Noah Rothman discusses his new book, "Blood and Progress: How Left-wing Violence Became America's New Normal," which he wrote while on his book tour. In this episode, Scott and Noah compare the current wave of left-wing political violence in America to the past wave of political violence from the right.
00:02:15.240this is a book where noah is comparing the current new puritans of the sort of the woke movement
00:02:21.940to the original puritans great historical analysis but let's oh can i just mention one
00:02:28.000more thing before we get going uh this is from this book i hear that the author is a astoundingly
00:02:34.900brilliant and handsome guy page 102 you ready sure in the words of the political commentator
00:02:43.500noah rothman quote the ban list is forever expanding and yet the scale of the problem
00:02:48.800environmentalists claim to want to confront never seems to shrink in scope it too is always growing
00:02:55.540which leads skeptical observers to wonder whether restricting consumers access to life's small
00:03:01.460pleasures is a remedy to a problem or an end in itself fantastic quote it's immortalized in this
00:03:08.600book. All right. I'm flattered. Let's get down to this. Give us the big synopsis and then we can
00:03:14.260drill down. Yeah, sure. So this book emerged from my frustration with a tendency I think we've all
00:03:19.700encountered, which is to hear from every source in America, every political authority, every
00:03:25.260institution, that the right is especially violent, if not uniquely violent, uniquely murderous. And
00:03:32.380we hear that all the time. We hear it after an attempted or successful assassination of a right
00:03:36.480wing figure. We hear it after an assault on an ICE or CBP facility, armed assault. We hear it
00:03:42.120after a mob lays siege to local police, attacks, even renders them bloody, or sometimes even kills
00:03:48.480them. So you have to wonder when we hear this so often, why we are not confronting the evidence of
00:03:54.280our own eyes. And so I do. And if you look at this current wave of political violence from the left,
00:04:00.900it looks a lot like historical waves of left wing violence in this country in the 1910s, 1920s,
00:04:06.1401960s, 70s, and 80s, and today. And what I argue in this book is this is not an obscure history.
00:04:11.820It is a suppressed history. And it is suppressed by data sets that purport to claim that the
00:04:16.760American right is especially violent. You go into those data sets, and they don't describe
00:04:20.780political violence as we understand political violence. It describes gang violence, inter-family
00:04:26.320violence, prison violence, sometimes to inflate these figures. And that's just not what people
00:04:31.060think of when they think of political violence. I liken it to these anti-gun groups that'll say,
00:04:35.860well, there's been 70 school shootings this year. And you say to yourself, I don't remember 70
00:04:39.740school shootings. And what they mean is a firearm was discharged adjacent to a school property.
00:04:45.200And that's just not what people think. But this data is used to inflate the data set in order to
00:04:50.720create the conclusion that it's the people who compile them want you to believe, especially
00:04:55.620in particular, that the right is uniquely violent. And a document that I regard as a smoking gun
00:05:01.480It was prepared for the Department of Homeland Security in 2021, in which researchers describe the efforts in their field, they study left-wing extremism, violent left-wing extremism, and they describe intimidation campaigns from their colleagues, efforts to create reputational disincentives to engage in the work, even the threat of physical retribution, to say nothing of the fact that the study of violent left-wing extremism is shot through.
00:05:26.960with people who are associated with the movements they are describing and attempting to study.
00:05:33.080So the whole enterprise is fatally subjective.
00:05:36.060And so I look at it with a subjective lens,
00:05:38.240and I try to get into the heads of the people who are so deluded in their thinking
00:05:41.700that they believe that violence will beget positive social change.
00:05:45.560Their thinking and the audience for political violence,
00:05:48.800and there's always an audience for political violence,
00:05:51.380are two factors that are contributing to this worsening condition in this country.
00:05:54.980And we're never going to get our hands around it unless we look at both sides of the equation, violence on the right and the left, because they both take inspiration from each other and resolve to mete out vengeance against one another.
00:06:06.480So we just have a problem in this country where we're looking at only one side of this problem and then wondering why we can't understand it.
00:06:13.320Well, we're not understanding it because we don't want to understand it.
00:06:15.980And I hope Blood in Progress clarifies the thinking of policymakers or at least its readers.
00:06:20.220So the bias that you're talking about, say, in the data sets, in the analyses of the data sets, in the interpretation of the analyses of the data set, is the source of that bias coming from academics who are publishing academic papers and academic journals who are inherently, we all know, overwhelmingly leftist?
00:06:42.980Is that where the bias is coming from? And before you answer, I did a very quick cursory, you know, search of the literature.
