What happens to a people when it becomes convinced that its public and private institutions serve only to keep it in chains? What happens when it becomes insular, narrow-minded, and petty? When good news is rejected because it undermines its woeful narrative, when it prefers societal alienation to integration, when provocateurs profit from ignorance and disillusionment? How does it all end?
Too often, the answer is in bloodshed.
Regression
“Not all value opinions are the result of social conditioning. For if they were, then there could be no non-conformity to society based on moral values,” the philosopher Peter Kreeft declares in his famous attack on moral relativism. “There could only be rebellions of force, rather than principle.”1 But to the most fanatical social justice activists, conditioning is inescapable and transcendent moral values are chimerical. The present is all that matters, and the present is rather terrible. Their worldview favors raw power over moral authority for advancing the interests of any individual or group. And if those interests are advanced by fomenting violence, a growing number seem prepared to answer, “So be it.”
“So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities,” James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper No. 10, “that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.” The Founders knew us better than we know ourselves. As partisan affiliation suffices for or enhances personal identity, political disagreements become personal disagreements. The more trivial our differences, the more those who benefit from conflict must exaggerate them.2
Both ends of the political spectrum are guilty of embracing elements who make a virtue of moral relativism. These elements convince themselves that their adversaries are aggressors with no remorse or compunction. To observe civility and decorum in the face of their opponents’ attacks is tantamount to unilateral surrender. They whip themselves and their supporters into a frenzy. They inflate virtually every cultural clash or policy disagreement into a battle for primacy or even survival. They cheapen the concept of self-defense by treating the most modest offense as a grave injury that demands retribution.
These movements, with their unrealistic view of what circumspect constitutional governance is capable of achieving, make demands of government that can never be met. The rise of social justice and grievance politics has therefore been accompanied by bitterness and increasing resentment toward government and the governing class. And when these movements perceive the political process as having failed them and their cause, they become convinced that it is only logical to take matters into their own hands.
With rare exceptions, America’s political culture has not been marked by organized violence. While violent conflict has not been entirely unknown, it has been dormant in our public for more than a generation. Regrettably, that may be changing.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire insists that students should be encouraged to see themselves as victims of systemic oppression, but he also advises educators to teach them to see violence as a legitimate remedy for their plights. “He defends violence and terror by redefining them,” Bruce Bawer observes. “[F]or the oppressed to resist [oppression] actively, in however bloody a manner, does not constitute violence or terror,” Bawer writes, “for ‘[v]iolence is initiated by those who oppress’ and ‘[i]t is not the helpless . . . who initiate terror’ but their oppressors.” In other words, any action in service to class war, even violent action, is justified.3
As we’ll see, this self-serving rationalization for potentially murderous violence outside the context of self-defense has taken root in the imaginations of many otherwise rational people. Identitarian movements erode the ethical and social safeguards against violence while erecting elaborate moral justifications for physical attacks on their perceived enemies. This is how organized political violence begins, as it has begun again in America.
The Fanatical Left
The type of violence we have seen from Identitarian factions on both the right and the left in the second decade of the twenty-first century presages a grim future. In many ways, this ugly moment in American political history began at an inconspicuous corporate park in Lower Manhattan.
Zuccotti Park was, in many ways, an apt site for the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Two and a half centuries before it was damaged in the 9/11 attacks, rebuilt by a corporate consortium, and renamed for Mayor Abe Beame’s city planning commission chairman, the site had been home to a coffee house.
Though the English have acquired a reputation as tea-drinkers, the British Empire had a far more robust coffee culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Coffee houses were ubiquitous in Great Britain, and the coffee was the least interesting thing about them. They were places where British subjects discussed current events, debated political philosophy, read their newspapers, and conducted commerce. The same was true in America, where, in the autumn of 1773, the Sons of Liberty held one of their first demonstrations against the Tea Act outside this Lower Manhattan coffee house.4
In 2011, the expression of financial anxiety that would become known as the Occupy movement made its appearance on this spot. In the wake of the Republican Party’s resurgence in the third year of a sluggish economic recovery and the abrupt end of the legislative period of Barack Obama’s presidency, here was a band of progressives demanding more. That demand won the hearts of many liberal champions, and they lent their support to this rabble despite their illegal occupation of private property. It was a grave misjudgment.
“I support the message to the establishment,” Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters when asked about the nascent Occupy movement. “God bless them for their spontaneity,” she later added. “It’s young, it’s spontaneous, and it’s focused. And it’s going to be effective.”5 Even President Obama, abandoning prudence, embraced this group despite its criminal inclinations. “The protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works,” he said.6 On another occasion he compared them to Martin Luther King Jr. because both “rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street.” Like the protesters, King had been “vilified by many, denounced as a rabble-rouser and an agitator, a communist, and a radical.”7
The irresponsibility of these assertions should have been obvious by the time a genuine civil rights leader, Congressman John Lewis, attempted to address an Occupy encampment in Atlanta. After making him sit through a bizarre confab about the relevancy of his African-American heritage and a cascade of self-referential speechifying, the occupiers voted not to let Lewis speak. The civil rights icon was forced to shuffle sheepishly back to Washington, having never addressed the movement he sought to co-opt.8
While Occupy was a leftist movement dedicated to a social democratic economic agenda, it was also a social justice movement. Soon, activist “facilitators” of Occupy’s various jaw sessions began to introduce the concept of the “progressive stack” into the mix. As one Occupier in Virginia explained it, “if you have your name on the list and you come from a traditionally marginalized background—race, gender, ethnicity, anything that is traditionally marginalized—you get bumped up the list.” Further, “white men, white women, people who’ve been privileged,” are obliged to “step back.”9
By Occupy’s fourth week in Zuccotti Park, it had given birth to chapters in urban centers all over the Western world. That was when the violence started.
