On this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Sami Winc explore the Left’s troubling and growing acceptance of political violence.
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
SAMI WINC: Victor, I just wanted to get your reflections on how we’ve had two assassination attempts on Donald Trump [less than] two years ago. And most recently, in this last year Charlie Kirk, of course, was assassinated. Is this something that is growing and going to be common or is this an aberration and going to die off in our culture?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Well, the four most noticeable ones, that’s a pretty good pool to make a generalization. There was Tyler Robinson, who did kill Charlie Kirk. There was Luigi Mangione, who killed the United Healthcare executive. There was Ryan Routh, who tried to kill Trump. And there was Thomas Crooks, who hit Trump in the ear and killed another person and wounded two.
Is there a pattern? Yes. They’re all four people of the Left. They’re all four, not just people of the Left, but activists incited by particular left-wing dogmas. In the case of Tyler Robinson, he was into the trans movement, this weird, furry movement, and felt that Charlie Kirk was probably an obstacle to that. In the case of Crooks, he had gone from either isolated, crazy, conservative to hard Left, and he had bought into the idea that Donald Trump was an existential threat, and he hated him.
If you look at Luigi Mangione, he was an overeducated nepo baby who believed that the health care [system] and the whole corporate world was unfair to poor people, and they weren’t getting health care. So, who’s going to take out one, the biggest, United Healthcare?
So he thought. That’s what he claimed.
If you were Ryan Routh, he said so many crazy things, but he hated Trump because he thought he was going to cut off aid to Ukraine, everything.
So now we have the idea that they are all trying to kill conservatives. By the way, there’s more of them than the opposite. If you count the eight or nine trans cases. Somebody just sent me something that was on the Libs of TikTok—I can’t assess the veracity of it. People who commit shootings of over four people based on their race or sexual orientation? The largest group shooting people were people who identified as trans or were in the trans movement of some way. I don’t know how you adjudicate all of those, whether you count Thomas Crook or you count Tyler Robinson who were somewhere there. Whether pronouns or furry animals or whatever crazy, kooky thing they are. But my point is this: That seems to be more common. And you go back to Stephen Scalise and other stuff.
OK, why are they doing it now?
If you were an Old Testament person, you would say that they’re pretty convinced that nobody who shoots anybody goes to the death penalty, and very few get life in prison without parole. And there’s a good chance if you shoot somebody and you’re young enough, you’ll be out. Number one.
Number two, the invective on social media—and that’s where they live, on social media—is all anti-Trump, anti-Trump, anti-corporate. It’s Left. There’s a huge left-wing. And the invective they’re using: Fascist, fascist, fascist, fascist, Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler.
In that environment, these people who are mentally ill or deranged or into some sex cult or into some left-wing bazaar are idolized. And they think if they shoot a conservative activist like Charlie Kirk or a health care executive, or Donald Trump, they’re going to be canonized, famous. They’re not going to be demonized. And the post-facto results show they’re absolutely correct. They’re making an opera out of Luigi Mangione in the Bay Area.
Tyler Robinson, people were already making fun of how Charlie Kirk died. They were reenacting, holding their neck. They had t-shirts with blood on their neck. They were crazy.
As far as Trump, there were people almost immediately who said, “He missed.” They weren’t upset on the Left. So, to review. If the general jurisprudence is weaponized and in general, it’s therapeutic now and that people who shoot and kill … even Decarlos Brown that killed poor Iryna [Zarutska] on the North Carolina subway, I don’t think he’s going to get the death penalty. He’s been out so many times. And the guy who just tried to burn to death the girl on the [Chicago train].
So, the system sends a message to these four. You’re not going to really pay the ultimate price. And then it sends message number two that if you do do this, you’re going to be canonized as a political hero in some quarters. And number three, you’re going to be famous.
You add all of that up, and there’s a fourth. It’s going to be lax, the security, because these are not popular people. I don’t mean that conspiracy like some people are saying that Donald Trump was set up. I do believe that [under] the head of the Secret Service—Trump was not president—it was Joe Biden’s Secret Service, and she was fired—there was a general laxity that said, “That’s just Trump. Just go down to Pennsylvania and go through the motions, but don’t scour every building or if somebody comes in and he kind of lets off an alarm …” Yeah, that kind of attitude, which they didn’t have with Obama or Biden. And that was pretty much part of the idea. If you do it, there’s not going to be a lot of consequences, but you could get away with it.
And if you’re at a university, and you’re walking around and Charlie Kirk is speaking and you just walk in broad daylight, you know, kind of limping around with an odd object or whatever you had to have, a gun, and then you go up on a roof, nobody says anything and you’re right. So laxity, laxity, laxity. Yeah, that explains it. Is it going to happen again? Absolutely.
WINC: Yeah.
HANSON: Because if somebody gets shot tomorrow, if Donald Trump is assassinated tomorrow, two things will be much harder. He’s got a good Secret Service now, and he’s going to be much better protected. But if somebody gets close enough to try it, will that person to be canonized? Yes. Just look at those attacking the ICE people, trying to shoot ICE.
So, we have assassination chic right now.
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