Below is my column in the Hill on the rising political violence on the left. Many have found an irresistible release from both reason and responsibility in rage. A new study found more people embracing political violence. Joel Finkelstein, the lead author of the report, stated that “what was formerly taboo culturally has become acceptable… We are seeing a clear shift – glorification, increased attempts and changing norms – all converging into what we define as ‘assassination culture.’” Roughly 40 percent reportedly found it somewhat justifiable to burn a Tesla or even to kill Donald Trump.
Here is the column:
“We should replace our piece of crap Constitution.”
Those words from author Elie Mystal, a regular commentator on MSNBC, are hardly surprising from someone who previously called the Constitution “trash” and urged not just the abolition of the U.S. Senate but also of “all voter registration laws.”
But Mystal’s radical rhetoric is becoming mainstream on the left, as shown by his best-selling books and popular media appearances.
There is a counter-constitutional movement building in law schools and across the country. And although Mystal has not advocated violence, some on the left are turning to political violence and criminal acts. It is part of the “righteous rage” that many of them see as absolving them from the basic demands not only of civility but of legality.
They are part of a rising class of American Jacobins — bourgeois revolutionaries increasingly prepared to trash everything, from cars to the Constitution.
The Jacobins were a radical group in France that propelled that country into the worst excesses of the French Revolution. They were largely affluent citizens, including journalists, professors, lawyers, and others who shredded existing laws and destroyed property. It would ultimately lead not only to the blood-soaked “Reign of Terror” but also to the demise of the Jacobins themselves as more radical groups turned against them.
Of course, it is not revolution on the minds of most of these individuals. It is rage.
Rage is the ultimate drug. It offers a release from longstanding social norms — a license to do those things long repressed by individuals who viewed themselves as decent, law-abiding citizens.
Across the country, liberals are destroying Tesla cars, torching dealerships and charging stations, and even allegedly hitting political dissenters with their cars.
Last week, affluent liberal shoppers admitted that they are shoplifting from Whole Foods to strike back at Jeff Bezos for working with the Trump administration and moving the Washington Post back to the political center. They are also enraged at Mark Zuckerberg for restoring free speech protections at Meta.
One “20-something communications professional” in Washington explained “If a billionaire can steal from me, I can scrape a little off the top, too.” These affluent shoplifters portrayed themselves as Robin Hoods.
Of course, that is assuming Robin Hood was stealing organic fruit from the rich and giving it to himself.
On college campuses, affluent students and even professors are engaging in political violence.
Just this week, University of Wisconsin Professor José Felipe Alvergue, head of the English Department, turned over the table of College Republicans supporting a conservative for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. He reportedly declared, “The time for this is over!”
Likewise, a mob this week attacked a conservative display and tent on the campus of the University of California-Davis as campus police passively watched. The Antifa protesters, carrying a large banner with the slogan “ACAB” or “all cops are bastards,” trashed the tent and carried it off.
Antifa is a violent and vehemently anti-free speech group that thrives on U.S. college campuses. In his book “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” Mark Bray explains that “most Americans in Antifa have been anarchists or antiauthoritarian communists. … From that standpoint, ‘free speech’ as such is merely a bourgeois fantasy unworthy of consideration.”
Of course, many of the American Jacobins are themselves bourgeois or even affluent figures. And they are finding a host of enablers telling them that the Constitution itself is a threat and that the legal system has been corrupted by oligarchs, white supremacists, or reactionaries.
This includes leading academics and commentators who are denouncing the Constitution and core American values. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, is the author of “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”
In a New York Times op-ed, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the nation to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”
Commentator Jennifer Szalai has scoffed at what she called “Constitution worship.” “Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us,” she wrote. “A growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.”
As intellectuals knock down our laws and Constitution, radicals are pouring into the breach. Political violence and rage rhetoric are becoming more common. Some liberals embraced groups like Antifa, while others shrugged off property damage and violent threats against political opponents. It is the very type of incitement or rage rhetoric that Democrats once accused Trump of fostering in groups like the Proud Boys.
