The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Noah Rothman, ＂Blood & Progress - A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America＂ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1007)

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00:01:05.740 Hi, everybody. This is Scott Saad. After a bit of a break from doing some sad truths,

00:01:11.500 because I was on my own book tour today, I have Noah Rothman, who's got his own book to discuss.

00:01:19.780 this beauty right here blood and progress a discussion of left-wing violence before i see

00:01:27.180 the floor to you let me just uh briefly mention who you are you're a senior writer with national

00:01:31.960 review and you're the author of three books including this one right here which i read last

00:01:38.000 year uh while i was in bermuda with my family so that that's a big accomplishment to take me away

00:01:45.400 both from the beach and from my family

00:01:48.100 in choosing to read your book, Noah.

00:01:50.340 And then the other book that you have,

00:01:52.180 I think it was maybe the first one,

00:01:54.120 Unjust, Social Justice and the Unmaking of America

00:01:58.100 and the Rise. 0.69

00:01:59.420 Yeah, that's it.

00:02:00.700 Anything else you want to add before we get moving?

00:02:03.420 No, that's great.

00:02:04.260 And I apologize for ruining your vacation

00:02:06.280 or at least interrupting it,

00:02:07.500 but I appreciate the read.

00:02:08.940 No, it's a great book.

00:02:09.940 For those of you who don't know,

00:02:11.180 I mean, we're going to get to this book in a second.

00:02:13.860 But for those of you who don't know,

00:02:15.240 this is a book where noah is comparing the current new puritans of the sort of the woke movement

00:02:21.940 to the original puritans great historical analysis but let's oh can i just mention one

00:02:28.000 more thing before we get going uh this is from this book i hear that the author is a astoundingly

00:02:34.900 brilliant and handsome guy page 102 you ready sure in the words of the political commentator

00:02:43.500 noah rothman quote the ban list is forever expanding and yet the scale of the problem

00:02:48.800 environmentalists claim to want to confront never seems to shrink in scope it too is always growing

00:02:55.540 which leads skeptical observers to wonder whether restricting consumers access to life's small

00:03:01.460 pleasures is a remedy to a problem or an end in itself fantastic quote it's immortalized in this

00:03:08.600 book. All right. I'm flattered. Let's get down to this. Give us the big synopsis and then we can

00:03:14.260 drill down. Yeah, sure. So this book emerged from my frustration with a tendency I think we've all

00:03:19.700 encountered, which is to hear from every source in America, every political authority, every

00:03:25.260 institution, that the right is especially violent, if not uniquely violent, uniquely murderous. And

00:03:32.380 we hear that all the time. We hear it after an attempted or successful assassination of a right

00:03:36.480 wing figure. We hear it after an assault on an ICE or CBP facility, armed assault. We hear it

00:03:42.120 after a mob lays siege to local police, attacks, even renders them bloody, or sometimes even kills

00:03:48.480 them. So you have to wonder when we hear this so often, why we are not confronting the evidence of

00:03:54.280 our own eyes. And so I do. And if you look at this current wave of political violence from the left,

00:04:00.900 it looks a lot like historical waves of left wing violence in this country in the 1910s, 1920s,

00:04:06.140 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and today. And what I argue in this book is this is not an obscure history.

00:04:11.820 It is a suppressed history. And it is suppressed by data sets that purport to claim that the

00:04:16.760 American right is especially violent. You go into those data sets, and they don't describe

00:04:20.780 political violence as we understand political violence. It describes gang violence, inter-family

00:04:26.320 violence, prison violence, sometimes to inflate these figures. And that's just not what people

00:04:31.060 think of when they think of political violence. I liken it to these anti-gun groups that'll say,

00:04:35.860 well, there's been 70 school shootings this year. And you say to yourself, I don't remember 70

00:04:39.740 school shootings. And what they mean is a firearm was discharged adjacent to a school property.

00:04:45.200 And that's just not what people think. But this data is used to inflate the data set in order to

00:04:50.720 create the conclusion that it's the people who compile them want you to believe, especially

00:04:55.620 in particular, that the right is uniquely violent. And a document that I regard as a smoking gun

00:05:01.480 It 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.

00:05:26.960 with people who are associated with the movements they are describing and attempting to study.

00:05:33.080 So the whole enterprise is fatally subjective.

00:05:36.060 And so I look at it with a subjective lens,

00:05:38.240 and I try to get into the heads of the people who are so deluded in their thinking

00:05:41.700 that they believe that violence will beget positive social change.

00:05:45.560 Their thinking and the audience for political violence,

00:05:48.800 and there's always an audience for political violence,

00:05:51.380 are two factors that are contributing to this worsening condition in this country.

00:05:54.980 And 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.

00:06:06.480 So 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.

00:06:13.320 Well, we're not understanding it because we don't want to understand it.