News of the squalid, lawless conditions in these encampments began to filter out, prompting officials to wonder if they had a public health crisis on their hands. In places like Rome, “Occupiers” exploded from their bivouacs to make war on the symbols of capitalism all around them. They smashed windows, destroyed ATMs, attacked television crews, and set vehicles on fire. In New York City, seven hundred protesters were arrested amid an attempt to shut down half the town by seizing the Brooklyn Bridge. These warning signs did not dissuade high-profile Democratic lawmakers from making common cause with a movement they wanted to believe could form the nucleus of a liberal Tea Party.10
Then things really spiraled out of control.
Supplies dwindled as the weather grew colder, and conditions in the camps became desperate. Occupy violence soon developed into something more organized and widespread. Tales of chronic drug use and overdoses, muggings and theft, assaults and protected spaces in which women were spared the threat of sexual violence began to escape the camps. In Washington, D.C., a mob overpowered security guards and invaded the National Air and Space Museum.11 A riot erupted in Denver when police attempted to break up the encampment there.12 Emboldened by the endorsement of labor unions, including the Service Employees International Union, AFL-CIO, Teamsters, and United Auto Workers, three thousand Occupiers in Oakland, California, stormed and captured an abandoned port facility. Their intention wasn’t to hold the ground but to destroy it. They broke windows, set vacant buildings on fire, and engaged in running street battles with police.13
As bad as the Occupy demonstrations became, they could have been much worse. In Ohio, five members of the local Occupy branch were arrested and charged with plotting to affix eight packages of what they thought were plastic explosives to the support structures of a local bridge. This failed attack was supposed to be part of a campaign of terrorism aimed at what they dubbed symbols of “corporate America.”14
Rationalizing Violence
The left, in particular, has grown comfortable drawing moral equivalencies between disagreeable speech and physical violence. When speech becomes indistinguishable from violence, a violent response to speech is justified—even morally necessary.
“When someone calls a black person the ‘n’ word out of hatred, he or she is not expressing a new idea or outlining a valuable thought,” read a 2012 editorial in the Harvard Crimson. “They are committing an act of violence.” When the feminist lecturer Christina Hoff Sommers was marched off campus in the spring of 2015, the student editors at the Oberlin Review penned a self-soothing “love letter to ourselves.” It was a fatuous mound of false equivalencies justifying the censorship of inconvenient statistical analysis that called into question the scope of the supposed epidemic of sexual violence on campus—or as the students called it, “rape denialism.”15 In 2017, editors at Wellesley College’s student newspaper offered an ominous endorsement of “appropriate measures” against speakers who bucked the leftist consensus. They weren’t being coy: “[I]f people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted.”16
These sentiments are, apparently, broadly shared. A survey conducted in 2015 by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles found that almost 71 percent of that year’s freshman class believed that colleges should “prohibit racist/sexist speech.” Another 43 percent of incoming freshmen agreed that colleges should “have the right to ban extreme speakers” from campus. These censorious ideas trickled down from their mentors. In 2010–11, the institute’s survey of faculty found that 70 percent of female university staff and nearly half their male counterparts believed that colleges should “prohibit” speech determined to be racist or sexist.
A poll conducted in 2017 by John Villasenor of UCLA and the Brookings Institution confirmed that students were prepared to take action to enforce their contemptuous dogma. That poll, funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, revealed that a plurality (44 percent) of students do not believe that the First Amendment protects “hate speech.” A majority of respondents said it was acceptable to shout down “a very controversial speaker” who is “known for making offensive and hurtful statements.” Most disturbingly, nearly one-fifth of college students polled said it was acceptable to engage in violence to silence a challenging speaker.17
This violent creed has begun to yield violent actions. When the right-leaning provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to appear at Cal Berkeley, the students set their campus ablaze.18 Professors at Middlebury College were physically assaulted and even injured by the dozens of students who violently protested the appearance of the political scientist Charles Murray.19 The inauguration of Donald Trump to the presidency was met with violent demonstrations across the country from college-age protesters who assaulted police, set vehicles on fire, and destroyed property.20
The tens of thousands who participated in the Women’s March against Trump in January 2017 were criticized by some on the left, like the New Republic’s Jess Zimmerman, for not being violent enough. She attributed the lack of brutality not just to the pacific nature of the march’s participants but also to their predominately white skin color. “If the police stay their hand with you, white women, it is not a compliment,” she wrote. “It’s condescension.”21
By legitimizing violence committed in defense of their shared values, these students and agitators were only mimicking their elders. When Islamist terrorists murdered the editorial staff of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015, for example, a variety of prominent members of the liberal intelligentsia insisted the dead had it coming.
