who, pretty much expressed, I got into this 'cause I wanna cut red tape for businesses. I wasn't really planning on addressing these really hot button issues," or, "That, that wasn't really the core thing that drove me into public service."

but we did hear about this in particular from, a number of, members of the Republican Party as there's been some really more extreme elements, extreme positions, on issues like reproductive rights or gun control, gun safety. that, sometimes some of these more traditional Republicans really found themselves, being subject to abuse.

Speaker 53: And so I think, we don't typically think of political violence that way. we usually think of it one side being targeted by the other side. but, as Ramachandran's saying here, actually a lot of it is, happening just within the Republican Party.

Speaker 54: Yeah, and we've seen this for a while now with, Trump in particular.

this is 10 years that Trump has been on the political scene. He's done a full takeover of the Republican Party. He's really fractured the party [02:10:00] in a lot of ways. And with social media, with the anonymity that comes with that sometimes, we've seen a lot more bullying in general, in trying to purify the party's views and to really target and go after people who are seen as RINOs, those Republicans In Name Only, which now are really maybe should be TINO or something because they're Trump In Name Only.

Because they really feel there are a lot of people on the right who are standing in the way of what the MAGA movement wants to do.

Speaker 52: Odette, you've also reported on how a lot of recent political violence, i- including allegedly what we've seen in Minnesota, has religious undertones. what's the connection there?

Speaker 53: Yeah, so I think we have to look at what happened specifically in Minnesota over the weekend. what we've been hearing from Senator Amy Klobuchar, from federal law enforcement today indicate that there was a wider number of people that were supposed targets of this suspect. And that this included people who were reproductive [02:11:00] rights advocates and some women's health clinics.

And so we really ought to be thinking of this within the context of the extreme militant anti-abortion movement in this country, which has always been very closely linked to a far-right Christian militancy. And so what's been a very interesting thing to be learning about the suspect who's been arrested with respect to these shootings is that he appears to have been influenced by something that we refer to now as the New Apostolic Reformation.

And this is a network, a decentralized network of neo-charismatic churches across the country and even across the world. It's very fast-growing right now across the world, and it has been very closely linked as well with President Trump. Some of his innermost circle of advisors come from within this network.

But this is a network that really was on the fringe of the Christian right [02:12:00] up until Trump ran for president. Because they embraced him early, he embraced them and brought them into the center of gravity of the Christian right. Some of what we have seen with videos of this suspect delivering sermons on mission work in Africa suggests that this is the kind of theology that he is part of, and this really represents, a concerning development in terms of real-world violence by somebody who may be affiliated with that network.

Speaker 52: Another figure that has ties to this group is Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, right? Can you explain that?

Speaker 53: Sure, yeah. you'll remember, Elena, there was reporting soon after Mike Johnson was selected as House Speaker about the flag that was flying outside his house office, this white flag with a green pine tree on it called the Appeal to Heaven flag, which really has become a symbol of the Christian nationalist right.

He has said that it was a gift given to him by [02:13:00] Dutch Sheets. Now, Dutch Sheets is a name that is very well known within the New Apostolic Reformation. He's a leading voice within the NAR. And the fact that you now have the Speaker of the House who claims to have a close friendship with Dutch Sheets is quite significant in terms of, that network's proximity to power.

One of the people that is in Trump's, inner circle really is, Pastor Paula White-Cain, who is part of the fabric of these NAR leaders. And, she was appointed earlier this year to be part of the White House Faith Office. And so we're seeing both with House Speaker Johnson and in the White House itself very close proximity of leaders within the NAR network to federal leadership.

McVeigh, to the extent he's remembered, is often described as anti-government and a lone wolf, both of which I think are more wrong than [02:14:00] right. he was not anti all government. He was not an anarchist. He was not someone who was a true lone wolf, like Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who was active at the same time, and whose story intersects McVeigh in peculiar ways.

McVeigh was part of a movement. McVeigh was part of the right-wing extremist movement of the r- of the mid-'90s He was someone who was a regular listener to Rush Limbaugh. He was a, a devoted listener to Bill Cooper, a shortwave radio, extremist. He was someone who read the publications of the right wing, the Sol- Soldier of Fortune, The Spotlight.

And perhaps most important, a- he was as motivated... a lot of people know he was motivated by his anger about Waco, but he was just as angry about something that happened on September 13th, 1994, which was Bill Clinton signing the assault [02:15:00] weapons ban. He was absolutely obsessed with fears that the government would, the federal government would take individuals' firearms away.