00:06:15.980 And I hope Blood in Progress clarifies the thinking of policymakers or at least its readers.

00:06:20.220 So 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?

00:06:42.980 Is that where the bias is coming from? And before you answer, I did a very quick cursory, you know, search of the literature.

00:06:51.540 And 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.

00:07:02.820 I 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.

00:07:09.340 Now, 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.

00:07:18.760 So is it the academics that are the originators of that bias?

00:07:23.680 There's academics that contribute to it.

00:07:25.760 I focus on one project via the University of Cincinnati that is an offender in this regard.

00:07:31.940 The ADL is another that has its own database.

00:07:34.720 There are a variety of databases that purport to conclude and lead readers to the conclusion that the right is especially uniquely violent.

00:07:43.000 And 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.

00:07:55.540 They 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.

00:08:06.260 You 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.

00:08:26.700 That 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.

00:08:35.580 Right-wing violent extremism falls into sovereign citizen and militia movements, racial and ethnic violence, etc.

00:08:41.020 But anarchistic violent extremism is the term of art for the FBI that captures a lot of violent left-wing extremist tendencies. 0.63

00:08:48.620 And yeah, I would contend with the Islamist stuff.

00:08:51.660 one of the features of Islamist radical terrorism that one sociologist that I quote describes is

00:08:59.440 not destitution, poverty, oppression. It is an engineering degree. There is a level of

00:09:06.360 sophistication and education and prosperity that those who practice political violence

00:09:14.360 are born into or fall into. And it makes sense. You would think if somebody perceives themselves

00:09:21.040 to be the instrument of history, you would think they would be marginally familiar with other

00:09:25.000 similar movements from history, which requires a certain level of education. And this is applicable

00:09:29.460 to the left-wing violence that we experienced if you look at the third attempt on Donald Trump's

00:09:34.460 life at the correspondence dinner in April. A lot of people were very confused by the perpetrator.

00:09:40.640 He's erudite. He's well-educated. He's relatively prosperous. He says all the stuff on Blue Sky

00:09:46.580 that we encounter on a daily basis.

00:09:48.500 Nora O'Donnell, CBS News, 0.98

00:09:50.440 confronted the president with the ramblings of the madman 0.99

00:09:52.860 who would have killed him if he could. 0.99

00:09:54.960 And in an earlier age,

00:09:56.320 his actions would have retroactively discredited

00:09:59.020 everything he'd written, but not to Nora O'Donnell.

00:10:01.880 Why? 0.94

00:10:02.600 Because the notion that Donald Trump is a pedophile, 1.00

00:10:05.840 a traitor, a villain, a criminal, 1.00

00:10:07.980 all the stuff that this would-be killer just said 0.91

00:10:10.300 of the president is currency on forums like Blue Sky.

00:10:14.440 They encounter it every day.

00:10:15.580 I 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.

00:10:25.140 So, Mr. President, explain.

00:10:26.800 Is he wrong?

00:10:28.040 I mean, that's the sort of thing that I'm attempting to confront here.

00:10:30.740 Do you think that there are, because you talked about, I think the term you used is permission structure.

00:10:35.780 Let 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.

00:10:51.200 You may know the meaning, but some of our viewers and listeners may not, so let me just briefly mention what it is.

00:10:56.860 Deontological ethics are absolute statements.

00:10:59.620 So if I say it is never okay to lie, that would be a deontological statement.

00:11:03.520 If I say it is okay to lie if I wish to spare someone's feelings, then that would be a

00:11:08.420 consequentialist statement.

00:11:09.700 Now, for many, many things that we do in our daily lives, it makes perfect sense for us

00:11:14.960 to be consequentialist.

00:11:16.240 But there are certain principles that are sort of the foundational bedrock of a society

00:11:21.000 that by definition have to be deontological.

00:11:23.960 Now, my intuition, maybe more than intuition, I think there's certainly evidence that suggests

00:11:31.200 that maybe the left is more consequentialist when it comes to justifying the causes of their

00:11:40.140 political violence. I mean, yes, murder is wrong. But when it comes to this particular guy, when it

00:11:46.240 comes to Donald Trump, and we recognize that he is an existential threat, then is it really wrong

00:11:50.740 to take him out? And now, so is my statement true that the left is more likely to use a

00:11:58.480 consequentialist ethics, or do both camps exactly use the same justification mechanisms to say why

00:12:05.280 what they're doing is noble and just? That's a very interesting question, and the premise

00:12:10.380 is hard for me to get my hands around, in part because I think their thinking shifts

00:12:16.600 depending on the outcome that they're seeking, to suggest that they have a consistent philosophical

00:12:24.520 approach to the application of violence so that it begets certain political outcomes.