“Charlie Hebdo has a long record of mocking, baiting and needling French Muslims,” read a loaded sentence by Tony Barber in the Financial Times. This massacre is “what happens when you get a culture that, rather than asking to what end we defend free speech, valorizes free speech for its own sake and thus perversely values speech more the more pointlessly offensive it is,” The Daily Beast’s Arthur Chu insisted. Even Secretary of State John Kerry contended that these murderers had “a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, ‘Okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.’ ”
Just four months after the Charlie Hebdo slaughter, the conservative activist Pamela Geller staged a well-publicized “cartoon drawing contest” in a Dallas suburb to demonstrate solidarity with the cartoonists at the Danish magazine Jyllands-Posten, which had been targeted with violence following a contest in which readers submitted satirical drawings of the prophet Mohammed. It worked. Two Islamist gunmen attacked Geller’s event and were summarily killed by security.
For conducting a successful experiment to demonstrate the barbaric illiberalism of her antagonists, Geller was pilloried. The Washington Post insinuated that she should apologize. MSNBC host Chris Matthews castigated her for “taunting,” “daring,” and “provoking” her would-be murderers. CNN’s Erin Burnett accused her of enjoying “being a target of these attacks,” and the New York Daily News columnist Linda Stasi wrote that Geller “will get her wish: More dead Americans at the hands of radical Muslims.”22
These are the logical foundations that lead otherwise decent and rational people to excuse murderous violence. This abhorrent phenomenon is not limited to the political left.
In August 2017, Donald Trump’s national security advisor, H. R. McMaster, ousted a conspiracy theorist from the president’s National Security Council. Rich Higgins was let go, however, only after he penned an addlebrained memorandum, to which the president himself was privy, that was so untethered as to be downright unnerving.
Headlined “POTUS & Political Warfare,” the memo is one long hysterical delusion. Higgins warns that the president may be forced out of office not because of his own incompetence but by the efficacy of “memes” spread anonymously on social media. He warns of “cultural Marxist drivers” who have seized the commanding heights of culture. He engages the contemptibly familiar straw man of “International Banking,” which supposedly benefits from immigrant labor and America’s “debtor status”—thinly-veiled anti-Semitism that gives away the game.
“Atomization of society must also occur at the individual level; with attacks directed against all levels of group and personal identity,” the memo continues. “Hence the sexism, racism, and xenophobia memes. . . . [T]his is a form of population control by certain business cartels in league with cultural Marxists/corporatists/Islamists who will leverage Islamic terrorism threats to justify the creation of a police state.”23
That this kind of neurosis was able to find its way to the president’s desk is, to put it mildly, disconcerting. Equating the president’s domestic political opposition with a “Maoist insurgency” is a caricature that any sense of republican civic decency would prohibit. The memo reduces Trump’s opponents to a one-dimensional, monomaniacal horde of People’s Liberation Army soldiers pouring over the hilltops to overwhelm the valiant, outmanned defenders in the White House. It was a radical effort to dehumanize, and dehumanization of a set of targets is a historically effective tool for fomenting political violence.
Through a quirk of American political history, this kind of thinking, common on fringe white supremacist blogs, came to be legitimized by the American president and the head of the Republican Party.
America’s Weimar Moment
In March 2016, as the political temperature rose to a boiling point, a Trump supporter at one of the candidate’s rallies in North Carolina sucker-punched an African-American protester in the back of the head. Following his arrest, the attacker was utterly unapologetic, promising that the next time he had the opportunity to come to blows with an anti-Trump demonstrator, his intent would be murder.24
The attack followed weeks of incitement by Trump himself. The future president reveled in the notion that his supporters were so passionate about his candidacy that they might harm his detractors. He talked openly about meting out violence himself—“I’d like to punch him in the face”—and complained, “We’re not allowed to push back anymore.” “In the old days,” Trump told a crowd, protesters “would be carried out on a stretcher.”25 He promised to pay the legal bills of those who were arrested for committing violence in his name, and not just on the stump but on Meet the Press.26
In the weeks that followed, attendees at Trump rallies were comfortable enough in the company of like minds that they were filmed giving Nazi salutes and yelling at onlookers to “go to f—ing Auschwitz” or “go back to Africa,” depending on the look of their targets.27 The attack on a black protester by a white Trump supporter had the feel of an opening salvo in a war. And, in a way, it was.
One day, when Trump traveled to downtown Chicago for another scheduled rally, his opponents were ready for him. At the nearby University of Illinois at Chicago campus, a mob of students, many of them self-described supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders, showed up with a simple mission: “Shut shit down.” Demonstrators flooded the streets outside the Trump rally and infiltrated the arena. Fist fights broke out and demonstrators clashed with police. By the end of the night, two police officers were injured—one was hit in the head with a bottle—and two demonstrators were arrested. This was a harbinger of unrest to come.28
The following month, twenty protesters were arrested in Costa Mesa, California, attempting to shut down another Trump event. The month after that, Trump rally-goers were attacked in San Jose by demonstrators waving Mexico’s flag while burning America’s. Some peaceful rally-goers were pelted with eggs. Others had their clothes torn off. One pro-Trump rally-goer was photographed bleeding profusely from the head and face following an encounter with attackers. “Violence against supporters of any candidate has no place in this election,” wrote Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. If it were not for the unambiguous hostility of the anti-Trump demonstrators, Podesta would not have felt compelled to take ownership of these protesters, albeit only to disown them.29
In June 2016, a collection of self-described “white nationalists” descended on Sacramento, California. Emboldened by the ascendance of Donald Trump and his apparent tolerance for their repugnant racism, they sought and secured a license from the city to promote their views. Their widely-publicized rally did not go unnoticed by their foes, some of them self-styled “anti-fascists.” They, too, gathered in the city’s center, intending to force the white supremacists to disperse.
