Summoning America’s Demons

Large-scale political violence had been a dormant force for over a generation at the dawn of this decade. Episodes of fundamentalist terrorism and senseless mass shootings shattered the relative calm typified by historically low rates of criminal violence, but masses clashing with police in the streets and the anti-government bombing campaigns of the last century seemed a thing of the past. So, when America’s political and thought leaders allowed themselves to be tempted by passions so intense and uncompromising that they manifest in savagery, it may have seemed a harmless indulgence. But it was not.

Political violence did not make a return to the streets overnight. The exhumation of this scourge was a joint effort involving both parties over seven years.

Even before the Occupy Wall Street movement burst out of its archipelago of urban encampments, destroying property and “seizing” public facilities, the lawlessness that prevailed in the camps didn’t prevent establishment Democrats from wrapping their arms around the movement.

Occupy demonstrations frequently clashed with police, producing what Democrats apparently thought were sympathetic images of mass arrests and protesters being sprayed with chemical irritants. On October 5, 2011, throngs of Occupy protesters attacked a police barricade, and were repelled by officers wielding batons and pepper spray. “God bless them for their spontaneity,” Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the next day. “The protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works,” averred President Obama ten days later. Like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Obama said, these protests were being unduly “vilified by many.” Just hours before Obama made these remarks, an Occupy franchise in Rome erupted as anti-capitalist rioters set cars and government buildings on fire, injuring 70.

In New York City, hundreds were arrested in the attempt to “seize” the Brooklyn Bridge. A mob overpowered guards in the attempt to capture the National Air and Space Museum. A riot erupted in Denver amid the effort to break up that city’s squalid encampment. After receiving the endorsement of the Service Employees International Union, AFL-CIO, Teamsters, and United Auto Workers, the Oakland, California branch of the Occupy movement sacked an abandoned port facility, setting buildings on fire and engaging in running battles with police through the streets.

Though he was more cautious in moments of real tension than many of his comrades, even Obama adopted the rhetoric of his party’s most reckless members. He called Republicans the “enemies” of Hispanic-Americans. Vice President Joe Biden insisted that Republicans sought to consign black Americans to renewed bondage. Their apologists insisted that these rhetorical flourishes were innocuous, rationalizing that everyone privy to the articulation of this existential threat would see it the same way. But the civility that Republicans were accused of abandoning had become a source of irritation for the left. “Abandoning civility,” The Atlantic’s Vann Newkirk wrote in 2016, is not just righteous but part of a noble American tradition of ideological combat that is “as fierce” as it is “ultimately effective.”

Republicans understandably resented the double standard. They were accused of inspiring violence in people who were schizophrenic or otherwise mentally disturbed, and their supporters were deemed violent and bigoted for advocating traditional conservative policies. To many on the right, adhering to a code of conduct reserved only for them seemed a form of unilateral disarmament.

Donald Trump catered to this sentiment.

By March 2016, Trump had already upended the norms that governed political discourse when he all but secured the GOP’s presidential nomination despite his penchant for accommodating racism and glorifying violence. The celebrity presidential candidate said a substantial number of Mexican migrants to the U.S. were “rapists” and drug dealers. He advocated a federal “database” of Muslims in America, whether they were citizens or not. He said a Hispanic judge could not be expected to fairly adjudicate claims against him. His campaign chairman, Steve Bannon, declared Trump’s candidacy “a platform for the alt-right.”

Such rhetoric was often paired with support for violence. Trump regularly urged his supporters to treat his protesters harshly, suggesting they should be “roughed up.” He routinely groused over the care law enforcement took in removing protesters from Trump gatherings. “Part of the problem,” he said, “is no one wants to hurt each other anymore.” On March 10, a Trump supporter sucker-punched one of the candidate’s detractors in the back of the head. Three days later, Trump pledged to pay the legal fees incurred in defense of his honor.

The GOP’s more thoughtful leaders understood the terrible forces Trump was unleashing but were unable to stop it. The liberal targets of Trump’s agitation resolved to confront Trump and his supporters. That’s when mass political violence came again to American streets.

On March 16, a group of liberal demonstrators marched on a Trump rally scheduled to take place in downtown Chicago. “Shut this s*** down,” the protesters shouted. For more than an hour, sporadic fistfights and assaults both inside the venue and out were broadcast live on national television. Rally-goers skirmished with demonstrators, and demonstrators clashed with police. Two police officers were injured in the melee; one was hit over the head with a bottle. There were five arrests, but they would prove to be the first of many.