And the specific inspiration to bomb this building in this way came from this terrible novel called "The Turner Diaries," where, Ear- Earl Turner was the hero in nov- the hero a- and protagonist of "The Turner Diaries," in, in a frenzy of racist and antisemitic violence, sets off a bomb, a truck bomb outside the FBI building in Washington, which in turn sets off a rebellion against the federal government.

This is exactly what McVeigh wanted to replicate. That's why he set off a bomb, in the federal government. But the core of my revisionist view is that he was not some loner, not some anti-government person. He was a right-wing extremist. Okay, I want to ask you [02:16:00] about that. First, let me just say that perhaps the most amazing and important thing about the book is that you are, as you suggested earlier, you have access to these extraordinary records.

So you have the intimate communications, and there were lots of them between McVeigh and his legal team, lots of recordings and writings and the like. So you really are able to reconstruct, I think, better than we've known to date, a lot better. I'm not an expert on this, but a lot better what motivated him, 'cause he talked about it a lot.

But let me just ask you, not a lone wolf, but just to be, just to try to get a better handle on this, he also wasn't a leader of this movem- movement. He was clearly influenced by it. you show "The Turner Diaries," Diaries especially. He was clearly influenced by this right-wing revolutionary movement, but he wasn't...

I would, I came away thinking he was somewhere between a lone wolf and, he was definitely part of the movement. He considered himself [02:17:00] simpatico with the movement, but he seemed more or less to be acting on his own. he was, but that was not for lack of trying. o- one of the key differences between 1995 and let's say January 6th, is the existence of the internet a- and, social media.

McVeigh said to his lawyers in a quote that really stuck with me, is he said to his lawyers, I know there is an army out there, but I was never able to find it." And McVeigh did circulate at gun shows, which was, I think logically, a place where he could look for allies, but he didn't have the personality, the temperament to recruit other people.

He did recruit Terry Nichols. He did have a, a friend, in Arizona named Michael Fortier who was aware of the plot, although not a participant in it. But he didn't have the tools to, recruit others and find like-minded people. [02:18:00] That's the reason why the internet is so important. If you look at January 6th, if you look at the plot to kidnap, Governor Whitmer, which was organized over f- Facebook private chats, if you look at the extremists who shot up the Walmart in El Paso or the grocery store in Buffalo or the synagogue in Pittsburgh or Dylann Roof in South Carolina, all of them were radicalized and found allies, on the internet.

McVeigh didn't have access to that and I think that's the big difference. And, and you're right, he didn't have the allies, but he didn't have the tools that later people had. And yet he seemed to think, and I found this almost unbelievable to the point of crazy, but I'm not in this mindset. He seemed to think quite firmly or hope that this event would spark a revolution.

he literally believed, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, that this bombing, or he hoped that the bombing would, through some mechanisms which re- [02:19:00] remain mysterious to me, set off a revolution in the face of these things going on in the country that he detested. For- fortunately, he, he was wrong about that.

But there is no doubt, that he believed that and that came right out of The Turner Diaries because that's what happens in The Turner Diaries, is that the truck bomb at the FBI sets off this counter-revolution. I, I think Jack Mc- McVeigh was certainly not insane in any legal sense.

he was rational. He was someone who knew what he was doing. But he was evil and he was deluded and he was twisted and I think part of what happened In, in, in his own mindset is that the intricate planning for assembling the ingredients and choosing the target and, and figuring out how to make a bomb, the process took over for him, and the [02:20:00] ultimate goal and what might happen afterwards, I think receded some, somewhat.

But, I, I share your befuddlement that, how he thought this would lead to a counter-revolution, but he did. So you open the book, the prologue is called 1776, and you basically show that McVeigh and other right of center domestic terrorists, both then and since, including the ones who, invaded the capital on January 6th, were inspired by and invoke the rhetoric of 1776.

And there's no doubt you document that's true. I wasn't sure what to make of this. What are we to make of this? There's a wonderful book that, that just won the Pulitzer Prize by Jefferson Cowie, called Freedom's Dominion, about, rebellions against the federal government. He focuses on a specific area of Alabama, a county that turns out to be George [02:21:00] Wallace's home county.

And, a-and he talks about how the, the rhetoric of the Founding Fathers is something that ha-has been found to be useful to right-wing extremists, throughout, throughout American history. As for what we're o-obliged to make of it, I don't really know other than the fact that it's a real constant in this right-wing world that, it is not a coincidence that they all fly the Gadsden flag, which is that yellow flag with the snake that says, don't tread on me."

Tim McVeigh had memorized large portions of the Declaration of Independence, not just the famous part, the, the first few lines, but the parts where Thomas Jefferson is justifying violent rebellion against the British. Those lines, from the Declaration of Independence, not familiar to most of us, certainly not to me, were also invoked by [02:22:00] people on January 6th as part of their justification to a-a-attack the Capitol.