00:12:29.180 I just don't see it. I see it shifting consistently in the minds of those who are

00:12:32.980 inclined towards violence. It's not in two points. One, and it's not in my book. It's in

00:12:38.740 Jason Burke's book, a recent book on the revolutionists, which tracks outside the

00:12:43.200 United States, the evolution of militant left-wing extremists in the 20th century gravitating around

00:12:50.040 the orbit of communist Cuba, towards pan-Islamic, pan-Arab, rather, socialism, as practiced by

00:12:57.600 Ba'athist parties in Syria and Iraq, to straight-up Islamists after the revolution in Iran,

00:13:03.960 which incorporated many Marxian elements into it. There's still a cult of Che Guevara inside Iran

00:13:08.580 today. And the people who gravitated towards that were inclined towards violence. Their ideology

00:13:13.880 shifted. They wanted to bring about the revolution. And whatever the instrument to bring about the

00:13:18.780 revolution happened to be at the moment, that was what they gravitated towards.

00:13:22.600 So when it comes to modern incarnations of political violence from the left in this country

00:13:28.120 in the 1910s, 1920s, 70s, and 80s, and today, I do see some through lines that suggest a

00:13:34.780 consequentialist approach to this sort of thing. One is propaganda of the deed. We might call it

00:13:40.540 direct action today, which is the perception among those who practice political violence

00:13:46.320 that every one of us hates the system we're in as much as they do.

00:13:50.600 We just don't have license to lash out against it.

00:13:54.120 So one galvanizing act of bloodshed or property destruction,

00:13:58.640 something really destructive and menacing,

00:14:00.840 is enough to wake us all up out of our stupor

00:14:03.520 and convince us to join them at the ramparts, as we would,

00:14:07.600 but we just don't have the permission to do so

00:14:09.460 until we can demonstrate that the god bleeds.

00:14:12.140 Another is the notion that systemic oppression,

00:14:15.240 as subjectively defined, licenses extra legal violence. So they perceive themselves to be

00:14:22.300 subject to oppressive forces, structural or otherwise. Therefore, every manner of extra

00:14:29.300 legal remedy is permitted in order to address that sort of situation. And they seek out historical

00:14:36.220 parallels that would justify this sort of thing. But it all seems to me to be utilitarian and

00:14:42.200 pragmatic in the worst possible way, just the pursuit of the nearest weapon to hand,

00:14:48.280 to justify a pre-existing predilection towards violence. By the way, in your last part of your

00:14:55.120 response where you said we use systemic oppression as a justification for committing political

00:15:02.620 violence, that exact mindset also explains not necessarily political violence, but just criminal

00:15:10.820 behavior as i explained in my own recent book in suicidal empathy i actually refer

00:15:15.540 uh to felons that are of that genre as blank slate felons because the blank slate when you

00:15:23.940 study the human mind or tabula rasa is the idea that we are all born with empty minds and it is

00:15:30.100 only the vagaries of the socialization that we're exposed to and the environmental cues that we are

00:15:36.180 exposed to that then shape our life trajectories. So then if I am a black man who is born in the

00:15:43.120 United States in a deeply white supremacist society where there is a daily genocide of 0.95

00:15:50.120 black men by the racist cops, then it certainly doesn't make sense for you to existentially 0.98

00:15:56.480 punish me twice. I'm already punished by the fact that I'm born in a white supremacist society. 0.99

00:16:02.260 So 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.

00:16:26.260 Exactly. 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.

00:16:36.460 I 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.

00:16:44.760 Yeah, 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.

00:16:57.780 And 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.

00:17:14.760 based on the presumption that the perpetrator of that crime is already himself a victim and the

00:17:20.840 other side of that coin is to see those who commit acts of self-defense as defined by a jury

00:17:29.240 and say that that's vigilantism usually based on the race of the person who is accused of having

00:17:35.640 engaged in criminal acts that a jury later subsequently determines have been self-defense

00:17:40.040 And 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.

00:17:52.740 It cannot adjudicate conflict.

00:17:55.340 It cannot mete out dispassionate verdicts that comport with their conception of justice, cosmic justice, karmic justice.

00:18:05.320 Therefore, the whole enterprise is a sordid affair, but the enterprise being the United

00:18:10.540 States and the social covenant in which we live in. 0.98

00:18:14.360 Justice is not only blind, it is deaf and dumb. 0.87

00:18:18.940 It cannot navigate this environment because it doesn't take into account historical inequities, 0.94

00:18:24.720 subjective assessments of relative levels of oppression, group dynamics.

00:18:29.360 They see individuals as avatars of a particular tribe and therefore strip them of individuality and individual agency.

00:18:37.660 And 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.

00:18:46.960 They have no control over their environments.

00:18:48.780 They're victims.

00:18:49.500 They've been victimized by their environments.

00:18:50.860 And it's up to us to dispense a measure of justice that the United States justice system simply cannot.

00:18:56.960 Yeah.

