political-violence – Martin Simpson

Some Thoughts on Exploding Drug Boats, and Political Violence in America (posted 10/17/25)

Today I’ve got a little light-hearted mockery, followed by more serious thoughts about political violence in America.

I’ll start with the kind of violence I can really get behind: that targeted at cartel drug-runners. I love the language of a RedState story on the fate of a Venezuelan drug smugglers’ boat on Tuesday. The headline said, “Trump Reports Another Intercepted Drug Boat.”

Yes! If by “intercepted” you mean “blown into small chunks of speed boat, cocaine, and filet of drug trafficker.” The War Department (love that name!) called it a “lethal kinetic strike.” The word “lethal” is doing a lot of work there, because “kinetic” is something I heard a lot in physical therapy after I’d partially torn my meniscus.

And that therapy involved neither cocaine nor rapid-onset biological disassembly of my body.

Pete Hegseth’s announcement of the latest kinetic ka-boom channeled Clint Eastwood quite nicely: “The message is clear: if you traffic drugs toward our shores, we will stop you cold.”

Which raised two questions for me:

1. Is Pete trolling the drug cartels with this? Because from what I saw of those gang members’ transnautical experience – in which something that had been assigned “boat” at its launch instantly changed its orientation, and identified as “ball of fire” – seemed anything but cold. In fact, I’m guessing the last words of those thugs were something like, “AIIEEEE! Estoy en fuego!”

2. In the history of Petes, have there ever been two Petes more opposite than Fightin’ Pete Hegseth and Maternity-leave-Takin’ Pete Buttigieg? (Not since pacifist rabbi Adolf Hersch and another Adolf H….)

Okay, now to more serious business.

In the five weeks since Charlie Kirk was killed, we’ve all spent more time than we ever wanted to spend thinking about political violence. I’m sure my thoughts on the topic are no deeper than the next guy’s, but I feel like enough time has passed that I might be able to share some ideas without just dropping F bombs like a maniac. So here goes.

I don’t think the main problem with political violence is the lone-wolf d-bags. Those exist on both sides of politics, and in all religious, ethnic and social groups. As infuriating and damaging as they can be, they are found in every human society, and they are not the core issue.

The real problem is violence that is sanctioned by the mainstream of any social or political group, because such sanction reveals a widespread social sickness that threatens the entire nation. And that kind of violence – socially-sanctioned, approved by the mainstream – exists almost entirely on the left in the United States in recent years.

I would point to 3 leftist groups who have sanctioned violence:

1. Culturally elite non-politicians: These include actors such as Robert DeNiro — who has repeatedly fantasized about physically assaulting Trump, as well as screaming (literally: screaming) about what a dictator, Nazi, punk, coward, etc. he is – and Johnny Depp, who delivered the dead-pan, not-joking rhetorical question, “When was the last time a president was killed by an actor?”

(Ironically, the answer is, “That time when racist Democrat John Wilkes Booth murdered Republican President Lincoln.” So, great company you’re putting yourself in, dumb-arse!)

And singers like Madonna, who openly confessed that she was thinking about bombing the White House, along with many third-rate no-talent rappers and pop wailers.

And some of the biggest influencers and talking heads, including podcasters and streamers, as well as MSNBC and traditional media hosts. Probably the closest thing the left has to Charlie Kirk – at least in terms of views and followers – are Hasan Piker and Stephen “Destiny” Bonnell, and both of them have openly and explicitly called for the death of conservatives. (See my 9/29 column at Martinsimpsonwriting.com for examples.)

2. Culturally elite politicians: It’s hard to think of any Democrats in the House, Senate or previous White House as “elite.” But their positions – congressman, senator, president, even SCOTUS justice – are elite, and their rhetoric has explicitly opened the door for violence, if not explicitly called for it.

(This example is the closest of the three to being bi-partisan, because our side engages in some of this too. I’ve got to call balls and strikes, and Trump’s many references to the “enemy within” or its equivalents are not helpful. Still, though I’m biased, I do think the Dems have been so much worse, and have acted as enemies, at least to the government (when run by GOP) and law enforcement.)

And though the Dems point to generic calls to “fight” or “target” vulnerable Dem House seats, those figures of speech are ubiquitous on both sides of the aisle. But has any GOP pol ever gone to the steps of SCOTUS the way Schumer did, bellowing an explicit warning to sitting justices that, “You’ll reap the whirlwind!” and “You won’t know what hit you” if you interpret the law in a way that disagrees with them?

