In the late 1850s, “Bleeding Kansas” was the term used to describe the escalating cycle of violence, when surrogates for the Union and soon-to-be Confederacy fought each other over whether Kansas would be admitted as a free or slave-owning state.
As the assaults and killings increased, radicals set the agenda.
The logical next step was the nightmares of Fort Sumter and Bull Run.
Those calling for restraint and peaceful resolutions were considered weak and traitorous. The thuggish and violent, instead, were praised as the true idealists and patriots, the real “base” of their respective parties.
We have witnessed a growing wave of left-wing assassins and would-be assassins in the last few years: James Hodgkinson, Luigi Mangione, James Crooks, Ryan Routh, Elias Rodriguez, and Tyler Robinson, who have targeted Republican House leaders, CEOs, Donald Trump, Jews, and Charlie Kirk. For months, leftists vandalized or torched anything to do with the Tesla brand, and with virtual impunity, they sometimes went after individual Tesla owners. Jews walked in the shadows on campuses, where mobs cheered Hamas killers.
From June through October 2020, Antifa- and BLM-led rioting led to 35 deaths, $2 billion in damage, 14,000 arrests, and 1,500 injured police. On January 6, violence left five dead, four from the protesting side.
But whereas the federal government immediately and often excessively jailed both violent and peaceful 2021 protesters, almost all of the 14,000 protesters and rioters of 2020 were released by left-wing blue-city and federal prosecutors and judges.
ICE officers and facilities remain under siege in a number of major cities. In this current left-wing legitimization of violence, the Democrat Party is now embracing an eerie channeling of an earlier, pre- and post-Confederate ethos. Nonstop Democrat grandees call for their resistance to hit the street, if need be, to go lower than the “gutter,” and to “let your rage fuel you.”
The demagogic, anti-ICE bluster of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, and Portland Mayor Keith Wilson is nullificationist and state-rights supremacy to the core.
New York mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani, in the spirit of Jefferson Davis, recently summed up the left’s resistance best, bragging that he hoped to disconnect New York local governance from federal government authority entirely—at least in the obligatory rather than beneficiary sense.
But do not left-wing states’ righters also applaud rogue lower-court federal judges who create and apply all sorts of edicts to stop the enforcement of federal law?
Maybe it’s time for the right to fight fire with fire