Anti-Trump demonstrators chanted “racists go home!” and “Whose streets, our streets!” as they collided with police outside of an April 2016 pro-Trump demonstration in Costa Mesa, California. Twenty were arrested, and two police cruisers were damaged. In May, an organized gang outside a venue in San Jose, California, assaulted pro-Trump rallygoers. They burned American flags, tore the clothing off some event attendees and pelted others with eggs. Some fought back, and heinous images of bloodied and battered Trump supporters gripped the national conscience. “Violence against supporters of any candidate has no place in this election,” Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman Jon Podesta wrote.

In June, a permitted gathering of white supremacists on the steps of the capital building in Sacramento was confronted by radicalized “anti-fascist demonstrators.” The “Traditionalist Worker Party” gathering was organized in part by the organization’s founder, Matthew Heimbach, an outspoken Trump supporter and someone who was the frontlines of 2016’s most violent confrontations. “White supremacists should not be entitled to ‘free speech’ to preach their hateful messages and incite beatings and murders,” the socialist outlet Liberation News declared ahead of the rally.

The event quickly exploded into hand-to-hand combat on the streets. Ten people were injured, some critically. Police said the counter-protesters were to more to blame. “If I had to say who started it and who didn’t, I’d say the permitted group didn’t start it,” said California Highway Patrol officer George Granada.

The face of the violence on this day wasn’t the caricatured white supremacists rallying beneath banners bearing the Iron Cross. It was a diminutive 47-year-old middle school teacher with cropped bangs and horn-rimmed glasses, Yvette Felarca. “The Nazis did not recruit anyone new today,” she gloated in an after-action briefing for a leftwing news outlet. “Our side did.” One year later, she was arrested and charged with assault and incitement.

A month after the Sacramento fracas, uniformed Klansmen were detained in connection with the stabbing of at least three counter-demonstrators in Anaheim. Police made 13 arrests amid the chaos.

In October, a Republican Party field office in North Carolina was firebombed. “Nazi Republicans leave town or else,” read the warning spray-painted on a nearby wall. Soon after that, three men in Kanas were arrested and later found guilty of plotting to execute a “bloodbath” by detonating explosives-laden vehicles near a building housing Somali Muslim refugees and a mosque on the day after the 2016 election.

On Inauguration Day, over 230 people across the country were arrested for violence in cities ranging from Washington D.C. to Portland, Oregon. Roving gangs broke storefront windows and set vehicles on fire. A few weeks later, a pro-Trump rally scheduled to take place in Berkeley, California ended in bloodshed . The “March 4 Trump” didn’t make it to Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park before the president’s supporters were confronted by “black bloc” anarchists. Both groups were filmed clashing in the streets before riot police broke up the battle. There were ten arrests for crimes ranging from battery and possession of a weapon, including knives, metal pipes, and baseball bats. A month later, 50 members of the rightwing group Oath Keepers tried to replicate the pro-Trump march through hostile territory, and they were met by an exponentially larger contingent of leftist counterdemonstrators. The rival gangs attacked one another with fists, small explosives, and concealable weapons. Eleven were injured, with seven hospitalized. Over 20 were arrested.

In June, a man adrift in life facing a variety of personal and financial problems became radicalized. He frequently wrote of his distaste for Republicans and Donald Trump, in particular. “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co,” he wrote. Just weeks later, he opened fire on Republican congressional lawmakers practicing baseball on a field in Virginia, seriously wounding four people including the House Majority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise.

It could have been the worst mass assassination of federal officeholders in history. Yet instead of drawing any lessons from this event, it passed through the national consciousness like an apparition. Perhaps it was too terrible to think about what was happening to us.

Likewise, Americans failed to confront the conditions that led to rolling battles between white nationalist and militant socialists over the preceding year. But it would not be ignored.

In August 2017, these Identitarian blocs again came to blows on the streets of Charlottesville, Va. Hooded Klansmen and militia members rallying behind makeshift riot shields marked with a white “X” engaged their counterparts, so-called anti-fascist demonstrators wearing masks and hoods, rallying beneath red banners. They beat one another with clubs, sprayed chemical irritants, and mobbed individuals who broke away from the protection of their tribe. A peaceful demonstration of anti-racist protesters several blocks away was attacked by one of the white nationalists who rammed his vehicle into the crowd, killing 33-year-old Heather Heyer.

