On Violence Part Two:

These Violent Delights

In 2022, I wrote about the death of Miguel Estrella. He was murdered by police in his hometown of Pittsfield, MA. They had come to answer an emergency call made by his friends because Miguel was experiencing a mental health crisis. Five years earlier, Pittsfield police killed another man, Daniel Gillis, who was also experiencing a moment of mental health crisis.

In both cases, community members organized and made it explicitly known what could have been done to prevent the deaths of Estrella and Gillis. They were ignored.

Four years after Miguel Estrella’s murder, nearby Hinsdale police would kill Biagio Kauvil, another young man experiencing a mental health crisis. This is what many on the left would describe as social murder. Preventable deaths that are not the result of malicious individual actions but rather the product of organizing society in such a way that it becomes inevitable that someone will die because society does not prioritize their existence.

The concept of social murder was at the heart of the discourse surrounding the death of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson, who was allegedly assassinated by Luigi Mangione in the middle of a public sidewalk in New York City. While politicians and professional opinion-havers were shocked and appalled by the gruesome killing and what it meant for a potential future where political dissent was bathed in blood, a lot of ordinary people from all over the political spectrum were at the very least sympathetic with Mangione’s alleged motivations, if not outright supportive. They understood Brian Thompson not as an innocent father and husband but as a socially acceptable mass murderer, wielding institutional procedure and fiduciary responsibility as a grim reaper’s scythe over the necks of those who could not afford the literal cost of living.

This widespread public sentiment indicting Thompson as someone who invited violence upon himself is difficult for the professional commentariot to digest. They don’t view the deaths caused by health insurance denials and high care costs as preventable murders caused by social apathy; they see them as unfortunate but unavoidable externalities to the best possible system for distributing healthcare. As tragic as it is for some to die from preventable fatal illness because they cannot afford timely treatment, it’s just not the same as walking up and shooting someone in the early morning light.

For those who do not believe social murder is an accurate descriptor for what we’re describing, I’d like them to consider the following hypothetical:

What if funding the Secret Service wasn’t a social priority? What if, instead of an entire law enforcement apparatus whose entire job is to investigate and protect the president and his family from violent threats, we just gave the president a couple of guys to follow him around? No motorcades, no advance security for public appearance locations, no gun bans at presidential events. In the likely event that we’d see many more successfully assassinated presidents, would we just chalk that up to a tragically unavoidable aspect of the office, or would we recognize that there are some collective choices to be made that would make being president a less violent proposition?

Anyway, yet another person tried and failed to kill President Trump recently, and we should talk about it.

The Real Problem with the Left Wing’s Violence Problem

Part of the center and right-wing animus toward Hasan Piker, whom we discussed last week, is due to what they see as his endorsement of political violence. In this particular critique of left-wing political expression, Hasan represents the leftist impulse to irresponsibly label and demean conservatives as racist, sexist, xenophobic, evil, and generally undeserving of human consideration and empathy. This constant invective, often based on exaggerated or disingenuous representations of conservative politics, inevitably leads to someone embracing the full implications of such defamatory rhetoric and deciding that violence against right-wing individuals or their property is justified.

It’s this climate caused by immature leftists and their insistence on believing in things that has led to a horrifying spate of violent acts carried out against the right. From burning the few remaining Teslas that haven’t already set themselves on fire to the horrific public execution of Charlie Kirk, and of course, the numerous attempts on Donald Trump’s life.

And if you think I’m being unfair in any way to the conservative position on this, here’s how National Review columnist T. Becket Adams describes the issue on his Substack:

“Anything to deny legitimacy to the idea that conservatives deserve dignity, sympathy, or even empathy. To grant any of these would be to concede that conservatives are human. But in the universe of left-wing activism, the right is evil incarnate. It can never be victim, only culprit. That’s why, in the wake of any violence directed against Republicans or conservatives, even when it is explicitly left-wing, the hardcore left, including certain elected lawmakers, will do anything to avoid admitting their side has a violence problem. Though this is partially intellectual cowardice, it’s mostly just a refusal to humanize the victims. The hatred runs that deep.”