“White supremacists should not be entitled to ‘free speech’ to preach their hateful messages and incite beatings and murders,” declared the socialist magazine Liberation. “They were met with a huge crowd that was there, committed and determined, very courageous, to take action, shut them down, and stop them from organizing for genocide and for lynch mobs,” asserted the counter-protest’s organizer, the diminutive middle-school teacher Yvette Felarca. A peaceful demonstration was not in the cards.
Armed with knives, clubs, broken bottles, and rocks, both groups were ready for a melee, and they soon got one—captured on video from multiple angles. Ten people were injured, two critically. “The Nazis did not recruit anyone new today, and our side did,” Felarca proclaimed triumphantly.
For whatever reason, Americans didn’t talk much about this episode. Perhaps its villains were not clear-cut enough. There is no moral ambiguity about opposing white supremacists, but some observers seemed conflicted over whether to condemn “anti-fascists,” even if they inaugurate violence. “If I had to say who started it and who didn’t, I’d say the permitted group didn’t start it,” said George Granada, a California highway patrolman and head of the department’s protective services division. A year later, Felarca’s arrest on charges of inciting a riot confirmed that Granada’s suspicions were shared by California’s department of justice.30
Maybe the inability to honestly blame this attack entirely on racist Trump supporters discouraged a media complex invested in his loss from delving too deeply into the story. Perhaps the thought of unapologetic fascists and communists coming to blows in the American streets was too terrifyingly evocative of the Weimar Republic’s final days to elicit much public discussion. Maybe we just didn’t want to see what was happening to us.
The scene was repeated in February 2017 when a group of so-called “alt-right” agitators targeted a lawful socialist demonstration. “Heil Trump,” they shouted in an effort to drown out the socialists, who barked, in Spanish, “One class, one struggle—against borders!” The clash of words soon escalated into a violent confrontation.
Hundreds were involved in a similar episode of politically-inspired mob violence the following April in Berkeley, California, where a large gathering of pro-Trump demonstrators was met by counter-protesters—a tense situation that prompted many businesses, fearing imminent violence, to close preemptively. They were right.
“Both groups threw rocks and sticks at each other and used a large trash bin as a battering ram as the crowd moved around the perimeter of the park,” the Los Angeles Times reported. Twenty-one people were arrested. Eleven were injured and six, including a stabbing victim, were taken to the hospital.31
In retrospect, these events deserved more attention than they received. They were a prelude to atrocities yet to come.
Racial Terror in the Age of Trump
On the night of Thursday, July 7, 2016, twenty-five-year-old Micah Johnson resolved to get his revenge. An African-American veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Johnson was steeped in racial resentment. He had no formal ties to any political organization, but he was a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement. His Facebook page revealed his support for the New Black Panther Party, which, according to the New York Times, “has advocated violence against whites, and Jews in particular.”32
His home was full of weapons—ballistic vests, bomb-making equipment and fuses, ammunition, a journal of combat tactics, and, of course, guns. But it was a sniper rifle that Johnson would use to mete out vengeance that night. Ascending to the top of a parking garage in downtown Dallas, Johnson set up his position, took aim at any policemen he could find, and opened fire. By the end of the night, five Dallas officers were dead. “The suspect said he was upset at white people,” said Dallas Police Chief David Brown. “The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
In February 2017, Adam Purinton walked into a bar in Olathe, Kansas, and quickly became agitated by the presence of two Indian men. He demanded to know their immigration status and, unsatisfied with their response, insisted that they “get out of my country.” Purinton was escorted out of the bar, but he returned thirty minutes later with a handgun and opened fire. “There is a kind of hysteria spreading,” a relative of one of the victims observed.33
Twenty-eight-year-old James Jackson was a U.S. Army veteran and a fan of the alt-right and Richard Spencer. He watched alt-right YouTube videos and cut his blond hair in a severe style that deliberately mimicked the haircuts of young men in Hitler’s Germany. In March 2017, Jackson traveled from Baltimore to New York City, where he encountered Timothy Caughman, a sixty-six-year-old African-American he had not previously met. Without warning or provocation, Jackson plunged a twenty-six-inch sword into Caughman’s chest, killing him. Prosecutors alleged that the murder was a trial run for a racist killing spree Jackson had planned to execute in Times Square.34
“Allahu Akbar!” shouted Kori Ali Muhammad in the act of murdering three white people in downtown Fresno, California, in April 2017. But despite his name and battle cry, Muhammad was no devout Muslim, and this was not a typical act of lone-wolf Islamist terrorism. A few days earlier, Muhammad had killed a security guard at a local Motel 6, a man police believe was targeted because he was white. Muhammad expressed hatred for white people on social media and in interviews with police and had an affinity for violent black liberationist rhetoric.35
The following month, twenty-three-year-old Richard Collins III, a newly commissioned lieutenant in the United States Army, was three days from graduating from college when he was stabbed to death by a random attacker. Collins was black and his murderer, Sean Urbanski, was a member of a racist Facebook group called the Alt-Reich Nation. That same day, Mississippi state representative Karl Oliver said that those seeking to remove Confederate monuments “should be lynched.”36
“I stabbed the two motherf—ers in the neck and I’m happy now,” yelled Jeremy Joseph Christian of Portland, Oregon. His unhinged rant was delivered into courtroom microphones as he was being arraigned for killing two men who came to the defense of Muslim girls whom Christian was harassing. “Death to the enemies of America!” he raved. “You call it terrorism. I call it patriotism.”37
The slaying of two good Samaritans provoked a national outpouring of grief and solidarity. A week later, organizers of a previously scheduled “free speech” pro-Trump rally (which Portland’s mayor sought unsuccessfully to have canceled) were swamped by a semi-spontaneous gathering of demonstrators rallying “against hate.” A clash ensued. “Protesters threw bricks, mortars, and balloons filled with ‘unknown, foul-smelling liquid,’ ” USA Today reported. Police used chemical munitions and impact weapons to subdue the crowds. Fourteen people were arrested.38
These violent assailants were no doubt mentally disturbed, as are almost all people who engage in murderous violence against strangers. But the vile sentiments that inspired them are promoted by people who know exactly what they are doing. In Portland, this kind of racist violence showed that it had the capacity to incite a mob. The worst was yet to come.