00:18:57.240 That's a road to radicalization.

00:18:58.820 It's a waypoint on the pathway to a radical mindset.

00:19:03.680 Well, so in this book, as I mentioned in the introduction, you know, you're comparing the original Puritans with the new Puritans.

00:19:11.900 And so let me draw another one of these kind of historical comparisons, speaking to the point that you just made.

00:19:19.280 so in sharia law and this i actually talk about in this book in the person of mine

00:19:24.160 in sharia law by definition the punishment that is meted to for a crime depends on the

00:19:33.820 identity of the victim and the perpetrator and so what i discuss in the book is that the progressive

00:19:41.440 justice ethos exactly follows the same principle right in sharia law i mean it's literally codified

00:19:49.260 And I actually quote all of the relevant passages.

00:19:52.860 Jewish man kills a Muslim man is not the same punishment as Muslim man kills a Jewish man. 0.86

00:19:59.780 Now, in that case, it's because of your religious, you know, which group you belong to. 0.95

00:20:05.420 But progressives do the exact same template, except that they use different ways by which

00:20:11.640 we assort how severe the punishment is. 0.55

00:20:14.740 So 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

00:20:36.400 Yeah, 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.

00:20:52.640 That 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.

00:21:08.300 This is something that we rebel against in our own minds in order to maintain the enlightened social covenant.

00:21:15.220 And you see this in the revolutionary tradition in every revolution since the American Revolution.

00:21:20.780 It 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.

00:21:36.140 And 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.

00:21:57.060 And 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.

00:22:11.640 And 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.

00:22:21.560 It was people from various professions and classes that have been regarded with stereotypical hostility by the Russian mind for centuries.

00:22:30.240 They 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.

00:22:43.720 But it was just tribalism. 0.89

00:22:45.360 It was just a rationalization that led them to the violent remedy that they were already inclined towards.

00:22:50.920 And much of it stems from this descent back into atavistic human tendencies towards tribalism and the protection of the tribe against outside tribes.

00:23:02.240 Yeah, 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.

00:23:15.680 And I often tell the story that there is no ends to which the human mind can construct

00:23:22.500 the alienation between in-group and out-group members.

00:23:25.940 And the classic example I love to give is that in my home city of Montreal, there is

00:23:30.600 a neighborhood that historically has been largely populated by, you know, ultra-orthodox

00:23:37.760 Hasidic folks, right?

00:23:39.880 But there are two camps within that ultra-orthodox.

00:23:44.200 there's sort of the polish background ones i can't remember their the names of the different

00:23:48.660 sects that sort of wear their pants regularly and then there's the hungarian sect that wear

00:23:53.440 the sort of the white white socks and the pants go in i think satmore or i can't remember the exact

00:23:59.100 name right now with so these are two groups of you know ishkenazi jews ultra orthodox hasidic jews 0.60

00:24:09.120 So you'd think, boy, they're one of the same.

00:24:11.680 But within those two camps, the guys that are on the left side of the street say, I 0.99

00:24:19.340 would never catch my daughter with one of the assholes on the other side of the street. 0.97

00:24:24.040 So even within such a rarefied group of folks that should have everything in common, I could 0.99

00:24:29.800 still come up with ways to argue that it's us versus them, to your point.

00:24:33.820 The narcissism of small differences. 1.00

00:24:35.440 Like, I can't tell the difference between a Hutu and a Tutsi. 1.00

00:24:37.660 and they can't tell the difference between a New Jersey and a Long Islander, but I sure can. 1.00

00:24:43.060 Exactly. Now, another title of a chapter in your book also perked my ears up. I think it's titled

00:24:50.320 Contagion. Now, I have to, just to be open, I haven't yet had the chance to read the book. I

00:24:58.440 sort of very quickly flipped through it, so I don't know what's in that chapter, but the title

00:25:02.820 appealed to me because, of course, I use a pathogenic framework to explain how people can

00:25:08.800 be parasitized by bad ideas, hence the parasitic mind and suicidal empathy. I compare people who

00:25:14.560 are suicidally empathetic to wood crickets. Wood crickets are parasitized by a hairworm that causes

00:25:20.760 them to commit suicide. So how are you using the term contagion within the framework of your own

00:25:27.200 analysis yeah so blood in progress um is based on an essay that was in commentary the cover of

00:25:32.860 commentary in february of 2025 um right after the assassination of brian thompson it was written

00:25:38.640 the united healthcare ceo by luigi mandrioni who has since been beatified he does have beautiful

00:25:43.760 abs he does have beautiful abs you gotta give it to the guy i mean you know an act of human

00:25:48.400 sacrifice notwithstanding he's got a physique uh nevertheless it that essay elided deliberately

00:25:55.140 and acknowledged right-wing violent episodes,

00:25:58.740 which the left, the politically violent left,

00:26:01.900 takes inspiration from,

00:26:03.120 resolves to mete out vengeance against.

