How about we finish the week by excusing political violence so long as it's committed by the correct people while blaming "right-wing extremists" for making it more acceptable?
"Steve, you've been reading The Atlantic again, haven't you?" I can hear you ask. Yes, yes I have been.
"Political violence is no longer confined to the radical fringe" following the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson (allegedly) by Luigi Mangione last week, according to The Atlantic's Ali Breland. "On the surface, Mangione may have just been a fundamentally normal guy who snapped. Or maybe the killing demonstrates how mainstream political violence is becoming."
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that political violence itself is maybe just a bit fringey.
But Mangione, you see, was active in normal ways on Goodreads and X and once even wrote a positive review of Dr. Seuss's "The Lorax." Mangione's "most extreme signal was a sympathetic review he gave to the manifesto written by Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber," Breland notes. "But as the writer Max Read points out, that’s not uncommon for a lot of younger politically active people who identify with Kaczynski’s environmentalist and anti-tech views."
"Mangione doesn't fit my preconceived notion of a political assassin, so that kind of violence must be kinda normal" is quite the take, but Breland is closer to the truth when she concludes, "There are millions of guys who view the world the way Mangione does, and millions more willing to cheer them on."
Left unasked is a question so inconvenient to our friends on the Left that it seems to be shrouded by one of Douglas Adam's SEP fields. If it takes a right-wing extremist to commit political violence — violence condemned by both sides — what does it mean when a mainstream lefty becomes an assassin but receives "Well, ackshully..." excuses from many on the Left? What does that say about "how mainstream political violence is becoming," as Breland put it, and which side is more accepting of it?
To be fair to The Atlantic, the magazine also published a piece this week by Adrienne LaFrance warning that "the brazen murder of a CEO in Midtown Manhattan—and, more important, the brazenness of the cheering reaction to his execution—amounts to a blinking-and-blaring warning signal for a society that has become already too inured to bloodshed." Then again, this is the second Atlantic piece this week pointing fingers about "violent right-wing extremism" without mentioning either of the two assassination attempts on Donald Trump. Weird, eh?
Both LaFrance and Breland point to the majority of violence being committed by "right-wing extremists" that the Biden administration warned us about earlier this year in a National Institute for Justice report on domestic terrorism. I read the summary report, and do you know what words are missing?
"BLM." "Riots." "CHAZ." "Minneapolis." And Islam is mentioned only to diminish the impact of Islamic terrorism with gems like this one: "Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives."
Um... how many people were murdered on 9/11?
Anyway, the point is that it's easy to claim that most domestic terrorism is right-wing when you define all the other instances of it out of existence.
The NIJ report is laughable — or it would be if once-reputable publications like The Atlantic didn't use it to push kook theories about the acceptability of political violence and who commits most of it.
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