#424 Noah Rothman - The Left-Wing Violence Nobody Wants to Talk About

Sure.

I'm a senior writer with National Review, which is a conservative magazine in the United States.

It's been in constant publication since 1955.

I've written three books.

My latest, Blood and Progress, A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, just recently came out.

And I live in New Jersey with my wife and two sons.

And I've been doing the business of analyzing politics and writing about politics for at least 15 years now.

A little bit longer, depending on how you evaluate my career in news talk radio in New York City.

But generally been in the business of analyzing politics for my entire adult life.

Why did you want to write a book specifically about left-wing violence in America?

Well, I've been chronicling the phenomenon of political violence in the United States pretty obsessively since it became a far more pronounced feature of the American civic compact beginning in the... more prominently beginning in the last decade.

And I'm extremely freaked out.

I write about things that freak me out.

One of them is political violence.

And throughout 2015, 2016, when I was seeing the Trump candidacy encourage expressions of political violence as a method of communicating zeal, political passion.

I was one of just about everybody else in the country who was horrified by the phenomenon.

But one thing that you didn't see was reciprocal horror and trepidation over the extent to which the political left responded to the Trump movement with violence.

chronicled it extensively.

Trump supporters had rocks pelted at them, had eggs thrown at them, had the clothes torn off their back, were beaten bloody.

Police officers had bottles broken over their heads.

Riots broke out in front of Trump rallies that shut them down.

And the level of trepidation that was expressed over that was really minimal compared to the hostility that Trump was engendering.

And throughout the Trump administration, part one, We saw evidence of the degree to which mainstream institutions looked the other way when the political left expressed violence.

It only got worse over the course of the Biden administration and culminated in the beginning of the Trump years and the end of the Biden years with waves of assassinations and mob violence and urban unrest and even small cell terrorism, as I think we'll probably discuss.

And what you saw every time these incidents occurred was mainstream institutions, mainstream political figures, left, mostly on the left, but sometimes in the center too, would say, well, it's the American right you really have to worry about.