00:06:51.540And perhaps to your point, and maybe you know or don't know this paper, in 2022, there was a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
00:07:02.820I mean, literally, the title is A Comparison of Political Violence by Left-Wing, Right-Wing and Islamist extremists in the United States and the world.
00:07:09.340Now, this is an incredibly prestigious journal, and they come to the conclusion, I mean, perhaps to your point, that it's much more the right that engages in this violence.
00:07:18.760So is it the academics that are the originators of that bias?
00:07:23.680There's academics that contribute to it.
00:07:25.760I focus on one project via the University of Cincinnati that is an offender in this regard.
00:07:31.940The ADL is another that has its own database.
00:07:34.720There are a variety of databases that purport to conclude and lead readers to the conclusion that the right is especially uniquely violent.
00:07:43.000And that has become a permission structure for those who are beholden to academic institutions or at least responsive to academic institutions to avoid confronting the problem of left wing violent extremism insofar as it comes from their own side.
00:07:55.540They just they're absolved from having to police their co-patriots, compatriots, rather, in part because of these the permission structure that exists with the creation of these databases.
00:08:06.260You mentioned Islamist terrorism, which is interesting, in part because one of the points that is made by those who contend that the right is especially violent, only to make the point that the left is not, is that they claim that the body count from the right is especially large and that left-wing violent extremists, which is true, tend to focus on property destruction.
00:08:26.700That is a feature of anarchistic violent extremism, which is the term of art that the FBI uses to describe most, but not all, left-wing violent extremism.
00:08:35.580Right-wing violent extremism falls into sovereign citizen and militia movements, racial and ethnic violence, etc.
00:08:41.020But anarchistic violent extremism is the term of art for the FBI that captures a lot of violent left-wing extremist tendencies.0.63
00:08:48.620And yeah, I would contend with the Islamist stuff.
00:08:51.660one of the features of Islamist radical terrorism that one sociologist that I quote describes is
00:08:59.440not destitution, poverty, oppression. It is an engineering degree. There is a level of
00:09:06.360sophistication and education and prosperity that those who practice political violence
00:09:14.360are born into or fall into. And it makes sense. You would think if somebody perceives themselves
00:09:21.040to be the instrument of history, you would think they would be marginally familiar with other
00:09:25.000similar movements from history, which requires a certain level of education. And this is applicable
00:09:29.460to the left-wing violence that we experienced if you look at the third attempt on Donald Trump's
00:09:34.460life at the correspondence dinner in April. A lot of people were very confused by the perpetrator.
00:09:40.640He's erudite. He's well-educated. He's relatively prosperous. He says all the stuff on Blue Sky
00:10:15.580I bet you Nora O'Donnell encounters it on a semi-regular basis, and she perceives it as entertainment, certainly not the sort of thing that would encourage murderous violence.
00:10:28.040I mean, that's the sort of thing that I'm attempting to confront here.
00:10:30.740Do you think that there are, because you talked about, I think the term you used is permission structure.
00:10:35.780Let me see if I can take that term, if I understand what you mean, and kind of link it to a distinction that I draw between two ethical systems in my own writings, between deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics.
00:10:51.200You may know the meaning, but some of our viewers and listeners may not, so let me just briefly mention what it is.
00:10:56.860Deontological ethics are absolute statements.
00:10:59.620So if I say it is never okay to lie, that would be a deontological statement.
00:11:03.520If I say it is okay to lie if I wish to spare someone's feelings, then that would be a
00:11:16.240But there are certain principles that are sort of the foundational bedrock of a society
00:11:21.000that by definition have to be deontological.
00:11:23.960Now, my intuition, maybe more than intuition, I think there's certainly evidence that suggests
00:11:31.200that maybe the left is more consequentialist when it comes to justifying the causes of their
00:11:40.140political violence. I mean, yes, murder is wrong. But when it comes to this particular guy, when it
00:11:46.240comes to Donald Trump, and we recognize that he is an existential threat, then is it really wrong
00:11:50.740to take him out? And now, so is my statement true that the left is more likely to use a
00:11:58.480consequentialist ethics, or do both camps exactly use the same justification mechanisms to say why
00:12:05.280what they're doing is noble and just? That's a very interesting question, and the premise
00:12:10.380is hard for me to get my hands around, in part because I think their thinking shifts
00:12:16.600depending on the outcome that they're seeking, to suggest that they have a consistent philosophical
00:12:24.520approach to the application of violence so that it begets certain political outcomes.