Members of Congress such as Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) have called for Tesla CEO Elon Musk to be “taken down” and said that Democrats have to be “OK with punching.”
Some take such words as a justification to violently attack a system supposedly advancing the white supremacy or fascism. Fortunately, such violence has been confined so far to a minority of radicalized individuals, but there is an undeniable increase in such violent, threatening speech and in actual violence.
The one thing the American Jacobins will not admit is that they like the rage and the release that it brings them. From shoplifting to arson to attempted assassination, the rejection of our legal system brings them freedom to act outside of morality and to take whatever they want.
Democratic leaders see these “protests” as needed popularism to combat Trump — to make followers “strike ready” and “to stand up and fight back.”
For a politician, a mob can become irresistible if you can steer it against your opponents. The problem is controlling the mob once it has broken free of the bounds of legal and personal accountability.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
Words, debate, and reasoned speech is not going to stop wild-eyed violence. Until the Right, Center, and even the reasoned Left start bringing their own muscle along and demonstrate their unwillingness to tolerate violence and property destruction and start forcefully pushing back and start leaving a few bloody noses this will only continue and intensify. You can’t fight violence and unchecked rage with logic and reason.
On the one hand they tell us that our Democracy is in danger and on the other hand they tell us that the document that lays out the freedoms to which we are entitled is outdated. What is conspicuously missing is a comprehensive replacement document. When bluster turns to bloodshed and property damage the full force of the Constitution which is the law of the land should be employed to quickly facilitate their arrests and convictions. When this application of the law happens they will be the first to call on the principles of this document in their defense. They will then declare that they have a right to free speech and that their right to free speech includes the burning of a Tesla. When will our ocular abilities be restored?
Ultimately, they are naught but Anarchists, trying to usher in their understanding of Communism
The Second Amendment is there for a reason
OT
“BAD BEHAVIOUR”
BOASBERG CHUTKAN ET AL.
UH, OH!
Boasberg was on vacation; he was not the “emergency” judge; he came back to town; he took the case.
“reclaim America from constitutionalism.” Reclaim to what? i.e. from Teslas to Guillotines
For both the Jacobins and the modern USA left, the igniter was hate, and then intense, and finally irrational hate. Hate spawned the violence and rage against the hate’s target. I hate to use the word Nazi, but it was likely hate generated against the Jews that allowed the ruthless atrocities to happen during the Nazi era. Hate is something like a magic carpet that transports ordinary people into violent and even organized mobs.
There’s another parallel. The violent acts beget even more intense rage, which then snowballs. We see that happening in America. It has been said that the Nazis hated the Jews even more intensely after they started killing them. Their killing of the victims did not assuage their hatred but intensified it.
BabyTrump whined All you trump sycophant readers, wake up, he is coming for you next.
When are all you black clad enraged Pantifa and Woke Useful Idiots from the Soviet Democrat Borg going to wake up and come for us here in Montana next? Don’t we deserve you coming here to trash us to ensure we get equity in your treatment? Montana is overflowing with deeply conservative Americans – when do we get our turn for your special attention, BabyTrump, you Woke Useful Idiot commie?
What do we have to do – make an appointment to get you to come here and make a house call for one of your performances?
#74. Bizarre
I don’t see any of these ‘intellectuals’ as intelligent. They act like spoiled brats who need a good ass whoopin’ when they get home. I really don’t think any of them have even read the Constitution and the reason they don’t like it because it limits them from trying to run our lives 24/7/365 with really bad ideas.
Those words from author Elie Mystal, a regular commentator on MSNBC
Professor Turley, why did you choose NOT to mention that Mystal, like you, is your fellow Democrat lawyer working in political journalism?
Professor Turley, most of this nations problems are a direct result of Democrat lawyers working in some position in politics, including journalism supporting The Great Democrat Leap Forward. You avoid mentioning that glaring fact like He Who Shall Not Be Named in the Harry Potter series.
And what are you doing writing for The Hill? Dennis, Gigi, and George insist on telling us you are an employee of Fox.
These people are of the same mindset as Ilhan Omar, who thinks Trump is both a supreme dictator and a puppet controlled entirely by Musk, in the exact same sentence.