I, I, as you say, I don't know exactly what to make of it. Certainly, it doesn't discredit the framers of our country... the Founding Fathers, the framers, because their words have been misused, but their words have been misused in this particular way for a long time, and I think that's worthy of note.

And there is this central idea in the declaration, I'll quote from it, that- Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, basically the consent of the governed, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute new government. And I assume that's one of the lines that he was inspired by?

That's the main one. That's the main one. And, y- you hear that... A- and that one, again, was, invoked o- on January 6th. the perversity [02:23:00] of, I... it needs hardly be elaborated that, that line does not justify setting off a bomb in front of, with a building full of people.

Those words do not justify attacking the Capitol on January 6th, but they are malleable words that impressionable, already motivated people can use to their own ends.

Speaker 54: the problem is people feel their values are under attack, and when you feel your values are under attack, then it's something that's deeper than just, something that's politics and we can get over that. That's saying, "Fundamentally, these people are bad people who disagree with me."

When we're that highly sorted, we don't know a lot of neighbors who think differently. It's a lot easier to devalue them as human beings, and it's easier to accept what should be intolerable acts.

Speaker 53: I think there's also something very specific about the dehumanizing, rhetoric that exists within the anti-abortion discussion.

and I've spoken about this with [02:24:00] Carol Mason, who is a professor at the University of Kentucky who's studied the rise of the right since the '60s with a focus on anti-abortion violence. and she said that there has been a shift, over the last several decades.

Speaker 60: Opposing abortion used to be seen as a sin, like adultery or blasphemy, but over time it became not just a sin, it became evil, and to some it became the worst evil.

Speaker 53: You hear that language very commonplace right now in, anti-abortion circles on the far right that characterize abortion as a genocidal industry that is about, ritual child sacrifice to demons. this is not uncommon to hear. And so that shift in, the rhetoric around abortion specifically has been itself a radicalized ideology.

and so you get, more potential for people to, say they're gonna take it upon [02:25:00] themselves to stop what to be an un-Christian thing that's occurring.

Speaker 54: And I wonder how you see that thing differently than, for example, you'll hear a lot of people on the right talk about some of the Democratic lawmakers', rhetoric, in talking about, for example, Congressman Mfume, who had earlier this year called for street fights, to be able to push back against DOGE, which he was describing as the Department of Government Evil.

so it's the same term, but is that... Do we see this differently as that just being words as opposed to deeply felt beliefs, on this, more radical extreme right?

Speaker 53: So I think what is important to look at is data around the violence itself, and former, Director of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, has said this in testimony before Congress, "The most persistent and lethal threat has come from the right."

And we've been hearing, especially in recent weeks, about, anti-Semitism and how embedded it is on the far right [02:26:00] and on the far left as well. but the fact is, recent attacks notwithstanding, the most lethal attack on Jews in the United States happened at the Tree of Life, synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, and that was somebody that was, on the far right who was motivated by anti-immigrant rhetoric that was happening at the time.

And it is absolutely true that you can see political violence from both sides. You can see dehumanizing rhetoric from both sides, but the body count is disproportionately a result of far-right violence.

Speaker 52: Mm. I wanna just end here a little bit broader. you're talking about this shift that we've seen i- in some of these views, and i- it's, very serious, but is there a way back, is there a way to lower the temperature, so to speak, or stem the tide of misinformation, that's fueling a lot of this violence?

Speaker 54: I think what's really important when it comes to this thing is [02:27:00] leadership, and you need people who are gonna say, "This is not appropriate. Violence is never appropriate," and to really mean it, right?

And to continue to be able to spread that message. we've seen different points of leadership on the campaign trail, in the past where people will stand up to their base and say, "No, that's not appropriate," but we really haven't seen it in the last decade.

Speaker 53: Yeah, I think that it's important that we did see President Trump condemn this violence, after these shootings in Minnesota.

We saw this actually across the political spectrum, that political leaders were doing that. I think, though, that, one of the tricky things about this particular example of political violence is that, you referred to it, Elena, as religious extremism. This more specifically could be referred to as Christian extremism.

And so I think that we need to look to the religious community that, this suspect was tied in with and see what condemnation they are, issuing [02:28:00] around this particular violence and, if there's any reflection about whether or how, the views espoused within that community may have caused it.

And Finally, Section E, The System and What Comes Next

American society normatively metabolizes a tremendous amount of mass death. And part of how we do that is by we conceptually silo it into a variety of categories. We apply narratives, throw blame or responsibility in this catalogic way.