Has any GOP congressman ever matched the level of incitement reached by Maxine Waters – with that raccoon perched on her head above that terrifying mudslide of a face — yelling that any Dems who see GOP pols in public places should, “Get in their faces, and push back on them, and tell them they’re not welcome there!” ?

3. Huge, organized groups in person, and thousands of “respectable” everyday citizens online: We’ve all grown accustomed to mob violence carried out by Antifa, BLM, and anti-ICE/ pro-illegal groups. But what was so shocking after Charlie Kirk’s murder was the huge number of people who appeared to be sane, functioning citizens, but who then revealed themselves to be sickening, hate-ridden monsters.

When you think of people videoing themselves being vulgar, giddy and gleeful over a bloody assassination, you think of seriously disturbed drifters and dregs of society, videoing themselves in their parents’ basements, or their squalid homeless camps, or a dilapidated single-wide. And there were some of those.

But there were many more apparent normies. They came from all walks of life, with the professions of teachers (K-12), college professors, and those in medicine (doctors and nurses), being well represented, as well as therapists and businesspeople, and even a few in intelligence and the military!

And all of the anecdotal videos are backed up by multiple, widely-reported polls that reinforce what we’ve all come to know in a way many people didn’t want to believe: leftists are MUCH more likely to support political violence.

So it’s no coincidence that this stuff happens routinely on the left, and is vanishingly rare on the right!

Did ANY mainstream GOP pols, cultural elites or media talking heads express approval of Tim McVeigh’s bombing? Even though the attacks on Democrats in recent years – Gabby Gifford, the MN politicians, Paul Pelosi, the arson attack on Josh Shapiro’s house – were NOT carried out by right-wingers espousing right-wing ideology, have ANY mainstream GOP or conservative figures celebrated or excused any of those attacks?

All of which brings me back to where I started: even with the lone-wolf killers, the leftists among them are not scary because they are crazy. They’re scary because they sound like “normal” mainstream lefties.

Charlie’s killer did not say that his dog or the fillings in his teeth told him to kill. The murderers of Christian children in Nashville and Minnesota did not say voices in their heads gave them their orders. The guy who shot Steve Scalise at the GOP baseball practice didn’t say that he was Napoleon, taking vengeance on the Bilderbergers.

Nope. Scalise’s shooter was a Bernie bro and campaign volunteer whose social media was full of typical anti-conservative hatred. Both “transgender” child-killers left manifestos lambasting “transphobic” conservatives. Charlie’s killer called him a “fascist,” just like 95% of the mainstream Dem pols and media talking heads have been doing for years.

As disturbing as the normalized violent impulses from the left are to me, I am heartened by how rare and non-influential such violence on the right really is.

Remember, the last time a “right wing” group came together and killed a person, it was a decade ago, and the group was the white nationalists in Charlottesville. In that case, the most high-profile white supremacists in the country got together – and “high profile” is an oxymoron in that sentence! (The only one I could name is Richard Spencer, and I’d bet you couldn’t find 1 in 100 Americans or conservatives who have even heard of him.)

Those racist “leaders” put out nationwide calls for 4 months to publicize the Charlottesville rally, using all of their social networks and means of reaching their faithful band of followers. And after all of that, they produced a group of how many tens of thousands of idiots?

Not tens of thousands at all. Not even thousands. The best estimates I can find – and those were from “mainstream” (i.e. center-left or farther left) sites – were that “around 100 people” showed up. THAT’S the high point of supposedly right-wing hate groups who have been spotted in America for the last 40 years or so, since the last vestiges of the Klan – a group with a Democrat lineage, inconveniently enough – were dismantled by federal law enforcement, using RICO, in the 1990s).

And THAT’S what Biden and the Dems have been calling “the greatest existential threat to America” today.

It was a ridiculous lie, and in their heart of hearts, even the Dems don’t believe it. But DEI is collapsing, the transgender fever has broken, the hostages have been freed in Israel, and the leftist agenda is disintegrating like a Venezuelan drug boat in our Navy’s gunsights, so it’s just about all they have left.

Bless their hearts.

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!

Some Thoughts on the Depravity of the Left After an Assassination (posted 9/12/25)

I’m still under a dark cloud after Charlie Kirk’s murder, but the aftermath of that heinous act has thrown into stark relief the radical differences between the left and right, writ large.

I don’t want to do a simplistic, Manichaean “they’re all terrible and we’re all great” thing. Primarily because it’s never true. All of us are fallen and broken in some way, and there are good and bad actors on both sides.

