The Barbarians are Approaching

An article that appeared here last week included something that demands greater attention. As best I can tell, this information has not been widely disseminated, which is weird when you consider that the report discovered that political violence, including assassination, is being normalized and justified in America. The best reason I can come up with for the corporate media blackout is the application of principals over principles:

Following the July 13, 2024 attempted assassination of President Trump, tolerance - and even advocacy - for political violence appears to have surged, especially among politically left-leaning segments of the population. These attitudes are not fringe—they reflect an emergent assassination culture, grounded in far-left authoritarianism and increasingly normalized in digital discourse.

So much for the much-discussed hysteria over violence from the far right that never materialized, along with Team Biden’s frustration that the supply of white supremacists never quite lived up to that administration’s demand. In fairness, the two people who tried killing Trump were white, as are most of the deep thinkers who believe that keying Teslas is sticking it to the man. But I somehow doubt that they are the supremacists who filled the pages of Joe’s speechwriters.

All smart-assery aside, when 48% and 55% of respondents can justify killing Elon Musk and President Trump, respectively, that’s worth a conversation and perhaps even a cooling-down period. But neither of those things is happening. Not one Democrat in Congress, not one left-leaning talking head on any cable network, not even one random liberal has suggested that violence should not be the newest plank in the party’s platform. As such, it is fair to ask, at what point does silence equal approval?

This report from the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University follows a similar finding in December 2024, when Luigi Mangione was afforded folk hero status for murdering a health insurance executive. When you are actively cheering the killing of innocent people, your moral calculus is long overdue for recalibration. Yet, here we are and there remain people insistent on bending reality to their will instead of recognizing and confronting it.

One of the most unintentionally ironic pieces I have ever seen – and there have been plenty of them, including one that says the war has already started – came from the keyboard of Warren Blumenfeld, a professor at UMass writing for LGBTQ Nation. The article begins with the predictable freakout over Trump’s election and the harm allegedly posed to certain people. In fairness, the author is correct in noting how “Strong leaders employ dehumanizing stereotypes and scapegoat entire groups while other citizens or entire nations refuse to intervene.”

The past is full of examples, including black people, Jews, and the tens of millions killed under communism. There is also the still-fresh memory of how scapegoating was used against people who did not enthusiastically queue up for the Covid jab. Where these pieces go off the rails is that fantasizing about what Trump might do blinds them to what people like them are doing. It is not surprising that Blumenfeld is deaf to his own words, similarly refusing to intervene and perhaps applauding the violence.

While events of the past several years have turned “make Orwell fiction again” into a business, another thinker of the past is getting short shrift. That’s the French philosopher Voltaire, whose 18th-century ideas are getting a 21st-century workout. Among his works is how people who can make you believe absurdities (that a man can get pregnant, for instance, or that no human is illegal) can also make you commit atrocities. That, too, is well-documented.

It leads to uncomfortable but necessary questions: How long before random acts of vandalism are no longer energizing enough? How long before attacking inanimate objects gets boring and other targets are considered? How much longer until a first blood moment occurs? There are people who want that. Some of them may be on the public payroll. I want to believe that most do not want that. I also know what I see, or more accurately, don’t see from certain quarters and don’t hear.

When people typically associated with the right – veterans, militia members, parents complaining about schools losing their way – are called domestic terror threats, they typically push back. Vocally. They don’t set things on fire or vandalize property or get excited about someone being killed. They simply get accused of those things by the people who actually do them.

So, when a university report comes out and says, “hey, you folks on the left have a problem in the ranks,” the implication is to not let it fester. When Chuck Schumer, who has a history of inciting violence against his preferred scapegoats, cannot be bothered to say a discouraging word about current events, what message does that send? How about when another Senator grandstands about traveling to El Salvador to rescue what CBS News still calls a “mistakenly deported” Salvadoran national? The answer is that the people at Rutgers will be ignored. It is going to fester.

Every dystopian work imagines an executive turned authoritarian. Real life often deviates from that theme. Not every revolution brings improvement; plenty have made things worse. What’s missing this time around is organized belligerents. In the book, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, a retired colonel says a modern-day conflict would not involve armies and battlefields. “I think it would very much be a free-for-all,” he said, “neighbor on neighbor, based on beliefs and skin colors and religion. And it would be horrific.”

Am I overstating the case? Am I seeing darkness where there is light? We’ll find out. Some thought that talk of violence regarding Trump was crazy. Then Butler, PA happened. And it was almost repeated on the man’s home turf. The study says what it says. The reactions to it have been what they have been. People are free and able to distance themselves from internal elements that are toxic to the body at large. Perhaps that will happen, though I wonder what must first occur to get to that point, and what the aftermath would look like.