00:12:29.180I just don't see it. I see it shifting consistently in the minds of those who are
00:12:32.980inclined towards violence. It's not in two points. One, and it's not in my book. It's in
00:12:38.740Jason Burke's book, a recent book on the revolutionists, which tracks outside the
00:12:43.200United States, the evolution of militant left-wing extremists in the 20th century gravitating around
00:12:50.040the orbit of communist Cuba, towards pan-Islamic, pan-Arab, rather, socialism, as practiced by
00:12:57.600Ba'athist parties in Syria and Iraq, to straight-up Islamists after the revolution in Iran,
00:13:03.960which incorporated many Marxian elements into it. There's still a cult of Che Guevara inside Iran
00:13:08.580today. And the people who gravitated towards that were inclined towards violence. Their ideology
00:13:13.880shifted. They wanted to bring about the revolution. And whatever the instrument to bring about the
00:13:18.780revolution happened to be at the moment, that was what they gravitated towards.
00:13:22.600So when it comes to modern incarnations of political violence from the left in this country
00:13:28.120in the 1910s, 1920s, 70s, and 80s, and today, I do see some through lines that suggest a
00:13:34.780consequentialist approach to this sort of thing. One is propaganda of the deed. We might call it
00:13:40.540direct action today, which is the perception among those who practice political violence
00:13:46.320that every one of us hates the system we're in as much as they do.
00:13:50.600We just don't have license to lash out against it.
00:13:54.120So one galvanizing act of bloodshed or property destruction,
00:13:58.640something really destructive and menacing,
00:14:00.840is enough to wake us all up out of our stupor
00:14:03.520and convince us to join them at the ramparts, as we would,
00:14:07.600but we just don't have the permission to do so
00:14:09.460until we can demonstrate that the god bleeds.
00:14:12.140Another is the notion that systemic oppression,
00:14:15.240as subjectively defined, licenses extra legal violence. So they perceive themselves to be
00:14:22.300subject to oppressive forces, structural or otherwise. Therefore, every manner of extra
00:14:29.300legal remedy is permitted in order to address that sort of situation. And they seek out historical
00:14:36.220parallels that would justify this sort of thing. But it all seems to me to be utilitarian and
00:14:42.200pragmatic in the worst possible way, just the pursuit of the nearest weapon to hand,
00:14:48.280to justify a pre-existing predilection towards violence. By the way, in your last part of your
00:14:55.120response where you said we use systemic oppression as a justification for committing political
00:15:02.620violence, that exact mindset also explains not necessarily political violence, but just criminal
00:15:10.820behavior as i explained in my own recent book in suicidal empathy i actually refer
00:15:15.540uh to felons that are of that genre as blank slate felons because the blank slate when you
00:15:23.940study the human mind or tabula rasa is the idea that we are all born with empty minds and it is
00:15:30.100only the vagaries of the socialization that we're exposed to and the environmental cues that we are
00:15:36.180exposed to that then shape our life trajectories. So then if I am a black man who is born in the
00:15:43.120United States in a deeply white supremacist society where there is a daily genocide of0.95
00:15:50.120black men by the racist cops, then it certainly doesn't make sense for you to existentially0.98
00:15:56.480punish me twice. I'm already punished by the fact that I'm born in a white supremacist society.0.99
00:16:02.260So surely you could be suicidally empathetic in granting me a second chance. And by second chance, I mean 194th chance because you've been previously arrested. So that mindset of using some external cue to justify why I'm going to do what I'm going to do applies to political violence and just just basically.
00:16:26.260Exactly. Yeah. You and I engaged in some overlapping thinking there, because in chapter six, I described the sort of the phenomenon of irrational empathy that you devoted an entire book.
00:16:36.460I actually, sorry, before you go on, I was going to say my ears perked up when I read the chapter titled Radical Empathy. So please tell us about that.
00:16:44.760Yeah, well, it is essentially the tendency that you just described, which is to invert the roles of victim and victimizer and to create an elaborate structure, a framework to justify what is essentially a moral inversion.
00:16:57.780And one of the manifestations of that, I described the manifestations of it, one of them was the Progressive Prosecutor Project, which is still with us, although it's on the downswing, which is essentially a prescription against prosecuting crime, even including violent crime, anti-property crime and physical crime.
00:17:14.760based on the presumption that the perpetrator of that crime is already himself a victim and the
00:17:20.840other side of that coin is to see those who commit acts of self-defense as defined by a jury
00:17:29.240and say that that's vigilantism usually based on the race of the person who is accused of having
00:17:35.640engaged in criminal acts that a jury later subsequently determines have been self-defense
00:17:40.040And all of it arises from this assumption on the part of the radicals who give permission to violent elements on their side of the aisle, that the justice system is itself inherently corrupt.