It’s also useful to remember the line from Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn – a great man who knew more about the evils of totalitarian leftism than any of us – to wit, “The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.”

But that truth doesn’t excuse or prevent us from trying to honestly judge the varying degrees of evil or corruption in competing groups or ideologies. And I think it’s just demonstrably true that the left has a real problem with its own base, in the form of a sick propensity to embrace and justify political violence.

Consider the most significant recent examples of serious violence that were politically motivated. There have been three mass movements of organized, long-lasting political rioting in the last 5 years, all propagated by those on the left: the BLM riots, the Antifa riots, and the recent anti-ICE riots in LA and several other cities. The first two continued for months, causing billions of dollars of damage, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands more, in cities all over the country.

When it comes to individual attacks, we’ve got the shooting attack on the GOP softball practice that nearly killed Steve Scalise; two assassination attempts on Trump in the span of a few months; the attempted burning to death of Jews in Boulder, and the murder of the young Jewish couple in DC; the mass shootings of Christian school children in Nashville and again in Minneapolis; the murder of the health insurance CEO by back-shooting coward Luigi Mangioni; and now the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

What counter-balancing examples are there from the political right? When it comes to group violence, I can think of only two possibilities: the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, and January 6^th. One person was killed in Charlottesville, and the only one killed on January 6^th was a Trump supporter. Both were events lasting no more than a few hours, carried out by several hundred people who acted violently – as compared to the many hundreds of thousands in the organized mobs of violent leftist rioters who wreaked havoc for literally months, and all over the country.

When it comes to individual attacks, the only ones I’m aware of were the shooting of Gabby Giffords, the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, and the three Democrat office holders recently murdered in Minnesota. And none of those turned out to be committed by right wingers for recognizable political motivations.

Gifford’s shooter had no discernable or rational political beliefs and was mentally ill, believing among other things that “the government was controlling people’s minds by controlling their grammar,” that the Mayan calendar apocalypse was imminent. Pelosi’s attacker was a schizophrenic, intermittently homeless, commune-dwelling hippy.

And after some excitement in Democrat circles because the Minnesota Democrat killer appeared at first to be a Trump supporter, it turned out he was a whacko who killed the three pols because he thought it would help Amy Klobuchar and Tim Wolz.

In fact, the white supremacists at Charlotte were also not affiliated with any mainstream conservative group or school of thought. Trump denounced them at the time and since, saying they should be “condemned completely,” and no white supremacists hold any office or sway in GOP circles, in congress or any other national office.

(I know: many Democrats scream about white supremacists throughout the GOP. But they are either lying, delusional, or both. Because when you examine their claims, it turns out that in their world, “white supremacist” means anyone who opposes racial discrimination of any kind, and supports the constitution, merit-based hiring, hard-work, punctuality, and every other good thing under the sun.)

In fact, the closest you can get to any political violence from the right that had any support from any mainstream Republican or conservative groups was arguably that committed on January 6^th. And initially, the violent minority among the J6ers were almost universally condemned by every corner of the conservative world.

That only changed after the Democrats went after all of them so viciously, imposing a double standard so blatantly unfair that by the time Trump was re-elected, most Republicans agreed with his decision to pardon them. (Even then, there was at least a strong plurality of opposition to pardoning the small number of January 6^th protestors who had been violent.) After watching Democrats let hundreds of thousands of violent thugs, rioters and looters in BLM and Antifa go without so much as a slap on the wrist, we conservatives were no longer willing to tolerate the wildly disproportionate punishment of non-violent J6ers who peacefully walked through the Capitol and then went home.

Again, I would challenge my leftist friends to cite any examples of representative conservatives, motivated by and espousing mainstream conservative beliefs, who have committed acts of political violence. To the extent that they can point to anyone, they’d have to dig up some far-fringe sliver of whackos with no serious connection to any legitimate, influential conservative candidate or group.

Compare that to the leftist practitioners of political violence listed above. BLM and Antifa might not speak for ALL Democrats, but they certainly speak for the majority of the most energetic Democrat base. The central views which can be found in any of their manifestos, speeches, banners or chanted slogans – the condemnation of free-market capitalism, of America as irredeemably racist, and of the “evil” rich, along with disdain for straight people and white people and the police – have been commonplace in the last half-dozen DNC platforms and Democrat presidential candidacies.

