June 3, 2026 • 33 mins
Noah Rothman (senior writer with National Review) joins Armstrong & Getty to talk about his new book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The brilliant Noah Rothman is the author of a brand
new book entitled Blood and Progress, A Century of left
Wing Violence in America. It's armstrong and getty extra large.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Because four hours.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Simply this is armstrong and getty extra large. What a
pleasure this is to talk to Noah Rothman, senior writer
with the National Review, author of a number of terrific
books through the years, and we are big fans of
years around here. Mister Rothman, how are you.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Noah, Thank you, sir. I'm very well. It's a pleasure
to be here. Excellent. Thanks.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
So I have dived into the book with great enthusiasm,
my compliments. First of all, it's one of those momentum reads.
The more I read, the more I was enjoying reading it.
And one of the points you made early on in
the book. Actually, just as an aside fan of your
work on the National Review podcast, and I remember when
you first brought up that you were working on this book.
(00:58):
My immediate reaction was, oh my god, there's going to
be an avalanche of what aboutism about right wing violence.
But you made the point early in the book that
the way we as media and society react to left
wing violence and right wing violence are very very different.
Can we start there?
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Of course? Sure? So. My book is Blood in Progress,
a Century of left Wing Violence in America. It's an
attempt to answer a question that I think we all
probably encounter too frequently, because we often hear about how
the right in America is uniquely violent, the primary threat
to the civic compact and individual life and liberty. We
(01:37):
hear about it after an attempted or successful assassination of
a right wing figure, an armed assault on an ICE
facility or a CBP facility, the mobs that descend almost
nightly on places like Portland, Oregon. We hear about it
all the time. And there's something of a taboo in there.
Right If your fingerpoint and you're saying no, no, no, you're
the violent one, there's a concession there that the public
(01:58):
doesn't like political violence, or you're imposing this on the
other side so that they'll have to defend themselves. But
the degree to which we hear this reflex, this inversion
is reflective, I think, less of a desire to get
the facts right and more of an attempt by left
of center Americans and institutionalists in venues that happen to
(02:19):
have progressive proclivities to avoid looking at the problem, to
turn their eyes away, and that's why we have so
much violence in this country. It's a reciprocal phenomenon. Those
who are inclined towards political violence take inspiration from those
who execute attacks on their side and especially to meet
out vengeance against their political adversaries, so they already perceive
(02:40):
to be violent. That often includes the state. Both sides
of this equation perceive the state to be on the
side of their political enemies. So you're never going to
get your hands around this problem if you refuse to
acknowledge its contours and scope. And that's what I do
in this book. I look not only at the wave
of left wing violence that we're experiencing right now, which
is a genuine way of left wing violence. I put
(03:01):
together a ton of evidence in Blood and Progress to
demonstrate that we are experiencing a classic wave of political
terrorism from the left. But I also explore the other
waves of political terrorism from the left, all of which
have been described by their scholars who study them as forgotten.
The nineteen tens and the nineteen twenties, the nineteen seventies,
the nineteen eighties and today, the twenty tens, in the
twenty twenties, all of this history has some similar features,
(03:25):
predictive and prescriptive elements, and I argue that it's not
an obscure history, it's a suppressed history. And on my
goal with Blood and Progress is to remove the omerta,
you know, destigmatize the notion that we can talk about
left wing violence with the authority and clarity that it deserves,
because otherwise we're never going to get our hands around
(03:46):
this problem.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
I like the way you pointed out that if there
is right wing violence, we have a long, solemn faced
national discussion about it, many many articles and panels and
that sort of thing. If there's agreed completely, we abhor
all political violence around here. But if there's left wing violence,
it becomes well, he understands, and it's an expression of
(04:07):
people's discontent with healthcare or what have you, no longer discussion.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Let me give you my best example a note. I
think you guys talked about this maybe in one of
the many podcast interviews i've heard you do when Trump
first started running for president, before it became all controversy,
and it was still kind of just fun in a joke.
He flew into Sacramento in the big Trump plane, and
I took my kids, which in retrospect seems crazy taken
I think they were. They were like six and four
(04:34):
something like that. I mean, there were little kids, But
it was still just kind of fun to go to
a Trump rally that was in Sacramento on like a
Wednesday night. The next night he's in San Jose and
some Trump people wherein Trump hats.
Speaker 4 (04:46):
Got beaten up on the sidewalk, got beaten up in
the middle of the day, and it got zero news
coverage and nobody was bothered by it, and I was like,
holy crap, when did political violence become okay?
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Since then, I've been highly disturbed.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Yeah. I remember writing a piece for Commentary magazine, where
I was employed at the time, in twenty sixteen, because
I had written a bunch about sharing the apprehension that
the national press had over the degree to which the
president was inclined to excuse or even give license to
people on his side who would react violently to the
protesters who were protesting his events, demonstrating against his events,
(05:23):
infiltrating his events, and harassing his supporters. I was unerved
by that, But I was just as unerved by the
degree to which Trump supporters were being attacked in the
streets in Sacramento, as you said, in places like Arizona
and Chicago, they shut down a rally that beat up, cops,
beat them bloody, had the clothes torn from their backs,
bell pelted with eggs, etcetera, etc. Got no coverage, and
(05:43):
throughout the course of the Trump presidency, first Trump presidency,
which got much much worse than Joe Biden's presidency, I've
been unnerved by the degree to which there is not
an excuse making exercise necessarily on the part of the left,
but certainly an effort to contextualize left wing violence and
render it, as you say, an excusable or forgivable response
(06:05):
to environmental conditions, many of which are completely subjective in
the minds of progressive activists. And you noted the degree
to which you got to understand the violence. A lot
of that came in the immediate aftermath of the assassination
of CEO but United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, where you
heard leading lights in the Democratic Party Alexandria Kosio Quortez,
(06:26):
Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Bernie Sanders. All of them condemned
the murder, but then say, but big pregnant butt, that
renders everything that came before it dismissable and perfunctory. But
you have to understand the healthcare system is broken in
Bernie Sanders' case, But you have to understand not just
the healthcare system, but the finance system, the election system,
(06:47):
the housing system, the education system. Everything is broken. Therefore,
what is necessary a revolutionary social upheaval, something that will
reset everything to year zero. We can get back to
the kind of social contract that we know we need,
and how do we get there. In the minds of
the revolutionary activists throughout the centuries now, it has been
(07:11):
that one galvanizing act of violence and bloodshed and human
sacrifice will ignite passions that are otherwise dormant in the public,
and they will rise up and join us in our
campaign against these oppressive structures, the civilizational oppression that the
public is just yearning to slough off themselves, and they
only need permission to do so, and we're going to
(07:31):
give it to them. This is a violent mindset, This
is the violent activist mindset, and it's the sort of
thing that is very pervasive on the left, even among
political professionals and responsible institutional stewards.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
And what we're about to talk about, what I'm about
to ask about is not all left wing political violence.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
The Lord knows.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
But I've been fascinated by what Matt Tybe recently called
upper class twits promoting revolution since I was a kid.