00:26:05.520 And to write this book honestly,

00:26:07.040 as I say in the introduction,

00:26:08.500 I cannot engage in a similar elision.

00:26:11.440 And the final chapter, Contagion,

00:26:14.400 describes the ways in which I identify

00:26:17.280 disturbing similarities with the way 1.00

00:26:20.760 in which those who are inclined

00:26:21.960 towards right-wing extremism

00:26:23.380 are exhibiting not the sort of symptoms that we would typically associate with violent right-wing

00:26:27.660 extremism, which is militia movements, sovereign citizen movements, abortion bombings, the sort of

00:26:32.300 stuff we experienced in the 80s and 90s. There's an evolution taking place in which those who are

00:26:37.880 inclined towards violent political extremism are just melding into one undifferentiated mass and

00:26:43.660 adopting their own very similar tactics. So you've seen the American right, for example,

00:26:49.100 endorse the notion that the state is on the side of their adversaries. This is very common

00:26:54.140 among those who are inclined towards political violence. They perceive the state to be aligned

00:26:58.460 with their adversaries, whatever side of the aisle they happen to be on. They have adopted a

00:27:02.760 martyrology around, for example, Ashley Babbitt, who was killed during the January 6th riots,

00:27:08.120 trying to enter a speaker's lobby. It's been retroactively determined that she was the victim

00:27:13.800 in that process, not the perpetrator. The pardons for January 6th under Donald Trump engaged in the

00:27:19.940 same failure of cognition that Joe Biden engaged in when he pardoned an entire mass of people

00:27:26.660 in a category. The category that Joe Biden pardoned was nonviolent drug offenders.

00:27:31.420 Well, it turns out that if you investigate the actual individuals in that category and treat

00:27:35.160 individuals as individuals, as the Enlightenment prescribes, you would find out that a lot of those

00:27:40.300 people were violent. They just had their violence expunged from their records through plea deals,

00:27:44.860 fictions, court fictions. So the result, he pardoned a lot of very violent people. Donald

00:27:49.700 Trump did the very same thing when he pardoned an entire category of people. And lastly, tactics.

00:27:54.860 The right has begun adopting tactics that were anathema to the right in a generation,

00:27:59.200 a generation ago. Mobs, affinity groups, which was something that the left had adopted and was

00:28:04.680 adopted by those who practiced and prepared for violence in advance of the 2018 riots in

00:28:14.120 Charlottesville, Virginia. Shock forces akin to black bloc tactics. Again, black bloc tactics were 0.58

00:28:20.060 very exclusive to the far left in this country, no longer. And they're talking themselves into 0.99

00:28:25.580 the notion that the system is inherently broken, that even smart, rational people who just work

00:28:32.320 themselves up into the notion that the banalities of constitutional government constitute systemic

00:28:37.120 oppression. And systemic oppression licenses extra legal violence. All of this stuff was

00:28:42.400 once very exclusive to the American left. And it's now migrating its way over to the extremes

00:28:47.960 on the far right, enabled, by the way, by the internet and social media in ways that were

00:28:53.260 previously unimaginable. So hopefully the reader, and this is a book for the right, because I want

00:28:58.880 to arm you this is not a book about the right this is a book about the left and i want to arm

00:29:02.140 readers of blood and progress with example after example gratuitous levels of evidence to demonstrate

00:29:07.480 that we are in the midst of a left wing a wave of left-wing violence akin to similar waves of

00:29:12.680 left-wing violence that you've probably never heard about because they're deliberately forgotten

00:29:16.080 their memory hold they don't want you to have the institutional memory the generational memory

00:29:21.060 necessary to have immunity against some of this stuff that's the most important part of this

00:29:25.760 project. But at the very end, after you presumably you've agreed with me for seven chapters, I want

00:29:30.860 to hold up a mirror and look at the unlovely reflection in it so that we can begin to address

00:29:36.040 the problems on our own side and therefore get our hands around the entire problem. Because just as

00:29:41.040 the left only looks at the right, the right cannot only look at the left. Well, that's to have self

00:29:46.840 insight is a very rare quality for most people. So I commend you for that. Maybe we could spend a

00:29:52.260 few minutes talking about the process by which you write. And I ask this because often when I

00:30:00.280 have authors, I want to understand whether their creative process is different from mine, from

00:30:06.500 others. And also because many times I have a lot of aspiring authors who are listening and watching

00:30:13.160 this show. So walk us through the typical means by which, okay, I have an idea. I've now signed

00:30:20.040 the book deal with whomever. And now I opened the laptop for the first time ever. What's your

00:30:25.180 process? So this book is bound up in bloodshed, sadly, to the point that I fear for my eternal