America had ignored the rising tide of radicalized identity-obsessives romanticizing political violence for too long, and Charlottesville merely temporarily shocked the nation’s senses.

“Anti-fascist” factions grew bolder after Charlottesville. Thousands of people attended an “anti-fascist” event in Berkeley as the terrible summer of 2017 faded, but by most accounts, there were no fascists there. An anti-Marxist event that attracted a handful of pro-Trump demonstrators was canceled out of concerns for the attendees’ safety, but the few who did show up were attacked and bruised and bloodied. A “Peaceful Portland Freedom March,” in Portland, Oregon a week later quickly devolved into a familiar scene, as police in riot gear deployed every non-lethal weapon in their arsenal to dispatch the massive crowd of “anti-fascist” demonstrators. On the first anniversary of Charlottesville, Antifa activists couldn’t find any neo-Nazis to attack on the streets of Washington D.C., so they assaulted reporters and police instead.

In the weeks before the 2018 midterm election, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s California offices were attacked and burglarized. In Florida, a gunman fired four shots at a GOP satellite campaign office. And in New York City, a historic union hall was the scene of reckless incitement, vandalism, and bloodshed.

The Metropolitan Republican Club on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a hall graced by the GOP’s most thoughtful leaders over the years, played host to Gavin McInnes, the founder of the so-called “Proud Boys.” Though he had frequently denounced racism, McInnes had a soft spot for violence, which he repeatedly endorsed as an effective political tool.

In a late-night raid on the club, “Antifa” vandals threw bricks through plate glass, caulked the front door locks shut, and smashed the entry keypad. Spray painted on the oversize oak entryway was a warning, the anarchist’s encircled “A” accompanied by a note that warned this “attack was merely the beginning.” That night, “Proud Boys” and “Antifa” activists fought in the streets, bloodying whomever they found within safe distance of their respective tribes.

Just as Charlottesville was the product of lessons unlearned, Americans also failed adequately to internalize what the attack on Republicans in Alexandria, Va., really meant. So those lessons were repeated in October of 2018, when a disturbed man, radicalized partly by political infotainment, attempted a wave of terrorist bombings targeting Democrats.

His targets included Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rep. Maxine Waters, Sens. Kamala Harris and Corey Booker, CNN, and former CIA Director John Brennan, among others. Included on this list, however, were figures that betrayed the source of his radicalization. Why were billionaire liberal activist George Soros and anti-Trump actor Robert De Niro targeted, but House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer were not? They have avoided wounding the president’s ego to preserve channels of potential cooperation, and Trump has also declined to antagonize them on the campaign trail. As such, these Democrats do not feature prominently in pro-Trump media, of which this potential terrorist was an avid consumer.

These 14 bombs didn’t go off, but some might have. “These were not hoax devices,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said. Twice in as many years, a disturbed man radicalized by the political environment attempted mass murder of elected officials. Both attempts failed, but we cannot count on luck to save us forever.

These spasms of violence are mostly on the fringes of political life, but less and less so, and they do not occur in a vacuum. The romance of revolutionary action features prominently in the rhetoric of influential political actors. Even those who do not actively agitate for violence seem at least sympathetic to it.

The tide of political violence has been rising for some time. It has swelled the ranks of the militant right and left, mirror image reflections of one another. Neither group is salvageable.

We have had violent periods in political life before, when the country seemed to be coming apart. This is not 1932, when an army of destitute ex-soldiers laid siege to the Capitol and were violently dispersed. Nor does this moment resemble the urban riots, politicized street fights, and assassinations that preceded the 1968 elections. The soft and comfortable malcontents playing at revolution in today’s streets are more bored than desperate, but that doesn’t render them less dangerous.

Our instinct is to understand them and their conditions, if only to see if empathy can defuse tensions. But that impulse is misguided if it prolongs the violence. Sometimes, the violent and racially aggressive just need to be defeated. Instead, we are consumed with pointing fingers across the aisle and defensively rejecting partisan equivalence. Unfortunately, a reaction cycle consisting entirely of the blame game ensures a future with plenty more occasions for laying blame.

Noah Rothman is associate editor at Commentary Magazine.