I grew up in a very pleasant suburb of Chicago
where the Harris family that were central to the Patty
Hurst kidnapping debacle lived, Their parents lived there, and it
astounded me that somebody coming from a very pleasant place,
(08:11):
well educated, certainly affluent enough to get by in America,
would turn to revolution. And I've since learned that that's
far from uncommon, a pretty good common thread from the
seventies of violence through at least some current left wing violence,
isn't there?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Oh my gosh? Yes. And we had some very recent
evidence of this. The third, not first, not second, third
attempt on Donald Trump's life was executed by a man
who the press seemed to be confused by because he
was erudite, because he was educated, because he came from
the same milieu that they come from. CBS host Nora
(08:51):
O'Donnell asked the president to opine on the ramblings of
a madman who tried to kill him in years past.
The guy's actions have discredited everything that came before, But no,
Nora o'donalds didn't seem much there that was beyond reason. Therefore,
maybe the president should have to answer why he's not
a pedophile, a traitor, a criminal. That's the sort of
(09:14):
thing that strikes those of us who are familiar with
the history and the profile that's associated with those who
execute violence in the pursuit of positive social change, which
is its own sort of disordered thinking that the profile
is that guy, especially the education part. The sociologists. There
are sociologists that I quote in this book who find
(09:36):
that within the context of Islamist terrorism, at least the
common thread there is that they share not privation, want
and hardship. They have an engineering degree, they come from
means they come from an educated background. And it makes
it a little bit of intuitive sense when you think
about it, that those who would pursue violence as a
(09:57):
vehicle for social change have at least some familiarity with
movements that engaged in similar pursuits in history. So it's
the sort of thing. That is. You can chalk it
up to ignorance, but it's an ignorance that's cultivated and
licensed and encouraged by people in positions of power and
(10:17):
authority in this country, who who scan the horizon for
any evidence of right wing violence, as they should, and
as you say, are treat us to prolonged lectures about
our permissiveness when we experience episodes of right wing violence,
as we should. The same cannot be said on the left.
There is a huge asymmetry here, and as a result,
(10:37):
I fully expect more right wing political violence because these
two things are intertwined. Those who are inclined towards violence
again resolved to meet out vendetta against their political adversaries,
and if they perceive that the state is no longer
concerned with their safety and that of their families, then yeah,
vigilantism could become a much more pronounced feature of the
American social compacts. And that's a big fear of mine,
(11:00):
something I'm hoping to stave off with my book.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Yeah, Progress, I hope you can also. So it's so
tawdry to get into a compare the left wing scorecard
to the right ring scorecard to see who's ahead or behind,
depending on how you look at it. But you kind
of have to because the FBI director or a president
or the media is going to give you a list of,
(11:24):
you know, what percentage of violence is right wing, and
I like how you break down some of the crazy
things that they put on that side of the ledger
to kind of fix the numbers.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Yeah, well, I'm not dueling in databases here, like I'm
not competing in the database world because I think it's
a hopelessly subjective enterprise. As you say, there are a
bunch of these statistical analyzes that purport to conclude that
the American right is uniquely violent or at least uniquely murderous.
Sometimes there's a distinction there with a difference, But if
you go into the databases, depending on which one you're
(11:56):
looking at, you see a lot of stuff that the
general public does not perceived to be political violence, gang violence,
prison violence, intra family violence. Now there's a person who
spray pains the slurs on the side of a church
writing violence, a homeless man who wanders into a hotel
and hurls racial epithets at the hotel and insults the
(12:18):
right wing violence. It's sort of like those databases that
are put out by gun control groups that purport to claim,
like there have been seventy school shootings this year, and
you say to yourself, well, I don't remember seventy school shootings.
And you look at the data and it shows somebody
discharged a firearm adjacent to a school property. Like, that's
just not what people think of when they think of
political violence. And then, most importantly, what I think is
(12:41):
a smoking gun. In the first chapter of this book
is a document that was prepared for the Department of
Homeland Security in twenty twenty one, in which researchers say
that the study of violent left wing extremism is shot
through with problems, one of them being the fact that
people who are allegedly participants in these violent movements are
themselves the authors of these studies of those violent movements.
(13:03):
And then those who are not are subjected to by
their colleagues intimidation campaigns, social isolation, even the threat of
physical retaliation for merely doing the job. It's right for exploration.
It is shot through with problems, and it's the sort
of thing that a society invested in its own preservation
would take very seriously. And it's a wonder why it
(13:25):
seems like very few are and there haven't been any real, pronounced,
sustained efforts to grapple with the problem of left fling
violence in this country. That's why blood and progress, I
think is so necessary.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Right. The oversimplified version of what I want to bring
up is that conservatives think progressives are misguided or wrong.
Progressives think conservatives are evil, which is obviously a thread
that runs, you know, directly into the violence. Is there
anything we can do as a society to I don't know,
(14:00):
some sort of forced interchange so folks have the left
can be exposed to more conservative ideals and realize we're
not evil. We just see the world more differently than
they do.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Well, I really hope they read my book. First of all,
I don't offer that'd be nice, right, I mean, it's
step one. I don't offer a panacea for the problem
of political violence in the United States, and I would
be suspicious of anyone who does. There's been political violence
in this country since its founding. It's a feature of
civic life in America. And then lovely one but one nonetheless,
(14:33):
but nevertheless, I do recommend things that we can do
on the margins. To address this problem, the New Lines Institute,
for example, offers some advice to law enforcement officials, for example,
to deprive those who are inclined towards violence of the
narrative that they often promulgate, in which they maintain that they,
(14:54):
the state and the police, are on the side of
the other side, the political adversaries, and therefore they're valid
targets too. I recommend that we restore politics to its
proper place. Politics currently knows no rational bounds. It's not
about education. It's not about elections and legislative affairs and
enumerated duties in a constitution. It's about the commercials you
(15:18):
watch and the shows that you watch, and the music
you listen to, and the foods you eat, and the
people you surround yourselves with and your hobbies, and all
of it has nothing to do with politics. Properly understood.
It might be political, but it's that is a construct,
and it's immune to remedy from the governmental entities by
virtue of the constitution, which is desirable. It's good. But
(15:41):
if you're so convinced that you have this moral imperative
on your hands, and society is deaf to it, it's
a radicalizing thing, and it can either lead you to
withdraw entirely from the political process or resolve to attack
the foundations of this holy, immoral enterprise that is deaf
to your appeals. So I do have a couple of,
(16:02):
you know, ideas for getting our hands around this problem.