Charlottesville
The white supremacist march on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville was already an un-American abomination well before the violence broke out.
On the night of August 12, 2017, approximately one hundred alt-right demonstrators gathered in Emancipation Park for the first of a set of weekend events dubbed “Unite the Right.” Bearing torches, chanting Nazi slogans, throwing Hitler salutes, and vowing that “Jews will not replace us,” these demonstrators made their intentions clear. They wore khaki pants and white golf shirts. Their faces were uncovered. They wanted to be identified, and they were looking for a fight. They soon found one.
“Stay in formation!” one rally organizer shouted to his compatriots, according to the Washington Post reporter Joe Heim. The mob of white nationalists swarmed a gathering of about thirty student counter-demonstrators. A scuffle ensued. “Shoves. Punches. Both groups sprayed chemical irritants,” Heim reports. Law enforcement was slow to intervene in what was eventually dubbed an “unlawful assembly,” allowing plenty of time for the nation to drink in the images of violent neo-Nazis swarming a college campus in the heart of the so-called New South. It was a sickening display that presaged a catastrophe.39
The following morning, the “Unite the Right” white nationalist demonstrators took to the streets for a sanctioned demonstration. They were met with a phalanx of peaceful counter-demonstrators: clergy and local political figures united in their opposition to white nationalism.
“[T]hen brawls broke out,” Hawes Spencer reported in the New York Times, describing a scene in which protesters sprayed one another with mace and beat one other with clubs, flagpoles, and “makeshift weapons.” White supremacists clad in black wearing mock militia garb and bearing white riot shields marked uniformly with a black “X” plunged into a gang of counter-demonstrators identified only by their black and red banners.40
Soon, the ranks of the white nationalists were augmented by uniformed and hooded Klan members, but the white supremacist presence was outnumbered by approximately one thousand counter-demonstrators. “A few minutes before 11 a.m.,” Heim recalled, “a swelling group of white nationalists carrying large shields and long wooden clubs approached the park on Market Street. About two dozen counter-protesters formed a line across the street, blocking their path. With a roar, the marchers charged through the line, swinging sticks, punching and spraying chemicals.”
As the clashes escalated, police tried to clear out the demonstrations, deploying tear gas and pepper spray. Twenty-three people were arrested, but only three were taken to the hospital—two for exposure to heat and one for over-imbibing. Elsewhere, a gang of white supremacists were photographed kicking and beating a black man in a parking garage—images reminiscent of a terrible era in American race relations. The images went viral and resulted in the arrest of two of the young men two weeks later.
So far the unrest, though regrettable, had not been as bad as it might have been, and by early afternoon, it seemed like disaster had been averted. It had not.
Several blocks from the park in which torch-bearing white supremacists had rallied the day before, anti-racist protesters ambled peacefully down a local thoroughfare. Without warning, a Dodge Challenger with tinted windows and no plates sped through the narrow streets of Charlottesville and collided with the back of a sedan. That sedan and the minivan in front of it lurched into the crowd of protesters, injuring nineteen persons, some quite badly. Thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer died of her wounds. Her murderer, James Alex Fields, was captured on camera just hours earlier marching with members of the organization Vanguard America—a white nationalist group that advocates “a government based in the natural law,” which “must not cater to the false notion of equality.”41
Fuel to the Fire
Nearly a month after the attack, the independent journalistic collective ProPublica published the results of an investigation into the behavior of the online communities that organized the “Unite the Right” rally. What they found was disgusting, although not surprising.
ProPublica reported that white supremacist groups spent months tracking the efforts of their adversaries to counter-organize ahead of Charlottesville. Racist online communities like the Daily Stormer prepared to present evidence of violent agitation by the left. They advised participants against bringing cell phones that might compromise their “affinity group,” a term they had borrowed from liberal social justice activists to describe a network of unaffiliated organizations working together on a common cause.
They prepared for violence and joked ominously about committing it—jokes that notably featured acts of vehicular violence. One user of a white supremacist message board posted an image of vehicles plowing through a crowd in response to a discussion about car insurance and logistics. “Another user replied, claiming that in North Carolina ‘driving over protesters blocking roadways isn’t an offense,’ ” ProPublica reported. “The user then posted a meme showing a combine harvester that could be a ‘digestor’ for multiple lanes of protesters, saying, ‘Sure would be nice.’ ”42
Typical of his compulsion to excuse the inexcusable and validate the self-pity that animates white supremacists, President Donald Trump spent the next week wrestling with himself over just how forcefully to condemn those who participated in this incident. The traumatic terroristic event could not be divorced entirely from the abhorrent white supremacism that had been on display for the better part of twenty-four hours. In its wake, the president appeared on camera and delivered a prepared statement denouncing the violence. But in a deviation from the script, Trump took the opportunity to suggest a moral equivalence and pointedly condemned “both sides.”