00:30:32.280 soul because I am selling a product on the back of real horrible violence. But I sold the book

00:30:38.940 idea after I wrote the essay for commentary in 2025 in February. And I thought that it would

00:30:44.360 have some interest in a treatment. So I wrote up a treatment. And I got approached by a literary

00:30:49.400 agency to sell it. And it was a tough sell for a while. There were not a lot of takers on the

00:30:57.500 idea. You know, one publisher said, well, why don't you just write a book about the 20s? I don't want

00:31:01.660 to write a book about the 20s. I want to write about political violence with which we're all

00:31:04.740 surrounded. One publisher picked it up, but they did so after Sarah Milgram and Yasha Lahren were

00:31:11.380 killed outside a Jewish event by a textbook case, Elias Rodriguez, who is a Marxist guerrilla. He

00:31:20.340 was infatuated with revolutionary Marxism and gravitated towards the Palestinian cause after

00:31:26.100 October 7th, as so many who are inclined towards radicalism for its own sake did. So I sold the

00:31:32.480 book on the back of those murders. And then Charlie Kirk was killed. This book was supposed

00:31:37.120 to come out in October of this year. We moved up the publication date after Charlie Kirk was murdered

00:31:42.160 because the problem was so acute, because we were beset by a phenomenon in which violent left-wing

00:31:48.860 radicals were murdering their opponents in the streets. So the process of writing the book was

00:31:55.300 truncated and sped up a little bit. But actually physically writing it, I have been writing this

00:32:02.100 book basically for 10 years. I've been chronicling political violence and our descent into it with

00:32:07.940 real, you know, trepidation over the course of a decade. So I had had a lot of the research

00:32:13.100 already prepared, but I had to research the historical period. So I spent the first two

00:32:17.480 months reading book after book after book about these historical periods and the authors whose

00:32:21.680 pretty recent scholarship, by recent, I mean, basically the century, because we're talking

00:32:26.120 about 100 and 125 years ago. And all of the researchers into these periods, the anarchism,

00:32:31.780 violence of the 20s and 10s, the nationalist movements of the 1940s and 50s, the Marxist

00:32:38.560 guerrilla movements of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. All of their scholars describe these moments as

00:32:42.920 forgotten and these periods as forgotten. And they're right. They were forgotten. But why were 1.00

00:32:48.100 they forgotten? So I did a lot of reading for the first two months. And then I just drafted the book

00:32:53.160 pretty much. The first draft was about a three-month period because it had to be very quick

00:32:57.800 in order to get the book to market.

00:32:59.740 The editing process took a little bit longer,

00:33:02.220 probably read the thing 800 times.

00:33:04.320 And it wasn't until I did the audio book

00:33:05.760 that I realized there was so many typos in it.

00:33:09.580 But we managed to get to them at the very end.

00:33:11.940 But it was a truncated process.

00:33:13.280 It was quick.

00:33:14.080 We got the contract in June

00:33:15.520 and submitted the manuscript finally in January of this year.

00:33:17.860 Do you, notwithstanding the sort of sped up timeline

00:33:21.620 in this particular case, are you the type of author?

00:33:24.700 And when I ask the question, I'll first answer it for myself.

00:33:28.300 Are you the type of author that once you are focused on a book project, you go off into

00:33:34.760 the proverbial cave to never come out until you're triumphantly with that book?

00:33:39.820 And I'm going to answer and then you can take the floor.

00:33:44.240 I'm very much like that, whereby, I mean, it's not as though I ignore my family and

00:33:48.380 my other responsibilities, but I'm so consumed with a desperate need to be creative and write

00:33:54.680 everything that that has been brewing in my mind that you know I sort of wake up you remember the

00:33:59.940 old you know time to make the donuts you sort of just get up and you just can't help but just walk

00:34:05.280 as a robot to your you know workstation I'm very much like that and I actually go through a bit of

00:34:11.160 a postpartum depression akin to how a woman would when she gives birth and that once I finish this

00:34:18.380 all-consuming project and now i wake up and there isn't a north star that i'm going to go to to sit

00:34:25.180 and write the book i feel kind of empty what the hell am i supposed to do with myself do you have

00:34:29.840 a similar reality walk us through that i have experienced that so postpartum is a good way to

00:34:35.660 describe it because you are you know you're giving life to this thing and then it's off on its own

00:34:40.120 and you know it has an organic life on its own and there's nothing you can do for it so that

00:34:44.520 that metaphor works for me. Um, so I don't take book leave. Uh, I stay, I'm on board full-time

00:34:51.440 with my employer in national review. So while I was writing blood and progress, I'm still writing

00:34:56.060 every day for national review and that has to, so I am single-minded in the pursuit of the book,

00:35:01.560 but I got to get the day job out of the way first. So I'll, I'll get to my desk by about