But the biggest problem but I attempt to address with
this book is the fact that that so few are
willing to acknowledge it. If all I've achieved with this
book is the acknowledgment of the degree to which we're
experiencing a pronounced and disproportionate way of left wing violence,
and that is not uncommon in this country, then I
(16:23):
will have achieved my objective.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
Yeah, when you've got both sides constantly saying this election
will be the last election if the other side wins,
I mean, you could justify lots of stuff, you know,
if you actually believe that. How do you separate out
a crazy person like completely nuts who happened to latch
on to a political point of view versus you know,
(16:45):
the somewhat sane.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
How do you do that. One of the reasons why
I don't tell this story in numbers and statistics is
because I wanted to do just that, to dive into
the disordered thinking of somebody who believes that an act
of political violence will beget positive outcomes and positive social change.
That's the sort of thing you can only tell in stories,
(17:09):
and so I do tell those stories, and some of
the individuals who engage in acts off look. First of all,
a crazy person can have as big an impact on
history an act of violence as a clear eye idiologue.
So there is, you know, there's a distinction as a
fine one to a certain degree. But there are plenty
of people who act out in deference to schizophrenia, for example,
(17:32):
or other disorders, who end up committing horribly violent acts
and may or may not have a political motive behind them.
Some of them are explicitly apolitical. But then there's also
the audience for that sort of thing, and there usually
is an audience, especially for political violence violence that is
designed to inflame passions, and sometimes they leave manifest us
(17:54):
behind indicating that that is their ideal, And the audience
for this sort of thing sometimes give you clues as
to what their motives are and what the milieu in
which they're operating in is like. And the first thing
that comes to mind. There is Shane Temora, who about
two years ago, walked into a high rise in mid
(18:16):
time Manhattan seeking the offices of the NFL because he
wanted to execute as many people in the NFL as
he possibly could, operating under the delusion that the NFL
was responsible for the concussions that he suffered as a kid.
He was disordered, and he ended up going to the
wrong place. He went to a real estate firm, and
he shot a bunch of people, one of them being
Wesley Lepattner, whose young real estate executive. And his act
(18:41):
was a completely senseless act of violence, but the audience
for it saw a lot of sense in it. They
saw the execution of a rapacious capitalist, somebody who had
it coming by virtue of her station and the degree
to which she had benefited from ill begotten goods in society,
just by virtue of her participation in enterprise, and they
(19:02):
perceived that act of violence to be a good thing
that was do everyone else. It brought us one step
closer to the revolution in which you and me and
everybody who's a participant in this immoral network that we
all inhabit the United States will get what's coming to us.
That's the mail you in which we're operating in right now.
(19:22):
This is our environment and it's going to get worse
if we don't confront it.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Well, that's just spiteful envy. A disordered individual shoots the
wrong person, but you think, well, that person, let's find
some sins and pronounce them deserving of their fate, which
is horrifying, Which brings us to, speaking of horrifying, the
the rising numbers of people, in most notably young people,
who will justify political violence of one sort or another.
(19:49):
Where did that come from?
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Well, it's hard for me to say whether the degree
to which it's been with us forever, because I do
think there's an element of this that can be overrid,
that there's a something in the young mind that is
attracted to breaking taboos, to shocking elders. There are so
few taboos left that do shock with the commensurate commensurate
(20:14):
to their desire to be provocative. Anti Semitism is one,
and violence is another. The celebration of bloodshed for its
own sake is another. But that performative ghoulishness, and we
saw some of it the other day outside of the
trial of Luigi Mangioni, where three young ladies into camera
competed with one another to be as gooulish as they
(20:36):
possibly could. Called Brian Thompson, his alleged victim a terrorist,
said his children were better off without him, his two
young children, that they would anything that he had bequeathed
them was blood money. And most importantly, in my view,
was that an indictment of the country, Because in the
minds of one of these activists, we are the most
(20:57):
passive and coowed population in the history story of the
planet that anybody, any other civilization that was experiencing the
kind of oppression that we're subjected to on a daily basis,
would have already risen up and overthrown the repressors. And
the fact that we don't is an indictment of us
and indicative of how badly we need revolutionary violence in
(21:17):
this country to wake us from our passivity. That is
clear eyed. In my view. It is performative, it is
a spectacle, but it's also designed to beget the kind
of violent outcomes that are often encouraged tacitly, even if
they don't acknowledge it, by democratic political officials who attempt
(21:37):
to co opt these movements. Why did they append the
butt when they were condemning Brian Thompson's murder? Why do
they lean into Occupy Wall Street or the twenty twenty
George Floyd Bobs? They see in these expressions of political
zeal which may be a little excessive, maybe unrefined, but
it could be harnessed and directed towards productive ends and
(21:59):
maybe contribute to democratic political prospects. It's a really utilitarian
approach to what is, in my view, a cancer on
American society and one that needs to be excised, not encouraged.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Are you more worried about individuals coming together under an
ideology and acting out individually? Or the groups? The Antifa,
the Proud Boys, the whatever.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Wow, it's sort of a matter of degrees, isn't it?
Am I? What am I more worried about? They're both
extraordinarily troubling.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
Well, which is more unique in this moment?
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Well? What is most troubling? I would say, where we've
seen more violence from individuals, so it's a more pronounced threat.
But what's really unnerving to me is the group violence,
in particular the violence targeting police. Last year we saw
three armed assaults on ice and CBP facilities, some which
(23:00):
were quite deadly, one of which featured extremely sophisticated ambush tactics.
There's about ten individuals and there was no ambiguity about
what they were trying to do. They left behind literature
advocating for the proletarian revolution. We know who these people are.
But they used fireworks to target this facility, lore their
targets out, and then open up on them from overlapping
(23:22):
fields of fire on the tree line. That's sophisticated. That's
an assault. That's a small self terrorist act, and it's
akin to what we saw in the nineteen seventies and
nineteen eighties with the Marxist guerrilla groups who targeted police explicitly.
And it's similar to the socialist anarchists' movements of the
nineteen tens nineteen twenties who targeted police specifically. That's the
(23:43):
sort of thing that is a portent of a possible convulsion,
a spasm of organized left wing terroristic violence of the
sort that we haven't experienced in this country in fifty years.
But if you don't know that we haven't experienced it
in fifty years or the fifty years before that, you
won't know what you're looking at. You won't have any
immunity to it. You won't know how to stop it.
That's why Blood and Progress is my view so important. Again.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Noah Rothman's new book is Blood and Progress, a Century
of left wing violence in America. We know your time
is limited. In a couple of minutes we have left,
can we talk about a couple of contemporary issues?
Speaker 2 (24:19):
Of course?
Speaker 1 (24:20):
First of all, what the hell is going on with
the negotiations with Iran? Is this going anywhere? Or are
we just getting strung along? I think we're getting.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Strong along, and I'm a little disappointed with how this
has gone in the ceasefire period. I think the Operation
Epic Fury was a tactical triumph. The ceasefire has been
a mess, and it's not advancing our interests, and the
President risks sacrificing a lot of the gains that were
made in this process in two ways, the first of
(24:51):
which being that during Operation Epic Fury, the Gulf States
abandoned this pretense of neutrality and gravitated towards the United
States and Israel. Of course they did because the United
States and Israel were defending them against barrages of fire
that were coming from Iran. We're seeing now as the
(25:12):
ceasefire breaks down, those barrages continue. Kuwait, Bahrain, Uae all
getting struck over the course. In last night, a very
significant assault on Kuwait City in which one person died,
sixty three were injured. And the President is kind of
taking it all in stride. So that really risks the
prospect of this kind of regional realignment that was very
beneficial to American strategic interests. The second being that the
(25:35):
president is moving towards the Iranians and the Iranians aren't
moving towards us in this very specific way. He confirmed.