“The greatest concern of the human being is to know how to properly fulfill his station in creation and to rightly understand what one must do in order to be a human being.” (Immanuel Kant, from a set of handwritten notes written in 1764 in his personal< copy of Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime, Ak. 20:41 )
Kant’s Account of Affects and Passions
The best known account of the passions and affects is from the Metaphysics of Morals. There, Kant says the following:
Affects and passions are essentially different from each other. Affects belong to feeling insofar as, preceding reflection, it makes this impossible or more difficult. Hence an affect is called precipitate or rash (animus praeceps), and reason says, through the concept of virtue, that one should get hold of oneself. Yet this weakness in the use of one’s understanding coupled with the strength of agitation of one’s soul [Stärke der Gemüthsbewegung] is only a lack of virtue and, as it were, something childish and weak, which can indeed coexist with the best will. It even has one good thing about it: that this tempest quickly subsides. Accordingly a propensity to an affect (e.g., anger) does not enter into kinship with vice so readily as does a passion. A passion is a sensible desire that has become a lasting inclination (e.g., hatred, as opposed to anger). The calm with which one gives oneself up to it permits reflection and allows the mind to form principles upon it and so, if inclination lights upon something contrary to the law, to brood upon it, to get it rooted deeply, and so to take up what is evil (as something premeditated) into its maxim. And the evil is then properly evil, that is, a true vice. [2]
In this passage, Kant mentions three related differences between affects and passions. First, affects “belong to feeling” whereas passions are “desires.” Second, affects reflect merely a “lack of virtue” whereas passions are “properly evil.” Finally, affects “quickly subside” whereas passions are “rooted deeply.”
Ref. : http://people.whitman.edu/~frierspr/kant_on_affects.htm
By: Patrick R. Frierson – Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy – Whitman College
http://people.whitman.edu/~frierspr/
pretty deep coming from onion fields!
↑ Anonymous at 11:20 AM ↑
I used to read Turley regularly under Biden because he provided a much-needed counterpoint to the vapid consensus of the so-called left (they ain’t). Now that his side is in power, rather than taking Trump & Co. to task, he’s harping on the powerless “left”. It’s just not interesting.
This isn’t an airport. You don’t need to announce your departure.
. . . powerless “left”
Hahahahaha! That’s a knee-slapper. I guess all the left-wing federal judges issuing scads of nationwide injunctions are “powerless,” and as for the Hamas-sympathizing and Antifa terrorists terrorizing America, there’s nothing to see here, move along. And the left-wing law faculties corrupting the minds of future lawyers and judges, and the left-wing faculties and students destroying conservative displays and shutting down free speech . . . nothing to write about there. What a clown.
You ever stop think – yeah I know that’s hard for D branders of late , but that maybe the insane anti constitutional vitriol of the left needs to be called out at a bare minimum ?.
There is a counter-constitutional movement building in law schools and across the country.
In other news, med schools now have a movement to do away with the human body. Auto mechanics programs at trade schools are advocating to abolish motor vehicles. Business and accounting school faculties are lobbying to get rid of all finances and return everyone to subsistence farming. And veterinary schools seek the extinction of all animals.
Love it!
“righteous rage” WAS J6!!!
“righteous rage” WAS J6!!!
And the 36 hour long assault on the White House by Democrat street thugs a few weeks before that? Also “righteous rage”?
The 2020 Election Season Mostly Peaceful Months Of Pillaging, Looting, Rioting, Arson and Murder? Also “righteous rage?
Or do you demand that American history didn’t exist before J6?
I think his point was J6 rage was “righteous”, as opposed to that of the numerous examples of leftist rage, including those you site.
I love headlines…
“This is the stock market’s worst start to a presidential term in modern history”
There are a lot of parallels between Trump II and Reagan I. Both followed the worst presidents of their time, high inflation, weak foreign policy, etc. and both started off with a stock market that had to be reset. Let’s hope the parallels continue with a robust recovery taking place next year before the midterm election.
Seems you should off your worldly bit of insight with a righteous act of self harm or something.