Becket Adams goes on to more or less explain how every act of violence against right-wing figures can be traced stochastically back to radical left-wing rhetoric, while every example of an act of violence against left-wing figures or people that the left tends to defend can be blamed solely on mentally unstable individuals who have no meaningful connection to the broader conservative political project. While we aren’t going to spend too much time on the substance of Becket Adams’ argument, I do want to provide the following passage as an example of just how tortured this logic can get: (emphasis mine)

“Pelosi’s assailant, anti-war and nudist activist David DePape, who had been homeless and mentally unstable at the time of the attack, was registered with the Green Party as recently as 2014. He later got into Covid-19 vaccine-conspiracy theories, 2020 election trutherism, and “Pizzagate”-style theories about child-trafficking, making him nearly indistinguishable from your run-of-the-mill left-wing Epstein conspiracy enthusiast.”

Just remember kids, it’s always the left’s fault.

What’s interesting about T. Becket Adams’ argument here isn’t the vacuity of his case for blaming the left, but rather the subtext that runs through the piece. At times, he seems less concerned about the actual violence than he is about the idea that Democrats (and more than a few non-affiliated voters) don’t seem to care very much that it’s happening.

“In a normal world, we’d be having one of those national conversations we hear so much about. We’d be discussing the (apparently) normalized left-wing position that the U.S. president deserves to die. We’d be talking about left-wing radicalization, with members of the Democratic Party themselves offering solutions.

But we don’t live in that world. We live in the one where the left and its leaders won’t even admit they have a crisis of radicalization, let alone commit to addressing it.”

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The problem with left-wing violence is less the violence and more the fact that it seems to be socially acceptable to a significant part of the country. Not that they would themselves engage in violence against conservatives, but they just aren’t all that concerned or sympathetic with conservative victims. This is a problem if your ultimate political goal is to weaponize these acts of violence into justification for using state power to suppress left-wing organizing. That’s the sort of thing you need public support to effectively achieve. In a liberal democracy, anyway.

I’m not saying that this is Becket Adams’ specific political goal, but it may go some way to explaining why he doesn’t display much intellectual honesty or curiosity about the other side of the political violence equation. Whatever the reason, there’s a tension at the heart of his argument that produces some pretty spectacular contradictions, like demanding empathy for members of a political project who are currently arguing that the concept of empathy has been made toxic by floppy-headed women being led by their pregnancy hormones into social and/or cultural suicide.

Cosmic Background Rage

In a way, the conservative demand for liberals and the left to take responsibility for recent violence directed at the right is really just a plea for special treatment. After all, it really wasn’t all that long ago that right-wing figures were in the position of having to deny that their own rhetoric was inspiring horrific political violence. And if we want to get to the bottom of the general public’s apathy toward what appears to be a sharp rise in political violence, we should start with conservative hypocrisy.

Not because hypocrisy is an effective indictment against the right, it’s not. At the same time, we should understand that the right and center’s arguments against left-wing violence and its purported causes were never meant to be constructive or productive. There’s no path offered by T. Becket Adams and others for the left to become a better version of itself and do something about all these acts of violence. There’s no acceptable way for someone to hold leftist politics, violence or not. The purpose of this discourse is not to build a healthier body politic, it’s to smear liberals and inspire a few more well remunerated “Why I left the left” articles from moderates who are scandalized by the fact that people on the internet don’t like it when they misgender people.

But at this point, it’s a really hard sell. All that the right has really accomplished here is to create general apathy toward political violence. Why should liberals bother denouncing the White House Correspondence Dinner shooter or debunk conspiracies about him being a secret Mossad agent when conservatives like our friend T. Becket Adams can barely admit that Vance Boetler was committing an act of right-wing-influenced political violence when he went on a shooting spree against Democratic lawmakers, instead opting to opaquely reference a couple of far-right conspiracy theories about the shootings:

“It’s worth pointing out here that one of Hortman’s final legislative acts was to side with her Republican counterparts in repealing taxpayer-funded health insurance coverage for adult illegal aliens. It’s also important to note that Boelter wrote a letter addressed to FBI Director Kash Patel claiming he “was trained by U.S. military people off the books starting in college.” Boelter also wrote that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz wanted him “to kill” Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith because the governor “wants to be a senator.”