Trump confirmed today that he did have this profanity laced
tirade when he was yelling at Bibnetnyah, who is really
Prime Minister Ntnyaho, for constantly fighting in Lebanon his words,
his Belaw attacked Israel during Operation Epic Fury. That war
(25:57):
is ongoing, but has Belot started it? And now Iran,
which used to deny that it had any links to Hesbela,
is under duress saying you got to reign in Israel.
Hesbelah's in real trouble and he's doing that. Why that's leverage.
That's something you can use to get the Iranians to
come to the table and be a little bit more
(26:19):
pliant in talks if there were ever going to be.
That's something they really hold dear and you can hold
it over their heads. But Trump's just giving it away
and he's not getting anything for it, and I don't
understand why he's Obviously he thinks time is on his
side and he has some evidence in that to that effect.
The blockade is a stranglehold on the Iranian economy and
(26:39):
they're starting to feel it and act like it. But
at the same time, he too is operating under obvious
duress and obvious pressure, political pressure, and practical pressure. You know,
the United States really is short on these interceptor missiles,
exquisite munitions that take a lot of time to refill. Nevertheless,
he picked this war. The time is now, and it's
time for him to finish the job that he started.
(27:00):
So I've been very disappointed with this ceasefire process.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
Well, in a steak is whether or not Iran gets
a nuclear weapon, which I think has gotten lost at
least in the mainstream media or buy a lot of
people that the what's that steak is not the price
of gas for the summer vacation. You're going on. It's
whether or not Iran gets a nuke, And we're saying
on the air the other day, Iran getting a nuke
would be one of the biggest moments in world history.
You agree or disagree.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
I do agree. And it's also beyond that. It's the
shape of the region for decades to come. The next
fifty years is on the table right now. Why have
we been unable to execute the pivot to Asia that
George W. Bush wanted, that Barack Obama wanted, that Trump wanted,
that Biden wanted. It's Iran and Iran will not let
us extricate ourselves from that region. It has been at
(27:43):
war with us. It sounds like a cliche, but it's true.
It has been at war with US, executing killing Americans
and executing operations on US soil and on our allies
soil designed to murder our allies and Americans for forty
seven years, not going to stop until that regime implode.
But we can contain that regime and the design being
(28:03):
to collapse it so that we could finally execute our
strategic priorities in other parts of the planet Earth. That's
a really desirable goal. If the President were able to
engineer it, it would have dividends that we would reap
for generations to come. But it's a big project, and
it's one that isn't going to take a couple of
weeks to engineer. So yeah, I understand that Americans are
feeling the price at the pain at the pump. I
(28:25):
am too, And the President hasn't asked us to bear
any burdens, which is one of the reasons why I
don't blame the American people for not really being all
that jazzed about this operation. He should have enlisted the
public in what is a national project that would entail
sacrifices on their part. He still can't. Nothing's stopping him,
but he seems content to pretend that this is all
(28:45):
going to work out in the end and it's not
a big deal, and anybody who's complaining about it doesn't
really know what they're talking about. And so yeah, I
don't blame anybody for repaying that lack of trust in kind.
But it's not working out for him, and it's not
going to work out for America in the long run.
Anybody who really appreciates the scope and gravity of what
we're doing right now in the Middle East. Should want
(29:06):
the President to take this more seriously. I certainly do.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Finally, meanwhile, back in Europe, Vladimir Putin in Russia hopelessly
admired in the situation, Ukraine probably losing ground. What do
you hope for and what do you fear will be
Vladimir Putin's next move?
Speaker 2 (29:26):
He's severely constrained materially and tactically. What he's doing is
trying to say a face and executing some horrific crimes
in the process. This week, I believe it was two
days ago or last night, perhaps even a volley of
ballistic missiles on civilian targets, indiscriminate targets inside Kiev. The
(29:50):
Putin regime is just engineering a crisis in warfare akin
to nothing like the continent has seen since World War Two.
And what I fear is a nuclear standoff. I've always
feared that, not a nuclear exchange, not a detonation. People
have a tendency to alli these things as though they
don't have a difference. There's a huge difference. But a
(30:11):
nuclear standoff a crisis that I believe is diffusible because
it certainly wouldn't be the first nuclear crisis between Washington
and Moscow and our histories, but I've felt for a
long time that that was going to be the tipping point.
I mean, I could because that's the only that's the
only arrow in Moscow's quiver at this point. They're severely
(30:31):
tactically limited in what they can achieve on the battlefield,
and they need a face saving way out of this crisis,
and a face saving way out of this crisis would
be to compel the West to back down in some
fashion or form. I'm just kind of surprised that we
haven't gotten there yet, in part because the only value
to nuclear weapons are to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.
They otherwise have no tactical or strategic value. But I
(30:54):
do feel like that is a very live possibility, and
it would be a very scary prospect. I don't want
to downplay it. Think it's resolvable in a positive way,
but it would be very scary and it would be
very unnerving to a lot of people. And cooler heads
may not prevail. They don't always do, so we shouldn't
talk lightly about that sort of thing. But that's my
biggest concern.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
One more time. The book is Blood and Progress is
centrally a century of left wing violence in America. No,
we're authman, great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for
the time, Thank you very much, appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
So I admire Noah's efforts here. I hope it works
that we can sort of balance the conversation out there
that's not just right wing violence as we're told by
whoever it was, McKay or Comy, one of the your
FBI directors and the media on a regular basis, because
like Noah says, we're never going to be able to
wrap our heads around this or have any sort of
conversation until we realize there's lots of political violence on
(31:44):
both sides. There's way too much we need to condemn it.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
All right, right, and the whole and is listing out
in the book of the reactions to not only the
assassination of Brian Thompson, but he goes into a great
deal of detail about the assassination to Charlie Kirk and
all of the people who condemned it, but condemned it,
butt condemned it. But as you described, it is really
(32:09):
quite striking when you read it. Yeah, and I think
it's more powerful psychologically than it seems at first. Blush,
because if you truly condemned something, you would say, this
is a horror, and nobody's frustration with healthcare justifies murder. Ever,
(32:32):
but if it takes the form of, of course I
condemn political violence, but people are very unhappy about their healthcare,
and blah blah blah, that takes you to a different
place rhetorically, of.