00:17:55.340It cannot mete out dispassionate verdicts that comport with their conception of justice, cosmic justice, karmic justice.
00:18:05.320Therefore, the whole enterprise is a sordid affair, but the enterprise being the United
00:18:10.540States and the social covenant in which we live in.0.98
00:18:14.360Justice is not only blind, it is deaf and dumb.0.87
00:18:18.940It cannot navigate this environment because it doesn't take into account historical inequities,0.94
00:18:24.720subjective assessments of relative levels of oppression, group dynamics.
00:18:29.360They see individuals as avatars of a particular tribe and therefore strip them of individuality and individual agency.
00:18:37.660And when the individuals have no agency, they're just, you know, rudderless, moralist, you know, things afloat on a sea that is bandying them about.
00:18:46.960They have no control over their environments.
00:18:58.820It's a waypoint on the pathway to a radical mindset.
00:19:03.680Well, so in this book, as I mentioned in the introduction, you know, you're comparing the original Puritans with the new Puritans.
00:19:11.900And so let me draw another one of these kind of historical comparisons, speaking to the point that you just made.
00:19:19.280so in sharia law and this i actually talk about in this book in the person of mine
00:19:24.160in sharia law by definition the punishment that is meted to for a crime depends on the
00:19:33.820identity of the victim and the perpetrator and so what i discuss in the book is that the progressive
00:19:41.440justice ethos exactly follows the same principle right in sharia law i mean it's literally codified
00:19:49.260And I actually quote all of the relevant passages.
00:19:52.860Jewish man kills a Muslim man is not the same punishment as Muslim man kills a Jewish man.0.86
00:19:59.780Now, in that case, it's because of your religious, you know, which group you belong to.0.95
00:20:05.420But progressives do the exact same template, except that they use different ways by which
00:20:11.640we assort how severe the punishment is.0.55
00:20:14.740So isn't it extraordinary that there is a political party in the United States that says, screw American jurisprudence and lady justice being blind, let's instead implement and copy the model of Sharia law as we implement justice in the United States. It's extraordinary to me.0.66
00:20:36.400Yeah, the thinking is just generally hostile to the Enlightenment, to the ideals of the Enlightenment, especially that an individual should be judged as an individual and based on their own individual actions rather than inherit the sins of their father or their tribe or what have you.
00:20:52.640That was a revolution in human thinking. And it's offensive on an evolutionary level to the human mind, which evolved to be tribal and to be covetous of tribal advantages and hostile to outsiders.
00:21:08.300This is something that we rebel against in our own minds in order to maintain the enlightened social covenant.
00:21:15.220And you see this in the revolutionary tradition in every revolution since the American Revolution.
00:21:20.780It stems from the French Revolution, and I describe that in Chapter 2, which is subsequently adopted by the Soviets and the Bolsheviks in the 1917 push, who embraced terror as an instrument of revolutionary fervor.
00:21:36.140And as Paul Johnson in modern times, his masterful work describes, the Bolshevik revolution quickly descended into a terror, even though some of the Bolsheviks themselves were very, you know, leery of being compared to the excesses of the Rose Pierre's Revolutionary Committee on Safety.
00:21:57.060And they adopted a sort of terror that was group-based very quickly, perceiving individuals to be representatives of class and tribe. Certain professions were to be expunged, sometimes violently.
00:22:11.640And it wasn't just criminal classes like prostitutes, for example, or people who were just vagrants or louts or flouting their responsibilities to build the revolution.
00:22:21.560It was people from various professions and classes that have been regarded with stereotypical hostility by the Russian mind for centuries.
00:22:30.240They just adopted some various Russian cultural traits, negative cultural traits, and it lacquered onto it a revolutionary ethos that made it part of the pursuit of the grand political project.
00:22:45.360It was just a rationalization that led them to the violent remedy that they were already inclined towards.
00:22:50.920And much of it stems from this descent back into atavistic human tendencies towards tribalism and the protection of the tribe against outside tribes.
00:23:02.240Yeah, well, I love the fact that you invoked an evolutionary mechanism, because as you may or may not know, my scientific work is in applying evolutionary psychology to study human behavior in general, consumer and economic behavior in particular.
00:23:15.680And I often tell the story that there is no ends to which the human mind can construct
00:23:22.500the alienation between in-group and out-group members.
00:23:25.940And the classic example I love to give is that in my home city of Montreal, there is
00:23:30.600a neighborhood that historically has been largely populated by, you know, ultra-orthodox