Steve Scalise’s shooter was a mainstream Bernie bro and campaign volunteer. The Muslim Jew-murderers in Boulder and DC (and elsewhere) are no more anti-Semitic than the jihad enthusiasts in the Squad. Trust-fund coward Mangioni is a folk hero to bloodthirsty, dimwit leftist fangirls (of both sexes) throughout the Democrat party and blogosphere.

And the transgender venom spouted by the murderers of Christian kids in Nashville and Minnesota – and, if early reports are right, by the killer of Charlie Kirk – could be lifted directly from the malicious, pseudoscientific babblings of the “57 genders” mainstream of the Democrat party.

And this isn’t new. The totalitarian Left has always justified political violence. Marx’s obsession with revolution was never about peaceful, democratic change. Lenin is often credited with the cold-hearted cliché about needing to break a lot of eggs to make an omelet (though it may have come from that earlier proto-Leninist, Robespierre). Stalin dismissively called the murder of a million people a mere “statistic,” and Mao happily noted that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Today many senior Dem politicians were smart enough to condemn Charlie Kirk’s murder, and I hope that for the sake of their souls, they were sincere. But we also saw an outpouring of vile celebration over this good man’s death from Stalin’s heirs, eagerly pursuing the bloody family business. If the Democrat party wants to avoid disaster, it needs to do something about the poisonous progeny it has allowed to spawn.

I think it’s a good sign that a smattering of leftist hate-mongers have lost their jobs today because of their wicked tweets, posts and videos. MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd (and boy, does that guy put the “anal” in “analyst) lost his job, along with his audience of literally dozens. So did a couple of creepy academics, and an even creepier “transgender” comic creator lost his new series.

On the other hand, the cesspool of Bluesky is full of vitriol, and Democrats in congress wouldn’t even allow a moment of prayer in the House when Kirk’s death was announced. Evil blimp Pritzker (#putdownthegiantturkeyleg) and phony squaw Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher) both rejected the idea that they should tone down their vile rhetoric, and said that Trump is the problem.

That’s right. The people who have called all conservatives “Nazis, fascists and existential threats to democracy” non-stop for years can’t see why that might have inspired some of their more unstable coreligionists to act as if those slanderous lies are true. And they’re simultaneously offended because Trump shoots his mouth off about Rosie O’Donnell being fat, and calls lunatics and illegals “lunatics” and “illegals.”

Ugh. At times like these I feel a kinship with H.L. Mencken, when he said, “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

But even momentarily indulging in that fantasy would be betraying my faith, and the cause that Charlie Kirk died for. While his foes spouted hatred and justified violence, Charlie did what old-school liberals always said they wanted: he engaged in spirited debate. He gave as good as he got when confronted by trolls and bad-faith homunculi, but he was even-handed and told the truth to those who would hear it.

He always made a point of allowing people who disagreed with him to come to the front of the line – as Ben Shapiro and many other conservatives routinely do. And I think it’s telling that I can’t think of any leftist “intellectual” or influencer who does the same. They prefer stacked partisan audiences, classrooms where they have power over cowed students, and the ability to cancel anyone who defeats them in a fair argument.

I’ve read a few Christian commentators over this last, sad 36 hours, pointing out that for the faithful, death is not the end, nor should it be sad.

But then I think of the famous, shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” Most of us know that one if we know any, and it is a favorite of lazy students who were assigned to memorize a Bible verse. (I respectfully plead the Fifth on this point.)

But many don’t remember the context. It appears in the book of John, and His reaction is caused by the death of his friend Lazarus. He weeps, and the next verse says, “Behold, how He loved him.”

Even though most of us never met Charlie Kirk, that’s how we feel now, and it’s right that we should. Let those whose poisonous politics are shriveling their souls wallow in their hatred; we shouldn’t lower ourselves to their level, and their misery is its own punishment.

Regular readers will remember that I discussed one of my favorite Shakespeare sonnets (#73) last month. It’s a somber meditation on death, by an old man facing the end of life. The speaker sees in his own frail body, “bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

Though the context of a dying old man couldn’t be more different from Charlie being cut down in the prime of life, the final couplet could have been written about what just happened on a beautiful, early fall day in Utah:

“This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

Charlie is definitely gone too soon. However, since the news broke, it’s become clear that he inspired so many young people.

We can take comfort in the prospect of a thousand Charlie Kirks stepping up and continuing the work that he had started. And in the words often read in Advent services: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not overcome it.”

But even so, it is heartbreaking to be talking about Charlie Kirk in the past tense.