Speaker 3 (32:44):
Course it does. Yeah, yeah, Ugly couldn't recommend the book
more highly, especially if you're gonna end up in an
argument with any liberal friends about who's got the most
violence on their side. Blood and Progress by Noah Rothman
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Extra large
The brilliant Noah Rothman is the author of a brand
new book entitled Blood and Progress, A Century of left
Wing Violence in America. It's armstrong and getty extra large.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Because four hours.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Simply this is armstrong and getty extra large. What a
pleasure this is to talk to Noah Rothman, senior writer
with the National Review, author of a number of terrific
books through the years, and we are big fans of
years around here. Mister Rothman, how are you.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Noah, Thank you, sir. I'm very well. It's a pleasure
to be here. Excellent. Thanks.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
So I have dived into the book with great enthusiasm,
my compliments. First of all, it's one of those momentum reads.
The more I read, the more I was enjoying reading it.
And one of the points you made early on in
the book. Actually, just as an aside fan of your
work on the National Review podcast, and I remember when
you first brought up that you were working on this book.
(00:58):
My immediate reaction was, oh my god, there's going to
be an avalanche of what aboutism about right wing violence.
But you made the point early in the book that
the way we as media and society react to left
wing violence and right wing violence are very very different.
Can we start there?
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Of course? Sure? So. My book is Blood in Progress,
a Century of left Wing Violence in America. It's an
attempt to answer a question that I think we all
probably encounter too frequently, because we often hear about how
the right in America is uniquely violent, the primary threat
to the civic compact and individual life and liberty. We
(01:37):
hear about it after an attempted or successful assassination of
a right wing figure, an armed assault on an ICE
facility or a CBP facility, the mobs that descend almost
nightly on places like Portland, Oregon. We hear about it
all the time. And there's something of a taboo in there.
Right If your fingerpoint and you're saying no, no, no, you're
the violent one, there's a concession there that the public
(01:58):
doesn't like political violence, or you're imposing this on the
other side so that they'll have to defend themselves. But
the degree to which we hear this reflex, this inversion
is reflective, I think, less of a desire to get
the facts right and more of an attempt by left
of center Americans and institutionalists in venues that happen to
(02:19):
have progressive proclivities to avoid looking at the problem, to
turn their eyes away, and that's why we have so
much violence in this country. It's a reciprocal phenomenon. Those
who are inclined towards political violence take inspiration from those
who execute attacks on their side and especially to meet
out vengeance against their political adversaries, so they already perceive
(02:40):
to be violent. That often includes the state. Both sides
of this equation perceive the state to be on the
side of their political enemies. So you're never going to
get your hands around this problem if you refuse to
acknowledge its contours and scope. And that's what I do
in this book. I look not only at the wave
of left wing violence that we're experiencing right now, which
is a genuine way of left wing violence. I put
(03:01):
together a ton of evidence in Blood and Progress to
demonstrate that we are experiencing a classic wave of political
terrorism from the left. But I also explore the other
waves of political terrorism from the left, all of which
have been described by their scholars who study them as forgotten.
The nineteen tens and the nineteen twenties, the nineteen seventies,
the nineteen eighties and today, the twenty tens, in the
twenty twenties, all of this history has some similar features,
(03:25):
predictive and prescriptive elements, and I argue that it's not
an obscure history, it's a suppressed history. And on my
goal with Blood and Progress is to remove the omerta,
you know, destigmatize the notion that we can talk about
left wing violence with the authority and clarity that it deserves,
because otherwise we're never going to get our hands around
(03:46):
this problem.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
I like the way you pointed out that if there
is right wing violence, we have a long, solemn faced
national discussion about it, many many articles and panels and
that sort of thing. If there's agreed completely, we abhor
all political violence around here. But if there's left wing violence,
it becomes well, he understands, and it's an expression of
(04:07):
people's discontent with healthcare or what have you, no longer discussion.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Let me give you my best example a note. I
think you guys talked about this maybe in one of
the many podcast interviews i've heard you do when Trump
first started running for president, before it became all controversy,
and it was still kind of just fun in a joke.
He flew into Sacramento in the big Trump plane, and
I took my kids, which in retrospect seems crazy taken
I think they were. They were like six and four
(04:34):
something like that. I mean, there were little kids, But
it was still just kind of fun to go to
a Trump rally that was in Sacramento on like a
Wednesday night. The next night he's in San Jose and
some Trump people wherein Trump hats.
Speaker 4 (04:46):
Got beaten up on the sidewalk, got beaten up in
the middle of the day, and it got zero news
coverage and nobody was bothered by it, and I was like,
holy crap, when did political violence become okay?
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Since then, I've been highly disturbed.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Yeah. I remember writing a piece for Commentary magazine, where
I was employed at the time, in twenty sixteen, because
I had written a bunch about sharing the apprehension that
the national press had over the degree to which the
president was inclined to excuse or even give license to
people on his side who would react violently to the
protesters who were protesting his events, demonstrating against his events,
(05:23):
infiltrating his events, and harassing his supporters. I was unerved
by that, But I was just as unerved by the
degree to which Trump supporters were being attacked in the
streets in Sacramento, as you said, in places like Arizona
and Chicago, they shut down a rally that beat up, cops,
beat them bloody, had the clothes torn from their backs,
bell pelted with eggs, etcetera, etc. Got no coverage, and
(05:43):
throughout the course of the Trump presidency, first Trump presidency,
which got much much worse than Joe Biden's presidency, I've
been unnerved by the degree to which there is not
an excuse making exercise necessarily on the part of the left,
but certainly an effort to contextualize left wing violence and
render it, as you say, an excusable or forgivable response
(06:05):
to environmental conditions, many of which are completely subjective in
the minds of progressive activists. And you noted the degree
to which you got to understand the violence. A lot
of that came in the immediate aftermath of the assassination
of CEO but United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, where you
heard leading lights in the Democratic Party Alexandria Kosio Quortez,
(06:26):
Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Bernie Sanders. All of them condemned
the murder, but then say, but big pregnant butt, that
renders everything that came before it dismissable and perfunctory. But
you have to understand the healthcare system is broken in
Bernie Sanders' case, But you have to understand not just
the healthcare system, but the finance system, the election system,
(06:47):
the housing system, the education system. Everything is broken. Therefore,
what is necessary a revolutionary social upheaval, something that will
reset everything to year zero. We can get back to
the kind of social contract that we know we need,
and how do we get there. In the minds of
the revolutionary activists throughout the centuries now, it has been
(07:11):
that one galvanizing act of violence and bloodshed and human
sacrifice will ignite passions that are otherwise dormant in the public,
and they will rise up and join us in our
campaign against these oppressive structures, the civilizational oppression that the
public is just yearning to slough off themselves, and they
only need permission to do so, and we're going to
(07:31):
give it to them. This is a violent mindset, This
is the violent activist mindset, and it's the sort of
thing that is very pervasive on the left, even among
political professionals and responsible institutional stewards.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
And what we're about to talk about, what I'm about
to ask about is not all left wing political violence.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
The Lord knows.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
But I've been fascinated by what Matt Tybe recently called
upper class twits promoting revolution since I was a kid.