You MAGAts need to stop repeating lies. Excerpted from “PolitiFact”:
“Under Biden, U.S. employment is now 10% above what it was when he was sworn in. Ranking second after three years is Clinton, with almost 8%, followed by Trump with 4.4%. Both Obama and Bush had fewer jobs filled after three years than they had on their first day in office.
Biden benefited from favorable timing. He was inaugurated January 2021, as the pandemic started receding. Although the jobs recovery began under Trump, Biden was blessed with a steady flow of Americans moving back into jobs that had been hampered during the pandemic.
Still, the simple return of workers sidetracked by the pandemic doesn’t explain all the job gains on Biden’s watch, even though Trump has tried to make that case. Employment data through Biden’s first three years in office significantly exceeds where the workforce stood before the pandemic.
Given that job creation was leveling off during Trump’s last few months in office, “it was not inevitable that we would get the huge bounceback we saw under Biden,” said Dean Baker, co-founder of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. Biden’s American Rescue Plan, a pandemic recovery bill passed weeks after Biden took office, “was a huge deal here.”
Another factor in the expanding labor market — though one that’s become a political two-edged sword — has been higher immigration rates under Biden. This has helped fuel the economy, according to analyses by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and others, even as it lets critics discuss chaos at the border.
Biden has emphasized the growth of manufacturing jobs when touting bills he’s signed into law, including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act.
The data shows that manufacturing jobs have grown by about 6.5% since Biden took office. Trump ranks second at 3.4%, followed by Clinton at 2.5%. Three years into their terms, Obama and Bush had both overseen losses in manufacturing jobs.”
We did not have “weak foreign policy” either–Biden mended our relations with the EU and NATO–something Trump has already trashed in record time.
Excerpted from “Morningstar”, 1/25/25:
“Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA advanced more than 39% over the same period, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite COMP jumped nearly 46%, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
However, the Dow and the Nasdaq saw their worst returns since George W. Bush’s second term between 2005 and 2009, while the S&P 500 logged its smallest gains since Barack Obama’s second term between 2013 and 2017, according to Dow Jones Market Data (see table below).
To be sure, Biden’s presidential term began in 2021 with an escalation of the COVID-19 pandemic and an economic downturn. The major stock averages still posted double-digit returns by the end of that year, as the global economy began its recovery from the pandemic, while the Federal Reserve maintained supportive monetary-policy measures first implemented in early 2020.
But in 2022, Wall Street suffered its worst year since the 2008-’09 financial crisis amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while the U.S. economy grappled with soaring inflation and higher interest rates.
Then in 2023 and 2024, a tech-fueled earnings recovery and the artificial-intelligence frenzy propelled U.S. stocks to historic levels. The S&P 500 scored back-to-back double-digit annual gains by the end of 2024 – and is now kicking off its third year in a bull market.”
Trump isn’t “resetting” the stock market–he’s crashing it because HE IS STUPID, ARROGANT, HE USES TARIFFS AS A CUDGEL TO BULLY OTHER COUNTRIES BECAUSE OF HIS NARCISSISM AND WON’T ADMIT THAT TARIFFS ARE BAD.
NO ONE is predicting any kind of “recovery” here. Instead, not only is a recession being predicted, but possibly, an all-out depression.
You’ve nothing to say, they’re breaking away
If you listen to fools, the mob rules
The mob rules
I don’t feel like getting all atwitter today and I do not see Caesarism as really that much of a problem. FDR faced worse in his 100 days and did far more and started off by closing the banks right off becomes the country was having one big bank run and the economy had virtually collapsed and the business as usual attempts by Hoover had failed. Actually people were leaving and going to the USSR because it seemingly offered a new way. But they were so blind that they failed to realize that the USSR already had a Caesar.
And many forget, that Julius Caesar was the reformer and man of the people who was assassinated and then the Senators (not commoners) were the ones who actually did the deed and had to flee because they had no support. That Cabal of senators were not conspirators because they wanted to preserve the Republic but they wanted to save themself and their prerogatives in the Senate. (Caesar was restocking the senate with new and young members and many from outside Rome)
Trump is doing what he pledged to do, he has the support of the people and more important their votes and the House and Senate.
