Bomb-Throwers, Mass Shooters, and Riot Junkies

The year 1938 was a tense one across Europe. On March 12, the Federal State of Austria was formally annexed by the German Reich following Chancellor Schuschnigg's call for a snap referendum. Following the May Crisis, when Prague partially mobilized its armed forces to counter a potential German invasion, the leaders of Great Britain and France initiated negotiations that culminated in the Munich Agreement of September 1938. Under this agreement, London and Paris permitted Berlin to annex a portion of the Sudetenland—the ethnically German region of northern Bohemia—and incorporate it into the Reich. Peace was secured, but only for another year.

Popular prewar mythology often depicts events as follows: conniving Germans hoodwinked the cowardly British and French leadership, who were willing to sacrifice Europe's smaller states to avert another global conflict. The enduring condemnation of their "appeasement" policy is predicated on the assumption that Europe's wealthy and democratic powers prioritized peace with a perceived monstrous evil over armed conflict. This perspective, however, overlooks the presupposition that pre-1938 Europe was peaceful. This was demonstrably not the case. Indeed, France's neighboring Spain was embroiled in the later stages of a brutal civil war even as Chamberlain and Daladier articulated their pronouncements about peace.

The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) receives comparatively scant attention in the Anglophone world for various reasons; however, it is plausible to surmise that it is rarely taught because the right-wing forces ultimately won. Despite garnering support from significant segments of the international press, academia, and the governments of France, Great Britain, and the United States, the left-wing Spanish Republicans were decisively defeated by the Spanish Nationalists, who comprised a strange mélange of monarchists, traditionalist Roman Catholics, Falangists, and conservatives. By 1938, a Nationalist victory was all but assured.

Earlier that year, in the spring of 1938, the Republican government began to exhibit signs of public fracture. On April 5, Minister of War Indalecio Prieto was dismissed from his post by the Soviets and their Spanish communist allies, reportedly owing to his perceived lack of conviction in the inevitability of a Marxist victory. Less than three months later, the Comintern instructed foreign volunteers to return home, thereby depriving the Republicans of some of their best troops.

In July, Nationalist forces commenced their bloody crossing of the Ebro River. By December, Barcelona, the last significant Republican stronghold, came under attack from over 120,000 Nationalist troops and their Italian allies. The city would fall the following month.

Around this same time, Spanish psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo-Nagera conducted a study of captured Republicans. His groundbreaking study of left-wing psychology was eventually published as Biopsychology of Marxist Fanaticism. In the volume, Vallejo-Nagera clinically analyzed the pathologies of both native-born Marxists and the many foreign volunteers who flocked to Spain during the war. He categorized subjects into groups such as Spanish Marxists, Hispanic revolutionaries, North American radicals, European volunteers, and female Republicans. Regarding Hispanic volunteers, Vallejo-Nagera observed that most had "degenerative temperaments," were more introverted and "social imbeciles," were predominantly irreligious, and primarily received their political education via newspapers. This pattern was repeated across many of Vallejo-Nagera's subjects, with some notable exceptions. Chief among these were the Americans, whom Vallejo-Nagera described as intelligent but lacking in culture, politically immature, and heavily influenced by the press and cinema. Unlike other groups, they tended towards teetotalism rather than alcoholism. Additionally, American subjects were characterized by their sexual debauchery and dedication. Vallejo-Nagera found no virgins among them; unlike their European or Hispanic counterparts, American subjects reported multiple sexual partners and rarely relied on prostitutes. Notably, American prisoners in Nationalist custody largely maintained their political fanaticism despite re-education attempts. Vallejo-Nagera also theorized that the New Deal's emphasis on equality, democracy, and egalitarianism made Americans particularly susceptible to Marxist propaganda. Finally, Vallejo-Nagera believed the American subjects most convincingly supported his thesis that Marxism primarily appealed to those perceived as professional, social, and sexual failures.