Violence, which is understood to be a thing that is just abstract, though it can maybe sometimes be represented when someone says something that's too offensive or they make some gesture, in a metaphorical way, can be subdivided or exist in relation to this thing called political violence, right?

Which is an interesting thing to think about when we're if someone killing somebody else, if the whole idea of, if the essence of politics is our living together, then when is murder not fucking political? But also that we'll even go so far that, the violence of order maintenance, when cops kill people, et [02:29:00] cetera, gets erased even as a type of violence, or it's treated as non-political.

And, this can go in a lot of different directions, right? But- Because it's the state which is the entity with a l- monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. So even when the state says, "Actually, that cop did wrong," it's a deviation from the legitimacy rather than a, than violence coming from a fundamentally illegitimate actor.

Yeah. It's this odd paradox where, violence is both understood as being entirely necessary to the social order, but also it's the coin of the realm that the state operates, and, maintains the social order. But also we have to disavow its violence, and we understand that violence is continually exceeding its bounds of containment, whether it be in stuff that, police will, when they're, they turn bad apples do, or when they do when they get home, 'cause, we know about the statistics of domestic violence, or, the violence that people who are not enjoying the supposed monopoly in the Weberian sense on the legitimate use of force, right?

more broadly speaking, let's start with this idea of, what we call, gun violence, right? in a, a representative year, well [02:30:00] over 40,000 people are gonna die because of a gunshot. Now, that could be self-inflicted. That could be, immediate, literally they're DOA on the scene, or they die shortly thereafter.

But, in 2022, it's 48,000, of which more than half are gonna be suicides, which means that in a representative year, 18 to 20,000 people are gonna die in, homicides. Most homicides, we should say, are done by people who know the victim of the homicide. So murders by stranger are comparatively rare.

If you're killed by someone who doesn't, know you personally, there's a one in three chance that they're a cop, right? That's another data about this. So also we're just saying that, firearms deaths are- the leading cause or a leading cause of death now for kids, and that more broadly speaking, the toll of Americans who die because of, let's say, this word gunshot outstrips but has long time been on par with other types of death.

But we could see a glimpse of other types of normalization, right? This stuff called car accidents, right? As though they're acts of [02:31:00] nature or God as opposed to outputs of design or driver choices or how even how we build our cities to, quote-unquote, overdoses, right? which can be called deaths of despair, but we don't call them death by Sackler.

Th- but these three ways of killing ourselves and others are continually vying for the top, and gun violence is now th- the winner in that category if you want. So th- that's the broad thing to say here, too. By the same token, we could look at some data about December 4th in particular, and I can, encourage people to check out the Gun Violence Archive, which draws this data from, publicly available news reports.

You can generate your own charts and whatnot, and, per that, I was looking at it before we talked, there are 30 people who were killed by gunshot on December 4th, right? Of whom 24 are not the perpetrators of the incident in question. So in those other cases, the person either shot themselves or were killed by authorities, right?

So 30 people though dead gunshot, and then another 40 people are injured. It's also worth saying, just as a caveat here that the data on how many of those people were killed by, [02:32:00] necessarily by police or other police shootings, that, that's lagging by about a month behind that, so we won't know that until later.

We could get more granular about who shot who on this day, right? We could subdivide it into a variety of categories. A lot of them are domestic, right? They're intimate partner violence. There's a man killing someone who he's involved with generally, and then possibly himself, maybe his kids.

Most cases, yeah, could there-- If you wanna use a term a mass shooting, most of those happen inside, for example, American homes. You also get a couple events that are, let's call them exceptional relative to those more quotidian ones. It's worth saying this on December 4th. In Northern California, a gunman who, appears to have been extremely disturbed and articulated his motives, to whatever extent this matters in terms of trying to impose some child sacrifice on Seventh Day Adventists in retaliation or to deaths in Gaza of Palestinians.

Again, this is-- I'm not making any equivalency. I'm saying this happened on the same day, right? he shoots and injures a five and six-year-old before killing himself, right? This all happened on the same day. [02:33:00] Now, we could look at all these events, and we could probably be descriptively, if you're an alien orbiting Earth, right?

Or if you're tr- again, operating at some level of bracketing, this is a society where people get shot regularly, and it's a society where certain types of people seem to get shot more, and certain other types of people seem to do the shooting more, or at least a situation in which there are tons of guns that circulate, and there's a distinct stratification to how the gunshot fatalities and injuries play out.

Oh, yeah, and we could interpret that as reflecting certain val-values or hierarchies of the society in question. So we could say, for example, that, if someone's gonna go out with a gun and kill a bunch of strangers, probably gonna be a guy. Most likely gonna be a white guy, but not necessarily. If a guy's gonna shoot himsel- if a person's gonna shoot themselves in the den, overwhelming likelihood it's gonna be a man.