The remnants of Obama’s coalition has torn itself apart, is ineffective and sees its power dissipating by the day. That’s what drives their rage. Their ability to manage the message has disappeared and that also drives their rage. We don’t listen to them any more and that drives their rage.
The main thing is for the right to keep their heads and just stay away from the demonstrations. Give the Left no ammmunition except to eat themselves. Then clean up the mess. I don’t think Trump will let the demonstrations get out of hand and he may have to act with the National guard in some areas. In 2020 he let things get out of hand. Call it Insurrection and jail them with no bail and the demonstrators can cool their heels for several weeks but get the names.
Also time to start looking up the money trees and nailing the financiers.
Outside of some major cities, the world in the US was quiet and most were watching basketball. Duke lost in the semi’s (men), UConn won (women), Finals (men) tonight.
Unlike FDR I would leave the banks open but close the universities and make the students go home. Let their parents deal with them like the undisciplined children that they are.
GEB,
Well said. They have lied and gaslighted the American people so many times, no one listens to them or when we do, we do not believe them. No one should.
They gaslit so long and so hard they started huffing their own fumes. They now believe their own original gaslighting is, was, and always will be the truth, so they have to gaslight more and more, like an addict looking for his next fix.
Hogwash that doesn’t address the article. Must be Dementia.
Wow, brilliant comment. Even better than Turley’s article. Thanks for sharing.
Unlike FDR I would leave the banks open but close the universities and make the students go home. Let their parents deal with them like the undisciplined children that they are.
Now that’s an infantile way to wreck an otherwise worthy post, a little bit of personal rage creeping into your post.
And a line of reasoning straight out of the Democrat playbook: with the hundreds of thousands of American ADULTS that are attending universities and colleges, because a fraction of their number are obsessed with protesting and vandalism, you want to stereotype and demonize ALL of them due to the actions of the outliers.
Punish them all because of the actions of a tiny minority which those other students have no control over: halt the education that they paid for, and send them home to their parents!!!!
Where do you suggest sending the ones who haven’t lived with their parents since they graduated from high school?
The ones who went to college/university after finishing their time in the military or working in the oil patch to save the money to pay for their education?
Going to send them to some people you recruit to be their foster parents, GEB?
Humanities Professor Darren Staloff calls it ‘the self righteous fanaticism of ideologues’, noting that college students are particularly prone to this, being rather young and impressionable, indoctrinated as they are by the leftist cultural bourgeoisie of the faculty lounge.
Turls, of course rage abounds. It’s absolutely related to the anger in the five stages of grief…, just amplified. And it’s a by product of what you seek to tap into in your efforts to rhetorically pitch from your seat in the vast right wing conspiracy. It’s why when you try to maintain on the surface that you don’t like invasions of the Capitol where people crap on the floor that you’re really, subtextually speaking, encouraging people to invade the Capitol and crap on the floor…
Mystal is right. The Constitution needs to be adapted. To the digital age certainly…, but more importantly beyond its implicit racism and reward of capitalistic metastasis.
Way I see it is we’ve been in Constitutional crisis since it was written just by virtue of the fact it was clear only a most prileged had the right to vote….
And for what it’s worth I think the future of this country depends on overthrow of the current president and the oligarchs he has in tow. Or who are actually in charge. Not that oligarchs haven’t always been in charge. The founders basically didn’t like monarchies where they personally didn’t have the power…, they were fine with their slave owning oligarchy here.
Tesla must be burned. Nazis must be punched in the mouth. And a serial sex abuser convicted felon president must be removed in order to save whatever shred of this country can be saved.
Gee, if I didn’t know better, I say we have another Tim Walz demanding the country be burnt to a cinder in the name of democracy.
At least he knows that Trump has a plan to restore Americans faith in the republic. And that’s a threat in his warped mind.
You don’t know better.
This particular Anonymous is just another child living in the basement hanging up Antifa posters next to his Van Halen posters. Ugly, stupid, immature, broke and virginal. It would be sad if he wasn’t such a jerk.