The findings in Biopsychology of Marxist Fanaticism would be replicated time and time again, with only the terminology differing. Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, which examined all mass movements, regardless of political alignment, found that "true believers" tended to be submissive personalities whose many failures led them to "willingly abdicate the direction of their lives to those who want to plan, command, and shoulder all responsibility." Later, the anonymous poster Spandrell coined the term "Bioleninism" to describe left-wing politics as a "Coalition of the Fringes" uniting the physically deformed, the spiteful, the resentful, and the spiritually ugly against orderly and beautiful civilization. In essence, being left-wing is a matter of biology rather than ideology.

The biological explanation for leftism is not entirely sufficient. Vallejo-Nagera found in 1938 that many American Marxists came from solidly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant backgrounds, and most were from either the middle class or the upper echelons of the working class. Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage similarly notes that many violent radicals of the 1960s and 1970s were children of privilege—well-educated, financially stable or wealthy, and often physically attractive. What united the American bomb-throwers of the 1960s and 1970s was a firm belief in the inevitability of a revolution and a commitment to "black liberation." As Burrough notes early in his narrative, the Vietnam War was a secondary matter to true believers in left-wing violence. To the men and women of the Weather Underground and the other urban guerrillas of the period, it was always about black Americans:

Every single underground group of the 1970s, with the notable exception of the Puerto Rican FALN, was concerned first and foremost with the struggle of blacks against police brutality, racism, and government repression. While late in the decade several groups expanded their worldview to protest events in South Africa and Central America, the black cause remained the core motivation of almost every significant radical who engaged in violent activities during the 1970s.

For leftist radicals in the 1970s (and the same demographic today), America's history of racial injustice provides the necessary framework for the expression of their maladaptive impulses. The mental illness of the left "can be understood as the result of a conflict between a dysgenic mythos and natural psychological tendencies which seek realization within an orderly mental and cultural framework." In other words, the unique socio-pathology of leftism may be inborn and biological, but it requires a certain cultural milieu to truly flourish and gain mass influence. And, as Josh Neal has written, "subversion of religious, national, and ethnic mythos grant a tremendous capacity for political and social control." Since the end of World War II, leftism has been the dominant ideology in the West, and it has multiplied its true believers via various methods of propaganda, all of which work to underscore the notion that leftism is the normal, default philosophy for all moral individuals.

One of the more prevalent and successful variants of this propaganda has been the villainization of the Western world and its people by the professional, technical, and elite classes. For such individuals, the forever-looming specter of renewed fascism or National Socialism is a permanent crisis. So, even before the end of the Second World War, the left began identifying conservative and right-wing ideologies as murderous and inevitably leading to horrors like Auschwitz. Marxist theorists like Hannah Arendt began pathologizing formerly healthy attitudes like patriotism, while others, such as Herbert Marcuse, popularized an exclusive definition of tolerance requiring intolerance towards exclusionary ideas (racism, sexism, colonialism, etc.). These ideas primarily spread on America's university campuses, where most left-wing radicals are cultivated and supported. Andy Ngo's exposé of American Antifa, Unmasked, decisively shows that the university campus is ground zero for left-wing indoctrination and radicalization. Of the many radicals profiled in Ngo's book, a large portion are either students or professors.

The contemporary university program, where Western civilization and its people are excoriated as part of a broader attempt to "de-centralize whiteness" or "de-centralize capitalism," provides philosophical justification for those individuals who are already predisposed to antisocial feelings. Such left-wing individuals over-identify "with the other" and under-identify "with the self." This mental paradigm makes it easy to identify with the oppressed in any situation, and to in turn hate the perceived oppressor. For the predominantly white members of Antifa and other anarcho-communist organizations, this paradigm of hatred is an expression of self-hatred, i.e., to atone for the sin of being born an oppressor, they make amends by becoming vehicles of anti-whiteness, anti-capitalism, etc. For non-white radicals, the paradigm is a simpler one of revenge.

America’s left-wing radicals are first born, but to fully flourish, they require a cause, a justification, or societal permission to commit acts of antisocial violence. Often this permission comes from the radicals themselves. "Antifa knows the effect that smashed windows, breached businesses, and fires have on crowd mentality," Ngo writes. Such a scene of disorder "serves as blood in the water" and can turn "protestors into rioters." Left-wing radicals know this, and their literature instructs followers to smash shop windows and start fires to intentionally incite the more animalistic and transgressive elements of the crowd. To smash a window may seem like a far cry from targeted assassination, but both acts fulfill the notion of "propaganda of the deed," whereby violence is committed to stir other left-wing radicals into action. This degenerative cycle, where natural malcontents use political violence to inspire others and to express their own desire for self-expression, self-annihilation, or self-redemption, has plagued the American Republic since the nineteenth century.