In fact, there was violence on both sides, but there was time enough for equivalencies after the blood had been washed off Charlottesville streets. In fact, the time for equivalencies was a year earlier, when revanchist fascists and proto-Bolsheviks were knifing each other on the streets of Sacramento. But that was a missed opportunity.
A firestorm erupted over Trump’s comments. Republican lawmakers, one after the other, criticized the president, and an exodus of business and labor leaders from Trump’s advisory councils eventually led to their dissolution.
Under pressure, Trump delivered another set of prepared remarks unequivocally condemning the white supremacists and the terrorism to which they were a party. But the president resents being controlled and, the following day, he contradicted himself in a free-flowing exchange with reporters at a press conference.
“What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, alt-right?” a visibly agitated Trump barked at reporters. “Do they have any semblance of guilt?” The president added that he believed “not all of those people” who attended the white nationalist demonstrations “the night before” were racists. “Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me,” Trump contended. “Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.”43
These remarks undid any good the president had done by sticking to the script the day earlier. Not only had he validated the cause to which white supremacists were rallying—as members of the alt-right were quick to point out—but he compelled his liberal opponents to valorize the abhorrent political violence being meted out by the costumed sociopaths calling themselves “Antifa.”
Antifa
Following the clashes at Charlottesville, members of the liberal intelligentsia declared any and all opposition to fascist white nationalists a noble enterprise—even if that resistance was violent.
Prominent liberal commentators disseminated simplistic memes comparing masked vandals to the American soldiers who landed on Omaha Beach,44 and there were glowing profiles in mainstream media outlets. “They relish in punching Nazis. They protest in all black. And they’ve vowed to physically confront racists and extremists across the country,” an NBC News report read,45 while Mark Bray of Dartmouth College praised “their willingness to physically defend themselves and others from white supremacist violence and preemptively shut down fascist organizing efforts before they turn deadly.”46
This impulse was the culmination of a campaign on the left to glorify violence committed in the name of “anti-fascism.” In January 2017, the Nation’s Natasha Lennard heaped praise upon the organization for being willing to “fight fascism in the streets.” She mocked liberals who “cling to institutions” and approvingly observed how this loose amalgam of leftist thugs had adopted twentieth-century tactics “rooted in militant left-wing and anarchist politics.”47
This admiration for authoritarian violence only became more overt after Charlottesville. “We’re not asking for Nazi speech rights to be curtailed,” Lennard wrote. “Antifa is not about asking.”48 The left-wing magazine Mother Jones joined the lionization of Antifa with a less-than-condemnatory profile of the “new wave of left-wing militants” who “pledged to resist right-wing extremists by any means necessary.”49
This wave of militancy has an unmistakably Identitarian flavor. Years before Charlottesville, the Antifa organizing website ItsGoingDown.org, which in late 2017 boasted a following of more than twenty-five thousand on Facebook and another thirty-five thousand on Twitter, prescribed violence against white nationalists within the framework of identity politics. One pseudonymous manifesto posted on the site calls for “the queerest insurrection”:
A fag is bashed because his gender presentation is far too femme. A poor transman can’t afford his life-saving hormones. A sex worker is murdered by their client. A genderqueer persyn is raped because ze just needed to be “f—ed straight.” Four black lesbians are sent to prison for daring to defend themselves against a straight-male attacker. Cops beat us on the streets and our bodies are being destroyed by pharmaceutical companies because we can’t give them a dime . . . Queers experience, directly with our bodies, the violence and domination of this world.50
This rhetoric is restrained compared with some of the other documents on this pro-Antifa website. Another essay, titled “Dangerous Spaces: Violent Resistance, Self-Defense, & Insurrectional Struggle against Gender,” is as despicable a revolutionary screed as you’re ever likely to read.
A compendium of radical tracts published by Untorelli Press begins by defining rape, vivisection, “gay bashing,” the conduct of commerce, full-time occupations, monthly rent bills, and a variety of medical ailments as “violence that dominates.” Except for rape and, bizarrely, involuntary surgery, these things are not violence. Confusing the tedium and trials of everyday life with acts of grotesque oppression is, as we will see, a common trait among members of Antifa.
The author of this unsigned document seems, though, to know what constitutes real violence. That kind of carnage is the violence he likes: “the violence that liberates.”
It is the murdered homophobe. It is the knee-capped rapist. It is the arson and the mink liberation. It is the smashed window and the expropriated food. It is the cop on fire and the riot behind bars. It is work avoidance, squatting, criminal friendship, and the total refusal of compromise. It is the chaos that can never be stopped.51
“I am never peaceful,” the introduction concludes. “The world does violence to me, and I desire nothing but violence toward the world. Anyone who attempts to keep me from my lust for blood and fire will burn with the world they cling so desperately to.” Sincerely and “until the last rapist is hung with the guts of the last frat boy,” yours truly, Untorelli Press.
These savage indulgences are prefaced with a “trigger warning” for the faint of heart.