We could make-- In other words, read an entire actuarial calculus of relative value and [02:34:00] disposability, but also relative access to, the prerogative to wield a gun to end someone's life, whether your own or theirs, as reflecting, the hierarchies of American racial capitalism, right?

And its patriarchal f- foundations, et cetera. This is a system of generalized human disposability that reflects certain basic hierarchies, but also there are enough guns circulating that sometimes you're gonna get stuff this guy going into the-- breaking containment, going into that sc- that school and killing those two kids.

Now, again, I'm not trying to collapse these different shootings or different kinds of shootings into one or another, but rather to be to say it's striking that some of this gun violence gets understood to be political, some of it's understood to be not political, or some of it's understood to be just, personal, but has to be dealt with under the political discourse that we call gun control.

These are all these styling mechanisms. Now, there's-- I'm already engaged in an artificial distinction here, though, too, because this, in addition to being a problem of fatalities, is a problem of injuries that does also have an extensive rapport with the healthcare system, too, right? So let me just throw a couple-- a little bit more empirics about this, too.

And just think, forty people injured in that day. [02:35:00] Let's say in an average year between, two thousand and nineteen and twenty seventeen, we're looking at about eighty-five thousand emergency room visits from people who have been injured by a gunshot. At a minimum, and this is the Government Accountability Office, not including, physician fees and many other data, Americans are spending a billion dollars a year at minimum on hospital care in the immediate aftermath of a gunshot.

And what we should say here, though, is, again, this-- note this these-- the mental categories we think about these things. someone's shot, are they wounded or they're gonna get better? Are they killed? They're done, right? No, many people will spend their entire lives debilitated or struggling with gunshot injuries, right?

They don't go away. In fact, they keep re-encountering in the healthcare system, right? And then you have to start doing complicated costs involving-- And again, I'm not reducing these to costs, but I'm trying to give us one way of thinking about the enormity of this problem and its ramification.

The leading cohort [02:36:00] of, a firearm injuries are, young people. What's the cost of care if you're exposed to, say, if you're wounded as a child, right? How much is going to be spent, quote-unquote, "on care"? At that point The numbers can, if you extend to lifetime and you adjust for average life expectancy, et cetera, a human being can be, the object of expenditure or be on the hook for, depending how it cashes out for, $20 million.

If you start factoring in things lost work benefits, hours, et cetera, or people, who are paying this out of Medicare, taxpayer burden, et cetera, you get estimates of nearly $78 to $80 billion for firearms injury in any given year. Again, the causal links here and the data are hard to work with, but this one system of, human liquidation is also a system of, human debilitation and injury that intersects with this other system.

We call it care, but that is also about managing and [02:37:00] putting a price on the basic needs for people who have still res- who are s- for whom the trauma of their gunshot wounding is not in the past.

Speaker 98: One small state of the culture observation on last night. Shortly after leaving the Hilton, where a gunman attempted to enter the room in which the president, vice president, and several caval- cabinet members, congressmen, dignitaries, business executives, and hundreds of America's leading journalists were gathered, I went to a bar with a small group of colleagues to touch base, get our bearings, and ideally watch the news coverage.

When I lived in Washington a decade ago, bars like this one usually had at least one TV tuned to CNN or Fox News. These TVs were on a hockey game, and no one in the bar seemed aware of what had just taken place mere blocks away. We asked a bartender- Oh ... to change the channel to CNN so we could watch the president's briefing with captions, which they did.

But then a few minutes later, the bartender said he'd been informed by the manager that the bar had a policy against showing political content, and he'd have to go back to sports. I tried to imagine what this bar might have looked like on March 30th, 1981, an hour or so after Hinckley [02:38:00] fired shots at Reagan at the very same hotel.

I imagine every television would've been on CNN or wall-to-the-wall special coverage on the broadcast networks, and that passersby would've come in to watch as well. The media is giving this ample coverage it deserves, but it's unnerving how desensitized so many people have become to shootings, obviously, but also to political violence and the abnormality of the moment.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we just picked the wrong bar, but I doubt it. Pew Research recently reported that the attention to newes- news in the US has declined across all age groups since 2016, and that young adults have consistently the, had the lowest levels. Go, going on, he says here, "And I

Speaker 99: sup-" Mother, motherfucker, you made the sandwich.

