“People will do what they do.” So said then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2020, when asked about a Baltimore mob tearing down a Christopher Columbus statue. Her attitude may be her political set’s norm, too. After all, no one in the Democratic Party leadership has, for example, spoken out against the attacks on Tesla vehicles and dealerships. And this could make one wonder:
Are Democratic pols leading their base astray?
Or, are they being led by it (or is it both?)?
Whatever the case, it certainly seems that violence is now “a leftist enterprise.” This not only is what I wrote in 2020, do note, but is also essentially the finding of a recent academic study.
“Assassination Culture”
Interestingly, leftists will often say, projecting all the way, that it is the Right (the MAGA set) that’s violent. But this is refuted by said research, conducted jointly by Rutgers University and the Network Contagion Research Institute, or NCRI. (The NCRI is an entity that tracks digital threats.) Titled “Assassination Culture: How Burning Teslas and Killing Billionaires Became a Meme Aesthetic for Political Violence,” its introduction informs:
Political violence targeting figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk is becoming increasingly normalized, particularly among politically left-leaning segments of the population. Following the attempted assassination of President Trump on July 13, 2024, tolerance and even advocacy for such violence appear to have surged. This trend builds on a broader pattern identified in two December 2024 reports by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), which analyzed how viral social media narratives are legitimizing political violence, especially after the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. These reports found widespread justification for lethal violence, including assassination, among younger, highly online, and ideologically left-aligned users. This online rhetoric is spilling into offline actions, as evidenced by a California ballot measure grimly named “the Luigi Mangione Access to Health Care Act.”
A broader “assassination culture” seems to be emerging within extreme left segments of the U.S. public, with targets now including prominent figures like Trump and Musk. NCRI’s empirical assessments, using original survey data and open-source intelligence analysis, reveal how normalized and justified violence against the administration has become in public discourse, signaling a significant threat to political stability and public safety.
Violence by the Numbers
For its research, the NCRI “surveyed 1264 U.S. residents, balanced to reflect Census data on race/ethnicity, gender, age, and education,” the group writes. It also provides some key data points:
- Mu[r]der Justification: 31% and 38% of respondents stated it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk and President Trump, respectively.
- These effects were largely driven by respondents that self-identified as left of center, with 48% and 55% at least somewhat justifying murder for Elon Musk and President Trump, respectively, indicating significantly higher justification for violence against these figures.
- Property Destruction: Nearly 40% of respondents (39.8%) stated it is at least somewhat acceptable (or more) to destroy a Tesla dealership in protest.
- Psychological/Ideological Correlations with Assassination Culture: These beliefs are highly correlated with one another, as well as with the justification of the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO and hyper-partisan left-wing ideology.
- This suggests that support for violence is part of a broader assassination culture, underpinned by psychological and ideological factors.
- Online Amplification of Radical Ideation: [left-wing social media site] BlueSky plays a significant and predictive role in amplifying radical ideation.
- Users are increasingly associating the memeification of Luigi Mangione with calls for political violence against Musk, Trump, and others, reflecting the growing cyber-social presence of assassination culture.
If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Kill ’Em?
In reality, this is nothing new. The so-called Left has been violent ever since its French Revolution birth. (I.e., the event’s infamous “Reign of Terror” claimed thousands of victims via guillotine.) This Reign of Error would continue, too, with Marxists in the USSR, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere killing approximately 100 million. Why, the left-wing-violence phenomenon is not even new in America. The actions of the Galleanist anarchists, Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army, FALN, and Symbionese Liberation Army are examples.
And what do leftists point to on the “other side”?
January 6.
But, first, just considering recent years, this can be contrasted with 600-plus country-rending Antifa and BLM riots in 2020 alone. So with a long way from one to 600, one could ask the Left: What else ya got?
Even more significantly, too, conservatives may complain about the disproportionate punishment many J6ers endured. But they don’t generally defend the violence committed by a small percentage of them.
In fact, the only way to make leftist and rightist violence seem proportional is to magnify the few incidents of the latter. And this is a major reason the establishment pounded the J6 drum ad nauseam.
Ideological Bias?
Yet if the assertion that the Left dominates the violence department isn’t mere prejudice, what explains the phenomenon? Put simply, and being very brief, the people we call leftists and rightists have quite different moral and emotional foundations. While everyone is flawed, American conservatives tend to be more virtuous. In contrast, “leftism” is not so much an ideology as it is a process: movement toward moral disorder. And since it is defined by a lack of virtue, it attracts low-virtue people.
Here’s a bit more food for thought, too. Leftist academics and others have insisted that certain types of speech can be “violence.” Why, liberals have even claimed that, sometimes, “silence is violence.” Of course, by conflating speech and violence, leftists hope to demonize both certain words and the reluctance to utter others. But think about this mentality’s implications.
Could violence not seem as legitimate as speech to many, when both behaviors are placed in the same category? The rationalization just may be:
We have a right to use speech.
And speech can be violence.
Ergo, we have a right to use violence.
In other words, this propaganda may sanitize violence as much as it demonizes speech.
Shorter version: Leftists live in a self-delusive world of “situational values.”
Thus did French Revolution author Maximilien Robespierre oppose the death penalty until he had the power to apply it. And thus it is with our leftists today. One example is that they’re apoplectic about illegal-alien criminals supposedly not getting due process when deported. Nonetheless, 71 percent of Democrats would favor creating special a law for the purposes of putting Elon Musk in prison. (Tweet below.)
So as the saying goes, “There’s no one as illiberal as a liberal” — and no one as regressive as a progressive.