These provocative assertions—the overwrought prose typical of pitiful, angsty, sexually repressed youth—should not be given undue significance. Replace the objects of their hatred (homophobes, frat boys, bank tellers, etc.) with the objects of white nationalist hatred (miscegenation, minorities, “social justice warriors,” etc.), and these ugly sentiments are almost ideologically interchangeable. But while it would be an error to suggest that manifestos like this are highly regarded on the social justice left, it would also be a mistake to dismiss their potential to incite.
Trump’s remarks might have led white nationalist sympathizers to get off the sidelines and into their misguided fight. The left’s esteem for violent “anti-fascists” might have had the same effect.
News from the Front
Berkeley, California, had been the scene of several brutal clashes. The riotous street battle in April 2017 was preceded by one in February, when the Berkeley College Republicans invited Milo Yiannopoulos to address the campus. Then, a mix of students and what the university called “150 masked agitators” took their anger out on their surroundings.
That reptilian tide broke windows, set fires, and torched a generator-powered spotlight before police used chemical irritants to disperse the crowd. Before the mob had scattered, they left behind one hundred thousand dollars in damages and several bloodied persons whom the mob had fingered as Yiannopoulos supporters. Though the images of the walking wounded quickly populated social media and were prominently featured in journalistic accounts of the violence on campus, Sergeant Sabrina Reich of the UCPD revealed that “no one has come forward and made a police report regarding being assaulted or injured.”52
The violence of February and April was merely a prelude to the events in Berkeley in August.
“We have neither the legal right [n]or [the] desire to interfere with or cancel their invitations based on the perspectives and beliefs of the speakers,” declared UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof about the mob’s demand that Yiannopoulos be permanently barred from campus. The local college Republicans tried again to get the provocative performance artist to address their campus as part of “Berkeley Free Speech Week,” and the university was keen to stand aside. But the city’s mayor, Jesse Arreguin, protested. To treat “free speech week” as an opportunity to exercise the right to free speech, he said, had the potential “to create mayhem.”53 He knew his town well.
Antifa brigades clad in improvised armor with bandanas covering their faces arrived in the thousands at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park, ready to meet their adversaries. Arranging themselves in a Greek phalanx, linking together homemade riot shields on which the words “No Hate” were stenciled, Antifa formed the vanguard of the legion assembled to “Rally Against Hate.”
Their outnumbered adversaries were not, in this case, white supremacists, but average Trump supporters and anti-communists. They gathered in smaller numbers because the event they wanted to attend, the “Freedom Rally” at Crissy Field Beach, had been canceled by its organizers. Joey Gibson, a peaceful pro-Trump activist, told reporters with the Los Angeles Times that he feared “extreme or racist figures might try to co-opt his event.” Moreover, the agitated counter-demonstrators could not be trusted to observe any decencies. “It doesn’t seem safe,” Gibson said. “A lot of people’s lives are going to be in danger tomorrow.”54 He was right.
Roving gangs of Antifa beat whoever looked to them like a Trump sympathizer. They set upon a handful of activists, including Gibson and his friends, who were clad in patriotic regalia (including one with an American flag do-rag) and had raised their hands in a sign of submission. The mob swung at them, hit them with bear repellent, and threw bottles in their direction. “Pete catches a shot right on his stars ’n’ stripes dome from a two-by-four and goes down,” reported the Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash, who was on the scene. “Someone crashes a flagpole smack on Joey’s head.”55
In retreat, Gibson walked backward into a line of police. They took him into custody, presumably because police were so vastly outmanned by the park’s menacing, so-called anti-fascist demonstrators. Six people were injured in the melee. Two were hospitalized. At least one police officer was injured while making one of the day’s thirteen arrests, but those were only the most egregious violators. “Berkeley Police Chief Andrew Greenwood said officers were told not to actively confront the anarchists,” the Associated Press reported.56
Bloodlust of the Bored
Those who engaged in violence in 2016 and 2017 were born in the most fortunate period in the safest and most stable country mankind has ever known. They were born into stability and relative prosperity, regardless of their personal circumstances. Unless they have migrated from elsewhere, most have never known organized, state-supported political terror. But they have nevertheless romanticized political violence and, to some extent, welcomed it.
“There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change, people are so drama-filled,” predicted Victor Vizcarra, a forty-eight-year-old Trump-curious Bernie Sanders supporter who spoke with the New York Times in early 2016. It was not uncommon to hear that kind of nihilism expressed freely in 2016.57
We are too far gone, this worldview holds, too tainted by elitist condescension, too decadent to survive in our present state. Those were the assumptions behind Michael Anton’s widely read pro-Trump essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” published by the Claremont Institute two months before the election of 2016. If the plane is going down no matter what, it is incumbent on its passengers to rage against their fate. Facing certain death, the hijacked are obliged to perform one last desperate act of defiance, even if it’s suicidal. For Anton, that meant supporting Trump not because of what he stood for but because of the hypocrites and moralizers who stood against him.
This anxiety and despair is not the kind of sentiment you’d expect to hear from a successful and connected financier residing comfortably in Manhattan. That’s the problem—our stereotypes do not match reality. A potentially violent movement becomes a kinetically violent movement when its unreasonable expectations are not met, not as a result of perceived deprivation.