Speaker 98: Yeah. Yeah. And I suppose this is how you find yourself in a bar in the nation's capital an hour after crouching behind a chair as Secret Service members evacuate the President of the United States from a room- Ugh, spare me ... being told that you have to watch Penguins versus Flyers. Yes, Dylan, you do have to watch Penguins-Flyers- Yeah

or Nuggets-Wolves, or any of the great NHL or NBA playoff action that's going on right now. Sorry everyone's so [02:39:00] desensitized to this, but, we've... As we've mentioned on the show, this is the third time someone has tried to do this. Nothing happened- No, it's

Speaker 100: the Fourth? It's technically the fourth.

Yeah, you're

Speaker 98: right.

Speaker 100: That's what I was gonna say earlier There was also a guy who went to Mar-a-Lago- Oh, yeah ... who was another former Trump fan turned- Yeah ... trump enemy, lovers to haters arc, w- that, that got blasted by Secret Service 'cause he walked up with a shotgun to Mar-a-Lago with, Molotov cocktails or something, like incendiary explosive devices, and we forgot about it.

That didn't even make a blip in the media because Trump seemingly is, on the verge of death by one of their, one of his former fans at any given moment. Yeah. literally anywhere he goes, there's If he sees, a weird-looking white boy w- who's just, looking at him strange, I would be worried if I was Trump.

Yeah.

Speaker 99: And that's talk about needle in a stack of needles. But I... by the way, I didn't think any article could be more pointless than that one we read about that fucking stupid conservative lady who goes to a restaurant and doesn't eat anything. This is even [02:40:00] worse. This is... oh, I don't know how people cannot be paying attention to the news when there's great articles like this.

... loser and loser friends go to bar, where CNN is gone. Yeah. How are they not... How is... how are people not spending $20,000 a year on subscriptions- But ... with content like this? But also, yeah, fourth assassination attempt. It's very fucking rich though, especially for the American media, to go, it's really fucking, unsettling how desensitized, people are to violence."

Speaker 98: Exactly. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 99: Oh, yeah. Yeah. By, by the way, that, hospital that g- got blown up, that was a Hamas missile. That, girl's school, that was an Iranian missile, and also, all the casualties are fake. Yeah ... only, Yeah, actually only, 50,000 people died i- in fucking Gaza, and they like it anyway.

Yeah. They like doing it, and have- Yeah ... more militants.

Speaker 98: We are o- obviously a culture totally awash in insane violence every day. And, for the most part, it doesn't really touch our lives. you go to this bar and people... He's "I was crouching under a table as Secret Service escorted the [02:41:00] cabinet out," blah, blah, blah.

Oh, poor you. And it's just, everyone in the bar is "Wake me when they actually kill this fucker, otherwise- Yeah ... we got Bruin Sabres on right now."

Speaker 99: Yeah, and it... By the way, that is, there is so much sneaky language in this. Yeah. But, "Half an hour after, I was crouching under a chair."

Speaker 98: No one

Speaker 99: cares. Because it's he knows if he said, "Fearing for my life"- ... everyone would just be Yeah ... "Okay, jerk off."

Speaker 98: Yeah.

Speaker 99: But, wh- okay, why is the bar supposed to put on the most boring... wh- where they put CNN on? Waiting rooms and airports because they want you to be, they don't want you-

Speaker 98: lulled into,

Speaker 99: Yeah

a

Speaker 98: passive-

Speaker 99: It's a- Yeah ... natural depressant.

Speaker 98: Yeah.

Speaker 99: It brings you down. It's if they played something exciting, if they played, if they even played, the Lethal Weapon with Keanu and Ivory Wayans, that series in waiting rooms-

Speaker 98: The TV series,

Speaker 99: yeah. Yeah, the, the scene from The Pit where the guy just clocks the nurse, that would happen every day-

Speaker 98: Yeah

Speaker 99: to every doctor. if they played it in airports, it would be the 1970s. Every plane's getting hijacked. But because these are they bring [02:42:00] you down, it, it, it, it makes everyone compliant. A bar is, that is a time for merriment and joy.

Speaker 98: Yeah.

Speaker 99: Not to be brought down, not to be treated as cattle.

There is no, there, there is no man with, transit- transition lenses that needs to touch your genitals at the bar. So you don't need to be brought down and herded like a cow with CNN, Dylan. get out of here.

Speaker 100: You brought this up already, but, it's ultraviolence everywhere. the American media is very clearly super comfortable engaging in military action, deposing leaders.

Speaker 98: Assassinations. Yeah,

Speaker 100: assassinations. Kidnapping. Yeah.

Speaker 98: Torture, rape.

Speaker 100: Yeah, all of that stuff. go down the list. Against- A

Speaker 98: Clockwork Orange shit.