I grew up in a very pleasant suburb of Chicago
where the Harris family that were central to the Patty
Hurst kidnapping debacle lived, Their parents lived there, and it
astounded me that somebody coming from a very pleasant place,
(08:11):
well educated, certainly affluent enough to get by in America,
would turn to revolution. And I've since learned that that's
far from uncommon, a pretty good common thread from the
seventies of violence through at least some current left wing violence,
isn't there?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Oh my gosh? Yes. And we had some very recent
evidence of this. The third, not first, not second, third
attempt on Donald Trump's life was executed by a man
who the press seemed to be confused by because he
was erudite, because he was educated, because he came from
the same milieu that they come from. CBS host Nora
(08:51):
O'Donnell asked the president to opine on the ramblings of
a madman who tried to kill him in years past.
The guy's actions have discredited everything that came before, But no,
Nora o'donalds didn't seem much there that was beyond reason. Therefore,
maybe the president should have to answer why he's not
a pedophile, a traitor, a criminal. That's the sort of
(09:14):
thing that strikes those of us who are familiar with
the history and the profile that's associated with those who
execute violence in the pursuit of positive social change, which
is its own sort of disordered thinking that the profile
is that guy, especially the education part. The sociologists. There
are sociologists that I quote in this book who find
(09:36):
that within the context of Islamist terrorism, at least the
common thread there is that they share not privation, want
and hardship. They have an engineering degree, they come from
means they come from an educated background. And it makes
it a little bit of intuitive sense when you think
about it, that those who would pursue violence as a
(09:57):
vehicle for social change have at least some familiarity with
movements that engaged in similar pursuits in history. So it's
the sort of thing. That is. You can chalk it
up to ignorance, but it's an ignorance that's cultivated and
licensed and encouraged by people in positions of power and
(10:17):
authority in this country, who who scan the horizon for
any evidence of right wing violence, as they should, and
as you say, are treat us to prolonged lectures about
our permissiveness when we experience episodes of right wing violence,
as we should. The same cannot be said on the left.
There is a huge asymmetry here, and as a result,
(10:37):
I fully expect more right wing political violence because these
two things are intertwined. Those who are inclined towards violence
again resolved to meet out vendetta against their political adversaries,
and if they perceive that the state is no longer
concerned with their safety and that of their families, then yeah,
vigilantism could become a much more pronounced feature of the
American social compacts. And that's a big fear of mine,
(11:00):
something I'm hoping to stave off with my book.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Yeah, Progress, I hope you can also. So it's so
tawdry to get into a compare the left wing scorecard
to the right ring scorecard to see who's ahead or behind,
depending on how you look at it. But you kind
of have to because the FBI director or a president
or the media is going to give you a list of,
(11:24):
you know, what percentage of violence is right wing, and
I like how you break down some of the crazy
things that they put on that side of the ledger
to kind of fix the numbers.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Yeah, well, I'm not dueling in databases here, like I'm
not competing in the database world because I think it's
a hopelessly subjective enterprise. As you say, there are a
bunch of these statistical analyzes that purport to conclude that
the American right is uniquely violent or at least uniquely murderous.
Sometimes there's a distinction there with a difference, But if
you go into the databases, depending on which one you're
(11:56):
looking at, you see a lot of stuff that the
general public does not perceived to be political violence, gang violence,
prison violence, intra family violence. Now there's a person who
spray pains the slurs on the side of a church
writing violence, a homeless man who wanders into a hotel
and hurls racial epithets at the hotel and insults the
(12:18):
right wing violence. It's sort of like those databases that
are put out by gun control groups that purport to claim,
like there have been seventy school shootings this year, and
you say to yourself, well, I don't remember seventy school shootings.
And you look at the data and it shows somebody
discharged a firearm adjacent to a school property. Like, that's
just not what people think of when they think of
political violence. And then, most importantly, what I think is
(12:41):
a smoking gun. In the first chapter of this book
is a document that was prepared for the Department of
Homeland Security in twenty twenty one, in which researchers say
that the study of violent left wing extremism is shot
through with problems, one of them being the fact that
people who are allegedly participants in these violent movements are
themselves the authors of these studies of those violent movements.
(13:03):
And then those who are not are subjected to by
their colleagues intimidation campaigns, social isolation, even the threat of
physical retaliation for merely doing the job. It's right for exploration.
It is shot through with problems, and it's the sort
of thing that a society invested in its own preservation
would take very seriously. And it's a wonder why it
(13:25):
seems like very few are and there haven't been any real, pronounced,
sustained efforts to grapple with the problem of left fling
violence in this country. That's why blood and progress, I
think is so necessary.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Right. The oversimplified version of what I want to bring
up is that conservatives think progressives are misguided or wrong.
Progressives think conservatives are evil, which is obviously a thread
that runs, you know, directly into the violence. Is there
anything we can do as a society to I don't know,
(14:00):
some sort of forced interchange so folks have the left
can be exposed to more conservative ideals and realize we're
not evil. We just see the world more differently than
they do.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Well, I really hope they read my book. First of all,
I don't offer that'd be nice, right, I mean, it's
step one. I don't offer a panacea for the problem
of political violence in the United States, and I would
be suspicious of anyone who does. There's been political violence
in this country since its founding. It's a feature of
civic life in America. And then lovely one but one nonetheless,
(14:33):
but nevertheless, I do recommend things that we can do
on the margins. To address this problem, the New Lines Institute,
for example, offers some advice to law enforcement officials, for example,
to deprive those who are inclined towards violence of the
narrative that they often promulgate, in which they maintain that they,
(14:54):
the state and the police, are on the side of
the other side, the political adversaries, and therefore they're valid
targets too. I recommend that we restore politics to its
proper place. Politics currently knows no rational bounds. It's not
about education. It's not about elections and legislative affairs and
enumerated duties in a constitution. It's about the commercials you
(15:18):
watch and the shows that you watch, and the music
you listen to, and the foods you eat, and the
people you surround yourselves with and your hobbies, and all
of it has nothing to do with politics. Properly understood.
It might be political, but it's that is a construct,
and it's immune to remedy from the governmental entities by
virtue of the constitution, which is desirable. It's good. But
(15:41):
if you're so convinced that you have this moral imperative
on your hands, and society is deaf to it, it's
a radicalizing thing, and it can either lead you to
withdraw entirely from the political process or resolve to attack
the foundations of this holy, immoral enterprise that is deaf
to your appeals. So I do have a couple of,
(16:02):
you know, ideas for getting our hands around this problem.
But the biggest problem but I attempt to address with
this book is the fact that that so few are
willing to acknowledge it. If all I've achieved with this
book is the acknowledgment of the degree to which we're
experiencing a pronounced and disproportionate way of left wing violence,
and that is not uncommon in this country, then I
(16:23):
will have achieved my objective.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
Yeah, when you've got both sides constantly saying this election
will be the last election if the other side wins,
I mean, you could justify lots of stuff, you know,
if you actually believe that. How do you separate out
a crazy person like completely nuts who happened to latch
on to a political point of view versus you know,
(16:45):
the somewhat sane.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
How do you do that. One of the reasons why
I don't tell this story in numbers and statistics is
because I wanted to do just that, to dive into
the disordered thinking of somebody who believes that an act
of political violence will beget positive outcomes and positive social change.
