In a video message to constituents last week, Sen. Andy Kim agonized over the “chaos in the streets that ICE has unleashed” on the city of Newark, NJ. The Garden State Democrat pledged to “do everything I can to try to stop this chaos.”
What nonsense. If anything, the senator and his fellow Democrats have done everything in their power to inflame passions and drive violent agitators onto those very streets — putting the safety of civilians and law enforcement alike in jeopardy.
They don’t seem to care that they are encouraging political violence. Rather, they appear to welcome civil disruptions that they see as expressions of exploitable political zeal. This is hardly the first time Democrats have put good sense to one side to court the violent and disturbed.
Readers of my new book, “Blood & Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America,” know exactly what they’re seeing unfold in Newark and the horrors that could flow from it.
“It’s a concentration camp, and they are disappearing people,” said one deranged union organizer of the Newark-based Delaney Hall detention facility, where the Trump administration is housing immigration deportation targets. Absurd though that claim is, it mirrors assertions from Democratic lawmakers that the conditions in that facility are “inhumane,” even though they insist they’ve been barred from witnessing them.
But Democrats have not been denied access to the facility.
And in their more sincere moments, they concede that detainees mostly complain that “there is no movement” of their cases through the courts. That’s a far cry from the activists’ allegations that detainees are being denied proper nutrition and medical care. But the capital “C” version of this conspiracy theory has proven sufficiently radicalizing.
For nearly two weeks, keffiyeh-clad agitators have been harassing federal law enforcement around Delaney Hall — disruptions that were met with pepper spray (even against Democrats like Sen. Kim). But the worst of the violence took place on Memorial Day weekend.
Police armed with riot gear and respirators were pelted with “water bottles, rocks and debris” by rioters who were similarly well equipped. Officers responded with rubber bullets and pepper balls, flashbang grenades and tear gas.
Mounted police on horseback charged into the crowd, briefly dispersing the demonstration before it regrouped down the block. There, rioters set plywood, trash, tires and plastic traffic drums alight.
As Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche proved with some graphic photo evidence, officers were beaten and even bitten by the rioters.
Do Democrats fear the fire they’re unleashing? Did they fear it last year, when radicals executed at least three armed assaults on federal immigration offices — one of which featured sophisticated ambush tactics?
Did they contemplate the prospect that appending a “but” onto their formerly unequivocal condemnations of Luigi Mangione’s alleged murder, urging us to understand that America is “broken” and revolutionary angst is a logical response to systemic oppression, would beget more killings?
Did they reconsider their actions after Charlie Kirk’s killer, who was “pretty left on everything,” according to one acquaintance, mimicked Mangione’s tactics? Have they audited their conduct since Donald Trump was targeted with assassination for a third time by a figure inspired by the propaganda that has become common currency on left-wing forums like Bluesky? Of course not.
They tell themselves that they don’t have to. After all, they already know that most domestic political violence comes from the right. They inform us of that immutable fact of American life after every act of obvious left-wing violence, so you’ve probably heard it a lot.
It’s a dubious claim. It’s propped up by datasets that contend, oddly enough, that political violence in America peaked in 2019, and quantitative analyses that claim prison violence, gang violence and even intra-family violence constitute episodes of right-wing political terrorism.
It’s also supported by a corrupted academic culture, as researchers concluded in a smoking-gun 2021 document prepared for the Department of Homeland Security. In it, the authors warned that their colleagues face intimidation campaigns, social isolation and even the threat of physical retaliation merely for attempting to expose the threat posed by left-wing extremists.
The truth is that America is experiencing a wave of left-wing political violence unlike any it has seen in the last half-century. But it’s not unprecedented. This wave looks eerily similar to the anarchist and socialist violence that consumed the country in the 1910s and 1920s, as well as in the 1970s and 1980s — periods routinely described by scholars as “forgotten” eras.
But this is not an obscure history. It’s a suppressed history.
The events unfolding on the streets of Newark today, and what may come next, will be hauntingly familiar to readers of “Blood & Progress.” Democrats have made a fetish of violence, seeing in it an excessive but useful manifestation of political enthusiasm, even as they tell themselves the left doesn’t have a violence problem.
“Blood & Progress” is an indictment of that fantasy and its enablers.
Noah Rothman is the author of “Blood & Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America.” (Center Street).
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