Political Violence in America

This op-ed originally appeared in the American Mind on May 7, 2024.

The leftist tumult, often sliding into intimidation and violence, overtaking American college campuses is neither temporary nor topical. That is, it won’t end when the war in Gaza ends, nor is it even particularly about that war. What we are seeing in 2024 is the latest, dreary iteration of left-wing violence that seems predictably to strike during election years.

Americans who remember the violence of 2020 will find it all familiar. Then, as now, there was a proximate trigger in events, and then, as now, the actual strategic aim of the so-called protestors—really insurrectionists—was to sow chaos and, not at all coincidentally, compel particular policy and electoral outcomes. We know what happened in 2020, even if the press and the regime have done their best to bury that memory or retrofit it as a righteous and mostly peaceful movement for justice. That fraught year saw American communities set afire, American law enforcement ambushed and murdered, American citizens subject to ideological show trials by fanatical roving mobs, and American institutions rush to acquiescence lest they be targeted. In any other country, it would have been called seditious insurrection and met with force. And probably it should have been.

The ideological violence of 2024 has yet to climax. One reason it is slow to build is that its proximate trigger is less sympathetic than the one in 2020: everyone wants equal rights for black Americans, but the local constituency for Hamas is quite a bit smaller. Another reason is that it’s early yet. Though the Gaza war has been underway for eight months, the American mass protests over it, in the form of territorial “occupations” and transportation shutdowns, are only a month or so old. Give them time to grow.

Read the full op-ed in the American Mind.