As someone who regularly uses the phrase “it’s worth noting”, I can definitively say that none of those things are worth noting if you’re talking about the lifelong Trump voter who decided to start killing democrats in his home state.

Both the left and the right want to make the case that irresponsible rhetoric from political leaders and activists drives people to commit violent acts in the name of ideology. To a certain extent, this is true. But for anything corrective to happen using this information, both sides have to admit their full role in fomenting this climate (with conservatives needing to admit they bear the majority of blame here) and commit to working together regardless of ideological beliefs toward changing the tenor of political discourse.

And we all know that shit is never going to happen.

It won’t happen because political violence isn’t a bug of the American political system. It’s a feature.

These Violent Delights

Liberal democracies like America run on systematized and institutionally authorized violence. The promise we make to ourselves is that this violence will be democratically adjudicated and only employed in the best interests of the nation as a whole. We accept that somewhere between 44,000 and 68,000 people per year will die because of a lack of access to healthcare. We accept that massive deficiencies in our systematic treatment of mental health will result in a percentage of those deaths. We understand that capital flight to other countries with cheaper labor will lead to deaths of despair.

We understand that our bombs kill people. We understand that the bombs we give to our allies kill people. We understand that in order for a functioning capitalist liberal democracy to deliver comfort and treats to a certain percentage of us living here, there must be some percentage of people who die or otherwise experience violence in order to make the gears grind smoothly.

And at the same time, we tell ourselves that violence is never the answer. While we arm our domestic political forces with military assets and weapons, train them in counter-insurgency and suppression, we say that violence is never the answer. While we drag homeless people out of their tents and make them watch as authorities destroy what remains of their material possessions, we say that violence is never the answer. We tell ourselves that political violence is the sign of a decaying society, while kidnapping and killing foreign heads of state who have not declared war on us.

Well, we used to say that anyway. One of the major innovations brought to us by TrumpWorld 2.0 is that they have exchanged the euphemistic pretense for fetishistic reverence. Actually, violence is the answer, and it should be disproportionate and overwhelming. Some people only understand violence, some people deserve only violence. Sometimes the rot is so deep that the only way to get it out is with a sniper rifle or a shotgun. If negotiations don’t get you exactly what you want… bombs away.

If this sounds like I’m blaming Trump and his rhetoric for the assassination attempts against him, then yes, this is exactly what it sounds like. But also, it’s not just Trump. Trump represents the unbridled id of an American popular consciousness, a national identity that spent its formative years developing an unhealthy relationship with violence as the guarantor of safety and freedom. Because in America, true freedom is the ability and capability to exterminate all the brutes. Whether they reside in Tehran or on Pennsylvania Avenue.

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Have Violent Ends

And to that end, it is my great displeasure to introduce you to Dalton Eatherly, a right-wing influencer located in Tennessee who goes by the moniker of Chud the Builder. Eatherly used to remodel homes until a road rage incident where he called a woman a nigger went viral. Since then, Eatherly has made a living by filming himself calling random Black people niggers and daring them to attack him.

Last week, Eatherly finally got what he wanted when he shot a man who had punched him in response to his monetized racial harassment campaign. He also shot himself, so it’s true that everyone has some tiny bit of hero in them. But while we’re waiting for T. Becket Adams to figure out exactly why Eatherly’s actions shouldn’t be considered an act of right-wing political violence, I think there is something interesting to be said about the way conservatives are dealing with the existence of someone like Chud the Builder.