That's the sort of thing you can only tell in stories,
(17:09):
and so I do tell those stories, and some of
the individuals who engage in acts off look. First of all,
a crazy person can have as big an impact on
history an act of violence as a clear eye idiologue.
So there is, you know, there's a distinction as a
fine one to a certain degree. But there are plenty
of people who act out in deference to schizophrenia, for example,
(17:32):
or other disorders, who end up committing horribly violent acts
and may or may not have a political motive behind them.
Some of them are explicitly apolitical. But then there's also
the audience for that sort of thing, and there usually
is an audience, especially for political violence violence that is
designed to inflame passions, and sometimes they leave manifest us
(17:54):
behind indicating that that is their ideal, And the audience
for this sort of thing sometimes give you clues as
to what their motives are and what the milieu in
which they're operating in is like. And the first thing
that comes to mind. There is Shane Temora, who about
two years ago, walked into a high rise in mid
(18:16):
time Manhattan seeking the offices of the NFL because he
wanted to execute as many people in the NFL as
he possibly could, operating under the delusion that the NFL
was responsible for the concussions that he suffered as a kid.
He was disordered, and he ended up going to the
wrong place. He went to a real estate firm, and
he shot a bunch of people, one of them being
Wesley Lepattner, whose young real estate executive. And his act
(18:41):
was a completely senseless act of violence, but the audience
for it saw a lot of sense in it. They
saw the execution of a rapacious capitalist, somebody who had
it coming by virtue of her station and the degree
to which she had benefited from ill begotten goods in society,
just by virtue of her participation in enterprise, and they
(19:02):
perceived that act of violence to be a good thing
that was do everyone else. It brought us one step
closer to the revolution in which you and me and
everybody who's a participant in this immoral network that we
all inhabit the United States will get what's coming to us.
That's the mail you in which we're operating in right now.
(19:22):
This is our environment and it's going to get worse
if we don't confront it.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Well, that's just spiteful envy. A disordered individual shoots the
wrong person, but you think, well, that person, let's find
some sins and pronounce them deserving of their fate, which
is horrifying, Which brings us to, speaking of horrifying, the
the rising numbers of people, in most notably young people,
who will justify political violence of one sort or another.
(19:49):
Where did that come from?
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Well, it's hard for me to say whether the degree
to which it's been with us forever, because I do
think there's an element of this that can be overrid,
that there's a something in the young mind that is
attracted to breaking taboos, to shocking elders. There are so
few taboos left that do shock with the commensurate commensurate
(20:14):
to their desire to be provocative. Anti Semitism is one,
and violence is another. The celebration of bloodshed for its
own sake is another. But that performative ghoulishness, and we
saw some of it the other day outside of the
trial of Luigi Mangioni, where three young ladies into camera
competed with one another to be as gooulish as they
(20:36):
possibly could. Called Brian Thompson, his alleged victim a terrorist,
said his children were better off without him, his two
young children, that they would anything that he had bequeathed
them was blood money. And most importantly, in my view,
was that an indictment of the country, Because in the
minds of one of these activists, we are the most
(20:57):
passive and coowed population in the history story of the
planet that anybody, any other civilization that was experiencing the
kind of oppression that we're subjected to on a daily basis,
would have already risen up and overthrown the repressors. And
the fact that we don't is an indictment of us
and indicative of how badly we need revolutionary violence in
(21:17):
this country to wake us from our passivity. That is
clear eyed. In my view. It is performative, it is
a spectacle, but it's also designed to beget the kind
of violent outcomes that are often encouraged tacitly, even if
they don't acknowledge it, by democratic political officials who attempt
(21:37):
to co opt these movements. Why did they append the
butt when they were condemning Brian Thompson's murder? Why do
they lean into Occupy Wall Street or the twenty twenty
George Floyd Bobs? They see in these expressions of political
zeal which may be a little excessive, maybe unrefined, but
it could be harnessed and directed towards productive ends and
(21:59):
maybe contribute to democratic political prospects. It's a really utilitarian
approach to what is, in my view, a cancer on
American society and one that needs to be excised, not encouraged.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Are you more worried about individuals coming together under an
ideology and acting out individually? Or the groups? The Antifa,
the Proud Boys, the whatever.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Wow, it's sort of a matter of degrees, isn't it?
Am I? What am I more worried about? They're both
extraordinarily troubling.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
Well, which is more unique in this moment?
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Well? What is most troubling? I would say, where we've
seen more violence from individuals, so it's a more pronounced threat.
But what's really unnerving to me is the group violence,
in particular the violence targeting police. Last year we saw
three armed assaults on ice and CBP facilities, some which
(23:00):
were quite deadly, one of which featured extremely sophisticated ambush tactics.
There's about ten individuals and there was no ambiguity about
what they were trying to do. They left behind literature
advocating for the proletarian revolution. We know who these people are.
But they used fireworks to target this facility, lore their
targets out, and then open up on them from overlapping
(23:22):
fields of fire on the tree line. That's sophisticated. That's
an assault. That's a small self terrorist act, and it's
akin to what we saw in the nineteen seventies and
nineteen eighties with the Marxist guerrilla groups who targeted police explicitly.
And it's similar to the socialist anarchists' movements of the
nineteen tens nineteen twenties who targeted police specifically. That's the
(23:43):
sort of thing that is a portent of a possible convulsion,
a spasm of organized left wing terroristic violence of the
sort that we haven't experienced in this country in fifty years.
But if you don't know that we haven't experienced it
in fifty years or the fifty years before that, you
won't know what you're looking at. You won't have any
immunity to it. You won't know how to stop it.
That's why Blood and Progress is my view so important. Again.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Noah Rothman's new book is Blood and Progress, a Century
of left wing violence in America. We know your time
is limited. In a couple of minutes we have left,
can we talk about a couple of contemporary issues?
Speaker 2 (24:19):
Of course?
Speaker 1 (24:20):
First of all, what the hell is going on with
the negotiations with Iran? Is this going anywhere? Or are
we just getting strung along? I think we're getting.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Strong along, and I'm a little disappointed with how this
has gone in the ceasefire period. I think the Operation
Epic Fury was a tactical triumph. The ceasefire has been
a mess, and it's not advancing our interests, and the
President risks sacrificing a lot of the gains that were
made in this process in two ways, the first of
(24:51):
which being that during Operation Epic Fury, the Gulf States
abandoned this pretense of neutrality and gravitated towards the United
States and Israel. Of course they did because the United
States and Israel were defending them against barrages of fire
that were coming from Iran. We're seeing now as the
(25:12):
ceasefire breaks down, those barrages continue. Kuwait, Bahrain, Uae all
getting struck over the course. In last night, a very
significant assault on Kuwait City in which one person died,
sixty three were injured. And the President is kind of
taking it all in stride. So that really risks the
prospect of this kind of regional realignment that was very
beneficial to American strategic interests. The second being that the
(25:35):
president is moving towards the Iranians and the Iranians aren't
moving towards us in this very specific way. He confirmed.