Studies have demonstrated that poverty is not a predictive factor when examining the causes of extremism and terror. In fact, in 2010, the sociologist Diego Gambetta and the political scientist Steffen Hertog noticed a trend among the perpetrators of Islamist terrorism—an engineering degree. A reasonably advanced education is a unifying feature of many violent groups: from Irish Republican rebels, to pre-independence Israeli radicals, to the Weather Underground in the United States. “[T]o a large extent, those historically attracted to terrorism have, in fact, tended to be reasonably well, if not, highly educated; financially comfortable and, in some cases, quite well off; and, often gainfully employed,” writes the National Interest’s Bruce Hoffman.58
This should be intuitive, but it is not. The liberal myth holds that privation and dispossession will drive people to acts of political violence, because the liberal myth is a reductionist philosophy that boils down every sociopolitical development to privation and dispossession. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like an opportunity to redistribute incomes. It does not require uncommon insight to conclude that those who steep themselves in violent revolutionary fantasies and class envy are at least familiar with similar movements throughout history. Whether the effect is intended or not, those who bend over backward to justify the violent injustices that characterize the social justice movement have helped to catalyze them.
Our Challenge
It must be said that it is more depraved for an individual to conduct a terroristic attack like the one that occurred in the streets of Charlottesville than for a mob to act like a mob.
History is, in many ways, the study of mobs, and they all have a similar nature. The mob that murdered African-American children in the streets of New York City in 1863 is the same mob that was moved to violence by the sight of Caesar’s bloody tunic. The coldblooded desire to surrender individuality and flow with the human tide seems instinctual. It takes only collective passion to transform a thoughtful person into a cog in a machine capable of astonishing brutishness.
“The crowd is the same everywhere, in all periods and cultures,” Elias Canetti wrote in his seminal work, Crowds and Power. “Once in being, it spreads with the utmost violence.” Canetti observed that the crowd that becomes a mob is a fickle instrument for those seeking power. The kind of crowd capable of mob violence must continually expand, and once it ceases to expand, it dissipates quickly. It may have to be baited into existence, but it can quickly resolve to perform acts of collective vengeance almost spontaneously, especially in stratified societies in which oppressed classes seeks to engineer a “reversal” of the power dynamic that benefits their oppressors.59
Premeditated acts of gross criminality by an individual amount to terrorism, but a healthy society can endure terrorism. Violent, politically programmatic mobs are more threatening to society’s foundations. The mob is a greater threat to societies that are already riddled with contradictions and stricken by self-doubt. Those sickly societies are apt to crumble under even weak pressure. Contrary to the braying of professional pessimists, the United States is not such a fragile society. Not yet, anyway.
The violence America witnessed in Sacramento and Charlottesville is likely to be repeated. It is the fruit of a potent anti-egalitarian trend, a trend that America desperately needs to confront.
For whatever reason, Americans barely noticed these incidents of violence when they began. In the days that followed the attack in Charlottesville, conservatives and Trump supporters (two groups that often overlap but are nevertheless distinct) observed that the rising tide of Identitarian violence did not materialize overnight. It is a wave that was building even before Sacramento. This observation prompted emotional outbursts from those who are fond of identity politics. They insisted that it was “whataboutism” or “moral equivalency” to invoke violence committed by leftists condemning white racist terrorism. But the time for burying our heads in the sand is over. The crisis is upon us.
No amount of opprobrium heaped upon white supremacists will ever be too much. But the initial reluctance of elite opinion-makers to condemn Antifa with equal fervor suggests that in their eyes some violent mobs are more abhorrent than others. That is corruption; it is the rot that eats away at the foundations of a healthy society. And one day, when the rot has been ignored for so long that no one believes it can be expunged, another mob will come along. And that time, the republic’s weakened edifice may not withstand the pressure.
The fate of a gathering of peaceful Trump-supporting Republicans in Minnesota in May 2017 illustrates the threat posed by the rise of the radical fringe. Trump fans, with a permit, assembled to celebrate the president’s first hundred days in office, but their rally was quickly hijacked by what the Minneapolis Star-Tribune described as a “small group” of white supremacist fanatics. “They show up everywhere,” an exasperated pro-Trump organizer told the reporters. “Please go away,” another attendee told the hijackers. “We have nothing to do with you guys.” To these displays of typical Midwestern courtesy, the demonstrators responded by chanting, “We are the future!”
The white supremacists had advertised their intention to hijack the event on social media, and their Antifa opponents were ready for them. Bearing their signature black and red banners, the anti-fascist counter-protesters became aggressive with the alt-right usurpers. Profanity and insults were exchanged between the two groups, who were kept apart by police. “Go home, fascists!” one group screamed. “No Nazis on our streets!” The other barked back, “Law and order!”60
By the end of the afternoon, the peaceful pro-Trump rally inside Minnesota’s capitol building had been forgotten. The action outside made all the headlines. It was all anyone would remember about the day, and it is a symbol of the challenge before conventional liberals and conservatives as their fringes secure more power and attention.
From the nation’s highest elected and appointed officials to its most obscure activists and students, a culture that confuses speech and violence has taken hold of the social justice left. The Identitarian right, too, has begun rendering its political opponents as one-dimensional stick figures against whom it can, and indeed must, lash out. Together, these groups presage a new age of political violence in America.
But the United States is a remarkable place, with an unrivaled capacity for reinvention and renewal. These are not the first poisonous ideas to root themselves in American minds. How can the rational people that make up the majority of American voters reassert their authority? Can they rescue the country from the charismatic fanatics in their midst?
If history is a guide, violent and prejudicial ideas can be expelled from the public square. It has been done before, and both the right and the left have models in their respective histories to which they might turn for guidance.