Violence existed in North America long before the first European colonists came ashore in Florida, Virginia, and Massachusetts. However, not long after the establishment of permanent colonies, racial warfare erupted along the frontier, with several massacres (the Jamestown massacres of 1622 and 1644) and even wars (King Philip's War). The first instance of political violence, Bacon's Rebellion, began in Virginia in 1676. However, the first recognizable stirrings of left-wing radical violence did not begin in the United States until the nineteenth century. During this epoch, left-wing labor agitators, spurred on by harsh working conditions and inspired by the Marxist and socialist philosophies coming from the Continent, carried out violent strikes and other acts of industrial terrorism. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Haymarket Riot of 1886, the Burlington Railroad Strike of 1888, and the Homestead Strike of 1892 all featured left-wing labor unions engaging in armed clashes, often involving guns and dynamite, with private police forces and later state militias and even the US Army. These events continued well into the twentieth century, with certain events standing out for their extreme violence.

These labor battles were mostly the domain of the native-born working class and were ostensibly justified by awful working conditions, low pay, long hours, and abusive labor practices. These grievances were championed by a small coterie of primarily foreign-born anarchists who advocated "propaganda of the deed" to incite a socialist revolution. One such anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, a mill worker and son of Polish immigrants, assassinated President William McKinley on September 6, 1901. A wayward loner, Czolgosz shot the president after hearing Emma Goldman, a Russian Jewish immigrant radical and former lover of Henry Clay Frick's assassin, speak about how capitalist society and religion enslaves working men. On October 1, 1910, twenty-one people were killed when a dynamite bomb exploded inside the Los Angeles Times building. This act of terrorism was carried out by a pair of brothers—James and John McNamara—who belonged to a union (the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers) that had been detonating bombs nationwide. Between 1906 and 1911, the union damaged over 100 ironworks sites as part of their campaign. The attack on the Times was carried out specifically because of the owner's stridently anti-union stance. The long investigation into the McNamara brothers revealed a sordid world of union corruption, free love communes guarded by anarchist militants, and a new radical consciousness wherein liberal lawyers, filmmakers, and newspapermen deliberately ran cover for left-wing terrorists.

No figure on the left better represented terrorism and propaganda of the deed than Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani. Forced into exile for his involvement in Italy's violent anarchist movement, Galleani fled to New Jersey and then Vermont. Galleani did not renounce anarchism in any way, and not long after stepping foot on American soil, the Italian radical began participating in strikes and violent actions. In 1903, Galleani began publishing an Italian-language newspaper, Cronaca Sovversiva, which spread anarchist ideas alongside bomb-making instructions. Galleani's followers in the United States became known as Galleanisti, and during what has become known as America's First War on Terror, Italian-born anarchists proved responsible for several high-profile and deadly attacks on Americans and American institutions. Some of the most notorious Galleanisti crimes were the November 1917 bomb attack that killed nine Milwaukee police officers and two civilians, a rash of bombings in 1919, and, most infamously, the September 6, 1920, Wall Street bombing that killed thirty-eight people. This latter event was likely linked to the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, a pair of Galleani associates and known anarchists who became international celebrities for the left despite (or maybe because of) their responsibility for the murder of a security guard and paymaster during an armed robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. Eventually, American authorities deported Galleani to Italy as part of a wider roundup of aliens and political subversives in 1919.

