By James B. Meigs
Manhattan Institute investigator Stu Smith recently posted a clip on X showing New York activist Nicolás Vargas speaking on a 2022 Zoom meeting with other tenant advocates, including a future adviser to Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Cea Weaver. Mr. Vargas is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and advocates “a world without landlords.” If politicians don’t enact the policies his supporters want, he told the meeting attendees, “we will kick them out or throw them out in the street and guillotine them.”
What struck me wasn’t so much the words he spoke (political extremists say a lot of inflammatory things) as the way he said them. His tone was matter of fact, businesslike. It was as if he were addressing a political strategy session, which in fact he was, and letting members know that cutting off the heads of opponents was one of several tactics they might consider. Far-left Twitch streamer Hasan Piker once made a splash saying something similar about killing landlords: “Let the streets soak in their f— red capitalist blood!” he exclaimed in an old video that occasionally resurfaces (more recently, he said the clip is “obviously hyperbolic”).
I asked Mr. Vargas for comment on X. He responded that the guillotine statement was intended to be sardonic, “a joke harkening to the french revolution.” Ah, the French Revolution. Always a source of humor and inspiration for the left. It’s no coincidence that a leading magazine of far-left thought today, Jacobin, is named after the French Revolution’s most bloodthirsty faction. How cheekily transgressive!
This casual celebration of revolutionary violence is all around us today. In April I wrote about the entertainers and thought leaders excusing and even applauding the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. This week, Michigan primary voters narrowly chose the far-left Abdul El-Sayed as their Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. After an attacker tried to blow up Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Mr. El-Sayed called it an “evil act” but then offered a sympathetic explanation for it, saying that “hurt people hurt people” and suggesting the attacker was motivated by Israel’s military strikes. Mr. El-Sayed also has a penchant for violent tough talk; speaking of the need to challenge centrist Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman in a primary, he said, “Ideally you put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message.”
It’s not only talk. Left-wing political violence is on the rise today. In recent years we’ve seen politically motivated assassinations and assassination attempts, protests that devolved into massive riots, widespread attacks on law enforcement, and countless lower-level acts of street violence. “Far too many Americans across the political spectrum are acclimating themselves to a base-line level of political violence in the United States,” warns Noah Rothman in his new book, “Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America.”
At National Review and in his previous position at Commentary (where he and I were colleagues), Mr. Rothman uses the term “permission structure.” It’s a useful concept: Certain kinds of rhetoric, especially statements from perceived cultural leaders, can break down societal taboos, giving people permission to express beliefs once considered beyond the pale. Look at how anti-Israel vitriol expressed by academics, entertainers and podcasters helped open the door to overt antisemitism on both the left and far right.
“Blood and Progress” doesn’t play down violent right-wing incidents, including the bombings and arson attacks of abortion centers in the late 20th century and the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. But left-wing violence has deeper roots and wider acceptance today, Mr. Rothman argues. That’s partly because our liberal elites have created a permission structure that simultaneously downplays and valorizes acts of mayhem on the left.
That’s a bold claim, especially given that our current president once called Jan. 6 rioters “patriots.” To back it up, Mr. Rothman reviews a century of left-wing political bloodshed, from early-20th-century anarchists to the campus-radicals-turned-domestic-terrorists of the 1960s and ’70s. Those scary episodes are largely forgotten today, or worse, reframed by the mainstream left as heroic episodes of resistance. Mr. Rothman wryly notes how celebrities embraced the causes of Mumia Abu-Jamal and other cop killers, while Democratic presidents from Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden pardoned or commuted the sentences of left-wing revolutionaries. “The elite arbiters of American discourse have elevated political violence and disruption into a civic virtue,” Mr. Rothman concludes.
For today’s activists, throwing around violent rhetoric helps burnish their radical bona fides. Stu Smith pointed me to a Nicolás Vargas tweet from last year reading, “KEEP CALM AND KILL YOUR LANDLORD.” Activists use such words “to build solidarity and mobilize support by creating a common enemy,” Mr. Smith told me via email. He added that this dehumanizing dynamic is “reinforced by the class antagonism that is central to Marxist thought.”
More-mainstream political leaders take a subtler approach. Though they condemn shootings, synagogue attacks and the like, they usually follow those rote statements with what Mr. Rothman calls the “pregnant ‘But,’ ” after which they offer justifications for those very acts. Speaking about the Brian Thompson murder, for example, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was quick to add that “people can be pushed only so far.” This elite permission structure doesn’t only encourage callous talk; it drives some people to pick up guns. I’m afraid Thompson won’t be the last to die at the hands of a misguided would-be martyr.
Mr. Rothman doesn’t relish the fact that his warnings grow more germane by the day. “Blood and Progress” grew out of his 2025 Commentary article about the CEO’s killing. As he worked on the draft, two young Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington were killed by a suspect shouting “Free Palestine!” The publisher asked him to speed up the project after Charlie Kirk’s assassination later that year. In many ways, he said, “the manuscript itself is bound up in bloodshed.”
Mr. Rothman writes in his book that he hopes it will “steel our mutual resolve to change the course we’re on before it’s too late.” Let’s hope it helps.
Mr. Meigs is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.