Speaker 100: Against foreign heads of state- yeah ... including little children at school, and there's this, normalization of all of that violence. But then also on top of that, we have a very violent culture here in the United States as well, where, there's a mass shooting happening on a daily basis in this country.

there's school shootings that [02:43:00] take place so frequently it... and at this point, the average American is just "Yeah, I guess it's just a part of life." The only thing that's extraordinary about what's taking place when, Charlie Kirk is assassinated, is the targets. For the first time ever, if it's the, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson or Charlie Kirk- people are now deciding to go after higher visibility, higher priority targets, or trying to attempt a, an insane assassination attempt on the president, as opposed to murdering their immediate loved ones, right?

Speaker 99: Yeah,

Speaker 100: it- Which there's still a good deal of that happening on the background as well. We don't even care about it. Yeah,

Speaker 99: but it- it's it- it does, it's a companion piece. The, the problem that the Republican Party and the conservative movement in general has been having, where they can no longer reconcile this idea of "Okay, we can be horribly, viciously racist to everyone, except Jews," because they're they're, the- that's above everyone else that, that they are now running headlong into how unsustainable that is.

How, how you can just [02:44:00] not do that now. and maybe it was... it never was truly sustainable in any medium or long run. The same thing happens when, people who die due to the hyper-maximal profit- profiteering of the American healthcare system, the, the gears of the American empire, all these people are killed day in, day out, mass slaughter, thousands at a time.

it, it happens so much they just purely become numbers, and any change to that, any even small marginal reformist adjustm- adjustment where it's okay, I don't, I don't think that it should cost $150,000 to be in the hospital one day. I don't think that we should, we should have these fucking carrier groups all over the place, able to strike and kill thousands at a time at moment's notice.

No, we can't do that just because of the way things work. sorry. Sorry, there's no avenue for- Felix- There's no avenue for this in political change, and if you keep telling people that, eventually they're gonna go, "Oh, okay."

Speaker 98: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 99: Bing.

Speaker 98: That's what I said, [02:45:00] left, center in this country, everyone has just basically come to the conclusion that, all that's left to do is just fantasize about Donald Trump being killed or die- or dying of natural causes.

Yeah. But, that's the only solution to the problem of him being president. If you- And, to your point, Felix, Kelsey Piper in her attack on, Hasan here, she described the, the... everyone who was killed by the American healthcare industry, she described that as, quote, "suboptimal policy."

Oh. Good to know. It's that's the most... that, from the effective altruist, abundance lives, that is the most Stalinist thing you could possibly say. one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.

Speaker 99: Yeah. i- if you keep telling people, "Yeah, sorry, there's just, maybe in 30 years- Yeah

it can get slightly better," what the fuck do you think is going to happen eventually?

Speaker 67: you and I started talking about, I can't remember, it might've been a year ago, maybe a year and a half, it was when the, Abe, the former prime minister of Japan, got assassinated.

And I had said we're entering into a territory where there's going to be not just more political violence, but probably targeted assassinations, right? So one of the things that I look for as a, as an analyst, I lo- I spend a lot of time reading [02:46:00] manifestos. I spend a lot of time studying people who carry out political violence, who are assassins, because they're very good signals of the political economy and temperature, right?

Who are they? Why do they do it? What background do they come from? How do they present themselves? Nick, Cole Allen, again, allegedly the, the attempted assassin. This was a 31-year-old man from California. He got degrees from Caltech. he was a NASA intern. He was a teacher. the manifesto that he published, he apologized to his friends, family, and colleagues and students.

He made a vigorous Christian argument saying, he, he considers himself a Christian. He said, quote, "Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I'm not the person raped in a detention camp. I'm not a fisherman executed without trial. I'm not a school kid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.

Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppo- oppressed is [02:47:00] not Christian behavior, it's complicit-complicity." He also says, "Why did I do this?" Quote, "I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflect on me, and I'm no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, coat my hands with his crimes."

So here's the thing, Nick, and this is the larger conversation to have. This manifesto comes out. It seems written by a grounded, rational person who has a motivation and an ethical and moral obligation within themselves to do something. This person does not-- I have not heard anything about him being unwell.

Maybe we'll hear that he was very quiet and kept to himself. we... This is often how these things are done. On top of that, I don't see anything in here, to be honest with you, that seems some an extremist philosophy. It might be extreme within liberal democracy, but he's not wrong about the crimes that the Trump administration has committed and that normal people of conscience should stand up to it.

So [02:48:00] then that asks us a question, while it also makes it clear, it gives us a signal that the state of play that we're living in has changed, which is: What do you do if you are a person with ethical and moral obligations, if you are living underneath a violent, fascistic dictatorship, more or less, in which representative government is corrupted, there's not an opposition party that you can believe in, and every single day people are dying or suffering?

