The recent rash of left-wing political violence can be chalked up to a variety of things, including the toxic political rhetoric of the Democratic Party and its associates. Their celebration of violent figures and events normalizes this political violence and leads America down an increasingly dark path.
This normalization was present throughout the first term of Donald Trump’s presidency. Masked thugs assaulted people and destroyed property in Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. These lawless antifa “demonstrations” would have been swiftly put down by any self-respecting state government; however, Washington and Oregon are not. Antifa rioters threw rocks, shot fireworks, and used other projectiles at federal law enforcement in Portland, committing $2.3 million in damages to federal buildings alone.
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Democratic politicians ignored all of this, and their media and activist allies did their best to defend antifa’s existence. They did so by comparing these rioting left-wing losers to the American soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day during World War II. After all, “antifa” supposedly just stands for “anti-fascist.”
Paul Farhi of the Washington Post called D-Day soldiers the “original antifa.” Mara Liasson of NPR posted a photo of D-Day and called it the “biggest antifa rally in history.” Chris Cuomo, then of CNN, defended antifa on multiple occasions with these comparisons, as did the Lincoln Project operatives and members of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns.
This normalization of street violence set the stage nicely for the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, with violent left-wingers in Democrat-run cities and states learning that they would not be held accountable for street violence, and that their side would ignore, defend, or even justify their violent acts. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris vindicated that idea when she promoted the bail fund for rioters and other violent criminals in Minneapolis during the BLM riots.
Terrorists
The most obvious example of prominent left-wingers celebrating terrorists is the aftermath of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack against Israel in 2023. Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel, slaughtered 1,200 men, women, and children, and took over 200 hostages back to Gaza. The despicable attack should have been roundly and relentlessly condemned.
But Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) were unable to provide that moral clarity. Instead, they treated Hamas leaders as unassailable reporters of the truth whose word must be taken as fact, peddling Hamas propaganda about both specific incidents — such as the fabricated ‘Israel bombed a hospital’ story and the fictional “genocide” in Gaza. The cause they have taken up paints Hamas as heroic resistance fighters by necessity.
Other Democratic politicians have then ignored pro-Hamas demonstrations on campus, including the illegal encampments that have led to antisemitism and violence on college campuses. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg dropped charges against multiple Columbia University students who trespassed in a university building and effectively took janitors hostage.
The worst has come from university professors and other education officials, who have gone as far as to glorify the antisemitic terrorists responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks. You can sort through the various lists of pro-terrorist professors and pick out your favorites, but a few stand out. A Cornell University professor called the rape and murder of Israeli civilians “exhilarating” and “energizing.” A Virginia Tech professor said, “We must refuse those who demand that we condemn Palestinian violence.” A professor at the University of Chicago celebrated the massacre as “Morning freedom.”
The celebration of terrorists at universities goes beyond Hamas. Weather Underground terrorists were responsible for bombings and other acts of domestic terrorism through the 1960s and 1970s, and leader Bill Ayers lamented in 2001 that he didn’t get to do enough bombings. He went on to become a much-celebrated professor at the University of Chicago. Kathy Boudin was in the same terrorist group when she and others went on to kill a security guard and two police officers in an armed robbery. She spent more than a decade as a professor at Columbia, while fellow terrorist conspirator David Gilbert was praised as a humanitarian when his sentence was commuted by then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2021.
Liberal media is not immune to the terrorist glorification and whitewashing either. The New York Times has turned its opinion pages over to a Taliban terrorist wanted by the FBI for killing six people and to an eco-terrorist who has called for committing domestic terrorism and blowing up pipelines. In the latter piece, the man who wrote a book titled “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” called for “sabotage” against not just pipelines but terminals, cranes, and mines.
Murderous dictators
Democrats and left-wing professors have also praised and whitewashed dictators and authoritarian regimes throughout the years, often speaking of them in more glowing terms than they use for Republicans and other conservatives. Former vice presidential nominee and current Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz praised Chinese communism as a system where “everyone is the same and everyone shares,” and everyone gets food and housing. Aside from downplaying the authoritarianism of China’s police state, Chinese communism only took roughly 65 million dead bodies to reach Walz’s ideal political state.
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and hatchet man Che Guevara are also popular in left-wing circles, despite their body count hitting five digits. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), former Rep. and current mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass, and members of the Congressional Black Caucus have all praised Castro. Then-President Barack Obama posed for a photo in Cuba in front of a giant mural of Guevara, a cult hero among the most left-wing students and professors on college campuses. Black Lives Matter hero Colin Kaepernick, in the twilight of his NFL career, tried to lecture people about Castro’s greatness before playing a game in Miami, the city known for being full of refugees from the horrors of Castro’s regime.
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The New York Times obituary section praised Castro as a “fiery apostle of revolution” who “defied the United States for nearly half a century,” hailing the “medical advances” of his communist regime and noting his “admirers from around the world, including some Americans, were impressed with the way that healthcare and literacy in Cuba had improved.” The outlet also marked the anniversary of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong’s death by highlighting his rise from “an obscure peasant” to “one of history’s greatest revolutionary figures.” That was deemed the appropriate framing for history’s single-greatest mass murderer.
All of this has persisted as Democrats, professors, liberal “journalists” and pundits, and left-wing activists all run around calling Republicans fascists who are going to kill us all. Is it any wonder, then, that a political movement that venerates terrorists, street thugs, and Fidel Castro is going to develop a culture of violence against its domestic political opponents who disagree with them on tax policy or immigration? This culture of violence has been cultivated by decades of Democratic rhetoric, including the praise of murderers and terrorists.