HullBobby,
I would offer a correction, “World class jerk.”
Another Jacobian ACAB on the loose. Move to Canada or Europe to be with your self-loathing brethren where you can sit in a cafe and read Marx all day.
Dumb
Oh look. Another “by any means necessary” person.
Apparently you forgot that the Revolution almost invariably eats the revolutionaries. If you get your way, I wish you good luck with your discussion with Mme. Guillotine.
A good little fascist you make , pitchfork in one hand and a molotov cocktail in the other…my are you so brave.
Nazis are the socialists who are trying to riot over the legitimately elected president doing what he was elected to do.
I notice that without the USAID money buying rent-a-mobs to bolster the protests, all you have is a bunch of fat, wheezing gray hairs yelling about muh democracy! Most of them would have a coronary from all their clot shot boosters if hey tried to punch somebody.
Instead of turning his focus to the President’s assault on the Constitution, Turley makes a strained and historically inaccurate reference to the Jacobins. The Jacobins advocated for strong executive power capable of implementing revolutionary policies without delay or obstruction. They centralized the state’s ability to monitor and control its citizens, and they created the Revolutionary Tribunal to prosecute enemies of the Revolution, bypassing local jurisdictions.
The political violence on the left is a response to authoritarian control, not advocacy for it. In fact, it is Trump that has clearly embraced the same centralized control of the Jacobins.
Referring to any political violence as a Jacobin revolution is just as lazy as Democrats making incessant and inaccurate historical references to Hitler. Shame on you.
Who cares if its Jacobins or National Socialist, or Maoists, or Marxist. History does repeat itself. Buckle in folks, the big one is coming.
Wrong. The Jacobins changed definition, membership, objective, and influence so many times that the influence of the movement was lost. Even you fail to understand, and even your little backup source, wikipedia, explains it for you. I think you are a georgie sockpuppet.
When were the Jacobins in favor of decentralization? Can you name a single Jacobins that advocated that?
That’s a ridiculous take.
“The Jacobins advocated for strong executive power capable of implementing revolutionary policies without delay or obstruction. They centralized the state’s ability to monitor and control its citizens, and they created the Revolutionary Tribunal to prosecute enemies of the Revolution, bypassing local jurisdictions.” You just described the Biden Administration or what was in essence Barack’s third term. The political violence on the left is rooted in their loss of authoritarian control and rejection of Democracy. They are Marxists who believe in revolution to remake Amerikkka in their authoritarian image.
Prey tell, what is President Trump’s assault on the Constitution? And, what side holds the most violent, anti-free speech extremists? We finally have a president who wants to put Americans first and stop the insanity of supporting the entire World through bad trade policies. I say that is a good thing. I don’t really care what you and your like minded brethren think and I know that makes you think we are all stupid. We are not. So go FY.
They insult, debride, and cause annoyance and rage, but they can never back up their talking points with actual fact. They are naught but NPCs asking why you don’t get to the Cloud District often.
I think you nailed it. Thanks.
The Jacobins were idealists who turned into executioners.
The hard educated left is composed of idealists who will turn into executioners.
Look at the left and how they turn more violent where today they approve of the murder of an executive for a health insurance company who was doing his job. They do not hesitate to call for an end (or death) for people who have fallen out of favor.
The Democrats of today are led by the hard left.
That’s a bizarre POV. The only assault on the constitution is coming from the rabid American leftist rabble. Nobody but that decrepit lot is screaming to burn it down amongst other things in fits of mindless rage.
Instead of turning his focus to the President’s assault on the Constitution, Turley makes a strained and historically inaccurate reference to the Jacobins… The political violence on the left is a response to authoritarian control
This Democrat apparatchik claims history only began AFTER the Democrats’ street thugs in Black Liars & Marxists and Antifa were rioting, pillaging, looting, burning and murdering while Obama was president – YEARS before Trump ran for office
You communists are very poor captains steering your false flag warships against the current president, not a single unconstitutional action by Obama, or Obama’s Third Term – but Trump is assaulting the Constitution!
The term “Marxist Useful Idiot” is still relevant a century later!