00:35:05.360 six 30 in the morning and do, you know, do as, as much as I can for my day job while trying to

00:35:12.680 maintain, you know, a finger on the pulse of the news. And then once I've satisfied myself in that

00:35:17.680 regard, then I'll begin to chip away at whatever the book project of the day happens to be, whether

00:35:23.540 it's reading this book, finishing this book, finishing this chapter, writing this chapter,

00:35:28.220 writing this period, you know, that's, it's incremental in that way. But I never, I don't

00:35:33.220 take off. So I can't be single-minded about the pursuit of the narrative that I'm, that I'm

00:35:38.020 writing. Unfortunately, you do have to compartmentalize a little bit, but that's just

00:35:41.060 because i don't want to i don't want to abandon my employer and i don't want to abandon my paycheck

00:35:45.300 so it's self-interested in this are you are you an easy husband to live with as you work on one

00:35:51.960 of these projects that is not a question for me i should ask my wife how how easy i am to live with

00:35:57.760 what's your prediction of what you would say i think she'd have a nuanced answer um one that

00:36:03.820 is probably you know a little self-effacing for me or you know denigrating depending on your

00:36:08.260 perspective. But also, I think that, you know, we have a very good working relationship. And I work

00:36:13.940 out of my house, and she's a stay-at-home mom. So we are, she works, she brings in some income, 0.59

00:36:19.020 but she doesn't go to an office. So we are surrounded with each other 24 hours a day.

00:36:24.840 If she was, you know, sick of my presence, I think I'd have known it by now. But we have a pretty

00:36:30.140 good relationship and enjoy each other's company enough that I think she managed to survive. I

00:36:35.260 mean, I'm out of her hair when I'm writing a book more than typical. So she should be grateful for

00:36:40.460 that. That makes sense. How about you? Do you get to like just stop what you're doing and focus

00:36:46.860 entirely on the book? That's a great question. So in this book was different because I took a

00:36:54.400 two-year leave from my tenured professorship and took up positions. The first year of my leave was

00:37:01.680 with a university in Michigan that involved very, very little teaching. And the second year of my

00:37:07.940 leave was with University of Mississippi, which now I'll be joining on a permanent basis and

00:37:13.880 leaving my tenured professorship. Now, the reason why I say this is because that which takes most

00:37:19.980 of my time in my daily duties as a professor, I was absolved of much of that because of the leave.

00:37:29.260 And so just like you had a speed, sped up process in writing the book, I was able to

00:37:35.900 write this book more quickly than I would have been able to do it, to do if I was also

00:37:41.820 supervising graduate students, writing research grants, teaching tons of courses, going to

00:37:48.360 departmental meetings, all that was removed for this book.

00:37:51.580 But from the previous book, then it was a lot more difficult to find the time.

00:37:57.380 So it's, I've got three hours now between this meeting with graduate students and this class.

00:38:02.580 Okay, let me write.

00:38:03.740 And so in a sense, the stage that I'm at now in my career is to hopefully have the freedom

00:38:10.540 to only be focusing on my creative impulse, right?

00:38:16.620 Not to imply that I don't still, you know, love to get up in front of a class and see

00:38:21.460 the student's eyes, hopefully, you know, beam with excitement.

00:38:24.660 but you know different stages in your life different things are important and right now

00:38:29.240 if i could immerse myself all day long with nothing but creative process then i'm i'm a happy

00:38:35.960 guy all right one more thank you i but i appreciate you asking the question uh this is a question

00:38:41.460 that's gonna seem like it's coming out of left field but it actually comes from when i wrote

00:38:45.800 this book the happiness book uh where towards the end of the book i talk about you know a life well

00:38:52.820 lived is one where hopefully you have as few looming existential regrets as possible right

00:39:00.100 and so when i'm talking about that in that chapter i distinguish between two types of regrets and

00:39:06.660 actually one of my former professors in my phd is a pioneer of the study of the psychology of regret

00:39:13.060 there's the psychology there's a regret due to action and regret due to inaction regret due to

00:39:18.480 action I regret that I cheated on my wife and now my marriage is over and I regret that regret due

00:39:24.140 to inaction is I regret that I never became an architect and decided to become a pediatrician

00:39:31.440 only because my parents are pediatricians and they expected me to follow in their footsteps

00:39:35.300 and it turns out Noah maybe this doesn't surprise you that the biggest looming regret in most

00:39:40.800 people's lives is the one due to inaction the road not taken so you're still a young man but

00:39:46.560 if I were to ask you today, do you have any looming regrets from your past? And if so,

00:39:54.420 if you care to share it. I do, but I've overcome them. I no longer regard them as regrets. I did

00:40:00.600 when I was a younger man and they're all action oriented regrets, not inaction, which isn't to

00:40:05.020 say that I don't have any, just none spring to mind. If I had a longer time to audit my entire

