Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Recently, there’s been almost an epidemic of left-wing hysteria about violence, murder, and people who commit violent crimes.
It’s more than just hysteria. There’s been an effort to defend people that commit heinous crimes or almost glorify them or just neglect the severity of their crimes on innocent people.
It takes various manifestations. But it does reveal and illustrate this element of leftism, that it’s heartless, it’s cruel, it’s cold. It’s almost as if, to make an omelet, you have to break, as Josef Stalin said, a few eggs.
I’ll give you a few examples.
We have over 600 sanctuary jurisdictions. And that means that in these areas of states, cities, and counties, when an illegal alien commits a crime and he’s apprehended and he is not legally in the United States, these jurisdictions will not turn him over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a Department of Homeland Security agency. They will not do it.
In other words, they’re saying to all of us: “We would rather let these people out—and they do get out—and maybe commit crimes, and that’s a price we’ll pay, in opposition to border security.”
We see another manifestation with President Donald Trump’s 30-day takeover. It’s not a takeover. It’s an augmentation of the Washington, D.C., police forces by bringing in federal forces. And for the first time in decades, there has been an eight-day period where there hasn’t been a single murder in Washington, D.C. The residents seem very happy, although careful not to express that joy because it’s contrary to the mainstream leftist governance of the city.
But what’s weird is Trump is getting lambasted by mostly wealthy, white, protected liberals, that he’s an autocrat, a dictator for coming into Washington and trying to help people live normal lives in the inner city.
Again, the theme is they don’t care about the number of people, this week, that have been saved from either being killed or maimed or wounded. But there are two or three other examples that are even more egregious.
We all remember the Department of Government Efficiency 19-year-old, Edward Coristine. I hope I can mention his nickname without seeming foul, but he was called “Big Balls.” And he worked for Elon Musk. He was attached to the Social Security department, the Department of Treasury, and the Department of Health and Human Services, etc., looking at the budgets of these various Cabinet divisions.
He was walking late in Washington, D.C., after a gathering. A young woman left ahead of him. He was worried that she shouldn’t have been walking a short distance alone to her car. When he followed her, he heard her scream.
There were 10 young thugs. They were trying to carjack her car and hurt her. She was confronting them. He ran over, pushed her in the car, tried to get her secure. She locked the car. Then he faced off with these 10 people, and he was beaten to a pulp, as you would expect.
Two of them, the prime suspects, were arrested, detained. And of course, a local judge in Washington, D.C., a liberal-appointed judge, let them out. They’re out now stalking people again, no doubt.
But the point is, a lot of people on social media and the Left said, “Why should we worry about a wealthy, basically, white kid, who gets roughed up a bit? Is that why Donald Trump went into Washington? And if so, we don’t really care.” It was very heartless.
It reminded me, very recently, do you remember the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson? He was a person from the middle class, was born without status or advantages or money, and he worked himself up to the leadership position of one of the largest health care concerns in the United States.
And Luigi Mangione—a 25- or 26-year-old wealthy, well-educated kid, high status, privileged—decided that he was an enemy of the people because health care was not universal and UnitedHealthcare may have refused coverage to certain people in need. So, he decided he was going to kill him. And he did kill him. He murdered him. It’s on tape.
And what was the reaction of the Left? Some on the left canonized him. They even made a play about him here on the West Coast. He is a folk hero. A former Washington Post reporter did an interview and talked about how magnetic he was, how good looking he was.
There was one other example. There was a Blackstone—that’s a real estate investment firm in New York—executive, a very successful young woman in her 40s, Wesley LePatner. And a deranged or angry—I don’t know what we would call him—young man walked in broad daylight with a semi-automatic weapon.
He was angry because he felt he should have been given a chance to go to the National Football League. And he had a vague idea where the National Football League headquarters was in Manhattan. He burst in through security. He didn’t even get up to the NFL. Instead, he saw various other offices that had nothing to do with his grievance. And he shot and killed three people. One of them was Wesley LePatner.
She was a 42- or 43-year-old mom, very successful, all well-liked. It was a horrendous accident. And yet, when you looked at the social media response, it was very similar to Ed Coristine’s action that earned him sarcasm or criticism, very similar to Luigi Mangione, who was, as I said, made a hero for murdering someone.
In this case, the shooter was contextualized. People said, “You know what? She makes thousands of dollars per minute. I’m not going to worry that she was offed by somebody who was from the underclass.”
What is the common denominator of all of this new leftism? It’s sort of Stalinistic. It basically says:
For the greater good of the revolution, there are enemies of the people. We don’t wanna know what their independent circumstances are. We don’t really care if they’re moms or nice people, if they’re bad people. All we know, in our Marxist binary, they’re on the wrong side of the ledger. They’re the victimizers and the poor people who were murderers or are thugs and assaulted them, they were the victimized. They had a perfect right. We’re gonna weigh in.
In other words, it’s one of the most heartless and disturbing aspects of contemporary, popular culture, and it’s pretty much the domain of the Left: “We can use violence, any means necessary, to hunt down and kill enemies of the people, or hit, assault, rough up people that we feel are not sufficiently sympathetic to the underclass.”
It should stop because it leads to a French revolutionary, Jacobin chaos, if we’re not already there.
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