You’ll find no moral equivocation at NR.
You would not be reading this unless you believed in the power of ideas — the capacity for reason and empirical evaluation to shape the world around us and drive the forces of history. That’s why we are asking you to support our effort to preserve and promote conservative ideas by donating to National Review’s fall webathon.
But suppose you didn’t believe that. Suppose you thought that power flows from the barrel of a gun, that history is a tale told by the victors who secured their ill-gotten influence through material circumstances like the pernicious influence of capital, and that the rest of us are led by the nose like placid farmstock to our destinies. Then you might conclude that ideas don’t matter. That only violence and the threat of violence matter.
If you thought that, you might find yourself adopting a sympathetic outlook toward the violent expressions of political passions we’ve been cursed to witness over the last few years. We’ve seen too much of that — a bloodless, almost indifferent posture toward displays of murderous violence as though they were the inevitable, perhaps even welcome, byproduct of structural oppression.
We’ve seen the activist class and the upper strata of Democratic politics alike find profound meaning in the cold-blooded murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and an effort to martyrize his killer, Luigi Mangione, as an anti-capitalist avenging angel.
We’ve seen marginal agitators and mainstream media personalities excuse the murder of Charlie Kirk as an understandable expression of the anxiety the conservative communicator induced.
We’ve witnessed too many small-cell and individual terrorist attacks on the agents of federal law enforcement — deadly violence perpetrated by outfits that freely retail their motives: “Fight ICE Terror with Class War,” read some of the literature strewn about the scene of a sophisticated armed assault on a Texas Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. “Resist Fascism. Fight Oligarchy.”
If you’re reading National Review, you know all about this. And so we ask if you will help us continue this coverage by contributing to our work in whatever way you can.
I am blessed to be joined by my colleagues in giving political violence zero room to flourish, and you’ll find no moral equivocation here.
You won’t see Jim Geraghty give the American political class or its media one ounce of slack for even tacitly allowing a climate of violence to fester.
You won’t find Charles C. W. Cooke ignoring a concerted effort by Democratic officials and their allies in the press to retroactively condition Americans into believing Kirk’s killer was a motiveless reactionary who, if anything, was probably more inclined toward the MAGA right.
You won’t read anything other than a clear-eyed assessment of the current threat of left-wing political violence from Andy McCarthy, including how it relates to the continuum of similar campaigns of left-led political terrorism throughout American history.
You will search in vain for evidence that Rich Lowry has ever welcomed the mob as though it was a righteous manifestation of uncompromising political zeal.
And those who might like to dismiss National Review’s coverage of left-wing violence as mere partisan red meat designed for right-wing consumption might be depressed to see the degree of consistency — and consistent revulsion — in our opposition toward right-coded manifestations of the mania overtaking the left.
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