Trump confirmed today that he did have this profanity laced
tirade when he was yelling at Bibnetnyah, who is really
Prime Minister Ntnyaho, for constantly fighting in Lebanon his words,
his Belaw attacked Israel during Operation Epic Fury. That war
(25:57):
is ongoing, but has Belot started it? And now Iran,
which used to deny that it had any links to Hesbela,
is under duress saying you got to reign in Israel.
Hesbelah's in real trouble and he's doing that. Why that's leverage.
That's something you can use to get the Iranians to
come to the table and be a little bit more
(26:19):
pliant in talks if there were ever going to be.
That's something they really hold dear and you can hold
it over their heads. But Trump's just giving it away
and he's not getting anything for it, and I don't
understand why he's Obviously he thinks time is on his
side and he has some evidence in that to that effect.
The blockade is a stranglehold on the Iranian economy and
(26:39):
they're starting to feel it and act like it. But
at the same time, he too is operating under obvious
duress and obvious pressure, political pressure, and practical pressure. You know,
the United States really is short on these interceptor missiles,
exquisite munitions that take a lot of time to refill. Nevertheless,
he picked this war. The time is now, and it's
time for him to finish the job that he started.
(27:00):
So I've been very disappointed with this ceasefire process.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
Well, in a steak is whether or not Iran gets
a nuclear weapon, which I think has gotten lost at
least in the mainstream media or buy a lot of
people that the what's that steak is not the price
of gas for the summer vacation. You're going on. It's
whether or not Iran gets a nuke, And we're saying
on the air the other day, Iran getting a nuke
would be one of the biggest moments in world history.
You agree or disagree.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
I do agree. And it's also beyond that. It's the
shape of the region for decades to come. The next
fifty years is on the table right now. Why have
we been unable to execute the pivot to Asia that
George W. Bush wanted, that Barack Obama wanted, that Trump wanted,
that Biden wanted. It's Iran and Iran will not let
us extricate ourselves from that region. It has been at
(27:43):
war with us. It sounds like a cliche, but it's true.
It has been at war with US, executing killing Americans
and executing operations on US soil and on our allies
soil designed to murder our allies and Americans for forty
seven years, not going to stop until that regime implode.
But we can contain that regime and the design being
(28:03):
to collapse it so that we could finally execute our
strategic priorities in other parts of the planet Earth. That's
a really desirable goal. If the President were able to
engineer it, it would have dividends that we would reap
for generations to come. But it's a big project, and
it's one that isn't going to take a couple of
weeks to engineer. So yeah, I understand that Americans are
feeling the price at the pain at the pump. I
(28:25):
am too, And the President hasn't asked us to bear
any burdens, which is one of the reasons why I
don't blame the American people for not really being all
that jazzed about this operation. He should have enlisted the
public in what is a national project that would entail
sacrifices on their part. He still can't. Nothing's stopping him,
but he seems content to pretend that this is all
(28:45):
going to work out in the end and it's not
a big deal, and anybody who's complaining about it doesn't
really know what they're talking about. And so yeah, I
don't blame anybody for repaying that lack of trust in kind.
But it's not working out for him, and it's not
going to work out for America in the long run.
Anybody who really appreciates the scope and gravity of what
we're doing right now in the Middle East. Should want
(29:06):
the President to take this more seriously. I certainly do.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Finally, meanwhile, back in Europe, Vladimir Putin in Russia hopelessly
admired in the situation, Ukraine probably losing ground. What do
you hope for and what do you fear will be
Vladimir Putin's next move?
Speaker 2 (29:26):
He's severely constrained materially and tactically. What he's doing is
trying to say a face and executing some horrific crimes
in the process. This week, I believe it was two
days ago or last night, perhaps even a volley of
ballistic missiles on civilian targets, indiscriminate targets inside Kiev. The
(29:50):
Putin regime is just engineering a crisis in warfare akin
to nothing like the continent has seen since World War Two.
And what I fear is a nuclear standoff. I've always
feared that, not a nuclear exchange, not a detonation. People
have a tendency to alli these things as though they
don't have a difference. There's a huge difference. But a
(30:11):
nuclear standoff a crisis that I believe is diffusible because
it certainly wouldn't be the first nuclear crisis between Washington
and Moscow and our histories, but I've felt for a
long time that that was going to be the tipping point.
I mean, I could because that's the only that's the
only arrow in Moscow's quiver at this point. They're severely
(30:31):
tactically limited in what they can achieve on the battlefield,
and they need a face saving way out of this crisis,
and a face saving way out of this crisis would
be to compel the West to back down in some
fashion or form. I'm just kind of surprised that we
haven't gotten there yet, in part because the only value
to nuclear weapons are to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.
They otherwise have no tactical or strategic value. But I
(30:54):
do feel like that is a very live possibility, and
it would be a very scary prospect. I don't want
to downplay it. Think it's resolvable in a positive way,
but it would be very scary and it would be
very unnerving to a lot of people. And cooler heads
may not prevail. They don't always do, so we shouldn't
talk lightly about that sort of thing. But that's my
biggest concern.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
One more time. The book is Blood and Progress is
centrally a century of left wing violence in America. No,
we're authman, great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for
the time, Thank you very much, appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
So I admire Noah's efforts here. I hope it works
that we can sort of balance the conversation out there
that's not just right wing violence as we're told by
whoever it was, McKay or Comy, one of the your
FBI directors and the media on a regular basis, because
like Noah says, we're never going to be able to
wrap our heads around this or have any sort of
conversation until we realize there's lots of political violence on
(31:44):
both sides. There's way too much we need to condemn it.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
All right, right, and the whole and is listing out
in the book of the reactions to not only the
assassination of Brian Thompson, but he goes into a great
deal of detail about the assassination to Charlie Kirk and
all of the people who condemned it, but condemned it,
butt condemned it. But as you described, it is really
(32:09):
quite striking when you read it. Yeah, and I think
it's more powerful psychologically than it seems at first. Blush,
because if you truly condemned something, you would say, this
is a horror, and nobody's frustration with healthcare justifies murder. Ever,
(32:32):
but if it takes the form of, of course I
condemn political violence, but people are very unhappy about their healthcare,
and blah blah blah, that takes you to a different
place rhetorically, of.
Speaker 3 (32:44):
Course it does. Yeah, yeah, Ugly couldn't recommend the book
more highly, especially if you're gonna end up in an
argument with any liberal friends about who's got the most
violence on their side. Blood and Progress by Noah Rothman
Speaker 1 (32:57):
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