DISPATCHES FROM 1968: Left-wing violence is being normalized.
At the Network Contagion Research Institute we’ve been scratching our heads ever since we noticed this explosion of online support for Thompson’s murder in December last year. It was disturbing to say the least. What could possibly explain the wild-eyed celebration of extreme violence on the streets of New York? Why was there a mass circulation of images featuring Musk being killed by Nintendo characters?
Well, after working through a heap of survey data and social media language trends, we’ve come to a series of startling conclusions about a change that’s happening in US society. The NCRI has uncovered more than just an online ecosystem of unsettling ideas. What we’re seeing is the rise and proliferation of assassination culture on the internet. It’s more than just a collection of jokes, symbols and memes. It’s an entirely new subculture for incubating radical and subversive ideas that are anathema to the things America has historically stood for.
Over the past several decades we have assumed that calls for political violence come from the far right, and they often have. What we never expected to see was the enormous growth in similar calls emerging from the mainstream left. We undertook a nationwide survey to understand it better and discovered that a breathtaking half of those who identified as politically left-wing agreed that the murder of public figures could be at least somewhat justified. What’s more, 56 percent of them agreed that there could be some justification for killing Trump. Just under half agreed that the same could be said about the fate of Musk. Tesla dealerships, too, merit at least some destruction, according to 59 percent of those surveyed.
And so we took a deeper dive into the online networks where so many young people spend much of their time today. We found a massive upsurge in coded endorsements of political violence, as well as users adopting and wielding the name “Luigi” as a codename for killing executives and wealthy individuals, all gamified with Nintendo memes featuring the character Luigi, an Italian plumber from the Super Mario series, as a wink and a nod to Mangione
It’s acceptable, it’s normalized, and, most strangely, it’s increasingly being portrayed as fun. It looks like the dissemination of what scholars call permission structures. Think of them as a kind of psychological corridor that can lead people, ego and pride intact, toward radically antisocial or even subversive behaviors such as the murder – or attempted murder – of public officials and corporate executives.
What would drive any American to actually support or condone such violence? It’s clear that the US healthcare system is unequal, unfair and in need of reform. But never in my life have any of my friends openly said that the public execution of C-suite executives might be an acceptable course of action. It’s not the America I grew up in, that’s for sure. Seeing the rise of assassination culture has been a bit like discovering an entirely new continent.
It is? If you’re as young and blinkered as the author of the above piece at Spectator World, I guess. But as Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times in 2017: Notes on a Political Shooting.
John F. Kennedy was hated passionately by many Republicans in Dallas, but Lee Harvey Oswald’s beliefs were Marxist, not right-wing. Nationalist movements, not partisanship, inspired Sirhan Sirhan and the Puerto Ricans who almost killed Harry Truman. George Wallace was shot by a man trying to make “a statement of my manhood for the world to see.” One of Gerald Ford’s two would-be assassins was a member of the Manson cult, the other a sympathizer with the Symbionese Liberation Army. John Hinckley famously shot Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster.
And most recently — if a little less famously, because the media spent a long time assuming that he was Tea Party-inspired — Jared Lee Loughner shot Gabby Giffords because he was a lunatic obsessed with (among other things) the government’s control of grammar, and she had failed to answer his town hall question: “What is government if words have no meaning?”
So [Bernie Bro Joel] Hodgkinson’s seeming normalcy, his angry but relatively mainstream Democratic views, might be a warning sign for the future of our politics.
And how. After the assassinations of JFK and RFK, violence from the left continued well into the early 1970s, Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism:
Many of us forget that the Weather Underground bombing campaign was not a matter of a few isolated incidents. From September 1969 to May 1970, Rudd and his co-revolutionaries on the white radical left committed about 250 attacks, or almost one terrorist bombing a day (government estimates put that number much higher). During the summer of 1970, there were twenty bombings a week in California. The bombings were the backbeat to the symphony of violence, much of it rhetorical, that set the score for the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rudd captured the tone perfectly: “It’s a wonderful feeling to hit a pig. It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building.” “The real division is not between people who support bombings and people who don’t,” explained a secret member of a “bombing collective,” but “between people who will do them and people who are too hung up on their own privileges and security to take those risks.”
In 2021, Politico focused on one of those bombings: When the Left Attacked the Capitol.
In the winter of 1971, you could still find vestiges of an age of innocence in Washington. The previous decade had been one of the most unstable in the country’s history, rocked by political assassinations, racial violence and explosions at public buildings. But at the U.S. Capitol, it was still easy to stroll through without having to empty your pockets or show a driver’s license. No metal detectors or security cameras. You didn’t need to join a tour. Which is why two young people who melted into the crowd of sightseers were free to scour the building for a safe spot to set their bomb.
They were members of the Weather Underground. Since 1969, the radical left group had already bombed several police targets, banks and courthouses around the country, acts they hoped would instigate an uprising against the government. Now two of these self-described revolutionaries wandered the halls with sticks of dynamite strapped under their clothing. They slipped into an unmarked marble-lined men’s bathroom one floor below the Senate chamber. They hooked up a fuse attached to a stopwatch and stuffed the device behind a 5-foot-high wall.
Shortly before 1 a.m. on March 1, the phone call came into the Capitol switchboard. The overnight operator remembered it as a man’s voice, low and hard: “This is real. Evacuate the building immediately.”
It exploded at 1:32 a.m. No one was hurt, but damage was extensive. The blast tore the bathroom wall apart, shattering sinks into shrapnel. Shock waves blew the swinging doors off the entrance to the Senate barbershop. The doors crashed through a window and sailed into a courtyard. Along the corridor, light fixtures, plaster and tile cracked. In the Senate dining room, panes fell from a stained-glass window depicting George Washington greeting two Revolutionary War heroes, the Marquis de Lafayette and Baron von Steuben. Both Europeans lost their heads.
You may recognize a few of the suspects:
Neither Jones nor anyone else in the documentary named the bombers. However, at least three published accounts have identified them as two women then in their late 20s—Kathy Boudin, one of the survivors of the Greenwich Village explosion, and Bernardine Dohrn, a graduate of the University of Chicago’s law school whose looks, brains and take-no-prisoners attitude had made her a romantic icon within the left. Neither Boudin nor Dohrn has publicly admitted or denied placing the Capitol bomb. Neither responded to questions for this article.
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The Weather Underground continued to stage nonlethal bombings in the 1970s, notably a blast inside a Pentagon bathroom and at the State Department. (They called ahead on those, too.) When the Vietnam War finally ended, the group lost its center of gravity. By 1980, Weather had effectively disbanded. Dohrn, along with her husband and fellow member, Bill Ayers, came out of hiding. They didn’t go to prison. The government had dropped most charges against them for the same reason they couldn’t prosecute Leslie Bacon, and also because agents on a desperate hunt for clues had been caught conducting illegal break-ins at homes of the fugitives’ friends and relatives. The FBI’s overreach had backfired, but the era of left-wing extremism imploded on its own.
Curiously, CTL-F “Obama” brings up zero mentions. But the article does mention:
As a slogan of the 1960s went, what goes around comes around. That 14-month-old son who Dohrn and Ayers raised for Boudin? He became a Rhodes scholar, a lawyer and a public defender. In 2019, he was elected district attorney of San Francisco, a job once held by Vice President Kamala Harris. [Mercifully, both are now out of power — Ed.] And on Jan. 6, as the pro-Trump mob attacked, Chesa Boudin sent out a tweet: “Hoping everyone who works in the Capitol is safe from this despicable effort to take down our democracy.”
Irony can be awfully ironic, sometimes.