00:40:11.360 history, I probably would come up with some. But they're action-oriented. I was, as a young man

00:40:18.660 in high school and early college, I was attracted to acting. I was a musical theater actor. I got

00:40:24.600 a scholarship to college to pursue it. And then 9-11 happened at the beginning of my sophomore

00:40:30.480 year. And I decided that I should do something a little bit more serious with my life. And then I

00:40:35.220 gravitated towards marginally more serious because I gravitated towards political entertainment,

00:40:39.760 journalism and ended up in News Talk Radio in New York City and stayed there for six years and

00:40:45.000 produced News Talk Radio. And it pretty much stayed in the career, the business of politics

00:40:49.620 as a medium for entertainment and journalism, but also ideological journalism. And I've been

00:40:57.580 in that mold my entire life with one possible detour. And that's when I was a very big fan of

00:41:03.340 the hot talk radio show, Opie and Anthony. And I was in radio. So when they were kicked off

00:41:08.520 regular radio and started on satellite radio, I joined them as an intern when they just started.

00:41:13.700 And the whole crew that I started with got picked up and employed. But I left. I left early because

00:41:20.380 A, I had a job that was paying over at WABC, where I was working at the time. And B, I didn't have

00:41:26.460 the money to continue. So it was imposed on me. This was not my choice. And I subsequently regretted

00:41:31.720 it for years. I thought, wow, that was a real fork in the road. And my career would have been much

00:41:35.380 more inclined towards comedy and humor and entertainment, which, you know, provide leaven

00:41:40.600 the soul in ways that consuming the news every day does not. So I was I was regretful of that

00:41:46.940 decision for a couple of years, but it didn't take me long to realize that the path that I

00:41:51.880 had embarked on and stayed on was the better path for me and a much more fulfilling path

00:41:58.760 financially and spiritually and in every other regard. So I no longer regard them as regrets.

00:42:03.820 i did at the time i suppose there's is that evolution a part of the psychology that you

00:42:09.400 describe where the regrets sort of just become minimized as the years go by and you you look at

00:42:15.640 all the the results that followed your decision and then they no longer become regrets i mean

00:42:21.800 perhaps that but also there is a beneficial value from an evolutionary perspective uh to regret

00:42:30.080 because we typically think of regret

00:42:32.040 as sort of just a negative, aversive emotion.

00:42:35.920 You know, why wallow in regret?

00:42:37.720 Just look forward, right?

00:42:38.840 Don't look in the past.

00:42:40.040 But there is a thing called anticipatory regret.

00:42:43.140 And the classic example of which would be Jeff Bezos,

00:42:46.540 where he basically argued that what led him

00:42:49.280 to walk away from his high paying executive job

00:42:53.340 and end up jumping into the pool of starting Amazon 0.89

00:42:57.640 where everybody was saying, are you insane?

00:42:59.520 You're going to walk away from this secure, high-paying job. 0.87

00:43:04.020 To start a bookstore.

00:43:05.280 To start a bookstore online.

00:43:07.000 What are you talking about?

00:43:08.240 And what he said, his answer was a brilliant one.

00:43:12.480 He basically said, I'm paraphrasing his word, I don't want to be sitting in the future in

00:43:18.700 some porch, porch, porch, is that like of a house, yeah, at where I'm saying, geez, I

00:43:26.460 should have done that thing.

00:43:28.340 So the calculus that he used is anticipatory regret. What is the likelihood of if I took

00:43:37.760 the right side of the fork or the left side, which one would result in the greatest likely

00:43:43.680 anticipatory? And that led him to say, I can't have that possible regret. So I think there are

00:43:50.480 benefits from regret. The other thing I would say that is functionally useful in regret

00:43:56.440 is that to sort of the general theme

00:43:59.520 of what you answered,

00:44:00.740 oftentimes, even the things that we regret,

00:44:03.980 we can distill some learning lesson from them

00:44:07.940 and so that we can move forward

00:44:09.720 to hopefully not commit again that action

00:44:12.380 or that inaction.

00:44:14.180 And so to your point,

00:44:15.800 I think that there are definitely evolutionary reasons

00:44:18.740 why regret is part of the arsenal of emotions

00:44:22.220 that we can experience.

00:44:23.360 All right, let me tell people again,

00:44:25.720 please go out and get this beauty read it comment in the section in the in the comment section

00:44:32.840 anything else you want to add noah before we say goodbye no thank you sir i'm so grateful for the

00:44:38.040 opportunity to talk about blood in progress and i i hope your uh your listeners and your viewers go

00:44:43.400 pick it up and then share your thoughts with me that'll be wonderful please stay on the line so

00:44:47.860 we can say goodbye offline and thank you so much for coming on the show thank you cheers

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - June 22, 2026

Noah Rothman, ＂Blood & Progress - A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America＂ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1007)

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