For one thing, not only does Eatherly represent the naked racism that conservatives strongly assert has been all but excised from society, but his relative popularity and ability to generate revenue make it hard to argue that there isn’t an audience for this racial hatred. He’s raised over a quarter of a million on his GiveSendGo (GoFundMe for fascists) page, and the donations come with a lot of notes mentioning “white solidarity” and “securing our future”.

But also Eatherly’s Zoomer exuberance and lack of subtlety make it rather difficult for conservatives to blame the left for his popularity. Not that they haven’t tried. It’s just really hard to argue that it’s solely Black people’s responsibility not to react to a large armed white man with a southern accent shouting “nigger” at them. It’s even harder to argue that words shouldn’t provoke violence when phrases like “from the river to the sea” and “death to America” are often cited as justification for the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran.

And all of this was summed up by internet personality and Drake SuperFan DJ Akademiks of all people when he said this about Eatherly on his show:

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“You see how Trump went out there and clapped that nigga from Iran, that fucking supreme leader. That might have to be Chud. Get him out the way. Cause he trying to start some shit and we ain’t trying to do it.”

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He happened to be streaming with right-wing influencer and professional shitheel Sneako. Sneako, a long-time Trump supporter turned critic over the war in Iran, tried to insist that “violence is never the answer”. But of course, Eatherly did believe violence was the answer because he was openly looking for it. A recent tweet before the shooting spelled this out in no uncertain terms.

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I’m not saying that I have all the answers when it comes to violence within and between societies, but I do know that when we are at the point where openly plotting to get away with murdering Black people isn’t seen as violence, but stopping him before he can is violence, we really need to start having better conversations about violence.

I’m also not saying that it’s good that so many people keep trying to kill Trump. It’s less a sign of bubbling left-revolutionary fervor and more an indication that collective consciousness needs serious therapy. His rogues’ gallery of assassins is a motley crew of cranks and losers with virtually nothing in the way of ideological coherence. They’re not getting riled up listening to Hasan Piker and going out to spark a socialist jihad. The White House Correspondence attacker, while certainly liberal, was also a liberal Zionist who hated Piker. For any one of these weirdos to actually have succeeded would have been a macabre gift to a MAGA movement barely maintaining a bloodstained grip on popular acceptance.

But as far as wondering where all this open political violence is coming from, what did we really expect? If we really believe that these incidents are the result of charged political rhetoric influencing mentally or emotionally unstable people, then surely our government brushing off the casual incineration of over 100 school children to launch a war of choice is communicating something to such borderline personalities. What are these potential attackers supposed to make of the constant stream of images from Gaza, depicting the gruesome deaths of women and children, along with testimonies of systemic rape and sexual assault, things we are told to ignore and to demonize anyone who would cite them as unacceptable? Surely the moral of Trump’s adventurism in Venezuela and likely soon Cuba is that when the leader of a state does things that you don’t like, the only answer is to have them removed by force.

We’ve already declared that violence actually is the answer many times, the only question is who is “trying to start some shit” and who “aint trying to do it”. These are questions that we should be asking collectively and with a goal of minimizing the application of violence wherever possible, with the solemn understanding that in certain situations, violence is unavoidable. Because to a certain extent, it is an act of economic violence to tax, fine, and regulate billionaires out of existence. But right now, it’s either that level of violence directed toward people who can afford not to be god-tier wealthy or we continue to accept the violence that comes with underfunded social services, homelessness, and for-profit health care.

As long as only the elite get to decide who violence is reserved for and average people become more and more atomized and distanced from the mechanisms that confer legitimacy, we’re going to keep seeing more and more people decide to say “That might have to be ______. Get him out the way.”

Solidarity Forever.

Editor’s Note:

This piece was written before yesterday’s shooting attack on an Islamic center in San Diego, where two teenagers opened fire just outside of the building, killing three and later ending their own lives. Early reports indicate the attack was motivated by anti-Islamic sentiments combined with suicidal ideation. If you or anyone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please reach out to the suicide prevention hotline or dial 988.

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