The First War on Terror would later have a parallel in the so-called "Days of Rage" during the late 1960s and 1970s. Instead of Italian anarchists, this period saw an unprecedented number of bombings (2,500 between 1970 and 1971 alone), targeted assassinations (mostly of police officers), and incidents of political and racial violence (e.g., the Zebra Killers in San Francisco, who murdered approximately fifteen people between 1973 and 1974 simply because they were white), all carried out by a hodgepodge of radicals, from university-educated white Americans to black nationalists and Puerto Rican separatists. The unifying cause of these radicals was a belief in an imminent revolution, and in response, they formed "underground resistance movements" that acted like guerrilla armies. Rather than mere terrorist cells, radicals like the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground used armed robberies, kidnappings, and other criminal enterprises to fund their war against the United States. These groups, which continue to inspire today's crop of left-wing radicals in the US and abroad, only began to dissolve thanks to aggressive police work by local, state, and federal forces. Unfortunately, an uncomfortably large number of these radicals were pardoned or accepted by society, with several becoming professors at prestigious universities. Bernadine Dohrn, who helped to make bombs and commit crimes as a member of the Weather Underground, became a clinical associate professor at Northwestern University. A fellow Weather Underground radical, Bill Ayers, found work as a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and in this position, he helped to foster the early political career of Barack Obama. Others found sanctuary in Cuba, which began accepting black nationalist from the United States for propaganda purposes as early as 1961.

The lesser-known radicals of this era returned to polite society, and many took up positions of prestige and power. Many became teachers and government bureaucrats, and a significant number remain in these roles today, explaining the left's near monopoly on education and governance. Yesterday's radicals educate today's nihilistic youth, and their commonalities extend beyond politics.

Days of Rage makes it abundantly clear that many radicals of the 1970s did not have specific goals in mind. Yes, they had enemies (white people, the American government, capitalism) but few specific goals. The point was pain—using propaganda of the deed to terrorize and harass as many people as possible. There were differences between the groups in organization and discipline, but the results were always the same. The previous year alone has been a watershed for political violence. On June 14, 2025, Democratic state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were killed in their Brooklyn Park, Minnesota home by a gunman wearing a latex mask and dressed as a police officer. Following a multi-day manhunt, the shooter was arrested and identified as Vance Luther Boelter, a former appointee to a state workforce development board. Despite finding flyers for the anti-Trump "No Kings" protest in Boelter's car, and his admission in a confession letter to the FBI that he was involved in a plot by Democratic Governor Tim Walz to kill Senator Amy Klobuchar, the prevailing belief is that Boelter was motivated by anti-abortion politics.

Months later, on August 27, Robert Westman, another Minnesota shooter, attacked the Annunciation Catholic School during morning mass, killing two children. Like Boelter, Westman's motivations appeared to be more schizophrenic than logical. Westman had legally changed his name to Robin in 2020 as part of his new identity as a trans woman. He also left behind a manifesto that contained demonic imagery, suicidal ideation, and a hatred of Christianity. The manifesto specifically lashed out at his mother, a member of the Annunciation parish, for telling him not to transition. Westman's firearms also provided clues to his motivations, as he had written both extreme left- and right-wing messages that included threats against Donald Trump, support for the Palestinian cause, and even absurdist jokes taken from internet memes. It remains possible that Westman was radicalized by Telegram chat rooms dedicated to accelerationism, Satanism, and the nihilistic subcultures that foster "fandoms" around mass shooters.

On September 10 of that year, the Turning Point USA co-founder and CEO Charlie Kirk was assassinated while hosting an open forum debate on the campus of Utah Valley University. The alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, was turned in by his family, who later told authorities that their son had become increasingly political over the last few years. Despite current attempts by leftists and right-wing conspiracy theorists to obfuscate the facts, shell casings found at the scene contained messages such as "Hey fascist! Catch!" and "Oh Bella, ciao, bella, ciao Bella ciao ciao ciao" make it clear that left-wing politics inspired the assassin. Further evidence indicates that Robinson was a member of several far-left chatrooms and had a trans live-in partner.

Even more important than the motivations of Kirk's assassin is the fact that the murder has been and continues to be publicly celebrated by hundreds of thousands of people online. Shirts, toys, and posters feature gruesome images of Kirk with a fatal gunshot wound to the throat. In response, right-wing online accounts launched a massive doxxing campaign, resulting in an untold number of terminations for individuals caught posting or recording jubilant responses to the cold-blooded murder.

