I was still on vacation and blissfully out of the loop about what was going on in the world when the news broke about the riots in Los Angeles. Reading and hearing about it all was a shocking way to come back to reality after a week off.
In a way, I think it shouldn’t have shocked me. After all, leftists embrace and idolize political violence when it suits their ends. The summer of 2025 is beginning to remind us of the long trail of left-wing violence:
- The domestic terrorists of “Stop Cop City” in Atlanta
- The 2020 “Summer of Love” Antifa riots
- Occupy Wall Street
- Germany’s Red Army Faction
- Peru’s Shining Path guerrillas
- The Weather Underground
- Communist and socialist regimes
- The 1968 Democratic National Convention
The list goes on and on, and while the right isn’t immune to violence, the modern left tends to make martyrs and idols of its violent actors. In a recent episode of The Spectator’s “Americano” podcast, host Freddy Gray spoke with anthropologist Max Horder about the normalization of left-wing violence.
“What we've sort of started picking up on is something we're calling an assassination culture, and what that really means is that when we think of a culture and we think about the norms and how we behave with each other, what we think is acceptable, many of the traditional norms are starting to change,” Horder told Gray.
While there’s always a fringe element — on both sides of the aisle — that can be prone to violence, Horder pointed out that an increasing faction of the left is growing ever more vicious.
Due to an “erosion of norms,” Horder noted that “when it comes to violence, it doesn't necessarily need to be just about the people that commit violence because there'll always be people that do that.”
“What the really alarming thing is, what happens when more and more people look the other way, or they give a wink or a tacit approval, and then those acts of political violence start to increase, and more and more people feel like this is a justified thing to do,” he added.
Gray said that “culture wars are now becoming closer to being actual wars.” Horder agreed.
Horder brought up the example of Luigi Mangione, who assassinated the CEO of United Healthcare, and how the assassin has become a hero and pop culture idol. Memes, Pokémon characters, and video game references keep this murderer in the cultural spotlight. Horder compared this phenomenon to the left’s veneration of Che Guevara, another attractive left-wing “pinup.”
“And it is religious, isn't it? Because it's iconography,” Gray suggested. “It's creating an image that quickly becomes worshipped.”
Flashback: Suddenly, Domestic Terrorism Charges Are a Problem Now That Atlanta Is Using Them Against Antifa
It reminds me of how the left tried to turn Manuel Teran into some kind of secular saint. The domestic terrorist came out of a tent he was occupying on the land that Fulton County, Ga., had set aside for a public safety training center, firing at police officers and wounding a Georgia State Patrol trooper. Teran paid for his violence with his life, and the left tried to turn him into a martyr.
Leftists held up posters of Teran at a vigil, calling him by his cutesy nickname, “Tortuguita” (little turtle). Far-left media tried to paint him (and the other domestic terrorists) as mild-mannered environmental activists, but he was a violent radical and would-be cop-killer. His 15 minutes of fame (infamy?) didn’t last long.
Horder laid much of this modern left-wing obsession with violence at the feet of ideological decay, saying, “It almost feels like the left has disintegrated ideologically and doesn't really know where to move forward.” However, he also pointed out the human-nature aspect of it because people thrive on drama and conflict.
Regardless of the reasons for it, leftists are growing increasingly violent, and there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight. I shudder to think what kind of chaos could happen before this tide turns.