It then offers a question, which is a question every time it's asked in the United States of America in its history, it leads to massive change. So this being presented to us, I think, is a game changer of a situation that I don't think most people are wrapping their heads around the importance of

Speaker 68: I, I agree.

I, I think in a functioning democracy, what you're supposed to do is lobby for, change and get people organized- Yeah ... and use your vote. that's really what is supposed to happen. And it, in, in fits and starts that's been successful across the, our history of our country. [02:49:00] But, it's easy to see why, you could look around and say, "That's, that was just simply doesn't work anymore," and that's what he was saying.

And I'm glad that he brought, more attention to the detention camps. I l- I'm remiss that we don't talk very much about it either because it's a story that's just not being covered. Yep. What's going on right now with people who have been detained here, and immigrants who have been contained here, it's, it is torture, and nobody's doing anything about it.

And that is a, if you feel strongly enough about it, it's not hard to follow the path that he would've taken. whatever. that said, to at least to get to the point where it feels as desperate as he felt, clearly, and without it being any mental illness per se, right?

That's the difference here, right? Obviously there's gonna be something we have to discuss where he's willing to basically sacrifice his entire life for this. Yep. and that's, that is related to something. But, it's not foreign. I can follow that path pretty easily, and it's, it's frustratingly

Speaker 67: and I think there's a couple of things to talk about here, very large things. And, and for the record, I've been looking forward to having this conversation with you because you're not just my podcast co-host. You are my friend, and we're [02:50:00] moving through this political environment together.

We've been doing this for years now. One of the reasons that we do this is to make sense of these things- ... right? And to chart where we are and where things are going. I would argue that one of the main theses of this project that you and I have been embarked on is chronicling the fascistic growth in the United States of America with the decline of American empire and what that means for us.

Anticipating where things are going and hopefully finding places to get off of a certain track. I wanna lay my cards on the table, Nick. You just brought up these concentration camps that are being built around the country. If a story came up tomorrow that somebody set one on fire, I wouldn't lose sleep.

I, I wouldn't feel bad. I wouldn't be upset about it. I wouldn't get on here and be like, " private property is private property." That's bullshit. That's not how this works. If I heard that, somebody had I don't know, sabotaged a plane that was going to deport people and send them to El Salvador to some [02:51:00] dystopian hell camp, I wouldn't lose sleep about that, right?

When we get to this, a person who seems like it's not that they're unwell, it's not that they're a lone nut, when it is a pretty middle-of-the-road liberal who says- ... "I can't just stand by and let this happen anymore." And by the way, he didn't even mention this, Nick. Estimates are right now that the starving, starvation deaths after the dismantling of USAID are as high as 750,000 human beings 750,000 human beings- that have starved to death because USAID was, cut off. On top of that, listen, you and I don't like to give flowers to George W. Bush. In fact, the soul repels against it. But one of the best things that George W. Bush ever did, I would argue probably the best thing he ever did, was set up aid and HIV relief for Africa.

And what's happening right now since the Trump administration got rid of it, AIDS and HIV are blowing up in Africa. It's going to lead to God knows [02:52:00] how much suffering and how much death. At some point or another, the apparatus and system of liberal democracy, if it's not kept in check with regulation, it gets corrupted and it starts to die.

Why do we have a legal system, Nick? We have a legal system to keep people from perpetrating violence against each other. Why do we have representative government? In order to give people a sense that they are able to change things and have representation so that they don't give up on having agency. If you start to take those things away, and am I wrong that they've been taken away?

Speaker 68: They have.

Speaker 67: They've been taken away. The, our judicial system is corrupted. Our representative democracy is corrupted. You take all of those things away, you have fascists who are killing people and who are hurting people. All of a sudden, people of conscience will start asking themselves, "Is it my responsibility as a person with conscience to interact with that?"

And it appears that this Cole Allen person [02:53:00] allegedly made the decision with, it seems like mental clarity, that it's time for people with a conscience to- ... engage with this and to use physical violence as a means of trying to set the record straight. That is a massive change and a massive moment that we've only experienced a few times in this country.

And if that's where we are, then we are at a crossroads between, two very different futures.

That's going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in.

You can record - and re-record - a voice message by tapping the link in the show notes,

You can reach us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,

or simply email me to [email protected]

The additional sections of the show included clips from;

Resistance History

Free Expression

People Who Read People

The Bunker

History Unplugged Podcast

Americast

Democracy Now!

The Chauncey DeVega Show

The NPR Politics Podcast

The Lawfare Podcast

The Dig

Chapo Trap House

and The Muckrake Political [02:54:00] Podcast

Further details are in the show notes.

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So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay! And this has been the Best of the Left podcast, coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.