While the investigation into Kirk's assassination is ongoing, it indicates that a new age of political terrorism is at our doorstep. The new age will not look like the last. Instead of well-organized political militias, America will see more mass shootings, more targeted assassinations, and more generalized violence that may at times seem beyond politics. To our civilization's chagrin, the near-total atomization of the youth and the easy dissemination of antisocial ideas via the internet mean that more dysgenic types will be pushed to carry out acts of violence. And as the Kirk episode continues to show us, the far-left's embrace of nihilistic violence is not just a problem of an active minority, but rather a deep-seated rot within a substantial segment of society. This is a disaster for American civilization, and it must be countered.

To prevent another assassination and to head off a third wave of radical terrorism, the Trump administration must face a stark reality: illiberal means are necessary to protect the last remnants of liberal democracy. As the great Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko notes in The Demon in Democracy, liberal and mass democracies are ill-equipped to defeat left-wing authoritarian movements because they accept far too many of the same assumptions as their Marxist, anarcho-communist, etc., foes. For all involved, equality is the basis of society, and any attempt to establish natural hierarchy is declared "fascist." To overcome this, the Trump administration and various right-wing organizations must participate in anti-democratic measures that will be invariably challenged by the courts. These should include the arrests of left-wing financiers and members of left-wing gun clubs, political organizations, and NGOs. The continued deployment of the National Guard in Democratic-run cities and renewed deportations by ICE must continue and increase. There must be a full-court press against the left that hits them from different angles all at once. Fostering a complex, well-funded, and motivated anti-leftist coalition of NGOs, bureaucrats, businesses, and members of the armed services like the one that was born following the Bolshevik Revolution is also a must, and so too are possible government programs like the CCC of the New Deal or other federal or state-sponsored plans to get American youth offline and back into the real world. If the latter cannot be done, then the United States must face the unsettling reality of pervasive online grooming and left-wing radicalization, and new laws should be implemented to address this reality. Parental authority alone cannot fill the gap when radical materials, "gore porn," and other such content are so easily accessible to those already bearing the true believer mental type.

The penultimate solution to this equation will shock more than a few comfortable souls in the United States. This solution was identified by Carl Schmitt in reference to the works of French jurist, political philosopher, and demonologist Jean Bodin, who proffered the concept of a "commissary dictatorship," or a classic, Roman-style dictatorship of prescribed length, as a countermeasure against democratic instability. Such dictatorships have been a feature of republics since the age of Cincinnatus, and many diverse civilizations have recognized the utility of temporary authoritarian rule during times of crisis. Those of us who lived through the horrors of 2020 are wise to be wary of such talk. After all, classic libertarian arguments against unchecked power ring true, especially since any future Democratic administration will not hesitate to implement severe anti-Republican measures, yet that is precisely why a commissary dictatorship in the US is so necessary. The Trump administration, with increased executive power, could effectively decapitate and dismantle America's left-wing networks so thoroughly that their re-emergence would be halted for at least a generation or more. Such measures are necessary given the visceral reality of the left's growing thirst for political violence and must be implemented before events spiral out of control. A popular and limited dictatorship, with several viable successors waiting in the wings, is essential for a new golden age not only in America, but throughout the West.

To confront and defeat left-wing violence in the United States, the usual solutions just will not do. A large portion of the population is not interested in dialogue and harmony, and in fact believes that certain opinions warrant capital punishment. This status quo cannot fester any longer. We need drastic solutions to prevent an even uglier future. First, the Trump administration and federal and state law enforcement should be granted greater legal powers to disrupt, dismantle, and destroy left-wing organizations seriously threatening America's delicate republican order. These same forces should also be unleashed against common criminals, as left-wing radicalism flourishes in degenerative environments. Second, more mental hospitals should be opened. Third, re-industrialization and a new Great Awakening must be encouraged as panaceas for the toxic culture of isolated and embittered individuals, particularly youth prone to antisocial behaviors. And finally, "blue" laws, which typically govern moral behaviors, should be reinstated. A society cannot defeat antisocial cancers without first being moral itself. No, this does not mean a return to puritanical strictures or overly harsh curtailments of personal liberty, but rather a solid and prejudicial structure whereby certain behaviors, activities, and even consumption patterns are heavily restricted.

The defeat of left-wing radicalism is not just a policy, but a necessity—a necessity for the American Republic, her people, and her progeny.